Nuclear Engineer here. I like to point out a few things that this article kind of gleans over about nuclear energy. In particular it bothers me that the Sierra Club made that Bugs Bunny quip. The fact is, nuclear fuel has ~2 million times more energy in it per mass than fossil fuel, and while splitting atoms intrinsically requires no carbon emissions, combusting fossil fuels do Carbon+Oxygen = CO2 + energy. When your fuel is 2 million times denser, you need 2 million times less mining, less transportation, etc. And if you run your enrichment plants off of nuclear reactors (like France does), then that process is low-carbon too. Nuclear is extremely clean and very low carbon.
Anyway, the nuclear scorecard is:
* Nuclear is currently producing 60% of the USA's carbon-free electricity (the article nailed that one)
* Nuclear worldwide has saved 1.8 million lives net by displacing air pollution
* Nuclear worldwide has prevented the emission of 65 billion tonnes CO2-eq
* If you got all your energy for 80 years from nuclear you'd make 1.3 soda cans of waste
* Advanced nuclear makes additional advances in already-fantastic safety and can improve cost
* Nuclear scales well (demonstrated in France)
* Nuclear is great for regions that get winter storms, lots of darkness, hurricanes, hail, very little wind, etc. while wind and solar are good in places that do not have those. Also recall that wind and solar are collecting a very non-dense (but free) energy so they need lots of material and land footprint.
That's just a list of the positives. I think it'd be useful to your argument to also provide some "real world" nuclear experience.
E.g.
* The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the estimated 100+ billion Euro cleanup of their reactors over the next 100 years.
* Sellafield cleanup alone is going to be £120 billion [1].
* New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget and not finished yet. So if we started constructing immediately then 2030 is optimistic [2].
* The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small. Have a look at Google maps some time.
I'd rather spend the 200 billion that new reactors will cost us on energy storage and many lower-risk, known-good providers like wind, thermal to spread risk.
I agree with all of these points and am rather a pro-nuclear myself. But the Chernobyl / Fukushima risk cannot be dismissed. What would be great is a form of nuclear energy that doesn't run this meltdown risk. I hear contradictory opinion on Thorium. Does Thorium eliminate this risk?
> When your fuel is 2 million times denser, you need 2 million times less mining, less transportation, etc.
That's assuming the raw materials have the same concentration and accessibility. I would naively assume that just pumping oil up requires no stripping of overburden while some surface uranium mining would. Not saying that oil is great, it's just that the comparison is not as straight-forward as you make it out to be.
Agreed. Some factoring in of maintenance costs and production costs, but other than that, it would be very good if nations gave more support. Also, there is a greater chance of devastation based on negligence or sabatoge over other energy production means.
Hey, while we've caught you here as someone knowledgeable, I've always worried about one thing re: nuclear power: What do you think the risks are in terms of nuclear facilities being easy targets for malicious people? Both in terms of the power network being less distributed because of the much higher energy production per plant, but also much more about the potential consequences of leaks and meltdowns. The Fukushima incident gave me serious doubts about whether containment buildings were truly sufficient to withstand a targeted attack in a war scenario. Sabotage is even more scary, but I'm guessing there are safeguards against that too. Sounds a bit paranoid, but seems worth thinking about before putting more and more civilians near these things :)
Fukushima and all the radioactive tuna that was eaten by all the sushi lovers before it was discovered it had too much radioactive content. And Chernobyl? How many cancers did those two cause?
I don't fully know why people are so anti-nuclear in general.
I'll be the first to admit that wind and solar are what society should aim for, but I don't full that, with our current implementations of them, that they're quite ready for a 7-billion-people level of energy needs.
I feel like nuclear could be a good way to get us using (relatively) clean energy and get people using electric vehicles in the relatively short-term.
When the US originally decided to build out plants in the 1960's, the plan was for 1000 plants. We ended up with just over 100. Each construction was filled with delays and cost-overruns. Then, we ran those plants, based on out-dated designs, long after they were intended to be torn down and replaced. Even some plants that were upgraded, had flaws that prevented them from being used, (SONGS is a good example), so they had to be shut down.
The industry won't pay for R&D for new designs. They won't invest in proper maintenance and training. They barely keep their word on decomissioning schedules.
Waste storage is a huge, huge problem, that nobody has addressed yet. (except the French). And even fuel reprocessing doesn't fully solve the problem.
I think it's a great technology, and there are awesome new designs that could be researched, tested, and put into production. But the industry has to actually pay for this shit and do it. And that's just not happening. The finance side of the industry is still stuck in 1960's models. Operators are finding that these plants aren't even profitable to operate, compared to natural gas plants. (so nuclear is very vulnerable to short-term energy market fluctuations after you've invested billions of dollars into construction).
Also: insurance is not insignificant, when there is a risk of accident that will contaminate land around the plant for hundreds of square miles. That's all "someone else's property" - and those people need to be compensated. What if it's a farmer, who would have generated revenue with that land for the next 100 years (while we wait for the cesium and strontium to decay or wash out of the soil)?
I remember writing a similar HN comment shortly before Fukushima, feeling very smart at the time.
Well Fukushima happened and left me wondering if we as humans are able to maintain something that can generate so much potentially irreversible damage, with our tendencies to cut-corners, wing-it and just being less than perfect.
I hang my hat in shame over that comment everytime I read of more irradiated water leaking into the Pacific.
I used to be pro Nuclear, nowadays I feel that all the people looking at the benefits of Nuclear miss a few big things. They overestimate the maturity of the tech (x1000 for the maturity of the materials development in the designs as opposed to the Nuclear reaction itself), far understate the risks and pretty much ignore the economics. And by economics I include operating costs, but also rarely discussed: the ability of private markets to finance, build, and start pulling profits from a power project in a reasonable time-frame. If that second part isn't possible, then building lots of anything isn't going to happen easily. There is a big difference in 40 x1 billion projects and one 40 billion project - and one way that plays out is in the likelihood of any project getting spun up and succeeding even if all other things are equal. But all other thing are not equal, in operating costs, Nuclear is less economically productive than wind energy by far, and soon solar (or perhaps already more-expensive when one figures in overruns, gov't support, etc..).
There is a point in that Nuclear can provide "baseload", but it's fairly incompatible with varying renewable supply as it doesn't seem to cycle up or down fast enough to be really be paired with a renewable supply. Energy storage, while also being immature, is likely to improve much more rapidly than the relative slow design development of Nuclear tech.
I don't want to be unnecessarily negative regarding Nuclear (and am excited about potential future fusion developments - esp the small scale designs), but I think there's a lot more holding Nuclear back than simply anti-nuclear activism.
There's a degree to which it is a zero sum system. If wind and solar is where we should be eventually, then resources put into nuclear now aren't going into wind/solar research and infrastructure building. And nuclear's not cheap.
Plus, while nuclear can be done safely, it often isn't, and when it fails, it fails catastrophically. So it's scary for a lot of people. People have to trust not just that nuclear _can_ be done safely, but that it _will_ be done safely. That second one, especially, is a big leap for lots of folks.
I dont think the public are particularly against nuclear. Most major developments have opposition. And any project as costly will have concerns simply from a project managment perspective. I don't think you can blame protestors for massive financial risk that investors are scared of. Lucrative projects that are much more environmentally damaging go ahead all the time afterall.
I'm anti-nuclear because we don't really know how much it costs.
The cost of cleaning up after very rare disasters has to be worked into the price, but the Fukushima incident is still ongoing. We're not even sure if the current efforts will prevent more radiation leaks, and perhaps the cost will continue to climb.
Let's think like internet.
Nuclear is the mainframe. Big, powerful, ... but when it goes down everything goes with it. (centralized)
Solar/Wind are small unit of production, they don't do much individually, cheap and in a network they improve their reliability. (decentralized)
New nuclear would be great in the long term. It's not the heart of what we need, but a useful part of the portfolio. The heart of what we need is integrated transmission supporting rapid rollout of all clean sources:
In the US, the new administration is vociferously opposed to any progress. Do NOT let them use nuclear as a wedge issue. They oppose targets in principle:
> Finally, there’s one big falsehood at the core of arguments for nuclear: that it’s “clean.” The full life cycle of nuclear power—from mining, milling, the separation of the uranium from the ore, to ultimate plant decommissioning—collectively generates vast amounts of carbon dioxide.
This is of course even more true for wind and especially solar.
Nuclear power is extremely expensive and does not allow for peaking power. In the US company's are shutting them down early because operation costs are to high, let alone construction. So, on the surface it seems relatively useless for meeting our long term energy needs.
The only 'advantage' seems to be making money for companies that build or operate nuclear power plants. Thus, there are going to be plenty of experts backing them.
PS: While the carbon in natural gas produces CO2, the hydrogen atoms in it combine with Oxygen to form water making it a lower carbon source than Coal. If the goal is a rather arbitrary 32% lower emissions then natural gas can help reach that goal.
It actually depends entirely on the design of the reactor whether or not the plant can be used for peaking power.
France used nuclear plants as load followers (their entire fleet). It stands to reason that one could be designed as a 'peaking' power plant if one had the desire.
Nuclear aircraft carrier and submarine design are good at load following and may be suitable for "peaking" with some modification.
Nuclear is expensive when compared to coal/oil/gas, but it's a bit of a catch-22. It's expensive to build a nuclear plant because we don't build very many, so you never get a real economy of scale in the production. Also they're expensive to insure/decommission, so they kind of need to be a state sponsored capital expense.
It is true that nuclear power is bad at peaking. That's why no one uses them for that. They are good at base-load power, which is where they are used.
Use the right tool for the job. Different sources of energy have different upsides and downsides and we should take advantage of those. Use wind and solar (possibly backed by batteries) and natural gas as peak load generation because they are good at that. And use nuclear as the base load.
I agree with the premise floated by the 1st expert in the article that we are not rewarding nuclear for its carbon free generation. The reason utilities are closing nuclear plants are because of the deregulation of electric power and creation of power supply "markets". Nuclear has to compete on price alone against cheap natural gas and subsidized renewables (not only are the fuel sources of those cheap, so are the capital costs compared to nuclear).
Re your PS, are you saying that hydrogen atoms in coal DO NOT combine with oxygen to create water during combustion? Because my college education and career as a mechanical engineer taught me otherwise.
I didn't know they were bad at peaking but that makes sense.
The way I understood nuclear plants is they are enormous capital expenses and thus a utility is going to shy away from them because of that. I wonder how much they compare to a new coal fire plant though.
It seems cost is the biggest issue compared to a combination of solar+wind+hydro. (hydro has its own issues, but a lot of capacity already exists, and it's great for levelling demand)
One way to look at it is from a risk balance perspective. Let's say that with increased nuclear use we would have a Chernobyl every 10 years. So between now and 2200 we would have 20 such disasters. Reading about the Chernobyl disaster and multiplying by 20 still results in orders of magnitude less damage both to humans and the environment than the projections of what will happen if we continue on our present course.
In addition, taking a realistic view, we will not be able to control climate change at this point just from a reduction in emissions. We will likely need to remove atmospheric carbon which will likely be very energy intensive. Having the extra power that nuclear brings to the table would be useful in this scenario.
Sometimes it is worth looking at what if we go all in on a technology, what happens and how will that play out.
So lets assume we are going nuc crazy and are ordering a 10 GW of plants. Can any nuclear power plant builder actually build this within 5 years? 10 years? Areva can't, Westinghouse seems to take 8. Who is going to man them, where is the training capacity for that many engineers.
Consider that if a grid is full nuclear, capacity factors drop to 50%. Unless, you have lots of storage i.e. same as wind and solar.
If I order 30gw of solar today, who can build that out in 10 years? lots of companies can. First Solar, Panasonic, LG and many more
If I order 30gw of wind today, who can build that out in 10 years? lots of companies can. e.g. Vesta, Enercon, GE and more
Nuclear construction capacity has dropped over the years and will take significant time to rebuild and re-equip.
That takes significant financial resources. Can anyone afford that at this time considering the competition of solar and wind?
Basically, isn't wind+solar+storage a lot cheaper and easier to finance than nuclear? So why go for the big central plants with lots of project risks.
This is the long-tail effect of society being irrationally anti-nuclear for so long, despite all the favorable evidence. I think being able to be 100% wind/solar is a pipe dream with the continued growth in power usage especially by data-centers. It makes sense to start making decisions now that will continue the positive impact, even if those plants aren't able to come online for 20 years. The additional capacity will still be useful.
> So lets assume we are going nuc crazy and are ordering a 10 GW of plants. Can any nuclear power plant builder actually build this within 5 years? 10 years?
China can. As a matter of fact, China connected 20 GW (20863 MW to be exact) capacity to grid within 5 years, from 2012 to 2016.
> Meanwhile, the price of solar took just five years to drop almost 70%, and it continues to fall at record rates.
Wow that is a surprising number. That looks encouraging. What is the expectation there? Is there a currently known limit that we expect to hit. (say the scarcity of some rare metal). Or it is easily possible to see another 70% drop next 5 years.
To my uninformed mind, advanced nuclear seems like a good way forward. Is there a way to make reactors smaller, "burn" the waste, Thorium seems popular and there were many articles on it.
I grew up not far from Chernobyl when it happened. So it would seem I should be vehemently opposed, but I believe with each accident we'd learn from the past what not to do.
There is no near/medium term limit to PV manufacturing volume from materials scarcity. The rarest material used in a typical crystalline silicon solar panel is silver, part of the conductive pastes used to make electrical contacts on cells. Limits on silver availability could limit annual production rates with present mainstream designs. But manufacturers have found many ways to economize on silver use so that total PV silver consumption rose only slightly from 2011-2015 even as annual production volume rose 80%.
SunPower uses plated copper for electrical contacts instead of silver pastes. Their modules are also the most efficient on the market. But the high efficiency and avoidance of silver come at the price of higher process complexity during cell manufacturing which leads to higher costs per watt of capacity. SunPower is at least an existence proof that you can produce modules at large scale, at high efficiency, from abundant elements. I expect other manufacturers to substitute away from silver too if increasing demand pushes silver prices up too high.
Sometimes you'll see people claim that solar can't attain really large volumes because of dependencies on "rare elements." Those claims are probably referring to the tellurium in cadmium-telluride PV modules and/or the indium and gallium in copper-indium-gallium-diselenide modules. But you can safely ignore those worries because CdTe and CIGS together account for a very small share of the market; crystalline silicon dominates PV at over 90% share.
The case of Slovakia and Hungary is interesting: they are two of the top 4 countries where the share of nuclear generation is highest (and above 50%) [1]. Slovakia is largely devoid of fossil fuels, while Hungary produces lignite, oil, and natural gas, but both are reliant on gas imports (mostly from Russia).
As such, they generally can't afford to not consider nuclear, despite being small countries where an accident would damage a sizeable chunk of the countryside. Despite their Russian-made reactors, and usually Russian-sourced fuel, the domestic production of more than half the countries' energy needs is simply a national security issue with the useful side-effect of reducing carbon emissions than if imported natural gas was used for a much higher share of production.
It is totally mind-boggling for me that the same people who are the strongest advocates of CO2 emission cuts are usually, the same time, the strongest opponents of nuclear power. Nuclear power, which is the only one economically viable way to achieve serious CO2 emission cuts they advocate.
And hyrdo power. I've seen zero discussion on building new dams. The PNW is bragging now about their clean energy, but they spent decades trying to get all those dams removed.
Look, no matter what we do, eventually ALL the oil will be extracted fro the ground. Alternative energy just isn't going to replace the oil fast enough. Carbon credits or not, it doesn't matter.
And under President Trump, the US will be developing all the fossil fuels it has. Great for economic independence and paying back sovereign debt. Bad for the environment.
The best thing to do at this point is to invest in ways to capture the carbon once it is released into the atmosphere.
Hopefully by the time all the natural oil is gone we will be able to efficiently produce synthetic oil that is compatible with out current infrastructure. Also we will, hopefully, have worked out the best way to capture and contain/re-use the CO2 emissions.
Though obviously we would need nuclear/wind/solar power for that backbone that facilitates oil synthesis.
My two favorites vulgarization approach about nuclear radiation:
- The XKCD radiation dose chart http://xkcd.com/radiation/
- The pretty bad-ass documentary "Uranium: Twisting the Dragon's Tail" where there presenter start by taking an radon bath in a Swiss SPA then travel around to the most radioactive places on earth (and flip out when under Pripiat hospital where he almost took too much risk)...
This article asks the wrong question. And answers an unrelated one.
First off, the question subtly implies that nuclear power should be the last resort. That's already setting the stage for a slanted discussion. The correct question is to ask whether we want nuclear power in preference to coal, oil, natural gas, and a little bit of solar and wind. As far as I can tell, the answer should be an emphatic YES---but the point isn't the answer, it's the loaded question.
Second, the WSJ asks what's necessary to hit emissions targets. That's dumb. We ought to ask what's necessary to stop global warming. I don't know what are the current targets, probably something like cutting emissions in half by 2050. I think we can do that by switching more industrial processes from coal or oil to natural gas. But if the dire predictions of the IPCC are true, we're still going to die, only a little bit slower. To stop global warming, we need to get CO2 emissions to practically zero, and natural gas doesn't get us there. Neither do unreliables (sun, wind) combined with natural gas backup, nor the vain hope for a magic storage solution nobody knows yet.
And finally, the stupid environmentalist hack proceeds to answer a different question. He tells us that nuclear power is expensive (still cheaper than wind and sun, though), but if indeed it was "Vital to Hitting CO2 Emissions Targets", we wouldn't care. We'd do it anyway, wouldn't we? But naturally, the ecotard doesn't even listen to the question and just rattles off his canned talking points...
Saying it's vital is not going to help.
the question is : how much time and money do we have to be carbon free. Is nuclear power helping to reach that target or not ?
Saying it's vital is equivalent to saying "do we really really really want it ?" And of course, a lot of uniformed opinions will come up...
let me remind you that 1/ nuclear is bad when it breaks 2/ solar/wind is hyper expensive to build in quantities large enough to cover our needs
If Trump could somehow channel his disdain for environmental groups away from coal and towards nuclear, he could actually end up doing a really great thing. The fact that environmentalists have resisted nuclear power for so long is one of the stupidest most self-defeating things in modern history.
If Trump took all his rhetoric and bullheadedness and focused it on making nuclear great again, that would make me supremely happy.
One thing I almost never see discussed is how expensive it gets when you have to keep building nuclear power plants due to decommissioning. Most nuclear power plants in use nowadays seem to have a 30 years life expectancy, new ones get up to 60. It just seems hugely expensive.
No one seems to be even considering fusion. I understand the tech isn't there, but that's because of the "fusion-never" levels of funding. Can someone please fund this!?
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|9 years ago|reply
Anyway, the nuclear scorecard is:
* Nuclear is currently producing 60% of the USA's carbon-free electricity (the article nailed that one)
* Nuclear worldwide has saved 1.8 million lives net by displacing air pollution
* Nuclear worldwide has prevented the emission of 65 billion tonnes CO2-eq
* If you got all your energy for 80 years from nuclear you'd make 1.3 soda cans of waste
* Advanced nuclear makes additional advances in already-fantastic safety and can improve cost
* Nuclear scales well (demonstrated in France)
* Nuclear is great for regions that get winter storms, lots of darkness, hurricanes, hail, very little wind, etc. while wind and solar are good in places that do not have those. Also recall that wind and solar are collecting a very non-dense (but free) energy so they need lots of material and land footprint.
[+] [-] teh|9 years ago|reply
E.g.
* The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the estimated 100+ billion Euro cleanup of their reactors over the next 100 years.
* Sellafield cleanup alone is going to be £120 billion [1].
* New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget and not finished yet. So if we started constructing immediately then 2030 is optimistic [2].
* The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small. Have a look at Google maps some time.
I'd rather spend the 200 billion that new reactors will cost us on energy storage and many lower-risk, known-good providers like wind, thermal to spread risk.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
[+] [-] Retric|9 years ago|reply
The 60% figure is also off as it excludes a lot of small scale off grid solar power.
[+] [-] cm2187|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the8472|9 years ago|reply
That's assuming the raw materials have the same concentration and accessibility. I would naively assume that just pumping oil up requires no stripping of overburden while some surface uranium mining would. Not saying that oil is great, it's just that the comparison is not as straight-forward as you make it out to be.
[+] [-] legulere|9 years ago|reply
It seems more likely that the opposite is true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
> * Nuclear scales well (demonstrated in France)
You mean except in Summer when the rivers are too hot to use their water as a coolant or in Winter when it's getting to cold and France needs to import electricity: http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-...
> Also recall that wind and solar are collecting a very non-dense (but free) energy so they need lots of material and land footprint.
Still lifecycle CO2 emissions are very similar. Building nuclear power stations and mining is also extremely resource-intensive.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helthanatos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makmanalp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilostmykeys|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|9 years ago|reply
I'll be the first to admit that wind and solar are what society should aim for, but I don't full that, with our current implementations of them, that they're quite ready for a 7-billion-people level of energy needs.
I feel like nuclear could be a good way to get us using (relatively) clean energy and get people using electric vehicles in the relatively short-term.
[+] [-] Pokepokalypse|9 years ago|reply
The industry won't pay for R&D for new designs. They won't invest in proper maintenance and training. They barely keep their word on decomissioning schedules.
Waste storage is a huge, huge problem, that nobody has addressed yet. (except the French). And even fuel reprocessing doesn't fully solve the problem.
I think it's a great technology, and there are awesome new designs that could be researched, tested, and put into production. But the industry has to actually pay for this shit and do it. And that's just not happening. The finance side of the industry is still stuck in 1960's models. Operators are finding that these plants aren't even profitable to operate, compared to natural gas plants. (so nuclear is very vulnerable to short-term energy market fluctuations after you've invested billions of dollars into construction).
Also: insurance is not insignificant, when there is a risk of accident that will contaminate land around the plant for hundreds of square miles. That's all "someone else's property" - and those people need to be compensated. What if it's a farmer, who would have generated revenue with that land for the next 100 years (while we wait for the cesium and strontium to decay or wash out of the soil)?
Insurance funds do not cover that kind of loss.
[+] [-] Roritharr|9 years ago|reply
Well Fukushima happened and left me wondering if we as humans are able to maintain something that can generate so much potentially irreversible damage, with our tendencies to cut-corners, wing-it and just being less than perfect.
I hang my hat in shame over that comment everytime I read of more irradiated water leaking into the Pacific.
[+] [-] dv_dt|9 years ago|reply
There is a point in that Nuclear can provide "baseload", but it's fairly incompatible with varying renewable supply as it doesn't seem to cycle up or down fast enough to be really be paired with a renewable supply. Energy storage, while also being immature, is likely to improve much more rapidly than the relative slow design development of Nuclear tech.
I don't want to be unnecessarily negative regarding Nuclear (and am excited about potential future fusion developments - esp the small scale designs), but I think there's a lot more holding Nuclear back than simply anti-nuclear activism.
[+] [-] dbingham|9 years ago|reply
Plus, while nuclear can be done safely, it often isn't, and when it fails, it fails catastrophically. So it's scary for a lot of people. People have to trust not just that nuclear _can_ be done safely, but that it _will_ be done safely. That second one, especially, is a big leap for lots of folks.
[+] [-] 7952|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akamaka|9 years ago|reply
The cost of cleaning up after very rare disasters has to be worked into the price, but the Fukushima incident is still ongoing. We're not even sure if the current efforts will prevent more radiation leaks, and perhaps the cost will continue to climb.
[+] [-] melling|9 years ago|reply
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...
You can read past arguments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777901
[+] [-] etaty|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spenrose|9 years ago|reply
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/atoms-for-green-energy-what-...
New nuclear would be great in the long term. It's not the heart of what we need, but a useful part of the portfolio. The heart of what we need is integrated transmission supporting rapid rollout of all clean sources:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/does-denmark-ho...
In the US, the new administration is vociferously opposed to any progress. Do NOT let them use nuclear as a wedge issue. They oppose targets in principle:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-picks-top-c...
Nuclear AND wind AND solar and especially long term planning are all good. Keep your eyes on the prize.
[+] [-] lmm|9 years ago|reply
This is of course even more true for wind and especially solar.
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|9 years ago|reply
The only 'advantage' seems to be making money for companies that build or operate nuclear power plants. Thus, there are going to be plenty of experts backing them.
PS: While the carbon in natural gas produces CO2, the hydrogen atoms in it combine with Oxygen to form water making it a lower carbon source than Coal. If the goal is a rather arbitrary 32% lower emissions then natural gas can help reach that goal.
[+] [-] ohyes|9 years ago|reply
France used nuclear plants as load followers (their entire fleet). It stands to reason that one could be designed as a 'peaking' power plant if one had the desire.
Nuclear aircraft carrier and submarine design are good at load following and may be suitable for "peaking" with some modification.
Nuclear is expensive when compared to coal/oil/gas, but it's a bit of a catch-22. It's expensive to build a nuclear plant because we don't build very many, so you never get a real economy of scale in the production. Also they're expensive to insure/decommission, so they kind of need to be a state sponsored capital expense.
[+] [-] paulyg|9 years ago|reply
Use the right tool for the job. Different sources of energy have different upsides and downsides and we should take advantage of those. Use wind and solar (possibly backed by batteries) and natural gas as peak load generation because they are good at that. And use nuclear as the base load.
I agree with the premise floated by the 1st expert in the article that we are not rewarding nuclear for its carbon free generation. The reason utilities are closing nuclear plants are because of the deregulation of electric power and creation of power supply "markets". Nuclear has to compete on price alone against cheap natural gas and subsidized renewables (not only are the fuel sources of those cheap, so are the capital costs compared to nuclear).
Re your PS, are you saying that hydrogen atoms in coal DO NOT combine with oxygen to create water during combustion? Because my college education and career as a mechanical engineer taught me otherwise.
[+] [-] wil421|9 years ago|reply
https://www.georgiapower.com/about-energy/energy-sources/nuc...
[+] [-] robohamburger|9 years ago|reply
The way I understood nuclear plants is they are enormous capital expenses and thus a utility is going to shy away from them because of that. I wonder how much they compare to a new coal fire plant though.
[+] [-] ant6n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbandela1|9 years ago|reply
In addition, taking a realistic view, we will not be able to control climate change at this point just from a reduction in emissions. We will likely need to remove atmospheric carbon which will likely be very energy intensive. Having the extra power that nuclear brings to the table would be useful in this scenario.
[+] [-] jerven|9 years ago|reply
So lets assume we are going nuc crazy and are ordering a 10 GW of plants. Can any nuclear power plant builder actually build this within 5 years? 10 years? Areva can't, Westinghouse seems to take 8. Who is going to man them, where is the training capacity for that many engineers.
Consider that if a grid is full nuclear, capacity factors drop to 50%. Unless, you have lots of storage i.e. same as wind and solar.
If I order 30gw of solar today, who can build that out in 10 years? lots of companies can. First Solar, Panasonic, LG and many more If I order 30gw of wind today, who can build that out in 10 years? lots of companies can. e.g. Vesta, Enercon, GE and more
Nuclear construction capacity has dropped over the years and will take significant time to rebuild and re-equip. That takes significant financial resources. Can anyone afford that at this time considering the competition of solar and wind?
Basically, isn't wind+solar+storage a lot cheaper and easier to finance than nuclear? So why go for the big central plants with lots of project risks.
[+] [-] tristor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanxiyn|9 years ago|reply
China can. As a matter of fact, China connected 20 GW (20863 MW to be exact) capacity to grid within 5 years, from 2012 to 2016.
Check for yourself using IAEA PRIS(Power Reactor Information System): https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.a...
[+] [-] rdtsc|9 years ago|reply
Wow that is a surprising number. That looks encouraging. What is the expectation there? Is there a currently known limit that we expect to hit. (say the scarcity of some rare metal). Or it is easily possible to see another 70% drop next 5 years.
To my uninformed mind, advanced nuclear seems like a good way forward. Is there a way to make reactors smaller, "burn" the waste, Thorium seems popular and there were many articles on it.
I grew up not far from Chernobyl when it happened. So it would seem I should be vehemently opposed, but I believe with each accident we'd learn from the past what not to do.
[+] [-] philipkglass|9 years ago|reply
SunPower uses plated copper for electrical contacts instead of silver pastes. Their modules are also the most efficient on the market. But the high efficiency and avoidance of silver come at the price of higher process complexity during cell manufacturing which leads to higher costs per watt of capacity. SunPower is at least an existence proof that you can produce modules at large scale, at high efficiency, from abundant elements. I expect other manufacturers to substitute away from silver too if increasing demand pushes silver prices up too high.
Sometimes you'll see people claim that solar can't attain really large volumes because of dependencies on "rare elements." Those claims are probably referring to the tellurium in cadmium-telluride PV modules and/or the indium and gallium in copper-indium-gallium-diselenide modules. But you can safely ignore those worries because CdTe and CIGS together account for a very small share of the market; crystalline silicon dominates PV at over 90% share.
[+] [-] niftich|9 years ago|reply
As such, they generally can't afford to not consider nuclear, despite being small countries where an accident would damage a sizeable chunk of the countryside. Despite their Russian-made reactors, and usually Russian-sourced fuel, the domestic production of more than half the countries' energy needs is simply a national security issue with the useful side-effect of reducing carbon emissions than if imported natural gas was used for a much higher share of production.
[1] https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/NuclearShareofElec...
[+] [-] piotrjurkiewicz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mason240|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bildung|9 years ago|reply
Without massive subsidies (both direct and through waste disposal etc.) nuclear is actually one of the most expensive power sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
And under President Trump, the US will be developing all the fossil fuels it has. Great for economic independence and paying back sovereign debt. Bad for the environment.
The best thing to do at this point is to invest in ways to capture the carbon once it is released into the atmosphere.
Then of course there is this: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...
[+] [-] shuntress|9 years ago|reply
Though obviously we would need nuclear/wind/solar power for that backbone that facilitates oil synthesis.
[+] [-] leereeves|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Twisell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 08-15|9 years ago|reply
First off, the question subtly implies that nuclear power should be the last resort. That's already setting the stage for a slanted discussion. The correct question is to ask whether we want nuclear power in preference to coal, oil, natural gas, and a little bit of solar and wind. As far as I can tell, the answer should be an emphatic YES---but the point isn't the answer, it's the loaded question.
Second, the WSJ asks what's necessary to hit emissions targets. That's dumb. We ought to ask what's necessary to stop global warming. I don't know what are the current targets, probably something like cutting emissions in half by 2050. I think we can do that by switching more industrial processes from coal or oil to natural gas. But if the dire predictions of the IPCC are true, we're still going to die, only a little bit slower. To stop global warming, we need to get CO2 emissions to practically zero, and natural gas doesn't get us there. Neither do unreliables (sun, wind) combined with natural gas backup, nor the vain hope for a magic storage solution nobody knows yet.
And finally, the stupid environmentalist hack proceeds to answer a different question. He tells us that nuclear power is expensive (still cheaper than wind and sun, though), but if indeed it was "Vital to Hitting CO2 Emissions Targets", we wouldn't care. We'd do it anyway, wouldn't we? But naturally, the ecotard doesn't even listen to the question and just rattles off his canned talking points...
[+] [-] wiz21c|9 years ago|reply
Saying it's vital is equivalent to saying "do we really really really want it ?" And of course, a lot of uniformed opinions will come up...
let me remind you that 1/ nuclear is bad when it breaks 2/ solar/wind is hyper expensive to build in quantities large enough to cover our needs
So which evil will we choose ?
[+] [-] darawk|9 years ago|reply
If Trump took all his rhetoric and bullheadedness and focused it on making nuclear great again, that would make me supremely happy.
[+] [-] iaskwhy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fej|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 234dd57d2c8db|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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