4 ms·

We are really really close to a solution, and for the one thing that nuclear is hyped to provide--clean electricity--we have cheaper and easier and more scalabl

We are really really close to a solution, and for the one thing that nuclear is hyped to provide--clean electricity--we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear. The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity. It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today. It's time to stop mythologizing the technology, stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine. It's a theoretically cheap heat source, but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades. In fact, if anything, it's gotten less elegant, more expensive, and even harder to build.

criley2 5y ago
There is nothing cheaper and easier and more scalable than nuclear for baseload gigawatt generation, especially when you actually account for the insane amount of batteries required to make wind/solar/etc viable as a baseload technology. People point at solar panel progress and always conveniently stay silent on the big battery problem (the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc) Nuclear did and does work out. It was not overhyped and it has delivered as expected. I would argue that solar is overhyped and has continually underdelivered. Anyone who has installed a solar system on their house has seen the significant issues with it. Nuclear remains the best way to replace coal/gas electricity generation for baseload power, to generate enough energy to power industries and cities, and is cleaner than filling a city with atrocious rare earth batteries that are required to paper over the problems with other inconsistently generating technologies. It is what it is, but if nuclear isn't the future, then coal isn't going anywhere.
- keewee7 5y ago
  >baseload gigawatt generation This is very important for the heavy industries yet opponents of Nuclear still pretend that solar and wind can cover it. They are fine with Nuclear as long as it is in China.
  - atomicusit 5y ago
    Why is China building as we speak 184 coal plants than? https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-building-184-coal-plants-guess-what-that-will-do-to-carbon-emissions/ https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-buil...
    - epistasis 5y ago
      Interpreting Chinese policy can be difficult foe an outsider, but the most likely reason seems to be the politics dominance of coal interests combined with inertia from plans made a long time ago. The coal capital expenditures into coal will likely be underutilized over the next 30 years, but that happens when there are massive plans that are set in motion over the course of many years without adjustment.
- jopsen 5y ago
  Cost at scale is hard to predict. I think a bigger question is, do we have enough "political capital" to pay for nuclear energy? Even if our politicians all agreed to it, across counties even, what are the odds that they would get ousted before the reactors are built and delivering cost efficiency energy.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    Worth pondering the extent to which anti-nuclear sentiment was funded early by big-coal money.
- epistasis 5y ago
  > the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc These are all trivial compared to nuclear's construction problem. But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem. Batteries scale as small or large as we can conceive. > atrocious rare earth batteries There aren't rare earth elements in batteries. It's been funny to watch "rare earth" become a synonym for "harmful" because this does not seem to have any basis in fact that I can understand. > coal isn't going anywhere Coal is already a dead man walking. Most of its use in the US is uneconomic, and loses money for utility customers. Bad financial agreements, executive incompetence, and misaligned economic incentives between utilities and their customers are the only reason its still on the grid. Everybody who bet on coal 10 years ago was foolish, and should lose their capital, but since that section of our economy is run on cronyism instead of capitalism, people bad at capital allocation are not losing their shirts like they should.
Veedrac 5y ago
All of these problems are due to bad regulation, not the technology. Nuclear fission was well on its way to cost-effective production back in the day. https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
tomp 5y ago
I've been listening to this rhetoric for years, yet every year, more energy problems are caused by (lack of) stable base load electricity supply, both in US and Europe, and much more in countries that heavily invested in "green" (non-nuclear) tech (e.g. Germany), than not (e.g. France).
- panick21 5y ago
  Its really a catch-22 type thing. You increase renewables, destroying the viability of base load. That forces more short term power producers into the market, that then inefficiently burn gas to produce when renewables are off. The gas plants are profitable because the prices you have to pay them are pretty high. And this problem is getting worse all the time and its not really a great overall strategy. I would argue renewables are subsides by how they use the grid. In the US renewables even get subsidies for energy they produce and sell at negative prices.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    And most insane thing to me is that we think in net terms and not peak terms. That is if you sign up to buy wind or solar. You should not be getting any when there is no wind or solar.
hakfoo 5y ago
If nuclear had delivered the "too cheap to meter" promise in the honeymoon pre-Three-Mile-Island phase, it might have affected decisions down the line. A big example is freight rail. The service in the US shrunk over time, and was basically reduced to captive-loop "coal mine to power plant" runs by the 1980s. If the entire country had similar economics, due to cheap ubiquitous nuclear power, there would be impetus to sustain and expand the electrified network. Instead of spending the 50s and 60s on half-baked turbine locomotives that burnt tar, and building ever larger diesels, the clear answer to more horsepower was to suck down more amperes from the overhead wire. Similarly, trolley-bus designs get more interesting when the cost gap between electricity and petrol widens.
panick21 5y ago
> we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear. It is cheaper now but my suggestion is that this is not inherent. My whole point about a nuclear society was that if existed the economics would be different. > The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity. Again, part of my point is that the best way to solve these problems is having cheap high temperature reactors. These reactors are prefect in replacing gas in heat production, and be used to for example to produce hydrogen that then would get further transformed into all kind of chemical fuels and feed-stocks. > It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today. People have such a narrow view of this. Nuclear provided gigantic amounts of clean energy when the only alternative was coal. This by itself saved far more lives then any nuclear accident ever killed (that number is very low). Not being able to beat massively powerful fossil industry with 60s technology in the middle of a massive anti-nuclear weapons (and thus everything nuclear) push is hardly grounds to dismiss it. If people had given a shit about climate change in the 1970 and willing to give it the same kind of subsidies that renewables have been getting then things would be different. This would have been more expensive then coal but the public heath aspect and the clean energy aspect would have made this worthwhile 10x over. The fact is, the reason we even started building PWR is that the military wanted them for submarines. And despite even the designers of them saying they were a bad fit for civil nuclear, the government and industry pushed forward on these designs and pretty quickly hard locked themself into these designs for everything commercial. Everything else with a few exceptions was locked into research efforts and those were reduced consistently after the 60s. > It's time to stop mythologizing the technology It has nothing to do with mythologizing. It has to do with simply first principles approach to problems solving. We have an energy source that is literally freely available as a waste product from mining. Existing rare earth mines already have unlimited thorium as waste stream. Natural Uranium is plentiful as well. This energy source turns out to be 10^12 more energy dense then fossil fuels that have powered society for a century and produced highly available energy at cheap prices. > stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine All of this is wrong. You conclusions are only based a reactor design, not on nuclear as a whole. A modern type of reactor (some are going threw regulatory process in Canada and could have been designed in the 70s) are far, far smaller then PWR type reactors and use orders of magnitude less concrete. There have actually been a lot of study about what makes nuclear expensive. And its mainly two things, that nuclear reactors are basically gigantic civil engineering projects that has to be done at a very high standard and to get those in on time, on budget you really need a workforce that has experience. This type of knowledge was achieved in a few cases and in those PWR were able to be build in 4-5 years reliably. The second part of what makes it commercially not viable is that financing these projects is actually a huge problem. Because of the long time it takes to build such a first time project, you require refinancing for 10 years and that is huge part of the overall cost. Pretty much all next generation reactors have a far more energy dense core. This means a far smaller reactor vessel. Because you don't use water coolant, you don't need to have a high pressure system and reactor vessel. Meaning both vessel and pipes are MASSIVELY simpler. You literally operate at atmospheric pressure. High temperature operations make air-cooled means you can use the same turbines as CCGT plants and you don't need the large water towers. So if the overall civil engineering project is far smaller, very comparable to a CCGT plants. > but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades This is an absurd claim. Gas power plants also need all of those things and are massively cheap and often beat renewables specially so if renewables were required to provide full reliability. As I pointed out above, with the size of plant reduced to a CCGT gas plant, and the input being massively cheap compared to buying gas. A nuclear plant like this could have an very small staff (smaller then a CCGT gas plant) as the reactor is actually self balancing and you mostly need to monitor it and refuel it. There has been a renewed interest in CO2 powered turbines that could potentially be more efficient and far smaller. Hopefully these will start to be commercialized at some point.

criley2 5y ago

There is nothing cheaper and easier and more scalable than nuclear for baseload gigawatt generation, especially when you actually account for the insane amount of batteries required to make wind/solar/etc viable as a baseload technology. People point at solar panel progress and always conveniently stay silent on the big battery problem (the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc) Nuclear did and does work out. It was not overhyped and it has delivered as expected. I would argue that solar is overhyped and has continually underdelivered. Anyone who has installed a solar system on their house has seen the significant issues with it. Nuclear remains the best way to replace coal/gas electricity generation for baseload power, to generate enough energy to power industries and cities, and is cleaner than filling a city with atrocious rare earth batteries that are required to paper over the problems with other inconsistently generating technologies. It is what it is, but if nuclear isn't the future, then coal isn't going anywhere.

keewee7 5y ago
>baseload gigawatt generation This is very important for the heavy industries yet opponents of Nuclear still pretend that solar and wind can cover it. They are fine with Nuclear as long as it is in China.
- atomicusit 5y ago
  Why is China building as we speak 184 coal plants than? https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-building-184-coal-plants-guess-what-that-will-do-to-carbon-emissions/ https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-buil...
  - epistasis 5y ago
    Interpreting Chinese policy can be difficult foe an outsider, but the most likely reason seems to be the politics dominance of coal interests combined with inertia from plans made a long time ago. The coal capital expenditures into coal will likely be underutilized over the next 30 years, but that happens when there are massive plans that are set in motion over the course of many years without adjustment.
jopsen 5y ago
Cost at scale is hard to predict. I think a bigger question is, do we have enough "political capital" to pay for nuclear energy? Even if our politicians all agreed to it, across counties even, what are the odds that they would get ousted before the reactors are built and delivering cost efficiency energy.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  Worth pondering the extent to which anti-nuclear sentiment was funded early by big-coal money.
epistasis 5y ago
> the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc These are all trivial compared to nuclear's construction problem. But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem. Batteries scale as small or large as we can conceive. > atrocious rare earth batteries There aren't rare earth elements in batteries. It's been funny to watch "rare earth" become a synonym for "harmful" because this does not seem to have any basis in fact that I can understand. > coal isn't going anywhere Coal is already a dead man walking. Most of its use in the US is uneconomic, and loses money for utility customers. Bad financial agreements, executive incompetence, and misaligned economic incentives between utilities and their customers are the only reason its still on the grid. Everybody who bet on coal 10 years ago was foolish, and should lose their capital, but since that section of our economy is run on cronyism instead of capitalism, people bad at capital allocation are not losing their shirts like they should.

Veedrac 5y ago

All of these problems are due to bad regulation, not the technology. Nuclear fission was well on its way to cost-effective production back in the day. https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

tomp 5y ago

I've been listening to this rhetoric for years, yet every year, more energy problems are caused by (lack of) stable base load electricity supply, both in US and Europe, and much more in countries that heavily invested in "green" (non-nuclear) tech (e.g. Germany), than not (e.g. France).

panick21 5y ago
Its really a catch-22 type thing. You increase renewables, destroying the viability of base load. That forces more short term power producers into the market, that then inefficiently burn gas to produce when renewables are off. The gas plants are profitable because the prices you have to pay them are pretty high. And this problem is getting worse all the time and its not really a great overall strategy. I would argue renewables are subsides by how they use the grid. In the US renewables even get subsidies for energy they produce and sell at negative prices.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  And most insane thing to me is that we think in net terms and not peak terms. That is if you sign up to buy wind or solar. You should not be getting any when there is no wind or solar.

hakfoo 5y ago

If nuclear had delivered the "too cheap to meter" promise in the honeymoon pre-Three-Mile-Island phase, it might have affected decisions down the line. A big example is freight rail. The service in the US shrunk over time, and was basically reduced to captive-loop "coal mine to power plant" runs by the 1980s. If the entire country had similar economics, due to cheap ubiquitous nuclear power, there would be impetus to sustain and expand the electrified network. Instead of spending the 50s and 60s on half-baked turbine locomotives that burnt tar, and building ever larger diesels, the clear answer to more horsepower was to suck down more amperes from the overhead wire. Similarly, trolley-bus designs get more interesting when the cost gap between electricity and petrol widens.

panick21 5y ago

> we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear. It is cheaper now but my suggestion is that this is not inherent. My whole point about a nuclear society was that if existed the economics would be different. > The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity. Again, part of my point is that the best way to solve these problems is having cheap high temperature reactors. These reactors are prefect in replacing gas in heat production, and be used to for example to produce hydrogen that then would get further transformed into all kind of chemical fuels and feed-stocks. > It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today. People have such a narrow view of this. Nuclear provided gigantic amounts of clean energy when the only alternative was coal. This by itself saved far more lives then any nuclear accident ever killed (that number is very low). Not being able to beat massively powerful fossil industry with 60s technology in the middle of a massive anti-nuclear weapons (and thus everything nuclear) push is hardly grounds to dismiss it. If people had given a shit about climate change in the 1970 and willing to give it the same kind of subsidies that renewables have been getting then things would be different. This would have been more expensive then coal but the public heath aspect and the clean energy aspect would have made this worthwhile 10x over. The fact is, the reason we even started building PWR is that the military wanted them for submarines. And despite even the designers of them saying they were a bad fit for civil nuclear, the government and industry pushed forward on these designs and pretty quickly hard locked themself into these designs for everything commercial. Everything else with a few exceptions was locked into research efforts and those were reduced consistently after the 60s. > It's time to stop mythologizing the technology It has nothing to do with mythologizing. It has to do with simply first principles approach to problems solving. We have an energy source that is literally freely available as a waste product from mining. Existing rare earth mines already have unlimited thorium as waste stream. Natural Uranium is plentiful as well. This energy source turns out to be 10^12 more energy dense then fossil fuels that have powered society for a century and produced highly available energy at cheap prices. > stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine All of this is wrong. You conclusions are only based a reactor design, not on nuclear as a whole. A modern type of reactor (some are going threw regulatory process in Canada and could have been designed in the 70s) are far, far smaller then PWR type reactors and use orders of magnitude less concrete. There have actually been a lot of study about what makes nuclear expensive. And its mainly two things, that nuclear reactors are basically gigantic civil engineering projects that has to be done at a very high standard and to get those in on time, on budget you really need a workforce that has experience. This type of knowledge was achieved in a few cases and in those PWR were able to be build in 4-5 years reliably. The second part of what makes it commercially not viable is that financing these projects is actually a huge problem. Because of the long time it takes to build such a first time project, you require refinancing for 10 years and that is huge part of the overall cost. Pretty much all next generation reactors have a far more energy dense core. This means a far smaller reactor vessel. Because you don't use water coolant, you don't need to have a high pressure system and reactor vessel. Meaning both vessel and pipes are MASSIVELY simpler. You literally operate at atmospheric pressure. High temperature operations make air-cooled means you can use the same turbines as CCGT plants and you don't need the large water towers. So if the overall civil engineering project is far smaller, very comparable to a CCGT plants. > but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades This is an absurd claim. Gas power plants also need all of those things and are massively cheap and often beat renewables specially so if renewables were required to provide full reliability. As I pointed out above, with the size of plant reduced to a CCGT gas plant, and the input being massively cheap compared to buying gas. A nuclear plant like this could have an very small staff (smaller then a CCGT gas plant) as the reactor is actually self balancing and you mostly need to monitor it and refuel it. There has been a renewed interest in CO2 powered turbines that could potentially be more efficient and far smaller. Hopefully these will start to be commercialized at some point.