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Fukushima converted me away from being a supporter of nuclear, or at least conventional nuclear. Maybe something like LFTR or WAMSR could re-open the debate in

by api 13y ago

Fukushima converted me away from being a supporter of nuclear, or at least conventional nuclear. Maybe something like LFTR or WAMSR could re-open the debate in my mind, but the debate for conventional solid-phase reactor cores is pretty much closed. Not because I buy into all the fear mongering about radiation, but for a much simpler reason: it showed that conventional nuclear is not cost-effective vs. the alternatives and is not scalable. In any system, accidents will happen. Worst case accidents will happen. The frequency may be low, but Fukushima shows that one singular bad accident can completely obliterate the economic rationale for nuclear power in a given country. Fukushima is going to be a billions-a-year money pit for Japan for at least the next decade and a half. Given those costs plus the fact that nuclear without accidents is not substantially cheaper than alternatives, it just seems more rational to invest the money and R&D effort required to solve the energy storage and distribution problems associated with solar and wind energy. In the end, provided we can back them up and distribute the power efficiently, there is actually more energy available from the sun and the wind than there is from any actionable real-world plan for scaling nuclear that I've ever seen. Renewables also have many other benefits including: - Very low risk... basically no more dangerous than any other construction or manufacturing. - No fuel, so little to no real sustainability concerns. This means that once we make them work they will work forever and we won't have to worry about energy anymore. - Small incremental investment cost. Wind and solar can be deployed in small increments, and it's exponentially easier to raise small increments of money than large ones. - Less politically centralized. Nuclear demands centralized regulation and huge centralized financial control, and nuke plants are central points of failure for the entire industrial system built around them. Were we to rely on them exclusively they would become easy "off switches." Renewables by contrast open up the potential for a "PC revolution" in energy. It just seems like a no brainer for me. Nuclear is a boondoggle, at least for most uses.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago
We have spent decades and hundreds of billions chasing a particularly poor form of nuclear because of the US and Russian military industrial complexes. Dismissing nuclear because of horrible past decisions seems unwise.
- api 13y ago
  Perhaps so, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if the point is moot. Solar is experience Moore's Law type effects in terms of cost per kW of installed capacity, and there is now immense R&D muscle behind energy storage due in part to the electronics industry. The awesome power of exponential tipping points is not to be underestimated. When the cost/kWh curves intersect, it could happen fast. Look at the adoption of the Internet and smart phones for examples. Solar could go from <1% of our energy to >25% in 5-10 years. That might be conservative. I'm seeing nuclear as a niche technology. In a post-fossil world I can see it for radionucleotide production (e.g. for nuclear medicine and space probes), maybe for a few really heavy industrial needs, and for some locations with very poor local renewable energy availability. But for the most part I see it as obsolescent. I do think it might find its killer app somewhere else though: Mars. There are many reasons it would make more sense there.
  - nazgulnarsil 13y ago
    China has 28 new reactors in the pipeline for a reason. Solar is nowhere near ready.
    - api 13y ago
      I don't see the actions of a huge, lumbering bureaucracy as a good predictor of the future.
      - moheeb 13y ago
        Guyana has zero, if that makes you feel better.
      - jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago
        You should study post revolution Chinese history a bit more, or at least click around on gapminder a bit. The idea that they're a lumbering ineffective bureaucracy is too simplistic to be useful. Two examples: First, China doubled its life expectancy in a single decade, moving from one of the lowest to being at parity with the developed world. Second, in the early 1980s China implemented policies that moved them from having stagnant GDP per capita to steadily doubling it per decade, a pace it remains on since. In fact, you could blame some of post revolutionary China's most disasterous events on the lack of bureaucratic inertia. The great leap forward was disasterous not just because the details of the plan were mistaken, but also because it was implemented so instantly and completely. Anyhow, if you look at the data instead of repeating narratives that personify organizations, you'll see it's not quite so simple as saying that all Chinese economic decision-making can be summarily rejected as lumbering bureaucracy.
tptacek 13y ago
I don't understand how an empirical analysis, such as this purports to be, could get around the fact that "conventional" power generation kills far more people than nuclear ever has.
- x0x0 13y ago
  I don't understand how people who keep bringing up that conventional power generation kills more people than nuclear ever has (yet!) get around having their nose rubbed in the fact that we haven't experienced a worst case nuclear incident yet and that we keep getting lucky and scraping past worst cases -- at least according to what I read about all those old fuel rods stored at Fukushima. People keep ignoring safety precautions and we keep getting lucky, but luck and hope is not an acceptable strategy when you can irradiate large chunks of countries as a worst case scenario. @SuperChihuahua: I can't find the articles now, but just one failure case is there were pools with spent nuclear rods in them that required active cooling. Failure to do so produces a plume of radiation straight into the air. Of course you're never supposed to store that many fuel rods, yet somehow safety wasn't important and there we where with tons of fuel rods in pools that required active cooling and no real plan for what to do if, say, we couldn't actively cool them.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    I didn't dismiss that argument, I simply said it doesn't have an empirical grounding despite the language that was used in the parent comment that made it appear otherwise. (I don't agree with that argument though; we're going to have to figure safe nuclear out, because we can't keep dumping pollutants into the atmosphere).
  - SuperChihuahua 13y ago
    What's the worst case nuclear incident in a modern reactor?
    - Retric 13y ago
      Someone steals Nuclear material and releases it over a large area. Or a design failure can lead to something about 20 times the size Of Chernobil and hundreds of times as deadly. Note Chernobil keep most of the radioactive material contained. PS: Granted those are both vary unlikely, but if you want to talk worst case it can get really bad especially when you add in say a large earthquake on an unknown fault or a meter impact etc.
ctdonath 13y ago
We're not using much in the way of renewable energy for good reasons. Simply: low and inconsistent output. Solar: The absolute maximum upper limit is 1.3kW/m^2, the total solar energy hitting the Earth's disc. Realistically, you'll max out around 130W/m^2 under ideal conditions, dealing with atmospheric absorption, night, clouds, conversion efficiency, breakage, etc. Realistic norm is somewhere around even a tenth of that. Output storage & buffering is problematic, batteries using environmentally unfriendly materials requiring manufacture & replacement over a less-than-you-want lifespan. By the time an installation has become cost-effective, it's done and you'll have to re-install diminishing-return components. On a large enough scale to compete with other energy sources, you're performing "solar strip-mining" on the local environment. Wind: Big turbines are costly, last about 20 years, annoy neighbors (I almost had a wind farm dropped on my town), and by the time those huge expensive generators wear out or burn up (!) nobody will have a financial interest in replacing/dismantling them. Likewise, inconsistent power output is a problem few seriously address. Converting large amounts of atmospheric movement to heat will itself result in "manmade global warming" type issues. Old-form nuclear sucks. Between lousy ancient designs and sheer paranoia over "weapons-grade" phases, coupled with vast construction handling high-pressure extreme-danger contents, yeah there's a disaster waiting to happen - and as noted it just takes one to make the savings moot. New-form nuclear has real potential. Small sealed units incapable of self-destructing, highly resistant to deliberate damage, and easy to transport make it entirely possible for a community to purchase one turnkey reactor and run from that for decades. Oil/coal will remain a major contender precisely because the energy has already been gathered into convenient pumpable-haulable form, is shelf-stable over usage fluctuations, and has little discernible waste. Renewables are just not viable, at least not yet. Despite huge piles of money thrown at it (by the current US administration in particular), nothing of marketable substance has emerged. If it were viable, it would be in widespread production. I'm looking to run my HVAC off solar if you disagree. The bashing of nuclear is mostly limited to old-school hot-water active-cooling designs. Yes, they suck. Get over it and move on to modern designs held back mostly by regulatory concerns which apply those fears to inapplicable reactors without further consideration.
- api 13y ago
  True-- for now. The question is: is it better to spend billions researching new generations of nuclear reactors or to spend billions working on energy storage? The former will lead to a switch from older, less concentrated fossil fuels to a newer, more energy-dense fossil fuel. But it's not without well-known problems. The latter will result in a permanent, eternal solution to the energy problem. There are limits to how much solar and wind is available, but those are orders of magnitude beyond our civilization's current energy requirements. Other limits to growth -- arable land, decreasing fertility with increasing wealth -- will likely prevent us from ever even approaching those limits. Solve the energy storage problem and the industrial revolution becomes as permanent as the agricultural revolution. Nuclear power won't do that. So energy storage technology is IMHO a more prudent, higher dividend investment than better nuclear reactors.
marze 13y ago
Worse case accident for solar: Ow. I dropped the solar panel on my foot. For nuclear: Oops, we destroyed $270B of real estate.
- SuperChihuahua 13y ago
  Can solar panels survive an earthquake?
  - marze 13y ago
    Probably at least as well as the Fukushima reactors did.
    - meepmorp 13y ago
      To be fair, the reactors survived the earthquake just fine, as well as the tsunami afterward. The problem is that the diesel generators that were supposed to provide backup power to the cooling systems got swamped, basically making meltdown inevitable with the design of the reactor. Edit:extraneous words removed
- cobrausn 13y ago
  Actual worst case for solar: Oops, we spent $270B on solar panels that can't provide enough power.
hannibal5 13y ago
The risks are small, but they are not so small that nuclear plants could get normal insurance from free markets. They have actuaries that can do the math. It all boils down to the expected value (= value*risk). Even if the risk is incredibly small the cost when the risk actualizes is so massive that it's deal breaker (alternatively, the cost of insurance from free markets makes nuclear energy too expensive) This is why every country with nuclear plants subsidies nuclear energy with laws that limit the amount of compensation.
- marze 13y ago
  Ask the 80000 people made homeless by the Fukushima meltdowns how much the government or power company gave them. It was a laughably small amount. I wouldn't expect any other 1st world country to much better.
- jessriedel 13y ago
  > Even if the risk is incredibly small the cost when the risk actualizes is so massive that it's deal breaker (alternatively, the cost of insurance from free markets makes nuclear energy too expensive) Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that the risks from nuclear are simply too high variance (i.e., concentrated in a few huge events) for an insurance company to absorb, not that the expectation value of the cost is high.
  - tome 13y ago
    I have friend who is a lawyer in the field of nuclear decommissioning. He said that contraray to what you might expect it's the small risks that are uninsurable, not the catastrophic ones.
    - jessriedel 13y ago
      What does that mean? You mean large risks of relatively small costs? (Small risks of small costs are obviously not important.) This is directly contrary to hannibal5's claim, correct?
ori_b 13y ago
Fukushima was an outdated design that was not safe under passive cooling (ie, it was physically possible for it to melt down). It's construction predated Chernobyl, and it's design was even older, and designed around a weaponizable fuel. Fukushima doesn't represent the state of the art. It didn't even represent the state of the art a quarter of a century ago.
- marze 13y ago
  Hmm, if it is so outdated, should we close all 45 of the identical General Electric-design reactors operating in US cities soon? Or, we could extend their operating license each for 20 years and see if they can handle it.
  - ori_b 13y ago
    YES. We should definitely be upgrading our nuclear reactors to modern designs. While the USA mostly isn't in an earthquake zone, which reduces the risks, the reactors are definitely past their useful life, less safe than they could be, and require more expensive, dangerous, and weaponizable fuel than then should. The problem with upgrading, of course, is political. The amount of public outcry that would occur if we started to build new reactors, even based on better designs, would make things very difficult politically.
  - VladRussian2 13y ago
    every time i drive to San Diego, i'm always struck at the view of this thing and how out of place it is and what could happen there. Seems common sense is winning as i heard they stopped reactors there and don't plan to restart.
akiselev 13y ago
To restore faith in nuclear: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710050022 http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710050022 Researched as a rocket engine (but equally effective for terrestrial power) over 40 years ago. Instead of taking 20,000 kg of fuel (which is about how much each Fukushima reactor had) and trying to prevent it from overheating, the nuclear lightbulb reactor (or rocket engine) takes 20kg of fuel, compresses, and heats the fuel to the point where it is a self sustaining critical reaction. If the chamber ruptures or power is cut, the core (which at this point is about 10,000 Kelvin and a black body radiator in UV-vis) expands, cools, and reacts with oxygen to quickly precipitate. If you combine this with a plasma window separated vacuum chamber with graphite or another neutron moderator, the second power is cut the entire chamber including the nuclear core is sucked into a safety chamber (plasma windows require multiple kilowatts of power per inch diameter so any failure causes it to die). Of course there are some material science problems to go over but with the progress we (Corning alone, really) made in the last 40 years, it is achievable. Food for thought: the worst power-generation related disaster was by far Deep Water Horizon, which is turning the entire Gulf of Mexico into a deadzone (you could even see the oil from space! [1]). Hell, BP's fuck up wasn't even the worst case scenario (earthquake or something causing the entire subterranean pipe to expand past the point of closing with conventional cement) and we will be dealing with the aftermath for many decades. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill_-_May_24,_2010_-_with_locator.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spil...
jessriedel 13y ago
A massive natural disaster hit Japan causing 15,883 deaths, 6,145 injured, and 2,667 people missing. It cost $235 billion dollars, making it the costliest natural disaster in world history. The nuclear power plant damage results in zero deaths (other than a handful of deaths from emergency crews unrelated to radiation) and a few billion in clean-up costs (the large majority of which is due to hysteria-provoked safety requirements which are vastly too strong). And you take this as evidence against nuclear power? Not only that, you consider this so obvious that the debate is pretty much closed. I'm just baffled.
- api 13y ago
  That's a non sequitur. The tsunami was a natural disaster, and was probably unavoidable. The Japanese now have a 20-year radiation-spewing money pit, which was avoidable. My post was mostly about the future. Why build more potential multi-billion-dollar 20-year money pits when there are alternatives that are almost ready and that could be brought to readiness with what are likely comparable R&D expenditures and infrastructure costs?
  - jessriedel 13y ago
    It's quite sequitur, because the existence of the tsunami means you only have acquired evidence that the reactors are dangerous in massive, already overwhelmingly dangerous situations. If a tornado destroys all the houses on your block, causing your car to roll out of your (destroyed) garage and run over a mailbox, no one goes around talking about how this proves the dangers of cars. (I exaggerate the comparison here, but you get the point.) Yes, obviously the cost of these ultra-rare events needs to be accounted for in doing a cost-benefit analysis. But the billions of dollars it will cost to clean up Fukishima (which, again, are mostly unnecessary) is tiny compared to the total cost of nuclear power, or any power source, on a global scale. There are ~500 nuclear plants worldwide, each costing ~$5 billion each. This singular event is just plain not important. The fact that it's "avoidable" is only useful on the scale of improving particular reactors or particular regulatory agencies. With regard to choosing sources of power, it really doesn't matter except to make nuclear more attractive. (If some nuclear power risks are avoidable, and therefore improvable, in a way that the costs of renewables cannot be improved, this is a point in nuclear's favor.) The question of which types of power society should invest in is a complex one, requiring the careful weighing of various risks, technological uncertainties, and ethical questions. I certainly don't know the answer. But what I do know is that the pittance of money lost in this disaster does not play an appreciable role in that calculation, except insofar as it gives ammunition for some people to fearmonger.
Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> ... one singular bad accident can completely obliterate the economic rationale for nuclear power in a given country. The anything-but-nuclear policy has caused fossil fuel wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. The parent comment is not merely wrong, it is the opposite of correct. Having a Fukushima-size meltdown every few years would be an economic bargain.
- api 13y ago
  This is simply unrelated. Fossil fuels are worth a lot of money and are frequently located in areas controlled by unstable regimes, hence wars. There are also wars over water, diamonds, gold, arable land, and any other high-value commodity located where the local political environment is unstable. Using a lot of nuclear power would not alter this picture in the slightest. It might alter the landscape in terms of supply and demand, perhaps shifting fossil fuel demand from heavy nuclear users toward developing or lower-tech countries, but the basic equation of high value resources plus political instability remains intact. California is highly oil-dependent and Texas has a lot of oil. So far California has not invaded Texas. That's because both are politically stable.
  - Daniel_Newby 13y ago
    > shifting fossil fuel demand from heavy nuclear users toward developing or lower-tech countries Right! Let someone else pour blood and treasure into the sands of the Middle East, while we enjoy a nuclear-electric-hydrogen economy. The goal is our prosperity, not the stability of a bunch of oily camel jockeys.
BrandonMarc 13y ago
Toshiba may have a decent answer for nuclear power, as described by one of the writers who investigated Three Mile Island, and whose friends helped battle Chernobyl many moons ago. A writer who just happens to not write under the name Mark Stephens ... namely, Robert X Cringely. Here's what he wrote about Toshiba [0], ~ 2.5 years ago when Fukushima lit up: But the new plants also have to show they can survive an 8.9 earthquake and reduce the number of critical failure points. Toshiba's 4S reactors, which have been around for several years now, though not yet commercially successful, do all that quite easily. 4S reactor cores are like nuclear building blocks, built on a factory production line and transported by truck to be installed 30 meters under the ground. Each 4S puts out 10 megawatts of electricity or enough for 2000 Japanese homes. Following this path means the lost 1000 megawatt reactors will need 100 4S's each to replace them or a total of 1200 4S reactors. 4S's are fueled at the factory, put in place to run for 20 years then returned to the factory for refueling. They are sodium-cooled and pretty darned impossible to melt down. If the cooling system is compromised they automatically shut down and just sit there in a block of sodium. I admit I haven't followed the Toshiba 4S model's progress in the intervening time, but was fascinated at the idea when I read about it before. Cringely isn't a nuclear engineer, but he's no slouch, either. It's all worth a read. ---------- [0] http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/13/is-anything-nuclear-ever-really-super-safe-small-and-simple/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/13/is-anything-nuclear-ever-... ... and here's more of RXC's writing on the topic. Fascinating stuff: http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/11/flea-powder-may-be-saving-lives-in-japan/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/11/flea-powder-may-be-saving... http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/16/who-ya-gonna-call-supertanker/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/16/who-ya-gonna-call-superta... http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/30/plutonium-is-forever/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/30/plutonium-is-forever/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/09/20/truth-about-fukushima-daiichi/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/09/20/truth-about-fukushima-dai... http://www.cringely.com/2012/05/24/the-next-japanese-nuclear-accident-its-inevitable-will-be-even-worse/ http://www.cringely.com/2012/05/24/the-next-japanese-nuclear...

by api 13y ago

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

We have spent decades and hundreds of billions chasing a particularly poor form of nuclear because of the US and Russian military industrial complexes. Dismissing nuclear because of horrible past decisions seems unwise.

api 13y ago
Perhaps so, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if the point is moot. Solar is experience Moore's Law type effects in terms of cost per kW of installed capacity, and there is now immense R&D muscle behind energy storage due in part to the electronics industry. The awesome power of exponential tipping points is not to be underestimated. When the cost/kWh curves intersect, it could happen fast. Look at the adoption of the Internet and smart phones for examples. Solar could go from <1% of our energy to >25% in 5-10 years. That might be conservative. I'm seeing nuclear as a niche technology. In a post-fossil world I can see it for radionucleotide production (e.g. for nuclear medicine and space probes), maybe for a few really heavy industrial needs, and for some locations with very poor local renewable energy availability. But for the most part I see it as obsolescent. I do think it might find its killer app somewhere else though: Mars. There are many reasons it would make more sense there.
- nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  China has 28 new reactors in the pipeline for a reason. Solar is nowhere near ready.
  - api 13y ago
    I don't see the actions of a huge, lumbering bureaucracy as a good predictor of the future.
    - moheeb 13y ago
      Guyana has zero, if that makes you feel better.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago
      You should study post revolution Chinese history a bit more, or at least click around on gapminder a bit. The idea that they're a lumbering ineffective bureaucracy is too simplistic to be useful. Two examples: First, China doubled its life expectancy in a single decade, moving from one of the lowest to being at parity with the developed world. Second, in the early 1980s China implemented policies that moved them from having stagnant GDP per capita to steadily doubling it per decade, a pace it remains on since. In fact, you could blame some of post revolutionary China's most disasterous events on the lack of bureaucratic inertia. The great leap forward was disasterous not just because the details of the plan were mistaken, but also because it was implemented so instantly and completely. Anyhow, if you look at the data instead of repeating narratives that personify organizations, you'll see it's not quite so simple as saying that all Chinese economic decision-making can be summarily rejected as lumbering bureaucracy.

tptacek 13y ago

I don't understand how an empirical analysis, such as this purports to be, could get around the fact that "conventional" power generation kills far more people than nuclear ever has.

x0x0 13y ago
I don't understand how people who keep bringing up that conventional power generation kills more people than nuclear ever has (yet!) get around having their nose rubbed in the fact that we haven't experienced a worst case nuclear incident yet and that we keep getting lucky and scraping past worst cases -- at least according to what I read about all those old fuel rods stored at Fukushima. People keep ignoring safety precautions and we keep getting lucky, but luck and hope is not an acceptable strategy when you can irradiate large chunks of countries as a worst case scenario. @SuperChihuahua: I can't find the articles now, but just one failure case is there were pools with spent nuclear rods in them that required active cooling. Failure to do so produces a plume of radiation straight into the air. Of course you're never supposed to store that many fuel rods, yet somehow safety wasn't important and there we where with tons of fuel rods in pools that required active cooling and no real plan for what to do if, say, we couldn't actively cool them.
- tptacek 13y ago
  I didn't dismiss that argument, I simply said it doesn't have an empirical grounding despite the language that was used in the parent comment that made it appear otherwise. (I don't agree with that argument though; we're going to have to figure safe nuclear out, because we can't keep dumping pollutants into the atmosphere).
- SuperChihuahua 13y ago
  What's the worst case nuclear incident in a modern reactor?
  - Retric 13y ago
    Someone steals Nuclear material and releases it over a large area. Or a design failure can lead to something about 20 times the size Of Chernobil and hundreds of times as deadly. Note Chernobil keep most of the radioactive material contained. PS: Granted those are both vary unlikely, but if you want to talk worst case it can get really bad especially when you add in say a large earthquake on an unknown fault or a meter impact etc.

ctdonath 13y ago

We're not using much in the way of renewable energy for good reasons. Simply: low and inconsistent output. Solar: The absolute maximum upper limit is 1.3kW/m^2, the total solar energy hitting the Earth's disc. Realistically, you'll max out around 130W/m^2 under ideal conditions, dealing with atmospheric absorption, night, clouds, conversion efficiency, breakage, etc. Realistic norm is somewhere around even a tenth of that. Output storage & buffering is problematic, batteries using environmentally unfriendly materials requiring manufacture & replacement over a less-than-you-want lifespan. By the time an installation has become cost-effective, it's done and you'll have to re-install diminishing-return components. On a large enough scale to compete with other energy sources, you're performing "solar strip-mining" on the local environment. Wind: Big turbines are costly, last about 20 years, annoy neighbors (I almost had a wind farm dropped on my town), and by the time those huge expensive generators wear out or burn up (!) nobody will have a financial interest in replacing/dismantling them. Likewise, inconsistent power output is a problem few seriously address. Converting large amounts of atmospheric movement to heat will itself result in "manmade global warming" type issues. Old-form nuclear sucks. Between lousy ancient designs and sheer paranoia over "weapons-grade" phases, coupled with vast construction handling high-pressure extreme-danger contents, yeah there's a disaster waiting to happen - and as noted it just takes one to make the savings moot. New-form nuclear has real potential. Small sealed units incapable of self-destructing, highly resistant to deliberate damage, and easy to transport make it entirely possible for a community to purchase one turnkey reactor and run from that for decades. Oil/coal will remain a major contender precisely because the energy has already been gathered into convenient pumpable-haulable form, is shelf-stable over usage fluctuations, and has little discernible waste. Renewables are just not viable, at least not yet. Despite huge piles of money thrown at it (by the current US administration in particular), nothing of marketable substance has emerged. If it were viable, it would be in widespread production. I'm looking to run my HVAC off solar if you disagree. The bashing of nuclear is mostly limited to old-school hot-water active-cooling designs. Yes, they suck. Get over it and move on to modern designs held back mostly by regulatory concerns which apply those fears to inapplicable reactors without further consideration.

api 13y ago
True-- for now. The question is: is it better to spend billions researching new generations of nuclear reactors or to spend billions working on energy storage? The former will lead to a switch from older, less concentrated fossil fuels to a newer, more energy-dense fossil fuel. But it's not without well-known problems. The latter will result in a permanent, eternal solution to the energy problem. There are limits to how much solar and wind is available, but those are orders of magnitude beyond our civilization's current energy requirements. Other limits to growth -- arable land, decreasing fertility with increasing wealth -- will likely prevent us from ever even approaching those limits. Solve the energy storage problem and the industrial revolution becomes as permanent as the agricultural revolution. Nuclear power won't do that. So energy storage technology is IMHO a more prudent, higher dividend investment than better nuclear reactors.

marze 13y ago

Worse case accident for solar: Ow. I dropped the solar panel on my foot. For nuclear: Oops, we destroyed $270B of real estate.

SuperChihuahua 13y ago
Can solar panels survive an earthquake?
- marze 13y ago
  Probably at least as well as the Fukushima reactors did.
  - meepmorp 13y ago
    To be fair, the reactors survived the earthquake just fine, as well as the tsunami afterward. The problem is that the diesel generators that were supposed to provide backup power to the cooling systems got swamped, basically making meltdown inevitable with the design of the reactor. Edit:extraneous words removed
cobrausn 13y ago
Actual worst case for solar: Oops, we spent $270B on solar panels that can't provide enough power.

hannibal5 13y ago

The risks are small, but they are not so small that nuclear plants could get normal insurance from free markets. They have actuaries that can do the math. It all boils down to the expected value (= value*risk). Even if the risk is incredibly small the cost when the risk actualizes is so massive that it's deal breaker (alternatively, the cost of insurance from free markets makes nuclear energy too expensive) This is why every country with nuclear plants subsidies nuclear energy with laws that limit the amount of compensation.

marze 13y ago
Ask the 80000 people made homeless by the Fukushima meltdowns how much the government or power company gave them. It was a laughably small amount. I wouldn't expect any other 1st world country to much better.
jessriedel 13y ago
> Even if the risk is incredibly small the cost when the risk actualizes is so massive that it's deal breaker (alternatively, the cost of insurance from free markets makes nuclear energy too expensive) Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that the risks from nuclear are simply too high variance (i.e., concentrated in a few huge events) for an insurance company to absorb, not that the expectation value of the cost is high.
- tome 13y ago
  I have friend who is a lawyer in the field of nuclear decommissioning. He said that contraray to what you might expect it's the small risks that are uninsurable, not the catastrophic ones.
  - jessriedel 13y ago
    What does that mean? You mean large risks of relatively small costs? (Small risks of small costs are obviously not important.) This is directly contrary to hannibal5's claim, correct?

ori_b 13y ago

Fukushima was an outdated design that was not safe under passive cooling (ie, it was physically possible for it to melt down). It's construction predated Chernobyl, and it's design was even older, and designed around a weaponizable fuel. Fukushima doesn't represent the state of the art. It didn't even represent the state of the art a quarter of a century ago.

marze 13y ago
Hmm, if it is so outdated, should we close all 45 of the identical General Electric-design reactors operating in US cities soon? Or, we could extend their operating license each for 20 years and see if they can handle it.
- ori_b 13y ago
  YES. We should definitely be upgrading our nuclear reactors to modern designs. While the USA mostly isn't in an earthquake zone, which reduces the risks, the reactors are definitely past their useful life, less safe than they could be, and require more expensive, dangerous, and weaponizable fuel than then should. The problem with upgrading, of course, is political. The amount of public outcry that would occur if we started to build new reactors, even based on better designs, would make things very difficult politically.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  every time i drive to San Diego, i'm always struck at the view of this thing and how out of place it is and what could happen there. Seems common sense is winning as i heard they stopped reactors there and don't plan to restart.

akiselev 13y ago

To restore faith in nuclear: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710050022 http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710050022 Researched as a rocket engine (but equally effective for terrestrial power) over 40 years ago. Instead of taking 20,000 kg of fuel (which is about how much each Fukushima reactor had) and trying to prevent it from overheating, the nuclear lightbulb reactor (or rocket engine) takes 20kg of fuel, compresses, and heats the fuel to the point where it is a self sustaining critical reaction. If the chamber ruptures or power is cut, the core (which at this point is about 10,000 Kelvin and a black body radiator in UV-vis) expands, cools, and reacts with oxygen to quickly precipitate. If you combine this with a plasma window separated vacuum chamber with graphite or another neutron moderator, the second power is cut the entire chamber including the nuclear core is sucked into a safety chamber (plasma windows require multiple kilowatts of power per inch diameter so any failure causes it to die). Of course there are some material science problems to go over but with the progress we (Corning alone, really) made in the last 40 years, it is achievable. Food for thought: the worst power-generation related disaster was by far Deep Water Horizon, which is turning the entire Gulf of Mexico into a deadzone (you could even see the oil from space! [1]). Hell, BP's fuck up wasn't even the worst case scenario (earthquake or something causing the entire subterranean pipe to expand past the point of closing with conventional cement) and we will be dealing with the aftermath for many decades. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill_-_May_24,_2010_-_with_locator.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spil...

jessriedel 13y ago

A massive natural disaster hit Japan causing 15,883 deaths, 6,145 injured, and 2,667 people missing. It cost $235 billion dollars, making it the costliest natural disaster in world history. The nuclear power plant damage results in zero deaths (other than a handful of deaths from emergency crews unrelated to radiation) and a few billion in clean-up costs (the large majority of which is due to hysteria-provoked safety requirements which are vastly too strong). And you take this as evidence against nuclear power? Not only that, you consider this so obvious that the debate is pretty much closed. I'm just baffled.

api 13y ago
That's a non sequitur. The tsunami was a natural disaster, and was probably unavoidable. The Japanese now have a 20-year radiation-spewing money pit, which was avoidable. My post was mostly about the future. Why build more potential multi-billion-dollar 20-year money pits when there are alternatives that are almost ready and that could be brought to readiness with what are likely comparable R&D expenditures and infrastructure costs?
- jessriedel 13y ago
  It's quite sequitur, because the existence of the tsunami means you only have acquired evidence that the reactors are dangerous in massive, already overwhelmingly dangerous situations. If a tornado destroys all the houses on your block, causing your car to roll out of your (destroyed) garage and run over a mailbox, no one goes around talking about how this proves the dangers of cars. (I exaggerate the comparison here, but you get the point.) Yes, obviously the cost of these ultra-rare events needs to be accounted for in doing a cost-benefit analysis. But the billions of dollars it will cost to clean up Fukishima (which, again, are mostly unnecessary) is tiny compared to the total cost of nuclear power, or any power source, on a global scale. There are ~500 nuclear plants worldwide, each costing ~$5 billion each. This singular event is just plain not important. The fact that it's "avoidable" is only useful on the scale of improving particular reactors or particular regulatory agencies. With regard to choosing sources of power, it really doesn't matter except to make nuclear more attractive. (If some nuclear power risks are avoidable, and therefore improvable, in a way that the costs of renewables cannot be improved, this is a point in nuclear's favor.) The question of which types of power society should invest in is a complex one, requiring the careful weighing of various risks, technological uncertainties, and ethical questions. I certainly don't know the answer. But what I do know is that the pittance of money lost in this disaster does not play an appreciable role in that calculation, except insofar as it gives ammunition for some people to fearmonger.

Daniel_Newby 13y ago

> ... one singular bad accident can completely obliterate the economic rationale for nuclear power in a given country. The anything-but-nuclear policy has caused fossil fuel wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. The parent comment is not merely wrong, it is the opposite of correct. Having a Fukushima-size meltdown every few years would be an economic bargain.

api 13y ago
This is simply unrelated. Fossil fuels are worth a lot of money and are frequently located in areas controlled by unstable regimes, hence wars. There are also wars over water, diamonds, gold, arable land, and any other high-value commodity located where the local political environment is unstable. Using a lot of nuclear power would not alter this picture in the slightest. It might alter the landscape in terms of supply and demand, perhaps shifting fossil fuel demand from heavy nuclear users toward developing or lower-tech countries, but the basic equation of high value resources plus political instability remains intact. California is highly oil-dependent and Texas has a lot of oil. So far California has not invaded Texas. That's because both are politically stable.
- Daniel_Newby 13y ago
  > shifting fossil fuel demand from heavy nuclear users toward developing or lower-tech countries Right! Let someone else pour blood and treasure into the sands of the Middle East, while we enjoy a nuclear-electric-hydrogen economy. The goal is our prosperity, not the stability of a bunch of oily camel jockeys.

BrandonMarc 13y ago

Toshiba may have a decent answer for nuclear power, as described by one of the writers who investigated Three Mile Island, and whose friends helped battle Chernobyl many moons ago. A writer who just happens to not write under the name Mark Stephens ... namely, Robert X Cringely. Here's what he wrote about Toshiba [0], ~ 2.5 years ago when Fukushima lit up: But the new plants also have to show they can survive an 8.9 earthquake and reduce the number of critical failure points. Toshiba's 4S reactors, which have been around for several years now, though not yet commercially successful, do all that quite easily. 4S reactor cores are like nuclear building blocks, built on a factory production line and transported by truck to be installed 30 meters under the ground. Each 4S puts out 10 megawatts of electricity or enough for 2000 Japanese homes. Following this path means the lost 1000 megawatt reactors will need 100 4S's each to replace them or a total of 1200 4S reactors. 4S's are fueled at the factory, put in place to run for 20 years then returned to the factory for refueling. They are sodium-cooled and pretty darned impossible to melt down. If the cooling system is compromised they automatically shut down and just sit there in a block of sodium. I admit I haven't followed the Toshiba 4S model's progress in the intervening time, but was fascinated at the idea when I read about it before. Cringely isn't a nuclear engineer, but he's no slouch, either. It's all worth a read. ---------- [0] http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/13/is-anything-nuclear-ever-really-super-safe-small-and-simple/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/13/is-anything-nuclear-ever-... ... and here's more of RXC's writing on the topic. Fascinating stuff: http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/11/flea-powder-may-be-saving-lives-in-japan/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/11/flea-powder-may-be-saving... http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/16/who-ya-gonna-call-supertanker/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/16/who-ya-gonna-call-superta... http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/30/plutonium-is-forever/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/30/plutonium-is-forever/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/09/20/truth-about-fukushima-daiichi/ http://www.cringely.com/2011/09/20/truth-about-fukushima-dai... http://www.cringely.com/2012/05/24/the-next-japanese-nuclear-accident-its-inevitable-will-be-even-worse/ http://www.cringely.com/2012/05/24/the-next-japanese-nuclear...