10 ms·

Former nuclear leaders: Say ‘no’ to new reactors

39 points by guerby 5y ago

cbmuser 5y ago
James Hansen, long time head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS), thinks otherwise: > https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html
guerby 5y ago
slashdot : https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/01/28/2251238/former-nuclear-regulatory-commission-chair-argues-nuclear-power-isnt-a-climate-solution https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/01/28/2251238/former-... The Verge : https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904943/nuclear-power-climate-change-solution-gregory-jaczko https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904943/nuclear-power-cl...
toomuchtodo 5y ago
“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction. The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. Perhaps most importantly nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.”
- boppo1 5y ago
  Could this guy be a partisan? That seems like a pretty brash statement.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmitrij 5y ago
    It's 4 guys. Former heads of nuclear regulation US, UK, Germany, France. " Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany Dr. Bernard Laponche, former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety Dr. Paul Dorfman, former Secretary UK Govt. Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters " Reasons: Too costly in absolute terms to make a relevant contribution to global power production More expensive than renewable energy in terms of energy production and CO2 mitigation, even taking into account costs of grid management tools like energy storage associated with renewables rollout. Too costly and risky for financial market investment, and therefore dependent on very large public subsidies and loan guarantees. Unsustainable due to the unresolved problem of very long-lived radioactive waste. Financially unsustainable as no economic institution is prepared to insure against the full potential cost, environmental and human impacts of accidental radiation release – with the majority of those very significant costs being borne by the public. Militarily hazardous since newly promoted reactor designs increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. Inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents from human error, internal faults, and external impacts; vulnerability to climate-driven sea-level rise, storm, storm surge, inundation and flooding hazard, resulting in international economic impacts. Subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems associated with newer unproven concepts, including ‘Advanced’ and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). Too unwieldy and complex to create an efficient industrial regime for reactor construction and operation processes within the intended build-time and scope needed for climate change mitigation. Unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation needed by the 2030’s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction costs of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Many of these apply to renewables as well. 2030 is not happening. It just isn't. The question is whether it will be 2040 or 2050 even.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  One unfortunate but plausible take: wind and solar advocates correctly argue that nuclear cannot scale up, and nuclear advocates correctly argue that wind and solar cannot scale up. I have seen 15 years of peak-oil debate characterized this way. One figure-of-merit, seldom emphasized, is how many tonnes of material per MW are required to create a generating facility/installation. EDIT: That's a figure-of-demerit. MW/tonne would be the figure-of-merit, I suppose.
- adventured 5y ago
  It's a clown argument as it pertains to climate change or climate issues in general. For example: > Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. We don't need it to be cheap (and it should be subsidized as far as consumers are concerned re cost). Who in the past few decades has successfully argued that nuclear is inexpensive? Nobody is making that argument, it's a straw-argument the author set up. We need it to produce energy at massive scale and reliably. Nuclear does that, and it's a technology we can keep improving upon (we should have spent the last 40-50 years aggressively improving upon it with large R&D expenditures; best time to plant a tree and all that). Current US energy mix is coal at ~19.3% and nuclear at ~19.7% (2020 EIA numbers). That's 93 nuclear reactors or less to wipe out US coal use. Hit the print button, get it to it already. In terms of US contributions on climate, that'd be a huge win. And more realistically, we could build toward 1/3 nuclear mix (instead of ~40%), while traditional renewables continue to expand, which would wipe out coal's share in tandem.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    So your non expert opinion is superior to that of four regulators who oversaw the tech in question? Show your work. Wind and solar are cheap and abundant, and will continue to be so. No waste risk, no proliferation concerns, no catastrophic failure modes, and very little permitting (compared to nuclear). Clean power for decades once installed. It boggles the mind that the armchair engineers continue to advocate for a technology subject matter experts conclude is a dead end. Nuclear advocates might as well be in the same camp as climate deniers. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 (Renewables account for most new U.S. electricity generating capacity in 2021) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.01.11/main.svg https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.01.11/main.svg https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818 (Solar power will account for nearly half of new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2022) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2022.01.10/main.svg https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2022.01.10/main.svg https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/26/sunrise-brief-the-interconnection-queue-in-the-us-jumped-from-139gwac-in-2019-to-639gwac-today-a-true-solar-tsunami/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/26/sunrise-brief-the-int... (Solar interconnection queue in the US jumped from 139GWac in 2019 to 639GWac today) https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-renewable-pipeline-poised-to-add-172-5-gw-through-2024-61902543 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... (US renewable pipeline poised to add 172.5 GW through 2024)
- cbmuser 5y ago
  Both France, Japan and the US have proven that nuclear scale up perfectly well.
  - antupis 5y ago
    Yeah it can currently nuclear has pretty bad technological and regulatory problem. 4/10 most expensive buildings are regular nuclear plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_build...
    - tester756 5y ago
      it's good or bad?
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    So well that the french one even had a negative learning curve. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
  - fsh 5y ago
    In the US and Japan the fraction of primary energy supplied by nuclear power is almost negligible (8% [1] and 3% [2]). Even the famously large French nuclear industry only manages 39% [3]. Nuclear power would have to be scaled up by orders of magnitude worldwide in order to make any difference to the global CO2 budget. [1] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/USA/total-energy/total-energy-consumption https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/USA/total-ene... [2] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/jpn/total-energy/total-energy-consumption https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/jpn/total-ene... [3] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/FRA/total-energy/total-energy-consumption https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/FRA/total-ene...
    - enkid 5y ago
      I mean, wouldn't it be an order of magnitude in the US? Going from 8% to 80% is a matter of resource allocation, not technology breakthrough.
- wbl 5y ago
  It's costly because the author made it excessively costly in his previous job.
  - number6 5y ago
    And if a reactor blows up (happens roughly ever 35 years) there are huge additional costs. Last time we were extremely lucky that we hadn't to evaluate Tokiyo. If something like this would happen in Central Europe it would be extremely costly for the whole world. But something like this could happen trice right?!
    - wbl 5y ago
      People live happily in Denver Colorado or New Jersey. Nobody ever says we should evacuate them. But they get an extra dose of radiation from living there, which reactors don't get. It's about costs and benefits. Central Europe also doesn't have tsunamis.
      - number6 5y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis_in_Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis_in_Europe
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      Chernobyl was the only one of those that blew up and it was based an idiotic graphite pile design abandoned everywhere outside of the USSR in the 50s. Fukushima Daiichi experienced 3 small hydrogen explosions that were fully contained by the reactor building, and wouldn't have happened if they hadn't built their backup power for that reactor underground. According to a linear no-threshold model, the accident would most likely cause at most 130 cancer deaths in total assuming everyone in the zone of highest exposure received the maximum possible exposure, which they did not. Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone and no one was exposed to enough radiation to increase their risk of cancer. The accident happened because someone trained on submarine reactors misapplied that training and turned off the cooling system. No operating reactor allows an operator to do that anymore. The reactor did not blow up. Only one civilian nuclear power reactor has ever "blown up", Tokyo was never in danger, no one died because of Three Mile Island, and even around Chernobyl the predicted incidence of cancer is failing to materialize.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. It's unbelievably safe, it has the among the lowest death toll per TWh of generated electricity. Depending on who you ask, it's lower than or in the same order of magnitude as solar and wind. [1] It's definitely clean, they're ultra-low-carbon - and especially breeder or fast neutron reactors, generate tiny quantities of waste relative to the amount of power that comes out. And these spicy rocks can just be placed back down into the earth from whence they came. Is it cheap? No. And that's ok, because that's not always the most important thing. However it's important to remember that nuclear prices in all externalities due to the public's fear and distrust. However, coal does not. The NRC uses a price of about $9M per additional death, and coal kills 9 million people per year. [2] If you price them at the same $9M per life, and divide by coal power generated - nuclear is cheaper than coal. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-fuels-pollution-deaths-research https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    Irrelevant comparing to coal. It is a dead industry sharing the same issue nuclear has, steam cycles are too costly to build and operate[1]. A dollar spent on nuclear power plants is a dollar not doing more work with renewables, that is the issue. Keep some R&D for the future magical break through, but current designs are dead in the water. You are also not taking into account that it is impossible to insure nuclear power plants, the public does that. I.e. they do not bear their full costs, not even close. Look no further than at Fukushima's $500B - $1000B clean up cost. [1]: Table ES3 https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_GBL_Study_of_Equipment_Prices_in_the_Power_Sector.pdf https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_G...
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      > You are also not taking into account that it is impossible to insure nuclear power plants, the public does that. I.e. they do not bear their full costs, not even close. Look no further than at Fukushima's $500B - $1000B clean up cost. Coal is unfortunately not a dying industry. [1] My point isn't that it should be compared to coal but rather that it is actually not far and away the most expensive once you price in externalities. If we're talking subsidies, coal, oil, and natural gas received $5.9 trillion in subsidies in 2020. [2] Makes the once-in-a-generation Fukushima cleanup look cheap no? I strongly suspect that renewables received huge subsidies too, the US alone threw a hundred billion or so their way in 2020. Nuclear gets almost nothing. To be clear I don't mind that renewables get subsidies - they should, and we should build them even if they're more expensive. Ditto for nuclear. > A dollar spent on nuclear energy is a dollar not doing more work with renewables, that is the issue. Por que no los dos? Solar requires a ton of footprint and wind requires mining rare earth metals in hellscapes in Mongolia. [3] There's no free lunch. More good lunches are good. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/far-from-dying-the-coal-industry-is-actually-booming/2022/01/28/7fb02ff0-8019-11ec-8cc8-b696564ba796_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/far-from-dyin... [2] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-subsidies-in-2020-report-finds https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...
_3u10 5y ago
Of course it isn't. If climate change were a scientific reality in which if we didn't switch off fossil fuels immediately we'd face drastic consequence people like this would be gung ho on any technology that could save the planet, but would destroy a single mountain in Arizona. Since climate change isn't a reality but is a political problem created to benefit solar and wind we can safely ignore nuclear as a solution to climate change because it also has some but very limited environmental costs. It's the same reason in BC where I live all the climate change people are against hydro power (Site C). It's very clear to me that anyone against nuclear doesn't really believe that we're on the brink of destroying the planet.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  I think it's possible that many feel that either option (global warming) or (nuclear meltdown) could easily doom our nation. In other words, if one solution to freezing to death would be to burn down your house, they wouldn't take it. Sure it would fix your problem for a few minutes and then you'd be dead. Note that I'm not against nuclear, just trying to point out how those you're referring to would view the situation.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    When I was growing up my dad and I would talk about the people who froze to death in their cars out in the valley every few years when there was a freak storm and chat about how to burn the family car down to survive should we get stuck in a storm like that. I'm definitely more in the Dudley and Stephens camp than most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens I think the US comes out slightly ahead in the worst case climate change scenario, Canada is a huge winner.
    - 7thaccount 5y ago
      Russia is the real winner in a much warmer world. All that useless ice becomes open ports and farmland I would guess.
gruturo 5y ago
[Edit: Title was changed, it previously only mentioned "former NRC chair".] so, let's see who that may be..... .....aaand it's Greg Jaczko, nothing to see, move along, dude's biased as hell, with some really poor work ethics on top. From his wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko): A report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Hubert T. Bell accused Jaczko of "strategically" withholding information from his colleagues in an effort to keep plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from advancing.[11][12] In October 2011, all the other four NRC commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—sent a letter to the White House expressing "grave concern" about Jaczko's actions at the NRC. On December 14, 2011, Commissioner William Ostendorff, a Republican, told a House oversight committee that Jaczko's "bullying and intimidation... should not and cannot be tolerated."[13] At a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee hearing on December 14, 2011, NRC Commissioner William Magwood, a fellow Democrat, testified about what he called Jaczko's abusive behavior towards employees, especially female subordinates. “One woman told me that she felt the chairman was actually irritated with someone else, but took it out on her,” Magwood said. “Another said she was angry at herself for being brought to tears in front of male colleagues. A third described how she couldn’t stop shaking after her experience. She sat, talking with her supervisor until she could calm down sufficiently to drive home.”[14]
- kyrra 5y ago
  One interesting take on radation was what I saw in a commentary piece a few months ago in WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-energy-regulator-radiation-climate-change-11632257020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... (mirror: https://archive.fo/LITQT https://archive.fo/LITQT) A key passage: > In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less than a third of natural background radiation. It makes me question some of the people that are on the NRC. Government regulators want to err on the side of caution, as they don't want to be responsible if things go wrong. So many of these bureaucrats hold positions that likely aren't actually the optimal for society at large.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> The reality is nuclear is neither clean This argument relies on fiddling with the definition of "clean" in a way it is not otherwise used when discussing climate change. In the context of climate change, nuclear is clean because it does not release greenhouse gases. It is the same tactic used by climate change deniers when they go on about how a wind turbine ended up in a landfill and as a result how there is no such thing as “clean” energy.
- godelski 5y ago
  I really dislike how people talk about waste. We can sit on it safely for a few hundred years. But people call that passing the buck. It's not if we pursue more recycling technology. It isn't if we pursue more long term storage options. I promise you that we'll advance in technology in the next 300 years. (The waste also doesn't have a feedback loop like carbon emissions do). It's naive to think we can safely store things for tens of thousands of years for civilizations that won't be able to speak our language. There's a lot of artificial constraints on this problem that people don't understand. They also seem to not understand that there's far more dangerous materials that we dump every day that don't have half lives, meaning they are forever. Lead doesn't go away. Most heavy metals are stable. Most of the anti nuclear points that the average person knows comes from oil propaganda. The same people who brought you the "reducing your carbon footprint" propaganda. It's basically the argument for perfection. Which we know perfection is the enemy of good. Because if they can sell this notion then we'll keep doing what we've been doing because momentum is also a powerful force.
  - Ourgon 5y ago
    Furthermore, solutions for the waste problem already exist in the form of fast breeder reactors [1] which can be used to create new fuel for (conventional) reactors. Using these the total amount of waste needing storage is reduced by a factor of 10. The remaining waste has a far shorter half life (none of the reaction products has a half-life between 100 to 210.000 years, all actinides are consumed in the reaction) which results in a relatively short (200-300 years) storage period instead of the thousands for spent fuel. This is not just some piece of fiction, there are several active FBRs with several more on the drawing board or under construction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
madaxe_again 5y ago
I’d take this with a hefty pinch of thorium salts. These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate. The current political climate says nuclear bad, because it’s a safe position for re-election - no government wants to invest in nuclear power because the optics of nuclear disasters are terrible, and because the payback time is much longer than an election cycle. The slow death of poor air quality (fossil fuels kill millions a year) and climate change are easy to wrangle politically, because you can treat them as externalities.
- seehafer 5y ago
  >These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate. See also: Fauci, Anthony
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
baq 5y ago
The biggest problem with nuclear isn’t waste management, fuel procurement, nimby, not even black swans. The top problem is that if we commission enough nuclear plants today, they won’t produce the first watt until after it’s way too late to prevent catastrophic climate change. It could have been a solution 20 years ago, now you can build, operate and decommission a wind farm or solar plant in the time it takes to design and build a nuclear reactor.
- zbrozek 5y ago
  That's a problem of our own making, and we could revert. The timelines are driven by permitting (both at the local level and at the NRC) and the customization of each reactor. We desperately need reactors to roll off of an assembly line to drive down physical costs. And we also desperately need to trim down the regulatory burden. Together, those changes would dramatically speed up deployment and cut costs. This was an interesting essay and I will probably read the book it is reviewing: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
rib3ye 5y ago
For me the pessimism is really starting to set in. Those most extremely passionate about climate change are ignoring the most immediate solutions and instead waiting future tech and economies of scale for expensive half-steps. If projections are correct, the chance of the global community figuring out the political solution seems nearly impossible.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I am at the point where it is something that comes out of Y Combinator or defense companies that solve the problems of climate change. Either tech solves the problem or we fight over what is left.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    Any technological solution at this point is going to face an impossible political situation. We have plenty of technological solutions already, and look at the mess we have. Sure, none of them is perfect, but none ever will be, either.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Tesla is making a lot of progress in electrification of transport. No impossible politics got in their way. Mostly standard fights over unions and subsidies.
  - duped 5y ago
    Tech is the problem of climate change. Tech powers economic growth, which has a price in joules, that incurs a debt in carbon. And not only that, the solution to the problem is already known. Have fewer babies and reduce the population over time, travel less, produce goods closer to where they are needed, eat more produce and less meat, and increase prices for goods and services that require more energy and produce more carbon emissions. Those are not technical solutions, they're political and economic.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
MrYellowP 5y ago
I don't care what it is that keeps power running. If removing nuclear reactors means that the whole energy grid is at risk, then I prefer having nuclear reactors compared to suddenly having a huge chunk of a population out of power. No fucking thanks.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  They are deciding to use natural gas instead.
- enragedcacti 5y ago
  I don't understand how your response relates to the article. Only two of the ten arguments apply to existing reactors: cascading accidents from internal or external problems some of which will be amplified by climate change, and dealing with nuclear waste. His position is that building more reactors isn't the most effective method for combating climate change, primarily because the vast majority of reactor projects have been massively late and massively over-budget. Because of this, the window for investment in nuclear to stop the most severe results of climate change has already passed. If he has argued for shutting down existing reactors then I apologize, but to me that is a major misrepresentation of the argument.
  - MrYellowP 5y ago
    I'm sorry. Let me explain. My perspective is a european one. Germany turned off three of its reactors while at the same time tons of people are screaming out of their lungs that it's a really bad idea doing so, because of technical reasons related to the safety of the european power grid. From our, the people's perspective, we should only care about making sure that the power keeps running, while it does so without harming the environment more than really necessary. I don't care about governments building new reactors when they shut down the old ones. New ones aren't going to help us, when the grid starts to fail, because they're not even going to be built yet. Talking about new reactors is just distracting from the fact that powergrids need to be in order, which apparently they aren't. The reason, why talking about new reactors is a waste of time, is because more reactors help NOTHING when the powergrid fails, which is a far more pressing matter than literally anything else related to power and energy. The reason, why my words don't really relate to the article, is because it's bullshit. Complete, utter bullshit.
VLM 5y ago
It can't be clean, safe, smart (what does that mean?), or cheap because each installation must be handmade and completely custom and bespoke. Much like for better or worse we could never have had "car culture" if every car ever made had to be custom designed and hand-built. Also note that we could never produce tens of millions of custom designed cars per year because there are not that many human car designers alive; likewise we simply cannot built 10,000 more nuclear reactors because we do not have that many living nuclear engineers such that we can afford to custom design 10,000 totally bespoke reactors. Also note that it took a century or so, but mass produced cars allow massive simulation for safety resulting in mass produced cars being VASTLY safer and less polluting than ancient 120 year old handmade cars. The argument in the linked article essentially boils down to a list of huge advantages that would come from mass production and mass investment in nuclear energy that cannot be permitted to happen because simple linear extrapolation of handmade production shows it would be "impossible" to reach those levels because there are no advantages from mass production. In summary, the authors can't make their minds up, do the economic gains from mass production exist or not exist? Now in practice, screwed up planet earth in 2022 might not be able to pull off mass production of nuclear power any more than we can currently pull off an interstellar space ship or similar technological daydreams. That's a serious argument against nuclear power, but the authors chose to be wishy washy instead and claim both sides of the argument that mass production either is awesome or doesn't exist, both at the same time.
seehafer 5y ago
The title of this article ought to be: Former nuclear _regulators_: Say ‘no’ to new reactors To which I say: “this is my shocked face”
indymike 5y ago
Former nuclear reactor operator here. It's time for this 1970s style fear mongering to stop so we can get the planet fixed. Dr. Jaczko is one of the worst NRC commissioners in history and was appointed by an anti-nuclear president to be obstructionist. Every one of the arguments in the letter are valid only because of regulations that have been put in place to make nuclear reactors impossible to build quickly or on budget.
- epistasis 5y ago
  The fear mongering isn't the problem with nuclear these days. The problem is that the US can't build it. VC Summer was a scam, billing rate payers of something like $9B for an abandoned construction site, and jail time for executives. Vogtle is little better, and by the time it's finished, it will be some of the most expensive energy on the grid, and spending that money on solar and storage would have had a much much bigger climate impact. Utilities know the financial risk of attempting nuclear construction, and the only reason these two sites attempted new nuclear is because laws were passed to pass all financial risk on to the public when there are construction failures. The public deserves better. Though this editorial may be annoying, it's a complete distraction from the true cause of nuclear's failure in the 21st century, and that cause is entirely the nuclear industry's own fault.
  - indymike 5y ago
    > The problem is that the US can't build it. With the current regulatory situation that is accurate.
    - epistasis 5y ago
      The regulatory system had nothing to do with the recent failures. Seriously, it was just incompetence. See also other large builds in the US which do not have the nrc.
      - indymike 5y ago
        I do believe it is not possible to build a reactor in the US without NRC approval and abiding by NRC regulation. Source: the NRC website.
halpert 5y ago
Reading Voices from Chernobyl changed my opinion on nuclear. The potential human cost is so great it doesn’t seem worth it. One other way of thinking about the issue is this: what would you consider a safe power plant? How about one that has a probability of failing once every ten thousand years. That sounds pretty safe, doesn’t it? Well with hundreds of power plants, the probability of a single one failing starts to get quite high on any given year. And that matches reality: three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, among many others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide... The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Is that really a wise bet to make in the face of climate change?
- funklute 5y ago
  > The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Modern reactor designs cannot explode high into the atmosphere the way that Chernobyl did. That is, their contamination will never be as far-reaching as Chernobyl was. With modern designs, it's really a question of local contamination. Pit this against the global impact of climate change and it's pretty clear which issue is the more serious one. The potential impact of climate change is big enough that we shouldn't let potential local contamination be an obstacle to building out nuclear power.
  - halpert 5y ago
    So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? It’s undeniable that there are failure scenarios that are unknown with any design.
    - funklute 5y ago
      > So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? Well, for a start that doesn't contradict what I said above. Overall, the impact from Fukushima was really not that bad, all things considered. Compare for example to pollution and deaths attributed to coal power plants around the world. Pollution and deaths due to nuclear have a tendency to get vastly more media exposure though. Second, they didn't evacuate all of Japan. They evacuated locally. And finally, Japan is arguably the worst possible place you could build a bunch of nuclear power plants. On top of that, Fukushima was under-engineered. The fact that it didn't go worse than it did is actually a good example of how harmless nuclear power can be. But of course, that's no reason not to have stringent safety measures in place. I'm by no means advocating a wild west of nuclear power.
trembonator 5y ago

39 points by guerby 5y ago

James Hansen, long time head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS), thinks otherwise: > https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html

guerby 5y ago

slashdot : https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/01/28/2251238/former-nuclear-regulatory-commission-chair-argues-nuclear-power-isnt-a-climate-solution https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/01/28/2251238/former-... The Verge : https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904943/nuclear-power-climate-change-solution-gregory-jaczko https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904943/nuclear-power-cl...

toomuchtodo 5y ago

“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction. The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. Perhaps most importantly nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.”

boppo1 5y ago
Could this guy be a partisan? That seems like a pretty brash statement.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dmitrij 5y ago
  It's 4 guys. Former heads of nuclear regulation US, UK, Germany, France. " Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany Dr. Bernard Laponche, former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety Dr. Paul Dorfman, former Secretary UK Govt. Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters " Reasons: Too costly in absolute terms to make a relevant contribution to global power production More expensive than renewable energy in terms of energy production and CO2 mitigation, even taking into account costs of grid management tools like energy storage associated with renewables rollout. Too costly and risky for financial market investment, and therefore dependent on very large public subsidies and loan guarantees. Unsustainable due to the unresolved problem of very long-lived radioactive waste. Financially unsustainable as no economic institution is prepared to insure against the full potential cost, environmental and human impacts of accidental radiation release – with the majority of those very significant costs being borne by the public. Militarily hazardous since newly promoted reactor designs increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. Inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents from human error, internal faults, and external impacts; vulnerability to climate-driven sea-level rise, storm, storm surge, inundation and flooding hazard, resulting in international economic impacts. Subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems associated with newer unproven concepts, including ‘Advanced’ and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). Too unwieldy and complex to create an efficient industrial regime for reactor construction and operation processes within the intended build-time and scope needed for climate change mitigation. Unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation needed by the 2030’s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction costs of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Many of these apply to renewables as well. 2030 is not happening. It just isn't. The question is whether it will be 2040 or 2050 even.
a9h74j 5y ago
One unfortunate but plausible take: wind and solar advocates correctly argue that nuclear cannot scale up, and nuclear advocates correctly argue that wind and solar cannot scale up. I have seen 15 years of peak-oil debate characterized this way. One figure-of-merit, seldom emphasized, is how many tonnes of material per MW are required to create a generating facility/installation. EDIT: That's a figure-of-demerit. MW/tonne would be the figure-of-merit, I suppose.
adventured 5y ago
It's a clown argument as it pertains to climate change or climate issues in general. For example: > Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. We don't need it to be cheap (and it should be subsidized as far as consumers are concerned re cost). Who in the past few decades has successfully argued that nuclear is inexpensive? Nobody is making that argument, it's a straw-argument the author set up. We need it to produce energy at massive scale and reliably. Nuclear does that, and it's a technology we can keep improving upon (we should have spent the last 40-50 years aggressively improving upon it with large R&D expenditures; best time to plant a tree and all that). Current US energy mix is coal at ~19.3% and nuclear at ~19.7% (2020 EIA numbers). That's 93 nuclear reactors or less to wipe out US coal use. Hit the print button, get it to it already. In terms of US contributions on climate, that'd be a huge win. And more realistically, we could build toward 1/3 nuclear mix (instead of ~40%), while traditional renewables continue to expand, which would wipe out coal's share in tandem.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  So your non expert opinion is superior to that of four regulators who oversaw the tech in question? Show your work. Wind and solar are cheap and abundant, and will continue to be so. No waste risk, no proliferation concerns, no catastrophic failure modes, and very little permitting (compared to nuclear). Clean power for decades once installed. It boggles the mind that the armchair engineers continue to advocate for a technology subject matter experts conclude is a dead end. Nuclear advocates might as well be in the same camp as climate deniers. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 (Renewables account for most new U.S. electricity generating capacity in 2021) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.01.11/main.svg https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.01.11/main.svg https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818 (Solar power will account for nearly half of new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2022) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2022.01.10/main.svg https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2022.01.10/main.svg https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/26/sunrise-brief-the-interconnection-queue-in-the-us-jumped-from-139gwac-in-2019-to-639gwac-today-a-true-solar-tsunami/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/26/sunrise-brief-the-int... (Solar interconnection queue in the US jumped from 139GWac in 2019 to 639GWac today) https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-renewable-pipeline-poised-to-add-172-5-gw-through-2024-61902543 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... (US renewable pipeline poised to add 172.5 GW through 2024)
cbmuser 5y ago
Both France, Japan and the US have proven that nuclear scale up perfectly well.
- antupis 5y ago
  Yeah it can currently nuclear has pretty bad technological and regulatory problem. 4/10 most expensive buildings are regular nuclear plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_build...
  - tester756 5y ago
    it's good or bad?
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  So well that the french one even had a negative learning curve. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
- fsh 5y ago
  In the US and Japan the fraction of primary energy supplied by nuclear power is almost negligible (8% [1] and 3% [2]). Even the famously large French nuclear industry only manages 39% [3]. Nuclear power would have to be scaled up by orders of magnitude worldwide in order to make any difference to the global CO2 budget. [1] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/USA/total-energy/total-energy-consumption https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/USA/total-ene... [2] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/jpn/total-energy/total-energy-consumption https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/jpn/total-ene... [3] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/FRA/total-energy/total-energy-consumption https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/FRA/total-ene...
  - enkid 5y ago
    I mean, wouldn't it be an order of magnitude in the US? Going from 8% to 80% is a matter of resource allocation, not technology breakthrough.
wbl 5y ago
It's costly because the author made it excessively costly in his previous job.
- number6 5y ago
  And if a reactor blows up (happens roughly ever 35 years) there are huge additional costs. Last time we were extremely lucky that we hadn't to evaluate Tokiyo. If something like this would happen in Central Europe it would be extremely costly for the whole world. But something like this could happen trice right?!
  - wbl 5y ago
    People live happily in Denver Colorado or New Jersey. Nobody ever says we should evacuate them. But they get an extra dose of radiation from living there, which reactors don't get. It's about costs and benefits. Central Europe also doesn't have tsunamis.
    - number6 5y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis_in_Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis_in_Europe
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    Chernobyl was the only one of those that blew up and it was based an idiotic graphite pile design abandoned everywhere outside of the USSR in the 50s. Fukushima Daiichi experienced 3 small hydrogen explosions that were fully contained by the reactor building, and wouldn't have happened if they hadn't built their backup power for that reactor underground. According to a linear no-threshold model, the accident would most likely cause at most 130 cancer deaths in total assuming everyone in the zone of highest exposure received the maximum possible exposure, which they did not. Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone and no one was exposed to enough radiation to increase their risk of cancer. The accident happened because someone trained on submarine reactors misapplied that training and turned off the cooling system. No operating reactor allows an operator to do that anymore. The reactor did not blow up. Only one civilian nuclear power reactor has ever "blown up", Tokyo was never in danger, no one died because of Three Mile Island, and even around Chernobyl the predicted incidence of cancer is failing to materialize.
arcticbull 5y ago
> The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. It's unbelievably safe, it has the among the lowest death toll per TWh of generated electricity. Depending on who you ask, it's lower than or in the same order of magnitude as solar and wind. [1] It's definitely clean, they're ultra-low-carbon - and especially breeder or fast neutron reactors, generate tiny quantities of waste relative to the amount of power that comes out. And these spicy rocks can just be placed back down into the earth from whence they came. Is it cheap? No. And that's ok, because that's not always the most important thing. However it's important to remember that nuclear prices in all externalities due to the public's fear and distrust. However, coal does not. The NRC uses a price of about $9M per additional death, and coal kills 9 million people per year. [2] If you price them at the same $9M per life, and divide by coal power generated - nuclear is cheaper than coal. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-fuels-pollution-deaths-research https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  Irrelevant comparing to coal. It is a dead industry sharing the same issue nuclear has, steam cycles are too costly to build and operate[1]. A dollar spent on nuclear power plants is a dollar not doing more work with renewables, that is the issue. Keep some R&D for the future magical break through, but current designs are dead in the water. You are also not taking into account that it is impossible to insure nuclear power plants, the public does that. I.e. they do not bear their full costs, not even close. Look no further than at Fukushima's $500B - $1000B clean up cost. [1]: Table ES3 https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_GBL_Study_of_Equipment_Prices_in_the_Power_Sector.pdf https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_G...
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    > You are also not taking into account that it is impossible to insure nuclear power plants, the public does that. I.e. they do not bear their full costs, not even close. Look no further than at Fukushima's $500B - $1000B clean up cost. Coal is unfortunately not a dying industry. [1] My point isn't that it should be compared to coal but rather that it is actually not far and away the most expensive once you price in externalities. If we're talking subsidies, coal, oil, and natural gas received $5.9 trillion in subsidies in 2020. [2] Makes the once-in-a-generation Fukushima cleanup look cheap no? I strongly suspect that renewables received huge subsidies too, the US alone threw a hundred billion or so their way in 2020. Nuclear gets almost nothing. To be clear I don't mind that renewables get subsidies - they should, and we should build them even if they're more expensive. Ditto for nuclear. > A dollar spent on nuclear energy is a dollar not doing more work with renewables, that is the issue. Por que no los dos? Solar requires a ton of footprint and wind requires mining rare earth metals in hellscapes in Mongolia. [3] There's no free lunch. More good lunches are good. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/far-from-dying-the-coal-industry-is-actually-booming/2022/01/28/7fb02ff0-8019-11ec-8cc8-b696564ba796_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/far-from-dyin... [2] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-subsidies-in-2020-report-finds https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...

_3u10 5y ago

Of course it isn't. If climate change were a scientific reality in which if we didn't switch off fossil fuels immediately we'd face drastic consequence people like this would be gung ho on any technology that could save the planet, but would destroy a single mountain in Arizona. Since climate change isn't a reality but is a political problem created to benefit solar and wind we can safely ignore nuclear as a solution to climate change because it also has some but very limited environmental costs. It's the same reason in BC where I live all the climate change people are against hydro power (Site C). It's very clear to me that anyone against nuclear doesn't really believe that we're on the brink of destroying the planet.

7thaccount 5y ago
I think it's possible that many feel that either option (global warming) or (nuclear meltdown) could easily doom our nation. In other words, if one solution to freezing to death would be to burn down your house, they wouldn't take it. Sure it would fix your problem for a few minutes and then you'd be dead. Note that I'm not against nuclear, just trying to point out how those you're referring to would view the situation.
- _3u10 5y ago
  When I was growing up my dad and I would talk about the people who froze to death in their cars out in the valley every few years when there was a freak storm and chat about how to burn the family car down to survive should we get stuck in a storm like that. I'm definitely more in the Dudley and Stephens camp than most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens I think the US comes out slightly ahead in the worst case climate change scenario, Canada is a huge winner.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    Russia is the real winner in a much warmer world. All that useless ice becomes open ports and farmland I would guess.

gruturo 5y ago

[Edit: Title was changed, it previously only mentioned "former NRC chair".] so, let's see who that may be..... .....aaand it's Greg Jaczko, nothing to see, move along, dude's biased as hell, with some really poor work ethics on top. From his wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko): A report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Hubert T. Bell accused Jaczko of "strategically" withholding information from his colleagues in an effort to keep plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from advancing.[11][12] In October 2011, all the other four NRC commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—sent a letter to the White House expressing "grave concern" about Jaczko's actions at the NRC. On December 14, 2011, Commissioner William Ostendorff, a Republican, told a House oversight committee that Jaczko's "bullying and intimidation... should not and cannot be tolerated."[13] At a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee hearing on December 14, 2011, NRC Commissioner William Magwood, a fellow Democrat, testified about what he called Jaczko's abusive behavior towards employees, especially female subordinates. “One woman told me that she felt the chairman was actually irritated with someone else, but took it out on her,” Magwood said. “Another said she was angry at herself for being brought to tears in front of male colleagues. A third described how she couldn’t stop shaking after her experience. She sat, talking with her supervisor until she could calm down sufficiently to drive home.”[14]

kyrra 5y ago
One interesting take on radation was what I saw in a commentary piece a few months ago in WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-energy-regulator-radiation-climate-change-11632257020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... (mirror: https://archive.fo/LITQT https://archive.fo/LITQT) A key passage: > In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less than a third of natural background radiation. It makes me question some of the people that are on the NRC. Government regulators want to err on the side of caution, as they don't want to be responsible if things go wrong. So many of these bureaucrats hold positions that likely aren't actually the optimal for society at large.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> The reality is nuclear is neither clean This argument relies on fiddling with the definition of "clean" in a way it is not otherwise used when discussing climate change. In the context of climate change, nuclear is clean because it does not release greenhouse gases. It is the same tactic used by climate change deniers when they go on about how a wind turbine ended up in a landfill and as a result how there is no such thing as “clean” energy.

godelski 5y ago
I really dislike how people talk about waste. We can sit on it safely for a few hundred years. But people call that passing the buck. It's not if we pursue more recycling technology. It isn't if we pursue more long term storage options. I promise you that we'll advance in technology in the next 300 years. (The waste also doesn't have a feedback loop like carbon emissions do). It's naive to think we can safely store things for tens of thousands of years for civilizations that won't be able to speak our language. There's a lot of artificial constraints on this problem that people don't understand. They also seem to not understand that there's far more dangerous materials that we dump every day that don't have half lives, meaning they are forever. Lead doesn't go away. Most heavy metals are stable. Most of the anti nuclear points that the average person knows comes from oil propaganda. The same people who brought you the "reducing your carbon footprint" propaganda. It's basically the argument for perfection. Which we know perfection is the enemy of good. Because if they can sell this notion then we'll keep doing what we've been doing because momentum is also a powerful force.
- Ourgon 5y ago
  Furthermore, solutions for the waste problem already exist in the form of fast breeder reactors [1] which can be used to create new fuel for (conventional) reactors. Using these the total amount of waste needing storage is reduced by a factor of 10. The remaining waste has a far shorter half life (none of the reaction products has a half-life between 100 to 210.000 years, all actinides are consumed in the reaction) which results in a relatively short (200-300 years) storage period instead of the thousands for spent fuel. This is not just some piece of fiction, there are several active FBRs with several more on the drawing board or under construction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

madaxe_again 5y ago

I’d take this with a hefty pinch of thorium salts. These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate. The current political climate says nuclear bad, because it’s a safe position for re-election - no government wants to invest in nuclear power because the optics of nuclear disasters are terrible, and because the payback time is much longer than an election cycle. The slow death of poor air quality (fossil fuels kill millions a year) and climate change are easy to wrangle politically, because you can treat them as externalities.

seehafer 5y ago
>These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate. See also: Fauci, Anthony

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

baq 5y ago

The biggest problem with nuclear isn’t waste management, fuel procurement, nimby, not even black swans. The top problem is that if we commission enough nuclear plants today, they won’t produce the first watt until after it’s way too late to prevent catastrophic climate change. It could have been a solution 20 years ago, now you can build, operate and decommission a wind farm or solar plant in the time it takes to design and build a nuclear reactor.

zbrozek 5y ago
That's a problem of our own making, and we could revert. The timelines are driven by permitting (both at the local level and at the NRC) and the customization of each reactor. We desperately need reactors to roll off of an assembly line to drive down physical costs. And we also desperately need to trim down the regulatory burden. Together, those changes would dramatically speed up deployment and cut costs. This was an interesting essay and I will probably read the book it is reviewing: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

rib3ye 5y ago

For me the pessimism is really starting to set in. Those most extremely passionate about climate change are ignoring the most immediate solutions and instead waiting future tech and economies of scale for expensive half-steps. If projections are correct, the chance of the global community figuring out the political solution seems nearly impossible.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I am at the point where it is something that comes out of Y Combinator or defense companies that solve the problems of climate change. Either tech solves the problem or we fight over what is left.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Any technological solution at this point is going to face an impossible political situation. We have plenty of technological solutions already, and look at the mess we have. Sure, none of them is perfect, but none ever will be, either.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Tesla is making a lot of progress in electrification of transport. No impossible politics got in their way. Mostly standard fights over unions and subsidies.
- duped 5y ago
  Tech is the problem of climate change. Tech powers economic growth, which has a price in joules, that incurs a debt in carbon. And not only that, the solution to the problem is already known. Have fewer babies and reduce the population over time, travel less, produce goods closer to where they are needed, eat more produce and less meat, and increase prices for goods and services that require more energy and produce more carbon emissions. Those are not technical solutions, they're political and economic.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago

MrYellowP 5y ago

I don't care what it is that keeps power running. If removing nuclear reactors means that the whole energy grid is at risk, then I prefer having nuclear reactors compared to suddenly having a huge chunk of a population out of power. No fucking thanks.

MattGaiser 5y ago
They are deciding to use natural gas instead.
enragedcacti 5y ago
I don't understand how your response relates to the article. Only two of the ten arguments apply to existing reactors: cascading accidents from internal or external problems some of which will be amplified by climate change, and dealing with nuclear waste. His position is that building more reactors isn't the most effective method for combating climate change, primarily because the vast majority of reactor projects have been massively late and massively over-budget. Because of this, the window for investment in nuclear to stop the most severe results of climate change has already passed. If he has argued for shutting down existing reactors then I apologize, but to me that is a major misrepresentation of the argument.
- MrYellowP 5y ago
  I'm sorry. Let me explain. My perspective is a european one. Germany turned off three of its reactors while at the same time tons of people are screaming out of their lungs that it's a really bad idea doing so, because of technical reasons related to the safety of the european power grid. From our, the people's perspective, we should only care about making sure that the power keeps running, while it does so without harming the environment more than really necessary. I don't care about governments building new reactors when they shut down the old ones. New ones aren't going to help us, when the grid starts to fail, because they're not even going to be built yet. Talking about new reactors is just distracting from the fact that powergrids need to be in order, which apparently they aren't. The reason, why talking about new reactors is a waste of time, is because more reactors help NOTHING when the powergrid fails, which is a far more pressing matter than literally anything else related to power and energy. The reason, why my words don't really relate to the article, is because it's bullshit. Complete, utter bullshit.

VLM 5y ago

It can't be clean, safe, smart (what does that mean?), or cheap because each installation must be handmade and completely custom and bespoke. Much like for better or worse we could never have had "car culture" if every car ever made had to be custom designed and hand-built. Also note that we could never produce tens of millions of custom designed cars per year because there are not that many human car designers alive; likewise we simply cannot built 10,000 more nuclear reactors because we do not have that many living nuclear engineers such that we can afford to custom design 10,000 totally bespoke reactors. Also note that it took a century or so, but mass produced cars allow massive simulation for safety resulting in mass produced cars being VASTLY safer and less polluting than ancient 120 year old handmade cars. The argument in the linked article essentially boils down to a list of huge advantages that would come from mass production and mass investment in nuclear energy that cannot be permitted to happen because simple linear extrapolation of handmade production shows it would be "impossible" to reach those levels because there are no advantages from mass production. In summary, the authors can't make their minds up, do the economic gains from mass production exist or not exist? Now in practice, screwed up planet earth in 2022 might not be able to pull off mass production of nuclear power any more than we can currently pull off an interstellar space ship or similar technological daydreams. That's a serious argument against nuclear power, but the authors chose to be wishy washy instead and claim both sides of the argument that mass production either is awesome or doesn't exist, both at the same time.

seehafer 5y ago

The title of this article ought to be: Former nuclear _regulators_: Say ‘no’ to new reactors To which I say: “this is my shocked face”

indymike 5y ago

Former nuclear reactor operator here. It's time for this 1970s style fear mongering to stop so we can get the planet fixed. Dr. Jaczko is one of the worst NRC commissioners in history and was appointed by an anti-nuclear president to be obstructionist. Every one of the arguments in the letter are valid only because of regulations that have been put in place to make nuclear reactors impossible to build quickly or on budget.

epistasis 5y ago
The fear mongering isn't the problem with nuclear these days. The problem is that the US can't build it. VC Summer was a scam, billing rate payers of something like $9B for an abandoned construction site, and jail time for executives. Vogtle is little better, and by the time it's finished, it will be some of the most expensive energy on the grid, and spending that money on solar and storage would have had a much much bigger climate impact. Utilities know the financial risk of attempting nuclear construction, and the only reason these two sites attempted new nuclear is because laws were passed to pass all financial risk on to the public when there are construction failures. The public deserves better. Though this editorial may be annoying, it's a complete distraction from the true cause of nuclear's failure in the 21st century, and that cause is entirely the nuclear industry's own fault.
- indymike 5y ago
  > The problem is that the US can't build it. With the current regulatory situation that is accurate.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    The regulatory system had nothing to do with the recent failures. Seriously, it was just incompetence. See also other large builds in the US which do not have the nrc.
    - indymike 5y ago
      I do believe it is not possible to build a reactor in the US without NRC approval and abiding by NRC regulation. Source: the NRC website.

halpert 5y ago

Reading Voices from Chernobyl changed my opinion on nuclear. The potential human cost is so great it doesn’t seem worth it. One other way of thinking about the issue is this: what would you consider a safe power plant? How about one that has a probability of failing once every ten thousand years. That sounds pretty safe, doesn’t it? Well with hundreds of power plants, the probability of a single one failing starts to get quite high on any given year. And that matches reality: three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, among many others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide... The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Is that really a wise bet to make in the face of climate change?

funklute 5y ago
> The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Modern reactor designs cannot explode high into the atmosphere the way that Chernobyl did. That is, their contamination will never be as far-reaching as Chernobyl was. With modern designs, it's really a question of local contamination. Pit this against the global impact of climate change and it's pretty clear which issue is the more serious one. The potential impact of climate change is big enough that we shouldn't let potential local contamination be an obstacle to building out nuclear power.
- halpert 5y ago
  So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? It’s undeniable that there are failure scenarios that are unknown with any design.
  - funklute 5y ago
    > So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? Well, for a start that doesn't contradict what I said above. Overall, the impact from Fukushima was really not that bad, all things considered. Compare for example to pollution and deaths attributed to coal power plants around the world. Pollution and deaths due to nuclear have a tendency to get vastly more media exposure though. Second, they didn't evacuate all of Japan. They evacuated locally. And finally, Japan is arguably the worst possible place you could build a bunch of nuclear power plants. On top of that, Fukushima was under-engineered. The fact that it didn't go worse than it did is actually a good example of how harmless nuclear power can be. But of course, that's no reason not to have stringent safety measures in place. I'm by no means advocating a wild west of nuclear power.

trembonator 5y ago