5 ms·

Nuclear Power Still Doesn’t Make Much Sense

10 points by lots2learn 4y ago

dtagames 4y ago
The energy source that was supposed to be "too cheap to meter" turns out to have a *net negative* energy value. When you add together the true costs of building, running, and decommissioning a nuclear plant it comes to more than you can sell the electricity for. All nuclear plants rely on government subsidy and externalization of decommissioning costs. In other words -- they're not on the balance sheets. What legit business gets away with that? The reality is that nuclear power is a 1950's technology -- one from the past, not the future. We never fully understood the implications of running or taking apart a nuclear plant at commercial scale and instead of addressing the real problems, we just pretend they don't exist. It's time to put the effort and expense once reserved for nuclear into something that doesn't create waste that lasts for 240,000 years (plutonium) or require supervised swimming pools to store (used fuel rods). We need power plants that can be turned on and off quickly -- at small scale -- not ones that require 20 years to build and 50 to tear down. The time for nuclear is over... and it has been for a while! We've just been in denial.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  The EROEI argument is almost certainly wrong. Justify, please. It's certainly very economically dubious, though.
- bzzzt 4y ago
  "All nuclear plants rely on government subsidy and externalization of decommissioning costs. In other words -- they're not on the balance sheets. What legit business gets away with that?" Lots. Name one business that has compensate for all of the CO2 their activities have produced when they are going out of business.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    That argument would have weight if CO2 emission wasn't going the way of slavery. The old generic argument "nuclear because CO2 is bad" doesn't work, because there's now a superior non-fossil alternative. Nuclear rested on its laurels, its supporters thinking it was the only alternative when fossil fuels had to be abandoned, and it's adrift now that it's no longer entitled to be fossil fuel's successor.
    - dTal 4y ago
      What's your superior non-fossil alternative? If it's "renewables", I'd love to see your plan for replacing e.g. Gravelines Nuclear Power Station in France with a renewable facility that can generate 5.5 GW for 24 hours a day 365 days a year, including the budget for the (nonexistent) storage technology required to make that happen and the land area it would need.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Let's look at the cost of providing synthetic baseload in France with wind + solar + batteries + hydrogen, using real weather data to drive the optimization problem: https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Using 2011 weather data and 2030 cost assumptions (some of which are already met), we get 71 euro/MWh. That's much better than what Flamanville 3 is going to be delivering. Inclusion of hydrogen reduces that cost from 93.1 euro/MWh. Many arguments against renewables assume batteries are to be used instead for long term smoothing, which is a poor choice. 2030 cost assumptions are appropriate because any new nuclear plant started now isn't going to be available before then. Ignoring the cost trajectory of renewables and storage is another common mistake of nuclear advocates, a mistake that nuclear investors cannot allow themselves to indulge in. Indeed, they likely are looking even further ahead, as that nuclear plant has to operate until 2070 or so.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  > externalization of decommissioning costs The companies that operate nuclear power plants usually pay into a fund that finances the decommissioning no?
- dTal 4y ago
  Almost everything in this comment is wrong. It reads like a political speech - an effort to convince using rhetoric rather than a serious entry in a technical discussion. It's so awful that I'm unhappy with just downvoting it and moving on, lest someone else be swayed by its words. So here's my attempt to refute the Gish gallop, sentence by sentence: > The energy source that was supposed to be "too cheap to meter" turns out to have a net negative energy value This is obviously nonsense. Nuclear plants produce far more energy than it takes to construct and manage them, for decades at a time. Nearly all of France's energy comes from nuclear; if this were true they would need to import vast amounts of fossil-derived energy just to cover the costs of building the plants. Completely inane. Obviously nuclear power makes power. > When you add together the true costs of building, running, and decommissioning a nuclear plant it comes to more than you can sell the electricity for. I'm highly skeptical of this claim - like the above, it doesn't pass the order-of-magnitude sniff test. But even if it were true, it wouldn't necessarily tell us much in the current world where the energy market is distorted by cheap fossil fuel power, which is both a) subsidized and b) under no requirement to pay for its own cleanup, the expense of which would be prodigious. >All nuclear plants rely on government subsidy and externalization of decommissioning costs. That's not true, many pay into their own decommissioning fund. > In other words -- they're not on the balance sheets. If anything, the externalities of nuclear are the most meticulously accounted of all the power sources. > What legit business gets away with that? All fossil fuel businesses, who spew their waste into the atmosphere and pay nothing for it. >The reality is that nuclear power is a 1950's technology -- one from the past, not the future. If we could use technology from the future, that would certainly solve a lot of problems. But if we're ranking energy technology by age, then the ordering goes: fossil fuels -> solar panels -> windmill generators -> fission. > We never fully understood the implications of running or taking apart a nuclear plant at commercial scale and instead of addressing the real problems, we just pretend they don't exist. ...We didn't? Again, France seems to manage okay. I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. > It's time to put the effort and expense once reserved for nuclear into something that doesn't create waste that lasts for 240,000 years (plutonium) or require supervised swimming pools to store (used fuel rods). What's your suggestion? What should we build right now? We can't just not build power plants because someone might invent a better technology in the future. > We need power plants that can be turned on and off quickly -- at small scale -- not ones that require 20 years to build and 50 to tear down. Not only is this is a weird false dichotomy - switching time is orthogonal to construction time - but it's also wrong on both sides of the dichotomy: nuclear power plants can be switched very quickly (just raise and lower the control rods), and also don't take 20 years to build. Gravelines Nuclear Power Station (not cherry picked, just the one I happen to have the Wikipedia page open for) is the largest nuclear power station in France, and took... 8 years to build. > The time for nuclear is over... and it has been for a while! We've just been in denial. What denial? People have been irrationally fighting nuclear power since the early days of the Cold War, largely due to its association with nuclear weapons.
egberts1 4y ago
Written by a person who lied in his other NYT article about being “unplugged” from Twitter. I’m moving on. Source: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  I don't care because there is no physics in the article. Nuclear matters, because of energy density and its effectively inexhaustible. One day we will have fusion reactors and none of this will matter at all.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    I love this energy density argument, because it sounds profound but actually is completely vacuous. Energy density doesn't matter, cost does. And we know nuclear sucks on cost.
    - grej 4y ago
      Energy density is far from vacuous. It goes directly to energy return on investment. Solar and wind require comparably MASSIVE amounts of raw materials because of their low power densities, and overall deliver a massively lower energy return on investment. Because of their intermittent nature they will also have to be paired with storage tech requiring still more raw materials and/or be built to a capacity which is far in excess of baseload requirements. All those input raw materials are mined, processed, and finished using, by and large, fossil fuels. Ergo the perceived low cost of renewables is actually based on the relative low cost of fossil fuels. And that fossil fuel price point which is rapidly rising under supply shortages.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        No, energy density doe not give energy return on investment. How could you possibly reach that conclusion? Moreover, EROEI is also a misleading metric. A technology with an EROEI of 100 is not 10x better than one with an EROEI of 10. The better metric is "energy after self-use" (say), which would be 1-1/EROEI. 0.99 is just 10% better than 0.9. This would be a minor advantage that could be easily swamped by other considerations. Solar and wind require raw materials (for at least some materials), but nuclear requires much more labor. After all, nuclear is demonstrably more expensive than renewables; those $ have to be going somewhere. I will add that solar actually uses much less concrete than nuclear, if mounted on the ground with steel earth anchors. Concrete production produces CO2 even in a fossil-fuel-free economy.
tachikom4 4y ago
Energy density matters... a lot. As a matter of scale, nuclear can be shipped by plane to feed a plant (no Government would allow it, just for comparison sake). Try doing it with coal or gas. How much digging you must do to have a sizeable quantity of radioactive ore to refine into nuclear fuel? Compare it to coal, lithium salt, bauxite (aluminium) and cobalt. Electrification of everything and mining every item above can take a greater toll on environment. Is Nuclear older tech? Light Water Reactors (LWRs) are from 1950s and used by the Navy. In the same time, Molten Salt Reactos (MSRs) were developed by Alvin Weinberg in the Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) and proved very successfull. Unfortunately, the US Gov't (Nixon) invested in Plutonium/Nuke tech and MSRs weren't developed further. Not all energy uses are electrical. MSRs can also be used on thermal processes (above 700 degrees Celsius) and thermal energy is crucial to dozens of industrial processes, currently moslty feeded by coal and gas. Current light water cooled nuclear plants just do at 350 degrees and requires tons of protection to contain gaseous water pressure (> 150 thousands Atm). MSRs can operate at 3 Atm and higher temps => low explosion risk. Radioactive waste: France is estimated to grow long term waste from 140,000 cubic meters (2019 - data from Statista) to 189,000 in 2040. Thats 2,200 40ft containers to 2,900. A 700 container size change in 20 years. All their current long term waste fills 11% of Evergreen, the infamous ship that clogged the Suez Canal. Compared to coal ash deposits, it is nothing. Current nuclear waste retains 97% of usable energy. With MSRs, it is estimated to reduce it to under 5%, with half-times around 50 years (very short). Imagine the waste reduction after recycling all that into those reactors. The most important component in solar panels is silicon with 99.999% purity. That consumes a lot or energy to produce. And China produces lots of them... fueled by coal plants. Nice for a carbon-free tech. Concrete is a carbon intensive material but you´ll use a lot less in a nuclear plant than a hidropower one. Concrete, aluminum, fertilizer are all thermal energy intensive industries and are carbon intensive with current tech. What do you think where their carbon footprint goes if you adapt them to use some nuclear thermo-electrical boost?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  All of the considerations you bring up are lame substitutes for the metric that actually matters... cost. If we had never built nuclear power plants or wind turbines or PV fields, maybe trying to get a handle on the cost by such indirect arguments could be useful. But why resort to such an unreliable methodology when we have the actual cost data? We know that nuclear is considerably more expensive than renewables, which is why nuclear is shut out of new construction in the US. Even around the world, renewables are dominating nuclear for new construction.

10 points by lots2learn 4y ago

The energy source that was supposed to be "too cheap to meter" turns out to have a *net negative* energy value. When you add together the true costs of building, running, and decommissioning a nuclear plant it comes to more than you can sell the electricity for. All nuclear plants rely on government subsidy and externalization of decommissioning costs. In other words -- they're not on the balance sheets. What legit business gets away with that? The reality is that nuclear power is a 1950's technology -- one from the past, not the future. We never fully understood the implications of running or taking apart a nuclear plant at commercial scale and instead of addressing the real problems, we just pretend they don't exist. It's time to put the effort and expense once reserved for nuclear into something that doesn't create waste that lasts for 240,000 years (plutonium) or require supervised swimming pools to store (used fuel rods). We need power plants that can be turned on and off quickly -- at small scale -- not ones that require 20 years to build and 50 to tear down. The time for nuclear is over... and it has been for a while! We've just been in denial.

pfdietz 4y ago
The EROEI argument is almost certainly wrong. Justify, please. It's certainly very economically dubious, though.
bzzzt 4y ago
"All nuclear plants rely on government subsidy and externalization of decommissioning costs. In other words -- they're not on the balance sheets. What legit business gets away with that?" Lots. Name one business that has compensate for all of the CO2 their activities have produced when they are going out of business.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  That argument would have weight if CO2 emission wasn't going the way of slavery. The old generic argument "nuclear because CO2 is bad" doesn't work, because there's now a superior non-fossil alternative. Nuclear rested on its laurels, its supporters thinking it was the only alternative when fossil fuels had to be abandoned, and it's adrift now that it's no longer entitled to be fossil fuel's successor.
  - dTal 4y ago
    What's your superior non-fossil alternative? If it's "renewables", I'd love to see your plan for replacing e.g. Gravelines Nuclear Power Station in France with a renewable facility that can generate 5.5 GW for 24 hours a day 365 days a year, including the budget for the (nonexistent) storage technology required to make that happen and the land area it would need.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Let's look at the cost of providing synthetic baseload in France with wind + solar + batteries + hydrogen, using real weather data to drive the optimization problem: https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Using 2011 weather data and 2030 cost assumptions (some of which are already met), we get 71 euro/MWh. That's much better than what Flamanville 3 is going to be delivering. Inclusion of hydrogen reduces that cost from 93.1 euro/MWh. Many arguments against renewables assume batteries are to be used instead for long term smoothing, which is a poor choice. 2030 cost assumptions are appropriate because any new nuclear plant started now isn't going to be available before then. Ignoring the cost trajectory of renewables and storage is another common mistake of nuclear advocates, a mistake that nuclear investors cannot allow themselves to indulge in. Indeed, they likely are looking even further ahead, as that nuclear plant has to operate until 2070 or so.
cinntaile 4y ago
> externalization of decommissioning costs The companies that operate nuclear power plants usually pay into a fund that finances the decommissioning no?
dTal 4y ago
Almost everything in this comment is wrong. It reads like a political speech - an effort to convince using rhetoric rather than a serious entry in a technical discussion. It's so awful that I'm unhappy with just downvoting it and moving on, lest someone else be swayed by its words. So here's my attempt to refute the Gish gallop, sentence by sentence: > The energy source that was supposed to be "too cheap to meter" turns out to have a net negative energy value This is obviously nonsense. Nuclear plants produce far more energy than it takes to construct and manage them, for decades at a time. Nearly all of France's energy comes from nuclear; if this were true they would need to import vast amounts of fossil-derived energy just to cover the costs of building the plants. Completely inane. Obviously nuclear power makes power. > When you add together the true costs of building, running, and decommissioning a nuclear plant it comes to more than you can sell the electricity for. I'm highly skeptical of this claim - like the above, it doesn't pass the order-of-magnitude sniff test. But even if it were true, it wouldn't necessarily tell us much in the current world where the energy market is distorted by cheap fossil fuel power, which is both a) subsidized and b) under no requirement to pay for its own cleanup, the expense of which would be prodigious. >All nuclear plants rely on government subsidy and externalization of decommissioning costs. That's not true, many pay into their own decommissioning fund. > In other words -- they're not on the balance sheets. If anything, the externalities of nuclear are the most meticulously accounted of all the power sources. > What legit business gets away with that? All fossil fuel businesses, who spew their waste into the atmosphere and pay nothing for it. >The reality is that nuclear power is a 1950's technology -- one from the past, not the future. If we could use technology from the future, that would certainly solve a lot of problems. But if we're ranking energy technology by age, then the ordering goes: fossil fuels -> solar panels -> windmill generators -> fission. > We never fully understood the implications of running or taking apart a nuclear plant at commercial scale and instead of addressing the real problems, we just pretend they don't exist. ...We didn't? Again, France seems to manage okay. I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. > It's time to put the effort and expense once reserved for nuclear into something that doesn't create waste that lasts for 240,000 years (plutonium) or require supervised swimming pools to store (used fuel rods). What's your suggestion? What should we build right now? We can't just not build power plants because someone might invent a better technology in the future. > We need power plants that can be turned on and off quickly -- at small scale -- not ones that require 20 years to build and 50 to tear down. Not only is this is a weird false dichotomy - switching time is orthogonal to construction time - but it's also wrong on both sides of the dichotomy: nuclear power plants can be switched very quickly (just raise and lower the control rods), and also don't take 20 years to build. Gravelines Nuclear Power Station (not cherry picked, just the one I happen to have the Wikipedia page open for) is the largest nuclear power station in France, and took... 8 years to build. > The time for nuclear is over... and it has been for a while! We've just been in denial. What denial? People have been irrationally fighting nuclear power since the early days of the Cold War, largely due to its association with nuclear weapons.

egberts1 4y ago

Written by a person who lied in his other NYT article about being “unplugged” from Twitter. I’m moving on. Source: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php

nh23423fefe 4y ago
I don't care because there is no physics in the article. Nuclear matters, because of energy density and its effectively inexhaustible. One day we will have fusion reactors and none of this will matter at all.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  I love this energy density argument, because it sounds profound but actually is completely vacuous. Energy density doesn't matter, cost does. And we know nuclear sucks on cost.
  - grej 4y ago
    Energy density is far from vacuous. It goes directly to energy return on investment. Solar and wind require comparably MASSIVE amounts of raw materials because of their low power densities, and overall deliver a massively lower energy return on investment. Because of their intermittent nature they will also have to be paired with storage tech requiring still more raw materials and/or be built to a capacity which is far in excess of baseload requirements. All those input raw materials are mined, processed, and finished using, by and large, fossil fuels. Ergo the perceived low cost of renewables is actually based on the relative low cost of fossil fuels. And that fossil fuel price point which is rapidly rising under supply shortages.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      No, energy density doe not give energy return on investment. How could you possibly reach that conclusion? Moreover, EROEI is also a misleading metric. A technology with an EROEI of 100 is not 10x better than one with an EROEI of 10. The better metric is "energy after self-use" (say), which would be 1-1/EROEI. 0.99 is just 10% better than 0.9. This would be a minor advantage that could be easily swamped by other considerations. Solar and wind require raw materials (for at least some materials), but nuclear requires much more labor. After all, nuclear is demonstrably more expensive than renewables; those $ have to be going somewhere. I will add that solar actually uses much less concrete than nuclear, if mounted on the ground with steel earth anchors. Concrete production produces CO2 even in a fossil-fuel-free economy.

tachikom4 4y ago

Energy density matters... a lot. As a matter of scale, nuclear can be shipped by plane to feed a plant (no Government would allow it, just for comparison sake). Try doing it with coal or gas. How much digging you must do to have a sizeable quantity of radioactive ore to refine into nuclear fuel? Compare it to coal, lithium salt, bauxite (aluminium) and cobalt. Electrification of everything and mining every item above can take a greater toll on environment. Is Nuclear older tech? Light Water Reactors (LWRs) are from 1950s and used by the Navy. In the same time, Molten Salt Reactos (MSRs) were developed by Alvin Weinberg in the Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) and proved very successfull. Unfortunately, the US Gov't (Nixon) invested in Plutonium/Nuke tech and MSRs weren't developed further. Not all energy uses are electrical. MSRs can also be used on thermal processes (above 700 degrees Celsius) and thermal energy is crucial to dozens of industrial processes, currently moslty feeded by coal and gas. Current light water cooled nuclear plants just do at 350 degrees and requires tons of protection to contain gaseous water pressure (> 150 thousands Atm). MSRs can operate at 3 Atm and higher temps => low explosion risk. Radioactive waste: France is estimated to grow long term waste from 140,000 cubic meters (2019 - data from Statista) to 189,000 in 2040. Thats 2,200 40ft containers to 2,900. A 700 container size change in 20 years. All their current long term waste fills 11% of Evergreen, the infamous ship that clogged the Suez Canal. Compared to coal ash deposits, it is nothing. Current nuclear waste retains 97% of usable energy. With MSRs, it is estimated to reduce it to under 5%, with half-times around 50 years (very short). Imagine the waste reduction after recycling all that into those reactors. The most important component in solar panels is silicon with 99.999% purity. That consumes a lot or energy to produce. And China produces lots of them... fueled by coal plants. Nice for a carbon-free tech. Concrete is a carbon intensive material but you´ll use a lot less in a nuclear plant than a hidropower one. Concrete, aluminum, fertilizer are all thermal energy intensive industries and are carbon intensive with current tech. What do you think where their carbon footprint goes if you adapt them to use some nuclear thermo-electrical boost?

pfdietz 4y ago
All of the considerations you bring up are lame substitutes for the metric that actually matters... cost. If we had never built nuclear power plants or wind turbines or PV fields, maybe trying to get a handle on the cost by such indirect arguments could be useful. But why resort to such an unreliable methodology when we have the actual cost data? We know that nuclear is considerably more expensive than renewables, which is why nuclear is shut out of new construction in the US. Even around the world, renewables are dominating nuclear for new construction.