If other low-carbon sources, namely wind and solar PV, are to fill the shortfall in nuclear, their deployment would have to accelerate to an unprecedented level. In the past 20 years, wind and solar PV capacity has increased by about 580 gigawatts in advanced economies. But over the next 20 years, nearly five times that amount would need to be added.
This is misleading enough to make one question every "fact" stated in TFA. 20 years ago was essentially a zero point for the statistic they cite. It was less than 5 gigawatts, anyway. It grew by over 100 times in that 20 years, and it will be "unprecedented" to grow by 5 times in the next 20? (5 < 100) Is anyone at this agency numerate?
> 20 years ago was essentially a zero point for the statistic they cite. It was less than 5 gigawatts, anyway. It grew by over 100 times in that 20 years, and it will be "unprecedented" to grow by 5 times in the next 20?
Do you expect the growth rate of Google over the next 20 years will be the same as it was between 1999 and today?
As things mature you don't get the same level of exponential growth. Meanwhile the subsidies for solar are being reduced etc.
And your chart is installed capacity, not panel production capacity. The growth in panel production capacity is lower than that visual implies.
But let's suppose we could replace nuclear with solar. That doesn't really work because solar can't produce at night and adding the requirement of batteries would make the demand for daytime-only solar generation fall off significantly, but suppose we could do it. That's still not what we need -- we need the expanding solar capacity to replace coal. Every GW of nuclear it would have to replace is one more GW of coal that stays online.
There have been some efforts to make residential geothermal heat pumps price competitive in many markets. In which case, winter insolation with clouds may actually be enough to heat houses.
I would guess that we'll see far more thermal storage (refrigerators, water heaters, etc...) in households as appliances get smarter.
That's why I went with air-based heat pumps instead of geothermal. Everyone I spoke with told me that it was very risky, cost-wise, to install where I live.
Granted, geothermal might be more affordable in other geologies.
Depends on a case by case basis. You'd need a desert, the South of Spain, Greece or Texas. Just like geothermal, it's very location specific, whereas one could deploy a nuclear reactor on the Moon or Mars.
Maybe a bit nitpicking, but solar would even work better on moon and mars due to the lack of atmosphere. But yes, here on earth it is very location specific.
Was this reply intended to go here? I made no predictions. I complained about the word "unprecedented". Are you holding IEA to the same standard you're attempting to apply here? ISTM you've steelmanned their deception to the point that it no longer resembles TFA. They didn't include any of this sophistry.
Have all the factories that got us to this level of (obviously) installed capacity burned down recently? Have the investors who invested in them and the engineers who built them all died?
OK, I'll make a prediction. Solar capacity will rise to 100% of today's total capacity, and it still won't displace lots of other energy sources. Why? Because when power is cheaper and has fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.
If you want to be a stickler, what that actually means is that it has never happened before. Have we ever installed ~2500 GW of new photovoltaic generation capacity over a twenty year period? Of any individual generation method?
> Have all the factories that got us to this level of (obviously) installed capacity burned down recently? Have the investors who invested in them and the engineers who built them all died?
It's not just a question of supply. It's also a question of demand.
Subsidizing five times as much capacity would require five time as much government money, which may not be available. If the subsidies end, the demand curve takes a hit.
In addition to that, the fact that solar only generates during the day hasn't yet become an issue because the daytime demand is higher, so solar can currently be efficiently used to satisfy the demand differential between day and night. But once there is enough solar generating capacity to satisfy the full differential, that efficiency ends and you start having to deal with expensive energy storage or paying capital and maintenance for alternative generation which is idle and unproductive half the day, effectively requiring the cost of solar to fall lower than the alternative's fuel/operating cost only and not the total cost including capital and maintenance, because the capital and maintenance then have to be paid anyway to make the capacity available at night.
It has also been getting installed more in the locations amenable to it -- places with more sunlight, clearer skies and less expensive land. Notice that a lot of the existing capacity is in places like Arizona and not places like Seattle. But once the demand in those locations is satisfied, you have to move to places without those characteristics and you get less power at higher cost.
Meanwhile just because you have the existing supply doesn't mean you have the existing supply. You need the price to fall to the level that it becomes economical to generate power even for use at night in Seattle, but that price may be lower than the price that customers in Asia and South America would pay, so even if the supply exists, it ends up going somewhere else first.
All this to say that extrapolating from an exponential curve is generally wrong sooner or later, and frequently sooner.
> Solar capacity will rise to 100% of today's total capacity, and it still won't displace lots of other energy sources. Why? Because when power is cheaper and has fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.
If it becomes genuinely cheaper even in northern cities and even with the cost of energy storage, it will displace lots of other energy sources and we'll use more of it. But that's still speculation that may or may not ever actually happen. And maybe it does, but it's still justifiable to be prepared if it doesn't.
Have we ever installed ~2500 GW of new photovoltaic generation capacity over a twenty year period? Of any individual generation method?
According to "The Shift Project" [0], we added over 1700 GW of fossil fuel generation between 1994 and 2014. Since less than 900 GW was added between 1980 and 2000, that was also "unprecedented", if we're using this weak definition of that word. We can expect any twenty-year period for any generation mode other than maybe dried-dung burning to be unprecedented in that sense. 1700 is still in the same ballpark for a smaller population with less economic development than we can expect twenty years from now.
It's also a question of demand.
OK, sure, maybe we won't need that much power. Maybe we'll need more. Maybe we'll need it earlier or later. Let's try to remember the discussion we're having, though. TFA is crying about the fate of nuclear. One of their cries is that nuclear is the only generation mode that can control greenhouse gases. In order to ignore the elephants called "solar" and "wind", they have to pretend that the growth in those generation modes will soon slow down massively. You don't save that ridiculous pretense by wondering about demand. The demand level is part of the premise of their whole ridiculous argument. If demand ends up being less, then we won't need as much solar and wind power.
You can't overtake oil without spending a comparable amount on developing renewables. While it isn't quite there yet, soon renewables will be a bigger business than oil. That's impressive, and it makes the kind of growth needed to replace nuclear power plausible.
The main reason for the current inflection point is that the cost per unit energy for solar/wind has dropped precipitously (and continues to drop), while the cost/energy for most fossil fuels is growing rapidly (natural gas is an exception, due to new fracking tech). And nuclear is such a massive long-term capital investment in a rapidly developing energy picture that the risk profile is really bad, even if a new plant operates perfectly with no problems for its entire planned lifespan. Nobody wants to be the one who decided to build a nuclear plant for X dollars/gigawatt (most of that cost up-front), only to have solar going for .5X before the new plant is even operational.
And it's not just the cost of solar/wind that's dropping... it's the cost of short-term energy storage, by way of batteries/thermal/hydro/etc. Nuclear plants are base-load power, good for long-term stable output rather than quick spikes up and down. But short-term storage allows solar/wind to act as baseline as well, capturing more when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and dumping it from storage when needed.
Committing to expensive nuclear power plants now, with this much disruption going on, is a good way for a utility to go bankrupt twenty, thirty years from now.
Yes and it's interesting to quote the rest of that paragraph, which ends up arguing that clean energy transitions "would end up hurting consumers through higher electricity bills."[1]
The use of the term "hurting" here is a tell. Yeah, you know, maybe fixing the planet will require a mobilization on the scale of going to war and result in higher prices. That's not hurting people; that's helping our children live on a planet free of nuclear waste and climate disaster.
[1] "Such a drastic increase in renewable power generation would create serious challenges in integrating the new sources into the broader energy system. Clean energy transitions in advanced economies would also require $1.6 trillion in additional investment over the same period, which would end up hurting consumers through higher electricity bills."
Haha, this may be the first time in history that nuclear enthusiasts have pretended to give a damn about ratepayers. I'd bet that most of their "$1.6 trillion" figure comes from decommissioning dangerous nuclear plants. We've already spent that money, assholes...
I'd believe 90% of current capacity, but it won't get to that portion of total capacity. Solar isn't perfect for every situation. Even so, when energy is cheaper with fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.
> their deployment would have to accelerate to an __unprecedented__ level
Parent comments point is that the 5x growth is not unprecedentedly fast compared to the past 20 years, its unprecedentedly slow compared to the past 20 years. Contrary to what the quote claims, and in line with projections from the past, the solar business would have to seriously slow down to miss the 5x milestone.
Why is it likely to be a hilarious underestimate? That seems like a statement that needs some support. Graphs don't go up forever; growth curves level off; growth gets harder the bigger you get. Linear growth forever should not be the default assumption for any energy technology, even one that is growing fast now.
But why does the curve level off? Supply and demand. Assuming that renewable energy is superior to fossil fuel from both environmental and cost perspective (it is, or soon will be), then it can reasonably be expected to grow until all fossil-based sources have been displaced, and it is no longer profitable to build more capacity.
Because people want cheap, cleaner electricity and we haven't used up all that much space yet. Manufacturing capacity is still growing, the rest of the industry is still growing, it's not likely that there will be a year in the next 20 where global installations are smaller than this year.
Depends if you are looking at it as growing linearly or exponentially. You can make an argument solar is growing exponentially, doubling ever so often, at the moment.
No, it has not taken off exponentially yet in the way the Tony Seba video demonstrates with a picture of 5th Ave in NYC in the year 1900 where there are lots of horses used for transportation, and only one car, compared with a picture of the same street in 1913, where the street is full of cars, and there is only one horse to be found.
There's the formal definition of "exponential", and then there is "exponential" in the sense of completely disruptive and transformative as in the example Tony Seba gives. I am referring to the latter.
One of the comments there points it out: The government keeps passing subsidies for solar that nominally expire, then renewing them again before they expire. Then the government's models assume the subsidies expire when the law says they will rather than getting renewed time and again.
Going from 5-580 is much easier than going from 580->2500. Just ask anyone how hard it was to make their first 100,000, million, billion, etc. Using multiples is actually oversimplifying the issue (i.e. "to make a hundred dollars, you just have to make $10 10 times, so making $1000 from $100 should be just as easy")
Not that I would necessarily know, but I always heard that the first million was the hardest? You seem to be arguing in support of my point? That is, switch out "first million dollars" for "first 580 gigawatts".
It's hard in the beginning, because of research and development. After that, you got the technology side covered, you got the processes side covered, all you need is to build and install.
Making the first mobile phones was hard. Making another million mobile phones today: not that hard. Especially if you make a million more of an established model.
No, that's not how it works. Every growth process has limits. Solar has much more limits than mobile phones: land, resources (phones are tiny compared to solar panels), labour (not just production, but also placing the panels and maintaining them)... I reckon if we treat solar panels like mobile phones (throw away every 1.5 years) we won't get far...
Limits only matter when we at least start getting close to reaching those. There is enough land, labor and resources for lots of solar panels while most of us in the western world already have a smartphone and seem to replace them less often due to a seemingly slower tech cycle.
I'm not convinced, solar is only now becoming cost competitive, that means for most of this period it was more expensive than its competitors. Now its getting into the realms of being the cheapest option, so why would growth be harder to come by?
Oversimplifying maybe but renewables are passing the tipping point of being the cheapest energy source without needing subsidies which will make things easier.
Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades? I feel like not many people know just how little waste is created with modern recycling and just how safe nuclear is with modern safety features.
Seems like we need a positive PR campaign to help convince folks that nuclear is way better than fossil fuels. This could easily be bipartisan.
There's really two kinds of waste: spent fuel (which can be effectively recycled, leaving only a tiny bit of extremely dangerous lanthanides, actinides, and plutonium), and "lower level" waste. The latter includes pretty much every other part of the reactor building after it's decomissioned.
> positive PR campaign
The nuclear industry has been at this for decades; at this stage, the PR is part of the problem.
My view on this is that it's probably too late to start building new nuclear plants, the cost overrun problems are severe, and there are plenty of countries that they should not be built in. But that doesn't mean we should close the existing ones early. If they can be refurbished economically without compromising safety, we should do that.
Switching from nuclear to natural gas indicates that gas is too cheap, and should be subject to carbon pricing and curtailment of new drilling and fracking.
We can build plants with SMRs. These should fix most of the issues of larger plants except maybe decomissioning. It should be easier to decomission 12 x 60 MW modules instead of a single 720 MW utility scale reactor. At least you can transport the smaller modules without dissasembly.
Nuclear power plants got big because operating costs do not scale linearly with reactor size. SMR advocates have not explained why their concepts will not be killed by increased operating cost per kWh.
> Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades?
I thought you were being snarky at first, but the rest of the comment appears to indicate you're being serious. In Belgium we've been stuck in endless discussions regarding what to do with our nuclear waste. We used to dump it in the sea, which was probably a bad idea. Now it's stored in barrels which are apparently leaking some kind of radioactive goo[1].
So either this waste recycling isn't as good everywhere, or we have a different definition of the word "good".
Part of the problem is the difficulty in building new reactors, which means old and outdated reactor designs remain in operation which cannot utilize or recycle nuclear material because our nuclear knowledge at the time was lacking. If your reactor was built in the 70s or 80s, it was probably designed in the 60s which means 60s era nuclear technology, only 20 years after we first discovered nuclear power in the first place.
Its like driving around Model-Ts and then lamenting about how inefficient and unsafe they are. And then using that as evidence on why we shouldn't build modern cars.
But, PV has gone through many generations of technology over the years. That's why its cost has gone down by a factor of 300 or so.
If nuclear hasn't iterated as much, that's the fault of nuclear, not the cruel oppressing world. It's a technology that's big and slow to evolve, and that's ultimately lethal.
The grandparent comment mentioned modern recycling. Perhaps Belgium is operating old types of reactors that aren't amenable to modern ways of dealing with waste? A quick search yielded that all of Belgium's reactors were built in the 70's and 80's.
A lot of news pieces about nuclear are unrealistically rosy. Waste reprocessing isn't really all that new and it doesn't really get rid of waste. It replaces much of the solid waste with even more liquid waste.
The problem with having any discussion of nuclear is agreeing upon the facts. It's crazy hard to find an unbiased source. If you asked a random bystander why we haven't built nuclear reactors in recent years, you might hear "environmentalists." However, the truth is dramatically different. No one will insure a nuclear power plant except the US government. Investors won't invest in nuclear, as there's no appetite for the risks to open a plant and spend over a decade building it when cost overruns are common and it may never actually open.
The reason wind and solar are growing much, much faster than nuclear today isn't because of "environmentalists." It's because nuclear involves far more subsidies and risk.
Mood has nothing to do with investing in nuclear. We are talking something you build that prints money at a guaranteed rate, there's no one to sell to that you need to influence one way or another to make them throw more of their money at you.
The only reason why nuclear power isn't widespread is that shareholders see a 30 year return on investment and run away to juicier returns.
Investors at large aren't phased by things like the environment. There's too many who would invest either way if the profit potential was clear. So far, all nuclear plants have required large subsides, taken over a decade to build and open, and have cost far more than originally anticipated. Investors often look to past performance as a predictor of likely returns. There's no appetite for this kind of investment nowadays.
And yet, for the same quantity of energy over the same timeframe, nuclear is cheaper. It's not so much that it loses because of economics, it's losing because of the perceived uncertainty of the economics.
Risk, not uncertainty. The long-term (or even medium-term) pricing situation for renewables is highly volatile right now. It makes investing in new nuclear extremely risky financially. What if you start building a plant now, expecting a certain energy price to pay for it over decades, and by the time you finish, solar power costs half as much as your target? That could well happen. That's how utility companies go bankrupt.
Does that factor in the upfront cost of building the reactor? IIRC it takes 30 years to get a return on investment for reactors, which is a non issue if the reactors are public but definitely a tough pill for the private sector to swallow.
We don't need to replace old reactors by new ones. Replacing the reactors with new ones is an option, but only an option, and almost certainly not the economically optimal one.
I believe the issue with recycling is non-proliferation from one or both of these reasons: 1) If I'm not mistaken, recycling generates/accumulates plutonium, which in the wrong hands can be made into a thermonuclear weapon. 2) Enriching the spent waste back into fuel is much too close to the process of enriching it for bombs. I distinctly remember a YT video where they said that it's very hard (as in, much work) to enrich U to x-% for reactor fuel, but once you're at x-%, it's realtively easy to keep going to to y-% for bombs. So to recycle waste involves running that process and the NRC or some governments simply don't allow anyone to do it. My apologies if I'm incorrect in any of this.
Excerpt: "According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, cost estimates to clean up the legacy radioactive tank waste and contamination at the facilities increased $214 billion from 2011 through 2018. During that same period, DOE spent $45 billion on cleanup efforts.DOE spent $170 billion on cleanup since 1989, but the most challenging work remains. Estimates now stand at $377 billion to clean up the waste, but that amount does not include cost to clean sites where no feasible remedy exists."
Because the site in question is the crater left by a nuclear bomb test in the 50s. There was never a power plant nearby, and the type of site, and the type of waste, is very different from what a power plant would produce.
Long term, large scale containment of radioactive waste is an unsolved problem. Nuclear advocates have two answers to this problem:
A) We'll solve it later (we should research fuel reprocessing, we have an urgency to act, etc.)
B) It's not really a problem (people don't actually die from radioactive waste, most nuclear plants have proven themselves safely managed, etc.)
Both answer sound like sweeping the dust under the rug. What happens when (not if) a catastrophe occurs? If a war breaks out, how can you guarantee the safety of all nuclear power plants around the world? If a country economy collapses, how will nuclear engineers get paid? If an epidemic of a deadly disease spreads worldwide, how many people can die before there is not enough people to safely operate a nuclear plant?
We cannot sweep this under the rug. Nuclear energy may be theorically cheap to implement, but the potential cost of an uncontrollable failure is too great.
A modern thorium/uranium recycling pipeline should only produce small amounts of "final" waste (and only after waste has been iteratively recycled many times). That final waste takes a few hundred years to decay, but if contained, it is harmless to the environment. So, create a warehouse large enough to handle 200 years worth of waste, and create a pipeline. At the end of the pipeline, the containers are empty and can be used at the start again. Who knows, we may even be able to figure out a way to extract even more energy from the "final" waste eventually.
Consider that the final nuclear waste passively disappears after a few hundred years, whereas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not passively disappear in a few hundred years - it must be actively removed by plants, but the plants can't keep up with humans.
"create a warehouse large enough to handle 200 years worth of waste"
200 years ago the world was a very different place. I'm struggling to think of any building not including houses still used for their original purpose, from that long ago.
So while I don't doubt that we could build a structure that lasts 200 years, I doubt we could build some kind of continuously used industrial building without it becoming some kind of ship of Theseus. Now that in itself isn't necessarily a problem, except what about a war or something. Unlikely? Yes, but how many countries havent had any war on their soil in the past 200 years?
And I cant imagine a 2219 health and safety person green lighting the reuse of a 200 year old containment vessel for storing nuclear waste either.
Westminster Hall has been single purpose for a while. Since the late 11th century.
Perhaps that's the answer. If waste is stored in a warehouse next to the seat of government, I doubt there will be short-cuts, neglect and cost savings to the same degree as say putting it on the Cumbrian coast.
You know Westminster palace is in dire need of repair and debating in the house of commons had to stop due to water flooding in through the roof recently?
Although Westminster Hall is on the estate and is part of the palace in terms of tours and so on, it isn't the part they want to refurbish.
It's too vast to be useful for much, but it does illustrate that the columns and so on in most buildings you do use are not actually obligatory (it doesn't have any). It's a bit like those huge buildings for building space rockets and jet liners, except built hundreds of years before the people who invented those were even born.
What if technicolor monkeys start flying out of my arse ? Whataboutism aside, today, right now, thousands of coal fired power plants are polluting the air I breathe with more radioactive waste, particulates and CO2, to a degree not seen in the last 800k years. Your catastrophe is real and happening right now, in real time, today, this minute.
A concrete dome containing radioactive waste on the
Marshall Islands is cracking open, The Washington
Post reported Monday.
The U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall
Islands in the 1940s and 1950. The dome was built decades later to cover remaining fallout debris
To put it in perspective, that's like closing solar power plant, because a star went supernova in another galaxy.
In fact nuclear waste management from civilian power has fantastic.
In fact all nuclear power stations include cleanup and waste management as part of the cost.
Germany problem is not technical but political and anybody that has ever looked into nuclear power in Germany knows this. Not to mention that finding a 'ultimate disposal' a pretty unnecessary and wrongheaded that is only being perused because limited understanding of nuclear power in the first place.
Really? I'm envious about your government's competency in the matter, in that case!
I'm fairly pro-nuclear, at least as part of a broadly renewable energy portfolio, as I think industry and transportation will need at least something more than solar and wind to reach none-emission energy production saturation any time soon.
However, if my own Government's record is anything to go by here in the UK, waste management is a perenially-deferred problem and clean up was not part of the original billing of any existing Nuclear facilities. It's all stored on site pending long-term secure solutions or - if optimisim is t obe believed - until we can develop technologies to eke every last joule of energy from the ever-growing mountain of waste.
We need to differentiate between a number of different problems.
One is cleanup of nuclear sites, in that are there is a separation between civilian nuclear reactors and the much, much more problematic site management for nuclear waste from nuclear weapons production. Most problems from civilian sites date back to the early days of nuclear and most states have put in place some live cycle protocols for these sites.
Old nuclear weapons production sites are a whole lot of a bigger issues and its a desperate topic. Its not fair to accuse nuclear power of being problematic based on issues from those sites.
In general, I would argue most of these problems date back to the early days of nuclear technology and should not be used as a argument against new nuclear power.
In terms of waste management from civilian waste there is a very good argument to be made that putting all that waste into a long term storage (1000s of years) is not a smart thing to do. The nuclear waste is so small in overall size and relatively easy to story that it is not really a pressing issue for the next couple decades or even small number of centuries.
The technologies to use the energy from nuclear waste will not happen unless nuclear energy get used and finds larger commercial adoption. If you believe in 200 years nuclear will not exist and solar and wind will be used, then these technology will never exists. However if you assume that humanity has any kind of nuclear future, these technologies will very likely exists and that nuclear waste will be considered a resource.
Technically its pretty clear that we can build such long term facilities for the eventual small amount nuclear waste without much technical difficulty. What bother me is the push to demand that this problem is handled, before any other nuclear innovation can take place. It is used as an argument against nuclear even if the problem is not pressing in the least and compared to the continued exists of coal and utterly disingenuous way to attempted prevent usage of nuclear technology.
Finnland has build a repository called, Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, and has shown that this is not really that crazy of a thing. Again, for me this is a problem that should be pretty far down on the list of priorites to solve for the world. The reason it doesn't exists in most countries is political, not technical. See the Yucca Maintain political shitshow while at the same time much better sites exists in the US but those can't be considered because of political deadlock.
Realize this thing is a sideshow. Having it open would not have helped the market acceptance of nuclear power. Even if waste disposal costs are totally ignored (as the Lazard levelized cost numbers do) new reactors are totally out of the running economically.
In fairness, no one needs to be convinced that nuclear plants are better than coal plants. The problem is the renewables.
In Iowa, they are in the process of shuttering their nuclear plants. Now no one in Iowa was out protesting the plants or anything, but here's the issue. Windmills have reached a level of practicality and low cost that encouraged Iowans to slap them up almost everywhere. (Seriously, drive through Iowa sometime and you'll see what I mean.) Even relatively small investors can get together, slap up some windmills, and start making some money.
Now imagine you're in Iowa and deciding on which electric bill you want to pay. Do you want to pay the 2 to 3 cents per kWh for wind? Or do you want to pay the 5x cost for coal or nuclear? Not surprisingly, Iowans, who are more poor than most of you on the coasts, have switched to wind in a big way.
It's a money problem. If we want nuclear, we have to convince the government to subsidize it. You're not going to find a lot of people out there who will just agree to sign up and pay 5 to 10 times the electricity bill just for the pleasure of saying they're using carbon free nuclear.
It's like organic food. Sure, maybe it is better for them.
People do need to be convinced that nuclear is better than natural gas. In calm winter nights, nuclear is competing with natural gas, not wind. And because of fracking and horizontal drilling, the electricity prices have fallen in deregulated markets like the midwest, and electricity revenues have dropped precipitously. When you have a plant that's all capital and O&M with very low fuel cost (like a nuke), this unexpected drop in electricity price is hard to swallow and you shut down.
Having natural gas prices go back up because it emits greenhouse gas would have a lot better optics than subsidizing nuclear plants. But you're right that Iowans don't care about that. Shoot, even in Seattle we couldn't get a carbon tax passed.
The nuclear industry needs to get serious about reducing its costs. It's not very efficient. They've got a few hundred people at each plant doing regulatory compliance paperwork with some really inefficient and expensive process.
And considering the usual ways giant industries choose to "reduce costs", it's a bit unnerving for the rest of us.
Blaming the costs on regulatory compliance bureaucracy is one of those things that pro-nuclear people really need to stop saying, even to the extent that it's true (which is less than they think). Distrust of big corporations is as high as distrust of government, and for good reason. No one wants to live downwind from a nuclear plant constructed by the lowest bidder. Blaming the cost and construction issues on those stupid anti-science treehuggers and their liberal regulations is just alienating the very people you need to win over.
That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels. And there's probably not a less attractive look for nuclear enthusiasts than some dude mansplaining about how solar is more dangerous than nuclear based on the number of people who smash their thumbs with a hammer while installing panels.
> That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels.
I'm going to go ahead and point out that more people die falling off their roofs installing solar per kWh than have died per kWh from decades of nuclear operation [1]. Denigrating that data as mansplaining seems pretty anti-scientific. Both death/kWh rates are nearly zero compared to fossil fuels.
Apparent risks, now that's a real problem. Can be solved with PR and education.
Check my link in the previous post. You'll see that the industry is writing down in good detail exactly how it plans to reduce costs by increasing procedural efficiency without reducing safety.
To just say that appropriate safety has to be expensive, and any attempt to fix it is unsafe, is pretty bold, especially in the face of what the climate scientists are predicting with continued carbon emissions.
The "falling off the roofs" argument is bogus in at least two ways.
First, most PV installs in the US are now large scale, where the PV modules are installed on the ground, not on roofs.
Second, deaths of workers in an industry are different than deaths of the general public. Workers made a choice to work on roofs; the public has no choice if a reactor near them has a problem.
So if a technology kills workers but not the public, that's ok, because the workers made that choice? I don't think that stands to much scrutiny. Most workers choose careers of opportunity.
Besides, the direct short-term deaths from commercial nuclear nearly all came from Chernobyl first responders, where staff and firefighters were the ones who got ARS (they chose hazardous careers too).
For the "up to 4000" latent deaths from Chernobyl, I think you have a good point. 1960s nuclear is worse than wind and solar in latent deaths. I'm hoping advanced nuclear with passive decay heat removal and low pressure coolants will even that out.
I also didn't mention the reasons behind deaths from wind, which include hazardous maintenance and ice throw. Deaths from these things are exceedingly low per kWh, just like they are for nuclear. That's the point I'm trying to convey: nuclear is roughly on par with wind/solar in terms of deaths/kWh.
Anyway, where is the best data on what kind of solar is currently being built?
I'm not saying it's ok, I'm saying its different. And it IS clearly different, in regulation. Risks to the uninvolved public are subject to stricter control than to workers, in the energy industry and elsewhere.
One could make the case that the public is also subject to risk from solar, for example from traffic accidents transporting the materials to and from large scale installation sites. But the "falls from roof tops" argument isn't doing that.
It's definitely different. I agree. I should adjust the falls from rooftops talk. I don't want to malign the variable renewables. I need to figure out how to explain to people that nuclear deaths/kWh are extremely low compared to our current mix, and yes they're even roughly as low or lower than the excellent characteristics of the wind/solar lifecycle.
People often meet this idea wish shock: "But how can wind or solar hurt anyone? There are no Captain Planet episodes about that." So I have to explain some mechanisms of why huge distributed energy harvesting can harm people. If you have other suggestions on how to communicate this effectively I'd love the help.
OK well I can agree with that! I have never converted an antinuke with that fact. I have converted dozens (at least from absolute rejection to cautious optimism) with 10-15 minute in-person discussions. I have not found out how to scale that.
The pro-nuclear advocates are usually their own worst enemies. That smug dudebro points-scoring is a huge problem. Then again, I think most people would be a lot more effective at life if they'd sit down and read How to Win Friends and Influence People and other basic sales texts.
I'm generally anti-nuclear, but not for safety reasons. I'm sure we can build safe plants. Rather, I distrust institutions, whether governments or giant corporations. I'm also concerned about the impact of nuclear power on inequality, as it's simply not available to the poorer nations, for reasons both good (proliferation, terrorism) and bad (lack of infrastructure).
Renewable power is so good in terms of fundamentals, particularly accessibility to poor nations and difficulty in using it for state-level violence, that I no longer see good reason to even attempt scaling up nuclear power. A meaningful scaling would take decades of effort and trillions of dollars worldwide. In that time, we'll grow a renewable infrastructure of the same scale profitably and organically.
This is a very good point. The shape of society will mirror the shape of its vital infrastructure. Energy is the fungible commodity - you can make virtually anything else with it. Centralize the [electrical] power, and the [political] power will centralize also.
I'm generally pro-nuclear - I think it's astonishing and tragic that we discovered an infinite source of clean energy, and doomed the Earth by failing to switch to it immediately - but the self-organization of the internet holds valuable lessons on the importance of distributed, fault-tolerant structures.
Especially as we enter a time already made uncertain by climate change, perhaps now is not the time to aggressively centralize. Windmills and Tesla walls look distinctly more "apocalypse-proof" than nuclear power stations.
Eh, nuclear isn't that great. It's taken decades to start even getting close to truly safe, low-waste reactors, and that only due to the considerable public pressure involved after various high-profile accidents. It's pretty cheap in the long run, but the initial costs are extremely high. We can't trust every nation to stick to high standards in terms of safety, so we're running globally at the safety level of the least competent crew of the worst reactor.
At this point, we're rapidly approaching (or already past) the point where renewables are cheaper per kwh in the long term than nuclear, and much cheaper in the short term - without the dependence on the neoliberal hegemony of giant governments and giant corporations and giant finance.
At this point, I'm not too concerned about climate change, largely because there's not much we can do about it. Environmentalism and liberalism are unfortunately full of a bunch of hairshirted Puritan shaming over anyone doing anything that feels happy or successful - denial is a moral good, and allowing ourselves the benefits of abundant energy is a sin. I feel that's driving concerns about global warming more than the actual environmental damage - they finally have an excuse to deny people a good time.
More importantly, denialism won't work. If we cut our consumption by 50% right now (fat chance), it'd just take us 100 years rather than 50 to burn through the same amount of dinosaur. Same long-term damage. The only thing that will work is creating an energy framework (both production and consumption) that doesn't use fossil fuels, but has roughly the same cost (or less) and the same output.
Renewables are on their way to giving us more energy than dinosaurs ever did, at lower cost, without complex technical dependencies, high up-front costs, etc. It's the greatest weapon against the Corporate State since the internet. Why anyone would want nuclear and its dependency on the neoliberal hegemony (especially if they fear concentrated power at all) is beyond me.
The nuclear exit was planned long before Fukushima, all Fukishima did was create public pressure to not go through with the prolonging of the nuclear exit that was originally planned.
There are 7 reactors operational still, although most are in the process of deconstruction.
German here - it is not because of panic over a tsunami, but about the complete incompetence shown in the Fukushima disaster. The plant had construction faults, the operations after the disaster failed to prevent a preventeable disaster. Yes, we won't have a tsunami at any our nuclear power plants. But whatever else has been overlooked during their construction, where are the operating companies maybe cutting too many corners to save costs?
I've seen the same thing in north Texas and Kansas but wind isn't everywhere in such large quantities (with tons of farm land to easily build on to boot).
Exactly; in places where wind works really, really well, you might as well take advantage of it. If you really can get your power from wind, why bother with nuclear? (But what about when the wind dies down?)
But there's many places where wind power just isn't feasible.
>Windmills have reached a level of practicality and low cost that encouraged Iowans to slap them up almost everywhere.
Why are you sure this is the reason? If the price tag is the main concern, the North Dakota oil boom and ongoing pipeline projects are probably the primary cause.
They seem to be saying that Iowa is closing their one nuclear plant because wind farms are cheaper. People primarily care about price, and don't want their government providing massive subsidies.
If price is what's causing them to turn away from nuclear, then they probably turned to cheaper oil. And they seem fine providing massive subsidies to further things like the Dakota Access pipeline.
I agree there is an implicit subsidy for pipelines, in the sense that if the pipeline operators screw up and poison everyone who lives nearby, society will probably do something to clean that up. That's similar to any useful but dangerous facility that we allow to be built and operated. (Like, for instance, a nuclear power plant...) Pipelines are still superior to other petroleum transport modes such as trains, in terms of both cost and safety. Most taxpayers can think of other projects that deserve the epithet "massive subsidy" more than a pipeline funded entirely by its owners.
I don't see the connection to wind generation, however. Did some Iowa landowner finance a wind farm with a DAPL eminent-domain payment? That seems tenuous.
Greenpeace has successfully spent several decades painting nuclear power as Evil so its going to be difficult to convince voters to support it from now on.
The backlash against nuclear comes from four points and a meta-point:
1) Weapons proliferation. The standard fission cycle is just too convenient for this (after all, that's why it was developed) and so an international infrastructure needs to be developed around restricting this. See Iran for example. This also prompted a lot of opposition from people who didn't want to live under the threat of their cities being nuked.
This also turned into lethal fights with the environmental movement (the French government sank Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior with a terrorist bombing that killed a photographer, over the question of nuclear weapons testing). A difficult bit of bad blood to bury.
2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland.
Pebble bed reactors were deemed the promising future, until one of them jammed. It's now unfixable and practically impossible to decomission: (wikipedia) "There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century."
3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains.
4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent.
5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.
1) Ok, this can be a problem.
2) Citation needed. It has lowest number of deaths per kWh. By your logic, planes fall out of the sky, and many people die, so we should never use planes and rely on more deadly methods.
As for pebble bed reactors, mistakes are normal when doing something novel. See the problems LHC faced. Luckily LHC had better funding than nuclear.
3) It's a thousand year problem. The rare metals in average phone are a more of a forever problem. They will never decay to a less toxic compound.
4) Yeah, this is true.
5) Not sure about this one, I see lots of FUD on all sides.
To clarify, I'm not claiming nuclear power is an angel that will save us. But it's a devil we'll probably have to live with if we are to go 0 carbon in near future. Going 100% renewables requires a revolution in battery tech, and a revolution in how electric grid distributes electricity.
Related to (2) and (5), nuclear advocates also tend to assume that the designs being safe if in the hands of a competent, well-supplied, conscientious organization is enough. I used to think the same, but seeing how nuclear plants are neglected even in Western European countries, I no longer think that assumption can be maintained.
All reasonable points, but would you not agree that in the here and now, our first priority should be replacing that coal power station with renewables, and then the gas, then the nuclear?
That's also a bit impossible. There aren't any easy solutions going forward.
You want to replace most power station with non-base load renewables (wind + solar). Well, at peak power are going to add more batteries, to make sure your energy doesn't go to waste. Want to add more batteries, oh you'll need more renewable sources keep it net positive during the winter months and probably keep those battery from draining completely. This is ofc, before the quetion arises, what happens if you have weeks/months of no sun at all :)
Geothermal? Not everyone has access plus possible increases in tectonic activity.
Hydro? Not everyone has access plus possible destruction of ecosystems.
Burning waste to produce power? Probably not enough burnable waste.
Don't get me wrong. Solar scales great if you have a backup to fallback to. California going from 1.9-2.5% of solar would cost as much as a small nuclear plant (around $18 billion dollars).
"The UK has already almost entirely replaced coal"
Indeed. I'd rather take a global approach to what is a global problem though. Germany and Eastern Europe are still burning plenty of coal that could be offset. We are all on the same grid I believe.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Greenpeace is the perfect example of how "fighting for the environment" is meaningless.
Are we talking about biodiversity, air pollution, water pollution, side effects of mining... or climate change?
Unfortunately, it's hard to find something that works for all of these problems. Except reducing consumption overall.
No. Unfortunatly research and devlopment into all things nuclear has been systematically eradicated. Regulation that were put in place have essentially eliminated all progress specially progress that isn't incredibly incremental.
The problem is that it is essentially impossible to bring these new technologies to market as a private companies. And government have shown zero interest in doing anything by themselves or even having a regulatory system that is in any way sensible.
Current plants in the west are pretty safe in general but recycling is non-existent. Only France does any kind of nuclear waste reprocessing at all (outside of research).
Sadly the anti nuclear wave went incredibly deep and has since basically destroyed the industry and a whole field of engineering.
The only positive thing is that both with democrats and republicans a new pro nuclear consensus is emerging. The US regulatory agency are slowly waking up to the fact that they have utterly destroyed the nuclear industry and are taking small steps in the right direction. Thanks to these changes a few important changes have gone threw congress and are getting implemented by the Department on Energy. Sadly these things are way to slow.
Reprocessing made sense in an environment in which nuclear was winning and uranium was becoming scarce. In that environment, it could make sense to reprocess to extend fuel reserves.
But we do not live in that world. Uranium supplies are plentiful. It's cheap and simple to just store spent fuel in dry casks and put off worrying about if it will ever be reprocessed. Reprocessing is a net economic loss, in France and elsewhere.
AFAIK most modern designs are fail-safe, e.g. with passive features like control rods suspended with electromagnets over the reactor - if activated (or if power fails) they simply fall in and kill the reaction.
It could definitely be bipartisan. I am a conservative and 100% support nuclear as an alternative to dirty coal. Unfortunately, many “environmentalists” seem to be stuck in the 1970s when it comes to knowledge about modern nuclear.
I grew up in San Diego. I have seen a very encouraging amount of solar deployment on houses there. But there is still a massive potential for more residential solar.
When I visited my brother in Ft. Worth I saw almost no residential solar. I also noticed that there was a massive supply of wind blowing around the neighborhood.
Is it really not feasible to harness solar and wind better? Maybe it requires moving to a more distributed system with suburbia becoming much less dependant on the power companies.
To me you just really need to be sure it's not feasible to do it with solar and wind before you get too serious about reviving the nuclear power industry.
The urgency of needing to deal with climate change mandates we do both renewables and nuclear.
We have the resources to push hard on both sides.
There's this idea that we should prioritize resources on one or the other. In my opinion, we have plenty of resources such that we'll reach diminishing returns (due to employment/skill/geographical/material bottlenecks) if we applied all of those resources to one or the other such that there's nothing lost by investing in both.
As an example, at very least we can address the siting constraints of nuclear by installing any new reactors at existing sites and maintaining and upgrading existing reactors. Solar and wind can both saturate an area and reach diminishing returns (see: duck curve) and require curtailment such that the resources become much less economic than you think they would be. And curtailment is not a totally bad thing, either.
So absolutely it's feasible to add more solar and wind (even to the point of curtailing a lot of it), but there's no time to waste by not also pursuing nuclear. We have more money than time (and costs of nuclear, if scaled out, are exaggerated).
The cost of nuclear is maximized when we're speaking of one site. That's why I mentioned scale out of nuclear. You're not going to get a beneficial learning curve unless you're building and siting lots of power plants with the same contractor(s).
Even with inflated costs, however, the extremely high latitude of the UK and its need for wintertime heat mean that the amount of renewable curtailment needed to ensure sufficient carbonfree wintertime energy make nuclear still cost competitive in a carbonfree scenario.
Generally speaking, no halfway competent investment in carbonfree energy should be opposed, IMHO. We don't have time to fight such internal battles when we're fighting anthropogenic climate change.
I think you have the onus of responsibility backwards. Nuclear power's ability to achieve the amount and type of energy production appropriate for today's energy usage patterns is proven.
We should be determining the feasibility of scaling solar and wind energy production, creating enough multi-scale storage, and long distance load balancing, and demand shaping before winding down nuclear.
I think it's obvious that we need to do both. Nuclear plants have a lifespan of ~50 years. Reaching and sustaining zero carbon lifestyle isn't a one time occurrence, it'll be an on-going journey for centuries. We'll have plenty of opportunities later to drawdown nuclear.
Given the lead time required to bring new nuclear generation capacity online, it probably makes more sense the other way around: before you get too serious about letting the nuclear power industry die, you just really need to be sure it's feasible to replace it with solar and wind.
(I don't love that nuclear reactors, as opposed to the turbines that generate electricity from the steam they produce, should be in the hands of industry at all; having a profit motive involved in such a safety-critical set of processes is a recipe for disaster. Given a choice between for-profit nuclear reactors and not-for-profit ones, I'll take the second every time. But given the criticality of reliable baseload supply to so many of the processes that support the style of societies on which we've grown so dependent, if we have to choose between for-profit reactors, with all the attendant problems, and no reactors at all - we may very well still be better off with the former than the latter.)
I'd like to point out that nuclear generates power via steam that spins a turbine. It's how you create the steam that's different.
As far as for profit reactors vs. non-profit, do you have any examples of this? The ones I'm aware of (in the U.S.) are utility owned but tightly regulated.
That’s the steam to which I’m referring, yes. The best example I have of nonprofit reactor operation, and the safety culture which such a paradigm can support, is the US Navy; while nuclear-powered submarines have been lost on two occasions, neither
loss resulted from a reactor accident, and indeed the US Navy has never had a reactor accident. [1] I’m not the first to suggest this model could be productively applied to civilian power generation; I remain uncertain why it seems so uncommon for other “Atomkraft? Ja, bitte!” folks to do so.
Chernobyl had a different perverse incentive, in that perceived failure to perform under a command economy such as that of the Soviet Union could be and often was individually punishable.
The simple answer is that San Diego has a great amount of Sun exposure, not every state does.
Also, you may be on to something with smaller distributions of power generation, but know that a large amount of solar fields are owned by utilities and this may be happening already to some degree.
Ft Worth is fed by a massive supply of cheap wind energy from West Texas as well as natural gas and coal plants. Roof top solar isn't that viable here. Not many people want a $20-30k installation on top of a $200-400k house and the energy prices just aren't high enough to substantiate it.
I've been a Fort Worth resident for nearly 4 years.
Anecdotal, but my old neighborhood (far south - near Crowley) had tons of residential solar (relatively speaking - probably 1/6 of the homes). It was a new development with no mature trees. TXU actually has a pretty attractive [residential solar program](https://www.txu.com/savings-solutions/renewable-energy/solar...) that lots of my neighbors took advantage of.
I've since bought a house built in the 60s. My new neighborhood (Ridglea) has lots of mature trees. There is no way solar would work here. My roof only gets sunlight for a couple of hours a day.
A big problem is solar installations aren't seen as equity items in homes through Texas and indeed the southeast US the same way they are on the west coast. I'm not sure why this paradigm exists though, considering these homes come with essentially free energy utility for the lifetime of the panels. You'd think that would be a major selling point, but it isn't.
This is one of the issues with solar power that gets overlooked. The physical 'stuff' needed to build a large solar farm is far more than a base nuclear plant.
After a quick search:
Solar Panels Lifespan - ~25 years - Good
Grid Battery Lifespan - 5-10 years - ehh..
If we switched to 100% solar, with a majority of the equipment probably manufactured in China, there would be an orders of magnitude more physical product in the manufacturing and logistics pipeline.
...At least our top notch recycling programs will be able to handle all the waste product properly...
I don't know where these numbers come from but the solar panels on my house were installed about 20 years ago and have so far not shown any degradation assuming a 5% margin of error in measurement.
Let me pull a pro nuclear style argument. Future batteries won't need rare earth metals. Actually this isn't a fair comparison. Batteries that don't need rare earth metals already exist today. Thorium reactors or next gen nuclear plants don't exist at all.
Kinda missing the point. We already live with way more dangerous material than nuclear. Only difference is that most toxic stuff kills us slowly, so we don't notice.
Even if new batteries are made of non toxic and recyclable materials, our phones, our electronic is littered with it. And future materials are probably going to be even more exotic.
Not only that, but the only reason nuclear waste is dangerous is that it's radioactive. That is, it's a radiating source of energy. In other words, nuclear waste is dangerous because it's full of unused energy.
The French use breeder reactors to extract this unused energy for more energy. We are literally choosing not to burn all of the nuclear material we have.
It's like taking a train that's got 20 cars full of coal, burning the coal in the first car, and then disposing the "waste coal" in the rest of the cars in a landfill while wringing our hands about the environmental problems that causes.
> Solar panel waste: grind and reuse. Health risk: negligible.
Do you have a source that solar panels can simply be ground up and reused? The article linked in the top level comment implies that recycling solar panels is much harder that one might think, and that solar panels are full of toxic heavy metals that are not "negligible" health risk.
Seeing that completely dishonest article over and over again gets tiring. Cadmium telluride solar cells only make up 5% of the market and there is no reason they couldn't just be banned outright so that we only use the more environmentally friendly crystalline solar cells (which we already do).
That article is really misleading. It starts off talking about the need to recycle cadmium-based panels in order not to leech toxic cadmium into the environment, and then claims that recyling isn't economically viable - but if you click through the links, that claim is based on the economics of recycling Si-based panels that don't contain any cadmium. Indeed, the whole reason Si panels aren't economically viable to recycle is because they don't contain these kinds of exotic (and toxic) materials; recycling of the cadmium-containing panels is very much viable and commonplace.
Lead acid batteries have a recycling rate of around 100%. LiIon can be recycled with relative ease. This seems like a much easier problem to solve than PV cells or nuclear waste.
Ah, Shellenberger. Look at what he's saying and realize what his level of credibility should be.
You will notice that article is talking about cadmium from PV. Silicon PV, which has come to dominate the market (95+%) does not use cadmium. Nor does silicon PV require lead.
And he repeats the lie that PV uses rare earth elements!
Nuclear power was once the fasted growing energy producer in world history. Adoption happened faster then coal, faster then oil or pretty much anything else.
The world was on track to essentially replace fossil fuels with nuclear on a pace that was outside of human experience.
Humanity was quickly entering a new age. But then a small number of accidents lead to a political change, witch lead to regulatory changes that essentially killed nuclear power in most places.
Since the US regulatory system changed the amount of new plants built has essentially gone to 0, far below replacement. And many of the same effects were mirrored in most of the west with the US taking the lead.
The worst thing is that the new regulatory system not only killed the building of new plants, but essentially ended any hope of getting new reactor types into commercial use. No new reactor type have been licensed since then.
This seems rather strange because in the 60-70 new reactor-types were build at a rapid rate, constant innovation even with relatively small amounts of money. All of this was destroyed. Even in places where nuclear power is so clearly a huge win like NASA.
Nuclear fuel storage issues has entered into a political limbo where anti-nuclear lobby has essentially managed to deadlock the whole process and can since claim that nuclear storage issues can't be solved. At the same time the government collects money from nuclear power stations to handle the waste issue.
This is one of the saddest and most depressing stories in human history if you ask me. There is 0 scientific or technical reason why shouldn't have cheap nuclear power even in remote places, even in space.
This is what happens when the free market is the only method to drive change. The only thing stopping the US from using the navy to produce reactors for cities and not battleships is lobbyists from the oil industry threatening to primary any elected official who goes against good old fashion american capitalism for the sake of public good. I can see the attack ad now.
This is 100% wrong. The free market was driving the change pretty quickly and then regulations came in and made it illegal to do most of those things.
Illegal to produce a proper prototype, incredibly restricted access to materials, incredibly high cost to entry and pretty much every other regulatory burden that exists. The nuclear industry is probably one of the un-freest markets ever.
And whats stopping the Navy from doing these things is not oil lobbyists, but rather the Navy having no interest in such tasks and that such tasks are not in their political mandate from congress. That's what the DoE and others are for (in theory). Not to mention that the Navy doesn't really care that much about cost.
I don't think you need a free market, if government wants to drive energy policy, then they can do it successfully with nuclear as well, see France. At least successful compared to most nations.
Either method works fine, specially in a market the size of the US. Currently both paths are blocked.
The free market destroyed nuclear, or rather recognized the failure of nuclear. This failure predates the regulations nuclear fans use to try to deflect blame from their energy waifu.
Nuclear power was NEVER going to be very cheap. Even in the 1950s, it was recognized that the cost of the common elements of coal and nuclear plants were going to restrict nuclear to being MAYBE 20% cheaper than coal, at best, and that only if everything broke the right way.
And that maximally optimistic scenario didn't happen. Nuclear plant construction turned out to be more difficult than thought. Even before increases in regulation -- which were going to happen, as new failure modes and near misses were identified -- costs and delays were escalating.
And now, nuclear has two feet in the tech grave. The tech base has decayed away, and continues to degrade. Hoped for cost reductions of Gen III/III+ reactors from experience would require impossible sustained subsidies. This is why hopes are being pinned on small Hail Mary Reactors. They're the only possibility of avoiding nuclear's extinction.
> The free market destroyed nuclear, or rather recognized the failure of nuclear.
The industry was incredibly young and just starting. Nuclear was actually competing on the free market against coal. Many many more nuclear projects were planed, and nuclear had fastest transition from any energy form to another when it was cut off by regulatory change.
Claiming its early development was a failure is totally wrong.
> Nuclear power was NEVER going to be very cheap. Even in the 1950s, it was recognized that the cost of the common elements of coal and nuclear plants were going to restrict nuclear to being MAYBE 20% cheaper than coal, at best, and that only if everything broke the right way.
That's wrong even for PWR and nuclear was in its infancy still. We know that you can build nuclear reactors much smaller and better over time. PWR are 2% efficient and there is lots of room for improvement.
Yes but coal also has a fuel cost for operation that is much much higher then fuel cost for nuclear. A nuclear plant last longer, doesn't kill close to as many people and doesn't cause global warming. A coal plant would not even be allowed to operate if it was regulated like a nuclear plant, its ironically to radioactive.
> And now, nuclear has two feet in the tech grave. The tech base has decayed away, and continues to degrade. Hoped for cost reductions of Gen III/III+ reactors from experience would require impossible sustained subsidies. This is why hopes are being pinned on small Hail Mary Reactors. They're the only possibility of avoiding nuclear's extinction.
It was literally impossible in the US to license and type of new reactor. Its impossible to buy fuel for prototypes. The DoE requires huge financial and time commitment before they even look at your innovations.
In the 60s new reactor types and experiments were built many a year and now a slightly different fuel for a reactor takes 10 years to go threw regulation.
In 100 years people will look back at this time and laugh at us. The will live in a nuclear society, not in one based on solar, wind and battery power.
Nuclear was "competing" against coal when vendors were lowballing bids (or eating cost overruns themselves on a few fixed-cost contracts before they learned to not do that.)
The first nuclear building boom in the US went disastrously badly on costs. That's ultimately why it ended, not accidents or regulations. The economics just didn't work.
Forbes magazine in Feb 1985 said it well:
"The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power, with an additional $140 billion to come before the decade is out, and only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible."
The only places in the world where nuclear has "succeeded" are those where opaque financial systems have cloaked the true cost of the technology.
Before regulation changed, many being built and many more being planned, after regulation changed, no new reactors built in 30 years. The fastest energy transformation in human history, but I'm sure that just because of a managerial errors.
And as I said, the costs of those plants were escalating, even before changes to regulations. BTW, the most impactful regulatory change wasn't even targeted at nuclear at all, although a court ruling was needed to inform the industry and the AEC that the law (NEPA) also applied to nuclear power plants (Calvert Cliffs decision).
So many people are grossly unaware of nuclear power and it's potential vs its risks. Many people in the USA live much closer to a nuclear power plant than they realize. It has huge potential but its scare factor keep it from widespread adoption.
This is kind of why I'm a little concerned with how well HBO's Chernobyl is being received...I really hope it doesn't lead to widespread fears of nuclear plants.
HBO's Chernobyl really is very good, but the writer made an execellent point:
"The lesson of Chernobyl isn't that modern nuclear power is dangerous. The lesson is that lying, arrogance and suppression of criticism is dangerous. The flaws that led to Chernobyl are the same flaws shown by climate change deniers today."
Edit: Purely by coincidence I read "Chernobyl: History of a Tregedy" by Serhii Plokhy a few months back - one of the few books that has moved me to tears - the self sacrifice of many who worked there with full knowledge of what the awful consequences would be is stunning.
Regardless of the writer's intentions it is probably having an effect. I was formerly fairly pro-nuclear and since watching the show I've begun reconsidering my position.
It isn't that the plant failed and the vivid depictions of that which have most affected me. It's the depictions of the knock on effects which were barely stemmed after the failure that have caused me to reconsider.
The most concerning thing about Chernobyl is not the initial explosion. It's the impact the secondary and tertiary disasters could have had if the Soviet government had not acted to mitigate them. Those are cases in which millions of people are affected and regions the size of Alabama become uninhabitable. I personally was not aware that a failure at a plant could cascade into those kind of issues. I didn't realize that Chernobyl could have been much much worse.
And that is my problem. I believe fundamentally in human fallibility. We and our best machines will always find new ways to fail. Always.
In some cases, the risks are acceptable. Such is the case with flying in a plane. No matter how good aircraft and our safety procedures get. The loss of a plane, however tragic does not impact the future of our planet of our species.
What's more, the law of large numbers says if you make nuclear power ubiquitous, it's almost a guarantee that some 1/1000, 1/10000, or even 1/1000000, event will occur.
For me, I'm not against nuclear now but I am much less gung-ho and that's due to this show. I look forward to learning more though and perhaps my opinion will sway back.
Eh. The Soviet Union really was a uniquely dysfunctional place. The level of reality denial and sucking up to the higher ups that led to Chernobyl is not commonplace.
If it's any consolation, the meme "nuclear is failing because of unreasonable fears" is wrong. Nuclear is failing because it costs too much, and that cost is driven by complexity and low learning effects, not regulation.
What keeps it from widespread adoption isn't that people are scared. Its the regulatory framework that was put into place after the accidents. They have killed the industry and pretty much all progress.
I don't think this is true. Ask people how they feel about nuclear energy. Then ask them how they feel about living near a nuclear plant. Regulations are difficult to navigate but if there is sufficient want and need then they will be navigated. See any government contract work.
I'm sorry but this is just not true. There is a large amount of difference between navigating regulation a software contract or a road compared to a nuclear plant.
Its quite literally impossible to operate a prototype reactor for example. You literally need to build a production version on your first try to even get fissile materials.
To actually being able to regulate something you need to pay the DoE and they don't even give you a timeline. "Hallo I like to build this new reactor, here are the plans", "Thanks now give us 100M$ and 2-4 years and then we will tell you all the things that we required, then you can submit it again (with more money of course)".
While I agree with your point it is phrased wrong.
There have been two large scale nuclear disasters. BUT in those disasters less people died (globally) or will die (using LNT model) than Americans die per year from coal ash. By a fair amount too (4x-100x. 100x is the UN estimate from 2006). You could argue that 10x Americans die every year by cars than any person has died from nuclear. Because when it come to nuclear we're really only talking about 1 event that lead to deaths, and the HIGH estimates of that are still under 100k (for reference, the coal ash number is ~200k/yr, and cars are ~33k/yr). Which yeah, that's a lot of people, but not that many when you consider the time frame of all of nuclear power. Other energy sources and utilities have their deaths spread out over decades and location, the problem with nuclear is that it is temporally and physically concentrated.
But let me repeat the main point.
Every year more Americans die from coal ash than ALL the people who have ever died from any nuclear incident.
Cars in the US alone kill 30,000 people every year. It's one of the biggest killers we have, only behind things like heart disease, and it's easily the biggest thing that kills younger, healthy people. Worldwide, the number is somewhere around 250k.
250k is an understatement, according to the WHO it's closer to 1.35 million. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death, worldwide, for people aged 5-29.
Both coal and nuclear have potentially killed millions. Just because it can take decades for Chernobyl, Fukushima, and coal air pollution to result in some cancers, that does not mean they aren't primarily responsible for those deaths.
> Both coal and nuclear have potentially killed millions.
If you remove nuclear from that sentence it is still true. If you remove coal from that sentence it certainly is not.
You are being EXTREMELY misleading. The page you show lists under 10k for nuclear (even if we take the highest estimates from Chernobyl we are around 100k). 20 times that more Americans die per year from coal ash. PER YEAR! 3x that die from cars, or opioids, or guns PER YEAR!
Lumping nuclear into this statistic is grossly misleading at best and manipulative at worst. Considering the link you provided, and that I believe you have the ability to count, it suggests the latter. So I just have to ask: why?
The estimation of excess cancer deaths for Chernobyl and Fukushima is based on exposure results and the LNT model of accumulated dose response instead of actual observed cancer incidences, because it's impossible to actually assign specific incidences of cancer to specific causes. Thus, the counts for deaths caused by Chernobyl--the only nuclear power plant to cause significant death--will include deaths that have yet to occur.
The total estimates for deaths to nuclear power, even including the use of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, struggle to amount to a million, even if you start using the high outlier estimates of anti-nuclear groups.
However in the case of Iran where they have both stated and have made significant nuclear weapons progress as well as expressed an official position of “wiping Israel off the map,” it would be a folly. But Europe, North and South America and much of Africa doesn’t have destroying another county as a stated ambition. Iran, for example, could be pursing rapid expansion of solar in addition to nuclear if getting off fossil fuels was their actual goal, but it’s not. Same for North Korea. There are some governments that absolutely can’t be trusted with dual-use nuclear technology. I would be equally nervous if Saudi Arabia were to develop a sudden interest in nuclear power.
Articles like this carry the implication that current-generation nuclear technology should be subsidized. There are reasons to subsidize new energy technologies, but not ones that have failed to become practical, safe, and economically viable over the long term.
Subsidizing current-generation nuclear power is what we have had all along. The cost of nuclear power was imposed on ratepayers without them having a say. It didn't work. Nuclear plants are still too expensive. Still uninsurable due to unbounded risk. Still ending up with shortfalls in decommissioning funds. Still without waste disposal. Practically nothing you would expect a period of subsidy to get to practical market-supporting economic models.
I could support government funding for demonstrator reactors using genuinely new technology that can make a case for solving the problems of nuclear power.
I will not support extending the life of reactors that do not even meet current site requirements (like Fukushima) or current containment standards. I will not support building new reactors based on old technology that does not transform the safety and economics of nuclear power.
Perhaps this piece (set in Vancouver) is a response to the agency formed in 2009 in response to the IEA's assertions, known as IRENA. https://irena.org/
Looking at mid term solutions: Nuclear fission is just not cost effective if you factor in all total cost of a building a secure nuclear power plant and safely dismantling it after its lifetime. Also uranium ore is a limited non renewable resource. Nuclear fusion looks similarly bad but at least deuterium and tritium is rather abundant.
Looking at ultra long term solutions: Wind power is nothing else than reducing the speed of rotation of the earth. This is similarly true for tidal power plants. Geothermal power plants will eventually destroy earths unique magnetic field.
Solar is the only true sustainable "renewable" way to produce energy in all scenarios for literally the next million years. So lets concentrate on that and not waste time on the other stuff.
Nuclear looks bad if you restrict it to 1940's technology. Which we have done. We don't allow ourselves to dream any more when it comes to nuclear. We are still building the same plants we designed for submarines and bombs, and wondering why they aren't great for power. There are safer, cheaper, lower waste alternatives if we'd allow ourselves to try them (Thorium reactors, for example).
Does wind power really reduce the speed of the earth? I'd assume wind energy comes from the sun heating the atmosphere, so wind power is really just solar power in a different form.
Solar makes me really sad. The amount of land it consumes is staggering. Land that can't be used for other living things. I saw the most beautiful farmland in Italy this month smothered under sterile black waves of solar panels.
> Nuclear looks bad if you restrict it to 1940's technology.
The research in nuclear is still been done very actively. My country is putting hundreds of millions per year into nuclear research. But even the new technologies are not competitive. The infrastructure and maintenance required for nuclear technologies is vastly more expensive than solar. The thorium hype is moot because nobody ever demonstrated a working molten salt reactor. And even if it works it is still very expensive, suffers from corrosion and produces radioactive waste that is expensive to dispose of. Nuclear technology is old. All the physics behind it is more or less known for 60 years. Very smart people had a lot of money available to come up with something during that whole time. I don't expect any ground braking innovation in that field any more.
> Does wind power really reduce the speed of the earth?
You can measure that by yourself. In my location the if you average over all wind directions during a year you clearly get very west wind bias. That is the amount of Energy you take from earths rotation.
> I saw the most beautiful farmland in Italy this month smothered under sterile black waves of solar panels.
Of course it is stupid to put solar panels on farmland. But there are so many desserts in America that America alone could power three globes only with solar power. Only half of the roof of my house is covered with solar panels and I would easily get through the summer. If I populate the rest of the roof I would get through the winter if there was a possibility for cheap storage that lasts half a year.
Also I find wind farms in nature equally disturbing.
"The rotation of the earth does have an effect on the direction of the wind, but it does not create it. Wind is primarily driven by differences in air pressure. These variations in air pressure are due to temperature differences caused by variations in solar energy received at the surface of the earth."
Conservation of angular momentum doesn't care about the origin of those winds. If you harvesting net average west wind you are slowing down earths rotation.
I think you need to retake that physics course where you learned about conservation of angular momentum.
Use of wind energy has zero effect on the total angular momentum of the Earth + atmosphere. It might cause a glitch as it ramps up and reduces average wind speed, but after that conservation of angular momentum ensures it cannot cause any further change.
Yes because Earth is not a closed system. If you reduce the speed of rotation and radiate the acquired Energy into space the total angular momentum (in the universe) stays the same but the angular momentum of only Earth + atmosphere changes.
Tides, I could see, maybe. But wind? How is this going to have any non-negligible effect? The gravitational coupling of the atmosphere to the Sun or Moon is small.
The transport of angular momentum from the Earth by radiation is very small, and the change in that due to changes in wind is even smaller.
Devastating! Chernobyl on the other hand is one of the most beautiful tourist locations to this day!
Really though, it baffles me how people can bring degrading postcard quality into a discussion with stakes of a few billion human lives with a straight face...
You said it yourself, nuclear is bad for the private sector as they can't rake the same returns as dirtier technologies. So why shouldn't we just let the public government do it? The U.S. Navy has more nuclear reactor experience than any entity in the world.
Yes, if you like communism then it is feasable to give away nuclear energy "for free". In the free market nuclear does not have a chance.
The military has specilized needs and is mainly interested in nuclear wheapons. Using the infrastucture to generate power is more or less a free "waste product" of maintaining that infrastructure.
Most "common" people who hold themselves as "climate conscious" have no clue how the science of modern nuclear reactors or economic implication of energy production systems / distribution infrastructure work at all. Anything nuclear they think, "fukushima was nuclear and it went bad", even though it was near the coast and a known fault-zone...
The rhetoric of "anything nuclear is bad" will likely be looked back upon as a core reason the human race didn't meaningfully curb climate change.
Interesting, especially when you consider the environmental disaster that occurs when something goes wrong with nuclear power. Think Fukushima or Chernobyl. From the actual HN list right now: https://moxie.org/stories/chernobyl-scene-report/
It’s too late for nuclear. We’re facing 1 meter sea level rise within 20 years.
When human civilization collapses I’d rather have a field of unused PV battery cells leaking, than nuclear waste from all the meltdowns around the world.
While I agree about not wanting nuclear waste, a sea level rise of one meter within 20 years is way above the general scientific prediction. In the last 17 years the rise was pretty stable at 3.3mm per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
It feels like something out of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. A telltale sign of a civilization in decline when the most advanced energy form accessible to mankind is being replaced by wood burning and windmills. Meanwhile people delusion themselves with arguments that renewable is more advanced. Our first energy source was renewable, but the energy density of wood is pitiful compared to nuclear.
I don't think subsidizing a losing technology just to let you avoid having to deal with your misconceptions about the future would be good public policy.
This is misleading enough to make one question every "fact" stated in TFA. 20 years ago was essentially a zero point for the statistic they cite. It was less than 5 gigawatts, anyway. It grew by over 100 times in that 20 years, and it will be "unprecedented" to grow by 5 times in the next 20? (5 < 100) Is anyone at this agency numerate?
Don't believe me, take a look at the charts here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Sure those don't include wind, but when you find those charts they will look the same. Anyway wind isn't growing as fast as solar.