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The author is a geologist at University of Vermont with no apparent connection to energy space except for his environmental activism. on a separate note, NASA

The author is a geologist at University of Vermont with no apparent connection to energy space except for his environmental activism. on a separate note, NASA had a recent breakthrough after decades of "paper reactors", building and testing the safest and smallest reactor so far based on a new solid core design https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower/

nitrogen 5y ago
environmental activism. My physics teacher in high school was a retired naval nuclear engineer/tech/something. He blamed Jane Fonda (the actress) for a huge portion of the anti-nuclear activism that basically entrenched the power of oil companies and cartels. It's funny/sad how badly the save-the-forest and anti-nuke activism of the 1970s is coming back to bite us so hard now, with wildfires and global warming. Makes me wonder which activist movements today will turn out to have been net negative in another 40-50 years.
- Retric 5y ago
  It’s cold hard economic issues that held back nuclear power rather than any environmental concerns. The US is actually close to the ideal nuclear mix from a cost basis. At best operating at full capacity with moderate subsides it’s roughly competitive with coal operating 24/7, but the grid has wildly fluctuating demand and nuclear’s price per kWh is roughly 3x as expensive at 30% power output as at 100%. France was able to export a lot of nuclear power while importing significant electricity to meet demand and they still had capacity factors fall below 70%. The most surprising issue with nuclear is actually fuel costs. Yes, it’s cheap to mine and enrichment isn’t that expensive, but refueling ends up being quite expensive in part because it’s slow. 3+ weeks of downtime every 1.5-2 years is effectively a 1.5+% fuel cost even if everything else was free. Dropping that to 1 week on it’s own wouldn’t really change the economics much but there are many such issues.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Economic issues were caused in part by political opposition. An extreme degree of reviews and legal objections can't help the economics. And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied. Plus, that coal vs nuclear economic calculation doesn't account for the costs of warming, nor for the intended electrification that abundant nuclear power was supposed to enable. It all has its roots in disproportionate opposition and silly old movies that portrayed nuclear plants as potentially exploding with ten megaton blasts.
    - Retric 5y ago
      > And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied. The core economic issues aren’t based on the physical design of the reactors. Better designs might have dropped net costs by 20%, but that doesn’t allow you to follow the demand curve. It doesn’t allow you to operate without vast quantities of water. It doesn’t reduce fuel costs, or allow efficient operation in extreme temperatures. Let alone figure out reasonable regulations in a small corrupt country that’s just going to build one. Worse, the industry can’t afford to invest it’s own money in these kind of improvements. We aren’t talking 100’s of millions or low billions, were talking 10’s of billions that might possibly payoff decades in the future. People see Nuclear already reviving billions in research funding and it hasn’t really paid off yet. That’s what makes such investments difficult.
      - akvadrako 5y ago
        It's clear these challenges don't nessesarially make Nuclear expensive when you look at France. They have the highest mix of Nuclear by some margin and the cheapest power in Western Europe.
- GLGirty 5y ago
  The safety concerns of the activists could have been quelled by developing thorium as a fuel. it appears to be very safe, too safe maybe to get funding. Instead, the technology that got developed was the one that created weapons grade material as a byproduct. "We'll build one near you. Oh we could build a completely safe one, but instead we're going to build the mostly safe one. We're willing to put you at risk if the commies also feel more at risk." I don't normally sympathize with nimbys, but I think that pitch deserved some pushback.
  - GLGirty 5y ago
    Why the downvote? Here is a citation [1] that molten salt reactor was killed for political reasons. Or was I jumping to conclusions to suggest that activists knew or cared about such details? [1] http://moltensalt.org/references/static/downloads/pdf/WhyMSRsAbandonedORNLWeinbergsFiringV3.pdf http://moltensalt.org/references/static/downloads/pdf/WhyMSR...
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    I think that falls under Myth #6 in the list of thorium reactor myths. https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
- 7952 5y ago
  Government's ignore activists all the time. Not sure why it was apparently so effective in the case of nuclear power.
  - evgen 5y ago
    The target of the activist is not the government, it is other citizens. The goal is to increase the disapproval and outrage above the activation energy of government agencies or legislatures. Anti-nuke activism hit as the first wave of the environmental movement was peaking (think anti-pollution efforts against some really, really bad industrial practices and the anti-litter movement) and it also pulled in a large swathe of anti-war activists who were looking for their next mission after the Vietnam war wound down. Combine these with some genuine hubris on the part of the nuclear energy industry and a public that has a hard time assessing actual risk and you get a perfect storm of sorts. It was easy to pass regulations and laws that made nuclear more difficult to deploy and casually ignore the consequence that this had on making petroleum products and coal the only viable alternatives.
  - qsort 5y ago
    chernobyl
    - chillingeffect 5y ago
      And numerous more. [0x0] Plus nuclear power was never found to be cost-effective. Maybe this decade. I understand reactors will be more uniform in new designs. [0x0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiatio...
      - qsort 5y ago
        I'm not making an argument as to whether nuclear energy is good or bad, cost effective or not. My prior on that is "it depends", but I don't know much about it, so it's a rather weakly informative prior. I was specifically addressing parent's point. Chernobyl had a disproportionate effect on the public perception of the matter. I hadn't even heard of half the disasters in that list, for instance.

nitrogen 5y ago

environmental activism. My physics teacher in high school was a retired naval nuclear engineer/tech/something. He blamed Jane Fonda (the actress) for a huge portion of the anti-nuclear activism that basically entrenched the power of oil companies and cartels. It's funny/sad how badly the save-the-forest and anti-nuke activism of the 1970s is coming back to bite us so hard now, with wildfires and global warming. Makes me wonder which activist movements today will turn out to have been net negative in another 40-50 years.

Retric 5y ago
It’s cold hard economic issues that held back nuclear power rather than any environmental concerns. The US is actually close to the ideal nuclear mix from a cost basis. At best operating at full capacity with moderate subsides it’s roughly competitive with coal operating 24/7, but the grid has wildly fluctuating demand and nuclear’s price per kWh is roughly 3x as expensive at 30% power output as at 100%. France was able to export a lot of nuclear power while importing significant electricity to meet demand and they still had capacity factors fall below 70%. The most surprising issue with nuclear is actually fuel costs. Yes, it’s cheap to mine and enrichment isn’t that expensive, but refueling ends up being quite expensive in part because it’s slow. 3+ weeks of downtime every 1.5-2 years is effectively a 1.5+% fuel cost even if everything else was free. Dropping that to 1 week on it’s own wouldn’t really change the economics much but there are many such issues.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Economic issues were caused in part by political opposition. An extreme degree of reviews and legal objections can't help the economics. And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied. Plus, that coal vs nuclear economic calculation doesn't account for the costs of warming, nor for the intended electrification that abundant nuclear power was supposed to enable. It all has its roots in disproportionate opposition and silly old movies that portrayed nuclear plants as potentially exploding with ten megaton blasts.
  - Retric 5y ago
    > And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied. The core economic issues aren’t based on the physical design of the reactors. Better designs might have dropped net costs by 20%, but that doesn’t allow you to follow the demand curve. It doesn’t allow you to operate without vast quantities of water. It doesn’t reduce fuel costs, or allow efficient operation in extreme temperatures. Let alone figure out reasonable regulations in a small corrupt country that’s just going to build one. Worse, the industry can’t afford to invest it’s own money in these kind of improvements. We aren’t talking 100’s of millions or low billions, were talking 10’s of billions that might possibly payoff decades in the future. People see Nuclear already reviving billions in research funding and it hasn’t really paid off yet. That’s what makes such investments difficult.
    - akvadrako 5y ago
      It's clear these challenges don't nessesarially make Nuclear expensive when you look at France. They have the highest mix of Nuclear by some margin and the cheapest power in Western Europe.
GLGirty 5y ago
The safety concerns of the activists could have been quelled by developing thorium as a fuel. it appears to be very safe, too safe maybe to get funding. Instead, the technology that got developed was the one that created weapons grade material as a byproduct. "We'll build one near you. Oh we could build a completely safe one, but instead we're going to build the mostly safe one. We're willing to put you at risk if the commies also feel more at risk." I don't normally sympathize with nimbys, but I think that pitch deserved some pushback.
- GLGirty 5y ago
  Why the downvote? Here is a citation [1] that molten salt reactor was killed for political reasons. Or was I jumping to conclusions to suggest that activists knew or cared about such details? [1] http://moltensalt.org/references/static/downloads/pdf/WhyMSRsAbandonedORNLWeinbergsFiringV3.pdf http://moltensalt.org/references/static/downloads/pdf/WhyMSR...
- pfdietz 5y ago
  I think that falls under Myth #6 in the list of thorium reactor myths. https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
7952 5y ago
Government's ignore activists all the time. Not sure why it was apparently so effective in the case of nuclear power.
- evgen 5y ago
  The target of the activist is not the government, it is other citizens. The goal is to increase the disapproval and outrage above the activation energy of government agencies or legislatures. Anti-nuke activism hit as the first wave of the environmental movement was peaking (think anti-pollution efforts against some really, really bad industrial practices and the anti-litter movement) and it also pulled in a large swathe of anti-war activists who were looking for their next mission after the Vietnam war wound down. Combine these with some genuine hubris on the part of the nuclear energy industry and a public that has a hard time assessing actual risk and you get a perfect storm of sorts. It was easy to pass regulations and laws that made nuclear more difficult to deploy and casually ignore the consequence that this had on making petroleum products and coal the only viable alternatives.
- qsort 5y ago
  chernobyl
  - chillingeffect 5y ago
    And numerous more. [0x0] Plus nuclear power was never found to be cost-effective. Maybe this decade. I understand reactors will be more uniform in new designs. [0x0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiatio...
    - qsort 5y ago
      I'm not making an argument as to whether nuclear energy is good or bad, cost effective or not. My prior on that is "it depends", but I don't know much about it, so it's a rather weakly informative prior. I was specifically addressing parent's point. Chernobyl had a disproportionate effect on the public perception of the matter. I hadn't even heard of half the disasters in that list, for instance.