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> I think you've got that a bit reversed, trying to fix climate change with nuclear is a bit impossible at this point. We can't build it! Can't or won't?
by andbberger 6y ago
> I think you've got that a bit reversed, trying to fix climate change with nuclear is a bit impossible at this point. We can't build it!
Can't or won't?
- epistasis 6y agoIn the US, it's mostly can't. The last attempt caused massive risk to Toshiba as its subsidiary Westinghouse was destroyed by its attempts. In the UK, at Wylfa, it's more "won't", Hitachi just refused to go forward with a new build, since it couldn't find external investors despite very generous guaranteed pricing for its energy. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54158091 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54158091 At least, it appears to be "won't", because who knows if a construction project that was started would ever be finished. If the new nuclear startups come through, everything has changed. But the new small ones they are designing are not really anything like the nuclear reactors of yore, so we have to wait and see if they pan out on costs. And in the decades they need to come online, storage and solar and wind keep halving in price every few years. But at the moment, pretend you're Jeff Bezos and want to buy $50B of nuclear reactors, however much that ends up in practice. Who do you go to? Toshiba, Hitachi? No. EDF? Hell no. Maybe South Korea? But they had their recent corruption scandal for inspections of nuclear plants. Rosatom? Feel like getting into bed with Putin? What's left of the industry?
- andbberger 6y agoThat was a rhetorical question. But the answer is won't. I submit to you that the economics and historical precedent are utterly irrelevant. It's a simple choice: build more nuclear power plants..... or face extinction
- epistasis 6y agoThat is not the choice at all, and I have yet to see anybody make a serious case for it. There are lots of plans for renewable, carbon free grids out there. Most include nuclear, but not all. Nuclear is not an essential component of any of them, we have many alternatives, the only question is which will provide the cheapest energy. IMHO, it's unlikely to be nuclear, and I think that because those who include nuclear as a part of their future grids vastly underestimate the pace of change for renewables and storage.
- pfdietz 6y agoAs an example, consider this story out of Utah: https://spectra.mhi.com/hydrogen-and-salt-domes-are-winning-the-west-for-renewable-energy https://spectra.mhi.com/hydrogen-and-salt-domes-are-winning-... A single cavity in that salt dome can store 150 GWh of energy, and there's room for 100 cavities.
- epistasis 6y agoI may have underestimate the potential of salt domes... I think we will be making lots of hydrogen for decarbonization of industrial processes, and maybe even for aviation or shipping, so as long as we can dump electrons to Utah and find the water, this sounds great.
- Dylan16807 6y agoSo about 5 hours of power for the entire US, though ~40% efficient?
- pfdietz 6y agoAverage electric power generation in the US, on the grid, is a bit less than 500 GW. So, 15 TWh is about 30 hours. There are lots and lots of other salt formations, both in the US and in the world. Also, aquifers and exhausted oil and gas fields can be used to store hydrogen.
- cercatrova 6y agoThis isn't good discourse, don't ask questions you can't accept (not necessarily agree with, of course) the answers to without condescension.
- bawolff 6y agoI'm with the OP on this one. Its clearly a won't not a can't. We have built them in the past, the knowledge didn't get lost. This isn't greek fire. The political environment being such that nobody wants to build them is the definition of won't not can't.
- cercatrova 6y agoThat's fine, I am not commenting on the content of the response, only on the condescending attitude it had.
- andbberger 6y agoYeah you're right about that. My bad.
- google234123 6y agoThere was a point not too long ago where there was no nuclear industry. It can come back.
- epistasis 6y agoThere was also a point not too long ago when there weren't any 3.5 inch floppy drives. If we are going to bring back obsolete industries, at least floppy drives could be thrown around the office for fun.
- cbmuser 6y agoNuclear isn’t obsolete technology. China, Russia, India etc are building all new plants. One NPP replaces millions of solar panels with a 90% capacity factor while solar has a 10-20% capacity factor. How is that “obsolete”?
- epistasis 6y agoChina and India are building some coal plants that they are going to highly regret, because it is even more onset than nuclear. When building something new that lasts decades, and the current examples that have already paid off their capital costs are shutting down because fuel and maintenance alone is more expensive than newer tech, that is pretty much the definition of obsolete. In India, the reason for coal and nuclear is that it's easier for local officials to take bribes. Not sure what the story is in China, as they are far more strict with the corruption penalties there. I suspect that it's mostly that there are old long term plans that haven't been updated for today's reality, a reality where renewables and storage got cheaper than even the most optimistic predictions.
- adrianN 6y agoBut can it come back quickly enough to make meaningful impact on the climate catastrophe? By all means, try to bring it back, but please don't use the "only nuclear can possibly save us" rhetoric to delay a massive push towards other carbon free energy.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago> "Couldn't find external investors despite very generous guaranteed pricing for its energy." UK is a world leader in finding particularly sadomasochistic ways of financing critical infrastructure. This is like the PFI debacle all over again. Interest rates are at zero, the government should take out the cheque book and finance the plant directly. You can absolutely just buy a reactor and they are being built in China at record pace. Private investment contributes nothing of value to this type of project, because spesification, location, and everything else was already decided It only accrues extra cost because of higher interest rates avaliable to private investors and risk hedging. All the current government is trying to do, is keep the cost of the powerplants off the book, and hiding it from the national debt.
- epistasis 6y agoBut why would the government want to provide the loans, when it is already providing a massive subsidy on pricing to guarantee good returns, which should be far more valuable to a buildable technology? The reason, of course, is that nuclear is not very buildable, and nobody is willing to make a bet, even with very high returns. If private investors would rather invest in offshore wind, or storage, why should the UK government be less wise with its money? If the UK is going to take on billion debt for energy infrastructure (an excellent idea in my opinion that would benefit the UK greatly!) it should invest in more sound and reliable sources of energy like renewables, that have a proven track record of being built on time and in budget. And technologies where we learn when we build so that next year's project is even cheaper.
- cbmuser 6y agoRenewables _always_ require a fossile backup. You are _not_ fixing the climate with just renewables. Look at electricitymap.org and compare the emissions of Germany (50% renewables) with France (70% nuclear). Germany is 7 times dirtier in its electricity sector. I don’t understand why people keep repeating that non-sense that renewables reduce emissions at large scale, they don’t. And building NPPs fast is no problem, look at China and Russia. Heck, Japan used to build new plants in just about three years.
- jariel 6y agoThe US and every other developed nation 'absolutely can'. The tech, research and regulations are '40 years old' stuck in an old era. The 'existential risks' from Nuclear are partly fallout but that can mostly be managed. It's really 1) waste and 2) proliferation. The waste ... might possible to be dealt with. We can re-process and turn waste into something that can reasonably sit somewhere safe for '100K years' - that sounds like a challenge but I think it's possible. Proliferation is the real problem. Nuclear requires 'very responsible systems' from top to bottom. Advanced nations, with transparency and oversight and scrutiny, can handle it. But as soon as US, Canada, France starts building reactors, then Chile, Ecuador, Afghanistan will want to as well, and who is going to stop them? Then it's only a 'small bribe' from 'very bad actors' getting a hold of nuclear material, enough to build a bomb, or much easier, just a dirty bomb, enough to very easily do some very bad damaage. I can see contamination being released in NYC, which maybe only makes a few people ill, another few thousands with 'somewhat unsafe exposure' - but which requires evacuation of Manhatten and 200 years of 'no go zone'. This is the real risk. So the UN, West, China, Russia would have to all perfectly align on 'the rules' and be very serious about enforcing them. Because it's political, I don't see it happening. Russia has tons of Fuel they want to sell to Kazhakstan, a civil war breaks out there, baddies get ahold of a reactor, and 'somewhere someone takes a bribe' and some bad materials slip out the back. We can definitely save the world with nuclear, we just have to act responsibly on a collective level. Not sure if we can, sadly.
- karamazov 6y agoThe proliferation risk of nuclear fuel is overblown. Reactors don’t use weapons-grade fuel, and purifying it to weapons-grade material is harder than making the fuel to begin with; if you can take fuel and refine it into a weapon, you might as well start with unprocessed uranium.
- 01100011 6y agoI find it interesting that spent nuclear fuel contains a fair amount of weapons grade Pu, but it also contains other isotopes of Pu which you wouldn't want and would be difficult to separate. It could definitely be used for a dirty bomb, which could, if nothing else, cause significant economic damage from the fear of radiation.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoIf you had $50 billion to spend on new nuclear you'd probably be better off approaching China or India See my recent comment here where you'll find 50 power reactors currently under construction in 15 countries. Though I'll grant whether any of it turns out to be money wisely invested, either financially or environmentally, is a different matter.
- kabes 6y agoI think a 'made-in-china reactor' will be too hard to sell to the general public in US/EU
- roenxi 6y agoThat would continue a trend of willfull ignorance and stupidity that is not out of character. Firstly, the evidence is that the Chinese are excellent at manufacturing and will likely be churning out high quality nuclear reactors. Secondly, high quality energy production is a bad topic for nationalism. The West decided not to pursue nuclear decades ago. But it remains the most technically excellent form of energy production and we should be grateful that there are still nations in the world pushing technology and engineering forward. It isn't like there are a lot of choices; the obvious options the world has right now are either Chinese nuclear or Chinese solar.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoI actually meant investing the 50 billion in China or India.
- defnotashton2 6y agoBut wha tid your remote be those artificial gov overhead costs designed to fail it out. Fro. What I understand the raw material is leased from the gov at high rates.
- atoav 6y agoThe one thing most people don't realize, is that this is not only about producing energy more cleanly, this will definitly also mean things like driving less (or less individual), eating different, flying way less, making all things more usable etc. And this quite frankly is the harder thing to tackle because it means changing culture. And that culture needed to change not now, but a while ago. If the whole world fully stopped emitting CO2 today, the latency till we could measure the first effect on climate would be roughly 13 years. Most people I know are way too optimistic about what it takes to deal with this. A good way to get a feeling is to play with the sliders of this model here: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org Edit: this is btw. not something that I am happy with. Like at all. It stresses me out to think about it. People down voting a post that simply states the scientific consensus on that topic doesn't make it any better to be honest.
- AniseAbyss 6y agoAmusingly only the Chinese seem capable to build nuclear powerplants these days. I was doing some research and practically all the sites in use today were built in the 1970s...
- jackjeff 6y agoI really think the economics behind nuclear traditional power plants are a bit screwed. It takes years to build and costs order of magnitudes more than a gas turbines. In addition gas turbines are particularly well suited to be turned on in a mater of minutes whenever there is peak demand. And you still need power when there is no wind or no sun. Unless there is strong support from government, Nuclear Plants can’t happen. I’m really putting a lot of hope in the next generation of mini self contained nuclear plants. I think Bill Gate is also looking into that. These have the potential to be successful both for the planet (get rid of gas turbines for peak demand when renewables fail) but also economically (easier cheaper to build).