26 ms·

Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

254 points by mutant_glofish 3y ago

LatteLazy 3y ago
Expensive though.
- JDEW 3y ago
  You know what’s expensive? Treating 100s of millions of people for pollution related illnesses.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    Not to mention new hazard mitigation due to climate change
- bluescrn 3y ago
  Nu-cu-lar is scary. And it's much cheaper to just tell the working class they can't heat/cool their homes any more, the little people have just got to stop using energy...
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Yep, no way that could ever backfire
  - LatteLazy 3y ago
    I mean they won't be able to afford nuclear...
- himinlomax 3y ago
  Solar panels are cheaper. They're also useless at night or in winter at higher latitude. The question is not whether it's expensive, the question is whether it's worth the price.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    Not sure about that. On paper, it looks like it. On practice, my mother pays 30€ a month of electricity in France, where nuclear energy is everywhere. She asked for a quote to get panels on her house, and they got back to her with 20000€. Sure you can move the needle by noting I drain way more power than her, than she heats her house using fossil fuel and that the quotes could be have been reduced in many ways. You can also note that solar panels have to be replaced several times, take much more space, don't have to including wiring in their ROI calculation (while nuclear does for some weird reason) and are created by electricity generated by fossil or nuclear fuel, so their building price is already cheap. I wouldn't say the answer is that clear cut.
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      What do you mean wiring isn't included? How is a quote not the total price, including labour and material costs?
      - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        I mean that in France, the reports assessing the cost of the energy produced by wind turbines and solar panels don't include the wiring from the source of energy to where the energy is distributed. Which is logical. For some reason I don't know, nuclear reactors cost evaluation must include the wiring.
        cinntaile 3y ago
        Since you kept talking about solar panels it was very unclear that you were no longer talking about the quote your mom got.
    - shakow 3y ago
      And that's with the ARENH screwing the French people w.r.t. the actual production price of EDF (mostly) nuclear energy.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
- marsven_422 3y ago
  [dead]
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  I would recommend reading the article. The paper they discussing projects .003 USD per kilowatt hour.
  - LatteLazy 3y ago
    The minute someone builds one and has the receipts and waste disposal set up, I am all ears. Really. But every generation of nuclear plant has promised "power too cheap to meter". The last 3 generations all failed to deliver (and have been ruinously expensive). Gen 4 isn't expected to start commercial operations until 2035 I think? This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality. I am open to some of the SME concepts (mass manufacturing, large numbers of small units) because they seem to deal with at least some of the economic issues nuclear has. But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is. I actually think that being small, simple, short term, politically unimportant with commodity parts is to other renewables (wind, solar etc) what reliability is for nuclear.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      > The minute someone builds one and has the receipts and waste disposal set up, I am all ears. Really. > This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality. > But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is. I don't think we're operating from the same base set of facts. Fission is a reality now. Entire countries rely on it for their entire grid, safely and reliably. TFA was just saying everyone could, and I agree. It's not a transition of kind, but of degree, which is much easier. This is not to say solar and wind have to place (which triggers a different kind of antibodies), just that fission does too.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
zokier 3y ago
If humans were perfect then all problems are trivial. In cryptography there is the idea of misuse resistance, and the same line of thinking applies to other fields where things are expected to be used at scale. Wind and solar are pretty much idiot-proof, and their low density means that the risks are spread out also. As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.
- zerodensity 3y ago
  > Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho. If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement. We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there. Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes. Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
  - zokier 3y ago
    > Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out. It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact. That is simply the nature of having existential crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.
Tade0 3y ago
> But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise. Perhaps that promise was empty? Blaming government regulation is especially a red flag to me here. It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating, even though the laws are, to put it mildly, draconian. With all that it's the safest mode on transportation by a wide margin. China is currently in the process of realizing nuclear power's potential and it appears that in terms of energy delivered it can't actually keep up with renewables - despite no systemic obstacles like in the west. Eventually everyone is going to just build renewable capacity and storage because that's simply the fastest, cheapest way to get energy. Developing countries especially have an interesting approach to renewables, because grids there are notoriously unreliable, so there's no expectation of having power 24/7. For this reason they opt for renewables instead of waiting for that nuclear power plant to happen.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating Planes still crash from time to time. The regulations on the aviation industry are the ant version of regulations compared to the elephants that the nuclear industry has to put up with. planes are only 600x safer than driving by death toll [0]. That would be a shut-the-industry-down safety stat for nuclear plants. That is why people are pointing out the nuclear safety rules are stupid. There is no comparable regulation on any industry. If nuclear plants were regulated to airline safety levels I would just be saying "meh, too expensive" in HN debates on the subject. The fact that it is still in the running despite crazy regulatory requirements is why there is reason to think it'd be a new age of energy if the technology was regulated sensibly. [0] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
  - gmerc 3y ago
    Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…
jillesvangurp 3y ago
The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. Important to note that the image is for 2018. So, things have shifted a bit in favor of wind and solar since then. There's an updated chart for this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/Energy_2021_United-States.pdf https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/E... A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph: - Wind and solar grew a lot. - Nuclear declined. - Gas grew a little. - Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up. - Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy. - fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less. - Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted. - Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years. - We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less. Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance. Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.
- melling 3y ago
  “Coal declined a lot” Yes, in the United States (4% of global population), coal usage declined. Unfortunately, globally coal usage is at all time highs. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-consumption-reach-all-time-high-this-year-iea-2022-12-16/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons... I’d say it’s ok that we overlooked that but we were warned 45 years ago about global coal usage being a large part of the problem. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
bullen 3y ago
Maybe, but the heat added to earth has to be radiated away from earth. We have never added energy from matter at this scale before. Same for fusion.
- defrost 3y ago
  You really should look up the daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight and compare that to annual total energy use by humans. The vast majority of daily solar energy is radiated away already and it dwarfs human energy consumption. Climate change is a result of human activity adding more insulation (via C02, methane, increased water vapor) to the atmosphere and trapping more of the energy from the sun that would previously have radiated away. The increasing global average tempreture is caused by humans adding more blankets .. not by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.
  - zapataband1 3y ago
    Interesting way of putting it, thanks for the explanation
  - a3w 3y ago
    AFAICT, you are probably wrong. Here is some points as to why: > daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight ... which is exactly the same as the amount of energy radiating off, in a state of equilibrium. But here comes the problem, if we add heat, e.g. from fission, we are not in an equilibrium anymore, are we? Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change make that claim all the time: Absolute numbers are huge, so they do comparisons like - 99.998% if Carbon does not take part in Carbon Cycle, or - heat radiation from the sun is more than X by a scale of Y. But in balance, so any addition without compensation can compound to be fatal to human life on earth. After increasing the temperature by storing energy, then radiation off the surface and air layers will increase. But the heat build up is strongest at ground level, yet radiating to space is hardest from that layer. So the effectiveness of heat dispersal in a layered, in-vacuum geoid is not ideal. > Not only[addition by me] by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets. Volker Quaschning hat an article, in german, on that. A comparable, unfavourable look on heat introduction instead for a post-co2 energy generation, was also cited in minkorrekt podcast (german, too). But that that is a small factor, too. I did back of the envelope calculation, and - if every of the 8 billion humans increases their consumption to western standards, - their energy from unlimited fusion or unlimited fission, earth still boils. It might be 2-5 % of the effect of greenhouse gases, by heat introduction is real and at scale deadly, too. With water, wind and solar, we have no added heat, since moving gases and fluids evoke heat anyway, which just is not converted to electricity in between. And solar changes the albedo of the place where the panel was placed to a reflectivity of that of a green meadow, which might be worse than some kinds of coating, but usually is better then other roof tiling [citing needed, do IR/VIS-white-painted roofs exist?]. TL;DR: Smaller problem by a few orders of magnitude, but unless dangerous geoengineering takes place[1], still unsustainably cooks mankind. [1]: Please don't. IPCC report says "keep the idea of geoengineering out of media, for it is not a solution but pandora's jar"
eaasen 3y ago
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- meghan_rain 3y ago
  > operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion” Indeed a gem. Or do you want a nuclear power plant in your neighbourhood managed by people who happen to be the pet-minority-du-jour on Twitter?
  - uoaei 3y ago
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    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      Harvard and UNC just lost a civil rights lawsuit because they were openly racist to Asian applicants. They guised that organized hate as “diversity, inclusion, and equity”.
      - uoaei 3y ago
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        meghan_rain 3y ago
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        rayiner 3y ago
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        uoaei 3y ago
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    - 3y ago
rayiner 3y ago
Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution—I.e. one that could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than rationing. Forget simply replacing today’s energy generation. That’s sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? Moreover, technology that will “level up” civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of nuclear development, or something similarly energetic, rather than windmills or solar.
- effed3 3y ago
  >What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal. Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable. This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consumption.
  - zerodensity 3y ago
    Having excess energy is great! We can use it for alot of useful stuff. For example to: - Recycle waste products. Most (not all) things are recyclable you just need the energy. - Grow food vertically so more land can be nature. - Siphon greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. - Desalinate Water
    - effed3 3y ago
      About this i absolutely agree.. if there is an equal amount of wisdom.
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      Many of those extra things can be intermittent and shut down when excess power isn’t available. Which means can overbuild solar and wind to satisfy everything but the worst case, and use the excess most of the time. The result is that don’t need seasonal storage only daily storage. It is likely better to build more capacity than long-term storage. Although, generated fuels like hydrogen might work well for long-term storage.
effed3 3y ago
All the analysis like this forget to count the cost of decommissioning the nuclear technology, reactors and fuels. Cost for end of life reactors are an order of magnitude those of contruction, and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist, both payed by -public-. The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane crash, not at all. The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by economic/financial reasons. If all the world, developing or not, will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers will be very different. Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels, the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones. Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis. One key of green energy is the distributed nature of solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less dipendence on big company, more public control. Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy use. EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not illuminate the belly of airplanes). The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good candidates too)
- karaterobot 3y ago
  > and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist This is certainly wrong, unless the word "definitive" is used to shift the goal post such that it's effectively impossible to meet. Like the people who said, of Yucca Mountain, that "sure, it's been geologically stable for millions of years, but we can't definitively say there won't be an earthquake tomorrow", or "what if society collapses and, ten thousand years from now, a tribe of stone age explorers breaks into the concrete and reinforced steel facility buried under a mountain in the remote desert, and then goes 700 meters down, uses their lithic tools to bust down a few more steel doors, and gets irradiated? Those hypothetical 10-20 people in the distant future might die, thus we can conclude there is no definitively safe storage solution".
  - 3y ago
ponorin 3y ago
[flagged]
- bigfryo 3y ago
  I think we will outlive the Sun. I think it's possible that we will repair the Sun and prevent its death..
  - peteradio 3y ago
    How would you repair a sun? It would seem to defy some entropy laws but what do I know?
    - petree 3y ago
      A star is just a giant fusion reactor. We just need to add more fusion material (hydrogen) and remove the waste material, which gathers in the core and makes it more difficult for the fusion reaction to continue. It would be possible to prolong the life of the Sun for a while by adding more hydrogen to it, and ideally taking out the heavier elements at the center, which might also be valuable on their own. This seems pretty impossible today, but given we survive enough time until this becomes a problem, then we might find ways to also fix it.
    - abecedarius 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
      - gs17 3y ago
        I forgot what that term meant, and was imagining carefully swapping the sun with a different, younger, star.
        abecedarius 3y ago
        When I first saw it in Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, it followed with the quote "You need to take good care of your star or it gets all dark and icky." I suspect it was parodying some ad that must've gone like "...good care of your hair..."
Brian_K_White 3y ago
original title is in quotes
backtoyoujim 3y ago
The space to keep exhausted fission fuel is not.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  It's quite a lot less space than you think. There's a giant dump outside Denver international airport that is orders of magnitude larger than we'd need. There are of course other factors, but space is not one of them.
- ars 3y ago
  One of the great parts of using a breeder reactor is it burns up all the harmful fuel. What's left decays very quickly, so there just isn't much to store.
acidburnNSA 3y ago
Nuclear engineer here. I did a similar write-up (gratuitously leveraging GNU Units) since most people don't seem to know this fact about fission breeder reactors. I added some other references at the bottom of people pointing this out throughout nuclear fission's history. https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  Since you are an industry insider, do you have an estimate when we’ll have commercial fast neutron reactors in the US?
  - ryathal 3y ago
    5-10 years after the US is serious about wanting them.
krupan 3y ago
Interesting (maybe?) background info, this is John Walker, the creator of AutoCAD, an o.g. software entrepreneur. Also the author of The Hacker's Diet: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Gwypaas 3y ago
After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.
- throwaway1777 3y ago
  Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid. People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      The reason people demand higher standards is history. An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it. Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by a factor of 100.
      - ben_w 3y ago
Zigurd 3y ago
If you have money, you can make energy. Therefore you should spend your capex on the things that will get you the most power soonest. And that is what is happening: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/ove... Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio. So you get articles like this that position uranium fission energy as "renewable."
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  I would think that nuclear is popular with the money class because you can own & control the means of prodution. It requires things that only the existing big boys can afford. Same goes for various battery & solar techs. If they can't prevent solar panels from becoming common, at least they can make sure that solar panels and batteties rely on at least some key ingredients or processes they can own & control access to. Somehow, one way or another, through safety regulation if not through artificial scarcity or patents, there will be no cooking up good batteries or solar panels in garages, and I bet it will never be down to actual physical impracticality.
skissane 3y ago
> Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of energy. The graph above uses “quads”, or quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ), Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well that isn’t SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least see the point to it. But “quadrillion BTUs” and calling that “quads” doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose
- brutusborn 3y ago
  I agree it’s annoying. I think it comes from historically defining large energy sources such as gas formations in BTU.
- yawaramin 3y ago
  It's explained in the post. It makes the total amount be roughly 100 quads, which makes it easy to estimate all the numbers in the graphic as percentages.
  - skissane 3y ago
    Given an exajoule and a quad are close in value, you’d get roughly the same result with exajoules instead. Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would not have been true in the past and will not be true in the future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of a temporary coincidence in the data
    - yawaramin 3y ago
      The post is about a specific point in time, not for all time. So there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of a temporary alignment in the data.
      - skissane 3y ago
VonGuard 3y ago
One thing this doesn't really address is that the way you separate plutonium from uranium is via acid. At the end of the process, you have a barrel of radioactive acid to deal with. Not nice stuff to handle. Toxic AND corrosive waste.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  The pyrometallurgical methods of separation are a bit nicer. Way less liquid waste than Gen 1 WW2-era separations like PUREX. https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6].pdf https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6...
epaulson 3y ago
Yes, we could get a lot more energy out of our fission fuel. The reason the USA doesn't is because Jimmy Carter set a policy of not reprocessing fuel because he felt it encouraged nuclear weapons proliferation, coming just a few years after India exploded its first device. Carter's statement: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Considering that Reagan reversed this policy by unbanning reprocessing in 1981, this isn't the only reason we don't do it today. Other reasons include that reprocessing is expensive and that we found a lot more uranium ore than originally expected. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf
  - sbierwagen 3y ago
    The Indian test used weapons-grade plutonium produced in the low power CIRUS research reactor, much like how we were making plutonium in 1945. It's thought that Carter banned civilian reprocessing because a nuclear test in 1962 showed that a weapon could even be made from what the DOE described as "reactor-grade" plutonium: https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/websites/osti.gov/www.osti.gov/html/osti/opennet/document/press/pc29.html https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/websites/osti.gov/www.osti.... https://npolicy.org/greg-jones-americas-1962-reactor-grade-plutonium-weapons-test-revisited/ https://npolicy.org/greg-jones-americas-1962-reactor-grade-p... A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  This is a common nuke bro story, but it's nonsense. The actual reason is that plutonium has negative value. It costs more to incorporate it in new fuel rods than it would cost to make fuel rods with freshly enriched uranium.
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
JackFr 3y ago
They had me until the antepenultimate paragraph: > Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks, and design, construction, management, and operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”. For me that turned the whole piece from a level-headed well-reasoned argument from domain experts to a Facebook political rant. That isn’t to say I agree or disagree with DEI initiatives, that sentence simply undermines the credibility of all that came before.
mkl95 3y ago
> Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries there is an irrational fear of that technology.
Julesman 3y ago
Absolutely false premise from the first sentence. It is NOT possible for the world to live like the first world did in the 20th century. And nuclear energy is an apocalypically short-sited solution, mostly favored by the current energy industry for maintaining the current model of distribution.
cyrillite 3y ago
This is brilliantly interesting. However, I lack a taxonomy for understanding nuclear power. What’s outdated, what’s just old, what’s new and promising, what’s just nonsense, and what are the ways we expect to deploy nuclear energy? Finding reliable and accessible sources is tricky. Does anybody here have a good starting point for a technically minded non-expert outsider?
- philipkglass 3y ago
  The vast majority of new reactors built each year are still light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel. There's a smaller but notable fleet of power reactors of the pressurized heavy water type. Everything else is a rounding error. My newest nuclear engineering textbook is from 1983 [1] and it's still fine because in the last 40 years very little has changed at a high level. In online discussions you'll see a lot of excitement about other kinds of reactors (molten salt reactors, gas cooled, metal cooled, pebble bed, breeders, etc.) and this older textbook mentions all those kinds of reactors too. But if you want to understand what the nuclear industry actually builds and operates, a used textbook from the 1980s or later will be fine. [1] Introduction to Nuclear Engineering 2nd Edition by John LaMarsh.
api 3y ago
"Inexhaustible" means at any reasonable human / terrestrial scale of course. Humans use a very tiny amount of energy in cosmic terms.
codethief 3y ago
> Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago. Thermodynamics would like to have a word: > […] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
- Ratalala 3y ago
  Interesting read. I once wondered what would be the contribution to atmospheric heat of the combustion of cigarettes, and waved it as probably insignificant. A quick googling suggests burning a cigarette releases 7.8 J/mg of tobacco[1], that a cigarette weighs around 1 g, and that about 5 trillions (5e12) cigarettes are smoked annually [2]. This amounts to 3.9e16 J, or, averaged over one year, 1.2e9 W; corresponding to the total US energy consumption around 1730, according to the figure in parent's link. Insignificant today, but not a few centuries back. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307705601_Heat_Emission_from_a_Burning_Cigarette https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307705601_Heat_Emis... [2] https://www.vitalstrategies.org/tobacco-atlas-global-tobacco-users-at-1-3-billion-smoking-among-young-teens-ages-13-15-increases-in-63-countries/ https://www.vitalstrategies.org/tobacco-atlas-global-tobacco...
whatever1 3y ago
Solar is inexhaustible. Wind is inexhaustible. So what? The only thing that matters is cost.
mharig 3y ago
Small breeder reactors bear the risk of breeding weapon grade Plutonium, e.g. Nice for the next generation of Daesh.

Expensive though.

JDEW 3y ago
You know what’s expensive? Treating 100s of millions of people for pollution related illnesses.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  Not to mention new hazard mitigation due to climate change
bluescrn 3y ago
Nu-cu-lar is scary. And it's much cheaper to just tell the working class they can't heat/cool their homes any more, the little people have just got to stop using energy...
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Yep, no way that could ever backfire
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  I mean they won't be able to afford nuclear...
himinlomax 3y ago
Solar panels are cheaper. They're also useless at night or in winter at higher latitude. The question is not whether it's expensive, the question is whether it's worth the price.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Not sure about that. On paper, it looks like it. On practice, my mother pays 30€ a month of electricity in France, where nuclear energy is everywhere. She asked for a quote to get panels on her house, and they got back to her with 20000€. Sure you can move the needle by noting I drain way more power than her, than she heats her house using fossil fuel and that the quotes could be have been reduced in many ways. You can also note that solar panels have to be replaced several times, take much more space, don't have to including wiring in their ROI calculation (while nuclear does for some weird reason) and are created by electricity generated by fossil or nuclear fuel, so their building price is already cheap. I wouldn't say the answer is that clear cut.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    What do you mean wiring isn't included? How is a quote not the total price, including labour and material costs?
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      I mean that in France, the reports assessing the cost of the energy produced by wind turbines and solar panels don't include the wiring from the source of energy to where the energy is distributed. Which is logical. For some reason I don't know, nuclear reactors cost evaluation must include the wiring.
      - cinntaile 3y ago
        Since you kept talking about solar panels it was very unclear that you were no longer talking about the quote your mom got.
  - shakow 3y ago
    And that's with the ARENH screwing the French people w.r.t. the actual production price of EDF (mostly) nuclear energy.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
marsven_422 3y ago
[dead]
jvanderbot 3y ago
I would recommend reading the article. The paper they discussing projects .003 USD per kilowatt hour.
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  The minute someone builds one and has the receipts and waste disposal set up, I am all ears. Really. But every generation of nuclear plant has promised "power too cheap to meter". The last 3 generations all failed to deliver (and have been ruinously expensive). Gen 4 isn't expected to start commercial operations until 2035 I think? This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality. I am open to some of the SME concepts (mass manufacturing, large numbers of small units) because they seem to deal with at least some of the economic issues nuclear has. But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is. I actually think that being small, simple, short term, politically unimportant with commodity parts is to other renewables (wind, solar etc) what reliability is for nuclear.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    > The minute someone builds one and has the receipts and waste disposal set up, I am all ears. Really. > This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality. > But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is. I don't think we're operating from the same base set of facts. Fission is a reality now. Entire countries rely on it for their entire grid, safely and reliably. TFA was just saying everyone could, and I agree. It's not a transition of kind, but of degree, which is much easier. This is not to say solar and wind have to place (which triggers a different kind of antibodies), just that fission does too.
    - pfdietz 3y ago

If humans were perfect then all problems are trivial. In cryptography there is the idea of misuse resistance, and the same line of thinking applies to other fields where things are expected to be used at scale. Wind and solar are pretty much idiot-proof, and their low density means that the risks are spread out also. As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.

zerodensity 3y ago
> Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho. If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement. We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there. Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes. Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
- zokier 3y ago
  > Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out. It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact. That is simply the nature of having existential crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.

Tade0 3y ago

> But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise. Perhaps that promise was empty? Blaming government regulation is especially a red flag to me here. It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating, even though the laws are, to put it mildly, draconian. With all that it's the safest mode on transportation by a wide margin. China is currently in the process of realizing nuclear power's potential and it appears that in terms of energy delivered it can't actually keep up with renewables - despite no systemic obstacles like in the west. Eventually everyone is going to just build renewable capacity and storage because that's simply the fastest, cheapest way to get energy. Developing countries especially have an interesting approach to renewables, because grids there are notoriously unreliable, so there's no expectation of having power 24/7. For this reason they opt for renewables instead of waiting for that nuclear power plant to happen.

roenxi 3y ago
> It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating Planes still crash from time to time. The regulations on the aviation industry are the ant version of regulations compared to the elephants that the nuclear industry has to put up with. planes are only 600x safer than driving by death toll [0]. That would be a shut-the-industry-down safety stat for nuclear plants. That is why people are pointing out the nuclear safety rules are stupid. There is no comparable regulation on any industry. If nuclear plants were regulated to airline safety levels I would just be saying "meh, too expensive" in HN debates on the subject. The fact that it is still in the running despite crazy regulatory requirements is why there is reason to think it'd be a new age of energy if the technology was regulated sensibly. [0] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
- gmerc 3y ago
  Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…

jillesvangurp 3y ago

The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. Important to note that the image is for 2018. So, things have shifted a bit in favor of wind and solar since then. There's an updated chart for this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/Energy_2021_United-States.pdf https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/E... A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph: - Wind and solar grew a lot. - Nuclear declined. - Gas grew a little. - Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up. - Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy. - fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less. - Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted. - Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years. - We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less. Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance. Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.

melling 3y ago
“Coal declined a lot” Yes, in the United States (4% of global population), coal usage declined. Unfortunately, globally coal usage is at all time highs. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-consumption-reach-all-time-high-this-year-iea-2022-12-16/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons... I’d say it’s ok that we overlooked that but we were warned 45 years ago about global coal usage being a large part of the problem. https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

bullen 3y ago

Maybe, but the heat added to earth has to be radiated away from earth. We have never added energy from matter at this scale before. Same for fusion.

defrost 3y ago
You really should look up the daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight and compare that to annual total energy use by humans. The vast majority of daily solar energy is radiated away already and it dwarfs human energy consumption. Climate change is a result of human activity adding more insulation (via C02, methane, increased water vapor) to the atmosphere and trapping more of the energy from the sun that would previously have radiated away. The increasing global average tempreture is caused by humans adding more blankets .. not by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.
- zapataband1 3y ago
  Interesting way of putting it, thanks for the explanation
- a3w 3y ago
  AFAICT, you are probably wrong. Here is some points as to why: > daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight ... which is exactly the same as the amount of energy radiating off, in a state of equilibrium. But here comes the problem, if we add heat, e.g. from fission, we are not in an equilibrium anymore, are we? Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change make that claim all the time: Absolute numbers are huge, so they do comparisons like - 99.998% if Carbon does not take part in Carbon Cycle, or - heat radiation from the sun is more than X by a scale of Y. But in balance, so any addition without compensation can compound to be fatal to human life on earth. After increasing the temperature by storing energy, then radiation off the surface and air layers will increase. But the heat build up is strongest at ground level, yet radiating to space is hardest from that layer. So the effectiveness of heat dispersal in a layered, in-vacuum geoid is not ideal. > Not only[addition by me] by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets. Volker Quaschning hat an article, in german, on that. A comparable, unfavourable look on heat introduction instead for a post-co2 energy generation, was also cited in minkorrekt podcast (german, too). But that that is a small factor, too. I did back of the envelope calculation, and - if every of the 8 billion humans increases their consumption to western standards, - their energy from unlimited fusion or unlimited fission, earth still boils. It might be 2-5 % of the effect of greenhouse gases, by heat introduction is real and at scale deadly, too. With water, wind and solar, we have no added heat, since moving gases and fluids evoke heat anyway, which just is not converted to electricity in between. And solar changes the albedo of the place where the panel was placed to a reflectivity of that of a green meadow, which might be worse than some kinds of coating, but usually is better then other roof tiling [citing needed, do IR/VIS-white-painted roofs exist?]. TL;DR: Smaller problem by a few orders of magnitude, but unless dangerous geoengineering takes place[1], still unsustainably cooks mankind. [1]: Please don't. IPCC report says "keep the idea of geoengineering out of media, for it is not a solution but pandora's jar"

eaasen 3y ago

[flagged]

meghan_rain 3y ago
> operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion” Indeed a gem. Or do you want a nuclear power plant in your neighbourhood managed by people who happen to be the pet-minority-du-jour on Twitter?
- uoaei 3y ago
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  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Harvard and UNC just lost a civil rights lawsuit because they were openly racist to Asian applicants. They guised that organized hate as “diversity, inclusion, and equity”.
    - uoaei 3y ago
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      - meghan_rain 3y ago
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      - rayiner 3y ago
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        uoaei 3y ago
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  - 3y ago

rayiner 3y ago

Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution—I.e. one that could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than rationing. Forget simply replacing today’s energy generation. That’s sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? Moreover, technology that will “level up” civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of nuclear development, or something similarly energetic, rather than windmills or solar.

effed3 3y ago
>What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal. Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable. This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consumption.
- zerodensity 3y ago
  Having excess energy is great! We can use it for alot of useful stuff. For example to: - Recycle waste products. Most (not all) things are recyclable you just need the energy. - Grow food vertically so more land can be nature. - Siphon greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. - Desalinate Water
  - effed3 3y ago
    About this i absolutely agree.. if there is an equal amount of wisdom.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    Many of those extra things can be intermittent and shut down when excess power isn’t available. Which means can overbuild solar and wind to satisfy everything but the worst case, and use the excess most of the time. The result is that don’t need seasonal storage only daily storage. It is likely better to build more capacity than long-term storage. Although, generated fuels like hydrogen might work well for long-term storage.

effed3 3y ago

All the analysis like this forget to count the cost of decommissioning the nuclear technology, reactors and fuels. Cost for end of life reactors are an order of magnitude those of contruction, and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist, both payed by -public-. The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane crash, not at all. The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by economic/financial reasons. If all the world, developing or not, will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers will be very different. Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels, the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones. Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis. One key of green energy is the distributed nature of solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less dipendence on big company, more public control. Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy use. EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not illuminate the belly of airplanes). The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good candidates too)

karaterobot 3y ago
> and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist This is certainly wrong, unless the word "definitive" is used to shift the goal post such that it's effectively impossible to meet. Like the people who said, of Yucca Mountain, that "sure, it's been geologically stable for millions of years, but we can't definitively say there won't be an earthquake tomorrow", or "what if society collapses and, ten thousand years from now, a tribe of stone age explorers breaks into the concrete and reinforced steel facility buried under a mountain in the remote desert, and then goes 700 meters down, uses their lithic tools to bust down a few more steel doors, and gets irradiated? Those hypothetical 10-20 people in the distant future might die, thus we can conclude there is no definitively safe storage solution".
- 3y ago

ponorin 3y ago

[flagged]

bigfryo 3y ago
I think we will outlive the Sun. I think it's possible that we will repair the Sun and prevent its death..
- peteradio 3y ago
  How would you repair a sun? It would seem to defy some entropy laws but what do I know?
  - petree 3y ago
    A star is just a giant fusion reactor. We just need to add more fusion material (hydrogen) and remove the waste material, which gathers in the core and makes it more difficult for the fusion reaction to continue. It would be possible to prolong the life of the Sun for a while by adding more hydrogen to it, and ideally taking out the heavier elements at the center, which might also be valuable on their own. This seems pretty impossible today, but given we survive enough time until this becomes a problem, then we might find ways to also fix it.
  - abecedarius 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
    - gs17 3y ago
      I forgot what that term meant, and was imagining carefully swapping the sun with a different, younger, star.
      - abecedarius 3y ago
        When I first saw it in Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, it followed with the quote "You need to take good care of your star or it gets all dark and icky." I suspect it was parodying some ad that must've gone like "...good care of your hair..."

Brian_K_White 3y ago

original title is in quotes

backtoyoujim 3y ago

The space to keep exhausted fission fuel is not.

jvanderbot 3y ago
It's quite a lot less space than you think. There's a giant dump outside Denver international airport that is orders of magnitude larger than we'd need. There are of course other factors, but space is not one of them.
ars 3y ago
One of the great parts of using a breeder reactor is it burns up all the harmful fuel. What's left decays very quickly, so there just isn't much to store.

acidburnNSA 3y ago

Nuclear engineer here. I did a similar write-up (gratuitously leveraging GNU Units) since most people don't seem to know this fact about fission breeder reactors. I added some other references at the bottom of people pointing this out throughout nuclear fission's history. https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.

credit_guy 3y ago
Since you are an industry insider, do you have an estimate when we’ll have commercial fast neutron reactors in the US?
- ryathal 3y ago
  5-10 years after the US is serious about wanting them.

krupan 3y ago

Interesting (maybe?) background info, this is John Walker, the creator of AutoCAD, an o.g. software entrepreneur. Also the author of The Hacker's Diet: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

Gwypaas 3y ago

After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.

throwaway1777 3y ago
Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste
- ben_w 3y ago
  Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid. People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    The reason people demand higher standards is history. An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it. Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by a factor of 100.
    - ben_w 3y ago

Zigurd 3y ago

If you have money, you can make energy. Therefore you should spend your capex on the things that will get you the most power soonest. And that is what is happening: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/ove... Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio. So you get articles like this that position uranium fission energy as "renewable."

Brian_K_White 3y ago
I would think that nuclear is popular with the money class because you can own & control the means of prodution. It requires things that only the existing big boys can afford. Same goes for various battery & solar techs. If they can't prevent solar panels from becoming common, at least they can make sure that solar panels and batteties rely on at least some key ingredients or processes they can own & control access to. Somehow, one way or another, through safety regulation if not through artificial scarcity or patents, there will be no cooking up good batteries or solar panels in garages, and I bet it will never be down to actual physical impracticality.

skissane 3y ago

> Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of energy. The graph above uses “quads”, or quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ), Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well that isn’t SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least see the point to it. But “quadrillion BTUs” and calling that “quads” doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose

brutusborn 3y ago
I agree it’s annoying. I think it comes from historically defining large energy sources such as gas formations in BTU.
yawaramin 3y ago
It's explained in the post. It makes the total amount be roughly 100 quads, which makes it easy to estimate all the numbers in the graphic as percentages.
- skissane 3y ago
  Given an exajoule and a quad are close in value, you’d get roughly the same result with exajoules instead. Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would not have been true in the past and will not be true in the future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of a temporary coincidence in the data
  - yawaramin 3y ago
    The post is about a specific point in time, not for all time. So there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of a temporary alignment in the data.
    - skissane 3y ago

VonGuard 3y ago

One thing this doesn't really address is that the way you separate plutonium from uranium is via acid. At the end of the process, you have a barrel of radioactive acid to deal with. Not nice stuff to handle. Toxic AND corrosive waste.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
The pyrometallurgical methods of separation are a bit nicer. Way less liquid waste than Gen 1 WW2-era separations like PUREX. https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6].pdf https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6...

epaulson 3y ago

Yes, we could get a lot more energy out of our fission fuel. The reason the USA doesn't is because Jimmy Carter set a policy of not reprocessing fuel because he felt it encouraged nuclear weapons proliferation, coming just a few years after India exploded its first device. Carter's statement: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Considering that Reagan reversed this policy by unbanning reprocessing in 1981, this isn't the only reason we don't do it today. Other reasons include that reprocessing is expensive and that we found a lot more uranium ore than originally expected. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf
- sbierwagen 3y ago
  The Indian test used weapons-grade plutonium produced in the low power CIRUS research reactor, much like how we were making plutonium in 1945. It's thought that Carter banned civilian reprocessing because a nuclear test in 1962 showed that a weapon could even be made from what the DOE described as "reactor-grade" plutonium: https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/websites/osti.gov/www.osti.gov/html/osti/opennet/document/press/pc29.html https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/websites/osti.gov/www.osti.... https://npolicy.org/greg-jones-americas-1962-reactor-grade-plutonium-weapons-test-revisited/ https://npolicy.org/greg-jones-americas-1962-reactor-grade-p... A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.
pfdietz 3y ago
This is a common nuke bro story, but it's nonsense. The actual reason is that plutonium has negative value. It costs more to incorporate it in new fuel rods than it would cost to make fuel rods with freshly enriched uranium.
- unethical_ban 3y ago

JackFr 3y ago

They had me until the antepenultimate paragraph: > Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks, and design, construction, management, and operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”. For me that turned the whole piece from a level-headed well-reasoned argument from domain experts to a Facebook political rant. That isn’t to say I agree or disagree with DEI initiatives, that sentence simply undermines the credibility of all that came before.

mkl95 3y ago

> Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries there is an irrational fear of that technology.

Julesman 3y ago

Absolutely false premise from the first sentence. It is NOT possible for the world to live like the first world did in the 20th century. And nuclear energy is an apocalypically short-sited solution, mostly favored by the current energy industry for maintaining the current model of distribution.

cyrillite 3y ago

This is brilliantly interesting. However, I lack a taxonomy for understanding nuclear power. What’s outdated, what’s just old, what’s new and promising, what’s just nonsense, and what are the ways we expect to deploy nuclear energy? Finding reliable and accessible sources is tricky. Does anybody here have a good starting point for a technically minded non-expert outsider?

philipkglass 3y ago
The vast majority of new reactors built each year are still light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel. There's a smaller but notable fleet of power reactors of the pressurized heavy water type. Everything else is a rounding error. My newest nuclear engineering textbook is from 1983 [1] and it's still fine because in the last 40 years very little has changed at a high level. In online discussions you'll see a lot of excitement about other kinds of reactors (molten salt reactors, gas cooled, metal cooled, pebble bed, breeders, etc.) and this older textbook mentions all those kinds of reactors too. But if you want to understand what the nuclear industry actually builds and operates, a used textbook from the 1980s or later will be fine. [1] Introduction to Nuclear Engineering 2nd Edition by John LaMarsh.

api 3y ago

"Inexhaustible" means at any reasonable human / terrestrial scale of course. Humans use a very tiny amount of energy in cosmic terms.

codethief 3y ago

> Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago. Thermodynamics would like to have a word: > […] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

Ratalala 3y ago
Interesting read. I once wondered what would be the contribution to atmospheric heat of the combustion of cigarettes, and waved it as probably insignificant. A quick googling suggests burning a cigarette releases 7.8 J/mg of tobacco[1], that a cigarette weighs around 1 g, and that about 5 trillions (5e12) cigarettes are smoked annually [2]. This amounts to 3.9e16 J, or, averaged over one year, 1.2e9 W; corresponding to the total US energy consumption around 1730, according to the figure in parent's link. Insignificant today, but not a few centuries back. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307705601_Heat_Emission_from_a_Burning_Cigarette https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307705601_Heat_Emis... [2] https://www.vitalstrategies.org/tobacco-atlas-global-tobacco-users-at-1-3-billion-smoking-among-young-teens-ages-13-15-increases-in-63-countries/ https://www.vitalstrategies.org/tobacco-atlas-global-tobacco...

whatever1 3y ago

Solar is inexhaustible. Wind is inexhaustible. So what? The only thing that matters is cost.

mharig 3y ago

Small breeder reactors bear the risk of breeding weapon grade Plutonium, e.g. Nice for the next generation of Daesh.