13 ms·

The fact is we could be doing a heck of a lot of cool things, if it weren’t for the anti-nuke crowd that set the technology back 20-30 years. Imagine a world w

The fact is we could be doing a heck of a lot of cool things, if it weren’t for the anti-nuke crowd that set the technology back 20-30 years. Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance. EVs would be a no brainer Natural gas would be obsolete. Nuclear desalination would completely solve the water crisis in the US West. I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age. Really the possibilities are incredible. It would be the equivalent of humanity going from horse and buggy to using fossil fuels, but another order of magnitude.

runarberg 4y ago
This is wishful thinking. France for example never had a Three mile island type of disaster which tilted the public opinion of nuclear power, like the USA did. They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests. In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left. This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables. EDIT: I feel like people are focusing on the wrong point here. I was apparently—and unintentionally—disingenuous by touting Germany’s success in replacing coal power with renewables, as compared to France. However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  > governments have historically put to much faith in it If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and had instead merely key up the pace, our grid wouldn't be 20% nuclear like it is today, it would be 100% nuclear. Instead, we made the choice to pump 20 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere while we waited for solar and wind to become viable. I'm glad they finally are -- they just broke into double digits, in a few years they will pass the nuclear buildout we stopped in the 80s -- but that was one helluva waiting cost.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - runarberg 4y ago
    This is false dichotomy. The US government also had the option of investing in renewables as early as the 1970s. They simply didn’t. The success of Germany’s recent investment suggests that was a wrong choice.
    - scoopertrooper 4y ago
      In fairness solar efficiency was below 10% in the 1970s, while the world was already producing many gigawatts of nuclear energy at that time. It's not as though Germany could have 'decided' in the 1970s to have 2022 technology. Sure, increased investment at the time may have sped up the development of renewables, but it still wouldn't be fast. Science doesn't quite work that way.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Solar efficiency and cost would have been where they are today by 1990, and we would not now be facing imminent, impending Climatic Catastrophe. Energy during ie past 30 years would have been radically cheaper. Coal plants and nuke plants alike would have been shuttered as unsustainable, not for their CO2 but just because they cost too damn much. But here we are, instead. Thank Reagan. And Bush. And Bush, again. US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.
        thrown_22 4y ago
        So you're argument is that in an alternative timeline where we'd invested more money we would have invented technology in the 1980s that still doesn't exist in the 2020s?
        spopejoy 4y ago
        Uhh, renewables are here today. The parent was refuting that "solar wasn't ready" by making the point that the progress in renewables is attributable to increased industrial activity and funding. Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any alternatives to fossil energy. That regime lasted until the 90s and by then any memory of the oil crises in the 70s was long gone.
- andrewmutz 4y ago
  Do you have a source on the France vs Germany thing? France uses 20x less coal than Germany to begin with (https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...) so I'm not sure about the comparison of reducing consumption Also, during the recent conflict with Russia, Germany is turning coal plants back online and France is not.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    France is right now buying coal-fired power from across borders. Domestic coal consumption figures are meaningless.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France That's wrong. France is a net exporter of power, by over 50%. So even on aggregate it is a net benefit to the world since 90% of the power generated is CO2 free.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        France exports energy when the rivers are cold enough to operate their nukes. Rivers are just now close to maximum temperature.
        thrown_22 4y ago
        Yes and? French electricity is 10 times less CO2 intensive to produce than German. Given that France exports 30% more electricity to Germany than they import it reduces the carbon footprint of both countries.
- The_Double 4y ago
  > they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left. That sounds a less impressive when you rephrase it as saying they went from 15x more coal use than france to 9x as much. Percentage wise the decrease seems similar in the last few years. source: https://www.iea.org/countries/france https://www.iea.org/countries/france https://www.iea.org/countries/germany https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
- espadrine 4y ago
  > France for example never had a Three mile island type of disaster which tilted the public opinion of nuclear power Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger. On the other hand, the costs grew because the standards for risk grew to tremendous levels that are way, way above those applied for the coal and gas industries, or wind and solar for that matter. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
  - asib 4y ago
    > Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger. The wiki article you linked says the plant was unfinished. This would indicate the attack was a protest against the construction of the plant, not an attempt to induce a nuclear meltdown. You are perhaps unintentionally twisting the facts.
    - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
      Besides, in France we've had "protest" attacks even against chip foundries. I would assume it par for the course for a nuclear plant.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        That said, historically chip factories have left overwhelming chemical messes.
      - baq 4y ago
        for good reasons... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride
- morning_gelato 4y ago
  >This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables. Historically the countries that invested in nuclear and hydro have been most successful in lowering the carbon intensity of their energy sector. Looking at the data, Germany does not appear to be nearly as successful as France. In 2021 France's electricity averaged 68 gCO2/kWh, and Germany averaged 364 gCO2/kWh. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?tab=chart&country=FRA~SWE~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?t... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
- Redoubts 4y ago
  > they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, Germany is like 40% coal, and France is maybe 5%. It's easier to reduce at a faster rate when your use is still massive.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pyrale 4y ago
  > They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests. > In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left. Rarely have I seen reality mistreated so blatantly. France has barely used coal in the last 4 decades, and so it seems to be enough to claim that, by slowly reducing their coal use, Germany does much better. That reminds me of the popular definition of chutzpah: the person that asks for mercy after murdering his parents, since, afterall, he's now an orphan. > However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down. Your main point is wrong. [1] shows that each model has experienced faster build time as new units were built. What is true is that new, more advanced designs can take more time to build than older, less advanced designs. [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%C3%A9aires_en_France#/media/Fichier:Chrono-parc-nucleaire-francais.svg https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%...
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    That graph shows nothing of the sort, and it conveniently excludes the 2010s, where Areva's Olkiluoto 3 plant in Finland has been under construction for 17 years and is still not finished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Even after being declared finished, it isn't.
    - pyrale 4y ago
      > That graph shows nothing of the sort CP0: first reactor 6.5y, last reactor 5y CP1: first reactor 6y, last reactor 5y CP2: first reactor 5y, last reactor 6y P4 : first reactor 7y, last reactor 6y P'4: first reactor 7y, last reactor 6.5y N4 : first reactor 12y, last reactor 7.5y That's 5/6 designs where building multiple plants lead to faster build times. > it conveniently excludes Honestly, I suspect you're just namedroping here. But let's adress the point: Olkiluoto and Flamanville are the first 2 reactors of their generation, I'm not sure what you want to compare them to in terms of build time. My guess is that Hinkley point will get built much faster, and that we may see further improvements if more are built.
- orangeoxidation 4y ago
  > They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests. Absolutely true. It proved expensive even at large scale and with full support of the state. I don't trust promises or hypotheticals of cheap nuclear power, at all. But here's the thing: France succeeded with decarbonizing their electricity production. It's a pretty notable success. Yes, it was (and remains) expensive and yes those plants are now failing often, remaining expensive ober their whole lifetime. But it worked and France could afford it. I'd argue many other countries could afford it as well. The German electricity mix is a lot dirtier by comparison.
  - kitkat_new 4y ago
    > But it worked and France could afford it. failing plants due to their age and maintenance resulting in less nuclear power in the long run say otherwise
- TameAntelope 4y ago
  Oh yeah, and Germany is totally not in any kind of energy crisis right now due to lack of domestic energy sources...
  - kitkat_new 4y ago
    nuclear isn't a domestic energy source either
    - samatman 4y ago
      But then you have to ask: why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Germ...
    - TameAntelope 4y ago
      As if the source of the uranium was in any way comparable to gas or coal…
Maursault 4y ago
> Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance. Economies of scale were applied from the inception of commercial nuclear power, yet the promise of electricity too cheap to meter has never materialized. Quite the opposite. In fact, nuclear has always been the most expensive method of generating electricity, and the anti-nukes don't enter into it. Even if every individual on the planet was pro-nuke, it would still be too expensive. If it was otherwise, nothing whatsoever could prevent investors from coming out of the woodwork to fulfill your dream of nuclear power plants everywhere. Make nuclear energy economical and you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, as well as being absurdly wealthy. But when you fail, try to avoid blaming anything other than nuclear energy itself.
- Paradigma11 4y ago
  The most expensive energy is wind and solar after a few weeks of low wind in a cloudy winter.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Fortunately, that very rarely happens, so backing it up with gas turbine plants (burning hydrogen, ultimately) is cheaper than dealing with the 365/24/7 high cost of nuclear.
    - Paradigma11 4y ago
      Nice, i would have guessed that duplicating the production infrastructure and the added loss of hydrogen transformation would be more problematic. Do you have any actual numbers at hand? "...is cheaper..." is a bit vague.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        I'll point to the simulation site I always link to: https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ This uses real weather data for various countries and optimize solar + wind + batteries + hydrogen to provide a constant output at minimum cost. The results are interesting. You can tweak the cost assumptions.
narrator 4y ago
If we had all that then all the things besides energy that are used in production would be depleted faster. We would have bigger populations, etc.
landemva 4y ago
That vision needs waste disposal or processing, which Jimmy Carter halted when he took office. It matters little that Ronald Reagan removed the prohibition, as investors will not put capital toward that again because the investment can be wiped out a few years later based on whims of politics. Without waste processing, storage of waste onsite forever creates an investment problem for new construction in USA. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower-waste-idUSKBN27W30U https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower-waste-id... 'Former President Jimmy Carter halted reprocessing in 1977, citing proliferation concerns.'
- pvarangot 4y ago
  The proliferation concerns probably got worse. I wouldn't invest in this in the US unless there was like a constitutional amendment saying we can reprocess.
  - volkl48 4y ago
    We're actively building new nuclear weapons anyway, I don't see how reprocessing changes any of that calculation?
- kova12 4y ago
  This is such a misguided argument. Amount of nuclear waste is so negligible compared to common waste, it doesn't deserve to even be argued about. Not only that, but today's nuclear waste in couple of decades could become a treasure for next generations. Discussion should be: we either develop new energy sources or we don't. Either works for me, but if you don't want to go on with progress, then shut up about climate change and stop calling yourself progressive
- pfdietz 4y ago
  The investors didn't put money toward it because it had no economic foundation. Uranium is too cheap, enrichment became cheaper, and separated plutonium has negative value. The French have admitted their reprocessing was net more expensive than not doing it.
Melatonic 4y ago
The other problem is that the anti nuke crowd had a point back in the day - they were wrong about Nuclear not being safe theoretically - but they were right about a few asshole corporations doing things too cheaply.
- gitanes 4y ago
  Yeah, I hate that corporation called USSR blowing up Chernobyl.
  - baq 4y ago
    they built too cheaply, ignored safety procedures and blew the thing up in the process. it doesn't matter they were USSR. might as well have been PG&E. soviet people and usa people were both just people and still are.
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      The anti-nuclear argument pretty much simplifies to: Nuclear is hard, maintenance needs to be done diligently and regularly, no corners can be cut, and humans are historically really bad to doing ANY of that!
- parkingrift 4y ago
  Instead we got decades of coal power which has caused at least tens of millions of deaths and has led to runaway global warming which might kill billions. Truly glad we prevented a few assholes corporations from making a mess of things. I get grossed out just thinking about the clean air and normal climate.
tcbawo 4y ago
One benefit of many small reactors is that, should an area become a conflict zone in the future, relocation is more feasible.
AlexCoventry 4y ago
Seems like dirty bombs would be a lot easier to make, in a world with ubiquitous nuclear power plants.
- kuhewa 4y ago
  You'd think control over the materials in these small plants would be much better than for the radioactive materials already widespread and easy to obtain, like cesium 137 calibration sources used in healthcare [1]. Apparently one of these would allow a dirty bomb to contaminate 40 city blocks [2]. So I reckon there are easier existing sources for radioactive materials if one wanted to cause mass panic, I don't think spent fuel rods are going to end up in the municipal waste. 1 https://www.perkinelmer.com/au/product/cesium-137-calibration-source-6018503 https://www.perkinelmer.com/au/product/cesium-137-calibratio... 2 https://www.wired.com/2011/10/ff-radioactivecargo/ https://www.wired.com/2011/10/ff-radioactivecargo/
- pyrale 4y ago
  Dirty bombs are already easy to make: there is radioactive material in every town for medical purpose.
akiselev 4y ago
> I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age. I'm absolutely certain of it. In regards to nuclear rocketry, it wasn't even the anti-nuclear crowd that killed one of the most promising technologies but they certainly guaranteed it would die in the dustbins of JPL's archive. NASA and the United Aircraft Corporation came up with a reactor design called the nuclear lightbulb [1] that used tens of kilograms of uranium instead of thousands by heating uranium hexaflouride [^1] to a plasma and using an irrotational vortex [^2] of neon gas to compress it until it became a self sustaining [^3] black body radiator [^4]. They were just about to test the reactor with real fuel when it was canceled (during Nixon's administration as part of the Mars program) but they managed to experimentally identify the remaining production challenges like the computational power needed to keep the core stable and the material science necessary to separate the vortex from the fluid economically. There has been so much progress in fields that address those challenges that many of the problems are considered solved and the remainder are surmountable engineering problems. I really hope with this renewed interest in nuclear someone eventually revives the design and tries to bring it to its conclusion. Just based off of the declassified publications from the 60s and early 70s [2][3][4][5] it is obvious how much potential this design had: it's safe [^5], useful for rocketry and terrestrial power generation, and self breeding by nature of its design [^6]. Who knows where we could be in space exploration and the battle against climate change had the design been fully explored. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb [2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018850 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018850 [3] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018851 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018851 [4] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710010820 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710010820 [5] and many more in the JPL archives! Search for "gas core reactor" [^1] UF6 is the most common intermediate in the enrichment process and depleted UF6 is how most of our nuclear waste is stored... and this reactor is a perfect breeding reactor for the waste (see [^5]). All of the infrastructure for dealing with the materials have existed since the Manhattan project. [^2] the opposite of a rotational vortex like a tornado, which have calm centers. In an irrotational vortex the particles in the center have the highest velocity and in the reactor it acts like a centrifuge, forcing the uraninum to the center and compressing it to tens or hundreds of atmospheres. This part was tested experimentally. [^3] the energy of the plasma and compression from the vortex increase the neutron cross section to the point where the nuclear reaction becomes self heating with only 20kg of fuel. They stopped just short of testing the full cycle but this is the same concept behind nuclear weapons, which use precise explosives to compress nuclear fuel until it reaches criticality, except the vortex can't generate the kind of pressures necessary for a nuclear explosion. [^4] the NASA/UAC design heats the UF6 till it radiates most of its energy away as UV. Classical steam turbines or hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles (in the case of a rocket engine) allow the system to extract power. [^5] since it's an active design, tons of power is required to pump the vortex and keep the core in a fissile regime. If any part of the system fails, the core loses pressure and becomes a really expensive gas canister until the chamber is cleaned up and the core restarted. With a plasma window separating the core from a vacuum, the entire system can be designed to depressurize safetly. [^6] anything injected into the core gets bombarded by neutrons and the vortex system constantly wicks away small amounts of the core. The system forms a closed loop that recycles unused fuel via centrifuge and it can also separate out transmuted waste [*]. The NASA/UAC team tested this with a neutron gun to simulate fission in the core. [*] we could have had honest-to-god alchemy!

runarberg 4y ago

This is wishful thinking. France for example never had a Three mile island type of disaster which tilted the public opinion of nuclear power, like the USA did. They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests. In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left. This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables. EDIT: I feel like people are focusing on the wrong point here. I was apparently—and unintentionally—disingenuous by touting Germany’s success in replacing coal power with renewables, as compared to France. However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.

jjoonathan 4y ago
> governments have historically put to much faith in it If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and had instead merely key up the pace, our grid wouldn't be 20% nuclear like it is today, it would be 100% nuclear. Instead, we made the choice to pump 20 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere while we waited for solar and wind to become viable. I'm glad they finally are -- they just broke into double digits, in a few years they will pass the nuclear buildout we stopped in the 80s -- but that was one helluva waiting cost.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- runarberg 4y ago
  This is false dichotomy. The US government also had the option of investing in renewables as early as the 1970s. They simply didn’t. The success of Germany’s recent investment suggests that was a wrong choice.
  - scoopertrooper 4y ago
    In fairness solar efficiency was below 10% in the 1970s, while the world was already producing many gigawatts of nuclear energy at that time. It's not as though Germany could have 'decided' in the 1970s to have 2022 technology. Sure, increased investment at the time may have sped up the development of renewables, but it still wouldn't be fast. Science doesn't quite work that way.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Solar efficiency and cost would have been where they are today by 1990, and we would not now be facing imminent, impending Climatic Catastrophe. Energy during ie past 30 years would have been radically cheaper. Coal plants and nuke plants alike would have been shuttered as unsustainable, not for their CO2 but just because they cost too damn much. But here we are, instead. Thank Reagan. And Bush. And Bush, again. US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        So you're argument is that in an alternative timeline where we'd invested more money we would have invented technology in the 1980s that still doesn't exist in the 2020s?
        spopejoy 4y ago
        Uhh, renewables are here today. The parent was refuting that "solar wasn't ready" by making the point that the progress in renewables is attributable to increased industrial activity and funding. Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any alternatives to fossil energy. That regime lasted until the 90s and by then any memory of the oil crises in the 70s was long gone.
andrewmutz 4y ago
Do you have a source on the France vs Germany thing? France uses 20x less coal than Germany to begin with (https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...) so I'm not sure about the comparison of reducing consumption Also, during the recent conflict with Russia, Germany is turning coal plants back online and France is not.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  France is right now buying coal-fired power from across borders. Domestic coal consumption figures are meaningless.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France That's wrong. France is a net exporter of power, by over 50%. So even on aggregate it is a net benefit to the world since 90% of the power generated is CO2 free.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      France exports energy when the rivers are cold enough to operate their nukes. Rivers are just now close to maximum temperature.
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        Yes and? French electricity is 10 times less CO2 intensive to produce than German. Given that France exports 30% more electricity to Germany than they import it reduces the carbon footprint of both countries.
The_Double 4y ago
> they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left. That sounds a less impressive when you rephrase it as saying they went from 15x more coal use than france to 9x as much. Percentage wise the decrease seems similar in the last few years. source: https://www.iea.org/countries/france https://www.iea.org/countries/france https://www.iea.org/countries/germany https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
espadrine 4y ago
> France for example never had a Three mile island type of disaster which tilted the public opinion of nuclear power Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger. On the other hand, the costs grew because the standards for risk grew to tremendous levels that are way, way above those applied for the coal and gas industries, or wind and solar for that matter. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
- asib 4y ago
  > Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger. The wiki article you linked says the plant was unfinished. This would indicate the attack was a protest against the construction of the plant, not an attempt to induce a nuclear meltdown. You are perhaps unintentionally twisting the facts.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    Besides, in France we've had "protest" attacks even against chip foundries. I would assume it par for the course for a nuclear plant.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      That said, historically chip factories have left overwhelming chemical messes.
    - baq 4y ago
      for good reasons... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride
morning_gelato 4y ago
>This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables. Historically the countries that invested in nuclear and hydro have been most successful in lowering the carbon intensity of their energy sector. Looking at the data, Germany does not appear to be nearly as successful as France. In 2021 France's electricity averaged 68 gCO2/kWh, and Germany averaged 364 gCO2/kWh. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?tab=chart&country=FRA~SWE~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?t... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Redoubts 4y ago
> they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, Germany is like 40% coal, and France is maybe 5%. It's easier to reduce at a faster rate when your use is still massive.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pyrale 4y ago
> They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests. > In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left. Rarely have I seen reality mistreated so blatantly. France has barely used coal in the last 4 decades, and so it seems to be enough to claim that, by slowly reducing their coal use, Germany does much better. That reminds me of the popular definition of chutzpah: the person that asks for mercy after murdering his parents, since, afterall, he's now an orphan. > However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down. Your main point is wrong. [1] shows that each model has experienced faster build time as new units were built. What is true is that new, more advanced designs can take more time to build than older, less advanced designs. [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%C3%A9aires_en_France#/media/Fichier:Chrono-parc-nucleaire-francais.svg https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%...
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  That graph shows nothing of the sort, and it conveniently excludes the 2010s, where Areva's Olkiluoto 3 plant in Finland has been under construction for 17 years and is still not finished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Even after being declared finished, it isn't.
  - pyrale 4y ago
    > That graph shows nothing of the sort CP0: first reactor 6.5y, last reactor 5y CP1: first reactor 6y, last reactor 5y CP2: first reactor 5y, last reactor 6y P4 : first reactor 7y, last reactor 6y P'4: first reactor 7y, last reactor 6.5y N4 : first reactor 12y, last reactor 7.5y That's 5/6 designs where building multiple plants lead to faster build times. > it conveniently excludes Honestly, I suspect you're just namedroping here. But let's adress the point: Olkiluoto and Flamanville are the first 2 reactors of their generation, I'm not sure what you want to compare them to in terms of build time. My guess is that Hinkley point will get built much faster, and that we may see further improvements if more are built.
orangeoxidation 4y ago
> They continued building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like your comment suggests. Absolutely true. It proved expensive even at large scale and with full support of the state. I don't trust promises or hypotheticals of cheap nuclear power, at all. But here's the thing: France succeeded with decarbonizing their electricity production. It's a pretty notable success. Yes, it was (and remains) expensive and yes those plants are now failing often, remaining expensive ober their whole lifetime. But it worked and France could afford it. I'd argue many other countries could afford it as well. The German electricity mix is a lot dirtier by comparison.
- kitkat_new 4y ago
  > But it worked and France could afford it. failing plants due to their age and maintenance resulting in less nuclear power in the long run say otherwise
TameAntelope 4y ago
Oh yeah, and Germany is totally not in any kind of energy crisis right now due to lack of domestic energy sources...
- kitkat_new 4y ago
  nuclear isn't a domestic energy source either
  - samatman 4y ago
    But then you have to ask: why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Germ...
  - TameAntelope 4y ago
    As if the source of the uranium was in any way comparable to gas or coal…

Maursault 4y ago

> Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance. Economies of scale were applied from the inception of commercial nuclear power, yet the promise of electricity too cheap to meter has never materialized. Quite the opposite. In fact, nuclear has always been the most expensive method of generating electricity, and the anti-nukes don't enter into it. Even if every individual on the planet was pro-nuke, it would still be too expensive. If it was otherwise, nothing whatsoever could prevent investors from coming out of the woodwork to fulfill your dream of nuclear power plants everywhere. Make nuclear energy economical and you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, as well as being absurdly wealthy. But when you fail, try to avoid blaming anything other than nuclear energy itself.

Paradigma11 4y ago
The most expensive energy is wind and solar after a few weeks of low wind in a cloudy winter.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Fortunately, that very rarely happens, so backing it up with gas turbine plants (burning hydrogen, ultimately) is cheaper than dealing with the 365/24/7 high cost of nuclear.
  - Paradigma11 4y ago
    Nice, i would have guessed that duplicating the production infrastructure and the added loss of hydrogen transformation would be more problematic. Do you have any actual numbers at hand? "...is cheaper..." is a bit vague.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      I'll point to the simulation site I always link to: https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ This uses real weather data for various countries and optimize solar + wind + batteries + hydrogen to provide a constant output at minimum cost. The results are interesting. You can tweak the cost assumptions.

narrator 4y ago

If we had all that then all the things besides energy that are used in production would be depleted faster. We would have bigger populations, etc.

landemva 4y ago

That vision needs waste disposal or processing, which Jimmy Carter halted when he took office. It matters little that Ronald Reagan removed the prohibition, as investors will not put capital toward that again because the investment can be wiped out a few years later based on whims of politics. Without waste processing, storage of waste onsite forever creates an investment problem for new construction in USA. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower-waste-idUSKBN27W30U https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower-waste-id... 'Former President Jimmy Carter halted reprocessing in 1977, citing proliferation concerns.'

pvarangot 4y ago
The proliferation concerns probably got worse. I wouldn't invest in this in the US unless there was like a constitutional amendment saying we can reprocess.
- volkl48 4y ago
  We're actively building new nuclear weapons anyway, I don't see how reprocessing changes any of that calculation?
kova12 4y ago
This is such a misguided argument. Amount of nuclear waste is so negligible compared to common waste, it doesn't deserve to even be argued about. Not only that, but today's nuclear waste in couple of decades could become a treasure for next generations. Discussion should be: we either develop new energy sources or we don't. Either works for me, but if you don't want to go on with progress, then shut up about climate change and stop calling yourself progressive
pfdietz 4y ago
The investors didn't put money toward it because it had no economic foundation. Uranium is too cheap, enrichment became cheaper, and separated plutonium has negative value. The French have admitted their reprocessing was net more expensive than not doing it.

Melatonic 4y ago

The other problem is that the anti nuke crowd had a point back in the day - they were wrong about Nuclear not being safe theoretically - but they were right about a few asshole corporations doing things too cheaply.

gitanes 4y ago
Yeah, I hate that corporation called USSR blowing up Chernobyl.
- baq 4y ago
  they built too cheaply, ignored safety procedures and blew the thing up in the process. it doesn't matter they were USSR. might as well have been PG&E. soviet people and usa people were both just people and still are.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    The anti-nuclear argument pretty much simplifies to: Nuclear is hard, maintenance needs to be done diligently and regularly, no corners can be cut, and humans are historically really bad to doing ANY of that!
parkingrift 4y ago
Instead we got decades of coal power which has caused at least tens of millions of deaths and has led to runaway global warming which might kill billions. Truly glad we prevented a few assholes corporations from making a mess of things. I get grossed out just thinking about the clean air and normal climate.

tcbawo 4y ago

One benefit of many small reactors is that, should an area become a conflict zone in the future, relocation is more feasible.

AlexCoventry 4y ago

Seems like dirty bombs would be a lot easier to make, in a world with ubiquitous nuclear power plants.

kuhewa 4y ago
You'd think control over the materials in these small plants would be much better than for the radioactive materials already widespread and easy to obtain, like cesium 137 calibration sources used in healthcare [1]. Apparently one of these would allow a dirty bomb to contaminate 40 city blocks [2]. So I reckon there are easier existing sources for radioactive materials if one wanted to cause mass panic, I don't think spent fuel rods are going to end up in the municipal waste. 1 https://www.perkinelmer.com/au/product/cesium-137-calibration-source-6018503 https://www.perkinelmer.com/au/product/cesium-137-calibratio... 2 https://www.wired.com/2011/10/ff-radioactivecargo/ https://www.wired.com/2011/10/ff-radioactivecargo/
pyrale 4y ago
Dirty bombs are already easy to make: there is radioactive material in every town for medical purpose.

akiselev 4y ago

> I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age. I'm absolutely certain of it. In regards to nuclear rocketry, it wasn't even the anti-nuclear crowd that killed one of the most promising technologies but they certainly guaranteed it would die in the dustbins of JPL's archive. NASA and the United Aircraft Corporation came up with a reactor design called the nuclear lightbulb [1] that used tens of kilograms of uranium instead of thousands by heating uranium hexaflouride [^1] to a plasma and using an irrotational vortex [^2] of neon gas to compress it until it became a self sustaining [^3] black body radiator [^4]. They were just about to test the reactor with real fuel when it was canceled (during Nixon's administration as part of the Mars program) but they managed to experimentally identify the remaining production challenges like the computational power needed to keep the core stable and the material science necessary to separate the vortex from the fluid economically. There has been so much progress in fields that address those challenges that many of the problems are considered solved and the remainder are surmountable engineering problems. I really hope with this renewed interest in nuclear someone eventually revives the design and tries to bring it to its conclusion. Just based off of the declassified publications from the 60s and early 70s [2][3][4][5] it is obvious how much potential this design had: it's safe [^5], useful for rocketry and terrestrial power generation, and self breeding by nature of its design [^6]. Who knows where we could be in space exploration and the battle against climate change had the design been fully explored. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb [2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018850 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018850 [3] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018851 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018851 [4] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710010820 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710010820 [5] and many more in the JPL archives! Search for "gas core reactor" [^1] UF6 is the most common intermediate in the enrichment process and depleted UF6 is how most of our nuclear waste is stored... and this reactor is a perfect breeding reactor for the waste (see [^5]). All of the infrastructure for dealing with the materials have existed since the Manhattan project. [^2] the opposite of a rotational vortex like a tornado, which have calm centers. In an irrotational vortex the particles in the center have the highest velocity and in the reactor it acts like a centrifuge, forcing the uraninum to the center and compressing it to tens or hundreds of atmospheres. This part was tested experimentally. [^3] the energy of the plasma and compression from the vortex increase the neutron cross section to the point where the nuclear reaction becomes self heating with only 20kg of fuel. They stopped just short of testing the full cycle but this is the same concept behind nuclear weapons, which use precise explosives to compress nuclear fuel until it reaches criticality, except the vortex can't generate the kind of pressures necessary for a nuclear explosion. [^4] the NASA/UAC design heats the UF6 till it radiates most of its energy away as UV. Classical steam turbines or hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles (in the case of a rocket engine) allow the system to extract power. [^5] since it's an active design, tons of power is required to pump the vortex and keep the core in a fissile regime. If any part of the system fails, the core loses pressure and becomes a really expensive gas canister until the chamber is cleaned up and the core restarted. With a plasma window separating the core from a vacuum, the entire system can be designed to depressurize safetly. [^6] anything injected into the core gets bombarded by neutrons and the vortex system constantly wicks away small amounts of the core. The system forms a closed loop that recycles unused fuel via centrifuge and it can also separate out transmuted waste [*]. The NASA/UAC team tested this with a neutron gun to simulate fission in the core. [*] we could have had honest-to-god alchemy!