I'm not scared of nuclear, but I'm terrified of climate change.
We don't need nuclear, because we have other options for firm low-carbon energy (geothermal) and energy storage of surplus and super-cheap intermittent renewables (lithium ion, flow batteries, hydrogen, methane, compressed air, liquid air...).
If nuclear could compete on cost, we should go for it, but it can't without a major tech breakthrough. The potential tech breakthroughs (SMRs) are far less technologically mature than any of our other options.
For example, we will definitely need to start producing hydrogen in order to decarbonize heavy industry (e.g. steel production, ammonia production, etc.). So we need hydrogen infrastructure because it's the only foreseeable path for several parts of our economy. It will get developed. Even this article, which is interpreted as heavily skeptical of hydrogen, sees a huge future for hydrogen on the grid:
Nuclear will only have a future if it can solve its construction problem, and compete with more modern technologies. As it is, it's a dinosaur from the past, a legacy of a time before we had better tech. The more we learn about nuclear, the more expensive it seems to get, in contrast to pretty much any good tech.
For the life of me, I cannot understand the disconnect in thinking for people who recognize the need for bold action on climate change and then in the next breath fret about money.
It's gonna cost money. It's gonna require work. It's going to not only be opportunity cost, but require us to do stuff. This is what it means to have climate change as a priority. It's a priority above money, above GDP growth, above even the standard of living. It should be our highest priority, and we should be prepared to roll up our sleeves and hit everyone up for money. It's a debt we need to pay, and there's no getting out of it.
> The more we learn about nuclear, the more expensive it seems to get, in contrast to pretty much any good tech.
At this point in time we need to push the dollar cost much further down our list of priorities and be shooting for what's going to avoid catastrophe and what's sustainable. (spoiler: nuclear energy is absolutely sustainable; there are literally billions of years of nuclear fuel accessible to us).
It's really not a priority above money, though. Money isn't some magical evil thing. Money is the unit of account that we use to measure goods and services. Something "costing money" means that it reduces the amount of goods and services we can create. Climate change "costs money" in the sense that it reduces global output. Reducing global output has a human cost, especially for low income nations.
To you and I perhaps it is 'just money' because your standard of living is sufficiently high that a 10%, 20% or even 50% reduction is a sacrifice of comfort, and not existential. But contracting the growth prospects for India by 25% over the next decade means consigning millions of people to crippling poverty.
This idea that money is some morally lesser concern just fundamentally misunderstands what money is. Aggregate wealth is just all the stuff we have. Less money means less stuff. Less stuff means more poverty. That may be worth while, if we think climate change is severe. But it's always extremely important to keep this in perspective.
Climate change is primarily going to hurt the world's poor, and so are the cuts we'll have to make to combat it. But if you don't keep that in perspective, the cure may end up worse than the disease.
> But contracting the growth prospects for India by 25% over the next decade means consigning millions of people to crippling poverty.
People say this, but I'll note that humans have lived through "crippling poverty" for most of our 2 million year existence. It is only crippling poverty by today's distortion lens (also a shifting baseline).
We should focus on what people really need to live quality lives, which is: good health (read: access to modern healthcare, freedom from pollution, disease), good food (read: freedom first from starvation, from malnutrition, poor diet), shelter from the elements, and then the rest of Maslow's hierarchy. Cars, TV, home appliances, and the whole lot of today's energy-hungry living isn't sustainable, and I'd argue isn't even the thing we should be shooting for. People of the past lived very different and satisfying lives that we simply can't imagine because, frankly, we are spoiled. People lived in tribes and hunted with spears for 100,000 years at least. And you know what, they beat those drums, painted their faces, tracked the stars, and contrary to whatever we might believe from our high place of "development" they actually enjoyed their lives.
This is a totally other conversation, but let's just say, I disagree with a lot of what you say about money and what it means to people. Money's new. We've been around a lot longer.
> People say this, but I'll note that humans have lived through "crippling poverty" for most of our 2 million year existence. It is only crippling poverty by today's distortion lens (also a shifting baseline).
That's very easy to say. But it's hard for me not to notice that you're commenting on web forums, which means you probably haven't given up on the creature comforts of modernity. If you're not willing to do it, what gives you the right to tell half of India to?
> We should focus on what people really need to live quality lives, which is: good health (read: access to modern healthcare, freedom from pollution, disease), good food (read: freedom first from starvation, from malnutrition, poor diet), shelter from the elements, and then the rest of Maslow's hierarchy. Cars, TV, home appliances, and the whole lot of today's energy-hungry living isn't sustainable, and I'd argue isn't even the thing we should be shooting for. People of the past lived very different and satisfying lives that we simply can't imagine because, frankly, we are spoiled. People lived in tribes and hunted with spears for 100,000 years at least. And you know what, they beat those drums, painted their faces, tracked the stars, and contrary to whatever we might believe from our high place of "development" they actually enjoyed their lives.
I see a whole lot of people saying things like this, and literally no one actually living it. The contradiction is hard to ignore. Maybe the old way of living wasn't really that nice.
> I see a whole lot of people saying things like this, and literally no one actually living it. The contradiction is hard to ignore. Maybe the old way of living wasn't really that nice.
Well you quite obviously are not going to due to selection bias. But yes, there are people who have tried to simplify their lives down, both now and since the dawn of the modern era. Pick any level of tech you like: log cabin, lean to, nothing but a knife. People try. Some succeed. Sometimes they write books, sometimes books are written about them. Very few post on hackernews. Nowadays it's pretty much impossible to escape the modern world, so I wouldn't hold my breath for naturalist/primitivists to rise up and take over the world.
But I'm not really arguing for anything. We're headed back to sustainability one way or another.
>That's very easy to say. But it's hard for me not to notice that you're commenting on web forums, which means you probably haven't given up on the creature comforts of modernity. If you're not willing to do it, what gives you the right to tell half of India to?
Which is another way to say: "How dare you criticize capitalism from your smartphone?"
This argument is so old, overused and has been debunked so much already, but I'll do it once again for you, even though it would take the intellectual honesty and introspection capacity of an 8 years old to realize it's a really bad argument.
1) We don't choose to be born and live in this society. It just happens, and we don't get to learn the survival skills necessary to do without it. Therefore, one could say we're stuck in it. Especially considering nowadays everything is property of someone, you can't just go and take a piece of forest to have your primitive tribe there.
2) Technology and innovation ARE NOT EXCLUSIVE to Capitalism. Repeat it once again if you need. Soviets had a space program too you realize that? Saying that Capitalism is the only way to have innovation, because someone invented iPhone under Capitalism means having no idea of what false correlation is. I'd suggest studying the very basis of statistics before making such claims.
>Maybe the old way of living wasn't really that nice.
Maybe we can take the best from both worlds. Lose the hunger for profit, the abstract finance, the exploitation and keep the progress.
> 1) We don't choose to be born and live in this society. It just happens, and we don't get to learn the survival skills necessary to do without it. Therefore, one could say we're stuck in it. Especially considering nowadays everything is property of someone, you can't just go and take a piece of forest to have your primitive tribe there.
You're not stuck. Learning survival skills is not very hard. You are simply waking up every single day and choosing not to do it. Nobody is stopping you.
> 2) Technology and innovation ARE NOT EXCLUSIVE to Capitalism. Repeat it once again if you need. Soviets had a space program too you realize that? Saying that Capitalism is the only way to have innovation, because someone invented iPhone under Capitalism means having no idea of what false correlation is. I'd suggest studying the very basis of statistics before making such claims.
Of course the Soviets had a space program. It's all they had. Their economy was falling apart. Centrally planned economies can do things. They're particularly effective at mustering the entire population behind a single project: like the space race.
They're much less good at doing all the things necessary to run a modern economy simultaneously. Everyone who has ever tried to run an economy this way has failed. The Soviets, the Chinese, North Korea is still making a valiant effort, but it sure doesn't seem to be working out very well for them.
It's true that capitalism isn't the only way to have innovation. It's also true that it's the only way to do it consistently, over a long period of time, across a broad array of industries. There are precisely zero counter-examples in world history. Of course, that doesn't prove it can't be done. But the numbers don't look very good.
> Maybe we can take the best from both worlds. Lose the hunger for profit, the abstract finance, the exploitation and keep the progress.
It'd be nice. I think if you want ideas like that, Glen Weyl's book Radical Markets is probably for you. Fundamentally you aren't going to make any progress on creating that world until you recognize that markets are not your enemy. Centralized state planning is not and never will be an effective way of coordinating an economy. It can be useful in some domains, but it simply doesn't work to run an entire economy that way. What you can do, however, are create market mechanisms that are more progressive than what we have now, by having properly designed taxation schemes, as described in the aforementioned book.
> Cars, TV, home appliances, and the whole lot of today's energy-hungry living isn't sustainable
It seems like you're gunning for some weird primitivist angle that just isn't realistic. These problems are solvable with good public transit infrastructure and a few thousand hectares of solar panels. Obviously there's no escaping some impact on our lifestyle, but "hey, destitution isn't so bad when you have family" is a bizarre leap out of left field. No climate scientists are realistically suggesting that we "end home appliances."
> People say this, but I'll note that humans have lived through "crippling poverty" for most of our 2 million year existence. It is only crippling poverty by today's distortion lens (also a shifting baseline).
Humans have died through crippling poverty for most of our existence, and that baseline, however shifted, is still not enough to ensure that everyone - in both developing and developed countries - can have good health, good food, and shelter.
Sure, this is mostly due to inequal resource distribution, but I don't believe that the crisis caused by climate change will rectify that, at least by itself.
We are far beyond the carrying capacity of Earth at this point, I am sorry to say. Honestly, I feel horrible about the future and I get the impression I am not the only one. Please resist the urge to read more into what I wrote than what I wrote.
The estimated extreme maximum carrying capacity of the Earth is 1 trillion people. This limit is set by direct thermal pollution. If one sticks with agriculture to make food, the limit has been estimated to be around 150 billion people. Africa alone could feed 15 billion if their agriculture achieved yields already demonstrated elsewhere in the world.
What's this Malthusianism doing in the 21st century? Can you cite some data suggesting that Earth is incapable of feeding and housing a population of ten billion at least? We have a surplus of food and a surplus of living space, and despite the ongoing energy crisis, there's every indication that renewables will be able to support our entire society once we've pumped enough money into them.
Are you worried about soil degradation? That's a fixable problem. These aren't "technological tricks," they're solutions. We've also got lots of arable land we're not using right now.
If you've got a really strong claim to make that sustainable farming at scale is unviable, then you must have a source to back that up.
> We should focus on what people really need to live quality lives, which is...
Which is what maybe ~1% of the most wealthy and lucky of human population currently get, some of the time.
> and then the rest of Maslow's hierarchy.
Oh wow, I like Maslow's "hierarchy". Although satisfaction of the human needs laid out there defy "provision", they are to be earned and achieved by the person.
> Cars, TV, home appliances, and the whole lot of today's energy-hungry living isn't sustainable, and I'd argue isn't even the thing we should be shooting for.
The very things which people invented, and are willing to pay for, to further themselves in the satisfaction of their needs. Which needs are laid out in Maslow's theory of motivation.
I presume you do realise this. Could you please explain how do you resolve this conflict?
A. Provision every human being with complete satisfaction of entire set of needs (bodily, security, society, esteem, knowledge, beauty, self-actualization and transcendence).
B. Take away from people, and punish them for having devices which are universally known to affordably address specific and provably existing human needs.
How do you propose to do A (at all), and then insist on B?
Am I right that you are a communist? Would you like to have a chance to live in the USSR?
> It's really not a priority above money, though. Money isn't some magical evil thing. Money is the unit of account that we use to measure goods and services.
Money is not magical but they may conceal the truth as the rabbit in a hat. Money is numbers and with numbers you can do math, its easy to grasp. But money doesn't in itself explain the factors around. A product or service may have a certain cost because of the quality or because it's subsidized or because its valued different or because of another unaccounted factor.
And what if its something that is invaluable? No money in the world can be fixed to it.
The risk of letting money be the priority is that we may see the number but not the damage to the nature behind it.
As climate change probably will take lives or even humanity in the future and life has one of the highest value, or at least the life of oneself, therefore it is a priority above money.
> Something "costing money" means that it reduces the amount of goods and services we can create. Climate change "costs money" in the sense that it reduces global output. Reducing global output has a human cost, especially for low income nations.
And if it's so then what says the cost needs to be distributed evenly?
Around 5% of the world population hold 70% of the world wealth(at least 2012).
> To you and I perhaps it is 'just money' because your standard of living is sufficiently high that a 10%, 20% or even 50% reduction is a sacrifice of comfort, and not existential. But contracting the growth prospects for India by 25% over the next decade means consigning millions of people to crippling poverty.
> This idea that money is some morally lesser concern just fundamentally misunderstands what money is. Aggregate wealth is just all the stuff we have. Less money means less stuff. Less stuff means more poverty. That may be worth while, if we think climate change is severe. But it's always extremely important to keep this in perspective.
> Climate change is primarily going to hurt the world's poor, and so are the cuts we'll have to make to combat it. But if you don't keep that in perspective, the cure may end up worse than the disease.
If we would divide the aggregated wealth equally between all people then the standard of living would probably be pretty decent and economical growth wouldn't be necessary.
Thou I find it hard to imagine that ever happening.
The difficulty for people to work without incentives.
The difficulty for people to realise it's just not their hard work but mostly luck that brought their wealth.
Climate change hopefully will change peoples views and values.
If we won't find a cure we may at least embrace the disease.
> It's gonna cost money. It's gonna require work. It's going to not only be opportunity cost, but require us to do stuff. This is what it means to have climate change as a priority. It's a priority above money, above GDP growth, above even the standard of living.
It is clear that climate change is an emergency. However, the amount of resources, including money, to address that emergency is finite, so it would be illogical (or even unethical) not to use resources in the most economical way possible.
New nuclear power plants have a cost of, for example,
over 90 £ / MWh. New solar and wind energy can deliver at less than half that price:
There is also another motication to build nuclear power plants - they subsidize military use of nuclear weapons. To cite from the article above: "On 12 October 2017, The Guardian reported that researchers informed MPs that the UK government was using the expensive Hinkley Point C project to cross-subsidise the UK military's nuclear-related activity by maintaining nuclear skills. The researchers from the University of Sussex, Prof. Andy Stirling and Dr. Phil Johnstone, stated that the costs of the Trident nuclear submarine programme would be prohibitive without "an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure".[97]"
On top of that, such plants, even with very conventional nuclear technology, take more than a decade to build. To address climate change, we need big and radical changes in energy production in the next twenty years. Building new nuclear energy is very clearly too slow to achieve that.
So, at that point, using nuclear to address climate change is merely a distraction. There are much better ways to address this problem.
The only problem with nuclear power is Government oversight, as you rightly point out: "they subsidize military use of nuclear weapons".
If Governments allow commercial development of nuclear power stations that cannot be used to produce enriched uranium (thorium being one of those), then free market forces will push the cost of design, and building them down, making the price of nuclear electricity much lower.
There's no economy of scale to the current nuclear industry. Each power station design is different in some way.
Imagine a commercial small sized, modular nuclear power plant, produced at scale. Nuclear subs, and aircraft carriers already have a version.
"Building new nuclear energy is very clearly too slow to achieve that."
I'd disagree, it is, as usual politics getting in the way of science, not the engineers or physicists. If the financial incentives are there, it would be solved very quickly. Fission isn't fusion, and the physics and engineering is well understood. Not directly comparable, but look at what SpaceX has achieved in 20 years in terms of design and engineering.
>If Governments allow commercial development of nuclear power stations that cannot be used to produce enriched uranium (thorium being one of those), then free market forces will push the cost of design
Nuclear plants have always been uninsurable without an explicit liability cap (currently set at $200 million).
The "free market" would never have let it happen in the first place without that subsidy (& several others).
Nuclear only ever exists and will only ever continue to existing because of subsidies.
The desire for subsidies is probably why this article exists, in fact.
The other market distortion that enabled nuclear to be built was the regulated monopolies of electric utilities. These utilities earn based on their capital investment, so the larger the capital investment they can get the regulators to swallow, the better. And this is best done by systems with large up front costs, costs that can be underestimated then escalated after the initial fixed investment.
What really killed the first wave of nuclear in the US was not TMI or over-regulation, but the passage of PURPA that began to open the markets to competition from non-utility suppliers.
Prior to 2000, the space industry was thought to be extremely complex and expensive and viable only by state sponsored efforts, i.e. NASA, ESA, and so on.
And then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others have come along and shown that an industry that expensive can be profitable, cheap, and safe.
It's not a perfect analogy by a long shot, but it's similar in terms of (historical) investment.
There's no reason to believe that nuclear should be any different. The engineering and physics is well understood.
I'd say that you've omitted the word "current", i.e. "current Nuclear plants have always been uninsurable", and "current Nuclear only ever exists and will only ever continue to existing because of subsidies."
I'll re-iterate my previous comment, if Governments would step back from over regulation, and the desire for reactors to produce weapons grade uranium and plutonium as a by-product, then new designs could be achieved quickly, cheaply, and safely. Molten-salt is being actively researched: https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/04/166330/meltdown-...
SpaceX and Blue Origin exist because of two billionaires brought up on dreams of space travel. Without their willingness to sustain potentially very heavy losses those companies would not exist.
It's not like there are a variety of startups nipping at their heels. They want to make a profit but they're not doing it because they're convinced they will.
As for the word "current"... well, if the nuclear industry thinks it's so safe and thinks it can prove it to the insurance industry why don't they prove it and forgo their public insurance subsidy? They fought for this subsidy in the first place, they can give it up just as easily.
Why not let the free market decide if they're safe rather than providing taxpayers as a backstop?
> Why not let the free market decide if they're safe rather than providing taxpayers as a backstop?
The free market is pretty evidence based, so it would decide they are safe. I doubt the public insurance subsidy works the way you are representing it. They'd not insure against the risk of a catastrophic meltdown in a free market, the risk is too low. The "insurance" is probably more of a government tax on the assumption that there is latent risk. I'm not going to say that is unreasonable, but it doesn't have anything to do with how safe the industry thinks it is.
Consider Fukushima, the result of one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history (Wikipedia says 4th largest [0]). Free markets don't bother to insure against that sort low-risk event. It would be like insuring San Francisco against the fact that it is on an active fault line - the market doesn't bother to insure against a risk that rare.
The free market is entirely based on investor hype. We have economic downturns ever 7-ish years, like clockwork, because some bubble burst again. It's a fallacy to treat investors like rational actors.
Chernobyl is presumably what you're talking about. It was a high pressure steam explosion due a sudden introduction of energy into the system, which of course would cause an explosion and contaminate a wide area [0].
> The engineering and physics is well understood.
as are the safety issues which is why there what research there is for a modern nuclear reactor design would not repeat those mistakes (e.g. molten-salt).
Whether the region around Chernobyl is uninhabitable is debatable, given that animals have returned to it in abundance.
One major thing about nuclear is that we do not even truly understand the effects of wide-ranging low doses of nuclear radiation.
I am repeating here from an earlier post:
There are many things we do not understand about radiation. The traditional models on radiation dosis and health effects are probably too simple. There is a strain of research on epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation:
Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus.
Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion.
There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far.
I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions.
The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development.
> Look all I'm saying is that if we let the free market do whatever it wanted with gene therapy, cancer would be cured already. The market innovates. Look at SpaceX.
You can't dismiss huge technical challenges and engineering problems with "uh the free market can probably innovate a solution." Likely what would happen is a dozen nuclear startups would spring up like mushrooms after rain, vacuum up hundreds of millions in VC funding, spin their wheels for five years, and then dry up, leaving us with nothing.
The market isn't there to innovate. It's there to generate revenue, and it only innovates insofar as it is easy and profitable to do so. It's not a magic wand you can wave at situations you dislike. Frankly, if you want someone to innovate for you, ask the government [1].
> For the life of me, I cannot understand the disconnect in thinking for people who recognize the need for bold action on climate change and then in the next breath fret about money.
Whilst I agree with your broad point, climate change is a systems problem and requires systems thinking and systemic change.
If you make nuclear available, but it is not competitive with fossil fuel energy, then we will continue to use fossil fuel energy. A relatively small number of oil company executives with a profit motive are going to make this decision for everyone, directly and indirectly.
'Doing stuff', as you say, involves governments of the people heavily regulating the most powerful corporations on the planet to ensure they can't make this decision in the wrong direction.
Government action in this direction hasn't happened for the last 30 years, and doesn't look close to happening in the present.
As such, it's reasonable for climate change activists to make plans to meet the market where it's at and prioritise competitive renewable products above nuclear.
> If you make nuclear available, but it is not competitive with fossil fuel energy, then we will continue to use fossil fuel energy
I'll make kind of absurd argument, but how is nuclear not competitive with dying? You could always tax the shit out of fossil fuels and they won't be competitive. You could also make other laws that punish fossil fuel usage with death penalty since you could argue its a crime against humanity.
I mean, law is an abstract construct. This is a live or death situation. Even if we need to abandon 30 years of economic growth for the sake of surviving, then maybe it's what we need to do.
>You could always tax the shit out of fossil fuels and they won't be competitive.
We have technically been able to do this as a species ever since global warming was discovered yet even in the face of an extinction level event we apparently still can't make ourselves do it. Fossil fuel lobbies are just too powerful. Carbon taxes are mostly weak or non existent. It's the species level way of saying "why don't you just give up smoking?". Not that easy.
Yet it is apparently possible to make solar + wind + storage + demand shifting energy cost competitive even without subsidies and very competitive with subsidies. The fossil fuel industry hasn't managed to shut it down. Species level nicorette patches.
One day we'll be able to tax the shit out of fossil fuels - once it is a nearly dead industry without much political muscle. By then it probably won't matter, though.
There are already emission limits implemented in EU. A next step would be to make them smaller and more expensive. This would of course harm the economic growth of some countries.
UK wants to ban conventional cars sales by 2030. We could go one step further and ban most combustion cars from driving. Of course I doubt there will be a politician bold enough to move at a rate that would upset the people. In the end, we will get what we deserve.
The UK government has said it "could" ban petrol and diesel car sales from 2035... but such cars are already planned to be illegal to drive in other European countries by then, so there likely won't be a market for them anyway.
Well, quite. None of this is exactly taxing the shit out of fossil fuels.
They'll gradually and then suddenly ratcheted up as the fossil fuel industry loses political power in various countries. It'll be far too little and too late to mitigate the worst effects of global warming though.
Did you hear the [more] left-wing candidate for President of the USA just went on the record, as part of his campaign, to deny that he would stop fracking?
Surely, where we have no other alternatives, as with hydrogen, we must push forward no matter the cost.
Nuclear is not on the critical path, as we have several alternative paths that reach the same carbon neutral end result. They will do this so with less cost than nuclear, by nearly all accounts (but not all accounts. However it seems quite likely to me that climate scientists will change their opinion as they revise the costs of nuclear to incorporate modern construction attempts.)
Why are we to choose the more expensive option? Simply because we like nuclear and want to subsidize it more than other clean energy sources? What good comes from nuclear's extra expense?
> (spoiler: nuclear energy is absolutely sustainable; there are literally billions of years of nuclear fuel accessible to us).
I am a big fan of nuclear but, I'm wondering, is this true? Do we have enough fuel for current nuclear reactors to run for....how long? Someone, also on HN, said we have enough fuel for maybe 150 years if we relie solely on it. So what is the truth?
(Above link says 1000 1000 MW reactors for 100,000 years, but doesn't mention how much that is with reprocessing--that is hundreds of times the rate of global nuclear power production today).
The question is, how much does it cost to extract it?
Even 150 years is _enough_ time for us to bootstrap to the next technology level. Which would be something like having robots mine the asteroid belt for manufacturing resources, and getting a massive solar farm up somewhere in orbit over earth and sending the power down. Many different science fiction works have covered variations on this plan.
As with any fuel, both statements are not wrong. We have comparatively little easily exploitable resources but if we had a huge demand, we could exploit much more.
Couple decades-centuries worth of Uranium deposit exist that are readily usable, then the depleted Uranium(10-100x mass) can be converted into Plutonium as drop in replacement.
It is possible that we exhaust both and still have no fusion or asteroid mining after couple centuries from now, but we’d have to be extremely lazy to be in that position.
> the depleted Uranium(10-100x mass) can be converted into Plutonium as drop in replacement.
This needs breeder technology which is a different kettle of fish. The only existing plant was the Japanese Monju plant which was closed due to numerous problems and accidents, including a dangerous liquid sodium fire. You can read about it here:
OP is correct. You don't need breeder technology to produce plutonium. In fact, the US produced enough in 1945 to build and detonate two plutonium-based atomic bombs. There are hundreds of tons of plutonium that have been produced and stockpiled worldwide, not including the thousands of nuclear warheads in existence and the thousands that can/could be decomissioned.
> You don't need breeder technology to produce plutonium. In fact, the US produced enough in 1945 to build and detonate two plutonium-based atomic bombs.
You can extract plutonium from spent fuel, I agree to that. This is what makes spent fuel processing expensive and this is what was used in 1945 and also turns any fuel waste into a proliferation issue. But converting depleted uranium (U-238) from spent fuel into fissile plutonium or whatever isotope, like GP suggested, is a different thing which would necessarily need some nuclear reaction.
However, you DO need breeder technology to treat all the 238U as a fuel. With burner reactors, the 239Pu produced is less than the fissionable material consumed, and most of the 238U ends up not being usable.
I'll add that with current technology, you can't reprocess MOX fuel another time (too many higher isotopes of Pu and transuranics beyond Pu are produced), so any Pu in it after it's consumed must be disposed of.
There’s nothing complicated in breeder technology, it’s just that it allows constant supply of nuclear material at desired concentrations, aka serial production of nuclear weapons, so politics and regional security needs to be sorted out first.
I have, perhaps, the privilege, to have grown up in Germany in the 80s and at that time there was a really big societal discussion around nuclear energy in general and breeder technology in particular. A focus point was the breeder project in Kalkar, the SNR-300and many physicists and technicians chimed in into that discussion. I say privilege because it was a discussion unlike anything I've seen in this decade, people went very much into the details how such a technology works and what as a society we want from it.
One main point of the discussion was that such a breeder reactor uses fast neutrons and this has the effect that it is far less controllable. Normal fission power plants use slow neutrons, that is neutrons which come from a nuclear reaction, and are slowed down by a moderator, which is water. Breeder reactors do use fast neutrons and need a far higher energy density. One consequence this has is that they need really exotic and difficult to handle coolants, such as liquid sodium. I therefore call bullshit in that there is nothing complicated in them.
Also, such reactors have a different safety behavior. A key task of any nuclear technology is to keep the chain reaction of atoms and neutrons under control. This happens at the microsecond scale, and some chain reaction needs to be going for the reactor to not fizzle out, so it is anything but trivial.
If the reaction in a normal pressured-water fission reactor becomes too strong, this has the effect that immediately the water heats up. This makes the water less dense, and this reduces the effect of its moderation, which makes the neutrons faster, which reduces their potential to react with uranium atoms, and therefore it slows down the reaction. This achieves self-control. What happens when this self-control is lost, is perhaps best illustrated by the Chernobyl accident.
A fast breeder reactor does not have such an inherent control via the moderator and coolant. It was therefore judged by the public to be more complicated, and more dangerous.
A funny thing is that during that discussion, the proponents of nuclear energy said again and again that nuclear power plant's are safe and that they in particular can't explode.
I still remember the twitter post with these pictures:
On the subject of safety: if a prompt supercritical accident were to occur in a fast reactor, as happened at Chernobyl (which of course was not a fast reactor), the result could be even more extreme. If the rearrangement of fuel in the resulting event were to cause some small fraction of the core to compress into an even smaller volume (and this is difficult to rule out a priori), the reactor could explode like a nuclear bomb. Imagine an event where the entire contents of the core was ejected by a kiloton (or larger) explosion.
For this reason, I suspect only a homogenous fast reactor (molten salt reactor using chloride salts, for example) could be licensed.
I was like 200-300mi/km from that thing when that happened. That morning the plant was nice sky blue, on evening it was like archival photos of Dresden bombing, that weekend many of news shows were explaining how concrete walls worked as blowoff panel using mock-ups and what could be going on up there in Unit 4’s spent fuel pool, and by the end of that decade the Japanese society as a whole showed deterioration by equivalent of that amount on a national scale.
I’m still pro-nuke though! In fact the whole situation made me so. Before I was naively thinking we better seek alternate fuels.
Nuclear is slow and labour-intensive to build. It's just not a good way to allocate resources in terms of a climate-change solution. I think nuclear plants are great, but not as a solution to an energy crisis.
the fact that it will be unimaginably expensive is not the point: we don't have a choice.
The issue raised by GP comment is how you allocate that insane expense. As I read it, they are only suggesting we spend on the most affordable technologies available to lessen the impact of climate change, not the most expensive.
Many people including me are not "terrified" but we do appreciate cleaner or alternative forms of energy if the cost is not crazily more expensive. If people who are terrified want our support to implement at least some of their suggestions they should also consider cost.
> We don't need nuclear, because we have other options for firm low-carbon energy (geothermal) and energy storage of surplus and super-cheap intermittent renewables (lithium ion, flow batteries, hydrogen, methane, compressed air, liquid air...).
Nuclear power is a zero emissions source of power. Alternative renewables (e.g. wind, solar) require fossil fuels to power the electrical grid when they are not able to generate power. The sources you mention are also substantial less effective from an energy density perspective. The amount of energy they output, relative to the energy input to construct them and the amount of land they consume, is orders of magnitude less than that produced by nuclear.
Storing energy is incredibly expensive. If we were to use lithium ion batteries to store electricity, it would cost trillions of dollars to produce and maintain the batteries. This does not include the immense environmental damage that would occur as a consequence of this policy (land usage, mining, waste products, etc.)
> If nuclear could compete on cost, we should go for it, but it can't without a major tech breakthrough
Nuclear energy is more cost effective than alternatives. The main issue is that antinuclear activists, funded by the fossil fuel industry, have lobbied to make it cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants by way of onerous regulation and prolonged legal battles. Countries that have reduced their reliance on nuclear power, for example France, have seen their electricity prices and carbon emissions rise as a consequence. We also know that nuclear power plants can operate for longer than previously believed — at least 80 years, as opposed to the 40 years that was previously assumed. This understanding further drives down the cost of electricity derived from nuclear energy, as it reduces the need to construct new facilities.
> For example, we will definitely need to start producing hydrogen
Why? Producing hydrogen is inefficient and unnecessary if you have a consistent source of energy, which nuclear provides.
> As it is, it's a dinosaur from the past, a legacy of a time before we had better tech.
Nuclear energy is safe, causing fewer deaths and adverse health impacts than alternative sources of energy. It is cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable than alternatives while also being far more environmentally friendly. If it is a dinosaur, then so are the transistors that make up computer processors, which are roughly as old and somehow are still the subject of cutting edge research.
> Nuclear power is a zero emissions source of power. Alternative renewables (e.g. wind, solar) require fossil fuels to power the electrical grid when they are not able to generate power.
Renewables are about an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. $15/MWh vs $112/MWh. So what you do is overprovision your renewables. In other words, build more than you need. The major reason to do this is so that when the wind is barely blowing and/or it's a cloudy day you still get enough power to supply your needs without peakers. Then on the days when you're producing excess power (ie, most of them), you use that excess energy to produce methane from CO2. Use that methane to run your natural gas peakers, making them carbon neutral. This is likely much cheaper than batteries, certainly if you already have the gas peakers.
You'll have to overprovision to cover the very unlikely time that both the wind and sun disappear for a long stretch, so you'll be overprovisioned all other times. Methane production takes Hydrogen as an input, so you can use some of that excess energy to create extra Hydrogen. Or you can turn methane into plastic for use or storage. Or just sell the extra electricity, there are several industries that can soak up cheap electricity (please not to bitcoin miners though).
> Nuclear energy is more cost effective than alternatives. The main issue is that antinuclear activists, funded by the fossil fuel industry, have lobbied to make it cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants by way of onerous regulation and prolonged legal battles.
Even in China, nuclear is incredibly expensive and takes a long time. So I don't think regulation is the main problem.
> Why? Producing hydrogen is inefficient and unnecessary
> So what you do is overprovision your renewables. In other words, build more than you need. The major reason to do this is so that when the wind is barely blowing and/or it's a cloudy day you still get enough power to supply your needs without peakers.
When there is zero wind and zero sun then it doesn't matter how much over provisioning there is: your output will be zero.
I live in Ontario, Canada, where we do have wind and (some) solar in our energy mixture. Wind can go from 100 to 2900 MW, and solar from 0 to 350 MW.
Looking at the Supply tab (18-24 Oct), on Tues, Oct 20, at 05:00 we had 173MW of wind and zero solar (sunrise@07:48):
The amount that we would have had to to "overprovision" to get useful renewables would have been ridiculous. Luckily our 9,500MW of nuclear just chugs along filling our base load with >4,000MW total available hydro helping, as well as some gas peakers.
If we built another 3000MW of nuclear then we could handle our base load with that, and hydro would be used for the variable portion of demand.
As someone who lives <50km from a nuclear power plant [0] bring in more.
What is the efficiency loss at each of these steps to get methane/hydrogen, and then the efficiency loss to convert these materials back to electricity?
I have no issue with using renewables per se; I'm just skeptical about basing the entire system on them:
> When there is zero wind and zero sun then it doesn't matter how much over provisioning there is: your output will be zero.
That does not really happen over large geographic regions, within which one can distribute energy via the electrical grid. In Germany, there has been a lot of research put into that before the non-nuclear strategy was decided. It was a political decision, but it has been prepared by many, many engineers and researchers.
In fact, there are times where Germany exports needed energy to France, in spite of that France has much more nuclear power. Sometimes that happens in hot sommers, when rivers have to little water and they become hot. Then, nuclear plants need to be shut down because otherwise they would cause environmental damage.
Other times, it happens in winter, because a lot of heating in France is electrical to accomodate for nuclear energy. But sometimes there is a shortfall, and it turns out that on windy winter days there is an excess of wind energy in western and northern Europe.
Another thing, storing energy is not necessarily expensive. A lot of energy use is things like room heating, room cooling, or hot water. Now, heat can be stored efficiently for many hours. (In larger tanks or earth installations, it can even be stored efficiently for months).
There are times when Germany exports energy to France, and those are hugely popularized due to the reasons you stated.
However, the far more frequent cases are: Germany has excess transient wind or solar energy, even making energy prices negative sometimes (due to fixed guaranteed producer prices and guaranteed preference). Energy storage companies in neighboring countries, mostly pumped hydro in the alps and Norway, buy the excess power and sell it back when there is demand (of course with an appropriately large margin).
In general, Germany has not planned for and refuses to build any significant kind of energy storage. Existing pumped hydro plants are even shut down. Transmission lines to even out the regional differences due to weather and consumption are planned, but do not exist yet for the usual reasons and will not exist for the next decade or so. This means that Germany relies on the rest of the European grid to balance out its excess production or consumption phases, of course at a significant cost in stability and money. Cherry-picking times where the balancing-out causes energy exports to France is just propaganda imho.
At least in the US this was supposed to be solved by interconnecting the three major grids, since it's highly unlikely that there would be zero wind and solar across the entire continental US all at once.
> Renewables are about an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear.
I think there are a lot of complications that are encountered when doing this sort of calculation. You might get a max output of "$15/MWh" or "$112/MWh" but that's only a portion of the picture.
Firstly Nuclear is X amount of power essentially on tap 24/7 where X is between some Min and Max value. From what I understand this makes grid management much simpler and reduces storage, transmission, and conversion losses. Even in the best case situation of "renewable" energy you'll see, in the absolute best case claimed by pumped hydro storage, you're seeing about an 87% efficiency.
Suppose you had a nuclear power plant that could output 100W consistently. Suppose you wanted to build a similarly efficient "renewable" energy source. How much more peak power would it need to output to be competitive? If we assume the power source is 0% efficient at night and 100% efficient during the day, off the bat, you'd need to generate 200W continuously during the day. Then you'd need to generate an extra 13% on those extra 100Ws to make up for storage losses (1.13*100 ~= 113). That means 100W from Nuclear is ~= 213W "renewable". Obviously this is a terrible calculation and not at all accurate but it's just a sample of some of the math that needs to be done.
Another factor that I've been skirting around is that "renewable" sources of energy are often not so renewable. Specifically things like like solar require a huge amount of rare metals & complex fabrication. Right now none of those externalizations are represented in the price of solar because there are no carbon taxes in countries that manufacture them.
Money in this case is a proxy of what needs to be measured and should not be the only factor we optimize for.
Nuclear is really good at producing consistent power. Unfortunately, that's not what we want. Peak demand for power in the evening is several times what it is during the middle of the night.
Except that it is exactly what we want for the level of demand that we never fall below, which is still about half of the peak demand. And if we use nuclear for that, it significantly reduces the amount of storage we need for renewables.
Also, nuclear combines well with thermal storage because you don't incur double conversion losses. If you store heat from the reactor during the day when solar is generating, use it during the peak demand in the evening when it isn't, and then run directly from the reactor overnight, you don't really need any other storage.
> Except that it is exactly what we want for the level of demand that we never fall below, which is still about half of the peak demand. And if we use nuclear for that, it significantly reduces the amount of storage we need for renewables.
The bottom half of the demand is the easy half, why would you use your most expensive power for the easy stuff?
> Also, nuclear combines well with thermal storage because you don't incur double conversion losses. If you store heat from the reactor during the day when solar is generating, use it during the peak demand in the evening when it isn't, and then run directly from the reactor overnight, you don't really need any other storage.
In other words, you're running your nuclear at a 50% duty cycle, doubling it's price. I don't think there is much appetite for power that costs over $200 per MWh.
I think this is, again, too simplistic a model for understanding the costs of different power systems. Industrial use cases (think data centers, factories, etc) likely reduce usage during night time hours but they surely don't drop by 50% usage.
> The bottom half of the demand is the easy half, why would you use your most expensive power for the easy stuff?
Factoring in carbon footprints nuclear would likely beat our battery based storage options if carbon output was taxed. Nickel–metal hydride battery and LiPo are not carbon neutral and are consumable components.
> In other words, you're running your nuclear at a 50% duty cycle, doubling it's price. I don't think there is much appetite for power that costs over $200 per MWh.
50% duty cycle means 50% fuel usage (not really but not not) meaning you're not really "wasting" energy here.
Another question to ask ourselves: we make the Total Cost of Ownership of a plant far better than it even currently is? We can do this by extending the lifespan of a plant to amortize construction. If you could design a power plant to last 100 to 200 years, that could be amortized further factoring into lower costs. We can also do this by reducing construction costs or improving efficiency.
I think those are accomplish-able goals (at least judging by China's adoption of Nuclear). Current plants in the USA operate for ~40 years. That means current plants were built with ~$today-50 (or more) years of physics and material science knowledge.
For context, that's the 70s. In the 70s:
- C was invented
- TTL logic was just starting to be used
- Stainless steel did not exist <- this statement was wrong
Edit: philipkglass pointed out that stainless steel is quite a bit older. Disregard that last item.
Nuclear requires huge amounts of cement and steel to build. Both of these resources are enormous sources of CO2. Cement clinker manufacturing, in particular, is a horrible emitter, responsible for 8% of global CO2 emissions all by itself.
That’s one type of building material among many that are needed in huge quantities.
That's a pretty weak argument. Those are once-off building requirements, not something that is repeated. If you compare the cement used by the one nuclear powerplant to the closest city it would be like a drop in the ocean.
There's been large improvement in cements specifically in the past few years. It can be recycled, enforced, and supplanted by other materials.
Concrete sold today can be bought with an advertised lifespan of 100 years. If you replace a coal plant with a nuclear plant how many years would it need to be net carbon negative? What is the grams of CO2 / kWh of nuclear vs coal vs solar?
Concrete resorbs CO2 from the air after you pour it. This carbonation of concrete can cause corrosion to rebar or other re-inforcments. A large portion of that CO2 is eventually reabsorbed back by the concrete. Depending on the mix this process can adsorb 1/3 to 2/3rds of the CO2 produced during production. However, this is a slow process and we keep making new concrete.
It's not so easy when you have to meet it even when there is no wind or sunlight for twelve hours straight.
> In other words, you're running your nuclear at a 50% duty cycle, doubling it's price.
You're still running it at a 100% duty cycle, you're just shifting the generation times. You have a reactor that can produce heat enough to generate 1GW continuous power, so it stores that heat for six hours a day during peak solar generation, then generates 2GW for six hours to cover peak demand in the evening, then generates 1GW directly for twelve hours overnight. It's generating 1GW worth of heat at all times, you're just converting the heat to electricity at different times of the day.
The problem isn't 12 hours of no wind or solar (and, come on, that's not even realistic).
The problem are week long wind droughts with heavy cloud cover. That's where there's a clear argument for geothermal, hydro, and hydrogen. Maybe natural gas with carbon sequestration. If nuclear wants to join these options, it needs to prove itself as something that can be built. And as somebody who doesn't believe that we are close at all to natural gas with carbon sequestration, I think we are a lot closer to making that work than we are to having the managerial and technical skill capacity to build new nuclear.
Nuclear is not the only option, we have so many more.
The key point about hydrogen is that the cost of storage capacity (to be distinguished from costs related to charging and discharging rates) is extremely low. So if you need a system to cover very rare extended outages, or to store energy from summer for use in winter, hydrogen is much better than batteries.
Also, hydrogen can be mixed into natural gas, without changing much infrastructure. This is of course only a transitional measure, not an end goal, but doable now and a very cheap one.
When we get to high levels of renewable penetration on the grid, we are going to have tons of excess energy, and capacity far past demand.
We have that with current generation systems too; we don't run natural gas at full bore all the time, usually. Most generators run at a capacity factor far below 100%.
The difference is that renewables generate power at zero marginal cost, while a natural gas turbine has fuel costs and wear and tear.
So we are going to have massive amounts of super cheap energy, for those applications that are not time sensitive.
Hydrogen production through electrolysis would be a great way to store this extra, nearly free energy. However this is unfortunately not a perfect match the intermittent surplus of renewables, since the capital costs of electrolyzers makes it so that constant production would be best. But at least some surplus energy will go this route.
Storage has several options, for example we could store hydrogen only for short periods before converting to methane or ammonia or other more stable chemical forms. We could convert pipelines perhaps.
Hydrogen has a lot of difficulties, but it is also, even now, an essential part of our economy and we work with it at scale. It will be a while before "green" hydrogen from electrolysis is cost competitive with fossil fuel derived hydrogen, but it will almost certainly happen.
There's a great, but long, two part series on hydrogen in Europe from what most would call a very skeptical stance, yet as a fellow hydrogen skeptic it convinced me that hydrogen will play a much larger role in the future:
Nope. Load following is something different from a planned shutdown. You can order your reactor to support load following, most reactors in Europe are built with that capability. This means that for a boiling water reactor, the reactor will regulate itself due to feedback from the cooling system: Slower coolant flow due to less load on the generators will increase the temperature in the reactor core, creating more steam bubbles that slow down the reaction and therefore reduce power output. Pressurized water reactors (PWRs) can also be configured for load following, however, they are slower and need to employ control rods.
The usual figures given for PWRs are something like "These reactors have the capability to regularly vary their output between 30–100% of rated power, to maneuver power up or down by 2–5%/minute" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuc...). This means that you can regulate your PWR over its power range within slightly more than half an hour at worst.
There is a lower limit to how much you can regulate your reactor down due to various limitations like Xenon poisoning. Because of that, a controlled complete shutdown is slower, because you need to get through the "icky" region between e.g. 30% and 0%. Also, you usually prepare for the longer phase the reactor will stay shut down. But all in all, shutdown is different from load following, and a conclusion that nuclear plants can't load-follow from a question about shutdown is just asking the wrong questions and drawing questionable conclusions from it.
Most solar doesn't require rare metals. CIGs does, but that's not very common. I can see complex fabrication, but pretty much everything requires that.
Besides cost, the other issue with nuclear, or any large single generator, is that they can go down unexpectedly and their output drops from whatever to 0. This is less common when generation is from many individual generators. If a wine turbine goes out, it only drops the output of the wind farm by some small fraction.
A quick search shows that the company referenced in that article, Solyndra, made CIGS panels, which, like I said, are relatively rare, in large part because they were a failed startup that went out of business.
> In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says solar is now the cheapest form of electricity for utility companies to build. That’s thanks to risk-reducing financial policies around the world, the agency says, and it applies to locations with both the most favorable policies and the easiest access to financing. The report underlines how important these policies are to encouraging development of renewables and other environmentally forward technologies.
Don't forget the massive initial buying subsidies, the ones that only last as long as the government wants them to, the ones which don't cover any of the maintainance costs.
> From what I understand this makes grid management much simpler and reduces storage, transmission, and conversion losses.
That's not so simple. Demand for energy is fluctuating hugely, and nuclear power cannot be freely switched on and off. This is also the case for large coal plants. So, with using renewable energy, grids need to become more agile, and a somewhat larger amount of freely controllable power sources is needed. Another strategy is to average out fluctuations over large areas.
This point was driven home for me when I was at Google. Googlers being flush with money, we had a local solar installer stop by a few times. I attended one of the presentations. This was in WA, by the way, which turns into Mordor for 6 months in any given year. So the guy keeps going on about how it'll pay for itself and so on, and presenting all kinds of stats like the ones you responded to. Then someone asked him how much our typical lack of sunlight affects this thing. He was like, "not much, let me show you", and he brought up a management UI for a solar installation in some school that they've recently completed. That was a mistake on his part. It was mid day, although a cloudy day IIRC, and the page showed like 10% of the possible output was being produced. Audience chuckled and some people started heading for the exit.
Even today, 6% of all natural gas consumed in the world goes to making hydrogen (about 700 cubic kilometers of H2 per year at STP). The major use is in making ammonia.
Nobody is saying this is being done now, but Germany for example is heavily banking on a hydrogen based energy economy for the future [0], just as the EU comission does.
Which makes a lot of sense: It's a way to utilize the overproduction from renewables and existing gas infrastructure can be retooled for hydrogen without too much investment [1].
There are even considerations for a European hydrogen backbone by gas infrastructure companies from nine EU member states [2]
Your post and links got me thinking: in many ways hydrogen is happening a lot more now than nuclear. China is building tons is alkaline electrolyzers. Europe is looking to PEM. There are new MW-scale electrolyzers used for silicon production. There's an active industry that is scaling and innovating and growing. Nuclear is in decline, with all the giants failing. The few startups are working on engineering projects where iteration is measured in decade time scales rather than months.
The hydrogen industry exciting right now, and honestly I can't imagine saying that even a year ago. Europe's investing tens of billions of dollars in it, which will result in massive changes and improvements for the technology. A similar investment in nuclear would not move the needle at all.
Local ammonia production is the best use for power from wind turbines that are distant from grid access. It is directly usable as both fertilizer and fuel, on the spot, for farms, and marketable to neighbors without turbines. Demand exactly matches supply.
> Nuclear energy is more cost effective than alternatives.
The UK's first nuclear power plant cost half a billion in today's money. The current (and only) one being built in the UK is up to 23Bn for construction, plus ~50Bn in electricity subsidies, and is overbudget and delayed.
> cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants by way of onerous regulation
> It is cheaper
You can't have it both ways. Everything is cheap if you exclude the costs which are annoying. Where, and how, is this regulation going to be removed, and how cheaply and how quickly? The fossil fuel lobbyists aren't going to roll over cheaply and let it happen. Nor are they going to agree to disallow lobbying for the greater good. They should, but they won't. Then what?
> Why? Producing hydrogen is inefficient and unnecessary if you have a consistent source of energy, which nuclear provides.
Renewables + short term storage + hydrogen will likely be cheaper than a grid based on nuclear, even with the inefficiency of hydrogen. One contributing reason for that (for the hydrogen) is that a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is 1/20th the capital cost per MW of a nuclear power plant.
You can check this out with some plausible assumptions for 2030 technologies and real climate data at
They’re also more profitable since they can respond to price hikes during peak demand
Nuclear requires a contract to buy all of that energy all of the time - and nobody really does that anymore at nuclear output levels. It’s the reason many large coal plants died of natural causes, nuclear is 2-3x worse
Actually, the economics of nuclear and wind and solar energy is quite similar in one important aspect:
You have a huge upfront cost for building the plant, and then when it is running, relatively little, or very little cost for generating any additional kWh of energy. The funny thing is that when you run an energy market, what determines the market price is the marginal cost, that is, the cost for generating that additional unit! It is the same as when you run a car factory, people are going to give you money for the one car you produce, not for building the factory.
Now, with the marginal cost being near zero, that means that the market price is near zero as well. The price on the energy market goes to near zero. (And this is a very good thing because fossil energy has a much higher marginal cost and is competed out of the market, which is good for our planet's climate).
With the consequence that both nuclear and renewable need some kind of subsidy or other mechanism which makes sure that the upfront cost is somehow financed.
What's also nice is that much of the subsidy goes in advance. And specifically with renewable power, it is very predictable and can be planned well. You cannot promise, as in so many other areas where government money is spent, that you build it at a cheap price, and then come back and demand more.
And the latter is one reason why big nuclear energy constructors, like Westinghouse, appear to go bust one after another.
Nuclear requires a lot of concrete and steel, both sources of carbon emissions (at least until the rest of the economy is decarbonized). The other "low carbon" sources are similar, they have carbon emissions only because the rest of the economy that manufactures them produces carbon.
As for cost, you are contradicting yourself when you say it's cheap (it's not), and when you say that it's expensive because of anti-nuclear activists. See, for example, France, whose new nuclear projects are not cost competitive despite having a strongly pro-nuclear regulatory situation.
As for the "efficiency" of hydrogen, the only efficiency that matters is economic efficiency, and all indications point to hydrogen storage of wind/solar to be more economically efficient than nuclear. (And for the record, for energy efficiency both nuclear and hydrogen are about 50% efficient, but like I said the only efficiency that matters for deployment is cost efficiency.
> Nuclear requires a lot of concrete and steel, both sources of carbon emissions
Alternative sources of energy also require materials to produce them. Natural gas plants require similar amounts of concrete and steel but have lower energy yields. Renewable sources like wind and solar require immense amounts of materials, including heavy metals and other toxic, non-recyclable materials. Because they are far less dense (~50 watts per sq. meter versus 2000-6000 watts per sq. meter from nuclear), they have a substantially greater environmental impact.
> As for the "efficiency" of hydrogen, the only efficiency that matters is economic efficiency, and all indications point to hydrogen storage of wind/solar to be more economically efficient than nuclear.
Solar and wind are heavily subsidized, at least in the United States, while nuclear is subject to expensive and arbitrary regulatory burdens. There’s not a level playing field to support the argument that nuclear energy is not economically competitive.
From the perspective of physics, hydrogen is necessarily less efficient than other energy sources. Generating the initial source of electricity to produce the hydrogen has a given level of inefficiency. Then actually producing the hydrogen compounds the amount of energy wasted. Finally, utilizing the hydrogen as an energy source also loses some energy. There’s no scenario where it’s more efficient to use hydrogen as an intermediary than it is to use the original source.
You keep making statements without backing them up and when others refute them with giving actual evidence you ignore them and move to another unbacked statement.
Regarding your statement that nuclear receiving high regulatory costs and renewables being highly subsidised, that statement is false again. The subsidies received by nuclear are significantly larger than the ones received by renewables.
That isn't really evidence, the environmentalists have a terrible track record of calling everything a subsidy.
In Australia we have a fuel tax as part of a user-pays philosophy for road maintenance. Because they don't use public roads, mining companies were exempted from the fuel tax. This gets classed as an enormous subsidy for coal which is technically true but realistically silly. If renewables were buying fuel and not using public roads they'd be exempted too.
There is a big handwave there where we take it, on faith, that these subsidies were just handouts as opposed to, say, reasonable tax exemptions like in the Australian case.
You’re right that I should have been citing my sources. I’ve been largely relying on the book Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger. It’s well worth reading.
The (decade old) source you provided for energy subsidies appears somewhat dishonest, as the date ranges appear cherry picked. Why is it that the source only looks at nuclear subsidies up until 1999, while subsidies to other energy sources are considered through 2009?
The choice of units in this source is also odd. What have the subsidies been in terms of energy output? At its peak, nuclear was producing some 16-20% of US power. I imagine normalizing on a $/MWh basis could paint a different picture.
Looking at a more recent source [0], it appears that recent nuclear subsidies have been marginal and are far outpaced by renewable subsidies. If we consider prior subsidies a sunk cost, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to subsidize a new, less environmentally friendly, source of energy when our best in class is already excellent.
Shellenberger is not rational when it comes to nuclear. If you base your information off what he says, you will only see the world through his rose colored glasses.
For him, it is a political wedge issue meant to drive partisan policy development.
If we are to be hard nosed climate hawks, we need to look at the reality of nuclear, as it exists today, and the reality of our capacity to change our industrial processes. And having done that, after being very bullish on nuclear starts in the 2000s, I do not see how Shellenberger can be taken the least but seriously. He doesn't address the reality of nuclear on the ground, instead focusing on political statements.
I just downloaded it from libgen and checked. There are no claims about rare earth elements. The two major arguments he marshals against solar power are "discarded solar panels are toxic waste" and "energy density!!!". He rounds out the argument with some outdated EROI numbers.
The PV EROI numbers could use an update pretty much everywhere. I have some ballpark-corrected numbers that I keep in my head but the academic literature badly lags industry. You can read a "new" solar EROI paper in 2020 and after dereferencing all its citation pointers find it's still using key numbers from 2008. Thinner cells, lower kerf loss, polysilicon reactor optimization, crystal growing optimization, higher cell efficiency (PERC), bifaciality, and the increasing prevalence of single axis trackers mean that a state of the art solar farm in 2020 has significantly better EROI than the same capacity farm in the same place in 2010. But industry cares about costs, not EROI, and academics who write about EROI seem to lack the will to gather numbers from current industrial practice.
I also occasionally suspect that good solar EROI analysis doesn't happen because people are anchored to previous conclusions. Whether that's nuclear promoters or deep green/"degrowth" types. Both would like to say "there is no alternative" to their visions of the future and a high solar EROI would demonstrate an inconvenient alternative. Or just inattentive grad students and advisors who assume current EROI numbers should be in line with older ones.
I saw an ad on TV last night (possibly a mining industry ad. Not sure, as is so often the case with tv ads) that said there was 4 tonnes of copper in each wind turbine.
So add that to the mix of what it takes to build a wind turbine. I'm not sure of the cost of copper production but I bet it's not cheap or easy on the environment.
It was probably mining industry promotion. This report from Navigant Research, prepared on behalf of the Copper Development Association, contains both statistics and copper industry scheming regarding copper use in wind power:
Most uses of copper in wind power can be substituted by aluminum when copper prices rise. Speaking on behalf of copper producers who want to impede substitution, the report says:
Substitution by aluminum can be addressed with proactive promotion based on copper’s known benefits of higher energy efficiency (reduction of energy losses) and assurance of long‐term reliability. Aluminum is vulnerable here due to its lower strength, relaxation behavior and corrosion resistance. The downstream technical and economic risks associated with “value engineering” copper out of critical components are unknown. And, because the costs or repair, maintenance and downtime are known to be high in wind‐energy plants, copper promotion based on reducing life‐cycle costs through improved reliability and efficiency should be a worthwhile undertaking. Institutional promotion through the establishment of prudent codes, standards and recommended practices is also recommended.
It's a mixture of highlighting legitimate engineering concerns, raising FUD about failure to address those concerns, and trying to get copper specifically entrenched in codes and standards so that aluminum will not be allowed to compete with copper.
For answering the specific question of how much copper current wind power uses, see table 2-1. There's a lot of variation. The project built with 2.1 MW turbines from Suzlon had a copper intensity of 6.8 tonnes (14,900 pounds) per megawatt, while the project with 3.0 MW turbines from Vestas took only 2.5 tonnes (5600 lbs) per megawatt. Mass of copper per turbine is a poor metric because turbines come in various generating capacities.
I know we've probably all moved on, but just for the record, I saw the ad on Australian tv. It was a BHP ad. (I've seen it again since the earlier comment)
> while nuclear is subject to expensive and arbitrary regulatory burdens
One major thing about nuclear is that we do not even truly understand the effects of wide-ranging low doses of nuclear radiation.
I am repeating here from an earlier post:
There are many things we do not understand about radiation. The traditional models on radiation dosis and health effects are probably too simple. There is a strain of research on epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation:
Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus.
Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion.
There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far.
I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions.
The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development.
Why are you dwelling so much on radiation? Do you plan on them dumping them into your front yard or something. The simple solution is to look at rates of cancer and other radiation induced conditions around nuclear plants. Also amongst the people working there? Are they higher? Do your research but I assure you that you won't find anything. It's been studied to death. Chernobyl doesn't figure in because modern reactors aren't Chernobyl style. It was a terrible design even when it was brand new. Now go look up the same information around coal plants.
On a large geographic scale renewables are able to continuously generate enough energy. We know how to transport energy (and nuke plants also need it), and interconnecting grid is considered a win whatever the type of source used (nuclear, wind...).
See https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-... , which doesn't seem to me more ambitious than hoping to quickly multiply by 10+ the existing nuclear power generation capacity, and hoping that there will be enough practically available combustible for them.
> The amount of energy they output, relative to the energy input to construct
The net outcome is positive.
Moreover renewables don't need fuel, and therefore there is no need to worry about cost/reserves/geopolitical turmoil/terrorist actions/waste.
> amount of land they consume
For solar there are many adequate deserts and unused surfaces. For offshore wind there are huge pertinent areas.
> Nuclear energy is safe, causing fewer deaths and adverse health impacts
> The book was not peer reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences.[2][9] Five reviews were published in the academic press, with four of them considering the book severely flawed and contradictory, and one praising it while noting some shortcomings.
Many crops benefit from partial shade. So, farms. Likewise cars, so parking lots. Likewise roofs, so warehouses and factories. Likewise irrigation (reduced evaporation), so reservoirs and canals.
That book was heavily criticized because it did, in the eyes of critics, not adhere to limiting described effects to such ones commonly and easily attributed to radiation.
Fact is, we know surprisingly little about radiation effects. Especially, we clearly do not have a complete theory on the effects of ionizing radiation - especially on children.
Nuclear is simple in the same sense mainframe computers are simple. Solar and wind are like blades in a server farm; if one goes down it's no problem. In a nuclear power plant, all the parts (aside from some limited redundancy) damned well better work or the whole system is in jeopardy.
> Nuclear power is often promoted as one of the best ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels to generate the electricity we need, but new research suggests that going all-in on renewables such as wind and solar might be a better approach to seriously reducing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Sciencealert isn't really a viable academic source. Most of the time its sources are reasonable though. Renewables won't cut it and we don't have a whole lot of time left for people to figure that out.
> Nuclear power is a zero emissions source of power.
That's not exactly true, apart from mining for example the construction of a reactor building requires huge amounts of concrete. Also, mined uranium needs to enriched by centrifuges before it becomes usable, which is a process that requires a lot of energy.
By this argument, nothing is zero emissions and the phrase zero emissions is worthless.
The process of nuclear fission is zero-carbon (unlike combustion) and the lifecycle carbon emissions for nuclear are 12 gCO2-eq/kWh compared to 40 for solar, 490 for fracked natural gas, and 820 for coal.
It's easier and meaningful in my opinion to just call nuclear zero carbon.
I don't think that is a valid argument. Take the extreme case of that some energy source requires huge amount of CO2 to build, but produces no emissions during operation. Is that a zero emission source? Also for nuclear we need to include the uranium mining, and ideally we would account for waste storage as well (not sure if that goes into current estimates).
Now the OP argument disingenuous because he also included emmissions of other sources into wind and solar. However as many have already pointed out it would be much easier to run a grid on renewables only than at nuclear only, because for renewables you only need a large enough grid and overprovisioning. Nuclear on the other hand is very bad at handling variable loads, so you will essentially have to overprovision to the the peak demand and run your plants at that demand and burn the energy somehow. Note that Belgium used to do that by illuminating all their highways at night.
I think you're missing my point. I'm saying that nuclear fission is indeed a totally zero carbon process, but the life-cycle emits 12 gCO2-eq/kWh. The term life-cycle is a technical term from the academic concept of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which includes all the energy and emissions from the processes of mining, fabrication, construction, operation, and decommissioning.
The life-cycle numbers I give are sourced directly from an IPCC meta-analysis [2]. With nuclear, the entire life-cycle is extraordinarily low carbon even though it requires lots of concrete to build because you get about a billion Watts 90% of the time for 60 years given that much concrete.
As for what's easier, the common answer seems to be that variable renewables are ok for a while but at deep decarbonization, the situation is much easier and cheaper if you include some kind of low-carbon energy that can run 24/7, aka a "firm low-carbon source" [3].
By your definition then none of it is zero emissions. Including wind, solar, hydro, or geothermal. "Zero emissions" is a common, agreed upon term for those sources, and therefore so is nuclear because they all have comparable infrastructure related carbon emissions. Please don't be pedantic.
Hmm, did you ever consider that ... nuclear power involves storing a huge amount of energy! Those huge cement walls and vassals require huge investments of money, energy, and materials. Just as much, that is energy invested in a particular location and assuming that location will continue to require energy. That's energy that's wasted if something goes wrong the construction or operation of the plant and that's energy that's gone at the end of life of the plant.
If you just require energy storage, it may be expensive but there are a number of flexible methods, some of which scale very easily (and others are cheaper but only at large scale, etc).
> If nuclear could compete on cost, we should go for it, but it can't without a major tech breakthrough
I do actually agree on the sentiment. We should be using the cheapest form of energy with a little bit of a concession to reliability.
But the problem with saying "nuclear costs more" is it is clearly over-regulated. We accept, for coal, about 3 orders of magnitude [0] more deaths per TWh than nuclear, as we have for the last 30 or 40 years†. At any point, literally hundreds of lives could have been saved moving to a technically excellent form of energy. We didn't do that. Ditto for renewables despite the terror displayed by the climate change lobby.
Humanity has, when tested, shown an overwhelming willingness to go with cheap power and disregard some really quite high social costs to get there. Nobody likes that inconvenient fact, but nuclear has been grossly over-regulated when assessed against humanities choices through the industrial revolution and beyond.
If we hold nuclear to the same standards all of us sitting in fossil-fuel based economies are accepting right now it would be much cheaper. If we held solar to the same standards of doing no harm as nuclear, it would be much more expensive.
So yes; cheapest option please. But can we also be consistent about the standards that we hold our energy to before we make that choice?
Though fears of safety has prematurely shut down nuclear in some markets, I don't think that safety fears has hindered deployment of new reactors that much. And if we are talking about addressing climate change, we are talking about new deployment because we must replace other energy sources.
In places where new nuclear has been built, it has not proven to be a spectacularly desirable energy source. The entire Western world has failed at building new reactors, causing bankruptcies and state acquisitions and restructurings. Even nuclear darling France is pulling back from new nuclear, instead looking to renewables and storage, including hydrogen. China tried valiantly but is pulling back from very large scale deployment. South Korea has had some success, but that's because quality control turned out to be a scam, so who knows about the quality of the reactors they built.
Russia's Rosatom has had some success, probably, but nobody trusts them.
The remaining market for nuclear are where there are corrupt bureaucracies where the prospect of a massive single project makes the potential for massive bribes possible. This is why coal succeeds in India, for example.
As for "doing no harm" with solar, I have yet to see any concrete examples of solar causing definitive harm. A solar failure doesn't cause massive environmental harm. The mining issues are similar to uranium mining. If solar is causing harm, I'd love to know how, but having searched for this and come up empty, and having people claim that solar causes harm and never follow through with specifics, I'm extremely skeptical of the claim. At least until there's some evidence to look into.
Until we can reliably contradict nuclear and also see that it actually seems like a good financial deal (taking into account all the costs of failed builds), nobody will really want to put up money for nuclear unless it's for ulterior reasons: corruption or nuclear proliferation or subsidizing a nuclear submarine fleet or something like that.
> The mining issues are similar to uranium mining.
They aren't comparable. There are something like 50 mines supplying the entire global uranium industry [0]. And I happen to know Australia quite well, 3rd biggest uranium supplier globally with 2 active mines and one reprocessing old waste heaps. More than half our production comes from a mine that isn't even a uranium deposit, it is really a copper mine [1]. That is a top 3 global uranium producer - a uranium mine, a copper mine and an old dump. Good luck supplying the production of a serious number of solar panels with that sort of mining setup.
There are no issues associated with uranium mining. The industry is too small.
> Still looking to see what harm solar is doing that it is not paying for.
Nuclear power is doing measurably less harm - in deaths, in habitat damage, in volume of waste produced and management thereof. Solar companies also aren't going to be held liable for the social costs of grid disruption which will inevitably cause outages or require additional countermeasures by other parties to secure their electricity supply.
Nobody is going to protest when solar company employees get skin cancer. Nobody is going to protest solar power when toxic sludge from carelessly-disposed heavy metals waste (or indeed solar panels themselves) contaminates drinking water in some rural town. Groups won't be organised to phase out solar installations in response to accidents in foreign countries.
And I think solar is perfectly fine, I just don't see why we impose all these silly restrictions on nuclear when it is a measurably superior form of energy.
> I'm surprised it takes 50 mines for uranium, that's far far more than I had expected.
Sounds like you might be in for a nasty shock when you find out how many coal mines the world has.
Except powering global civilization with solar means using most ground-mounted large scale solar fields, not covering rooftops. The latter is more a way to game utility billing systems, and is inherently unfair to those left paying for grid power and subsidizing the grid for the solar powered free riders (who get the reliability benefit of the grid at low cost.) Rationalizing the design of grid billing to make everyone pay their share of this reliability service makes rooftop solar much less attractive.
I could never understand what makes some people believe that using hydrogen makes sense.
Hydrogen is just a means of STORING energy and it is one of the worst for this purpose.
If we restrict the discussion just to storing energy as chemical energy, like with hydrogen, then almost any alternative has either better energetic efficiency or better energy density and in most cases is much better for both criteria.
For example, flow batteries have excellent energetic efficiency, much better than hydrogen could ever achieve, but they have low energy density, i.e. they must be very large for a given storage capacity.
For high energy density, nothing beats the method invented by the living beings a few billions of years ago, i.e. storing energy in hydrocarbons.
How to make synthetic fuel has already been known for about a century, it just is not much used yet because fossil petroleum is cheaper.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of money in pointless hydrogen research, all the efforts should have been directed to improving the efficiency and cost of fuel cells using some hydrocarbons and of the synthesis of some hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide.
That these targets are indeed achievable, unlike using hydrogen for storage, which has fundamental limitations, is proved by the existence of the living beings which use their equivalents.
> Hydrogen is just a means of STORING energy and it is one of the worst for this purpose.
People who say this aren't thinking clearly.
There are different storage use cases. For diurnal storage (daily charge/discharge cycles), hydrogen is indeed inferior to other technologies.
But this is not the only storage use case.
Other use cases are seasonal storage (particularly important at high latitudes) and backup storage (especially for rare events when it's both cloudy and windless over large areas for extended periods). For those use cases, hydrogen can be much better than things like batteries or compressed air (or flow batteries, or storage in synthetic hydrocarbons).
Hydrogen cannot be better than hydrocarbons, because the efficiency of the cycle can reach very close values for both, while storage tanks and associated devices are much smaller and cheaper for hydrocarbons.
Converting the energy stored in hydrocarbons back to electrical energy can be done with the current technology at efficiencies well over 50% using Diesel engines.
Higher efficiencies can be reached with fuel cells. It is true that for now, especially for room-temperature fuel cells, much more research has been done for fuel cells with hydrogen.
However room-temperature fuel cells are handicapped anyway by the need for expensive catalysts. High temperature fuel cells can be made to work almost as well with hydrocarbons as with hydrogen. Their lifetime needs improvement, but it is likely that better results could have already been obtained if the research efforts in energy conversion would not have so dispersed over a very large number of directions, most of which were obviously wrong since the beginning.
Right now it is indeed possible to obtain hydrogen from water with a higher efficiency than hydrocarbons, because it can be done in a single simpler step, the electrolysis.
Nevertheless, in an optimized synthesis, the efficiency of obtaining hydrocarbons instead of hydrogen, also sequestering carbon dioxide as an added benefit, should have a very close efficiency, as proven by the countless bacteria that do a similar job.
It is possible right now to capture carbon dioxide and store energy in synthetic hydrocarbons, then generate electrical energy from the stored hydrocarbons.
However the cost and efficiency of doing that would be much less than desirable and possible.
That is why I said that this would require much more R&D than now, but this would be a certain solution for the long term storage problem.
For short term storage, high-efficiency solutions, e.g. flow batteries, pumped water, compressed air and so on, are better solutions.
> Hydrogen cannot be better than hydrocarbons, because the efficiency of the cycle can reach very close values for both, while storage tanks and associated devices are much smaller and cheaper for hydrocarbons.
So, where do you get the carbon from? Atmospheric capture? That blows the "easier" claim right out of the water. Biomass? Not practical on the very large scale needed.
Efficiency of conversion in combined cycle plants is around 60%.
Remember that we need to put all the carbon we added to the atmosphere since the 1800’s, which will take more energy than we generated during that time window (ignoring some one time bonuses, like planting trees and olivine).
We need to take out a lot more than that, because of all the CFCs (1700+ times CO2) and HFCs (2500+ times CO2) vented. If all the HFCs currently in use were vented instead of collected and incinerated, it would produce as much greenhouse effect as all the CO2 we have added to the atmosphere.
Some of the CFCs and HFCs get collected, mostly at industrial sites. Car and residential mostly leaks.
> The more we learn about nuclear, the more expensive it seems to get
This is a pretty gross falsehood.
Nuclear power is could be cheap and safe, but we _make_ it expensive by banning any form of innovation and by lying to the public about how risky it is compared to alternatives. The idea that nuclear is bad and costly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the public incentivize politicians to ban it or regulate it into oblivion.
We should not be building the same basic reactor design as we have in the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that we're stuck on big, expensive containment vessels and water is a clue about what is happening to nuclear.
Hydrogen can be generated by electrolysis from excess wind power, and fed into natural gas distribution networks. This is already happening. It is possible to add a significant part of hydrogen. The advantage of this that no completely new, expensive hydrogen infrastructure is needed, it can simply added as one of many necessary steps.
I'm not scared of nuclear, but I'm terrified of climate change.
I’ve said this before. It’s not one or the other. The fallout of climate change is potentially so catastrophic, you need to spend the money on nuclear anyway. You have to double down just in case renewables don’t pan out 100% the way we hope. You want to spend the money to maximise the chances of a working solution.
Think of it like COVID vaccine trials. We’re spending money on multiple vaccine candidates in parallel.
We already know that renewables are super cheap. Even the super conservative, anti-renewables IEA recently declared that solar now produces the cheapest energy in history.
The only question is how to deal with intermittency of renewables. For which we have tons of options, with nuclear being a poor contender, IMHO. There are certainly some models of zero carbon energy grids that say nuclear is the cheapest way to achieve zero carbon, but I think those models have not adequately accounted for several key observations about the world, namely: 1) how storage technologies are getting cheaper far faster than anyone anticipated, by an order of magnitude, 2) how we will build a lot of hydrogen infrastructure anyway to decarbonize industrial processes that we can't electrify, and 3) how nuclear is getting more expensive every year because it relies on industrial techniques that have been optimized in the past, and where we are now losing skills. Even if we correct 3), I don't think it could outweigh 1 & 2.
That's not to say that nobody should invest in nuclear, just that nobody should bother with gen 3 or 4 designs, as they are already obsolete. Look to the tiny startups, and forget about the giant conglomerates of yesteryear like EDF, Toshiba/Westinghouse, and Hitachi.
The only question is how to deal with intermittency of renewables.
And if we don’t quite solve it? Then what? This is why Bill Gates is on the board of a nuclear startup. Everyone wants renewables. But not investing in other forms of carbon free energy is simply gambling because a carbon free future must happen.
I agree, I don't see why anyone thinks we should throw all of our eggs in one basket. I advocate for both. There are modern nuclear designs that are far superior and don't have the problems of old designs.
"compete on cost" when you don't consider the external damage by sources like coal, oil, etc is not a good reason. We need dependable power sources. Wind is not predictable except over long periods of time. Hydro is predictable (somewhat) mostly but it's already maxed out and destroys ecosystems as part of its damage. Solar varies quite a bit. Nuclear is dependable and completely controllable, it's also safe, no matter what its critics say. Their knowledge and reasons are 40 years old and no longer relevant with modern designs. No don't talk to me about Japan, that was a bad design even when it was "new" and horrible placement of the actual facility. The saving grace is they can dump all that excess radiation into the ocean around it when they have to.
> The more we learn about nuclear, the more expensive it seems to get, in contrast to pretty much any good tech.
A lot of the cost of nuclear is about bringing down risk to an acceptable level. And this is why nuclear accidents have increased to cost of nuclear plant construction: They have partly confirmed, and partly uncovered, areas in which plants were not safe enough.
The Three Miles Island accident has shown that it is possible that cooling fails, with the consequence of a reactor core melting down, and having a significant aggregation of critical reactive material sitting at the bottom of the reactor vessel. As any physicist knows, an uncontrolled aggregation of fissile stuff can go boom. And this is what in fact happened in Fukushima - several times.
In addition, there has been modeling since thee eighties what happens if cooling fails, and the results have been ... not so good. The pressure vessels will not withstand heat and pressure for longer than hours. Which is too little time for wide-range evacuation in a densely populated area.
In addition, in Fukushima we've seen what happens if a plant loses electrical power from cooling systems. This is also a real danger in the US plants which are in some cases exposed to disasters like hurricanes or flooding.
We have also seen that the storage of used fuel in a nuclear plant is a mayor hazard because it needs to be continually cooled for a long time. And on top of that in plants constructed so far, it has much less protection, so an airplane falling into such a spent fuel storage can cause a significant accident.
Then, in the Japanese Monju plant we've seen that breeder reactors which are cooled with liquid sodium are difficult to keep safe in case of a fire. We also now that such breeders can become super-critical if certain things line up. And so on.
So, in short, nuclear became more expensive, because we know much more what can go wrong. Whining about "regulatory hurdles" will not cut it. What is the intention here is apparently to cut down on safety regulations, which will have the result of increased risks.
Similarly as in Chernobyl, the chain reaction produced excess heat, and this likely caused water to dissociate into oxygen/hdydrogenium which caused the big explosion. In that sense, it was not a nuclear explosion, but one caused by an out-of-control chain reaction.
If I remember correctly, there were also reports of some observations of short-lived fission products. But we still do not know exactly what happened.
Roughly the same could have happened in Three Miles Island, because the reactor was melting down, but the process was stopped, possibly very little time before the reactor would have been destroyed.
The Chernobyl explosion was not due to hydrogen and oxygen reacting. If you heat water hot enough to dissociate, it will explode just from the pressure of the steam. There's no need to add endothermic chemical reactions to the scene.
There was no nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. I guarantee you will find zero sources for your theory other than conspiracy sites. It was physically impossible for there to have been a nuclear explosion.
"but it can't without a major tech breakthrough. "
It can absolutely compete on cost, the only 'breakthrough' we need is operational fidelity.
It's 'expensive' for the same reason that the AHA web site cost $1B to build when it should have cost $50M or the tunnel in Boston went 5x over budget.
Also, there's the issue of liability and insurance is problematic, it needs to be externalized i.e. we need to have rules, safeguards around what happens and how people are comped.
The 'modern world' is significantly harangued by our inability to build complicated things with effectiveness, Nuclear Power is just an artifact of that.
In theory yes; in practice, all of the existing nuclear deployments rank among the least cost effective ways to generate energy on the planet.
Without a 2 order magnitudes improvements in cost, any plans towards building anything nuclear are probably futile over the course of a 5 decade run time of the facility starting about 2-3 decades from now given current and likely improvements with alternatives in terms of cost reductions in the same time span. Sub 1 $ct /kwh energy plants are very close (there have been a few solar bids in the 1-1.5 $ct range recently). I expect prices to routinely start dipping below that as early as next year.
If you consider e.g. organic solar panels mass produced using some inkjet style production process, producing many TWH of solar capability might become a matter of just printing such panels by the square mile using cheap production processes that don't involve a lot of exotic materials, energy, etc. That's not feasible just yet but there are plenty of researchers playing with prototypes for this right now. So, that has the potential to deliver some order of magnitude cost advantage over the already dirt cheap current state of the art for clean energy. That's what I call a feasible path to delivering orders of magnitudes cost improvements. We have similar things in the works for energy storage. And off shore wind is also delivering nice improvements still. Hell, at with that kind of improvement, even producing synthetic fuel at ludicrously low inefficiencies could still be worth the trouble from a cost perspective over anything nuclear. And there's research chipping away at that problem as well (i.e. doing it more efficiently and cheaper).
IMHO there's actually nothing stopping people coming up with dirt cheap nuclear in theory but lots of non trivial obstacles preventing us from getting there on a timescale where it matters. And then once we do get there; there's still the notion that mass producing material for dirty bombs poses some non trivial security challenges. E.g. mass deploying micro reactors all over the world massively increases the possibility that some of them end up in the wrong hands. All it takes to create a dirty bomb is some cheap explosives and some radioactive material. All it takes to depopulate e.g. downtown Manhattan is one such bomb. Nuclear safety not just about reactor failure but also ensuring the nuclear waste is properly secured for however many millennia it takes for it to degrade.
Another issue is the lack of ambition on growing the energy market. A lot of projections are based on our current energy consumption patterns and seem to assume that ballpark what we currently consume globally does not need to grow by orders of magnitude. The reality is that throughout history, our ability to deliver cost improvements for energy production has always resulted in increased demand together with economic growth. There's no shortage of useful things we could do with a supply of dirt cheap peta watt hours. Unlocking that potential would create something similar to the industrial revolution in terms of economic growth. IMHO that's exactly what this century is going to be about. A few orders magnitude improvement in cost would go hand in hand with a few orders magnitude increase in energy produced.
The premise that we need to get nuclear done is based on the notion that we can somehow break that pattern of it being too expensive by orders of magnitudes. However, I don't see how this could happen. Most articles I read about nuclear seem to ignore the security aspect and tend to gloss over the cost aspect or just generally even lack the ambition to do better than even current approaches in the market.
So, I'll just put a stake in the ground and spell it out: anything over 0.001$ per kwh is basically going to be obsolete from a cost perspective before it is ready for the market I.e. shipping in volume and at a relevant price point for the state of the art for other technologies at that point. That's decades from now at the earliest IMHO.
And that's only a 10X improvement over today, which is arguably not good enough. To play it safe, you really need to be thinking closer to 0.0001$ per kwh or better. That would be at least a 100x improvement. I can see fusion delivering this potentially towards the end of the second half of this century (earliest) but not nuclear in any of its current imagined incarnations. Certainly not in under 2 decades like this article seems to suggest: too little, too late and for too much $. It just doesn't add up.
Offshore wind will have removed most gas/coal plants from the equation around that time in any case. China is currently talking about 2060. The UK is talking 2030. Nuclear does not really factor into those intentions. Wind and solar are outstripping everything else in terms of growth currently. If you break down new capacity coming online, coal and nuclear are mere footnotes (production with that is actually shrinking in lot of markets). New nuclear coming online is not keeping pace with old nuclear going offline. And there's a lot of that happening currently as a lot of 1960s/1970s reactors are basically at the end of their useful life.
> If you consider e.g. organic solar panels mass produced using some inkjet style production process, producing many TWH of solar capability might become a matter of just printing such panels by the square mile using cheap production processes that don't involve a lot of exotic materials, energy, etc.
If the panels are too cheap, the cost of the inverter becomes the bottleneck. That is, there's a limit to how low you can go; even if the panels cost zero to produce, you still have to produce the inverters.
" anything over 0.001$ per kwh is basically going to be obsolete" is a fantastical statement that has little credibility without a lot of referential material, even then ...
We are not even scratching the surface of the potential energy we extract from fission. If we approached it with the same vigour as renewable, and Greenpeace didn't effectively make Nuclear politically toxic, we might already be 'most of the way' towards carbon neutrality.
> The potential tech breakthroughs (SMRs) are far less technologically mature than any of our other options
They're conventional reactors of 10x smaller size using LEU. Kind of like naval reactors but without enriched nuclear fuel used on military ships designed to operate for 30 yr without refueling the reactor. They can make better safety guarantees than utility scale.
> If nuclear could compete on cost, we should go for it, but it can't without a major tech breakthrough.
Fusion perhaps. But fission, patently untrue. The price of existing nuclear fission power plants is artificially high because politicians want weapons grade nuclear material, ill-informed "public opinion" and regulation.
And to qualify my "ill-informed public opinion", Chernobyl's direct death toll was 31. Fukishima was zero. Yet nuclear is held to some different standard to all other energy. A nuclear accident, with zero deaths is front page news but the millions of people that have died world wide from burning or mining coal, or drilling for oil, isn't.
The design of nuclear reactors is uranium based, and over 50 years old.
There's no commercial incentive to make better, cheaper nuclear fission power plants because Governments won't let anyone try. Search for 'nuclear startup' and they're all fusion. Making France (EDF) or Japan (Hitachi?) compete 'on tender' to build the UK a new power station is not really competition unfortunately.
It is my understanding that nuclear isn't particularly expensive as unlike other forms of energy, all costs (including long term storage of waist) are calculated in advance.
And this is a very good thing - we have an exact number that encapsulates the entire cost of this energy for good.
The problem with nuclear is that we are extremely poor at calculating this number up front, typically by a factor of 2x-5x. Construction starts based on unrealistic expectations of huge profits, then as expenses explode, the hope of profit disappears. Projects will complete if the builders are susceptible to the sink cost fallacy, or if they do not need to compete with cheaper forms of energy.
And if low operating expenses is a good thing, then solar and wind and battery storage are far better than nuclear on that front.
We don't need any major tech breakthroughs, what we need is to put in actual effort, money, and political capital into trying to solve the biggest long term threat facing our species. The solution has been around for at least forty years in the form of the nuclear lightbulb reactor [1].
This research was completed by the United Aircraft Corporation in the late 60's and early 70's before it was canceled by Nixon along with the Mars program. It was under a NASA contract for space exploration so the literature was written in the context of the arms race but it is even more compelling as a terrestrial reactor as it uses a tiny amount of fuel (tens of kilos instead of tens of tonnes) and actively keeps that fuel at supercritical so if power is lost the entire thing fizzles out. This is a fast neutron design with an extremely high neutron cross section, far beyond that of any other reactor, easily allowing you to feed nuclear waste into it and very efficiently transmute much of it into fuel or more manageable waste that is then separated out by centrifuges (which are already in the design to separate usable UF6 from the neon exhaust). UAC was set to win a
contract to test the reactor with nuclear fuel when Nixon pulled the plug. They even had a design mapped out for a slow neutron reactor that would have made it economically viable in the 70s.
All of the technological breakthroughs in computation, material science, and nuclear engineering needed to make this happen at an industrial scale have been discovered since the project was canceled. If it weren't for all the anti-nuclear hysteria, we might have actually had someone willing to take the risk to bring the nuclear lightbulb reactor to market. Sadly, almost all of the scientists and engineers that worked on this design have passed on so the institutional knowledge is gone and our best opportunity to head off climate change remains bogged down by pointless arguments over thorium and molten salt reactors.
The cynic in me says climate change is the most pressing issue of our lifetime because carbon based power production is the leading technology and competing technologies want a shot at becoming the lead horse.
If we ever switched to nuclear based power production, the most pressing issue of our lifetime would immediately become managing uncontrolled radioactive waste. The carbon based and renewable based power production industry advocates will make sure of it.
The difficult part about costs is finding out the real cost of generating electricity, most studies are incomplete or biased. If you don't count the cost of discarding used fuel, nuclear is suddenly much cheaper, and same is true if people don't take into account the cost of decommissioning wind turbines or solar cells, and the need for baseload.
Why? There's no rational reason to be terrified, unless you've been propagandized.
Climate change is generally considered to be a gradual problem eveolving over the next 80 years, while we've had corona pandemics since 2003. People die every day of poverty and malnutrition.
I am almost envious that you are dealing with worry, because I am often dealing with extreme sadness when looking at the whole situation. I have to accept that I am way more attached to life around me, and depending on it, than I would ever have admitted. And yet the civilization I belong to is destroying it.
Interesting take that because X and Y are issues, we should ignore an upcoming disaster that impacts the entire planet and somehow any serious concern means we've been "propagandized".
The only serious Corona virus pandemic is today, in 2020, not in 2003. Unsurprisingly, the people leading the charge to stifle measures aimed at preventing climate change also happen to be the very ones who stated that COVID 19 is a hoax, a conspiracy (first the US Democratic Party was blamed responsible for the hoax) – but soon it became the Chinese virus, and now they have no solution other than to encourage people from stop testing altogether and to stop wearing masks altogether.
Many of the largest mass extinctions have been associated with rapid increase in atmospheric CO2, including the largest, the end-Permian mass extinction, during which the equatorial regions of Earth became too hot for vertebrate life to survive.
Is there reason to be "terrified" of climate change? The scientific consensus forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that the risks we face are manageable, and we have decades to prepare mitigation measures like improved flood management and forest management. Certainly we would like to avoid these outcomes if possible, but I don't see a reason it should keep you up at night any more than other government policy questions.
That link seems to speak only of the effects of hitting the hoped for limit of warming (1.5 Celsius), while it's entirely possible that we will surpass that. Even if we do stop at the 1.5 C limit, it seems silly to say "manageable". We are already seeing massive a drop-off in biodiversity and increases in extinctions. We don't even fully know how the ecological damage we're already seeing will echo into the future, but the outcomes are almost certainly not good.
Beyond the unknowns of ecological damage, the increases in forest fire and storm event damages we're already seeing are also hitting us now, not in decades. Further, from everything I have read thus far since that report was released , most of the models have underestimated the release of methane, which could mean we're already accelerating faster than previously thought. All of this also assumes that there will be a massive effort to cut emissions to 0 in a reasonable time - a big assumption in the time of Trump's America.
China's a tough problem so America shrugs and gives up.
What a defeatist attitude...but I expect nothing less from weak people that vote for/support a weak man.
We managed to absolutely crush CFCs in the late 80's and reverse the damage that we were doing to the Ozone layer. Only in Trump's America is America relegated to a non-actor on the world stage...and he did it by choice.
> What a defeatist attitude...but I expect nothing less from weak people that vote for/support a weak man.
Not sure what makes you think this has anything to do with Trump, per se. I don't care about Trump. This is about fixating on the wrong things, which is at the heart of how the problem has become so severe.
It shows nuclear lifetime emissions are lower than solar, but I think this report excludes the carbon footprint in manufacturing/recycling the renewables.
[outdated] You might be misinterpreting that report slightly - it estimates that all renewables -- with the exception of utility-scale solar -- currently emit fewer lifetime emissions than nuclear.
Digging into why utility-scale solar is currently an exception, one potentially relevant factor is that utility-scale solar is working through some regulatory and infrastructure obstacles[1] as it scales up.
[outdated] That said, I couldn't see any indication that manufacturing solar panels themselves is an issue. If residential solar has lower lifecycle emissions, then I wonder why the panel manufacturing would be a problem. Do you have any more information on that?
Edit: noting that first and third paragraphs are outdated following edits to parent comment
Self-reply: d'oh, I may have misinterpreted on this too; the data in the report is a little more complex.
I was comparing the 'max' lifetime estimates per-source (the third value in the column) rather than the medians (second value).
Using the medians, wind is cleanest, followed by nuclear, followed by solar. I'd encourage anyone interested to read the linked report to confirm their understanding.
It'd be nice to find trends over time to see whether these estimates (and thus the overall ordering) is likely to remain stable, or whether recent developments may change the situation.
yeah, thanks for this, and sorry for edits, I need to search for a good reference on manufacturing/recycling emissions for renewables, i think the report either excludes or underestimates the bootstrapping and maintenance carbon footprint. I got my original info from a professor in nuclear engineering program years ago, I wish I still had the notes.
All good, and no problem - I try to follow a mostly-append-only commenting approach where possible, hence the edit notes.
Glad to read what you find; I think some of these figures may also be due for updates given the latest updates around small modular reactors -- and no doubt renewable tech continues to advance too.
Seems like a boot strapping problem to me. If we create enough solar/wind energy then we can devote some of that energy back to production of materials used to produce solar panels.
I'll bite: the energy density of sunlight on average is something like 1.4 kW/m^2
If you put down a square meter of solar panel, weigh it and run it for an hour to get an equivalent wh/kg and compare to almost any other energy source (except maybe wind?) you will find it to be complete garbage.
The only thing solar has going for it is it's free, basically no waste products and you can find it literally anywhere on the surface of the earth.
The energy density of sunlight itself is energy available per kg of mass-energy. That mass-energy can be totally converted to usable energy, unlike nuclear reactions or chemical fuels.
Of course, what this shows is that energy density, as was being used, is a silly metric. By that I mean that it's useful for d--- measuring contests, but not for making any actual decision about what technology to choose.
It seems you've written c² in units of Wh/kg? But the fact that per arbitrary mass, you can theoretically get more energetic reactions than by fission or even fusion doesn't mean comparing the productivity of fission to oil is silly. The issue is realistic ways of efficiently liberating and harnessing energy from matter.
One better than fusion not impossible option is carefully feeding small black holes and extracting their huge output of energy. The feedstock for the black hole might even be lifted from the sun. In the meantime, fission is a productive and practical option to add to the energy mix that will more than serve until we've worked out fusion.
One place I think I agree with you is that phrasing it as energy density, rather than focusing on efficiency of a given unit of mass or fuel at yielding energy can be a bit obscuring. That is, it's better to focus on sustainability of fuel source. Energy density (J/m^3 and J/kg, specific energy) are units more appropriate for talking about energy storage and bombs.
You're comparing the wrong things. Those weights are of energy stored, but with light it is in motion. Maybe if you manage to get some light stuck in a crystal we can have a meaningful comparison.
Are there any details on how much processing you need to get uranium from the ore? My intuition is that it is a lot harder to get to uranium fuel from the ore compared coal and oil.
And there's 2 million more oil/coal on earth than uranium, quantity wise?
Don't get me wrong, being an informed human being, I'm obviously pro-nuclear but if humanity main energy source become uranium then we will note have enough by the end of the century, at least by the current estimate (more funding will enable to find more uranium but it is an unknown which imply an existential risk).
The solution would be thorium based nuclear reactors which would feed humanity for at least a millennium! But by design they must be less cost effective (how much?) and needs R&D funding today.
Both uranium breeders and thorium breeders offer truly inexhaustible energy for humanity. Especially uranium, which is available in seawater at astronomical scale, and which replenishes first through runoff and then through plate tectonics.
We'll run out of nuclear fission fuel roughly when we run out of nuclear fusion fuel in the sun (i.e. when the sun burns out).
2. Sunlight can't be measured by kilos, so it can't be compared against.
3. Sunlight is the consequence of the sun's nuclear reactions. So fusion nuclear energy might be comparable, but until then, fission is as close as we get.
If you have an idealized mirrored box, and add some light to the inside, that will increase the inertia of the box. So in that sense the light has mass.
Right. We should be afraid of people who want to cut corners with nuclear power.
Also, building a reactor takes a long time when all the precautions are taken. Building hundreds simultaneously is begging for precautions to be dropped or mismanaged.
At this point we have some proven designs that make things a little easier to get right because we're not building from scratch. But a big part of the problem now is lack of expertise. We don't have enough trained hands to build these sorts of specialized systems, or keep them running once built.
We need to bootstrap our way out of this problem. Appropriate education programs should be created and subsidized. The aging workforce that still exists should be paid well to put off retirement or hired out of retirement to help implement things like apprenticeships. In five years we could have a new generation of workers with an established pipeline to continue training more people.
At this point I'm skeptical of these designs. How recent they are and how many units are in operation? How long have they operated? Did we see changes in projected useful life?
CANDU reactors are a moribund technology. The attempt to sell new ones to Ontario ten years ago came in too expensive by a factor of 3. No one is buying them.
Counterexample: Large infrastructure projects that take >10 years to build. Big Dig, trains, et cetera. They take so long to build that people only work on a very small number during their career so the ability to learn lessons from one to apply to another is small.
They're only in this category specifically because each one is a bespoke custom project. That's not a compelling argument against standardization and mass factory production.
Even China has huge problems with nuclear. When they took the French EPR design, they thought each would take less than 4 years to build. Ended up taking 9 years.
If you work on years 1-2 of Project 1, shouldn't that put you in a good position to work on years 1-2 of Project 2? You might not see the effects of bad decisions that start mattering in year 6, but it seems there should be lots of workers for whom that doesn't matter, and for the rest, it seems like having some people do close inspections and produce good reports (which others read when they're on Project 3+) might mostly cover that. Seems like this should be mostly solvable...
That’s not my understanding. That’s precisely the benefit France enjoyed when it decided to scale up its nuclear power. Right now very few new reactors are built so the benefit and the expertise are gone. But if a country decides to scale up rapidly in the same way you should see that benefit.
It was grossly overhyped by a government trying to make trillions (current dollars) spent on nuclear weaponry not seem such an egregious drain on humanity. That it would crash back to Earth as the hype and groupthink met reality was inevitable.
They didn’t build all the cars they would need concurrently; they mostly finished a small number at a time. That let them learn along the way, but there isn’t time to do that for nuclear because we need hundreds or thousands of plants and they each take years to build.
And the number of opportunities to fuck up is mindblowingly high. A lot of nuclear accidents start with accidents on support systems that cascade into other systems up to the point the reactor can't be safely operated.
I thought that the costs come mostly from insurance? (Which the public is already on the hook for to some degree)
There are an lot of industry where they are not cost effective without heavy government involvement, and even then the public barely get to reap the rewards.
(Though I supposed if this happened in the USA it would be the death knell of the fossil fuel industry)
Interesting question, how many nuclear plants can be built at once in the world. I imagine there are not that many outfits with the experience to take on that kind of job.
That's not some kind of abstract fear, even without doing it at such a mass-scale there have been and are more than enough examples of cutting corners [0]
The nuclear industry, just like every other industry on this planet, is run by flawed and corruptible humans. The problem is that their flaws and corruption can do damage for many generations to come, so being a bit careful and skeptical is only due diligence.
A salient quote from TFA, "there have been a total of over 17,000 reactor-years (where one nuclear reactor operating for a year equals one reactor-year) spanning 33 countries. The three aforementioned incidents [Chernobyl, 3-mile island, Fukushima] are the only adverse ones to be documented in all that time"
What about the financial disasters? Especially in all attempts within the last 30 years?
Nuclear has long had a reputation as a tech that could bankrupt a utility, which is why utilities stopped building it in the 1980s.
In the mid-2000s, in an attempt to revitalize the industry, we had an attempt to build nuclear in highly supportive communities with high levels of support from the Nuclear Regulatory Committee.
This attempt ended in yet more financial disaster. South Carolina residents pay an average of $20/month on their electricity bill for a failed project that will never produce energy (Vogtle). In order to convince the utility to take on the massive financial risk of a nuclear construction project, the nuclear industry pushed through a special bill in the state legislature that lets the utility charge ratepayers whether or not a nuclear construction project completes.
The UK started attempts at building nuclear at the same time, and though it started construction at Hinckley C, a project far behind schedule and far over budget, it has not even been able to find somebody to build at Wylfa. Hitachi pulled out.
Similarly, France, who is often an example of "good nuclear," is abandoning new nuclear because their attempts at building again have all ended in financial disaster and blown schedules.
Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima are not the nuclear failures that scare those who would build it. It's the financial risk that scares away investors, and it should scare us all. Dumping such high capital costs in a 50-year investment, at a time when alternatives are dropping in cost exponentially, is just foolish. It's like buying 50 years of lock-in to 386 Intel processors in 1990. Just foolish.
I would argue that buying anything where the cost is dropping exponentially is foolish as well. This would mean that it makes a lot more sense to invest in the economy and wait until renewable technology stops becoming cheaper/more reliable before buying.
But what do we do in the meanwhile? What do we do if storage technology isn't able to match energy demand when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing? What do we do in areas that don't get as much renewable energy? Many questions. Probably more than one sensible answer.
Renewables might not be a magic bullet. We need a plan B. Nuclear as a long term base load power source? Not as crazy as it sounds.
As equipment ages out, we need to replace it with something. Just as we need to buy computers right now for our computation needs, even if it would be cheaper to wait until 2050 to compute things, that doesn't help us with decisions now.
The lifecycle of wind and solar is typically planned to be around 25 years. Most installs are lasting longer than expected. With wind, some farms are reporting with bigger turbines even before lifetimes are over as it is the economically advantageous choice for getting more energy out of a prime location for wind. This isn't common with solar because new panels are cheaper, but so now generate much more power from the same land usage unlike wind.
Renewables are a proven option, solar has truly become a "magic bullet," in that it is the cheapest energy source in history. But it will only be one tool among many that we will use.
I would like for nuclear to be a tool, but the current generation of tech is not constructable, and the lead times are too long for it to have an impact in the foreseeable future.
Yes, only 3 incidents - but in 35 years we haven't managed to clean up the mess made by the first one. Chernobyl has been a hazard now for 4x longer than the reactor was in service.
That's the thing I would like to see from the pro-nuclear side - not more assurances that modern reactors are safe, but a demonstration that if something does go wrong, we could actually clean it up and it won't become another permanent blight on the landscape.
Fully clean up Chernobyl (or Hanford, Washington, which wasn't an "incident" but is still a radioactive mess) and I'll support more nuclear reactors 100%.
But I want a better remediation plan than "bulldoze all the radioactive stuff into a pile, pour a bunch of concrete on top and wait for a few centuries".
Nobody is ever going to clean up Chernobyl because it happened in a location where the surrounding land is basically forest so there is no real incentive for anybody to want to allocate resources to do anything about it.
Hanford is basically the same thing except that the US actually cares enough to do something about it, just not enough to do it quickly.
The cleanup for Fukushima is likely to be completed before either of them because it's a location that people actually care about cleaning up.
Do you realize that a single reprocessing plant releases more than 10x more tritium in the ocean yearly than the amount currently contained at Fukushima? This has been happening safely for decades, under constant monitoring for impact on fish and other ocean life. The whole recent "Fukushima tritium release" news cycle is entirely FUD, and all nuclear safety experts agree that there is basically no risk involved. Please stop propagating the FUD.
Reprocessing plants are indeed much worse than nuclear power plants in terms of day-to-day radioactive release and many other safety aspects - which is why I get a little perplexed when nuclear proponents keep on pushing them as the solution to the nuclear waste problem. It's only waste because we foolishly don't use it as fuel, they say, but the processes for doing that are an absolute disaster (and also a nuclear weapons proliferation risk to boot).
They want to dump a tiny, tiny fraction of the radioactive material released from Fukushima. The water that they cooled the busted cores with picked up all sorts of crap, and they filtered out most of it. Tritium is really hard to remove though, so the cost/benefit ratio there is way higher than would justify removing it.
> In January 2003, the plant's private network became infected with the slammer worm, which resulted in a five-hour loss of safety monitoring at the plant ....
Look at the Hambach brown coal site in Germany. It’s 45 sq km of environmental destruction. Chernobyl’s concrete coffin is barely 1 sq km. And the rest of the area is returning to nature. Animals, at least aren’t affected by radiation anywhere near as badly as originally thought.
Large animals, and while the area is acting as somewhat of a refuge for them they depend on mobility from surrounding areas with more ordinary ecology.
Smaller forms of life have been profoundly impacted, and microbial life is so void there organic matter does not break down at regular rates. This has resulted in a buildup of petrified, dead organic matter that poses an elevated risk of wildfire. If/when it happens, radioactive material will be ejected into the atmosphere from the site once again.
Long-term research is showing that some medium-sized forms of life which we expected to do badly, such as mice and voles, seem to have some inherent resilience to radiation exposure in the area. On the other hands similar sized animals such as birds show a significantly higher rate of abnormalities.
'There's wildlife in chernobyl' is often mentioned to argue that we overestimate the harm from nuclear incidents - The reality is more complex.
As the projected lifespan of a reactor is 50+ years and most of the current ones are quite old, that works out rather closely to 1% (17,000 / 50 / 3) of reactors with a significant issue. Building even 1,000 of them would therefore likely see a handful of Fukushima scale 100+B$ disasters.
It might be worth it if there was no viable alternative, but that’s a harder sale.
PS: There have also been 2 significant nuclear sub accidents, though with older designs.
The article forgot a couple dozen accidents that leaked radioactive material to the environment, that killed someone and that cost multiple million dollar to fix or contain.
>...The most comprehensive and statistically sound estimates show that bird deaths from turbine collisions are between 140,000 and 500,000 birds per year. As wind energy capacity increases under the DOE’s mandate (a six-fold increase from current levels), statistical models predict that mean bird deaths resulting in collisions with turbines could reach 1.4 million birds/year.
Though the issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type:
>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.
This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue.
>...that can be reduced 70% by painting one blade black
A lot of different techniques have been used to try and limit bird deaths and painting blades a different color is one of them, but it doesn't reduce deaths by 70%.
Or accidents like Aberfan where a coal waste tip collapsed onto a school killing 116 Children and 28 Adults - the anniversary was a couple of days ago.
I’m sure that in the list of substances which have leaked into the environment and caused one or more deaths, nuclear material is certainly one of them—possibly even in the top 1,000.
When "what maybe could have happened but didn't, ha-haa!" is making half of European continent uninhabitable for several generations in 1986... fear is fully justified.
Our brain evolved the capability to explore hypothetical undesirable outcomes and feel fear of it to keep us alive, and it serves us well since millions of years. The fools that never are afraid of anything tend to have very short lives.
In what remotely plausible scenario would that have happened? Feel free to involve the USSR, reactor safety of the time, etc.
Because from what I know, the fallout was definitely not making anything nearly that large "uninhabitable". Deaths would go up, but so did they from the coal plants that were subsequently built (we're at 3 million deaths a year, if memory serves; that's the number you have to beat to make nuclear less attractive than coal from a more sciency perspective than "what maybe could have happened but didn't, ha-haa!").
> In what remotely plausible scenario would that have happened?
If all people would just have run and quit the area letting the reaction finish.
> we're at 3 million deaths a year
Lets assume that this number is real, the comparison would be still wrong.
1) There are much more coal plants in the planet than nuclear plants so this is like saying than a car contaminates less than 1,000 bicycles. Yes, can be true but it does not mean that replacing all bicycles by cars would reduce contamination. Replacing all coal plants by nuclear plants would increase and equilibrate really fast the death-count in both groups. Absolute numbers are useless here.
2) When talking about coal plants, the short term, middle and long term effects of contamination are included. With nuclear just the first 90 days were taken. This is a shady and dishonest way to do statistics
Oh for sure, but I guess my overarching point that I think us pro-nuclear people need to keep in mind is that it only takes one, and that (possibly irrationally) scares people.
I think everyone is well aware that it takes only one disaster to paint a picture, no matter whether it's still possible today, proportional to deaths caused by other energy sources, or otherwise based on misinformation and emotional reasons. This is exactly the fallacy everyone should be arguing against. Yes, also people who think nuclear is a bad option for other (rational) reasons. Otherwise you're lying about your motivations and pushing a different point under false pretenses.
In what remotely plausible scenario would that have happened? Feel free to involve USSR-specific issues, reactor safety of the time, etc.
Because from what I know, the fallout from it literally exploding is not making anything nearly that large "uninhabitable", even if we literally stand around and did nothing against it. Deaths would go up, but so did they from the coal plants that were subsequently built (we're at 3 million deaths a year, if memory serves; that's the number you have to beat to make nuclear less attractive than the technology we did build. Every year. Millions of people.).
Edit: a quick search suggests 4 million now, or another source says 10k/day which works out to 3.7 million per year (from results' summaries shown on DDG) but feel free to find reliable sources.
Uncontrolled reactor breach and explosion, spreading core material into the atmosphere at several orders of magnitude bigger level than occurred. It actually almost occurred, it’s a major drama arc in the HBO special.
I loathe whenever these articles pop up on HN because they embrace an almost puerile approach to a wide range of complex issues surrounding Nuclear power and conclude their critics as histrionic environmentalists to avoid the demanding task of defending the atom. when people express concern about nuclear energy its not just meltdowns. its the entire lifecycle.
>Yes, it’s true that fission power plants that cut corners could lead to radioactivity-related disasters
Nuclear plants are an enticing target for terrorists, natural disasters, and human error with consequences far outstripping any carbon benefit. Major accidents can render tens or hundreds of kilometers of sterile earth uninhabitable for thousands of years, during which time floods and fires can continue to poison surrounding areas as was seen recently with the wildfires of Pripyat.
We still, to this date, have no comprehensive or cogent plan to properly extinguish a nuclear fire the scale of Chernobyl other than sacrificing first responders until the catastrophe abates. We didnt even have a competent plan to prevent or arrest the meltdown at Fukushima which created its own 400km exclusion zone.
finally, we have no competent architectural, structural, or societal plan to alert or inform anyone 20,000 years from now of the vast areas of nuclear contamination we will have left buried in the earth in the desperate hope of staving off irreversible climate change. The idea that we would so foolheartedly blaze a trail of atomic poison without considering in any of these articles a future generation smacks of a pandersome tone that seeks a quick and dirty answer to a problem that renewables --which require careful consideration and study-- can easily achieve.
Nuclear is the dullards flex-tape solution to a much larger concern of careful consideration, moderation, and sustainable lifecycles of energy for the future.
This was a good summary of my thoughts on this topic as well, thanks for adding it to the discussion.
It seems to me the only sensible option is to have all the nuclear power contained in one huge reactor, and keeping that reactor some 150 million kilometers from any humans. Luckily we already have that! ;-)
Personally I believe we already have the solution to the energy problem in the form of hydrogen gas, which can be made from seawater in harmless and well known ways. Water which is returned when the energy is consumed, so the possibility of also solving the water crisis at the same time seems worth exploring.
It's hard to even theorize about a more optimal solution.
The sun is for all earthly intents a limitless power source, and we now have the technical means of capturing and storing it without permanently consuming any resources on earth. So why don't we just do that? Why are not all energy projects supporting that optimal solution instead of pursuing other goals?
Even nuclear proponents are hopefully mostly interested in nuclear as a means to an end, and not just nuclear as a thing in itself.
There are challenges with both solar panels and hydrogen gas for sure, but as far as I can tell all of them are small compared to the various challenges around nuclear power.
Elon Musk should get on this, he has most of the pieces of the puzzle already!
Have the Boring company make underground storage caves for hydrogen, let Solar City make the gas, and use tech from SpaceX to store and burn it optimally! :)
Well put. Yes the problem is there is a lot carbon in the air, but the deeper problem is that we have no respect for the environment or for future generations.
We should not just be looking for the cheapest, easiest, fastest solution generate electricity. We need to build a society that lives in harmony with our environment and doesn't leave any waste behind for future generations to clean up.
> I loathe whenever these articles pop up on HN because they embrace an almost puerile approach to a wide range of complex issues...and conclude their critics as histrionic environmentalists
> finally, we have no competent architectural, structural, or societal plan to alert or inform anyone 20,000 years from now of the vast areas of nuclear contamination we will have left buried in the earth in the desperate hope of staving off irreversible climate change. The idea that we would so foolheartedly blaze a trail of atomic poison
Frankly your comment here is extraordinarily unhelpful in the grand scheme of things because it begins with preemptive insults and grievances and devolves quickly into breathless fearmongering and insult-laden tirade that is exactly the kind of thing that gets labeled as histrionics.
And the fact that you end here:
> Nuclear is the dullards flex-tape solution
These insults are just not helpful. It's exactly the kind of comment that makes these discussions so unruly, tiring, and turn people off.
I agree. Fukushima proved that even when a nuclear power plant is hit by a massive earthquake and a tsunami (that killed more people than have ever died from nuclear power) the disaster can be managed with few deaths and ill effects.
If we should be afraid of nuclear power we should be afraid of a lot more than we currently are. For starters, we should move everyone off of major fault lines.
Factor in a cleanup cost of $200 billion, or up $470 billion if actually taking care of the contaminated water [0] and not a single insurance company or reinsurance broker willing is to take on a nuclear plant.
I would much rather have that money going to true decentralized renewables and reliable transmission.
I would too, but we're not doing it. That leaves me wondering if maybe we should plan (and commit) to build nuclear up to, say, 50% of our energy need and then start to reduce that when we actually build wind/solar/hydro to replace it. Xor commit to building those renewables instead (concretely: X MWh using renewable technology Y in location Z). Or, heck, use coal and carbon capture (real stuff, not tree planting, preventing emissions elsewhere, or other cheap magic that doesn't actually take the CO2 back out of the air) in case that's the way people want to go. I don't care, just get started already.
It's not my choice, I already vote for parties that want to take more action, my energy provider is one that actively builds out renewables, and I don't own an amount of land where even a single solar panel would fit. We can't do this on an individual level so I guess governments will have to decide what goes where. It's up to them, but we can't choose it do neither solution.
Not sure if an irreparable reactor that's to date still leaking radioactive waste water should be used as an example of how well nuclear power plants handle catastrophic failure.
Are you aware of the fact that the problem isn't "solved" yet and they are still frantically building storage tanks to store the thousands of liters per day of contaminated water that gets pumped out of the reactor that is cooled by sea water preventing a boil down? [1] Just a few days it was discussed dumping some of the contaminated water into the sea [2]. While this is underway an army of people is trying to shovel contaminated earth of the whole prefecture into plastic bags and store them in huge piles.
It also shows that if you cut power to the cooling system of a reactor of a very common design, there are no passive systems that can prevent a meltdown.
We should definitely be afraid of misinformed nuclear apologists using an example of a major nuclear meltdown event as a testament to nuclear's safety. Comments like these are why nuclear is not trusted. These kinds of disasters demand respect and sobering retrospectives, not flippant dismissal.
That's a really bad example, giving that this thing will poison the ocean for millennia to come and stopped short just on the brink of becoming the next Chernobyl. If things had just turned out slightly differently, the reactor core could have gone haywire and that would have been the end of it.
As it is, this was just dumb luck. Nothing more. If anything, Fukushima has proven (if there was ever any doubt) that there is absolutely nothing, even a high tech nation like Japan can do to deal with a disaster like this. Exactly the opposite of what you claim.
I have read that the technically correct number is "zero" deaths. There were, however, deaths from evacuation to avoid the lack of death from radiation.
Some points that this kind of articles typically fail to address:
1) Storage of waste is still an unsolved problem. Even here in Switzerland, which is a very rich country, there is no definitive agenda for storage.
2) We are in the middle of a climate transient, with severe and long droughts as one of the many consequences. Is a technology that require water to be safe the best bet for the future.
3) Little is said about the necessity to reduce energy use, it's often assumed our energy demand will continue growing exponentially, with no questioning on that side.
Actually the problem is solved. First, dangerous waste is extremely small. All of the French high-activity waste for the past 50 years is currently in one single storage pool (a cube of less than 50m).
Second, deep storage is safe. Oil and gas stayed safely deep in the earth crust for many millions of years. Nuclear waste has no particular reason to be so much more difficult to store.
Building nuclear doesn't preclude a very high reduction of our energy use. Fossil fuels are currently 80 to 90% of our energy. So we're already talking of a very steep reduction ahead. Do you want to try reducing by 95 or 99%?
Regarding energy use, please consider that the fact that there are about 8 billions humans roaming the earth is because of high energy availability. We already face the very serious challenge of reducing drastically our energy use without making it a genocide of unimaginable proportions. I'd rather stay prudent and modest in our abilities.
1. The world does -not- need nuclear. Green sources simply collect zero-cost fuels that are available to everyone, everywhere, without mining or transportation or political borders. Nuclear is expensive.
It costs money to store green energy for future use. It also costs money to store nuclear waste ... for what use?
2. I'm not afraid of nuclear -power-. But the risks are quite clear, much greater, and more costly. The industry has consistently demonstrated that the nuclear path is vulnerable to human error, acts of god, deliberate shortcuts and cost-cutting , lack of maintenance, undetected deterioration, sabotage, bad design, and so on. Each risk can result in leakage of very dangerous and persistent toxins into the environment.The cost of remediation - if that's even possible - (Fukushima for one example) can be much, much higher than the cost of avoiding the problem. How much windpower could Japan create with the money they'll invest in Fukushima in coming decades (for what return)?
The technology is already available to allow us to go Green, at much lower cost, on a much faster timeline, with much less waste and environmental risk, anywhere in the world where there's sun and wind.
There will be a lot of smart people in this thread saying nuclear doesn't make economic sense, and honestly I don't know how accurately quantify the price myself, but if you look at a map of all nuclear energy projects under construction, they are not happening in "rich" countries, but nations with huge populations that are on the verse of emerging from mass poverty. I assume they have done the math.
If you're implying nuclear power is just a pork barrel scam to milk the tax base money and jobs, then I am really starting to understand why we, as Americans, may never meaningfully tackle climate change. Even Joe Biden is pitching conversion to solar as a jobs-creation initiative.
No, it's not just a pork barrel scam. It's the pork barrel scam all other pork barrel scams wish they could be, the ur-scam.
It has a superficially plausible premise that continues to fool a lot of people, a tie-in to the military-industrial complex, it always involves insane amounts of capital expenditure, takes years and years of construction before anything comes out, and costs way more than everything else.
Orbital solar power might rival it someday. Fusion is trying; watch out, once they hit break-even.
If the money spent on fusion projects had been put into solar, we would have had solar cheaper than coal 20 years ago.
I disagree, it is one of the riskiest ways to try to confront climate change. Any Western nation that has tried in the past 30 years has had terrible experiences with building it.
Construction of nuclear in Western economies is too financially risky to pursue. It's too delayed. Even if we start 200 reactors tomorrow, expecting half of the construction projects to fail, we would not be able to finish them in time to have a significant climate impact, because they take too long to build.
Those projects failing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's the public narrative that makes laws and funding disappear and reappear every 4 years, not to mention continuous brainwashing in climate groups.
But realistically speaking, I take your point. I just don't want to dismiss nuclear for the wrong reason. We need to make a choice of how much energy to build where, using which technology, and by when.
Let's make it.
Realistically people are going to hate on nuclear for stupid reasons? Fine, then please let us find an energy mix that works where we reach our climate goals. And we can still adjust those projects whose start-by date hasn't passed if, say, fusion is looking good. We just shouldn't wait and pray, as we're currently doing for the most part, because that mistake will catch up to us. Rather, let's make the plan and only adjust parts with other parts that work rather than leave huge, huge blanks.
Where nuclear has failed, at Vogtle in South Carolina, at VC Summer in Georgia, at Wylfa, all of EDFs projects, the failure hasn't been from funding showing up and disappearing. It hasn't been from regulations changing.
It's all been due to lack of expertise and project mismanagement. In the US they plowed forward with designs that "couldn't be constructed" and wasted money building something different from what had been designed. With the French EPR design, welding skills weren't there to deal with insanely complex and difficult welding jobs.
The failures of nuclear construction have been internal to the industry, they haven't been foisted on the industry.
We should build now with the clear path we have to 80%-90% decarbonization, and see where the chips fall.
So I think we are in agreement there? Maybe in 2045 NuScale (Or Terrapower or whoever) will be shipping reliably and have brought down costs quite a bit from what they currently think they can hit. Maybe not, and we will go with whatever the cheapest alternative is to meet our reliability needs.
There's certainly adequate VC money to get these nuclear startups off the ground. Personally, I don't think any of it is "smart" money, but rather just hedging money. Which is to say I'm really glad that people are investing in it, even though I don't think it's a likely bet, it's a necessary bet.
There has been no other technology faster at decarbonizing the energy sector, than nuclear power. France and Sweden still hold the record for that exact same reason.
This was true 50 years ago, but has not been true in the last thirty years.
The technology has changed. Within the past 30 years, nuclear has become more expensive than alternatives, and a dollar invested in nuclear correlates with seven-fold less drop in emissions than that same dollar invested in renewables:
Note that the above story has been criticized as being correlative, but that correlative reasoning is the same reasoning that's used when saying that France and Sweden have decarbonized with nuclear. (And Sweden owes a lot to hydropower, which is 45% of its electricity)
I have read the study you cite. I don't question whether you've read the full study or only the news story, but the study has quite a few flaws and (what I view as) false assumptions. I'll argue against the news story, so I'm sure not to exclude anybody.
>Nuclear and other renewables don't co-exist well, and both lead to lock-in and path dependancies
Why should they co-exist? If you have 100% of your electricity generated by nuclear power, that is literally zero sense in buying wind turbines.
The path dependancies are obvious: Wind farms require infrastructure that can handle 100% of the total power output, but will only see around 30-40% average capacity used. This requires a larger, decentral power grid, with a ton of resources poured into additional load balancing, as well as storage in times of low wind.
Modern nuclear power has a capacity factor of >90%. It requires the grid to be dimensioned to the needed power; not huge spikes in production. It doesn't require storage and it doesn't require expensive balancing systems, needed for intermittent sources of energy.
>Countries with high GDP and nuclear lower their CO2-emissions slower than similar countries with other renewables
In Denmark, our taxes on energy has increased tremendously alongside the roll-out of "cheap" renewables. This obviously changes demand, which is why the study is indeed correlative.
And in Denmark we're cheating right now: Our biofuels (mainly wood from Estonia and the US) count as zero emissions, since they "grow back in 60 years". This type of fraudulent behaviour changes our balance sheet. And even with our massive expansion of wind energy, our average CO2-emissions per kWh of electricity used is still around 3-6x that of Sweden.
To the question of something being "true 50 years ago, but not true in the last 30 years", look to figure 2 in the link below and you will see how your statement is not correct.
The figure (and the article it originates from) clearly argues that e.g. my country of birth, Denmark, which has spent an incredibly large amount of money (relative to the size of our economy) propping up the wind industry and constructing large wind farms, have been much* slower at adding non-carbon energy sources to the production of electricity.
I know how Sweden produces its electricity, but I don't know what makes hydro relevant here? I am purely talking about the Swedish expansion of nuclear power, which was the fastest expansion of stable green electricity production in the world, to date. That it happened more than 30 years ago only begs the question, as to how no one has caught up to that yet.
Having asked the Swedish state nuclear authority about the possibility of expanding nuclear power, they state that given a positive political climate (e.g. removing red tape and vetocracy, but keeping a high level of safety), they could roll out new reactors in around 5 years, at $4100 pr. kW capacity. This is 10-30% cheaper than 2020 off-shore wind farms – without solving the storage issue!
For me, climate change is a serious issue, requiring serious solutions. This is where I see nuclear energy. All the talk of "slow roll-out" simply goes against the facts and oddly enough, the same people are also against rolling it out – talk about correlation!
Nuclear has the stability, economics and climate factors right. And newer technologies will only make this better. It must be done in a safe way. We can't have old plants not being maintained properly.
No new power plants have been built in the EU or US for the last 30 years, which has lead to brain drain in the industry. Newer plants might cost more in the start, but that too will level off. The same argument that one uses for their own preferred tech mustn't be forgotten for the opposing side.
I understand that you are invested in this debate, but it is simply indefensible to make these types of straw-man arguments. If you want to criticise nuclear power, try making a steel-man argument and argue against that. This is far more efficient – and respectful to your debate partner - than speaking against concrete facts.
Your criticisms about the paper are not criticisms of what I cited. I agree that the authors speculations about path dependence are less than convincing. But the paper is clear that they are speculations, so refuting the speculations does not refute the core observation: investing a unit of capital in nuclear results in less emissions reductions than investing that unit of capital in renewables. We can speculate about technology changes which would change this, and make nuclear competitive with renewables for reducing emissions, but let's be clear about those technology changes, and also estimate the probabilities of the technology changes given our current learning curves.
A Western government that they can build new nuclear at $4000/kW is living in a fantasyland. It has been tried again and again across the US and Europe in the past 20 years, with similar claims, and failure at every attempt. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those are plausible numbers at the moment, any more than $5/MWh solar in 2021 is a plausible number. Perhaps it can be done, but when we have recent attempt after recent attempt that's coming in at more than a factor of two difference, it is not a credible claim.
I view climate change as the most important challenge to humanity, and I daily regret that I did not choose a career path that let me direct address it in my workday, leaving my research to only a couple hours a day in the evenings.
And 15 years ago, I viewed nuclear as probably the only route forward, as many others did at the time too. I closely followed construction projects started then. And by following, I have become absolutely disillusioned about the possibility of nuclear. The time to build and perfect designs was 15 years ago, so that we could deploy now. Instead. The opportunity was squandered with incompetence, and we are now further away from building large nuclear reactors than we were in 2005.
And I'm the same time period, we have had an absolute revolution in costs for wind and solar and storage.
Please point out a straw man argument that I have made. I have tried to be respectful here, and apologize if I haven't. But I do not find you to be realistic about nuclear's current prospects, and current costs. If you believe that nuclear could be a climate solution, I urge you to investigate both its recent history and the recent history of our newer, better technologies. We are no longer living in 1970 and we can not apply its reasoning.
This is a little pedantic, but I don't think it's fair to say France has also had a terrible experience with nuclear energy. According to Wikipedia [1], they've have about 15 major incidents totaling about 1 death and 300 million dollars in additional cost, while 70% of their electricity is nuclear.
Additionally, the TGV has been a rousing success (they closed down their domestic airline because it couldn't compete in price) in part because they had access to such cheap, consistent power.
While France has had good experiences with operation of existing facilities, they have not had good experiences with building reactors that could replace their aging fleet. For example at Flamanville:
> EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.[6][2]
I think the big issue with nuclear (that doesn't come up) is not cost or waste, but proliferation.
Even if we could build nuclear plants in the USA or Europe, we will be far less willing to lend out the technology to developing countries, especially those who are our geopolitical enemies (or in the influence of our geopolitical enemies). Actually, I don't think that will ever happen -- look at how much effort/innocent lives/etc we expended for the Iran deal.
These countries will try to source fuel from their most powerful regional neighbor, who might not be on best terms with the US, which would inflame everyone, and for that reason, US/the West will not ever give up the keys to the kingdom.
I agree that "the Iran deal" is a sore issue. But that is not the issue. Regarding climate change, I would focus much more in China and India getting nuclear power plants (which they are building right now), rather than worry about proliferation, since that ship sailed decades ago.
I should be clear, I think the US policy re: proliferation is more draconian than necessary, and will essentially prevent any new nuclear technology from being shared, worsening climate change and increasing the risk of mishaps.
Climate change is a global problem and if nuclear is going to be a part of the solution the proliferation issue is central.
I'd be a big fan of fission energy if it wasn't for people.
1. Processing uranium ore into sufficiently enriched U235 creates a lot of waste. That waste needs to essentially be stored (at least I'm unaware of a better option). I'm talking about UF6 centrifuge byproducts here.
2. Depleted uranium fuel also needs to be stored.
3. While running the plant needs to be properly maintained and serviced.
So I'm not sure the true cost of (1) and (2) is represented by fission energy costs. Maybe it is but the infrastructure around this (the NRC for inspections, storage sites, etc) needs to be accounted for.
I don't trust people to do any one of these things let alone all three. Not long term and at scale.
We need it to be cheaper, that will make it much easier to build our nuclear fleet. Solar, wind, batteries, and gas are much cheaper in the vast majority of power markets. The only way to build out nuclear is for innovation to drive down the price, or for society to come to grips with negative externalities from gas and coal.
What I think you mean is that politicians have spoken and the market saw the open coffers and took advantage of that.
If I go to the market and ask for 240TWh of stable energy each year (Danish electricity consumption), without any carbon-based sources as backup, which technology will provide that the cheapest?
Oddly enough, electricity is 50% more expensive in windmill-rich Denmark, than nuclear and hydro-powered Sweden. One wonders what the market is trying to tell us Danes...
My whole life was altered by a nuclear power accident, and I was lucky to "just" spend summers far from home (so as to not be outside in the contaminated area) for years before my family moved away. Millions of people developed health issues, and many, many people died, although the "official" statistics will tell you thousands.
If you're not afraid of nuclear power, you're a fool.
If you're not afraid of environmental and habitat destruction through all the various different means, you're a fool.
So because I was in an airplane crash and developed a fear of flying, which doesn't seem unreasonable, everyone who isn't afraid of flying is now a fool?
Nuclear is not free of risks, that goes without saying. But the risks in mining uranium, operating the plants, and storage or repurposing of the waste are still lower than a million people installing solar panels on rooftops. Accidents happen and we should minimize them. Trying to live zero risk by cutting out what bit you before rather than what bit a lot of other people does not make sense.
I'm not against solar, I'm not against nuclear. I'm for reducing the biggest sources of damage (coal, gas, cows, planes, etc.). We, densely populated Europe in particular, seem to be having a lot of trouble deploying land-consuming technologies like solar and wind at a rate that makes us likely not to trigger any runaway climate-affecting processes. I see nuclear as an option, on the expensive side but definitely not beyond what our western society can pay, that would make a big step ten years from the moment we commit to it (and cost-wise roughly on par with off-shore wind, cheaper or more expensive depending on who you ask, so cost is apparently not the problem in any country that deploys significant amounts of off-shore wind). I just can't decide whether there's still hope of rationality in this debate, especially being involved with brainwashed climate activists that somehow convinced themselves it's super dangerous (that's demonstrably untrue) and a few of them know details like that it's more expensive (but never know by how much (~2x according to UK and USA studies, I can lookup the links tomorrow (1:30am here)), nor can they explain how France doesn't have crazy energy prices (<2x compared to countries with nearly zero nuclear) with 70% of the power coming from nuclear, nor are they opposed to other solutions that would mean increasing the cost by as much if that gets us to CO2 neutrality)...
Where was this? I feel rude to object to your personal history, but no major, trustworthy institution has reported anything like this.
The worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, had around 50 casualties. This was mostly due to the handling by the Soviet Union, not something inherent to nuclear power itself (other than the obvious radiation involved, but the secrecy, lack of knowledge, etc. is 100% a political issue).
To be precise, Chernobyl had 31 casualties and around 4000 statistically estimated death toll. That is, life expectancy reduced because of radiation exposure.
That's basically on par with the casualties resulting from 9/11. Blaming Chernobyl on inherent dangers of nuclear power feels a lot like blaming 9/11 on skyscrapers. The USSR was absurdly reckless and incompetent. It wasn't just some freak chance that everything went wrong, even the designers of the RBMK reactor knew that operating it in the way the operators did would be catastrophic. Any competent reactor operator should have understood why the power level dropped so much at Chernobyl and should have understood why just removing the control rods was such a terrible idea to "fix" it.
How did it built the reactors to start with, then? The reality is never that simple. One interesting remark that comes often in the Legasov notes is that military handled these reactors safely, but since reactors of exactly same design were put into civil use, safety culture was not transferred, out of secrecy-induced ignorance.
Sure, there was some details about the reactor design that were not disclosed because "state secrets" but the very glaring error occurred after the operator deliberately ignored the safety limits that were shared and knowingly exceeded that by withdrawing all of the control rods. I'm not saying the USSR didn't have any capable nuclear engineers, but that operator should never have even stepped foot in a control room with their lack of knowledge of nuclear physics and a blatant willingness to just push forward when they know they don't understand what the reactor was doing. Add on top of that management insisting that they push on and get the reactor up to power, to hell with the consequences. Xenon poisoning after high output operation was not some secret safeguarded knowledge. The reactor operating limits were known to the operator, he decided to blow past them anyways.
I'd call their behavior, both management and the operator, reckless and incompetent. Even in the original design to forego a full containment structure, that was predicated on making sure that the operating limits specified were never exceeded and no one bothered to check to see if the night shift guy was clueless or not. It'd be one thing if they followed up the design to forego the containment structure with rigorous controls around ensuring competent operators and hard physical limits on reactor operations but they didn't.
According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, 25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled"
Which makes a total of 60,000 dead and 165,000 disabled (by now).
The organisation Médecins pour la prévention de la guerre nucléaire estimated that 10,000 babies had born in Europe with malformations attributable to Chernobyl, and 5,000 sucklings died by the effects of radiation.
The "but just 31 people died" statement, that conveniently forgets about the long and middle term health effects suffered, or about the effects on babies and pregnant women, is incredibly disrespectful for the victims.
I lived in Minsk, 400km from Chernobyl when it happened, so I should count as one of those "victims". Still, I would rather maintain the deathcount of 31 people and the International Atomic Energy Agency figure of 4000 projected deaths.
Crooks will tell you anything in exchange of funds and media attention.
This deathcount is just for people dying by acute poisoning radiation before 90 days. Leaving cancer and middle term effects out of the statistics is not a realistic way to measure mortality here.
More than 31 people died that day. There were emergency personnel and journalists filming molten containment rods (which was filmed), and they must be included in that 4000 because they are definitely dead.
With that 70s technology and understanding, which would you rather be a responder for, Chernobyl or The World Trade Center (after the second collapse)?
I think the biggest problem with nuclear energy is humanity itself. We are simply not capable of making long term commitment and keeping them. Sure theoretically nuclear power is safe, especially in developed countries like the US and Europe.
But let's pretend we build a super safe nuclear facility somewhere in Europe. In the beginning we will be very vigilant. The depleted ore will be properly stored (or whatever the toxic nuclear byproduct is). Maintenance will be kept to highest standard but what happens in 20 years? During that time frame a lot can change, a country can be bankrupted, and has to cut a budget. What is a fairly rich country today might not be one in 20 years.
But let's say that doesn't happen. We also always try to optimize. Say we fill our storage for depleted ore, and we look for a new one. We figure out that we can outsource it to another country because it is cheaper. This country has the same standards we do, so we happily give it to them. But after a while they can't accept anymore so we start looking for other countries to sell our waste product to, and because we have already outsourced it once, we will probably do it again but this time at lower standards.
What I am saying is, it is really difficult to predict how we handle a nuclear plant built today, 40-100 years from now, because this is how long the lifetime of a plant and its byproducts are at minimum.
Meanwhile wind/solar/batteries has a much better defined lifetime. After only 10 years we will most likely recycle them. Yes sometimes recycling them creates unnecessary waste because some countries/companies/people will cut corners but the damage caused by improperly recycled solar and even batteries is so much lower then the damage of what a nuclear power plant can do.
So the question is, do we trust all countries that 'can safely operate a nuclear plant today' to do so in 20-50 years? What about the waste products? Can we be sure that they will always be properly stored? That every country checks their stores for leaks regularly over 100 years? And this doesn't even account for developing countries that want -- and possible need nuclear power -- to catch up to developed countries. Can we just deny it to them while we are doing it ourselves?
If humanity has proven anything, it's that we are not capable of making such decisions of a long period of time reliably.
That suggests solar and wind are much cheaper than nuclear, globally at least. But maybe that's not accounting for the battery costs necessary to make solar and wind practical for usual patterns of load?
Latest Lazard LCOE (Levelized cost of energy) report actually showed that the building new of the cheapest onshore wind is lower than marginal cost of running existing nuclear plants. It also showed that PV+Storage, though with their defined amount, can compete to nuclear new builds.
the problem with wind, solar is that manufacturing them in sufficient capacity to replace fossils fuels will create even more pollution.
Those billions of solar panels and the materials and energy used to create and recycle them are not coming out of thin air. You have to burn enormous amounts of fossil fuels to generate that energy. It is not sustainable in the long run.
Nuclear, because of its extremely high energy density and close to zero emissions, is the best shot we have saving the environment.
Do you have a reference to indicate that the carbon footprint is greater for renewables than nuclear?
I tried to find some data on it and discovered this[1] IPCC report which indicates that renewables generally have lower lifetime emissions than nuclear, with the exception of utility-scale photovoltaic solar.
(I was surprised that any type of renewable has a larger lifetime emission estimate, so I'm puzzling over the reasons behind that now)
Edit: follow-up - also discovered a second report[2] published by the IPCC, which references two separate emissions estimates - one by the IPCC themselves as part of an 'AR5' report, and one published by SSRN (a separate organization).
The SSRN estimate indicates that solar photovoltaic (unspecified utility vs residential) is on an equal lifecycle emissions footing with nuclear.
I wonder if they assumed the utility scale solar used concrete footings. There are solar ground mounting systems that use no concrete at all, just steel earth anchors.
In any case, CO2 released during construction is a poor metric. What matters is CO2 avoided per $.
You're making it sound like solar and wind cause a net increase in fossil fuels because there are non-renewables involved in their manufacture, but that's simply not a true statement.
They emit nuclear waste and we still have no good way to deal with that. Geological disposal most certainly has long term effects and we really don't even know what those will be.
Michael Shellenberger has been pushing his recent book pretty hard recently and it seems they are also trying to gain attention with the anti-intellectuals now after failing with the other side. He has been on Tucker Carlson recently.
Besides that Shellenberger bought Zion Lights. A former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion in the UK.
I'm willing to accept that the technical and safety aspects of nuclear are manageable. The hard part is that humans are responsible for operating the reactors.
How do we protect against regulatory capture, when there may be very large sums of money involved with safety decisions? (Note that regulatory capture can go both ways: a company running a reactor might prefer regulations to be lax for their reactor, but unattainably strict for any new reactor a competitor might build.)
My answer to this is to look at it this way. We’ve been running nuclear power for over fifty years, exposed to these very concerns you have of regulatory capture and humans at the controls, and it’s still over that time proven to be the safest form of electricity. So the experiment has been done and the conclusion is really: nuclear power is safer than other forms in spite of regulatory conditions or humans.
Nuclear would be fine, if it weren't for human nature. Time and time again humanity has proven it can not handle the responsibility of any process that involves low probability but very high stakes long term risks.
And it is not that it's a close call. Blatant irresponsible gambles at huge scale for concentrated short term profits are the core of our preferred socioeconomic paradigms.
How come there are many countries with 100% renewable then?
Big, small, rich, poor; we have many examples of different characteristics and still we get the nuclear vs coal debate as those were the only options.
Is it really that expensive, how come 3rd world countries can afford it?
I think it's more about politics than feasibility.
I'm not afraid of nuclear power but I am afraid of the corruption that seems to be inextricably entwined with it.
If a private company and its investors want to build a nuclear power plant and are willing to earmark sufficient funds for decommissioning then I say they should be allowed to go for it. But they should not expect any more state support than any other commercial enterprise and they should be expected to bid on the open market for the resources (land, water, rail and road connections, etc.) that they need without relying on state guarantees for the power that is generated not for compulsory purchase orders when someone refuses to sell their house to make way for it. And certainly the state should not be demolishing sites of special scientific interest in order to build nuclear, or any other, power stations.
The same, of course, should apply to wind and solar.
We absolutely should have a healthy fear and respect for nuclear power. I’m personally for it to provide a baseline load for other renewables.
But let’s not pretend like there are no risks anymore. Although in a theoretical setting we have reactor designs that are safe, in practice plants can be mismanaged and unexpected disasters can strike. People also thought Chernobyl and Fukushima were safe before they weren’t, and the price for getting it wrong is so high.
One thing I’d like to know is why there isn’t more research into thorium reactors, when I looked into some years ago it seemed like a much safer technology, so I was missing the reason why it wasn’t getting nearly as much funding or attention.
We should have a healthy respect and fear of all forms of energy generation/harvest. Energy is, well, energetic! Everything we have done to produce and harness energy has been dangerous to people, plants, and animals. Stating that nuclear energy is dangerous is just stating a tautology.
The interesting discussion is about the trade-offs relative to other energy sources.
You could kill someone with the output of the inverters very easily. Also, the ones that are placed over "bare land" have killed life that was there on that land before the panels stole the energy that used to hit the land there.
That's not to mention what it took to gather materials, manufacture, and transport the panels.
> Also, the ones that are placed over "bare land" have killed life that was there on that land before the panels stole the energy that used to hit the land there.
There's also evidence that the shade they provide reduced loss of water in a similar way as trees would.
Same. I learned about thorium reactors a few years back from Kirk Sorensen. Purportedly, thorium is safer, readily available, and produces less radioative waste. "Kirk currently serves as the President and Chief Technologist at Flibe Energy..."[1]
It seems the anti-nuclear crowd on HN always points out the cost/MWH vs wind/solar as a sort of coup des grace against nuclear but I have never understood that argument. Can someone help me to understand how the same reasoning couldn't be applied to fusion entrepreneurship as well? The cost per MWH for fusion right now is infinity because we can't _yet_ get net energy gain. Should the current inefficiency stop innovation and investment?
Yes. There is no rational reason to expect fusion will produce a single watt of practical, commercial power in the lifetime of the grandchildren of anyone reading this. The most optimistic estimate of power density of a productive plasma is so low that a practical fusion plant would need to be tens or hundreds of times as large as a current nuke. Then, it would destroy itself in a short time, leaving hundreds of tons of more-or-less radioactive waste.
Fusion research is a jobs program for high-neutron-flux physicists, to provide a population to draw on for weapons work. There has never been an expectation of practical power generation, and its prospects fall as renewables continue getting cheaper.
Fusion is ridiculous. It will make fission look simple and cheap by comparison. Those investing in it are pouring money into a bottomless pit. And this would be true even if the plasma confinement issues were 100% solved.
Even if it really is safe now, it's going to be hard to sell the public on nuclear when we keep telling them how safe it is and how Chernobyl was a one-time Communist screw-up, and Fukushima only happened because it was an old design, and every other excuse listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
Dropping the ball wasn't a one time thing, and it's going to be hard to talk people into believing we somehow now finally will stop dropping the ball, or that we have foreseen every possible edge case, or that the worst-case scenario really isn't that bad.
> Radiation release during explosion and fire at Russian nuclear missile test site
> Thor missile launch failures during nuclear weapons testing at Johnston Atoll
> Goiânia accident
A lot of these aren't accidents related to use of nuclear for power generation.
Chernobyl, three mile island, Fukushima, and Lucens are just the civilian ones and thats _a lot_ for something "totally safe" in a short period of time relative to our long term future... and thats 4 different parts of the world with different governments and engineering standards!
Those "weren't that bad", but it'll be hard to convince the public the next one can't be worse, larger scale, longer lasting, and with more cancer. Even if the science is there, the trust isn't.
Small, safe, portable nuclear would be a "nice to have" but not a "need to have". And just like modern passenger airplanes they would need to have extensive safety tests before deployment.
Let's put aside Chernobyl, Fukushima and all the safety/economic/environment implications those incidents have had.
What about the nuclear waste ? How/where are we gonna store it ?
And for how long is gonna be safe, before containers start leaking radioactive st into the environment ?
Nobody wants to live anywhere near that st.
That's a big problem.
Thus waste storage engineers need to make a plan to secure high-level waste for about 1000 years. Is this a difficult problem? 1000 years is certainly a long time compared with the lifetimes of governments and countries! But the volumes are so small, I feel nuclear waste is only a minor worry, compared with all the other forms of waste we are inflicting on future generations. At 25 ml per year, a lifetime’s worth of high-level nuclear waste would amount to less than 2 litres. Even when we multiply by 60 million people, the lifetime volume of nuclear waste doesn’t sound unmanageable: 105 000 cubic metres. That’s the same volume as 35 olympic swimming pools. If this waste were put in a layer one metre deep, it would occupy just one tenth of a square kilometre.
in the US No one wants to live near the hidsiously environmentally unsafe fly ash tips from the 120'ish million tons produced yearly by coal power plants either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash and they were told to get stuffed basically.
Waste storage is a technical non-issue (Yucca Mountain). It is a political one.
I keep meaning to have a bumper sticker made: “Solar Power is Nuclear Power!” with a cute little trefoil for one of the O’s.
Until we can do profitable fusion, though, “alternative” energy may be the best, holistically.
Neighborhood-, ward-, and city-sized nuclear à la Taylor Wilson’s proposal would be ideal, but humans will be humans and we can’t afford such a security risk. This pains me to no end. We’ve been given a near-magical metal (see XKCD, “Plutonium”) but we’re too... base to manufacture and use it appropriately.
I’m butchering it, but the quote that keeps coming back to me is, “Nuclear is a 22nd-century solution to a 20th-century problem.”
If you’re into fate and religious stuff, I have a suspicion it was deliberately dangled in front of us as the one way to conquer interstellar space, if we can maturely manage the material itself.
We only need nuclear if you care about co2 (even then its debatable, but whatever).
And we don't actually care about co2. Everyone lies and says they do, but we keep on emitting it. We're even emitting more every year.
This is like how it's vitally important to find a cure/vaccine for malaria, vitally important until you have to decide between that and finding a tax cut or a pensions increase or a new shiny aircraft carrier. Then suddenly it will wait till next year...
Yes, and we don't even need to use uranium, and it doesn't need to be as dangerous. Fusion is mainly a problem of scaling the system up now I believe, there are a few possible fuels depending on the method if I recall correctly.
Unfortunately we are not even close to getting control of fusion just like fission. And for fission, we can hardly tell whether it brings more benefit than harm as the radioactive wastes take so long to neutralize.
Nuclear is expensive due to regulation. Renewables are going to destroy vast swaths of the world. The drive to get raw materials with strip the amazon of her forests. All of this because we’ve adopted a fevered dream of storage from solar or wind.
The way I see it, nuclear is proven. And renewable storage is uncertain. Most likely we can make it work, but what if we can't? It could quite literally doom us.
It may sound macabre, but I would feel much safer if I knew the renewable advocates had serious skin in the game. If they were duty bound to commit seppuku should the renewables push fail.
Please, tell us what happened in Fukushima with comparisons to other forms of energy production. Include dollar costs, life costs of humans, animals, and plants, costs in terms of physical footprint, noise, net carbon output, and any other relevant factors you can think of.
No form of energy comes without trade-offs and dangers.
Also should we just rely on nuclear because it’s accessible technology to us right now? We need new forms of energy creation, accepting nuclear energy as our defacto power source will be equivalent to our ancestors choosing coal when looking back at history. Don’t be naive.
You do also know that older nuclear power plants are a major headache to most governments
> Does a plane accident imply we haven't figured out flight yet?
The 737MAX implies that we can't be trusted with following sound technical processes to ensure safety of complicated machinery where there's a financial incentive to cut corners.
Shifting the goalposts, but still a magnificent example: does the 737MAX invalidate all other dozens of airplane models with billions of passenger/mile without issues?
The 737 Max implies that third world pilot training programs should come under deeper scrutiny. It wasn’t a coincidence that both crashes had “pilot mill” pilots. The FO on Ethiopian had less hours than required to get a commercial certificate in the US, let alone an ATP rating required by US law to fly airliners. And Lion Air was a maintenance joke with a long history of 737 accidents and incidents.
The incidents were unrelated to maintenance. They were only related to training in the sense that the airlines in question didn't have access to the training that would have informed pilots of the serious design flaws inherent in this aircraft.
New revealings in the report include the discovery of the reason the AOA sensor was feeding faulty information to the flight control computer was that it was most likely improperly repaired by a U.S.-based maintenance repair facility. [0]
So, the seemingly racist thread hypothesis of "Indonesians are too stupid to operate modern aircraft" still doesn't hold.
This is not equivalent in terms of risk assessment. One broken product does not endanger environmental ecosystems or countries at the same scale as nuclear.
Bear in mind that this was a pretty routine earthquake that is still causing issues almost a decade later.
Nuclear really is the only viable option at scale...
“Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told, we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of biofuels? Something like 4 Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 61,000 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build three 100-megawatt steam turbines every day—1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week—52 a year, times 25.” Add it up, and when you’re done, you’ve got an area about the size of America—“Call it Renewistan,” says Griffith—covered with stuff dedicated to generating humanity’s energy."
That argument isn't even an argument. "Oooh, numbers are big and scary! Run away!"
The truth is that renewables (well, aside from biomass; that's usually what those arguments boil down to, so don't use biomass as your renewable source) scale just fine. The Earth is constantly struck by 100,000 terawatts of sunlight, and global primary energy demand is less than 20 terawatts.
Where do you put all the waste you generated covering renewistan with all the equipment and infrastructure you had to build??? Is that not an environmental disaster??? The environmental impact of all nuclear would be an order of magnitude smaller.
Where do we put the waste from industrial society in general? The material flow through the renewable energy system will still be but a fraction of the flow through the economy as a whole. The US makes 100 million tonnes of steel annually, for example. There is no need to use any toxic (or, really, uncommon) elements in renewables, so recycle what it makes sense to recycle and just landfill the rest. This is sustainable indefinitely.
In the very long term, humanity might face a problem with exposure of crustal rocks by mining operations. This causes reducing materials in the rocks to react with atmospheric oxygen, gradually depleting that oxygen. The long term solution to that will be to bury some reduced materials to compensate (the production of those materials released oxygen when oxides or CO2 were reduced). So, some level of sustained burial of waste material is not only acceptable, it's likely to be necessary.
We don't need nuclear, because we have other options for firm low-carbon energy (geothermal) and energy storage of surplus and super-cheap intermittent renewables (lithium ion, flow batteries, hydrogen, methane, compressed air, liquid air...).
If nuclear could compete on cost, we should go for it, but it can't without a major tech breakthrough. The potential tech breakthroughs (SMRs) are far less technologically mature than any of our other options.
For example, we will definitely need to start producing hydrogen in order to decarbonize heavy industry (e.g. steel production, ammonia production, etc.). So we need hydrogen infrastructure because it's the only foreseeable path for several parts of our economy. It will get developed. Even this article, which is interpreted as heavily skeptical of hydrogen, sees a huge future for hydrogen on the grid:
https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
Nuclear will only have a future if it can solve its construction problem, and compete with more modern technologies. As it is, it's a dinosaur from the past, a legacy of a time before we had better tech. The more we learn about nuclear, the more expensive it seems to get, in contrast to pretty much any good tech.