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Ask HN: Can you both take climate change seriously and against nuclear energy?
We could have switched most of the planet to pure nuclear energy decades ago. If you believe climate change is an existential threat, how can you be against nuclear energy?
We are at a point where huge investments in renewables are becoming a reality, but the damage is already done.
- nsahu 4y agoI don't think so. It's fairly clear that nuclear is incredibly safe in comparison with coal and other fossil fuels. Nuclear is going to be part of the solution, unless we figure out a way to massively scale up renewables. Thankfully, Europe seems to be doing some of this.
- hrdwdmrbl 4y agoCoal also produces more radioactive waste - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-plants-release-more-radiation-than-nuclear-power-plants https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-pl...
- thehappypm 4y agoThis is a bad stat. Chernobyl is still radioactive. Coal plants don’t irradiate whole regions
- yellowapple 4y ago> Coal plants don’t irradiate whole regions They absolutely do. Where do you think that radioactive soot goes?
- thehappypm 4y agoIt’s so dilute compared to something like a nuclear meltdown.. like orders of magnitude
- hrdwdmrbl 4y ago"the solution to pollution is dilution"
- yellowapple 4y agoIt still exists, and a normally-operating coal plant produces far more radioactive contamination than a normally-operating nuclear plant, by orders of magnitude: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- andrewla 4y ago> incredibly safe in comparison I assume you mean this empirically, not based on the actual risk profile. The cost, in lives, of a major nuclear containment failure is easily in the millions to tens of millions. The cost, in lives, of a major coal disaster is at worst maybe in the hundreds, even in principle. So it comes down to a belief in whether we have properly contained the risk. My priors on this shifted tremendously after Fukushima.
- lokimedes 4y agoDo you have any evidence for these claims?
- andrewla 4y agoThe claim for the millions to tens of millions number? I mean, we have deliberately initiated containment failures for military purposes, so we know what they can look like.
- SlickNixon 4y agoDo they look like Fukushima or Chernobyl?
- andrewla 4y agoTo redirect back to my original point -- this is an empirical argument. Russian Roulette is not safe because nobody got shot in the first two rounds. The turkey is not safe because he was well treated through October. Containment failures of nuclear reactors have a very large upper bound of damage.
- SlickNixon 4y ago> I mean, we have deliberately initiated containment failures for military purposes, so we know what they can look like. This is an empirical argument. Is the upper bound of damage higher for nuclear reactors or fossil fuels?
- scandox 4y agoNuclear Energy is fantastic. Humans are awful. Who guarantees the long term stability safe Nuclear installations require? We've seen that military forces can be very casual about them. We've seen that corruption in procurement is hard to control. I think that's a reasonable line to take.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoSure. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. And you should be skeptical of anyone pushing an agenda. I’m pro nukes (best phrasing), but it’s understandable why people are scared of it. I hope that the costs can come down and we can start doing some small scale experiments to show the reliability and safety. Most people just don’t have experience with the recent tech.
- lloeki 4y ago> I’m pro nukes (best phrasing) On my side I would say I'm "pro" nuke a) by default (because I can't see an alternative as to how we could reasonably achieve stable renewable with current tech on a short enough timescale) and thus b) as a transition technology. I mean, I hate the waste, the impact of a catastrophic event can be terrible, but when taking a step back it feels like peanuts compared to the global scale and very real impact of what's currently happening, and for which we need to hit the brakes, like, yesterday, and continue to do so real hard for a very long time.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoTo bring the costs down we need to shoot a few regulators. The problem is that the safety standards are to make them as safe as reasonably possible--this *inherently* means they're going to be too expensive because if they weren't that means it would be feasible to improve the safety. We get huge cost overruns because the safety standards get changed in construction and they have to go back, reevaluate and modify. And because the greens manage to tie things up in court causing delays. Instead, I would like to see (generally, not just in this case) that safety say twice as good as the best alternative is deemed good enough. (And note that solar and wind are not alternatives without a suitable storage system--which doesn't yet exist. The best alternative is natural gas--and it turns out my memory was faulty, natural gas is two orders of magnitude worse and coal is three orders of magnitude worse.)
- petercooper 4y agoApparently so, as it's been the standpoint of the Green Party in the UK for many years: https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/safe-climate.html https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/safe-climate.html
- hrdwdmrbl 4y agoSame with the green party of Canada
- mupuff1234 4y agoThe same goes for the green party in Germany afaik.
- sofixa 4y agoAnd the Green Party in Belgium, which had the audacity to say natural gas is necessary to transition from nuclear to renewables. The cognitive dissonance is incredible.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI don't know the details of whatever claim you are disputing, but basically all sensible plans include some natural gas burning in the short term. As has France with their nuclear fleet. So mocking a Green Party for being factually correct, pragmatic and effective in achieving their aims seems a bit cheap. Sometimes feels like people only like nuclear because it lets them talk smack about Greens. Who are generally well educated people with sensible ideas. So why are we attacking them again?
- the_biot 4y agoIndeed, we simply can't do without non-renewables at the moment, nobody can. Just wait until everybody really does have a ton of renewable energy, and you get headlines like "<area> ran on 100% renewables all week!", and thus it seems obvious we don't need the gas plants anymore. Except, that is, for when there's no wind or sun, then you absolutely need them. But why would companies keep those plants going, when most of the time nobody buys energy off them? They'll just shut them down, since they'd just lose money keeping them online -- resulting in massive outages at times without wind/sun. Meaning the government will have to subsidize carbon-belching gas plants just to keep them open.
- therealmarv 4y agoAsk Germany, they take both seriously. They are now dependent on natural gas imports. Guess where most natural gas is coming from for Germany...
- rodoni 4y agoGermany has 350g CO2 per kWh and they are also burning coal for energy. France has 50g CO2 per kWh. IMO they don't take climate change serious...
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y agoAnd France is in trouble, as half its fleet of nuclear reactors are offline due to many issues (ERP delays, corrosion everywhere https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2022/04/24/french-energy-supplier-edf-shows-concern-over-corrosion-problems-at-its-nuclear-plants_5981437_19.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2022/04/24/french-...). Here are the wholesale electricity prices for next winter in various European countries. Look at the France-Germany spread! https://twitter.com/GoldbergNic/status/1542103521524424704 https://twitter.com/GoldbergNic/status/1542103521524424704 There's a reason why we had to turn on our old coal plants again.
- lloeki 4y ago> gas imports And, all the while being a major electricity exporter itself (towards e.g Poland), Germany also depends heavily on electricity imports from... France's nuclear generators. https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/electricity-export-france/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/electricity-export... TIL that Germany's inroads into green electricity production is more or less offset by its electricity exporting economy. Also Germany was a major exporter of reprocessable nuclear waste towards France (2nd place with 17% in reprocessed material at la Hague, 1st being France with 70%). That's old data though, IIRC they shut down 3 reactors (out of 6) since, the three remaining ones were due to shutdown this year but this is being reconsidered because gas x Ukraine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site
- adamdusty 4y agoI suspect at least a few people displaced by Chernobyl or Fukushima hold the position of anti-nuclear and acknowledge climate change. I would argue yes, you can rationally arrive at that stance.
- the_only_law 4y agoI'm not anti nuclear, but I watched a lot of people get screwed by this real time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
- josephcsible 4y agoGiving up nuclear power because of Chernobyl would be like giving up pesticides because of Bhopal.
- cumshitpiss 4y agoIts not truly renewable and the topic of waste is a real issue. Its a short term solution but ultimately not the solution for sustainable environmentalism.
- josephcsible 4y agoSolar isn't "truly renewable" either because the Sun will eventually burn out, and we have enough fissile material to last a similar amount of time, if we keep reprocessing it.
- Nursie 4y agoNucleur power has historically been problematic in that it creates waste, it takes a fuckton of money to decommission safely after the useful life of the reactor is over, and there have been incidents of massive environmental contamination. Can all these things be overcome? I don't know. Let's hope so. But in the mean time there's every reason to proceed cautiously here. It's certainly not a stop-gap while green energy comes online - projects are many decades in length.
- causi 4y agoThat's valid from a blank-slate perspective but we live in a world where the average coal plant produces the same amount of radioactive waste as a nuclear plant with far less stringent containment procedures.
- shreyshnaccount 4y agointeresting, can you point me to a source?
- causi 4y agohttps://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1002/ML100280691.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1002/ML100280691.pdf https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- th0ma5 4y agoNuclear would've been a great solution in the 70s and 80s to cut down on greenhouse emissions, but it is too late now to help from what I understand.
- salmonfamine 4y ago[citation needed]
- galvin 4y agoIt takes at least 10 years to build a latest generation nuclear power plant such as Flamanville 3 or Hinkley Point C. According to the IPCC, we can't wait that long to reduce our emissions.
- salmonfamine 4y agoThat is also not true, and not supported by the IPCC. What do you mean "we can't wait that long?" Any time we start reducing emissions is better than never. There will never be a "too late" point to reach net zero. Secondly, what is the alternative to reducing our carbon outprint in 10 years?
- adrianN 4y agoThe alternative to building thousands of reactors that finish construction in ten years if we're lucky is building millions of wind turbines and solar panels that incrementally reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
- salmonfamine 4y ago1. There is no "10 year" time limit. There is a window of time to keep our overall warming below 1.5c, which is virtually impossible regardless of which policies we choose to pursue, collectively. 2. There is no indication that we will be able to produce lithium-ion batteries with a high enough wh/kg density to create high enough energy storage capacity to replace carbon-based energy sources. Until such a time as that technology becomes possible and production-ready, we will need other sources of energy. Not building nuclear with the assumption that grid-scale battery storage will become feasible is a potentially catastrophic policy decision.
- dotcoma 4y agoI’m no expert, but I want to fight climate change and I am against nuclear energy. https://actu.epfl.ch/news/what-if-half-of-switzerland-s-rooftops-produced-el/ https://actu.epfl.ch/news/what-if-half-of-switzerland-s-roof...
- rvdca 4y agoI am genuinely interested in your position : what are your concerns with nuclear energy?
- dotcoma 4y agoThree Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, for example. Or the fact that we don't really know where to store 'normal' nuclear waste safely. And the fact that it takes ages to build a nuclear plant. And they are always late, and over budget. And that solar power and wind power apparently are cheaper.
- yellowapple 4y ago> Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, for example. And yet nuclear is still safer per unit of energy than any other sort of power. > Or the fact that we don't really know where to store 'normal' nuclear waste safely. The quantities are tiny, especially compared to the fossil fuel plants they'd be replacing (said plants happily spewing their far larger quantities of waste into the atmosphere). > And the fact that it takes ages to build a nuclear plant. > And they are always late, and over budget. Due to regulatory hurdles, NIMBYism, and the usual government expenditure bloat that affects all public works projects (at least here in the US). > And that solar power and wind power apparently are cheaper. Per kilowatt, that's doubtful - particularly once you factor in the batteries needed to make solar/wind a suitable replacement for nuclear. If you're going to advocate we skip nuclear, then the best bet would be to advocate a push for geothermal. The Earth is hot 24/7, and using that heat for power is "simply" a matter of digging a sufficiently-deep hole.
- uberman 4y agoWhile I personally support nuclear energy as part of the solution, I am keenly aware that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) (currently 1600 square miles) if applied to either of the decommissioned reactors in South East New York State would constitute a crisis of epic proportion. The CEZ applied to the Shoreham reactor would make most of Long Island uninhabitable and in the event of a disaster there would be no practical way to evacuate the bulk of Long Island. In fact this evacuation concern lead to the decommissioning of the plant. The CEZ applied to the Indian Point reactors would potentially make New York City north of Upper Manhattan similarly uninhabitable with similar evacuation issues. I think Indian Point particularly should not have been decommissioned and replacing it with natural gas was a mistake but I am also empathetic to the concerns others have around safety.
- vimy 4y agoClimate activists who predict doom but don’t want nuclear power are just cosplaying. The modern world can’t run on renewables alone. It’s impossible.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago>The modern world can’t run on renewables alone. It’s impossible. Also true for nuclear.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago> The modern world can’t run on renewables alone. It’s impossible. It's not only possible, it's cheaper than many of the alternatives. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify
- vimy 4y agoThat’s why Denmark and Germany, two EU countries with highest % wind, have the highest electricity cost in Europe. Math checks out.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoGermany gets 75% of its energy from fossil fuels. Of course its electricity price went up. British Columbia gets 99% of its energy from renewables. It's electricity price decreased in 2022.
- vimy 4y agoThis was before the war. You see the same with France and Belgium. Respectively 80 and 60 % nuclear. Very cheap prices until renewables were introduced. 99 % is impossible. Storage systems to achieve 99 % don't exist yet.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoBC electricity is 87% hydroelectric, so 100% renewable is easy there, since all that hydro can act as giant batteries. The link to the Electrify book in my original comment shows how to get to 100% green electricity. It's possible. Not easy nor cheap, but possible. It uses existing nuclear because that's cheap and rational. It doesn't include building more nuclear, though because that would add trillions to the cost.
- a1371 4y agoNo we couldn't switch the whole planet to nuclear that easily. If you are a proponent of nuclear, we are living on the biggest nuclear power plant we would ever want, we just have lay some pipe and extract the heat. I'm talking about geothermal.
- adrianN 4y agoNuclear energy would have been a good idea about thirty or forty years ago. Today it is probably cheaper and faster to just build renewables.
- karaterobot 4y agoFlagging this because it's a rhetorical question.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y agoAbsolutely. Here's how the electricity mix changed in UK between 2000 and 2021: - renewables went from 3 to 40% - imports: 3.6 to 7.6% - nuclear: 22 to 14% - oil & gaz: 40.1 to 39.7% - coal: 31.7 to 1.9% Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls... (3rd chart)
- retrac 4y ago> If you believe climate change is an existential threat, how can you be against nuclear energy? Mainstream nuclear power technology is easily repurposed to the manufacture of nuclear weapons. A corollary is that a world with no nuclear reactors is a world incapable of making nuclear bombs. If one considers nuclear war an existential threat on the same scale or greater than climate change, it may seem paradoxical to construct the tools that would proliferate that risk to fight another existential risk.
- dmytrish 4y agoIt's unlikely that this Pandora box can be closed now. As long as any geopolitical rivalry exists, it takes one crazy dictator to make this into the prisoners dilemma scenario. The knowledge of physics cannot be unlearned easily, unless you imagine our future as a Dune-like world with strict prohibition on physics knowledge and experiments.
- usrn 4y agoNo it isn't. Refining Uranium to the purity usable for bombs is notoriously difficult, much harder than is needed for power generation.
- retrac 4y agoMost (all?) power reactor designs produce plutonium as a by-product, as with many small-scale reactors. For example, Canada built a small research reactor [1] in India in 1954, similar to many Canadian heavy water reactor designs. It was supplied with natural uranium. It was repurposed to manufacture several kilograms of plutonium per year. As I understand it, any country with power reactors and a decent industrial-engineering base - such as Finland, Canada, Japan, Argentina, etc. -- could, in principle, build a fission weapon on rather short notice. Separation of plutonium from reactor waste is a horribly nasty business, but not challenging in the same way as uranium enrichment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor
- gpm 4y ago> Mainstream nuclear power technology is easily repurposed to the manufacture of nuclear weapons. A corollary is that a world with no nuclear reactors is a world incapable of making nuclear bombs That doesn't follow, just because <X> is one way to do <Y> doesn't mean you can't do <Y> without doing <X>. It also doesn't really hold up in the real world - we had nuclear weapons before we had nuclear power plants. Admittedly we do refer to some of the devices used to make the first nuclear bombs as "reactors" (though they produced no electricity).
- chrisfosterelli 4y agoOne can hold any opinion you want, but I don't think it would be a very grounded opinion. Renewables like solar and wind should be the priority, but right now we're missing key pieces like 1) an effective power grid connecting the places that have solar and wind to the places that need power, and 2) a cost effective mechanism for smoothing over wind and solar's inconsistency. Coal and natural gas are incredibly effective in these respects. The plants can be built near the places the power is needed and / or in places where the required grid already exists, and they inherently produce steady power on demand. Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for these attributes that can supplement renewables in a low emission way today. Without it, or a series of technological breakthroughs in renewables, we'll just end up with an overall mix of renewables supplemented by coal and natural gas -- which isn't going to be enough. And it's not good to bet the world on the hope that we have some technological breakthrough. Given enough time, we might instead focus purely on solar and wind, but we don't have enough time. We need to get to zero net emissions as soon as possible, and we need to use all options available to us if we want to take climate change seriously.
- Bromeo 4y ago> 2) a cost effective mechanism for smoothing over wind and solar's inconsistency. > Coal and natural gas are incredibly effective in these respects. [...] Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for these attributes that can supplement renewables in a low emission way today. If I understand you right, you're saying that nuclear would be a feasible "drop-in" solution for coal/gas to solve the inconsistency problem of renewables. This is precisely /not/ the case, as nuclear power plants are extremely slow to adapt to sudden changes in the power grid (to get a feeling, a short research suggests that the shutdown time for a Pressurized Water Reactor, common e.g. in France, is about 90h [1]). Since crucially nuclear power cannot address the shortcomings of renewables, you still need a way to deal with high-frequency supply/demand changes (gas/coal/hydrogen/batteries/connected grid). Then you can decide whether you prefer covering the baseline with nuclear or renewables. You can choose to use both, but you could also argue that why bother with nuclear in the first place if you can "usually" cover all your needs with renewables + some dynamic technology and then cover the gaps (no wind no sun) by maxing out your dynamic technologies. This might have high CO2 emissions in the moment, but is still amortized small. Finally, electricitymap.org[2] gives a great overview of how the energy is composed in different countries. [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6944254B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6944254B2/en [2]: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
- timst4 4y agoAs much as I am for nuclear energy, your question is rather naive. The first mention of CO2 warming was made in the early 1900s and the research was definitive by 1981 [0]. The reality is that there was a coordinated disinformation and obfuscation campaign made by Exxon, Shell, BP, et al. They sacrificed our planets Goldilocks zone for 50 years of corporate profit. Certainly grab your pitchfork. This is a human atrocity that will soon trump all others. But the ones you should be skewering are sitting in boardrooms right now figuring out how to squeeze the last few dollars from our planet before wet bulb temperatures reach 50C. [0] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html
- devnull3 4y agoI don't know how much nuclear reactors have advanced. But I can understand the fear in the someone's back of their mind: What if something goes wrong? I see this risk = Fallout x Probability. Even though the proponents argue that the tech is much more safer, the fallout is so huge and generational that its it neutralises the low probability of any accidents. PS: I am neither for or against the nuclear tech.
- josephcsible 4y agoBut wouldn't even another Chernobyl-scale disaster be a drop in the bucket compared to what the climate doomsday cult says will happen if we don't stop burning coal and gas?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- curiousgal 4y agoRelevant: the intermittency of solar and wind production vs nuclear, in France over a small period of time. https://mobile.twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1471538237739085839 https://mobile.twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1471538237739...
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y agoThis tweet is a joke. Tristan knows perfectly that France did everything in its power to deploy renewables in the worst possible way (so as to prove that we must always rely on nuclear energy and support France's nuclear giants). We have a word in French "foisennement" (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foisonnement#En_.C3.A9nerg.C3.A9tique https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foisonnement#En_.C3.A9nerg.C3....): although it may not be possible to rely only on renewables without storage, it's also easy not to have such intermittent sources. Wind and solar compensate one another quite well when the grid is designed for that. As we speak, one out of two French nuclear plant is offline. We had to restart coal plants recently. Even RTE (>50% owned by EDF, a nuclear giant) says going 100% renewables by 2050 in France is both feasible and affordable: https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospectives/bilan-previsionnel-2050-futurs-energetiques https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...
- hprotagonist 4y agoIt's real hard to argue against that kind of energy density.
- ss48 4y agohttp://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-will-our-supplies-of-uranium-and-thorium-last/ http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-w... Nuclear as it exists is a finite energy source. We could have been in a similar situation if we doubled down on nuclear decades ago. At some point, we will need to transition to nuclear systems built with different technologies, if they are feasable, which is still questionable, or other renewable energy sources, like solar and wind. No solution is going to be a magic bullet that solves the effect of climate change because it is the outcome stemming from several technological and social limitations.
- josephcsible 4y agoIt's only finite in the technical sense. Unless you do something really stupid like seal off "waste" that could still have a bunch more energy easily extracted, we have enough fissile material available for nuclear to be our sole energy source until the Sun blows up (which makes solar "finite" too, btw): https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
- andrewla 4y agoI would say this is firmly in "Modest Proposal" territory, in the sense that the solution proposed would certainly contribute to solving the problem, but has enough negative effects that it doesn't make sense. As a parallel example, it's clear that if we killed off 50% of the earth's population we would substantially reduce the environmental impact of human activity on the climate. Yet nobody would seriously consider this as a solution to the climate problem, and there is no one proposing this and nobody would support it. But how can you be against this, if climate change in an existential threat? Frankly I find it difficult to believe that there are still nuclear supporters out there. Fukushima was thankfully somewhat small in impact, but let's not lose sight of the fact that there was a full-on containment failure -- an actual honest-to-god meltdown. I have been assured so many times by so many nuclear experts and proponents that this sort of failure mode is simply not possible anymore. Given that the impact of a major containment failure can be extremely dramatic, with death tolls in the millions, what makes people think that we understand the engineering problem enough?
- n8cpdx 4y agoFossil fuels kill way more people, it’s just not dramatic so you don’t notice. https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
- andrewla 4y agoYou're speaking empirically, not in terms of risk exposure. We're basically one major containment failure that is less lucky than Fukushima to completely invert those numbers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bryanlarsen 4y agoNuclear power is too expensive and takes too long to build. Renewables + storage is about 1/3 the price of nuclear and a new plant can go from proposal to delivering power in under 2 years. Nuclear takes more than 20 years. I'd rather have 3x as much CO2 reduction per dollar 2 years from now than 1x as much 20 years from now. Even as little as 5 years ago nuclear was a good choice. But renewables and storage have overtaken it.
- sofixa 4y ago> Renewables + storage is about 1/3 the price of nuclear and a new plant can go from proposal to delivering power in under 2 years What storage that can provide the same availability and stability as a nuclear power plant? There is no such deployment today, and many of those planned are based on theoretical designs, and are thus with theoretical costs.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoRenewables and storage are anti-fragile. Constantly fluctuating, their capacity to deal with interruptions is regularly tested and measured. They're also small, so any individual failure is easy to substitute. Nuclear plants are quasi-stable. They can work properly for years, lulling their users into a false sense of security. But they do have occasional failures, resulting in massive outages. A solar plant can withstand a Russian missile strike. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/02/ukrainian-solar-plant-partly-resumes-operations-after-bombing/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/02/ukrainian-solar-plant...
- keneda7 4y agoAny chance you have anything to support renewables + storage generating the same amount of power as a nuclear power plant are 1/3 the price? Preferable I would like to see reports that include all the cost of mining and processing for the battery material as well as how the used renewables sources are going to be disposed of. Also as you are claiming nukes are take to long to build can you provide evidence of how long it would take to build and install enough renewables to output 1GW of power at all time? You would have to have massive battery farms to do this, so those must be included too. You claim it takes under 2 years to get a renewable up yet a quick google search returns taking between 16-20 weeks for 1MW so 1GW (average output of one reactor) would take 16 weeks * 1000 so 16000 weeks. Which is 307 years.
- cameronh90 4y agoFor nuclear to be viable globally, which is necessary to solve climate change, it would mean trusting other, far less developed and unstable countries to build and operate nuclear power plants. That is something that even the US, the USSR and Japan have all occasionally failed to do correctly with significant consequences. The UK has a ton of hot nuclear waste that is still improperly stored due political issues. I don't think there's political appetite for expanding the set of countries with access to fission. Solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels etc. are imperfect, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where a mistake can make a significant chunk of the earth uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
- aylons 4y agoBrazil, Argentina, India, South Africa and Mexico have been operating nuclear power plants for decades, with no major events. They are fewer than the US, USSR and Japan, but they are very capable of operating advanced technology. Advanced technology, specially the most recent and in this case, safer, is held from these countries for reasons has little to do with fear of a significant chunk being uninhabitable for hundreds of years. Quite on the contrary, if fear of a big chunk of the countries being uninhabitable had anything to do in this matter, rich nations would be financing nuclear power plants to the poor to prevent sea level rise.
- fgeiger 4y agoYes, you can certainly be both. Climate change is an immediate existential threat as you say yourself. Seeing nuclear as the solution to that threat is very shortsighted IMHO. Many commenters mention the threat of accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima. That is one aspect, yes. However, on the grand scale it seems as if humanity has limited the risk for these kind of accidents. The much bigger problem with nuclear energy is that humanity has not yet figured out how to handle the waste on the short term. Let alone on a time scale that is beyond human comprehension. I was quite impressed by the thorough analysis in this article: https://bostonreview.net/articles/is-nuclear-power-our-best-bet-against-climate-change/ https://bostonreview.net/articles/is-nuclear-power-our-best-... Piling more nuclear waste on to the already unmanageable heap is irresponsible. That is why being against nuclear energy as the stop gap solution for climate change is not only reasonable but also responsible.
- josephcsible 4y ago> The much bigger problem with nuclear energy is that humanity has not yet figured out how to handle the waste on the short term. Let alone on a time scale that is beyond human comprehension. Yes we have. Breeder reactors. We just need to start actually using them.
- pjc50 4y agoBreeder reactors turn U238 into various isotopes of plutonium, but there are other kinds of nuclear waste, both in terms of isotopes of spent fuel and normal materials that have been contaminated.
- josephcsible 4y agoWikipedia says "A breeder reactor is not restricted to using recycled plutonium and uranium. It can employ all the actinides". Which isotopes won't work in any breeder reactor, and also have half-lives in the window that makes long-term storage a concern?
- fgeiger 4y agoWhy are they not used yet? Are they safe to operate? Are they commercially viable? There are many promises for technical solutions. Yet, none of them are actually used today for a myriad of reasons.
- pjc50 4y agoA brief history of green opposition to nuclear power will show the following points, which should not be handwaved away: - nuclear weapons. This is where Greenpeace actually got their start and where the "peace" comes from in their name. Most uranium designs require enrichment to some level and can also be used to produce plutonium. This is not a dead consideration; see Iraq's controversial civilian nuclear programme, and the ongoing war between a very large nuclear-armed rogue state and the proxy forces of the nuclear-armed West. Are you comfortable with a nuclear power plant in every country? - terrorist and other attacks. The Ukraine war has seen fighting around Chernobyl, and actual shelling of Zaporizhzhia. https://theconversation.com/russian-shelling-caused-a-fire-at-a-ukrainian-nuclear-power-plant-how-close-did-we-actually-come-to-disaster-178549 https://theconversation.com/russian-shelling-caused-a-fire-a... - nuclear waste. Again a big issue for Greenpeace in the 80s; admittedly this has massively improved. Note that there is both "high level" waste which can be reused as fuel, "high level" waste which cannot be used as fuel, and a much larger amount of contaminated normal materials. Some of which are less radioactive than naturally occurring rocks. - choose your poison: CO2 is a slowly rising problem. Nuclear power plants are a "black swan" distribution; mostly perfectly safe, but the disasters that have happened have affected huge areas. An additional practical consideration: - cost and time overruns. Hinkley Point C is projected to have a 50% cost overrun and to be completed 17 years from its initial announcement. Even if we were to decide to roll out nuclear power, we must keep up the rate of renewables buildout (now considerably cheaper) because it will take decades for the plants to actually be built. I do think the SMR concept is worth giving another go. nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers are already small modular reactors with great safety records. We must not bet on it alone. Thorium seems to be a nerd trap; nobody seems to be trying this commercially, and since it can't be used for weapons there's no government subsidy as there was for the original buildout of uranium based plants. Molten salt has unsolvable materials science / plumbing issues: it's too corrosive.
- stefantalpalaru 4y ago> nuclear waste. Again a big issue for Greenpeace in the 80s; admittedly this has massively improved. Did it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
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- sharikous 4y agoLooking at the videos of Russian soldiers shelling the Zhaporizha nuclear plant made me more aware of the downsides of nuclear power. I am still in favor but I see there are just huge non preventable dangers, mostly dependent on political or competency failures, something that just happens in human society
- warrenm 4y agoThat's akin to being worried a biological or chemical attack would be launched by poisoning water resovoirs
- sto_hristo 4y agoRenewables are no match and no substitution to nuclear energy. No matter how much investment you dump into renewables, their energy density will remain inferior and sooner or later you will hit a threshold where, like it not, you will switch to full nuclear, because calculator batteries can't power industries. Nature has nothing better to offer (according to our current knowledge of physics) and that is not an opinion, but pure reality. People don't want to accept this fact in the same way flat earthers don't want to accept that Earth is spheroid. They want to live in their imaginary worlds simply because they're insane. But, today, if we were all 100% nuclear, you still have to deal with the fact that battery tech is inadequate to replace fossil. I believe that once a miracle happens such that a superior battery magically becomes trivially available to anyone, demand for power and pure market forces will cut the throat of renewables and society will completely shift to nuclear.
- josephcsible 4y agoIt makes about as much sense as both taking automotive fatalities seriously and being against seat belts.
- Konohamaru 4y agoThe emphasis on nuclear is a game the fossil fuel industry is playing. They know it will take a lot of time to build nuclear power plants, which means more time for them to extract $$$ from oil.
- yellowapple 4y agoThe opposition to nuclear is also a game the fossil fuel industry is playing. They know that renewables have a very hard time with replacing coal/gas/oil, and that a successful transition to nuclear represents an existential threat to the fossil fuel industry.
- Konohamaru 4y agoThe problem is that the technology for nuclear power is the same as the technology for nuclear weapons. Do you want every country to become a nuclear state?
- yellowapple 4y agoIf it means decoupling energy production from further destruction of our planet? Sure, why not? Even assuming that "the technology for nuclear power is the same as the technology for nuclear weapons" (which is patently and blatantly false), MAD seems to have prevented global nuclear annihilation for a good 50 years or so, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoThis again? Nuclear is not competitive with solar/wind on currrent LCOE, existing nuclear is basically good for base and peak load leveling, just like gas turbine. And solar/wind is still increasing in economies of scale. Current nuclear is not competitive and won't be, and there is no 10-year target price that any next-gen nuclear can reliably target without a ton of boondoggle incentives. Same with fusion. In previous threads the nuclear people warn that all the nuclear engineers will age out if nuclear plants keep being decommissioned. This is a good thing. Nuclear and next-gen are saddled with military who-cares-the-consequences-and-risks thinking combined with NIMBY regs that make it TOO difficult to approve. The hulking concrete dome designs that are what you're stuck with have fundamental design problems. The "industry" needs to be swept away. In 10 years time, solar/wind/battery will stabilize long-term, and nuclear can consider designs that may be competitive. Whatever the viability of LFTR engineering wise, this is the promise/advantage that any "next gen nuclear" needs to accomodate: - breeds uses all the nuclear fuel, and can reprocess old waste (LFTR can do this) - is meltdown proof (LFTR has the plug that will melt if reaction temp gets too hot and then the liquid disperses and neutron economy falls stalling the reaction) - is scalable/compact (LFTR's test reactor was allegedly closet sized) - has no shadow or cross-purpose design for nuclear weapons isotopes (LFTR is allegedly proliferation resistant). I suspect that PWR and solid fuel rod reactors "won" because the military got their isotopes. In order to be palatable to the public, you need the LFTR capabilities, whether you do that with pebbles + reprocessing or some other scheme, but you NEED that full fuel use and closed cycle. All these stories/posts are from "old guard nuclear" that handwave all the solid fuel rod design problems and dangers away. Honestly, good riddance to these people.
- LatteLazy 4y ago1. It's horrendously expensive. 2. Out current political systems make waste management impossible.
- summerlight 4y agoYes. This is a complicated economical and geopolitical issue. There are several points why nuclear fission energy cannot dominate the market. The most significant offender here is the fact that nuclear fission can be arbitrarily expensive if you want to make it as safe as possible which makes it a partially political one as well; there's no single consensus on what is its levelised cost since the large fraction of it comes from upfront and decommissioning cost and we don't really have enough data points there. The equation gets more interesting since renewable energies have been becoming cheaper over the decade while the mainstream of nuclear fission energy technologies still generate nuclear waste which either can be repurposed into weapons or become your headache for an order of thousand years (in fact it's both). This is why many of the next generation reactors are focusing on reducing/eliminating those costs. We all know that nuclear energies are extremely competitive regarding fuel costs, operational costs and carbon emission. The issue is the large question marks I mentioned above so everyone in the industry is working on that. Remember, energy production is largely an infrastructural (thus political) issue, so public support is an essential part of decision making. Hopefully, there hasn't been much investment in nuclear fission technologies for a while, so we might have plenty of headroom to eliminate these uncertainties.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoDepends on what "against" means, but nuclear is likely to be a footnote in future energy history compared with wind and solar so if you mostly talk about nuclear as an excuse to repeat lies you heard about renewables from climate change deniers then you're not helping. If we're breaking out the time machine to restore past wrongs then starting earlier on renewables that we know now are the future would help more than nuclear. As would preventing fossil fuel interests capturing the governments around the world. But nuclear is cool tech. Right up there with pumped storage, geothermal, good insulation, heat pumps, EVs and carbon taxes as part of the family of cool tech that will help avoid climate catastrophe. Sadly nuclear and to an extent carbon taxes seem to be used as a stick to beat people creating real change, doing the old "perfect is the enemy of the good" trick. Sad really, and will only tarnish their reputations in the long term.
- nachexnachex 4y agoI'm against it because nuclear waste. IMHO it's a false dichotomy to think that if I understand climate change to be an existential threat, then I must be in favour of nuclear. Other renewables combined with less energy usage could be my preference.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y agoEvery graph and book i've read have shown the nuclear is extremely expensive nad takes years to come online. It frankly no longer competes with natural gas, solar, wind, geothermal or any other renewable energy resources. So... thats why i'm against it; It's not economical.
- imtringued 4y ago>We could have switched most of the planet to pure nuclear energy decades ago. Fission isn't Fusion. You can't run the entire planet on nuclear power.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoWhy not? There is some need for chemical fuel but you can synthesize it if need be.
- josephcsible 4y ago> You can't run the entire planet on nuclear power. Yes you can: https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
- 28304283409234 4y agoYes. Because this isn't an energy crisis. It is a consumption crisis. Atomic energy will be seen as a free pass to consume more and more, worstening climate change.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoThe green route to dooming civilization. Atomic energy isn't going to cause climate change. The total power we consume is a drop in the bucket compared to the solar incident energy.
- t0bia_s 4y agoI dont think climate change is existencial threat. I'm fine with nuclear energy. Existencial threat are impotent goverments and greedy politics.
- senectus1 4y agowhile emissions favorable to climate change, Nuclear is not environmentally friendly and I include the massively environmentally unfriendly process needed to mine uranium. It uses TONNES of clean water, and turns it toxic as well. It might be an answer to climate change but its no "green energy"