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Nuclear energy is sustainable only with technology we don't have yet. All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10

Nuclear energy is sustainable only with technology we don't have yet. All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades. And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hundreds of billions of tons of sea water every year, even if we disregard the fact that most seawater isn't easily accesible. But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late. Even if we managed to build nuclear reactors faster than at any other time in history, we would be far too late to stop climate change.

bshoemaker 5y ago
I do not understand why this comment is getting votes. The doomer perspective alone should be disqualifying... While we can't completely prevent any climate change, we have already significantly bent the curve and our efforts now are important - 2 degrees warming vs. 4 degrees is incredibly material. More on this: https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV
- cedilla 5y ago
  I think climate change is solvable, but we need solutions we can implement now. Proven solutions exist. Scaling up nuclear is not a solution. It is too slow and requires too much manpower. Nuclear had its chance, and it failed to deliver. It's a failed technology. It didn't work out, and it was never as cheap or as reliable as people wish it was.
  - p_l 5y ago
    The big economical killer for nuclear isn't renewables, but fossil fuels (specifically, gas turbines). Take away gas turbines and other fossil sources, and without magic pie-in-the-sky, renewables leave you with rolling blackouts and broken grid.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late." Sadly I see no other viable alternative. Wind and Solar are seemingly clean but require a ton of resources, have a massive footprint, and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather. >"All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades." No risk of accidents is an impossible standard. I know this will sound snarky, but, if you agree with the idea that the danger of climate change is existential, affordability is a relatively minor concern in comparison. Especially when you consider that a big factor as to why Nuclear is so expensive today is because we don't build them anymore, outside of places like China and India, which already have nuclear weapons.
- Tepix 5y ago
  What's the massive footprint you talk about? If we put enough solar panels to provide electricity for all humans into the Sahara desert, it only covers a small area.
  - p_l 5y ago
    And you would cause untold destruction to amazon rainforests, among other things. No, you can't just pave desert with panels and magically solve power generation without ugly environmental consequences, that doesn't work even in computer games.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      > And you would cause untold destruction to amazon rainforests, among other things. Why would putting all the panels in a desert do that to a rainforest on a different continent? And how much of the Sahara do you think we’d need to cover in PV if for some strange reason we didn’t put any on rooftops, brownfield land, parking lots, car bodies, and (for most of the world) closer deserts? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area%20sahara%20%2F%20%28%28global%20power%20use%29%2F%281kw%2Fm%5E2%2A20%25%2A25%25%29%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area%20sahara%20%2F%20%...
rich_sasha 5y ago
> All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades. So, like storage for renewables? Seems to me, we're not concerned on R&D budgets, so we should pursue all relevant methods of decarbonisation, of which nuclear is a very promising one.
- drclau 5y ago
  > we're not concerned on R&D budgets Just curious, why do you think so? I do think this should be the case, but I just don't see it happening.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Mistyped, should have said "constrained". In the planetary scale, paying a few $10bns or $100bns is nothing, especially against the backdrop of global warming damage. I don't think we should skimp on researching nuclear in this context, "because renewables are cooler". I think we need a new "nuclear Trinity project" (only this time for energy generation!) or a SpaceX-type enterprise. Iterate, build a simple, single, safe design, and deploy it widely. Or fail, but not without trying.
- cedilla 5y ago
  We are concerned on R&D budgets. Costs matter because costs represents material and personnel that needs to be devoted. We are also tight on time. Nuclear reactors take at least a decade to build. Oh, and while we have lots and lots of people and know-how in renewables, battery tech and transmission technology. We don't have that many people who can build reactors, due to the anti-nuclear trend of the last three decades. You can bemoan that, and maybe building up nuclear during that time would have been a solution to climate change, but that doesn't change the fact that even if we wanted to build hundreds of nukes today, we would lack the specialists.
  - p_l 5y ago
    We also have a) existing working designs for nuclear power b) existing paper designs for improved nuclear power. Meanwhile c) we are working on getting paper designs for storage that might or might not work to get renewables good enough. The starting point is vastly different.
dodobirdlord 5y ago
Nuclear energy is already sustainable with technology we have, breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing. They have been built since the 60s, some are still in operation, and more are under construction in India and China, where there is still an appetite for nuclear power.
- Tepix 5y ago
  We have this stuff on paper. Stuff tends not to work out in practise. It costs more, it's unreliable etc. If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?
  - twofornone 5y ago
    >If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed? Because naysayers have had a dominant influence over nuclear policy since Chernobyl.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Because reprocessing is problematic politically, not technically. Yes, reprocessing involves some ridiculous chemistry, but we know how to deal with it. What we don't have is political will, especially when anti-nuclear activists are joined hand-in-hand with war mongers crying about nuclear weapons if anyone tries to go for plutonium economy (France and Japan are considerable way there).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dodobirdlord 5y ago
    Reprocessing works fine in practice, as others have mentioned, it’s uncommon because it’s politically unpopular. Partially because everything related to nuclear anything is politically unpopular, partially because having high-purity plutonium lying around poses nuclear weapon proliferation risks. Though this can be avoided by breeding and reacting in situ. > why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed? You may be inclined to wonder why there is so much nuclear waste at all. After all, we could just melt it, dilute it into a slag with a bunch of silicon, cart it off to a boat and dump it into a deep ocean trench if we wanted to be safely rid of it. But we don’t want to be rid of it. It’s extremely expensive to produce and extremely valuable, and any permanent solution for storing nuclear waste needs to be reversible in case we ever want it back for reprocessing.
oceanplexian 5y ago
Is there another form of energy generations with "no risk of accidents"? I've read some statistics that say nuclear energy is already safer than all other forms of energy generation per kWh. As for proliferation risk I think it's becoming a moot point as countries like Iran, North Korea, etc., are already making their own highly enriched nuclear materials and can give it to whoever they want.
p_l 5y ago
A lot of the time it's because they are stuck in the same point for the last 10 years - "no funding for finishing 95% done tech because non-existant future storage tech will make renewables reliable"
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Reliable solar power for $40/MWh: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-solar-plus-storage-pipeline/ https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
  - p_l 5y ago
    And it requires the exclusive use of very favourable terrain (for solar, which isn't available in many places) to provide what, 1/5th of what same sized nuclear facility could do (and that's me underplaying the capacity of the nuclear facility, it's even worse if you go for what's possible)
    - bryanlarsen 5y ago
      Location doesn't make as much difference as you would think. Arizona gets about 3 times as much sun as Boston does, but a cloudy day in Arizona isn't significantly different than a cloudy day in Boston. And if you size your solar to support cloudy days... And yes, solar farms are bigger than nuclear plants. That might be a problem in Singapore, but a few hundred square miles of solar farms is not a big deal in a country with 3.5 million square miles.
      - p_l 5y ago
        So it can provide piddling amounts of power given very favourable conditions. Now consider that Boston is on similar distance from North pole as Spain, and not everywhere has huge swaths of unused land conveniently stripped of natives.
belorn 5y ago
If its too late to build nuclear, it is far too late to continue burn fossil fuel. They need to shutdown now with the coal, oil and gas staying in the ground and the one that we have already gathered need to be put back into the earth where it shall remain. Until we first agree to shut fossil fuels down, talk about fossil fuels alternatives being "too late" is advocacy to continue burning fossil fuel.
notreallyserio 5y ago
Indeed, and to your last point I propose a challenge: over the next 30 years, we build as much nuclear and solar+wind as we can and see which generates more kWh at the end. My money is on the latter, but either way we all win.
ben_w 5y ago
That’s overly pessimistic, I think. While we would indeed need to process seawater at an enormous scale, that becomes necessary after roughly 24 times longer into the future than the first nuclear power plant is into the past, which is when the non-seawater fuel runs out. This is too far into the future to make realistic predictions about technology or industry. As for it being too late to stop global warming: well yes, but because that ship sailed some time ago. As is said of various things and time periods, the best time to do it was a few decades ago, the second best time is today. The bigger problem is the political viability, both internally and internationally. How does Iran ever use nuclear power when every reactor is destroyed by an Israel afraid that Iran wants the atom bomb? But, instead of thinking of it as all or nothing, think of the reactors than can be built as storage or intercontinental power grid capacity that doesn’t need to be built, or at least that we don’t need on the same time frame. Right now, solar is doing what nuclear promised and failed to deliver for costs; batteries, while cheap enough to make electric cars interesting, are still more expensive for shifting day production to night load than just using nuclear to start with, and my preference of a global power grid needs a few decades to build even with (unrealistic) zero political concerns. All of this can probably be helped with nuclear.

bshoemaker 5y ago

I do not understand why this comment is getting votes. The doomer perspective alone should be disqualifying... While we can't completely prevent any climate change, we have already significantly bent the curve and our efforts now are important - 2 degrees warming vs. 4 degrees is incredibly material. More on this: https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV

cedilla 5y ago
I think climate change is solvable, but we need solutions we can implement now. Proven solutions exist. Scaling up nuclear is not a solution. It is too slow and requires too much manpower. Nuclear had its chance, and it failed to deliver. It's a failed technology. It didn't work out, and it was never as cheap or as reliable as people wish it was.
- p_l 5y ago
  The big economical killer for nuclear isn't renewables, but fossil fuels (specifically, gas turbines). Take away gas turbines and other fossil sources, and without magic pie-in-the-sky, renewables leave you with rolling blackouts and broken grid.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

>"But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late." Sadly I see no other viable alternative. Wind and Solar are seemingly clean but require a ton of resources, have a massive footprint, and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather. >"All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades." No risk of accidents is an impossible standard. I know this will sound snarky, but, if you agree with the idea that the danger of climate change is existential, affordability is a relatively minor concern in comparison. Especially when you consider that a big factor as to why Nuclear is so expensive today is because we don't build them anymore, outside of places like China and India, which already have nuclear weapons.

Tepix 5y ago
What's the massive footprint you talk about? If we put enough solar panels to provide electricity for all humans into the Sahara desert, it only covers a small area.
- p_l 5y ago
  And you would cause untold destruction to amazon rainforests, among other things. No, you can't just pave desert with panels and magically solve power generation without ugly environmental consequences, that doesn't work even in computer games.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    > And you would cause untold destruction to amazon rainforests, among other things. Why would putting all the panels in a desert do that to a rainforest on a different continent? And how much of the Sahara do you think we’d need to cover in PV if for some strange reason we didn’t put any on rooftops, brownfield land, parking lots, car bodies, and (for most of the world) closer deserts? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area%20sahara%20%2F%20%28%28global%20power%20use%29%2F%281kw%2Fm%5E2%2A20%25%2A25%25%29%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area%20sahara%20%2F%20%...

rich_sasha 5y ago

> All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades. So, like storage for renewables? Seems to me, we're not concerned on R&D budgets, so we should pursue all relevant methods of decarbonisation, of which nuclear is a very promising one.

drclau 5y ago
> we're not concerned on R&D budgets Just curious, why do you think so? I do think this should be the case, but I just don't see it happening.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Mistyped, should have said "constrained". In the planetary scale, paying a few $10bns or $100bns is nothing, especially against the backdrop of global warming damage. I don't think we should skimp on researching nuclear in this context, "because renewables are cooler". I think we need a new "nuclear Trinity project" (only this time for energy generation!) or a SpaceX-type enterprise. Iterate, build a simple, single, safe design, and deploy it widely. Or fail, but not without trying.
cedilla 5y ago
We are concerned on R&D budgets. Costs matter because costs represents material and personnel that needs to be devoted. We are also tight on time. Nuclear reactors take at least a decade to build. Oh, and while we have lots and lots of people and know-how in renewables, battery tech and transmission technology. We don't have that many people who can build reactors, due to the anti-nuclear trend of the last three decades. You can bemoan that, and maybe building up nuclear during that time would have been a solution to climate change, but that doesn't change the fact that even if we wanted to build hundreds of nukes today, we would lack the specialists.
- p_l 5y ago
  We also have a) existing working designs for nuclear power b) existing paper designs for improved nuclear power. Meanwhile c) we are working on getting paper designs for storage that might or might not work to get renewables good enough. The starting point is vastly different.

dodobirdlord 5y ago

Nuclear energy is already sustainable with technology we have, breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing. They have been built since the 60s, some are still in operation, and more are under construction in India and China, where there is still an appetite for nuclear power.

Tepix 5y ago
We have this stuff on paper. Stuff tends not to work out in practise. It costs more, it's unreliable etc. If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed?
- twofornone 5y ago
  >If this were a solved problem why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed? Because naysayers have had a dominant influence over nuclear policy since Chernobyl.
- p_l 5y ago
  Because reprocessing is problematic politically, not technically. Yes, reprocessing involves some ridiculous chemistry, but we know how to deal with it. What we don't have is political will, especially when anti-nuclear activists are joined hand-in-hand with war mongers crying about nuclear weapons if anyone tries to go for plutonium economy (France and Japan are considerable way there).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dodobirdlord 5y ago
  Reprocessing works fine in practice, as others have mentioned, it’s uncommon because it’s politically unpopular. Partially because everything related to nuclear anything is politically unpopular, partially because having high-purity plutonium lying around poses nuclear weapon proliferation risks. Though this can be avoided by breeding and reacting in situ. > why is there so much nuclear waste that has not been bred and reprocessed? You may be inclined to wonder why there is so much nuclear waste at all. After all, we could just melt it, dilute it into a slag with a bunch of silicon, cart it off to a boat and dump it into a deep ocean trench if we wanted to be safely rid of it. But we don’t want to be rid of it. It’s extremely expensive to produce and extremely valuable, and any permanent solution for storing nuclear waste needs to be reversible in case we ever want it back for reprocessing.

oceanplexian 5y ago

Is there another form of energy generations with "no risk of accidents"? I've read some statistics that say nuclear energy is already safer than all other forms of energy generation per kWh. As for proliferation risk I think it's becoming a moot point as countries like Iran, North Korea, etc., are already making their own highly enriched nuclear materials and can give it to whoever they want.

p_l 5y ago

A lot of the time it's because they are stuck in the same point for the last 10 years - "no funding for finishing 95% done tech because non-existant future storage tech will make renewables reliable"

bryanlarsen 5y ago
Reliable solar power for $40/MWh: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-solar-plus-storage-pipeline/ https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
- p_l 5y ago
  And it requires the exclusive use of very favourable terrain (for solar, which isn't available in many places) to provide what, 1/5th of what same sized nuclear facility could do (and that's me underplaying the capacity of the nuclear facility, it's even worse if you go for what's possible)
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Location doesn't make as much difference as you would think. Arizona gets about 3 times as much sun as Boston does, but a cloudy day in Arizona isn't significantly different than a cloudy day in Boston. And if you size your solar to support cloudy days... And yes, solar farms are bigger than nuclear plants. That might be a problem in Singapore, but a few hundred square miles of solar farms is not a big deal in a country with 3.5 million square miles.
    - p_l 5y ago
      So it can provide piddling amounts of power given very favourable conditions. Now consider that Boston is on similar distance from North pole as Spain, and not everywhere has huge swaths of unused land conveniently stripped of natives.

belorn 5y ago

If its too late to build nuclear, it is far too late to continue burn fossil fuel. They need to shutdown now with the coal, oil and gas staying in the ground and the one that we have already gathered need to be put back into the earth where it shall remain. Until we first agree to shut fossil fuels down, talk about fossil fuels alternatives being "too late" is advocacy to continue burning fossil fuel.

notreallyserio 5y ago

Indeed, and to your last point I propose a challenge: over the next 30 years, we build as much nuclear and solar+wind as we can and see which generates more kWh at the end. My money is on the latter, but either way we all win.

ben_w 5y ago

That’s overly pessimistic, I think. While we would indeed need to process seawater at an enormous scale, that becomes necessary after roughly 24 times longer into the future than the first nuclear power plant is into the past, which is when the non-seawater fuel runs out. This is too far into the future to make realistic predictions about technology or industry. As for it being too late to stop global warming: well yes, but because that ship sailed some time ago. As is said of various things and time periods, the best time to do it was a few decades ago, the second best time is today. The bigger problem is the political viability, both internally and internationally. How does Iran ever use nuclear power when every reactor is destroyed by an Israel afraid that Iran wants the atom bomb? But, instead of thinking of it as all or nothing, think of the reactors than can be built as storage or intercontinental power grid capacity that doesn’t need to be built, or at least that we don’t need on the same time frame. Right now, solar is doing what nuclear promised and failed to deliver for costs; batteries, while cheap enough to make electric cars interesting, are still more expensive for shifting day production to night load than just using nuclear to start with, and my preference of a global power grid needs a few decades to build even with (unrealistic) zero political concerns. All of this can probably be helped with nuclear.