[HN Gopher] Nuclear Power in France
___________________________________________________________________
Nuclear Power in France
Author : vanilla-almond
Score : 215 points
Date : 2021-10-12 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.world-nuclear.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.world-nuclear.org)
| redm wrote:
| "Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035."
|
| I'm no expert on Nuclear power but it seems to me were going in
| the wrong direction. At a time when we're investing so much money
| in other fuels, we could be investing that in better nuclear
| power, like Small Modular Reactors [1], Sodium Cooled Fission,
| Small Pellet reactors, etc. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-
| sm...
|
| [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/safer-nuclear-
| rea...
|
| Edit:
|
| I see France is investing in Small Reactors, but only 1 billion.
|
| "One billion euros is to be thrown into nuclear power: "We need
| to develop small, innovative nuclear reactors in France by 2030,
| with better waste management," Macron said."
|
| [3] https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20211012-hydrogen-nuclear-
| power...
| woko wrote:
| The government policy for a reduction to 50% is not based on
| issues with nuclear power itself. As far as I have seen, there
| are mainly 2 reasons mentioned in the public debate: i) a
| concern about the disposal of nuclear wastes and the long-term
| cost of their storage, and ii) the desire to follow other
| countries' policies, with a focus on wind, water and sunlight,
| rather than leading the way with the cheapest and most modern
| solution for electricity production.
|
| The decision was written in the law in 2015 [1,2], with a
| statement that renewable electricity (wind, water) should reach
| 40% of the production, which implies that nuclear power should
| not account for 70% in the future.
|
| Overall, I believe this is not a bad idea because i) renewable
| electricity is bound to get better thanks to worldwide
| research, and ii) it is smart not to put all your eggs in the
| same basket.
|
| [1]
| https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...
| (in French)
|
| [2]
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_relative_%C3%A0_la_transit...
| (in French)
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > i) a concern about the disposal of nuclear wastes and the
| long-term cost of their storage
|
| I don't understand this concern. If you already have several
| decades worth of nuclear waste to manage/dispose, is it
| really more expensive to manage/dispose another several
| decades? For example, if you're disposing in a deep geologic
| repository, is it really much more expensive to put a little
| bit of waste in a big hole versus a little more waste?
|
| > Overall, I believe this is not a bad idea because i)
| renewable electricity is bound to get better thanks to
| worldwide research, and ii) it is smart not to put all your
| eggs in the same basket.
|
| I don't think anyone is advocating 100% nuclear energy, but
| nuclear is the only clean base load energy source. Without
| nuclear, we're putting all of our eggs in the "renewable
| energy" basket (assuming the goal is to move off of fossil
| fuels) and praying for a miracle breakthrough for base load.
| Considering that it takes decades to bring a new nuclear
| plant online, decommissioning a nuclear plant is the height
| of folly. It necessarily means more dependence on fossil
| fuels and the countries who provide them (in Europe, this
| largely means Russia).
| forty wrote:
| Where have you seen nuclear is the cheapest solution for
| electrity production? Nuclear has some benefits, but price
| does seem to be one of them (and actually one of the reasons
| for preferring renewable)
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Comparing non-dispatchable sources with dispatchable
| sources is comparing apples to oranges. Solar is cheap,
| until you saturate daytime consumption and have to start
| building storage. Similar with wind.
| derriz wrote:
| Nuclear isn't dispatchable - most reactors have a design
| output and are not intended to be ramped up and down.
| They require a big chunk of actual dispatchable power
| (natural gas mainly) to provide demand following. LACE is
| a measure which takes into account the value of the
| generated electricity as well as the cost of production
| but nuclear does poorly here also as much of its output
| occurs when wholesale prices are low.
| NaNDude wrote:
| nuclear dispatching is mostly done over international
| distribution in UE. the requirements in more
| dispatchables power like gaz or hydro is'nt comparable
| with weather randomized energy sources with poor
| efficiency which usually require a 1:1 alternative
| dispatchables sources (gaz or hydro again). France
| electric energy mix is/was around 70-80% nuclear.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| A better term might be "non-intermittent". Nuclear plants
| produce the same amount of energy regardless of time of
| day or wind speed. And power output can be modulated with
| more aggressive cooling. Same thermal output of the
| reactor, but lessened electrical output.
|
| By comparison, any plan for a renewable grid requires
| massive storage capacity. Most hand-wave this away by
| assuming some new technology will effectively make
| storage free.
| derriz wrote:
| Nuclear plants are also "intermittent" - the average US
| reactor spends 32 days offline per year.
|
| Does that mean a grid relying heavily on nuclear needs
| massive amounts of storage?
|
| No - it means you need to have redundant capacity which
| is the solution also used for wind and solar. The benefit
| of nuclear in this regard isn't that it's "non-
| intermittent" - it's that the most common failure modes
| for a nuclear nuclear are statistically independent
| (except when it's not like in a natural catastrophe
| situation - like Fukushima).
|
| But as a grid operator trying to match supply and demand,
| it's just a variant of the same problem.
|
| The solution preferred by grids heavily dependent on wind
| for example is simply to over-provision wind and use de-
| rating while maintaining natural gas capacity reserve
| (which is relatively cheap). This approach is relatively
| proven at this stage with some European countries
| deriving around half their electricity from
| "intermittent" renewables.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| A capacity factor of over 90% is exceptionally good. Wind
| and solar are 35% and 25% respectively [1]. And this down
| time for refuelling and other tasks is scheduled in
| advance. This not at all comparable to solar and wind's
| uncontrollable intermittency. A nuclear grid requires
| vastly less overproduction than a renewable grid. As you
| point out, renewable sources end up falling back on
| fossil fuels to pick up the slack. That's not an option
| if our goal is zero emissions.
|
| 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-
| capaci...
| namibj wrote:
| Hydrogen requires minimal modifications to gas turbines,
| notably the combustors need to be swapped out.
|
| Storage and distribution works the same as for fossil
| methane (pressurized in cave systems/old gas wells).
|
| Production is simple, and we yes, the efficiency is
| around 20-30% round-trip. But that's enough to handle up
| to ~30% of electricity supply with less than 2x
| overcapacity.
|
| And that's assuming you don't just slap carbon capture on
| a gas turbine you feed with fractionally distilled oxygen
| (>99% should be easily enough) and enough exhaust back-
| feed to not melt the turbine blades. A diesel would
| probably deal better with the combustion temperatures,
| though.
|
| And Fischer-Tropsch can turn captured carbon into piston-
| engine-suitable liquid fuel, if you'd need to.
| lazide wrote:
| On a 'basic capacity price' type basis, nuclear is dirt
| cheap. When you throw in endless political tarpits and
| their side effects (like having no economies of scale at
| all despite the clear opportunity for them) then yes, it is
| very expensive. _shrug_
|
| Most nuclear projects outside of China basically turned
| into exercises in endless planning churn and endless delays
| for no rational reason to appease anti-progress political
| factions long ago. For an example of a similar money
| pit/tarpit playing out in a similar way, check out "High
| Speed" Rail in California.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _When you throw in endless political tarpits and their
| side effects..._ "
|
| Like "where are you going to put the waste?" and "I don't
| want my property values to go to zero when an accident
| occurs"? :-)
|
| If one were suitably cynical, one might suggest China
| does not have that kind of problem.
| evilos wrote:
| Fun fact: all the nuclear waste that the US has ever
| produced fits in football field at a height of 30 feet.
|
| Currently, spent fuel just stays at the nuclear plants
| because there is so little of it and it's not a problem.
| You just put them in sealed casks and they sit there. You
| don't really want to lose access to the spent fuel either
| because if you develop breeder reactors that spent fuel
| is now just 'fuel'.
| lazide wrote:
| Nah, those (if legitimate) aren't tarpits. We've had, at
| various times, approved locations for waste, and we
| actually still approve the storage of waste on site -
| indefinite storage of 'temporary waste'. Paying into an
| insurance fund in case of a nuclear disaster would be far
| cheaper than what has been happening.
|
| What happens instead is 1) a set of requirements is made,
| 2) someone spends years figuring it out. 3) it gets
| approved, 4) before it finishes getting built (or started
| to be built in some case), someone files a lawsuit
| causing it to stop or changes the rules, 5) rinse and
| repeat, or;
|
| Someone gets the bright idea to try something new and
| unproven, and then they pay all the R&D time, and then
| the first thing starts happening, and then you're
| tarpitted again.
|
| In California it even appears to be part of the plan for
| high speed rail; as the engineering firms get paid every
| time the plan needs to get redrawn, and they can keep
| juking between plans forever until the funds are gone.
| This happened with Caltrain electrification for a decade.
| Billions spent for literally a 45 miles'ish stretch of
| track to electrify it, with zero progress over that time.
|
| If folks are being paid to make plans instead of make a
| project, that's usually what they are going to do.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If Amory Lovins had designed a nuclear reactor that would
| be unaffordable to build it would be
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
|
| You can make the case that regulation inflates the cost
| of nuclear power plants, and that's somewhat true, but
| the deep problem is the cost of the steam turbine and
| other facilities (e.g. heat exchangers) to accept energy
| at the low temperatures that the LWR works at.
|
| All of that is so big and expensive it would be hard to
| make the economics work even if you got the heat for
| free.
|
| A liquid metal fast reactor or a molten salt reactor or a
| high temperature gas cooled reactor could power a closed-
| cycle gas turbine
|
| https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1221819
|
| which would fit in the employee break room of the turbine
| house at a nuclear plant. Such a "fourth-generation"
| nuclear power plant might have compelling economics to
| build, but it's hard to believe anybody is going to start
| and finish an LWR outside of China.
|
| It's little appreciated that the cost of the steam
| turbine is what killed coal circa 1980. Once GE adapted
| aerospace turbines for low-capital cost power plants on
| the ground, it made no sense to build more thermal coal
| plants.
|
| In the late 1970s you see various attempts to save the
| coal industry, plausibly you could have gotten better
| capital costs pyrolyzing the coal and running the gas
| through a gas turbine. This kind of technology is making
| a comeback because it can be coupled with carbon storage
| to make CO2 free or CO2 negative energy.
| makomk wrote:
| The UK tried building gas cooled reactors that produced
| more useful and efficient steam temperatures on the
| output. They worked - in fact, they make up pretty much
| the entire UK nuclear generation capacity these days -
| but turned out not to be as practical as boring PWR
| reactors due to various annoying engineering issues.
| There are other reactor concepts out there which promise
| to do better but they're pretty untested and would also
| likely turn out to be harder to build than they look.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They're still running a steam turbine but it is more
| compact and efficient.
|
| Fourth-generation reactors won't be easy, but the
| motivation to develop them is strong.
|
| Arguably there is a lot of experience with liquid metal
| fast reactors, many of the problems like sodium fires and
| problems with inspection are probably solved. Think
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Flux_Test_Facility
|
| as opposed to
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, the basic economics of a PWR or even BWR are quite
| sound and you don't need fancy tech to change that. Even
| with very expensive uranium and very expensive turbines,
| it doesn't change that (depending on the number of orders
| of magnitude we're talking about of course). And if
| you're making 10x-100x of the things in a few years, it
| actually gets cheaper for both, since you can build a
| series of turbines, or reopen a sizable mine and just do
| it, instead of what we do now.
|
| And now, instead of it taking a couple years to build
| with predictable timelines and approvals, you end up in
| decades long and impossible to predict legal fights that
| drag out construction; ruin any sort of economies of
| scale; and put everyone into a 'meh' state when it comes
| to actually getting anything done on a timeline. I know
| folks in Nuclear Engineering for some of the plants that
| literally have spent a decade plus generating paperwork
| and going in circles. Very, very, very well paid folks I
| might add.
|
| A steam turbine doesn't cost $5 billion dollars and 5
| years per plant like these things do.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Nuclear is very expensive, that's why even countries very
| positive to nuclear aren't happily replacing their old
| reactors. France did the math recently, 100 billion euros
| for 10 new reactors. The old ones are better from an
| economical point of view so it's much better to try and
| keep them going.
| lazide wrote:
| I take it you didn't read my earlier comment?
|
| There is no engineering reason for those reactors to cost
| $10bln. Literally zero.
|
| There are lots and lots of other reasons why they will
| probably cost even more than $10bln/ea though.
|
| Just like there is literally zero engineering reason for
| the 'high speed' rail in California to cost the insane
| sums it is currently consuming, and will continue to
| consume.
|
| The reason why the old ones are 'better' is because they
| already are operating under existing approvals, so the
| tarpits don't work on them.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There are two problems.
|
| (1) If you could build a nuclear reactor for the sticker
| price, there's the problem that other energy sources got
| cheaper, specifically natural gas fired Brayton cycle
| turbines. To justify nuclear power at the sticker price
| you need to price carbon emissions.
|
| (2) Nuclear power plants cost many more times to build
| than the sticker price. Some people blame delays on
| opposition to nuclear power, but the delays seem
| intrinsic to the process in industry. AP1000 construction
| was hung up in the U.S. because it was hung up in China
| (where environmentalists get shot) and it was hung up
| there because the factory had trouble make a pump that
| was supposed to be easier to make.
|
| On one hand you could make the case for a real accounting
| of the type (2) problem (which I suspect is a game of
| "Poker" where suppliers quote a lowball price because
| they know buyers will keep putting chips in the pot.) But
| I think a more radical approach to the type (1) problem
| is necessary.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Indeed! Rail and nuclear power seem to play out the exact
| same tragedy. Very sad.
| forty wrote:
| If you like trains and nuclear, you should move to
| France, we have lots of both. And pastry too ;)
| kmonsen wrote:
| But you also need to be able to speak French well. If not
| it would be my number 1 country :-)
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I know, but but your costs for both are going up, you're
| loosing your skills.
|
| (The Macron -- Le Pen culture war politics might be even
| more depressing than here, too. At least I think the
| right side is winning here in that arena.)
| woko wrote:
| For instance, it is discussed in this press article [1]
| published in 2016 and available in French. It is mentioned
| that nuclear power costs 60EUR/MWh, compared to 80EUR/MWh
| for wind power. It is also mentioned quite often in the
| French press: I have seen it mentioned a few days ago. The
| source mentioned in the 2016 press article is an official
| report [2] published in 2014.
|
| However, it is true that the maintenance cost increases as
| the power plants get older.
|
| [1] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-vrai-du-
| faux/le-... (in French)
|
| [2] https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/publications/le-cout-de-
| productio... (in French)
| forty wrote:
| Yeah I feel the end of life has not yet been factored in
| the price (ie the cost of dismantling the reactor or
| maintaining it alive forever). It would be very aligned
| with the general philosophy of nuclear ^^ (ie "the next
| generations will either figure it out or pay the price")
| digianarchist wrote:
| Decommissioning costs are huge and were kicked into the
| long grass in the UK instead of being factored in at the
| start like here in Canada.
| godelski wrote:
| Most of the French nuclear reactors were built when they
| had the capacity to build many reactors and thus it was
| cheaper. The problem with a lot of current nuclear costs is
| that you have to reinvent the wheel every time. If you're
| mass producing then things get cheaper. We haven't mass
| produced reactors in decades.
| nickik wrote:
| There is really one reason, the population doesn't like it,
| so they have to pretend reasons exist to build solar or wind.
|
| The cost of waste storage is tiny.
|
| By far the best would to join with Canada on next generation
| nuclear.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Nuclear is always touted as such a good idea on this site, but
| I want to take the opposite stance.
|
| - Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other
| forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that todays
| designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as
| 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single
| catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn't acceptable.
|
| - Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with. Our current
| strategies include finding a secret underground cave, and
| hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it. Not to mention we
| have no plan for dealing with widespread use of nuclear power
| and the waste that would produce.
|
| - Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely
| expensive. These costs make it impractical for a city to invest
| in. They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad for the
| environment, locally and globally) and absurd amounts of space.
|
| - Nuclear is centralized, and vulnerable to attack. In a
| national defense situation, nuclear power plants are large,
| easily identifiable, delicate targets that can take an entire
| area's grid offline with a single hit to a cooling tower. The
| damage doesn't even need to be severe, just enough to warrant a
| shutdown and inspection.
|
| Compared to other readily available green power sources, I
| cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe, distributed,
| clean grid of solar panels.
|
| Maybe one day when humanity is a space faring race we could
| look to nuclear to support us then, but using nuclear on earth
| today is a bad decision.
|
| edit: A large number of replies seem to think I am pro-shutdown
| of plants or pro-coal, but that was never stated. My argument
| is against further investment into nuclear when there are other
| more known technologies available, like solar and wind.
| baud147258 wrote:
| > They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad for the
| environment, locally and globally) and absurd amounts of
| space.
|
| All the other types of power plants use massive amount of
| concrete too and space (except solar panel installed on
| roofs)
| p_j_w wrote:
| Solar panels aren't all that great at EOL, either. They've
| got some toxic materials in them and aren't, as yet, easily
| recyclable. They beat the shit out of fossil fuels as far
| as the environment goes, but they're hardly without their
| own problems.
| smotah wrote:
| Indeed, nuclear power plants requires way less concrete by
| kWh than wind turbines.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in
| other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that
| todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such
| thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single
| catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn't acceptable.
|
| Are we ignoring the hundred thousand people dying per year
| because of coal exhaust? Because it sure seems like that's
| what you're doing. 13,000 people die premature deaths per
| year because of coal power in the United States, more in
| countries with more coal and less stringent emissions
| controls. If we're evaluating "inherent risks", you really
| should include that in your calculus.
|
| Natural gas power production probably kills ~4,000 people per
| year, by the by.
|
| > Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with. Our current
| strategies include finding a secret underground cave, and
| hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it. Not to mention
| we have no plan for dealing with widespread use of nuclear
| power and the waste that would produce.
|
| So is fly ash. Hell, so is CO2.
|
| > Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely
| expensive. These costs make it impractical for a city to
| invest in. They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad
| for the environment, locally and globally) and absurd amounts
| of space.
|
| Never see these arguments raised against coal or natural gas
| plants and production infrastructure.
|
| Also, it's not like governments don't waste crap tons of
| money all the time on dumb things. The F-35 is up to what,
| half a trillion dollars now? The Zumwalt class destroyer cost
| $7.5 billion each _and we don 't even have ammunition for its
| main gun_. There is plenty of money around to make nuclear
| happen, we just decide to pour that money into useless shit
| rather than power.
|
| > Nuclear is centralized, and vulnerable to attack. In a
| national defense situation, nuclear power plants are large,
| easily identifiable, delicate targets that can take an entire
| area's grid offline with a single hit to a cooling tower. The
| damage doesn't even need to be severe, just enough to warrant
| a shutdown and inspection.
|
| I was unaware that natural gas power plants can move. Oh
| wait.
|
| The power grid itself is a huge, vulnerable thing. The actual
| target for enemy actors isn't the power plant itself, which
| is usually hardened, but rather transformer stations that are
| usually soft targets. Hell, one got knocked out in CA
| recently by an unknown actor with a single rifle, no fancy
| nation state equipment needed.
|
| > Compared to other readily available green power sources, I
| cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe,
| distributed, clean grid of solar panels.
|
| The rub is that it is currently impossible to run our power
| grid on renewables. Night time is a thing, as are still days
| when the wind does not blow. Maybe in a few decades we'll
| have sufficient grid level storage in order to make this a
| moot discussion, but we're not there yet. Right now any grid
| running a significant portion of renewables still requires
| "peaker" plants to provide base level load when the sun isn't
| shining and the wind isn't blowing.
|
| And I say that someone with rooftop solar. It's great, but I
| can't run my house on it at night.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in
| other forms of modern energy generation.
|
| The risk is mostly that there's a large, high-profile
| accident every 20 years. Coal power has probably killed more
| regular people (not miners) than nuclear due to its
| emissions, but it's metered out slowly, so it's less scary.
|
| People are more afraid of flying than driving for the same
| reason.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| I do not consider coal to be a modern source of fuel, it's
| clearly a legacy source that we need to be rid of.
| juanjmanfredi wrote:
| For what it's worth, nuclear energy kills fewer people
| per kilowatt hour than any other energy source, including
| solar and wind. This is as of 2012.
|
| Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/1
| 0/energys-d...
| lm28469 wrote:
| Well too bad because closing nuclear reactors right now
| means reopening coal plants, as we've recently seen in
| Germany and France. We don't really have the luxury of
| having time when it comes to energy/electricity and
| nuclear objectively is the best stopgap measure until
| (if) we manage to master intermittent energy sources.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| I also never said anything about closing reactors.
|
| I recommend you try and understand the position
| somebody's trying to take before you argue against them,
| lest you end up embarrassing yourself arguing the wrong
| points, like you are now.
|
| I added some clarity to my point above.
| lkbm wrote:
| I agree with you that we should be pursuing wind and solar at
| this point, but this isn't because it's a better solution
| technologically. Nuclear is still slightly better, IMO. It's
| just politically a non-starter, mostly due to the incorrect
| way humans assess risk, and I think this is an example of
| that:
|
| > If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic
| nuclear plant failure isn't acceptable.
|
| We've been using nuclear power for over sixty years, and the
| most catastrophic nuclear plant failure killed ~4,000
| people[0]. Worst incident in the US was Three-Mile Island
| with 0 deaths. Coal has been killing many more than that in
| the US alone annually for decades, though we may finally be
| below that count[1]. Of course, this is before considering
| the effects of climate change.
|
| It's akin to how air crashes get our attention, while we
| ignore the car accidents that kill 1000 as many people. Air
| pollution deaths are even less visible.
|
| At this point, wind and solar are still slightly behind
| nuclear as a technologically-viable solution (in my amateur
| view), but because they can still iterate, I think they'll
| probably surpass it soon. That said, a lot of us are still
| bitter that we could have converted to a clean, carbon-
| neutral grid in the 1970s (Nixon proposed doing this!) and
| the politics of bad risk analysis (and incumbent coal
| interests) killed it.
|
| Solar+wind have the benefit of political support/momentum. I
| think their biggest political challenge is in building out
| high-voltage transmission lines across land owned by hundreds
| of different entities (and that that keep burning down
| California because maintaining them properly is expensive).
| So yeah, I'm for us going all-in on them. However, them
| saving is is a fantasy, and if we're in fantasy land, why not
| entertain the fantasy of us using nuclear instead? :-)
|
| (Or better yet, why not both?)
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-
| kno...
|
| [1] https://www.catf.us/work/power-plants/coal-pollution/
| kazinator wrote:
| If something is 99.9999999% safe, it's not going to have a
| catastrophic failure. It will have some rare minor failures,
| whose effects are mitigated by a cascade of multiple
| safeguards.
|
| > _Our current strategies include finding a secret
| underground cave_
|
| Let's ignore how radioactive minerals are already found in
| caves.
|
| Just don't ventilate your above-ground cave, and you've got
| radon gas.
| derriz wrote:
| There are a large number of people who believe nuclear is a
| victim of a conspiracy instead of just looking at how
| economics of electricity production has evolved.
|
| Nuclear has been in a steady decline globally since the late
| 1980s.
|
| At one point - during the oil-crisis 70s nuclear was the
| cheapest but coal overtook it in the late 80s/90s - being
| cheaper and more flexible/dispatchable and easier to build.
| By 2000-2010, natural gas displaced coal and now - in the
| last few years or so - solar PV and wind represent over 80%
| of the additional electricity generation capacity added
| globally.
| nickik wrote:
| I think all of those are not really true when we are thinking
| about modern plants that you would build if you were really
| serious.
|
| If you really go into nuclear today you would try to use
| something like Terrestrial Energy Molten Salt reactor or
| something like that.
|
| - Nuclear kills less people, that is worth some tiny risk
|
| - Nuclear waste is actually a resource for the future. You
| can get things like nuclear batteries, medical isotopes and
| so on. Not to mention reusing the fuel in next generation
| reactors.
|
| - Nuclear plants take ages to build because they are big,
| next generation reactors are 10-20x smaller
|
| - Next generation Nuclear reactors are built underground and
| have a very strong defense on top. In war time you could
| reinforce that. That said, for most nation that matters, this
| is not a huge concern.
|
| > I cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe,
| distributed, clean grid of solar panels.
|
| Because its reliable and produces energy even if a vulcano
| covers the sun and you have a few days without win. It gives
| you power when and where you need it, no need for a gigantic
| storage and transmission infrastructure. Maximum reuse of
| existing infrastructure.
|
| > Maybe one day when humanity is a space faring race we could
| look to nuclear to support us then, but using nuclear on
| earth today is a bad decision.
|
| That crazy. Just based on first principle nuclear is the best
| and most dense energy source. We can use it with 60s tech,
| and we could do much better today. Why would we only use it
| in some far future when the technology exists now.
| oezi wrote:
| Nuclear at this point is dead in the water. The upward
| trajectory of renewables is so strong that building nuclear
| plants is no longer viable. If anybody would change course
| now and start planning and building new nuclear plants it
| will be at least 10 years before these go online. By this
| time wind and solar will be another magnitude cheaper and
| nuclear will not be able to compete.
| masklinn wrote:
| > - Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in
| other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that
| todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such
| thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single
| catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn't acceptable.
|
| We've already seen what the worst-case catastrophic failure
| of a bad plant design yields and it's...
|
| Not that bad frankly, especially from an ecological
| standpoint.
|
| > - Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with. Our current
| strategies include finding a secret underground cave, and
| hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it. Not to mention
| we have no plan for dealing with widespread use of nuclear
| power and the waste that would produce.
|
| The amount of nuclear waste is ridiculously small, the
| entirety of highly radioactive nuclear waste produced to date
| fits on a football field 3 stories tall. There are thousands
| of terrils bigger than that out there.
|
| As for "hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it", Oklo
| was pretty hard to find.
|
| > - Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely
| expensive.
|
| Nuclear plants are like anything else, if you get in the
| groove they can be built fast and for good prices. At the
| height of its construction, France completed plants in
| something like 5 years and had half a dozen going on at any
| one time.
|
| > They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad for the
| environment, locally and globally)
|
| So do wind turbines?
|
| > and absurd amounts of space.
|
| Compared to what? Millions of square miles of solar panels?
| The Paluel Nuclear Plant is 1.6 sq km total, and has the same
| nameplate capacity as 35 sq km of solar panels. We're talking
| 35 square kilometers covered entirely in solar cells, once
| you add access and maintenance you're at 40 or 50.
|
| And that's before accounting for the dismal capacity factor
| of solar, which increase the surface 2 to 5 folds depending
| on the location. Or the variability and seasonal
| unreliability of solar panels.
|
| > - Nuclear is centralized, and vulnerable to attack. In a
| national defense situation, nuclear power plants are large,
| easily identifiable, delicate targets that can take an entire
| area's grid offline with a single hit to a cooling tower.
|
| You don't seem to realise renewable power plants have
| centralised collector stations you can hit all the same and
| take the entire thing offline. And unlike nukes, protection
| against this sort of events is not part of a substation's
| usual brief.
|
| > edit: A large number of replies seem to think I am pro-
| shutdown of plants or pro-coal, but that was never stated. My
| argument is against further investment into nuclear when
| there are other more known technologies available, like solar
| and wind.
|
| All of which have massive drawbacks, and are not incompatible
| with nuclear plants.
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| "Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with."
|
| This is false. It is easier and safer to store the waste from
| modern nuclear power plants than waste from production and
| used solar panels (which are conveniently outsourced to China
| now due to poor env regulations there)
| therealcamino wrote:
| Do you have sources for that?
| orwin wrote:
| It took time to find a pro-solar source which touched
| upon the subject (other were Forbes and shady websites):
| https://news.energysage.com/solar-panels-toxic-
| environment/
|
| Basically, what i've heard before (i only skimmed the
| source), all solar panel are toxic, because the
| production create use a lot of chemical and create
| byproducts. We ignore this, it mostly hit poor areas in
| China and Africa, and this pollution will disapear in
| less than a century. The end-of-life is OK for old-style
| PV. Most "new" type of solar panels however, especially
| those you put on your own roof, are extremely toxic at
| their end-of-life, and what's worse is that their
| toxicity are not due to a chemical compound but to
| elements. What's even worse is that those elements are
| heavy metals, so bury even one of those PV panels in the
| ground and it become cancer-land a few year after.
| orangepurple wrote:
| If nuclear core meltdowns can be fully contained by design
| the risk is mitigated. For instance with newer designs of
| smaller portable reactors by NuScale
| smotah wrote:
| That's also utility of the "core catcher" component of some
| gen III reactor designs, that are specifically made to cool
| down corium in case of a core meltdown. For SMR, the risk
| is mitigated because the reactor isn't sufficiently
| powerful to melt itself.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| "That's impossible, an RBMK reactor can't explode."
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| It is easier to design perfect reactors and then it is to
| build perfect reactors.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in
| other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that
| todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such
| thing as 100%
|
| You're breathing coal and gas byproducts every single day,
| byproducts which are taking years of life expectancy, and it
| doesn't seem to bother anyone, but oh god "Chernobyl bad,
| let's close perfectly safe and working nuclear reactors".
| Germany is firing up coal plants because they're
| decomissining their nuclear reactors in favour of
| intermittent energy sources (Germany kwh price is 2x compared
| to France), we simply don't have time to do both at the same
| time
|
| > Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with.
|
| Intermittent energy sources produce a huge amount of waste
| and are a pain in the ass to recycle, not even talking about
| how to store that energy for later use.
|
| > Nuclear is centralized, and vulnerable to attack.
|
| Sure, but if a country is bold enough to start attacking
| nuclear reactors you can be sure you're not too far from full
| scale war and at that point it'll just be a small detail in
| the vast amount of violence and destruction that will ensue.
|
| > Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely
| expensive.
|
| There is no magic bullet here, solar and wind are also a
| major pain in the ass to build and maintain. We have 8000
| windmills in France, we'd need 55 000 running at 100% to
| produce enough energy for our current use
|
| > I cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe,
| distributed, clean grid of solar panels.
|
| Because there is no such thing
|
| Intermittent energy sources only work if we stop using more
| and more energy, but since GDP = energy we're fucked [0]. We
| can't decommission both gas and nuclear at the same time and
| keep the same quality of life / growth expectations with
| solar and wind.
|
| [0] https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/energy-and-
| us/wha...
| pydry wrote:
| >Germany is firing up coal plants
|
| They've been steadily reducing the % of coal in their
| electricity usage:
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/
| p...
|
| The last coal fired plant has already been built and the
| last one will be switched off in 2038.
| bildung wrote:
| _> Germany is firing up coal plants because they 're
| decomissining their nuclear reactors in favour of
| intermittent energy sources_
|
| No they aren't, they are decomissioning coal plants, too,
| and at a much faster rate than nuclear.
|
| From 2013 to 2020 nuclear as share of Germany's energy mix
| went from 17% to 13%. https://energy-
| charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
|
| During the same time, coal went from 45% to 23%.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
|
| _> Germany kwh price is 2x compared to France_
|
| The difference is taxes, not production costs. Have a look
| at price composition for Germany:
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-
| house...
| cerved wrote:
| it should be zero f*ing percent
| lm28469 wrote:
| These aren't the numbers I have https://www.cleanenergywi
| re.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
| Gwypaas wrote:
| That's capacity, the interesting side is usage which as
| you can see also has declined, while total capacity has
| increased.
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/style
| s/g...
| [deleted]
| pjscott wrote:
| > - Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely
| expensive.
|
| If you look at the list of reactors in the article, most of
| them took only 5-6 years to build. Between 1977 and 1987, a
| ten-year span of time, they added 45 GW of nuclear power to
| the grid. Do nuclear plants _really_ take ages to build?
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| You can stand up incremental solar panels at a very small
| scale and go up from there. Solar also requires almost 0
| regulatory red tape, something that adds years onto the
| planning stage of a plant
|
| You get no ROI from nuclear until the plant is active.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| "Maybe we will make a few km^2 a no human zone" and "let's
| torch the planet" are not comparable risks. Not remotely.
|
| > Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely
| expensive.
|
| So do subways, these days, for no good reason!
|
| Capitalism kinda sucks at things with upfront costs and
| little maintenance costs. Without operational costs in fuel,
| there can't be enough rent sneaking to make the investment
| self-funding, and without the ability to do things
| incrementally --- constant practice --- we can't lower costs
| the usual way.
|
| Fundamentally, Capitalism is bad at capital, and good at
| operational. Irony in the name.
|
| It's no secret that places like Korea are good at doing
| nuclear power and subways cheaply. It's the same skill.
| Unfortunately, to the extent it's exporters being good at it,
| they skill relates on our non-skill.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in
| other forms of modern energy generation
|
| Aviation has inherent risk that are managed more than
| adequately, making it the safest mode of transportation
| around.
|
| Similarly, nuclear power has inherent risks that are managed
| more than adequately, as evidenced by the fact that the only
| major accident in the last 30 years, Fukushima, caused one
| (1) victim.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Compared to other readily available green power sources
|
| 1. No power source is green. They all take a toll on the
| environment. 2. You can't compare nuclear to solar/wind, as
| solar/wind is intermittent. Currently, dismantling a nuclear
| power plant means replacing it by fossil fuel. See what is
| happening in Germany for instance.
| shakow wrote:
| > If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic
| nuclear plant failure isn't acceptable.
|
| We do people focus so much on the danger aspect of nuclear
| energy only? Why not the thousands of people who died of dam
| break, the millions who die of lung failure due to exposure
| to polluants, or, the elephant in the room, the dozens of
| millions whoe die and will die of climate change?
|
| Sure, it's very sad that a handful of Soviet and Japanese
| technician perished in accidents, don't get me wrong, but why
| such an irrational focus on nuclear accidents when a single
| dam break (and still, hydroelectric energy is among the
| safest of the safests) caused more casualties than nuclear
| energy in its whole life?
|
| > that are not present in other forms of modern energy
| generation
|
| That's just plain wrong.
|
| > and hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it.
|
| I, too, often randomly stumble on nuclear waste depots 400m
| deep under the surface. Such a way to waste my Sunday.
|
| > They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad for the
| environment, locally and globally)
|
| While otherenergy sources are maid of fairy tears?
|
| > and absurd amounts of space.
|
| Ah yes, remind me how many windmills we would need to produce
| as much energey as a NPP?
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Ah yes, remind me how many windmills we would need to
| produce as much energey as a NPP?
|
| Here's an infographic on that very subject :)
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-how-much-
| powe...
| eldaisfish wrote:
| this is an oversimplified and thus misleading comparison.
| A nuclear (or any fuel-controlled generator) can generate
| power at-will i.e. on demand.
|
| No wind or solar generator can do this and before you say
| batteries, no battery in existence can power a medium-
| sized city for more than a few minutes.
|
| These comparisons are usually presented as an aggregated
| amount of energy over a year and completely ignore the
| fact that at some points in time, the power output of
| entire fleets of wind and solar generators is zero.
| cogman10 wrote:
| What? This infographic is proving the point that nuclear
| generates a BUNCH of power and a single plant would
| require vast amounts of renewables to replace it. Did you
| actually read it before ranting?
|
| > No wind or solar generator can do this and before you
| say batteries, no battery in existence can power a
| medium-sized city for more than a few minutes.
|
| This is a silly argument. The only real limiting factor
| on the capacity of a battery, at this point, is
| manufacturing capacity. That is changing very quickly as
| more than a few companies are looking at expanding their
| battery production capabilities.
|
| Beyond that, grid batteries are good for any grid
| configuration. Batteries have rapid response to demand
| surplus and deficits. They are a grid stabilizing
| technology. Even if we had a 100% coal grid, you'd still
| want batteries for when the coal plants max out or to
| smooth out the cooldown time for the coal plants.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| i did read it. It is a mischaracterisation because the
| two are not comparable as time is ignored. To achieve
| functional parity with a fuel-powered generator such as a
| nuclear plant, you would need to guarantee identical
| operation with an array of wind generators. At the
| moment, this is only possible over large geographical
| areas.
|
| As for battery capacity, you seem to underestimate how
| much electrical energy even small cities use. The
| limiting factor is capacity. FYI, the US consumes around
| 3,800 terawatt hours of electrical energy annually. Good
| luck powering even a fraction of that for more than a few
| seconds with a battery.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > As for battery capacity, you seem to underestimate how
| much electrical energy even small cities use.
|
| I'm not sure where you get that impression.
|
| We are manufacturing around 500 GWh of new batteries
| yearly right now [1].
|
| To put that in perspective, that's enough capacity for 1
| hour of US annual energy consumption per year. 1 hour is
| a lot of time to bring up new power generation plants in
| the event of an outage.
|
| That production rate has been accelerating with the new
| demand for EVs. That is likely to double or triple within
| the next few years.
|
| The current largest battery plant weighs in at 1.6GWh,
| which is more than enough to power a city of 100k for
| several hours (it isn't currently used for that, it is
| stabilizing regional power).
|
| Like all things, battery power will first be able to
| handle seconds, then minutes, then hours, and finally
| days worth of power requirements. For grid stabilization,
| that's more than enough capacity requirements.
|
| And, as I said earlier, batteries are good for any grid,
| regardless of energy source. It allows a nuclear operator
| to run the plant harder and it allows plants to ditch
| fast ramping plants for more economical slow ramp plants.
|
| [1] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-
| production
| lm28469 wrote:
| This isn't France though, we're much more limited in term
| of sun and windmill efficient land over here and 80% of
| our electricity comes from nuclear, not 20% as in the US
| cogman10 wrote:
| Did you actually read the infographic? It is saying that
| you'd need a lot of renewable resources to replace a
| single nuclear plant.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| The risk is different. For coal, more or less everybody
| gets a few years off of their life expectancy, some a bit
| more who live closer to a plant, but roughly speaking, it's
| something everybody suffers from. With nuclear, those who
| live closer to a plant risk much more devastating damage in
| case something goes wrong. If you normalize both then
| nuclear comes out much safer, but that's not how humans
| work. I live 60km from a very old reactor that is 20 years
| past its designed runtime, has several shutdowns a year,
| had a few leaks "that didn't pose any danger to people". We
| just gonna keep it running because nothing bad happened
| yet, until something bad happens. Capitalism at work.
|
| But indeed the waste storage is by far the greatest
| problem. Not for us luckily, we get some cheap electricity
| and coming generations can deal with the waste we shoved in
| some hole. Expecting that the way we store the waste is
| safe for thousands of years is naive. Germany hasn't found
| a final destination and is just shipping that stuff around.
| Someone thought it was a good idea to store it near east
| Germany, until east Germany was no more and suddenly it was
| in the middle of the country in an unsuited location.
| Someone thought it was a good idea to store it in a salt
| mine, until the containers started corroding from salt
| water. But that was back when humans were still stupid and
| didn't know salt water corrodes things. Luckily we reached
| end of history now and do everything right. I'm positive
| the next location will not be picked by political motives.
| mcguire wrote:
| Probably something to do with the nearly 2000 sq mi of
| "exclusion zones" from Chernobyl and Fukushima. (Which,
| admittedly, is great for the local wildlife.)
|
| " _Ah yes, remind me how many windmills we would need to
| produce as much energey as a NPP?_
|
| About 1500.
| shakow wrote:
| > About 1500.
|
| Nope. Average charge load for a windmill is ~35%, vs.
| over 90% for NPPs. Thus, you would need roughly thrice as
| many, and that in places with alternating winds -
| otherwise you would just get blackouts.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > We do people focus so much on the danger aspect of
| nuclear energy only?
|
| Because nuclear = bad word / bombs / chernobyl
|
| They don't mind living in cities and breathing cars exhaust
| all day long even though it shaves years of their lives
| though. Real world boiling frog situation
| kazinator wrote:
| Indeed, the word _nuclear_ is so bad that nuclear-
| magnetic resonance (NMR) has to be called just magnetic
| in medicine. You go for an MRI, not NMRI.
|
| When nuclear-magnetic resonance is used in a scientific
| or industrial setting for analyzing the chemical content
| of a sample, it is properly called NMR.
|
| [Source: organic chemistry prof pointed this out, almost
| 30 years ago.]
| mhermher wrote:
| ah! I always wondered about this distinction, but I guess
| it makes sense that it's due to people's fear over
| "nuclear".
| effie wrote:
| However, MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is the
| preferable term; the process has nothing to do with
| nuclear reactions or nuclear energy or nuclear material
| or nuclear bombs. The fact that the thing that is
| resonating with EM radiation are nucleic magnetic moments
| does not make the process _nuclear_ in the usual sense of
| the word.
|
| CT (computer tomography), on the other hand, is slightly
| deceptive term; it actually gives you a dose of X-rays.
| It should be called X-ray Computer Tomography (XRCT).
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| The tone here is much more patronizing than required.
|
| > We do people focus so much on the danger aspect of
| nuclear energy only?
|
| Because nuclear is the only one with multigenerational
| risks that can make entire regions inhabitable. A damn
| break is deadly, a nuclear meltdown is potentially
| significantly way worse.
|
| > Such a way to waste my Sunday.
|
| Hiding waste is not a viable solution to dealing with it,
| regardless of the risk of finding it. We used to be quite
| content with dumping regular trash into holes, until we
| realized that didn't scale either.
|
| > Ah yes, remind me how many windmills we would need to
| produce as much energey as a NPP?
|
| Windmill vs nuclear powerplant space is not a 1:1
| comparison. Windmill fields are very sparse, and you came
| safely use the land underneath for farming or other uses.
| Not to mention the ecological devastation related to
| ruining a square mile of land permanently for centuries.
| You cans just change an entire miles worth of drainage and
| soil without damaging the area around it.
|
| Additionally, I said nothing about windmills. I said solar.
| We have millions of rooftops across the nation that have no
| solar yet would benefit. That land is free as far as space
| is concerned; it's unused.
| shakow wrote:
| > Because nuclear is the only one with multigenerational
| risks that can make entire regions inhabitable.
|
| I'm glad to know climate change will be a solved problem
| for my children.
|
| > Hiding waste is not a viable solution to dealing with
| it
|
| Why? Is just dropping it in the atmosphere better?
|
| > and you came safely use the land underneath for farming
| or other uses.
|
| Not really. There are safety margins, noise regulations,
| concrete platforms, electrical connections, ...
|
| > Not to mention the ecological devastation related to
| ruining a square mile of land permanently for centuries
|
| They don't remove the foundations either when windmills
| are done.
|
| > I said solar.
|
| So the energy for which you would require dozens of
| millions of square mils of surface, a cleaning system to
| prevent them to lose 30% of their efficiency in a year,
| whose construction process is incredibly polluant, and
| that doesn't work for half a year in half of the world?
| That sounds like a great large-scale solution.
| saalweachter wrote:
| > I'm glad to know climate change will be a solved
| problem for my children.
|
| You don't even need to jump to climate change when you
| have coal seam fires and ash ponds.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| >Because nuclear is the only one with multigenerational
| risks
|
| As opposed to continuing to emit carbon? this
| mischaracterisation of the threat is dangerous. The
| climate is changing right now. We literally cannot afford
| to bicker and wait for an indeterminate point in the
| future when entire grids will run on wind, solar and
| batteries.
|
| We have a solution now. That solution is nuclear power
| and will buy us time to transition to a fully renewable
| grid.
| cududa wrote:
| One Japanese technician died due to not following safety
| protocols. That's it.
|
| Thousands a year die in coal mines
| shakow wrote:
| > Thousands a year die in coal mines
|
| And that's only counting direct casualties. If we were to
| count long-term illnesses/deaths or consequences on the
| population like the people reaching gazillions of deads
| at Tchernobyl do, it would be up to one death out of 10
| (https://ourworldindata.org/air-pollution).
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| > I, too, often randomly stumble on nuclear waste depots
| 400m deep under the surface. Such a way to waste my Sunday.
|
| When those dumps leak into your groundwater it does indeed
| ruin your day.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Not really. We test for uranium contamination of water.
| There's actually a lot of areas where naturally occurring
| uranium puts it above safe concentrations and it has to
| be filtered out. This is the case in much of California,
| the Rockies that feed into this area's water supply
| naturally had high uranium concentration [1]. Given that
| we already test and treat water she to naturally
| occurring uranium I'm not too concerned over waste sites.
|
| 1. https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-
| contaminat...
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| So the testing will then also magically clean the water
| if it gets contaminated? Sure, if Flint MI is our
| baseline for acceptable living standards this is fine.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Yes, removing uranium from water supplies is not much
| different than removing other heavy metals like lead.
| This isn't particular hard, debacles like Flint are
| newsworthy _because_ it 's something most water services
| do successfully.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| You misunderstand what's happening in Flint. The water
| coming from the water treatment plant is perfectly safe,
| the issue is that it is then delivered to customers _in
| lead pipes_. This means cleaning up the water doesn't
| involve removing lead at the treatment plant, which is
| normal, but rather replacing all of the water pipes in
| the city, which is very very hard. In fact removing
| various heavy metals from water is a regular thing that
| water treatment plants do, including metals like uranium
| and chromium.
|
| The takeaway from Flint is not "we can't remove uranium
| from ground water", but rather "don't build your water
| distribution network out of toxic heavy metals like
| lead".
| gilbetron wrote:
| > I cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe,
| distributed, clean grid of solar panels.
|
| Night and northern climate.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Of the things you've listed, I think the costs are really the
| only argument against nuclear.
|
| The inherit risks are supremely low and the catastrophic
| failure mode for nuclear plants isn't a nuclear winter, in
| the absolutely worst case it's a contamination of the area
| where the plant was built (Modern nukes are all about
| containing failures. So even while they've optimized for not
| failing, they've also optimized for what happens when failure
| happens).
|
| Nuclear waste isn't nearly as difficult to deal with as
| NIMBYs are. It's pretty easy to find enough room and
| locations to store nuclear waste, the harder part is
| convincing people that's a good place to store it. For
| example, a single abandoned mine could house decades worth of
| nuclear waste. Nuclear plants produce almost no waste and the
| waste they do produce is entirely self contained. Further,
| more modern breeder reactors produce even less waste and the
| waste they produce ends up having a low level or
| radioactivity at the end of it.
|
| For the national defense argument, Every single power
| generation method has an output line to tie to the grid. Why
| would you attack a cooling tower (which would take a bunch of
| heavy duty explosives) when cutting a few MW transmission
| lines would have the same effect and require bolt cutters?
|
| The only reason not to build new nuclear is because it's more
| expensive than the current crop of green tech and it will
| take longer to bring online. Existing nuclear should keep
| operating until the grid is decarbonized.
| Pyramus wrote:
| > The inherit risks are supremely low and the catastrophic
| failure mode for nuclear plants isn't a nuclear winter, in
| the absolutely worst case it's a contamination of the area
| where the plant was built.
|
| Well, not really. While the probability of an accident is
| indeed low (but not super low by any means, as near misses
| are often not publicised), the damage/cost of an accident
| follows a heavy-tailed distribution. As a result the
| average cost is extremely high.
|
| So high in fact, that there is no market price for it. As a
| result no nuclear power plant worldwide is insured - the
| risk is directly born by the society. If we re-distribute
| the risk to the private sector there would simply be no
| nuclear power plants.
|
| Regardless if you are pro/contra nuclear - this 'market
| view' is strong indication that the risk can't be easily
| dismissed.
|
| Of independent interest: Some studies even conclude that
| this is one of the rare cases where we observe a
| distribution without a first moment in real life.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > So high in fact, that there is no market price for it.
| As a result no nuclear power plant worldwide is insured
|
| That's a very confident and incorrect statement.
|
| https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-
| sheets/n...
|
| As for accident vs costs of cleanup, like I said, new
| plants are designed not only to eliminate accidents from
| causing failures, but also such that if a failure
| happened, it would be completely contained.
| Pyramus wrote:
| Seems like Wikipedia is incorrect as well?
|
| "The main purpose of the [Price-Anderson Nuclear
| Industries Indemnity] Act is to partially compensate the
| nuclear industry against liability claims arising from
| nuclear incidents [...]."
|
| "By 1966 it had become apparent that the industry would
| still be unable to obtain adequate private insurance, so
| the act was extended until 1976. [...] In 2005 it was
| extended again through 2025 via the Energy Policy Act of
| 2005."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucl
| ear...
| lazide wrote:
| Even crazier - attacking the power lines doesn't even
| require bolt cutters. A ballon or toy drone and some
| aluminized string or thin wire is more than enough to have
| it blow itself up.
| sliken wrote:
| Maybe for a short outage, I'd expect it to vaporize
| without the power line noticing. Even if noticed,
| automated systems will send a test voltage along the
| lines periodically.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The thin wire will melt appart before the power lines do.
| cesarb wrote:
| > The thin wire will melt apart before the power lines
| do.
|
| It's a bit more subtle than that. As far as I understand,
| the thin wire might melt, but its vaporized remnants
| would be enough to keep an arc going between the phases
| or a phase and the ground. Then the protection devices at
| both ends of the line would detect the short circuit,
| turn off the line, wait for a bit of time (enough for the
| vaporized remnants and ionized air to disperse), and turn
| the line on again automatically. Since most high-voltage
| power grids have redundant circuits, it's likely that no
| consumer would lose power even for a moment.
| lazide wrote:
| It doesn't melt, it vaporizes, causing a live plasma
| channel to form and a giant arc between the lines that is
| self sustaining. If they have a arc interrupter, it might
| stop it before it destroys the lines, but not often, and
| at the power levels we're talking about here, it is a
| very difficult problem.
|
| The technique the US Military uses to destroy enemy power
| grids is to detonate a ball of long stringy aluminum
| confetti/Mylar above the enemy power substations. The
| destruction is apparently substantial.
|
| Check out Mylar balloons and power lines (lots of
| compilations on YouTube if you don't believe me.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Arcing powerlines generally doesn't cause irreparable
| damage. Sometimes a swarm of birds will trigger a swarm.
| The protection circuit normally trips and it's fine.
|
| Over a substation I could see it causing a lot more
| damage though.
| enriquto wrote:
| > a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn't
| acceptable.
|
| We've already detonated hundreds of nuclear bombs. The
| effects are ecologically catastrophic, but negligible
| compared to the damage of fossil fuels. As long as there is a
| single coal plant in the world, or a city whose
| transportation is based on burning fossil fuels, worrying too
| much about nuclear plants is stupid (unless you live just
| next to one of them).
| soperj wrote:
| >Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in
| other forms of modern energy generation.
|
| Hydro power has greater risks.
| culi wrote:
| The obsession with solar panels is currently driving a major
| ecological catastrophe. Solar panels are known to leak lead
| in the environment. We also have no good way to recycle them
| once the cells are done for good (currently, the average
| lifespan of a panel is about 20 years). There is already a
| massive buildup of solar waste full of extremely toxic
| components and we're not even close to seeing the worst of it
| considering most solar panels today were installed in the
| past 2 decades.
|
| In addition to that, the amount of space it would take to
| have the equivalent amount of power that a modern nuclear
| plant would provide is a massive ecological disaster in and
| of itself.
|
| And I haven't even begun to talk about batteries...
|
| Solar is not the solution. To be honest nuclear isn't either.
| Coal is obviously terrible and wind is unreliable. The real
| solution that no one dares to talk about is degrowth. George
| Bush articulated it himself when he said, ""The American way
| of life is not up for negotiations." And to this day we would
| never dare to bring up the idea that we actually just need to
| USE LESS.
| XiJinpinggg wrote:
| Degrowth = recession = Less funds to invest in renewables.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I was with you until degrowth, kind of.
|
| But we could 1000x the number of nukes and not run into the
| power generation or waste problems. Now, with that much
| energy we _would_ have far more of a growth problem far
| worse than today, but that 's not really nuclear's "fault",
| that's more a downstream issue.
|
| I have a secret suspicion renewables are popular precisely
| because they have scaling issues. For the certain easy-to-
| dunk-on degrwoth fan who has more guilt than clear
| thinking, the idea of renewables as a sort of self-
| flagellation austerity is attractive.
|
| The problem is our society (or "Captialism"), even, pushes
| for growth because a feeling for austerity. Only with the
| feeling of abundance do we step off the gas. Things like
| UBI and nuclear, which they fear will lead to a spending
| spree and rampant new consumerism, should instead turn off
| the real and metaphorical cortisol that leads to these
| things in the first place.
|
| -------
|
| The best stuff I've read about degrowth is from Nathan
| Tankus, who's got the necessity for needle-threading down,
| along with the skills to actually do the threading. I will
| try to find something that is not a tweat.
| robocat wrote:
| > Solar panels are known to leak lead in the environment.
|
| I suspect you are grasping for excuses. Do modern panels
| have significant lead in them? Also there is a _huge_
| abundance of lead in our city environment already (paints,
| leaded petrol). Even if there is lead in panels, it is
| concentrated, and I suspect the total amounts in panels
| would be at least three orders of magnitude less than that.
| Back when we used alkyllead additives in petrol, it was
| about 0.5g lead per litre[1], which would be an astonishing
| amount of lead put into our direct environment.
|
| And those used panels will still have value to people (eg
| third world) and will get reused, giving excess value to
| poor countries.
|
| [1] https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=%22grams+lead+per+gal
| lon%2...
| malka wrote:
| > I cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe,
| distributed, clean grid of solar panels.
|
| I enjoy having clean electricity when it rains, during the
| night, or when there is no wind.
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| How many have been affected by emissions because we let
| perfect be the enemy of good? We don't go out with a bang
| with coal, no spectacular single point to focus attention.
| Nonetheless people are dying early right now this minute
| because it's easier to dismiss the actual long drawn out
| deaths than the theoretical ones.
| godelski wrote:
| > You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but
| there is no such thing as 100%.
|
| I'm not sure how you wrote this and took it seriously. Should
| I never leave the house? How do I eat? Eating is more
| dangerous than that. We can't just live in a bubble. There is
| never perfect safety in anything you will do in life. You'll
| always have to make risk/reward trade offs. Historically
| nuclear shows the safest option.
|
| > Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with. Our current
| strategies include finding a secret underground cave, and
| hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it. Not to mention
| we have no plan for dealing with widespread use of nuclear
| power and the waste that would produce.
|
| You seem to be uninformed of how these work. If you care to
| learn more I suggest reading here[0]. I bet you're also
| overestimating how much waste there is. Let's look at the
| total waste of decades worth of France[1] and Russian[2]
| waste. That's the entire amount of waste since the nuclear
| programs started till now. France also recycles most of its
| waste which greatly reduces the rate of waste. Storage also
| doesn't have to be as long as you think. We tend to have a
| few orders of safety in nuclear safety. You're also not being
| fair in your comparisons. You're acting like strip mining and
| dredging for rare earth materials isn't doing crazy damage to
| our environment too. Pretending that these also don't pose a
| significant waste problem as well. Like the previous
| response, there is a waste tradeoff. Even the IPCC reports
| will demonstrate that the lifetime emissions and waste is low
| for nuclear. This is the part that frustrates me most about
| many of these discussions. People act like solar, wind,
| hydro, and geothermal are perfectly clean and have no
| problems. Doing so just demonstrates naivety. I'm happy
| you're passionate. Good. We need passionate people to solve
| this problem. BUT we can't stay uneducated and expect to
| solve the most complex problem humans have ever faced in
| history. I repeat: the most complex problem in human history.
| I don't pretend to be an expert. No single person can know
| everything. But to act like it is simple is harmful. And just
| to clarify, "pro-nuclear" just means keeping it on the table
| as an option. It does not mean using only nuclear. Energy
| requires a diverse portfolio of tools. The more we limit
| ourselves the more challenging the problem is ahead.
|
| > Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely
| expensive.
|
| I actually agree with this argument.
|
| > Nuclear is centralized, and vulnerable to attack.
|
| They also are very hard to attack, never have been, and
| there's a reason they haven't. It is just never worth it
| because reactors can shut down. They are designed to take
| multiple plane strikes.
|
| > Compared to other readily available green power sources, I
| cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe,
| distributed, clean grid of solar panels.
|
| Read this[1]. You're vastly overestimating the risk. But that
| is unsurprising since humans are notoriously bad at it.
|
| > edit: A large number of replies seem to think I am pro-
| shutdown of plants or pro-coal, but that was never stated. My
| argument is against further investment into nuclear when
| there are other more known technologies available, like solar
| and wind.
|
| That's because that's what your comment implies, even if you
| don't realize it. Many people do not actually understand the
| complexities of climate change, how we got here, and how much
| further we have to go. Most people think green energy is
| simply a matter of political will. It's far from that.
| Physics Girl recently did a 4 part series on Hydrogen Fuel
| [4], Batteries and Fuelcells[5], Storage[6], and CSP[7].
| Climate change isn't happening simply because we drive cars
| and our grid isn't green. Changing those only gets us half
| way there. And no, the other half isn't switching to a vegan
| diet, we're just talking about the energy sector. There's
| still major technical challenges that lie ahead, especially
| in mass storage.
|
| [0] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
|
| [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/risk.html
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghIckc7nrY
|
| [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWAO3vUn7nw
|
| [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHmIVw9etns
|
| [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccO0_hSXMyM
| jasamer wrote:
| > They also require ... absurd amounts of space.
|
| I'd have thought that nuclear requires the least amount of
| space of all energy sources.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Plants require dedicated space that cannot be used for
| anything else. Plants also require security barriers and
| other obstructions that take up more space.
|
| You could (potentially) put a full solar array, enough to
| power your house, on your roof right now, and not take up
| any additional space.
| sliken wrote:
| You could, but you'd need grid access for when the sun
| goes down, and the variability of sun and wind is one of
| the leading justifications for nuclear.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Don't shoot the messenger but my take is that environmentalism
| is much more than just climate change. It just feels like it
| because carbon emissions is the current topic and perhaps is
| the most pressing topic because most of the worlds energy is
| generally carbon based.
|
| The actual issue that environmentalist want solved is less
| overall production, reduction in all pollution and impact on
| the environment. And perhaps a bit of wealth redistribution
| throw in.
|
| If nuclear ever took off meaningfully, the conversation would
| change and the Greta Thunberg's and Netflix documentaries would
| be targeted toward nuclear (or whatever takes the place of
| carbon based fuel) instead. The EVs, solar, wind, batteries and
| nuclear are great... until they are the last thing standing.
|
| Again don't shoot the messenger! This is just my hot take.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| We figured out ship reactors for some time now. Easier target
| for global emissions reduction could be getting reactors into
| some of these huge container ships that are currently burning
| bunker (on windy.com the emissions are so bad you can see
| trails where these ships go). I wonder why there's not at least
| 1 container ship with a reactor yet while Russia's got stuff
| like icebreakers running them?
|
| I found this to be an interesting read, covers the US's only
| nuclear powered cargo ship that came a little too early to be a
| container ship: https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-
| cargo-ships/
| _ph_ wrote:
| France isn't reducing the capacity as a targetted policy but
| out of necessity. They have 58 nuclear power plants, most of
| them quite old (before 80ies). To maintain the current level,
| they would have to be replaced not too far in the future, but
| currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and
| both late and way over budget. So there currently is no route
| in maintaining the current capacity. Consequently politics has
| to come up with a roadmap which relies less on nuclear power.
| worrycue wrote:
| > currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction
| and both late and way over budget.
|
| So in a few decades France has forgotten how to build
| reactors on time and in an affordable way?
| pydry wrote:
| It's never been cheap. It's previously been heavily
| subsidized, often as a means to maintaining a domestic
| nuclear economy as a means of maintaining nuclear arsenals.
| michael1999 wrote:
| Booms generate an educated cohort. A stalled boom freezes
| this now-oversized cohort in place, and leaves no job
| openings for the next generation. Then, a generation later,
| retirement can leave an industry incapable of past glories.
| galvin wrote:
| Most reactors in France are 1st gen whereas the new one
| being built is 3rd gen and the first of its kind in France.
| The increased safety has made construction more complicated
| than previous reactors but a lot of those issues are being
| worked out so future reactors would probably be built more
| quickly and cost efficiently.
| pas wrote:
| It's not surprising at all.
|
| Everything has been debundled, privatized, consolidated,
| streamlined, modernized. This is not "bad" in itself, but
| doing big public projects this way is not efficient,
| because this way of organization needs big volume to become
| efficient.
|
| Basically we need to order 100+ reactors to get them cheap
| and fast. (And we need to have them use truly standardized
| interchangeable (modular) components. Naturally, modularity
| has an overhead, but it pays off if there's a long term for
| it to pay off. As long as we only build a few plants
| treating each of them as different allows for some local
| optimizations, but that is against large volume
| manufacturing, maintenance, etc.)
| mwilliaams wrote:
| Projects taking significantly longer and costing
| significantly more seems to be a common theme these days.
| See any U.S. military project...
| _ph_ wrote:
| As have all western countries. Building a new nuclear power
| plant at the safety level one would expect today is hugely
| expensive.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| South Korea hasn't forgotten. They have gotten the costs
| down quite a bit.
| _ph_ wrote:
| How far?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-
| costs-u...
|
| This has some useful charts.
|
| It shows that nuclear still has economy of scale to
| improve, if we give it the chance.
|
| The big difficulty for nuclear is public pressure/fear of
| accidents. People are much more afraid of "big scary
| nuclear accident" vs. probabilistic deaths caused by air
| pollution, even if the deaths from the latter is in the
| tens of thousands and the former is in the dozens.
|
| That fear of public/policy backlash makes raising capital
| in order to actually benefit from those economics of
| scale very difficult.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Not really. While it is true that we have not been building
| nuclear reactors in the last 40 years (and that, therefore,
| all knowledge is basically lost, leading to the insane delays
| we're seeing in the EPR), this is mostly a political maneuver
| to win the ecologist vote. Hollande closing down Fessenheim
| when it was good for an additional 20 years at the very least
| is a prime example of the clownery at the head of this
| country.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Consciously deciding to not replace capacity when the need
| for replacement is known decades in advance is a targeted
| policy.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Maybe I have not made that point clear enough in my post:
| currently they are failing to build replacement plants at a
| cost at which they could replace all of the existing
| reactors. Unless they can come up with an entirely new
| design which considerably cuts cost compared to what is
| considered a "current design" right now, there will be a
| reduction in capacity.
| the8472 wrote:
| Building them in series tends to make per-unit cost come
| down.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Yes, that would be to expect. But to determine the
| feasibility and calculate possible savings with further
| units, one would have to finish the first of the series
| first.
| it_citizen wrote:
| Surprisingly, experience has shown that building more
| nuclear plants, even standardized, don't make them
| cheaper to build but more expensive.
|
| 2010: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/p
| ii/S03014...
|
| 2020: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-
| nuclear-plan...
| the8472 wrote:
| In the 2020 article two of the 3 reasons listed are
| changes, regulation and design changes. So it's not
| really series-production of a single model.
| concordDance wrote:
| Nuclear being staggeringly overregulated is the reason
| for the high costs. If we put the same price on lives
| lost to car accidents as we do to lives lost in nuclear
| accidents (which some basic back of envelope calculations
| using old reactor construction costs and lives lost in
| nuclear accidents reveals to be well over a billion
| dollars per life) none of us would drive.
| _ph_ wrote:
| If you consider the possible extend of a major accident -
| whole southern Germany could become contaminated and tens
| of million of people could loose their homestead - a
| certain emphasis on safety is welcome.
| ronnier wrote:
| China is investing in nuclear power.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/04/23/china-wil...
|
| > As of this month, China has 49 nuclear reactors in operation
| with a capacity of 47.5 GW, third only to the United States and
| France. And 17 under construction with a capacity of 18.5 GW.
| None have been shut down. Nuclear provides only 2% of China's
| electrical power now, but the country intends nuclear to
| eventually surpass all other sources
| dragonelite wrote:
| They are also running 4th generation thorium molten salt
| reactors prototypes and thinking of having a commercial
| viable design in 2030. From what I gathered the waste is not
| that suitable for nuclear weapon usage. So those Reactors
| could be exported to SCO/BRI/global south countries.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w
| tehjoker wrote:
| Thorium reactors produce isotopes that can be converted
| into U238, which is less desirable than U235 for weapons
| purposes, but can be converted into a usable if annoying
| and expensive to manage bomb due to its high gamma
| production.
|
| https://www.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/nfc/power-
| weapons...
| ortusdux wrote:
| The problem with molten salt based reactors is that the
| high temperature radioactive molten salts destroy their
| containment vessels. I've yet to see a system design where
| the salt facing components are expected to last more that
| 7-10 years, which really hurts profitability.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There are two problems.
|
| One is corrosion/radiation damage to the reactor vessel
| which is probably made with something like
|
| http://www.haynesintl.com/alloys/alloy-
| portfolio_/Corrosion-...
|
| The other is that most of these designs have a graphite
| moderator, and the graphite gets damaged in the reactor
| environment.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I would consider graphite moderators under the umbrella
| of salt facing components.
|
| High Ni alloys such as Hast-N have their own issues -
| mainly radiation induced Ni -> He embrittlement and
| tellurium embrittlement. That being said, they are very
| promising.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Yes, the reactor cores would have to be replaced every
| 12-15 years. But if the reactors are mass produced and
| designed to swap out the cores, it doesn't have to be too
| expensive.
| bipson wrote:
| Still not "sustainable".
|
| And not really cheap either.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It is actually quite sustainable. The reactor core is not
| a large cost for a GW over 15 years.
|
| The US navy swaps out reactor cores for 100-200 million
| dollars, and those are in submarines and ships. There is
| basically no maintenance outside of those.
|
| For comparison, a GW of wind capacity is 1.6 billion
| every 20 years. For solar panels for 1GW of average
| generation you'll be paying 10 billion dollars or so
| every 25-30 years.
| avianlyric wrote:
| I think GP meant environmentally sustainable, rather than
| fiscally sustainable, you need to do something with the
| old reactor cores.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The reactor core will probably be drained of molten salts
| and then treated as low level radioactive waste.
|
| Yes it is waste, but I don't see anyone making the
| argument with wind turbines or solar panels, which will
| create more waste in total.
| varajelle wrote:
| > you need to do something with the old reactor cores.
|
| You burry it deep in a geologically stable ground [1].
| Was that not counted in the price?
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repos
| itory
| concordDance wrote:
| That's sustainable long past the point we run out of
| radioactives. Just how much space do you think buried
| reactor cores take up and how big do you think the
| earth's crust is?
|
| You could literally throw it in the deep ocean and it'd
| still do less damage than a single day of Brazilian
| deforestation for biofuel production or a month of
| operation of a coal plant (partially because water is
| actually quite good at blocking radiation and not
| becoming radioactive, you can safely swim in a spent fuel
| rod storage pool).
| robviren wrote:
| What does a coal plant do with the emitted radiation,
| CO2, coal ash, and other waste products? Current spent
| fuel rods from nuclear reactors sit in concrete casks
| located on site usually. At least I don't need to breath
| spent nuclear fuel or have to deal with it's CO2. Not
| saying we should do nothing about it, but at least the
| impact to my life today is substantially less.
| mcguire wrote:
| What happens to the used cores?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| They have to be disposed of. That creates waste. This is
| the same as with any other power generation method that
| exceeds it's lifespan. 15 years is not that different
| from 20 years for a wind turbine or 30 years for a solar
| panel.
| spfzero wrote:
| Solar panels are lasting about 10-15 years in practice.
| About half of what was expected.
| worik wrote:
| The core will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of
| years will it not?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The molten salt will be quite radioactive, yes. It is
| part of the radioactive waste generated by a molten salt
| reactor. Some types of molten salt reactors do not have
| this problem, but I don't think they are the most
| practical.
|
| The metal containing the molten salts might become
| somewhat radioactive too.
|
| All in all, this is still comparable in amount of waste
| to water cooled reactors.
| favorited wrote:
| Molten salt reactor waste should have a dramatically
| shorter half-life than waste from a light water reactor.
| MSR waste only needs a few hundred years of containment,
| not hundreds of thousands of years.
| concordDance wrote:
| Which is nowhere near as big a deal as it sounds. The
| damage it will do (on average) if glassed and buried
| 100ft under ground is absolutely negligible at the scale
| we are talking about (global climate change and energy in
| general).
|
| Yes, there's a 1 in 10000000 chance that 2000 years from
| now industrial age humans recovering from the apocalypse
| might dig a well in exactly that location and thousands
| will get sick with hundreds of deaths. You could multiply
| that by a hundred thousand cores and it would still be
| negligible compared to the hundreds of millions likely to
| die due to climate change in the next century
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| I really liked how you framed the danger.
|
| But what about if we had a Reactor Dump storing 100's of
| these reactors, and then something happened to that dump,
| either it was hit by a meter or it was intentionally
| attacked in some way. Could that result in an
| apocalyptical type event?
| beebmam wrote:
| Part of this is due to China's new expansion of their nuclear
| arsenal: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57995185
| tehjoker wrote:
| Why would they build land based missiles? My understanding
| is that that part of the US triad is basically pork due to
| the capabilities of sea and air and the fact that they are
| static installations that can be easily targeted.
|
| I can only speculate that it could make sense for China if
| their sea and air power are substantially less capable.
|
| It's pretty amusing for US officials to express concern
| over an increasing arsenal when they are themselves
| spending over a trillion dollars on that exact thing while
| they deliberately provoke China over the Taiwan issue,
| placing US soldiers in Taiwan, which is considered Chinese
| territory.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-troops-have-been-
| deployed-i...
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| It isn't really a Triad these days. It's more like a
| hexaiad when you consider the various forms that nuclear
| weapons can take.
|
| But as to your question, silos benefit from very reliable
| coms. It's possible to communicate to subs, but it is
| slow and unreliable. Airpower suffers from jamming and
| signs of strike, since the planes need to be put in the
| air and that is observable. There is also a limit to the
| size of the missiles and therefore immediate range. If
| you want to strike anywhere on command with little
| notice, silos are best. If you want to hit foreign target
| with absolutely minimal response time, submarines usually
| win out, since most major capitals are by the ocean. But
| even beyond this consideration, it is good to have a
| diversity of options to reduce the risk of a catastrophic
| vulnerability existing. For example, some hypothetical
| weapon that could eliminate all your submarines without
| warning.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| China actually has a couple of French-built nuclear power
| plants. There's been a long standing cooperation in that
| domain.
| pixiemaster wrote:
| they have also build hundred of steam reactors that have a
| modular heating system - while currently served with a coal
| system can be exchanged by nuclear heating anytime
| neaanopri wrote:
| Nuclear can also directly generate heat, for residential
| district heat, or industrial processes heat
| pjscott wrote:
| I often hear opponents of nuclear power say that it takes too
| long to construct, so it's interesting to look at the timelines
| for these reactors -- most of them took about 5-6 years from the
| start of construction to being hooked up to the power grid, and
| there was a lot of concurrent construction, so their peak
| throughput was several reactors per year. More recently France
| seems to have lost the ability to build nuclear plants quickly;
| their only one under construction has been under construction for
| the past 14 years, and is projected to finish in 2023.
|
| France in the 1970s is existence proof that nuclear plants aren't
| inherently slow to build, so I have to wonder: what happened?
| (And what other technology are we in danger of losing?)
| nickik wrote:
| There has been a lot of research into this.
|
| The main thing is actually learning effects, the second thing
| is 'mass production'.
|
| If you have teams that have build reactors before, they will be
| much better. Once you have people on their 3rd reactor, they go
| fast.
|
| Its kind of like other massive infrastructure projects like
| bridges.
|
| Basically nuclear reactors are large civil engineering
| projects, and you need experience to do it.
|
| The second is that some parts, like the core reactor vessel are
| insanely complex high pressure and the production of these
| needs special facilities that basically only exist in like 3
| places. They managed in the 70-80s to kind of 'mass' produce
| these but today its totally costume.
|
| Another things is, France totally failed by themselves to build
| next generation plants. Its borderline crazy that we are still
| building PWR type reactors. All attempts at next generation
| reactors have been terrible.
|
| I am really high on what's going on in Canada, real next
| generation reactors are FINALLY really seriously going threw
| real internationally recognized nuclear validation from a first
| class regulator.
| orwin wrote:
| The reason why we still use PWR is because of pilotability.
| When you're able to modulate the power of a reactor of 40% in
| 30 minutes without damaging anything or engaging any
| failsafe, you can reasonably make nuclear reactor follow the
| consumption.
| lazide wrote:
| We lost the sense of urgency and the connection between our
| decisions, what happens, and why we feel the way we do. It was
| also helped along by the 'green field' nature of Nuclear at the
| time (writing new code is easier than fixing a legacy code
| base, and making a new design when you don't know and have to
| consider the bazillion regulations and gotchas since discovered
| is also easier), and a general 'do it' mindset after the
| massive destruction of the war and ongoing rebuilding.
|
| Mostly now we're not in a hurry because we 'already have stuff
| that works' because we've had so many of those prior projects
| 'just work' (hint: they didn't, it took massive hard work to
| make them happen - but the people alive today were not the ones
| getting dirty on the ground there, so they don't know that).
| And we haven't had many big disasters around them yet (as in
| electric grid collapses for a month in winter and can't be
| restarted) to give it more urgency and importance.
|
| In some ways I think we're in a classic 'rich kid' fallacy.
|
| Hey, we have so much money, why do we need to be responsible
| right? We can be irresponsible because even if we crash the
| Porsche we got for our birthday, we'll get a new one in a week
| anyway.
|
| Well, we only have so much money because the prior generation
| worked so hard (and stole a bunch of stuff and murdered a bunch
| of people, but hey whatever - sometimes folks need their
| illusions), and while the inheritance _might_ last if we keep
| pissing it away, it usually doesn't for very long. And one of
| these days we're going to crash the Porsche and end up with
| life long medical issues.
|
| It does tend to self correct, but oooof does the other side of
| the curve hurt. And sometimes whatever mindset or situation
| created the wealth in the first place just never is recaptured.
| Greece and Italy are certainly not on a trajectory back to
| world defining empire status anytime soon, and are more worried
| about how to keep their pensioners fed.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Japan is turning the nukes back on, France with the Eastern
| Europeans is taking on Germany's reckless move
| https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/11/led-by-france-10-eu-coun... .
| The current energy crunch is demonstrating how "renewables now,
| nukes of off now, batteries later" is irresponsible both
| environmentally and politically, I hope it's a turning point.
|
| At the vary least, turning off the nukes is a reward one earns
| _after_ the transition is demonstrated end-to-end, with the grid
| storage and renewables both in place.
| oezi wrote:
| Two counterpoints:
|
| - Isn't the current gas shortage just Putin trying to ram
| through Nordstream 2?
|
| - Isn't it great to have high prices fossil energy sources to
| drive renewable investment and stop wasteful use of fossils?
| masklinn wrote:
| > Two counterpoints:
|
| > - Isn't the current gas shortage just Putin trying to ram
| through Nordstream 2?
|
| Is "fossil fuels are a geopolitical weakness" really a
| counterpoint to "fossil fuels are kinda shit"?
|
| And that geopolitical weakness is exactly why france built
| lots of nukes in the first place, it was not ecological
| (though that's a nice side-effect), it was for energy and
| geopolitical independence, and though it fails somewhat in
| that uranium ore still needs to be procured, it's much easier
| to stockpile uranium ore than fossil fuels, and the available
| sources are much more varied: the main known reserves are in
| Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia, South Africa.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| It _is_ great the price has gone up. What 's bad is people
| are buying it anyways.
|
| The price needs to be high, sure, but also _too_ high, in
| that demand is scared off and consumption /revenue goes down.
| Sadly, the price is not too high at the moment by that
| definition.
|
| > Isn't the current gas shortage just Putin trying to ram
| through Nordstream 2?
|
| I have no idea. What I noticed is not even a gas shortage,
| but a _wind_ shortage driving up demand for gas.
| smotah wrote:
| Unsurprisingly Germany lobbied EU members such as Austria,
| Denmark, Luxembourg and Spain to block the inclusion of nuclear
| power in the "green taxonomy" (allowing it to be subsided like
| new renewables are), while pushing for natural gas (emitting 40
| times more CO2 than nuclear). Such geopolitical move is
| definitely illogical and favoring climate change acceleration.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I love how a bunch of plants have been pushed at the border.
| Strategically that seems like a bad decision in an event of a
| war. But in an event of an accident, you push at least some of
| the risk to your neighbors.
| cesarb wrote:
| A more logical explanation is that most country borders are on
| rivers, and nuclear power plants need a lot of cooling.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > However, 58% thought that nuclear power caused climate change
| while only 46% thought that coal burning did so
|
| This raises some interesting thoughts about the nature and
| importance of democracy.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Democracy is probably not what's it said to be, it's a
| necessary emotional escape valve. People are too random to be
| heard with 100% equal value as you point at. The hierarchy
| filters through knowledge to steer.
| Gupie wrote:
| As it has been said democracy is rubbish, the only thing going
| for it is that it is better than the alternatives.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Maybe the deepest point is that if the voters are ignorant
| about this they can't be trusted on anything.
|
| But a shallow perhaps more practical take away is that voters
| shouldn't be asked about implementation details, only values.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I remain a supporter of democracy but do have serious doubts
| regarding the ability of the majority of humankind to maintain
| a sufficient understanding of the increasingly complex world
| they control.
|
| Large portions of the US population seem to have problems with
| basic reasoning skills. I'm not sure the school system or
| western culture is capable of rectifying that anytime soon.
| godelski wrote:
| I think the bigger issue is that everyone feels they need to
| be an expert on every subject. Look at any of these
| conversations on nuclear and/or climate. Climate is the most
| complex problems humans face today yet we all pretty much act
| like we're experts and all pretend it's purely political will
| to solving the problem. Even on a tech forum where the
| average person is much more tech literate these beliefs and
| actions are common.
|
| The problem isn't that the world is getting more complex. The
| problem is that we're unwilling to admit it.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous
| structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to
| a "super-industrial society". This change overwhelms people.
| He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and
| social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from
| "shattering stress and disorientation"--future shocked.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Representative democracy helps in this regard.
| asdff wrote:
| It also makes it easy for charlatans to take the helm by
| appealing to nonsense.
| Hermel wrote:
| Why do you assume that the average politician is better
| informed than the average citizen?
| asdff wrote:
| The average politician at least has reports prepared for them
| by government scientists and engineers, while the average
| citizen only hears about things after they've gone through
| the telephone game of the media.
| pydry wrote:
| Although it is an poll with a weird and surprising result from
| a nuclear lobby group with a strong interest in depicting the
| general public as "in need of education" on nuclear issues.
|
| As far as I can see there are no details about who ran the
| poll.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| how so?
| blamazon wrote:
| In the data provided, the majority believes that burning coal
| does not cause climate change, while nuclear power does. In
| fact, it is the reverse--coal's impact on climate change is
| exponentially more than nuclear.
|
| Thus, if the data is accurate, and if the majority rules
| directly, from these viewpoints it suggests that investments
| would be made into coal, and reduced from nuclear, which is
| aligned with creating more climate change, not less.
|
| So, this implies that, for these data, democracy and taking
| action against climate doom are compatible.
| bittercynic wrote:
| It seems like a pretty big problem when the electorate is
| this misinformed on an issue that's so straightforward, and
| important.
| dehrmann wrote:
| A horrifyingly large portion of the population believes all
| sorts of stupid things. The sad thing for democracy is most
| people don't understand policy or even civics well enough to
| make an informed decision on a candidate. Even then, most
| candidates don't either, and they end up relying on advisors
| and lobbyists. The fun implication of campaign finance reform
| is it implies elections can be bought (just ask Michael
| Bloomberg), and people can't sort out political messages for
| themselves.
|
| Oh, the good news about two-party democracy is it mostly keeps
| 20% views out of politics entirely. 58%/46% is a problem,
| though.
| belval wrote:
| I'd go one step further and say that we all believe in all
| sorts of stupid things. It's just that we are unaware of our
| own misconceptions because they aren't often disproven.
|
| Democracy works when the population is generally educated
| because the mean opinion (or the opinion held by the most
| people) should converge to the "right" one.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The population has to have access to the truth though.
|
| One bellend (idiot) spouts lies in front of a bus,
| supported by media magnates. A couple of years later we
| have fuel and food shortages, myriad supply chain issues,
| broken off from a treaty that gave us relatively stable
| local peace for 50+years, etc.. Now COVID has plummeted us
| into a place where the exchequer has been exploited to the
| hilt for 'contracts for the boys' (nepotistic corruption)
| because the oversight of our former arrangements have been
| stripped away.
|
| Our representatives are actively conning the population
| into voting against their own (the populations) best
| interests.
|
| Just having generally good education levels isn't seemingly
| protecting us from powerful ruling classes who simply don't
| care and are willing to use their power to exploit the
| population.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Or at least the success and role of schools and the media.
| agumonkey wrote:
| And long term emergent structures of society. Not to step too
| much in conspiracy but an economy first system might
| naturally steer toward medium level education so that money
| flows without people thinking too hard or be able to be
| independent from the usual marketing tricks. It's almost a
| natural order, smart and cynical will be rewarded by high
| ranks, while the clueless mass will be spun to fuel the
| system.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Reminds me of this optimized city in SimCity:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU
|
| https://www.neatorama.com/2010/10/16/magnasanti-the-
| largest-...
| masta wrote:
| What the site does not seem to talk about is that an internal
| commission in 2011 found[1] that the real cost per kWh is around
| 50-56c. Nuclear power in France is heavily subsidized, directly
| and indirectly.
|
| [1] https://bit.ly/3DAGW2s
| nitrogen wrote:
| Do you have a non-shortened/non-tracking link?
| Zigurd wrote:
| France has also underestimated decommissioning costs by a
| multiple. The real costs are hard to know, but other nations'
| estimates are much higher.
| olivermarks wrote:
| i think advanced modular small nuclear reactors are the only
| viable way forward if we are to have a predominantly electrically
| powered future society.
|
| 'The term "modular" in the context of SMRs refers to the ability
| to fabricate major components of the nuclear steam supply system
| in a factory environment and ship to the point of use. Even
| though current large nuclear power plants incorporate factory-
| fabricated components (or modules) into their designs, a
| substantial amount of field work is still required to assemble
| components into an operational power plant. SMRs are envisioned
| to require limited on-site preparation and substantially reduce
| the lengthy construction times that are typical of the larger
| units. SMRs provide simplicity of design, enhanced safety
| features, the economics and quality afforded by factory
| production, and more flexibility (financing, siting, sizing, and
| end-use applications) compared to larger nuclear power plants.
| Additional modules can be added incrementally as demand for
| energy increases'.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-sm...
|
| Most people are still thinking last century enormous reactors.
| Electricity does not travel well and a network of modular
| reactors provides enormous opportunity for housing development in
| areas that are hard to get power to.
|
| I am no longer enthusiastic about solar or wind power except for
| fringe augmentation of grids
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I share the same viewpoint. I wonder if anyone has any
| information about what ordinary Americans can do to support
| SMRs? What should I ask my representatives to do? Is there
| proposed legislation I could petition them to support? Are
| there organizations I could donate to?
| Zigurd wrote:
| From this 2017 article: https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-
| really-cost-to-decomm...
|
| _Whereas Germany has set aside EUR38 billion to decommission 17
| nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
| estimates that clean-up of UK's 17 nuclear sites will cost
| between EUR109-250 billion over the next 120 years, France has
| set aside only EUR23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors.
| To put this in context, according to the European Commission_
|
| That's an impressive range of estimates. Who thinks the lower
| estimates are realistic?
| orwin wrote:
| You can't compare PWR to gas/graphite or heavy water reactor
| core. PWr is harder to design and to build and need special
| combustible, but you don't have to wait 100 years to bypass the
| shield, unlike UK's gaz/graphite reactors. We will see by 2030
| the real cost anyway. Also, EDF set aside 23 billions (not
| France) and aim for 56 billions for the 58 reactors (as they
| will still produce electricity some more years). I've seen a
| better estimate of the cost is 90 billion (so EDF will be
| missing roughly 30 billions). But if the reactors are allowed
| 20 more years (like US own PWRs), i think everything will be
| fine. especially considering the ressources.
|
| Also, according the engineers at The Shift Project, based on
| Rystad data, future of petroleum imports look bleak[0], and
| while their study was done before Covid, they perfectly
| predicted the situation we are in this winter. Fear not, it is
| only the beginning of a trend, so next year might be better
| actually.
|
| [0] https://theshiftproject.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/%C3%8... (in french)
| unchocked wrote:
| I've been prodding friends in the climate movement about their
| community's historical opposition to nuclear power lately. In my
| view, opposing nuclear power after 1989 (Hansen's testimony to
| the US Senate) is anti-climate.
|
| I've held up France as an example of where we could be in an
| alternate history where states did not bow to anti-nuclear
| activism. Unfortunately, from the article, it seems France is
| heading in that direction as well.
|
| > In October 2014 the Energy Transition for Green Growth bill was
| passed by the National Assembly and so went onto the Senate. This
| set a target of 50% for nuclear contribution to electricity
| supply by 2025, and capped nuclear power capacity at 63.2 GWe,
| the level at the time. This meant that EDF would have to shut at
| least 1650 GWe of nuclear capacity when its Flamanville 3 EPR
| starts commercial operation.
|
| A sad decision to see in the only pro nuclear power democracy.
| And a sad decision for climate, because for decades past and for
| decades to come, anti-nuclear is pro-coal.
|
| *edit, the French government also seems to be slow-walking the
| tragic mandate:
|
| > In October 2016 the government postponed until after the 2017
| presidential and National Assembly elections any decision on
| which, if any, reactors would close in order to reduce the
| nuclear share to 50%. In 2017 France postponed its 2025 target
| for reducing the share of nuclear to 50%. In December 2017 the
| French President stated that nuclear is "the most carbon-free way
| to produce electricity with renewables." In November 2018, a
| draft of the country's new energy plan confirmed that 2035 was
| the new target date for the reduction of nuclear's share to 50%.
| The plan states that 14 of the country's nuclear reactors will
| shut down by 2035, 4-6 of those by 2030. However the plan also
| states that the option to build new nuclear reactors remains.
| XiJinpinggg wrote:
| They reversed it: https://archive.is/cCDfv
| ElKrist wrote:
| A few things to give you some hope:
|
| * The target to reduce the share of nuclear to 50% does not
| directly imply that nuclear production will decline as much.
| The reason is that the share of electricity (from nuclear,
| hydro renewables.. combined) in total energy consumption should
| increase (electrical vehicles, hydrogen production etc.).
|
| * Most French people still believe nuclear emits CO2. I expect
| that to change as people get more and more informed on climate
| change. Once more people realize it's one of the cleanest
| source for greenhouse gases, I expect a stronger support for
| nuclear
|
| * The sovereignty aspect (France does not extract uranium on
| its soil but has well established logistics) is more important
| in the French debate recently, probably increased since Covid.
| The lack of wind in UK recently causing price to soars, the
| Nord Stream 2 pipeline for Germans to get gas from Russia.. are
| not examples France wishes to follow
| godelski wrote:
| France is only reducing to 50%. That still means France will be
| the world leader in nuclear energy. I'm not sure why both pro
| nuclear and anti-nuclear people see this as the end of nuclear
| power in France. Far from it. Energy should be well
| diversified. This is a good move for France and nuclear in
| general. There are some advantages to solar and wind but they
| can't support the entire network itself. France's goal is to
| start by increasing solar and wind and completely eliminate
| coal first. This move is neither anti-nuclear nor pro-coal.
| adventured wrote:
| France is not _the_ world leader in nuclear energy. They 're
| one of the leaders.
|
| The US produces a lot more energy from nuclear and has a lot
| more reactors.
|
| China and India are building a lot more new reactors than
| France.
|
| The nuclear industry in Russia and South Korea is as vibrant
| as France (South Korea getting around 30% of its energy from
| nuclear today is extremely impressive given where their
| economy was at just 40 years ago).
|
| And at 50%, France will drop below Ukraine.
| saboot wrote:
| I don't understand why nuclear waste is considered a significant
| issue. You either bury it, or leave it on site enclosed in
| concrete.
|
| We bury much worse chemicals with little to no regulation right
| _now_.
|
| There's many solutions to put nuclear waste in a stable form such
| as vitrification.
|
| There's no time left, feel like screaming at the world that we
| are okay with putting carbon indefinitely in the air instead.
| Nuclear waste is such a small issue in comparison.
| corban1 wrote:
| Nuclear is clean, it is safe but it is not cheap. It's safe and
| clean because of it's moderately priced. I stand by nuclear
| because it's cleanness and safeness which can't be compared to
| anything else.
|
| What will we generate electricity with in non-windy cloudy days?
| Coal? LNG? ESS? Note that all of those options are more
| dangerous, more expensive and more dirty than nuclear.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I wonder how the cost of nuclear stacks up against the cost of
| fossil fuels when you don't cook the books (externalize the
| costs of pollution)?
| corban1 wrote:
| The same applies for others like wind and solar. Do they
| really calculate all the costs? It was easy for nuclear to
| cook books in the past. I feel other energy sources are doing
| it nowadays.
|
| I think in order to set things straight, they should apply
| the cost of uncertainty to wind and solar.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I doubt the cost figures for wind, solar, and nuclear are
| off by much, or rather, they could be off by hundreds of
| percents and still be more accurate than fossil fuels cost
| estimates which fail to account for pollution entirely.
| Gupie wrote:
| Is it safe considering the 1000 square miles of Ukraine that
| Chernobyl made uninhabitable? How safe are they against
| terrorist attacks, an attack by a rogue state or in a
| conventional war?
| corban1 wrote:
| Yes because we learned from Chernobyl and Fukushima. The
| reason nuclear is expensive is because they protect
| themselves from war or terrorist attacks by drills, policies,
| strengthened structure and alertness.
|
| Actually, if you are in a war or you are a terrorist, there
| are much more high value targets than a structure with 1.3m
| thick re-enforced concrete plus 1cm thick steel dome.
| Pyramus wrote:
| We didn't really learn (enough) - Fukushima made that very
| apparent. As an example, Angela Merkel, who used to be pro
| nuclear, changed position after the disaster.
|
| The reason is that ever since Chernobyl there has been an
| active debate in Germany pro/contra nuclear (where in some
| parts there are still consumption limits on certain types
| of wild mushrooms and game due to contamination with
| caesium - 30 years later, 1000+ km away!). And the core
| argument pro was the same it is today: We learned from
| Chernobyl, nuclear reactors are way safer, Chernobyl will
| never happen again.
|
| But if you followed Fukushima closely while it happened,
| the fact that Fukushima wasn't Chernobyl was sheer luck -
| had the wind blown southwards towards Tokyo (and not
| eastwards out to the sea like it did) Fukushima would have
| been worse.
|
| I'm in no way saying that we have not advanced massively in
| science and technology - in fact, we have - I'm saying
| there are tricky biases at play here that make it very
| difficult to estimate whether we have learned enough.
| asdff wrote:
| If we had any sense we would establish similar perimeters
| around coal plants. There are also thousands of nuclear power
| plants around the world and I can't think of any that have
| suffered from terrorist attacks.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Yes, even including Chernobyl and all the other accidents,
| nuclear power causes less deaths per GWh and less
| environmental damage than coal (which is the type of
| electricity used to fill in the gaps when e.g. Germany
| stopped it's nuclear plants). If you're worried about the
| habitable land, Hydro power is relatively "green", but each
| major hydro plant wrecks habitability and ecosystems in an
| area that's smaller than but comparable on scale with the
| Chernobyl exclusion zone.
|
| Like, this is a reasonable question to ask, but it has been
| asked and analyzed a lot and the practical answer to it is
| _overwhelmingly_ against fossil fuels, it 's not even close.
| Coal causes far more cancer than radioactive disasters, but
| we simply aren't (yet?) holding them accountable for this
| damage.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Not sure about Europe, but nuclear seems to be expensive in the
| US because construction costs are high because of overcautious
| regulation[1]. It was considerably cheaper in the 50/60s here,
| and it seems like mostly a policy issue
|
| [1] https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
| corban1 wrote:
| That's the point. Nuclear is getting over-regulated to be
| safe, not to make any mistakes. I don't disagree with the
| regulators. I disagree with overly cheap nuclear. Overall, no
| power generation method can replace nuclear's steady output
| with its level of cleanness and safeness.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| On the other hand, nuclear is far, far safer than _almost_
| every other kind of energy source. If we allowed nuclear to
| be as unsafe as coal, how much cheaper might it be?
| pydry wrote:
| Nuclear is expensive with a $200 million liability cap for
| accidents. By comparison, that's roughly 0.2-0.5% of what the
| total cost of dealing with Fukushima will cost.
|
| If we think it's over-regulated the _first_ regulation that
| should go should be that $200 million liability cap.
|
| Then perhaps private insurers can decide for themselves what
| level of safety is required to protect them from a potential
| $1 trillion cleanup cost they'd be on the hook for.
|
| If the nuclear industry can convince them it's worth it at
| all, that is.
| corban1 wrote:
| Do cars pay for the possibility of crude oils spilled in
| the ocean? Was the Deepwater Horizon insured for the full
| amount of dealing with the disaster? Does coal energy
| plants pay for future diseases of people breathing air from
| their chimney? Does wind turbines pay for people that
| suffer from low frequency sounds and solar flickers?
|
| All energy sources have uncertainties. We've been using
| much much more dangerous energy sources than nuclear. So
| the question is yours; why do you assume the worst only for
| nuclear when nuclear is the only source that is preparing
| for the worst?
| misiti3780 wrote:
| ok, that sounds like a policy issue though - no ?
| makomk wrote:
| The reason nuclear regulation in the US is stricter these
| days is because companies used to do things like routing all
| their supposedly-redundant control and monitoring wiring
| through the same shared duct, stuffing it full of flammable
| foam, and then testing that for air leaks using a bare candle
| whilst the plant is operating. This is not a hypothetical
| problem - it was apparently standard practice in the era
| you're talking about and nearly caused a major catastrophe,
| and the fire regulations that stop practices like this are
| cited as a major cost making it hard to build nuclear power
| plants by companies in the business.
| usui wrote:
| Reducing nuclear power in France seems to be one of the worst
| decisions you could make in a time when the rest of the world has
| its head in the sand.
|
| From OP: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/country-pr...
|
| > France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due
| to its very low cost of generation, and gains over EUR3 billion
| per year from this.
|
| > In November 2018, a draft of the country's new energy plan
| confirmed that 2035 was the new target date for the reduction of
| nuclear's share to 50%. The plan states that 14 of the country's
| nuclear reactors will shut down by 2035, 4-6 of those by 2030.
| However the plan also states that the option to build new nuclear
| reactors remains
|
| Taking into consideration France's industrial activity and being
| within the world's top 10 economies with approximately equal to
| Japan's GDP per capita
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_France, it is without a
| doubt one of the best countries in carbon emissions per capita.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
|
| If one were to argue that not all countries are capable of
| following the nuclear power model, I think that would be a valid
| argument, but electricity and power can be exported, and France
| makes a profit from the nearly-free energy that it generates.
|
| Before someone mentions renewable energy methods such as solar
| power, hydro, windmills, etc.: Who exports solar power? Who
| exports windmill energy? Who stores and uses an effective
| proportion of methane gas as a result of renewable energy? Is
| there any country with the available infrastructure of stored
| energy (centralized or decentralized) that can even make claim to
| power its own country's needs by a proportion of 70%, let alone
| 50%?
|
| So what about safety?
|
| We have been conditioned culturally to believe that nuclear power
| is dangerous, but stats-wise, coal mining, air pollution, and
| work hazards account for far, far more deaths recorded than
| nuclear power so far. I encourage anyone interested to Google
| "nuclear power deaths comparison" and pick the sources you think
| are unbiased, or just believe this:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| > Nuclear energy is by far the safest energy source in this
| comparison - it results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than
| the 'dirtiest' forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250
| times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas
|
| So nuclear fission brings in money, less deaths, and
| decarbonization, with the only drawback being its image of how to
| store nuclear waste which itself shouldn't even be an issue
| compared to the pollution we see nowadays, and that some
| proportion of it is also reusable.
|
| The anti-nuclear sentiment in favor of solar panels and more
| green technologies are red herrings even big companies love to
| use to split up decarbonization into factions and slow the
| movement down. The infrastructure required to construct+maintain
| solar panels that can satisfy our current living situation will
| be slower than going to nuclear, with capacity for future growth
| currently out of the question because fulfilling current needs is
| nowhere within reach.
|
| If nuclear power is the cheapest way we know to generate power,
| this is the most obvious way companies can cut down on costs, and
| the involvement of companies is necessary for climate change to
| make progress, because companies are the biggest contributors to
| climate change. People will far more easily change their behavior
| if you show them something they want, rather than telling them
| what they do not want.
|
| For the current energy arrangement to withstand the next century
| and to ignore nuclear fission, I believe one of two things needs
| to happen: A decoupling from opulent, wasteful lifestyles or the
| breakthrough of nuclear fusion. Do both sound very far from
| happening? If yes, then nuclear fission is the only choice unless
| you think every nation in the world is going to hold hands and
| follow through on climate change policies in exchange for their
| own economic prosperity relative to other nations.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > Reducing nuclear power in France seems to be one of the worst
| decisions you could make in a time when the rest of the world
| has its head in the sand.
|
| When people claim to have goal A but do things that run counter
| to A, you must conclude that their real goal is not goal A but
| instead some other goal B.
|
| When environmentalist types rail against nuclear power, they
| reveal their true preferences. They care more about dismantling
| technological civilization than they do about reducing
| emissions. If they really cared about emissions as much as they
| claim to care, they'd support nuclear power out of necessity.
| They don't, so it's fair to conclude they have unstated goals.
| cesarb wrote:
| > When environmentalist types rail against nuclear power,
| they reveal their true preferences. They care more about
| dismantling technological civilization than they do about
| reducing emissions. If they really cared about emissions as
| much as they claim to care, they'd support nuclear power out
| of necessity. They don't, so it's fair to conclude they have
| unstated goals.
|
| There's an alternative explanation: that their "true
| preferences" and "unstated goals" are against nuclear
| _weapons_ (and the pollution associated with their use), and
| nuclear power is seen as an enabler of nuclear weapons. (You
| also have to keep in mind that greenhouse gases are not the
| only type of pollution "environmentalist types" are
| concerned about.)
| asdff wrote:
| There hasn't been a nuclear detonation on the planet in
| almost 29 years. At this point that argument is out the
| window.
| Jedd wrote:
| > There hasn't been a nuclear detonation on the planet in
| almost 29 years. At this point that argument is out the
| window.
|
| That's clearly not true.
|
| France 1996
|
| China 1996
|
| India 1998
|
| Pakistan 1998
|
| North Korea 2017
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tes
| ts
| dane-pgp wrote:
| 29 years may seem like a good record, but by the Doomsday
| Argument[0] we shouldn't necessarily assume that this
| lull will last more than another 29 years.
|
| Also, I think your choice of time frame is a little
| strange. It's true that the last US nuclear test was
| 1992, but North Korea as recently as 2017 tested a
| hydrogen bomb[1]. I don't know if by "on the planet" you
| mean "above ground", but the 1992 US test occurred in a
| tunnel.[2]
|
| Anyway, when the stakes are "billions of people are
| killed by radiation and famine", I think it's fair to
| want greater guarantees than "no nuclear detonation in
| the past 4 years". Similarly, "nuclear weapons haven't
| been used to kill people in the past 76 years" isn't much
| more comforting.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_North_Korean_nucle
| ar_test
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Julin
| Zigurd wrote:
| "Fungible" is a word not appearing on this page yet. But the most
| important thing for future power generation is how much you can
| buy for the money. Energy capex is _fungible._
|
| Here are the numbers. Buy the ones at the bottom of the graph:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| being anti-nuclear at times of climate crisis is a moral and
| intellectual equivalent to being anti-vaccines during the
| pandemic
| prettygood wrote:
| You're judging to quickly without looking at all parameters.
|
| The cost of nuclear power has only been rising and the price
| per kWh is much higher compared to wind or solar.
|
| Building cost and time has never been correctly estimated for
| new plants. Just ask France, UK and Finland. Which resulted in
| going way over budget.
|
| All of this while prices for solar and wind are lowering...
| Obviously you can't rely solely on wind and solar but at the
| moment it would make more sense to invest in those solutions
| compared to nuclear, for some countries.
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| wind and solar are heavily subsidized and nuclear is,
| arguably, over regulated despite being statistically the
| safest source of energy (as measured in deaths / twh)
| eldaisfish wrote:
| every time someone mentions the cost of wind and solar, i
| remind them of the same point - there are lots of costs that
| are not borne by wind and solar. The "low" cost is primarily
| due to their fuel cost being zero and that's not inherently a
| bad thing.
|
| The problem is in assuming that the current "cost" scales
| linearly. it does not.
|
| Some examples of these costs are balancing, standby,
| frequency support and so on. At the moment, no "cost" metric
| for renewables includes these costs. They assume that all
| energy generated is consumed by the grid and this is
| increasingly not the case.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _cost of nuclear power has only been rising and the price
| per kWh is much higher compared to wind or solar_
|
| Do we have numbers from China? They're actually pursuing this
| technology. The West, largely, is not. I'd thus be hesitant
| about comparing numbers from a stagnated industry from one
| with active R&D.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Being anti-nuclear is more like being anti-facebook. Nuclear is
| a giant centralized free-loading subsidized secretive toxic
| industry. Just like nuclear.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think the usual way of phrasing that joke is:
|
| "What's the difference between nuclear power and Facebook?
| One is a giant centralized free-loading subsidized secretive
| toxic industry, and the other is a way of providing low-
| carbon electricity."
| beders wrote:
| bullshit.
|
| If there are cheaper and safer alternatives. being anti-nuclear
| is common sense.
| baud147258 wrote:
| are alternatives really cheaper when you need to build more
| to compensate for the moments when the sun doesn't shine and
| the wind doesn't blow?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yes, even assuming curtailment, renewables + storage are
| cheaper than nuclear.
|
| EDIT (sources):
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-
| energy-...
|
| https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-
| rec...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-
| sola...
|
| https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/1144654725901504512
|
| https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/09/solar-challenging-
| nuc...
|
| https://www.utilitydive.com/news/minnesota-study-finds-it-
| ch...
| eldaisfish wrote:
| are you certain this remains true on a grid dominated by
| wind and solar? it is true at the moment because the grid
| just deals with the vagaries of these sources and other
| generators (and consumers) bear the cost.
|
| Will this continue to be the case?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Renewables have zero marginal cost to generate. When the
| spot price goes negative, they can simply stop exporting.
| Other generators are paying others to take power and for
| the fuel they're using to generate. As renewables
| penetration increases, it only puts more pain on legacy
| generators and increases the arb opportunity for storage
| (which can charge when power is cheap, and discharge when
| demand is high). This is the entire model around Tesla's
| Autobidder platform [1] and their energy trading division
| [2], and their desire to become a virtual utility (with
| the value in energy orchestration between system
| components).
|
| [1] https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-
| software/autobidd...
|
| [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/tesla-plans-
| begin-tr...
|
| EDIT: @eldaisfish: Energy storage growth in the US: https
| ://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/batterystor..
| .
|
| Tesla currently orchestrates 1.2Gwh of storage, and their
| Megapack manufacturing facility will have the capacity to
| build 40Gwh of storage per year:
| https://electrek.co/2021/03/16/tesla-autobidder-managing-
| ove..., https://electrek.co/2021/10/08/tesla-megafactory-
| aims-40-gwh...
|
| The Hornsdale Power Reserve (built and orchestrated by
| Tesla) is used for grid services (frequency and voltage
| response, "continuous power"), and has exceeded
| expectations: https://pv-magazine-
| usa.com/2020/05/20/hornsdale-and-its-big...
|
| Utility scale PV can also provide grid forming services
| at minimal cost (firmware upgrade to inverters):
| https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/renewables-
| rescue-st...
| eldaisfish wrote:
| tesla's service does not scale to gigawatts and gigawatt
| hours. Battery storage works for minutes of demand, not
| hours. At the moment, any battery tries to profit from
| arbitrage, not supplying continuous load.
|
| You mention zero energy prices but fail to address the
| major problem - reliability. The power is always on and
| losing power is catastrophic.
|
| The solution to the current problem is more transmission
| capacity. Not batteries.
|
| Wind and solar can help but they are not the solution
| unto themselves.
|
| Oh and the cost of wind and solar are not only in fuel.
| There's lots of costs to O&M and grid balancing, both of
| which are not included in their energy cost.
| gizmondo wrote:
| Source?
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| no one is asking for 100% nuclear. Sure, when sun shines
| solar makes sense. But it can't satisfy all the needs all the
| time. Look at California - we are closing our nuclear and
| buying more electricity from Utah where it is generated using
| coal and gas. You can't outsource climate change.
| [deleted]
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Holding out for new battery stuff when we should have acted
| yesterday scares me.
|
| Confusing the new marginal cost of renewables with the cost
| of them playing all roles in power demand is similar to the
| sort of myopic thinking that got us into this mess in the
| first place --- reliability is also an externality. If that's
| too harsh an analogy, comparing going all-window/solar to
| just-in-time supply chains might be better.
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| Which ones are those that are also effective enough?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Renewables, pumped and battery storage, HVDC transmission,
| interconnectors between grids. California and Australia
| (picked from the top of my head based on knowledge of their
| forward looking policies) will be almost entirely powered
| by renewables in 2045 and 2030 (respectively) without any
| nuclear power.
|
| "Green" hydrogen and ammonia are still in early stages of
| development, but are promising very long duration storage
| technologies that can buffer excess renewable production.
| asdff wrote:
| We do not yet have the technology to power California
| with non-nuclear renewable energy by 2045. Those
| estimates are based on expectations that we will have
| that technology by then, but we don't have these
| capabilities yet. What we do have today is nuclear energy
| that can achieve that goal by 2030, if we began today.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| the problem with cheaper and safer is that you are assuming
| there will come a point in the future where carbon-based
| generation will be eliminated. That date is indeterminate and
| isn't guaranteed.
|
| On the other hand is nuclear, a technology that's well
| understood, expensive, over-regulated but which does not have
| ongoing carbon emissions.
|
| Climate change is a problem today. It was a problem yesterday
| and needs a solution ASAP, not at some indeterminate point in
| the future.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Here is a better analogy: Being pro nuclear is like being anti-
| vaxx because monoclonal antibodies work. They just cost a large
| multiple of vaccination.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Is it not more like being anti Pfizer?
| [deleted]
| beders wrote:
| Note how France conveniently placed many of their nuclear power
| plants close to their eastern border.
|
| With winds coming from the west most time of the year... Sneaky.
| baud147258 wrote:
| Or maybe France just built their plants there to put them close
| to the alluvial resources and close to consumers (between
| Paris, Germany, Rhine and Rhone valleys), rather than a for
| reddit-tier conspiracy theory idea.
|
| Edit: and the map a sibling comment provided showed that most
| French nuclear power plants aren't even close to the Eastern
| border, but rather spread out over the national territory
| masklinn wrote:
| > Or maybe France just built their plants there to put them
| close to the alluvial resources
|
| Yep, nukes require cooling, and good cooling mean either the
| seashore or a large river with suitable sites. Hence there
| being 4 plants on both Rhone (highest discharge in the
| country, not including the Rhine) and Loire (longest river in
| the country), while the smaller Garonne rates only 2.
| mcronce wrote:
| What exactly do you think the winds are carrying that would
| motivate them to place nuclear reactors based on that pattern?
| ElKrist wrote:
| For those who actually want to see a map, showing that "how
| France conveniently placed many of their nuclear power plants
| close to their eastern border" is non-sense:
|
| https://www.irsn.fr/FR/connaissances/Installations_nucleaire...
| timinc wrote:
| Very interesting
| orwin wrote:
| Listen, i'm pretty sure every person who ever lived in Lille,
| Strasbourg or Paris would gladly pay a premium to move our 3
| plant out of the way (3/21 by the way) if germany stop their
| peakers, coal plants and industries in the Rhur each time the
| wind blow westward, especially when the anticyclone is resting
| over France. Never had asthma before my trip to Paris, and when
| i learnt that most of the particles that declenched that were
| due to coal burning and not cars, i became very, very pro-
| nuclear.
| cocoggu wrote:
| Many is 4 out 22 plants[1] and they are located on rivers
| because it's needed. Also, maybe it's to have less loss when
| selling generated power to eastern countries?
|
| [1]
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_plants...
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Those plants put out non-radioactive steam, while the Ruhr
| Valley coal that is used on the other side of the border puts
| out highly-radioactive fly ash.
| inasio wrote:
| Fun fact I learned from a guy from the team: the team that built
| the Pepper robot [0] was originally employed by the French
| nuclear comission to build and operate robots to remotely work
| inside nuclear plants in the case of an accident (or when doing
| cleanups).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(robot)
| atkailash wrote:
| Anytime I'm in a discussion about nuclear energy (or I guess
| energy) France is always my example of well managed. Few major
| incidents (that I'm aware of, and this seems to confirm unless
| I'm missing something), and less waste than the US despite using
| significantly more.
|
| Sure the waste is long lasting but it can also be isolated
| (especially somewhere like the US), whereas byproducts from coal
| and the smoke from it has worldwide effects. Especially with
| androgenic climate change being so obvious at this point, it
| feels like a no brainer
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