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If nuclear power was invented today, it would have been considered a breakthrough capable of changing the course of climate change dramatically. Since it exists

• thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > while dying constantly from things they cannot see (like air pollution from coal) Air pollution from coal has many problems. But invisibility is not one of those problems. You can see it.
  • eftychis 4y ago
    Not 100% true. Here is a counter-example. First, guess what is one of the most abundant element on earth. Uranium. [1] Now consider what is a common pollutant when we mine coal or burn it. Uranium. [2,3, 6] Saying that we should burn coal because we are afraid of nuclear/radioactive waste is ad absurdum. And unlike nuclear plants it is questionable if we process the radioactive waste in question [4 & 5 show the contradiction in assuming if the post-processing is done correctly or not] [1]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-fuel-facts-uranium https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-fuel-facts-uranium [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... [3] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/langsdorf2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/langsdorf2/ [4] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-power-plants https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po... [5] https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-stations-produce-radioactive-waste/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta... [6] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/power/references/hvistendahl/ http://large.stanford.edu/publications/power/references/hvis...
    • Ma8ee 4y ago
      It was a long time since the discussion was coal version nuclear. Today it is sun and wind and different storage solutions versus nuclear. Nuclear is losing due to slow building times and being too expensive. The nuclear industry is unhappy about that and tries to blame it on regulations.
      • eftychis 4y ago
        Yes I agree. Was replying to burning coal/lignite. We need to figure out storage and hopefully that doesn't involve lithium -- too scarce and its mining is destructive. I support using nuclear too as a) there is a lot of improvements since the 60s - 80s -- e.g. nuclear reactor without the use of any water/steam -- using electromagnetic field deviations via plasma. And b) it provides an option for a steady power basis -- a necessity in any electrical power grid. But not always available with non-fossil alternatives when the weather patterns and solar exposure of a number of countries do not conform with their power consumption. Europe is relatively lucky here. (Source studies/workshops/projects in undergrad + grad school. Don't think things have moved that much since then unfortunately.) Another option is ensuring a robust and connected almost continent wide power grids. U.S. and Europe are getting there and has saved us from a lot of issues. Examples here of its usefulness -- UK power issues between Scotland and England, and ... Texas. That will help solar and wind adoption.
    • BoppreH 4y ago
      > First, guess what is one of the most abundant element on earth. Uranium. Your source says it's the 48th most abundant element in crustal rocks. Doesn't sound that common to me.
      • thaumasiotes 4y ago
        You don't think 48th out of 94 counts as "one of the most abundant"?
      • eftychis 4y ago
        Sorry will clarify with the following Wikipedia citation to paint the difference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore 40 times more likely to find than silver. 500 more than gold. There is this old 1981 article about how to recover uranium from lignite by the Oak Ridge National Labs https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0304386X81900268 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030438... P.S. (Because I have been digging and reading on all the issues related to how uranium is distributed on Earth’s crust; if someone else is interested) Also a bit random to non-Europeans citation but the concentration of Uranium (in its various forms/compounds) is causing issues when we access deeper aquifers. Perhaps, something to consider also in California https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969721075239 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
• zackees 4y ago
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• tooltower 4y ago
  I don't agree. If it was invented today, you'd have the same fear-mongering, the same lobbying from the coal industry. In addition, you'd also be lacking the decades of safety data that we can use to turn the tide.
  • throwbadubadu 4y ago
    We see again just how fearful and critical the situation is around Ukrainian plant... with climate change conflicts in the world will likely increase. So yeah, call me fearful, we don't need that and could have been long into enough multiple better alternatives. They are no option for most of the world.
    • piva00 4y ago
      > They are no option for most of the world. It's the crux of the issue for me. I'm not at all against nuclear reactors as part of the energy mix of some countries but the vast majority of countries do not have the infrastructure (socioeconomic included) to properly maintain dozens of reactors going with a stellar safety record. It takes a lot of money, low corruption, stability, and properly following procedures to keep nuclear reactors safe. I can't see those conditions being met by a large set of countries over 5-7 decades to consider nuclear reactors as a solution. When you consider that even Japan with Fukushima had issues with designing a safe plant...
      • tooltower 4y ago
        You might be surprised by how much of the world uses nuclear power, and has done so for decades: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country Indeed, your argument about stability and infrastructure all applies to other modern amenities too. E.g. air travel. They have all worked fine. I myself come from a country of high corruption. Yet I trust them to maintain nuclear power plants.
      • LorenPechtel 4y ago
        While I do agree there were problems with Fukushima note that despite how badly things went the expected death toll was zero. That is, until the politicians got involved and killed hundreds in their need to be seen to do something (and their going anti-nuke is going to kill even more down the road.) Beware of safety data that assigns those deaths to nuclear. (The correct number is around .02 or .03 per Twh. When you see stuff around .07/Twh you're looking at contaminated data.)
• Reptur 4y ago
  > Regulations keep piling on, adding costs and construction time, with no measurable benefit other than political expediency. Read the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" and you'll understand why the red tape just grows. Big Energy Co's don't want their profits to decrease, and the people with the oil rights wouldn't own those nuclear plants and there is nothing stopping more companies from making competing systems as tech were to progress. Oil can be owned and protected by force. Thats the key difference.
• otherme123 4y ago
  Regulations are also hitting coal hard, at least in Europe. UK got rid of coal. The article is making it sound like coal plants can do whatever they want, while nuclear have it worse. I don't think the way is to lower the safety for nukes, but to raise the safety requirements of coal. This article sounds like someone claiming that airbags are barely used, and removing them is a good way to get cheaper cars for all at the low cost of a few thousand deaths. Friendly reminder that half french nukes are plagued with leaks since the last year, and we would never know how serious they are or how close we were to a disaster. With current safety standards.
  • roenxi 4y ago
    > UK got rid of coal. Consult this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Coal_Production.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Coal_Production.png And then reflect on the fact that it probably wasn't regulation that resulted in them ceasing to use coal in the 2010s. It was predictable from the 60s by anyone equipped with a ruler.
    • otherme123 4y ago
      UK was explicit in this: they regulated the National Grid to be carbon neutral by 2030 or so. That target effectively shutsdown coal generation, harder than any regulation that affects nuclear or any other energy source. Unless a coal plant discovers a magic way to produce while being carbon neutral, coal is gone. Nuclear power at least can keep going in the UK. It's not getting bigger, but is not falling either. Imagine they say today "National Grid targets being Nuclear free by 2040", like in Germany: it would hit harder than any safety regulation you could write, not just halting new plants, but shuting down existing ones.
  • austinjp 4y ago
    > UK got rid of coal Not quite https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-56023895 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-56023895
    • otherme123 4y ago
• bottlepalm 4y ago
  Maybe if it were designed today they wouldn't stop at 'good enough' and actually commercialize a design that is fail safe. Current reactors around the world only have a limited amount of backup time, days/weeks, before the spent fuel pool boils off and the fuel burns resulting in a massive disaster spreading radioactive ash across wide swaths of land.
  • eddyg 4y ago
    Passive “fail safe” designs have been around for quite a while, like the GE ESBWR, which is a Gen III reactor. This[1] data sheet is from 2011. Newer reactors, like the pool-type, metal-fueled, small modular Sodium Fast Reactor [2] are significantly more efficient, are air-cooled, automatically shutdown without human, electronic or mechanical intervention, and by using electro-metallurgical separation, can recycle up to 96 percent of the fissionable material. [1] https://nuclear.gepower.com/content/dam/gepower-nuclear/global/en_US/documents/product-fact-sheets/ESBWR%20Passive%20Safety%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf https://nuclear.gepower.com/content/dam/gepower-nuclear/glob... [2] https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-power-plants-overview/prism1 https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-p...
    • bottlepalm 4y ago
      Fail safe designs have been around for decades, but they never built them. At this point it doesn't matter. We have 400 non-fail-safe reactors out there. Either shut them down, or replace them with fail safe ones. The fact fail safe designs 'exist' isn't an argument for continuing to operate the ones we have. Or building more of those non-fail-safe designs which is what's currently happening around the world right now.
• cryptoneo 4y ago
  If there is such good evidence it shouldn't be hard to get nuclear plants insured. Insurance companies usually don't decide based on ´emotional reactions to incidents that were not that serious´ but look at the facts. As long as the cleanup cost is externalized and paid for by my tax dollars you're damn right I'm reacting emotional. Wouldn't you, if they set up the plant in your backyard (think Europe's population density)? The sun gives us 10,000 times earths energy demand, so maybe we stop discussing nuclear industry marketing blogs and shift focus on energy storage technology.
  • beefield 4y ago
    Insurance companies work typically by sharing risk between insurers. Against risks that are relatively common in aggregate, so that you can calculate a reasonable price for the risk. The occurrence of nuclear accidents is so rare and the potential cost so high that a typical insurance company business model can't accommodate that risk. You could try develop some kind of insurance bond scheme where nuclear power plant needs to raise a capital buffer to protect against accidents, and in case of an accident, bond investors lose their money. But even this kind of a scheme would be pretty difficult to pull off in a scale that would cover all potential losses, and someone (government) would need to take the tail risk. And just to be clear, even now, nuclear plants do not go completely uninsured. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
  • mpweiher 4y ago
    The problem is that the cost of an accident is also not driven by facts but by politics and emotion. And that makes the cost of an accident not just much higher, but also essentially incalculable. "How irrational are the public and the pandering politicians going to be this decade?" is a difficult variable to price into your models. And since the costs are, in fact, largely driven by the politics and irrational public fears, it actually makes sense to have the public bear those costs...in a weird way.
    • piva00 4y ago
      The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come. It's not just politics and emotion, it's transforming a large area of a country into a completely unproductive land, for centuries, where no one can live or work at... How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large? And I'm an advocate for nuclear power, I believe we should've invested in it decades ago to avoid the worst of climate change to come, I just can't agree that the whole issue is "politics and emotion", that's just shoving the real problems with nukes under the rug. Cost of maintenance, cost of decommissioning, baseline factors required for safe operation (including the socioeconomic and political environment of the country a reactor is at), sourcing of fissile material, permanent deposits for nuclear waste, etc.
• makeitdouble 4y ago
  > emotional reaction to incidents that were not that serious You're really making easy for those emotionally impacted by these deaths and whole regions made inhabitable to swallow your argument.
• piva00 4y ago
  > Regulations keep piling on, adding costs and construction time, with no measurable benefit other than political expediency. Isn't that expected for a technology that can poison a pretty large area of your country for hundreds of years if something go wrong? As a member of the public I'd rather have strong regulations instead of lax ones until something bad happens and poisons a large swath of land... The potential damage is just too large, something has to imbue responsibilities and expectations on the ones exploiting the technology. Could you expand on what type of regulation are you complaining about specifically?
• trog 4y ago
  > If nuclear power was invented today, it would have been considered a breakthrough capable of changing the course of climate change dramatically. This is pretty funny because we can look at 'AI' which is being called exactly that kind of breakthrough and it is wall-to-wall emotional reaction to its existence!
• beached_whale 4y ago
  The density is astonishing too. A 2000MW plant is small compared to the equiv solar/wind. Not saying not have solar/wind(the opposite) but when a city needs a lot of energy, nuclear is often a really good source. The build times are almost all red tape too and that is something governments have chose to do.