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> I'm in the anti-nuclear camp. Mainly because I think the inertia around current consumption patterns is too strong to overcome, so adding a lot of nuclear to

> I'm in the anti-nuclear camp. Mainly because I think the inertia around current consumption patterns is too strong to overcome, so adding a lot of nuclear to the mix would make things a lot more dangerous without making things much better. Adding lots of nuclear would vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the single biggest threat to humanity and life on earth. > This is how I think about the danger of nuclear power. Imagine a really safe nuclear power plant. How often will it fail? Let's say, once every 100,000 years. Assuming this probability is uniformly distributed over the 100,000 year time period, it has a 1/100,000 chance of failing in any given year. A failure seems pretty unlikely. But, there are something like 450 operating nuclear power plants in the world. The chance of a single power plant failing in a year is then 1 - (99,999/100,000)^450 which is around 0.5%. That's starting to look a lot more likely now. After 30 years, there is a 78% chance of a nuclear power plant failing somewhere on Earth. > Now what's even more interesting is if you look back on historic nuclear power accidents at INES level 6 or higher. 1957 - Kyshtym disaster, 1986 - Chernobyl, 2011 - Fukushima. And of course there have been other close calls (e.g. Three Mile Island). The cadence of these accidents seems to match the data from the thought experiment above. Yes nuclear power plants fail at some rate. Contrary to the pro-fossil-fuel / green propaganda, even quite serious failures are just not very serious in the scheme of things. A single coal mine collapse will easily kill many more people than all the direct deaths attributed to nuclear accidents combined. As for indirect, coal mines (EDIT: that should be coal power stations) will pump out chemicals and radiation that kill vast numbers of people _when they are operating normally without any failure_. Other fossil fuel plants less bad than coal, but still very damaging. EDIT: references - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-pollution-responsible-for-1-in-5-deaths-worldwide/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p..., https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Prevents-Deaths-Causes.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Pr...

Schroedingersat 4y ago
> Adding lots of nuclear would vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the single biggest threat to humanity and life on earth. Does it though, or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade? Let's say there's a trillion dollars to spend today. What is the net reduction in emissions between now and 2040 achieved by spending it on nuclear (hint: if the project takes as long as most in the west do it's negative)? What is the net reduction achieved in the same timespan by spending it on renewables? Even if there weren't a bunch of other problems (and there are) it's like claiming you need to stop and build a new engine so your car can go faster on the last lap of a race.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  > Does it though, Yes. See France, for example. > or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade? Nuclear is the real solution. The past 40 years of people alleging nuclear is too late and there are magical other solutions that should be employed instead is what has been propping up fossil fuels for decades.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    The Hinkley C is a real project which is under construction in the west right now. It's prpjected to take 19 years since approval and 10 years since construction began and cost 26 billion pounds for a nameplate 3200MW capacity. Taking the ratio between nameplate and net for its predecessor of about 62%, we can expect around 11.8 pounds per watt. This does not include operating costs or the decommissioning when the taxpayer gets left holding the ball, or any of the other hidden costs such as the externalised costs of security and publicly funded administration overhead. Nuclear has a zero or even negative economic learning rate so there is no reason to believe any additional plants will be cheaper. You personally can go buy a 1kW net system for less money per watt right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI It will pay itself off before any nuclear project started now even opens. By that time batteries will be a third of the price and solar panels will have halved. Wind is anti-correlated with sun and you can purchase a 10kW wind turbine right now for around 6000 pounds. Put 5kW of nameplate wind capacity into a copy of the same storage system and you have another 2kW average with lower price and even less downtime. A hydrogen electrolyzer you can purchase right now costs $1000/kW, a 1kW fuel cell is around $4000 and low pressure hydrogen tanks are on the order of $20/kWh. These make weeks or even months of storage possible. Nuclear is so expensive that even the fudged numbers of a gigawatt scale project with outcomes over a decade away do not compare favourably to end user retail prices of a system you can install in a month. Any argument about the fission plant running longer are invalid, because the system outlined only has to make 9p/kWh (the same 9p that Hinkley C is being guaranteed via taxpayer funds even when electricity predictably falls below 4p/kwh wholesale) to pay itself back with enough left over for replacement in the two decades before it opens. So to answer my question for you: money spent on a nuclear project will have a net increase in CO2 before 2040 because it will require concrete and steel and produce no power. The same money spent on renewables and storage will produce net-zero carbon energy for at least 10 years of that timeframe. It is only when we have enough renewables that the gas backup stays off even when there is 10% of the average solar or wind that we should consider diverting funds to nuclear.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

> Adding lots of nuclear would vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the single biggest threat to humanity and life on earth. Does it though, or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade? Let's say there's a trillion dollars to spend today. What is the net reduction in emissions between now and 2040 achieved by spending it on nuclear (hint: if the project takes as long as most in the west do it's negative)? What is the net reduction achieved in the same timespan by spending it on renewables? Even if there weren't a bunch of other problems (and there are) it's like claiming you need to stop and build a new engine so your car can go faster on the last lap of a race.

throwawaylinux 4y ago
> Does it though, Yes. See France, for example. > or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade? Nuclear is the real solution. The past 40 years of people alleging nuclear is too late and there are magical other solutions that should be employed instead is what has been propping up fossil fuels for decades.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  The Hinkley C is a real project which is under construction in the west right now. It's prpjected to take 19 years since approval and 10 years since construction began and cost 26 billion pounds for a nameplate 3200MW capacity. Taking the ratio between nameplate and net for its predecessor of about 62%, we can expect around 11.8 pounds per watt. This does not include operating costs or the decommissioning when the taxpayer gets left holding the ball, or any of the other hidden costs such as the externalised costs of security and publicly funded administration overhead. Nuclear has a zero or even negative economic learning rate so there is no reason to believe any additional plants will be cheaper. You personally can go buy a 1kW net system for less money per watt right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI It will pay itself off before any nuclear project started now even opens. By that time batteries will be a third of the price and solar panels will have halved. Wind is anti-correlated with sun and you can purchase a 10kW wind turbine right now for around 6000 pounds. Put 5kW of nameplate wind capacity into a copy of the same storage system and you have another 2kW average with lower price and even less downtime. A hydrogen electrolyzer you can purchase right now costs $1000/kW, a 1kW fuel cell is around $4000 and low pressure hydrogen tanks are on the order of $20/kWh. These make weeks or even months of storage possible. Nuclear is so expensive that even the fudged numbers of a gigawatt scale project with outcomes over a decade away do not compare favourably to end user retail prices of a system you can install in a month. Any argument about the fission plant running longer are invalid, because the system outlined only has to make 9p/kWh (the same 9p that Hinkley C is being guaranteed via taxpayer funds even when electricity predictably falls below 4p/kwh wholesale) to pay itself back with enough left over for replacement in the two decades before it opens. So to answer my question for you: money spent on a nuclear project will have a net increase in CO2 before 2040 because it will require concrete and steel and produce no power. The same money spent on renewables and storage will produce net-zero carbon energy for at least 10 years of that timeframe. It is only when we have enough renewables that the gas backup stays off even when there is 10% of the average solar or wind that we should consider diverting funds to nuclear.