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It's crazy to think it would only take a few thousand plants to power the entire world, or about 15 times the ones we have today. But even another few hundred p

• RobertRoberts 4y ago
  Waste storage. If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear power right now.
  • adamsb6 4y ago
    Your terms are agreeable.
  • jbverschoor 4y ago
    So instead we just pump energy waste / byproducts in the air?
  • goodpoint 4y ago
    There are a lot of problem related to nuclear, including its cost, the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid.
    • S201 4y ago
      > the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid. Sounds a lot better to me than relying on the middle east and Russia for fossil fuels.
      • goodpoint 4y ago
        That's called false dichotomy.
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    Waste is stored on site until it’s quite a bit less radioactive, this can and has been done for decades. The fear of shipping this cooled down waste and burying it in a mountain is entirely unfounded and the only reason it hasn’t happened is people spreading unnecessary fear.
  • S201 4y ago
    Waste isn't a problem, or at least not a problem that can't be solved with a bit of effort. Let's stop repeating the scary propaganda line that there's mountains of highly radioactive waste pouring out of nuclear power plants that is just waiting to irradiate our neighborhoods because we don't have anywhere to put it. > If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle: > Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized. Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
    • delecti 4y ago
      I agree that nuclear waste is an overblown problem, but that link entirely ignores the structural components that become radioactive. There's lots of things like concrete and steel that need to be contained as well.
      • S201 4y ago
        Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down and use it in a new reactor.
        • mjevans 4y ago
          Not an expert; but offhand I recall that irradiated materials, in addition to being harmful to biological entities like humans, are also changed by the absorbed radiation. Effectively they gain impurities from it. The best course of action would be to let the halflifes decay and then return it to the raw material stream.
  • amluto 4y ago
    I would love a nuclear plant in my neighborhood, especially if I could buy power from it without going through PG&E. I have trouble imagining waste storage being cost effective here. Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes sense. Small nuclear could go near where power is used. Waste should be somewhere with inexpensive land and in a convenient location for putting the waste there. If there were container-sized reactors that produced a few tens of MW, they could go all over the place. Fancy neighborhoods could pay a premium to put them in fake houses. But the waste would probably be much more economical to handle by moving the entire container to a service facility, refueling at the facility, and handling the waste at or near the facility. This would be in an industrial area, just like other large warehouses or factories.
    • Lammy 4y ago
      > Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes sense. Like Bodega Head where you can actually visit the never-finished reactor pit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
      • amluto 4y ago
        To be fair, if it was going to be a Fukushima-style boiling water reactor that can fail dangerously if it loses power, sticking it that close to a major fault line in an isolated area may not be the best idea.
        • Lammy 4y ago
          I honestly don't believe that :) At Fukushima, the reactor SCRAMed successfully and it was the seawater that took out the generators powering the decay-heat cooling system. If California experienced a wave that could crest Bodega Head's yuge natural seawall then we have bigger problems lol https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=96773349539f93042d90063536ffd22f https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=96773349539f93...
        • 4y ago
  • thesuitonym 4y ago
    If zealous deniers of nuclear asked for storage of other power waste to be stored anywhere other than the sky, they'd realize their argument is worthless.
  • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
    If zealous supporters of coal plants asked for the fumes to go into their neighborhood I still would not be on board. Have you ever seen the effects of coal power? Like really - lived there? I have and it is not pretty at all. I would take a correctly stored nuclear waste right away.
  • cpwright 4y ago
    I had an active nuclear plant in my neighborhood (Indian Point Energy Center) until the NY government made it untenable to continue the relicensing process. I would be perfectly fine with the plant continuing to run and continuing to have onsite storage of the waste. It provided 25% of the power for our county and NYC, employed 1500 people directly, and paid for roughly 1/3 of our children's schools. Shutting it down was a mistake, nuclear is so upfront capital cost intensive that it is a waste to stop a functional plant.
  • yellowapple 4y ago
    I hereby volunteer my bedroom for nuclear waste storage if it means more nuclear power right now.
  • yodelshady 4y ago
    I would very happily have one in my neighbourhood, so kindly stop slandering me. Here's the deal: I get that, and am connected to the grid, you don't, and no fossil back up for either. Virtue signalling over a gas grid is killing people, people I know, and I don't like people who support that. No "batteries maybe in some mystical future". We had carbon free tech forty years ago. If you frustrated that you too are responsible for the destruction I now see everywhere.
  • otikik 4y ago
    If you start calling the other side "zealous", make sure you are not one first.
  • thehappypm 4y ago
    How much waste do you think will be produced? We’re talking about less than a typical landfill’s worth of waste for the entire world.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    I'm willing to take some nuclear waste right here, and I understand if the glowing green barrels aren't available so I can take the green glass.
• Lammy 4y ago
  Really makes me wonder what the world would be like now if Watergate hadn’t happened: https://atomicinsights.com/why-did-richard-nixon-so-strongly-endorse-nuclear-energy-in-april-1973/ https://atomicinsights.com/why-did-richard-nixon-so-strongly...
  • downrightmike 4y ago
    If Nixon hadn't sent his people to Vietnam in the late 60's and promise the Vietcong a better deal if they walked away from negotiations, He wouldn't have been able to run on 'winning the war' and we would have been out of Vietnam FIVE YEARS EARILER. Nixon was a fuck up, and is still screwing the world today. Piece of shit.
    • matthewdgreen 4y ago
      Well, at least the Viet Cong got their better deal, right?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • BiteCode_dev 4y ago
      No need to go back that far, the irak war after 9/11 was a resource hog by itself. 600 trillions if I recall ?
  • devgonewild 4y ago
    The world would be a better place if Nixon never existed, how is it possible for one person to do so much damage
  • jpeter 4y ago
    Or imagine if Chernobyl didn't happen.
  • akiselev 4y ago
    Nixon canceled the Mars program where the vast majority of cutting edge nuclear research was happening - tech like the nuclear lightbulb (search my comments for details) that could have matured and saved us by now. He was no friend to nuclear, just the entrenched nuclear industry.
• orthecreedence 4y ago
  It takes too long to build, though. Because everyone is sitting around bitching about how it takes too long to build instead of building it. "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago."
  • rmason 4y ago
    It takes too long to build primarily because opponents tie things up with lawsuits and challenges. Federal research money is available for competitors but not nuclear. One Utah Senator tried to for something like fifteen years to get money to build a modern thorium reactor sample plant. He never succeeded but there was plenty of money for things like Solyndra. Thankfully thorium research has become so attractive that it's now attracting private money but we've lost a couple of decades.
  • pydry 4y ago
    I know, right? Why build a solar farm in 6 months or a wind farm in a year when you can spend five times as much and have a nuclear plant ready in 10-15 years?
    • otikik 4y ago
      In 6 months you don't even have the permission for building a wind farm (or a solar farm). Source: https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2022/10/15/solar-farm-update-we-finally-have-planning-permission/ https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2022/10/15/solar-farm-...
      • benj111 4y ago
        I suppose it's how you define 'build'. If I build an IKEA bookcase, do I time the build from when I throw the instructions away, or when my significant other decides to buy it between mouthfuls of meatballs?
      • kmeisthax 4y ago
        If you think the NIMBYism for renewables is bad, imagine trying to build a nuclear plant in your backyard. In fact, the majority of problems with nuclear being slow to build boil down to "the NIMBYs wont have it". This is probably a place where nuclear and renewable advocates could come together and fight back against the NIMBYs who would rather you just built more coal plants next to the poors. Because NIMBYism is just lower-case c conservatism with extra steps.
• beders 4y ago
  It's cheatcode with a 1% catastrophic failure rate we rightfully are not using. The article is neglecting a few critical details, to say the least.
  • rglover 4y ago
    Then the money being wasted on all of the renewable stuff should be invested in nuclear safety improvements. Problem solved.
  • 8note 4y ago
    1% sounds very high for 3 failures worldwide over many many years. What does the 1% represent?
    • LorenPechtel 4y ago
      Three? Three Mile Island wrecked the plant due to government idiots keeping the operators from handling it right. There was basically zero radiation release (if you lived at the reactor fence it was more dangerous to walk across one street in evacuating than it was to stay put), it shouldn't really be counted. Chernobyl was a major disaster caused by blatant disregard for safety protocols that never would have happened in a country with a functioning regulatory commission. The plant operators knew what the boss was doing was insane but there was nothing they could do about it. Fukushima should have had a death toll of approximately zero (because a fraction of a person can't die--the expected death toll was well under 1) but hundreds died due to the politically motivated evacuation of the area. It probably wouldn't be a good idea to eat things grown locally for some time but the threat from simply living there was minuscule. (Not to mention that there seems to be no relationship between background radiation rates and cancer.)
• bottlepalm 4y ago
  Nuclear power is a half baked technology that hasn’t had any real advancement since the Cold War ended. Unfortunately advancing the technology is beyond us. Like going to the moon, the costs are too high. Nuclear can and is commercialized, but the technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous given how relatively primitive it is. Maybe go global scale with 10th gen nuclear, but what we have is barely better than 50 years ago still. Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe, as in an emergency once their backup generators fail the core will meltdown. Edit: I would go on to argue that our technology has actually regressed. The technology has not kept up with regulations which means the time to build is getting longer. The answer is not rolling back regulations - you really want to live near a plant built with less regulations? The answer is actually improving the base technology - which is much much harder, but necessary to achieve a design that is both cheap to build and inherently safe.
  • hbrn 4y ago
    > technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous That's a common fallacy. If you look at mortality rate by terawatt-hour for each energy source, nuclear is going to be orders of magnitude below coal/gas/oil. Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.
    • hinkley 4y ago
      Precautionary Principle doesn't work that way. Also you're assigning a terawatt value for a human life. We do that anyway often enough, but when you do it consciously it's ghoulish.
      • hbrn 4y ago
        If you're willing to look at it from a different lens, I'm actually increasing value of a human life that has already been assigned naturally.
      • pjscott 4y ago
        Ignoring the tradeoff doesn't make it go away, and if you don't consciously put a value on a human life, you'll probably wind up far from the Pareto frontier. In this case, for instance, thinking in terms of deaths-per-TWh is exactly what you want in order to fulfill our energy needs with as few people dying as possible. If a little "ghoulishness" saves lives, then I'll happily be a ghoul.
• pfdietz 4y ago
  It would take about 6000 3 GW(th) plants to supply the world's current average rate of primary energy consumption (18 TW). And if these were today's thermal reactors we'd run out of the current estimate of the global resource of U (at < $260/kg) in less than a decade.
  • mnau 4y ago
    Increase in price would increase amount of mineable U. Nobody even prospected it in last 50 years. There is enough of of known deposits, why trying to find new ones? That is like peak oil stories. Increase price twice or thrice and suddenly there is enough place where it is worth mining. Nobody even talks about peak oil anymore. It's not like U is significant part of a cost/kWh. We could get U even from seawater.
    • Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Sea mining as an alternative to renewables + storage is an absolutely riotous joke. Take a look at the results of practical attempts and see if you can find the punchlines (there are at least three). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30648847/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30648847/ https://www.ornl.gov/publication/investigations-reusability-amidoxime-based-polymeric-adsorbents-seawater-uranium https://www.ornl.gov/publication/investigations-reusability-...
      • pfdietz 4y ago
        Powering a single 1000 MW(e) LWR reactor with sea water uranium would require an adsorber field covering 170 square kilometers of continental shelf. The average power/area would be considerably worse than solar. Also (from second reference): "The predicted cost to extract uranium from seawater ranged from $610/kg U to $830/kg U." Ouch.
        • Schroedingersat 4y ago
          You missed the really funny bit where to reduce costs to a "mere" ~$400/kg you attach the sea mining equipment to supply 5MW to an offshore wind turbine which in 2022 will produce around 10MW net. Then it produces enough vanadium to add about 1hr or storage in flow batteries for the wind turbine each year. It also requires a constant supply of polymer that caps the EROI around 10.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  We need the power now, not in 15 years. The magic wand that waves away all of nuclear's problems that prevent this from happening sooner, simply does not exist. There seem to be lots of delusional dreamers that pretend otherwise but they don't have a whole lot of GW of power to show for their wishful thinking. Nuclear has been a no show during the Ukraine crisis. People talk about it. But it's all a bit academic. A whole lot of could have, would have, should have, but not a whole lot of actual new capacity coming online. What little there is under construction tends to have eye watering budgets and lots of delays. This crisis will be ancient history by the time any new nuclear planned this year actually comes online. Solar and wind on the other hand are outstripping nuclear in terms of growth by no small margin. It's the cheat code we have and we're using it to make hundreds of GW of new power generation happen in the next few years.
  • tinco 4y ago
    Did you not read the article? Stop pulling the 15 year number out of your ass. It's plainly possible to build nuclear power plants in under 4 years. Solar and wind are outstripping nuclear in growth because their contribution is laughably small, and there's plenty low hanging fruit that can be achieved with small investments. If we'd invested in nuclear power plants in 2010, like we said we needed to and then we didn't then we wouldn't have been dependent on Russian oil in 2022 during a fucking war while playing with windmills and solar panels like toddlers in a fucking sandbox. Look what all that supposed growth in windmills has given us. Ask the layed off employees from aluminium power plants if wind energy was cheap enough for them. You want to know how you can tell windmills are a joke the energy industry is playing on you? They're in every fucking Shell "we've changed" TV commercial, that's how.