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This article makes some good points but forgets this: our knowledge increases constantly. So today's reactors might not be able to scale well, but the more we

This article makes some good points but forgets this: our knowledge increases constantly. So today's reactors might not be able to scale well, but the more we build the better we are at it.

rangoon626 6y ago
Absolutely. Our knowledge nuclear energy production would have increased more if “environmentalists” hadn’t thrown a hissy fit over gen 2 reactor problems in the 70s. Its 2020, and I am still breathing in exhaust of a pollution from energy production, as a direct result of their foolishness.
wwweston 6y ago
That's a good counter for some of the points, although there's limits to how much you can count on it. It's less comforting for others, like the limited amount of uranium available and diminishing returns on how to get it.
- Manfredo_1 6y ago
  Uranium seawater extraction vastly increases the accessible amount of uranium: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#e1cc9e4159ae https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... It's about an order of magnitude more expensive than mining uranium. But the cost of fuel extraction is negligible in the context of the rest of nuclear's cost.
  - wwweston 6y ago
    The author of the article linked in the top-level comment mentioned seawater extraction: "as uranium is extracted, the uranium concentration of seawater decreases, so that greater and greater quantities of water are needed to be processed in order to extract the same amount of uranium. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would need to be processed would become economically impractical in much less than 30 years."
    - Manfredo_1 6y ago
      Read further in the article: > However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years.
      - wwweston 6y ago
        That's in the Forbes article rather than the Phys.org article. And there's a billion dollar/watt question in there. "Equilibrium" is doing a lot of work in that paragraph. In order for the claim to matter practically, the reactions he's talking about have to replenish uranium to extraction-viable concentration at the same rate it's extracted. It sounds like our Forbes writer is suggesting the process accelerates at least linearly with the extraction rate, and that'd be cool, but forgive me if I don't take it for granted without further focus on why that's a reasonable expectation.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      That doesn't sound right. The oceans contain several billion tons of uranium. A 1 GW(e) reactor uses the equivalent of about 100 tons of natural uranium per year. So, he's claiming the world would have ~1 million reactors.
pfdietz 6y ago
Some knowledge we gain is negative. We've learned nuclear wasn't as promising as had been claimed. More generally, in engineering most technologies must fail. That's because there are multiple technologies that can solve any given problem, and only one can come out on top. The number of niches < the number of different solutions. If you think just wait, we'll learn more and nuclear wins, why doesn't that same argument apply to the technologies nuclear is competing against?
- manfredo 6y ago
  You've got it backwards. We've built nuclear plants. We've encountered unknown difficulties and overcome them. Our cost estimates for nuclear power are historical estimates. We did built nuclear at scale before, and it did cost less. By comparison, the cost estimates for building things like massive amounts of energy storage are cost projections. These costs represent what we think these projects will cost. But these projections, by definition, don't account for unforseen engineering challenges. Historical costs do. Comparing the two is apples to oranges. Historical costs include the cost of engineering challenges, cost projections for new technologies do not.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Yes, we've built nuclear power plants. And we've discovered they are complex and expensive, and we've discovered they take forever to design, and that very often the construction process fails and the investment is lost. Energy storage technologies have the property that they can rapidly iterate new designs, on a smaller scale than nuclear. They are inside nuclear's decision loop. The mammals are outbreeding the dinosaurs (yes, I know that metaphor is unfair to the actual animals). There's a reason business people don't swallow the kind of BS you sling on nuclear, and it isn't because they're Greenpeace members.
    - Manfredo_1 6y ago
      But the point is, we have built nuclear at scale. And built it at scale. France has over 70% of its electricity coming from nuclear, Belgium over 50%. The US is at ~10%. We've encountered the emergent issues, and fixed them. Cost estimates on nuclear are historical estimates. They're not projections. We haven't built energy storage at anywhere close to the required levels of scale. We have 4 minutes worth of energy storage. Most of that is from hydro electric storage. 1% and 3% are from battery and thermal storage, respectively [1]. What will be the cost of scaling this up to the hours or days required to make intermittent sources viable? We can only offer cost projections: what we think massive grid-scale projects will cost. But cost projections do not include the costs of unknown engineering challenges. Remember, early nuclear proponents claimed it would be an order of magnitude cheaper than fossil fuels and had the studies to prove it. But real-world experience demonstrated otherwise. What makes us think that increasing our amount of energy storage by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude won't encounter similar unforeseen costs? We have built nuclear at scale, and yes we have discovered engineering challenges that increase cost. But we haven't built energy storage at scale, and we haven't encountered it's unforeseen engineering challenges. This post offers an excellent analogy on this topic [2]. With nuclear, we've walked this path, and know firsthand the difficulties it takes. With new technologies we're looking at the map. Those are two fundamentally different measurements of cost. 1. http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-factsheet#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20the%20U.S.%20had,of%20total%20installed%20generation%20capacity.&text=Globally%2C%20installed%20energy%20storage%20capacity%20totaled%20173.6%20GW.&text=California%20leads%20the%20U.S.%20in,%2C%20New%20York%2C%20and%20Texas http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-facts.... 2. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3/answer/Michael-Wolfe https://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-esti...

This article makes some good points but forgets this: our knowledge increases constantly. So today's reactors might not be able to scale well, but the more we build the better we are at it.

rangoon626 6y ago

Absolutely. Our knowledge nuclear energy production would have increased more if “environmentalists” hadn’t thrown a hissy fit over gen 2 reactor problems in the 70s. Its 2020, and I am still breathing in exhaust of a pollution from energy production, as a direct result of their foolishness.

wwweston 6y ago

That's a good counter for some of the points, although there's limits to how much you can count on it. It's less comforting for others, like the limited amount of uranium available and diminishing returns on how to get it.

Manfredo_1 6y ago
Uranium seawater extraction vastly increases the accessible amount of uranium: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#e1cc9e4159ae https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... It's about an order of magnitude more expensive than mining uranium. But the cost of fuel extraction is negligible in the context of the rest of nuclear's cost.
- wwweston 6y ago
  The author of the article linked in the top-level comment mentioned seawater extraction: "as uranium is extracted, the uranium concentration of seawater decreases, so that greater and greater quantities of water are needed to be processed in order to extract the same amount of uranium. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would need to be processed would become economically impractical in much less than 30 years."
  - Manfredo_1 6y ago
    Read further in the article: > However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years.
    - wwweston 6y ago
      That's in the Forbes article rather than the Phys.org article. And there's a billion dollar/watt question in there. "Equilibrium" is doing a lot of work in that paragraph. In order for the claim to matter practically, the reactions he's talking about have to replenish uranium to extraction-viable concentration at the same rate it's extracted. It sounds like our Forbes writer is suggesting the process accelerates at least linearly with the extraction rate, and that'd be cool, but forgive me if I don't take it for granted without further focus on why that's a reasonable expectation.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    That doesn't sound right. The oceans contain several billion tons of uranium. A 1 GW(e) reactor uses the equivalent of about 100 tons of natural uranium per year. So, he's claiming the world would have ~1 million reactors.

pfdietz 6y ago

Some knowledge we gain is negative. We've learned nuclear wasn't as promising as had been claimed. More generally, in engineering most technologies must fail. That's because there are multiple technologies that can solve any given problem, and only one can come out on top. The number of niches < the number of different solutions. If you think just wait, we'll learn more and nuclear wins, why doesn't that same argument apply to the technologies nuclear is competing against?

manfredo 6y ago
You've got it backwards. We've built nuclear plants. We've encountered unknown difficulties and overcome them. Our cost estimates for nuclear power are historical estimates. We did built nuclear at scale before, and it did cost less. By comparison, the cost estimates for building things like massive amounts of energy storage are cost projections. These costs represent what we think these projects will cost. But these projections, by definition, don't account for unforseen engineering challenges. Historical costs do. Comparing the two is apples to oranges. Historical costs include the cost of engineering challenges, cost projections for new technologies do not.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Yes, we've built nuclear power plants. And we've discovered they are complex and expensive, and we've discovered they take forever to design, and that very often the construction process fails and the investment is lost. Energy storage technologies have the property that they can rapidly iterate new designs, on a smaller scale than nuclear. They are inside nuclear's decision loop. The mammals are outbreeding the dinosaurs (yes, I know that metaphor is unfair to the actual animals). There's a reason business people don't swallow the kind of BS you sling on nuclear, and it isn't because they're Greenpeace members.
  - Manfredo_1 6y ago
    But the point is, we have built nuclear at scale. And built it at scale. France has over 70% of its electricity coming from nuclear, Belgium over 50%. The US is at ~10%. We've encountered the emergent issues, and fixed them. Cost estimates on nuclear are historical estimates. They're not projections. We haven't built energy storage at anywhere close to the required levels of scale. We have 4 minutes worth of energy storage. Most of that is from hydro electric storage. 1% and 3% are from battery and thermal storage, respectively [1]. What will be the cost of scaling this up to the hours or days required to make intermittent sources viable? We can only offer cost projections: what we think massive grid-scale projects will cost. But cost projections do not include the costs of unknown engineering challenges. Remember, early nuclear proponents claimed it would be an order of magnitude cheaper than fossil fuels and had the studies to prove it. But real-world experience demonstrated otherwise. What makes us think that increasing our amount of energy storage by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude won't encounter similar unforeseen costs? We have built nuclear at scale, and yes we have discovered engineering challenges that increase cost. But we haven't built energy storage at scale, and we haven't encountered it's unforeseen engineering challenges. This post offers an excellent analogy on this topic [2]. With nuclear, we've walked this path, and know firsthand the difficulties it takes. With new technologies we're looking at the map. Those are two fundamentally different measurements of cost. 1. http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-factsheet#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20the%20U.S.%20had,of%20total%20installed%20generation%20capacity.&text=Globally%2C%20installed%20energy%20storage%20capacity%20totaled%20173.6%20GW.&text=California%20leads%20the%20U.S.%20in,%2C%20New%20York%2C%20and%20Texas http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-facts.... 2. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3/answer/Michael-Wolfe https://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-esti...