7 ms·

I've spent a lot of my life opposed to nuclear power - but I'm slowly feeling that even with the currently unsolved long term storage issues - that it is better

by ljf 6y ago

I've spent a lot of my life opposed to nuclear power - but I'm slowly feeling that even with the currently unsolved long term storage issues - that it is better than the alternatives (carrying on burning fossil fuel until some point in the future when storage is good enough.) I'd love to be wrong and I'd love to see renewable energy and storage solved in the next 10 years (though likely take longer than that to scale up nuclear).

verdverm 6y ago
There are many types of nuclear power, with thorium salt reactors being one of the most effective possible components to an overall solution. These could be scaled up quickly. The problem is public opinion and the lack of nuanced understanding of the differences.
- eloff 6y ago
  Nuclear does have a huge PR problem.
  - dboreham 6y ago
    Caused by huge safety problems and huge lying about safety problems.
    - verdverm 6y ago
      Modern fission reactors are far, far simpler and safer than what exists in most places today.
- jabl 6y ago
  No, the problem with molten salt reactors is that except for a few test reactors in the 1960'ies, nobody has built and ran them. There is little knowledge how well they'd actually work as power production reactors running at high power for years. E.g. how do you do maintenance? And on top of that, the Th fuel cycle requires reprocessing and breeding, again technology that looks feasible on paper but little knowledge how it would work out in practice. I'm not saying this as a negative, I think MSR's are cool and potentially very useful technology. We should definitely research them with the goal of taking them into use for large-scale power production. But this won't be ready in 10 years. Now, I hope I'm wrong, and maybe IMSR proves me wrong by deploying at scale sooner. Though that is the traditional once-through LEU cycle, no Th, but still a MSR design.
  - EricE 6y ago
    You know who has picked up all the research on molten salt we abandoned? China. The utter hysteria around Nuclear is the biggest threat to climate change and if you really want to diminish the use of fossil fuels nuclear is the most economically viable path. The majority of costs are either cultural or obtuse regulations that have layered up over time. Micro reactors, molten salt and other really innovative designs don't get traction because of irrational fears radiation spawns in people. Similar to a lot of hysteria we are seeing around COVID-19. Even if the majority of the population gets infected, it's only a real threat to a small portion of the population - so rather than managing that specific threat we are acting like it affects everyone the same - with disastrous results that are still unfolding.
- thinkcontext 6y ago
  Thorium reactors can't be scaled up quickly because none exist. We could put more money into R&D but saying they can be scaled up is premature.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  Molten salt reactors have HUGE technological issues with corrosion. You have to design a material which would contain essentially almost all of Mendeleev's Table at high temperatures and under really powerful neutron flux. And we don't even touch problem of online processing of this salt. Even for BN reactors fuel processing plant is arguably more complex than the reactor design, and for salt reactors this problem even more nightmarish.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
This is where I'm at as well. I'm not crazy about Nuclear, but when I sat down and did a hard look at a lot of alternatives, there isn't really anything that can provide power that dramatically, at least not without some sort of magic leap forward in battery technology.
core-questions 6y ago
Why are you so opposed? It seems like most of the problems have been entirely man-made through poor regulations, stupid choices, or lack of budget - all of which are surmountable. The technology itself is proven, and produces reams of clean energy. It could even be cheap, if we stopped gutting the nuclear industry and built up towards smaller-scale, commodity modular reactors.
- sp332 6y ago
  all of which are surmountable Yes but it would be nice to actually surmount them before making more of the stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU
  - core-questions 6y ago
    The CANDU reactor seems to have surmounted that stuff decades ago.
    - EricE 6y ago
      many designs have, but few want to have discussions because of the decades of hysterical ranting about how evil radiation is. Radioactivity is neither good nor evil; it's a tool. Yup, it can be used for evil but it can also be used for good.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
RangerScience 6y ago
AFAIK modern reactor designs do a lot to solve the long-term storage issues; from what I remember France uses a series of different reactor designs, combined with reprocessing, that result in a small amount of waste that's only a problem for 60-70 years. The kind of reactor most people think of (again, AFAIK) are breeder reactors, or otherwise derived from breeder reactors, which were about making weapons-grade material rather than power, which is part of the reason those designs have the issues everyone (largely legitimately) has with them.
- notJim 6y ago
  What is the state of the world with these modern reactor types? Are they in use anywhere, or still limited to research experiments?
  - jabl 6y ago
    The Russians have a couple of them in production (BN-600 & Bn-800) and another being planned (BN-1200). They work fine, but with current uranium prices there's not much reason to do breeding and reprocessing. It's good that we research these, but there is no pressing need to take them into use soon.
- jabl 6y ago
  No, France uses light water reactors, just like the rest of the world. They also reprocess their spent fuel, but due to complicated sciency reasons you can only do that a few times when you're burning it in thermal reactors. France had plans to move to a closed cycle, which would improve fuel utilization by a couple of orders of magnitude, but their breeder reactor program (required for the closed cycle) has largely stalled (see Phenix, SuperPhenix, and ASTRID which was recently cancelled before it even got off the drawing board). And no, breeder reactors per se aren't about making weapons-grade material except in the feverish dreams of Greenpeace.
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    SuperPhénix was cool on paper but I'm actually surprised that they built it and after that it took so long to stop it. It used sodium, a lot of it, which explodes violently in contact of water. That's an issue for most people. The political pressure was huge to stop the project. The CEA wasn't even that good at manipulating sodium, they got two known major incidents in Cadarache. One quite spectacular with a huge cloud of fire. I think nuclear power is great to research and the risk is sometimes worth it, but SuperPhénix was too risky.
3pt14159 6y ago
If it makes you feel any better, many types of reactors produce helpful medical isotopes as a side effect of operation. So when looking at lives-per-megajoule nuclear is one of the absolute best, even accounting for some of the accidents.
- phildenhoff 6y ago
  When you compare Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Wind, Solar, and Hydro, Nuclear comes out by far as the safest technology [1]. Coal is incredibly dangerous directly - mining and operation are generally unsafe. Hydro has had some terrible accidents like the Chinese Banqiao dam rupture in 1975 which killed tens or hundreds of thousands. Solar and wind I'm not too sure about, but nuclear power has tens of deaths total attributed to it. The nuclear-relate deaths that occurred have been from using light-water reactors, which are essentially very-high pressure high-temperature radioactive containers. Modern designs like molten salt reactors (like LFTR) have the potential to be safer, but don't have regulatory support and are mired in the process [2]. I made a whole infographic about the safety of nuclear power, but I'm not an engineer or journalist [3] [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#39c8081d709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... [2]: https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.cfm https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.c... [3]: https://create.piktochart.com/output/37686680-safe-nuclear-power https://create.piktochart.com/output/37686680-safe-nuclear-p...
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Per IPCC, wind and solar are very nearly on par with (possibly better) than nuclear. It's coal that really drags down the average, and yes, we need to stop using that. Hydro's mortality is largey attributable to a single, though immensely bad incident, the Chinese Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975. That itself was a consequence of poor engineering, planning, management, response, and an unanticipated weather event (parked typhoon/cold-front dumping > 1,000mm rain in 24h), with most issues being common to any high-profile technical engineering project. Hydro otherwise is largely safe (there are a few other exceptions, again higghligghting planning, management, response, and institutional integrity, especially in developing regions or periods), problems not specific to the energy-harnessing mechanism) and the Banqiao site is presently home to > 15 millions, rather than being a multi-century technically-induced wildlife park as is the case with other technologies.
ip26 6y ago
Not to mention, while it needs a solution, long term storage doesn't have to be solved today. Or tomorrow, or even fifty years from now. Climate change on the other hand will not wait fifty years for us to get around to facing it. I'd much rather my children face the narrow technical challenge of long term storage, as opposed to global migration crises, drought, and famine.
- AlanSE 6y ago
  Dry cask storage will not be without issues on the 100 year time frame. However, I am relatively well convinced that this will be a problem in the billions in cost. That is a lot, but not $10s of billions or $100s of billions. A single national reprocessing facility is >$10 billion. The simple truth is that radioisotopes decay. When you split Uranium, you dig up the nuclear dust. The more years you give it, the more it settles. Don't get me wrong, fuel cladding is going to be popping, leaking, and breaking all over those racks of fuel in dry Helium atmosphere or whatever it is. Also, companies who want to do US reprocessing (but will not anytime soon b/c of $$) are ready to cherry-pick the living daylights out of the fuel inventory. In another 50 years, the best fuel candidates will be vastly more economically attractive. You have the burn history of each fuel assembly, and you know which has the most good stuff and the least bad stuff. Time tends to shift that ratio in the right direction.
baix777 6y ago
I'm not convinced nuclear is safe enough. Say new nuclear it is 2x safer than previous designs on average, and we spin up 4x more nuclear plants, well you can see where this goes. Plus, such a concentrated power source is going to invite a terrorist attack by something like drones, which can't be effectively defended against. An attack that looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_attack#:~:text=On%2014%20September%202019%2C%20drones,Khurais%20in%20eastern%20Saudi%20Arabia.&text=The%20attack%20caused%20large%20fires,put%20out%20several%20hours%20later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at....
- fuoqi 6y ago
  I think that modern designs are at least an order of magnitude safer than reactors from early generations. Chernobyl's RBMK and Fukusima's BWR/1 were both designed in 60s. Note that containment of modern reactors is designed to withstand direct airplane hit, so without a bunker-buster grade munition such attack would not result in radiation release.
kinjba1 6y ago
No energy source [that we've discovered so far] is perfect. All have downsides. Sadly, living in denial of that fact is more popular than ever, but that's a separate topic. Here are a couple TED talks showing the downside of renewable energy - such as the enormous land usage and reliable energy storage needed to compete with nuclear or fossil. Why renewables can’t save the planet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w A reality check on renewables https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o
dkarl 6y ago
I've been skeptical that we can make nuclear power safe, too, given the human elements, but global warming has me asking myself which is worse: a Chernobyl every ten years, or a 2ºC rise in global temperatures? Chernobyl was billed as proof of just how bad nuclear disasters can be, but looking back, we didn't know how good we had it when that was all we had to be afraid of.
- yesenadam 6y ago
  I suspect you're imagining the Chernobyl happening to someone else, but the 2 degrees rise happening to you (and everyone you know).
  - dkarl 6y ago
    Or I could be thinking of death tolls in the thousands versus in the millions, hundreds of thousands of displaced people versus hundreds of millions.
legulere 6y ago
New nuclear power in the west is currently very expensive with rising prices and and extremely slow to build (see for example hinkley point c). I‘m not sure if battery storage, which has predictably falling prices, isn’t already cheaper than that, but you can at least already calculate when it is going to be. A sensible strategy is to keep old nuclear plants running and invest heavily in renewables and energy storage.

by ljf 6y ago

verdverm 6y ago

There are many types of nuclear power, with thorium salt reactors being one of the most effective possible components to an overall solution. These could be scaled up quickly. The problem is public opinion and the lack of nuanced understanding of the differences.

eloff 6y ago
Nuclear does have a huge PR problem.
- dboreham 6y ago
  Caused by huge safety problems and huge lying about safety problems.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    Modern fission reactors are far, far simpler and safer than what exists in most places today.
jabl 6y ago
No, the problem with molten salt reactors is that except for a few test reactors in the 1960'ies, nobody has built and ran them. There is little knowledge how well they'd actually work as power production reactors running at high power for years. E.g. how do you do maintenance? And on top of that, the Th fuel cycle requires reprocessing and breeding, again technology that looks feasible on paper but little knowledge how it would work out in practice. I'm not saying this as a negative, I think MSR's are cool and potentially very useful technology. We should definitely research them with the goal of taking them into use for large-scale power production. But this won't be ready in 10 years. Now, I hope I'm wrong, and maybe IMSR proves me wrong by deploying at scale sooner. Though that is the traditional once-through LEU cycle, no Th, but still a MSR design.
- EricE 6y ago
  You know who has picked up all the research on molten salt we abandoned? China. The utter hysteria around Nuclear is the biggest threat to climate change and if you really want to diminish the use of fossil fuels nuclear is the most economically viable path. The majority of costs are either cultural or obtuse regulations that have layered up over time. Micro reactors, molten salt and other really innovative designs don't get traction because of irrational fears radiation spawns in people. Similar to a lot of hysteria we are seeing around COVID-19. Even if the majority of the population gets infected, it's only a real threat to a small portion of the population - so rather than managing that specific threat we are acting like it affects everyone the same - with disastrous results that are still unfolding.
thinkcontext 6y ago
Thorium reactors can't be scaled up quickly because none exist. We could put more money into R&D but saying they can be scaled up is premature.
fuoqi 6y ago
Molten salt reactors have HUGE technological issues with corrosion. You have to design a material which would contain essentially almost all of Mendeleev's Table at high temperatures and under really powerful neutron flux. And we don't even touch problem of online processing of this salt. Even for BN reactors fuel processing plant is arguably more complex than the reactor design, and for salt reactors this problem even more nightmarish.

blaser-waffle 6y ago

This is where I'm at as well. I'm not crazy about Nuclear, but when I sat down and did a hard look at a lot of alternatives, there isn't really anything that can provide power that dramatically, at least not without some sort of magic leap forward in battery technology.

core-questions 6y ago

Why are you so opposed? It seems like most of the problems have been entirely man-made through poor regulations, stupid choices, or lack of budget - all of which are surmountable. The technology itself is proven, and produces reams of clean energy. It could even be cheap, if we stopped gutting the nuclear industry and built up towards smaller-scale, commodity modular reactors.

sp332 6y ago
all of which are surmountable Yes but it would be nice to actually surmount them before making more of the stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU
- core-questions 6y ago
  The CANDU reactor seems to have surmounted that stuff decades ago.
  - EricE 6y ago
    many designs have, but few want to have discussions because of the decades of hysterical ranting about how evil radiation is. Radioactivity is neither good nor evil; it's a tool. Yup, it can be used for evil but it can also be used for good.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

RangerScience 6y ago

AFAIK modern reactor designs do a lot to solve the long-term storage issues; from what I remember France uses a series of different reactor designs, combined with reprocessing, that result in a small amount of waste that's only a problem for 60-70 years. The kind of reactor most people think of (again, AFAIK) are breeder reactors, or otherwise derived from breeder reactors, which were about making weapons-grade material rather than power, which is part of the reason those designs have the issues everyone (largely legitimately) has with them.

notJim 6y ago
What is the state of the world with these modern reactor types? Are they in use anywhere, or still limited to research experiments?
- jabl 6y ago
  The Russians have a couple of them in production (BN-600 & Bn-800) and another being planned (BN-1200). They work fine, but with current uranium prices there's not much reason to do breeding and reprocessing. It's good that we research these, but there is no pressing need to take them into use soon.
jabl 6y ago
No, France uses light water reactors, just like the rest of the world. They also reprocess their spent fuel, but due to complicated sciency reasons you can only do that a few times when you're burning it in thermal reactors. France had plans to move to a closed cycle, which would improve fuel utilization by a couple of orders of magnitude, but their breeder reactor program (required for the closed cycle) has largely stalled (see Phenix, SuperPhenix, and ASTRID which was recently cancelled before it even got off the drawing board). And no, breeder reactors per se aren't about making weapons-grade material except in the feverish dreams of Greenpeace.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  SuperPhénix was cool on paper but I'm actually surprised that they built it and after that it took so long to stop it. It used sodium, a lot of it, which explodes violently in contact of water. That's an issue for most people. The political pressure was huge to stop the project. The CEA wasn't even that good at manipulating sodium, they got two known major incidents in Cadarache. One quite spectacular with a huge cloud of fire. I think nuclear power is great to research and the risk is sometimes worth it, but SuperPhénix was too risky.

3pt14159 6y ago

If it makes you feel any better, many types of reactors produce helpful medical isotopes as a side effect of operation. So when looking at lives-per-megajoule nuclear is one of the absolute best, even accounting for some of the accidents.

phildenhoff 6y ago
When you compare Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Wind, Solar, and Hydro, Nuclear comes out by far as the safest technology [1]. Coal is incredibly dangerous directly - mining and operation are generally unsafe. Hydro has had some terrible accidents like the Chinese Banqiao dam rupture in 1975 which killed tens or hundreds of thousands. Solar and wind I'm not too sure about, but nuclear power has tens of deaths total attributed to it. The nuclear-relate deaths that occurred have been from using light-water reactors, which are essentially very-high pressure high-temperature radioactive containers. Modern designs like molten salt reactors (like LFTR) have the potential to be safer, but don't have regulatory support and are mired in the process [2]. I made a whole infographic about the safety of nuclear power, but I'm not an engineer or journalist [3] [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#39c8081d709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... [2]: https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.cfm https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.c... [3]: https://create.piktochart.com/output/37686680-safe-nuclear-power https://create.piktochart.com/output/37686680-safe-nuclear-p...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Per IPCC, wind and solar are very nearly on par with (possibly better) than nuclear. It's coal that really drags down the average, and yes, we need to stop using that. Hydro's mortality is largey attributable to a single, though immensely bad incident, the Chinese Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975. That itself was a consequence of poor engineering, planning, management, response, and an unanticipated weather event (parked typhoon/cold-front dumping > 1,000mm rain in 24h), with most issues being common to any high-profile technical engineering project. Hydro otherwise is largely safe (there are a few other exceptions, again higghligghting planning, management, response, and institutional integrity, especially in developing regions or periods), problems not specific to the energy-harnessing mechanism) and the Banqiao site is presently home to > 15 millions, rather than being a multi-century technically-induced wildlife park as is the case with other technologies.

ip26 6y ago

Not to mention, while it needs a solution, long term storage doesn't have to be solved today. Or tomorrow, or even fifty years from now. Climate change on the other hand will not wait fifty years for us to get around to facing it. I'd much rather my children face the narrow technical challenge of long term storage, as opposed to global migration crises, drought, and famine.

AlanSE 6y ago
Dry cask storage will not be without issues on the 100 year time frame. However, I am relatively well convinced that this will be a problem in the billions in cost. That is a lot, but not $10s of billions or $100s of billions. A single national reprocessing facility is >$10 billion. The simple truth is that radioisotopes decay. When you split Uranium, you dig up the nuclear dust. The more years you give it, the more it settles. Don't get me wrong, fuel cladding is going to be popping, leaking, and breaking all over those racks of fuel in dry Helium atmosphere or whatever it is. Also, companies who want to do US reprocessing (but will not anytime soon b/c of $$) are ready to cherry-pick the living daylights out of the fuel inventory. In another 50 years, the best fuel candidates will be vastly more economically attractive. You have the burn history of each fuel assembly, and you know which has the most good stuff and the least bad stuff. Time tends to shift that ratio in the right direction.

baix777 6y ago

I'm not convinced nuclear is safe enough. Say new nuclear it is 2x safer than previous designs on average, and we spin up 4x more nuclear plants, well you can see where this goes. Plus, such a concentrated power source is going to invite a terrorist attack by something like drones, which can't be effectively defended against. An attack that looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_attack#:~:text=On%2014%20September%202019%2C%20drones,Khurais%20in%20eastern%20Saudi%20Arabia.&text=The%20attack%20caused%20large%20fires,put%20out%20several%20hours%20later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at....

fuoqi 6y ago
I think that modern designs are at least an order of magnitude safer than reactors from early generations. Chernobyl's RBMK and Fukusima's BWR/1 were both designed in 60s. Note that containment of modern reactors is designed to withstand direct airplane hit, so without a bunker-buster grade munition such attack would not result in radiation release.

kinjba1 6y ago

No energy source [that we've discovered so far] is perfect. All have downsides. Sadly, living in denial of that fact is more popular than ever, but that's a separate topic. Here are a couple TED talks showing the downside of renewable energy - such as the enormous land usage and reliable energy storage needed to compete with nuclear or fossil. Why renewables can’t save the planet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w A reality check on renewables https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o

dkarl 6y ago

I've been skeptical that we can make nuclear power safe, too, given the human elements, but global warming has me asking myself which is worse: a Chernobyl every ten years, or a 2ºC rise in global temperatures? Chernobyl was billed as proof of just how bad nuclear disasters can be, but looking back, we didn't know how good we had it when that was all we had to be afraid of.

yesenadam 6y ago
I suspect you're imagining the Chernobyl happening to someone else, but the 2 degrees rise happening to you (and everyone you know).
- dkarl 6y ago
  Or I could be thinking of death tolls in the thousands versus in the millions, hundreds of thousands of displaced people versus hundreds of millions.

legulere 6y ago

New nuclear power in the west is currently very expensive with rising prices and and extremely slow to build (see for example hinkley point c). I‘m not sure if battery storage, which has predictably falling prices, isn’t already cheaper than that, but you can at least already calculate when it is going to be. A sensible strategy is to keep old nuclear plants running and invest heavily in renewables and energy storage.