Yves here. This post is guaranteed to make some reader go nuclear, hence the importance of running it.
Since it seems politically and practically impossible to get enough support for the most effective and least destructive approach to reducing the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, which is radical conservation, we are left with only greatly inferior second-best approaches.
Even if you disagree with its conclusion, this post makes important points: nuclear power routinely elicits knee-jerk rejection based on prejudice, not actual risks, and most “renewable” energy sources are given a free pass on their environmental damage.
By Zion Lights, a science communicator known for her environmental advocacy work. Zion is founder of the climate action group Emergency Reactor, author of ‘The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting’ and a keen astronomer who has given a TED talk on stargazing. She is the former editor of The Hourglass, Extinction Rebellion’s print newspaper. Zion is active on Twitter @ziontree. Originally published at openDemocracy
I have been a climate activist for well over a decade. Sixteen years ago I was arrested once for protesting about tar sands and again for protesting about coal. In 2018 I was one of the main spokespeople for Extinction Rebellion UK and founder of its print newspaper The Hourglass, and in 2015 I authored an evidence-based book on green parenting.
I try to ignore ad hominem attacks, since they only show that the attacker has a weak argument. But I want to respond to the latest: ‘Why is support for nuclear power noisiest just as its failures become most clear?’, an article here on openDemocracy by Andrew Stirling and Phil Johnstone.
Since I started talking about nuclear positively, I have been accused of being an industry ‘shill’. But I have never taken money from the nuclear industry. I’ve said publicly that if the industry promoted its product better then I wouldn’t have to do the job for it. It has a clean product that requires little land compared with the alternatives, and doesn’t cause air pollution or climate change.
The industry also provides green jobs that are unionised – supported by GMB Union, Prospect and others – unlike most renewable enterprises.
Conversely, renewables have such good branding that most people don’t even consider their environmental impact.
It was realising all of this that made me want to advocate for nuclear energy.
There is scientific consensus that we need nuclear power to address climate change. Nuclear energy is included in all of the IPCC’s pathways for decarbonisation in its landmark 1.5°C report.
The Nuclear Waste Myth
When I was anti-nuclear, my main concerns were safety and waste. I later learned that nuclear power is only slightly less safe than wind, hydro power and solar. More importantly, it is vastly safer than any fossil energy, once you factor in air pollution as well as accidents.
Almost everything I believed about waste turned out to be wrong. While many people think of Sellafield in regards to waste management, this is actually a nuclear weapons facility, where spent fuel is also reprocessed. Spent fuel is well managed and has never harmed anyone. In fact, nuclear waste was stored in dry storage casks (thick blocks of concrete) at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, and they were completely undamaged despite being hit by a tsunami and earthquake. This is a standard waste management approach, and the casks were intended to be stored on site for decades, to be reprocessed at a later date.
Waste management methods vary per country. Spent fuel can be recycled, which France has been doing for years. Finland is building a deep geological disposal facility to bury spent fuel, where it will be safely stored for as long as is needed. Mistakes have been made with inadequate waste disposal, and certainly where this has happened those countries should ensure that management is adequate. This is a political issue rather than a technical one.
On the other hand, toxic waste from solar panels is not well managed: there is currently no way to recycle them, which means that they end up in landfill sites where they leach toxic chemicals. This hazardous waste needs a solution, but doesn’t seem to concern many environmentalists. Meanwhile, fossil fuel waste is being stored in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Price Tag
Stirling and Johnstone use a metric called “levelised cost of energy assessment” (LCOE) to argue that renewables are the cheapest of all energy sources, over the lifetime of an individual generation plant. However, LCOE is not appropriate for assessing the cost of weather-dependent resources like wind and solar. An in-depth study of the levelised cost of wind power found that “windfarms are not cost effective when a certain output must be guaranteed as major opportunity costs are introduced.”
According to Dieter Helm, an energy economist at the University of Oxford, “The more renewables are added to the grid, the more backup must be built as well, even if much of it sits idle much of the time.” Opposition to nuclear has driven the cost up.
Stirling and Johnstone claim that “nuclear power diverts resources and attention away from more effective strategies, increasing costs to consumers and taxpayers”. Yet in 2019, France’s electricity, 71% of which came from nuclear energy, cost just 59% of that in Germany, which had been shutting down nuclear power since 2011 and is still struggling to phase out coal. What’s more, Germany’s solar and wind farms will have to be rebuilt every 15 to 25 years. Nuclear power plants can last from 40 to 80 years or more.
Build Them Faster
Is nuclear power “slower, less effective and more expensive at tackling climate disruption”, as Stirling and Johnstone state? Slower in the UK, yes, but let’s look more widely. A 2016 analysis found that of the 441 reactors then in operation around the world, 18 were completed in just three years: 12 in Japan, three in the US, two in Russia and one in Switzerland. The mean construction time was 7.5 years. The UK could decarbonise quickly, if it really wanted to.
Standardisation has been shown to reduce build time and cost, which means using the same engineers to build the same reactors one after another. France built over 50 reactors in the 1960s and 70s and they still enjoy that clean energy today. France has even been exporting clean nuclear energy to Germany, which has decided to close all of its own nuclear power stations. As a result of this, Germany is missing climate targets despite pouring trillions of euros into renewable technologies. It is still the EU’s largest coal power country; former chancellor Angela Merkel admitted to approving the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline due to the need for gas to replace nuclear. German Green MEP Sven Giegold has said that Germany will need additional gas capacity in order to “stabilise” renewable power on the electricity grid.
Green-on-Green War
Many people first became anti-nuclear out of a fear of nuclear weapons, and that’s understandable – it would be odd not to fear weapons of such scale. But there is no correlation between weapons and energy. For example South Korea doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but it is one of the world’s largest nuclear power producers, whereas North Korea has nuclear weapons but no nuclear energy programme.
Stirling and Johnstone argue that nuclear power is “seriously under-challenged”, when actually groups like Greenpeace, WWF, Avaaz, Clean Air Alliance, most Green parties, and even the German government have been lobbying against it for decades. Greenpeace has staged many protests against nuclear energy, and WWF has argued that the world needs renewables but not nuclear. Remarkably, WWF admits that renewables need a backup energy source, and that they’d prefer that to be gas.
The authors of the piece state that “media attention is repeatedly given to emphatic claims that relatively few people died directly during nuclear catastrophes.” But such claims are simply the truth – only one death has been linked to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown, and even that number is debated. In fact more people died due to the unnecessary, panicked evacuation of the area after the meltdown.
The worst nuclear disaster that has occurred was in Chernobyl, Ukraine, and was due to the combination of human error and an old reactor designthat did not have a containment structure – a concrete and steel dome over the reactor itself designed to keep radiation inside the plant in the event of such an accident. All reactors of this type have since been upgraded to ensure these additional safety measures, and no new ones are being built. Estimates of the numbers of deaths from Chernobyl vary widely: 4,000 according to the World Health Organisation, 16,000 according to another paper.
All methods of energy production carry a toll, and nuclear is still one of the safer options. Hydropower is clean, but disrupts ecosystems and can be extremely dangerous: the worst ever energy-generation disaster was the Banqiao dam collapse in China in 1975, which killed between 171,000 and 230,000 people. Few people seem to fear hydropower the way they do nuclear power. Nevertheless the focus should really be on eliminating the big killer: fossil fuels.
Academic Battles
The authors point to a paper in Nature Energy by Benjamin Sovacool, Stirling himself and others which claims that “nuclear programmes do not tend to correlate with generally lower carbon emissions. The building of renewables does.” However, Nature Energy has just published a critical response which concludes: “there are serious limitations in the Sovacool et al. analysis, which call into question the policy implications advanced by the authors.” The same journal has included a further response from Sovacool and colleagues defending their work.
There appears to be a bias in favour of the renewables-only argument in the peer-review process for journals. In 2015 Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences arguing that the world can be powered by 100% renewable technology. This was debunked in 2017 because it used “invalid modelling tools, contains modelling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions”. Jacobson then tried (and failed) to sue the scientists who flagged up these problems. Nevertheless, his paper is treated as a bible for renewables-only advocates. He later published a similar study in the journal Joule.
There is no one-size-fits all energy scenario for every country. The data on the countries that have largely decarbonised demonstrate that it has only ever been achieved with a combination of nuclear energy, hydropower and a little wind and solar in addition. That’s not my opinion, it’s just arithmetic. Are “renewables displaying such massively improving performance worldwide”, as Stirling and Johnstone state? Yes, in some countries they are, but they are not managing it long-term without a back-up power source – known as baseload power – for when it’s not windy or sunny. Not anywhere in the world.
The arguments made by Stirling and Johnstone against nuclear power today are the same arguments I was making a decade ago, and I was wrong. I was pro-renewables-only too, writing and rallying in favour of them and arguing that better battery storage and the energy transition were just around the corner. I changed my mind about nuclear energy because the scientific consensus compelled me to. We can’t keep making the same bad arguments today, while the Global South slowly becomes uninhabitable due to climate change, just because spent fuel has a PR problem.
As for other groups setting up shop in the wake of my nuclear advocacy, I’m going to take some credit for that, and I’m proud to do so. Although cults may hold disdain for those who question their convictions, thankfully we also live in a world where many people appreciate it when someone changes their mind based on reason. Perhaps even one day I’ll be able to tell my children that some of my climate action actually worked. If I save one nuclear reactor from being prematurely shut down, I’ll be able to calculate the carbon emissions I’ve saved, and even the lives. That’s my real motive.
Stirling and Johnstone assert that “free thinking should always be welcomed”. I agree, but only when it is supported by facts.
Johnstone and Stirling tell openDemocracy: “We have had prior sight only of selected details of Ms Lights’s critique of our [openDemocracy] article – and these are gravely misleading. For instance, contrary to Ms Lights’s implication, even the ‘critical’ article she cites actually confirms our argument that nuclear is less associated with lower carbon emissions than renewables are.
“Beyond this, there is much in her critique we have not yet seen and this brief comment affords too little space to address much more. This in itself reflects the sad wider mismatch in public and media debate that our article documents, between PR rhetoric on nuclear power and opportunities for open, rigorous response.
“Of course, many complexities and uncertainties do (as we say) leave space for legitimately contrasting positions, for and against. But it is again deeply misleading for Ms Lights to present partisan personal preferences as unambiguously driven by ‘scientific consensus’. Science, the climate and democracy all deserve better.”
One of Angela Merkel’s greatest mistakes – a woman who made a great deal of catastrophic mistakes in office – was starting the closure of Germany’s nuclear plants.
Agree. What a mistake: creating, instead of reducing, dependency on fossil fuels.
I recall many of these German plants were already in or near cities, and had cooling constraints. I was astonished many years ago when I first saw one very near Cologne as I travelled past in a train.
It created a different politics in Germany versus France, or in other countries less densely populated and with coastal locations mainly chosen for cooling, but also less visible to city dwellers.
I was surprised to see Merkel of all leaders apparently do the switcheroo too, but it was all about what she and her advisers perceived as German federal politics. I doubt the tsunami had much to do with the decision except for the emphasis and timing.
I don’t think any of the nuclear plant proponants would like to live near nuclear power plants. NIMBY!
They can put one in my backyard, I don’t care. The fear is completely irrational.
Was really rooting for the local team – Transatomic Power, and their molten salt reactor, but seems they over-promised it could run on existing low level waste. Turns out the analysis didn’t pan out on that.
The article does mention to the containment of spent nuclear fuel but not the reactor structure.
It does appear not discuss the embitterment of the reactor, and the storage of the reactor structure and plant when is is both radioactive at its end of life,
I don’t know the current decay life of the current set of reactors, but I did read man years ago that a reactor site is low level radioactive, and should be fenced for 1,000 years after decommissioning.
As I recall, this discussion was published in “Electronics and Power” in the spring of 1969.
I agree. Ask former residents near Chernobyl and Fukushima. Or, for that matter, Three Mile Island.
Would you prefer to live next to a coal power plant? Maybe in the middle of a large wind farm? Downstream from a large hydro dam?
Comparing the risks and nuisance effects, I’d pick the nuclear plant if I had to live near one of them. No one loves to live next a large industry, but as long as we want the stuff they produce we can’t avoid it.
It wasn’t (just) Fukushima that started Germany in this path. The Asse II salt mine in Saxony is being used for nuclear waste storage, and it has turned out to be a really bad choice. It’s porous and slowly filling with water.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-nuclear-storage-facility-hit-by-safety-scandal/a-3618649
It wasn’t Angela Merkels decision. It was Siemens. They pulled the plug. Germany never invested heavily in nuclear and its plants are old and were inefficient. Germany has lots of problems with nuclear, most obviously its difficulty in getting suitable sites for a reliable supply of coolant water. Its grid is insufficient for bring power from the Baltic Coast to the industrial buildings to the south, and only the Rhine really has the consistent flow for coolant. Nuclear was always an expensive option for Germany, it has plenty of coal and plenty of wind.
Germany was a partner in the EPR, the main European nuclear plant, but they bailed out when they realised it was a disaster in the making. It was a wise decision as a variety of companies, from Westinghouse to Hitachi have been brought to their knees by nuclear investments.
Germany invested heavily in conventional fossil fuel plant, solar, wind, and most importantly, grid technology. It never had a big investment stake in nuclear, so they had no incentive to put more government money into it, unlike the French or Japanese, etc. The decision to kill nuclear was a straightforward commercial decision to aid German industry. They’ve been proven right.
Back in the ’90s, when I was a naive graduate student, my advisor, a much older and vastly wiser person than I, told me that he reckoned that nuclear power would be necessary to transition the energy system to ‘post-carbon’. He saw the economic and political realities even then (he was an old-school R person).
Depending on the biological and political longevity of a certain politician of national stature from a coal-producing state, it may be that US will be way behind the curve, compared to rest-of-world, in terms of transitioning away from chemical energy (carbon and hydrogen combustion) toward all forms of nuclear energy (noting, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, that renewables rely directly or indirectly on incident sunlight, which is produced by nuclear reactions in the core of the Sun).
From a practical helping-humanity-POV, burning natural gas to generate electricity is insane when fission is an alternative.
Natural gas is better used as a heating fuel (95%+ efficiency in modern furnaces), needed to make fertilizer(keep food affordable, you need NH3…natgas = the H3), and used as a transport fuel (beats diesel buses). And of course kept in the ground and used as economically as possible due to methane leakage.
Just as ethanol mandates wound up being proven dumb when corn used as fuel started making animal feed expensive, the US has painted itself into a corner re. natural gas.
Fertilizer prices are going through the roof thanks to rising natural gas prices which are due: (a) to less shale production, (b) increased demand from electricity plants, (c) exports to EU.
Brace for a wild 2022 for food prices. Yes, a post about fission can lead to nat. gas can lead to fertilizer can lead to the price of kids’ chicken fingers.
I’m not sure that ‘expensive synthetic fertilizer’ is such a bad thing. There are ways of cropping that regenerate reduced Nitrogen in the soil (nitrogen-fixing cover crops in the annual planting rotation — see Gabe Brown’s Dirt to Soil, for example), and this can be done sustainably (or more sustainably — GB doesn’t produce his own tractor fuel, for example, though perhaps at some point he could).
I kind of view continued (but hopefully declining) use of synthetic fertilizer as a necessary evil to avoid mass starvation as the food production system is transitioned away from its current extractive model toward a regenerative model.
One of Gabe Brown’s IMO compelling points is that conventional fossil-fuel fertilized ag producers tend to evaluate their ‘production efficiency’ primarily in terms of ‘crop yield per unit land area.’ He thinks ‘crop yield per $ expended’ is a more useful metric, and has reconfigured his operations to produce more of his inputs (seed, soil nitrogen, soil moisture retention) through planting species that do the work for him. I have the impression that his conventional metric yields are not shabby in comparison with conventional method results of his neighbors (in part due to the superior water retention properties of his regenerated soil) but with much less exogenous inputs.
One might argue that sustainable regenerative approaches will generally have reduced yield per land area compared to optimal input-heavy present methods and would require more land to be brought into Ag production; I don’t know enough to evaluate that, but I have the impression that Brown’s methods can regenerate marginal soils that would be considered unsuitable for conventional farming methods.
GB doesn’t produce his own tractor fuel, for example, though perhaps at some point he could. True enough, but since he does not plow or cultivate, spreads neither fertilizer, pesticides nor herbicides, nor does he feed grain to his cattle — his farm’s fossil fuel requirements would be much, much lower than industrial ag operations. Some of our local farmers do pretty well farming with horses, like we did before the tractor was invented (ie, most of human history)..
Certain farmers ( Gabe Brown, Gary Zimmer, others) claim to be meeting or exceeding their Haber-Bosch nitrogen neighbors’s yields without using any Haber-Bosch nitrogen at all. Do their row-crop grains and beans cost more than the Haber-Bosch alternative? If so, that might be the price of eco-bio sustainability and reducing natgas consumption by the amount of natgas not used for Haber-Bosch nitrogen not needed.
If higher-priced grain is the price of survival, is it a price worth paying? Some people think so.
Unh, GB, at any rate, seems to have much confirmation from his local university extension, and in any case doesn’t row-crop. Improvements in his tilth are also tested regularly as he is a numbers kind a guy.
Totally agree and for decades have been a voice crying in the wilderness.
One thing is that Zion Lights lumps all forms of fission reactors into one category.
But there are pressurised water reactors (PWR), boiling water reactors (BWR), advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGR), light water graphite-moderated reactors (LWGR), fast neutron reactors (FNR).
It’s my limited understanding that thorium bed reactors are the safest (though the least powerful), and the French fast breeder reactors are sodium cooled.
And of course there are fusion reactors on the horizon – which like the horizon, always lies somewhere in the distance.
current fusion reactor tech can last 30 sec. goal is 50 sec. this year.
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/01/16/business/tech/Kstar-Korea-Institute-of-Fusion-Energy-nuclear-fusion/20220116070013302.html
ya, creating a mini-sun in a warehouse is a tad tough, especially when Americans spend more on chips than global fusion R&D spending.
“Americans spend more on chips than global fusion R&D spending.”
Do you mean computer chips or potato chips? [Hmmm… Though now that I think about it, I suspect the statement is true for both.]
US spends something like $8 billion on potato chips annually.
The Koreans built their fusion test reactor for <$500 million and it costs less than $50 million a year to operate/research…..for literal civilization-changing technology.
So for less than one F35 squadron or the cost of developing a launch vehicle to send millionaires into space, you can fund Korea's fusion program for 10+ years.
Family blogging pathetic— US priority for basic research.
They spend as much or more even when the chips are down ;)
And they promise … the horizon.
Damned dastardly Americans .. did it again.
So sayeth .. dour .. Sergei the Lavrov.
There. Did it again. Caused ANOTHER! .. nuclear war!
:)
Fusion tech is cautiously slow. What are the dangers? Is it possible to actually create a black hole with runaway fusion? The ultimate global warming. Must balance the strong and weak forces here lest we expand or contract?
My climate advocacy organization has looked pretty deeply into fusion. This is a very diverse and complex “space” – much more so than fission. We have looked pretty deeply at the full range of possible “constraints” (safety, waste, proliferation, etc.) and don’t yet see any significant safety risks or other “show stoppers”. Managing fusion wastes could be challenging. They will be much larger in volume than from a similar power fission reactor. Very little of this waste (if any) will be “high level waste” – but pretty much all of it will be “low level waste” and if fusion really begins deploying a decade+ out our existing “low level waste” facilities would fill up quickly. Some excellent recent DOE lab work has outline the complex “clearance, recycling and repurposing” systems that would need to be put in place to manage fusion waste – but it is not clear that anyone in government or the “fusion industry” is addressing this challenge. A further complexity is that there are some significant variations in “challenges” (including materials supply chain issues) that vary among the different approaches to fusion. One good example is managing tritium (challenging!) for any fusion system, using “DT” fuel vs. system that do not.
My “take aways” here are:
We should remember that the first fission reactor operation was in December of 1943! And we are not yet at that stage for fusion..
The fusion systems “space” is not yet well explored and the most promising are is the least explored and has had very little government support. One good example of systems in this space is “Helion”
Fusion tokamaks are probably the closest to demonstrating net energy production as most government investment globally down selected to this option decades ago. Tokamaks have potential challenges like beryllium supply that could severely limit their deployment and they are likely to be relatively high cost energy producers.
And there is some promising work in progress to facilitate greatly expanding exploration of the fusion space (“MIF”) that potentially has the most promising opportunities.
It’s slow because there are enough parameters (about 6) in the description of magnetic plasma confinement that ITER will need ~1000 20-minute long “burns” to explore plasma stability in its unprecedentedly large “D” s (the cross section of the toroidal volume occupied by the super heated plasma. Lots of prep for each shot and much data to crunch after. They increase each generation of fusion reactor by tripling the volume, requiring ~3^6 stable burns to establish which path to follow to the next stable scaleup. After ITER is the DEMO tokamak, which will benefit from newer superconducting magnets that can take higher magnetic fields. These are already going into competing commercial designs (and in Korean and Chinese reactors) that are trying to beat ITER’s deuterium+tritium experiments set to start in 2035. Increasing field strength B is major because fusion power output goes as pressure squared
p^2 = (nkT+B^2/constant)^2 ie 4th power of B.
n particle density, T temperature, k Mr Boltzmann’s constant.
ITER was slow out the gate because of its multinational structure, the time it took to spread complex contracting around all the partners so that their most sophisticated domestic industries would benefit, and initial inept project management that you can duckduckgo about. It’s on track now for first plasma in a few years, see iter.org
Lol: the aliens who .. monitor .. swarmings of neutrinos-artificial have grown Quite Concerned at this system’s near-monkeys and their Pretensions of Insularity from quantum entanglements.
Oumuamua WILL be back, and next time may deliver .. Obeisance.
There is a joke about fission. Fisson – technology of the future, always has been, always will be.
Isn’t that fusion?
What happened to the original boast that ‘nuclear power will be so cheap, there will be no need to meter electricity’?. There are numerous ways of creatively accounting for costs. I would imagine clean up costs will fall on society to socalise these rather than the companies that profited from providing the power.
Just as you can cut your car fuel costs by driving more smoothly with less harsh acceleration and braking, plenty of energy could be saved by improving insulation, turning off lights, systems, heating etc., when not needed etc. That should be a very big priority.
Nuclear power relies on a finite resource that one day will run out. Renewables have to be the ultimate answer.
Maybe it is time to phase out about massive power stations and go for local mini wind, solar power systems etc., that can meet local needs. A bit like individual PCs have replaced massive mainframes.
Clean up costs already do. ex Hanford. Granted a lot of the current clean-up site come out of military research.
The entire waste cycle of uranium has been a government subsidized program to nowhere.
Having been to Hanford on a tour (it became a National Park, along with Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Los Alamos in New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project in 2014), I can attest to the mess that will never get cleaned up in many lifetimes to come. The greatest threat is leakage of the underground tanks estimated to be nearly 1,300 gallons per year and just 10 miles away from the Columbia River.
But Oregonians who purchase their electricity from Portland General Electric (PGE) have other reasons to feel distaste for nuclear. Having been the major investor in Trojan Nuclear Power plant, PGE was forced to decommission it in 1993 after its stuttering operations began in 1976. This not-so-useful lifespan ended twenty years before it was supposed to last, apparently in 2013. There were many reasons why this happened. But this hits home in the seismically active NW.
https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/trojan_nuclear_power_plant/
We will continue to pay for the stranded assets and nuclear waste of this plant on our bills ad infinitum. According to the Oregon Department of Energy: “Thirty-four dry casks of spent nuclear fuel are stored on a concrete pad at the former Trojan nuclear power plant site. The spent fuel will remain there until the federal government establishes a national spent fuel repository or an interim consolidated storage facility.”
Hence, the opposition to nuclear energy here in the Pacific NW.
Marketing talk, presumably?
Nuclear is, however, relatively cheap. France, for example, is about 70 percent nuclear, 20 percent renewables (3/4 of which is hydro), with the balance of grid power coming from coal and gas.
Consumer electric prices in France are below the EU average, being about half what they are in Germany, which is phasing out nuclear and going all-in on non-hydro renewables, such as solar, wind, etc.
People living in high-wind, nuclear-free places such as Denmark and Ireland also pay far more for theirpower than French householders.
No, political talk. It was made by Lewis Strauss (pronounced “Straws”), and it’s unclear whether he was talking of fission or fusion.
Intersting article
Incidentally, Strauss was one of the major hounders of J. Robert Oppenheimer, primarily because JRO’s arrogance tickled Strauss’ arriviste insecurities.
And France exports its waste to Larry Summers’ “Sahel”, or w/e.
I know a bit about this from my profession. Wholesale nuclear power is produced for between 1 and 3 cents per kilowatt hour. Your typical electric bill is 10 to 20 cents per kilowatt hour by comparison. So, nuclear as base load power may not quite be too cheap to meter, but its pretty damn cheap.
I think you are mixing apples and oranges here. In my state, we pay about about 12 cents per kwh but that price is determined by the Public Services Commission, not by what we can get on the wholesale market, and to us, it doesn’t matter where the electricity comes from – the price is the same.
You’re quite correct. The electric utility companies buy power from hydro (i.e. from the USG) for a couple of pennies per kwh and they sell it for a lot higher.
I’ll betcha the 1-3 cents/kwh does not take into account reprocessing costs of spent uranium nor waste disposal.
That’s all pretty cheap. Nuclear costs are mostly related to construction/set up and then the interest payments to services all that up front spend. Large companies usually can’t justify any project, no matter the benefit, if it won’t accrue for 10 years – cost benefit analysis pushes values past that down to zero.
It’s a massive market failure, which the government used to fill in but of course doesn’t anymore.
Kind of going with my other comment, is that their actual wholesale rate or just their operating cost / kWh?
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if their operating cost is that cheap, but IIUC, the catch with nuclear (and hydro) has always been the fixed costs. If that’s what they’re actually charging even after things like depreciation and financing, that would be impressive (assuming they’re not continuing to operate at a loss).
I read somewhere (sorry, no link), that the majority of French uranium supply was from Mali, hence the 5000ish troops defending ‘democracy’. So the cheap power at the plug is subsidized via the military budget.
Renewables, particularly PV, are not all that renewable unless we develop a clean, low-energy, economic way to recycle. If we don’t recycle we will be substituting one stream of finite resources in PV panels for the finite stream of fossil fuels we hope to eliminate. Also, we don’t use the terms solar farms and wind farms for nothing. Renewables consume immense amounts of real estate. They all extract energy from the sun just like our crops. Less than 10 miles from where I live a nuclear plant on 25 acres provides over 1000MW of power almost continuously. The same property could support 13MW of intermittent wind power or maybe 25 MW of intermittent solar. I will say the best renewable choice is offshore wind. Essentially free real estate and more or less steady winds.
While I agree that nuclear energy may be needed to manage an energy transition from fossil fuels, I do not have the warm fuzzys for nuclear that seem to afflict converted environmentalists these days. (Growing up not far from Three Mile Island admittedly colors my views somewhat.) I think we need to be _very_ careful before taking the leap into nuclear.
1) Nuclear power was and is _always_ linked to nuclear weapons, because the same facilities are usually used for fuel enrichment in both cases and nuclear research was always tied to the military. More countries processing fuel risks increasing weapons proliferation, with its concomitant dangers.
2) Mining and fuel processing is not a clean process. Many hazardous materials are used in processing uranium ore and radioactive contamination of processing sites is a long-standing problem. Radioactive tailings resulting from mining need to be carefully handled as well.
3) The security of the fuel chain is always an issue (e.g. war, political instability, natural disaster, terrorist attacks). Military, internal security and intelligence services are all closely connected to nuclear programs. Secrecy surrounding the industry is a risk to democracy.
4) Whatever the reactor type, disposal of spent fuel, regardless of the claims in the article above, is still an open problem. Furthermore, during reactor operation, the radioactivity present in the reactor weakens the reactor vessel and surrounding structure over time. When replacement (or decommissioning) becomes necessary, these materials also need to be disposed of in a safe manner and kept safe for a long period of time.
My 2c, for what it’s worth!
The author’s use of South Korea as an example of a place that uses nuclear power but has no weapons is funny. Both them and Japan rely on the presence of the US military to keep nuclear powers from intimidating them, but I suspect they are ready to build a nuke very quickly if the American shield goes away!
I agree. The spent fuel being a “political problem” and not a “technical problem” is not a relief at all. How much spent fuel is sitting at the power plant requiring continuous power to water pumps to keep it from spewing radioactivity all over the planet? I’ve read each plant has massive amounts of radioactive material, way more even than a bomb. Fukushima is clear evidence of how much radioactivity just one place can release. Just how long do people expect perfectly available electricity to last? Fukushima went up from backup generators getting water logged and not powering the pumps to cool the radioactive fuel. If there’s ever war in a country or an earthquake or anything not totally predictable… nuke plants are in trouble. And the material is radioactive for thousands of years.
And further, speaking of political, the nuclear industry is extremely dependent on gov’t subsidies and couldn’t possibly put aside the amount of money needed to account for cleanup of a disaster – my understanding is they don’t have private insurance because only gov’t would be foolish/corrupt enough to insure. The nuclear industry is so politicized I’m not surprised only one death was attributed to Fukushima – I’m sure none of the cancers and stillbirths and childhood hormone imbalances and childhood. mental deficiencies and other radioactive consequences were attributed to it.
On transitions, only doing one transition at a time is foolish. Ideally for the benefit of everyone we’d develop a collective plan to change our way of life and transition together. But just getting away from coal or just from nuclear – of course this won’t lead to ideal outcomes. The whole culture needs to shift to get away from systemic violence, consumerism, militarism, and so on.
I sympathize with the author. I find it really hard looking around and seeing no good options. But that doesn’t make bad ones ok. Collapse is baked in at this point. One of the most important things we can do now is to reduce toxicity (plastics, other chemicals, radioactive materials, etc) so the world’sa healthier place after. And also ‘cause it’s frickin’ rude to pollute each other and our non human neighbors. Finding ways to give more than we take from the living world is the only path I support.
It’s funny in the odd sense that fission gets hyped and fusion is rarely even mentioned.
Stephen King did a pretty convincing critical presentation of fission’s hideous problems in a memorable passage in his “Tommyknockers.”
ITER is an example of ‘get on the tech bus when it comes by and don’t wait for the next one’ and is now a bit of a behemoth compared to presently evolving tech. But I like to watch its progress. In it lies hope.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time around a vented fission facility, I’m not very sanguine about the inconvenient problems of fissionable materials’ disposition.
I keep inviting Stewie Brand to chug a pint of Fukushima water from the water well that used to serve retired racehorses in that prefecture. Funny/odd, he never responds.
Thanks for an excellent article, well-written and thorough in addressing pros and cons. I agree with the conclusion. Nuclear (like GMO’s) is a hot-button topic and big money-raiser for environmental groups. Frighten people with scary exaggerations and partial facts and then insert the “Donate” button.
Thanks for the useful links. Great tools to cut through the rhetoric: https://lowcarbonpower.org/chart.
You can add regions and drill down: https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/EU. Shows Europe still dependent on 35% fossile fuels; USA is 62% dependent; France 8% . It allows you do see stats with or without nuclear and hydropower.
I am pronuclear but anti-GMO. I suggest reading this about Gabe Brown on a better route than GMOs, which are just part of the big ag, synthetic nitrogen, climate, soil, and water quality disaster.
Eleven years ago a nuclear disaster that could have killed hundreds of thousands was averted because the wind blew the radiation from Fukushima out to sea rather than down to Tokyo (where I live). On March 10, 2011 you would have heard experts in industry and government extolling the safety of Japan’s plants, and the overwhelming majority of the residents of Japan would agree; but the next day’s events, which are still shrouded in secrecy, changed that completely.
Safe geological disposal of nuclear waste may be possible at least in some countries, but sites like Hanford, which is still bleeding contamination, show how difficult it is to implement in practice. Because something is technically feasible (self-driving cars?) doesn’t mean it is a good idea to carry it out. Or to put it another way, if advanced societies can’t even implement “radical conservation,” is there much chance anyone can implement a worldwide energy generation program that involves huge quantities of water and deadly byproducts that may be around a million years?
Thorium? PRC thinks it’s worth a try, and they may be right, since it doesn’t appear from this article that the energy problem is on it’s way to being solved anytime soon.
….and there is a very nice nature reserve in the Ukraine c/o Chernobyl. While nuclear power is very safe, it’s not risk free. The risks are very real and lead to large areas of land that can not be safely populated. Draw a Chernobyl or a half Chenobyl around your local nuke. For me that’s Toledo and Detroit. Those are 50 year old reactors (and welds) with a history of safety violations and accidents
.
But sure nuclear power is the way forward.
I’ll take the problems with solar and wind.
Existing reactors and Gen3 designs are not sustainable, affordable, nor can/should scale in number to meet enhanced worldwide electrification. Phase them out over the next 20 years. If the following are done, nuclear can play a (minor) role if justified as response to the climate emergency:
– Put nuclear under international control including uncorrupted inspections. May need military to keep out MBAs.
– Mass produce only a couple of smaller unit designs after prototypes are exposed to accelerated aging.
– Deposit waste that’s left after advanced reprocessing in deep boreholes in basalt.
– …
But in reality according to the MIT nuclear response to carbon constraints study, there are far too few qualified people with decades of experience to manage this process and few faculty to prime the pipeline who aren’t in Chinese engineering schools.
Meltdowns aren’t really a problem if the plant is built underground to begin with. It might be expensive, sure, but the point is that nuclear could certainly be done if the will to do it existed
Huh? Maybe you need to get out of Tokyo sometime. The 3/11 disaster didn’t blow the radiation out to sea. The hydrogen explosions blew off the top of several reactors, raining radioactive debris over a vast area in Fukushima prefecture. What do you think those mountains of black bags full of radioactive soil all over Japan are about? Many farms were wiped out. Fishing areas closed. Towns like Futaba were evacuated for years and will probably never recover.
This article fails to take into account the impact of a nuclear accident like Fukushima. Sure, nuclear sounds great when you can externalize all the insane costs of cleanup after a meltdown and your buddies in government will cover your ass and make sure your company is never held accountable for any major f*ckups. Just follow the TEPCO playbook of denying responsibility and it’ll all be groovy.
And we don’t yet know the damage caused to marine creatures and plants. The Japanese Govt. has quietly allowed the pollution of the ocean.
Both Quantum & Acacia are correct. Prevailing winds carried 97% of the radiation out to sea with only 3% contaminating the land. But that 3% devastated Fukushima Perfecture. When I visited Fukushima in 2013, background radiation levels measured from 5 times to, in one instance high in the mountains, 35,000 times the background rate measured in downtown Tokyo. In Namie, about 5 miles from the reactor, the geiger counter readings were approximately 50 times that in Tokyo. Everywhere we went, mountains of bright blue tarps covered radioactive waste. We were told by mothers that the Japanese government refused to cover the approximately $200 cost of tests for thyroid damage, and that they had to pay themselves.
Regarding the article itself, Ms. Lights may not be paid by the nuclear industry, but she regurgitates every one of the industry claims. Even if everything she claims were true, nuclear power can do little or nothing to prevent climate catastrophe. The time simply doesn’t all anything remotely resembling BAU regardless of utopian techno fix fantasies, including nuclear.
“Maintaining BAU by alternative means” – quote from Bill Rees regarding what all sides including enviros want to do. Real sustainability in the sense of not wiping the species out is a small hut, 2 sets of clothing, growing your own food and maybe a donkey or oxen. We won’t accept that, so we won’t go down the degrowth path with antibiotics&internet, but stumble into the darkness.
And an American aircraft carrier got zapped by the blow-off plume, sailed right thru it.
Sailors probably wouldn’t appreciate anodized versions of “Fuku-” …
Preview of coming attractions in their line of work
Hanford and spent fuel rods are apples and oranges. I have never been convinced that geologic storage of spent fuel isn’t a pandora’s box. However, as the article points out, onsite storage of spent fuel in dry casks is nearly bullet-proof for about 100 years.
Fukishima highlights the need to get capitalism out of nuclear power. TEPCO built a deluxe reactor then skimped on backup power generation. The swamping of the backup power generators was the proximate cause of the disaster. Nuclear needs to be publicly financed and publicly operated, with the military kept as far away from it as possible. Unfortunately, in neoliberal America, that would be the biggest obstacle of all.
i will roll out my standard reply to this—when we can actually get clean water and proper working sewerage to every household in this country, and perhaps a high speed rail line or two, then maybe we have the technical chops to handle nuclear. oh, and to cease making weapons with a side bennie of power generation.
and to that latter, you can’t trust our rulers to do the right thing. only the insane but highly beneficial (to them) thing.
we’ve technically devolved and it shows. invest in horse & buggies. the Amish are sitting on another goldmine!
disclaimer—half the folks who came out of my tripartite Environmental Science class in undergrad (so, a bunch of Portland greenies) said “nuclear, it is then, is it?”
The disclaimer made me laugh. Good work.
But the answer to when is never. So, what is the next option?
My feeling of nuclear is it’s great idea in a competent, stable society that prioritizes excellence.
We don’t have that and much of the third world does not either. So building out nuclear is the equal to building out an extensive exponential tail risk infrastructure and then giving it to high school delinquents to manage. When they melt down, and they do, you get lasting crapshoots like Belarus (24% of arable land significantly polluted), and Japan.
Other constant snafus are Hanford and the piling up of spent fuel outside nuclear power plants. I think proponents of Nuclear would be better served cleaning up the existing messes than insisting how the next generation will be x amount safer.
Also, in our future of heightened hostilities nuclear plants are great targets.
I was thinking along the same lines: watch out when a country with a number of reactors becomes a failed state. I’ll take this a bit further:
Consider that institutional functionality and continuity is needed to keep active reactors from melting down. When a plant’s production fails or stops for whatever reason, it needs power to maintain meltdown-avoiding cooling operations. In a jackpot situation, a world full of reactors will ensure that very little of anything will survive. Much better to have civilization collapse without these (alternative energy infrastructure will simply become inert objects).
Also consider that nuclear waste remains toxic for periods longer than any one human speech/writing language has persisted. We develop these things thinking that our civilization will be continuous and permanent, when history shows otherwise.
We have had Fukashima and Chernobyl within a 35 year period. At this rate, how many such events will accrue over 200 years?? And as another post noted, a different wind direction and the toll from Fukashima would have been hundreds of thousands.
Yeah, tail risk is my main concern with nuclear too (and with the lifecycle of nuclear waste, we could be imposing risk on civilizations as far removed from us as we are from ancient Greece or Egypt). It might be all nice and practical on paper provided we have a stable, rational society with competent government for all of that time, but what’s the longest period in human history for which that’s been true? And given everything that’s coming down the track, even a century might be asking a lot at this point.
At least nuclear doesn’t seem to be an existential threat – wildlife is apparently doing quite well around Chernobyl these days, although I still wouldn’t be in a hurry to try the same experiment with humans.
Objective reality has shown nuclear power is never cheap. I am old enough to remember the nuclear industry proclaiming that nuclear energy would be too cheap to meter. History shows this to be a lie. Not a single plant in the western world has been built and put into production at the original quoted cost. Tthe cost overruns are getting worse. The last grand renaissance of the 2000s were either cancelled or are 10x cost overruns and still incomplete.
Safety is clearly compromised by politics and profit. Those are two insurmountable hurdles in the USA.
We have yet, as a society, settle on how we are going to handle the waste for tens of thousands of years.
The science is one thing, the corruption of politics and society by money overwhelms any benefits.
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Yves, I think you are being unfair to Fabian V. Just because he has not included links does not mean his comment is worthless, or that his statements are untrue. Consider PlutoniumKun’s comment immediately below this. PK doesn’t include any links, but it is clear that he knows what he’s talking about. Whereas Zion Lights’ article is full of links – many of them leading to nuclear industry propaganda points such as the claim that Fukushima only had one victim, or the Forbes article which claims that French electricity is cheaper than German electricity (it does this by ignoring the cost of building the nuke plants, maintaining and decommissioning them, and disposing of the waste).
Zion Lights’ mini-bio says she is “a science communicator known for her environmental advocacy work”. But an internet search reveals only advocacy for nuclear power. In that sense she is another faux-enviro nuke shill, like The Guardian’s George Monbiot. She’s also wrong in claiming that shills are paid propagandists. The American Heritage defines a shill as “One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.”
This Reply to Fabian V went into ModLand and never emerged, so I am casting it again:
– Cheap – also you say:
Safety is clearly compromised by politics and profit. Those are two insurmountable hurdles in the USA.
The Down thread comments coming in are supportive of your assertion–as do I.
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/06/south-caroline-green-new-deal-south-carolina-nuclear-energy/
Documents released as the project unraveled show that both SCE&G and Santee Cooper were well aware of shortcomings, mismanagement, and lack of oversight that eventually made the reactors impossible to complete, years before Westinghouse declared bankruptcy and both companies pulled out.
*** “They were allowed to charge the customers for all the money that they spent, plus a return,” Jaczko explained. “Even though they failed to deliver the project.” ***
*** Only 48 percent of South Carolinians know about the failed program, according to an October statewide poll surveying electric ratepayers. ***
Oh, another recent example supporting that ‘compromised’ assertion:
Duke Energy is poised to begin demolition of its shuttered nuclear plant, with a timeline reduced from nearly six decades to seven years because of a drop in costs.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/environment/os-ne-duke-nuclear-plant-demolition-20201007-oa4bvubxanevnof2dzyzyshg2a-story.html
Duke’s 890-megawatt reactor near Crystal River at the Gulf of Mexico has been out of commission since 2009, when a construction accident crippled the containment building. In 2015, facing a *** projected demolition cost of more than $1 billion, *** Duke was prepared to let the plant remain for 60 years before removing it.
maybe Florida could use all those wasted resources–er, rubble–to harden up that Miami Beachfront against High Tide Flooding
But, one man’s waste is another’s treasure, so there is this though:
https://www.quora.com/Are-there-other-materials-used-in-armor-piercing-ammunition-other-than-Tungsten-and-Depleted-Uranium
from which this Link came from:
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Depleted_uranium
The aerosol produced during impact and combustion of depleted uranium munitions can potentially contaminate wide areas around the impact sites or can be inhaled by civilians and military personnel. During a three week period of conflict in 2003 in Iraq, 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of DU munitions were used, mostly in cities.
Now, for Radical Conservation (a greased pig I commented on the other day)—
I stay in the Metrolina Area of the second largest banking hub in the USA–which gets much Energy from the 3 Nuclear Plants located in that Metrolina
and
is lit up like a Roman Candle well into the wee hours, every day and night just for because—Radical Conservation appears to be a mysterious thing.
When I picked apples to support my University aspirations, I always started with that low hanging fruit…
The use of DU is elective. Shame on the US military but what does this have to do with cheap power? The US military also uses other hugely toxic weapons like Agent Orange and naplam and exposes its troops and unfortunate civilians to harm.
In fact, sadly the reason we have the sort of reactors we do is TPTB wanted the leftover nasties to make bombs.
I can recall James Ho Kunstler some several years ago speak of NASCAR tailgate party culture, “swilling of beer & eating of fried cornpone by the potbellied” as the burning of fossil fuels was religionized.
We saw what that culture became.
Now Kunstler reads like Koch money peering .. from within >> -out.
“K” tells us certain forces pay better, much better.
He alluded, at one time, his daughter may have ‘pre-woke’ at one time, and has formed his present somehow, we’re to believe.
Idk, i’ll try not to grow enthused the next time the Russians threaten to turn North America into “nuclear ash” (neoliberal) because … Kaliningrad.
/sarc
Fabian V made strong form, sweeping assertions which per below, as I anticipated, he is not able to substantiate as as formulated.
Cost overrunns:
Nuclear Power’s Economic Failure Key quote, “Costs continue to increase and the Vogtle project only survives because of multi-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts. The project is six years behind schedule.”
A new analysis by MIT researchers details many of the underlying issues that have caused cost overruns on new nuclear power plants in the U.S., which have soared ever higher over the last five decades.
Issues with waste See the Union of Concerned Scientsts
To my point “The science is one thing, the corruption of politics and society by money overwhelms any benefits.” see the taxpayer bailouts mentioned above.
You made an absolute claim and you can provide only isolated examples. In the US, it’s a given that all infrastructure projects run way over budget. Just look at airport expansions. Infrastructure projects are hopelessly broken in the US. There’s an extensive literature on that.
So overruns in the US prove squat about nuclear in particular. Pretty much nothing gets done remotely on time or on budget here, even comparatively simple projects like toll roads.
You need to prove they overrun in countries that are competent at managing infrastructure projects, that this problem is unique to nuclear and does not show up in other major infrastructure projects. For instance, France is noted for having an efficient contracting and construction process.
— Cheap — also you say:
Safety is clearly compromised by politics and profit. Those are two insurmountable hurdles in the USA.
The Down thread comments coming in are supportive of your assertion–as do I.
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/06/south-caroline-green-new-deal-south-carolina-nuclear-energy/
Documents released as the project unraveled show that both SCE&G and Santee Cooper were well aware of shortcomings, mismanagement, and lack of oversight that eventually made the reactors impossible to complete, years before Westinghouse declared bankruptcy and both companies pulled out.
*** “They were allowed to charge the customers for all the money that they spent, plus a return,” Jaczko explained. “Even though they failed to deliver the project.” ***
*** Only 48 percent of South Carolinians know about the failed program, according to an October statewide poll surveying electric ratepayers. ***
Oh, another recent example supporting that ‘compromised’ assertion:
Duke Energy is poised to begin demolition of its shuttered nuclear plant, with a timeline reduced from nearly six decades to seven years because of a drop in costs.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/environment/os-ne-duke-nuclear-plant-demolition-20201007-oa4bvubxanevnof2dzyzyshg2a-story.html
Duke’s 890-megawatt reactor near Crystal River at the Gulf of Mexico has been out of commission since 2009, when a construction accident crippled the containment building. In 2015, facing a *** projected demolition cost of more than $1 billion, *** Duke was prepared to let the plant remain for 60 years before removing it.
maybe Florida could use all those wasted resources–er, rubble–to harden up that Miami Beachfront against High Tide Flooding
But, one man’s waste is another’s treasure, so there is this though:
https://www.quora.com/Are-there-other-materials-used-in-armor-piercing-ammunition-other-than-Tungsten-and-Depleted-Uranium
from which this Link came from:
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Depleted_uranium
The aerosol produced during impact and combustion of depleted uranium munitions can potentially contaminate wide areas around the impact sites or can be inhaled by civilians and military personnel. During a three week period of conflict in 2003 in Iraq, 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of DU munitions were used, mostly in cities.
Now, for Radical Conservation (a greased pig I commented on the other day)—
I stay in the Metrolina Area of the second largest banking hub in the USA–which gets much Energy from the 3 Nuclear Plants located in that Metrolina
and
is lit up like a Roman Candle well into the wee hours, every day and night just for because—Radical Conservation appears to be a mysterious thing.
When I picked apples to support my University aspirations, I always started with that low hanging fruit…
This is an enormous topic and hard to cover in a quick post.
I took the opposite direction from the writer. I was a very strong advocate of nuclear power in the 1990’s when I was active in the environmental movement. I nearly lost friends over it. The reason I was an advocate was simple – the then Gen IV designs on the way seemed to be much safer and cheaper than the existing plants and most importantly of all, the figures didn’t add up for renewables. They were far too expensive, and far too unreliable to make sense for anything but very specific grid contexts.
But the situation now is entirely different. The Gen IV nuclear designs are catastrophes. Far too expensive, far too complex, and completely unscalable even when they do make sense in certain limited contexts. And don’t talk to me about modular nukes, they’ve been around for 70 years and are unicorns. Nobody has made them viable economically, they are the self driving cars of the nuclear world, just total unicorns. Countless billions of dollars, pounds, euros, yen and roubles have been thrown into their development and they’ve never made sense, apart from nuclear subs and aircraft carriers. If no military can make them work for regular naval vessels (and they’ve tried, many, many times), then they are not going to make sense for economically viable power, outside of (again), limited circumstances, such as small isolated grids.
The latest shiny thing for the nuclear industry is scale – if only everyone would order dozens of them, they can bring down the cost, like the F-35 or something like that. The problem is that existing thermal designs are just not suitable for scaling – even the Chinese are not doing it (and yes, they’ve tried). The Chinese have been desperately trying to get someone, anyone, to buy their Hualong One reactor (the Hualong one is yet another attempt to make Gen III light water reactors viable). They’ve found one customer – Argentina – and no doubt they’ve had to bung them a lot of cash to get that contract.
There are of course designs that will be ready as soon as the prototypes are built and made work and so can be rolled out in 10 years. Just as they’ve been for the past 50 years (often the same damn designs, just doing a constant cycle of unicorn spotting).
The reality is that if someone has a truly viable new design, it will still take 20 years to roll them out at the scale needed. Thats simply too late. Thats another generation of gas and coal stations built.
Right now, only large scale wind and solar make sense economically and technically. It is cheap. It is, most importantly, scaleable. And most importantly of all, it has a very short cycle from planning to power output. We are nowhere even close to building them out to the point where intermittency is a problem on most grids. Lets get to that point, and solve that problem when we reach it. Maybe nuclear will make sense by then. But anyone who thinks it will…. well, I’ve got some crypto I’d like to sell you. But we will almost certainly have viable large scale power storage before we have viable large scale nuclear, the trends are far clearer in terms of costings.
And yes radical conservation is needed. The problem is that to radically reduce energy use we must, paradoxically, increase electricity production. This is essential because with existing technology we can only radically reduce energy use across a wide range of sectors by electrifying them. This is actually beneficial for intermittent power sources as we can use surplus grid energy for other purposes, such as creating hydrogen for cement or steel manufacture.
I agree with you on the roll out numbers. I disagree that renewables are going to provide a reliable substitute, even supplemented with LNG, the case being Germany. However, if societies do not make the R&D investments, regulatory changes to allow novel reactors, and make capital available, you are never going to get to commercially available cheaper, safer, lower waste designs in 20 years, its going to be 50 years of fossil fuels by default. Further, while everyone pro-nuclear is accused of being an “industry shill”, it is hard to believe that Big Oil is not doing what they can to hamstring investment in nuclear energy.
When you say ‘renewables are not going to provide a reliable substitute’ you need to be clear on what they are substituting. On current technology, renewables can provide 40% plus energy in most grids, and this can be increased substantially with better grid integration. When there is plenty of hydro, it can achieve pretty near 100%, as in Norway. The requirements for power inputs to a grid require a lot of considerations – capital costs, fuel costs, lifecycle costs, grid capacity, resilience, reliability, etc., etc. These vary widely according to the nature of the grid. Generalised statements about any input is usually an indicator of a poor understanding of the energy planning process.
Nuclear is also not a competitor to oil – gas an oil only provide baseline electric power at times of very low prices. Its a competitor to coal and hydro. Nuclear only provides baseline power economically, it is pretty much useless for anything else. Hence it has to be matched up with natural gas – the gas is required for daily and seasonal peaks, just as with renewables gas is required for matching with intermittent output. If you increase nuclear capacity beyond your baseline, you need huge amounts of energy storage. Somehow, energy storage is only described as an obstacle with renewables, but its just as important with nuclear if your strategy is nuclear only.
Nuclear also, incidentally, requires very large grids with a high level of integration as when a nuke plant goes down (when, for example, attacked by jellyfish), you need instant pick up supply somewhere else.
Planning electric grids is like cooking. You need a very careful balance of inputs, and more of the good stuff is not necessarily a good thing if you want an edible dish. Ideally, grids go for a very wide variety of inputs (which seems to be the Chinese approach). The more you focus on one input, whether it is renewables, nuclear, coal, or hydro, the more trouble you get into. What the anti-renewable brigade neglect to mention is that renewable penetration to most markets is so low we are a very long way of hitting its natural constraints.
Where I live in the U.S. northeast bulk dispatchable solar is in the 3% range. Roof top solar seems to be doing better. It’s treated as a drop in mid afternoon demand by the grid operator. But it also means heavy dependence of natural gas standby for quick backup when clouds take over. When the roof tops and old landfills are fully exploited that’ll be the end of solar. We do have wind generators that can produce a peak of about 1000MW peak the same as the nuclear plant north of me which produces continuously on 25 acres (base load is approx 14000MW in our grid) . Of the 1000MW wind we get 30MW from offshore, the rest is onshore mainly in the mountains to the North. No one wants wind in their backyard. They also don’t want it offshore, land owners on the coast, fishermen and tourist industry. We have one wind turbine in our city in an industrial park. When it started up you would think it was the end of the world from the complaints about noise and flicker. A second wind turbine proposal for a more remote area of the city was killed by environmentalists in the city council with little debate. I point this out because I live in probably the most progressive region of the U.S, solidly democrat, in a sanctuary city.
In 2000, France managed its grid with 75% nuclear plus 13% hydro plus 3% only of oil and gas to manage the consumption peaks. Intermittent Renewables require an order of magnitude more energy storage. You can’t compare the two.
Also, it is a myth that nuclear power plants can’t load follow. Most modern plants technically can. They just don’t because penetration of nuclear is so low (even in France because France is integrated in the European Grid).
Furthermore, the “economically” qualifier is a thorny concept. If electricity was really a free market, like, say, fruits and vegetables, not a single wind or solar installation would be profitable because “tunable” power sources, including nuclear, would set the market price at a very low level when the sun shines and the wind blow, and make up for their loss with a high price when they don’t. There is a huge subsidy from “tunable” to “intermittent” power source embedded in a market structure that forces the former to provide flexibility to the latter at zero cost.
France is not a standalone grid it is heavily interconnected with its neighbours. It is a net exporter (this is why they can manage such a high nuclear component), but manages load capacity through interconnections with its neighbours. This is particularly important to the French as they struggle in hot summers as the nuke plants go down due to lack of water coolant. They are heavily dependent on imports from Spain (gas and renewables) at those times.
And yes, nuclear can ‘technically’ follow load. But a car engine can ‘technically’ drive you around without changing out of second gear. That doesn’t mean its sensible or efficient.
Your third paragraph is demonstrably untrue. Don’t assume the stupidities of the US grid design and pricing apply elsewhere.
This is the best thread of the comments today.
One thing to add, when cooling water is unavailable, nuclear shuts down. This happened during a drought in France (August 2020) and when river temps rose beyond the max allowable limit (August 2018). It also happened on the Connecticut shore when Long Island sound got too warm (August 2012).
As the climate inexorably warms, there will be more warming of water sources. This is a big factor against the nuclear power industry.
Secondly, most nuclear uses river water for cooling (I know that there are also salt water cooled plants). These plants use A LOT of fresh water. Nuclear would seem unsuited for places where the fresh water is over used currently, like the SW USA.
These 2 factors mean that nuclear has very serious limitations that must be carefully assessed before deciding that our future can be assured by a massive investment in nuclear power.
As with most high tech solutions, the Chinese are actually trying quite hard to see if they can make nuclear power work. We will know the answer in a few years. Of course, the Chinese water supply is already highly stressed, so I wonder if they have included that in their thinking.
Yes, the achilles heel of PWR nuclear is water supply. They need vast amounts of cool water. As you say, inland plants are vulnerable to drought, and coastal sites are vulnerable to, as I linked above, random events such as jellyfish invasion.
The problem with this is that the type of problem that can affect one plant, can affect dozens of them. This is why the claimed 95% capacity is so misleading. There is no point having plants that are outputting at 100%, 95% of the time, when they all go down at the same time during the 5% when they are not outputting. This is why countries with high proportions of nuclear power like France need a massive amount of interconnection or spare capacity. Sound familiar? The problem they have is the exact same as ‘intermittent’ renewables. They need large interconnected grids and lots of spare storage and dormant capacity.
Anyone who claims that the need for storage and surplus capacity is unique to renewables and does not apply to nuclear simply has no idea how grids work.
Thanks for the well informed comment. I think there’s an argument that those of us who grew up in the atomic age have an irrational fear of all things nuclear, but also that the nuclear boosters back in the sixties and seventies had an irrational enthusiasm that glossed over the many problems. Back then AGW wasn’t much thought about and now that it is new ideas about nuclear deserve another look. But getting an objective look at the practical realities may be difficult with the current set of world politicians and therefore irrational fear may still be the way to go. Any push toward nuclear may just as likely be a grift aimed at spending lots and lots of public money.
My own view is that the risks of nuclear energy are absolutely negligible compared to the nightmare of climate change. But the risk profile of nuclear is very different from, for example, coal. The chance of a major nuclear disaster (and so far, we haven’t seen anywhere near the theoretic worst case scenario) is low, but the potential impacts are enormous for anyone within a few hundred miles. As always, people need to read, and understand, their risk assessment theory very carefully.
Yes, the risk of coal is zero: there is no risk at all that coal will fail to cause at least 2 million premature deaths each and every year, rain or shine, regardless of which way the wind blows. See the link provided by the author in the article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
As that link shows, the average deaths/terawatt of nuclear is about 1/800 that of coal (so far). What about the future? A nuclear accident every single year that killed 500,000 people would reduce that safety margin of nucear over coal to around 1/200. Nukes would also still be about 20% safer than oil as well, even in what I think we’d all agree is a pretty worst-case scenario…
I don’t disagree that nuclear has some substantive drawbacks–but so do others. CO2 and deaths are not among those of nuclear, compared to coal or oil, and CO2 and deaths might be considered to be the most important issues–deaths always, and CO2 for the next century. And coal is precisely what nuclear replaces–some oil too, if nukes make electricity for e-cars. At any rate, the data on massive deaths from fossil fuels, readily available in links like the one above, should be included front and center in every discussion of nuclear safety. Oddly, they almost never are…
This is a good comment, I learned some new things from all the details.
I guess I’d put myself in a middle camp of being pro-research reactors and maybe the occasional plant, if the government is really serious about doing it right. France seems to have been pretty successful with their nuclear industry, but maybe the French are just really good at those sort of projects?
To your point of scaling though, that’s what I’ve always heard is the real limit on nuclear power: simple investment risk and break-even time. Why plow billions of dollars into 1 decades-long investment (with some nightmarish failure modes) based on a forecast of demand 30 years out, when you can just marginally plop down X acres of solar panels and Y wind turbines when and where you need them?
I agree that we need to urgently research nuclear and build pilot plants for all the most promising technologies. In the long term (which with the climate coming apart is essentially after 2050) I think we will probably need nuclear. But right now, it is a distraction. Wind and solar are, in comparison, proven and dirt cheap. We need to scale them up very rapidly.
The fundamental problem with Gen III and Gen IV nuclear plants is that they are water thermal plants, and these only work at a very large scale. A typical nuclear or coal plant is 3-4 times bigger than a typical gas CCGT plant for a very simple reason – it needs sheer size to drive down per watt-hour costs. However, its this very large scale of engineering that guarantees production bottlenecks (only a very limited number of suppliers for the key foundry components), and there is a limit to just how much you can mass produce them. The new Rolls Royce design of so called ‘modular’ (in reality, a scaled down conventional reactor) attempts to solve this by scaling things down to ensure that some mass production can take place. But these plants will be inefficient due to their relatively small size, and its not clear that mass production will overcome this problem.
Some saving are possible obviously the French were successful in the 1970’s at mass producing a standardised design. But the truth was this was only achieved with massive hidden subsidies. Nobody else did it, because it cost too much, its that simple. The South Koreans and the Chinese have had some success, but even they’ve hit limits as to how much they can push down the costs.
As you say, the big advantage wind and solar has is a very rapid pay back for investors. A bank can sign off a loan to a wind farm operator and it can be built and generating cash in 6 months. Even faster for a solar farm. Nothing else can match this. And with off-shore wind, there are enormous benefits to scale. The bigger you go, the cheaper it gets. There is a limit of course, but we haven’t hit it yet (some have claimed we have, but I think the recent cost increases are related almost entirely to covid supply chain issues).
I’m not an expert on nuclear but the Gen IV plants with which I’m familiar are not thermal water (I assume you mean light water reactors (LWR). The most promising Gen IV are molten salt reactors (MSR). These reactors burn almost 100% of the fuel compared to < 3% for waste generating LWRs, hence little long lasting radioactive waste. They do not require emergency core cooling systems. Many of the proposed designs would use passive cooling. They are also capable of burning Thorium as well as the radioactive waste from existing nuclear plants and weapons. See here https://aris.iaea.org/
They also don’t work.
they’ve been around for decades. Literally every month since the 1980’s I’ve been reading articles in the literature on how the problems around molten salt reactors have been cracked and they are the solution to all our problems. All we need is a few million dollars to build the the prototype that will demonstrate how cheap and safe they are. I’m still waiting for one to produce energy to match the cost of diesel generators, let alone more efficient alternatives..
And Gen IV reactors covers a range of types that were supposed to replace the Gen III reactors of the 1960’s and 70’s. They include upgraded LWR’s such as the EPR, as well as a variety of other designs. They’ve all flopped, every one, which is why the latest generation of reactors are, like the Hualong One, just relabelled Gen III’s.
An anthropological observation: there are a fair share of people with high “purity” biases attracted to green politics out of fear and suspicion of nefarious corporations perversely corrupting the most fundamental building blocks of life. Some oppose vaccinations in general, they don’t like food additives, they are against GMOs, they eat organic food, they wear only non-synthetic clothing, purity, purity, purity. This is not to say there may not be cogent justifications for these positions, but there is an underlying theme.
There is beauty in the idea of using solar and wind energy to fuel societies over smelly, dirty fossil fuels. In contrast, nuclear radiation causes genetic damage, and destroys the human essence at its most fundamental level, and the idea of using nuclear power to fuel societies based on a fuel source that threatens the human essence is not going to work with the purity front.
This is not to say that there is no cogent arguments against nuclear power, but that there is a certain psychological type that becomes attracted to Green politics, and its very hard to get someone dressed in Merino wool who only eats organic non-GMO vegan food to embrace nuclear power.
On a side note, one of the commenters correctly points out that civilian nuclear power has always been downstream of nuclear weapons programs. However, it is reasonable to believe that nations pursue nuclear weapons because they represent the ultimate defensive weapons and nations pursue them because they seek security. Whether civilian nuclear power is used to address energy demand or not, those security concerns will remain, and nations will seek nuclear weapons. (You do not hear a lot about regime change in North Korea since they began missile testing.) This is not intended to dismiss nuclear proliferation fears, because they are real, but addressing climate change is primarily an engineering problem, in the sense that you need to pursue the least imperfect technology to address the problem, rather than wait for the perfect solution to fall from the sky.
This is why China, which is basically run by engineers, is pursuing nuclear energy, and why Western countries, which are basically run by the marketing department, are pursuing renewables.
China is not pursuing nuclear energy over renewables, in fact the opposite is true. It provides much less than 5% of overall annual energy production. In fact, wind and solar provide significantly more Chinese output than nuclear. They’ve had incremental attempts at nuclear power over the years. The overwhelming focus in Chinese investment has been in coal and hydro, and these are still the focus of the 5 year plans. They have built plants mostly on an incremental basis to try them out. They seem to have focused on the Hualong One design, which is basically an update of the French PWR’s. But even their planned construction for this design is tiny in terms of the scale of Chinese energy investment.
The current 5 years plan, approved in March 2021, has this to say about nuclear power:
“We will construct the Hualong No. 1, Guohe No. 1, and high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) demonstration projects and actively and orderly promote the construction of three generations of nuclear power along the coast. We will promote advanced reactor demonstrations such as modular small-scale reactors, 600,000-kilowatt commercial HTGRs, and offshore floating nuclear power platforms, construct low- and medium-level radioactive waste disposal sites for nuclear power plants, build spent fuel reprocessing plants, and carry out demonstrations on the comprehensive utilization of nuclear energy such as at Haiyang in Shandong. The installed operating capacity of nuclear power will reach 70 million kilowatts.”
Presently, China’s operating nuclear power capacity is about 19 million kilowatts.
That’s a giant leap! Maybe by Chinese standards it’s incremental, but it doesn’t sound incremental to me. Who knows if they’ll achieve it, but their ambitions are big. They seem to be gung-ho about nuclear energy–the 14th Five Year Plan mandates improved safety as well:
” We will implement strict nuclear and radiation safety regulations and promote the prevention and control of radioactive pollution. We will establish a post-incident assessment mechanism for environmental sudden incidents and a public health impact assessment system. We will implement compulsory liability insurance for environmental pollution in high-risk areas.”
Thats typical 5 year Plan Chinese motherhood and apple pie stuff. You need to look at what they are actually putting money into – and that as the Hualong One (a pretty old design), and even that at a fairly low rate by Chinese standards. Everything else is a demonstration project and ultimately meaningless in the short to medium term. The Chinese method with new tech is to have one 5 year cycle of throwing everything at the problem, then look at the results for a few years, and then, and only then, pick a solution that works and put massive resources behind it. They are not doing this yet with nuclear, which means they are not convinced they have found the solution yet.
If you think China’s nuclear program is impressive, check out their offshore. They built nearly 17 GW of capacity (close to the entire nuclear capacity) in 2021 alone. It added over 100GW of capacity of renewables – again, in 2021 alone. That is staggering by any standards, and dwarfs anything in their nuclear program.
At least for now, the Chinese engineers are adding a lot more renewable than nuclear. Wikipedia has numbers up to 2020, when they added a 100 TWh of solar+wind, against 20 for nuclear. That trend is not going to change soon. All their reactors currently under construction add up to not much more that 100 TWh/y, while PV and wind are still accelerating.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
China does lots of things that seem more gee whizz engineering than sensible necessities. There are those pre built cities with no people and PBS had a show about the over the top engineering used to turn an old quarry into an indoor winter temperatures ski run.
Someone who only eats vegan food would never wear merino wool because ” animal slavery”.
Waste: ” This is a standard waste management approach, and the casks were intended to be stored on site for decades, to be reprocessed at a later date.”
Too funny.
Slogging through “The Prize”, by Daniel Yergen, and am in the crux final chapters of the 1991 tome on the history of Oil. The Carter era crisis…synfuels, nukes, you name it as we thrashed and lashed out in panic. The cooler heads suggesting conservation as being the full-life-cycle least costly easiest to achive, were derided and set aside by the hucksters and promoters of Synfuels, shale-oil, and nuke-power plants and bombs as tech. There was a plan to detonate a nuke in the bowels of the Book Cliffs and beyond in western Crowdorado.
Here we are, 42 years post-Carter Iran Hostage Iraq-Iran conflagration, right where we were, with 2x as many people on the face of the earth.
Thank goodness we are all getting along splendidly and pulling together on the collective harness of Spaceship Earth to our bright future!
Tribalism and conflict would indicate conservation and distributed, decentralized localized energy is the prudent direction. Certainly the utilities and powers that be will embrace this direction wholeheartedly!
The poop tint of my eyeglasses? They Call it Cynic. It’s in the ‘follow the money’ color group.
What is missing from the pro nuclear lobby is any question of cost. Nuclear fuel already receives more than 10 times the funiding of green energies and dating back to the 1950s, it received over 10000 times as much, plus the defence subsidy
Yes France is ‘recycling’ some of its waste (the only country to manage it) but it is a very small ammount, the rest of the non recyclable waste is kicked overseas and forgotten. Burrying the waste has proven difficult because of the depth and the reliability of the method.
So all the arguments here are flawed and incomplete, nuclear is not the way forward, if we invested as much in other types as in nuclear, the waste of nuclear would be obvious to all
There is no secret to reprocessing uranium fuel rods. It is not done only in France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
America doesn’t do reprocessing for civilian uses due to the Carter administration (probably in cahoots with uranium miners).
The section “economics” in your link explains why America does not do reprocessing now.
Kind of like coal, nuclear is cheap if you do not have to deal with the waste.
Cost is nothing more than material capability and political will.
I sympathize with the author but still can’t support nuclear. Overarching recent themes on NC include end stage capitalism, crapification, regulatory capture and decline and fall of the American empire. A lot of things need to go right for nuclear power to be safe, similar to what it take to keep a Boeing plane in the air. Those things need to go right, and keep going right for decades. If things go wrong, results can be massively catastrophic. Nuclear safety is a bet I’m not willing to make. At the same time, my real fundamental issue is the waste. I assume reprocessing the fuel doesn’t render it inert, and until we have a way to render the spent fuel inert, I will not be on board. If we think burying the waste in a mountain is a solution, then we don’t have a solution.
I have some personal history on the topic ;-) I was a junior nuclear safety analyst, in europe, for some years during the “nuclear renaissance” when nuclear power seemed to be growing again. I left the field after Fukushima, because it looked like the Renaissance would be over. I never regretted that decision, even though I still support nuclear power in general.
My personal reasoning is this:
– nuclear power requires solid public support to succeed, over a long time. Many election cycles. If not, it gets bogged down in endless delaying procedures, and you might just as well stop at the start
– people are very, very concerned about radiation, both from potential accidents, and from nuclear waste. In my personal view, people strongly overestimate of radiation compared to how they treat other health risks, it’s not view that matters, but the view of that wide public that has to support nuclear power . I can provide plenty of arguments for that view, but similar arguments have not swayed public opinion in the past either. As result, nuclear power just has to accept that people demand extremely high standards when it comes to radiation.
– Those high standards might be possible to achieve, but they are nearly impossible to guarantee. Even if you build extremely safe plants and foster a good safety culture, how can you really prove this? To yourself, to others? The standard is effectively zero accidents, worldwide. People thought that Japan had a good nuclear safety culture, until it didn’t. One accident therefore casts doubt on every other place, even places where everything is actually fine (but you’d have to observe for centuries before know that for sure).
– the nuclear industry in the west has hoped to escape from this conundrum by adding more and more safety systems to new designs, and by having fairly strict , somewhat adversial regulators (compared to the days of large-scale construction). This has not shifted public opinion much, while it has turned power plant construction in a project management disaster. The history of the Flamanville project is illuminating. I invite everyone to read this example: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Regulator-OKs-fix-to-Flamanville-EPR-nozzle-welds One design detail on one pipe completely derailed the project, costing billions. Other projects got stuck on similar cases, because there are just so many things that can go wrong.
Typo that I cannot fix: it’s not MY view that matters, but the view of that wider public that has to support nuclear power .
I just read Yves’ excellent article on “late stage capitalist failure: operational breakage,” and I find the juxtaposition of that with this pretty odd.
I used to be pro-nuclear power. I am now against it. My current belief is that humans just aren’t good enough to make it work. I find this very sad.
The problem isn’t the engineering. Nor is it not knowing what to do with the waste. Although, in practice, solutions to the waste problem have never been successfully implemented.
The problems are everything else. The greed of the capitalist class. The ossification of bureaucracies. The apathy and ignorance of the workers. Infrastructure which requires human competence and engagement longer than any human civilization has lasted when our current one displays many signs it is coming to an end.
It is enormously tragic, but the Simpsons represents the problems of the nuclear industry too well.
As you may know, the Simpsons creator is Matt Groening, who hails from Portland, Oregon. If my previous moderated comment has come through, you will fully understand his attitude regarding nuclear.
The problems with nukes all remain. Their renaissance is being brought about by the our inability to discuss the environmental challenges we face, first and foremost the complete lack of discussion on the hyper-consumptive economy capitalism demands. All sorts of reasons for this.
There’s no doubt in attempts to saving present “developed” world lifestyles, many nukes will be built, it will be popularly demanded. They will do nothing to arrest all the rest of the environmental problems that may just bite quicker and harder than climate.
Late stage capitalism implies: end stage, end stage implies: the end, IMOH. The end of capitalism implies the likelihood that there will be no incentive to clean up and mothball the plants. So what then, they just go boom? Circling back around, IMO, nukes are only useful in perpetuating our capitalist system, which with the end of capitalism seems to rule out the need for nukes, as this whole exercise may just be designed to perpetuate capitalism as long as possible. Who will save the salmon and other living things on this our only earth. Thought provoking post. thanks.
But does it make sense to generate steam at 1000C , at 30% efficiency, to produce electricity to run LED lights and charge iPhones? Thermodynamically, all thermal power generation seems crazy. Like those molten sodium solar plants that cook birds while they generate electricity at a lousy efficiency, they’re not helping global warming any.
Also, is there enough uranium to power a global switch to nuclear?
That being said, I’ve always liked the CANDU reactor design. It’s safe, pretty much immune to meltdown (if you lose the heavy water coolant, the reactor stops because the coolant is also the moderator), and it seems to purr along well after its projected lifespan. The nuclear waste is always a crisis, yet seems to fit in several large swimming pools on site while we argue about long term storage.
Another Canadian invention, the SLOWPOKE reactor can be built in sizes that will heat office complexes and shopping malls (if they ever come back into existence) or for district heating, or for producing medical isotopes.
Our trouble has been politics. In Ontario, conservative governments sold off the power plants but retained the debt involved in financing their construction, thereby screwing the consumer.
Meanwhile the Harper Conservative federal government gave away our nuclear power research facility to an engineering company known mostly for its corruption.
AECL,the power research company, left Harper with few good choices after blowing 1 billion on the failed Maple reactors/isotope facility, millions more on the advanced Candu design that went nowhere and failure during the retubing of Point Lepreau.
Unfortunately he picked a poor choice.
The political appointees ran the company into the ground and the American grifters using SNC Lavalin as the front moved in.
The CANDU Reactors in Ontario are run by Ontario Power Generation (an Ontario Crown Corporation) except for Bruce A and Bruce B. These are located on at the Bruce Nuclear Power Development near Kincardine Ontario. The Ontario Government leased the Bruce Site to Bruce Power in 2001. There are 8 reactors (4 units in Bruce A and 4 units in Bruce B).
Bruce Power is a private Canadian company partnership.
Bruce Power is now refurbishing and re-tubing the reactor units over a program lasting into the next decade. This was started under Ontario’s Long Term Energy Program which will extend station life to at least 2064.
Darlington, 4 Unit CANDU station near Toronto, is also undergoing a similar refurbishment under Ontario Power Generation.
CANDU reactors are (PHWR) Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors which use natural (non-enriched) uranium fuel with heavy water (deuterium oxide) coolant and moderator. They are also the only commercial power reactors capable of on-line re-fuelling at full power. Small point: the coolant and moderator are systems are separate from each other. They have good safety records and good capacity factors. The CANDU design dates back to the 1960s so the technology is well known.
So I would think that the Government of Ontario has decided that nuclear power is a viable choice for now. Also the government decided to shutdown their coal fired plants a number of years ago. The Bruce site provides about 30% of Ontario’s power needs as well.
With nuclear, it’s the long-tail that gets you in the end. So you gotta decide if an extremely unlikely, but nonetheless catastrophic possible outcome is acceptable. Those are some dice I don’t particularly care to roll.
I really don’t know if we can properly judge different sources of power without considering their costs and I mean all of them. So with nuclear energy. Can it survive without any government subsidies at all? Can commercial corporations afford to pick up their insurance without the government picking up the bulk if not all of it? How much does tens of thousands of years of storage cost? Show me the real figures without all the subsidies and we can get somewhere.
The article says ‘Hydropower is clean, but disrupts ecosystems and can be extremely dangerous: the worst ever energy-generation disaster was the Banqiao dam collapse in China in 1975, which killed between 171,000 and 230,000 people.’ That may be true but almost immediately after, people could start the long job of rebuilding. They did not have to abandon that region for the next coupla thousands of years. And I am not just picking on nuclear power here. I want to know the real costs for all these sources of power and their associated costs like toxic pollution or whatever. And that means wind power, solar power or any other source.
That is a very good idea. When expenses are left out of the analysis it’s worse than pointless; it’s a future disaster. I’m open to fusion if it can be contained, but in my ignorance I’m skeptical because there’s always something wrong with the business plan. Externalizing costs in a world of haphazard growth, mostly to nowhere, isn’t as disastrous as willful ignorance about the dangers of radiation on a broad scale. But that’s always been our plan – never mind the pollution and don’t bother making a viable industry out of recycling and decontamination – just go for the profits. When, in fact, if we started seriously to make an industry of clean-up technology we would be farther ahead in less time.
Fukushima is mentioned only in passing, and as some kind of good example? Really? Am I imagining that radioactive water from Fukushima was, after a long delay, released into the ocean? Am I incorrect in thinking there is no such thing as a “safe” amount of radioactivity…to be, let’s say, released into the ocean? Please do correct and enlighten me here.
Ms. Lights also glossed over the large exclusionary zones that are required when nuclear plants melt down (as some invariably will). Let’s not forget the nuclear wasteland (Hanford Nuclear Reservation) in eastern Washington; the result of the US nuclear weapons program. Five thousand square miles of land is uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. And let’s not forget the decades long efforts to find a safe repository for nuclear waste.
Ex Navy nuclear submariner here. I believe nuclear power can be safely and economically utilized for our energy needs, IF, the regulatory and operating entities were to have a major shift in their procedures and practices. The US Navy has never had a nuclear accident to my knowledge, and in fact has operated over 5400 reactor years accident free. There has never been an over exposure of radiation to US Navy personnel on nuclear ships. Why? I would attribute that to rigid and intense oversight, procedures, and training. The Navy reactor operating manuals for the small S5W reactor on a sub would literally cover a large dining room table over a foot deep in paper. And woe betide any nuclear officer who violated even the most minor procedure laid out in those manuals. But the US Navy does not operate based on the profit seeking and the CYA environment so prevalent in US businesses today. If you want a prime example of why NOT to build a nuclear plant, read up on the V.C. Summer nuclear plant $9 billion fiasco in South Carolina. or Nukegate as some now call it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal. A more mish mash collection of incompetents, schemers, and fraudsters would be hard to find. I think nuclear power can be safely used. But it would require a whole new way of thinking and an overhaul of our society from being the self-centered, individualistic, every man for himself way it operates now, to a society where everyone is important and the common good reigns.
And, pray tell, what prevented such a “gathering of terrorists” from forming? Wasn’t foot-high tables of safety manuals, right?, or James Conca “assuming” personas, right again?
Therefore, setting the military’s secrecy aside, can such sociopathic swindlers be trusted? Ummm, No.
“The Ambushed Grand Jury” , on Rocky Flats, tells of indifference.
“Operators”, all of them. “Playuhs”.
Keep’em!!
I’ll try not to grow “enthused” next time “Rocky Flats” .. “downwinds” me.
The Price-Anderspon Act of 1957 partially compensates nuclear power corporations against liability claims.
Does this skew cost calculations?
Thanks!
There are a few common basic comments about why we can’t do nuclear,
It will make bombs, its too slow to build, its too expensive, radiation, not enough fuel and we can do it with renewables. Let me address those.
It will make bombs: No it won’t. Nuclear reactors have a U235 3%, 238 97%. To make a bomb you need 90% U235 of which a reactor doesn’t make, the U235 goes down with use. Here is a video explaining that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1QmB5bW_WQ&t=1031s
go to time about 17 minutes
Too slow to build. Building unique one of designs are always slower and more expensive. Every reactor in the USA is unique, no two are the same. Building the same design allows for common parts, building forms, engineering, and a faster build on #’s 2,3 etc. If you ever built the same thing more than once you know how quickly the next ones go. But permitting and engineering is probably the longest time to build. Even a wind project that might take 2 years to build took 4-5 years to permit.
Its too expensive. Compared to what? climate change? There are many ways to compare costs. If you are using LCOE ( leveled cost of energy) then yes nuclear is about 2 times as expensive as renewables. Thats about $.029 for solar, $.04 for nuclear.
What about land area to provide the same energy? Nuclear power plant is about 1-2 sq miles maybe? For the same amount of daily energy production ( lets use diablo canyon in CA, which is a 2.2GW ( billion watt)). Solar takes about 10 acres per MW or about 187 sq miles of land. https://www.seia.org/initiatives/siting-permitting-land-use-utility-scale-solar 2.2GW x 24 hours a day = 52.8 GWH/day. To make that with solar takes on daily average 5.5 times as much or 12 GW. At $1 per watt that is $12 billion dollars. And as I have discussed before, then you have to add battery storage ( lithium, metals mining etc) which would be for the 18 hours of the day the sun isn’t shinning about $300 per kWh or $13 billion dollars and if you wanted say 3 days of energy because of no sun, then that’s about $40 billion for batteries, plus the $12 billion or at least $52 billon dollars, vs about $12 billion for the nuclear plant.
Not enough fuel. Some of the Gen IV designs burn old fuel, there by reducing 30,000 year waste to about 300 years. Again view videos of the energy prof as he talks about this, using physics and science.
Radiation: See that same video listed above.
And finally we can do it with renewables: As I point out above, just a single 2.2GW power plant ( could be coal, gas or nuclear) would take on average close to 200 sq miles of land, and actually cost more. When you factor in winter, you know short days, multi day, week storms, areas of the country that are cloudy in winter, the amount of solar and battery storage becomes impossibly expensive. Why do I know this?
I design for the last 25 years off grid solar powered homes. In cloudy areas especially in the farther north, the days are shorter, winter longer and so you get way less sun. Which means you need a lot more solar panels to provide the same amount of energy than say southern california, or texas, etc. Often its 3 times as much, so that 12GW goes to 36GW? In an off grid home you deal with it by having a hybrid system which includes back up power source, a fossil fuel powered generator.
But you say, we’ll put the panels in the sunny south and then run power lines all over. Yes that can work, but there is a huge amount of push back on people who’s land those power lines would run through. I don’t see it happening.
So its a simple choice. Yes we can and should reduce our consumption first, but much of the world is already at super low per capita energy levels, meaning there isn’t much lower they can go. Right now the amount of renewables powering the world is in the single digits, and at a pace that isn’t fast enough to address climate change let alone active carbon removal as the IPCC has spelled out.
The choice is do we throw everything possible to try and address climate change or not? So far it’s not.
I agree with everything you say, SolarJay. Essentially the common criticisms of nuclear are demonstrably false. And paradoxically, that is the real problem with nuclear – if it had been adopted, and public fear of radiation not stirred so successfully by fossil fuel lobbies, we really could reduce our climate impact yet enjoy plentiful energy. But the 1972 book, Limits to Growth shows this comes at the cost of an even greater catastrophe. As many readers of NC will know, LTG examined the sensitivity of the World3 model to assumptions about resource availability, pollution controls, agricultural productivity, etc.
“But let us be even more optimistic and assume that new discoveries or advances in technology can double the amount of resources economically available. …The overall behavior mode ….-growth and collapse-is very similar to that in the standard run. In this case the primary force that stops growth is a sudden increase in the level of pollution, caused by an overloading of the natural absorptive capacity of the environment. The death rate rises abruptly from pollution and from lack of food. At the same time resources are severely depleted, in spite of the doubled amount available, simply because a few more years of exponential growth in industry are sufficient to consume those extra resources.”
The authors specifically examine unlimited nuclear energy.
“Population reaches about the same peak level as it did in …(the previous model)…, but it falls more suddenly and to a lower final value. ‘Unlimited’ resources thus do not appear to be the key to sustaining growth in the world system. Apparently the economic impetus such resource availability provides must be accompanied by curbs on pollution if a collapse of the world system is to be avoided.”
By concentrating on the supposed problems of nuclear power, we are sidetracked from considering the real predicament we are in. So, we have a “super wicked problem”.
(A note about LTG: Ugo Bardi has well defended the work against the criticisms that buried it; and It is worth noting that independent analysts (e.g. Graham Turner, Gaya Herrington) have confirmed or extended the standard model run of World3 empirically.)
See:
Reality Blind
Integrating the Systems Science
Underpinning Our Collective Futures
Vol. 1
NJ Hagens and DJ White
Has in depth discussion about this and other important related topics, e.g.:
SECTION 4 – ENERGY AND ECONOMY
Energy Part 9 – Energy Properties and Renewables
“Renewable” Energy: Solar Photovoltaics and Stochasticity
“Renewable” Energy: Nuclear Fission Power
Worth a look, if only for context outside the “tribal” zone so common to this discussion . . .
Everyone here knows by now what I think of nuclear energy, so I won’t go there. But I did want to make some comments on this article.
I believe this author is very well meaning so I am not judging her commitment to the environment.
Yes, she is right – we do throw away solar panels and this is completely wrong (we are a throw-away society, however) but as I understand it, solar panels can be recycled. This isn’t a reason to abandon solar energy. This is a reason to understand that all energy waste is harmful and must be dealt with. We need to start thinking ‘cradle to grave’ with every kind of energy production.
https://nerc.org/news-and-updates/blog/nerc-blog/2019/01/29/the-opportunities-of-solar-panel-recycling?gclid=CjwKCAiAl-6PBhBCEiwAc2GOVJgptjGFMbcWqcu5l8vDLNjL_Aa85gyhn_4vfxVBRo2Uc7m_qNxIQxoCA0QQAvD_BwE
And I think she is mistaken with her comment that spent fuel at Fukushima was unscathed by the earthquake and tsunami. Yes, the fuel in the casks was unscathed, but the spent fuel pools were not. One of the most iconic pictures from Fukushima was the pumper trucks trying to pump water into the damaged spent fuel pools to keep the fuel from going critical. And putting spent fuel in pools to cool is a critical step in the management of spent fuel.
She also seems to think that we have all the technical issues to do with spent fuel storage solved. We do not. Anyone who thinks differently needs to get familiar with NRC’s NUREGs or the International Atomic Energy Agency’s TECDOCS. There are still many issues to solve wrt spent fuel storage. Neither of these agencies are in any way anti-nuclear but they do understand what they are dealing with.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/index.html
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1710/ML17108A306.pdf
https://www.iaea.org/sitemap
https://www.iaea.org/publications/14680/management-of-spent-fuel-from-nuclear-power-reactors
As for those people mourning the loss of Yucca Mountain, do you realize that Yucca Mountain would have been filled up and we would have been again looking for a place to store spent fuel? Yucca Mountain was designed to hold 77,000 tons of spent fuel – we now have over 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel in storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47796
I think your comment is tight but this thing jumps out:
We need to start thinking ‘cradle to grave’ with every kind of energy production.
because, imo, it is the only type of thinking that can really grow Radical Conservation, and its supportive corollaries into fruition.
You cite Links to some of the issues but there is also an obvious one that can’t be ignored:
https://energynews.us/2016/09/09/nuclear-plants-feel-the-heat-of-warming-water/
Nuclear power proponents say the energy source is crucial to reducing the impact of climate change.
But ironically, “We’ll have to solve global warming if we want to keep using nuclear power,” says Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear safety expert Dave Lochbaum.
That’s because nuclear power plants need large amounts of water for cooling, and overheating can present a major safety risk. As the lakes and rivers that typically supply cooling water become hotter thanks to climate change — and as droughts dry up some water bodies — nuclear power plants face problems, researchers say.
It’s all a question of the level of reliable technology; all the arguments can be eventually settled if the technology is good. But to add to your argument – our technology is more hopeful than good. If we had filled Yucca Mountain with nuke waste at that time we’d also have probably packed it down with kitty litter and half of Nevada would now be Yucca Lake. That little technique was given an OK by our nuclear “experts” as I recall – the incident in New Mexico.
iirc, I think it was the Carlsbad storage site.
Nothing to fear but fear itself; I suspect the way we handle COVID is the way any country in free fall collapse of all ethical and moral values in an insatiable global crazed drive for profit would handle the construction of massive numbers of nuclear installations; with an, um, unusual level of integrity and promised standards that people could count on far far into the future. Just ask any main stream news media outlet.
If we have no choice, well that makes it all better. I guess.
Just because nay-Sayers may be spoil sports does not mean that they are not also correct.
If the US can’t work itself up to handle a lethal global pandemic with integrity, if it’s highest politicians can not hold off on insider trading to garnish their stock portfolios for just a few months so as to give succor to their constituents in such a massive human catastrophe, then what conceivable hope does it have with the equally if not even more dire and thorny one of ensuring safe nuclear power plants with long term (not just until I’m no longer in office) storage of spent fuel, and our electrical grid. And as to France and it’s nuclear plants, they were mostly built in the 70’s. France was a very different country then, far less captivated by neoliberal worship of crappification for fun and profit.
One has to wonder how regulators determine when nuclear power plants have lived beyond their lifespan.
When a nuclear plant is euthanized well before its time (1993), you read at the Oregon Department of Energy (responsible for the siting of this plant) that its license “only” had 13 more years to go.
https://www.oregon.gov/energy/safety-resiliency/Pages/Trojan-Site.aspx
How many more years can these French nuclear power plants safely operate?
One has to wonder how regulators determine when nuclear power plants have lived beyond their lifespan.
The regulators, of course, know these things in Excruciating detail, but here’s some good guesses ..
When embrittlement of reactor vessels has made it porous, and Nobody wants to work in such extremely high-rad environments, robots not being up to the task, jackhammering reinforced concrete/fitting pipes in screaming-hot environments, THAT’s when they start, or *should start*, “navigating” to decommissioning.
As far as the meme that corruption in construction is an aspect “we” should for some reason ‘factor-into’ safety risks, we can file that in this concept here, the 2nd-definition of “canard”: “a small winglike projection attached to an aircraft forward of the main wing to provide extra stability or control, sometimes replacing the tail.” LOL, Right? As in, all .. camouflaged .. attempts at “conditioning” the “peasants” towards unquestioning acceptance of the inevitableness of nuke power are .. Hereby REJECTED.
Rather summary, and perfected.
Gregory Benford on the concept of “Deep Time” storage of nuke waste, “10,000 years”, a holding-together of knowledge no human society has ever achieved, the Upanishads being the closest analog and look at air quality in .. New Delhi now. Not likely. They already frack all around the WIPP.
So the waste is to be akin to myths of evil spirits arising from below .. after another Chicxulub occurs because contemporaries ‘neglected’ to invest in asteroid control and that dry-as-a-bone Permian Basin gets flooded Again by a super-tsunami. Or the Russians send one from Neptune.
“Of all sites in the USA, the Carlsbad area looked best. Its salt beds laid down in an evaporating ocean 240 million years ago testify to a stable geology, water free .. ”
Benford does not mention deep borehole disposal because it would be rather expensive, so not really feasible.
https://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html
Some nations can do nuclear power better than others. In the United States I am not at all comfortable that large scale nuclear power plants can be operated safely and economically. Many Americans agree, as few wish to live near such power plants.
The claim that nuclear power is “cheap” is a monumental untruth. Proof of this is the very existence of the “Price-Anderson” act, which falsifies the economic cost of nuclear energy by limiting the insurance required for a nuclear corporation to a ridiculously tiny amount (currently a mere $.45b per reactor). Without that law, no private nuclear power plant would ever have been built in the US, because no insurance company could ever provide adequate liability insurance against the likely damage from a nuclear accident (and even if one could, it certainly wouldn’t sell it at a price that didn’t make the electricity grossly unprofitable.)
Never heard of the Price-Anderson Act! Apparently it became law in 1957 and was most recently renewed for 20 years in 2005.
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/351728-federal-energy-subsidies-go-to-far-more-than-nuclear-and-coal
This article also points out: “only ‘mineral or natural resource’ businesses such as oil, natural gas and coal (but not wind or solar energy) are able to use a government-subsidized financing structuring called a “master limited partnership” (MLP). These publicly-traded vehicles are not subject to corporate taxation and are extremely tax efficient, which allows those privileged businesses to access investment capital at low rates for large infrastructure projects. This implicit tax subsidy lowers the cost of gas-fired electricity, in addition to other implicit subsides available only to oil and natural gas.”
Public Utility Commissions use “least cost, least risk” methods toward approving Investor-Owned Utilities (IOUs) investments in energy plants. Oregon is taking steps toward addressing the costs of climate change with greenhouse gas reduction goals in these calculations. See:
https://www.oregon.gov/puc/utilities/Documents/EO20-04-PUC-WorkPlan.pdf
Am I optimistic? Uhhh….
This was a very interesting article, thanks for posting. It seems to me that the author skirts the thorny political issues inherent to nuclear energy. It’s true in a technical sense that nuclear energy and nuclear weapons could be separated, but this seems like a non-starter politically. Nuclear weapons are still a key part of military strategy both for countries that control their own nukes (e.g. the US) and those who are afforded secondary protection through alliances with a nuclear power (e.g. NATO). The author here contrasts South Korea’s nuclear power with North Korea’s nuclear weapons but fails to mention the thousands of US troops stationed there. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is purely for civilian energy generation, but this hasn’t stopped the US from adding sanctions and withdrawing from negotiated agreements on the matter. These are just a few examples, US-focused to be sure, of the kind of political problems that are inherently linked with nuclear and have nothing to do with the environmental tradeoffs.
I mention this because reading these kinds of analyses sometimes feels like an exercise in wishful thinking. This is not a fault of this particular author or any particular strategy, as no one person can or should be expected to address all these issues completely in order to argue their position. I just can’t shake the feeling that, at least for a layman like me, delving into debates over the technology is on some level an escape from political problems that seem even more intractable than the technical issues.
When we are looking at the total cost and carbon inputs of fission energy, fusion is 10 years away will will be for decades, you ignore the real costs, since nuclear is subsidized in the fuel cycle, construction, R&D, and decommissioning. It may be cheaper than paying minimum wage workers to do a treadmill, but not by much.
The carbon input, including things like concrete and handling the waste is large, and to blithely suggest that because a few nuke plants were made in three years in the past, that the 15-20 year construction time can be avoided, is Panglossian.
If we went all in with uranium based power plants right now, there would be an enormous impact immediately from concrete, refining, and enriching, with no payback for 15 years.
For the same reason that the best solution, radical conservation is not gonna happen as a planned voluntary response to carbon pollution, the nuclear thing is not gonna happen.
The radical conservation will happen naturally as we slide farther down the collapse slope. Deep enough into that, the existing nukes will be abandoned in place. The tech to deal with them will no longer exist.
Durability of modern concrete and its use in containment might be just one thing to consider.
I’m assuming most of the existing nuclear facility regions are going to be no-go zones in about 50years give or take, so proliferating nuclear facilities all over the landscape I presume would just make whole continents no-go zones.
Nuclear supplanting fossil fuels is just fancy talk for unscientific assumptions about eternal progress.
I do love her nom de plume: Zion Lights. There isn’t much in this world as awesome as a clear night sky. And nuclear doesn’t fill the atmosphere with particulates. We have analyzed our options endlessly for the lat 50 years. They should all be on the table. And cautiously developed with the requirement that they actually do what they say they do. No fudging. So that’s a luxury we don’t actually have – we don’t have the leisure to go forward on clean energy at some convenient pace. So that’s a fact, imo. Which means we do need to find ways to practice extreme conservation. (I do mean “extreme” because last nite’s NOVA was all about methane and the melting permafrost…) Along with the concept of Extreme Conservation we need to add Extreme Resiliency. And we should be open to all possibilities. We humans could become seasonally transient, moving to climates that do not require adjustments; we could actually wear proper clothing; we could work by sunlight; and when catastrophe strikes we could go underground. There’s no excuse for demanding automobiles in this world – except for the profits of the industry – it’s pure vanity and convenience – we need better substitutes. For just about everything.
For a bit of optimism here – there is a very innovative, way out of the mainstream approach to fission moving to physical demonstration (probably 24-36 months from now) that was actually identified by researchers working in NASA’s nuclear lunar rover program – back in the late 60’s and early 70’s. If NASA’s nuclear program had not been zeroed out to free up funding for the pork barrel fast breeder reactor project (that never was built), we might have had this technology 40 years ago and the energy world would look very different today.
This technology is extremely safe. It never has more radioactive material at one time at a power plant site than a typical hospital would have on site for blood irradiation equipment. It would be fueled primarily by Uf6 – a non-radioactive waste product from conventional nuclear fuel production. The existing US stockpile of this stuff is owned by DOE and continues to sit in containers at three large sites as DOE has never come up with an affordable way to dispose of it. This waste material could produce enough energy through this innovative technology at current US levels of electricity production for about the next 1400 years.. So fuel supply is not an issue.
A power plant using this system would be very similar to a typical natural gas combined cycle plant (NGCC). And there would be fuel delivery or storage logistics – a 300 MW power plant would only require about a 55 gallon drum of Uf6 to operate form a year and this could be delivered by common carriers.
I know this sounds “too good to be true” – which is one reason why it has taken a while to get this really moving. The nuclear physics and technology heritage is way outside typical nuclear physics training and commercial experience, so it takes a while for most nuclear “insiders” to accept that it is real.
So I don’t see any future for conventional nuclear fission once this technology has been successfully demonstrated.
Link? Or a name I can google?
This is still pretty much in stealth mode. We are working on a useful website and I will post it when available. Much relevant technology history was developed for gaseous fuel reactors in the USSR in the later 50’s. Also check out NASA’s nuclear program in the 60’s to early 70’s. We are finding that prominent nuclear physicists have typically never encountered this history.. Some have commented that “this system would be impossible” and then the inventor produces a slide of equipment NASA developed to do this and noted that this equipment is mothballed at one of t( nuclear labs and could be borrowed for the demo if needed..
FYI the inventor also has much better nuclear space propulsion (or lunar power systems) concepts than currently being pursued by NASA and will probably be moving those once the power system is fully demonstrated.
I thought this DW article was a pretty good discussion.
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
The bottom line on emissions is nuclear power at present is more carbon intensive (full life cycle comparison) than renewable and about 1/4 the carbon output of natural gas – the best of the fossil fuel alternatives.
The bottom line on cost is nuclear is very expensive at present.
Of course as Yves pointed out, the very best alternative is radical conservation, best bang for the buck.
Here…I will post some links recovered from the old Depleted Cranium blog, dedicated to debunking bad science. The author, drbuzz0 breaks down different topics of nuclear energy in order to clear up misconceptions and explain what the real issues are in context. He does it in a very simple manner that is easy for the average person to understand. It is a shame the blog went inactive, but I think he did not have the time to run it anymore.
I am posting this, because I think these articles provide one of the best reference points on the topic of nuclear energy for people unfamiliar with the subject.
Nuclear Waste In Context
Zero Carbon Nuclear Communities
Uranium Scarcity
Medical Reactor Shortage
Why You Can’t Build A Bomb From Spent Fuel
LNT and Nuclear Energy
A High-Energy Future
Basic Nuclear Energy Quiz
A French Story of Nuclear Success
What Does It Cost To Build A Nuclear Power Plant? What Could It Cost?
What Is Spent Fuel, Anyway?
What Coal Does To The Land
I think it can be a part of the equation, but I think the author underestimates some issues/risks here. Highly recommend Andrew Cockburn’s recent piece in Harper’s, Spent Fuel:
https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/spent-fuel-the-risky-resurgence-of-nuclear-power/
Hoo boy, thanks for posting this Yves.
I’ve got nothing to say on competing renewables other than none of them are a panacea.
More power generation is not needed, less is what is needed. Hasn’t it been shown by physicists/mathematicians that we will cook the planet if we keep generating more, no matter what type, because of the increased human activities that more energy enables?
Has there ever been a nuclear facility built without 100% government funding/subsidy/guarantee, because no insurance company would touch them? Perhaps this is true with other types of generation as well, I don’t know.
I used to be opposed to nuke plants because I believe there will be no functioning society in the future to properly decommission nuclear power plants, but I think Chernobyl has shown that the biosphere will be fine (humans not so much) and at this point the biosphere is my main interest. I still believe lack of proper decommissioning will be a huge issue (for humans!) if many more plants are built.
How about “peak uranium ore”, or whatever nuclear fuel ore is being mined these days, won’t the raw material run low rather quickly just like every other highly exploited raw material? What about the enviro/carbon-footprint of all that new mining?
What about cooling water and the mess we find ourselves in regarding climate change and sea level rise? It would be a shame to be unable to cool thousands of new nuke plants.
Perhaps these issues were addressed in links in the article, but it seems like a lot of questions were not addressed in the article itself.
Put me in the unconvinced column.
Although I’m pro-nuclear (with strict caveats), as devil’s advocate, I’m surprised that know one seems to have mentioned the WHOOPS fiasco .
Perhaps I missed a mention in the astute-as-always comments. Or am I showing my age?
From the 8th August 1983 Time article:
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,955183,00.html
That’s a good point, pac nw utilities are still paying off the debt from the WPPSS debacle. This was mentioned in prior posts, but behind every percentage point in GDP is a unit of energy. We need quite a bit in the next 3-5 years as elderly coal and nat gas is switched off for renewables. To my simple mind, modular nukes combined with reformed energy policy to reuse spent fuel could solve a significant portion of our baseboard problems. I’m reminded of the great randall munro cartoon https://xkcd.com/1162/
Wow, that was an … … incredible … … propaganda piece, almost as if James the Conca “assumed” a persona, and laid it on THICKLY.
“Safe” nuclear waste? Only one method is viable after having painted the biosphere into a corner, as Los Alamos will acknowledge, and that is deep borehole disposal, far-deeper than mentions of France.
Has ANY country even begun such processes? No.
And “reprocessing” spent fuel is another chimera — the acids used are super-strong/toxic, and only the North Koreans do it with “no consequence”.
Yes, DO laugh freely at that.
Nuke waste is THE MOST GRACELESS gift A “SENTIENT” SPECIES *COULD* gift TO THE BIOME THAT FOSTERED ITS EXISTENCE.
Hands down.
After life had to wait a billion years for natural radioactivity to subside-enough after Earth’s formation.
Don’t be too hard on the woman – she’s a beginner. Certainly her 2005 degree in Literature/English didn’t prepare her for this new profession. The 2019 one in “science communication” just needs some polishing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion_Lights
Her Wiki tells how she is sort of ‘partnering’ with rich people in her new role. You know, the types who plan to do a version of the 2011 Schiff book. Prospective title:
How to Live and Prosper During the Coming Climate Collapse
The Rich People will need scores of the tiny nuke plants for their many “Level 7” types of shelters, so why not get the peasants used to the idea?
Anyhow, though the woman’s selection of materials from the Big Nuclear Agiprop Archives isn’t yet so great, she’ll get better. No doubt future articles will speak of all the dead birdies from the ugly Wind Turbines, and how the massive blades on those Turbines cannot be recycled. And of course the miracle of Thorium Reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_7_(novel)
(That assumes the Rich People migration to Mars won’t happen in time, but I’m fairly sure Musk is covering all angles.)
Noted this on CO2 capture, and its manner of doing it is like anti-Darwin in its awareness of what’s before the eyes:
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-game-changing-technology-carbon-dioxide-air.html
I do believe a bright future speaks to us on physorg.com, and not on GRU talking points of those who would have us entrained to the nuclear belligerents’ gameplan of conditioning everyone to believe we “deserve” to be nuked by the “righteous socialists” of Russia. Might be the dry run for nuking Iran, while talking as if the GRU.
Very similar to your “During the Coming Climate Collapse
The Rich People will need scores of the tiny nuke plants for their many “Level 7” types of shelters, so why not get the peasants used to the idea?”
Is there a coincidence a persona called “Zion Light” pops up fronting outdated arguments after Iskanders got shuffled in position?
If so, ‘the enemy is in their rear’, as it’s had.
So, here’s what is happening “in the field.”
Here in Plymouth, Mass., the no-longer-operating Pilgrim Nuclear Station is being decommissioned by a company named Holtec. The problem Holtec faces — which has, by the way, never fully decommissioned a plant, and was given the contract anyway; is also facing a lawsuit from the AG of New Mexico for its conduct re: nuclear waste there — is what to do with the waste from 5 decades of operation (none of this power went to us, here on the semi-periphery, but to Boston and its environs — internal colonialism, as Lambert would say).
It has come up with the brilliant idea of dumping a million gallons of irradiated wastewater into Cape Cod Bay. This is opposed by pretty much everyone except … Holtec. The fishing industry, particularly the highly lucrative shellfish industry (Island Creek and Wellfleet oysters), are up in arms, because even the iota of a concern about radioactive contamination can destroy sales for fisheries for decades. Even if the water were completely free of radiation, it is still hot (so I understand), and the Gulf of Maine, of which Cape Cod Bay is a part, is already warming so quickly that lobsters are running north, away from the heat.
The Wampanoag are up in arms as well. They view this, rightly I think, as more colonial despoliation of their sacred lands and waters.
The tourist industry, pretty bloody important on the littoral of Cape Cod Bay, is up in arms, too. No one wants their kids to play in water that is radioactive, even if the levels are “safe” according to … the nuclear industry and their shills, who have a pecuniary interest in saying so (“He would say that, wouldn’t he?” — Mandy Rice-Davies). This also ignores the fact that tritium bio-accumulates up the food chain, the same way DDT does, and the fish we eat in fish and chips are pretty high up the food chain.
Finally, the current storage of the spent fuel rods is just yards away from the Plymouth-Carver sole source aquifer, the largest in Massachusetts, and a gift from the glacier. If it gets polluted, by radioactive or other sources, it is finis. Kaput.
So far, the only other options are to evaporate the wastewater, which will just come back to us as rain and snow, or to truck it to the West to bury it (also somewhat unfair to people who live there — probably should put it in the Back Bay or Harvard Square, since they were the ones who benefitted….)
In other words, I echo everyone above: in a normal, functioning, developed country, nuclear should be doable. We are not that. Holtec has an abysmal safety record, Entergy, which ran Pilgrim until 2019, has one just as bad, and we are not at all confident in anyone in the nuclear industry’s ability to handle the aftermath of fission here. The NRC is a bought joke, incidentally.
Maybe this would work in Finland, or Switzerland. In the US? I’m sorry, but no.
The part on waste is completely bogus. It is the main issue of nuclear, it generate waste that will last longer than human recorded history. There is no way to justify such a legacy, on what ground can we claim that we are entitle to create this waste just so that we keep our life style and crazy energy consumption ?
We are running out of time, and need to pursue every good solution. Nuclear power is a good solution.
China is getting ready to do a test of thorium fission power:
China prepares to test thorium-fuelled nuclear reactor
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w
Hopefully, it will go well. We need some good news.
America actually ran a thorium experiment back in the 60s:
The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment( 1969) by Oak Ridge National Laboratory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyDbq5HRs0o&t=999s
The research into the Molten-Salt reactor at Oak Ridge National Lab were done while Alvin Wienburg ran the Lab. He was ultimately fired from ORNL leadership by Nixon because “he continued to advocate increased nuclear safety and molten salt reactors (MSRs), instead of the Administration’s chosen Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR)”:
Alvin M. Weinberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Weinberg
If nuclear power is so safe, why does it require the Federal Government to insure its operation and liabilities?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act#:~:text=The%20Price%2DAnderson%20Nuclear%20Industries,the%20United%20States%20before%202026.
Hint: Power company bonds and stocks would be worthless without this insurance.
Maybe Wall Street is not as unaware of the risks as some “pundits” :)).
Readers might be interested in Lang (2017): Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates; Disruption and Global Benefits Forgone, https://doi.org/10.3390/en10122169.
Abstract
This paper presents evidence of the disruption of a transition from fossil fuels to nuclear power, and finds the benefits forgone as a consequence are substantial. Learning rates are presented for nuclear power in seven countries, comprising 58% of all power reactors ever built globally. Learning rates and deployment rates changed in the late-1960s and 1970s from rapidly falling costs and accelerating deployment to rapidly rising costs and stalled deployment. Historical nuclear global capacity, electricity generation and overnight construction costs are compared with the counterfactual that pre-disruption learning and deployment rates had continued to 2015. Had the early rates continued, nuclear power could now be around 10% of its current cost. The additional nuclear power could have substituted for 69,000–186,000 TWh of coal and gas generation, thereby avoiding up to 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 emissions. In 2015 alone, nuclear power could have replaced up to 100% of coal-generated and 76% of gas-generated electricity, thereby avoiding up to 540,000 deaths and 11 Gt CO2. Rapid progress was achieved in the past and could be again, with appropriate policies. Research is needed to identify impediments to progress, and policy is needed to remove them.
Keywords: nuclear power; construction cost; learning rate; energy transition; disruption; benefits forgone; deaths; CO2 emissions