Placing some bets on nuclear make sense (France gets 80% of electric generation from nuclear) but counting on nuclear is risky because nobody can make nuclear plants cost efficiently anymore. America should probably keep trying on a small scale and if they can figure it, then ramp up. The big problem is that nuclear is essentially a big government project, and America is very bad at those.
"nobody can make nuclear plants cost efficiently anymore."
Wrong, China and South Korea does,some private enterprises too.
Unlike most technologies nuclear power plant building cost has increased over time (5 times)
Mostly among other things (e.g lack of standardization except France), the huge current cost is because of irrational, overengeenered safety specifications.
America could trivially build cheap power plants like in 70s and it would still make statistically less deaths than wind or solar and be the most cost effective energy source on earth.
Talking about cost efficiency in power production is impossible as long as the default option is that we will burn fossil fuel when the power grid request more power than is being produced by other sources.
The most cost efficient way today is to use renewable sources like wind and solar when they produce, and natural gas when they don't. Gas powered generators can on demand easily be turned on or off, and pipe lines makes the import/export very cost effective so it can reach the target market quickly with minimal costs. The combination also allow for partial build up and short time between investment and revenue, while nuclear plants have all the cost up front and take long time to build.
It should not be a major surprise that many new natural gas power plants is currently being built in the US, and in the rest of the world. If I read the articles/numbers correctly it is the most common type of new power plants being built, with the second most common being wind in areas where wind expect to be profitable.
The good news is that natural gas is also replacing coal and oil. The bad news is that they are replacing nuclear. Natural gas is about half as dirty as coal, but half as dirty as coal does not sound that great of a replacement for nuclear.
> nobody can make nuclear plants cost efficiently anymore.
Russia and China disagree with you. The French and American troubles with building new nuclear plants is more linked to the demise of the state-driven industry in those countries than to some inherent difficulties with nuclear itself.
Unless you're lucky to live next to hydro, or unless you do like China and steamroll over your citizens building massive hydro, there's nothing cheaper, overall, than nuclear.
> nobody can make nuclear plants cost efficiently anymore
Nobody ever could! Nuclear power generation, from its infancy, has been outrageously subsidized, both directly (i.e. DoE grants, government funding of waste disposal) and indirectly (industrial-scale refining of fuel as a side effect of the weapons industry). Once those sources dried up it just plain stopped making sense.
At the end of the day it needs to stand on its own to make sense, and it can't, especially when compared to its green (and largely unsubsidized!) competitors. People who really want this to happen need to solve the technical problems and then come back with a plan.
To riff on the title: it's not "anti nuclear" to be anti-pro-nuclear. Make it work first before shouting about it on the internet.
> nobody can make nuclear plants cost efficiently anymore.
That is simply factually untrue. You can get cost effective nuclear plants from China or South Korea right now.
The core problem with nuclear has always been that if every reactor is a bespoke thing, it will be expensive. Mass production helps with nuclear as with everything else, that has been true whenever we saw a large expansion of nuclear power.
Trying GenIV reactors on a 'small' scale is simply not possible.
> The big problem is that nuclear is essentially a big government project, and America is very bad at those.
Then go to South Korea and order 50 reactors, give them access to US labor and let them build it.
First the author tells us that if we consider ourselves pro or anti nuclear we can't possibly have thought through the pros and cons of nuclear power. It must be because we identify ourselves as left or right. Or green or not.
Then he tells us that if we _do_ have a policy position, we are probably wrong because "its complicated". All of which I find mildly insulting.
Then he proceeds to look at nuclear "purely though the lens of climate change", which as far as I'm concerned is not useful because many of the reasons one might choose to be anti-nuclear are not climate change related.
I found it good informative reading, compared to biased articles or comments that cover only one side. These articles are written for the masses, not people who have spent dozens of hours studying every nuance and came to an opinion.
If such people do comment on the article, I'd rather hope they comment on specifics rather than just say "writer is a snob, article sux".
The point of every Vox article is to justify the existence of Matthew Yglesias-style centrist neoliberal wonks. "All problems are too complicated for the average American to understand! The answer is always somewhere in the middle! Go to sleep and let the adults in the room handle this!"
When Bernie/AOC lead with rhetoric like "climate change requires WWII levels of mobilization", it strikes me odd that they think that level of change is feasible, but that the unprecedented mobilization and centralization of efforts can't be applied to nuclear technology. It's bizarre and makes me think that it's a blatant political agenda much more than sensible application of technology to solve problems in the world.
What is bizarre about it? Not all options are equally good investments - some are clearly preferable over others. Why insist on new nuclear power when so much evidence shows it is not needed?
As an aside, I was surprised by the repeated use of "climate hawk" throughout the article as an identity that we might be interested in taking on. Could they have said e.g. "people concerned about climate change"? I may just not know the term's history.
If it's really the case that the only way to make nuclear viable is to deregulate the industry, then Bernie is absolutely right that we need to end reliance on nuclear power.
I just so much hate how anytime the solution to anything is 'deregulation' its meet with utter horror. Just using the word 'deregulation' is basically a political death sentence.
Even when deregulation things like airplanes, logistics and lots and lots of other industry has been very beneficial.
I don't think people even realize to what absurd extend the anti-nuclear movement had managed to attack nuclear energy. To the point where it is basically impossible to build any kind of new reactor in the US.
There are only two types of regulation, for extremely tiny research reactors that are whole unsuited for researching actual power reactors. Or full deployment ready reactors that meet all the regulation of a current reactor.
Now the current regulation says that you need to have a way to cool steam. Well, a sodium or molten salt reactor (or lots of others) simply don't have steam that can be cooled. Meaning that LOTS of technical requirements that are only valid for one specific type of reactor and a specific way of building that reactor is valid at all.
Now we can argue over the expect right regulation needed to run a nuclear plant but arguing that 'deregulation' as a concept is so horrible that its worth trying to destroy the biggest source of carbon free energy is beyond dogmatic and wholly irrational.
Its simply outright refusing to deal with the problems of the nuclear industry based on principle rather then actually trying to evaluate the real problems with the current set of regulations (that are widely acknowledged by people from the industry and even within the government itself).
You can't have the real, workable New Green Deal without nuclear power. Anyone who says we're heading towards a climate catastrophe and is against 4th gen nuclear (thorium) at the same time is a hypocrite. Here we have something both sides of the aisle will support, irrespective even of their views on climate change, let's get to work and if there are safety concerns, let's mount an effort to address those. Once those are conclusively addressed, it will be easier to deregulate the industry and make it cheaper to build nuclear power plants. Thorium is abundant. There are now reactors that can utilize "nuclear waste" as well, so that problem could be solved too, I'm pretty sure.
I would be willing to bet that it will be dramatically cheaper than $10T "deals" floated so far. Shit, getting fusion to work with net energy gain will likely cost less than $1T all in all (although it'll take time).
If done properly, we could finally end up with electricity that's "too cheap to meter", and massively reduce the need for coal, oil, and gas, all without having to hobble the entire domestic industries and force them to burn coal in China instead.
I have met with quite unreasonable (to my mind) fears about nuclear waste's supposed deleterious effects on people and nature, even if stored in a remote underground facility. Whenever people have gut reactions without evidence, the conversation quickly becomes non-productive.
When these conversations take place in the policy space, everyone agrees to do nothing, and you end up with situations where power plants with <100 year lifetimes are de facto storage facilities for the foreseeable future.
Living in New York, all of the nuclear facilities will be decommissioned in my lifetime, and the ratepayers or taxpayers will be paying for upkeep of the storage components for decades or centuries. We already have to provide direct subsidy just to keep them operating as they aren’t financially viable.
The main argument against nuclear is that it absolutely requires a highly educated, well organized society and workforce. If something really serious disrupts our elaborated, complex societies, then nuclear plants will become really dangerous.
With looming climate change, energy crisis, overpopulation and other problems, you can't be sure that we'll be in a stable enough world long enough to be completely safe.
>The main argument against nuclear is that it absolutely requires a highly educated, well organized society and workforce. If something really serious disrupts our elaborated, complex societies, then nuclear plants will become really dangerous.
No, i think the main arguments against nuclear is the impact of the problem if something goes really wrong and that everybody is cutting corners making a technology more unsafe than it could be.
I'm amazed we've had so few accidents, considering how many nuclear plants are located all around Europe. Recently I was reading about an incident in Ukraine, where workers from a nuclear power plant connected the internal network to the internet to mine bitcoin.
It's a shame there's no avherald for nuclear power, I bet it would be an interesting read. C. Perrow had access to industry journals when documenting the chapter on nuclear in his "Normal accidents" book. The incidents described there were mind-boggling.
Yup. Plus, with nuclear, even if we do everything as safely as possible, there's always a tail risk of a VERY negative event due to causes outside our control.
I'm yet to understand why this part of the argument is often so readily dismissed.
The alternative can be even worse though. Even well maintained coal and natural gas plants pollute more, and are responsible for more deaths than the worst case of nuclear power
The other main argument I hear all the time is that building a new nuclear power plant today is so expensive that it will never pay for itself at current electricity prices.
How do plants deal with rising water from floods, or falling water from drying out, or overly hot cooling water from high temperatures? These are all in our future. I'm genuinely curious and not trying to troll
Sorry folks give up the ghost nuclear was dead at least 3 decades ago. Solar and wind are the future. We don’t have a decade to build a new nuclear plant, in that plan we’d need a time machine going backa decade to abate climate change that’s now locked in. I’ll spare you all the risks and externalities, it’s just dumb. Again sorry.
You don't think we will need more power than solar and wind can provide in 10 years? Our energy consumption has historically only increased, even with strong conversation campaigns, we should assume this trend will continue.
Carbon neutral is a fancy way of saying "let's pollute the same as we do now". Generally achieved via fake offsets, as we do not have the technology to offset something like US pollution.
Even EU ETS (the most developed offset system) is much too slow to cause major dent in the problem.
Where most climate predictions require us to stop altogether to avoid most painful results of climate change.
- cutting down the very few square kilometers of forest we have because the EU declared that everyone has to be carbon neutral or pay fines, and 'wood pellets' are considered 'renewable' energy sources by the administration. The cabinet minister in charge has admitted to the absurdity but stated he is not going to stop the practice as this would lead to being fined.
- keeping open severely damaged aging nuclear plants even when under the protest of several neighboring countries recognizing the dangers. The person in charge of this matter at the energy minister's cabinet just moved through he revolving door and got a very cozy 'job' at the company that owns and operates the plants. The energy minister was not amused as it is customary to await the next elections before cashing in and this person moved in a potential election preamble period.
- The nuclear test facility operated by the government has once more run out of storage space for nuclear waste. In the 'good old days' they just dumped all the waste in the North Sea (it's still there), but now they have to store it. The cement vats they have been using were leaking in the past, and now they have ran out of space for storing them as the piles keep on growing.
Nuclear might be sound in theory, but humans just can't handle the responsibility in practice. And the one answer a neoliberal market economy based socio-economic system is incapable of providing is abstinence, as it is systemically antithetical to it and outside of its potential solution space.
viburnum|6 years ago
The_rationalist|6 years ago
Unlike most technologies nuclear power plant building cost has increased over time (5 times) Mostly among other things (e.g lack of standardization except France), the huge current cost is because of irrational, overengeenered safety specifications. America could trivially build cheap power plants like in 70s and it would still make statistically less deaths than wind or solar and be the most cost effective energy source on earth.
Even taking into account modern occidental power plants, they are still mostly competitive with fossil and destroy other clean energy sources. Source: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a...
belorn|6 years ago
The most cost efficient way today is to use renewable sources like wind and solar when they produce, and natural gas when they don't. Gas powered generators can on demand easily be turned on or off, and pipe lines makes the import/export very cost effective so it can reach the target market quickly with minimal costs. The combination also allow for partial build up and short time between investment and revenue, while nuclear plants have all the cost up front and take long time to build.
It should not be a major surprise that many new natural gas power plants is currently being built in the US, and in the rest of the world. If I read the articles/numbers correctly it is the most common type of new power plants being built, with the second most common being wind in areas where wind expect to be profitable.
The good news is that natural gas is also replacing coal and oil. The bad news is that they are replacing nuclear. Natural gas is about half as dirty as coal, but half as dirty as coal does not sound that great of a replacement for nuclear.
littlestymaar|6 years ago
Russia and China disagree with you. The French and American troubles with building new nuclear plants is more linked to the demise of the state-driven industry in those countries than to some inherent difficulties with nuclear itself.
jhayward|6 years ago
With one exception (Flammanville, 11 years over schedule and 400% over budget) no new plants are planned.
willis936|6 years ago
bassman9000|6 years ago
You have to account for the externalities of the only cheaper thing out there (fossil fuels).
And then there's this
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Unless you're lucky to live next to hydro, or unless you do like China and steamroll over your citizens building massive hydro, there's nothing cheaper, overall, than nuclear.
glogla|6 years ago
ajross|6 years ago
Nobody ever could! Nuclear power generation, from its infancy, has been outrageously subsidized, both directly (i.e. DoE grants, government funding of waste disposal) and indirectly (industrial-scale refining of fuel as a side effect of the weapons industry). Once those sources dried up it just plain stopped making sense.
At the end of the day it needs to stand on its own to make sense, and it can't, especially when compared to its green (and largely unsubsidized!) competitors. People who really want this to happen need to solve the technical problems and then come back with a plan.
To riff on the title: it's not "anti nuclear" to be anti-pro-nuclear. Make it work first before shouting about it on the internet.
nickik|6 years ago
That is simply factually untrue. You can get cost effective nuclear plants from China or South Korea right now.
The core problem with nuclear has always been that if every reactor is a bespoke thing, it will be expensive. Mass production helps with nuclear as with everything else, that has been true whenever we saw a large expansion of nuclear power.
Trying GenIV reactors on a 'small' scale is simply not possible.
> The big problem is that nuclear is essentially a big government project, and America is very bad at those.
Then go to South Korea and order 50 reactors, give them access to US labor and let them build it.
gingabriska|6 years ago
[deleted]
jay_kyburz|6 years ago
First the author tells us that if we consider ourselves pro or anti nuclear we can't possibly have thought through the pros and cons of nuclear power. It must be because we identify ourselves as left or right. Or green or not.
Then he tells us that if we _do_ have a policy position, we are probably wrong because "its complicated". All of which I find mildly insulting.
Then he proceeds to look at nuclear "purely though the lens of climate change", which as far as I'm concerned is not useful because many of the reasons one might choose to be anti-nuclear are not climate change related.
belltaco|6 years ago
If such people do comment on the article, I'd rather hope they comment on specifics rather than just say "writer is a snob, article sux".
rmrfrmrf|6 years ago
DiogenesKynikos|6 years ago
gnusty_gnurc|6 years ago
bjourne|6 years ago
The_rationalist|6 years ago
csours|6 years ago
murftown|6 years ago
As an aside, I was surprised by the repeated use of "climate hawk" throughout the article as an identity that we might be interested in taking on. Could they have said e.g. "people concerned about climate change"? I may just not know the term's history.
Whatarethese|6 years ago
rmrfrmrf|6 years ago
nickik|6 years ago
Even when deregulation things like airplanes, logistics and lots and lots of other industry has been very beneficial.
I don't think people even realize to what absurd extend the anti-nuclear movement had managed to attack nuclear energy. To the point where it is basically impossible to build any kind of new reactor in the US.
There are only two types of regulation, for extremely tiny research reactors that are whole unsuited for researching actual power reactors. Or full deployment ready reactors that meet all the regulation of a current reactor.
Now the current regulation says that you need to have a way to cool steam. Well, a sodium or molten salt reactor (or lots of others) simply don't have steam that can be cooled. Meaning that LOTS of technical requirements that are only valid for one specific type of reactor and a specific way of building that reactor is valid at all.
Now we can argue over the expect right regulation needed to run a nuclear plant but arguing that 'deregulation' as a concept is so horrible that its worth trying to destroy the biggest source of carbon free energy is beyond dogmatic and wholly irrational.
Its simply outright refusing to deal with the problems of the nuclear industry based on principle rather then actually trying to evaluate the real problems with the current set of regulations (that are widely acknowledged by people from the industry and even within the government itself).
m0zg|6 years ago
I would be willing to bet that it will be dramatically cheaper than $10T "deals" floated so far. Shit, getting fusion to work with net energy gain will likely cost less than $1T all in all (although it'll take time).
If done properly, we could finally end up with electricity that's "too cheap to meter", and massively reduce the need for coal, oil, and gas, all without having to hobble the entire domestic industries and force them to burn coal in China instead.
SubiculumCode|6 years ago
Spooky23|6 years ago
Living in New York, all of the nuclear facilities will be decommissioned in my lifetime, and the ratepayers or taxpayers will be paying for upkeep of the storage components for decades or centuries. We already have to provide direct subsidy just to keep them operating as they aren’t financially viable.
That’s why nuclear doesn’t get built today.
Jill_the_Pill|6 years ago
wazoox|6 years ago
With looming climate change, energy crisis, overpopulation and other problems, you can't be sure that we'll be in a stable enough world long enough to be completely safe.
BurningFrog|6 years ago
chefkoch|6 years ago
No, i think the main arguments against nuclear is the impact of the problem if something goes really wrong and that everybody is cutting corners making a technology more unsafe than it could be.
blub|6 years ago
It's a shame there's no avherald for nuclear power, I bet it would be an interesting read. C. Perrow had access to industry journals when documenting the chapter on nuclear in his "Normal accidents" book. The incidents described there were mind-boggling.
mandelbrotwurst|6 years ago
I'm yet to understand why this part of the argument is often so readily dismissed.
gnopgnip|6 years ago
dagw|6 years ago
The other main argument I hear all the time is that building a new nuclear power plant today is so expensive that it will never pay for itself at current electricity prices.
cm2187|6 years ago
rhino369|6 years ago
Making the collapse of society a little worse isn't something we should worry about.
delinka|6 years ago
But don't we? We have to be completely polarized on every topic. How else will the binary political system survive?
OK, onward without the sarcasm ... This same kind of critical thinking must be applied to every issue, or we'll just end up in the dark ages again.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
elchief|6 years ago
kjar|6 years ago
aeternum|6 years ago
realusername|6 years ago
There's not a single country in the world which manages to run on solar and wind only or which could in a realistic future.
fnord77|6 years ago
monieseee|6 years ago
[deleted]
AstralStorm|6 years ago
Even EU ETS (the most developed offset system) is much too slow to cause major dent in the problem.
Where most climate predictions require us to stop altogether to avoid most painful results of climate change.
hollerith|6 years ago
"Carbon neutral" has a precise definition, and that's definitely not it.
PeterStuer|6 years ago
Over here we are:
- cutting down the very few square kilometers of forest we have because the EU declared that everyone has to be carbon neutral or pay fines, and 'wood pellets' are considered 'renewable' energy sources by the administration. The cabinet minister in charge has admitted to the absurdity but stated he is not going to stop the practice as this would lead to being fined.
- keeping open severely damaged aging nuclear plants even when under the protest of several neighboring countries recognizing the dangers. The person in charge of this matter at the energy minister's cabinet just moved through he revolving door and got a very cozy 'job' at the company that owns and operates the plants. The energy minister was not amused as it is customary to await the next elections before cashing in and this person moved in a potential election preamble period.
- The nuclear test facility operated by the government has once more run out of storage space for nuclear waste. In the 'good old days' they just dumped all the waste in the North Sea (it's still there), but now they have to store it. The cement vats they have been using were leaking in the past, and now they have ran out of space for storing them as the piles keep on growing.
Nuclear might be sound in theory, but humans just can't handle the responsibility in practice. And the one answer a neoliberal market economy based socio-economic system is incapable of providing is abstinence, as it is systemically antithetical to it and outside of its potential solution space.