10 ms·

Want to fight climate change? Build more nuclear power

78 points by markmassie 12y ago

sounds 12y ago
Hopefully there are lots of people here who feel like I do, that building nuclear plants is a great idea -- just, what kind of nuclear plant should we build? 1. You want to use government funding to build nuclear plants. My response: please look at previous government-funded nuclear operations of all types. It appears this doesn't work, from a failure to manage the environmental impact to a failure to keep the project cost-effective. This includes state-controlled energy companies, since nuclear power is a very tightly controlled business. 2. You want to use an unproven technology. My response: there are several well-proven nuclear options that are being developed by very promising companies. Please compare your technology with them. Some of the promising technologies are government-funded, however, which seems like a waste of a good idea. 3. You want to keep existing plants alive. This is nuanced. Some existing nuclear plants are necessary, but hopefully we can shut down the aging and dangerous and high-level-waste-producing ones in favor of cleaner alternatives. Doing so shouldn't necessarily cost a lot of money. 4. You want to reprocess existing nuclear waste and burn it to low-grade waste while generating clean electricity. My response: if you can show that you've cleared the regulatory hurdles (a lot of waste is held by governments) and if you're reasonably transparent about your progress, I'd like to give you a donation.
- vmp 12y ago
  I'm personally excited about Thorium reactors, suprised that nobody else mentioned them yet. I could cite the "pamphlet propaganda" but I feel that I lack knowledge to lead the thorium discussion, so I'll let somebody else do that. :)
discardorama 12y ago
The people of the areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl may beg to differ. I'm not anti-nuclear, but the cost of a failure at a nuclear power plant is so high, that the engineering must be to similarly high standards. Unfortunately, as we have seen in the cases of 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima, this is not the case. We need to really figure that part out before opting for this route. And then there's the problem of nuclear waste disposal.
- Yardlink 12y ago
  Don't confuse Fukishima with a nuclear disaster. Yes there was environmental contamination, but 10's of thousands of people were killed by a tsunami. Nuclear accidents aren't nearly that bad. What we need is more sea walls, not less nuclear plants. Also it was of the type that melts down if the cooling water is lost. Other reactor designs (eg 3-mile island) need water to operate so they shut down automatically if there's any major breakdown. Furthermore, coal is far more dangerous. We just don't care when thousands of Chinese coal miners die every year as much as we do when Japanese farmland is rendered unusable once in a lifetime.
  - jaekwon 12y ago
    Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar? I don't trust anybody with nuclear power. I don't know whether I should be eating fish from the pacific ocean. I have some idea how much cesium is in our ocean water because somebody is tracking it, but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
    - ars 12y ago
      > Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar? There isn't enough. Not even close. It's not as abundant as you think - the amount of our planets resources we would have to consume to make use of this "renewable" energy is enormous. > but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA. Well now you do. There are no ramifications whatsoever.
      - jaekwon 12y ago
        You're wrong on both counts. We don't know the full effects of Fukushima yet (it's not over, and cancers caused may take much longer to show).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ihsanyounes90 12y ago
This is the easy way to get energia. Ok, We have seen that in Canada they use the dams, but we know that this harms the environment (for salmon). Here we really need to do research for alternative energy, do not think only about money and earnings, but think about the future. Otherwise we risk in 2050 to find the first deserts created by humans because of global warming.
marze 12y ago
The obstacles that nuclear power faces are formidable. One is that two other carbon-free options, solar and wind, are dropping in cost at a rapid rate at the same time that cost estimates for new nuclear plants are rising at a similarly rapid rate. Another is that there isn't anyone who thought their investment in the existing fleet of nuclear plants in the US was a good investment. They were uniformly bad investments, which is the primary reason for the 40 year gap with essentially no new plants ordered. Furthermore, even completely amortized plants are shutting down in the US. They can't even cover their operating costs, the few that shut down in the last year, let alone operating cost plus amortized construction cost. So even with the federal government guaranteeing 90% of the funds used for new plant construction (free money) it hasn't been easy to find investors willing to put up the remaining 10%. Nuclear power is awesome, especially if it is fusion power, and the reactor is 90M miles away, and anyone can use it for free just by put an inexpensive fusion power receiving panel outside with a clear view of the sky. One just needs to project what the wholesale price of PV power will be in 10 years to see the real reason it is difficult to find investors for new nuclear plants. Why spend $5B on a nuclear plant when you could spend it on five solar panel plants that each produce 1GW of solar panels, each year, creating substantially more jobs than the reactor would? Just asking.
- osmala 12y ago
  Problem with nuclear is that they cannot operate in situation where there is other players which destabilizes the network and are profitable with subsidies even if they sell at negative price. Nuclear is long term base load you just cannot shutdown a nuclear plant in windy situations, and expect it up in next hour and save anything by doing it. Solar and wind is more expensive if you take away all subsidies and force everyone to handle the smoothing their electricity production to grid needs. But force buying in short term spot prices and giving more subsidy than cost of production per kw/hour for intermittent sources is actually terrible way of handling the grid, it increases greenhouse emissions by forcing to use low efficiency gas plants when sun doesn't shine, (not high efficiency since you cannot bring them online fast enough). Nuclear gets loan guaranties which are not free money, and regulatory fees which are additional tax for nuclear industry.
- hackuser 12y ago
bayesianhorse 12y ago
As long as the nuclear waste problem isn't solved, nuclear power can't be the answer. Also the cost is very high, especially if you factor in risk/insurance and decommissioning.
lispm 12y ago
Nuclear energy has still some popularity in the US. Especially among technical people. But technology is only one thing. What are the effects on a society long term? Here in Germany it is mostly dead. For us you are discussing positions of twenty years ago. The US has a very different energy situation compared to us: large country, nuclear weapons, lots of nuclear technology, extremely high energy use (more than twice than the average German), much lower population density, lots of energy sources, ... Here in Germany we've seen a lot of the negative effects in a country with higher density in the middle of Europe: * no plan or place for the waste * nuclear power plants all over the country * widespread corruption between politicians and industry * protests were suppressed with military-like police, escalated almost into civil war * lots of transport of nuclear materials through the country * extremely costly research paid by the tax payer * lots of promises of the nuclear industry just did not materialize: for example our pebble-bed reactor was closed silently, while earlier it was promised to solve a lot of technical problems * centralization of electricity production in few monopoly-like companies with zero competition The effects on an democratic society of nuclear technology is at least as bad as its technological problems. This was seen decades ago in the book 'Der Atomstaat' and the effects had been shown in Japan, where the Atomstaat was more advanced than here in Germany. We were able to stop it. Now we have to build-up renewable decentralized energy during the next decades. That's the common goal here in Germany.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > Now we have to build-up renewable decentralized energy during the next decades. That's the common goal here in Germany. Can it be done quickly enough to prevent the damage from climate change? If not, the problems of nuclear may be much less than the alternative. > * protests were suppressed with military-like police, escalated almost into civil war I don't mind a little hyperbole, but many people reading this have no idea what actually happened. Could you describe it?
  - lispm 12y ago
    Can you build enough nuclear power to prevent the damage from climate change? I don't think so.
brandonmenc 12y ago
Why is France rarely mentioned in these discussions? Most of their energy is nuclear. They've also standardized on plant design, which must have huge benefits - fungible employees and more MTBF being big ones. All of our (the United States) plants afaik are bespoke designs, and can't be cheaper than pumping out cookie cutters. What are they doing right, and how do we copy it?
- lispm 12y ago
  > Most of their energy is nuclear Sure not. Last I looked their cars all use gasoline...
  - hueving 12y ago
    Sometimes people get confused when they meant to say electricity instead of energy. Rather than correcting it, they get embarrassed and downvote. It really is a huge difference that needs to be acknowledged with people switch to electric forms of transportation.
    - brandonmenc 12y ago
      I don't have downvoting permissions.
- einrealist 12y ago
  What they do right? They dump toxic waste from the rod processing into the sea. They pollute entire regions from mining operations (Niger, Canada). They operate plants at limits (age, cooling, costs) - not a week without an incident.
- cygx 12y ago
  Keep in mind that not everything is golden in the promised land of nuclear energy production that is France: If it gets too hot to use river water for cooling, they have to shut down their nuclear reactors and import electricity from their european neighbours. For that matter, they also have problems when it gets too cold: The French generally use electricity for heating and they cannot meet demand on their own.
kisstheblade 12y ago
Irrational fears is the only thing keeping nuclear energy from being used to it's potential. Read this excellent paper on nuclear energy. Alla common fallacies are addressed here from a physics standpoint. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ I don't know why policymakers aren't required to actually study the science of the things they make decisions on. So now we have coal power which kills massive amounts of people, and people talking about hings like chernobyl and fukusima without realizing that not one single person has ever died of a nuclear "disaster" that was the result of a "non-military nuclear powerplant", ie. all western nuclear powerplants. And as for waste management, a quote: "For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity."
lolgas 12y ago
Important to note that nuclear accounts for only 90 deaths in history, while providing 17% of the world's power. source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
cygx 12y ago
Note that we haven't yet reached the end of the line as far as improvements to the manufacturing process of solar cells is conscerned, in particular http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature13435.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/natur... . Cheaper solar energy might not be far off.
angry_octet 12y ago
The use of any sort of nuclear power with a well though out multi millenia waste storage system is irresponsible. Ideally this would be accomanied by a secret cult of priests of the atom, charged with defending the sacred temple sites fovever. (Religion being the one institution proven able to survive millenia.)

78 points by markmassie 12y ago

Hopefully there are lots of people here who feel like I do, that building nuclear plants is a great idea -- just, what kind of nuclear plant should we build? 1. You want to use government funding to build nuclear plants. My response: please look at previous government-funded nuclear operations of all types. It appears this doesn't work, from a failure to manage the environmental impact to a failure to keep the project cost-effective. This includes state-controlled energy companies, since nuclear power is a very tightly controlled business. 2. You want to use an unproven technology. My response: there are several well-proven nuclear options that are being developed by very promising companies. Please compare your technology with them. Some of the promising technologies are government-funded, however, which seems like a waste of a good idea. 3. You want to keep existing plants alive. This is nuanced. Some existing nuclear plants are necessary, but hopefully we can shut down the aging and dangerous and high-level-waste-producing ones in favor of cleaner alternatives. Doing so shouldn't necessarily cost a lot of money. 4. You want to reprocess existing nuclear waste and burn it to low-grade waste while generating clean electricity. My response: if you can show that you've cleared the regulatory hurdles (a lot of waste is held by governments) and if you're reasonably transparent about your progress, I'd like to give you a donation.

vmp 12y ago
I'm personally excited about Thorium reactors, suprised that nobody else mentioned them yet. I could cite the "pamphlet propaganda" but I feel that I lack knowledge to lead the thorium discussion, so I'll let somebody else do that. :)

discardorama 12y ago

The people of the areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl may beg to differ. I'm not anti-nuclear, but the cost of a failure at a nuclear power plant is so high, that the engineering must be to similarly high standards. Unfortunately, as we have seen in the cases of 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima, this is not the case. We need to really figure that part out before opting for this route. And then there's the problem of nuclear waste disposal.

Yardlink 12y ago
Don't confuse Fukishima with a nuclear disaster. Yes there was environmental contamination, but 10's of thousands of people were killed by a tsunami. Nuclear accidents aren't nearly that bad. What we need is more sea walls, not less nuclear plants. Also it was of the type that melts down if the cooling water is lost. Other reactor designs (eg 3-mile island) need water to operate so they shut down automatically if there's any major breakdown. Furthermore, coal is far more dangerous. We just don't care when thousands of Chinese coal miners die every year as much as we do when Japanese farmland is rendered unusable once in a lifetime.
- jaekwon 12y ago
  Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar? I don't trust anybody with nuclear power. I don't know whether I should be eating fish from the pacific ocean. I have some idea how much cesium is in our ocean water because somebody is tracking it, but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
  - ars 12y ago
    > Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar? There isn't enough. Not even close. It's not as abundant as you think - the amount of our planets resources we would have to consume to make use of this "renewable" energy is enormous. > but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA. Well now you do. There are no ramifications whatsoever.
    - jaekwon 12y ago
      You're wrong on both counts. We don't know the full effects of Fukushima yet (it's not over, and cancers caused may take much longer to show).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ihsanyounes90 12y ago

This is the easy way to get energia. Ok, We have seen that in Canada they use the dams, but we know that this harms the environment (for salmon). Here we really need to do research for alternative energy, do not think only about money and earnings, but think about the future. Otherwise we risk in 2050 to find the first deserts created by humans because of global warming.

marze 12y ago

The obstacles that nuclear power faces are formidable. One is that two other carbon-free options, solar and wind, are dropping in cost at a rapid rate at the same time that cost estimates for new nuclear plants are rising at a similarly rapid rate. Another is that there isn't anyone who thought their investment in the existing fleet of nuclear plants in the US was a good investment. They were uniformly bad investments, which is the primary reason for the 40 year gap with essentially no new plants ordered. Furthermore, even completely amortized plants are shutting down in the US. They can't even cover their operating costs, the few that shut down in the last year, let alone operating cost plus amortized construction cost. So even with the federal government guaranteeing 90% of the funds used for new plant construction (free money) it hasn't been easy to find investors willing to put up the remaining 10%. Nuclear power is awesome, especially if it is fusion power, and the reactor is 90M miles away, and anyone can use it for free just by put an inexpensive fusion power receiving panel outside with a clear view of the sky. One just needs to project what the wholesale price of PV power will be in 10 years to see the real reason it is difficult to find investors for new nuclear plants. Why spend $5B on a nuclear plant when you could spend it on five solar panel plants that each produce 1GW of solar panels, each year, creating substantially more jobs than the reactor would? Just asking.

osmala 12y ago
Problem with nuclear is that they cannot operate in situation where there is other players which destabilizes the network and are profitable with subsidies even if they sell at negative price. Nuclear is long term base load you just cannot shutdown a nuclear plant in windy situations, and expect it up in next hour and save anything by doing it. Solar and wind is more expensive if you take away all subsidies and force everyone to handle the smoothing their electricity production to grid needs. But force buying in short term spot prices and giving more subsidy than cost of production per kw/hour for intermittent sources is actually terrible way of handling the grid, it increases greenhouse emissions by forcing to use low efficiency gas plants when sun doesn't shine, (not high efficiency since you cannot bring them online fast enough). Nuclear gets loan guaranties which are not free money, and regulatory fees which are additional tax for nuclear industry.
hackuser 12y ago

bayesianhorse 12y ago

As long as the nuclear waste problem isn't solved, nuclear power can't be the answer. Also the cost is very high, especially if you factor in risk/insurance and decommissioning.

lispm 12y ago

Nuclear energy has still some popularity in the US. Especially among technical people. But technology is only one thing. What are the effects on a society long term? Here in Germany it is mostly dead. For us you are discussing positions of twenty years ago. The US has a very different energy situation compared to us: large country, nuclear weapons, lots of nuclear technology, extremely high energy use (more than twice than the average German), much lower population density, lots of energy sources, ... Here in Germany we've seen a lot of the negative effects in a country with higher density in the middle of Europe: * no plan or place for the waste * nuclear power plants all over the country * widespread corruption between politicians and industry * protests were suppressed with military-like police, escalated almost into civil war * lots of transport of nuclear materials through the country * extremely costly research paid by the tax payer * lots of promises of the nuclear industry just did not materialize: for example our pebble-bed reactor was closed silently, while earlier it was promised to solve a lot of technical problems * centralization of electricity production in few monopoly-like companies with zero competition The effects on an democratic society of nuclear technology is at least as bad as its technological problems. This was seen decades ago in the book 'Der Atomstaat' and the effects had been shown in Japan, where the Atomstaat was more advanced than here in Germany. We were able to stop it. Now we have to build-up renewable decentralized energy during the next decades. That's the common goal here in Germany.

hackuser 12y ago
> Now we have to build-up renewable decentralized energy during the next decades. That's the common goal here in Germany. Can it be done quickly enough to prevent the damage from climate change? If not, the problems of nuclear may be much less than the alternative. > * protests were suppressed with military-like police, escalated almost into civil war I don't mind a little hyperbole, but many people reading this have no idea what actually happened. Could you describe it?
- lispm 12y ago
  Can you build enough nuclear power to prevent the damage from climate change? I don't think so.

brandonmenc 12y ago

Why is France rarely mentioned in these discussions? Most of their energy is nuclear. They've also standardized on plant design, which must have huge benefits - fungible employees and more MTBF being big ones. All of our (the United States) plants afaik are bespoke designs, and can't be cheaper than pumping out cookie cutters. What are they doing right, and how do we copy it?

lispm 12y ago
> Most of their energy is nuclear Sure not. Last I looked their cars all use gasoline...
- hueving 12y ago
  Sometimes people get confused when they meant to say electricity instead of energy. Rather than correcting it, they get embarrassed and downvote. It really is a huge difference that needs to be acknowledged with people switch to electric forms of transportation.
  - brandonmenc 12y ago
    I don't have downvoting permissions.
einrealist 12y ago
What they do right? They dump toxic waste from the rod processing into the sea. They pollute entire regions from mining operations (Niger, Canada). They operate plants at limits (age, cooling, costs) - not a week without an incident.
cygx 12y ago
Keep in mind that not everything is golden in the promised land of nuclear energy production that is France: If it gets too hot to use river water for cooling, they have to shut down their nuclear reactors and import electricity from their european neighbours. For that matter, they also have problems when it gets too cold: The French generally use electricity for heating and they cannot meet demand on their own.

kisstheblade 12y ago

Irrational fears is the only thing keeping nuclear energy from being used to it's potential. Read this excellent paper on nuclear energy. Alla common fallacies are addressed here from a physics standpoint. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ I don't know why policymakers aren't required to actually study the science of the things they make decisions on. So now we have coal power which kills massive amounts of people, and people talking about hings like chernobyl and fukusima without realizing that not one single person has ever died of a nuclear "disaster" that was the result of a "non-military nuclear powerplant", ie. all western nuclear powerplants. And as for waste management, a quote: "For nuclear waste, a simple, quick, and easy disposal method would be to convert the waste into a glass — a technology that is well in hand — and simply drop it into the ocean at random locations.5 No one can claim that we don't know how to do that! With this disposal, the waste produced by one power plant in one year would eventually cause an average total of 0.6 fatalities, spread out over many millions of years, by contaminating seafood. Incidentally, this disposal technique would do no harm to ocean ecology. In fact, if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power and all the waste generated for the next hundred years were dumped in the ocean, the radiation dose to sea animals would never be increased by as much as 1% above its present level from natural radioactivity."

lolgas 12y ago

Important to note that nuclear accounts for only 90 deaths in history, while providing 17% of the world's power. source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

cygx 12y ago

Note that we haven't yet reached the end of the line as far as improvements to the manufacturing process of solar cells is conscerned, in particular http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature13435.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/natur... . Cheaper solar energy might not be far off.

angry_octet 12y ago

The use of any sort of nuclear power with a well though out multi millenia waste storage system is irresponsible. Ideally this would be accomanied by a secret cult of priests of the atom, charged with defending the sacred temple sites fovever. (Religion being the one institution proven able to survive millenia.)