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Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of

• deleted 6y ago
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• IgorPartola 6y ago
  This is the first time I have seen nuclear described as more expensive. My understanding was that it was several times cheaper than coal. I could be totally wrong of course.
  • jka 6y ago
    A useful term to search the web for related to this is 'LCOE' - an acronym for 'levelized cost of energy'. It's essentially the same notion as 'total cost of ownership' in IT, but in the domain of energy generation.
  • jojobas 6y ago
    You haven't read much from a particular mindset then. They tend to evaluate nuclear waste storage as pretty much an eternal cost.
  • hwillis 6y ago
    That's because its a bit of a bait and switch. When people pull that out, it's about keeping existing plants running- extending them to run for 60+ years. That's pretty cheap, since the cost of fuel is tiny and you just need to pay for the ~1000 people onsite. The issue there is risk- you can't just open up all the valves to check how worn out they are, or if all the computers still have nice transistors and clean relays. You can do some basic stuff like looking for cracks, but the system is ancient. Who knows if that is okay or not. Then, if you talk about new construction, the issue is cost but the conversation is entirely about risk. There's very, very little danger even for many decades. Cost is another matter. The best estimates are that nuclear costs as much as the most expensive other technologies to build, but the actual end figure has just gotten higher and higher over time. Manufacturing is not what it used to be and these huge plants have been outpaced by smaller plants and different technologies.
    • Retric 6y ago
      That’s just part of the story, annual nuclear refueling is also surprisingly expensive. The raw material is cheap, but you need to refine it to reactor grade, creating fuel rods, and only use ~6% of it before replacing the rods. So on net it ends up being quite costly before considering long term storage. You also need to shutdown the reactor for refueling. Other costs like maintenance starts to really add up over time. Similarly, reactors are small but nuclear power plants take up a lot of land for security, staff, etc. It’s really a combination of several factors that’s keeping Nuclear so expensive in every country around the world not just the US.
      • HarryHirsch 6y ago
        Also the nuclear waste problem. Nuclear reprocessing looks nice on paper, but the technical implementation is problematic, it's chemistry but in a radioactive environment. If something catches on fire there's problems.
        • titzer 6y ago
          France has successfully processed 23,000 tons of spent fuel, or 14 years worth. With zero incidents. In fact it works so well, they process other countries' spent fuel, too. https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...
• MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  Exactly, its a bit like discussing systemd in that way. I suspect small modular nuclear reactors will find their niche for islands etc., but renewables + batteries will win due to cost reasons.
  • ChuckMcM 6y ago
    Okay you win, systemd as nuclear power is pretty epic. :-) That said, there is something about nuclear power that is puzzling. Sure it has a lot of fearmongering but it is very well supported by folks who create these sorts of false narratives. Kind of like conspiracy theories to me, how to they continue to exist when the narrative is clearly incorrect in the presence of all the facts? I had a professor at USC who was teaching Nuclear Engineering and he was solidly convinced that these "whisper campaigns" were funded by the big oil companies. His thesis was that big oil couldn't survive if electricity became so cheap that the things we do with oil now could be done more cost effectively with electricity. It is too bad he didn't live to see the revolution in PV solar power. Clearly the geopolitical aspects of cheap solar is changing the landscape, and yet solar didn't seem to get the same treatment as nuclear. If I have learned only one thing in my life it is that if you can keep the debate emotional (fear, hate, anger) then you can prevent the incursion of unpleasant facts by shutting down the listener's ability to reason. This was not a fun thing to learn.
    • 7952 6y ago
      There are lots of good reasons why mega-projects fail or under-perform that nuclear is hardly immune to. In fact the complexity, scale and grandeur of nuclear may make it particularly susceptible.
• cwp 6y ago
  The problem with nuclear is that people are afraid of it. If we had spent the last 40 years trying to make it cheaper instead of trying to prevent accidents, it wouldn't be so expensive.
  • nicoburns 6y ago
    True, but this isn't exactly irrational. Nuclear only has such a good safety record because we have been so careful with it. Nobody seriously thinks "move fast and break things" nuclear reactors are a good idea.
    • formerly_proven 6y ago
      They used to, and every major accident raised the demanded safety measures.
    • pojzon 6y ago
      Its about time a lot of nuclear power plans will reach their life-expancy. I wanna see how countries like France, Japan, Germany, Russia, China are going to deal with that. Fukushima was not a good example of “how to treat reports of damaged facility”. Goverment knew and did nothing. Newer nuclear reactors are safe, but older designs are a ticking time bombs.
      • Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
        Not a single person has died directly of radiation from the Fukushima accident. That's in the context of a tsunami wave that has directly killed large number of people by impact. So in general, Fukushima should be a very good example for promotion of nuclear power.
        • nicoburns 6y ago
          However the Fukushima cleanup has been very expensive (hundreds of billions of US dollars). If you factor in the cost of accidents like Fukushima then nuclear becomes pretty uncompetitive cost wise.
• colordrops 6y ago
  > it kills a very low number of people per TWh This is a grossly naive and over-simplistic way to judge safety and efficacy. Yes, perhaps fewer people die in a major accidents, but then you've left a large swath of land unusable for hundreds or thousands of years. And the cost for managing the disasters is astronomical. In a place like Japan, they lose a not insignificant portion of landmass to an accident. While other forms of energy may overall cause more deaths, it's been distributed across everyone evenly. And apparently this is considered an better outcome, because that is precisely the policy we are taking with Covid. I'd make a bet that by the end of this pandemic, the amount of suffering and death caused by the lockdowns will be more than from Covid itself, when you consider the massive economic failure of small business, children in isolation for so long, depression, overdoses, suicide, domestic abuse, diseases not being diagnosed or treated, civil unrest, etc. It's considered a good policy to share the suffering across everyone to avoid a few directly attributable deaths of compromised individuals. edit: I'd be curious if anyone was willing to refute my statement rather than downvote it. I strongly believe what I say but am a big supporter of critical thought and would love for someone to challenge my statement and give me a reason to think otherwise.
  • drivebycomment 6y ago
    Which large parcel of land in Japan is unusable for hundreds of years ? I am not aware of any large area declared unusable that way.
    • colordrops 6y ago
      http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclear-accident/evacuation-orders-and-restricted-areas http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclea...
      • drivebycomment 6y ago
        Where does it say the evacuated areas are off limit for hundreds of years ?
• steeve 6y ago
  Most of the cost of a MWh of nuclear comes from the cost of capital (interests). [1] Put differently, if capital is backed by the state, that the $/MWh could be a _lot_ less than it is. 1. https://imgur.com/a/4mAlUbO https://imgur.com/a/4mAlUbO
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    This also seems to be a problem because the US seems to have gotten much worse at building fixed structures (bridges, buildints &c.) over the last 100 year. Some of that cost is probably due to better workplace safety, but some of that cost has come in the past 40 years, and I don't feel like OSHA has tightened the screws that much in the psat 40 years.
    • vianneychevalie 6y ago
      Not only the US. The Flamanville EPR has suffered increased costs because the welders that actually learned how to do nuclear-level welds had retired by the time someone decided to build a new nuclear reactor after Chernobyl. Additionally, the foundries that build a key part of the nuclear core (I belive it’s called a chaudron in French, but it’s basically a big metal boiler) were not as good as they were, because they had to actually remake it twice. It is horrifying but we lost a technological capacity. Here’s a good source in French on that subject: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville# https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville#
      • manfredo 6y ago
        It's less that we've lost a technological capacity, and more than we are no longer leveraging economies of scale. France and the US built a lot of nuclear power plants in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (well, mostly just France in the 1980s). Nuclear power plants often require specialized parts that aren't found in any other industry. That means when one-off plants are built an entire portion of the supply chain needs to be rebuilt, but when a serial run of plants are constructed (as was done in France) overhead costs of setting up the supply chain are spread out across all plants.
      • 6y ago
• icedistilled 6y ago
  >Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time. For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ years already.
  • mycall 6y ago
    If we had enough solar to power the world, would all of the solar cells actually lower the temperature of Earth due to being black?
    • projektfu 6y ago
      Solar radiation that is absorbed by a solar panel will either heat the panel or generate electricity, which will also mostly become heat in the end. Reflected radiation will hopefully leave the earth. The things that cool the planet are mostly white — reflective. Clouds, white roofs, etc. Trees cool their local area by performing endothermic reactions creating carbohydrates and lignans.
      • thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > Trees cool their local area by performing endothermic reactions creating carbohydrates and lignans. Let's not forget shade. How much are they cooling the air above them?
        • Filligree 6y ago
          A fair bit. I don't have numbers for trees in particular, but one of the benefits of putting solar panels above farms is supposed to be cooler panels, which improves panel efficiency. Though most of that would be evaporation, not chemistry.
    • chmod775 6y ago
• whearyou 6y ago
  Strong disagree. And the brushing off of large scale risks from current technology, fail-deadly nuclear is very irresponsible. Nuclear has the possibility for point-scale accidents to render large areas permanently uninhabitable. Given the fallibility of human social organizations point scale accidents are guaranteed in all domains. Therefor using nuclear power is conceding areas will be rendered uninhabitable. As we saw with the Chernobyl near miss and since, these areas may be as large as a continent in the case the point scale accident is bad. Note all of this changes if nuclear technology is fail-safe. Examples include the fusion-seeded fission model, and the candlestick reactor model. Technology here is severely underfunded in interest of fail-deadly technologies more likely to be implemented and yield profit in the short term, even if we’re running huge risks by adopting them. In the era of Covid where we see how badly our social systems can fail, the hand wavy attitude toward nuclear is simply appalling.
  • simion314 6y ago
    >Nuclear has the possibility for point-scale accidents to render large areas permanently uninhabitable I disagree with your point, but on a tangent, didn't US(and others) explode nuclear bombs in caves,deserts, space etc so maybe there are such desert areas where you can have nuclear plants where nobody would be affected.
• codingdave 6y ago
  > it kills a very low number of people per TWh. I worked in energy for 5 years. Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production. The goal was zero. We did not reach that goal, but nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up.
  • thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production. What? Of course they are. Just like deaths are made acceptable by anything else people need.
  • Lazare 6y ago
    Obviously zero deaths is a great target, yes. Obviously zero deaths is impossible. No energy production method causes zero deaths; even wind and solar have a death toll (eg, from workers falling off things, construction accidents, manufacturing processes, etc), and yes, at the scale we're talking about that adds up. Everything causes deaths when you're talking about thousands of TWhs. At most you can minimise the deaths. > Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production. Nor are they acceptable because of food production, and yet food production causes deaths. Fishing boats are famously dangerous places; even farms have a lot of hazards (chemicals, large animals, heavy machinery). We could say the same about minerals, lumber (a friend of mine lost her father at a young age; he worked in forestry and a tree came down the wrong way), and more. And yet, we need all these things. > Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. [...] nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up. I don't doubt it. That is, after all, how we ended up in this mess. Japan is currently building a large fleet of coal fired power plants (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...). Those plants will kill a horrifying number of people; many hundreds of times more than died from the Fukushima disaster. That seems fairly clearly like the sort of decision you'd made if you weren't thinking about the obvious results.
    • dane-pgp 6y ago
      The buried lede from that article: > But Japan relies on coal for more than a third of its power generation needs. And while older coal plants will start retiring, eventually reducing overall coal dependency, the country still expects to meet more than a quarter of its electricity needs from coal in 2030. So this decade Japan's reliance on coal power will roughly drop from 33% to 25%. To provide even more context, Japan's energy consumption has been falling since before the 2011 disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japan_energy_and_GDP.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japan_energy_and_GDP.svg
• ComputerGuru 6y ago
  Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the site back to “normal” decades later isn’t put up in escrow from the start: that’s all captured in the price. If we did that for fossil (and other) fuels, you’d bet they would cost more too.
  • rgbrenner 6y ago
    Your post conveniently ignores solar/wind + batteries, which is even cheaper than coal.
    • ComputerGuru 6y ago
      Are you really suggesting those have zero externalities not priced in?
      • 7952 6y ago
        The externalities are orders of magnitude less complex to deal with.
        • emteycz 6y ago
          This right here is a prime example of Dunning-Kruger effect. You're completely forgetting the large scale effects on nature, for example, which nuclear does not have.
          • deleted 6y ago
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    • manfredo 6y ago
      Where are you getting this claim? Natural gas costs somewhere between $40 and $70 per MWh [1]. Storage costs for batteries range from $100/KWh (very optimistic) to $300/KWh [2]. But that's per kilowatt hours. That's $100,000 per MWh to $300,000 per MWh. Solar and wind's dispatchability remains its key weakness. Storage at anywhere near the required amounts remains a fantasy. That's why Germany and California are still burning fossil fuels for ~40% of their energy, while France's share of fossil fuel generation is under 10%. 1. https://blog.aee.net/the-numbers-are-in-and-renewables-are-winning-on-price-alone#:~:text=With%20the%20cost%20of%20coal,competitive%20resources%20in%20today's%20marketplace https://blog.aee.net/the-numbers-are-in-and-renewables-are-w.... 2. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/73222.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/73222.pdf
• yurlungur 6y ago
  To me the bummer of nuclear power is how much advocates try to underestimate the cost of handling the waste for decades and the potential risks. I think if you really think we need to go full speed ahead with nuclear power you need to ask how close a waste deposit to your home are you comfortable with? Often times these things just get transported to supposedly remote places which just mean a more vulnerable community may be exposed to the long term risks.
  • Consultant32452 6y ago
    Modern nuclear power plants use waste from previous generation nuclear power plants as their fuel.
    • Balgair 6y ago
      Doesn't that then make it easier to get to the bomb?
      • AngryData 6y ago
        The limit to producing nukes now is mostly energy requirements. Nuclear chemistry is not a secret and anybody can go to school for it. The limitation is the massive energy requirements to actually purify the materials to such high grades. The Manhattan project used 10% of the US total electrical generation capacity.
        • Balgair 6y ago
          So then yes, it would be easier
    • pfdietz 6y ago
      No, they don't, in most cases. And when they do (MOX fuel in some thermal reactors) it's a net economic loss. MOX fuel is difficult to fabricate; the Pu used has negative value compared to just using fresh enriched uranium.
    • 6y ago
• AI_WAIFU 6y ago
  The first working nuclear reactor was hastily cobbled together in a tennis court. It's literally just a critical mass of inexpensive magic rocks, a control system, and some way to remove the heat. The only reason it costs so much is precisely because everyone is paranoid, so we demand expensive security systems and protocols. If the regulators got out of the way you could probably put one together for a few million dollars.
  • Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    We could, but we shouldn't. The fact that we can is probably the reason for the fears around the reactor. People don't fear the technical limitations of a well-build and well-managed safe reactor, and those can be built. But they fear the danger of the corruption and corner-cutting in some countries which is very difficult to constrain, which will lead to building an unsafe reactor.
    • shadowgovt 6y ago
      And the consequences of building such a reactor. At the height of the Chernobyl disaster, calculations were suggesting a vast swath of Europe could be rendered uninhabitable by humans for several generations in the melt-to-groundwater-detonation scenario. As it stands, an area of diameter slightly smaller than the length of Manhattan is still considered high-risk for permanent habitation.
• strulovich 6y ago
  This death per TWh calculation is naive. In reality modeling and averages are not enough here. If can tell a coal plant kills X people per year, then I can pretty safely deduce it will kill somewhere between 0.9X and 1.1X people next year. (Made up numbers, but the point holds) For nuclear, we can easily estimate with the same models the damage. One miscalculation, or one disastrous outcome can cause 50000 deaths, or turn the entirety of New York City to radiated ground that has to be avoided for decades. As long as the extrapolations for nuclear are prone to extreme outcomes, nuclear is more unpredictable and therefore has more danger potential. This is why small nuclear reactors which fail independently are the way to turn nuclear plants into common energy source. They can reduce our fragility to extreme Chernobyl like outcomes.
  • DoctorOetker 6y ago
    the price of protecting many small nuclear reactors against say aeroplanes will rise per watt. I certainly agree with death per TWh calculations being naive, but for a different reason: ethics trumps metrics. If I agree to climb a roof and maintain some solar panels in exchange for money, I am risking my own life and limb. A child 100 years from now will not fall off in my place. If you agree to work in a nuclear reactor today, in theory a child in the future could get cancer from a mishap today. Put differently: even if eating 20 grams of human babies cured AIDS, and hence many lives could be saved in exchange for one, does not justify the trade. We expect informed consent of all parties involved.
    • nobodyandproud 6y ago
      How do you quantify the life and healthcost of the mining, “recycling”, and disposal of the PV and the battery? PV and batteries are expected to last only three decades or a decade+, respectively. Unlike a centralized power source, decentralized power has all of the downsides that we have today with consumer garbage. Disposal is left to the consumer, which means it’s just going into landfills. Ethics is a strawman.
      • DoctorOetker 6y ago
• rgbrenner 6y ago
  solar/wind + batteries is now cheaper than coal and nuclear. And it can be brought online faster with virtually no safety issues. Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissioning some disaster decades from now.
  • lightgreen 6y ago
    Do you have evidence that batteries are cheaper than say nuclear? I only heard of the opposite, batteries are prohibitively expensive.
    • ncmncm 6y ago
      Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage. But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate.
      • glogla 6y ago
        Australia has a tiny (on grid scale) battery used to stabilize the grid, not for long term storage like you would need for relying on solar energy in place that actually has winters.
      • lightgreen 6y ago
        > Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage. Maybe. But nuclear does not require batteries. > But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate. I do don’t have the numbers from Australia at hand. Do you? Is it really cheaper than nuclear, or they heavily overpaid for them, or Telsa sold it with large discount?
      • nickik 6y ago
        I love that Australia battery, but lets be real its tiny. Comparing that to a solution that could fully balance all solar/wind energy is a gigantic strech. I have looked into all of these storage mechanism, and not one is actually really read for the market and is mass deployable quickly. We just have to hope Tesla can actually spit out many tera of batteries by 2030 and the other companies match them.
• johnmorrison 6y ago
  Nuclear energy is regularly significantly (usually more than an order of magnitude, from what I've seen) cheaper for electricity than any other source in comparable countries (e.g. nuclear electricity in Toronto >10x cheaper than coal/solar electricity in Berlin) Nuclear energy is and always has been inherently competitive on total profitability over the course of a plant's lifetime. The main issue is the time it takes to get a plant built, and the heavy upfront investment. Both of these extend painfully the time before investors reach nonnegative ROI, which is (imo) part of why despite the actual profitability being much better human investors with inherently limited lifetimes opt for, for example, natural gas or solar installations. + Also of course, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than other sources of energy, which leads to good things like reduced accident deaths, but also heavily increases cost and time to build.
  • chjdev 6y ago
    do you have a source for the >10x? because that was my assumption as well, but after reading through [0-3] i'm pretty amazed how cheap solar and wind have become over the last years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/solar-power-cost-decrease-2018-5 https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/solar-power-cost-decrease-... [2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/
    • johnmorrison 6y ago
      The average price I paid for electricity in Ontario over a couple years vs. the average of a number of sources I found for cost of electricity across Germany. I don't have any links saved, but yeah it was like ~0.05 CAD vs 0.55 CAD per kWh iirc. You're right that solar has become very price competitive. We're pushing that at Tesla & I do think as the current regulatory environment around nuclear continues to stay roughly the same, solar will be much cheaper in the coming decade. It should be noted that subsidies, regulatory fees, and economies of scale play a MUCH larger role in the LCOE of energy sources today than the fundamental physics, efficiency, material costs etc do. Therefore it is wiser to look at the options from a first principles perspective and consider the potential costs of sources after equally large effort is put into scaling and optimization, and ignoring political factors. When you analyze the options in this way, nuclear wins every single time.
• manfredo 6y ago
  > Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it? Compete against fossil fuels? No, but neither can solar and wind. Nuclear power also loses out against solar and wind in the very short term, and depending on the geography. Solar is cheap until you saturate the energy market during peak generation hours. Adding storage into the mix creates costs an order of magnitude larger than nuclear. We don't have a plan to decarbonize the electricity sector with solar and wind that doesn't involve a massive breakthrough in energy storage. The reality is that the only proven ways of powering nations with carbon-free energy are either geographically dependent (hydroelectricity and geothermal power) and nuclear. Nuclear also provides additional benefits in the form of things like desalination with the waste heat - which is going to be highly in demand as climate change ramps up- and thermochemical hydrogen production, which is likely our best method of decarbonizing shipping.
  • pas 6y ago
    Just a day ago someone on HM mentioned that the Diablo Canyon plant is being shut down because it would need a 7B USD cooling system (evaporation towers), and building 40 GWh storage would cost less. (I found this ~400 USD / kWh for 4 hours number, that gives 17.5 GW for 4 hours for 7B. by W Cole at NREL.)
    • reincarnate0x14 6y ago
      I don't doubt that the Diablo Canyon upgrade is expensive, and various interests have been set on killing that plant for decades, but there is no way on earth you're getting 40 GWh of storage in central California at any price within a decade. The total pumped and gas storage capacity of the United States is only like 25 GWh. Building that would require a majority of the total battery production of the entire planet for a year, and most of that wouldn't even be the right kind of batteries regardless of what technology they settled on. Some sort of dream moonshot project to build that would be awesome, but is completely outside the scope of any modern commercial endeavor.
• nickik 6y ago
  > Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it? We are still using basically 1960 tech, that's why its expensive. As Elon Musk pointed out often, what matters is pace of innovation. Nuclear has a pace of innovation that is almost inperceptable. The reasons are that its almost impossible for a startup to do anything, without 10s of millions or better 100s you don't even have to start. The existing reactors last for 60-100 years, so if the country built some in the 1970-1980, it might be enough for multible generations. You don't have a large industry that can substain itself on building reactors. Industry basically makes money with the fuel dilivery, but those companies have no insentive to innovate on the reactor. You can not even build a prototype or experimete. A university level research reactor is not enough to validate a real reactor. And the only other thing is a full commercial reactor. This means companies are forced to develop everything on paper, long before they even get some uranium to play with. That is an insnaly difficult way to build anything, compare that to SpaceX Starship development. I am a huge fan of nuclear, and we really did have the technology in the 1970 to basically solve climate change as France basically showed. I believe one 'gigafactory' that mass produces small or medium reactors and a appropritae fuel cycle would be by far the cheapest long term solution. Sadly I see no way how we can get to that situation, a single sighting project takes many, many years. Also, the concept of 'baseload' is dead. If you only produce when renewables are not needed you are in a horrible market situation. Even if you wanted to be dynamic, current tech can't be. This is not an issue with nuclear in general, but the current generation. A load following nuclear reactor is possible, but even that will simply lead to an underutilized resource. That is why companies like Moltex Energy are designing their reactor more like CSP installation. Where the nuclear reactor has a 'heat-battery' and multible CCGT so that when there is money to be made, you actually triple the output of the reactor for when prices are high. It also leads to the nuclear part of the investment being only like 30% and the rest is known cost, but of course it requries a pretty large scale of project to work. All in all, I hope the best for nuclear, it would have been the right solution, but its unfortunate history and properties just didn't fit in socity correctly for many reasons. I hope by the end of the decade we have some advanced nuclear, but unfortunatly I now beleive the majority of 'green' energy will have to come from gathering up wind and solar power on massive scale, plus Terrafactories worth of battery production with some gas backup plants.
• piokoch 6y ago
  "the issue with nuclear is cost" the cost is the problem indeed, but the cost is something that can be lowered with sufficient amount of innovation - see how SpaceX managed to lower cost of sending satellites or people to the space. Nuclear energy researches were stagnant for many, many years - anything "atomic" was considered to be "non-green", and green movements were fighting nuclear energy vigorously, as a result there were not much research done in this area - working on that was a dangerous career choice, people who did that were treated like Holocaust deniers, people who do researches on differences between races or try to cure homosexuality. Another "success" of ecologist was that they've managed to scare people. As a result finding location for nuclear plant is very hard, there are protests, people do everything to stop building plants in the area, so there is huge cost associated with paying compensations. Fun fact: in early '90 there was a plan to build nuclear plant in Poland, obviously it was heavily protested, Greenpeace and friends arrived, do their usual stuff like chaining to to whatever they could, etc. The project was abandoned (first government after fall of communism was reluctant to act heavy-handed), however, believe or not, 30 years later people leaving near the planned location still put on their houses "stop atom" banners. I would not believe that myself I hadn't seen them. So instead of having clean energy Poland keeps emitting CO2 (not that the amount is even comparable to Germany emission or other more developed countries, but still). Cost is also a matter of scale. France, which relays on nuclear energy a lot, managed to make it feasible with a great effect for both economy and environment.
  • pvaldes 6y ago
    > Another "success" of ecologist was that they've managed to scare people. And that saves lives and protects the economy of entire areas. In 1974 somebody wanted to build a nuclear plant in Murcia Spain. Same BWR model as Fukushima. A few ecologists marched with home made banners, a famous actor protested, and the plan eventually was dismissed. In 2011, just 37 years after, the same area chosen to hold a nuclear plant suffered a 5.1 earthquake that devastated the city. The idiots were trying to build a nuclear plant over a fault. Sometimes, ecologists just are right. Things would be really different in Europe today without this heroes daring to say the things that nobody wanted to hear.
    • 6y ago
• Aachen 6y ago
  Copying another comment of mine since you're making the exact same argument as a sibling comment: Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy. With nuclear we'd be making faster progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.
  • phicoh 6y ago
    That does not compute. The netherlands needs about 40000 wind turbines to cover current needs. The Netherlands is about 40000 km2. So you need roughly 1 wind turbine per km2 for current needs which is completely doable. Of course we need more in the future, but there is plenty of space. At the same time, building off-shore wind turbines is profitable today. In contrast, nobody is going to invest in nuclear if nuclear has to compete at the same conditions as now hold for off-shore wind (which includes putting up a reserve now for when the wind turbine needs to be removed). And of course, people find wind turbines ugly, but nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant.
• fogihujy 6y ago
  The power grid is a complex beast. In Europe, as an example, the power grid is the subject to the regulations, political ambitions, restrictions and technological legacy of around 30 countries, the European Union, Commonwealth of Independent States, NATO, CSTO and probably a bunch of others as well. Getting everyone to play along amidst power-play, public opinion, financial concerns and so forth is a nightmare, and yet that is BEFORE the expected major impact from any major changes introduced in order to fight climate change. So, in order to be able to do a large roll-out of nuclear power, you need to: 1) Find a location where building a plant is viable and from where you will be able to transmit the produced energy to it's indended destination. 2) Convince the public that the plant won't render their home uninhabitable. 3) Convince the public that the plant won't result in more environtal damage in their back yard compared to someone else's back yard. 4) Convince the authorities to give you a permits for new plants. 5) Convince the authorities that you're the right one to build it, because they WILL have an issue if you involve people seen as political opponents, say a business from another power block. 5) Convince someone that it's OK if you dig down depleted fuel in their back yard for 100,000 years. 6) Convince the authorities that that it's OK to dig down that depleted fuel in someones back yard for 100,000 years. Now, if you fail any of those things, then your new shiny plant will most likely never be constructed. Even if you do make it, you still need to compete with solar/wind/storage to make ends meet, while a semi-monopoly sold by the state to private investors in the 90's is still sitting on the huge dam built in the 20's, and can churn out base power from it considerably cheaper. After all, it's not their problem if your local power grid is to weak to handle all that energy being sent through the entire country through one single line built in the 50's. You should have thought of that beforce you decided to replace your coal plant with a nuclear one! End result: the owner of the local grid gets the blame and everyone switches to solar because the government is trying to stimulate the market and no matter how inefficient and insufficient it may or may not be compared to your nuclear plant, a solar panel on the roof is preferable to a nuclear power plant for many, many people. I'm sure there will be new nuclear plants built in the future too. Not many though -- the situation's too messed up for that.
• grey-area 6y ago
  Correct. The right questions to ask is not 'But what about Chernobyl' (which is unlikely in most countries) but instead: What about decommissioning costs? Fukushima is a good example of costs from a normal accident we can expect from time to time. Costs are at 200b USD and rising, and they still don't have the reactor site under control. Even normal decommissioning is incredibly expensive and usually covered by governments and ignored in the costs of electricity. https://nuclear-news.net/2020/09/24/9-1-2-years-after-meltdowns-no-end-in-sight-for-fukushima-nuke-plant-decommissioning/ https://nuclear-news.net/2020/09/24/9-1-2-years-after-meltdo... https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-... Nuclear fusion (if we ever get to commercial production), will make nuclear much more attractive again though and cut decommissioning costs a bit (though there is still the question of how to deal with reactor parts).
  • koheripbal 6y ago
    Can you show me the costs associated with decommisioning a hydro electric dam? This is a hurdle people are only throwing in front of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants can run indefinitely if maintained - just like all major infrastructure.
    • DanBC 6y ago
      I think we should be building nuclear everywhere, but it's important to realise the life of a nuclear power plant is between 20 to 40 years. https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf > It is evident that the average age of power reactors in the IAEA's Member States is increasing. (See accompanying graphs.) By 2000, more than 50 nuclear plants will have been providing electricity for 25 years or longer. Most nuclear power plants have operating life-times of between 20 and 40 years. > Ageing is defined as a continuing time-dependent degradation of material due to service conditions,including normal operation and transient conditions. It is common experience that over long periods of time, there is a gradual change in the properties of materials. These changes can affect the capability of engineered components, systems, or structures to perform their required function. Not all changes are deleterious, but it is commonly observed that ageing processes normally involve a gradual reduction in performance capability. > All materials in a nuclear power plant can suffer from ageing and can partially or totally lose their designed function. Ageing is not only of concern for active components (for which the probability of malfunction increases with time) but also for passive ones, since the safety margin is being reduced towards the lowest allow-able level
• timoth3y 6y ago
  > Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. That statement is true, but you are overlooking that fact that the reason nuclear power kills so few people is because we focus so much on the risks.
• kohlerm 6y ago
  Note that cost would also include getting rid of the nuclear waste, which AFAIK is still not a solved problem. E.g. you could send the waste via rockets to thes sun, but that would be very costly ;-) The problem with the statistics is also that we cannot rely on averages here. E.g. one big accident might cause huge environmental issues. Estimating accurately how likely that is seems difficult to impossible
  • ryanstanton 6y ago
    Regarding nuclear waste: first off, the amount of nuclear waste generated today is drastically less than in the past. During WWII and the Cold War era the methods for processing nukes was extremely crude, resulting in an embarrassing amount of waste, which we are still dealing with today. Today, the amount of waste is small fraction of that. Second, the waste problem has been solved by vitrification. Vitrification takes nuclear waste (in liquid or solid form) and blends it with molten glass in a high-strength steel casing. When it cools, it becomes solidified. Then it can be stored in a remote location. Vitrified nuclear waste poses no acute danger to humans and IMHO is much preferred to the damaging effects of fossil fuels which include both harmful pollutants (Particulate Matter, NOx, Ozone, etc.) and dramatic acceleration of climate change.
  • m4rtink 6y ago
    Firstly, it's not really waste. Only a fraction of useful energy has been extracted & there is a lot of useful elements mixed in due to all the transmutations and fision going on. There are techniques to reprocess used nuckear fuel into more fuel and other useful substances but there is often no political will & a lot of noise from people protesting agains anything nuclear that prevents used up fuel from being properly reused.
• nipponese 6y ago
  Why are containment and cost frequently seen as constants while the solar + battery solutions are frequently argued as the only practical solution as long as we keep funding the tech? I have seen very few comments (if any) on HN that are critical of nuclear and offer thoughtful solutions on how to bring the cost down.
• atoav 6y ago
  Well well. My girlfriends oldest brother died in what was a wave of cancer infant deaths that strangely coincides with the fallout of Chernobyl's radioactive cloud. Her other brother came to the world deformed, which again happened to more mothers than hers. In my school class (~30 kids) alone there were 4 kids who had deformations or other mutations that affected their life's negatively (for those who still live: to this day). All of them were born in the years after the fallout. In my region you are still adviced not to eat certain mushrooms or the meat of boars. Not to speak that one death and one deformed child that needs life long attention does something to the families tho whom such things happen. Of course all of it is incredibly hard to attribute this to Chernobyl, but the region which got the brink of the radioactive rain (southern Bavaria, southern Austria) had the most of such cases to such a degree that the doctors noticed it. That being said: of course a lot improved after Chernobyl in terms of reactor safety. But nuclear is still a business, where a (not insignificant) part of the costs linked to waste and potential catastrophes aren't carried by those who earn the money. So whether nuclear really is affordable depends on how you do the accounting — how much you get the public, the environment and by future generations to carry for free. E.g. how much does it cost to store 1 kg of nuclear waste safely for 10 000 years? Is that cost prized into the cost of the produced electricity or do we expect future generations to carry it even after all uranium has been burned? Please convince me that nuclear isn't a Ponzi-scheme on the future generations.
  • gtsteve 6y ago
    > of course a lot improved after Chernobyl in terms of reactor safety My understanding is that Chernobyl was caused by an experiment that went wrong due to errors in following processes correctly. I would assume that most reactors just make electricity, and outside of smaller reactors used for research they aren't used for experiments. Is that correct?
    • dboreham 6y ago
      Not an expert but my understanding is that you are largely incorrect. The "experiment" was a test the facility had to pass (dark station shutdown) in order to be certified safe. The site's primary function was to generate electricity. Secondary function to create weapons material precursors. That humans had to follow processes in order to avoid contaminating large parts of Europe is a fundamental failing.
• Aeolun 6y ago
  > No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Is it though? It seems countries are quite willing to build new nuclear power plants, but nobody wants them in their backyard.
• xiler 6y ago
  Nuclear companies generally aren't prepared to assume full liability for nuclear accidents [1]. This makes me pretty skeptical that nuclear power is really that safe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
• _ph_ 6y ago
  Even if we completely put aside the discussion about safety, storage of the nuclear waste etc., the killer argument is the price. There are no current designs available that would allow nuclear compete with renewables. On top of that, nuclear power plants are rather slow to switch output levels, so are not a good companion to the renewable producers. Instead we should use gas for filling the gaps in the renewable production. Gas plants are rather quick to change power output and as long as we drill for oil, gas often gets even burned on site as there is not enough demand. And of course we should grow renewable sources strongly.