Is Nuclear Power Vital to Hitting CO2 Emissions Targets?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-nuclear-power-vital-to-hitting-co2-emissions-targets-1479092761

by jseliger • 10 years ago

88 160 10 years ago

wiz21c• 10 years ago

Saying it's vital is not going to help. the question is : how much time and money do we have to be carbon free. Is nuclear power helping to reach that target or not ?

Saying it's vital is equivalent to saying "do we really really really want it ?" And of course, a lot of uniformed opinions will come up...

let me remind you that 1/ nuclear is bad when it breaks 2/ solar/wind is hyper expensive to build in quantities large enough to cover our needs

So which evil will we choose ?

travelbyphone• 10 years ago

I'd bet its best to pay more money now for huge benefits later, than save money now with huge risks later.

adrianN3• 10 years ago

How much time do we have left? About twenty years.

http://trillionthtonne.org/

toyg4• 10 years ago

Easy: money is immaterial in the long run, the planet does not care whether it exists or not. Whereas nuclear waste, or the result of nuclear accidents, is a real threat to life.

spenrose• 10 years ago

Maintaining existing nuclear power is very important and politically difficult:

http://www.utilitydive.com/news/atoms-for-green-energy-what-...

New nuclear would be great in the long term. It's not the heart of what we need, but a useful part of the portfolio. The heart of what we need is integrated transmission supporting rapid rollout of all clean sources:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/does-denmark-ho...

In the US, the new administration is vociferously opposed to any progress. Do NOT let them use nuclear as a wedge issue. They oppose targets in principle:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-picks-top-c...

Nuclear AND wind AND solar and especially long term planning are all good. Keep your eyes on the prize.

tombert• 10 years ago

I don't fully know why people are so anti-nuclear in general.

I'll be the first to admit that wind and solar are what society should aim for, but I don't full that, with our current implementations of them, that they're quite ready for a 7-billion-people level of energy needs.

I feel like nuclear could be a good way to get us using (relatively) clean energy and get people using electric vehicles in the relatively short-term.

dbingham• 10 years ago

There's a degree to which it is a zero sum system. If wind and solar is where we should be eventually, then resources put into nuclear now aren't going into wind/solar research and infrastructure building. And nuclear's not cheap.

Plus, while nuclear can be done safely, it often isn't, and when it fails, it fails catastrophically. So it's scary for a lot of people. People have to trust not just that nuclear _can_ be done safely, but that it _will_ be done safely. That second one, especially, is a big leap for lots of folks.

wbl• 10 years ago

There have only been three accidents at level 5 at commercial nuclear power plants, ever. Only one (Chernobyl) resulted in any casualties. The exclusion zones around Fukushima are as radioactive as Denver.

ComputerGuru2• 10 years ago

Plus, while nuclear can be done safely, it often isn't

Huh? Citation certainly needed since by ANY metric you are 100% incorrect. Count the number of nuclear subs, nuclear power plants, plutonium power sources, controlled fusion reactions in testing, fission reactions being carried out across the globe by nations at different stages of development, etc and tell me it is "often" not done safely.

The fact that nuclear is so scary to get wrong is precisely why we (by and large) get it right.

0xfeba2• 10 years ago

Plus, while nuclear can be done safely, it often isn't, and when it fails, it fails catastrophically.

And thus is the problem with the court of public opinion on this. Nuclear is the safest per Kw/h, period. But yes, there are accidents and they are plastered over the news for weeks. Whereas coal mining disasters? Well it's just coal mining, not related to the coal power plant that coal was all headed too.

Roritharr2• 10 years ago

I remember writing a similar HN comment shortly before Fukushima, feeling very smart at the time.

Well Fukushima happened and left me wondering if we as humans are able to maintain something that can generate so much potentially irreversible damage, with our tendencies to cut-corners, wing-it and just being less than perfect.

I hang my hat in shame over that comment everytime I read of more irradiated water leaking into the Pacific.

adrianN3• 10 years ago

You have to weigh the alternatives. Continuing to use coal for base load is much worse for almost everyone compared to nuclear.

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

It was a bad accident and I was worried about it to. But in retrospect, zero people died from Fukushima and the surrounding land is mostly at dose rates well below some area's natural background already. Compared to the alternatives that are killing people as we speak it doesn't seem that bad.

kw71• 10 years ago

Try not to feel so guilty. I think everything on the planet has been contaminated a little bit since 16 July 1945.

maverick_iceman2• 10 years ago

How many people died in Fukushima? Especially compared to disasters at coal mines?

mannykannot• 10 years ago

The damage that global warming will do will be far less reversible that the damage Fukushima did.

In an ideal world, fission power could be avoided, but while we wait for that, the greenhouse gases are building up. Fission has to be evaluated against the politically feasible alternatives.

rz2k• 10 years ago

I suspect that one of the biggest problems is a human one. That is, the most knowledgeable experts, who are in charge and should be, are also under the constant impression that the safety of nuclear power plants is unfairly criticized.

When you must always be in defense mode, do you begin to internalize that perspective almost as though it is a debating position?

During the Fukishima disaster there were some of the worst arguments immaginable given by nuclear energy proponents. For example: you can't expect the engineers to have designed for such a massive earthquake and a tsunami!

If you can enumerate a thousand things that happen about once a thousand years, you can reasonably expect about one of them to occur in the next year, but it can be difficult to nme them unless you are in the right frame of mind. How many natural disasters occur every decade that we are "shocked" could ever happen?

My impression is that the engineers behind Fukishima were not actually insane, and did try to build a plant that would survive an earthquake and a tsunami, but their models were incorrect about the likelihood of different wave heights, and perhaps even more accurately, the cooling system simply had insufficient redundancies.

Finally, what I really feel most discussions lose sight of is that both Chernobyl and Fukishima were very far from being worst case disasters. In both disasters once an uncommon set of events set them in motion, an also uncommon amount of heroism and ingenuity prevented the disasters from spiralling further out of control. I don't mean to say so much that it is unimaginable that people would risk their lives to save others in their own towns, so much as to say that that was the last line of defense, and it was necessary to use it, contrary to what I what the models should rely on. What if instead, the on site engineers had been as reliable as the New Orleans police during hurricane Katrina?

etaty• 10 years ago

Let's think like internet. Nuclear is the mainframe. Big, powerful, ... but when it goes down everything goes with it. (centralized) Solar/Wind are small unit of production, they don't do much individually, cheap and in a network they improve their reliability. (decentralized)

TeMPOraL4• 10 years ago

Let's think like industry. Factories are extremely efficient, able to produce lots of stuff for very cheap by means of economies of scale, which leads to lots of goods available for consumers. Home manufacturing is very inefficient, wasting energy and material. Which is why nobody does it to produce goods for mass consumption.

Seriously. I'm fascinated by the Internet too, but it's like people are forgetting that centralization == efficiency, distribution == waste. There are ways to achieve reliability without totally decentralizing the grid, and what we need now is not adding few more nines after decimal point of the already 99.999something% reliable grid. We need efficiency all across the board to reduce waste.

akamaka• 10 years ago

I'm anti-nuclear because we don't really know how much it costs.

The cost of cleaning up after very rare disasters has to be worked into the price, but the Fukushima incident is still ongoing. We're not even sure if the current efforts will prevent more radiation leaks, and perhaps the cost will continue to climb.

revscat• 10 years ago

We know quite well what it costs. I believe you are making a mistake by using "we" for "I" in your first sentence.

Pokepokalypse4• 10 years ago

When the US originally decided to build out plants in the 1960's, the plan was for 1000 plants. We ended up with just over 100. Each construction was filled with delays and cost-overruns. Then, we ran those plants, based on out-dated designs, long after they were intended to be torn down and replaced. Even some plants that were upgraded, had flaws that prevented them from being used, (SONGS is a good example), so they had to be shut down.

The industry won't pay for R&D for new designs. They won't invest in proper maintenance and training. They barely keep their word on decomissioning schedules.

Waste storage is a huge, huge problem, that nobody has addressed yet. (except the French). And even fuel reprocessing doesn't fully solve the problem.

I think it's a great technology, and there are awesome new designs that could be researched, tested, and put into production. But the industry has to actually pay for this shit and do it. And that's just not happening. The finance side of the industry is still stuck in 1960's models. Operators are finding that these plants aren't even profitable to operate, compared to natural gas plants. (so nuclear is very vulnerable to short-term energy market fluctuations after you've invested billions of dollars into construction).

Also: insurance is not insignificant, when there is a risk of accident that will contaminate land around the plant for hundreds of square miles. That's all "someone else's property" - and those people need to be compensated. What if it's a farmer, who would have generated revenue with that land for the next 100 years (while we wait for the cesium and strontium to decay or wash out of the soil)?

Insurance funds do not cover that kind of loss.

melling• 10 years ago

Much of the HN crowd is against nuclear. We had the debate 3 weeks ago when I posted this TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

You can read past arguments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777901

dv_dt• 10 years ago

I used to be pro Nuclear, nowadays I feel that all the people looking at the benefits of Nuclear miss a few big things. They overestimate the maturity of the tech (x1000 for the maturity of the materials development in the designs as opposed to the Nuclear reaction itself), far understate the risks and pretty much ignore the economics. And by economics I include operating costs, but also rarely discussed: the ability of private markets to finance, build, and start pulling profits from a power project in a reasonable time-frame. If that second part isn't possible, then building lots of anything isn't going to happen easily. There is a big difference in 40 x1 billion projects and one 40 billion project - and one way that plays out is in the likelihood of any project getting spun up and succeeding even if all other things are equal. But all other thing are not equal, in operating costs, Nuclear is less economically productive than wind energy by far, and soon solar (or perhaps already more-expensive when one figures in overruns, gov't support, etc..).

There is a point in that Nuclear can provide "baseload", but it's fairly incompatible with varying renewable supply as it doesn't seem to cycle up or down fast enough to be really be paired with a renewable supply. Energy storage, while also being immature, is likely to improve much more rapidly than the relative slow design development of Nuclear tech.

I don't want to be unnecessarily negative regarding Nuclear (and am excited about potential future fusion developments - esp the small scale designs), but I think there's a lot more holding Nuclear back than simply anti-nuclear activism.

7952• 10 years ago

I dont think the public are particularly against nuclear. Most major developments have opposition. And any project as costly will have concerns simply from a project managment perspective. I don't think you can blame protestors for massive financial risk that investors are scared of. Lucrative projects that are much more environmentally damaging go ahead all the time afterall.

Retric9• 10 years ago

Nuclear power is extremely expensive and does not allow for peaking power. In the US company's are shutting them down early because operation costs are to high, let alone construction. So, on the surface it seems relatively useless for meeting our long term energy needs.

The only 'advantage' seems to be making money for companies that build or operate nuclear power plants. Thus, there are going to be plenty of experts backing them.

PS: While the carbon in natural gas produces CO2, the hydrogen atoms in it combine with Oxygen to form water making it a lower carbon source than Coal. If the goal is a rather arbitrary 32% lower emissions then natural gas can help reach that goal.

robohamburger• 10 years ago

I didn't know they were bad at peaking but that makes sense.

The way I understood nuclear plants is they are enormous capital expenses and thus a utility is going to shy away from them because of that. I wonder how much they compare to a new coal fire plant though.

AstralStorm7• 10 years ago

Not badly even considering the political issues and expense up front. Maintenance is not that expensive.

Utilities mostly shy away because of politics, not cost.

ohyes2• 10 years ago

It actually depends entirely on the design of the reactor whether or not the plant can be used for peaking power.

France used nuclear plants as load followers (their entire fleet). It stands to reason that one could be designed as a 'peaking' power plant if one had the desire.

Nuclear aircraft carrier and submarine design are good at load following and may be suitable for "peaking" with some modification.

Nuclear is expensive when compared to coal/oil/gas, but it's a bit of a catch-22. It's expensive to build a nuclear plant because we don't build very many, so you never get a real economy of scale in the production. Also they're expensive to insure/decommission, so they kind of need to be a state sponsored capital expense.

Retric9• 10 years ago

At what cost? Load following is actually a much easer problem than peaking for nuclear power. Quickly going from 0 to 100% is much harder than 20-90%. This means they operate well as huge chunks of the grid, but don't fit nearly as well into a variable energy mix.

A lot of different things make nuclear power expensive to build and operate. Compared to coal/natural gas they need a lot of extra buildings and much thicker walls etc. Compared to solar they need armed guards, and exclusion zone, regular inspections, etc. Space wise you can grow food in the middle of a wind farm without issue.

It turns out the real problem is not construction costs so much as operation and decommissioning costs, which have little to do with economy's of scale. The decommissioning costs have also gotten much worse as investment returns have dropped. Paying for things 40 years down the line means return on investment becomes critical.

paulyg2• 10 years ago

It is true that nuclear power is bad at peaking. That's why no one uses them for that. They are good at base-load power, which is where they are used.

Use the right tool for the job. Different sources of energy have different upsides and downsides and we should take advantage of those. Use wind and solar (possibly backed by batteries) and natural gas as peak load generation because they are good at that. And use nuclear as the base load.

I agree with the premise floated by the 1st expert in the article that we are not rewarding nuclear for its carbon free generation. The reason utilities are closing nuclear plants are because of the deregulation of electric power and creation of power supply "markets". Nuclear has to compete on price alone against cheap natural gas and subsidized renewables (not only are the fuel sources of those cheap, so are the capital costs compared to nuclear).

Re your PS, are you saying that hydrogen atoms in coal DO NOT combine with oxygen to create water during combustion? Because my college education and career as a mechanical engineer taught me otherwise.

Retric9• 10 years ago

Using batteries for grid storage is terrible compared to pumped hydro and on demand hydro.

We agree on the chemistry. The point of my ps is the C becomes CO2 the H becomes H2O, but we don't care about H2O. Which is why hydrocarbons produce less CO2 per watt than coal.

wil421• 10 years ago

Actually, companies are building more. In Georgia we are building the first new reactors in 3 decades with more planned.

https://www.georgiapower.com/about-energy/energy-sources/nuc...

ant6n• 10 years ago

It seems cost is the biggest issue compared to a combination of solar+wind+hydro. (hydro has its own issues, but a lot of capacity already exists, and it's great for levelling demand)

lmm• 10 years ago

Finally, there’s one big falsehood at the core of arguments for nuclear: that it’s “clean.” The full life cycle of nuclear power—from mining, milling, the separation of the uranium from the ore, to ultimate plant decommissioning—collectively generates vast amounts of carbon dioxide.

This is of course even more true for wind and especially solar.

AcerbicZero• 10 years ago

I also did a bit of a double take upon reading that. It seemed like a questionable position to try and take up in an otherwise reasonable-ish debate.

mnw21cam• 10 years ago

Wow. Very light grey text, on a white background. Almost unreadable.

7Z7• 10 years ago

OT: the irony.

swehner2• 10 years ago

The short answer is, no, it's not vital. (That was easy)

swehner2• 10 years ago

You (down-voter) guys really are the hoot!

EGreg• 10 years ago

Look, no matter what we do, eventually ALL the oil will be extracted fro the ground. Alternative energy just isn't going to replace the oil fast enough. Carbon credits or not, it doesn't matter.

And under President Trump, the US will be developing all the fossil fuels it has. Great for economic independence and paying back sovereign debt. Bad for the environment.

The best thing to do at this point is to invest in ways to capture the carbon once it is released into the atmosphere.

Then of course there is this: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...

shuntress• 10 years ago

Hopefully by the time all the natural oil is gone we will be able to efficiently produce synthetic oil that is compatible with out current infrastructure. Also we will, hopefully, have worked out the best way to capture and contain/re-use the CO2 emissions.

Though obviously we would need nuclear/wind/solar power for that backbone that facilitates oil synthesis.

leereeves• 10 years ago

Nuclear would have been a great option 30 years ago when the public debate about CO2 began.

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

Nuclear Engineer here. I like to point out a few things that this article kind of gleans over about nuclear energy. In particular it bothers me that the Sierra Club made that Bugs Bunny quip. The fact is, nuclear fuel has ~2 million times more energy in it per mass than fossil fuel, and while splitting atoms intrinsically requires no carbon emissions, combusting fossil fuels do Carbon+Oxygen = CO2 + energy. When your fuel is 2 million times denser, you need 2 million times less mining, less transportation, etc. And if you run your enrichment plants off of nuclear reactors (like France does), then that process is low-carbon too. Nuclear is extremely clean and very low carbon.

Anyway, the nuclear scorecard is:

* Nuclear is currently producing 60% of the USA's carbon-free electricity (the article nailed that one)

* Nuclear worldwide has saved 1.8 million lives net by displacing air pollution

* Nuclear worldwide has prevented the emission of 65 billion tonnes CO2-eq

* If you got all your energy for 80 years from nuclear you'd make 1.3 soda cans of waste

* Advanced nuclear makes additional advances in already-fantastic safety and can improve cost

* Nuclear scales well (demonstrated in France)

* Nuclear is great for regions that get winter storms, lots of darkness, hurricanes, hail, very little wind, etc. while wind and solar are good in places that do not have those. Also recall that wind and solar are collecting a very non-dense (but free) energy so they need lots of material and land footprint.

makmanalp2• 10 years ago

Hey, while we've caught you here as someone knowledgeable, I've always worried about one thing re: nuclear power: What do you think the risks are in terms of nuclear facilities being easy targets for malicious people? Both in terms of the power network being less distributed because of the much higher energy production per plant, but also much more about the potential consequences of leaks and meltdowns. The Fukushima incident gave me serious doubts about whether containment buildings were truly sufficient to withstand a targeted attack in a war scenario. Sabotage is even more scary, but I'm guessing there are safeguards against that too. Sounds a bit paranoid, but seems worth thinking about before putting more and more civilians near these things :)

sambe2• 10 years ago

Last time I checked (maybe a year ago) there was not a single person who had died from Fukushima (the reactor problems - obviously the quake/tsunami had many fatalities). There was one worker who died but the last official stance was that it was from exposure. I think also some elderly or frail people died as part of the evacuation. Estimates in the abstracts of papers I skimmed were low hundreds of potential future deaths, but quite some uncertainty there obviously. I think the models nearly always estimate on the high side due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model being used but I'm not an expert.

Obviously you can continue to argue about environmental damage and cost of the land being unusable for many years as well. I actually felt a bit better about nuclear safety though - if old reactor designs that are poorly managed can be hit by tsunamis, melt down and still not result in many deaths, the safety looks better than expected. Possibly the risk model changes for a determined attacker?

EDIT: current state of Wikipedia is pretty much in agreement with the above, but it's an article with a lot of edits and some points have no references. The number of deaths "due to evacuation conditions" is much higher than I remembered (~1500).

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

Good question. For sabotage, right now they are not easy targets because most plants are behind one of the strongest structures known to man (reinforced concrete containment domes) and employ ~130 paramilitary guards.

For wars it's another story, most militaries could bomb the hell out of a nuke and cause some grief. One rather crazy idea to deal with this is to build nukes on large ships, 10 miles offshore. Worst case, they retreat as designed into one of the most unaccessible places on the planet (the bottom of the ocean), where they stay cooled and avoid releasing radiation until things calm down and the planned recovery operation begins.

Other pluses in this scenario include possible shipyard construction (could be cheap), ability to use power purchasing agreements to get nuclear power to countries that don't have nuclear regulatory infrastructure (the NRC could regulate plants worldwide), and enhanced safety since you're always coupled to a great heat sink and there are 0 people living within your evacuation zone. Anyway that's a bit far-fetched but I love the idea.

nsxwolf• 10 years ago

The soda cans... does that mean 15.6 ounces by volume of waste (1.3x a 12oz can), or about 20 grams of waste (1.3x a 15 gram aluminum can)?

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

I mean a full soda can's volume full of high-level nuclear waste.

code_duck• 10 years ago

what do you think about thorium?

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

It's good stuff, but not a total panacea. Some of the advanced reactor designs that work well with it have very interesting features (Molten Salt Reactors) that we need to develop as a civilization. Until we run them at scale we can't be totally sure of the benefits but some in safety and cost seem very intriguing.

cm21875• 10 years ago

I agree with all of these points and am rather a pro-nuclear myself. But the Chernobyl / Fukushima risk cannot be dismissed. What would be great is a form of nuclear energy that doesn't run this meltdown risk. I hear contradictory opinion on Thorium. Does Thorium eliminate this risk?

ceejayoz5• 10 years ago

But the Chernobyl / Fukushima risk cannot be dismissed.

Chernobyl was a massive fuck-up that IIRC wasn't even possible in Western plants of the time, let alone afterwards.

Fukushima demonstrates the risks of building a power plant in a tsunami zone, but its death toll is zero, and even the worst estimates of cancer deaths are only in the hundreds. A single coal mining disaster kills more than that, and we have them fairly regularly.

In short, the risk can be dismissed, especially if you factor in the risks of things like coal mining and emissions.

snuxoll6• 10 years ago

Molten-salt reactors like LFTR's are extremely safe against catastrophic meltdown and are probably the best path forward, but we still need to actually put theory into practice with them. Gen IV traditional reactor designs are much improved over what was used in Fukushima as well, but with that said there has probably been fewer casualties from nuclear energy disasters than people that have contracted illnesses or died from our use of coal in particular.

saulrh• 10 years ago

If you want to only consider nuclear by looking at its worst-case, you have to do the same with its competitors for the comparison to be fair, which turns out to be even more favorable to nuclear than the naive examination - banqiao dam, global climate change, people falling off roofs and turbines, etc. Even if nuclear power plants continue to fail at the same rate as they have historically, or five or ten times the historical rate, I'd take them over existing power sources in a heartbeat.

maverick_iceman2• 10 years ago

28 people died in Chernobyl, 0 in Fukushima. How many have died due to coal related air pollution? And this is completely ignoring global warming effects of coal fired plants.

08-153• 10 years ago

Does Thorium eliminate this risk?

sigh (I hear this too often.)

No, it doesn't. Thorium in conventional, solid fuel reactors is useless. Also, conventional, solid fuel reactors are a relatively dumb idea.

We need better reactors. We have known that since around 1954. One particular design of a more efficient, safer, and likely cheaper reactor would benefit from being fuelled with Thorium. But it's about the reactor, not the Thorium!

By the way, Chernobyl and Fukushima were very different events. Different reactors, different physics, different ourcome. Don't get hung up on Thorium, learn something about reactor physics instead.

Retric9• 10 years ago

Coal has a much higher concentration in mines than uranium so it does not take 2 million times the mining.

The 60% figure is also off as it excludes a lot of small scale off grid solar power.

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

Fair point on the concentration. I concede. I will have to adjust the number, but I suspect it will still be in the 1e4+ range. In the meantime I'll pivot to the fact that seawater uranium extraction (while currently more expensive than mining) is renewable on a world-scale. It replenishes through rain runoff and plate tectonics faster than we could ever use it, even if triple the world's current consumption was provided by 100% nuclear.

Off-grid power is very small compared total energy used in the USA.

the8472• 10 years ago

When your fuel is 2 million times denser, you need 2 million times less mining, less transportation, etc.

That's assuming the raw materials have the same concentration and accessibility. I would naively assume that just pumping oil up requires no stripping of overburden while some surface uranium mining would. Not saying that oil is great, it's just that the comparison is not as straight-forward as you make it out to be.

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

Fair point.

legulere2• 10 years ago

* Advanced nuclear [...] can improve cost

It seems more likely that the opposite is true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

* Nuclear scales well (demonstrated in France)

You mean except in Summer when the rivers are too hot to use their water as a coolant or in Winter when it's getting to cold and France needs to import electricity: http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-...

Also recall that wind and solar are collecting a very non-dense (but free) energy so they need lots of material and land footprint.

Still lifecycle CO2 emissions are very similar. Building nuclear power stations and mining is also extremely resource-intensive.

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

I mean advanced nuclear as in GenIV guys like Molten Salt Reactors, HTGR (which can do process heat and expand the market), fast breeders, etc. None of these have been shown to be cheaper in practice yet but they have attributes that logically would reduce cost once developed. The problem here is that advanced nuclear development is very slow and costly. So far really on the US Navy has done this successfully and at scale (giving us today's LWRs).

teh• 10 years ago

That's just a list of the positives. I think it'd be useful to your argument to also provide some "real world" nuclear experience.

E.g.

* The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the estimated 100+ billion Euro cleanup of their reactors over the next 100 years.

* Sellafield cleanup alone is going to be £120 billion [1].

* New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget and not finished yet. So if we started constructing immediately then 2030 is optimistic [2].

* The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small. Have a look at Google maps some time.

I'd rather spend the 200 billion that new reactors will cost us on energy storage and many lower-risk, known-good providers like wind, thermal to spread risk.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

acidburnNSA12• 10 years ago

I agree that listing downsides is important too. But the Greenpeace person did this in the article.

I did look at the Google map you're referring to and I converted the scary colors to numbers using the hard-to-find scale and was shocked to learn that the numbers were well within the safe zone. Even the orange.

European reactor constructions are looking rough. But that doesn't have to be the only case. In UAE, the South Koreans are building 4 huge PWRs on budget and schedule. The South Koreans somehow consistently deliver on nukes. The Americans and Europeans could hopefully learn from them how this is done.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516...

08-153• 10 years ago

The tax payer in Germany is picking up most of the... cleanup.

Indeed, because it's cleanup of political, not nuclear fallout.

Energy policy is Germany has always been a political issue. The government decides what gets done, who does it, how it is cleaned up, and who makes money from it. That can work, except it doesn't if politicians are fickle.

The fast breeder at Kalkar (SNR-300) had been planned and construction had started. Then the government changed (from CDU to SPD), the new government didn't like the idea of the reactor and added new ridiculous requirements, for example a cooling device for the ground under the reactor already in construction. You can probably guess how expensive it is to install anything under an existing building. In the end, the whole power plant was constructed, but never fuelled, and finally demolished. Now it serves as an example for how expensive nuclear power is---but really, the expense is all due to politics.

Decommissioning of the current light water reactor fleet is just the same thing. They got shut down prematurely because one particular reactor in Japan was flooded by a tsunami (and everybody knows Germany gets inundated by tsunamis all the time), which makes decommisioning relatively more expensive. It is obvious that the operators don't want to pick up the cost for this purely political decision. Given the political landscape right now, it's likely they aren't able to, either. In addition, the government promised to take care of the waste, but isn't actually doing it. (The original plan involved recycling in fast breeders, which isn't happening, thanks to politics.) Since there is no plan for the waste (thanks to politics) and the industry isn't allowed to come up with a plan themselves (thanks to politics), the expected cost for waste disposal is infinite. Decommisioning of the plants should have been funded by the operators. But the rules have been changed for no good reason. Effectively, everything has to be decontaminated to ridiculously low levels, and the workers doing it must not be exposed to anything. This is impossible, so it's infinitely expensive. Thanks not to technical difficulties or health concerns, but politics.

So yes, the needed money is stolen from everyone ("the tax payer picks it up"), but that's not the fault of the nuclear industry, it's the fault of incompetent, technically illiterate politicians.

Sellafield cleanup

Military facility. (It was purely military when it was still called Windscale, and that's when it got contaminated.)

New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget

Everything in Europe is over budget. Berlin Airport, Stuttgart central trainstation, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg... Europe, but especially Germany, lost the ability to get anything done. Sad, but true. The Energiewende (German energy turnaround) is also over budget, and underdelivering.

The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small.

If that chunk is a no-go zone, then so is Denver, Colorado. The customary limit of 1mSv/a is below natural background! And people live in areas that "badly contaminated" all over the world with no ill effects. Calling something that radiates that weakly a "no-go zone" is another political hatchet job.

I'd rather spend the 200 billion... on energy storage

Go ahead. Do that and get rich by buying electricity when the sun shines and selling it when it doesn't. If you can do that, more power to you! The practical problem with that plan is---you can't. And if you could... well, you'd probably be buying nuclear electricity at night and selling it during the day.

ilostmykeys• 10 years ago

Fukushima and all the radioactive tuna that was eaten by all the sushi lovers before it was discovered it had too much radioactive content. And Chernobyl? How many cancers did those two cause?

AstralStorm7• 10 years ago

Chernobyl estimated 4000, Fukushima less than 100.

My bet is that dust inhalation during coal mining caused an order of magnitude higher number, that is not even counting accidents such as groundwater pollution.

Human body is quite good at dealing with radiation damage, compared to chemical damage, chronic physical irritation or other sources of inflammation.

helthanatos• 10 years ago

Agreed. Some factoring in of maintenance costs and production costs, but other than that, it would be very good if nations gave more support. Also, there is a greater chance of devastation based on negligence or sabatoge over other energy production means.

sonium• 10 years ago

TLDR: No, it is not.

Once again Betteridge's law of headlines holds.

piotrjurkiewicz2• 10 years ago

It is totally mind-boggling for me that the same people who are the strongest advocates of CO2 emission cuts are usually, the same time, the strongest opponents of nuclear power. Nuclear power, which is the only one economically viable way to achieve serious CO2 emission cuts they advocate.

mason240• 10 years ago

And hyrdo power. I've seen zero discussion on building new dams. The PNW is bragging now about their clean energy, but they spent decades trying to get all those dams removed.

hangsi• 10 years ago

I imagine there are a couple of points that play into this:

1) The good dam spots are occupied, to put it lightly.

2) Hydroelectric dams aren't exactly built to be replaced

3) The technical side of hydroelectric power generation hasn't changed much in recent years; the old dams hold up pretty well for efficiency in taking energy from the water flow.

Hydroelectric dams were great before global warming became an issue.

The effect of all the above points is that a modern dam would be situated in a place either too small or too risky or too troublesome to put one before. With the effects that dams have on the surrounding environment, it's unfeasible to imagine a scenario without government on board.

Given that they must be involved anyway, the state's scarce resources might be better placed in other energy investments than the remaining high growing fruit left on the hydroelectric branch.

bildung• 10 years ago

Nuclear power, which is the only one economically viable way to achieve serious CO2 emission cuts they advocate.

Without massive subsidies (both direct and through waste disposal etc.) nuclear is actually one of the most expensive power sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

piotrjurkiewicz2• 10 years ago

nuclear is actually one of the most expensive power sources

...amongst non-intermittent sources. But cheaper alternatives (gas, coal) generate CO2, so I assume they are out of interest for these people.

jbandela1• 10 years ago

One way to look at it is from a risk balance perspective. Let's say that with increased nuclear use we would have a Chernobyl every 10 years. So between now and 2200 we would have 20 such disasters. Reading about the Chernobyl disaster and multiplying by 20 still results in orders of magnitude less damage both to humans and the environment than the projections of what will happen if we continue on our present course.

In addition, taking a realistic view, we will not be able to control climate change at this point just from a reduction in emissions. We will likely need to remove atmospheric carbon which will likely be very energy intensive. Having the extra power that nuclear brings to the table would be useful in this scenario.

snuxoll6• 10 years ago

While I agree with you, saying "If Chernobyl happens every 10 years..." probably isn't going to be a good way to sell nuclear energy :)

AstralStorm7• 10 years ago

But it should be. We get Chernobyl every year from coal plants.

jerven• 10 years ago

Sometimes it is worth looking at what if we go all in on a technology, what happens and how will that play out.

So lets assume we are going nuc crazy and are ordering a 10 GW of plants. Can any nuclear power plant builder actually build this within 5 years? 10 years? Areva can't, Westinghouse seems to take 8. Who is going to man them, where is the training capacity for that many engineers.

Consider that if a grid is full nuclear, capacity factors drop to 50%. Unless, you have lots of storage i.e. same as wind and solar.

If I order 30gw of solar today, who can build that out in 10 years? lots of companies can. First Solar, Panasonic, LG and many more If I order 30gw of wind today, who can build that out in 10 years? lots of companies can. e.g. Vesta, Enercon, GE and more

Nuclear construction capacity has dropped over the years and will take significant time to rebuild and re-equip. That takes significant financial resources. Can anyone afford that at this time considering the competition of solar and wind?

Basically, isn't wind+solar+storage a lot cheaper and easier to finance than nuclear? So why go for the big central plants with lots of project risks.

tristor• 10 years ago

This is the long-tail effect of society being irrationally anti-nuclear for so long, despite all the favorable evidence. I think being able to be 100% wind/solar is a pipe dream with the continued growth in power usage especially by data-centers. It makes sense to start making decisions now that will continue the positive impact, even if those plants aren't able to come online for 20 years. The additional capacity will still be useful.

sanxiyn• 10 years ago

So lets assume we are going nuc crazy and are ordering a 10 GW of plants. Can any nuclear power plant builder actually build this within 5 years? 10 years?

China can. As a matter of fact, China connected 20 GW (20863 MW to be exact) capacity to grid within 5 years, from 2012 to 2016.

Check for yourself using IAEA PRIS(Power Reactor Information System): https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.a...

Twisell2• 10 years ago

My two favorites vulgarization approach about nuclear radiation: - The XKCD radiation dose chart http://xkcd.com/radiation/ - The pretty bad-ass documentary "Uranium: Twisting the Dragon's Tail" where there presenter start by taking an radon bath in a Swiss SPA then travel around to the most radioactive places on earth (and flip out when under Pripiat hospital where he almost took too much risk)...

iaskwhy• 10 years ago

One thing I almost never see discussed is how expensive it gets when you have to keep building nuclear power plants due to decommissioning. Most nuclear power plants in use nowadays seem to have a 30 years life expectancy, new ones get up to 60. It just seems hugely expensive.

rdtsc2• 10 years ago

Meanwhile, the price of solar took just five years to drop almost 70%, and it continues to fall at record rates.

Wow that is a surprising number. That looks encouraging. What is the expectation there? Is there a currently known limit that we expect to hit. (say the scarcity of some rare metal). Or it is easily possible to see another 70% drop next 5 years.

To my uninformed mind, advanced nuclear seems like a good way forward. Is there a way to make reactors smaller, "burn" the waste, Thorium seems popular and there were many articles on it.

I grew up not far from Chernobyl when it happened. So it would seem I should be vehemently opposed, but I believe with each accident we'd learn from the past what not to do.

philipkglass• 10 years ago

There is no near/medium term limit to PV manufacturing volume from materials scarcity. The rarest material used in a typical crystalline silicon solar panel is silver, part of the conductive pastes used to make electrical contacts on cells. Limits on silver availability could limit annual production rates with present mainstream designs. But manufacturers have found many ways to economize on silver use so that total PV silver consumption rose only slightly from 2011-2015 even as annual production volume rose 80%.

SunPower uses plated copper for electrical contacts instead of silver pastes. Their modules are also the most efficient on the market. But the high efficiency and avoidance of silver come at the price of higher process complexity during cell manufacturing which leads to higher costs per watt of capacity. SunPower is at least an existence proof that you can produce modules at large scale, at high efficiency, from abundant elements. I expect other manufacturers to substitute away from silver too if increasing demand pushes silver prices up too high.

Sometimes you'll see people claim that solar can't attain really large volumes because of dependencies on "rare elements." Those claims are probably referring to the tellurium in cadmium-telluride PV modules and/or the indium and gallium in copper-indium-gallium-diselenide modules. But you can safely ignore those worries because CdTe and CIGS together account for a very small share of the market; crystalline silicon dominates PV at over 90% share.

rdtsc2• 10 years ago

Thank you for explaining. The future sounds exciting.

I especially like the "Solar Roof" from Tesla that is probably what was needed to make it mainstream. When building a house customer has a checkbox to a regular roof or solar roof, but otherwise it looks about the same. One day the solar roof might be the default choice in many areas of the country probably.

niftich• 10 years ago

The case of Slovakia and Hungary is interesting: they are two of the top 4 countries where the share of nuclear generation is highest (and above 50%) [1]. Slovakia is largely devoid of fossil fuels, while Hungary produces lignite, oil, and natural gas, but both are reliant on gas imports (mostly from Russia).

As such, they generally can't afford to not consider nuclear, despite being small countries where an accident would damage a sizeable chunk of the countryside. Despite their Russian-made reactors, and usually Russian-sourced fuel, the domestic production of more than half the countries' energy needs is simply a national security issue with the useful side-effect of reducing carbon emissions than if imported natural gas was used for a much higher share of production.

[1] https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/NuclearShareofElec...

Fej• 10 years ago

Keep fighting for LFTR. We need to beat the CO2 targets, not miss them. Unfortunately, even hitting the targets seems like a pipe dream at this point.

darawk• 10 years ago

If Trump could somehow channel his disdain for environmental groups away from coal and towards nuclear, he could actually end up doing a really great thing. The fact that environmentalists have resisted nuclear power for so long is one of the stupidest most self-defeating things in modern history.

If Trump took all his rhetoric and bullheadedness and focused it on making nuclear great again, that would make me supremely happy.

234dd57d2c8db• 10 years ago

No one seems to be even considering fusion. I understand the tech isn't there, but that's because of the "fusion-never" levels of funding. Can someone please fund this!?

08-153• 10 years ago

This article asks the wrong question. And answers an unrelated one.

First off, the question subtly implies that nuclear power should be the last resort. That's already setting the stage for a slanted discussion. The correct question is to ask whether we want nuclear power in preference to coal, oil, natural gas, and a little bit of solar and wind. As far as I can tell, the answer should be an emphatic YES---but the point isn't the answer, it's the loaded question.

Second, the WSJ asks what's necessary to hit emissions targets. That's dumb. We ought to ask what's necessary to stop global warming. I don't know what are the current targets, probably something like cutting emissions in half by 2050. I think we can do that by switching more industrial processes from coal or oil to natural gas. But if the dire predictions of the IPCC are true, we're still going to die, only a little bit slower. To stop global warming, we need to get CO2 emissions to practically zero, and natural gas doesn't get us there. Neither do unreliables (sun, wind) combined with natural gas backup, nor the vain hope for a magic storage solution nobody knows yet.

And finally, the stupid environmentalist hack proceeds to answer a different question. He tells us that nuclear power is expensive (still cheaper than wind and sun, though), but if indeed it was "Vital to Hitting CO2 Emissions Targets", we wouldn't care. We'd do it anyway, wouldn't we? But naturally, the ecotard doesn't even listen to the question and just rattles off his canned talking points...

Is Nuclear Power Vital to Hitting CO2 Emissions Targets?

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