6 ms·

A Nuclear Renaissance Is the Best Path Forward

50 points by hammock 3y ago

corethree 3y ago
We shouldn't forget Chernobyl. Yes the statistics say that air pollution is a far worse killer than nuclear power plants but that same statistic applies to nuclear bombs. I feel people are just blindly following the data driven narrative and using it to predict something as unpredictable as the stock market. More caution is needed here. Yes, I agree that nuclear is an option here, but it is not an option that is so obviously the best as some people think it is.
- widowlark 3y ago
  Mentioning Chernobyl at all, at least to me, shows a deep lack of understanding about nuclear power infrastructure and capabilities in the 21st century. It cannot be stressed enough that Chernobyl was a fluke on top of a fluke, with bad design and dangerous elemental choices at its core. It is nothing like the nuclear power tech we would choose to use today. Thorium MSR poses literally near-zero risk of meltdown, and the meltdown potential of Thorium can be compared to Chernobyl in parts per million. Considering all of this, mentioning the threat of another Chernobyl every time nuclear power is positioned as a viable option is like thinking that the Valdez disaster occurs every time we ship gas overseas.
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    Nobody knows what the risks are of thorium deployment, because no thorium plant has been deployed. Pretending "unknown = zero" is how we got here. But it is all moot, because thermal generation of any kind has wholly priced itself out of the market. There is hardly even a place remaining for geothermal.
    - widowlark 3y ago
      It's true that no large scale Thorium reactor has been built yet. It's also true that its mathematically, chemically, and physically impossible for Thorium to pose the same radiation threat that Uranium poses under load.
      - credit_guy 3y ago
        I'm a huge nuclear fan, but Thorium reactors are overhyped. Yes, it is chemically, physically and mathematically impossible for Thorium to pose any danger because Thorium is not fissile. Thorium by itself cannot sustain a chain reaction. Whatever Thorium reactor people envision, inevitably you will have Uranium, and sometimes Plutonium, inside that reactor too. Now, you are free to claim that only a small part of the reactor is going to be Uranium or Plutonium, to which I'm going to say that only a small part of a regular Uranium reactor core is the U-235 type, 95% is the somewhat inert U-238. Now, can Thorium reactors be good, or great? Sure thing, but for the time being all their purported advantages are on paper only, while the PWR reactors are in wide use.
        widowlark 3y ago
        The issue isn’t the U232-33-35. Its the potential for meltdown, which the MSRE systems fully mitigate in situ
        credit_guy 3y ago
        MSR stands for Molten Salt Reactor. It's a type of reactor that can use either Thorium or Uranium or Plutonium. For some reason a lot of people equate it with Thorium. MSRE specifically refers to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment [1], which was a reactor that burned only Uranium, never Thorium. By the way, the Department of Energy is collaborating with the private industry on a number of advanced reactor designs [2]. There is only one molten salt reactor and that one uses Uranium or Plutonium, not Thorium (see [3], slide 3). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment [2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reactor-development https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reac... [3] https://www.nationalacademies.org/documents/embed/link/LF2255DA3DD1C41C0A42D3BEF0989ACAECE3053A6A9B/file/DB0D308269688B2BD7B1AF60BAA143D48890C2DE80BB?noSaveAs=1 https://www.nationalacademies.org/documents/embed/link/LF225...
- tstrimple 3y ago
  > I feel people are just blindly following the data driven narrative I really wish nuclear proponents would take a data driven approach. It would essentially stop the conversation right there. Instead we have to deal with ridiculous scenarios talking about the safety of nuclear power immediately followed by "we just need to remove these regulations which make it too expensive to operate" as if one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. The energy sector in the US is ran for profit. If there were a profit to be made off of nuclear power, energy companies would be all for it. Yet instead they just keep putting up more wind farms that they can realize profit from after 12-18 months instead of spending billions of dollars and decades on a project that may never see completion.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    Nuclear is has the lowest number of deaths per unit of energy produced [1], except Solar. At the same time it's also the heaviest regulated. These two, are, of course, connected. Isn't it logical that we shuld search for a middle ground by reducing regulation while taking care the number of deaths per megawatt doesn't exceed the worst current climate change culprits: gas, oil and coal?! [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
    - realusername 3y ago
      I doubt that solar is so low, just the few deaths from the roof installers will go over the figure given there
- callalex 3y ago
  We shouldn’t forget BP’s Deepwater Horizon. We shouldn’t forget Exxon’s Valdez. We shouldn’t forget the Moningah disaster…I could go on for a while.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    So after listing all of these disasters, the conclusion is to let these companies handle technology that has even worse outcomes in the case of disaster?
    - callalex 3y ago
      No, thorium reactor disasters are way more limited in worst-case scenario harm than any of the disasters I mentioned.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
I'm just going to re-post this amazing statistic I saw the other day: In the first nine months of 2023, China built 215 TWh (adjusted for capacity factor!) of solar and wind energy. This exceeds the 206TWh from the entire fleet of 26 nuclear power plants that China has under construction today, and those have completion dates years in the future. It is likely that China will exceed these amounts again in the near future. It goes without saying that there are still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage. Maybe nuclear will end up having some role. But the idea that nuclear is going to be more than a small fraction of future global energy generation just seems completely obsolete in the face of this manufacturing wave. And articles that argue for building nuclear because "renewables are manufactured overseas" just highlight how desperately we need to get realistic here -- it's like arguing we should keep using sail-power and whale oil rather than industrializing, because we made the decision not to build steam engines domestically.
- nickpp 3y ago
  > still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage So maybe this is why China is still building those nuke plants?! We can have both, you know. But we keep burning gas, oil and coal while arguing how dangerous nuclear is. Meanwhile Climate Change is here and it's real. We could've been 100% nuclear by now. It was fear mongering from greens and environmentalists (heavily financed and brainwashed by oil producers like Russia) that f-d up our climate like it did.
  - 8ytecoder 3y ago
    The number of premature deaths caused by coal/oil/gas - both directly due to the pollution and indirectly due to climate change, far exceeds the total deaths by nuclear power. The funny thing is it’s usually the most progressive and green leaning people that oppose nuclear so much.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    >We can have both, you know. TFA is not about "having both." It is clearly about positioning nuclear as an alternative to renewable buildouts. This is in the title and also the text. And that's fine, because it reads like a nuclear industry promotional piece. But leave that aside. Both my anecdote and this article agree on one critical fact. It shows up in this line: the age of the brutalist concrete cooling towers and highly centralized state control as the only features of nuclear power may already be over. In other words, even these authors agree that the traditional (1970s-era) nuclear plant is already obsolete, and won't compete with renewables. The only tech that can possibly compete at this point is some kind of modular factory-built nuclear that can scale exponentially. Anything else is likely to be a very costly footnote, both here and probably in China. The rest of the article pins its hope on the success of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to be the scalable tech that can somehow compete with renewables. I've seen a number of articles on HN in recent days giving some pretty bad news about the state of SMRs. But at least an accelerated-development-of-SMRs story hangs together consistently, whereas a lot of wishful "legacy nuclear would be a viable contender but for those meddling environmentalists" Internet commentary just makes no sense in the face of the kind of massive scale that renewable buildouts are seeing.
fabifabulous 3y ago
Nope, it isn‘t. Our path forward is renewable energies and reliable energy partnerships only.
- thedrbrian 3y ago
  And sitting in the dark wearing two jumpers
  - fabifabulous 3y ago
    That‘s nonsense. At least when you only relate this to renewable energies. Ask the French, what they think about this summer, when they had to shut down many nuclear reactors simply because there was no water to cool them. Or us Germans when Russia invaded Ukraine and we were faced with our past decisions to completely rely on cheap Russian gas. Or look at water taps in the US that you can turn into little flame throwers because fracking contaminated drinking water. Also check out the rising numbers of earth quakes in the US due to fracking. But sure. Climate change is great, so that at some point you won‘t have to wear any jumpers anymore, even in winter. Too bad that grandma then died a little before her time, in the last heatwave.
    - nickpp 3y ago
      Ask me what I think about the solar panels on my house late at night or when it's winter-dark outside.
      - fabifabulous 3y ago
        So you live somewhere remote without connection to the grid? In that case, nuclear power wouldn‘t help you as well. For everything else, I recommend googling the following terms to get started with: green hydrogen, biogas, hydropower, pumped hydro storage, smart grid.
        nickpp 3y ago
        Biomass boasts 155 times more deaths per unit of energy produced compared to nuclear, while hydropower only 43 times [0] but at the same time is a methane (potent greenhouse gas) emitter and a general ecosystem wrecker. The others seem to be a rounding error in today's actual energy industry - maybe someday in the future?! Meanwhile we keep burning gas, oil and coal and spewing CO2 into the atmosphere. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
more_corn 3y ago
Stop with all the nuclear astroturfing. The shit is ungodly expensive, results in a real hazard to life and creates perverse incentives operate cheap and long. Neither of which is compatible with safe.
- nickpp 3y ago
  Stop with all the nuclear fear mongering. No industry is perfectly safe. Nuclear has the lowest number of deaths [1] per megawatt produced, other than Solar. It's so expensive because it is ungodly regulated. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    > Nuclear has the lowest number of deaths [1] per megawatt produced > It's so expensive because it is ungodly regulated. The two are two sides of the same coin. Which regulations do you have proof of being unjustified?
    - nickpp 3y ago
      All regulation! The proof is in the ridiculously low rate of deaths per megawatt. When you have such a complex tech made as safe a solar panels but takes decades to build and costs more than going to Mars - it's clear overregulation is the culprit. The solution is simple: deregulate slowly and carefully until you reach the safety of the gas, oil and coal plants dooming our planet (while killing us with pollution) right now.
      - _aavaa_ 3y ago
        I don’t even know where to being. All I’ll say is that, justified or not, the PR apocalypse that will accompany the first incident to occur under this deregulation plant will be the end of the nuclear industry. The current opposition to nuclear will look like a bunch of YIMBYs in comparison.
gustavus 3y ago
Saw this xkcd today. Just thought I'd leave it here https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/
- EmmaEngineer 3y ago
  Sunlight: 90,000,000,000MJ/kg
  - virtue3 3y ago
    Sunlight: 1.6e-6 MJ/m^3 (I do actually think solar will be the most useful energy source going forward)
  - nickpp 3y ago
    That is the total energy of a Kg matter according to E=mc2, if I'm not mistaken. How exactly are you planning to convert that matter into energy? Do you have a Kg of antimatter laying around your house?!
    - gdavisson 3y ago
      Photons are their own antiparticle, so this is not an issue.
      - kimixa 3y ago
        Photons are the means for transfer for all energy sources at some level, so using that as a comparison for the actual generation method seems a little pointless.
derpydude 3y ago
Written and paid for by a nuclear industry lobbyist
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

50 points by hammock 3y ago

We shouldn't forget Chernobyl. Yes the statistics say that air pollution is a far worse killer than nuclear power plants but that same statistic applies to nuclear bombs. I feel people are just blindly following the data driven narrative and using it to predict something as unpredictable as the stock market. More caution is needed here. Yes, I agree that nuclear is an option here, but it is not an option that is so obviously the best as some people think it is.

widowlark 3y ago
Mentioning Chernobyl at all, at least to me, shows a deep lack of understanding about nuclear power infrastructure and capabilities in the 21st century. It cannot be stressed enough that Chernobyl was a fluke on top of a fluke, with bad design and dangerous elemental choices at its core. It is nothing like the nuclear power tech we would choose to use today. Thorium MSR poses literally near-zero risk of meltdown, and the meltdown potential of Thorium can be compared to Chernobyl in parts per million. Considering all of this, mentioning the threat of another Chernobyl every time nuclear power is positioned as a viable option is like thinking that the Valdez disaster occurs every time we ship gas overseas.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  Nobody knows what the risks are of thorium deployment, because no thorium plant has been deployed. Pretending "unknown = zero" is how we got here. But it is all moot, because thermal generation of any kind has wholly priced itself out of the market. There is hardly even a place remaining for geothermal.
  - widowlark 3y ago
    It's true that no large scale Thorium reactor has been built yet. It's also true that its mathematically, chemically, and physically impossible for Thorium to pose the same radiation threat that Uranium poses under load.
    - credit_guy 3y ago
      I'm a huge nuclear fan, but Thorium reactors are overhyped. Yes, it is chemically, physically and mathematically impossible for Thorium to pose any danger because Thorium is not fissile. Thorium by itself cannot sustain a chain reaction. Whatever Thorium reactor people envision, inevitably you will have Uranium, and sometimes Plutonium, inside that reactor too. Now, you are free to claim that only a small part of the reactor is going to be Uranium or Plutonium, to which I'm going to say that only a small part of a regular Uranium reactor core is the U-235 type, 95% is the somewhat inert U-238. Now, can Thorium reactors be good, or great? Sure thing, but for the time being all their purported advantages are on paper only, while the PWR reactors are in wide use.
      - widowlark 3y ago
        The issue isn’t the U232-33-35. Its the potential for meltdown, which the MSRE systems fully mitigate in situ
        credit_guy 3y ago
        MSR stands for Molten Salt Reactor. It's a type of reactor that can use either Thorium or Uranium or Plutonium. For some reason a lot of people equate it with Thorium. MSRE specifically refers to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment [1], which was a reactor that burned only Uranium, never Thorium. By the way, the Department of Energy is collaborating with the private industry on a number of advanced reactor designs [2]. There is only one molten salt reactor and that one uses Uranium or Plutonium, not Thorium (see [3], slide 3). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment [2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reactor-development https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reac... [3] https://www.nationalacademies.org/documents/embed/link/LF2255DA3DD1C41C0A42D3BEF0989ACAECE3053A6A9B/file/DB0D308269688B2BD7B1AF60BAA143D48890C2DE80BB?noSaveAs=1 https://www.nationalacademies.org/documents/embed/link/LF225...
tstrimple 3y ago
> I feel people are just blindly following the data driven narrative I really wish nuclear proponents would take a data driven approach. It would essentially stop the conversation right there. Instead we have to deal with ridiculous scenarios talking about the safety of nuclear power immediately followed by "we just need to remove these regulations which make it too expensive to operate" as if one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. The energy sector in the US is ran for profit. If there were a profit to be made off of nuclear power, energy companies would be all for it. Yet instead they just keep putting up more wind farms that they can realize profit from after 12-18 months instead of spending billions of dollars and decades on a project that may never see completion.
- nickpp 3y ago
  Nuclear is has the lowest number of deaths per unit of energy produced [1], except Solar. At the same time it's also the heaviest regulated. These two, are, of course, connected. Isn't it logical that we shuld search for a middle ground by reducing regulation while taking care the number of deaths per megawatt doesn't exceed the worst current climate change culprits: gas, oil and coal?! [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
  - realusername 3y ago
    I doubt that solar is so low, just the few deaths from the roof installers will go over the figure given there
callalex 3y ago
We shouldn’t forget BP’s Deepwater Horizon. We shouldn’t forget Exxon’s Valdez. We shouldn’t forget the Moningah disaster…I could go on for a while.
- danielbln 3y ago
  So after listing all of these disasters, the conclusion is to let these companies handle technology that has even worse outcomes in the case of disaster?
  - callalex 3y ago
    No, thorium reactor disasters are way more limited in worst-case scenario harm than any of the disasters I mentioned.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

I'm just going to re-post this amazing statistic I saw the other day: In the first nine months of 2023, China built 215 TWh (adjusted for capacity factor!) of solar and wind energy. This exceeds the 206TWh from the entire fleet of 26 nuclear power plants that China has under construction today, and those have completion dates years in the future. It is likely that China will exceed these amounts again in the near future. It goes without saying that there are still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage. Maybe nuclear will end up having some role. But the idea that nuclear is going to be more than a small fraction of future global energy generation just seems completely obsolete in the face of this manufacturing wave. And articles that argue for building nuclear because "renewables are manufactured overseas" just highlight how desperately we need to get realistic here -- it's like arguing we should keep using sail-power and whale oil rather than industrializing, because we made the decision not to build steam engines domestically.

nickpp 3y ago
> still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage So maybe this is why China is still building those nuke plants?! We can have both, you know. But we keep burning gas, oil and coal while arguing how dangerous nuclear is. Meanwhile Climate Change is here and it's real. We could've been 100% nuclear by now. It was fear mongering from greens and environmentalists (heavily financed and brainwashed by oil producers like Russia) that f-d up our climate like it did.
- 8ytecoder 3y ago
  The number of premature deaths caused by coal/oil/gas - both directly due to the pollution and indirectly due to climate change, far exceeds the total deaths by nuclear power. The funny thing is it’s usually the most progressive and green leaning people that oppose nuclear so much.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  >We can have both, you know. TFA is not about "having both." It is clearly about positioning nuclear as an alternative to renewable buildouts. This is in the title and also the text. And that's fine, because it reads like a nuclear industry promotional piece. But leave that aside. Both my anecdote and this article agree on one critical fact. It shows up in this line: the age of the brutalist concrete cooling towers and highly centralized state control as the only features of nuclear power may already be over. In other words, even these authors agree that the traditional (1970s-era) nuclear plant is already obsolete, and won't compete with renewables. The only tech that can possibly compete at this point is some kind of modular factory-built nuclear that can scale exponentially. Anything else is likely to be a very costly footnote, both here and probably in China. The rest of the article pins its hope on the success of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to be the scalable tech that can somehow compete with renewables. I've seen a number of articles on HN in recent days giving some pretty bad news about the state of SMRs. But at least an accelerated-development-of-SMRs story hangs together consistently, whereas a lot of wishful "legacy nuclear would be a viable contender but for those meddling environmentalists" Internet commentary just makes no sense in the face of the kind of massive scale that renewable buildouts are seeing.

fabifabulous 3y ago

Nope, it isn‘t. Our path forward is renewable energies and reliable energy partnerships only.

thedrbrian 3y ago
And sitting in the dark wearing two jumpers
- fabifabulous 3y ago
  That‘s nonsense. At least when you only relate this to renewable energies. Ask the French, what they think about this summer, when they had to shut down many nuclear reactors simply because there was no water to cool them. Or us Germans when Russia invaded Ukraine and we were faced with our past decisions to completely rely on cheap Russian gas. Or look at water taps in the US that you can turn into little flame throwers because fracking contaminated drinking water. Also check out the rising numbers of earth quakes in the US due to fracking. But sure. Climate change is great, so that at some point you won‘t have to wear any jumpers anymore, even in winter. Too bad that grandma then died a little before her time, in the last heatwave.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    Ask me what I think about the solar panels on my house late at night or when it's winter-dark outside.
    - fabifabulous 3y ago
      So you live somewhere remote without connection to the grid? In that case, nuclear power wouldn‘t help you as well. For everything else, I recommend googling the following terms to get started with: green hydrogen, biogas, hydropower, pumped hydro storage, smart grid.
      - nickpp 3y ago
        Biomass boasts 155 times more deaths per unit of energy produced compared to nuclear, while hydropower only 43 times [0] but at the same time is a methane (potent greenhouse gas) emitter and a general ecosystem wrecker. The others seem to be a rounding error in today's actual energy industry - maybe someday in the future?! Meanwhile we keep burning gas, oil and coal and spewing CO2 into the atmosphere. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

more_corn 3y ago

Stop with all the nuclear astroturfing. The shit is ungodly expensive, results in a real hazard to life and creates perverse incentives operate cheap and long. Neither of which is compatible with safe.

nickpp 3y ago
Stop with all the nuclear fear mongering. No industry is perfectly safe. Nuclear has the lowest number of deaths [1] per megawatt produced, other than Solar. It's so expensive because it is ungodly regulated. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  > Nuclear has the lowest number of deaths [1] per megawatt produced > It's so expensive because it is ungodly regulated. The two are two sides of the same coin. Which regulations do you have proof of being unjustified?
  - nickpp 3y ago
    All regulation! The proof is in the ridiculously low rate of deaths per megawatt. When you have such a complex tech made as safe a solar panels but takes decades to build and costs more than going to Mars - it's clear overregulation is the culprit. The solution is simple: deregulate slowly and carefully until you reach the safety of the gas, oil and coal plants dooming our planet (while killing us with pollution) right now.
    - _aavaa_ 3y ago
      I don’t even know where to being. All I’ll say is that, justified or not, the PR apocalypse that will accompany the first incident to occur under this deregulation plant will be the end of the nuclear industry. The current opposition to nuclear will look like a bunch of YIMBYs in comparison.

gustavus 3y ago

Saw this xkcd today. Just thought I'd leave it here https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/

EmmaEngineer 3y ago
Sunlight: 90,000,000,000MJ/kg
- virtue3 3y ago
  Sunlight: 1.6e-6 MJ/m^3 (I do actually think solar will be the most useful energy source going forward)
- nickpp 3y ago
  That is the total energy of a Kg matter according to E=mc2, if I'm not mistaken. How exactly are you planning to convert that matter into energy? Do you have a Kg of antimatter laying around your house?!
  - gdavisson 3y ago
    Photons are their own antiparticle, so this is not an issue.
    - kimixa 3y ago
      Photons are the means for transfer for all energy sources at some level, so using that as a comparison for the actual generation method seems a little pointless.

derpydude 3y ago

Written and paid for by a nuclear industry lobbyist

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]