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First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because n

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also promise to pay billions in upkeep, and then pay billions for decomissioning. If you aren't willing to do that upkeep or clean up after yourself then you can cause a radiological disaster. What happens if we have a majority government that refuses to believe in the long term effects of radiation damage even as scientists explain to them over and over again what will happen? They just don't see why we should be spending that amount of money on reactor decomissioning or on upkeep and don't want to be seen as the one spending taxpayer money on something so costly. What if they decide to cut nuclear safety programs in a political stunt? I wish I could say that I know that won't happen, but on the hundred years in the future scale I'm just not sure. Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.

aplummer 6y ago
Define short term; I think by the time a reactor you start today comes online, we are already pretty screwed
- melling 6y ago
  hey, we have been asking for 2 decades. Somewhere in the past year or so a lot of people have started saying “too late” Maybe you can humor the people who want nuclear while we continue to add solar and wind. The world needs a lot of electricity.
  - piva00 6y ago
    I long for the day we get a breakthrough with some next level power source. Be it fusion or some other thing to come. Humanity always depended on having a leap in either: transport, communication or energy. We are going through a massive change in communication, if we get a cheap and super scalable and sustainable source of energy we might find our next leap...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- eloff 6y ago
  It's trite, but it's never too late to start. Certainly starting now is better than doing nothing in this case, and nuclear may be a good option. I'm not convinced that old nuclear tech is economically viable anymore compared to batteries + renewables. New nuclear tech may be. We need investment there.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    I don’t think we have time to wait for new old school plants to be built, and we certainly don’t have time for new tech to be developed, tested, regulated before we even start building it. We should start now with the tech we already have (which is renewables).
    - eloff 6y ago
      Doing one doesn't preclude doing the other, that's a false dichotomy.
  - toast0 6y ago
    It could possibly be too late to start with new nuclear plants, although I'm not totally convinced. If we had them now, nuclear plants would be vastly superior to coal plants for baseload, at least in terms of emissions. The question is, if a nuclear plant takes 20-30 years from project start to being online, how will it compare with what's available then and over the design lifetime (50ish years). Of course, we can't know for sure, but if storage becomes good enough in the next 30 or so years, the lifetime economics of a nuclear plant get pretty bad. That said, maybe the economic risk isn't as important as the emissions risk. If renewable + storage doesn't work, and we are still running coal plants in 30 years, that's probably worse than if renewable + storage works and ratepayers paid for an underutilized nuclear plant.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      Why 20-30 years? Russia started building of Belarus nuclear plant at 2011. It already works and will be completely finished at 2022. Is US nuclear industry significantly behind Russia?
- ci5er 6y ago
  I don't know. The science and engineering has quietly moved quite a bit over the last 40 years. These [0] SMRs can, for example - there are several other approaches - can be assembled on a standard assembly line, shipped in a couple of C-Containers, and stood up on a concrete pad (well, not exactly, but close enough that I don't feel like complicating the point. [0]: https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    NuScale has given up assembling their reactors in their factory. https://losalamosreporter.com/2020/08/22/get-out-of-the-fluor-nuscale-small-modular-reactor-project/ https://losalamosreporter.com/2020/08/22/get-out-of-the-fluo... "In answer to a question I posed to Nuscale at the town hall we have learned that the plan to save costs by fabricating the modules at a remote factory and shipping them to the Idaho site has been abandoned. The artful response to my question said that Nuscale engaged with approximately 40 … pressure vessel fabricators worldwide and … determined that Nuscale will use existing factories … in lieu of building its own factory. The major module subcomponents will be manufactured at multiple manufacturer locations and shipped to a single location for assembly prior to installing into the facility.” This signifies the failure of one of the major cost-saving features of the Nuscale project, which was to forestall this exact scenario." The cost of that project has already escalated 70%, btw, with three towns dropping out and the output only 30% subscribed. I think there's a good chance it will never be built.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    The best time to build nuclear would have been in the 1980s. However, when we tried to build again back in 2008, it turned to failure. In areas with highly supportive populations that want the nuclear jobs in their community, with an NRC that changed processes to try to make it easier to get approval, we are still 12 years in, way behind schedule, and 2-3x over budget, without a solid feel for when we will star pushing electrons with the new reactors. Last I heard, NuScale is hoping to hit a cost of $55/MWh. That's about the current cost of wind/solar and the storage to make it dispatchable. Meaning that by the time they finally ship, it will be a more expensive option for firm low-carbon energy than the current options we have. So not only is NuScale aiming at a not-so-desirable target, by the time it can deliver its first 10GW, it's quite likely that the renewables will be curtailed for much of the year, meaning that we have extra generation capacity that goes unused, which is likely to spur a huge round of economic innovation for that energy. I would hate to get stuck with the path dependence of nuclear. Renewables are so cheap that they open up a ton more doors for society.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  If this is a reference to the "we only have 12 years to save the planet" meme, that is just a thing that went viral. There is no science behind it.
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    It is a reference to how quickly we are depleting our carbon budget to avert certain levels of warming.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    Because there is no clear line between saving and not saving. It's just degrees of badness the longer we wait. I heard there are some inflection points when it becomes warm enough for methane to escape from the tundra in Siberia.
- DennisP 6y ago
  It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can. However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118303866 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
  - est31 6y ago
    Nuclear power isn't very "dispatchable", it takes long times to be turned on vs off. But it might be useful for seasonal use in the winter when there is less sun.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      No. Unless you run your nuclear power plant at high capacity factor, the cost of power from it inflates unacceptably. It's an economic issue, not a technical issue.
      - piva00 6y ago
        That's the whole point of nuclear, hydro or coal though, they need to be run at high capacity to be economically viable, have long spin up and down times and are costly to maintain. You use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary, less batteries needed as the base load can always be delivered by nuclear/hydro. Coal is basically dead in the next decade or so.
        dTal 6y ago
        >use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary Er, how does this work? You can't control when wind and solar produce power, so how can you use them to "fill up the demand when necessary"? If anything, using a fluctuating source on top of already fluctuating demand just increases the amount of power storage you need. A power source that ramps up and down quickly is more convenient than one that ramps up and down slowly, but both are miles more convenient than one which ramps up and down uncontrollably.
- rayiner 6y ago
  It’s really already too late. Even if we the developed world decarbonizes in the next 20 years, India, China, and Africa will not. That means what we really need to be looking at is technology to power carbon capture.
  - nickpp 6y ago
    I guess you need energy for carbon capture too.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    India is nuclear heavy, China has a serious nuclear focus and is actively decarbonising, so what are you talking about? Various African countries can be helped to pick/prefer carbon-free energy options.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      India gets about 2% of their power from nuclear. They are not "nuclear heavy."
- bccdee 6y ago
  Yeah I'm a big fan of nuclear energy, but it just takes forever to get reactors online. We just don't have that kind of time. By all means, let's invest in nuclear, but we need to be building acres and acres of solar panels NOW. "We've got some reactors on the way" is not enough.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    If the alternative is the end of the human species I think we might find some motivation to build them a bit faster and better. Just saying.
- speleding 6y ago
  Rosatom will sell you a floating reactor you can tow into a harbour and hook up to your grid [1]. So short term can be pretty short if you want. And don't worry about the fuel, they simply tow it back to St. Petersburg when the fuel is expired and keep the dirty stuff there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
api 6y ago
One thing I seldom see brought up is that different energy sources work best in different places. Solar works great in the Southwest. In the upper Midwest where it snows and is overcast a lot? Maybe not so much. Wind works better there, but wind may not be enough alone and requires even more storage as it usually peaks out of phase with peak demand.
- runarberg 6y ago
  There is also geothermal energy (Alaska, West Coast, Rockies; I assume we are talking solely the USA here) and hydroelectric power (Alaska, West Coast, South East, and more). But we often don’t talk about the energy wasted in bad location of industries. E.g. growing water demanding crops in the Mid-West or South East instead of California where water is scarce, or energy intensive industries in Alaska (where energy is plentiful) instead of Texas where it is scarce. Another thing not mentioned is wasted energy because of lacking infrastructure. This also applies to the rest of the world. A good example is not building high speed rail connection between high travel areas, so people use polluting air travel instead, another is lack of waste management facilities so garbage is left to rot instead of reused or recycled lowering demand for making the same thing again in a far away facility.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  You can transmit power over long distances with surprisingly little energy loss with high-voltage DC. Any sane national plan for renewable energy would include a large amount of long-distance power transfer, if for no other reason than to minimize the variance in power production.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    When I look at it I notice that current variation in cost per mwh is much larger than transmission line losses or storage losses. You look on a map and you notice places where the days of sun shine aren't very conductive to solar are usually within 1500 miles of places where solar works great. Seattle to the Mojave desert is 1200 miles for instance.
wutbrodo 6y ago
> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants? EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a piece of the plan)
- tertiary 6y ago
  I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past? [1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-leaves-door-open-nuclear/ https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...
  - tl 6y ago
    AOC can claim any position she wants, but the Green New Deal says (page 7, lines 6-9 as linked in another post) says "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources". That's a clear anti-nuclear stance.
    - iron0013 6y ago
      You don’t think that’s a desirable goal?
      - xupybd 6y ago
        It is desirable however impractical given currently available technology. We need significant developments in energy storage to make it work. We could have zero carbon now using nuclear with no new technologies.
        skitout 6y ago
        Why impractical??? Whith a diversified mix, energy efficiency, a big market for demand response, thermal storage, and a bit of electrical storage, there is no problem with current technologies. Coming tech could decrease the cost and make it easier to implement. And nuclear is much much more expensive than most renewable now (https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/)
dane-pgp 6y ago
> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. While that is true in principle, there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly (perhaps because of the upfront costs of nuclear power stations, and the time it takes to build them). "Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions—and in poorer countries nuclear programs actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions." https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-crowd-nuclear-renewables-dont.html https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-crowd-nuclear-renewables...
- DennisP 6y ago
  This is a biased source but seems to make a good case that that study has serious flaws: https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/we-need-both-nuclear-and-renewables-protect-climate https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/we-need-both-nuclear-a...
  - epistasis 6y ago
    That's a weird world view. University of Sussex researchers are "biased" but you link to the Nuclear Innovation Alliance?
    - mulmen 6y ago
      I think the implication is that the Nuclear Innovation Alliance is biased but still making a good point.
      - DennisP 6y ago
        Yes, exactly.
      - epistasis 6y ago
        It would be good to do a bit more work to justify that, then. The NIA blog post doesn't even address the core point of the paper. It looks at a correlation of existing energy by US states, where our nuclear was largely built in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, the academic paper looks at what has happened to countries , globally, that have tried to build nuclear since the 1990s. And this is a crucial distinction, because the problem with nuclear is that economies have changed since the 1970s and we have new technologies with different costs. So what if we look at what has happened to US states that, since 1990, have tried to build nuclear versus those that have tried to build renewables? Nuclear has failed since the 1990s in the US, even with construction project with very strong community support and federal regulatory support from the NRC. So when you ask the question that the paper asks: "does building new nuclear or renewables decrease carbon more with modern economies?" We see that the US recapitulates the same correlation that researchers found globally. This huge bias of nuclear proponents, the inability to address the cost issue and very basic construction issues, is far more problematic for nuclear than a corrective analysis of what has happened to grids that have pursued different strategies.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Spot on. People often ignore the political problems of nuclear power: - Centralization of control encourages corruption and the hiding of incidents - Power stations make excellent targets in case of war. The bigger they are, the bigger the impact - Nuclear power stations also cause social panic if hit, even if the damage is minimal - The last two points apply to war but also to terrorism If we want political stability (aka no wars) we need reasonably decentralized access to food, water, energy and information.
- hcurtiss 6y ago
  Then build them smaller. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34198830/two-cities-pull-out-nuscale-tiny-reactor-nuclear-revolution/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34198830/tw...
- cambalache 6y ago
  We already have something 10000000X worse: Nuclear Weapons, that cat is out of the bag. So either we dismantle all nuclear arsenals in the world or we stop giving the "potential socio-political inestability"as a reason to not building more nuclear plants. You are stopping the butcher to use big knives for fear he may go insane in the future and kill some customers with them, when millions of weapons are highly available.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > that cat is out of the bag Not at all, this is a logical fallacy. A small fraction of countries have nuclear weapons and yet they still engage in conventional warfare because they really don't want to trigger a nuclear holocaust. On top of that, terrorist organizations, guerrilla fighters, criminal organization and so on never managed to launch an ICBM.
    - cambalache 6y ago
      > Not at all, this is a logical fallacy. I dont think you understand what a logical fallacy is. The number of nuclear weapons in the world is in the 5 figures order, that is fact. Nuclear weapons are a fact. > and yet they still engage in conventional warfare because they really don't want to trigger a nuclear holocaust. Most experts assessed the chance of a nuclear war during the Cuban missiles crisis at 1/3. Maybe that is a number you feel comfortable with, I dont. In +70 years of nuclear plants the 3 "big" accidents (3 Miles Island,Chernobyl, Fukushima) are nothing compared with that. > On top of that, terrorist organizations, guerrilla fighters, criminal organization and so on never managed to launch an ICBM. And never managed to sabotage a nuclear installation and cause an accident so your point is moot.
pdonis 6y ago
> you can have both Not if the Green New Deal sucks up all the resources for "renewables" that will never provide anything close to the base load power we need.
- kristopolous 6y ago
  It's at least a few orders of magnitude away from ever plausibly getting there. For all intents and purposes, such a concern is imaginary. And even then, one doesn't preclude the other. Retrofitting power distribution to have less energy loss, buildings with better insulation, more efficient logistics networks for food delivery, these are green new deal issues. None of that is anti-nuclear - they simply aren't related. By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else. That is simply not how reality works.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else. Nonsense. Please apply some intelligence and common sense. We're not talking about shutting down all other activities and only doing Green New Deal stuff. We're talking about the limited amount of resources that can be redirected by various choices of government policy. Given the magnitude of the resources that would be required for the grandiose plans for renewables touted in the Green New Deal, there wouldn't be anything left over for nuclear.
    - kristopolous 6y ago
      How so? Nuclear requires certain types of expertise and I'd hope, certain certifications for construction. Also, historically, they've each been multi-year ventures. These are likely different humans and different companies than people doing urban gardening projects and rooftop solar. I honestly don't see the conflict here. I don't know too much about nuclear construction and maintenance but I'd imagine it takes years of specialized training and experience to be competent. If that's true, I can't imagine someone sliding from say, retrofitting insulation to older apartment buildings to nuclear in any reasonable time. I think we have to conclude they're as different as any other sophisticated skills; you're still starting at zero if you want to switch. The GNDs problem has been the same since Jill Stein was talking about it in 2012 - it's too grandiose for a society and time that has rejected grand visions. We would need to fix our systemic cultural inability to be able to subscribe to a collective imaginary before a GND is broadly entertained. However, you crack and divide GND as separate goals, such as increasing the usefulness and efficiency of mass urban transit, most people are on board. And each of these concrete goals doesn't preclude Exelon and GE from building nuclear power plants. Once you reframe the GND as simply a basketcase of low hanging fruit of city and neighborhood level projects, then we get into nuclear's real issue in this conversation - It is the biggest project of the bunch. Ignoring possible futures and going with historical pasts, nuclear plants are what are called "megaprojects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject) and that's their main Achilles heel for our times. Americans at least, have stopped believing in them. They think "big = broken disaster". Some american may even feel obligated to respond to this, "But it's true" and then my point will be made. The GND proponents could finally understand marketing and branding and successfully reposition their project to our collective appetites as a collection of small bite-sized community projects but nuclear cannot do this.
corn13read 6y ago
With liquid salt and Thorium reactors all of this is far less "bad" plus the amount of land used for nuclear over solar/wind is exponentially less. You cannot have green new deal and nuclear deal at the same time, we do not have unlimited funding. Plus the amount of harm to the environment and economy from green new deal is incalculable.
KoenDG 6y ago
Future political generations abusing nuclear power for their own goals is something I hadn't yet considered. Potentially extremely dangerous.
primroot 6y ago
If nuclear is so safe then why the subsidized insurance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
- marcusverus 6y ago
  That's not a subsidy. It's a claim by a third party (who, coincidentally, exists to advocate for strict regulation of the nuclear industry) that the government is underestimating the risk associated with nuclear power. Differences of opinion regarding actuarial tables aren't subsidies. The wiki article claims that CATO also supports this, but that claim does not appear to be supported in the cited material.
monkeycantype 6y ago
We're killing our planet because we externalise cost. CO2, deforestation, habitat destruction, species extinction, overfishing, ocean pollution are proximate problems arising from that deeper ultimate problem. Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating, it the worst possible response to ultimate problem of externalising cost. To advocate nuclear in good faith it is essential to acknowledge this tension, and the complex social and philosophical challenges to resolving that tension.
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  Nuclear also externalizes cost -- to future generations, for thousands of years. Wave energy, wind and solar is different though. > ... Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating ... It's not the only way -- what about heavier taxes for energy from burning oil and coal. But I guess people like their cars and getting stuck in the daily 08:00 traffic jams too much. Who wants trains or buses or bikes or running shoes.
econcon 6y ago
I think we don't have a good way to transport energy which makes green energy slightly impractical as the main source of energy. If we find a way to connect the world on a common electricity grid, we might be able to skip nuclear and go full green (ofc this ignores the cost of producing/disposing those green energy generators)
- skitout 6y ago
  With a diversified mix (with solar pannel facing different position also), energy efficiency, demand response, thermal storage and a bit of electrical storage, we definitely don't need a world grid
carlosdp 6y ago
> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. The FAQ AOC released after the document explicitly ruled out nuclear energy, iirc.
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  No. It said we need to decommission our old reactors, which we do regardless. It’s linked in the first major thread in this discussion.
- speleding 6y ago
  There is an economic reason you cannot have both: Nuclear power plants need to run near capacity to be economical. If you have a lot of intermittent power from wind and solar then nuclear plants will only be able to get a reasonable price for their output 40% of the time (at night when it's not windy). Conversely, if the nuclear power plant is running anyway and has enough capacity to cover a windless night, you may as well get rid of the solar and wind. This equation will change if we ever get storage to be cheap enough so we can store intermittent power, but there is nothing on the horizon that will do that.
kova12 6y ago
If your concerns are valid, perhaps we should just stay with coal and gas. Renewables amid other problems are not going to work without massive energy storage systems, which we don't and won't have anytime soon
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  Please please please stop repeating this. It’s an assumption about a solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist yet. As we build more renewables, we’re also building better grid connections to serve demand response. You build until most places are overproducing.
andrewjl 6y ago
> whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. And if that's not the case then what do you think will happen to the other programs critical in keeping climate change at bay? Taken to its ultimate conclusion this line of thinking leads to analysis paralysis, i.e. to shut down our government and do nothing. Which may be good thinking; especially for government policy likely full of unintended consequences. I don't think this should stop perfectly good technology from being developed and built out though. Or for the government to effectively kneecap it via regulation so restrictive it's tantamount to a ban, as the US has done with nuclear power. > Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science. I agree yet have drawn strikingly different conclusions. Nuclear development should be encouraged to proceed. Collectively we need to figure out how to incentivize the actors to behave safely without kneecapping their ability to do something.
skitout 6y ago
"Nuclear is amazing"... but much much more expensive than wind and solar https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/
- zingplex 6y ago
  If humanity is going to survive the next few decades with a quality of life even remotely resembling what we have now, we'll need to stop looking at the pocket book for a short while.

aplummer 6y ago

Define short term; I think by the time a reactor you start today comes online, we are already pretty screwed

melling 6y ago
hey, we have been asking for 2 decades. Somewhere in the past year or so a lot of people have started saying “too late” Maybe you can humor the people who want nuclear while we continue to add solar and wind. The world needs a lot of electricity.
- piva00 6y ago
  I long for the day we get a breakthrough with some next level power source. Be it fusion or some other thing to come. Humanity always depended on having a leap in either: transport, communication or energy. We are going through a massive change in communication, if we get a cheap and super scalable and sustainable source of energy we might find our next leap...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
eloff 6y ago
It's trite, but it's never too late to start. Certainly starting now is better than doing nothing in this case, and nuclear may be a good option. I'm not convinced that old nuclear tech is economically viable anymore compared to batteries + renewables. New nuclear tech may be. We need investment there.
- runarberg 6y ago
  I don’t think we have time to wait for new old school plants to be built, and we certainly don’t have time for new tech to be developed, tested, regulated before we even start building it. We should start now with the tech we already have (which is renewables).
  - eloff 6y ago
    Doing one doesn't preclude doing the other, that's a false dichotomy.
- toast0 6y ago
  It could possibly be too late to start with new nuclear plants, although I'm not totally convinced. If we had them now, nuclear plants would be vastly superior to coal plants for baseload, at least in terms of emissions. The question is, if a nuclear plant takes 20-30 years from project start to being online, how will it compare with what's available then and over the design lifetime (50ish years). Of course, we can't know for sure, but if storage becomes good enough in the next 30 or so years, the lifetime economics of a nuclear plant get pretty bad. That said, maybe the economic risk isn't as important as the emissions risk. If renewable + storage doesn't work, and we are still running coal plants in 30 years, that's probably worse than if renewable + storage works and ratepayers paid for an underutilized nuclear plant.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    Why 20-30 years? Russia started building of Belarus nuclear plant at 2011. It already works and will be completely finished at 2022. Is US nuclear industry significantly behind Russia?
ci5er 6y ago
I don't know. The science and engineering has quietly moved quite a bit over the last 40 years. These [0] SMRs can, for example - there are several other approaches - can be assembled on a standard assembly line, shipped in a couple of C-Containers, and stood up on a concrete pad (well, not exactly, but close enough that I don't feel like complicating the point. [0]: https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/
- pfdietz 6y ago
  NuScale has given up assembling their reactors in their factory. https://losalamosreporter.com/2020/08/22/get-out-of-the-fluor-nuscale-small-modular-reactor-project/ https://losalamosreporter.com/2020/08/22/get-out-of-the-fluo... "In answer to a question I posed to Nuscale at the town hall we have learned that the plan to save costs by fabricating the modules at a remote factory and shipping them to the Idaho site has been abandoned. The artful response to my question said that Nuscale engaged with approximately 40 … pressure vessel fabricators worldwide and … determined that Nuscale will use existing factories … in lieu of building its own factory. The major module subcomponents will be manufactured at multiple manufacturer locations and shipped to a single location for assembly prior to installing into the facility.” This signifies the failure of one of the major cost-saving features of the Nuscale project, which was to forestall this exact scenario." The cost of that project has already escalated 70%, btw, with three towns dropping out and the output only 30% subscribed. I think there's a good chance it will never be built.
- epistasis 6y ago
  The best time to build nuclear would have been in the 1980s. However, when we tried to build again back in 2008, it turned to failure. In areas with highly supportive populations that want the nuclear jobs in their community, with an NRC that changed processes to try to make it easier to get approval, we are still 12 years in, way behind schedule, and 2-3x over budget, without a solid feel for when we will star pushing electrons with the new reactors. Last I heard, NuScale is hoping to hit a cost of $55/MWh. That's about the current cost of wind/solar and the storage to make it dispatchable. Meaning that by the time they finally ship, it will be a more expensive option for firm low-carbon energy than the current options we have. So not only is NuScale aiming at a not-so-desirable target, by the time it can deliver its first 10GW, it's quite likely that the renewables will be curtailed for much of the year, meaning that we have extra generation capacity that goes unused, which is likely to spur a huge round of economic innovation for that energy. I would hate to get stuck with the path dependence of nuclear. Renewables are so cheap that they open up a ton more doors for society.
BurningFrog 6y ago
If this is a reference to the "we only have 12 years to save the planet" meme, that is just a thing that went viral. There is no science behind it.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  It is a reference to how quickly we are depleting our carbon budget to avert certain levels of warming.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Because there is no clear line between saving and not saving. It's just degrees of badness the longer we wait. I heard there are some inflection points when it becomes warm enough for methane to escape from the tundra in Siberia.
DennisP 6y ago
It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can. However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118303866 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
- est31 6y ago
  Nuclear power isn't very "dispatchable", it takes long times to be turned on vs off. But it might be useful for seasonal use in the winter when there is less sun.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    No. Unless you run your nuclear power plant at high capacity factor, the cost of power from it inflates unacceptably. It's an economic issue, not a technical issue.
    - piva00 6y ago
      That's the whole point of nuclear, hydro or coal though, they need to be run at high capacity to be economically viable, have long spin up and down times and are costly to maintain. You use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary, less batteries needed as the base load can always be delivered by nuclear/hydro. Coal is basically dead in the next decade or so.
      - dTal 6y ago
        >use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary Er, how does this work? You can't control when wind and solar produce power, so how can you use them to "fill up the demand when necessary"? If anything, using a fluctuating source on top of already fluctuating demand just increases the amount of power storage you need. A power source that ramps up and down quickly is more convenient than one that ramps up and down slowly, but both are miles more convenient than one which ramps up and down uncontrollably.
rayiner 6y ago
It’s really already too late. Even if we the developed world decarbonizes in the next 20 years, India, China, and Africa will not. That means what we really need to be looking at is technology to power carbon capture.
- nickpp 6y ago
  I guess you need energy for carbon capture too.
- sofixa 6y ago
  India is nuclear heavy, China has a serious nuclear focus and is actively decarbonising, so what are you talking about? Various African countries can be helped to pick/prefer carbon-free energy options.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    India gets about 2% of their power from nuclear. They are not "nuclear heavy."
bccdee 6y ago
Yeah I'm a big fan of nuclear energy, but it just takes forever to get reactors online. We just don't have that kind of time. By all means, let's invest in nuclear, but we need to be building acres and acres of solar panels NOW. "We've got some reactors on the way" is not enough.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  If the alternative is the end of the human species I think we might find some motivation to build them a bit faster and better. Just saying.
speleding 6y ago
Rosatom will sell you a floating reactor you can tow into a harbour and hook up to your grid [1]. So short term can be pretty short if you want. And don't worry about the fuel, they simply tow it back to St. Petersburg when the fuel is expired and keep the dirty stuff there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...

api 6y ago

One thing I seldom see brought up is that different energy sources work best in different places. Solar works great in the Southwest. In the upper Midwest where it snows and is overcast a lot? Maybe not so much. Wind works better there, but wind may not be enough alone and requires even more storage as it usually peaks out of phase with peak demand.

runarberg 6y ago
There is also geothermal energy (Alaska, West Coast, Rockies; I assume we are talking solely the USA here) and hydroelectric power (Alaska, West Coast, South East, and more). But we often don’t talk about the energy wasted in bad location of industries. E.g. growing water demanding crops in the Mid-West or South East instead of California where water is scarce, or energy intensive industries in Alaska (where energy is plentiful) instead of Texas where it is scarce. Another thing not mentioned is wasted energy because of lacking infrastructure. This also applies to the rest of the world. A good example is not building high speed rail connection between high travel areas, so people use polluting air travel instead, another is lack of waste management facilities so garbage is left to rot instead of reused or recycled lowering demand for making the same thing again in a far away facility.
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
You can transmit power over long distances with surprisingly little energy loss with high-voltage DC. Any sane national plan for renewable energy would include a large amount of long-distance power transfer, if for no other reason than to minimize the variance in power production.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  When I look at it I notice that current variation in cost per mwh is much larger than transmission line losses or storage losses. You look on a map and you notice places where the days of sun shine aren't very conductive to solar are usually within 1500 miles of places where solar works great. Seattle to the Mojave desert is 1200 miles for instance.

wutbrodo 6y ago

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants? EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a piece of the plan)

tertiary 6y ago
I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past? [1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-leaves-door-open-nuclear/ https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...
- tl 6y ago
  AOC can claim any position she wants, but the Green New Deal says (page 7, lines 6-9 as linked in another post) says "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources". That's a clear anti-nuclear stance.
  - iron0013 6y ago
    You don’t think that’s a desirable goal?
    - xupybd 6y ago
      It is desirable however impractical given currently available technology. We need significant developments in energy storage to make it work. We could have zero carbon now using nuclear with no new technologies.
      - skitout 6y ago
        Why impractical??? Whith a diversified mix, energy efficiency, a big market for demand response, thermal storage, and a bit of electrical storage, there is no problem with current technologies. Coming tech could decrease the cost and make it easier to implement. And nuclear is much much more expensive than most renewable now (https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/)

dane-pgp 6y ago

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. While that is true in principle, there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly (perhaps because of the upfront costs of nuclear power stations, and the time it takes to build them). "Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions—and in poorer countries nuclear programs actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions." https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-crowd-nuclear-renewables-dont.html https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-crowd-nuclear-renewables...

DennisP 6y ago
This is a biased source but seems to make a good case that that study has serious flaws: https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/we-need-both-nuclear-and-renewables-protect-climate https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/we-need-both-nuclear-a...
- epistasis 6y ago
  That's a weird world view. University of Sussex researchers are "biased" but you link to the Nuclear Innovation Alliance?
  - mulmen 6y ago
    I think the implication is that the Nuclear Innovation Alliance is biased but still making a good point.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      Yes, exactly.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      It would be good to do a bit more work to justify that, then. The NIA blog post doesn't even address the core point of the paper. It looks at a correlation of existing energy by US states, where our nuclear was largely built in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, the academic paper looks at what has happened to countries , globally, that have tried to build nuclear since the 1990s. And this is a crucial distinction, because the problem with nuclear is that economies have changed since the 1970s and we have new technologies with different costs. So what if we look at what has happened to US states that, since 1990, have tried to build nuclear versus those that have tried to build renewables? Nuclear has failed since the 1990s in the US, even with construction project with very strong community support and federal regulatory support from the NRC. So when you ask the question that the paper asks: "does building new nuclear or renewables decrease carbon more with modern economies?" We see that the US recapitulates the same correlation that researchers found globally. This huge bias of nuclear proponents, the inability to address the cost issue and very basic construction issues, is far more problematic for nuclear than a corrective analysis of what has happened to grids that have pursued different strategies.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

> my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Spot on. People often ignore the political problems of nuclear power: - Centralization of control encourages corruption and the hiding of incidents - Power stations make excellent targets in case of war. The bigger they are, the bigger the impact - Nuclear power stations also cause social panic if hit, even if the damage is minimal - The last two points apply to war but also to terrorism If we want political stability (aka no wars) we need reasonably decentralized access to food, water, energy and information.

hcurtiss 6y ago
Then build them smaller. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34198830/two-cities-pull-out-nuscale-tiny-reactor-nuclear-revolution/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34198830/tw...
cambalache 6y ago
We already have something 10000000X worse: Nuclear Weapons, that cat is out of the bag. So either we dismantle all nuclear arsenals in the world or we stop giving the "potential socio-political inestability"as a reason to not building more nuclear plants. You are stopping the butcher to use big knives for fear he may go insane in the future and kill some customers with them, when millions of weapons are highly available.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > that cat is out of the bag Not at all, this is a logical fallacy. A small fraction of countries have nuclear weapons and yet they still engage in conventional warfare because they really don't want to trigger a nuclear holocaust. On top of that, terrorist organizations, guerrilla fighters, criminal organization and so on never managed to launch an ICBM.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    > Not at all, this is a logical fallacy. I dont think you understand what a logical fallacy is. The number of nuclear weapons in the world is in the 5 figures order, that is fact. Nuclear weapons are a fact. > and yet they still engage in conventional warfare because they really don't want to trigger a nuclear holocaust. Most experts assessed the chance of a nuclear war during the Cuban missiles crisis at 1/3. Maybe that is a number you feel comfortable with, I dont. In +70 years of nuclear plants the 3 "big" accidents (3 Miles Island,Chernobyl, Fukushima) are nothing compared with that. > On top of that, terrorist organizations, guerrilla fighters, criminal organization and so on never managed to launch an ICBM. And never managed to sabotage a nuclear installation and cause an accident so your point is moot.

pdonis 6y ago

> you can have both Not if the Green New Deal sucks up all the resources for "renewables" that will never provide anything close to the base load power we need.

kristopolous 6y ago
It's at least a few orders of magnitude away from ever plausibly getting there. For all intents and purposes, such a concern is imaginary. And even then, one doesn't preclude the other. Retrofitting power distribution to have less energy loss, buildings with better insulation, more efficient logistics networks for food delivery, these are green new deal issues. None of that is anti-nuclear - they simply aren't related. By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else. That is simply not how reality works.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else. Nonsense. Please apply some intelligence and common sense. We're not talking about shutting down all other activities and only doing Green New Deal stuff. We're talking about the limited amount of resources that can be redirected by various choices of government policy. Given the magnitude of the resources that would be required for the grandiose plans for renewables touted in the Green New Deal, there wouldn't be anything left over for nuclear.
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    How so? Nuclear requires certain types of expertise and I'd hope, certain certifications for construction. Also, historically, they've each been multi-year ventures. These are likely different humans and different companies than people doing urban gardening projects and rooftop solar. I honestly don't see the conflict here. I don't know too much about nuclear construction and maintenance but I'd imagine it takes years of specialized training and experience to be competent. If that's true, I can't imagine someone sliding from say, retrofitting insulation to older apartment buildings to nuclear in any reasonable time. I think we have to conclude they're as different as any other sophisticated skills; you're still starting at zero if you want to switch. The GNDs problem has been the same since Jill Stein was talking about it in 2012 - it's too grandiose for a society and time that has rejected grand visions. We would need to fix our systemic cultural inability to be able to subscribe to a collective imaginary before a GND is broadly entertained. However, you crack and divide GND as separate goals, such as increasing the usefulness and efficiency of mass urban transit, most people are on board. And each of these concrete goals doesn't preclude Exelon and GE from building nuclear power plants. Once you reframe the GND as simply a basketcase of low hanging fruit of city and neighborhood level projects, then we get into nuclear's real issue in this conversation - It is the biggest project of the bunch. Ignoring possible futures and going with historical pasts, nuclear plants are what are called "megaprojects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject) and that's their main Achilles heel for our times. Americans at least, have stopped believing in them. They think "big = broken disaster". Some american may even feel obligated to respond to this, "But it's true" and then my point will be made. The GND proponents could finally understand marketing and branding and successfully reposition their project to our collective appetites as a collection of small bite-sized community projects but nuclear cannot do this.

corn13read 6y ago

With liquid salt and Thorium reactors all of this is far less "bad" plus the amount of land used for nuclear over solar/wind is exponentially less. You cannot have green new deal and nuclear deal at the same time, we do not have unlimited funding. Plus the amount of harm to the environment and economy from green new deal is incalculable.

KoenDG 6y ago

Future political generations abusing nuclear power for their own goals is something I hadn't yet considered. Potentially extremely dangerous.

primroot 6y ago

If nuclear is so safe then why the subsidized insurance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

marcusverus 6y ago
That's not a subsidy. It's a claim by a third party (who, coincidentally, exists to advocate for strict regulation of the nuclear industry) that the government is underestimating the risk associated with nuclear power. Differences of opinion regarding actuarial tables aren't subsidies. The wiki article claims that CATO also supports this, but that claim does not appear to be supported in the cited material.

monkeycantype 6y ago

We're killing our planet because we externalise cost. CO2, deforestation, habitat destruction, species extinction, overfishing, ocean pollution are proximate problems arising from that deeper ultimate problem. Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating, it the worst possible response to ultimate problem of externalising cost. To advocate nuclear in good faith it is essential to acknowledge this tension, and the complex social and philosophical challenges to resolving that tension.

HappyDreamer 6y ago
Nuclear also externalizes cost -- to future generations, for thousands of years. Wave energy, wind and solar is different though. > ... Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating ... It's not the only way -- what about heavier taxes for energy from burning oil and coal. But I guess people like their cars and getting stuck in the daily 08:00 traffic jams too much. Who wants trains or buses or bikes or running shoes.

econcon 6y ago

I think we don't have a good way to transport energy which makes green energy slightly impractical as the main source of energy. If we find a way to connect the world on a common electricity grid, we might be able to skip nuclear and go full green (ofc this ignores the cost of producing/disposing those green energy generators)

skitout 6y ago
With a diversified mix (with solar pannel facing different position also), energy efficiency, demand response, thermal storage and a bit of electrical storage, we definitely don't need a world grid

carlosdp 6y ago

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. The FAQ AOC released after the document explicitly ruled out nuclear energy, iirc.

Schiendelman 6y ago
No. It said we need to decommission our old reactors, which we do regardless. It’s linked in the first major thread in this discussion.
speleding 6y ago
There is an economic reason you cannot have both: Nuclear power plants need to run near capacity to be economical. If you have a lot of intermittent power from wind and solar then nuclear plants will only be able to get a reasonable price for their output 40% of the time (at night when it's not windy). Conversely, if the nuclear power plant is running anyway and has enough capacity to cover a windless night, you may as well get rid of the solar and wind. This equation will change if we ever get storage to be cheap enough so we can store intermittent power, but there is nothing on the horizon that will do that.

kova12 6y ago

If your concerns are valid, perhaps we should just stay with coal and gas. Renewables amid other problems are not going to work without massive energy storage systems, which we don't and won't have anytime soon

Schiendelman 6y ago
Please please please stop repeating this. It’s an assumption about a solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist yet. As we build more renewables, we’re also building better grid connections to serve demand response. You build until most places are overproducing.

andrewjl 6y ago

> whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. And if that's not the case then what do you think will happen to the other programs critical in keeping climate change at bay? Taken to its ultimate conclusion this line of thinking leads to analysis paralysis, i.e. to shut down our government and do nothing. Which may be good thinking; especially for government policy likely full of unintended consequences. I don't think this should stop perfectly good technology from being developed and built out though. Or for the government to effectively kneecap it via regulation so restrictive it's tantamount to a ban, as the US has done with nuclear power. > Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science. I agree yet have drawn strikingly different conclusions. Nuclear development should be encouraged to proceed. Collectively we need to figure out how to incentivize the actors to behave safely without kneecapping their ability to do something.

skitout 6y ago

"Nuclear is amazing"... but much much more expensive than wind and solar https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

zingplex 6y ago
If humanity is going to survive the next few decades with a quality of life even remotely resembling what we have now, we'll need to stop looking at the pocket book for a short while.