The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any leakage can easily detected.
And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled:
> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
> Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a lot of nuclear waste right now that is just "temporarily" stashed away in various places - some of which already had issues with flooding, like Asse II.
Asse isn't a storage for high-level waste. It contain low-level waste that can also come from hospitals and such. Germany has no storage for high-level waste yet.
Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall.
Just look at this photograph, it shows all of the French nuclear waste accumulated in decades:
> https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It never was.
I also don't understand why not having a geological repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing it in place after decommissioning. You have a lot of shielding material (i.e. the other 99% of reactor waste that is mostly concrete) to protect a very small amount of radiation and keep the material distributed, which has some security benefits. Not having a centralized location doesn't seem like an issue. It isn't like humans are going anywhere anytime soon and we're going to lose information about where waste is stored. We have plenty of time to figure out a long term storage system that is still safe if the entirety of human information is lost. It's a great goal, but if that's our concern we should talk about deep geological repositories for a lot of other waste that we have that doesn't degrade overtime.
That number is not actually supported by your source, as a matter of fact, your source points out that the US it not recycling any of the fuel at all.
> Oh, but Germany has a storage for highly toxic chemicals in Herfa-Neurode with already over 3 million tons of waste
Sorry, but I don't see the argument there? Just because there's already toxic waste, does not mean that more toxic waste wouldn't change anything. Or are you suggesting the nuclear waste should just be thrown into Herfa-Neurode with all the chemical waste?
> Compared to that, Germany has only 11,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. An amount that fits into a single hall.
Germany also has quite a high population density, it doesn't have the luxury of large swats of unpopulated land where it could build it's "nuclear waste storage hall", and that's assuming that "just store it in a hall" is actually a good way to store it.
If it really was as simple as that, then why did Finland spend billions on building their Onkala deep geological repository? Which is the only installation of that kind on the whole planet. Not even in the US a proper storage location has been found yet, as Yucca Mountain was not deemed suitable.
The best answer anybody can currently give to that is "Just store it on site", which isn't a solution, it's the temporary band-aid for a rather permanent problem that's not actually solved.
You can't just hand-wave that away by claiming it ain't a problem and allegedly never was.
If its so easy as you say, why doesn't every country have a small room to keep all the waster?
Why do we often "just" throw it in the ocean instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
Why do these "so easy to maintain rooms" leak?
https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-st....
Why do managers of nuclear reactos "loose" all the waste?
https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/missing-german-nuclear-mater...
Etc.
Nuclear energy is still a fantastic, dense source of energy. I would much,much prefer to live next to a nuclear power plant than a coal or similar one.
If there was a way to generate even cleaner power with such efficiency then great. 25 years ago we had that hope for a few weeks with cold fusion.
They are now stored in the "yard" at the different nuclear powerplant
Decades of fighting has eventually killed every attempt because people do not want it.
I am always curious about people who say not to mind the waste, if it would be ok to store them in their yard?
In fact, we have unmitigated leaking dumps here in the US, but since it is not in your backyard you don't care. Not your problem, someone elses problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Han....
I can play the environmentalist on the backs of other people as well. Super easy.
Some of us believe that if we can't generate power without creating waste for future generations, we should go without the power.
Seriously, we don't need it.
The thing is, we don't have a long term solution for storing CO2 either.
The thing I like about nuclear waste is is it's obvious, its tangle and it sits around in sinister looking containers.
As opposed to CO2.
There's other ways, of course, but this was the best one I remember reading about; it's expensive but less so than the incidentals of CO2 and particulate release.
That sounds like the same catch-22 as the rest of this. We've thrown up our hands and gone "Not worth it" and then our lack of investment in proper storage is somehow a blocker.
Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear wast...
Additionally Politicians mess in seriously bad ways with anything related to nuclear.
Like pushing for nuclear power but if it's found that the objective best place to store the wast underground is around where they live they will try all kind of things to exclude the best suited place from the list of potential candidates.
Or adding a unsuited place close to the border of the neighbor country they don't like "because of reasons".
Or pushing for nuclear power with arguments like it's electricity being very cheap while it's actually the most expensive electricity source in their country and that is even through it's highly subsidized (which the much cheaper alternatives are not).
Etc. Etc.
I would love I people would start to have a purely objective discussion about this.
And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up.
And to have a tracking chain where no fuel gets into the wrong hands.
Do you know how germany decided on the position of its long term nuclest storage facilities?
East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border.
Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.
So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.
The assumption is simply wrong.
https://www.thoughtco.com/seismic-hazard-maps-of-the-world-1...
Are there other instabilities to take into account? Finally there is also a question as to the political viability of burying waste at a particular location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Who knows... perhaps in a few years we can dump the nuclear waste into space.
The thing is, these are not just straw men, but talking points frequently used by nuclear energy opponents. Along with others, like asserting that nuclear energy is a source of CO², etc.
If nuclear proponents had to focus only on reasonable, grounded talking points, they would probably be happier for it.
> for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution.
It's an OK point, and it's a shame that Germany seems to skip its environmental responsibilities. However, EU laws apply to all EU countries, including the ones that do a better job.
First, you could charge outrageus amounts of money for the service.
Second, you could practically ditch your defence forces simply because absolutely nobody would want anyone else to attack a country with huge amounts of radioactive waste.
Finally, after some time, you could likely sell the waste back as a fuel ingredient to new nuclear technologies.
This only slightly tongue in cheek. Of course I understand that proposing that would be a political suicide, but nevertheless, it would make sense.
Why would you think that?
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
Deep geological storage, but not in salt beds, is a simple answer. And not entombed, etc. Just sitting on skids. Waiting to be inspected and repaired. I've been in deep hard-rock mines that individually would hold the entire world's waste.
The true answer though is breeder reactors and using 99% of the fuel, not 3%, and the waste being shorter-term byproducts as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repositor...
Is flooding a problem for nuclear waste? It's hard to imagine it being stored in a way that it could contaminate water.
Either way, that's a minute detail. A straw man, if you will. Even with the occassional accidents, whether it's kaboom or something more benign, nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil.
Plus, that used fuel will likely be reused in the future. I think having to store a lot of nuclear fuel is a much better problem than having to extract carbon out of the atmosphere, or building difficult to recycle chemical batteries out of scarce resources.
Schacht Asse II was never a sound choice for waste storage because of several incidents of water ingress even during the time it was an active salt mine. Water ingress became worse after the facility was reused to dump low and medium level waste into it. This wasn't some orderly storage either. Drums of waste were unloaded into caverns by dozers and then closed off with salt. It was accepted that drums would crack open right there and then.
Saltwater is highly corrosive and it will eat these drums in short order. Waste immobilized with concrete will also not resist for long. The current plan is to extract the waste out of this mine again before it floods and widespread nuclear contamination will result. This cock-up will cost the German tax payer an estimated 4 to 6 billion EUR.
A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a radioactive isotope, often with much shorter half-lives. Some of these are even useful in industry.
There are new kinds of reactors, like the Traveling Wave Reactor (TVR) which efficiently use fuel like breeder reactors as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
There were challenges in the past with breeder reactor design (for example as this article outlines: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/30/fast-bre...), but this is an area that there should be a lot more active research in. The long-term benefits of doing so would be immense.
I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic) facility, that’s completely transparent to outside observers, and where no humans are allowed.
Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to not steal material from the line.
Because that scenario is very common.
Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a field, doing nothing for 100 years.
The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is idiotic.
Sold problem for decades. This is an economical question. Can we store nuclear waste in reliable manner for a long time that we can afford when operating a nuclear power plant.
Yes we can. Case closed.
- What if we make a 1 meter wall thick lead / steel container and seal the waste in and leave it? Surely nothing can break it, not even an earthquake. Just make a giant tennis court sized containers and dump stuff in there. We know how to build bridges, surely we can build large containers.
Just want to learn, I am sure this is proposed and would love to know why its a stupid idea.
The big boxes still need armed guards and a stable government so that it that they are not dismantled and used as weapons by future generations of extremists.
The problem comes when one introduce fossil fuels into the production chain because it makes economical sense to do so.
Nuclear power is poorly understood and easily stigmatised but on balance is far less harmful than burning fossil fuels.
(and I know the accidents were worse, but we iterated on car and plane safety, so why not energy safety?)
It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous.
The issue though, is that energy production is mostly quiet unless there's a problem, but people do see personal benefit in air travel.
Add to that: Coal is a silent killer, it's not obvious that it's killing us and in such numbers as it is. Nuclear is a dramatic killer, when we die from radiation it's clear and obvious and horrific.
But all analogies are like that...they need people to squint so details go fuzzy and merge.
The Zeppelin is an equally plausible aircraft analogy. Theoretically it is possible for nothing to go wrong when taking dependencies on a quarter million hand sewn cow intestines.
Because of this, one common refrain from nuclear proponents on HN is that we should just get rid of all those safety regulations and go back to 70s-era levels of nuclear safety because it's safe enough, which would be like if we'd just accepted planes were unsafe back when accidents were more common and not tried to fix it. It also misses one of the key lessons of airplane safety: this kind of normalization of deviance is a major cause of serious accidents. For every major disaster, there is a chain of less serious incidents where things just didn't happen to align right to cause lots of deaths, until one day they did... and nuclear power has the potential for some really impressive disasters. It also probably wouldn't be enough to make nuclear power viable again; it has a lot of cost problems.
We want more energy per person in the future.
Stable energy is required to make industry sustainable.
Stable 'free' energy allows you to do really cool new things (like melt trash for resources?)
Waste & environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil fuels.
A nation needs to agree to the risk/reward of a nuclear power plant, it must be owned and payed for primarily by the government.
Having a country/state that offers free energy will pay itself back easily. Cost should not be an issue, 20 % of GDP should be on the table. ( Money is made up, Jules are real ).
Solar and wind are mostly done innovating. Nuclear has a relatively clear path of improvements ahead in terms of $/joule.
Storage based on hydrogen or thermal are too inefficient and don't scale well enough to power homes and industries during the winter.
Any comments are welcome.
We have petawatt-hours worth of storage capacity.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
US nuclear power gets a liability cap of $0.2 billion. The nuclear industry will keep telling us it is safe but it will refuse to shoulder the insurance costs beyond a minimal level. That's the taxpayer's job and the taxpayer's job alone.
And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.
You could get the price down in a number of ways, but the most obvious one is going to be to skimp on safety.
This isn't Germany's fault. Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond those it already has. The only countries that will really want it are those with nuclear weapons and a desire to keep a nuclear industry running to maintain skills and technology.
It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with decarbonization as an excuse.
Germany's nuclear phase out costs the country $12 billion per year plus 1100 additional deaths due to air pollution:
> https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf
> And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.
Except you are comparing levelized costs of electrity with the total system costs. Wind and solar need backup and/or storage, nuclear doesn't.
> Nuclear is only competitive with lavish subsidies beyond those it already has.
Nuclear was *never* subsidized in Germany:
> http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf (p. 16, answer 27)
> It's about nuclear arsenal maintenance at this point, with decarbonization as an excuse.
It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons and which have nuclear power. North Korea has nuclear weapons, they don't have nuclear power. South Korea is the opposite.
Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made.
Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.
Guess which energy source in France receive most subsidies? If the answer was fossil fuels you would be right. If you ask Germany with its massive subsidies for renewable, it is actually renewable followed by fossil fuels. Then its fossil fuels again. The story repeats itself in practically every country in EU. Even Sweden with its very public facing pro-renewable stance spends millions on subsidizes for fossil fuels. In total for 2018, 50 billions euro wast given as subsidies for fossil fuels in EU.
Inquisitive people might ask why all those countries are spending so much subsidizes on fossil fuels, and the answer is pretty simple. Do you want a stable energy grid? You either pay the oil, gas and coal companies to keep the engines warm in case there is a demand spike, or there won't be enough supply when demands go up. Now lets discuss why the need to pay for "reserve energy" has spiked in the last few decades. It has something to do with intermittent energy production.
Here is a suggestion. Lets cut that 50 billions for fossil fuel subsidies to 0. Either pay for nuclear/storage or accept an unstable grid. I am very tired of oil, coal and gas being paid to just keep the engines warm.
I'm very suspicious of these claims. First, there's stuff like this: https://energycentral.com/c/ec/germany-solar-and-wind-triple.... Second, the position of most nuclear opponents is not "solar and wind can provide clean energy for everyone at a fraction of the cost", but rather "everyone needs to radically cut back on energy use and alter their lifestyles". I get the same sense as I do from religious conservatives who oppose STD vaccines because they allow people to continue their sinful ways.
Where can I find a source confirming that ?
This first link here makes me absolutely furious. There's too much to quote from here, but this succinct excerpt touches on loosening safety tests. It goes into more detail in other parts of the article. The post has numerous example of very concerning issues.
> When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859
> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...
> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...
I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow.
I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their local coal plant to manage demand. That link was unsecured radiowaves directly interacting with their safety critial systems. Their defense was "it's point to point, so you'd have to build a tower beteen." Yeah or wait 15 years and buy a drone.
And we still haven't the tech to get rid of the waste products.
The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
And that's only the long term cost of pulling it out of the ground. The costs of putting it safely away for a million literal years is not included.
> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
How much do those solar panels cost once you factor in environmental remediation, EOL recycling, land use, etc.? Since that's the standard nuclear is held to, it would be good to know.
The Fukushima plant was hit by:
1) Magnitude 9 (!) earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Massive fire 4) Total loss of all power to control circuitry.
Even after that, it still didn't kill anybody from radioactivity (some firefighters were killed fighting the fire, not from radiation).
What do you suppose would happen if a similar series of catastrophes struck a hydroelectric dam? Say, the Three Gorges Dam in China?
Hint: nothing good.
Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible) and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power plants).
Solar can't be used for base load at the moment.
Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium:
- produces significantly more energy per ton
- produces significantly less waste
- the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00 years, instead of x0000 years)
Thorium has only one actual physical advantage, and that is that it can do breeding with slow neutrons rather than fast ones. This is a technicality and has lots of complications.
If you are not doing a breeder, uranium is just fine.
[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optoelectric_nuclear_battery
I'll let you do that first. Please do it somewhere remote kay? :D
They produce very little power (W).
1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1];
2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues;
3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems;
4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue; and
5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
The big problems with nuclear aren't technical they're political but they are no less significant. For me, I just don't trust humans--either government entities or for-profit enterprises--to safely and responsibly build and manage a nuclear power plants as well as all the infrastructure to mine, process, transport, reprocess and store any byproducts.
Do you have a source? There's plenty of larger fossil fuel catastrophes that just aren't well known because they are in third world countries, so who gives a fuck, right? [0] (note that this is 1700 square miles) I'm not sure this point if about environmental damage or human not being able to live there damage. If the former, I think climate change is a pretty apparent counter point. If the latter, well the size of that is largely political but you can think of it as an unexpected opening of a national forest. Sure, sucks for humans, but all the trees are great for climate (hell, killing humans is great for climate, but that's not popular).
> 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem.
Reprocessing isn't necessary. There's little reason to with our current industry, and even France's. Storage is easy. You place it on site. We have a few hundred years to figure out deep geological repositories (which I also advocate for plastics, heavy metals, and other non-degradable toxic substances). We just don't have enough and it isn't dangerous enough for this to be a problem. Nuclear waste is hundreds of thousands of times smaller than other energy sources (500,000x less than coal). You all act like this is a problem that only nuclear has. It isn't even close to being the biggest perpetrator. It is a good criticism, but if you are only applying this criticism to one product I'm not convinced it is a concern you actually have but rather you're just holding "enemies" to higher standards.
> 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems
This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons, which my response would be that you clearly do not understand the difference between weapons and reactors. As a side note, understanding this difference is key to understanding the Iran Deal and why no one is concerned that they produced more enriched material than the deal allowed (i.e. it was a political gesture and could only be a political gesture).
> 4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue
And? It is stored on site. Energy production plants of any kind are a security issue.
> 5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
See 4.
And congrats, you hit 5/10 of the common myths[1].
Now if you said that nuclear power plants were too expensive, we could have a real discussion and there would be differing opinions based on different criteria and hopeful/naive projections. But we can't even have that conversation if you aren't willing to just google the opposition's answers to your questions that have been continually asked for decades. I'm just reminded of this Futurama episode (which I just noticed makes a flat earth joke)[2]. We don't need more Dr. Banjos.
[0] https://medium.com/@renegadeinc/the-amazon-chernobyl-6309a19... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikneKQAeUp0
[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
Yes, Chernobyl. Unless you can point me to a _single_ non-nuclear power plant accident that has rendered 1,000 square miles uninhabitable for 35 years (and counting) then my point stands.
Pro-nuclear advocates always bring up the health effects of coal. Yes, it’s terrible. But you’ve also picked the worst offender (what about natural gas?) and those health effects are spread across the entire industry, not localized to a single plant failure.
> This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons
No it is not. Many in this thread and elsewhere will selectively talk about nuclear waste in terms of spent fuel processing and storage. This completely ignores the byproducts of enrichment.
And yes uranium for power plants is still enriched, even if it’s not to the degree that weapons-grade uranium is enriched.
> Energy production plants of any kind are a security issue.
False equivalency strikes again. You’re trying to deflect to the issue of securing the plant. Compare what can be done with a ton of nuclear fuel or nuclear waste vs a ton of whatever goes into or comes out of a coal plant.
You also call the waste footprints of nuclear fission power “small”. Well it’s partly small because nuclear power is small. To scale it up to the level where could actually displace fossil fuel use would multiply those numbers and problems by 10-100x.
And I’ll not to completely skipped over the biggest problem of all: it requires humans tasked with building, maintaining, operations and monitoring plants in a way that just doesn’t seem realistic or scalable.
The answer to your question depends on the characteristics of the technology. There are many proposed variations (eg the traditional H-H including heavier isotopes, He₃, pB).
For fuels, deuterium is abundant in the environment environment so isn't an issue. Tritium decays quickly. This is a fairly common theme with lighter elements. U₂₃₅ on the other hand is extremely problematic for being both a heavy metal, long-lived and radioactive.
But I'm not yet convinced we'll actually have commercial fusion power. Aneutronic variants aside, neutron embrittlement and the energy loss from neutrons are significant unsolved problems. Even with powerful magnets, containing a fluid at 100M Kelvin is a significant problems, inherently so because of turbulence.
I hope relatively cheap fusion power is in our future but there's no clear path forward yet.
None of these have particularly problematic byproducts.
Furthermore:
1. Nuclear has always been the most expensive alternative, moreso now than ever before. Its advocates knew this at the time that they were calling it "too cheap to meter". Even continuing to operate an existing plant costs more than building out renewables and switching to those.
2. Nuclear construction projects invariably turn into massive pipelines for corruption and graft, siphoning $billions or tens of $billions from public budgets into well-connected private hands before ever delivering any power. Renewable projects (with the exception of larger dams) have not typically catered to corruption. "Small nuke" has never got traction, despite apparent efficiencies, specifically because it offers so little scope for long-term corruption. (E.g., the US government just granted a measly $10 million to one company to promote it.)
3. Nuclear construction takes so long that any supposed benefit comes far too late to do much good. The same money spent on renewables always starts delivering immediately, in much larger amounts, when it is most needed. The money saved on the much cheaper power can be spent immediately building out more, for even more benefit, compounding.
As an aside, Tokamak fusion will never, ever produce so much as one solitary erg of commercially competitive energy. The current ITER project is not projected to do anything until 2050 (although it will take hundreds of megawatts to fire up, for experiments), and then is not so much as planned to deliver practical power, ever, despite costing tens of $billions. The "practical" plant they imagine building, to turn on at end-of-century (after all of us reading this are dead!), would need to be an order of magnitude larger, and cost $trillions and decades without producing, all the while stealing capital from actually viable projects.
The only rational conclusion is that Tokamak fusion research is and was never intended to produce practical power. The whole program is, rather, purely a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists and contractors, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. Every cent spent on Tokamak fusion is stolen from research on alternatives that could, in principle, be practical.
(The one valuable output of Tokamak research is a generation of physicists now comfortable with plasma fluid-dynamics mathematics.)
I believe that HVDC conduits going to solar farms in Spain, even under the Mediterranean to Africa could be built faster than nuclear plants.
I also believe that most people would prefer a compressed gas storage system built in a old coal or salt mine built nearby over a nuclear plant.
With all recent developments in space technology, I'd expect it to be extremely safe and reliable in the next decades.
We could also go way up. But there is the sun already, why build another?
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low...
I don’t think anyone is ignoring the problem, having huge amounts of zero carbon power is the starting point for lots of things that will let us solve a lot of the harder problems like cement, or jet fuel etc.
Take away points:
* The first approach is to use a different mix that can nearly half the temperature required to produce the concrete. This can reduce the CO2 emissions to produce the concrete by up to 40%
* The second approach uses pure CO2 to cure the concrete which locks away more CO2 in the concrete
* The concrete produced by these approaches need to be fully tested before the methods can be rolled out and costs reduced
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...
Nuclear is just too slow to fix our CO2 problems
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems? In the following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2 buildup, not "fix our CO2 problems".
Renewables
> Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems?
It's the main claim of the Nuclear AstroTurf campaign.
> In the following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2 buildup, not "fix our CO2 problems".
As I've shown: it is not the appropriate tool to do that in an efficient way.
Can somebody tell me why this won't be a viable option? Seems simple enough, and it's not like we've not done worse.
Current nuclear waste solutions are perfectly sufficient and appropriate [1].
Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases like powering infrastructure in space and implementing big red buttons for our presidents, supreme leaders and chairmen.
Nobody can rule out accidents or malicious things going on with the spent fuel anyways.
Wind and solar are very cheap and the sun won't turn off anytime soon. Can't we cover the planet's deserts with photovoltaics and wind turbines? Couldn't we ship the converted energy using high voltage DC lines or hydrogen/methane pipelines?
Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?
Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.
Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.
Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.
Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
[2] https://thenextweb.com/science/2021/03/02/solar-panels-in-th...
Are there safe breeder reactor designs? How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?
> Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.
True. But irradiating large patches of land/streams of water just makes for bad publicity. Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site or similar sites, like the one near my home town Hanau (see comment below).
> Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.
South Korea suffers from massive corruption and the country is practically run by a few ultra-rich families, even Chinese are complaining about that fact. ;)
As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few? It is no wonder that regulatory costs there are lower. A human life is apparently less valuable.
> Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.
This is something to consider. Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert? Would wind turbines reduce peak windspeed and stop or revert desertification?
> Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...
If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries" that would be awesome. Unfortunately shielding combined with the fact that it won't work as a closed system for long (need for "refreshing" spent fuel in a breeder periodically) makes that impractical due to hard physics. As far as I know.
How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled? Normal nuclear fuel transport cost lots of money and require high security. Are you going to put those perfectly safe rods in an Uber? Like that radioactive fracking brine on the back of a small truck without shielding? That model could work in Russia... or maybe the US.
Which is more dirty, has a touch of corruption and allows mother Russia to tell the Germans how to behave. But it makes some politicians and companies in two countries happy and shows that large scale energy projects can work if there is a will.
So it's a start I guess.
There are many designs for nuclear reactors that are simpler, safer, and more suitable for smaller communities, but various government nuclear regulation agencies around the world have such a high bar for entry that those designs will never be put into practice.
In the US, if you want to operate a nuclear reactor, the design has to be vetted first. To vet the reactor, you have to convince the agency to let you build a full-scale test reactor and convince them that the design is likely safe before building the test reactor. If anything about the test reactor makes them uncomfortable, the design will be denied and the reactor won't be allowed to operate and cannot work as a template for future reactors.
This creates a very difficult and expensive bar for entry into the market. For a large reactor, a company would have to invest billions of dollars for a decade before they could even begin to hope to operate to pay back the loans, and even then there is no guarantee that they'll be allowed to operate the reactor to sell the electricity.
That is, unless they use one of the existing pre-approved reactor concepts that were designed in the 70's and have known flaws (albeit, with known ways to reduce the risks of those flaws)
Nuclear radiation might be damaging, but it's not really a big deal as long as the design prevents accidents and there are safeguards to prevent the uncontrolled release of radiation.
You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.
Solar is an excellent source of energy, with long life spans of the equipment but it's only functional for anywhere from 6 to 16 hours a day, depending on your latitude and the weather. The ideal places for solar farms are often far from the highest concentrations of consumers.
Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.
Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.
Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.
The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
The problem is that it takes a lot of political will to build a nuclear power plant because everyone is afraid of that. Bigger plants are often desired because plant owners need to invest the decade and tens of millions of dollars getting not just approval from the NRC, but approval from the people and government within 20 miles of the plant.
Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.
This is interesting. I thought without breeder reactors and continued widespread nuclear use we would run out in ~50 years. Maybe you have more current sources.
> Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.
Yes and I additionally worry about the fiber material being slowly rubbed off and being spread downstream by the wind (google wind turbine leading edge erosion). Because wind turbines on land are often built on farming land. Thus I put a lot of hope in improved wind "turbine" designs like: https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/
> Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.
I thought the US grid is pretty old and some parts (Texas?) are on their own. Maybe investments in that area could help, in addition to storage (mechanical or hydrogen connected with solar).
> Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.
Combine this statement (risk of "real war") with this suggestion...
> The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.
...and you get great savings in making that hated opponents main population centers uninhabitable and the irradiated ruins a monument to remember. Even if only by unfortunate "accident". In WW2 cities were burned down using "firestorm" tactics here in Germany. I heard the anniversary bells ring an annoyingly long time a few days back in the rebuilt city of Würzburg... why would humanity change character and suddenly become more civil in the next conflict?
> Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.
I agree that this is probably due to the hard lessons learned from the risks in older experimental and larger commercial designs. But are we willing to learn the hard lessons of 10000s (or more) of handy, small reactors spread in everyones backyard?
Better put some solar panels on some roofs and hydrogen metal hydride storage in a few basements. Maybe not under a school or kindergarden or the likes.
A grid like this could be made incredibly resilient and hard to destroy by any opponent.
The currently identified reserves of Uranium could last us at least 200 years, even longer if you enrich it more or use newer reactor designs. If you extract it from seawater we've got about 60000 years worth
Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Wind and Solar are indeed cheap, but have higher materials throughput than nuclear, and they use orders of magnitude more land. This land use will almost certainly have a larger impact on the environment than Nuclear. There is also new research that is showing wind turbines are a major cause of insect decline as well.
The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
Now lets say you've got solar and wind up the wazoo, and battery banks to load shift. Can you still power society 24/7? Nope. You still need either hydro, natural gas, or nuclear to run the grid in a stable and reliable manner. Batteries to provide base load overnight would require so much money and materials that I don't see this happening any time soon without major breakthroughs in battery tech.
What about pumped hydro? Well... turns out dams need to manage water levels for practical reasons and while some pumped hydro can be useful, the available capacity for this when you take into account electricity production and practical water management issues is minimal.
Why can't we cover the deserts in solar and wind and transmit it? Or move electricity from one area to another when the wind isn't blowing or its cloudy? Well transmission is expensive and incurs energy loss in a major way. transmission and sub-transmission lines today account for about a 30% energy loss. Now you're talking about tripling or quadrupling the transmission infrastructure at a minimum, and moving energy over great distances, which is VERY expensive compared to producing it near where it is consumed.
There is a good article here on the technical challenges: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...
Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.
https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/493-494/ex...
Children found funny metal pill or drop-like objects in the forests around the plant and played with it. While there were reports of inspectors and interested civilians being blocked from taking measurements.
After this and Chernobyl nobody has a right to complain about me being a retarded monkey... or dying maybe 1-5 years earlier than normal due to earlier onset of cancer.
Humans can not be trusted (at scale) to keep such material secure and even in labs accidents can happen. Same is true for large scale use of dangerous chemicals, too.
> Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly reactive metals?
> The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.
Human operators can never be trusted. And machines built by humans will also fail, but at least risk could be more easily calculated. (Well, at least until machine learning came along and we started to introduce some "human factor" back into the algorithms for better or worse.) If we were able to avoid using most pesticides we would do so already. Unfortunately our way of producing food for the masses with low manual effort and low technology (large machines, monoculture) forces us to keep using them, for now. We will see what alternatives we can build (robotic farming, indoor farming and maybe a few organic farms) that can do with less or no pesticides. I don't think anyone questions the harm widespread pesticide use has done to our ecosystem. Pesticides are just like chemical weapons. What you really want is the bug not eating your plant, not multiplying in excess and staying mostly out of your bottom-line. Using pesticides is like waging a war against the bug species in question (with collateral damage) instead of finding ways to fix the root-causes. As someone who picked potatoe bugs from a field once, I can relate to the waging a war option, but that doesn't mean it's the right course of action.
> The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
True. I also don't see how lithium based batteries have a long future in large scale energy storage. Too high environmental impact and political risk. (Everyone designs battery cars and China controls most needed rare earths. How is that not a dependency.) I have high hopes in direct hydrogen storage. Efficieny is important, but not the single most important factor. Total cost (over lifetime) and environmental impact - also in countries where the raw materials are mined - should be considered.
> There is a good article here on the technical challenges: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...
This one states that "Transmission Losses is approximate 17% while distribution losses is approximate 50%.". So these 50% loss in the distribution part are shared by any other power generation except distributed local (on your own roof or in your basement). The 17% in the transmission area do not sound so much and are lower than I expected. I do however take from that article that baseload power generation should be as distributed as possible to avoid unnecessary losses in distribution (smaller power lines/transformers of the villages/buildings).
> Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
This one is unfortunately true. Every idea has its merrits and downsides. I'd rather err on the biome uninhabitable by us humans, though.
> At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.
Let us use this compact and efficient method for powering the ion engines to travel to some other planets, instead of using them here, with the risk of lowering our homeworld's value.
