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Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

136 points by voydik 4y ago

silexia 4y ago
Who really killed nuclear power? I bet if you traced all the financial donations to all the environmental groups and people who have opposed nuclear power, you will find a lot of oil dictatorships and oil companies. Follow the money...
- tomfunk 4y ago
  iirc that's one of Michael Shellenberger's points in Apocalypse Never. i feel like he has a specific agenda so it's hard to take everything he says at face value but that point seems reasonable.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  This is discussed in the article. >Instead of reexamining their energy vision, the greens have committed themselves to promoting energy poverty. In part, they’ve stayed the course because doing so has made them lots of money. The Environmental Defense Fund and the NRDC have a combined budget of nearly $384 million, for example... A recent study found that “tax-motivated investors in today’s renewable energy deals are typically a highly restricted set of the US’s largest banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions” who “have been joined more recently by a handful of giant corporations like Google and Amazon.” Those who reap the rewards of the tax breaks are also some of the biggest donors to climate change causes that back renewables-only policies.
  - RappingBoomer 4y ago
    no. I don't think that is what he is talking about...I was a young nuclear reactor operator for the navy back in the seventies, and I was there to witness the massive propaganda campaign that effectively killed off nuclear power...granted, that campaign used as ammo all those old nuclear scare movies from the fifties, back when the MIC scared the population regarding the Soviet 'menace' so as to manufacture consent for spending more money on the military, but even so, something new was definitely going on...there was some force behind the anti nuclear movement in the seventies, almost certainly fossil fuels industry...
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      "There were propaganda campaigns" and "nuclear died off" doesn't mean the former caused the latter. Classic correlation/causation fallacy. Just as a predator is more successful against a dying prey animal, so are activist groups more successful against an industry that is suffering from grave self-induced problems. Nuclear would be in fine shape today, activists or not, if there were money to be made, as there would be if it really were competitive.
- Symmetry 4y ago
  As regulated utilities the operators of nuclear power plants sold electricity to the grid on a cost plus basis. The larger their costs, the more their profit. So a lot of it was these operators rather than oil companies pushing for ALARA standards. Normally regulators would prevent huge, useless expenditures on their parts but now they weren't able to.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Implicit in that paranoia is the assumption that environmental groups are what stopped nuclear. But that's really just a dubious right wing talking point. Nuclear appears to have shot itself in the foot all on its own.
  - chickenchicken 4y ago
    Thanks for your service.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Environmental groups fought it tooth and nail.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      So what? That doesn't show they actually affected anything.
fundatus 4y ago
Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.
- musha68k 4y ago
  Yes, it’s interesting to watch consensus switch over to pro-nuclear again. I’m not only referring to power generation by the way. In terms of global warming I’m still conflicted myself. It’s a complex topic. Going nuclear probably would be a pragmatic last minute band-aid if it had been applied 20 years ago. Now I’m not so sure anymore. Future plants will also likely meet more wars and other shocks to the system. You only have to read about current fears surrounding Zaporizhzhia. Green energy and changing consumption patterns might be the safest solution at this point.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    My thinking boils down to this question. What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? Batteries may reach some practical limits and not end up being feasible for global grid scale storage. Would we rather live in a world where we grind out building more nuclear capacity, one with rolling blackouts in the OECD, or runaway climate change?
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      > What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all. So, it's just a financial risk. If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised (for example, in the estimates used to compare renewables and nuclear). This risk historically has been very real.
      - ch4s3 4y ago
        > The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all. Smart grid tech could easily fail to be able to deal with the complexity of balancing lots of dynamic demand and output. It could simply be too hard to do that with software in real time needing to react to signals over a great distance in real time. As for batteries, they could be too expensive, clusters large enough for over night power could be dangerously fire prone, or we could have problems with lithium supply/recycling/disposal. >If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised Yes, of course it might be. But it may turn out to be much cheaper if we settle on a few well understood designs and stamp them out largely in factories. I'm not advocating for going all in, just getting the ball rolling as a contingency. If renewables live up to their promise and batteries deliver in the next 10 years then I'll be celebrating along with everyone else. However I think it makes some sense to build some new nuclear plant designs now just in case renewables and batteries take longer to mature than expected. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
dundercoder 4y ago
I worked in commercial nuclear power for a while, including a stint at three mile island. The regulatory compliance burden alone, from the NRC and DOE, is crippling financially.
- ortusdux 4y ago
  Exactly. Regulation has led to larger plants, and longer construction times. https://i.redd.it/djub5auudfj91.png https://i.redd.it/djub5auudfj91.png I really hope pre-approved, pre-built modular reactors lower costs, delays, and regulatory overhead. https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/ I'm also hopefully that molten salt reactors, once viable, are different enough to not be hampered by the full breath of traditional reactor regulations.
- epistasis 4y ago
  That seems to conflict with the low operating expenses of nuclear reactors. Once they are built, what is the crippling aspect?
  - desindol 4y ago
    low operating expenses over the whole lifetime of the plant including deconstruction or just the fun part?
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Typically decommissioning costs are collected throughout the lifetime of operation, and to my knowledge these costs do not significantly raise the operating expenses. But I'm not familiar in detail with many examples, so if I'm wrong on the general trend, I would like to know!
      - desindol 4y ago
        Typically the energy corps gets rid of their assets before decommissioning puts them in a "bad bank corp" and lets us pay for it.
xaduha 4y ago
I blame Naked Gun 2½ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSJZjBC-Dd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSJZjBC-Dd8
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history; ... In North America, the mantle belongs to Ontario, whose nuclear plants replaced its coal fleet.1 I am dubious of this claim, but it probably depends on exactly how you define it. But switching from a country to a province immediately sends up red flags.
- jonnybgood 4y ago
  Canada has 3 out of 4 currently operating nuclear plants in Ontario. France has them scattered throughout the country. I believe that’s why Ontario is specifically mentioned.
  - mcronce 4y ago
    Ontario is also twice the size of France and 1/4 the population; they're at least in the same order of magnitude. I'd call it a reasonable comparison.
    - frozencell 4y ago
      > Ontario is also twice the size of France You certainly mean Metropolitan France*. France is at least 10 times the size of Ontario.
      - causi 4y ago
        He means geographic size. Ontario has twice the land area of France.
- ant6n 4y ago
  > France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history I thought it was hydro in Quebec, or perhaps Norway.
  - ska 4y ago
viburnum 4y ago
The Washington Public Power Supply System was the biggest municipal default in US history.
WalterBright 4y ago
Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit: 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels 2. nuclear plants for base load power and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces. Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-fail-11661547051 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...
- rglover 4y ago
  Thank you. This is a dirt simple and obvious track that would create a wealth of jobs and potential for everyone. It's the ultimate pro-humanity solution to our concerns around energy/pollution.
- fundatus 4y ago
  It's literally natural market forces that are "killing" nuclear energy. It's simply too expensive compared to modern, emission-free alternatives.
  - fi358 4y ago
    Have you solved the problem of intermittent power production by solar and wind energy and included the costs of it to the calculation? It seems to me that the solar and wind energy are causing problem in the energy market with their unreliable production and not paying the cost of solving this problem.
  - choko 4y ago
    Market forces heavily influenced by politics, so not "literally".
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Political considerations push nuclear more than the market by itself would. There has not been a single merchant nuclear power plant (that sells into a competitive power market) built anywhere in the world.
- 4y ago
jmyeet 4y ago
I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example: > The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement. and > Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eugenics returned with gusto under the banner of “population control” after the war. The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl, which has created an absolute exclusion zone of (literally) 1,000 square miles nearly 40 years later with no end in sight, other than to simply ignore it as an outlier that isn't relevant because the USSR doesn't exist anymore. Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off: > No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses of radiation. All the same arguments against nuclear power still apply: nuclear waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel, transporting of fuel and waste, trusting people in corporations and governments to adequately build and maintain such plants and the very fact that not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help (which is why the pro-nuclear lobby will focus on operational costs rather than capital or total costs).
- jdasdf 4y ago
  >The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl~ We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years, and you would cause less environment damage, and human deaths than we did by operating fossil fuel plants in 2021. There is no argument against chernobyl because chernobil is quite frankly irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for, and arguably are already accounted for to a far greater extent than the normal operation of fossil fuel plants.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    Yes, tell that those chernobyl children who still suffer visibly today? Not every country has that much square meters for landfills or nuclear wastelands, too. Nuclear won't save us from not realizing we cannot grow forever and resources are finite. > arguably are already accounted wtf?
pintxo 4y ago
I am curious, was there ever a time were insurance companies did offer risk insurance for nuclear power plants? If not, then nuclear has been killed by it's risk profile.
- moogly 4y ago
  Nuclear plants tend to be underinsured; the bulk of the financial burden of a cleanup after a potential accident will be carried by tax payers. I am not sure if that is true everywhere, but at least in the US (the federal government takes over after the first $15 bn) and parts of Europe. Japan technically not, but practically yes. [0][1][2] It gets even trickier with plants bordering other countries. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... [1]: https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51672335&itype=CMSID https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51672335&itype=CMS... [2]: https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-there-are-big-lessons-for-nuclear-disaster-liability-56167 https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-there... | https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/08/national/fukushima-medical-insurance/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/08/national/fukush...
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Working for an insurance company, I feel really uncomfortable with that. Insurance prefers short policy durations: a year long, preferably. Anything longer and the level of uncertainty becomes massive. For an oil well, a year long policy is fine. Nuclear requires decades.
dctoedt 4y ago
Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor. (Neither Three Mile Island [0] nor Chernobyl [1] would have been so disastrous had it not been for cascading sequences of human error.) Expecting nominal performance by people or machinery is ... unwise; as Admiral Rickover famously said, "you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect." All that adds to costs. Source: Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. [0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-mile-island https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-... [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas. Yet all these materials are cheap.
  - lnsru 4y ago
    Add semiconductor foundries. They have tons of nasty materials there. Enough to make inhabitants of the next bigger city not alive anymore.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > Yet all these materials are cheap. Yes, in large part because the safeguards are not nearly as strong. (And a lot of the rest is because the safeguards impede research on how to make nuclear cheaper.)
mwattsun 4y ago
The accident at Three Mile Island and the film "China Syndrome" turned the public against it in America. The prejudice still lingers. I was working as a reactor tech on a nuclear submarine shortly after and decide before I got out that there was no future in nuclear. I became a computer programmer instead. Alvin Toffler's book "The Third Wave" convinced me to do this.
- dctoedt 4y ago
  Another ex-nuke here — when I got out and went to law school, coincidentally right after Three Mile Island, my dad (neither a lawyer nor an engineer) tried to convince me that I should specialize in nuclear-energy law because I'd have a built-in advantage. I politely explained why I thought that would be a dead end, and that turned out to be correct.
  - mwattsun 4y ago
    Working in nuclear under normal operations is boring anyway and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators. At least on the submarine we'd scram the reactor and run drills. I'm sure civilian nuclear is less exciting than this. I had one buddy who did it for a career, but just one that I know of.
    - dctoedt 4y ago
      > and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators And logs. You forgot taking logs* — or is that done automatically these days? It's been decades since I've been in a nuclear plant, so I have no idea. * That is, recording readings of various indicators.
      - mwattsun 4y ago
        They're probably recorded automatically but logs are still taken as way to ensure human eyes are on the indicators, like security guards have to scan a waystation point to prove they were there. I haven't been in a plant for over three decades so I don't know either. One thing I carried with me through life was to "always trust your indicators." It's too easy to look at an anomaly and conclude the gauge is broken.
locallost 4y ago
The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs, and is partially the reason prices are going into the stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential risk for your analysis, well... The French futures market is almost at 2000 Euros per MWh for the next two quarters [1]. You'd think the market is not anticipating those nuclear plants are coming back online any time soon. Can we not talk about this as a success story please? [1] https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snippetpicker%22%3A%22EEX%20French%20Power%20Futures%22%7D https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere near nominal capacity.
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      They are by building power plants without cooling towers. Problem is not enough water, but because water discharged back to river is too hot.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        I always liked simple answers to comokex questions like, e.g, nuclear power plant cooling. Especially when they come with pre defined scape goats.
kingkawn 4y ago
The present day shelling of Zaporizhzhya is a sufficient argument alone to invest no further resources in the development of this technology and to remove it from the face of the earth.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  And replace it with burning of wood, dumping glass panels full of cadmium and burying spent fiberglass in desert.
- erentz 4y ago
  Ukraine disagrees with you. They’ll be building more nuclear power after the war. There are much easier ways to terrorize people than trying to cause a radiological release from a plant like this. And that is already happening! Witness the constant shelling, bombing and missiles strikes a of civilians. Of the friends that go missing in occupied areas and are found tortured weeks later. Of the children that are being abducted and filtered into Russia. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Ukraine-planning-for-post-war-nuclear-power-plants https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Ukraine-planning...
smm11 4y ago
Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/?sh=55a6110829cf https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag... There's zero places even pretending to do this. There's one under construction that does 1/10th of that in Finland called Onkalo that's cost multiple billions and is years behind This waste procedure includes multi-decade long cooling requirements which require continuous power and water. Spent waste today won't be ready for storage here for about 120 years - mid 22nd century. All for something you could get with some windmills or solar panels The blind nuclear boosterism on Hn is absurd. We are well on our way to fully decentralized renewable electricity that's so cheap it won't be metered and instead there's this fetish for centralized plants that take 10 years to construct, have waste that takes 120 years to process, and lead to multi-continent ecosystem disasters when predictable natural events happen. Cool tech... Existing and deployed solar is 1/7th the cost of not yet deployed hypothetical advanced nuclear btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Capital_costs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... Their best claimed future efforts make it 7x the cost. This is just about keeping power generation privatized metered monopolized centralized and boosted by the government while claiming it's a free market. Typical mindless libertarian drivel.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    > Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. That had jack shit to do with the failure of nuclear in the US. The back end of the fuel cycle is a trivial cost that had nothing to do with the financial failure of nuclear here. And it's the financial failure that stopped it.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
jwie 4y ago
Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other. Most people just don’t know how safe nuclear power is. I worked on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear medicine procedures create. The other source is entrenched players in the power industry hate nuclear power because it works, and can credibly produce post scarcity levels of power production. It is unfortunate that the green energy movement has been lied to and co-opted against this genuinely fantastic energy source.
- arez 4y ago
  tell that to france and their inability to generate power with many reactors because either the rivers are dry or too hot. How is that a sustainable solution
  - rglover 4y ago
    Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is: > After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers. And also... > Since 2000, production losses due to high river temperatures and low river flows have represented an average of 0.3% of annual production. However, half of EDF’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline due to planned maintenance and work to repair corrosion which was delayed by the pandemic, just as Europe faces an energy crunch following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So, in essence the inability to use the water appears to be a regulatory/timing issue, not a technical one, as far as I can gather. While I wouldn't advocate for harming wildlife, I'd say the answer to your question is "locate nuclear plant developments in areas that will have the least impact on wildlife (or, where wildlife can easily be relocated and protected from potential harm)." [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-reduce-nuclear-power-output-as-french-river-temperatures-rise https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
epistasis 4y ago
While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear. Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade? By focusing on culture war, we miss a bigger story: perhaps nuclear construction is not compatible with modern economies? And perhaps it never was a great fit, according to this quote from the article? > At first, nuclear energy was too expensive and so less attractive to utilities. But once General Electric and Westinghouse spurred the industry onward by becoming loss leaders (they collectively lost around $1 billion building plants) the race was on.18 A herd mentality soon developed as utilities lined up to take advantage of government benefits to build new reactors. So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”19
- alerighi 4y ago
  Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.
  - nullc 4y ago
    We need to stop looking at coal/gas, etc. as fuel. They're not. They are part of an atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. When we get energy from carbon emitting sources we're discharging the atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. Eventually we're going to have to charge it again, and to do so it will take substantially more energy than we got from discharging it. Beyond CO2, coal in particular produces a large amount of radioactive and particulate atmospheric pollution. We expect nuclear to capture most of its externalities but we ignore those of most other ways we obtain energy.
Barrin92 4y ago
who killed nuclear energy? Nobody did. The decline in nuclear energy utilization with very few exceptions is secular and global[1]. Two very mundane reasons, the high, largely stagnant cost of generating nuclear energy combined with the rapidly falling cost of renewables. It's amazing to me how everything in the United States can be turned into some weird culture war debate, ignoring the most material explanations, the article straight up ventures into conspiracy theory territory at the end "The all-renewables dream was never about reducing greenhouse gasses, but about entrenching energy poverty to halt population growth, so as to spare the environment." [1]https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-climate-renewables/a-59338202 https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-c...
hindsightbias 4y ago
There should be a meme for not very serious articles about nuclear issues. “We need fewer, clearer, and more sensible regulations.” And not a single example of which regulations to drop. How about redlining the appropriate docs and posting those? If they’re all so bad it should be a trivial excercise.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  One regulation mentioned is “ linear no-threshold standard (LNT) for measuring doses of radiation.” That’s not a regulation per se, but likely the source of many unnecessary regulations.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    LNT is a godsend for the nuclear industry. The alternative is not "we don't know, so we'll assume the effect is zero"; it's "we don't know, so we'll assume the effect is the largest not ruled out by evidence." And that would make estimates of the effects of radiation in nuclear accidents far worse.
gene-h 4y ago
"During the 2021 Uri storm, Texas’s $66 billion in renewable energy investments failed to perform in a time of crisis" So did nuclear. A nuclear reactor in texas went offline for two days during the crisis due to cold weather taking 1.3 GW of capacity with it. The linked article the author cites mentions that the outage was primarily caused by the failure of thermal plants which hadn't been winterized rather than lack of wind power. [0]https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/021821-texas-nuclear-unit-returns-to-service-after-outage-related-to-cold-weather https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
- tstrimple 4y ago
  This is borderline misinformation. It's well known that the Texas grid suffers because of budget conscious corner cutting that the choice of technologies powering the state. It was actually natural gas power generation which failed due to the cold because Texas decided to save some money during construction. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...
genericone 4y ago
The Simpsons 3 eyed fish was the closer.
kmeisthax 4y ago
[flagged]
Sporktacular 4y ago
"today’s so-called environmentalists" The nuclear industry had decades to fix its economic, safety and environmental issues but sat on its hands instead. If half of the subsidies they received over that time when into research we would have fixed the renewable storage problem a decade ago. There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. Fission was only ever a temporary measure. Turns out "today’s so-called environmentalists" as the author disparagingly calls them, and not arrogant industrialist cheerleaders, had it right all along.
- Blammar 4y ago
  Got a citation for your claim about the U supply? And there are reactor designs that burn much more of the U in the fuel...
  - Sporktacular 4y ago
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521002330 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152... Or Sabine Hossenfelder's explanation https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365 https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365 Current reactors use U235 which is less than 1% of all Uranium on the planet. Don't know about reactors that use other uranium isotopes, but if after 70 years they are still at the design stage, it kind of makes my point. It's just too late to turn that around. The article just overlooks this fundamental problem.
    - Blammar 4y ago
      Thanks for the links!
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Note that there's not enough uranium to use at 3% burnup. At 90% there's plenty for baseload providing we end growth immediately, but breeder reactors and reprocessing are even less likely to happen than an affordable LWR
- 4y ago
nborwankar 4y ago
Some counterintuitive “cheery thoughts”. The “safety” aspect of nuclear power is usually discussed in the most narrow sense. The regulatory burdens may be excessive but no other power source is a thermonuclear weapon in a “close to critical state” as its normal condition. Yes, one could fly a small plane into one and maybe nothing will happen but as the Ukraine war points out military grade attacks are not counted in safety calculations. Nor are the impacts of natural disasters especially earthquakes. Cyberattacks are not counted either. Therefore one needs to secure a nuclear power station to the same level of physical and cyber security as a military stockpile of nuclear weapons. With the added risk of direct takeover by live cyberattack or malware. Personnel hiring needs to be at the same level of background checks and security as a military nuclear reactor. All this in a practical sense, and counterintuitively, means that the construction and operation of a nuclear power station with fissile Uranium needs more burdensome protocols not less. Finally the calculations often talk in the language of probability but what is needed is to calculate or estimate Expectation. This sort of “it won’t happen because p ~= 0” thinking is also the kind of thinking that led to the 2008 stock market crash ie “house prices will never go down”. The Expectation calculation of what happens if/when they do was never really thought through. That tends to happen when humongous amounts of money are involved as is the case with energy. We owe it to future generations to not create another multigenerational problem because we short circuited safety considerations trying to save the planet in the medium term. Other than that - stay happy :-).
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > thermonuclear weapon Unless they've installed fusion reactors while I wasn't looking, no nuclear power plant is "thermonuclear".
orthecreedence 4y ago
Advocating for a lower population is not "eugenics." People who beat this drum are lazy and stupid. There are only so many resources to go around, and our productive externalities can cross limited thresholds before becoming lethal. The common factor is the scale of our consumption and production which is, by some incredibly odd coincidence, linked to our population. Who knew... I'm pro-nuclear, but trying to paint the anti-nuclear environmental movement as eugenicists is grasping.
flgb 4y ago
The industry told themselves and the community a lie .. that nuclear was cheap (“too cheap to meter”) and that it was perfectly safe. But, there were always and continue to be cheaper sources of energy, and when incidents did inevitably occur they had an outsized impact on community perceptions.

136 points by voydik 4y ago

Who really killed nuclear power? I bet if you traced all the financial donations to all the environmental groups and people who have opposed nuclear power, you will find a lot of oil dictatorships and oil companies. Follow the money...

tomfunk 4y ago
iirc that's one of Michael Shellenberger's points in Apocalypse Never. i feel like he has a specific agenda so it's hard to take everything he says at face value but that point seems reasonable.
karaterobot 4y ago
This is discussed in the article. >Instead of reexamining their energy vision, the greens have committed themselves to promoting energy poverty. In part, they’ve stayed the course because doing so has made them lots of money. The Environmental Defense Fund and the NRDC have a combined budget of nearly $384 million, for example... A recent study found that “tax-motivated investors in today’s renewable energy deals are typically a highly restricted set of the US’s largest banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions” who “have been joined more recently by a handful of giant corporations like Google and Amazon.” Those who reap the rewards of the tax breaks are also some of the biggest donors to climate change causes that back renewables-only policies.
- RappingBoomer 4y ago
  no. I don't think that is what he is talking about...I was a young nuclear reactor operator for the navy back in the seventies, and I was there to witness the massive propaganda campaign that effectively killed off nuclear power...granted, that campaign used as ammo all those old nuclear scare movies from the fifties, back when the MIC scared the population regarding the Soviet 'menace' so as to manufacture consent for spending more money on the military, but even so, something new was definitely going on...there was some force behind the anti nuclear movement in the seventies, almost certainly fossil fuels industry...
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    "There were propaganda campaigns" and "nuclear died off" doesn't mean the former caused the latter. Classic correlation/causation fallacy. Just as a predator is more successful against a dying prey animal, so are activist groups more successful against an industry that is suffering from grave self-induced problems. Nuclear would be in fine shape today, activists or not, if there were money to be made, as there would be if it really were competitive.
Symmetry 4y ago
As regulated utilities the operators of nuclear power plants sold electricity to the grid on a cost plus basis. The larger their costs, the more their profit. So a lot of it was these operators rather than oil companies pushing for ALARA standards. Normally regulators would prevent huge, useless expenditures on their parts but now they weren't able to.
pfdietz 4y ago
Implicit in that paranoia is the assumption that environmental groups are what stopped nuclear. But that's really just a dubious right wing talking point. Nuclear appears to have shot itself in the foot all on its own.
- chickenchicken 4y ago
  Thanks for your service.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Environmental groups fought it tooth and nail.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    So what? That doesn't show they actually affected anything.

fundatus 4y ago

Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.

musha68k 4y ago
Yes, it’s interesting to watch consensus switch over to pro-nuclear again. I’m not only referring to power generation by the way. In terms of global warming I’m still conflicted myself. It’s a complex topic. Going nuclear probably would be a pragmatic last minute band-aid if it had been applied 20 years ago. Now I’m not so sure anymore. Future plants will also likely meet more wars and other shocks to the system. You only have to read about current fears surrounding Zaporizhzhia. Green energy and changing consumption patterns might be the safest solution at this point.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  My thinking boils down to this question. What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? Batteries may reach some practical limits and not end up being feasible for global grid scale storage. Would we rather live in a world where we grind out building more nuclear capacity, one with rolling blackouts in the OECD, or runaway climate change?
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    > What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all. So, it's just a financial risk. If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised (for example, in the estimates used to compare renewables and nuclear). This risk historically has been very real.
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      > The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all. Smart grid tech could easily fail to be able to deal with the complexity of balancing lots of dynamic demand and output. It could simply be too hard to do that with software in real time needing to react to signals over a great distance in real time. As for batteries, they could be too expensive, clusters large enough for over night power could be dangerously fire prone, or we could have problems with lithium supply/recycling/disposal. >If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised Yes, of course it might be. But it may turn out to be much cheaper if we settle on a few well understood designs and stamp them out largely in factories. I'm not advocating for going all in, just getting the ball rolling as a contingency. If renewables live up to their promise and batteries deliver in the next 10 years then I'll be celebrating along with everyone else. However I think it makes some sense to build some new nuclear plant designs now just in case renewables and batteries take longer to mature than expected. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

dundercoder 4y ago

I worked in commercial nuclear power for a while, including a stint at three mile island. The regulatory compliance burden alone, from the NRC and DOE, is crippling financially.

ortusdux 4y ago
Exactly. Regulation has led to larger plants, and longer construction times. https://i.redd.it/djub5auudfj91.png https://i.redd.it/djub5auudfj91.png I really hope pre-approved, pre-built modular reactors lower costs, delays, and regulatory overhead. https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/ I'm also hopefully that molten salt reactors, once viable, are different enough to not be hampered by the full breath of traditional reactor regulations.
epistasis 4y ago
That seems to conflict with the low operating expenses of nuclear reactors. Once they are built, what is the crippling aspect?
- desindol 4y ago
  low operating expenses over the whole lifetime of the plant including deconstruction or just the fun part?
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Typically decommissioning costs are collected throughout the lifetime of operation, and to my knowledge these costs do not significantly raise the operating expenses. But I'm not familiar in detail with many examples, so if I'm wrong on the general trend, I would like to know!
    - desindol 4y ago
      Typically the energy corps gets rid of their assets before decommissioning puts them in a "bad bank corp" and lets us pay for it.

xaduha 4y ago

I blame Naked Gun 2½ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSJZjBC-Dd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSJZjBC-Dd8

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history; ... In North America, the mantle belongs to Ontario, whose nuclear plants replaced its coal fleet.1 I am dubious of this claim, but it probably depends on exactly how you define it. But switching from a country to a province immediately sends up red flags.

jonnybgood 4y ago
Canada has 3 out of 4 currently operating nuclear plants in Ontario. France has them scattered throughout the country. I believe that’s why Ontario is specifically mentioned.
- mcronce 4y ago
  Ontario is also twice the size of France and 1/4 the population; they're at least in the same order of magnitude. I'd call it a reasonable comparison.
  - frozencell 4y ago
    > Ontario is also twice the size of France You certainly mean Metropolitan France*. France is at least 10 times the size of Ontario.
    - causi 4y ago
      He means geographic size. Ontario has twice the land area of France.
ant6n 4y ago
> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history I thought it was hydro in Quebec, or perhaps Norway.
- ska 4y ago

viburnum 4y ago

The Washington Public Power Supply System was the biggest municipal default in US history.

WalterBright 4y ago

Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit: 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels 2. nuclear plants for base load power and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces. Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-fail-11661547051 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...

rglover 4y ago
Thank you. This is a dirt simple and obvious track that would create a wealth of jobs and potential for everyone. It's the ultimate pro-humanity solution to our concerns around energy/pollution.
fundatus 4y ago
It's literally natural market forces that are "killing" nuclear energy. It's simply too expensive compared to modern, emission-free alternatives.
- fi358 4y ago
  Have you solved the problem of intermittent power production by solar and wind energy and included the costs of it to the calculation? It seems to me that the solar and wind energy are causing problem in the energy market with their unreliable production and not paying the cost of solving this problem.
- choko 4y ago
  Market forces heavily influenced by politics, so not "literally".
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Political considerations push nuclear more than the market by itself would. There has not been a single merchant nuclear power plant (that sells into a competitive power market) built anywhere in the world.
4y ago

jmyeet 4y ago

I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example: > The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement. and > Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eugenics returned with gusto under the banner of “population control” after the war. The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl, which has created an absolute exclusion zone of (literally) 1,000 square miles nearly 40 years later with no end in sight, other than to simply ignore it as an outlier that isn't relevant because the USSR doesn't exist anymore. Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off: > No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses of radiation. All the same arguments against nuclear power still apply: nuclear waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel, transporting of fuel and waste, trusting people in corporations and governments to adequately build and maintain such plants and the very fact that not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help (which is why the pro-nuclear lobby will focus on operational costs rather than capital or total costs).

jdasdf 4y ago
>The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl~ We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years, and you would cause less environment damage, and human deaths than we did by operating fossil fuel plants in 2021. There is no argument against chernobyl because chernobil is quite frankly irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for, and arguably are already accounted for to a far greater extent than the normal operation of fossil fuel plants.
- throw827474737 4y ago
  Yes, tell that those chernobyl children who still suffer visibly today? Not every country has that much square meters for landfills or nuclear wastelands, too. Nuclear won't save us from not realizing we cannot grow forever and resources are finite. > arguably are already accounted wtf?

pintxo 4y ago

I am curious, was there ever a time were insurance companies did offer risk insurance for nuclear power plants? If not, then nuclear has been killed by it's risk profile.

moogly 4y ago
Nuclear plants tend to be underinsured; the bulk of the financial burden of a cleanup after a potential accident will be carried by tax payers. I am not sure if that is true everywhere, but at least in the US (the federal government takes over after the first $15 bn) and parts of Europe. Japan technically not, but practically yes. [0][1][2] It gets even trickier with plants bordering other countries. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... [1]: https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51672335&itype=CMSID https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51672335&itype=CMS... [2]: https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-there-are-big-lessons-for-nuclear-disaster-liability-56167 https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-there... | https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/08/national/fukushima-medical-insurance/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/08/national/fukush...
pyuser583 4y ago
Working for an insurance company, I feel really uncomfortable with that. Insurance prefers short policy durations: a year long, preferably. Anything longer and the level of uncertainty becomes massive. For an oil well, a year long policy is fine. Nuclear requires decades.

dctoedt 4y ago

Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor. (Neither Three Mile Island [0] nor Chernobyl [1] would have been so disastrous had it not been for cascading sequences of human error.) Expecting nominal performance by people or machinery is ... unwise; as Admiral Rickover famously said, "you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect." All that adds to costs. Source: Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. [0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-mile-island https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-... [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs

tuatoru 4y ago
Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas. Yet all these materials are cheap.
- lnsru 4y ago
  Add semiconductor foundries. They have tons of nasty materials there. Enough to make inhabitants of the next bigger city not alive anymore.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > Yet all these materials are cheap. Yes, in large part because the safeguards are not nearly as strong. (And a lot of the rest is because the safeguards impede research on how to make nuclear cheaper.)

mwattsun 4y ago

The accident at Three Mile Island and the film "China Syndrome" turned the public against it in America. The prejudice still lingers. I was working as a reactor tech on a nuclear submarine shortly after and decide before I got out that there was no future in nuclear. I became a computer programmer instead. Alvin Toffler's book "The Third Wave" convinced me to do this.

dctoedt 4y ago
Another ex-nuke here — when I got out and went to law school, coincidentally right after Three Mile Island, my dad (neither a lawyer nor an engineer) tried to convince me that I should specialize in nuclear-energy law because I'd have a built-in advantage. I politely explained why I thought that would be a dead end, and that turned out to be correct.
- mwattsun 4y ago
  Working in nuclear under normal operations is boring anyway and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators. At least on the submarine we'd scram the reactor and run drills. I'm sure civilian nuclear is less exciting than this. I had one buddy who did it for a career, but just one that I know of.
  - dctoedt 4y ago
    > and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators And logs. You forgot taking logs* — or is that done automatically these days? It's been decades since I've been in a nuclear plant, so I have no idea. * That is, recording readings of various indicators.
    - mwattsun 4y ago
      They're probably recorded automatically but logs are still taken as way to ensure human eyes are on the indicators, like security guards have to scan a waystation point to prove they were there. I haven't been in a plant for over three decades so I don't know either. One thing I carried with me through life was to "always trust your indicators." It's too easy to look at an anomaly and conclude the gauge is broken.

locallost 4y ago

The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs, and is partially the reason prices are going into the stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential risk for your analysis, well... The French futures market is almost at 2000 Euros per MWh for the next two quarters [1]. You'd think the market is not anticipating those nuclear plants are coming back online any time soon. Can we not talk about this as a success story please? [1] https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snippetpicker%22%3A%22EEX%20French%20Power%20Futures%22%7D https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...

Georgelemental 4y ago
France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere near nominal capacity.
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    They are by building power plants without cooling towers. Problem is not enough water, but because water discharged back to river is too hot.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      I always liked simple answers to comokex questions like, e.g, nuclear power plant cooling. Especially when they come with pre defined scape goats.

kingkawn 4y ago

The present day shelling of Zaporizhzhya is a sufficient argument alone to invest no further resources in the development of this technology and to remove it from the face of the earth.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
And replace it with burning of wood, dumping glass panels full of cadmium and burying spent fiberglass in desert.
erentz 4y ago
Ukraine disagrees with you. They’ll be building more nuclear power after the war. There are much easier ways to terrorize people than trying to cause a radiological release from a plant like this. And that is already happening! Witness the constant shelling, bombing and missiles strikes a of civilians. Of the friends that go missing in occupied areas and are found tortured weeks later. Of the children that are being abducted and filtered into Russia. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Ukraine-planning-for-post-war-nuclear-power-plants https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Ukraine-planning...

smm11 4y ago

Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.

kristopolous 4y ago
Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/?sh=55a6110829cf https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag... There's zero places even pretending to do this. There's one under construction that does 1/10th of that in Finland called Onkalo that's cost multiple billions and is years behind This waste procedure includes multi-decade long cooling requirements which require continuous power and water. Spent waste today won't be ready for storage here for about 120 years - mid 22nd century. All for something you could get with some windmills or solar panels The blind nuclear boosterism on Hn is absurd. We are well on our way to fully decentralized renewable electricity that's so cheap it won't be metered and instead there's this fetish for centralized plants that take 10 years to construct, have waste that takes 120 years to process, and lead to multi-continent ecosystem disasters when predictable natural events happen. Cool tech... Existing and deployed solar is 1/7th the cost of not yet deployed hypothetical advanced nuclear btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Capital_costs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... Their best claimed future efforts make it 7x the cost. This is just about keeping power generation privatized metered monopolized centralized and boosted by the government while claiming it's a free market. Typical mindless libertarian drivel.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. That had jack shit to do with the failure of nuclear in the US. The back end of the fuel cycle is a trivial cost that had nothing to do with the financial failure of nuclear here. And it's the financial failure that stopped it.
  - kristopolous 4y ago

jwie 4y ago

Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other. Most people just don’t know how safe nuclear power is. I worked on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear medicine procedures create. The other source is entrenched players in the power industry hate nuclear power because it works, and can credibly produce post scarcity levels of power production. It is unfortunate that the green energy movement has been lied to and co-opted against this genuinely fantastic energy source.

arez 4y ago
tell that to france and their inability to generate power with many reactors because either the rivers are dry or too hot. How is that a sustainable solution
- rglover 4y ago
  Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is: > After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers. And also... > Since 2000, production losses due to high river temperatures and low river flows have represented an average of 0.3% of annual production. However, half of EDF’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline due to planned maintenance and work to repair corrosion which was delayed by the pandemic, just as Europe faces an energy crunch following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So, in essence the inability to use the water appears to be a regulatory/timing issue, not a technical one, as far as I can gather. While I wouldn't advocate for harming wildlife, I'd say the answer to your question is "locate nuclear plant developments in areas that will have the least impact on wildlife (or, where wildlife can easily be relocated and protected from potential harm)." [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-reduce-nuclear-power-output-as-french-river-temperatures-rise https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...

epistasis 4y ago

While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear. Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade? By focusing on culture war, we miss a bigger story: perhaps nuclear construction is not compatible with modern economies? And perhaps it never was a great fit, according to this quote from the article? > At first, nuclear energy was too expensive and so less attractive to utilities. But once General Electric and Westinghouse spurred the industry onward by becoming loss leaders (they collectively lost around $1 billion building plants) the race was on.18 A herd mentality soon developed as utilities lined up to take advantage of government benefits to build new reactors. So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”19

alerighi 4y ago
Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.
- nullc 4y ago
  We need to stop looking at coal/gas, etc. as fuel. They're not. They are part of an atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. When we get energy from carbon emitting sources we're discharging the atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. Eventually we're going to have to charge it again, and to do so it will take substantially more energy than we got from discharging it. Beyond CO2, coal in particular produces a large amount of radioactive and particulate atmospheric pollution. We expect nuclear to capture most of its externalities but we ignore those of most other ways we obtain energy.

Barrin92 4y ago

who killed nuclear energy? Nobody did. The decline in nuclear energy utilization with very few exceptions is secular and global[1]. Two very mundane reasons, the high, largely stagnant cost of generating nuclear energy combined with the rapidly falling cost of renewables. It's amazing to me how everything in the United States can be turned into some weird culture war debate, ignoring the most material explanations, the article straight up ventures into conspiracy theory territory at the end "The all-renewables dream was never about reducing greenhouse gasses, but about entrenching energy poverty to halt population growth, so as to spare the environment." [1]https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-climate-renewables/a-59338202 https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-c...

hindsightbias 4y ago

There should be a meme for not very serious articles about nuclear issues. “We need fewer, clearer, and more sensible regulations.” And not a single example of which regulations to drop. How about redlining the appropriate docs and posting those? If they’re all so bad it should be a trivial excercise.

pyuser583 4y ago
One regulation mentioned is “ linear no-threshold standard (LNT) for measuring doses of radiation.” That’s not a regulation per se, but likely the source of many unnecessary regulations.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  LNT is a godsend for the nuclear industry. The alternative is not "we don't know, so we'll assume the effect is zero"; it's "we don't know, so we'll assume the effect is the largest not ruled out by evidence." And that would make estimates of the effects of radiation in nuclear accidents far worse.

gene-h 4y ago

"During the 2021 Uri storm, Texas’s $66 billion in renewable energy investments failed to perform in a time of crisis" So did nuclear. A nuclear reactor in texas went offline for two days during the crisis due to cold weather taking 1.3 GW of capacity with it. The linked article the author cites mentions that the outage was primarily caused by the failure of thermal plants which hadn't been winterized rather than lack of wind power. [0]https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/021821-texas-nuclear-unit-returns-to-service-after-outage-related-to-cold-weather https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

tstrimple 4y ago
This is borderline misinformation. It's well known that the Texas grid suffers because of budget conscious corner cutting that the choice of technologies powering the state. It was actually natural gas power generation which failed due to the cold because Texas decided to save some money during construction. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

genericone 4y ago

The Simpsons 3 eyed fish was the closer.

kmeisthax 4y ago

[flagged]

Sporktacular 4y ago

"today’s so-called environmentalists" The nuclear industry had decades to fix its economic, safety and environmental issues but sat on its hands instead. If half of the subsidies they received over that time when into research we would have fixed the renewable storage problem a decade ago. There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. Fission was only ever a temporary measure. Turns out "today’s so-called environmentalists" as the author disparagingly calls them, and not arrogant industrialist cheerleaders, had it right all along.

Blammar 4y ago
Got a citation for your claim about the U supply? And there are reactor designs that burn much more of the U in the fuel...
- Sporktacular 4y ago
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521002330 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152... Or Sabine Hossenfelder's explanation https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365 https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365 Current reactors use U235 which is less than 1% of all Uranium on the planet. Don't know about reactors that use other uranium isotopes, but if after 70 years they are still at the design stage, it kind of makes my point. It's just too late to turn that around. The article just overlooks this fundamental problem.
  - Blammar 4y ago
    Thanks for the links!
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Note that there's not enough uranium to use at 3% burnup. At 90% there's plenty for baseload providing we end growth immediately, but breeder reactors and reprocessing are even less likely to happen than an affordable LWR
4y ago

nborwankar 4y ago

Some counterintuitive “cheery thoughts”. The “safety” aspect of nuclear power is usually discussed in the most narrow sense. The regulatory burdens may be excessive but no other power source is a thermonuclear weapon in a “close to critical state” as its normal condition. Yes, one could fly a small plane into one and maybe nothing will happen but as the Ukraine war points out military grade attacks are not counted in safety calculations. Nor are the impacts of natural disasters especially earthquakes. Cyberattacks are not counted either. Therefore one needs to secure a nuclear power station to the same level of physical and cyber security as a military stockpile of nuclear weapons. With the added risk of direct takeover by live cyberattack or malware. Personnel hiring needs to be at the same level of background checks and security as a military nuclear reactor. All this in a practical sense, and counterintuitively, means that the construction and operation of a nuclear power station with fissile Uranium needs more burdensome protocols not less. Finally the calculations often talk in the language of probability but what is needed is to calculate or estimate Expectation. This sort of “it won’t happen because p ~= 0” thinking is also the kind of thinking that led to the 2008 stock market crash ie “house prices will never go down”. The Expectation calculation of what happens if/when they do was never really thought through. That tends to happen when humongous amounts of money are involved as is the case with energy. We owe it to future generations to not create another multigenerational problem because we short circuited safety considerations trying to save the planet in the medium term. Other than that - stay happy :-).

pfdietz 4y ago
> thermonuclear weapon Unless they've installed fusion reactors while I wasn't looking, no nuclear power plant is "thermonuclear".

orthecreedence 4y ago

Advocating for a lower population is not "eugenics." People who beat this drum are lazy and stupid. There are only so many resources to go around, and our productive externalities can cross limited thresholds before becoming lethal. The common factor is the scale of our consumption and production which is, by some incredibly odd coincidence, linked to our population. Who knew... I'm pro-nuclear, but trying to paint the anti-nuclear environmental movement as eugenicists is grasping.

flgb 4y ago

The industry told themselves and the community a lie .. that nuclear was cheap (“too cheap to meter”) and that it was perfectly safe. But, there were always and continue to be cheaper sources of energy, and when incidents did inevitably occur they had an outsized impact on community perceptions.