I want to believe that the mainstream could accept nuclear again but I don't have huge hopes. I'm French, we've been getting cheaper and cleaner electricity than our neighbors for a long time. Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down.
And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more. I find it depressing personally. We're at 75% now, apparently we're on track to hit 50% by 2035. There's nuclear waste and there's a waste of nuclear.
One of the things I find amazing about France is that out of all the energy they produce about 17% if from recycled nuclear[0]. Not 17% of the total nuclear power is from recycled, 17% of TOTAL power is from recycled nuclear. That's pretty neat!
And with regards to greenhouse gasses, hard to argue with this [1].
That being said, I don't mind the the reduction to 50% by 2035. Renewables are a good thing. I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...). If slack can be picked up by renewables and that lessens the requirement for nuclear, that's a good thing. As long as this reduction doesn't involve building coal or natural gas plants in place of nuclear, I'm all in support of it (i.e. nuclear is being replaced purely by renewables). Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first.
Nuclear will forever be shunned, not because it's inherently unsafe, but rather because WE are unsafe.
Every nuclear disaster so far has exposed incompetence, negligence, corruption, or unsafe practices at some level, and has usually been accompanied by delays, denials, and attempts to bury the evidence. When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable.
Ans since human nature and psychology is not going to magically evolve over the next couple of centuries, and since there's no such thing as a foolproof design, reducing nuclear power is a pragmatic approach, even if it causes a temporary increase in dirtier energy production (up to a point, of course).
My personal opinion is that in large part, the reason people have such an aversion to nuclear power is the imagery that is associated with the word "nuclear". Bring up the word, and there is an immediate association with nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, irradiated wastelands. Just think of how many entertainment properties use the trope of a nuclear wasteland or things glowing green, mutants and radiation beasts..etc.
We know that media significantly affects culture, so it's not that surprising to me that if how we picture nuclear anything in entertainment leaks into how people think of it in the real world.
We're also not very good about perceiving continued effects. The radiation that a coal plant spits out is in effect diffuse. Yes there's a lot, but its a lot over a time scale instead of immediately. Whereas a nuclear meltdown, well, that's quick and extremely potent. We're far more likely to react to the latter viscerally. For a parallel, consider air travel vs car travel. Air travel is far safer per miles traveled, but we still get our collective panties in a bunch over airplane accidents, despite there being far more car accidents in any given span of time.
I think nuclear power's biggest issue is image. It has far too many negative associations in most people's minds. Until that image is changed, I don't know if nuclear power is viable culturally. Maybe once we start going further out in space and nuclear becomes the only viable power source, that might change. Right now, a few RTG-powered probes aren't going to do it.
> Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down
When nuclear is shut down, it's often replaced by coal. See also Japan, with a lot of coal plants coming up:
"It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming."
Ugh, if the US had just kept up the pace of nuclear construction in the 80s instead of shutting it down, we would be approaching 100% CO2-free electricity today. Not 50 years from now, today. But we threw it all away!
Nuclear isn't failing because of safety or waste or political negativity. It's failing because it's too expensive. France is giving up on new nuclear plants because the can't build them sufficiently cheaply.
Ultimately, this comes back to the unforgiving complexity of nuclear technology. The plants have to be big to get economies of scale, but then they have so many critical parts that the economies of scale are illusory. A truly scalable technology is made of large numbers of mostly independent pieces that don't have to be so expensively reliable.
I'm a brit and would be in favour of nuclear if it was cheap and safe but the progress of our Hinkley C reactor has not been promising on the 'cheap' bit.
>construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion.[7][8] The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion,
Mainstream acceptance is like third or maybe fourth on the list of biggest roadblocks to nuclear power. The simple truth is that nuclear electricity is outrageously expensive relative not just to gas but to renewables. The plants represent huge investments, and waste storage remains a problem that has literally never been solved by the market (i.e. nuclear waste processing has always been a government subsidy in some form or another).
Nuclear needs to make sense on a balance sheet first before you'll see uptake from environmentalists like me. But it'll happen. Make it a cheap carbon-free energy source and I guarantee you we'll advocate for it. Right now it mostly looks like another boondoggle.
That is not quite correct. There was a lot of discussion about the coal plant in question (Datteln 4). It is ready built, but might not have gotten into the operation at all. In the end, it seems it goes into production replacing some very old east german coal plants which get shut down early. Supposedly, the new plant is cleaner and more efficient than the aged cold plants it replaces. Usage of coal in Germany is in a strong decline, as CO2 certificates and the carbon tax are making it less and less attractive for the power companies.
Closing the nuclear power plants certainly increases the challenges in becinung CO2 neutral, but we are talking about aging power plants which would have to be closed pretty soon anyway.
Which is an even bigger problem for France, its fleet of reactors is approaching the end of the life time and there are not enough new reactors being built to replace the aging reactors. So the reduction of nuclear energie is the direct consequence of that, independant of ecological concerns.
If we can just get some carbon tax, I think these projects will be be forced into existence whether people like it or not, which in turn will allow a higher carbon tax.
Let's do everything to kick this virtuous cycle off.
What is mainstream? Western world? I think that many countries are building nuclear plants and will build more, for example China where real world production concentrates nowadays.
I wonder what will happen when people realize there are other sources of radioactive waste [1] ... they may either seek to reduce those as well or lose interest in eliminating nuclear energy.
I have a possibly rude but serious question. Do you think French culture, which stereotypically at least is more at home with a centralized, top-down control, might be more suited for nuclear development than Angloamerican which tends to be more ad hoc?
I tend to believe technocracy should be encouraged. I wish science could have an important place in politics, and hold some form of power. Maybe the word scio-cracy should be invented.
> And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more.
The problem with nuclear is that they don't have the lobby and the political backing that oil and gas does.
> Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down.
"Partially" while we fight with the russians over who gets to supply germany with natural gas.
Much of the geopolitical issues today results from the fight over who gets sell gas where and who buys gas from whom. When you supply energy to a country, you have leverage over a country. It's why we limit how much energy russia supplies to japan, korea, etc. It's why we got upset when russia built a major pipeline from siberia to china. It's also why russia wants to build more pipelines to germany/europe. It's also why iran is such a major issue ( guess who has the largest gas reserves in the world? ).
"Clean gas" isn't winning because they are "cleaner" than anything, it's because the players backing gas are much more powerful than those backing nuclear. In the near term, it will be "clean" oil and gas dominating the energy sector. Unless Trump is successful with his "clean" coal.
Oh please, you make it look like it wasn't Germany jumping in when your old and already long overdue reactors fell apart again and need to be shut down for repairs or when your rivers were too hot because...summer and they couldn't provide cooling anymore.
Germany is moving away from coal. They have a plan, a timeline and everything that was slowing them down was politics. There are voters to be lost around coal. Especially in the east where right wing populists are getting strong.
It was not about power requirements (https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374) and the only reason this one coal plant is being opened is because they got the allowance for it before the whole political process started and buying them out of it would cost even more than the industry is getting through massive lobbying.
Which brings us back to costs: those astronomical amounts of money Germany drowned into nuclear energy just to sit on it's remains for hundreds and hundreds of years costing the taxpayer while they get nothing back for it.
There is absolutely no need for more of the same when there are alternative energies which get better from year to year and decade to decade and do not leave radioactive was behind them.
The whole article reads like a punchline for a joke involving Admiral Rickover's famous letter. (We just had a thread on it here not two weeks ago!)
"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
We should have built more nuclear 20 years ago, but it seems it's too late now. The design of reactors that are actually built is extremely conservative, it still takes forever to plan them and get appropriate permissions, and then they take nearly a decade to build. Meanwhile the price of wind+storage is dropping. If you were to start planning a new reactor now, by the time it's operational it might be uneconomical to even turn on. And even if it isn't, it's extremely unlikely that you make your investment back over the lifespan of the plant, especially once you add the decommissioning (which is more expensive than the construction of the plant, because a lot of the structure turns slightly radioactive).
We had our chance, we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs. Now the economics of those designs no longer make sense for new plants, and nobody is going to risk a fortune on building unproven large-scale reactor designs. There's some opportunity with reactors sized like those on ships, but that's it.
Fukushima was a big influence in the most recent hate on nuclear energy. In laymans views, the fact that a (perceived to be) secure, organized country such as Japan had such a terrible nuclear incident, meant that every nuclear plant on the planet was dangerous and we were being lied about.
Politicians simply moved along that line. It doesn't matter that coal is worse for the environment. A nuclear incident can cost your head. Climate change? Clearly nobody cares.
IQ2 had a debate on nuclear power. One of the arguments against expansion was that nuclear reactor design is basically bespoke for every installation and that the promise of rapid, cheap deployment has not been realized in many years (decades).
While reading the article, I repeatedly thought "wow this reads like a big ad for nuclear power".
Almost all passages of the very long text pointed out how great it is. It gives only a hand-wavey comment to the problem of what do we do with the waste that will remain toxic for thousands of years to come. Its not a technical but a political problem. Uhm, okay. And the other problem that uranium is much scarcer than previously thought is not even mentioned.
Atomic energy is way cleaner when it comes to immediate CO2 generation - true. But the long term problem of waste is not solved at all.
"... What if we could produce more power—and do it affordably, with minimal environmental impact? That’s the almost utopian vision that some backers see for the next generation of nuclear power. ..."
Utopian?! We are adding gigawatts of wind and solar this year, and modulo coronavirus we'll add more next year. New geothermal plants are measured in dozens of megawatts:
"According to Ted Nordhaus, founder of the “eco-modernist” Breakthrough Institute, SMRs could offer a more decentralized, entrepreneurial approach to reducing CO2 emissions without hobbling the economy."
Wind and solar are extremely de-centralized and competitive. The economies that install them at scale—China, California—are doing as well as any.
“Will any of them ultimately be a success in the marketplace? You can’t say for sure,” he said. “But I think a bunch of them will get licenses to build test plants.”"
While we are waiting, offshore wind farms will continue to be installed at hundred-megawatt scale:
Please continue promoting new nuclear; we could really use it. But please stop with the anti-variable-renewable BS, and FFS stop giving Nordhaus airtime when he insist on talking like this.
"The US Energy Information Administration has recommended that levelized costs of non-dispatchable sources such as wind or solar may be better compared to the avoided energy cost rather than to the LCOE of dispatchable sources such as fossil fuels or geothermal. This is because introduction of fluctuating power sources may or may not avoid capital and maintenance costs of backup dispatchable sources. Levelized avoided cost of energy (LACE) is the avoided costs from other sources divided by the annual yearly output of the non-dispatchable source."
Wind and solar still don't scale as well as a nuclear plant. It is the the most compact way to generate a few gigawatts of energy in one place without re-routing a huge river. Likewise, the big problem with wind and solar is that the areas where they are economical to install (e.g. Western China) are often far away from where the energy is needed (e.g. Eastern China), and transmission over long distances still hasn't been worked out.
Advanced nuclear reactor designer here. It is tough times in the industry. The large traditional reactors in the West (US, France, UK) are really struggling. Existing reactors have operations costs that were fine until fracked natural gas pulled the floor out on electricity prices. Now they're struggling. New builds have been boondoggles because contracts went to lowest bidders, who had no idea how to build nuclear plants. The people are focused on intermittent clean sources like wind and solar, with due cause as solar PV prices fell by a factor of 10x since 2009 (as long as the sun is shining).
Meanwhile there has been a bunch of hype about "new" reactors (quoted because they were all initially conceived of and tested in the 1950s). Thorium. Molten Salt. Small Modular. Traveling Wave. Microreactors. These will have less waste and be safer! But will it matter? As I've grown in experience and expertise, I've started looking at the numbers more. Nuclear waste has great solutions in crystalline bedrock (Onkalo), massive salt (WIPP), and deep boreholes (Deep Isolation). If a reactor makes a little bit less, will that move the needle for the public? In terms of safety, current reactors are statistically extraordinarily safe because they don't participate in causing the 4.2 million deaths/year from air pollution (a Chernobyl of death every 2.5 days from the fossil industry). So if a new reactor is slightly safer, will all the anti-nuclear institutions roll over begging for one? I highly doubt it.
Besides, with tech development in nuclear, it's fleet experience that matters. Many MSR designs make vast amounts of tritium and require remote maintenance. Will this be doable? Will releases be acceptable? Only fleet experience can tell. Never believe someone who's never built a nuclear plant on what their design will cost.
These smaller reactors will absolutely struggle economically, especially at first.
More and more I think it's really public communication/PR/education that matters most for nuclear.
Chinese and Russian reactors, on the other hand, are doing better, with Russia seemingly selling VVERs like hotcakes, and moving into markets like Nigeria soon.
I recently wrote up an elaborate page about early reactor development history [1] and about more modern nuclear economics [2] if anyone wants a deep dive. I've been thinking of turning these into a book.
> Never believe someone who's never built a nuclear plant on what their design will cost.
> More and more I think it's really public communication/PR/education that matters most for nuclear.
I'm almost 30 years old and I live in France. While I see nuclear science as very cool and futuristic, I also just dont want to see anymore nuclear reactors. Especially since we showed that batteries and renewable energies have room for improvements.
Even people who are supposed to know how to build nuclear reactors don't know how to do it :
Flamanville's reactor has 10 years of lag and costs tripled to billions of euros. Guess where does the money come from ? Our taxes.
All this money (and UK money) could have been invested in consuming less (smarter consumption, more efficiency), improve battery technologies and improve renewable energies.
To me, the goal of 50% of nuclear energy should even be lowered to 30%.
Everywhere I've lived in the US that has nuclear power in the mix (Pittsburgh and Georgia) has a surcharge on rates because of the cost of the plant, and we end up paying a higher rate than other areas that don't have nuclear. Are there localities in the US where nuclear has beaten the cost-benefit curve?
It's such a b.s. article and is likely written by the nuclear industry. There are many factual problems but I'll just point out one: the idea that wind and solar will never be enough. Here's a study that includes wind, solar & storage and gets 100% coverage:
That's NuScale again. They're building a reactor at the Idaho reactor test station, where, if something goes wrong, it's not too bad.
It's not a technical breakthrough. It's an argument that full containment isn't necessary. While the design is supposed to be immune to loss of cooling power, it still has other potential problems. Multiple reactors share the same cooling pool, so if one has a leak, the whole group gets contaminated. If the cooling pool leaks into the ground and you can't refill, as might happen in an earthquake, you could have a meltdown.
It's not really small, either. Each unit is 60 megawatts, and a plant is 12 units, at 0.72GW. Almost 3/4 of an AP 1000.
The issues is partly political. We could overcome that.
Partly technological: risk of fallout, and more ugly - long term storage.
But really, the issue nobody thinks about is proliferation.
If the West started pumping out 5 cent/mmh electricity and booming, you can be darn sure every tin pot fool everywhere in the world would be as well. After all, why shouldn't they?
But Canada will manage it's boring, hardened facilities extremely well. The entire economy of Canada is not based on anything really intelligent - just 'boring, consistent responsibility and stability' - which is exactly what you want for such things.
But how long will stability remain around Nigeria's 20 new reactors? Hey - they convinced us that 'everything was fine' and that it was 'Colonialist and Evil to require external, rigorous inspection'. But now there's a regime change, a civil war breaking out. A rebel group has nabbed a reactor. A second reactor the staff are fleeing because Boko Haram is in the area. The US president wants to send in Marines to lock down the facilities immediately, but wary it will just erupt in more violence immediately.
Obviously that's hugely speculative, but if/when nuclear power breaks up with 100's of reactors popping up everywhere - something like this will happen - somewhere.
I think we can conquor public opinion and figure out 'long term' issues with enough focus and innovation.
But this requires 'highly responsible civilisation' almost universally so that something doesn't blow up somewhere in the long tail.
Since most of the world actually isn't ready for that responsibility, what do we do? Controls? How? Can we tell them 'no'? We could block Somalia from getting nuke power ... but probably not most other places.
I’m sorry but this article sounds like some pretty egregious reactionary astroturfing. Harping on and on about the cost of the Green New Deal as a given is suspicious in itself. Of course infrastructure investment programs have costs. It just happens that the public would see dividends from it, not just a handful of industrialists.
No body seems to have address the cost of Nuclear. There are solar farms in Portugal and Abu Dhabi that cost below $0.02 / kWh non-subsidise. And it seems Sub 1 cents / kWh, what was previously thought to be impossible are now within reach in this decade. How is Nuclear going to compete?
I think right now the race is for utility scale Battery. And this goal seems to be a lot easier to achieve than having a cost competitive Nuclear reactor.
Note: I am not pro Solar or Anti Nuclear, in fact I pretty much want Nuclear to succeed in the long term since I dont like the idea massive land area being used for solar, not every country has the luxury of doing so especially those with limited sunlight hours. But looking at the cost alone it seems solar is hard to compete against.
I just watched the Chernobyl HBO series, and I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between that disaster and COVID-19, at least in the US.
Those who lead governments are inherently motivated by self-preservation first and foremost, meaning that when something really bad happens, the inclination is to minimize the perception of a problem without considering the cost.
That inclination cost thousands of lives in Ukraine in 1986, and will cost thousands of lives around the world now because leaders didn’t listen to the experts early on. Not to mention the constant war on science and intellectualism that has been permeating American politics for years.
This is the price we pay to live in the political environment we have.
A very interesting concept and I am looking forward to see how it works out. Industrial production of small reactors has the potential to improve the economics a bit and I hope their safety is as good as promised. However the article doesn't talk about a few key points: what are the costs per kWh being produced they are aiming for? The article talks about the reactors being "clean", but doesn't mention what happens with the nuclear waster. What other costs for longterm operations (many decades) have to be calculated? Can the whole reactors be returned to the manufacturer for recycling? The viability of any new concept depends on answering these questions.
Meanwhile, especially these small reactor units are under strong competiton from renewables. Solar plus battery becomes very cost-competitive, especially for small units. If we look towards Africa, solar is ideal there. Not only because the output level is high, but also because the seasonal variation is minimal. Storage mostly would have to last only over night.
And lets not forget about wind energy, which doesn't care about day or night and works very far up north.
They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't. I wish we just were not wasting so much money and effort on this. Solar and wind are already far cheaper, we need to be researching energy storage solutions to make the already cheap solar and wind energy more reliable and not looking for another dangerous boondoggle to make energy for, if we are lucky, ten times the price of solar. Even before the corona-virus hit, this past summer solar cell prices were 15 cents per watt. This is about half of what it was last year. Offshore wind prices are difficult to pin down in a per watt metric, but power companies are saying they are even cheaper than solar and the cheapest option. This is where our efforts should be pointed. We already have the cheap and safe energy we just need to make it more usable and reliable on the grid.
This is all institutional inertia. I know there are a lot of very smart people that studied fission and wanted to dedicate their careers to it and now they are really pissed off that the field is declining rapidly. I know they will all write angry posts in response and down vote me rapidly. I am sorry, I feel bad for you all but I do not wish to risk my life just so you have careers doing something unnecessary and dangerous. You are all very smart I am sure you can re-target your expertise towards power electronics, solid state physics or many of the other fields of physics that are hot right now.
And there is a lot of institutional inertia as well. During the cold war there was an endless stream of tax payer money pointed at anything and everything nuclear and now a lot of the institutions that benefited from it are fighting tooth and nail for relevance. I have the same thing to say to them -- there are other very needed and useful fields where you can direct your efforts.
> They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't.
What is "it" here? Fukushima for example was built in the 70s with a design which was even older. That seem like a very strange bar for "always promise it will be safe".
What nuclear plant designed in this century has ever been shown to not be safe? Are we always going to stay stuck on false promises made half a century ago?
It's already safer than almost all forms of electricity generation (and probably cheaper in bulk than solar and wind). However, it doesn't matter, because market forces favor small incremental additions, changes, and there is not enough inertia to properly do a 50+ plant megaproject.
I question whether it is ultimately cheaper, if all subsidies were taken away, the natural resource extraction and transportation costs are considered, the relatively short lifespan, e-waste and intermittent generation all taken into an account. I don’t know but I think what we see as “cheap solar/wind” is about as illusory as “cheap gas”. I’m not saying nuclear is “cheap” but relative to its reliability, productivity, lifespan balanced against its footprint, waste, etc, I’d believe that it were cheaper and more beneficial for all in the long run that wind/solar/tidal solutions. There’s a place for renewables, but replacement of fossil fuels seems like too big of an ask.
Many of us want to believe this. The problem is the general public doesn't have an appetite for it.
The HBO series Chernobyl is helping/not-helping that cause, but mostly not helping. It is really important not to forget history, not repeat, of course, but the series is bringing nuclear fears to the forefront. For better or worse, we're teaching a whole new generation to interalize those fears about a design that is still very much active [0].
As much as I want to believe the gen 4 reactors are safe and worth attempting, getting this to fly in the public minds is going to take more effort than it's probably worth. For the public, fission power has been poisoned. Single disasters that ruin 20+ years and whole regions of countries are valid/non-ignorable fears.
Large parts of me simply want to dump the money into chasing fusion. Even if it costs 1000x to get there, today money is not the problem - it's sentiment.
Corporations and governments use ad campaigns effectively all the time. I'm convinced that if you took a fraction of that fusion money and bombarded people with "nuclear is fine" ads for a year or two, public opinion would change. If a TV show can swing opinion one way, why can't something else swing it back?
Yes, fear is in the mind, but despite the fear, the danger is real.
Fear prevents progress but blindness to real danger can cause tragedy. You need to remember that although the HBO series brought nuclear fears to the forefront it is a series that is telling a relatively True story.
Be concerned with the truth, not what a truth can promote.
I think we should move forward with nuclear. But let's say I took away all the fear in the world right now and we started building nuclear power plants near every city, village and town where we and our children live.
I think even an optimist will hesitate before moving forward with such a proposition. Move forward, but move with caution.
What's strikes me is that the cost of operating a nuclear plant during its lifetime is actually unknown, making it the expensivest energy source. Why it is still in use : obviously because it serves as base technology and knowledge to build weapons.
Some example of hidden costs not included in nuclear kwh price :
- Cost of managing waste: How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes ?
- Risk prime to insure huge damage that could arise from accident or future leaks in storage area : Again this amount is so big, that this externality has to be socialized.
- Cost of dismantling a plant : Beside one or two exceptions, no plant has been successfully dismantled. All the planning and costs for the currently plan in dismantling are exploding and will take years and tons of capital ... leaving more unmanageable wastes and unusable lands.
All those aspects will become increasingly difficult to manage in countries that made the (bad) choice of going full nuclear a few years ago, like France.
People are scared of it, and don't understand fission. Popular docudrama shows, like Chernobyl, propagate myths that reactors can explode with "2-4 megaton power".[1]
Politicians won't back it because no one wants it in their back yard. And carbon gives them new revenue they can leverage and borrow against to balance the budget.[2]
I list more reasons at [3], which I link every time this comes up.
[+] [-] simias|6 years ago|reply
And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more. I find it depressing personally. We're at 75% now, apparently we're on track to hit 50% by 2035. There's nuclear waste and there's a waste of nuclear.
[+] [-] godelski|6 years ago|reply
And with regards to greenhouse gasses, hard to argue with this [1].
That being said, I don't mind the the reduction to 50% by 2035. Renewables are a good thing. I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...). If slack can be picked up by renewables and that lessens the requirement for nuclear, that's a good thing. As long as this reduction doesn't involve building coal or natural gas plants in place of nuclear, I'm all in support of it (i.e. nuclear is being replaced purely by renewables). Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first.
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?countryCode=FR&page=country
[+] [-] kstenerud|6 years ago|reply
Every nuclear disaster so far has exposed incompetence, negligence, corruption, or unsafe practices at some level, and has usually been accompanied by delays, denials, and attempts to bury the evidence. When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable.
Ans since human nature and psychology is not going to magically evolve over the next couple of centuries, and since there's no such thing as a foolproof design, reducing nuclear power is a pragmatic approach, even if it causes a temporary increase in dirtier energy production (up to a point, of course).
[+] [-] genocidicbunny|6 years ago|reply
We know that media significantly affects culture, so it's not that surprising to me that if how we picture nuclear anything in entertainment leaks into how people think of it in the real world.
We're also not very good about perceiving continued effects. The radiation that a coal plant spits out is in effect diffuse. Yes there's a lot, but its a lot over a time scale instead of immediately. Whereas a nuclear meltdown, well, that's quick and extremely potent. We're far more likely to react to the latter viscerally. For a parallel, consider air travel vs car travel. Air travel is far safer per miles traveled, but we still get our collective panties in a bunch over airplane accidents, despite there being far more car accidents in any given span of time.
I think nuclear power's biggest issue is image. It has far too many negative associations in most people's minds. Until that image is changed, I don't know if nuclear power is viable culturally. Maybe once we start going further out in space and nuclear becomes the only viable power source, that might change. Right now, a few RTG-powered probes aren't going to do it.
[+] [-] Reedx|6 years ago|reply
When nuclear is shut down, it's often replaced by coal. See also Japan, with a lot of coal plants coming up:
"It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...
And a lot of people aren't aware nuclear is the safest form of energy per TWh: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[+] [-] jjoonathan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|6 years ago|reply
Ultimately, this comes back to the unforgiving complexity of nuclear technology. The plants have to be big to get economies of scale, but then they have so many critical parts that the economies of scale are illusory. A truly scalable technology is made of large numbers of mostly independent pieces that don't have to be so expensively reliable.
[+] [-] tim333|6 years ago|reply
>construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion.[7][8] The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion,
As a result I say go batteries, wind, solar!
[+] [-] ajross|6 years ago|reply
Nuclear needs to make sense on a balance sheet first before you'll see uptake from environmentalists like me. But it'll happen. Make it a cheap carbon-free energy source and I guarantee you we'll advocate for it. Right now it mostly looks like another boondoggle.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|6 years ago|reply
How can a person having some idea about ecology ever advocate opening coal plants and closing nuclear ones?
[+] [-] _ph_|6 years ago|reply
Closing the nuclear power plants certainly increases the challenges in becinung CO2 neutral, but we are talking about aging power plants which would have to be closed pretty soon anyway.
Which is an even bigger problem for France, its fleet of reactors is approaching the end of the life time and there are not enough new reactors being built to replace the aging reactors. So the reduction of nuclear energie is the direct consequence of that, independant of ecological concerns.
[+] [-] Ericson2314|6 years ago|reply
Let's do everything to kick this virtuous cycle off.
[+] [-] vbezhenar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itronitron|6 years ago|reply
1. https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2019/06/an-extraordinaril...
[+] [-] xorcist|6 years ago|reply
In reality, EDF had sunk billions in debt, despite multiple injections of capital by the state.
[+] [-] maelito|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dntbnmpls|6 years ago|reply
The problem with nuclear is that they don't have the lobby and the political backing that oil and gas does.
> Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down.
"Partially" while we fight with the russians over who gets to supply germany with natural gas.
Much of the geopolitical issues today results from the fight over who gets sell gas where and who buys gas from whom. When you supply energy to a country, you have leverage over a country. It's why we limit how much energy russia supplies to japan, korea, etc. It's why we got upset when russia built a major pipeline from siberia to china. It's also why russia wants to build more pipelines to germany/europe. It's also why iran is such a major issue ( guess who has the largest gas reserves in the world? ).
"Clean gas" isn't winning because they are "cleaner" than anything, it's because the players backing gas are much more powerful than those backing nuclear. In the near term, it will be "clean" oil and gas dominating the energy sector. Unless Trump is successful with his "clean" coal.
[+] [-] Krasnol|6 years ago|reply
Germany is moving away from coal. They have a plan, a timeline and everything that was slowing them down was politics. There are voters to be lost around coal. Especially in the east where right wing populists are getting strong.
It was not about power requirements (https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374) and the only reason this one coal plant is being opened is because they got the allowance for it before the whole political process started and buying them out of it would cost even more than the industry is getting through massive lobbying.
Which brings us back to costs: those astronomical amounts of money Germany drowned into nuclear energy just to sit on it's remains for hundreds and hundreds of years costing the taxpayer while they get nothing back for it.
There is absolutely no need for more of the same when there are alternative energies which get better from year to year and decade to decade and do not leave radioactive was behind them.
For further reading on costs of this dead energy: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_... (fixed link to english version)
[+] [-] zipwitch|6 years ago|reply
"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
Link to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730
[+] [-] wongarsu|6 years ago|reply
We had our chance, we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs. Now the economics of those designs no longer make sense for new plants, and nobody is going to risk a fortune on building unproven large-scale reactor designs. There's some opportunity with reactors sized like those on ships, but that's it.
[+] [-] dr_zoidberg|6 years ago|reply
Politicians simply moved along that line. It doesn't matter that coal is worse for the environment. A nuclear incident can cost your head. Climate change? Clearly nobody cares.
[+] [-] tra3|6 years ago|reply
Interesting episode, I wish I retained more of it: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/02/10/iq2-debate-expand-n...
[+] [-] chris_engel|6 years ago|reply
Almost all passages of the very long text pointed out how great it is. It gives only a hand-wavey comment to the problem of what do we do with the waste that will remain toxic for thousands of years to come. Its not a technical but a political problem. Uhm, okay. And the other problem that uranium is much scarcer than previously thought is not even mentioned.
Atomic energy is way cleaner when it comes to immediate CO2 generation - true. But the long term problem of waste is not solved at all.
[+] [-] spenrose|6 years ago|reply
"But what if there were sources of zero-carbon electricity that didn’t require heavy-handed regulation to make them viable in the marketplace? ..."
Wind and solar are cheaper now than nuclear advocates hope nuclear will be by 2030.
1.https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
2. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/30/latest-bnef-report-find...
"... What if we could produce more power—and do it affordably, with minimal environmental impact? That’s the almost utopian vision that some backers see for the next generation of nuclear power. ..."
Utopian?! We are adding gigawatts of wind and solar this year, and modulo coronavirus we'll add more next year. New geothermal plants are measured in dozens of megawatts:
* https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-01-22/califor...
"According to Ted Nordhaus, founder of the “eco-modernist” Breakthrough Institute, SMRs could offer a more decentralized, entrepreneurial approach to reducing CO2 emissions without hobbling the economy."
Wind and solar are extremely de-centralized and competitive. The economies that install them at scale—China, California—are doing as well as any.
“Will any of them ultimately be a success in the marketplace? You can’t say for sure,” he said. “But I think a bunch of them will get licenses to build test plants.”"
While we are waiting, offshore wind farms will continue to be installed at hundred-megawatt scale:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms#La...
Please continue promoting new nuclear; we could really use it. But please stop with the anti-variable-renewable BS, and FFS stop giving Nordhaus airtime when he insist on talking like this.
[+] [-] DeathArrow|6 years ago|reply
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
So, is LCOE for wind and solar higher than LACE for nuclear power?
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|6 years ago|reply
Meanwhile there has been a bunch of hype about "new" reactors (quoted because they were all initially conceived of and tested in the 1950s). Thorium. Molten Salt. Small Modular. Traveling Wave. Microreactors. These will have less waste and be safer! But will it matter? As I've grown in experience and expertise, I've started looking at the numbers more. Nuclear waste has great solutions in crystalline bedrock (Onkalo), massive salt (WIPP), and deep boreholes (Deep Isolation). If a reactor makes a little bit less, will that move the needle for the public? In terms of safety, current reactors are statistically extraordinarily safe because they don't participate in causing the 4.2 million deaths/year from air pollution (a Chernobyl of death every 2.5 days from the fossil industry). So if a new reactor is slightly safer, will all the anti-nuclear institutions roll over begging for one? I highly doubt it.
Besides, with tech development in nuclear, it's fleet experience that matters. Many MSR designs make vast amounts of tritium and require remote maintenance. Will this be doable? Will releases be acceptable? Only fleet experience can tell. Never believe someone who's never built a nuclear plant on what their design will cost.
These smaller reactors will absolutely struggle economically, especially at first.
More and more I think it's really public communication/PR/education that matters most for nuclear.
Chinese and Russian reactors, on the other hand, are doing better, with Russia seemingly selling VVERs like hotcakes, and moving into markets like Nigeria soon.
I recently wrote up an elaborate page about early reactor development history [1] and about more modern nuclear economics [2] if anyone wants a deep dive. I've been thinking of turning these into a book.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
[+] [-] antpls|6 years ago|reply
> More and more I think it's really public communication/PR/education that matters most for nuclear.
I'm almost 30 years old and I live in France. While I see nuclear science as very cool and futuristic, I also just dont want to see anymore nuclear reactors. Especially since we showed that batteries and renewable energies have room for improvements.
Even people who are supposed to know how to build nuclear reactors don't know how to do it :
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclearpower-flamanvi...
Flamanville's reactor has 10 years of lag and costs tripled to billions of euros. Guess where does the money come from ? Our taxes.
All this money (and UK money) could have been invested in consuming less (smarter consumption, more efficiency), improve battery technologies and improve renewable energies.
To me, the goal of 50% of nuclear energy should even be lowered to 30%.
[+] [-] projektfu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totalZero|6 years ago|reply
I have two stupid questions.
Why is offshore nuclear not a solution to many of the public fears about nuclear power?
If fracked natural gas is very cheap, why are coal and resid (both comparatively dirtier fuels) in widespread use for energy generation?
[+] [-] spenrose|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melbourne_mat|6 years ago|reply
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/ee/c7ee03...
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
It's not a technical breakthrough. It's an argument that full containment isn't necessary. While the design is supposed to be immune to loss of cooling power, it still has other potential problems. Multiple reactors share the same cooling pool, so if one has a leak, the whole group gets contaminated. If the cooling pool leaks into the ground and you can't refill, as might happen in an earthquake, you could have a meltdown.
It's not really small, either. Each unit is 60 megawatts, and a plant is 12 units, at 0.72GW. Almost 3/4 of an AP 1000.
[+] [-] rpiguy|6 years ago|reply
I do want it to happen, but my faith is shaken after 35 years of waiting.
[+] [-] jariel|6 years ago|reply
Partly technological: risk of fallout, and more ugly - long term storage.
But really, the issue nobody thinks about is proliferation.
If the West started pumping out 5 cent/mmh electricity and booming, you can be darn sure every tin pot fool everywhere in the world would be as well. After all, why shouldn't they?
But Canada will manage it's boring, hardened facilities extremely well. The entire economy of Canada is not based on anything really intelligent - just 'boring, consistent responsibility and stability' - which is exactly what you want for such things.
But how long will stability remain around Nigeria's 20 new reactors? Hey - they convinced us that 'everything was fine' and that it was 'Colonialist and Evil to require external, rigorous inspection'. But now there's a regime change, a civil war breaking out. A rebel group has nabbed a reactor. A second reactor the staff are fleeing because Boko Haram is in the area. The US president wants to send in Marines to lock down the facilities immediately, but wary it will just erupt in more violence immediately.
Obviously that's hugely speculative, but if/when nuclear power breaks up with 100's of reactors popping up everywhere - something like this will happen - somewhere.
I think we can conquor public opinion and figure out 'long term' issues with enough focus and innovation.
But this requires 'highly responsible civilisation' almost universally so that something doesn't blow up somewhere in the long tail.
Since most of the world actually isn't ready for that responsibility, what do we do? Controls? How? Can we tell them 'no'? We could block Somalia from getting nuke power ... but probably not most other places.
[+] [-] ngcazz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|6 years ago|reply
I think right now the race is for utility scale Battery. And this goal seems to be a lot easier to achieve than having a cost competitive Nuclear reactor.
Note: I am not pro Solar or Anti Nuclear, in fact I pretty much want Nuclear to succeed in the long term since I dont like the idea massive land area being used for solar, not every country has the luxury of doing so especially those with limited sunlight hours. But looking at the cost alone it seems solar is hard to compete against.
[+] [-] save_ferris|6 years ago|reply
Those who lead governments are inherently motivated by self-preservation first and foremost, meaning that when something really bad happens, the inclination is to minimize the perception of a problem without considering the cost.
That inclination cost thousands of lives in Ukraine in 1986, and will cost thousands of lives around the world now because leaders didn’t listen to the experts early on. Not to mention the constant war on science and intellectualism that has been permeating American politics for years.
This is the price we pay to live in the political environment we have.
[+] [-] _ph_|6 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, especially these small reactor units are under strong competiton from renewables. Solar plus battery becomes very cost-competitive, especially for small units. If we look towards Africa, solar is ideal there. Not only because the output level is high, but also because the seasonal variation is minimal. Storage mostly would have to last only over night.
And lets not forget about wind energy, which doesn't care about day or night and works very far up north.
[+] [-] hristov|6 years ago|reply
This is all institutional inertia. I know there are a lot of very smart people that studied fission and wanted to dedicate their careers to it and now they are really pissed off that the field is declining rapidly. I know they will all write angry posts in response and down vote me rapidly. I am sorry, I feel bad for you all but I do not wish to risk my life just so you have careers doing something unnecessary and dangerous. You are all very smart I am sure you can re-target your expertise towards power electronics, solid state physics or many of the other fields of physics that are hot right now.
And there is a lot of institutional inertia as well. During the cold war there was an endless stream of tax payer money pointed at anything and everything nuclear and now a lot of the institutions that benefited from it are fighting tooth and nail for relevance. I have the same thing to say to them -- there are other very needed and useful fields where you can direct your efforts.
[+] [-] ehsankia|6 years ago|reply
What is "it" here? Fukushima for example was built in the 70s with a design which was even older. That seem like a very strange bar for "always promise it will be safe".
What nuclear plant designed in this century has ever been shown to not be safe? Are we always going to stay stuck on false promises made half a century ago?
[+] [-] pas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aksss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irjustin|6 years ago|reply
The HBO series Chernobyl is helping/not-helping that cause, but mostly not helping. It is really important not to forget history, not repeat, of course, but the series is bringing nuclear fears to the forefront. For better or worse, we're teaching a whole new generation to interalize those fears about a design that is still very much active [0].
As much as I want to believe the gen 4 reactors are safe and worth attempting, getting this to fly in the public minds is going to take more effort than it's probably worth. For the public, fission power has been poisoned. Single disasters that ruin 20+ years and whole regions of countries are valid/non-ignorable fears.
Large parts of me simply want to dump the money into chasing fusion. Even if it costs 1000x to get there, today money is not the problem - it's sentiment.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
[+] [-] sv9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crimsonalucard|6 years ago|reply
Fear prevents progress but blindness to real danger can cause tragedy. You need to remember that although the HBO series brought nuclear fears to the forefront it is a series that is telling a relatively True story.
Be concerned with the truth, not what a truth can promote.
I think we should move forward with nuclear. But let's say I took away all the fear in the world right now and we started building nuclear power plants near every city, village and town where we and our children live.
I think even an optimist will hesitate before moving forward with such a proposition. Move forward, but move with caution.
[+] [-] ElDji|6 years ago|reply
Some example of hidden costs not included in nuclear kwh price :
- Cost of managing waste: How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes ?
- Risk prime to insure huge damage that could arise from accident or future leaks in storage area : Again this amount is so big, that this externality has to be socialized.
- Cost of dismantling a plant : Beside one or two exceptions, no plant has been successfully dismantled. All the planning and costs for the currently plan in dismantling are exploding and will take years and tons of capital ... leaving more unmanageable wastes and unusable lands.
All those aspects will become increasingly difficult to manage in countries that made the (bad) choice of going full nuclear a few years ago, like France.
[+] [-] trimbo|6 years ago|reply
People are scared of it, and don't understand fission. Popular docudrama shows, like Chernobyl, propagate myths that reactors can explode with "2-4 megaton power".[1]
Politicians won't back it because no one wants it in their back yard. And carbon gives them new revenue they can leverage and borrow against to balance the budget.[2]
I list more reasons at [3], which I link every time this comes up.
[1] - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480113/how-large...
[2] - https://www.eenews.net/stories/1059981189
[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167207