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.
> If nuclear could compete on cost,
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).