First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.
Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.
Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also promise to pay billions in upkeep, and then pay billions for decomissioning. If you aren't willing to do that upkeep or clean up after yourself then you can cause a radiological disaster.
What happens if we have a majority government that refuses to believe in the long term effects of radiation damage even as scientists explain to them over and over again what will happen? They just don't see why we should be spending that amount of money on reactor decomissioning or on upkeep and don't want to be seen as the one spending taxpayer money on something so costly. What if they decide to cut nuclear safety programs in a political stunt? I wish I could say that I know that won't happen, but on the hundred years in the future scale I'm just not sure.
Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.
> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.
Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants?
EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a piece of the plan)
> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.
While that is true in principle, there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly (perhaps because of the upfront costs of nuclear power stations, and the time it takes to build them).
"Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions—and in poorer countries nuclear programs actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions."
We're killing our planet because we externalise cost.
CO2, deforestation, habitat destruction, species extinction, overfishing, ocean pollution are proximate problems arising from that deeper ultimate problem.
Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating, it the worst possible response to ultimate problem of externalising cost.
To advocate nuclear in good faith it is essential to acknowledge this tension, and the complex social and philosophical challenges to resolving that tension.
> whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.
And if that's not the case then what do you think will happen to the other programs critical in keeping climate change at bay? Taken to its ultimate conclusion this line of thinking leads to analysis paralysis, i.e. to shut down our government and do nothing. Which may be good thinking; especially for government policy likely full of unintended consequences. I don't think this should stop perfectly good technology from being developed and built out though. Or for the government to effectively kneecap it via regulation so restrictive it's tantamount to a ban, as the US has done with nuclear power.
> Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.
I agree yet have drawn strikingly different conclusions. Nuclear development should be encouraged to proceed. Collectively we need to figure out how to incentivize the actors to behave safely without kneecapping their ability to do something.
One thing I seldom see brought up is that different energy sources work best in different places. Solar works great in the Southwest. In the upper Midwest where it snows and is overcast a lot? Maybe not so much. Wind works better there, but wind may not be enough alone and requires even more storage as it usually peaks out of phase with peak demand.
I think we don't have a good way to transport energy which makes green energy slightly impractical as the main source of energy.
If we find a way to connect the world on a common electricity grid, we might be able to skip nuclear and go full green (ofc this ignores the cost of producing/disposing those green energy generators)
If your concerns are valid, perhaps we should just stay with coal and gas. Renewables amid other problems are not going to work without massive energy storage systems, which we don't and won't have anytime soon
From the article: "No nuclear energy program has ever launched without heavy state intervention — the capital costs are just too high for private entities to take on."
I think this misses the real reason. High capital costs are no barrier to private financing as long as the eventual profits will accrue to the investors. But in this highly-regulated industry, investors can't put money into nuclear plants thinking that in 20 years there will be a high demand, and they'll be able to charge a high price for power. Once the time comes, the regulators will likely decide that they can charge only a "fair" price. And that's assuming that they actually get to build and operate the plant - there's a substantial chance that political winds will change, and the plant ends up being banned or regulated to the extent that it's effectively banned. Government financing is the only solution to this problem, which is created by the existence of government.
We see the same thing in Canada now with pipeline construction - only government can finance them due to the government being capable of destroying any private company that tries to build them.
We only have one real data point as far as actual newly constructed plants in the US go, but that data point agitates against your position. At Vogtie, the government made a rule that effectively forbids consumers in the Vogtie service region from using anything but Vogtie. So no switching to using some wind farm that someone might slap up down the road from you. Material point is that regulations generally favor these sorts of plants where consumers are concerned because the government needs the plant. (Or, at minimum, has decided they want the plant.)
Not that any of it matters. Obviously, Vogtie still is a financial mess. I suppose it's probably beyond "mess". Once something's more than 200% or 20 billion over budget it's OK to go ahead and call it a financial disaster. I'm only pointing out that regulations work both ways, and when the government is trying to get a power plant built the regulations will generally work in favor of the generating entity.
The essential issue is that nuclear plants cost money even if there are no regulations at all. The required metallurgy, for instance, just costs a baseline amount of money, and there's no way to cut it down. I doubt anyone could get a nuclear plant built for less than $1 Billion even in the absence of regulations. And that's for the designs we know and understand. There will definitely be cost overruns for the newer designs that we haven't worked with in production. Investors have to be able to recoup that outlay within a reasonable time frame. So the government is actually doing the right thing by "guaranteeing" customers so to speak. In an environment free of the ability to regulate, I doubt any nuclear plants get built.
> I think this misses the real reason. High capital costs are no barrier to private financing as long as the eventual profits will accrue to the investors.
What about the risk premiums for disasters. Isn't it only economical if states accept the cost? If we wouldn't accept an owner of a nuclear power plant to go bankrupt before cleaning up ,after a Fukushima scale accident they'd be forced to either have an insurance that made it uneconomical, or deposit many times more than the reactor costs up front, for cleanup. Neither is viable. It's always subsidized.
In the US insurance is another issue.
The cost is massive if any company is willing to offer it.
So the people paying tax has to cover both the building,
the insurance, so if anything should go wrong, it si 100% on the tax payers.
Then the tax payer has to pay for facilities to store all the waste
for hundres of years. Something no Americans wants close to them.
Last I heard the The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository will not happen.
Presently the US does not have secure facilities to store highly radioactive waste. That still has to be built and that will cost
gigantic sums of money. If it has to be sized to accommodate an increase in the production of said waste, then it has to be even bigger.
Presently highly radioactive waste is stored on site where it is being produced. That far from an ideal situation.
At the end we have to pay for the decommissioning.
https://neon.energy/Hirth-Ueckerdt-Edenhofer-2015-Integratio... suggests that wind energy has up to 50% higher "real" cost than typical LCOE measurements because of variability, however, this still puts the costs for nuclear (118-192) a lot higher than wind (28-54) and solar (32-42).
Is the higher cost for nuclear related to the high regulation put in place? Are the low costs for solar and wind using subsidies and considering lifetime/replacement/disposal?
> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs...
No they don't, but they do blow up like industrial hydrogen gas explosions. Loss of coolant accidents are unforgiving in boiling water reactors and quickly fail catastrophically (in the engineering sense).
> the 1950s design CANDU reactor is small enough to be considered “modular”
Ummm, no. I stood in front of reactor #4 at Darlington just before it went into production. I think this was the last CANDU reactor to go into service in Canada. The scale of the reactor, the turbine hall, and the containment building are incomparable to anything else man-made that I've experienced.
The large size compared to equivalent boiling water reactors accounts for the CANDU's primary failing: it costs too much. Especially in the age of fracking, nuclear is uncompetitive cost wise compared to natural gas.
The supporters of nuclear energy and The Green New Deal both rely on a working assumption that the cost of CO2 emissions is the only important factor moving forward. Geographic and geopolitical considerations may play a significant role in continental Europe, Japan, and China but I have yet to hear a reasonable non-ideological argument against a natural gas centric strategy in North America.
Yes, nuclear power is more expensive than natural gas. But natural gas still emits carbon dioxide. If our goal is to curtail climate change, then our goal is to decarbonize our economy. There are additional culprits too like methane and some refrigerants. But carbon dioxide accounts for the lion's share of climate change.
I agree, but why set up a false dichotomy? Nuclear energy should be part of a "Green New Deal", which shouldn't just be about energy, but pragmatic environmentalism in all fields.
It seems very unlikely to me that there will ever be sufficient desire for fission based power in most countries, no matter how safe scientists say it is. I still think nuclear power will be important.
It seems plausible that governments will continue to fund research into fusion power but I am doubtful that much more money could be raised than was raised for ITER, especially as the results from ITER will not be particularly exciting. Therefore I don’t think fusion would be cost effective with ITER level technology (the way to make fusion generate power more efficiently without changing the underlying technology is to make it bigger which makes it much more expensive (I think cost scales roughly as the fourth power of the diameter)). Therefore improvements in technology would be required. A fundamental technology in this case is the quality of the superconductors (one aspect in particular is that some superconductors become less effective in high magnetic fields but the whole reason they are used is to generate very strong magnetic fields).
Perhaps if more funding had gone into fusion over time, it would have gone into the more fundamental research into things like new superconductors specific for fusion (ie focusing on things like achieving high field strength more than cost). Fortunately other funding has gone into superconductor research and cheaper superconductors mean fusion research may also become cheaper (and better superconductors mean smaller reactors which are much cheaper).
It still feels like more funding would be better: projects could complete faster and iterate more, but it doesn’t feel absolutely hopeless to me. If all our hopes rested on ITER, I think it would be time for despair.
Despite the slow progress on fusion it still feels more likely to me than the green new deal.
At this point, I will take any and every mix of non-polluting energy we can get.
I do worry about the stability-of-nations risk, but I think if we could plan as a global community for such contingencies we could come up with plans for securing or perhaps even permanent shutdown of nuclear facilities in the event of the collapse of a nation.
Ultimately, I think we are at the point where we need to take more drastic action, and nuclear can certainly fit into that for avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change.
I also hope that we come to a point as a society where we are willing to make and enforce laws that will help us prevent a similar event as the ones that brought us climate change. We were systematically and intentionally lied to, over and over, by oil and related industries. Technology that would aid us was scrapped for the sake of short term profits. Scientific analysis was hidden. Lobbying allowed the practices to continue. Lies were allowed to be propagated to the public to the extent that, even today, many people doubt climate change is even happening despite overwhelming evidence. These need to be crimes, as they have real victims: and unlike many person-to-person crimes, these corporate crimes can affect our entire society.
> "Solar panels produce ~300x more waste than nuclear reactors when providing the same amount of energy."
Didn't know it was so much better. That's awesome.
I'm happy to read recent developments in the approval for small nuclear reactors. Hope to see this stuff become more popular.
There was an article posted on HN a while back, “Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs”. Not sure if the information is now dated, but I always think about it when I see articles like these.
Author has good intentions, but absolutist and dangerous thoughts here. For example: "In order for this to work in the United States, the federal government could consolidate the nuclear arms of General Atomics, General Electric, Westinghouse, and others into a single public corporation. This federal entity would be mandated to decarbonize the American electricity grid."
They suggest making a monopoly for nuclear? Are you kidding me? That is a recipe for bad technology choices and taking advantage of customers. Let the market figure it out, with dozens of designs and vendors and demonstrations. It's already an oligopoly with maybe 2 or 3 incumbents in the US. And it's been that way since the 60s when the government created that market power for military and international nuclear export reasons. Essentially they picked water cooled technologies because they made sense for the Navy, and picked just two companies to export them internationally, subsidized, etc for civilian use. We need more companies not less. And we need the government to stay out of it. The only thing federal government should do is help lower licensing costs and timelines and establish locations for rapid and responsible demonstration of advanced nuclear projects. The only way to do this is smaller reactors that take less money and time to demonstrate and verify. Think small not big. The DOE might be doing this with the Advanced Reactor Demonstration, but it seems they may be in the business of monopoly creation with just two companies out of 20 or more selected to demonstrate billion dollar mega projects.
Whatever we do, we should not deploy more water cooled technologies just to decarbonize. Yes, they work; yes they have not caused damage human life the US. But the GE designed Fukushima reactors and the RMBK water reactors are astonishingly close to catastrophe. People don't understand how much effort goes into avoiding meltdowns. We need new meltdown proof designs that don't need active cooling to keep the reactor at safe temperatures.
TO THE FEDS: prevent monopolies - make demonstrating new nuclear technologies easier
If "we" want to spend several times as much money for our power, and only start getting it 10+ years from now, "we" can go all in on nukes. But that "we" looks an awful lot like "them" to me.
My expectation is that if CO2 production has not taken a nosedive by 2030, we are looking at a worldwide collapse after mass migration pushes fascist governments into the driver seat, leading directly to global thermonuclear war. (I would welcome being shown wrong.)
The only problem cited for renewables is energy storage, for which we have numerous alternatives that look like they will all work.
Besides gravity storage, with weights that may be lowered into disused mine shafts, underground compressed air, batteries, and molten salt baths, a surprising synthesis is solar panels floating on dam reservoirs.
They operate more efficiently by staying cool, and are easily cleaned without consuming water. They relieve daytime load, and the existing turbines run at night. There is already a grid tap in place.
Strongly behind this for the merits of the technology which are just unquestionably better results for the costs and risks. I’d also really favor making nuclear energy an era-defining technology, like IT was for the 80s-20s. I think it’s wise to have big technological ideas drive progress, and as much as I care about “green,” it’s an uninspiring concept compared to nuclear.
If you want this then write your representatives at the local and national levels. They do listen. The reason it’s not happened is the opposite side doing exactly this for years.
There are a bunch of startups developing new reactor designs that should be cheaper and safer than existing plants. Some are ready or close to building demonstration plants.
I'd rather we fund the most promising dozen or so of those funding to build demos over the next decade than start building conventional plants now and locking ourselves in to those for decades.
There was an interesting Nova episode a few years ago that looked at a bunch of these new designs.
I remember one that used a liquid fuel in a spherical vessel, with an opening in the bottom to drain into a wider, long, shallow rectangular vessel. The fuel would react in the spherical vessel, but if you drained it into the rectangular vessel it would not react.
This is because in the spherical vessel if a given atom reacts and produces a neutron there are many directions it can go which have to pass through enough fuel that it has a good chance of causing another reaction. It's enough to achieve a self-sustaining reaction.
In the rectangular vessel, there are much fewer directions for a neutron that pass through enough fuel to react. You can't get a self-sustaining reaction.
The best part was how they plugged the drain when the reactor was operating. They plugged it by having some frozen fuel in the pipe. The heat from the reaction in the spherical vessel would quickly melt the plug unless it was heavily and continuously cooled.
Note that unlike other plants where if something goes wrong with cooling you have to take explicit action to stop the reactor before meltdown, in this one if something goes wrong with the cooling the reactor stops itself.
Another good one is the traveling wave reactor. There was a joint venture between TerraPower (a company founded by Bill Gates) and China National Nuclear Corporation to build a 600 MWe demo reactor from 2018-2025 followed by commercial 1150 MWe plants later that decade, but TerraPower was made to stop in early 2019 by the US government.
Besides having a much lower chance of doing something that can harm people in the surrounding area than current designs, many of these new designs allow for much smaller reactors so that even if something does happen the area affected will be small.
Green new deal is something we can have now, and something we needed ten years ago. Nuclear (on the scale needed for the climate disaster) takes decades to implement. We simply don’t have the time to omit a real and solution we can start now, for a more expensive dream solution.
... is what people have been saying about Nuclear literally since Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Had we started back then we wouldn't be in this mess. I argue not pursuing any nuclear solutions in favor of solely investing in solar and wind, we may well find ourselves saying the same thing a few decades from now. Time to get going!
We might want new nucelar power plants for industrial centers. But what we certainly shouldn't be doing is using them as an excuse to propagate the idea of a centralized grid of power authorities distributing power nationally or globally.
Centralized grids are incredibly expensive, difficult to manage, and introduce single points of failure in the physical and information domains. We should be doing everything we can to decentralize our grids, promote distributed power generation and storage in urban and commercial installments, and focus on letting the municipal levels of government coordinate bulk storage appropriate to their needs.
Folks get so worked up about highly efficient new nuclear power plants that they forget about transit and storage, or argue that these aspects shouldn't be considered. Both ideas are deleterious to making a modern, resilient power infrastructure that's able to adapt to climate change, changes in the economic environment, and the increasing pace of modern technology in the space of power storage and delivery.
Until these goals can coexist with the call for a "nuclear new deal", we should view them for what they are: short-sighted and misguided attempts to make profit off a need without considering the actual long term goals that society has.
We needed nuclear. And everything else. Two decades ago.
Now must do anything and everything to get to zero carbon as fast as possible. Not tomorrow. Not a decade from now. Today. Now.
If we went all in for nukes, ignoring all the financial and technical and policy downsides, what's the soonest it'd go live? A decade?
Too late.
So while we build out wind, solar, storage... And while we rebuild our grid... We should also triple down on nukes. Dump money into every feasible and semifeasible and farfetched variation. And hope that in a decade some of those bets pay off. (I especially wish traveling wave reactors can work.)
Meanwhile, per disagree and then commit, get with the program. All this narcissism of small differences makes the concern trolls part of the problem. If nukes are your thing, knock yourself out. And praise all the complimentary efforts. Because we need all of it, as soon as possible.
Problem with nuclear deals is that the technology solutions are so centralized they put control in the hands of big government and big corporations.
And take control out of the hands of individuals.
Which means people are no longer free to decide for themselves where their energy dollars will be spent.
Who can afford to put solar panels on their home, when they are footing the bill through taxes for huge projects typically ridden by massive cost overruns, failure to properly account for decommissioning costs, and ample opportunities for corruption?
Decentralized solutions like solar, which can be paired with fast-improving battery technology, are much more appealing, even if they perhaps necessarily need to be augmented with fraught solutions like nuclear.
> The reason I say “eco-pessimist” rather than “environmentalist” is that to me if you’re an environmentalist, it means you’re somebody who takes environmental problems seriously. You are aware of the literature on the problems of air pollution. You’re not saying the Chinese made up climate change. I’m 100 percent on board with that. I think we need to take that seriously. I think we need to invest money in green electricity and in the electrification of our vehicle fleet. But I think if you are smart about environmental problems, you recognize that to resolve climate change, you either need a cataclysmic fall in living standards — and that’s not going to happen — or you need new technologies and a new technological paradigm.
> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.
I think nuclear is part of this difference in world view. Even if windmills and solar are part of the solution in the short term, that’s not going to be enough in the long term. You need keep increasing the amount of available energy. You’re not going to create a Star Trek society without investing in nuclear.
I have two main points against solar and wind @ large scale. Please destroy them.
First point.
Solar relies on rare earth materials and are mostly being bought from China since they are cheaper. The estimate is that these solar panels last less than other panels. So imagine the land area needed to power the USA and China top polluters in the world and then imagine replacing all of that every n years. Plus we will run out way faster in rare earth material for solar than fission material for nuclear.
For wind turbines maintenance costs increases as the structure ages. Imagine this at large scale.
Second point.
Dams are way better than solar and wind. But they are dependent on the region, so is solar and panel. So picture the winter where the sun sets @ around 3pm-5pm and wakes up around 7am. Or cloudy days. And @ night! We're talking storage that can last weeks, months. I don't know if in 30 years grid level storage will reach a level that can satisfy these requirements.
so nuclear energy per density kills solar and wind, can produce 24/7 energy on the order of MW to GW and produces minimal waste with current technologies.
If the argument is that solar/wind energy will improve, then so will nuclear energy.
[+] [-] tertiary|5 years ago|reply
Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.
Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also promise to pay billions in upkeep, and then pay billions for decomissioning. If you aren't willing to do that upkeep or clean up after yourself then you can cause a radiological disaster.
What happens if we have a majority government that refuses to believe in the long term effects of radiation damage even as scientists explain to them over and over again what will happen? They just don't see why we should be spending that amount of money on reactor decomissioning or on upkeep and don't want to be seen as the one spending taxpayer money on something so costly. What if they decide to cut nuclear safety programs in a political stunt? I wish I could say that I know that won't happen, but on the hundred years in the future scale I'm just not sure.
Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.
[+] [-] wutbrodo|5 years ago|reply
Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants?
EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a piece of the plan)
[+] [-] dane-pgp|5 years ago|reply
While that is true in principle, there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly (perhaps because of the upfront costs of nuclear power stations, and the time it takes to build them).
"Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions—and in poorer countries nuclear programs actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions."
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-crowd-nuclear-renewables...
[+] [-] monkeycantype|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skitout|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewjl|5 years ago|reply
And if that's not the case then what do you think will happen to the other programs critical in keeping climate change at bay? Taken to its ultimate conclusion this line of thinking leads to analysis paralysis, i.e. to shut down our government and do nothing. Which may be good thinking; especially for government policy likely full of unintended consequences. I don't think this should stop perfectly good technology from being developed and built out though. Or for the government to effectively kneecap it via regulation so restrictive it's tantamount to a ban, as the US has done with nuclear power.
> Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.
I agree yet have drawn strikingly different conclusions. Nuclear development should be encouraged to proceed. Collectively we need to figure out how to incentivize the actors to behave safely without kneecapping their ability to do something.
[+] [-] aplummer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|5 years ago|reply
Spot on. People often ignore the political problems of nuclear power:
- Centralization of control encourages corruption and the hiding of incidents
- Power stations make excellent targets in case of war. The bigger they are, the bigger the impact
- Nuclear power stations also cause social panic if hit, even if the damage is minimal
- The last two points apply to war but also to terrorism
If we want political stability (aka no wars) we need reasonably decentralized access to food, water, energy and information.
[+] [-] primroot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlosdp|5 years ago|reply
The FAQ AOC released after the document explicitly ruled out nuclear energy, iirc.
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KoenDG|5 years ago|reply
Potentially extremely dangerous.
[+] [-] econcon|5 years ago|reply
If we find a way to connect the world on a common electricity grid, we might be able to skip nuclear and go full green (ofc this ignores the cost of producing/disposing those green energy generators)
[+] [-] corn13read|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pdonis|5 years ago|reply
Not if the Green New Deal sucks up all the resources for "renewables" that will never provide anything close to the base load power we need.
[+] [-] kova12|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radford-neal|5 years ago|reply
I think this misses the real reason. High capital costs are no barrier to private financing as long as the eventual profits will accrue to the investors. But in this highly-regulated industry, investors can't put money into nuclear plants thinking that in 20 years there will be a high demand, and they'll be able to charge a high price for power. Once the time comes, the regulators will likely decide that they can charge only a "fair" price. And that's assuming that they actually get to build and operate the plant - there's a substantial chance that political winds will change, and the plant ends up being banned or regulated to the extent that it's effectively banned. Government financing is the only solution to this problem, which is created by the existence of government.
We see the same thing in Canada now with pipeline construction - only government can finance them due to the government being capable of destroying any private company that tries to build them.
[+] [-] pydry|5 years ago|reply
By contrast wind got about £39-£41 for two years. Future years will likely be even lower.
[+] [-] bilbo0s|5 years ago|reply
Not that any of it matters. Obviously, Vogtie still is a financial mess. I suppose it's probably beyond "mess". Once something's more than 200% or 20 billion over budget it's OK to go ahead and call it a financial disaster. I'm only pointing out that regulations work both ways, and when the government is trying to get a power plant built the regulations will generally work in favor of the generating entity.
The essential issue is that nuclear plants cost money even if there are no regulations at all. The required metallurgy, for instance, just costs a baseline amount of money, and there's no way to cut it down. I doubt anyone could get a nuclear plant built for less than $1 Billion even in the absence of regulations. And that's for the designs we know and understand. There will definitely be cost overruns for the newer designs that we haven't worked with in production. Investors have to be able to recoup that outlay within a reasonable time frame. So the government is actually doing the right thing by "guaranteeing" customers so to speak. In an environment free of the ability to regulate, I doubt any nuclear plants get built.
[+] [-] alkonaut|5 years ago|reply
What about the risk premiums for disasters. Isn't it only economical if states accept the cost? If we wouldn't accept an owner of a nuclear power plant to go bankrupt before cleaning up ,after a Fukushima scale accident they'd be forced to either have an insurance that made it uneconomical, or deposit many times more than the reactor costs up front, for cleanup. Neither is viable. It's always subsidized.
[+] [-] ThinkBeat|5 years ago|reply
So the people paying tax has to cover both the building, the insurance, so if anything should go wrong, it si 100% on the tax payers.
Then the tax payer has to pay for facilities to store all the waste for hundres of years. Something no Americans wants close to them. Last I heard the The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository will not happen.
Presently the US does not have secure facilities to store highly radioactive waste. That still has to be built and that will cost gigantic sums of money. If it has to be sized to accommodate an increase in the production of said waste, then it has to be even bigger.
Presently highly radioactive waste is stored on site where it is being produced. That far from an ideal situation.
At the end we have to pay for the decommissioning.
It is a huge sinkhole of tax money.
[+] [-] pydry|5 years ago|reply
LCOE of various energy sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
https://neon.energy/Hirth-Ueckerdt-Edenhofer-2015-Integratio... suggests that wind energy has up to 50% higher "real" cost than typical LCOE measurements because of variability, however, this still puts the costs for nuclear (118-192) a lot higher than wind (28-54) and solar (32-42).
[+] [-] zaroth|5 years ago|reply
CA’s specific mishandling of their push for a renewable-heavy power supply is the cause, but renewables aren’t inherently the cause.
This is technically true in a way, while denying the reality of the situation on the ground in CA.
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|5 years ago|reply
Don’t know. Actually asking.
[+] [-] polote|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sradman|5 years ago|reply
No they don't, but they do blow up like industrial hydrogen gas explosions. Loss of coolant accidents are unforgiving in boiling water reactors and quickly fail catastrophically (in the engineering sense).
> the 1950s design CANDU reactor is small enough to be considered “modular”
Ummm, no. I stood in front of reactor #4 at Darlington just before it went into production. I think this was the last CANDU reactor to go into service in Canada. The scale of the reactor, the turbine hall, and the containment building are incomparable to anything else man-made that I've experienced.
The large size compared to equivalent boiling water reactors accounts for the CANDU's primary failing: it costs too much. Especially in the age of fracking, nuclear is uncompetitive cost wise compared to natural gas.
The supporters of nuclear energy and The Green New Deal both rely on a working assumption that the cost of CO2 emissions is the only important factor moving forward. Geographic and geopolitical considerations may play a significant role in continental Europe, Japan, and China but I have yet to hear a reasonable non-ideological argument against a natural gas centric strategy in North America.
[+] [-] manfredo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebmellen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan-robertson|5 years ago|reply
It seems plausible that governments will continue to fund research into fusion power but I am doubtful that much more money could be raised than was raised for ITER, especially as the results from ITER will not be particularly exciting. Therefore I don’t think fusion would be cost effective with ITER level technology (the way to make fusion generate power more efficiently without changing the underlying technology is to make it bigger which makes it much more expensive (I think cost scales roughly as the fourth power of the diameter)). Therefore improvements in technology would be required. A fundamental technology in this case is the quality of the superconductors (one aspect in particular is that some superconductors become less effective in high magnetic fields but the whole reason they are used is to generate very strong magnetic fields).
Perhaps if more funding had gone into fusion over time, it would have gone into the more fundamental research into things like new superconductors specific for fusion (ie focusing on things like achieving high field strength more than cost). Fortunately other funding has gone into superconductor research and cheaper superconductors mean fusion research may also become cheaper (and better superconductors mean smaller reactors which are much cheaper).
It still feels like more funding would be better: projects could complete faster and iterate more, but it doesn’t feel absolutely hopeless to me. If all our hopes rested on ITER, I think it would be time for despair.
Despite the slow progress on fusion it still feels more likely to me than the green new deal.
[+] [-] EdgarVerona|5 years ago|reply
I do worry about the stability-of-nations risk, but I think if we could plan as a global community for such contingencies we could come up with plans for securing or perhaps even permanent shutdown of nuclear facilities in the event of the collapse of a nation.
Ultimately, I think we are at the point where we need to take more drastic action, and nuclear can certainly fit into that for avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change.
I also hope that we come to a point as a society where we are willing to make and enforce laws that will help us prevent a similar event as the ones that brought us climate change. We were systematically and intentionally lied to, over and over, by oil and related industries. Technology that would aid us was scrapped for the sake of short term profits. Scientific analysis was hidden. Lobbying allowed the practices to continue. Lies were allowed to be propagated to the public to the extent that, even today, many people doubt climate change is even happening despite overwhelming evidence. These need to be crimes, as they have real victims: and unlike many person-to-person crimes, these corporate crimes can affect our entire society.
[+] [-] hereme888|5 years ago|reply
Didn't know it was so much better. That's awesome. I'm happy to read recent developments in the approval for small nuclear reactors. Hope to see this stuff become more popular.
[+] [-] pvaldes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_pdp09|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimpletune|5 years ago|reply
https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...
[+] [-] hairytrog|5 years ago|reply
They suggest making a monopoly for nuclear? Are you kidding me? That is a recipe for bad technology choices and taking advantage of customers. Let the market figure it out, with dozens of designs and vendors and demonstrations. It's already an oligopoly with maybe 2 or 3 incumbents in the US. And it's been that way since the 60s when the government created that market power for military and international nuclear export reasons. Essentially they picked water cooled technologies because they made sense for the Navy, and picked just two companies to export them internationally, subsidized, etc for civilian use. We need more companies not less. And we need the government to stay out of it. The only thing federal government should do is help lower licensing costs and timelines and establish locations for rapid and responsible demonstration of advanced nuclear projects. The only way to do this is smaller reactors that take less money and time to demonstrate and verify. Think small not big. The DOE might be doing this with the Advanced Reactor Demonstration, but it seems they may be in the business of monopoly creation with just two companies out of 20 or more selected to demonstrate billion dollar mega projects.
Whatever we do, we should not deploy more water cooled technologies just to decarbonize. Yes, they work; yes they have not caused damage human life the US. But the GE designed Fukushima reactors and the RMBK water reactors are astonishingly close to catastrophe. People don't understand how much effort goes into avoiding meltdowns. We need new meltdown proof designs that don't need active cooling to keep the reactor at safe temperatures.
TO THE FEDS: prevent monopolies - make demonstrating new nuclear technologies easier
[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
If "we" want to spend several times as much money for our power, and only start getting it 10+ years from now, "we" can go all in on nukes. But that "we" looks an awful lot like "them" to me.
My expectation is that if CO2 production has not taken a nosedive by 2030, we are looking at a worldwide collapse after mass migration pushes fascist governments into the driver seat, leading directly to global thermonuclear war. (I would welcome being shown wrong.)
The only problem cited for renewables is energy storage, for which we have numerous alternatives that look like they will all work.
Besides gravity storage, with weights that may be lowered into disused mine shafts, underground compressed air, batteries, and molten salt baths, a surprising synthesis is solar panels floating on dam reservoirs.
They operate more efficiently by staying cool, and are easily cleaned without consuming water. They relieve daytime load, and the existing turbines run at night. There is already a grid tap in place.
[+] [-] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfraze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
I'd rather we fund the most promising dozen or so of those funding to build demos over the next decade than start building conventional plants now and locking ourselves in to those for decades.
There was an interesting Nova episode a few years ago that looked at a bunch of these new designs.
I remember one that used a liquid fuel in a spherical vessel, with an opening in the bottom to drain into a wider, long, shallow rectangular vessel. The fuel would react in the spherical vessel, but if you drained it into the rectangular vessel it would not react.
This is because in the spherical vessel if a given atom reacts and produces a neutron there are many directions it can go which have to pass through enough fuel that it has a good chance of causing another reaction. It's enough to achieve a self-sustaining reaction.
In the rectangular vessel, there are much fewer directions for a neutron that pass through enough fuel to react. You can't get a self-sustaining reaction.
The best part was how they plugged the drain when the reactor was operating. They plugged it by having some frozen fuel in the pipe. The heat from the reaction in the spherical vessel would quickly melt the plug unless it was heavily and continuously cooled.
Note that unlike other plants where if something goes wrong with cooling you have to take explicit action to stop the reactor before meltdown, in this one if something goes wrong with the cooling the reactor stops itself.
Another good one is the traveling wave reactor. There was a joint venture between TerraPower (a company founded by Bill Gates) and China National Nuclear Corporation to build a 600 MWe demo reactor from 2018-2025 followed by commercial 1150 MWe plants later that decade, but TerraPower was made to stop in early 2019 by the US government.
Besides having a much lower chance of doing something that can harm people in the surrounding area than current designs, many of these new designs allow for much smaller reactors so that even if something does happen the area affected will be small.
[+] [-] runarberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcticbull|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KirinDave|5 years ago|reply
Centralized grids are incredibly expensive, difficult to manage, and introduce single points of failure in the physical and information domains. We should be doing everything we can to decentralize our grids, promote distributed power generation and storage in urban and commercial installments, and focus on letting the municipal levels of government coordinate bulk storage appropriate to their needs.
Folks get so worked up about highly efficient new nuclear power plants that they forget about transit and storage, or argue that these aspects shouldn't be considered. Both ideas are deleterious to making a modern, resilient power infrastructure that's able to adapt to climate change, changes in the economic environment, and the increasing pace of modern technology in the space of power storage and delivery.
Until these goals can coexist with the call for a "nuclear new deal", we should view them for what they are: short-sighted and misguided attempts to make profit off a need without considering the actual long term goals that society has.
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
We needed nuclear. And everything else. Two decades ago.
Now must do anything and everything to get to zero carbon as fast as possible. Not tomorrow. Not a decade from now. Today. Now.
If we went all in for nukes, ignoring all the financial and technical and policy downsides, what's the soonest it'd go live? A decade?
Too late.
So while we build out wind, solar, storage... And while we rebuild our grid... We should also triple down on nukes. Dump money into every feasible and semifeasible and farfetched variation. And hope that in a decade some of those bets pay off. (I especially wish traveling wave reactors can work.)
Meanwhile, per disagree and then commit, get with the program. All this narcissism of small differences makes the concern trolls part of the problem. If nukes are your thing, knock yourself out. And praise all the complimentary efforts. Because we need all of it, as soon as possible.
Source: Saul Griffith
[+] [-] natch|5 years ago|reply
And take control out of the hands of individuals.
Which means people are no longer free to decide for themselves where their energy dollars will be spent.
Who can afford to put solar panels on their home, when they are footing the bill through taxes for huge projects typically ridden by massive cost overruns, failure to properly account for decommissioning costs, and ample opportunities for corruption?
Decentralized solutions like solar, which can be paired with fast-improving battery technology, are much more appealing, even if they perhaps necessarily need to be augmented with fraught solutions like nuclear.
[+] [-] rayiner|5 years ago|reply
> The reason I say “eco-pessimist” rather than “environmentalist” is that to me if you’re an environmentalist, it means you’re somebody who takes environmental problems seriously. You are aware of the literature on the problems of air pollution. You’re not saying the Chinese made up climate change. I’m 100 percent on board with that. I think we need to take that seriously. I think we need to invest money in green electricity and in the electrification of our vehicle fleet. But I think if you are smart about environmental problems, you recognize that to resolve climate change, you either need a cataclysmic fall in living standards — and that’s not going to happen — or you need new technologies and a new technological paradigm.
> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.
I think nuclear is part of this difference in world view. Even if windmills and solar are part of the solution in the short term, that’s not going to be enough in the long term. You need keep increasing the amount of available energy. You’re not going to create a Star Trek society without investing in nuclear.
[+] [-] winfortheworld|5 years ago|reply
First point. Solar relies on rare earth materials and are mostly being bought from China since they are cheaper. The estimate is that these solar panels last less than other panels. So imagine the land area needed to power the USA and China top polluters in the world and then imagine replacing all of that every n years. Plus we will run out way faster in rare earth material for solar than fission material for nuclear. For wind turbines maintenance costs increases as the structure ages. Imagine this at large scale.
Second point. Dams are way better than solar and wind. But they are dependent on the region, so is solar and panel. So picture the winter where the sun sets @ around 3pm-5pm and wakes up around 7am. Or cloudy days. And @ night! We're talking storage that can last weeks, months. I don't know if in 30 years grid level storage will reach a level that can satisfy these requirements.
so nuclear energy per density kills solar and wind, can produce 24/7 energy on the order of MW to GW and produces minimal waste with current technologies.
If the argument is that solar/wind energy will improve, then so will nuclear energy.