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According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power producti

• closeparen 5y ago
  What is the long term solution for "the last few weeks have been cloudy"?
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    Diversity. Long distance (1000 km) transmission, wind AND solar, short term storage, load shedding agreements, and long duration storage. Iron-air looks economically viable already for timescales of two days to two weeks. Hot rock storage, the same. It's rare to get cloudy calm periods lasting longer than two weeks over 1000 km distances, but there are readily available seasonal storage choices. Electrolysed hydrogen, either stored directly or as ammonia. Just need PV prices to fall a bit, which is expected, and the cost of electrolysis to fall, which is happening. I have only hit the universals here. Depending on geography and mining history, there are a bunch of other storage options available in many places. Mechanical (gravity) storag other than pumped hydro is another possible technology. So is methane synthesised from CO2. Edit. I'm in favour of nuclear, if the numbers work. The LNT theory should be exposed as the bull** that it is and ALARA abandoned in favour of specified limits. Then let nuclear compete with renewables.
    • andrekandre 5y ago
      yes, and i get the feeling that like global communications, our power grids will have to be internationally (and continentally?) linked up so that different regions can augment lower generation elsewhere...
      • tuatoru 5y ago
        Morocco-UK Power Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJunxkln578&t=615s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJunxkln578&t=615s Australian - ASEAN Power Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link Edit: oops, now it's called Australia - Asia Power Link.
        • andrekandre 5y ago
          nice to see things are in progress, hopefully we can continue to link up and have a more robust system overall
    • panick21 5y ago
      This just sounds so crazy complex. It requires completely changing existing infrastructure. A lot more energy moving around (and that is not efficient). If actually cared about efficiently transferring to fight climate change, and not build a utopia. We would simply create a list of all coal power stations, order them by age and then start building a nuclear plant right next to one after the other as fast as possible. If you did it that way, you could in less then 20 years basically make your grid green. Most people wouldn't notice anything what so ever. No new infrastructure would need to be build. It would be reliable in basically all situations. And it would give you a very large base of highly educated engineers and technicians. Compare that to just importing tons of PV from China and putting up tons of new transition lines. > but there are readily available seasonal storage choices Are there? Non have been deployed and if you look at modeling these need to be essentially free to actually happen. > Iron-air looks economically viable One startup claims this, they have not shown a prototype or given specs, it will not be commercially deployed for a few years. Its a bit early to claim its viable. Fact is, storage beyond 2h is totally unproven. Most companies that have worked in this direction have failed. > Electrolysed hydrogen, either stored directly or as ammonia. Just need PV prices to fall a bit, which is expected, and the cost of electrolysis to fall, which is happening. Using direct heat is simply a better option then electrolysis on large scale. With advanced nuclear you can use nuclear heat to crack steam. Far better option.
• spfzero 5y ago
  "you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them." Presumably that would be power from nuclear power plants, making electric vehicles that much more carbon free. So the vehicle part could change, and dramatically as electric vehicles replace fossil-fueled vehicles.
• bwestergard 5y ago
  I think the main objection, which is mentioned briefly in the article, is that the infrastructure for nuclear energy generation is largely identical with that required for nuclear weapons production and maintenance. It is difficult to envision nuclear energy as a global solution without also envisioning new nuclear weapons proliferation problems. One position that seems attractive is keeping some nuclear plants online where they exist, but not building any new capacity. On a long enough time scale, we can engineer around base load requirements.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    Internationalize the Gid (which is also good for amortizing renewables), and then invest more in thorium research. Ideally, if we do the small nuclear reactors, we can switch assembly lines from one to the other with relative ease.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    Internationalize the grid (which is also good for amortizing renewables), and then invest more in thorium research. Ideally, if we do the small nuclear reactors, we can switch assembly lines from one to the other with relative ease.
    • bobthepanda 5y ago
      Can't wait for the nuclear version of Western Europe facing gas shortages because of Russian disputes with Eastern European states their gas pipelines run through, then.
      • Ericson2314 5y ago
        What? You realize that the energy density of fissile material is such that stockpiling is much easier?
  • cletus 5y ago
    I honestly don't buy into the nuclear proliferation objection to fission power for several reasons: 1. Uranium is abundant. There are parts of the US you can walk around and pick up rocks that contain Uranium compounds that can be extracted without anything complicated; 2. Enriching uranium is relatively trivial. You basically need the ability to make UF6 and to make and operate centrifuges. That's it. This is 80+ year old tech; and 3. The design of an atomic bomb as was dropped on Hiroshima is likewise "primitive" and easily reproducible. There is really no substantial barrier-to-entry to nuclear weapons. The only thing that's missing now is the political will. The biggest factor in nuclear proliferation is nation-states seeking to guarantee their future existence (ie North Korea, Iran). Foreign policy by the dominant developed powers is far more significant than any imagined or real technological or industrial barrier.
• ars 5y ago
  Your point 1 and 2 are simply untrue, and I wish people would stop repeating them. Breeder reactors will consume all of those waste products leaving only short term waste. Right now we use barely 1% of the energy in Uranium - all the rest is that terrible waste. With a breeder reactors we can consume substantially all of it.
  • himinlomax 5y ago
    It's not exactly wasted as it's safely kept around and could be reused should the need and will arise. Compare and contrast with hydrocarbon waste, those are truly wasted.
• Maakuth 5y ago
  A large share of the other GHG emitting sectors could also shift to electricity. For example various heating processes in industry and commercial sectors burn fuels such as natural gas and could switch to electricity. And the externalities of providing energy to electric transportation is very much what we are talking about: where are we getting the power from.
  • ttul 5y ago
    Waste heat from nuclear can also be used for industrial processes. And it’s waste heat. It’s free.
    • epistasis 5y ago
      Good luck transmitting it to where you need it, though... The waste heat is also a significant limiting factor for nuclear, currently. In the US, we only have a limited amount of water heat sinks that we can use to dissipate waste heat, and there's limited heating allowed before we destroy those ecosystems. The figure that I heard recently was about ~500GW across the nation. After that, we will need to find other solutions, which bar often more expensive that using natural water. There's a nuclear plant in Arizona that uses water water from Phoenix, for example. But after that we will need some innovation in water heat management to overcome the natural limitations of thermal generators like nuclear, at least while on planet earth.
      • Accujack 5y ago
        >Good luck transmitting it to where you need it, though... True, but the scale of the problem we're dealing with makes it worthwhile to consider locating certain industries near nuclear plants to take advantage of low cost/free energy. Locating industries there means they can close elsewhere, freeing space and lowering consumption of electricity. >The waste heat is also a significant limiting factor for nuclear, It is, but the above also helps with that, consuming the waste heat to some degree as it simultaneously makes industry cheaper to operate. Another possibility is to use the waste heat from a reactor to heat indoor farms/greenhouses. A vertical farm uses a fraction of the water an outdoor farm does, it produces food in a very small area of land relative to an outdoor farm, it produces high quality food that usually needs no pesticides to produce good yields. One final advantage of vertical farms is that they free up land to allow it to be reforested or at least planted with non food crops that will absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere. So many people's thinking about how to adapt our power generation to climate change is limited by the assumption that whatever we do must be a drop in replacement for what we have now. That's not the case, and in fact it's likely we'll have to change far more than just how we generate power to survive.
• zepto 5y ago
  > I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. This is my biggest concern as well. However it needs to be balanced against the alternative, which is trusting governments and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways. A reality check tells us: 1. Governments and corporations have not responded to climate change adequately so far and there is no evidence that this is about to change. 2. Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer excess deaths than coal. It’s far from ideal, but it is here and it works.
  • ravenstine 5y ago
    Then I guess we're effed then. After all, if we can't trust non-government entities like Equifax with private records, why even go as far as trusting some other non-government entities to handle nuclear reactors? We're all to die then, if we're to believe that letting climate change take its course is better than the occasional nuclear meltdown. > Governments and corporations have not responded to climate change adequately so far and there is no evidence that this is about to change. How else are they to fill their pockets with wealth taxed via inflation if there are no crises? There must always be a crisis looming to get people to part with their wealth. > Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer excess deaths than coal. Leadership knows full well that this is a fact. Think about that.
    • nuerow 5y ago
      > Then I guess we're effed then. After all, if we can't trust non-government entities like Equifax with private records, why even go as far as trusting some other non-government entities to handle nuclear reactors? The point is that the drawbacks of Nuclear far out weight it's benefits, and it's simply better all around to invest into energy sources which aren't as reliant on flawless management or execution to avoid catastrophic failure modes.
      • zepto 5y ago
• adventured 5y ago
  > I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. What can they be trusted with then? National defense. Social programs, healthcare systems, tax collection, regulation, various infrastructure & safety matters. You'd have to abolish nearly all governments on the planet if you applied the standard across the board to their responsibilities and the innumerable ways they can - potentially - severely harm the people of a nation. Whether Europe, the US, Asia, Latin America, Africa, corporations already provide nearly all of the world's food from start to finish, and are (typically) overseen / regulated by the governments of the world. But they can't be trusted to operate nuclear power plants? That doesn't make sense. So who else is going to manage the global food supply if not people? (small businesses, large businesses, governments, whatever the case) They're also charged with overseeing drug regulations around the world, which can easily kill large numbers of people if it's not done correctly. Who should regulate and manufacture drugs if not people? (small businesses, large businesses, governments, whatever the case) Besides, nuclear power plants as a risk have nothing on good 'ol fashioned war. Would the plan be to take all national defense and all military control responsibilities away from governments? The point being, applied fairly, the actual replacement standard you're suggesting at is anarchy.
• tomp 5y ago
  Invest in small-scale, distributed breeder reactors. Store waste (the little amount that there is) in old oil wells/mines. Use the resulting power to charge electric vehicles. Use excess power to capture CO2 into artificial gas/diesel/methane to power vehicles that cannot be electricised (planes, rockets, cars far away from civilization). The solution is right there. People just refuse to take it. As my Zen teacher used to say: The best time to invest in nuclear is 50 years ago. The second best time to invest in nuclear is today.
  • Accujack 5y ago
    >Invest in small-scale, distributed breeder reactors. Store waste (the little amount that there is) in old oil wells/mines. I believe completely that nuclear power is the way forward for us, but your assumptions here are just bonkers. Breeder reactors of any kind are a proliferation risk. We also don't need them. Thorium fueled reactors are a better choice, both for the availability of fuel and the lowered risk. Storing nuclear waste in any location not designed to store waste is just stupid. Oil wells aren't big holes where nothing exists once the oil is gone, putting anything in them probably affects aquifers locally (see fracking). Plus to store waste in a well we'd have to liquify it, making it more likely to leak. We also would have no way to really determine if it's leaking or if it's not, plus no way to deal with it if it does leak. Mines are about as bad... even placing waste in a very stable, dry mine could leave it prone to escaping and travelling elsewhere. The problem isn't finding a place to put the stuff that's out of the way, it's building a place to put it that will not allow it to leak/migrate for a significant amount of time. Yucca mountain would have been good, but the NIMBY crowd is too afraid of waste to store it there. Fortunately, newer reactor designs produce less waste. It's still a concern, though, and not anywhere near as easy to deal with as you're making it.
    • jabl 5y ago
      > Breeder reactors of any kind are a proliferation risk. We also don't need them. Thorium fueled reactors are a better choice, both for the availability of fuel and the lowered risk. The Thorium fuel cycle is, by definition, a breeding fuel cycle because Th doesn't naturally contain any fissile isotopes. U-233, which is the fissile isotope that is the actual fuel in the Th cycle, is perfectly fine as a bomb material, so you have similar proliferation worries as with a U-Pu fuel cycle.
• sentinel 5y ago
  The newer types of reactors - gen 3 are way safer than a Chernobyl. I.e. a meltdown could not happen
  • antattack 5y ago
    Safer does not mean safe however.
    • loeg 5y ago
      Wind turbines aren’t "safe"[1]. Relative safety matters. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-eagle-deaths-wind-turbines-kill-humans/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-ea...
      • natmaka 5y ago
        No wind turbine can produce long-term 'hot' waste, nor trigger a disaster threatening millions.
    • tuatoru 5y ago
      If it isn't perfect, it isn't good enough? Every technology has costs. Fossil fuels are killing hundreds of thousands and blighting the lives of tens of millions of asthma sufferers every year.
  • NewEntryHN 5y ago
    > a meltdown could not happen Gen III reactors have a core catcher[1] to handle a meltdown, in addition to many features making a meltdown even less likely to happen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher
• unchocked 5y ago
  The Chernobyl exclusion zone, terrible as it is, doesn’t hold a candle to the realities of climate change. Geological repositories are the solution for long term storage. They are not only technologically feasible, but actually constructed and waiting for use. Ignoring the solution is not the same as there being no solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
  • chiefalchemist 5y ago
    Um. I'm not so sure that's accurate. Chernobyl and Fukushima are uninhabitable, and will be as such for many years to come. As we increase fission reactors, risk will increase as well. Ironically, perhaps due to climate change. The question is: if we commit to fission, are we simply trading one problem disaster for another? Put another way, given our collective (lack of) response to CC, should our track record on decision making be trusted?
    • himinlomax 5y ago
      > Fukushima are uninhabitable What area are we taking about here, and is it truly inhabitable or is it just the same flawed logic that caused the Japanese government to evacuate the area when there was no sense in doing so?
    • onepointsixC 5y ago
      >risk will increase as well Not even close to significant amount, compared to the certainty of a CO2 fueled Climate disaster. Not to mention modern reactors are passively safe.
      • chiefalchemist 5y ago
        Climate disaster? To who? Humans? Mother Nature, on average isn't concerned. She adjusts. She evolves. History is clear on this. Radiation on the other hand is all but permanent. Climate disaster is a self-inflicted death blow by humans to humans.
• ohgodplsno 5y ago
  1/ UF6 is not a necessary byproduct (only if you go through gaseous diffusion or centrifugal separation). Laser-based enrichment methods are, while not industry ready yet, very efficient. If we had more research and weren't forced to sleep on it for years, we could have made more progress. 2. We do. It's called breeder reactors (The Phenix and Superphenix projects in France for example, were used for research, produced energy, and were closed because of political maneuvres). As for the rest... Burying is legitimately the best option. 150 years of nuclear waste (planning for future use) can easily be buried in underground complexes, with the ability to pull things out should research advance. 3. Modern reactors designs need active energy input to keep the reaction going. Said input it decoupled from the reactor itself, preventing things from going wild. Your only example is Chernobyl 40 years ago, as the USSR were swaying their dicks around and trying to show who has the biggest. And before anything, no, Fukushima is not a disaster. Yes, people were evacuated (as a matter of safety), but as it stands, you get more radiation taking a flight than being next to it. 4. Cool, that's why countries don't give that up to governments. Taking France as example, the ASN is a fully independent entity. They have the ability to unilaterally shut down reactors at the most minimal event, and every single event is listed for everyone to see. They are the very reason our EPR is taking a super long time to build, because of the insane security requirements.
  • natmaka 5y ago
    1/ "Not industry ready" while (AFAIK) being researched for at least 4 decades is a real problem 2/ Superphenix had numerous non-'political' problems/challenges, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix 3/ Fukushima (not the max-case: half of the reactors weren't running at the time of the accident, not built in a densely-populated area...) will costs billions to cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Costs_of_the_cleanup_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... 4/ This is either justified, or not. If it is, as we probably both think it is(?), this adds complexity (delays and costs), calling for margins (delays, costs), even w/o knowing the requirements in advance. Every EPR project (in France, Finland or China) largely blowed-up both its schedule and budget.
• fighterpilot 5y ago
  You say the Chernobyl failure mode is "huge", but I would argue the opposite. If you compare the number of deaths across types of energy, nuclear is only slightly higher than solar/wind (about 2x) but when compared to deaths due to fossil fuel it's effectively zero. The big picture must be kept in mind. The other thing to note is that nuclear reactor design has improved a lot since Chernobyl, so it's not honest to say that the probability of that incident occurring again hasn't declined substantially. You can also build the plant far away from cities and send the power via lines fairly efficiently, if you must reduce an extremely small risk to a zero risk situation.
  • borski 5y ago
    I agree with you in general, but I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans. I also agree the probability is way lower now, but the failure mode is huge nonetheless.
    • onepointsixC 5y ago
      In fear of making small area's of land uninhabitable by humans for a short period of time, we are making the entire planet uninhabitable by humans permanently.
      • borski 5y ago
        I don't disagree with you. I'm just trying to very clearly state that the "worst" failure modes are not equivalent.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • loeg 5y ago
      > I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans. Are you talking about the land required by solar/wind generation? I wouldn't say it makes it uninhabitable by humans, but I wouldn't want to live under a big turbine.
• bobthepanda 5y ago
  There is also the fact that the "small, cheap" nuclear reactor has never really happened in a commercial context. I have literally heard about those since my childhood and one has actually yet to happen. The current very large nuclear plants are expensive to build (the ones that have opened on time and on budget are the exception, not the rule).
  • loeg 5y ago
    The US Navy regularly buys small, cheap reactors for submarines and carriers.
  • diordiderot 5y ago
    > have literally heard about those since my childhood and one has actually yet to happen. What's your point?
  • pjscott 5y ago
    Most of the recent construction of large nuclear plants is in China, and they're actually doing quite well at building them on time. The ones that are super late and over budget are the exception worldwide; they just make the news more often. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
    • orwin 5y ago
      Nuclear plants in SK are on time as well, which is quite impressive since they did not have as much training. I guess just having a good plan is enough.
      • bobthepanda 5y ago
        At the same time, SK also has a similar problem as Japan with overly cosy relations between business and regulators, which is part of what happened to the lapses at TEPCO in 2011. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-nuclear-report/japans-atomic-disaster-due-to-collusion-panel-report-idUSBRE8640K420120705 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-nuclear-report/japa... Here's a recent journal article on Korean regulators: https://academic.oup.com/jwelb/article/13/1/47/5837954#204517734 https://academic.oup.com/jwelb/article/13/1/47/5837954#20451...
• fallingknife 5y ago
  > 1 We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive; We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of coal mining waste. > 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products; We don't even have a short term solution to the storage and disposal of combustion waste products. > 3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and The failure modes of hydrocarbon based power are huge. Most notably cooking the entire planet, which stands at 197,000,000 square miles. > 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. The US government and corporations have managed all of the nuclear reactors in the US so far without any significant failures (3 Mile Island is not significant).
  • nuerow 5y ago
    > The failure modes of hydrocarbon based power are huge. Most notably cooking the entire planet, which stands at 197,000,000 square miles. It's a good thing then that hydrocarbon-based power is being phased out as well. For example, the EU just announced their target to eliminate emissions by 2050. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-unveils-plan-increase-renewables-share-energy-mix-40-by-2030-2021-07-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-unveils-plan...
    • jabl 5y ago
      Governments around the world are competing in announcing ever more ambitious climate targets. Would be nice if they would also walk the walk.
      • nuerow 5y ago
        > Governments around the world are competing in announcing ever more ambitious climate targets. Would be nice if they would also walk the walk. A few EU member-states already met their targets a few years ago, and are actually ahead of schedule. https://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/07/22/six-eu-countries-have-already-met-their-2030-climate-targets/ https://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/07/22/six-eu-countrie... Every challenge might be different, but there are indeed countries not only walking the walk but doing so at a fast pace.
• midrus 5y ago
  Well, it's not ideal but what is the alternative? To me it is either nuclear or watch how the next generations are going to be the last ones, because there is no other solution (or improvement at least) at sight right now.
• csallen 5y ago
  > 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. Genuine question: Don't we already trust governments to do all of the above for nuclear submarines, arsenals, etc? Are power plants so much riskier?
  • antattack 5y ago
    We do try to keep nuclear know how away from some governments and punish others who try to acquire it. Just recently US military Genaral was apparently concerned about POTUS having access to nuclear codes.
• gumby 5y ago
  > The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact… The fossil fuel inclusion zone is 197 million square miles. Many of the current problems of nuclear come from its small volume (small unit count). Of course, as with fossil fuels, many new problems will emerge if volume comes up (waste storage is already an unsolved problem). But they may be resolvable if there is determination and incentive to do so,
• umvi 5y ago
  We don't have a long term storage plan for coal/gas plant waste either (apparently).
  • chromatin 5y ago
    On its face this sounds so trite, but after initially scrolling past I did a double take and thought deeply about it. Kudos.
• midrus 5y ago
  To me right now it is the uncertainty of all the things that maybe could go wrong with nuclear power vs the certainty of a global collapse.
  • Accujack 5y ago
    Like what? And have you researched new generation reactor designs, like molten salt reactors? They address most of the problems with existing reactors, which are for the most part 50 year old technology.
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      It is always easy to say that unbuilt designs lack problems. What we can be certain of is that, by the time construction of such a plant is completed, wind+solar+storage will be overwhelmingly cheaper. Building out solar is right now the best use of every climate-disaster prevention dollar. In the near future, storage will compete, as iron-air batteries come online, and long-distance transmission. Each dollar spent elsewhere, whether on building or patching nuke plants, or patching or fueling coal plants, brings climate disaster nearer.
      • Accujack 5y ago
        I'm not saying the designs lack problems. Rather, I'm saying that they have addressed the problems you're talking about and are potentially considerably safer than old reactor tech. >In the near future, storage will compete, as iron-air batteries come online, and long-distance transmission. and if this doesn't happen? You're willing to risk our survival? >Each dollar spent elsewhere, whether on building or patching nuke plants, or patching or fueling coal plants, brings climate disaster nearer. You're equating coal plants with nuclear? Wow, you have quite a cognitive bias there. Nuclear plants have 0 carbon emissions, they don't contribute to global warming once constructed, and construction doesn't generate enough carbon to nullify that advantage. Renewables can't meet our needs unless new technologies are developed. Nuclear CAN in its present state, and can do so even better if technological progress is made. Both must be pursued.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Chernobyl was the literal worst case scenario, the thing exploded. I'm big on nuclear but I also worry when humans are involved. There is a town near mine where the groundwater is polluted from a chemical company a long time ago. I've often wondered how long until all ground water everywhere is ruined given enough time. Then I think of nuclear power and it scares me.
  • himinlomax 5y ago
    Nuclear is dangerous, just like flying is dangerous. Yet we can manage that danger so well that flying is literally the safest form of transport around, thanks to a culture of safety, strong oversight and regulation.
    • natmaka 5y ago
      There is a fundamental difference: flying isn't really dangerous (statistically) for those deciding not to fly. Nuclear is dangerous for everyone ('indiscriminately'), even for many generations to come (hot long-lived waste).
      • himinlomax 5y ago
        What do you think happens when a plane crashes onto a residential area? It's happened several time.
        • natmaka 5y ago
          I wrote 'statistically', meaning that this risk is extremely low. Moreover one can even considerably reduce it by not living or working nearby any airport. During and after a nuclear disaster vast areas may become dangerous zones, and dangerous particles reach (thanks to wind or water) remote areas. Dangerous waste in a water table is also an ordeal.
          • himinlomax 5y ago
            Statistically, no civilian has died from nuclear power accidents in the last 30 years. None. Hundreds have died due to airplanes falling onto them. See for example El AL cargo plane falling onto a residential building in the Netherlands in 1992, I believe it's the worst event but several lesser accidents have happened since then. Oh wait. There was 9/11. More victims than Chernobyl, even taking the most pessimistic estimates.
• vimy 5y ago
  > 1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive; 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products; Why do we even consider this a problem? For more than 50 years nuclear waste has been sitting above ground in warehouses. Nothing happened. Seems to me there is no problem and we should just keep doing what we're doing. Why even bother with expensive underground storage at this point.
  • twofornone 5y ago
    I think its an insidious remnant of 70s era anti-nuke propaganda that refuses to die. Nuclear waste is spooky, especially when you don't have a concept of scale, and don't realize that the risk from spent fuel is orders of magnitude lower than what's allegedly at stake. I'm surprised by how long this myth has persisted.
• angeland89 5y ago
  What does 1 in 5 deaths can be attributed to fosil fuels in the air even mean. Give years, that's what matters. Lifespan is shortened by what exactly, 2 years, 10 years, 50?
• arrosenberg 5y ago
  > 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. I trust private corporations even less when it comes to fixing the current problem with carbon pollution. It's going to cost money, and they aren't going to do it.
• ComputerGuru 5y ago
  > According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. As we increasingly seek to electrify everything, that number is sure to (slowly) inch up.
• yodelshady 5y ago
  So, the worst nuclear plant ever occupies about twice as much land as the comparable solar installation would need. Except they're not comparable are they? A decent chunk of that 75% is winter heating. Which, weirdly, lots of Russian districts have pretty much solved, somehow, without gas. Wonder how?
• headmelted 5y ago
  I don’t think this is being fully fair to the EV case. You’re implying that the externalities of getting electricity to power a car (i.e. fossil fuel burning) would be a barrier but the thread is explicitly about having that electricity come from nuclear generation. In terms of storage, I’m actually significantly less worried about this and would go as far to suggest it won’t even be an issue once we have EV’s at scale. V2G exists now for current EVs and essentially converts every car into a large battery for grid storage.
• swebs 5y ago
  >We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts Currently fossil fuel plants vent all waste into the atmosphere, including radioactive byproducts. At least in this case, the waste is in solid form and can be contained somewhere.
• xwdv 5y ago
  Dealing with nuclear waste is a can we can kick down the road for quite a long time. Climate change will kill many of us off by the end of the century.
• dillondoyle 5y ago
  Transportation seems to be about 29%, so as we go electric that becomes >50%. Though seems cheaper and easier to just build more solar, wind etc
• agumonkey 5y ago
  what cultural change would help reduce the 75 remaining percents ? a few ideas I've seen: - leaner diet => less energy / land used to breed beef etc - more walking / bike / clean transport what else ?
  • loeg 5y ago
    It’s just electrifying processes that use fuel today. Electric cars. Electric heating. Etc. That means we need more generation than we have today, especially in poor countries.
• SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  > I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. I think this is a big point. This would be expensive and there will be a temptation for politicians to underfund the operations and give the difference back as tax cuts.
• snewman 5y ago
  > According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, but realistic plans for addressing climate change generally entail converting a lot of other activities to electric power; this is on the table for everything from transportation, to heating + cooking, to steel manufacturing. Not to mention carbon capture; many of the options there require a lot of energy. Even if some modes of transportation continue to require chemical fuels, we may be using electricity to produce some of those fuels. It's reasonable to quibble at the margins, but in the big picture, we are going to need a LOT of carbon-neutral electricity and that is going to drive a lot (the solid majority?) of greenhouse gas mitigation. > The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them. What point are you making with regard to externalities? Everything has externalities, you just need to add them into your calculus. Are you suggesting the externalities of electric vehicles imply that we should stick to fossil fuels for transportation? As for higher cost: cost should continue to come down as we continue to climb the learning curve. I don't know if / when the lines cross (and of course it will be different for different use cases and locations), but again - if we're going to address climate change, we don't have a lot of choices; we will have to find a way to bring costs down and/or subsidize the higher cost. "Limited utility" is absolutely going to be an ongoing challenge, but again it's not like we're helpless to do anything about it. More charging stations, longer range, possibly adjustments to usage patterns. In some cases, yes, we might need to stick to chemical fuels and find carbon-neutral sources, but this is not ideal and my expectation+hope is that it will eventually be very much a minority of usage. I should note, I'm not advocating for nuclear power as the source of all this electricity we'll need; the feasibility of scaling nuclear power is a complicated topic and personally, I honestly don't know what to think or expect. The point I am trying to make is that a BIG part of "how to stop emitting GHGs" is going to boil down to "how to generate a stupendous amount of carbon-neutral electricity".
• hikingsimulator 5y ago
  My own take on this state of affair is that I would trade a localized, visible and accountable (in all meanings of the term) pollution with our current globalized, amorphous and invisible (for now and still...) pollution that will lead to terrifying effects down the line (given some are already there). Nuclear is not clean per se, but in scale, it is much, much more preferable.
• zamalek 5y ago
  > 1, 2 What about the long-term solution for the storage and disposal of combustion by-products? Do we just keep dumping them into the atmosphere? This argument against nuclear waste is an emotional one: the fact that we can see, store, and move nuclear by-products is an advantage. We completely lose control of combustion by-products that we dump into the atmosphere; they are simply perceived as less dangerous to our monkey brains. > 3 The failure mode of coal power plants is continuous, and the damage caused by the sum of all fission disasters is nothing compared to the damage caused (including radioactive) by burning coal under normal circumstances, each year. There is obviously no contest compared to wind/solar.
• capkutay 5y ago
  "The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact" We can also talk about all the tragedies and catastrophic events related to commercial aviation. But no one in their right mind would propose that we stop or slow down the airline industry because of the 'failure modes'.
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    I may not be in my right mind, but there is a #nofly tag on twitter. Edit: tourism is a low productivity, low value, environmentally harmful industry. Fiji's coral reefs, for example, were beautiful, diverse, and productive, according to old National Geographics. Now they are gone. We could do better with VR, as in the film "Soylent Green". Edit. I agree with your point, which is that all technology choices have costs. There are no Disney miracles.
• air7 5y ago
  > According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. I feel this is a misleading statistic, as cheap green (perhaps subsidised) electricity would offset more that that. The report states: Transportation 29%: With cheap electricity I can easily imagine a huge shift to EVs within a decade. Industry 23%: "Greenhouse gas emissions from industry primarily come from burning fossil fuels for energy". Not sure what they mean, but energy could just as easily be created with electricity in an industrial setting. Commercial and Residential 13%: "Greenhouse gas emissions from businesses and homes arise primarily from fossil fuels burned for heat". Same. Heat could easily made from electricity. So it seems to me that dirt cheap clean electricity could fix a huge chunk of our problem.
• jollybean 5y ago
  1) Electricity could replace most carbon usage, the amount generated now from carbon is almost besides the point. "So it's including vehicles. You could be 100% nuclear power generation and that part wouldn't change." ? We're going to electric cars. Cars currently run on fossil fuels because it was cheap and convenient, that will change. 2) We have at least mid-term storage and there are plenty of options on the table for long-term we just have to make up our minds. 3) The 'failure modes' are not that bad - nobody died in Fukishima - and - we can limit them. Neither Fukishima nor Chernobyl plants should have ever been running. At this point, the only thing stopping us is ourselves. To the extend we are organized and competent we can do it just as well.
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    Nitpick: in the Fukushima incident, one worker died of radiation poisoning and 273 (elderly) people died of evacuation-related stress. Still negligible compared to the deaths from coal burning. And as you say, the Fukushima reactors are much worse than current designs like Hualong One.
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Our biggest issue right now is climate change, full stop. Nuclear power basically solves that. Currently renewables do not. You other points are in the noise of what global warming is going to do to us if we don't use the solutions that are available to us now. We literally need a Manhattan style project on even better nuclear than we currently have. We have plenty places where nuke waste can be stored. It takes up a very very small area compared to the problem that gets solved.
• Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  1000 square miles is the area of a square 33 miles on a side. Assuming it's in a remote place, it's nothing relative to a aworldwide climate disaster. (If it were in a highly populated area, that would be a tragedy -- but surely nobody is going to put a nuclear plant next to a city.)
  • cletus 5y ago
    You mean other like within 50 miles of New York City [1][2]? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center [2]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-you-live-within-50-miles-nuclear-power-plant-180950072/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-you-live-wi...
• envengineer 5y ago
  And to add: there is another huge negative to nuclear. The hidden and forgotten costs of uranium mining and waste are almost always glossed over and forgotten. The only solution for secure disposal of mines, and mining waste, is flooding. So now you have massive (50-5000 acres) ponds or lakes, to manage in perpetuity. We often hear of regular mining tailings ponds failing. Now imagine acidic, toxic and radioactive, water and sludge flooding down stream. Example: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-mining-development-poses-serious-risk-to-water-sources-report/article24763705/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-min...
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    > massive (50-5000 acres) ponds or lakes Pretty sure you meant to write "tiny" there. Compare the numbers with copper mining. Going to ban copper?
• jcoq 5y ago
  Well we have no solution for the byproducts of fossil fuels except to spew them into the atmosphere. So I'd say that nuclear fuel is superior. We're not going to solve climate change while maintaining the same level of energy consumption without making some tradeoffs. I feel like the environmentalist movement's sentimentalism is what helped to get us here. We change Earth - it's what humans do. We at least need it to be habitable. Nuclear energy's risks are known and have solutions that exist today.
  • envengineer 5y ago
    Actually we have solutions for All those byproducts. Just as with NO2,SO2 capture was enabled after we found those are bad. We can scrub CO2 too. It is just a matter of cost. And desire.
    • jcoq 5y ago
      Yeah, and I think climate engineering is probably our only hope at this point. I've seen estimates that we could scrub about 1/5th of the carbon that gets emitted. So we still need to somehow reduce the emissions. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25259/negative-emissions-technologies-and-reliable-sequestration-a-research-agenda https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25259/negative-emissions-technol...
• deleted 5y ago
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• philwelch 5y ago
  > We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive Depleted uranium is a useful and valuable material and not just a “byproduct” to be “disposed” of. > We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products Long-lived fission waste products can be fed into breeder reactors to produce new fuel. We don’t do this because we haven’t chosen to grow the deployment of nuclear power. The need for long term storage of long-lived fission waste products is a consequence of self-inflicted decline that the advocates of self-inflicted decline can turn around and use as an argument in favor of self-inflicted decline.
• na85 5y ago
  >I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. The US Navy has 300+ reactors and has been operating them for decades without incident.
  • cletus 5y ago
    Oh really? [1] The most serious incident is probably the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. While it wasn't as serious as Chernobyl or Fukushima, "without incident" seems at best a stretch. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t...
    • edmundsauto 5y ago
      I think parent was referencing the nuke ships in the US Navy fleet, which have been without any known incident. I have no idea, however, if their production is comparable. OTOH, it seems harder to keep a mobile plant operating safely versus a stationary one.
    • joannanewsom 5y ago
      That’s not run by the US Navy.
• andbberger 5y ago
  How often do you drive over a bridge? Or get a in a building that could collapse on you? Or fly in a plane? That's not really so different than nuclear energy is except some of us have lost our collective minds and come to the erroneous conclusion that nuclear energy is _scary_. The climate change potential of nuclear energy goes far behind the direct greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production. With cheap abundant electricity (as could be produced from nuclear energy in a sane world), industrial processes that burn fossil fuels could be switched to electricity and carbon skimmers could be run. Not to mention your other concerns which I think can be aptly dismissed with a nice tech brain metaphor: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame" Adapt or die. The water's lapping at your feet and you're looking at the spec sheet for a nuclear first-gen ipod and concluding there's nothing there. And don't even get me started on your electric vehicle hot take. Battery vehicles are not the answer. We here in the Us practice a particularly perverted form of urbanism. Gimme a fucking train. Gimme more trolleybuses. Gimme walkable neighborhoods and dense design. I am so sick of all of this bullshit, the answers are obvious
  • natmaka 5y ago
    There is a fundamental difference: flying isn't really dangerous (statistically) for those deciding not to fly. Nuclear is dangerous for everyone ('indiscriminately'), even for many generations to come (hot long-lived waste).
    • andbberger 5y ago
      That is not supported by the statistics. Even including chernobyl and friends nuclear is the safest method of electricity production by a mile... And it's not like we only started collecting data recently
      • natmaka 5y ago
        As for the past: There are many studies about the amount of deaths related to nuclear accidents, and their conclusions vary widely. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the... As for the future: no specialist denies that a running nuclear reactor (using any now-available architecture) is dangerous, and the industry accepts very strict (and more and more strict) security-related requirements. According to some the probability of a disaster is very tiny, however it just cannot be 0. Who is entitled to coerce others into accepting a risk? Especially when the maximal impact is beyond all insurance cover, and with a risk extending to future generations?
• fredophile 5y ago
  I think the concern about long term storage is somewhat overemphasized. In theory it should be possible to choose a fairly remote, geologically stable area and make it the storage site. The problems are more political than technical. If it turns out that finding such a site isn't possible why don't we just grind the waste into a very fine powder and disperse it into the atmosphere? Coal ash is radioactive too and that's what we do with it. That was originally meant to be tongue in cheek but now I'm legitimately curious about how big an area you'd need to disperse a nuclear reactor's waste to get radiation levels no higher than you'd see from waste from a coal plant.
• m0zg 5y ago
  Chernobyl, famously, did not have a containment building around it. We don't build reactors like that. In addition today you can build reactors which simply do not have the failure modes that led to either Chernobyl or Fukushima. > Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone This is a pet peeve of mine. They always use flimsiest of statistics to "attribute it" so, but never mention how many people would die if it _wasn't_ for fossil fuels. The number would be in the billions. Much of Canada, and all of Russia's north would freeze to death. People in Africa, India and China would starve. Industry (and with it livelihoods of billions of people worldwide) would collapse. Europe would erupt in a war. And so on. Hardly a wortwhile tradeoff. And no, it is not possible to replace all uses of fossil fuels with electricity. Not now, not in the foreseeable future.
• throwawaylinux 5y ago
  > While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant. I'm not sure what you mean by that. Replacing fossil fuels outside electricity generation will require large amounts of electricity. Hydrogen production using electrolysis, electric arc furnaces, battery charging, etc.
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  Also, a huge percentage of industrial emissions is due to fossil fuels being used for direct heating (e.g. natural gas used to fire a boiler or furnace). These loads can be electrified, they must be electrified, but electrifying them will take an unbelievable amount of power even compared to what we produce today. Our grid will probably need to produce 3-4x what it currently does to get us electrified fully. A rapid paced plan to build a standard reactor design en masse is the only reasonable way to do that in a short period of time.
• panick21 5y ago
  > According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant. We need all heating and all driving replaced with power, so an ever increasing amount of stuff falls into electricity. In France, where they had green nuclear power for 40+ years electrical heating is the norm. All driving and heating should move to nuclear. Modern nuclear can also be used to drive many industrial process including making potentially hydrogen and other chemicals that can then be used as feedstock for chemical industries. > 1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive; If we switch to breaders we basically never need to actually do that. > 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products; Most of the bad stuff can be burned up in advanced reactors. We even have the money to design such reactors already but sadly idiot politicians have deadlocked themselves on this idiotic Yucca Montain plan. There is still some very little real waste left, but even if you power all of the US, you can literally store it all on a single parking lot for next couple hundred years without any issues. If we really use this technology it totally reasonable not to have a solution for the next 300 years. The amount is so limited that in 100 years you might as well be able to shot it into space or drop it deep into the earths core. In the absolute worst possible case, you have a parking lot full of stuff that needs to be monitored and in very, very few scenarios it has to be moved or repackaged. But that is very unlikely. And if we are at a point where we can not even monitor a few inert boxes on a parking lot our society has way bigger problems then slightly radioactive inert boxes. I literally mind-blowing that people believe this is a show stopper. > 3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and Tons of people live in the Exclusion Zone and they are perfectly fine. And comparing Cheernobyl to a modern Gen4 reactor is like comparing a first generation Zeppelin to a modern airliner. And btw the Cheernobyl reactors were designed to make nuclear weapons, not civilian nuclear power. > 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. I have bad news for you buddy. The government already build and maintains and inspects NUCLEAR WEAPONS. That are literally 100000x more dangerous. The US Navy has been using nuclear power for 50+ years and had very few issues. And we HAD nuclear reactors running for a long time. France has literally had green energy for 40+ years and seem to be doing reasonably ok. > The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them. Electric vehicles actually have MORE utility, not less. They are far quicker, more comfortable, have more interior space, less noise, better handling, safer and more reliable. The lift-time cost of an EV is already beating ICE. The initial cost is higher so that is not fully felt, but even that is dropping fast. > you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them And that's why we want nuclear power.
• tekknik 5y ago
  > 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale. The US navy has been operating mobile nuclear power plants on water for decades with not a single issue. Why don’t you trust them? The people guarding the freedom in this country have no problem sleeping right next to one that has a high chance of being shot at and destroyed. (Also don’t forget their in water!)