13 ms·

Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it. The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square

• gruez 6y ago
  >We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free! except you know, the solar panels. by the same logic you can you can capture fission power for free, all you need is set up the reactor.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • crispyporkbites 6y ago
    Installing a solar panel can be done today, for a $100. Tomorrow it will be $50, and it’ll keep going down until the market dictates the price. Nuclear takes years to build and generate output, and the price is going up. It would be foolish to build a nuclear plant today unless you have a specific need for it (small location, little sunlight/wind). Personally I think that in 20-40 years time most people will get the bulk of their energy from local solar panels, with the grid, backed by a mix of renewables and existing non-renewable sources filling in all the gaps.
    • briffle 6y ago
      The whole point of this system is that its also quick to install, and cheap. Its not a custom designed for each mega site type of setup like traditional reactors. Solar is going to have fun in places like Alaska.
    • anoncareer0212 6y ago
      The market always dictates the price. People who make solar panels for a living say yes, the curve has been astronomical and beyond predictions, but, we're closer to a wall than we are halving costs again
  • semi-extrinsic 6y ago
    There was a comment here about cleanup costs of nuclear vs. solar, that was deleted while I was typing my response to that. I'm just gonna copy in my response here, because I think it's an interesting topic: Are we really sure solar panels are much easier to dismantle on a euro-per-kWh basis though? That is, if you divide the total cost of dismantling and recycling a solar power plant, divided by the total amount of energy produced over the lifetime, does solar power do much better than nuclear? Nuclear power in Germany (17 powerplants) has produced well over 5 million gigawatthours over the lifetime so far. It's hard to put good numbers on the cleanup costs, but somewhere in the ballpark of 50 billion euros is probably correct. (Keep in mind that some cost is the government paying the powerplant owners compensation because they are forcing them to shut down long before end-of-life). So that gives you around 0.01 euros per kWh. A solar panel with 20% efficiency placed close to the equator produces 500 kWh/m2/yr. Over 30 years of lifetime that would produce 15 000 kWh/m2. Are you sure you would spend significantly less than 150 euros per square meter of panel to dismantle, transport and recycle the solar panels?
    • jbob2000 6y ago
      Solar panels aren't the only way to generate energy using the sun. You can build a concentrated solar farm (see: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco-solar-farm-formula-e-spt-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco-solar-...) which uses mirrors and salt to produce up to 580mw of power, with a cost of just under $1bil. My neighbor heats their pool using solar, it's just a bunch of tubes that cycle water over their roof. They got rid of their gas heater. Given that most backyard pools are used in the summer, why can't we swap these to using solar?
      • pfdietz 6y ago
        Concentrated solar has lost to PV. It's simply not competitive now. For domestic hot water, it's now cheaper to use PV and a heat pump (or even resistive!) water heater.
      • tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
        If the pool needs heating while the house needs air conditioning, using the pool as a heat sink for the A/C would probably be even better.
  • nimish 6y ago
    Fission is ultra-complicated and dangerous with Uranium. I can buy a solar panel for $100 and have it generating electricity in my backyard at a click of a button Why would I _not_ do that?
• adrianN 6y ago
  The expensive bit about nuclear is not the fuel. It's making sure that the fuel stays where it is supposed to be. A different design might change the cost of that dramatically.
  • mdorazio 6y ago
    Not really. It's rather expensive (billions of dollars) to setup a nuclear plant in the first place, even before a single fuel rod shows up. Meanwhile solar is so cheap and easy that you can install panels on your roof yourself.
    • adrianN 6y ago
      I agree that traditional nuclear makes little economic sense. But I disagree that this is inherent to nuclear power, because there might be a different reactor design that doesn't cost billions of dollars to set up. We just haven't found it yet.
      • evgen 6y ago
        One of the specific targets of the modular reactors that are now getting approval are these cost issues. If you build one reactor a year it will be big, bespoke, and incredibly overpriced. If you build a hundred modular reactors every year the cost will drop significantly.
• throwaway894345 6y ago
  The glaring problem (pun intended) with solar and wind is that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow and we don't have a good way to store energy for those sunless and windless intervals.
  • mdorazio 6y ago
    We do have a good way to store energy. It's called batteries, they are already cost effective in several use cases, and their cost is going down about 5% per year.
    • adrianN 6y ago
      Don't oversell them. Batteries as they are today are much too expensive to cover all needs. You need a way to store weeks of power consumption for large areas. Batteries are too capital intensive for that. They can take the role of peaker plants, but they are currently unsuited for storing energy for dark, windstill winter weeks. For that other technology, for example Power-to-Gas is needed currently.
    • V6HBGNQHU 6y ago
      When people talk about the cost of solar they ignore the price of batteries and underestimate the amount of batteries required. Watch this video about renewables in California[0]. The video mentions a study that would put the cost of energy storage required for California to be 100% on renewables would be over $3.6 trillion which is equivalent to an entire year's GDP for the state. The video author explained that study's methodology got that number by assuming enough to store excess capacity during the summer to provide power in winter when not enough would be generated on most days. This isn't great because li-on batteries are not great for long term storage and would lose power over time. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY
    • Manfredo_1 6y ago
      The US has about 8 seconds worth of battery storage. By comparison, to use renewables for 80% of our electricity we would need 12 hours of energy storage. For 100%, 3 weeks of storage [1]. 1 hour of energy storage in the US is 500 GWh. This amounts to more than the sum total of global lithium iron battery production (currently about 300 GWh) [2]. 1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora... 2. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/02/world-battery-production.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/02/world-battery-producti...
• whatshisface 6y ago
  >Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity. Yeah, there's no upper limit on energy usage. In several decades, mark my words, we will have a solar panel related deforestation problem.
  • zaroth 6y ago
    This is mathematically impossible. The entire world could be powered with 200,000 square miles of solar panels. Since 1990 we’ve lost ~2.5x that amount of land to deforestation, approximately zero of which was due to building solar. We have a deforestation problem, but it has nothing to do with solar.
    • whatshisface 6y ago
      Using present-day numbers to say that solar deforestation will not be a problem is just as fallacious as using today's temperature to say that global warming is not a problem.
      • zaroth 6y ago
        That is a flawed comparison, and a poor argument. Present day worldwide energy usage is a real metric which allows us to calculate the present day 200,000 sq mile figure. Today's temperature doesn't allow calculating anything relevant to global warming. I assumed you were being hyperbolic and thought some readers might be curious about the hypothetical area of panels required to meet the entire world's energy demand. It's an interesting figure to put things in perspective. But a claim that widespread solar power will be a leading cause of deforestation is entirely devoid of evidence and fails the basic napkin-math test. Energy usage will increase over time. Interestingly, so does solar panel efficiency. And most solar panels won't be built in forests. And the Earth will never be 100% powered by solar. But most compellingly, even if you did have to build solar farms only in forests, and even if you did need to provide 100% of the Earth's demand for energy through those farms, you could do it today with only 40% of the deforestation that's already occurred over the last 25 years. It's also nice to consider that solar panels built in deserts can even be beneficial to local flora and fauna (although not universally). [1] [1] https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/04/can-desert-plants-and-solar-panels-live-in-harmony-sometimes-yes/ https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/04/can-desert-plan...
• Konohamaru 6y ago
  Nuclear power provides enough megawatts for creating sustainable, electricity based heavy industry. If we're going to become zero carbon, that means we also need a system to fuel steel foundries, chemical manufacuring, and cement mixers without coal.
  • RobertoG 6y ago
    Not that I oppose to nuclear in principle, I only wanted to point that for heavy industry there are clean alternatives in development using mirrors. https://heliogen.com/ https://heliogen.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955247
• hindsightbias 6y ago
  As populations move north to escape climate change those areas will also become more adaptable to solar. Plus the areas they left will be well suited for solar as long as there is adequate infrastructure to move the electricity north.
• steeve 6y ago
  Wind and solar are very diffuse forms of energy, so harvesting them is hard and costly both in money, and most importantly for the biosphere. For instance, the universe radiates 3K of heat, which we could harvest and use. We don't because it's too diffuse. And I'm not talking about the intermittency problem.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    And yet, the cost of a kWh from renewables is less than from nuclear, for all the supposed advantage of nuclear's energy density. This should tell you that energy density is not actually a good metric.
    • steeve 6y ago
      Comparing a source controllable uninterrupted source of energy with an unreliable intermittent one doesn't make sense. Having power when you need it is very valuable. And in the case of renewables, you'd need to account for storage, after which the prices explode. What would you say if you could only turn on AC in the 3 months of winter? But there is another ugly side with regards to price (which are heavily subsidised): it is mostly cheap because offer far exceeds demand when power is available, because when it's sunny, it's sunny everywhere nearby so there's nobody wants to buy. Peak demand are at 7-8pm on during week days in winter. Good luck with solar or wind. On a bigger scale, see Denmark (invested heavily on wind) vs Norway (almost entirely hydro). When wind is up, Denmark, which _has_ to sell this energy, sells it to Norway, which will buy it at the effective operating cost of hydro, which is ~$0. And when there is demand, Norway will happily sell it to Denmark at a normal price. In effect, Denmark pays twice.
      • pfdietz 6y ago
        Intermittency and power density are two entirely different things. I was addressing the former there. But elsewhere in this thread, I address the intermittency issue. Constancy is an advantage, but not an unlimited one. If renewables have a sufficiently large levelized cost advantage they can push nuclear entirely out of the picture, even though they are intermittent.
• johnchristopher 6y ago
  > Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity. Or maybe time constraints ? Because we can't accommodate our growing energy needs fast enough with renewable only and we need fossil to sustain our civilization until renewable output is high enough to phase out non-renewable ? Does that make sense ? (I don't know the first thing about the economy and the engineering behind it at all)
• V6HBGNQHU 6y ago
  Land usage is a big factor. Most people are interested in solar because they care about the environment so taken up vast swathes of land for all the solar panels, destroying habits, is counter productive. Another downside of solar or wind is that it is intermittent and thus will require massive battery systems or alternative conventional power plants to provide energy the rest of the time.
  • dangerface 6y ago
    If you are short on space for your solar panels put them on your roof, problem solved. There are cheaper better ways of storing electricity like water stores, and this is what they use not batteries, they have never used batteries thats just a Tesla thing.
    • evgen 6y ago
      > put them on your roof, problem solved. This is why solar kills more people every year than nuclear, and your hydro storage and batteries are not even a drop in the ocean compared to total load or daily capacity of even a small grid.
      • dangerface 6y ago
        Wha? Becuase stuff falls off your roof and kills them? How does that compare to tiles falling off your roof and killing people? This doesn't sound like a real thing. Hydro storage is quite literaly a drop in the ocean, get it.
        • evgen 6y ago
          No, because people installing solar routinely fall and die. Because of the low power density of renewables like wind and solar you need a lot of installation sites and constant maintenance of same, which means a lot of opportunities for people to have fatal accidents. Nuclear has the lowest death rate per joule of energy provided of any available power source.
• slezyr 6y ago
  > The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free! Are going to clean solar panels/mirrors for free? > Bahawalpur is desert terrain , having high dust count, therefore, the efficiency of panels were reduced by 40%. It required 30 people to clean panels with 15 days to restore the panels back to their full capacity, which reduced production of installed 100MW plant to below 18 MW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park#Operational_hurdles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park#Operat...
  • dangerface 6y ago
    Do you get out of your car to wipe your windscreen when its raining? This cleaning problem seems like something that would be super easy to automate, I dunno why they would higher 30 people to do this when you could higher one engineer.
    • slezyr 6y ago
      Just add a bit of water™ How come that number of rovers on Mars dies due to dust on its panels? If it's a simple problem to solve why would NASA let them die? Water shortage is also present on that power plant.
    • pfdietz 6y ago
      There are many PV cleaning robots already on the market. Google for them.
  • tomatotomato37 6y ago
    30 workers isn't a lot for a power plant. According to this article[0] (ignore the coal stuff) a decent gas turbine plant takes ~25 workers to keep it running, and that's for a system whose energy source can just be piped in rather than having to be constantly babysat so it doesn't irradiate the tri-county area. That's kinda the flaw of a steam turbine based system; it doesn't matter if the heat comes from coal, uranium, concentrated solar, whatever, you still need people around to make sure the system with superheated steam and a big heavy turbine spinning really, really fast doesn't go wrong. [0]https://www.powermag.com/supporting-coal-power-plant-workers-plant-closures/ https://www.powermag.com/supporting-coal-power-plant-workers...
• Manfredo_1 6y ago
  The sun and wind are both very low energy density, and are intermittent sources. The sun is only available for part of the day, and wind is highly variable in a short term time frame. The real cost of using renewables for a primary source of energy is the cost of storage. Using renewables for 80% of our energy demand would require 12 weeks of storage - to get to 100% it would take 3 weeks of storage [1]. These are staggering amounts of storage. Most countries have energy storage that is measured in the seconds or minutes, not in hours let alone weeks. Solar and wind would be great if we had a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. But until that happens, we're going to be burning fossil fuels. There's a reason why Germany, which invested heavily in wind and solar, still emits 10x the carbon emissions from electricity generation as compared to France, which invested in nuclear. 1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
  • agumonkey 6y ago
    what about cultural changes ? serious question. less living at night, less energy consumption, making sun randomness a bit less of an issue. Just asking.
    • Manfredo_1 6y ago
      By "cultural changes" you mean energy shortages. Realistically, this would most likely result in leaders getting elected out of office and resuming the use of fossil fuels. Regular blackouts are immensely unpopular.
      • evgen 6y ago
        Those of us who lived through the oil shock in the 70s are having a laugh at the 'just cut the energy supply' path. Would love to hear from people who endured the UK at the height of their 3-day week to see how keen people were about this forced change...
        • agumonkey 6y ago
• holoduke 6y ago
  There will be a moment in the human evolution that even the total power of the sun is not enough. We need to explore alternatives to escape our planet, otherwise we are doomed.
• f154hfds 6y ago
  The problem with these renewables over time is that their energy density is fundamentally limited compared to nuclear by physics. We need sustainable _ecologically_ friendly energy sources and at scale unfortunately density becomes all important. People can and will quickly point out the ecological nuclear disasters that have occurred. I only say this - be intellectually honest with yourself about those disaster zones _now_. Compare them to the alternatives and think about it. You will also point out - renewables are becoming much more efficient over time! This is true, but there is an enormous asymmetry in investment between renewables and nuclear, so to compare recent efficiency gains of renewables with the current status of nuclear seems unfair. From a purely theoretical level the energy density of nuclear gives many potential environmental benefits: 1. Less raw material: this has a huge impact on society as a whole. Solar panels and wind turbines require a lot of raw materials that must be mined, refined, transported and built on site. Nuclear requires these things too of course, but it is more energy dense - requiring less given similar levels of technological innovation. 2. Less space: I've seen solar panels go up in various institutions around where I live. They're awesome! But many times they replace what once were fields, forests or pasture land. Wind turbines are even worse, always altering the natural landscape. Do _not_ get me wrong - I fully support these renewables, but once again they are not as space efficient as nuclear at scale. 3. Less workers: purely an economic efficiency principle. At scale density matters with respect to cost effectiveness. Given the same innovation and investment as renewables, nuclear can bottom out in a cost effective way that could really reshape our current energy landscape. Renewables have a much higher threshold requiring a higher percentage of our overall economic output to be dedicated to them. This means many other initiatives (like - for example - many other innovations sorely needed to mitigate carbon emissions) simply won't have resources because our society has taken those resources up building less efficient renewables.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    The distributed nature of renewables is actually a huge advantage. It means the renewable system is extremely fault tolerant. Not only does that help in operation, but it means installation is much more forgiving of low quality work (so you can use cheap labor that's easy to train). Screw up 1% of the modules in a PV field and output is down 1%. Screw up 1% of the welds in a nuclear power plant and you have a world of pain.
• logicallee 6y ago
  >The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free! From the surface of the Earth we can capture 1/100000000000000000000000000th of its output per square meter, for $100. That's because it's not really in the sky, as a bird or plane might be. It's 93 million miles away. As a result hardly any light makes it to Earth over a small area. You need like $1000+ of paneling and many square meters to capture enough of it to operate a hairdrier electrically. Which makes sense because a hairdrier uses a lot more energy than drying your hair by standing in daylight. On a cool morning you'd start sniffling from cold before the sun dried your hair. No animal gets its energy from photosynthesis, they wait for stationary plants to do it over months and years and then eat them. The sun is just not that energetic seen from Earth. So yes it is a 384.6 yottawatt nuclear power plant. But we're so far away we can get a hundred watts of it for $100, on a good day. Could be cool to send something there to collect and ship us electricity in bundled form though.
• shakezula 6y ago
  Nuclear is the only way we’re going to be able to get ahead of climate change. Renewables do not have the energy density required at this point. In the 70s? Sure, we might have been able to get ahead of it. At this point, we’re going to need nuclear whether we like it or not. Nuclear is the only option that will provide enough power to both scrub out existing carbon from the atmosphere and reduce our output of carbon while we do it.
  • socialdemocrat 6y ago
    50m2 Solar on the roof top of every household would power An average western country. That is not a lot. And that is is an upper band as we have wind power, biomass, hydro power geothermal and many other sources of clean energy. Offshore wind is getting really cheap and offers vast amount of unused space.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      There are western countries with snow in the winter. Also, countries where the majority of population lives in apartments. Also, how would an average western country power itself at nights, if all it has is 50m2 solar on every roof top?
      • socialdemocrat 6y ago
        As I mentioned we got tons of other options besides solar power. EVs are now increasingly beating gasoline cars on cost of ownership and these often have batteries large enough to store the power required for 4 days of a regular western household. I doubt you will be entirely without sunshine for 4 days straight.
        • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
          > I doubt you will be entirely without sunshine for 4 days straight. Come to Russia, some place like Yekaterinburg. Or Saint-Petersburg, where the sun can be unseen for months.
• caditinpiscinam 6y ago
  > Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it Why "no longer"? I did some reading on Fukushima the other week (I think it was an anniversary of the accident?) and was surprised to learn that multiple studies predicted the disaster years before it happened, only to be ignored. Even as engineering advances, if people keep choosing to take shortcuts and ignore glaring concerns, does it really matter? Is there a reason to believe that nuclear (or the energy industry in general) is acting more prudently than in the past?
  • opo 6y ago
    All indications are that much was learned by industry and the NRC after TMI: "...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to increased identification, analysis and publication of plant performance information, and recognising human performance as “a critical component of plant safety”. Key indicators of plant safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those indicators show: • The average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years has dropped to nearly zero. • Today there are far fewer, much less frequent and lower risk events that could lead to a reactor-core damage. • The average number of times safety systems have had to be activated is about one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago. • Radiation exposure levels to plant workers have steadily decreased to about one-sixth of the 1985 exposure levels and are well below national limits. • The average number of unplanned reactor shutdowns has decreased by nearly ten-fold. In 2007 there were about 52 shutdowns compared to about 530 shutdowns in 1985." https://www.nucnet.org/news/three-mile-island-led-to-sweeping-and-permanent-changes https://www.nucnet.org/news/three-mile-island-led-to-sweepin... No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been safer than all the alternatives that were available. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#28a1e128709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could've let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would they have covered it if 200 thousand were evacuated because of a nuclear power plant? It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?