5 ms·

Cost always comes up around nuclear, and maybe justifiably so, but I think it shouldn't be such a large factor. The U.S. for example could easily afford this.

Cost always comes up around nuclear, and maybe justifiably so, but I think it shouldn't be such a large factor. The U.S. for example could easily afford this. We just passed a $700B bill for clean energy and heavily subsidize oil & gas. What matters more imo is reliability and energy security and in those respects nuclear makes me a lot more confident than renewables such as solar or wind.

stevenjgarner 4y ago
The problem with all these costs is that we only get to know the real costs in hindsight. With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change. With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation. I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs. [1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climate-change https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years. In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this money has been collecting interest. It it political deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the solving of this problem. And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally flawed policy that again, is simply systematic incompetence. > I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100% harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon style logic. > So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation. Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence in the federal government. > and the cost of nuclear accidents The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the population the chance of really series accidents is very low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.
  - eric-hu 4y ago
    Firstly, I applaud your YIMBYism. Secondly, regarding waste, I share your view, and I think there’s an additional travesty that we’ve had breeder reactor technology for decades. That can significantly shorten the volume and half life of waste while also producing new nuclear fuel. Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders.
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      I believe most waste isn’t spent fuel but rather other contaminated stuff, which isn’t going to be helped by breeder reactors.
      - jtc331 4y ago
        My understanding is most of this waste also isn’t as dangerous or as long-lasting.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      > Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders. Yes, its insane to suggest the US in its own boarders can't handle it. They do a lot of things much more dangerous in every way to build nukes.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The US is not, in fact, collecting money for disposal, and has not been for years. The US is, instead, handing back all the money that was collected to the remaining nuke operators. Not, notably, to the ratepayers it was collected from. This is fallout from a court case where nuke operators argued that disposal was flimflam, so the money was collected fraudulently. The court agreed, and ordered the money returned. Not to those it came from, but just to whoever was still operating.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Waste is an incredibly easy problem to solve: bury it in impermeable bedrock. That said, there's no real point in storing existing nuclear waste since we don't reprocess our fuel. So the existing waste is a source of fuel in the future. Solar and wind should also be transparent in the fact they require fossil fuels to fill in gaps in production. Thus, they do not represent a solution to climate change but merely delay it. Thus the cost of solar and wind includes the cost of climate disaster.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Solar and wind currently use fossil fuels to fill in gaps, but they don't require that. It's just that while we're still burning fossil fuels without CO2 charges, using them for gap filling is the cheapest thing that will do it.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      They will continue to require fossil fuels until energy storage comes along and we have no idea when that will occur. So far, all of our storage systems have proven inadequate.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      It does until we achieve many times cheaper storage technology. Existing storage solutions don't provide nearly enough capacity to scale (especially since Li is very scarce, and is also required for cars and other modes of transport).
      - adrianN 4y ago
        Hydrogen (or Methane) are an existing storage solution that scales very easily. The truth is that currently we have so little renewable generation capacity that we save more CO2 by building more wind turbines and PV per dollar than by building storage.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
- concordDance 4y ago
  > With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. Long term storage is actually trivial, just requires actually storing it. Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea. This controls the temperature and acts as a radiation shield and there's more a hundred times more life on the surface than in the abyss. Also, no humans who get prissy about 1 in 100 chances of cancer than animals don't fare about. The ocean's also big enough that a your case corroding and some material being dissolved and spreading in the water is irrelevant (unless all your nuclear waste you ever dump manages to escape and spread throughout the ocean rather than just sit in a sullen pile you'll be under EPA limits).
  - visarga 4y ago
    > Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea. That's how you make Godzilla!
    - agentwiggles 4y ago
      I, for one, welcome our new anglerfish overlords.
  - bb88 4y ago
    > best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea. You say as if it's a done deal. Hanford is 14 years behind schedule on this, and now it looks as if it will off-gas toxic chemicals. Original budget was $4B and now is $17B. The chemical they're using easily ignites and turns into hydrogen cyanide. https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/04/hanford-report-reveals-problem-nuclear-waste-solution https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/04/hanford-report-reve...
ncmncm 4y ago
Money is fungible. Each dollar spent on a nuke is exactly that dollar not spent on renewables, instead. But it takes with it another dollar spent on coal while waiting for construction to complete. The amount spent just on coal and coal plant operation during those ten long years is enough, by itself, to build enough renewables to displace the nuke. The cost of building the nuke itself is enough to build several times enough to displace the nuke, beyond. And the renewables would come on immediately, displacing carbon immediately. Without radically increasing build-out of renewables, we will fail to avert climate catastrophe. The exact mode of civilization collapse in that case is debatable, but global thermonuclear war punctuates many.
- brianwawok 4y ago
  100% renewable isn’t enough right now. Batteries cost too much. 70% renewable and 30% nuke isn’t a bad mix though.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The overwhelming majority of utility storage will not be in batteries, so battery cost is immaterial. Batteries will be useful for load-smoothing, and short-term storage in smaller grids.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    In comparison against renewables and storage, new nuclear isn't competing against batteries and storage right now, it's competing against batteries and renewables that could be installed during the operating lifetime of the power plant (earlier in the life more so than later.) So the question is what will renewables and storage will cost in (say) 2030 or later. Batteries have been falling in price by 27%/year recently, and PV by nearly that much, so it's a bold position to assert this will suddenly stop.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Past advancement is not necessarily an indication of future advancement. Battery tech is still exploring ways to improve Li batteries, but capacities have stopped increasing dramatically as far as I know. Even worse, even at the theoretical maximum capacity for these types of chemical batteries, there just aren't enough resources on Earth to build enough to cover the storage requirements of a huge grid. Now, is it possible that a new type of battery will appear and take over the market by 2030? Yes. Will there be enough of them to compete with the stabilizing power of a nuclear power plant? Maybe. Will there be enough nuclear + storage so that the best use of that storage will be to shut down the nuclear plant? Absolutely not. Basically, we need massive amounts of new electrical power (so we can transition transportation to electrical), and we need to shut down all fossil fuel power generation yesterday. Since we can't have enough storage yet for an exclusively green grid, nuclear shouldn't be competing with green energy in this discussion. Our choices are not "all green by 2030 VS green by 2030 + nuclear", they are "green + coal/gas by 2030 vs green + nuclear + less coal/gas". If we're instead talking about 2100, or 2200, then yeah, well probably be able to shut down nuclear as well.
Balgair 4y ago
It's striking to me about the US's fuel 'dole' and comparisons to the Roman's grain dole. Not the same at all, but the similarities and how different governments through time prioritize the goods and services to achieve their ends is fascinating.

stevenjgarner 4y ago

The problem with all these costs is that we only get to know the real costs in hindsight. With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change. With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation. I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs. [1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climate-change https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg

panick21_ 4y ago
> long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years. In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this money has been collecting interest. It it political deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the solving of this problem. And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally flawed policy that again, is simply systematic incompetence. > I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100% harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon style logic. > So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation. Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence in the federal government. > and the cost of nuclear accidents The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the population the chance of really series accidents is very low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.
- eric-hu 4y ago
  Firstly, I applaud your YIMBYism. Secondly, regarding waste, I share your view, and I think there’s an additional travesty that we’ve had breeder reactor technology for decades. That can significantly shorten the volume and half life of waste while also producing new nuclear fuel. Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders.
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    I believe most waste isn’t spent fuel but rather other contaminated stuff, which isn’t going to be helped by breeder reactors.
    - jtc331 4y ago
      My understanding is most of this waste also isn’t as dangerous or as long-lasting.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    > Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders. Yes, its insane to suggest the US in its own boarders can't handle it. They do a lot of things much more dangerous in every way to build nukes.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The US is not, in fact, collecting money for disposal, and has not been for years. The US is, instead, handing back all the money that was collected to the remaining nuke operators. Not, notably, to the ratepayers it was collected from. This is fallout from a court case where nuke operators argued that disposal was flimflam, so the money was collected fraudulently. The court agreed, and ordered the money returned. Not to those it came from, but just to whoever was still operating.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
Manuel_D 4y ago
Waste is an incredibly easy problem to solve: bury it in impermeable bedrock. That said, there's no real point in storing existing nuclear waste since we don't reprocess our fuel. So the existing waste is a source of fuel in the future. Solar and wind should also be transparent in the fact they require fossil fuels to fill in gaps in production. Thus, they do not represent a solution to climate change but merely delay it. Thus the cost of solar and wind includes the cost of climate disaster.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Solar and wind currently use fossil fuels to fill in gaps, but they don't require that. It's just that while we're still burning fossil fuels without CO2 charges, using them for gap filling is the cheapest thing that will do it.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    They will continue to require fossil fuels until energy storage comes along and we have no idea when that will occur. So far, all of our storage systems have proven inadequate.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    It does until we achieve many times cheaper storage technology. Existing storage solutions don't provide nearly enough capacity to scale (especially since Li is very scarce, and is also required for cars and other modes of transport).
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Hydrogen (or Methane) are an existing storage solution that scales very easily. The truth is that currently we have so little renewable generation capacity that we save more CO2 by building more wind turbines and PV per dollar than by building storage.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
concordDance 4y ago
> With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. Long term storage is actually trivial, just requires actually storing it. Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea. This controls the temperature and acts as a radiation shield and there's more a hundred times more life on the surface than in the abyss. Also, no humans who get prissy about 1 in 100 chances of cancer than animals don't fare about. The ocean's also big enough that a your case corroding and some material being dissolved and spreading in the water is irrelevant (unless all your nuclear waste you ever dump manages to escape and spread throughout the ocean rather than just sit in a sullen pile you'll be under EPA limits).
- visarga 4y ago
  > Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea. That's how you make Godzilla!
  - agentwiggles 4y ago
    I, for one, welcome our new anglerfish overlords.
- bb88 4y ago
  > best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea. You say as if it's a done deal. Hanford is 14 years behind schedule on this, and now it looks as if it will off-gas toxic chemicals. Original budget was $4B and now is $17B. The chemical they're using easily ignites and turns into hydrogen cyanide. https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/04/hanford-report-reveals-problem-nuclear-waste-solution https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/04/hanford-report-reve...

ncmncm 4y ago

Money is fungible. Each dollar spent on a nuke is exactly that dollar not spent on renewables, instead. But it takes with it another dollar spent on coal while waiting for construction to complete. The amount spent just on coal and coal plant operation during those ten long years is enough, by itself, to build enough renewables to displace the nuke. The cost of building the nuke itself is enough to build several times enough to displace the nuke, beyond. And the renewables would come on immediately, displacing carbon immediately. Without radically increasing build-out of renewables, we will fail to avert climate catastrophe. The exact mode of civilization collapse in that case is debatable, but global thermonuclear war punctuates many.

brianwawok 4y ago
100% renewable isn’t enough right now. Batteries cost too much. 70% renewable and 30% nuke isn’t a bad mix though.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The overwhelming majority of utility storage will not be in batteries, so battery cost is immaterial. Batteries will be useful for load-smoothing, and short-term storage in smaller grids.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  In comparison against renewables and storage, new nuclear isn't competing against batteries and storage right now, it's competing against batteries and renewables that could be installed during the operating lifetime of the power plant (earlier in the life more so than later.) So the question is what will renewables and storage will cost in (say) 2030 or later. Batteries have been falling in price by 27%/year recently, and PV by nearly that much, so it's a bold position to assert this will suddenly stop.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Past advancement is not necessarily an indication of future advancement. Battery tech is still exploring ways to improve Li batteries, but capacities have stopped increasing dramatically as far as I know. Even worse, even at the theoretical maximum capacity for these types of chemical batteries, there just aren't enough resources on Earth to build enough to cover the storage requirements of a huge grid. Now, is it possible that a new type of battery will appear and take over the market by 2030? Yes. Will there be enough of them to compete with the stabilizing power of a nuclear power plant? Maybe. Will there be enough nuclear + storage so that the best use of that storage will be to shut down the nuclear plant? Absolutely not. Basically, we need massive amounts of new electrical power (so we can transition transportation to electrical), and we need to shut down all fossil fuel power generation yesterday. Since we can't have enough storage yet for an exclusively green grid, nuclear shouldn't be competing with green energy in this discussion. Our choices are not "all green by 2030 VS green by 2030 + nuclear", they are "green + coal/gas by 2030 vs green + nuclear + less coal/gas". If we're instead talking about 2100, or 2200, then yeah, well probably be able to shut down nuclear as well.

Balgair 4y ago

It's striking to me about the US's fuel 'dole' and comparisons to the Roman's grain dole. Not the same at all, but the similarities and how different governments through time prioritize the goods and services to achieve their ends is fascinating.