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EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document
- seanhandley 6y agoThis is a good move. Nuclear power is poorly understood and easily stigmatised but on balance is far less harmful than burning fossil fuels.
- dstick 6y agoAfter having read Gates’ latest book on climate change, one metaphor that stuck with me was the one on nuclear energy. It’s as if the Wright brothers invented the first airplane, flew off, crashed, lost every passenger, and then we collectively dropped the entire technology and every promise it held. Never to be visited again. Humans are weird. (and I know the accidents were worse, but we iterated on car and plane safety, so why not energy safety?)
- dijit 6y agoIt's worse than that. It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous. The issue though, is that energy production is mostly quiet unless there's a problem, but people do see personal benefit in air travel. Add to that: Coal is a silent killer, it's not obvious that it's killing us and in such numbers as it is. Nuclear is a dramatic killer, when we die from radiation it's clear and obvious and horrific.
- Haemm0r 6y agoThe comparison of a happening with basically no longterm consequences to future generations like MH17 to nuclear fallout / necessary waste treatment is quite lame imho. Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. Just do the math if you need decades to dismantle and decontaminate an old nuclear power plant alone.
- doikor 6y ago> Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all And yet we seem to be doing just that here in Finland. The for profit companies operating and building the plants have been trying to get permits to build more (and very likely are going to get another one soon). Even with the "failure" of Olkiluoto 3 they seem to find a way to do it in a profitable enough way that they (2 companies TVO and Fennovoima) want to build more. There are no subsidies for nuclear power at all in Finland. Also our permanent spent fuel storage site is almost finished and should hold around 100 years of spent fuel. Though there have been now some talks to not really use it for most fuel as it makes more sense to build breeder reactors and just burn that fuel into much smaller amount. If that happens it will fit much more then 100 year of spent fuel.
- pydry 6y agoThis reactor? >This month, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland was supposed to start producing power. Instead, the plant is at least three and a half years late and more than 50 percent over-budget. Olkiluoto was to be the “poster child” for the new generation of nuclear power plant designs that would drive the “Nuclear Renaissance” and if any nuclear project was going to go well. Instead, it has become an example of all that can go wrong in economic terms with new reactors. The vendor (Areva NP) and the utility are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default. https://web.archive.org/web/20130728115821/http://www.psr.org/safe-energy/the-myth-of-the-european.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130728115821/http://www.psr.or... There does seem to be another reactor being built in Finland, but it's being built by Russia.
- rhodozelia 6y agoWhat’s your point other than people generally sell large projects with a low up front number and it ends up being higher. Investors don’t get the 3-4x return they wanted and have to settle for 2x. Or it takes longer to pay itself back. Solar and wind are expensive too if they are overbuilt 5x or backed up with enough batteries to be a firm source of power. How can anyone argue against nuclear being part of the solution of reducing carbon emissions just because it takes more imaginary monetary tokens to build? Who cares who is building the reactor? Russia and China have the skill and the will to make it happen while everyone else is wringing their hands and continuing to pump out co2.
- jcelerier 6y ago> It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous. well, a lot of people simply refuse to air travel because of perceived safety issues
- belorn 6y agoInteresting historical perspective since bomb planes transformed human warfare and was critical in the development of first ww1 and then more so during ww2. While not fully unique, the idea of killing the morale of the citizens rather than confronting the military was an insight many leader found from the bomb planes, and the idea of nuclear bombs are almost impossible without the idea of air travel.
- didibus 6y agoYa, but the challenge, and I say that as a supporter of Nuclear in general, is that you don't sign up for the experiment. If you're in the radius of the plant if it were to fail, you might be wary of it.
- pitaj 6y agoPeople don't sign up for pollution from fossil fuels either.
- kcmastrpc 6y agoYes, they do. If you drive a car, heat your home via gas/electricity, use the internet (to post this) -- you signed up for it.
- pitaj 6y agoOkay then by the same logic people do sign up for nuclear by using the electricity for their homes, the internet, etc
- oblio 6y agoThat's not how it works :-) I don't smoke but until they started banning smoking everywhere, plenty of people would sign me up for passive smoking without asking me anything.
- kergonath 6y agoHow so? Do the particulates and aerosols avoid me breathing them in because I don’t drive a car and use electric heating? How does it work? Pollution from fossil fuel is unavoidable in quite a lot of places regardless of your life style. Also, much more deadly than anything related to nuclear so far.
- didibus 6y agoIt's an emotional response though, like how there are still more people with a parallizing fear of flight that don't have a problem hopping into a car. Like I said, I'm not justifying being against Nuclear, but explaining the challenge with Nuclear's general acceptance, there is a fear response from people, and it'll need to be curbed and addressed. That fear response is due to the grandiose nature of a Nuclear failure which fossil fuel don't have, even if they kill you slowly and might lead to world ending catastrophies.
- tarboreus 6y agoI think it really comes down to the A-bomb and how large it loomed in the left politics of the mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, I think well-meaning greens have majorly contributed to climate change by opposing nuclear. The mistake is understandable, but we need to be reversing it as fast as possible.
- chpatrick 6y agoAs far as I know there are also economic problems with nuclear. Nuclear power plants are enormous investments, then take decades to build and eventually decomission. If renewable energy gets efficient enough, nuclear is not worth the effort.
- pitaj 6y agoThe economic problems are tied directly to policy problems, like the broken regulatory structure. For instance, as I understand it, a nuclear plant that began construction 10 years ago and is ready to go online by the standards when it began construction has to comply with all regulations created since. This makes creating new plants very expensive.
- jhgb 6y ago> like the broken regulatory structure Doubt it. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-bare-why-nuclear-costs-keep-rising https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-... > It turns out that the main reason for spiraling nuclear plant construction bills is soft costs, the indirect expenses related to activities such as engineering design, purchasing, planning, scheduling and — ironically — estimating and cost control. > These indirect expenses accounted for 72 percent of the increase seen in reactor construction costs between 1976 and 1987, a period in which the amount of money needed for containment buildings rose by almost 118 percent.
- pydry 6y agoThis is the real issue. It's 3x as expensive as other renewables. Every dollar of subsidy producing 1 MWh of nuclear could provide 3 MWh of solar or wind. Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas are), and it's insanely capital intensive (which leads to cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat profit margins). It's got real lobbying muscle though, especially from defense and military.
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
- natch 6y agoI don’t know, cost differences that exemplify the concept of “orders of magnitude” could be one reason.
- brudgers 6y agoAn interesting analogy considering the evidence of the airplane’s role in regard to observed changes in atmospheric chemistry. But all analogies are like that...they need people to squint so details go fuzzy and merge. The Zeppelin is an equally plausible aircraft analogy. Theoretically it is possible for nothing to go wrong when taking dependencies on a quarter million hand sewn cow intestines.
- ncmncm 6y agoConsidering that the Hindenberg was destroyed by a bomb sneaked on board, the analogy is pretty good. The flames seen in the film were kerosene fuel ignited by the bomb. Humans have a way of causing their own disasters, when technical risks fail to deliver. And, more than 2/3 aboard at the time survived. Hard to say where this fits into any proposed analogy.
- makomk 6y agoThe actual answer is that we did improve on nuclear safety, and that all the regulations required to - for example - make sure that power plant designers didn't route all the redundant monitoring and control wiring down the same cableways and stuff them full of highly flammable foam are part of the reason nuclear power has become increasingly unaffordable. This is not some hypothetical example I'm making up, nuclear power plants in the US really did do that with predictable results and apparently the fire safety regulations really are a major cost. The Trump administration tried to fix this by giving more flexibility to designers, but of course that just made it proportionally harder to show the designs were safe and achieved nothing. Because of this, one common refrain from nuclear proponents on HN is that we should just get rid of all those safety regulations and go back to 70s-era levels of nuclear safety because it's safe enough, which would be like if we'd just accepted planes were unsafe back when accidents were more common and not tried to fix it. It also misses one of the key lessons of airplane safety: this kind of normalization of deviance is a major cause of serious accidents. For every major disaster, there is a chain of less serious incidents where things just didn't happen to align right to cause lots of deaths, until one day they did... and nuclear power has the potential for some really impressive disasters. It also probably wouldn't be enough to make nuclear power viable again; it has a lot of cost problems.
- lispm 6y agoActually many countries have developed nuclear technology in various forms over decades. The current latest generation of nuclear power plants (like the French EPR) is simply not cost effective. The Russian technology is nothing which would ever have a change to be deployed in a western country, due to its lower technical standards... Russia can't actually clean up its own nuclear installations.
- natch 6y agoIt’s far more centralized and prone to overly bloated government contracts, big industry, corruption, accounting shenanigans, excessive taxation to pay for the mistakes, and loss of individual freedom and control over where your energy dollars go to. Especially as compared to solar but it’s even bad compared to fossil fuels in these respects.
- oblio 6y agoAfter solar and wind take off completely, the reality is that for 99% of people out there, they will be as centralized as nuclear is. Both because of industry consolidation and because of practical realities.
- natch 6y agoYou are confusing centralization of manufacturing, which is possible and not so bad, with centralization of energy production, which is much more insidious.
- oblio 6y agoNo, I'm not. The only "personal" production of energy is from solar panels. Which still comes with its own problems, as you generally still want to be connected to a grid, in which case utility companies generally attach a lot of strings. Solar will seem to be less centralized but in reality and over the long term we will have huge solar farms owned by big companies, for the same reason we generally have huge actual farms owned by big companies. And what difference does it really make for the regular user if they get their power from 40 nuclear plants or from 200 solar farms? Wind is super centralized, big companies are building wind farms and big companies are operating them. You need a ton of capital for wind farms.
- natch 6y agoNone of this stuff is one or the other. It can be centralized, and also it can be on the average Joe’s roof or in the average Joe’s backyard. With or without a grid. Without the grid, you need some extra equipment so people who can, tend to opt for having the grid hooked up. But it’s possible to do it independently and be free of all the centralization. Oh, wait. Not true for nuclear.
- hekker 6y agoCurious, I am pro nuclear as well, looking at the technological benefits, but how are we practically going to handle nuclear waste that will be there for thousands of future generations to handle?
- pitaj 6y agoNuclear waste storage isn't a technology issue: we know how to store it safely. It's an issue of political obstructionism.
- hekker 6y agoIf that’s true why would be this obstructionism be there? It does not make any rational sense if we can use nuclear to win us time until we have working fusion and/or wind/sun/etc energy implemented.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago>why would be this obstructionism be there The short answer is the oil lobby.
- loeg 6y ago> If that’s true why would be this obstructionism be there? It does not make any rational sense if we can use nuclear to win us time until we have working fusion and/or wind/sun/etc energy implemented. You said it — it's irrational.
- kergonath 6y agoA combination of NIMBY, genuine concerns, poor education and political point scoring. It does not make any rational sense.
- anoncake 6y agoIt's also unsuitable as a long-term solution and too slow to build for a a short-term solution. So all it is is a distraction.
- jdsully 6y agoCrazy they were able to label natural gas as “sustainable” but nuclear just barely squeaked in.
- brtkdotse 6y agoNatural gas or biogas? Same gas but the first is fossil while the other is made from fermenting sewage and hence renewable
- loeg 6y agoEither? The problem is that combusting it produces CO₂.
- enkid 6y agoMethane is going to come out of sewage whether we process it or not, and methane itself is a greenhouse gas. It's not going to come out of the ground without help (in the quantities we are using).
- loeg 6y agoSure, burn that methane. Is there enough of that to many any significant impact on energy needs?
- brtkdotse 6y agoMost busses and taxis in Sweden run on it, so there’s that
- jnurmine 6y agoAnd the gas comes from biowaste, which is actually nice, because municipalities which have the most effective ways of collecting and processing biowaste can export the resulting biogas to e.g. surrounding municipalities and in this way generate income to run things for everyone. This means waste must be sorted somehow, but this is a rational thing to do anyways. And it pisses me off immensely to see some idiots throw plastic bags or non-food waste to the biowaste bins. There are signs in many languages and even with pictures, but some people still manage. Such biowaste cannot be used for gas generation, so it's kind of hurting all the inhabitants.
- tpmx 6y agoGermany's populistic policy decisions following Fukushima set us back so much.
- j-pb 6y agoFukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not neglegible enough. I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow. I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their local coal plant to manage demand. That link was unsecured radiowaves directly interacting with their safety critial systems. Their defense was "it's point to point, so you'd have to build a tower beteen." Yeah or wait 15 years and buy a drone. And we still haven't the tech to get rid of the waste products. The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors. And that's only the long term cost of pulling it out of the ground. The costs of putting it safely away for a million literal years is not included.
- lrem 6y agoWe don't have all that many tsunamis in Germany...
- Hani1337 6y agoNo but we have a lot of terrorists
- cbmuser 6y agoModern nuclear power plants such as the German Konvoi or modern Russian VVER survive plane crashes. Some German plants even have military defense systems on site.
- kergonath 6y ago“A lot of terrorists”? In Germany? I’m not saying it is perfect, but you might want to balance a bit your news sources.
- natch 6y agoLet’s just ignore the carbon released by cement production.
- tpmx 6y agoIn Europe: That cement (which is used to create concrete) is by far mostly going into the huge foundations needed for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of 150m+ tall wind power plants that only produce power sometimes.
- lostlogin 6y agoYes, but compare their CO2 footprints to nuclear. Have you a source that shows Nuclear is better? I hunted around a while back and got a large range of answers, but nuclear seemed consistent worse. Eg see page 29 of this link. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
- tpmx 6y agoThe error bars make that graph unusable for this purpose.
- lostlogin 6y agoThat’s exactly the point I was trying to make - it isn’t clear that nuclear power has less C02 emissions than wind turbines. It’s also something that needs a very long view to calculate - nuclear waste needs storing and protecting and wind turbines aren’t being decommissioned all that much.
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- chmod775 6y agoThere's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
- jackweirdy 6y agoLunar orbit
- sushisource 6y agoI just don't really see how this is true. Isn't the basic idea to just dig a really deep hole somewhere geologically stable and dump it in? My impression isn't that the problem isn't solvable, but simply that no one has actually made the appropriate investment yet. That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.
- cinntaile 6y agoResearch has been ongoing since the 70s to find geologically stable underground storage, this is not a solved problem.
- pas 6y agoNo. This is not a real problem. If it were NPPs would not store spent fuel on site. The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway. Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).
- pdog 6y agoIf you're worried about nuclear waste, why not build small nuclear reactors way out in the desert and encase them in concrete for a couple hundred years once you're done with them?
- freeone3000 6y agoGermany is notably lacking in both deserts and anything reasonably considered "way out".
- ducleonctor 6y agoWe could drill way down. But then geothermal seems like the more sensible option. ;) We could also go way up. But there is the sun already, why build another?
- sunkenvicar 6y agoNuclear fission produces spent fuel. All the spent fuel a plant produces in it’s lifetime fits in the parking lot. But the fuel is not really spent. It contains vast amounts of energy that can be extracted at a reprocessing plant. People who want to landfill spent fuel lack credibility. Perhaps they own shares in a uranium mining company?
- rando57 6y agoI hope that in the future we will seriously consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium: - produces significantly more energy per ton - produces significantly less waste - the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00 years, instead of x0000 years)
- max_ 6y agoYou can make your own thorium battery. [0] [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optoelectric_nuclear_battery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optoelectric_nuclear_battery
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoYou're not thinking of a Tritium battery are you? They produce very little power (W).
- black_puppydog 6y ago> A failure of containment would release high-pressure jets of finely-divided radioisotopes, forming an effective dirty bomb. I'll let you do that first. Please do it somewhere remote kay? :D
- croes 6y agoWe can't even handle a pandemic and you think we can handle nuclear energy?
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoHave Florida build it.
- croes 6y agoTo the down voters, which company or authority do you trust enough to operate this systems for decades?
- LatteLazy 6y agoThey said this to Thatcher back in the 80s didn't they?
- thecleaner 6y agoOh finally. Hopefully these Greenpeace jackasses dont ruin it again.
- s5300 6y agoAm I the only person who thinks we're just going to be sending nuclear waste into space/storing it on moons with SpaceX Starships/whatever comes next? Can somebody tell me why this won't be a viable option? Seems simple enough, and it's not like we've not done worse.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoIt's both cheaper and more likely to remain isolated from the biosphere in stable geologic formations like crystalline bedrock than going through the trouble of (relatively unreliably) getting into (and out of) orbit. Current nuclear waste solutions are perfectly sufficient and appropriate [1]. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
- effie 6y agoSending waste to space is a very dumb idea. First, rockets explode quite often. Second, sending things to space is very expensive, much more than storing them in storage facility. Third, nuclear waste will be very valuable in the future, so forward thinking country wants to keep it.
- aszantu 6y agohttps://nonuclear.se/files/g100rs_en.pdf https://nonuclear.se/files/g100rs_en.pdf if all those costs would be factored into the price, nuclear power wouldn't be so cheap...
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThe future looks bleak for humans, better get a geiger counter and carry it with you.
- athrowaway3z 6y agoI've been thinking about nuclear this last week and i have some assumptions that i would appreciate if somebody more knowledgeable can quickly filter: We want more energy per person in the future. Stable energy is required to make industry sustainable. Stable 'free' energy allows you to do really cool new things (like melt trash for resources?) Waste & environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil fuels. A nation needs to agree to the risk/reward of a nuclear power plant, it must be owned and payed for primarily by the government. Having a country/state that offers free energy will pay itself back easily. Cost should not be an issue, 20 % of GDP should be on the table. ( Money is made up, Jules are real ). Solar and wind are mostly done innovating. Nuclear has a relatively clear path of improvements ahead in terms of $/joule. Storage based on hydrogen or thermal are too inefficient and don't scale well enough to power homes and industries during the winter. Any comments are welcome.
- Hypx 6y agoEnergy storage based on hydrogen can easily scale up to power homes and industry during the winter: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/16/hydrogen-storage-in-salt-caverns/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/16/hydrogen-storage-in-s... We have petawatt-hours worth of storage capacity.
- Krasnol 6y agoIt still remains a waste of money if you have other sources: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099... Nuclear is just too slow to fix our CO2 problems https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
- effie 6y agoWhat else do you propose as replacement for coal and gas power plants? Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems? In the following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2 buildup, not "fix our CO2 problems".
- Krasnol 6y ago> What else do you propose as replacement for coal and gas power plants? Renewables > Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems? It's the main claim of the Nuclear AstroTurf campaign. > In the following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2 buildup, not "fix our CO2 problems". As I've shown: it is not the appropriate tool to do that in an efficient way.
- effie 6y agoIt is not realistic to power current developed societies using only solar and wind power. For simple reason - we can't store energy well. Stop throwing up and shooting down strawmen. Nuclear energy was never going to replace all energy sources. Only the worst ones, like coal and gas power plants.
- jhgb 6y agoStoring energy is a straw man as well. The most realistic scenarios of renewable grids rely on overgeneration and opportunistic consumption. This will continue to be the case as long as storage costs significantly continue to exceed extra generation capacity costs.
- cletus 6y agoHere we go again: 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1]; 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues; 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems; 4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue; and 5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue. The big problems with nuclear aren't technical they're political but they are no less significant. For me, I just don't trust humans--either government entities or for-profit enterprises--to safely and responsibly build and manage a nuclear power plants as well as all the infrastructure to mine, process, transport, reprocess and store any byproducts. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone
- bliteben 6y agowould you support fusion power, or are you a one fusion reactor per solar system kind of guy?
- cletus 6y agoSome solar systems have 2 or even 3 fusion reactors. :) The answer to your question depends on the characteristics of the technology. There are many proposed variations (eg the traditional H-H including heavier isotopes, He₃, pB). For fuels, deuterium is abundant in the environment environment so isn't an issue. Tritium decays quickly. This is a fairly common theme with lighter elements. U₂₃₅ on the other hand is extremely problematic for being both a heavy metal, long-lived and radioactive. But I'm not yet convinced we'll actually have commercial fusion power. Aneutronic variants aside, neutron embrittlement and the energy loss from neutrons are significant unsolved problems. Even with powerful magnets, containing a fluid at 100M Kelvin is a significant problems, inherently so because of turbulence. I hope relatively cheap fusion power is in our future but there's no clear path forward yet. None of these have particularly problematic byproducts.
- pharke 6y ago
- The_rationalist 6y agoThey should invest in thorium research, only then fission would become sustainable at human time scale
- acidburnNSA 6y agoI mentioned this in another thread but this simply is not true. Thorium breeder reactors are indeed sustainable, but so are uranium breeder reactors. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604898
- The_rationalist 6y agoI am obviously talking about the order of magnitude greater abundance of thorium on earth than regular uranium used for fission. In what way do your address the point?
- acidburnNSA 6y ago* There are 6.1 million tonnes of uranium in reasonably assured deposits (World Nuclear Uranium) * There are 6.3 million tonnes of thorium in reasonably assured deposits (World Nuclear Thorium) * Uranium exists in seawater at an average concentration of 0.003 ppm (also World Nuclear Uranium) * There are about 332 million cubic miles of water on Earth, 96.5% of it is in the ocean (USGS). At a density of 1 gram/cm3, this comes out to 1.4 yottagrams of water, or 1.4e21 kg) * At 0.003 ppm, this means there are about 4000 million tonnes of uranium in seawater There is effectively zero thorium in seawater. Seawater uranium extraction with breeder reactors is likely to be more economical than harvesting low-grade thorium from the crust.
- consumer451 6y agoMy only concerns are the timelines required for nuclear plant construction, and also that no one wants one constructed near them. I believe that HVDC conduits going to solar farms in Spain, even under the Mediterranean to Africa could be built faster than nuclear plants. I also believe that most people would prefer a compressed gas storage system built in a old coal or salt mine built nearby over a nuclear plant.
- shoo 6y agoDavid MacKay's book "sustainable energy: without the hot air" has a section that estimates if nuclear fission might work as a large scale long-lived energy source http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_161.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_161.shtml
- ducleonctor 6y agoNuclear power seems incredibly expensive and complicated, even more so than large coal power plants. The logistics alone are crazy. Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases like powering infrastructure in space and implementing big red buttons for our presidents, supreme leaders and chairmen. Nobody can rule out accidents or malicious things going on with the spent fuel anyways. Wind and solar are very cheap and the sun won't turn off anytime soon. Can't we cover the planet's deserts with photovoltaics and wind turbines? Couldn't we ship the converted energy using high voltage DC lines or hydrogen/methane pipelines? Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?
- tpmx 6y agoMeanwhile, in the real world...
- ducleonctor 6y ago...Germany gets its natural gas from mother Russia. Which is more dirty, has a touch of corruption and allows mother Russia to tell the Germans how to behave. But it makes some politicians and companies in two countries happy and shows that large scale energy projects can work if there is a will. So it's a start I guess.
- tpmx 6y agoOk, I'll bite: > Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts? In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa. Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with a factor of 100-1000x. Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...
- 6y ago
- simonCGN 6y agoAnd yet another of this propaganda pieces. Why so many recently I wonder.
- ldbooth 6y agoThis comment section is not going to solve nuclear waste storage.
- 0df8dkdf 6y agoJust wonder can we just send the nuclear wast to the sun, wouldn't that be a good way to get ride of them?
- hetspookjee 6y agoNo, for the reason that the waste is extremely heavy and more importantly, if the rocket blows ups, you now have a huge problem with radioactive waste spread on a high altitude.
- torresmo 6y agoI see a lot of fair concerns about nuclear waste. Here's a crazy thought: Can we just send it to space? With all recent developments in space technology, I'd expect it to be extremely safe and reliable in the next decades.