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> I'm terrified of climate change. > If nuclear could compete on cost, For the life of me, I cannot understand the disconnect in thinking for people who recog

• golemiprague 6y ago
  Many people including me are not "terrified" but we do appreciate cleaner or alternative forms of energy if the cost is not crazily more expensive. If people who are terrified want our support to implement at least some of their suggestions they should also consider cost.
• RealityVoid 6y ago
  > (spoiler: nuclear energy is absolutely sustainable; there are literally billions of years of nuclear fuel accessible to us). I am a big fan of nuclear but, I'm wondering, is this true? Do we have enough fuel for current nuclear reactors to run for....how long? Someone, also on HN, said we have enough fuel for maybe 150 years if we relie solely on it. So what is the truth?
  • choeger 6y ago
    As with any fuel, both statements are not wrong. We have comparatively little easily exploitable resources but if we had a huge demand, we could exploit much more.
  • mjevans 6y ago
    Even 150 years is _enough_ time for us to bootstrap to the next technology level. Which would be something like having robots mine the asteroid belt for manufacturing resources, and getting a massive solar farm up somewhere in orbit over earth and sending the power down. Many different science fiction works have covered variations on this plan.
  • titzer 6y ago
    Yes, it is really true. There are 4 billion tons of Uranium dissolved in Earth's seawater. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#519bdfcd159a https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... (Above link says 1000 1000 MW reactors for 100,000 years, but doesn't mention how much that is with reprocessing--that is hundreds of times the rate of global nuclear power production today). The question is, how much does it cost to extract it? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#4fc99436159a https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
    • jnxx 6y ago
      > There are 4 billion tons of Uranium dissolved in Earth's seawater. There are also many tonnes of gold dispersed in rivers and seawater. It is however not economical to extract it. Also, uranium mining is often causing a lot of health problems. Like in the German SAG/SDAG Wismut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(mining_company)#Impact_on_employees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(mining_company)#Impact...
      • wjkramer 6y ago
        I think an example from the former East Germany is not generally applicable. Political enemies were forced to work there. Unless Antifa wins and can implement the cited policies: "People were ordered to start working in the uranium mines otherwise there would be strict sanctions for them."
        • adamsea 6y ago
          It’s just silly to introduce “Antifa” (which isn’t a singular thing) into a discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear power.
        • jnxx 6y ago
          So, would the Eastern German governments political friends have been less susceptible to these health effects? And, in order to not wander too far off topic of energy economics, how is the extraction of uranium from seawater going to be economical?
  • numpad0 6y ago
    Couple decades-centuries worth of Uranium deposit exist that are readily usable, then the depleted Uranium(10-100x mass) can be converted into Plutonium as drop in replacement. It is possible that we exhaust both and still have no fusion or asteroid mining after couple centuries from now, but we’d have to be extremely lazy to be in that position.
    • jnxx 6y ago
      > the depleted Uranium(10-100x mass) can be converted into Plutonium as drop in replacement. This needs breeder technology which is a different kettle of fish. The only existing plant was the Japanese Monju plant which was closed due to numerous problems and accidents, including a dangerous liquid sodium fire. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
      • titzer 6y ago
        OP is correct. You don't need breeder technology to produce plutonium. In fact, the US produced enough in 1945 to build and detonate two plutonium-based atomic bombs. There are hundreds of tons of plutonium that have been produced and stockpiled worldwide, not including the thousands of nuclear warheads in existence and the thousands that can/could be decomissioned.
        • pfdietz 6y ago
          However, you DO need breeder technology to treat all the 238U as a fuel. With burner reactors, the 239Pu produced is less than the fissionable material consumed, and most of the 238U ends up not being usable. I'll add that with current technology, you can't reprocess MOX fuel another time (too many higher isotopes of Pu and transuranics beyond Pu are produced), so any Pu in it after it's consumed must be disposed of.
        • jnxx 6y ago
          > You don't need breeder technology to produce plutonium. In fact, the US produced enough in 1945 to build and detonate two plutonium-based atomic bombs. You can extract plutonium from spent fuel, I agree to that. This is what makes spent fuel processing expensive and this is what was used in 1945 and also turns any fuel waste into a proliferation issue. But converting depleted uranium (U-238) from spent fuel into fissile plutonium or whatever isotope, like GP suggested, is a different thing which would necessarily need some nuclear reaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium
  • jnxx 6y ago
    There are in fact concerns about the amount of nuclear fuel available. See for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1421 https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1421 and in more length: http://theoildrum.com/files/O_118_Michael_Dittmar.pdf http://theoildrum.com/files/O_118_Michael_Dittmar.pdf The author also notes that, as of today, nuclear energy contributes only a very small part of the delivered energy mix.
• darawk 6y ago
  It's really not a priority above money, though. Money isn't some magical evil thing. Money is the unit of account that we use to measure goods and services. Something "costing money" means that it reduces the amount of goods and services we can create. Climate change "costs money" in the sense that it reduces global output. Reducing global output has a human cost, especially for low income nations. To you and I perhaps it is 'just money' because your standard of living is sufficiently high that a 10%, 20% or even 50% reduction is a sacrifice of comfort, and not existential. But contracting the growth prospects for India by 25% over the next decade means consigning millions of people to crippling poverty. This idea that money is some morally lesser concern just fundamentally misunderstands what money is. Aggregate wealth is just all the stuff we have. Less money means less stuff. Less stuff means more poverty. That may be worth while, if we think climate change is severe. But it's always extremely important to keep this in perspective. Climate change is primarily going to hurt the world's poor, and so are the cuts we'll have to make to combat it. But if you don't keep that in perspective, the cure may end up worse than the disease.
  • titzer 6y ago
    > But contracting the growth prospects for India by 25% over the next decade means consigning millions of people to crippling poverty. People say this, but I'll note that humans have lived through "crippling poverty" for most of our 2 million year existence. It is only crippling poverty by today's distortion lens (also a shifting baseline). We should focus on what people really need to live quality lives, which is: good health (read: access to modern healthcare, freedom from pollution, disease), good food (read: freedom first from starvation, from malnutrition, poor diet), shelter from the elements, and then the rest of Maslow's hierarchy. Cars, TV, home appliances, and the whole lot of today's energy-hungry living isn't sustainable, and I'd argue isn't even the thing we should be shooting for. People of the past lived very different and satisfying lives that we simply can't imagine because, frankly, we are spoiled. People lived in tribes and hunted with spears for 100,000 years at least. And you know what, they beat those drums, painted their faces, tracked the stars, and contrary to whatever we might believe from our high place of "development" they actually enjoyed their lives. This is a totally other conversation, but let's just say, I disagree with a lot of what you say about money and what it means to people. Money's new. We've been around a lot longer.
• AniseAbyss 6y ago
  You can pay 20 billion for a single nuclear reactor and wait 20 years for the damn thing to be built. Or you can put solar panels on every house. Nuclear is an excuse to do absolutely nothing.
  • mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    Which accomplishes? Nothing. Energy use by households is nothing.
• jnxx 6y ago
  > It's gonna cost money. It's gonna require work. It's going to not only be opportunity cost, but require us to do stuff. This is what it means to have climate change as a priority. It's a priority above money, above GDP growth, above even the standard of living. It is clear that climate change is an emergency. However, the amount of resources, including money, to address that emergency is finite, so it would be illogical (or even unethical) not to use resources in the most economical way possible. New nuclear power plants have a cost of, for example, over 90 £ / MWh. New solar and wind energy can deliver at less than half that price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... There is also another motication to build nuclear power plants - they subsidize military use of nuclear weapons. To cite from the article above: "On 12 October 2017, The Guardian reported that researchers informed MPs that the UK government was using the expensive Hinkley Point C project to cross-subsidise the UK military's nuclear-related activity by maintaining nuclear skills. The researchers from the University of Sussex, Prof. Andy Stirling and Dr. Phil Johnstone, stated that the costs of the Trident nuclear submarine programme would be prohibitive without "an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure".[97]" (The linked reference [97] is https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...) On top of that, such plants, even with very conventional nuclear technology, take more than a decade to build. To address climate change, we need big and radical changes in energy production in the next twenty years. Building new nuclear energy is very clearly too slow to achieve that. So, at that point, using nuclear to address climate change is merely a distraction. There are much better ways to address this problem.
  • DrBazza 6y ago
    The only problem with nuclear power is Government oversight, as you rightly point out: "they subsidize military use of nuclear weapons". If Governments allow commercial development of nuclear power stations that cannot be used to produce enriched uranium (thorium being one of those), then free market forces will push the cost of design, and building them down, making the price of nuclear electricity much lower. There's no economy of scale to the current nuclear industry. Each power station design is different in some way. Imagine a commercial small sized, modular nuclear power plant, produced at scale. Nuclear subs, and aircraft carriers already have a version. "Building new nuclear energy is very clearly too slow to achieve that." I'd disagree, it is, as usual politics getting in the way of science, not the engineers or physicists. If the financial incentives are there, it would be solved very quickly. Fission isn't fusion, and the physics and engineering is well understood. Not directly comparable, but look at what SpaceX has achieved in 20 years in terms of design and engineering.
• learnstats2 6y ago
  > For the life of me, I cannot understand the disconnect in thinking for people who recognize the need for bold action on climate change and then in the next breath fret about money. Whilst I agree with your broad point, climate change is a systems problem and requires systems thinking and systemic change. If you make nuclear available, but it is not competitive with fossil fuel energy, then we will continue to use fossil fuel energy. A relatively small number of oil company executives with a profit motive are going to make this decision for everyone, directly and indirectly. 'Doing stuff', as you say, involves governments of the people heavily regulating the most powerful corporations on the planet to ensure they can't make this decision in the wrong direction. Government action in this direction hasn't happened for the last 30 years, and doesn't look close to happening in the present. As such, it's reasonable for climate change activists to make plans to meet the market where it's at and prioritise competitive renewable products above nuclear.
  • slykar 6y ago
    > If you make nuclear available, but it is not competitive with fossil fuel energy, then we will continue to use fossil fuel energy I'll make kind of absurd argument, but how is nuclear not competitive with dying? You could always tax the shit out of fossil fuels and they won't be competitive. You could also make other laws that punish fossil fuel usage with death penalty since you could argue its a crime against humanity. I mean, law is an abstract construct. This is a live or death situation. Even if we need to abandon 30 years of economic growth for the sake of surviving, then maybe it's what we need to do.
    • pydry 6y ago
      >You could always tax the shit out of fossil fuels and they won't be competitive. We have technically been able to do this as a species ever since global warming was discovered yet even in the face of an extinction level event we apparently still can't make ourselves do it. Fossil fuel lobbies are just too powerful. Carbon taxes are mostly weak or non existent. It's the species level way of saying "why don't you just give up smoking?". Not that easy. Yet it is apparently possible to make solar + wind + storage + demand shifting energy cost competitive even without subsidies and very competitive with subsidies. The fossil fuel industry hasn't managed to shut it down. Species level nicorette patches. One day we'll be able to tax the shit out of fossil fuels - once it is a nearly dead industry without much political muscle. By then it probably won't matter, though.
• bccdee 6y ago
  Nuclear is slow and labour-intensive to build. It's just not a good way to allocate resources in terms of a climate-change solution. I think nuclear plants are great, but not as a solution to an energy crisis.
• appleflaxen 6y ago
  the fact that it will be unimaginably expensive is not the point: we don't have a choice. The issue raised by GP comment is how you allocate that insane expense. As I read it, they are only suggesting we spend on the most affordable technologies available to lessen the impact of climate change, not the most expensive.
• epistasis 6y ago
  Surely, where we have no other alternatives, as with hydrogen, we must push forward no matter the cost. Nuclear is not on the critical path, as we have several alternative paths that reach the same carbon neutral end result. They will do this so with less cost than nuclear, by nearly all accounts (but not all accounts. However it seems quite likely to me that climate scientists will change their opinion as they revise the costs of nuclear to incorporate modern construction attempts.) Why are we to choose the more expensive option? Simply because we like nuclear and want to subsidize it more than other clean energy sources? What good comes from nuclear's extra expense?