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Why Nuclear Must Be Part Of The Energy Solution (2018)

159 points by yaa_minu 6y ago

konjin 6y ago
No other fuel has the energy density of nuclear, no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365. Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. Nuclear on the other hand has been here for 50 years and could have already solved our CO2 problems. But because it's unfashinable to be pro-science in liberal cities no one has the guts to stand up and say "You're not only wrong but delusional" to the hippies who have as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography. It's ridiculous that the people who say they want to save the earth are the reason why we've locked in a 6th mass extinction already.
- cygx 6y ago
  Renewables are based on the hope that one day we [...] get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. You're right that we aren't there yet, but Star Trek level technology is hyperbole. Just to give one example, the German gas grid can store several hundreds TWh of energy, and there are lab results that indicate we might be able to improve power-to-gas-to-power efficiencies to make this viable[1]. [1] https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2018_009_power-to-gas-with-high-efficiency.php https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2018_009_power-to-gas-wit...
  - edbob 6y ago
    [1] is really interesting, but it is literally burning natural gas with extra steps. How is it better than normal gas generation?
    - cygx 6y ago
      Because you synthesize the gas, there's no net CO2 production.
    - _Microft 6y ago
      The issue with burning natural gas (i.e. from fossil sources) is that it increases the amount of carbon in circulation.
- logicchains 6y ago
  "Science for me and not for thee!"
- pif 6y ago
  I can't understand the downvotes you got. You pushed may be a bit on political stereotypes, but other than that you just stated the facts.
  - realusername 6y ago
    That's where we are at right now, just stating the energy facts are considered political... There's no realistic scenario at the moment where renewables can be used alone to build a grid for a full country unless you are betting on future tech which doesn't (and might never) exist.
    - cygx 6y ago
      Because it's overstating the facts ("no other source", "seen only in Star Trek", "as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography", "ridiculous"), contradicting any study on the topic I've seen (which, to be fair, might have been a biased sample). This was my take-away when I looked into it a couple of years ago: Going 60% renewable is not much of a problem. 80% needs investment into infrastructure, but still viable. 100% would need better storage technology - or the political will to make cuts: You first need to build enough off-shore windparks, storage and smarter grids to get you through the 'Dunkelflaute' (simultaneous reduced energy production from solar and on-shore wind due to weather conditions, sometimes for weeks!). There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to adjust to uneven levels of power generation, eg by shutting down some industries when production is low, and dumping excess power somewhere when it's high (smelting, scientific experiments, bitcoin mining, whatever).
      - orwin 6y ago
        We don't need 100% renewable, we need 350% renewable. Electricity is at best 25% of our energy usage. 20% of the energy i'm consumming everyday come from nuclear and i'm living in France, where 80% of our power grid is nuclear. And we need the grid investment in copper that comme with it if we want a distributed grid. And a secondary grid to serve hospital and emergency buildings. Oh, and we need Veolia's solar panel recycling plant: its economical, recylce 91 to 95% of the product (granted, the less important part) and it only cost 8 time the raw materials, making it the most efficient solar panel recycling plant (and the only one in the world of its size). It also cost 5 time the energy of raw material extraction and transformation, and weirdly, this is never taken into account when the cost of solar PV is on the table, as if everyone think we can just put lead and cadmium in a landfill. Oh yeah, that's right, we can and we did, nice job us.
- yokaze 6y ago
  > No other fuel has the energy density of nuclear Irrelevant, unless you want to have a mobile power generator. > no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365. First, not true: Geothermal and hydro both can generate power 24/7/365. Yes, that is location dependent, but you set yourself up there with using absolutes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Iceland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Iceland.) Second, we do not need a single source to deliver 24/7/365, we need "just" a power-mix capable of delivering the changing power-demand over the day. Yes, that is a technical challenge. But nuclear is facing technical challenges too. > Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. Hydro-power can act as energy storage, and it has been here since practical forever: Yes, not an universal solution. And yes, it puts more strain on the grid and requires more management. But I consider your point rather hyperbolical than factual considering the progress made there. > Nuclear on the other hand has been here for 50 years and could have already solved our CO2 problems. Sure, and the only reason we aren't there is because of those hippies. It isn't like half of the research budget since the 50s went to nuclear research, and only 11% to renewables (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/09/nuclear-fossil-fuels-have-dominated-federal-energy-rd-spending https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/09/nuclear-...), most of it after the 70s. It isn't like there are technical and nuclear anti-proliferation reasons why a new nuclear reactor require huge budgets to build and operate. Or that no insurance company in the world will cover the worst-case scenario, and there is always a limited liability of the operator of such plant. I would suggest looking at the amount of resources (money and time) invested in both nuclear power and renewables and how the costs developed respectively over time, when doing your bet on either technology.
  - realusername 6y ago
    I strongly doubt there's that many places where you can build some hydro plants which haven't been used yet. At least there's approximately none in Europe. That's fine as a philosophical thought but in reality, all the hydro capacity is already used.
    - 6y ago
- audunw 6y ago
  > Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. That's absolutely ridiculous. Even with nuclear power, we'll need to produce MASSIVE amounts of hydrogen to cut all carbon emissions. If we have enough renewable hydrogen production plants to make all the hydrogen we need for ships, planes, steel production, farming and fertilizers, we'll have all the energy regulation and storage capability we'll ever need. Seasonal variations in cold climates can be handled better by trash burning facilities. Yeah, recycle/reuse first, but eventually you'll need to get rid of a lot of non-recyclable mixed waste regardless. I feel like people claiming nuclear is essential has never truly thought about the big picture. In my opinion it's a benefit that renewables stimulate more R&D into energy storage. It's a positive synergy, since those solutions are absolutely essential to solving the climate crisis anyway. Unless we invent nuclear reactors we can put on planes and trucks. Now there's a Star Trek level invention!
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    > Seasonal variations in cold climates can be handled better by trash burning facilities. Yeah, recycle/reuse first, but eventually you'll need to get rid of a lot of non-recyclable mixed waste regardless. Do you have any numbers or sources to provide for this claim? > If we have enough renewable hydrogen production plants to make all the hydrogen we need for ships, planes, steel production, farming and fertilizers, we'll have all the energy regulation and storage capability we'll ever need. So your argument is predicated on a future breakthrough in hydrogen production and storage that is so impressive it solves both transportation problems and renewable energy intermittancy? And you argue this is better than using a proven source of baseline energy today?
- justatdotin 6y ago
  nuclear doesnt run 24/7/365
  - opo 6y ago
    It is pretty close to that and very good compared to other sources of power: >...Nuclear has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source—producing reliable, carbon-free power more than 92% of the time in 2016. That’s nearly twice as reliable as a coal (48%) or natural gas (57%) plant and almost 3 times more often than wind (35%) and solar (25%) plants. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
readflaggedcomm 6y ago
The article's actual title does not senselessly elide the word "power." Also, it's from 2018.
tgv 6y ago
The best argument: more people died in Bhopal. As if going nuclear will make that stop. Please, the only argument to make to such a question is "because we can't reduce CO2 emissions without, and that's because ...". But what do you expect from an article that tries to tarnish opponents of nuclear energy by comparing them to "Elizabethan preachers [who] railed against [coal], a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement."
lawrenceyan 6y ago
What do you do in 30 years when another incident like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster happens? Batteries will be the long term solution to energy baseload needs, not nuclear.
- konjin 6y ago
  Nothing because the incident killed fewer people than a coal plant does during regular operation in the same time period.
- johncolanduoni 6y ago
  We could do just as badly and still have nowhere near as many deaths (including evacuation related deaths) as a single coal plant causes due to pollution.
  - lawrenceyan 6y ago
    I'm not a fan of having cancer rates rise either. I've stated this before, and I'll repeat it here: Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world. They're cheaper too.
    - wiz21c 6y ago
      What about the resources needed to build the solar and wind infrastructures ? Metal, extraction of that metal, rare earths,... ? I'm all for solar and wind and whatever, but at some point there are some maths to do... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o
      - partingshots 6y ago
        Isn’t nuclear power really expensive? Solar and wind I think are just materially cheaper than anything else even including construction. I’m looking at the Lazard 2020 Levelized Cost of Energy report here: https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
legulere 6y ago
> Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies. This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die. Chernobyl and Fukushima had dramatic effects on millions of people. Contamination from Chernobyl to this day is a problem in Germany for instance.
- roenxi 6y ago
  We're comparing two neighbourhoods. One has less deaths and less robberies. It is the one with nuclear power. Chernobyl has done less damage and had less impact on those millions of people than the totally routine burning of coal. I grew up in a coal mining region; I fully expect more people suffer negative health outcomes when coal works as expected than in a Class 7 nuclear catastrophe. We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect. The overwhelming safety of the nuclear process makes the failures look bad, because we aren't used to nuclear plants producing detectable levels of ambient pollution.
  - paganel 6y ago
    > We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect. This also goes for nuclear.
    - MagnumOpus 6y ago
      The "too hard to prove cause" is for attributing individual cases. In any particularly case - just like with the link of smoking and lung cancer - it is impossible to say if lung problems were caused by coal plants. Statistical estimates of the amounts of deaths and lung problems coal power plants cause, however, can be much more accurate. And they bespeak hundreds of thousands gruesome deaths from coal every year.
  - _nalply 6y ago
angry_octet 6y ago
I can't recommend you spend your time reading this nebulous essay, which doesn't in any way address the time and cost blowouts for the latest generation of reactors, instead choosing to blame woke liberals. Tiresome.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Blaming hippies is kinda like the Solarwinds CEO blaming an intern. If nuclear power was all that it's boosters claim it is, the objections of woke liberals would be a long forgotten road kill squirrel. Seriously the hippies don't have that much political power.
amarant 6y ago
I think nuclear definitely has a role to play, at least in the short term. I'm not sure about expanding its usage, but definitely maintain what we have until it can be replaced with renewables, and definitely replace nuclear only after coal/gas/other fossil fuels are no longer being used anywhere. Don't be fooled by disastrous events, nuclear is statistically the safest energy source we have[1], so don't fear it senselessly. This is a whole topic on it's own and I won't delve deeper into it here. [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
- ruph123 6y ago
  > Don't be fooled by disastrous events, nuclear is statistically the safest energy source we have[1], so don't fear it senselessly. The fear of operation should not be put forward as the one problematic thing of nuclear energy. Another big problem is how we deal with the toxic waste for the next millennia? Especially looking at the volatility of sensible politics in the US, how can you be sure that the next Trump will not just suppress information about leaking nuclear waste and straight up not deal with it because it is “fake news”? The problem with nuclear power plants is that: You have to deal with very dangerous material and guarantee that this waste, which could very well outlive humanity, will not hurt your population. How can you guarantee that? Don’t use the straw-man argument of “Oh ya’ll are just against nuclear because of safety in operation”.
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    > The problem with nuclear power plants is that: You have to deal with very dangerous material and guarantee that this waste, which could very well outlive humanity, will not hurt your population? It is worth noting when considering this question that fossil fuels also leave dangerous and radioactive waste, but instead of being confined to a dense waste we understand how to contain, it is emitted as particulates into the air that we breath.
    - lorenzhs 6y ago
      It's well known that coal exhaust isn't fairy dust, but it doesn't pose a storage problem [edit: on the scale of millenia], so your argument amounts to whataboutism.
_Microft 6y ago
The article discusses only nuclear fission power if that helps to decide whether you actually want read it. The arguments presented are pretty much the same as always.
MrDresden 6y ago
I'm waiting for those Thorium reactors to start popping up
- throwaway210222 6y ago
  Here is one being hatched: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1
GlennS 6y ago
I feel like this is a prime example of someone failing to update their beliefs with new information. For decades it would have been a reasonable position that governments should override political objections, embark upon mass nuclear power programs, and try to drive costs down through economies of scale and process improvements over time. 20 years ago it was arguably a correct and very strong position to take? 10 years ago, still a reasonable-seeming one? By 5 years ago, nuclear had probably missed its chance. Most of us had probably not quite grasped that yet. Today, anyone arguing this just needs to redo their sums with up-to-date numbers and they'll see the impossiblity of their argument. Nuclear is done. Baseload business models are done. The market has chosen a winner, which is mass deployment of wind and solar.
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  It would be better to provide sources for some of those. Also what do you mean by "baseload business models"?
- derriz 6y ago
  Exactly, people are repeating decades old argument without incorporating what has happened with technology over the last 10 or 20 years. In the last decade, grid scale battery costs have declined by 75%. Wind turbines and solar panels have declined by 80% and 90% respectively. These declines are actually accelerating at the moment - grid scale battery storage has halved in price over the last two years. In contrast, the LCOE of nuclear has increased by 20%. The industry is moving so fast that arguments become stale very quickly but people are slower, it seems, to update their opinions. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/04/30/solar-and-wind-costs-continue-to-fall-as-power-becomes-cleaner https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/04/30/solar-and-...
  - ElKrist 6y ago
    "The industry is moving so fast that arguments become stale very quickly but people are slower, it seems, to update their opinions." How fast is it moving? "For the first time in nearly a decade, annual installations of energy storage technologies fell year-on-year in 2019. Grid-scale storage installations dropped 20%" [1] [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-storage https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-storage
fragile_frogs 6y ago
Relevant Kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM
bjourne 6y ago
The article does not explain why nuclear must be part of the energy solution. In fact, the argument seem to be that nuclear has been the target of fear mongering from environmentalists and therefore nuclear must be a part of the energy solution which is a fallacy. Germany has decommissioned numerous nuclear plants (Energiewende) and yet its GDP is up and its coal consumption down. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... Critics said it couldn't be done, except it was done. Critics claim that Energiewende isn't popular, except surveys show that it is supported by a super majority of Germans. The main issue nuclear power's supporters ignore is that nuclear is much more expensive than renewables. According to LAZARD 14.0, the cost for wind is $26 to $54 per MWh and $129 to $198 for nuclear. https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o... Furthermore a nuclear plant costs billions to construct and is an investment that takes decades before reaching its break-even point. That's not something the market is interested in, despite record-low capital costs around the world. Should the tax-payer subsidize an energy source that is already at least four times as expensive as wind which may, in a decade or two, be ten times as expensive?
- hntrader 6y ago
  "four times as expensive as wind" This isn't a valid comparison, since wind isn't capable of base load supply. You would need to factor in storage costs to make the comparison valid.
  - partingshots 6y ago
    Batteries are also getting cheaper and improving in capacity at immense rates too no? It seems like a double whammy against nuclear, unless there’s something I’m missing?
    - rusk 6y ago
      Just curious where we are we at in terms of the environmental aspects of mass scale heavy duty battery production?
oblio 6y ago
I saw this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbrT3m89Y3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbrT3m89Y3M I hope they get adopted and maybe even replace the old ones plus coal/gas powered ones.
JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
My main issue with Nuclear power is my lack of trust in regulators over time. Nuclear done well is safe, clean and has an extremely low carbon footprint. But, where profit incentives exist, lobby groups exist. And the US government has shown itself incredibly pliable with enough donations and time given. So for me, give it 10-15 years, or less, and the safety margins will erode over time as people get too comfy with the new normal, and like always happens, be it Boeing, Texas power systems or the like, I have a nasty suspicion bad events will start happening at a scale previously unseen, with companies not doing their due diligence and lobbying for concessions and bending regulation around expensive but necessary precautions.
- fsflover 6y ago
  You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases kill less people than coal done well.
  - mFixman 6y ago
    They kill less people than coal if you make a very gross average of total deaths per kWh. 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster there are two uninhabitable subdivisions of Ukraine that will require control for the rest of human history. "Average deaths" doesn't matter when the people living near nuclear power plants have to be in constant preparation for total evacuation. I agree with the parent comment in that I wouldn't trust Western countries in maintaining nuclear plants for 40 years and safely disassembling them afterwards. Luckily for us, renewables exist so we don't have to.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      > when the people living near nuclear power plants have to be in constant preparation for total evacuation What are you talking about? Is there any serious unpredictable danger for people living near Chernobyl?
      - 6y ago
justatdotin 6y ago
....."ultimately be a matter for markets to decide". done.
- yodelshady 6y ago
  Yeah, they decided really well in Texas at $ 9,000 / MWh.
  - jerven 6y ago
    Do you think that the organizations that couldn't bother to take into account a 1 in 20 winter would build safe and secure nuclear? Also consider the amount of battery storage arriving onto the Texas grid in the next few years. If that would have been commissioned already, reconnecting neighbourhoods would have been much easier.
    - yodelshady 6y ago
      I don't need to think. Somebody provided several PWh - PWh - of energy with, in the US, simply no accidents worth worrying about, and on global scale still none that compare to the damage fossils have done. That's not a hypothetical. It already happened. I really, really aggressively don't care what grid storage salesmen claim. Put up a plan for the TWhs needed to cover a cold windless snap and we'll talk.
neuronic 6y ago
I am in no way or shape against nuclear power per se. I know its technology, I have studied the engineering behind it etc. Still, any argument against nuclear is immediately categorized as "fearmongering" no matter how much it isn't based on the technology itself. Facts and an interest in truly bringing your country forward don't matter. Money and lobbyism is what rules the discussions. No matter how many subversive nuclear shills keep posting on reddit and other forums. Reddit drowns in fake marketing/PR accounts, you can buy them by the thousands. In the past, I have seen templates for responses written in the weekly pro-nuclear threads. But whatever - just one simple statement that remains true in 2021 is this: Nuclear fission power is entirely uneconomical and already replaced by safer, better alternatives. And on top of the insane cost - plants will never be profitable without lifelong government subsidies - the insane length of construction and planning to build new modern generation plants is completely out of what's reasonable because we have to tackle climate change NOW. You're looking at $20bn and 10-15 years of construction at least. Finland is currently struggling to finish their new reactor and it costs them dearly. Just invest in renewables and be done with it far sooner at much lower cost and factor 1000 less problems (aside from lobbyism and shilling). Just look at this mess of cost and lost time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c... All that jazz for a measly 1600 MW. Less than 1500 off-shore wind power turbines deliver a whooping 7.5 Gigawatt for Germany [1]. If you can build 300 wind turbines in 20 years at a fraction of the cost of a single nuclear plant you will have the same output and no possible nuclear incidents or nuclear waste to take care of. Mix it with other renewables and you get the power consistency you need. Nuclear in 2021 is so incredibly unreasonable it bothers me to no end. In Germany, we still have no reasonable way to dispose of 1900 CASTOR containers containing dangerous plutonium with a half-life of 24,000 fucking years. The containers are rated for 40 year protection btw. We have a super majority that rejects nuclear power. Do we struggle sometimes to make the shift away from fossil fuels AND nuclear at the same time? Yes. Do we have to buy power from France or other neighbors in times of high demand? Has happened before. But we are making progress and are able to sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY. If we had this discussion in 1990, my opinion would have been different. But it's too late and too expensive now to shift back into nuclear. By 2042, when a plant planned TODAY would go online, our renewable infrastructure will far outdo what any nuclear plant is capable of in terms of risk-reward. [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/german-offshore-wind-power-output-business-and-perspectives https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/german-offshore-w...
webreac 6y ago
There are many videos of Jean-Marc Jancovici on this subject. Some of them are in English. It gives documented pragmatic analysis. One conclusion is clear: Current nuclear plants shall be preserved to smooth the energetic transition (fossil free). What has been done in Germany was not wise. It is less obvious whether we shall build new nuclear plants or focus on new energy sources. In France, we struggle to recover our aptitude to build new plants.
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
> Elizabethan preachers railed against a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement. 1. So it seems, 500 years later, as we struggling with all the issues this resource has caused and still causing they were not wrong... > For too many environmentalists concerned with global warming, nuclear energy is today’s Devil’s excrement Read (1) --- It is only a question who will suffer along the lines, after we are long gone from the existence.
fmajid 6y ago
The article doesn’t even discuss the annual deaths from coal mining accidents, specially in China.
temp_rider2224 6y ago
nice article
sebow 6y ago
Glad someone finally takes a stance on this.Nuclear is by far the greenest and most efficient energy source we have right now.In Europe for example we're suffering because of the chernobyl/fukushima rhetoric that is mainly voiced from Germany and the rest of the continent bows down to it(with few exceptions, mainly france). It's a shame and hopefully US/China will take the lead, only to prove the idiotic leadership of the mistakes we're making.It's a critical aspect of the economic recovery of the continent, and also of the "space-race" we're finding ourselves in.
cybervegan 6y ago
We aren't even responsible enough with the nuclear assets and waste we already have, and we're going to have to actively look after that lot for millennia to come. You can't just walk away from a spent fuel waste facility - you have to run it, or it will eventually leak radioactive isotopes into the environment. We aren't even doing that right now, so how do we expect our decendents to have the will and knowledge to do that in 2200? If we're still around at all.
- Paradigma11 6y ago
  We regularly build mines 4km deep with no water for several km around. Where are these radioactive isotopes supposed to leak to and why should we care? If you have suddenly contact with rock from 4km depth there are not many scenarios where it would matter if it's radioactive.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    That is simply untrue. The deepest operational facilities - e.g. Morsleben and Schact Asse II in Germany, WIPP in the US - are less than 1000m. There are a handful of others under construction, even more under consideration, but even if those all became operational today "regularly" at 4km would be a drastic overstatement. Even with the facilities that exist, there have been incidents and concerns about groundwater contamination over the truly long term that many of these isotopes require. You present it as a solved problem but in fact it's anything but.
dalbasal 6y ago
Nuclear energy, for generations now, always has a stronger theoretical case than a practical one. Going on first principles, nuclear is amazing. Abundant. Clean. Cheap. Constant. When we build cities along the kuiper belt, they're obviously going to be nuclear powered. Practically... Nuclear energy has been around for 60+ years. There have been massive investments. Many plants in many countries trying different things. It's rarely been a notable success. It rarely been especially cheap. Not that nuclear energy projects always fail, but... To riff on the author's own analogy: nuclear never had a coal_vs_wood moment. It didn't ultimately matter that the clergy hated coal. Coal was better than wood by a big enough margin that it would win regardless. Nuclear was never practically superior enough to replace coal, and many countries that invested in nuclear divested later. Renewables OTOH, despite their first principles problems are on an economic trajectory that nuclear never had in practice. Long term, nuclear is a good bet. Practically, it's that bet rarely never paid off to date... and many bets have been made.
- chrisdinn 6y ago
  What counts as notable success? The entire base energy load for Ontario, Canada comes from nuclear (see: live.gridwatch.ca) and the provinces high energy costs (such as they were) were directly caused by investment in renewables through guaranteed high rates paid to producers. This is not a political point, I supported those mostly-now-abandoned investments. They took down just-erected windmills near my house in recent years (Prince Edward County, Ontario). Seems like you are seizing defeat here.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Notable success would be what was promised in the 50s. Energy so abundant that it's not metered. Doing to coal what coal did to wood. I don't think you should judge renewables on the same terms. These are much younger projects, at scale. Seizing defeat is fair, perhaps. Nuclear has been on the cusp for too long. "Marginally better than coal/gas" is not the notable success we were promised. I'm willing to cut losses, if that's all that is at risk. I'm not saying that nuclear's first principles advantages will never materialize. They will eventually. I just wouldn't be betting on nuclear now.
bamboozled 6y ago
Where going to see the end of civilization if we don't make a decision soon?
amai 6y ago
"a Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that nuclear is safer than most energy sources" Since when are Pulitzer prize winners experts on nuclear energy? A sentence like this is shows he has absolutely no clue what he is talking about: "Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem in the U.S., is not any longer a technological problem." see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU "A final complaint against nuclear power is that it costs too much. Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide, but there is no question that a full accounting of the external costs of different energy systems would find nuclear cheaper than coal or natural gas. " Ok, see here https://www.carbonbrief.org/wind-and-solar-are-30-50-cheaper-than-thought-admits-uk-government https://www.carbonbrief.org/wind-and-solar-are-30-50-cheaper... Nuclear is already the most expensive solution to produce electricity. Also we don't need artificial nuclear energy here on Earth. There is plenty of nuclear energy available for free from the sun.
- i_am_proteus 6y ago
  The pricing analysis assumes that costs for renewables scale linearly as they approach 100% of grid capacity, but they do not. Other comments in this thread speak to this phenomenon well. Without viable energy storage, operating in parallel with something like load-following nuclear is necessary for wind and solar to remain as cheap as currently quoted. If viable scale energy storage is invented, it will not be free.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Batteries for energy storage is already viable. Batteries are already cheaper than high voltage power lines. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-electricity-is-local/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
    - i_am_proteus 6y ago
      In some markets. The author of this short essay makes many assumptions that trends will remain linear.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
When you consider any public infrastructure - roads, telecommunications, electricity grids - the bottleneck is always how much can be supplied during peak periods. When we add capacity, its always to address the peak demand. The solution is to get smarter about shifting demand, particularly as we build out a massive fleet of EVs. Here's an example of hourly electricity use in Florida: https://energymag.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/daily-demand-florida-public-utility-commission.jpg https://energymag.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/daily-demand-f... We need appliances that can take into account grid pricing, and any local power supply that the owner has (solar, EV battery), and adjust accordingly. eg. heating or cooling a house an hour earlier than when the owner would typically manually request it. Secondly for EVs that can charge offpeak at night (eg. at 9pm, not simply when the owner gets home at 6pm and plugs it in - contributing to peak demand) and then upload some power back into the grid in the morning, and then during the day again if necessary. Its going to be hard to integrate this into appliances, but power upload and smart charging/discharging should be mandated for new EVs. While we're at it we should also begin charging for time of use for roads - to reduce congestion, and replace the revenue from gas taxes. This UI and charging mechanism could be built into the infotainment system.
deleted 6y ago
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notacoward 6y ago
Perhaps some form of nuclear power can be part of a sustainable energy solution, but that doesn't mean expanding nuclear power is a good idea right now. Building, running, and maintaining a nuclear power plant is a formidable engineering challenge. So is dealing with its waste. The biggest fallacy is that just because we've been able to get by with temporary waste storage and haven't had a disaster so far we'd be able to deal with much more over much longer periods of time. Nobody who's serious about this or any other topic just assumes infinite scalability. Show proof or GTFO. With newer plant designs and better waste handling we can come back to considering expansion of nuclear. AFAIK there are just too many problems still unsolved, so that would be premature. In the here and now solar and wind seem vastly preferable. Also, the remaining problems with wave/tidal power, while far from trivial, seem likely to be solved before the remaining problems with nuclear. If that happens, there's no reason to take any risk with nuclear.

159 points by yaa_minu 6y ago

No other fuel has the energy density of nuclear, no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365. Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. Nuclear on the other hand has been here for 50 years and could have already solved our CO2 problems. But because it's unfashinable to be pro-science in liberal cities no one has the guts to stand up and say "You're not only wrong but delusional" to the hippies who have as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography. It's ridiculous that the people who say they want to save the earth are the reason why we've locked in a 6th mass extinction already.

cygx 6y ago
Renewables are based on the hope that one day we [...] get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. You're right that we aren't there yet, but Star Trek level technology is hyperbole. Just to give one example, the German gas grid can store several hundreds TWh of energy, and there are lab results that indicate we might be able to improve power-to-gas-to-power efficiencies to make this viable[1]. [1] https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2018_009_power-to-gas-with-high-efficiency.php https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2018_009_power-to-gas-wit...
- edbob 6y ago
  [1] is really interesting, but it is literally burning natural gas with extra steps. How is it better than normal gas generation?
  - cygx 6y ago
    Because you synthesize the gas, there's no net CO2 production.
  - _Microft 6y ago
    The issue with burning natural gas (i.e. from fossil sources) is that it increases the amount of carbon in circulation.
logicchains 6y ago
"Science for me and not for thee!"
pif 6y ago
I can't understand the downvotes you got. You pushed may be a bit on political stereotypes, but other than that you just stated the facts.
- realusername 6y ago
  That's where we are at right now, just stating the energy facts are considered political... There's no realistic scenario at the moment where renewables can be used alone to build a grid for a full country unless you are betting on future tech which doesn't (and might never) exist.
  - cygx 6y ago
    Because it's overstating the facts ("no other source", "seen only in Star Trek", "as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography", "ridiculous"), contradicting any study on the topic I've seen (which, to be fair, might have been a biased sample). This was my take-away when I looked into it a couple of years ago: Going 60% renewable is not much of a problem. 80% needs investment into infrastructure, but still viable. 100% would need better storage technology - or the political will to make cuts: You first need to build enough off-shore windparks, storage and smarter grids to get you through the 'Dunkelflaute' (simultaneous reduced energy production from solar and on-shore wind due to weather conditions, sometimes for weeks!). There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to adjust to uneven levels of power generation, eg by shutting down some industries when production is low, and dumping excess power somewhere when it's high (smelting, scientific experiments, bitcoin mining, whatever).
    - orwin 6y ago
      We don't need 100% renewable, we need 350% renewable. Electricity is at best 25% of our energy usage. 20% of the energy i'm consumming everyday come from nuclear and i'm living in France, where 80% of our power grid is nuclear. And we need the grid investment in copper that comme with it if we want a distributed grid. And a secondary grid to serve hospital and emergency buildings. Oh, and we need Veolia's solar panel recycling plant: its economical, recylce 91 to 95% of the product (granted, the less important part) and it only cost 8 time the raw materials, making it the most efficient solar panel recycling plant (and the only one in the world of its size). It also cost 5 time the energy of raw material extraction and transformation, and weirdly, this is never taken into account when the cost of solar PV is on the table, as if everyone think we can just put lead and cadmium in a landfill. Oh yeah, that's right, we can and we did, nice job us.
yokaze 6y ago
> No other fuel has the energy density of nuclear Irrelevant, unless you want to have a mobile power generator. > no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365. First, not true: Geothermal and hydro both can generate power 24/7/365. Yes, that is location dependent, but you set yourself up there with using absolutes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Iceland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Iceland.) Second, we do not need a single source to deliver 24/7/365, we need "just" a power-mix capable of delivering the changing power-demand over the day. Yes, that is a technical challenge. But nuclear is facing technical challenges too. > Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. Hydro-power can act as energy storage, and it has been here since practical forever: Yes, not an universal solution. And yes, it puts more strain on the grid and requires more management. But I consider your point rather hyperbolical than factual considering the progress made there. > Nuclear on the other hand has been here for 50 years and could have already solved our CO2 problems. Sure, and the only reason we aren't there is because of those hippies. It isn't like half of the research budget since the 50s went to nuclear research, and only 11% to renewables (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/09/nuclear-fossil-fuels-have-dominated-federal-energy-rd-spending https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/09/nuclear-...), most of it after the 70s. It isn't like there are technical and nuclear anti-proliferation reasons why a new nuclear reactor require huge budgets to build and operate. Or that no insurance company in the world will cover the worst-case scenario, and there is always a limited liability of the operator of such plant. I would suggest looking at the amount of resources (money and time) invested in both nuclear power and renewables and how the costs developed respectively over time, when doing your bet on either technology.
- realusername 6y ago
  I strongly doubt there's that many places where you can build some hydro plants which haven't been used yet. At least there's approximately none in Europe. That's fine as a philosophical thought but in reality, all the hydro capacity is already used.
  - 6y ago
audunw 6y ago
> Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. That's absolutely ridiculous. Even with nuclear power, we'll need to produce MASSIVE amounts of hydrogen to cut all carbon emissions. If we have enough renewable hydrogen production plants to make all the hydrogen we need for ships, planes, steel production, farming and fertilizers, we'll have all the energy regulation and storage capability we'll ever need. Seasonal variations in cold climates can be handled better by trash burning facilities. Yeah, recycle/reuse first, but eventually you'll need to get rid of a lot of non-recyclable mixed waste regardless. I feel like people claiming nuclear is essential has never truly thought about the big picture. In my opinion it's a benefit that renewables stimulate more R&D into energy storage. It's a positive synergy, since those solutions are absolutely essential to solving the climate crisis anyway. Unless we invent nuclear reactors we can put on planes and trucks. Now there's a Star Trek level invention!
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  > Seasonal variations in cold climates can be handled better by trash burning facilities. Yeah, recycle/reuse first, but eventually you'll need to get rid of a lot of non-recyclable mixed waste regardless. Do you have any numbers or sources to provide for this claim? > If we have enough renewable hydrogen production plants to make all the hydrogen we need for ships, planes, steel production, farming and fertilizers, we'll have all the energy regulation and storage capability we'll ever need. So your argument is predicated on a future breakthrough in hydrogen production and storage that is so impressive it solves both transportation problems and renewable energy intermittancy? And you argue this is better than using a proven source of baseline energy today?
justatdotin 6y ago
nuclear doesnt run 24/7/365
- opo 6y ago
  It is pretty close to that and very good compared to other sources of power: >...Nuclear has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source—producing reliable, carbon-free power more than 92% of the time in 2016. That’s nearly twice as reliable as a coal (48%) or natural gas (57%) plant and almost 3 times more often than wind (35%) and solar (25%) plants. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity

readflaggedcomm 6y ago

The article's actual title does not senselessly elide the word "power." Also, it's from 2018.

tgv 6y ago

The best argument: more people died in Bhopal. As if going nuclear will make that stop. Please, the only argument to make to such a question is "because we can't reduce CO2 emissions without, and that's because ...". But what do you expect from an article that tries to tarnish opponents of nuclear energy by comparing them to "Elizabethan preachers [who] railed against [coal], a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement."

lawrenceyan 6y ago

What do you do in 30 years when another incident like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster happens? Batteries will be the long term solution to energy baseload needs, not nuclear.

konjin 6y ago
Nothing because the incident killed fewer people than a coal plant does during regular operation in the same time period.
johncolanduoni 6y ago
We could do just as badly and still have nowhere near as many deaths (including evacuation related deaths) as a single coal plant causes due to pollution.
- lawrenceyan 6y ago
  I'm not a fan of having cancer rates rise either. I've stated this before, and I'll repeat it here: Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world. They're cheaper too.
  - wiz21c 6y ago
    What about the resources needed to build the solar and wind infrastructures ? Metal, extraction of that metal, rare earths,... ? I'm all for solar and wind and whatever, but at some point there are some maths to do... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o
    - partingshots 6y ago
      Isn’t nuclear power really expensive? Solar and wind I think are just materially cheaper than anything else even including construction. I’m looking at the Lazard 2020 Levelized Cost of Energy report here: https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

legulere 6y ago

> Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies. This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die. Chernobyl and Fukushima had dramatic effects on millions of people. Contamination from Chernobyl to this day is a problem in Germany for instance.

roenxi 6y ago
We're comparing two neighbourhoods. One has less deaths and less robberies. It is the one with nuclear power. Chernobyl has done less damage and had less impact on those millions of people than the totally routine burning of coal. I grew up in a coal mining region; I fully expect more people suffer negative health outcomes when coal works as expected than in a Class 7 nuclear catastrophe. We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect. The overwhelming safety of the nuclear process makes the failures look bad, because we aren't used to nuclear plants producing detectable levels of ambient pollution.
- paganel 6y ago
  > We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect. This also goes for nuclear.
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    The "too hard to prove cause" is for attributing individual cases. In any particularly case - just like with the link of smoking and lung cancer - it is impossible to say if lung problems were caused by coal plants. Statistical estimates of the amounts of deaths and lung problems coal power plants cause, however, can be much more accurate. And they bespeak hundreds of thousands gruesome deaths from coal every year.
- _nalply 6y ago

angry_octet 6y ago

I can't recommend you spend your time reading this nebulous essay, which doesn't in any way address the time and cost blowouts for the latest generation of reactors, instead choosing to blame woke liberals. Tiresome.

Gibbon1 6y ago
Blaming hippies is kinda like the Solarwinds CEO blaming an intern. If nuclear power was all that it's boosters claim it is, the objections of woke liberals would be a long forgotten road kill squirrel. Seriously the hippies don't have that much political power.

amarant 6y ago

I think nuclear definitely has a role to play, at least in the short term. I'm not sure about expanding its usage, but definitely maintain what we have until it can be replaced with renewables, and definitely replace nuclear only after coal/gas/other fossil fuels are no longer being used anywhere. Don't be fooled by disastrous events, nuclear is statistically the safest energy source we have[1], so don't fear it senselessly. This is a whole topic on it's own and I won't delve deeper into it here. [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

ruph123 6y ago
> Don't be fooled by disastrous events, nuclear is statistically the safest energy source we have[1], so don't fear it senselessly. The fear of operation should not be put forward as the one problematic thing of nuclear energy. Another big problem is how we deal with the toxic waste for the next millennia? Especially looking at the volatility of sensible politics in the US, how can you be sure that the next Trump will not just suppress information about leaking nuclear waste and straight up not deal with it because it is “fake news”? The problem with nuclear power plants is that: You have to deal with very dangerous material and guarantee that this waste, which could very well outlive humanity, will not hurt your population. How can you guarantee that? Don’t use the straw-man argument of “Oh ya’ll are just against nuclear because of safety in operation”.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  > The problem with nuclear power plants is that: You have to deal with very dangerous material and guarantee that this waste, which could very well outlive humanity, will not hurt your population? It is worth noting when considering this question that fossil fuels also leave dangerous and radioactive waste, but instead of being confined to a dense waste we understand how to contain, it is emitted as particulates into the air that we breath.
  - lorenzhs 6y ago
    It's well known that coal exhaust isn't fairy dust, but it doesn't pose a storage problem [edit: on the scale of millenia], so your argument amounts to whataboutism.

_Microft 6y ago

The article discusses only nuclear fission power if that helps to decide whether you actually want read it. The arguments presented are pretty much the same as always.

MrDresden 6y ago

I'm waiting for those Thorium reactors to start popping up

throwaway210222 6y ago
Here is one being hatched: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1

GlennS 6y ago

I feel like this is a prime example of someone failing to update their beliefs with new information. For decades it would have been a reasonable position that governments should override political objections, embark upon mass nuclear power programs, and try to drive costs down through economies of scale and process improvements over time. 20 years ago it was arguably a correct and very strong position to take? 10 years ago, still a reasonable-seeming one? By 5 years ago, nuclear had probably missed its chance. Most of us had probably not quite grasped that yet. Today, anyone arguing this just needs to redo their sums with up-to-date numbers and they'll see the impossiblity of their argument. Nuclear is done. Baseload business models are done. The market has chosen a winner, which is mass deployment of wind and solar.

Toutouxc 6y ago
It would be better to provide sources for some of those. Also what do you mean by "baseload business models"?
derriz 6y ago
Exactly, people are repeating decades old argument without incorporating what has happened with technology over the last 10 or 20 years. In the last decade, grid scale battery costs have declined by 75%. Wind turbines and solar panels have declined by 80% and 90% respectively. These declines are actually accelerating at the moment - grid scale battery storage has halved in price over the last two years. In contrast, the LCOE of nuclear has increased by 20%. The industry is moving so fast that arguments become stale very quickly but people are slower, it seems, to update their opinions. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/04/30/solar-and-wind-costs-continue-to-fall-as-power-becomes-cleaner https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/04/30/solar-and-...
- ElKrist 6y ago
  "The industry is moving so fast that arguments become stale very quickly but people are slower, it seems, to update their opinions." How fast is it moving? "For the first time in nearly a decade, annual installations of energy storage technologies fell year-on-year in 2019. Grid-scale storage installations dropped 20%" [1] [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-storage https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-storage

fragile_frogs 6y ago

Relevant Kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

bjourne 6y ago

The article does not explain why nuclear must be part of the energy solution. In fact, the argument seem to be that nuclear has been the target of fear mongering from environmentalists and therefore nuclear must be a part of the energy solution which is a fallacy. Germany has decommissioned numerous nuclear plants (Energiewende) and yet its GDP is up and its coal consumption down. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... Critics said it couldn't be done, except it was done. Critics claim that Energiewende isn't popular, except surveys show that it is supported by a super majority of Germans. The main issue nuclear power's supporters ignore is that nuclear is much more expensive than renewables. According to LAZARD 14.0, the cost for wind is $26 to $54 per MWh and $129 to $198 for nuclear. https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o... Furthermore a nuclear plant costs billions to construct and is an investment that takes decades before reaching its break-even point. That's not something the market is interested in, despite record-low capital costs around the world. Should the tax-payer subsidize an energy source that is already at least four times as expensive as wind which may, in a decade or two, be ten times as expensive?

hntrader 6y ago
"four times as expensive as wind" This isn't a valid comparison, since wind isn't capable of base load supply. You would need to factor in storage costs to make the comparison valid.
- partingshots 6y ago
  Batteries are also getting cheaper and improving in capacity at immense rates too no? It seems like a double whammy against nuclear, unless there’s something I’m missing?
  - rusk 6y ago
    Just curious where we are we at in terms of the environmental aspects of mass scale heavy duty battery production?

oblio 6y ago

I saw this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbrT3m89Y3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbrT3m89Y3M I hope they get adopted and maybe even replace the old ones plus coal/gas powered ones.

JauntyHatAngle 6y ago

My main issue with Nuclear power is my lack of trust in regulators over time. Nuclear done well is safe, clean and has an extremely low carbon footprint. But, where profit incentives exist, lobby groups exist. And the US government has shown itself incredibly pliable with enough donations and time given. So for me, give it 10-15 years, or less, and the safety margins will erode over time as people get too comfy with the new normal, and like always happens, be it Boeing, Texas power systems or the like, I have a nasty suspicion bad events will start happening at a scale previously unseen, with companies not doing their due diligence and lobbying for concessions and bending regulation around expensive but necessary precautions.

fsflover 6y ago
You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases kill less people than coal done well.
- mFixman 6y ago
  They kill less people than coal if you make a very gross average of total deaths per kWh. 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster there are two uninhabitable subdivisions of Ukraine that will require control for the rest of human history. "Average deaths" doesn't matter when the people living near nuclear power plants have to be in constant preparation for total evacuation. I agree with the parent comment in that I wouldn't trust Western countries in maintaining nuclear plants for 40 years and safely disassembling them afterwards. Luckily for us, renewables exist so we don't have to.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    > when the people living near nuclear power plants have to be in constant preparation for total evacuation What are you talking about? Is there any serious unpredictable danger for people living near Chernobyl?
    - 6y ago

justatdotin 6y ago

....."ultimately be a matter for markets to decide". done.

yodelshady 6y ago
Yeah, they decided really well in Texas at $ 9,000 / MWh.
- jerven 6y ago
  Do you think that the organizations that couldn't bother to take into account a 1 in 20 winter would build safe and secure nuclear? Also consider the amount of battery storage arriving onto the Texas grid in the next few years. If that would have been commissioned already, reconnecting neighbourhoods would have been much easier.
  - yodelshady 6y ago
    I don't need to think. Somebody provided several PWh - PWh - of energy with, in the US, simply no accidents worth worrying about, and on global scale still none that compare to the damage fossils have done. That's not a hypothetical. It already happened. I really, really aggressively don't care what grid storage salesmen claim. Put up a plan for the TWhs needed to cover a cold windless snap and we'll talk.

neuronic 6y ago

I am in no way or shape against nuclear power per se. I know its technology, I have studied the engineering behind it etc. Still, any argument against nuclear is immediately categorized as "fearmongering" no matter how much it isn't based on the technology itself. Facts and an interest in truly bringing your country forward don't matter. Money and lobbyism is what rules the discussions. No matter how many subversive nuclear shills keep posting on reddit and other forums. Reddit drowns in fake marketing/PR accounts, you can buy them by the thousands. In the past, I have seen templates for responses written in the weekly pro-nuclear threads. But whatever - just one simple statement that remains true in 2021 is this: Nuclear fission power is entirely uneconomical and already replaced by safer, better alternatives. And on top of the insane cost - plants will never be profitable without lifelong government subsidies - the insane length of construction and planning to build new modern generation plants is completely out of what's reasonable because we have to tackle climate change NOW. You're looking at $20bn and 10-15 years of construction at least. Finland is currently struggling to finish their new reactor and it costs them dearly. Just invest in renewables and be done with it far sooner at much lower cost and factor 1000 less problems (aside from lobbyism and shilling). Just look at this mess of cost and lost time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c... All that jazz for a measly 1600 MW. Less than 1500 off-shore wind power turbines deliver a whooping 7.5 Gigawatt for Germany [1]. If you can build 300 wind turbines in 20 years at a fraction of the cost of a single nuclear plant you will have the same output and no possible nuclear incidents or nuclear waste to take care of. Mix it with other renewables and you get the power consistency you need. Nuclear in 2021 is so incredibly unreasonable it bothers me to no end. In Germany, we still have no reasonable way to dispose of 1900 CASTOR containers containing dangerous plutonium with a half-life of 24,000 fucking years. The containers are rated for 40 year protection btw. We have a super majority that rejects nuclear power. Do we struggle sometimes to make the shift away from fossil fuels AND nuclear at the same time? Yes. Do we have to buy power from France or other neighbors in times of high demand? Has happened before. But we are making progress and are able to sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY. If we had this discussion in 1990, my opinion would have been different. But it's too late and too expensive now to shift back into nuclear. By 2042, when a plant planned TODAY would go online, our renewable infrastructure will far outdo what any nuclear plant is capable of in terms of risk-reward. [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/german-offshore-wind-power-output-business-and-perspectives https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/german-offshore-w...

webreac 6y ago

There are many videos of Jean-Marc Jancovici on this subject. Some of them are in English. It gives documented pragmatic analysis. One conclusion is clear: Current nuclear plants shall be preserved to smooth the energetic transition (fossil free). What has been done in Germany was not wise. It is less obvious whether we shall build new nuclear plants or focus on new energy sources. In France, we struggle to recover our aptitude to build new plants.

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

> Elizabethan preachers railed against a fuel they believed to be, literally, the Devil’s excrement. 1. So it seems, 500 years later, as we struggling with all the issues this resource has caused and still causing they were not wrong... > For too many environmentalists concerned with global warming, nuclear energy is today’s Devil’s excrement Read (1) --- It is only a question who will suffer along the lines, after we are long gone from the existence.

fmajid 6y ago

The article doesn’t even discuss the annual deaths from coal mining accidents, specially in China.

temp_rider2224 6y ago

nice article

sebow 6y ago

Glad someone finally takes a stance on this.Nuclear is by far the greenest and most efficient energy source we have right now.In Europe for example we're suffering because of the chernobyl/fukushima rhetoric that is mainly voiced from Germany and the rest of the continent bows down to it(with few exceptions, mainly france). It's a shame and hopefully US/China will take the lead, only to prove the idiotic leadership of the mistakes we're making.It's a critical aspect of the economic recovery of the continent, and also of the "space-race" we're finding ourselves in.

cybervegan 6y ago

We aren't even responsible enough with the nuclear assets and waste we already have, and we're going to have to actively look after that lot for millennia to come. You can't just walk away from a spent fuel waste facility - you have to run it, or it will eventually leak radioactive isotopes into the environment. We aren't even doing that right now, so how do we expect our decendents to have the will and knowledge to do that in 2200? If we're still around at all.

Paradigma11 6y ago
We regularly build mines 4km deep with no water for several km around. Where are these radioactive isotopes supposed to leak to and why should we care? If you have suddenly contact with rock from 4km depth there are not many scenarios where it would matter if it's radioactive.
- notacoward 6y ago
  That is simply untrue. The deepest operational facilities - e.g. Morsleben and Schact Asse II in Germany, WIPP in the US - are less than 1000m. There are a handful of others under construction, even more under consideration, but even if those all became operational today "regularly" at 4km would be a drastic overstatement. Even with the facilities that exist, there have been incidents and concerns about groundwater contamination over the truly long term that many of these isotopes require. You present it as a solved problem but in fact it's anything but.

dalbasal 6y ago

Nuclear energy, for generations now, always has a stronger theoretical case than a practical one. Going on first principles, nuclear is amazing. Abundant. Clean. Cheap. Constant. When we build cities along the kuiper belt, they're obviously going to be nuclear powered. Practically... Nuclear energy has been around for 60+ years. There have been massive investments. Many plants in many countries trying different things. It's rarely been a notable success. It rarely been especially cheap. Not that nuclear energy projects always fail, but... To riff on the author's own analogy: nuclear never had a coal_vs_wood moment. It didn't ultimately matter that the clergy hated coal. Coal was better than wood by a big enough margin that it would win regardless. Nuclear was never practically superior enough to replace coal, and many countries that invested in nuclear divested later. Renewables OTOH, despite their first principles problems are on an economic trajectory that nuclear never had in practice. Long term, nuclear is a good bet. Practically, it's that bet rarely never paid off to date... and many bets have been made.

chrisdinn 6y ago
What counts as notable success? The entire base energy load for Ontario, Canada comes from nuclear (see: live.gridwatch.ca) and the provinces high energy costs (such as they were) were directly caused by investment in renewables through guaranteed high rates paid to producers. This is not a political point, I supported those mostly-now-abandoned investments. They took down just-erected windmills near my house in recent years (Prince Edward County, Ontario). Seems like you are seizing defeat here.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Notable success would be what was promised in the 50s. Energy so abundant that it's not metered. Doing to coal what coal did to wood. I don't think you should judge renewables on the same terms. These are much younger projects, at scale. Seizing defeat is fair, perhaps. Nuclear has been on the cusp for too long. "Marginally better than coal/gas" is not the notable success we were promised. I'm willing to cut losses, if that's all that is at risk. I'm not saying that nuclear's first principles advantages will never materialize. They will eventually. I just wouldn't be betting on nuclear now.

bamboozled 6y ago

Where going to see the end of civilization if we don't make a decision soon?

amai 6y ago

"a Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that nuclear is safer than most energy sources" Since when are Pulitzer prize winners experts on nuclear energy? A sentence like this is shows he has absolutely no clue what he is talking about: "Nuclear waste disposal, although a continuing political problem in the U.S., is not any longer a technological problem." see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU "A final complaint against nuclear power is that it costs too much. Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide, but there is no question that a full accounting of the external costs of different energy systems would find nuclear cheaper than coal or natural gas. " Ok, see here https://www.carbonbrief.org/wind-and-solar-are-30-50-cheaper-than-thought-admits-uk-government https://www.carbonbrief.org/wind-and-solar-are-30-50-cheaper... Nuclear is already the most expensive solution to produce electricity. Also we don't need artificial nuclear energy here on Earth. There is plenty of nuclear energy available for free from the sun.

i_am_proteus 6y ago
The pricing analysis assumes that costs for renewables scale linearly as they approach 100% of grid capacity, but they do not. Other comments in this thread speak to this phenomenon well. Without viable energy storage, operating in parallel with something like load-following nuclear is necessary for wind and solar to remain as cheap as currently quoted. If viable scale energy storage is invented, it will not be free.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Batteries for energy storage is already viable. Batteries are already cheaper than high voltage power lines. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-electricity-is-local/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
  - i_am_proteus 6y ago
    In some markets. The author of this short essay makes many assumptions that trends will remain linear.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

When you consider any public infrastructure - roads, telecommunications, electricity grids - the bottleneck is always how much can be supplied during peak periods. When we add capacity, its always to address the peak demand. The solution is to get smarter about shifting demand, particularly as we build out a massive fleet of EVs. Here's an example of hourly electricity use in Florida: https://energymag.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/daily-demand-florida-public-utility-commission.jpg https://energymag.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/daily-demand-f... We need appliances that can take into account grid pricing, and any local power supply that the owner has (solar, EV battery), and adjust accordingly. eg. heating or cooling a house an hour earlier than when the owner would typically manually request it. Secondly for EVs that can charge offpeak at night (eg. at 9pm, not simply when the owner gets home at 6pm and plugs it in - contributing to peak demand) and then upload some power back into the grid in the morning, and then during the day again if necessary. Its going to be hard to integrate this into appliances, but power upload and smart charging/discharging should be mandated for new EVs. While we're at it we should also begin charging for time of use for roads - to reduce congestion, and replace the revenue from gas taxes. This UI and charging mechanism could be built into the infotainment system.

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notacoward 6y ago

Perhaps some form of nuclear power can be part of a sustainable energy solution, but that doesn't mean expanding nuclear power is a good idea right now. Building, running, and maintaining a nuclear power plant is a formidable engineering challenge. So is dealing with its waste. The biggest fallacy is that just because we've been able to get by with temporary waste storage and haven't had a disaster so far we'd be able to deal with much more over much longer periods of time. Nobody who's serious about this or any other topic just assumes infinite scalability. Show proof or GTFO. With newer plant designs and better waste handling we can come back to considering expansion of nuclear. AFAIK there are just too many problems still unsolved, so that would be premature. In the here and now solar and wind seem vastly preferable. Also, the remaining problems with wave/tidal power, while far from trivial, seem likely to be solved before the remaining problems with nuclear. If that happens, there's no reason to take any risk with nuclear.