6 ms·

> It's way easier. Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? > It has been working fine since the 1950s. Oh, yeah, just fine, not a

> It's way easier. Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? > It has been working fine since the 1950s. Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... > Waste problem is solved The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? > net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution And we fight wars for peace too. > It's zero carbon Not if you count the mining aspect. But even if you didn't: Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more, and take a lot less time to set up. The power output stability benefit is wearing thin.

mwint 4y ago
Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine. With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.
- nine_k 4y ago
  France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries. (But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    >After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal. https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-waste-france-long-short-game/ https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w... Yes, short term they manage it. When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.
    - danaris 4y ago
      When we are discussing climate change, our concern is not long term. If we could build the nuclear reactors now, keep the spent fuel (whether or not we're going to reuse it in breeder reactors) as safe as we know how, and solve the long-term problem later, then we'd have a much better chance of there being a later to worry about.
      - cyanydeez 4y ago
        Climate change is both. People proposing nuclear energy as this wonderful overlooked strategy are not consider why it's consistently self limiting. It's not a "solved" problem inthe long term
    - dodobirdlord 4y ago
      The long term plan is to reprocess it, which is why we need to keep it around in the meantime. If we just wanted to get rid of it that would be trivially easy. But we don’t want that because we know in future we’re going to want to get it back from wherever we put it.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        They've given up on fast reactors. Reprocessing with thermal reactors doesn't actually solve the problem, as MOX fuel cannot then be further reprocessed and used in thermal reactors again. You still end up with all the fission products, and now the higher actinides from spent MOX, to deal with. Having said that, dry casks are a perfectly cromulent way to deal with spent fuel.
        dodobirdlord 4y ago
        The main motivation to not reprocess fuel was nuclear nonproliferation, because it frees up the plutonium for nuclear weapons. But on the off chance that governments ever want to build a giant pile of nuclear weapons it’s sensible to not get rid of the nuclear waste, since if it ever turns out you do want it again it’s very expensive and time consuming to produce. Since you’ve already gone to all of the effort of mining the uranium and producing a bunch of plutonium, best to just keep it around somewhere in case you ever do want it for some reason.
- freetime2 4y ago
  They already tried this in Nevada and failed for political reasons [1]. Dumping nuclear waste in the desert may be a non issue to you (and to me as well), but to a lot of people - particularly people who actually live in Nevada - it is a very serious issue. The question of how to dispose of nuclear waste - in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed - remains an unsolved issue in the US. And the current policy is to basically just ignore the waste. It’s being stored for the time being at reactor sites in steel and concrete casks - which I don’t think anyone would argue is a sufficient solution. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    All you're saying here is, "people object to it." Or is there something more substantive? > in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed No, that is basically NIMBY. Of course some residents won't like nuclear waste buried underground, 100 miles from them in a place they'll never go and where no one lives. I don't know how to not sound callous about that.
    - freetime2 4y ago
      Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”.
      - dodobirdlord 4y ago
        Many people also hate renewable energy for ideological reasons. People can be persuaded, or, in a democracy, simply outvoted by a critical mass of supporters. Nuclear power has been losing the propaganda war for decades in the United States, but that’s not a reason to give up on it forever.
      - light_hue_1 4y ago
        > Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”. We do this all the time. People object to living next to the airport. They object to new roads. They object to schools being built, rail lines, bus stops, even hospitals. Yet, we weigh the pros for society against the cons for specific people. That's why we have a country with any infrastructure. If we simply gave in whenever someone said no, we would all be dead in an empty field.
robotresearcher 4y ago
> > It's way easier. > Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? 'Late and over-budget' sounds easier than 'has never been demonstrated'.
acidburnNSA 4y ago
Groan here we go again. > Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution. https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution > The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? I mentioned the solutions but didn't provide a link. here you go. https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html > And we fight wars for peace too. See the literature https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html > Not if you count the mining aspect. Nuclear has rock bottom full lifecycle carbon emissions of 12 gCO₂-eq/kWh, including mining. C.f. 11 for wind, 40 for solar, 490 for gas, 800+ for coal. Hard to beat. > Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more You're comparing the worst US nuclear builds with wind/solar without storage, transmission, overbuilds needed for storage, etc. LCOE is not an appropriate metric for systems costs. Never was. Lazard are a bunch of kooks. Look at Hualong One costs. Details on cost comparison for deeply decarbonized grid here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006
- jmyeet 4y ago
  > Groan here we go again. Yeah, we do with more pro-nuclear propaganda and outright falsehoods (again). > Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution. No, it doesn't. Here's the exact quote from your source: > The combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution is associated with 7 million premature deaths annually. Not "die from" but "is associated with". What does that mean? "Associated with" here means "reduces the life expectancy", basically. That's a far cry from "dies from". The primary relationship with mortality seems to come from particulates. Some of these are natural (eg sand in deserts), some of it isn't (eg cooking fires). It also includes motor vehicle exhausts. To give you a sense of the level of bullshit going on here, other conditions are getting attributed to air pollution [1]: > They linked nine causes of death with the pollution: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer and pneumonia. One study estimates 100,000 Americans die every year from air pollution [2]. That just doesn't pass the smell test and shows you what's going on: it's attributing air pollution to certain medical conditions and then counting deaths from those conditions are air pollution deaths. Exaggerations and outright lies do your cause a massive disservice. Pro-nuclear propaganda doesn't address these issues: 1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies; 2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later. If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China? I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/us-air-pollution-deaths-study-jama https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/us-air-p... [2]: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-08/100-000-americans-die-from-air-pollution-study-finds https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-0...
jimbob45 4y ago
The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? The waste is completely solid and can be safely buried and forgotten. Is that ignorance?
jcranmer 4y ago
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... How many industries are there where the list of notable accidents has such few fatalities? I mean, have you actually looked at the accidents on that list? The vast majority of them are basically garden-variety industrial accidents--and there's only so many because people are minded to exhaustively list every mishap that occurs at a nuclear power plant in a way that they're not for, say, a coal power plant.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Well, Chernobyl will likely end up killing about as many people as have ever died in a commercial jet crash.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  Probability of accident * Expected damage of accident = Expected damage of activity/project. Nuclear has had non-negligible probability of accidents, including dangerous accidents. The expected damage of the dangerous accidents is millions dead and injured, and potential destruction of very wide ecosystems. An accident in a coal power plant mean a bunch of coal burning. Which is bad, but several orders of magnitude less. ... And that's all while ignoring the question of waste management; and damage to reactors due to attacks at wartime. Now, has technology improved in recent decades? I'm sure it has, to some extent. But the credibility and trustworthiness of the organizations building nuclear power plants has not improved, certainly not to the level at which lay-people - like myself - are willing to take their word for it. And that includes key world state governments.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    At what point do we observe no accident causing millions of deaths or injuries and adjust our "expected damage" calculation? Decades? Centuries? We can look past the damage caused by an accident at a coal plant and just count the damage caused by ordinary routine operation of coal plants and quickly reach damage figures that eclipse every nuclear accident in history combined.
GoodbyeMrChips 4y ago
pfdietz 4y ago
Fission reactors can be easier than fusion reactors, and still go over time and hugely over budget. This just means fusion reactors are likely to also go over time and budget.

mwint 4y ago

Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine. With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.

nine_k 4y ago
France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries. (But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  >After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal. https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-waste-france-long-short-game/ https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w... Yes, short term they manage it. When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.
  - danaris 4y ago
    When we are discussing climate change, our concern is not long term. If we could build the nuclear reactors now, keep the spent fuel (whether or not we're going to reuse it in breeder reactors) as safe as we know how, and solve the long-term problem later, then we'd have a much better chance of there being a later to worry about.
    - cyanydeez 4y ago
      Climate change is both. People proposing nuclear energy as this wonderful overlooked strategy are not consider why it's consistently self limiting. It's not a "solved" problem inthe long term
  - dodobirdlord 4y ago
    The long term plan is to reprocess it, which is why we need to keep it around in the meantime. If we just wanted to get rid of it that would be trivially easy. But we don’t want that because we know in future we’re going to want to get it back from wherever we put it.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      They've given up on fast reactors. Reprocessing with thermal reactors doesn't actually solve the problem, as MOX fuel cannot then be further reprocessed and used in thermal reactors again. You still end up with all the fission products, and now the higher actinides from spent MOX, to deal with. Having said that, dry casks are a perfectly cromulent way to deal with spent fuel.
      - dodobirdlord 4y ago
        The main motivation to not reprocess fuel was nuclear nonproliferation, because it frees up the plutonium for nuclear weapons. But on the off chance that governments ever want to build a giant pile of nuclear weapons it’s sensible to not get rid of the nuclear waste, since if it ever turns out you do want it again it’s very expensive and time consuming to produce. Since you’ve already gone to all of the effort of mining the uranium and producing a bunch of plutonium, best to just keep it around somewhere in case you ever do want it for some reason.
freetime2 4y ago
They already tried this in Nevada and failed for political reasons [1]. Dumping nuclear waste in the desert may be a non issue to you (and to me as well), but to a lot of people - particularly people who actually live in Nevada - it is a very serious issue. The question of how to dispose of nuclear waste - in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed - remains an unsolved issue in the US. And the current policy is to basically just ignore the waste. It’s being stored for the time being at reactor sites in steel and concrete casks - which I don’t think anyone would argue is a sufficient solution. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  All you're saying here is, "people object to it." Or is there something more substantive? > in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed No, that is basically NIMBY. Of course some residents won't like nuclear waste buried underground, 100 miles from them in a place they'll never go and where no one lives. I don't know how to not sound callous about that.
  - freetime2 4y ago
    Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”.
    - dodobirdlord 4y ago
      Many people also hate renewable energy for ideological reasons. People can be persuaded, or, in a democracy, simply outvoted by a critical mass of supporters. Nuclear power has been losing the propaganda war for decades in the United States, but that’s not a reason to give up on it forever.
    - light_hue_1 4y ago
      > Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”. We do this all the time. People object to living next to the airport. They object to new roads. They object to schools being built, rail lines, bus stops, even hospitals. Yet, we weigh the pros for society against the cons for specific people. That's why we have a country with any infrastructure. If we simply gave in whenever someone said no, we would all be dead in an empty field.

robotresearcher 4y ago

> > It's way easier. > Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? 'Late and over-budget' sounds easier than 'has never been demonstrated'.

acidburnNSA 4y ago

Groan here we go again. > Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution. https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution > The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? I mentioned the solutions but didn't provide a link. here you go. https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html > And we fight wars for peace too. See the literature https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html > Not if you count the mining aspect. Nuclear has rock bottom full lifecycle carbon emissions of 12 gCO₂-eq/kWh, including mining. C.f. 11 for wind, 40 for solar, 490 for gas, 800+ for coal. Hard to beat. > Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more You're comparing the worst US nuclear builds with wind/solar without storage, transmission, overbuilds needed for storage, etc. LCOE is not an appropriate metric for systems costs. Never was. Lazard are a bunch of kooks. Look at Hualong One costs. Details on cost comparison for deeply decarbonized grid here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006

jmyeet 4y ago
> Groan here we go again. Yeah, we do with more pro-nuclear propaganda and outright falsehoods (again). > Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution. No, it doesn't. Here's the exact quote from your source: > The combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution is associated with 7 million premature deaths annually. Not "die from" but "is associated with". What does that mean? "Associated with" here means "reduces the life expectancy", basically. That's a far cry from "dies from". The primary relationship with mortality seems to come from particulates. Some of these are natural (eg sand in deserts), some of it isn't (eg cooking fires). It also includes motor vehicle exhausts. To give you a sense of the level of bullshit going on here, other conditions are getting attributed to air pollution [1]: > They linked nine causes of death with the pollution: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer and pneumonia. One study estimates 100,000 Americans die every year from air pollution [2]. That just doesn't pass the smell test and shows you what's going on: it's attributing air pollution to certain medical conditions and then counting deaths from those conditions are air pollution deaths. Exaggerations and outright lies do your cause a massive disservice. Pro-nuclear propaganda doesn't address these issues: 1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies; 2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later. If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China? I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/us-air-pollution-deaths-study-jama https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/us-air-p... [2]: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-08/100-000-americans-die-from-air-pollution-study-finds https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-0...

jimbob45 4y ago

The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? The waste is completely solid and can be safely buried and forgotten. Is that ignorance?

jcranmer 4y ago

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... How many industries are there where the list of notable accidents has such few fatalities? I mean, have you actually looked at the accidents on that list? The vast majority of them are basically garden-variety industrial accidents--and there's only so many because people are minded to exhaustively list every mishap that occurs at a nuclear power plant in a way that they're not for, say, a coal power plant.

pfdietz 4y ago
Well, Chernobyl will likely end up killing about as many people as have ever died in a commercial jet crash.
einpoklum 4y ago
Probability of accident * Expected damage of accident = Expected damage of activity/project. Nuclear has had non-negligible probability of accidents, including dangerous accidents. The expected damage of the dangerous accidents is millions dead and injured, and potential destruction of very wide ecosystems. An accident in a coal power plant mean a bunch of coal burning. Which is bad, but several orders of magnitude less. ... And that's all while ignoring the question of waste management; and damage to reactors due to attacks at wartime. Now, has technology improved in recent decades? I'm sure it has, to some extent. But the credibility and trustworthiness of the organizations building nuclear power plants has not improved, certainly not to the level at which lay-people - like myself - are willing to take their word for it. And that includes key world state governments.
- tptacek 4y ago
  At what point do we observe no accident causing millions of deaths or injuries and adjust our "expected damage" calculation? Decades? Centuries? We can look past the damage caused by an accident at a coal plant and just count the damage caused by ordinary routine operation of coal plants and quickly reach damage figures that eclipse every nuclear accident in history combined.

GoodbyeMrChips 4y ago

pfdietz 4y ago

Fission reactors can be easier than fusion reactors, and still go over time and hugely over budget. This just means fusion reactors are likely to also go over time and budget.