Can Nuclear Power Offer a Way Out of the Climate Crisis?

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/can-nuclear-power-offer-a-way-out-of-the-climate-crisis-a-06a8a27f-d492-45d3-8134-30187eefbdf3

by ericdanielski • 7 years ago

64 75 7 years ago

spiegel.de

breeny5924• 7 years ago

Nuclear gets pointed to because the mining companies still have a large role to play in digging material out of the ground for nuclear energy. Lobbyists gon' lobby.

As an asset, much like coal power stations, they require huge Government subsidies to be profitable to run.

Renewables are the only way forward - they've proven to be far more efficient, stable, and infinitely cheaper when mixed across multiple mediums.

SlowRobotAhead2• 7 years ago

Do you how many people are killed yearly mining coal vs uranium? [0] Uranium is mined in open pits, and when the radon is handled properly is safe

Renewables are the only way forward

How do you reconcile the article that Germany is already failing their goals before they shut nuclear down in 2022?

[0] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...

Edit: well, I guess that is how polarizing Nuclear is, HN is ready to ignore reality as poised in the article, and a nasa link.

rayiner• 7 years ago

Renewables are a dead end if we want to keep evolving society. Imagine what possibilities there would be with 10x or 100x the available energy. Renewables are not even at the point where they can currently replace the existing electric grid. (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline.) You certainly can’t build a Star Trek world with wind mills. You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations with solar.

nl2• 7 years ago

Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline.

Right now reliable baseload can be provided by renewables plus gas fired turbines for intermittent supply much cheaper than nuclear.

http://www.energyscience.org.au/BP16%20BaseLoad.pdf

If the argument is that we want nuclear power on Mars, then sure, that seems a reasonable position to take.

breeny5924• 7 years ago

Imagine what possibilities there would be if humanity finds a way to power all its current and future needs that produces no harmful side effects rather than trying to equate science fiction with reality.

(Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline

Because traditional baseload isn't a concept in a fully renewable grid - distributed storage and production naturally evens out demand and production, and also makes the grid more resilient to freak weather events (the kind we see more and more thanks to climate change)

You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations with solar.

You're not doing them with anything at the moment so whats the point of conjecture. You really think that energy is the biggest concern over, you know, the colonisation of space?

quelltext• 7 years ago

Not if we want to mitigate climate change.

Renewables will not get us there in time, even if they might be viable at some point.

breeny5924• 7 years ago

Renewables will not get us there in time, even if they might be viable at some point.

Construction of new nuclear plants takes on average 7.5 years, and are extremely prone to cost overruns and delays. Renewables are a much faster and cheaper option to come online, be profitable and allow for shutdown of legacy infrastructure in the same period of time.

And they are viable now - several countries have run for days and weeks on renewables alone. Several regions of Germany are also fully renewable powered.

coin• 7 years ago

Renewables also requires digging stuff out of the ground

breeny5924• 7 years ago

And look at the companies that publicly advocate for things such as battery storage, typically they have vested interests in things such as lithium.

Nuclear gets thrown about because it's an easy pivot for mining companies - especially in Australia which has a powerful mining lobby and large amounts of both coal and uranium.

robmccoll• 7 years ago

Hopefully much like how renewables went from being unprofitable, inefficient, and requiring subsidies to where they are now over the last decade and a half thanks to R&D, subsidies, and a market that has scaled up, nuclear could become a more desirable solution if we incentivize it and start pursuing it seriously again.

The thing about most renewables is still that you can schedule and control output easily to meet demand so you have a storage problem unless you can pair it with another production method to cover the gaps. Maybe nuclear is a good option to lean on for that.

Krasnol9• 7 years ago

There has been significant R&D in all directions in nuclear in the past decades. Even if something would come out of the current development it's slow and expansive. Too slow and expansive compared to the rapid development in renewables to justify throwing even more money on it. Those funds are much better invested in renewables which is why only those few you hear about do invest in it.

cameldrv• 7 years ago

Uranium is such a dense fuel that mining it isn't a huge market. The total market is about 6 billion a year. In contrast, oil is about 2,000 billion a year, so oil is about a 300x larger market, and oil only produces about 4.5x as much energy per year as oil. The fuel is practically free compared to any fossil source.

SlowRobotAhead2• 7 years ago

Can you imagine when nuclear would be now without the stalls, delays, feet dragging, protests, fear mongering?

keanzu8• 7 years ago

I don't have to imagine it, none of those things are relevant in China, they've discovered a different problem - the economics don't work and so China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...

Wowfunhappy• 7 years ago

What about once you factor in the long-term economic costs of climate change? If that was truly factored into the cost of producing electricity, I suspect nuclear would come out well ahead.

elchief• 7 years ago

deleted

BurningFrog• 7 years ago

Oceans will rise a few mm/year at worst.

The vast majority of land is eternally safe

olivermarks• 7 years ago

'The core of the reactor will be almost entirely filled with nuclear waste, which is a great way of disposing of it. Furthermore, the reactor should be able to operate for 60 years without refueling. Indeed, the spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants in the United States alone would be sufficient to cover the entire world's energy needs for centuries to come.'

I've always liked this win win way of disposing of nuclear waste. What isn't apparent in the article is the size of the 'mini' reactors and what the worst case scenario is for failures, and ways to lessen failure states.

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

I really believe Bill Gates is using his money to try to improve the world. He's a smart guy, almost all of his decisions are well-grounded.

I think Gates is right again on this one. Nuclear power is efficient and reliable, day and night, windy or not, rain or shine.

baron816• 7 years ago

What still scares me about nuclear power is the black swan events. If we have 100,000 reactors spread across the world, what’s the likelihood that over 100 years one of them, I don’t know, gets hit by a meteor and contaminates half a continent? With enough reactor over enough time there is bound to be one or two that fail catastrophically, right?

xupybd3• 7 years ago

But are those one or two catastrophies worse than the alternative. We know coal kills thousands each year and harms the planet. Would the net impact of Nuclear be better than running the current course.

Ideally we'd use renewables but there are limits to the current tech that need to be solved before we can go 100%.

Areading314• 7 years ago

You can't heat your house in winter with wind + solar. For a carbon-free world, you need nuclear, period.

javagram2• 7 years ago

Chernobyl exploded and caught on fire and burned, leading radioactive smoke to spread hundreds of miles. Isn’t this similar to the scenario you propose? We’ve already seen what happens (42 immediate casualties, 1000s of cancer cases). But Europe is still a livable continent, it didn’t turn into the scene of a Fallout video game or whatever.

In comparison, the 2011 Tsunami in Japan killed 15,000, yet people are still allowed to live near the ocean...

crdoconnor2• 7 years ago

The point is that Chernobyl could have turned Ukraine into an unlivable country. Badly although it was managed, it could have been even worse.

claudeganon• 7 years ago

I got downvoted in another thread for saying this, but I’ve yet to see any nuclear advocate explain how these systems will fair in a war or state collapse. We’re less than a hundred years out from when wide swathes of Europe were reduced to rubble, but expected to believe that current political formations are going to be stable as far into the future as nuclear materials need to managed.

It may be the case that nuclear energy is required to stave off climate disaster, but given the political instability that’s also likely to engender, I’d like to see anyone speak to this with anything like a historical perspective.

pdonis2• 7 years ago

expected to believe that current political formations are going to be stable as far into the future as nuclear materials need to managed

With proper management (reprocessing), we're talking a hundred years or so. That seems like a reasonable time frame to me.

barry-cotter3• 7 years ago

Do not complain about being downvoted. It’s boring, it often leads to further downvoting for whining and it shows a complete lack of perspective to be complaining about meaningless message board points.

As for how nuclear power will fare in the event of war or state collapse, really badly, like everything else. Any state capable of running a nuclear reactor built by someone else, never mind building their own, has the capacity for modern industrial warfare, which is insanely expensive in lives and capital. A doubling or trebling of cancer rates due to a Chernobyl level disaster would be background noise compared to war.

I wouldn’t worry excessively about state collapse. There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation. If North Korea can keep going and there hasn’t been an instance of non-war induced state collapse in Europe since Rome’s withdrawal from Britain I wouldn’t worry. Think of Libya, Yugoslavia or Somalia. The first fell to outside aggression, the second was a civil war massively prolonged by outside interference and the third had state capacity too low to be relevant in this context.

pdonis2• 7 years ago

If we have 100,000 reactors spread across the world, what’s the likelihood that over 100 years one of them, I don’t know, gets hit by a meteor and contaminates half a continent?

Zero. There simply isn't enough radioactive material in a reactor to contaminate half a continent, even if it were dispersed that widely by an extraordinary event like a meteorite strike. And the smaller you make the reactor, the less radioactive material there is inside it.

As has already been remarked, Chernobyl is a good benchmark for a worst case scenario of a catastrophic event with a reactor dispersing radioactive material over a wide area. And even counting Chernobyl (and Fukushima), the number of deaths caused by nuclear power per unit of energy generated is orders of magnitude smaller than the corresponding number for any other energy source. So I simply don't see black swan events as a valid concern that should stop the widespread deployment of nuclear power, particularly given the advantages to be gained.

crystaldev2• 7 years ago

Humans are ridiculous. Coal, solar, wind are all stone age compared to nuclear power. If humans went full bore nuclear, they'd have so much energy it would be nothing to move spent fuel to space. It's sort of depressing how this technology that can be used to colonize space gathers dust, so little progress.

blake12• 7 years ago

Nuclear power is pretty Stone Age.

Hold a bunch of special rocks close together. They get hot and make water hot. And turns into hot, wet air, which turns a big fan. Hook a magnet to that fan, and spin it in some hoops and you get electricity. Oh, and always, always, always keep the rocks from getting too hot.

Compare that to solar cells, which are semiconductors doped with cleverly designed impurities, and layered to exploit quantum effects to deliver electrical power simply by pointing it at the sun. You can make it more useful by hooking it to a rechargeable battery, which also exploits clever quantum chemical effects to store that electricity. And the combo of these two wonderful quantum-technological devices is cheaper than the reactor.

Both technologies require understanding of modern physics, but it's pretty telling that you can do enough math to make a fission reactor with a hand calculator, and not a high-powered computer.

buzzkillington2• 7 years ago

Ah yes, the stone age phase change turbine. Well attested in cave paintings and stone chippings.

Solar cells in space are a great idea. Much more efficient than nuclear power when you're closer than the orbit of Venus. A lot less so when you're at the bottom of an atmosphere with dust and clouds.

xupybd3• 7 years ago

The economics of nuclear are good but not as good as you're implying.

It takes a long time and a lot of money to start earning on a nuclear plant. Given the risks involved it's not that easy to build one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

I don't think firing nuclear waste into space would be wise either. The risk of that blowing up on launch is high and the fall out from that would be a disaster.

keanzu8• 7 years ago

Just imagine 10 years after you've built your nice new nuclear plant and someone makes a breakthrough on some form of cheap reliable energy. The current development focus on alternative forms of energy makes nuclear high risk purely due to the payoff period.

crystaldev2• 7 years ago

In the short term nuclear waste should be stored in remote sites on the earth, in the future it should all be moved to space by elevator rather than launch.

vinniejames• 7 years ago

Yes, it always has been a way out. The blocker is public opinion. Nuclear, taking into account disasters, is far safer for society than any other known energy source.

millstone2• 7 years ago

Nuclear is really far safer than solar panels? How is that?

johngalt• 7 years ago

Scale. Nuclear puts a huge denominator in the 'deaths per kwh' ratio.

keanzu8• 7 years ago

By measuring deaths per TWhr. Nuclear power plants generate a lot of power and very few deaths. The amount of energy generated by nuclear is so vast that it more than outweighs incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima over the long-term.

This source only has "rooftop solar" which is more deadly than nuclear power.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

I don't have numbers for non-rooftop solar.

SapporoChris• 7 years ago

Rooftop solar is fairly dangerous to install. However, the main reason nuclear is considered so safe is the massive amount of energy it produces is far greater than the danger.

There are quite a few resources on energy safety. Key terms to search for: energy production safety https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...

barry-cotter3• 7 years ago

In an average year nuclear accidents from power generation kill no one and the total deaths from all nuclear accidents ever are probably under 5,000. People die installing rooftop solar panels every year. Nuclear waste is treated with incredible care and there’s very little of it. Every solar panel has toxic heavy metals in it and most of them are manufactured China. I guarantee you people die from heavy metal exposure every year and once solar panels come to the end of their useful lives someone will be reprocessing them, probably unsafely.

Nuclear power is really safe.

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

eloff• 7 years ago

I've heard it seriously argued, because of the number of injuries and deaths taking of roofs and ladders while installing them. I'm not sure I buy it, but there's an argument to be made at least.

manicdee• 7 years ago

Almost entirely because of rooftop solar.

Contractors doing lots of small jobs end up cutting corners including foregoing safety gear (“how much is a fall from a roof going to hurt anyway”) and the inevitable death-per-thousand-installs basically blows the deaths-per-MW-capacity figure out of the water.

Nuclear plants tend to be large, tightly regulated work sites where things like fences and safety rails can be installed for little cost of time and money relative to the overall cost of the project.

Solar farms have deaths too, the usual fatalities expected from humans working around forklifts, cranes, and other heavy equipment.

Nuclear plants have all the extra joys of falls from heights (ref fences and cutting corners), asphyxiation in confined spaces, concrete injuries (skin burns, lung damage), etc.

This is all highly simplified, the pedants will argue the decimal points but I am only talking hand-wavy numbers.

pmoriarty3• 7 years ago

"What should we fear more: inevitable global climate change or the regional dangers associated with a possible reactor meltdown?"

But earlier in the article, the author said:

"There is one thing almost all model calculations do agree on: Moving forward, the majority of electricity will be supplied by a mix of solar, biomass, wind and hydro power."

So if the majority of power will be non-nuclear, how is nuclear supposed to prevent inevitable global climate change? And why aren't we just pushing to go for 100% non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel energy? Why is that not an option?

In another part of the article, they say "Qvist believes the lower costs are the primary advantage offered by the smaller nuclear power plants."

So even according to this pro-nuclear consultant, the primary advantage of nuclear is not its ability to prevent inevitable global climate change.

There are some other important things this article does not touch on, one of them being the gross mismanagement of Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the record of nuclear power companies and corrupt regulators not taking safety seriously enough, leading to accidents.

You can have the best technology in the world, but when the companies managing these plants cut corners and don't prioritize safety the ostensibly wonderful technology might be broken, missing, inactive, or inadequate when its needed most. Fukushima and Chernobyl were cases in point.

I'd also take authoritative-sounding pronouncements on the safety of nuclear power in threads like these with a couple of grains of salt.

I remember paying close attention on HN when the Fukushima accident was under way, and there were plenty of people on HN and elsewhere swearing that the Fukushima reactor would never melt down, that it was designed to prevent just such a meltdown. It melted down nevertheless.

Recurecur3• 7 years ago

So if the majority of power will be non-nuclear, how is nuclear supposed to prevent inevitable global climate change? And why aren't we just pushing to go for 100% non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel energy? Why is that not an option?

First off, they have "biomass" as one of the options, which happens to be a bad one in almost all cases.

Second, it's very hard to have reliable grid power once more than 50% of your power is coming from unreliable sources. Even storage isn't a great answer, due to 10/100/1000 year events.

As the article points out, less than 2% of current power comes from wind/solar. It's very difficult to scale that to even 50%. Nuclear, on the other hand, can easily be scaled beyond 50%. In France, it was 80% at one point.

To have a great future, the human race needs clean, abundant, cheap energy. Nuclear is a win!

Recurecur3• 7 years ago

I remember paying close attention on HN when the Fukushima accident was under way, and there were plenty of people on HN and elsewhere swearing that the Fukushima reactor would never melt down, that it was designed to prevent just such a meltdown. It melted down nevertheless.

Yep, there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet. That said, the Fukushima reactors would have been fine if the backup generators to power cooling had been available. However, they weren't in a watertight compartment (as recommended), and were flooded by the tsunami. Even then other backup generators would have worked, but were delivered with the wrong connector and time ran out.

Many Gen-IV designs are, on the other hand, inherently or "walk away" safe. They literally can't melt down or explode due to basic physics.

Krasnol9• 7 years ago

Before some one comes up with the baseload story:

https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374

Summary
Arguments that renewable energy isn't up to the task because "the Sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow all the time" are overly simplistic.
There are a number of renewable energy technologies which can supply baseload power. The intermittency of other sources such as wind and solar photovoltaic can be addressed by interconnecting power plants which are widely geographically distributed, and by coupling them with peak-load plants such as gas turbines fueled by biofuels or natural gas which can quickly be switched on to fill in gaps of low wind or solar production. Numerous regional and global case studies – some incorporating modeling to demonstrate their feasibility – have provided plausible plans to meet 100% of energy demand with renewable sources.

boyadjian• 7 years ago

No, Nuclear is not a sustainable system. The nuclear waste are a big problem for future generation. The only solution, is to lower our energy consumption.

jillesvangurp• 7 years ago

The tricky bit will be not doing it but doing it such that it is cost competitive and able to keep up with wind, solar, & battery all of which are currently rapidly improving in terms of cost, economies of scale, and exponentially growing existing deployments with prices continuing to drop. 0.01 $ / kwh is soon becoming a reality for some of the most competive bids.

When it comes to safety, part of the deal with anything nuclear is going to be security measures needed to prevent somebody from depopulating an area with a dirty bomb using the nuclear material inside the reactor. That alone can prevent this type of solution from ever reaching a point where it is actually cheaper to use than simple & safe wind/solar deployments. People are putting solar on their roofs, batteries in their car, and windmills on their farms. Security is not a cost factor for this. It is for nuclear.

This doesn't have to be a show stopper but it does limit the applications and contexts where this is going to be useful. Fundamentally solar + batteries is going to be pretty reliable, predictable, and cheap given enough mass production capacity. Also most of the timelines nuclear is supposed to happen on (measured in decades) give us plenty of room to vastly improve output, price, and efficiency. Therefore, I doubt that nuclear will be very relevant significant short term but it may help us get rid of the few remaining gas/coal plants in 2-3 decades.

Longer term that and fusion will be great in supplementing power needs anywhere solar/wind are just not practical.

Can Nuclear Power Offer a Way Out of the Climate Crisis?

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