We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

https://www.thebellows.org/we-need-a-nuclear-new-deal-not-a-green-new-deal/

by oedmarap • 6 years ago

471 351 6 years ago

pfraze• 6 years ago

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.

cinntaile2• 6 years ago

I don't see what you base your claims of unquestionably better results for the costs and risks on? Current nuclear energy production is quite expensive, it's on par with the costs for offshore wind iirc. The risks, well... Privately insuring a nuclear power plant is pretty much impossible from a cost perspective. That's why governments, the tax payers in other words, have to assume the full risk in case something goes wrong.

rtx3• 6 years ago

Why are we talking cost and not the pollution footprint.

Manfredo_111• 6 years ago

So it nuclear costs as much as offshore wind, but it's not intermittent? That's very strong advantage: non-intermittent generation avoids the need to overproduce and store energy.

hprotagonist3• 6 years ago

The Green New Deal is at worst nuclear-neutral in favor of stressing wind and solar.

Biden's climate plan, which has a bunch of the same stakeholders and says the GND is a great idea, is on top of that more explicitly and vocally in favor of reactor development and a focus on efficiency improvements and waste processing and reclamation.

Hell, even greenpeace has been pro-reactor for a while now.

I don't see a short-to-medium solution that is the combination of better, cheaper, or safer per watt than nuclear power. (I have no problems with solar and wind, either)

jka4• 6 years ago

Hell, even greenpeace has been pro-reactor for a while now.

Hrm. Do you have a reference for where you read about Greenpeace's stance on reactor development?

Their nuclear energy page[1] currently says: "Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future."

[1] https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/nuclear...

hprotagonist3• 6 years ago

i think i misremembered. Weird!

ianai2• 6 years ago

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.

ttul2• 6 years ago

Tax carbon at $200 per ton and magically the financing for nuclear will appear.

digianarchist• 6 years ago

World Nuclear Industry Status Report - Nuclear energy too slow, too expensive to save climate: report - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...

The economics don't make sense and probably never will. Taxing carbon isn't going to make renewables more expensive.

ttul2• 6 years ago

Either way, tax carbon.

pfdietz21• 6 years ago

The president of Exelon stated that CO2 taxes would have to reach $300-400/ton for new nuclear to compete with NGCC in the US. Renewables would likely be used instead. For nuclear to replace intermittent, gap-filling NG generators would require far higher taxes.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088

CO2 taxes could keep existing reactors operating, though.

hereme888• 6 years ago

"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.

pvaldes3• 6 years ago

Totally different type of waste.

sparkie• 6 years ago

Both are toxic waste, but one often ends up in landfill or flytipped, and the other is safely contained underground because its developers are legally obliged to plan for its disposal and long-term storage as part of the design process.

The cost of disposal is often ignored when pricing solar (PV).

https://stopthesethings.com/2020/10/10/lingering-legacy-mill...

arcticbull7• 6 years ago

Indeed, one is the kind of waste you can drop a few oil drums of into Yucca Mountain and never have to worry about it again.

On the other hand wind requires huge quantities of rare earth metals mined in open-air hellscapes in the far western reaches of China -- devastating the environment [1, 2]. So, why is it all mined in China you might ask, knowing rare earths are distributed all over the world? Specifically because developed nations are not interested in bearing the ecological burden.

Solar panels frequently contain cadmium and tellurium, which both have to be mined (see above) and then leech out into the environment [3].

Then there's the human toll. Nuclear energy ends up with about 1/4 as many deaths per TWh generated as wind, 1/10 as many as rooftop solar, and 1/2 as many as industrial solar. [4]

[edit] The nice thing about nuclear waste is that radiation is easy to detect. All you need is a Geiger counter and some lead underpants. Cadmium, tellurium, the run-off from refining rare earths? That's what I'm really scared of.

[1] https://earth.org/rare-earth-mining-has-devastated-chinas-en...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607867/

[4] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

throwaway_pdp093• 6 years ago

Would you think that the waste type from solar panels is comparable to the waste type from nuclear?

ianai2• 6 years ago

Yes. Solar is probably way more hazardous to work with at plants.

rtx3• 6 years ago

Yes, less amount and quicker to decay.

pydry6• 6 years ago

Why Renewables Aren't the Reason for California Blackouts: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew...

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).

zaroth2• 6 years ago

The National Geographic article attempts to make the point that the problems in CA aren’t fundamentally an issue with renewables.

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.

pydry6• 6 years ago

A lack of forecasting and reliance upon energy imports that are not supported by long term contracts aren't problems that are intrinsically all that hard to fix either. It just requires a bit more competence in running the grid.

California has had a history of poor management of its electric grid (remember enron?). A wholesale switch to nuclear is a vastly expensive and not terribly effective fix for poor grid management.

ip263• 6 years ago

Wasn't half of the problem in CA due to unexpected natural gas plant power-downs? That was hardly renewable's fault.

79522• 6 years ago

I don't think the fundamentals of the technology are ever the most important aspect of the debate. What constrains us are human, political and market factors. That is why America has been slow to adopt renewables and why the nuclear industry has declined. That is why the US grid is in such a poor state.

SV_BubbleTime• 6 years ago

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?

Don’t know. Actually asking.

epistasis11• 6 years ago

Some nuclear proponents say that regulation is the cause, but in my experience they aren't the proponents that have examined actual projects' economic failures in the past decade.

And even those who say that regulations are the reason for high prices don't seem to have any specific suggestions of how to change regulations, just a general "regulations are a problem" vibe, with the implicit suggestion of "get rid of all regulations" since no other change is offered.

But I would love to encounter somebody who says that regulations are the problem and also has ways to change them to allow more economic construction. Just hasn't ever happened despite tons of discussions with lots is people over the past five years I've been following nuclear closely.

pydry6• 6 years ago

Partly. It's also just very expensive to build a nuclear plant.

It's also worth noting that cleanup costs in the case of a nuclear accident are capped by law at $200 million. Any costs above that are shouldered by the taxpayer. Cleanup costs for Fukushima are about ~$500 billion.

epistasis11• 6 years ago

And to address the other half of your question, the lower costs for solar and wind take into account the lifetime of the generation, and it's usually measured by the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) which is roughly the lifetime cost divided by the lifetime energy output. This does not take into account the value of the time that energy is delivered, so LCOE is not directly comparable for renewables and dispatchable generation like natural gas (though a huge percentage of the new solar and wind deploys for the next 5 years are adding storage to convert them into dispatchable resources.)

As for the disposal costs, that's a fairy trivial problem. Solar panel recycling has not really started because there's not many dead panels to recycle; lifetimes are tending to be longer than expected. However as there is a larger source of retired solar panels, those attempting to recycle them will get a better feel for the costs of construction of new panels from raw materials versus recycled magerials.

polote4• 6 years ago

You can't compare nuclear and wind/solar, how are you going to power the lights at night when there is a no wind ?

sudoaza• 6 years ago

power storage

DiogenesKynikos5• 6 years ago

With energy from wind farms 1000 km away, hydro and biofuels closer by, and nearby storage. At the beginning, you'll probably also have a small amount of "dirty" generation as backup, but which sits idle most of the time.

ip263• 6 years ago

In addition to other points made, I wanted to add, at the altitude large turbines reach, there is almost always wind, around the clock.

throwaway_pdp093• 6 years ago

If we're going to do nuclear there are better arguments needed. This is not an honest evaluation

nuclear waste isn’t a glowing toxic ooze

That's irrelevant, whether true or false waste has to be handled. So far it's not been done well, and language like that is appeal to emotion, not facts.

The comment of 300 times waste from solar panels than nuclear doesn't reflect the different waste types.

I'm not actually against nuclear intrinsically but pieces like this are not honest nor therefore, useless.

sebmellen3• 6 years ago

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.

aaronbrethorst• 6 years ago

False dichotomies generate controversy and get more clicks!

sebmellen3• 6 years ago

I wonder how many clicks an article could get with a title like: "Alex Jones Denounces Satanic 'Green New Deal', Scientists Propose Nuclear Energy Alternative".

bilbo0s2• 6 years ago

They're pretty good for getting votes at the ballot box too.

It's been my observation that the tenets of many political ideologies are predicated on false dichotomies. Or even out and out falsehoods.

godelski3• 6 years ago

I always say this whenever nuclear conversations come up:

It isn't nuclear vs renewables, it is nuclear + renewables vs renewables. You use the best technology for the local environment and situations. Why take something off the table?

Seems like the author is buying into the common false dichotomy because it is more sensational.

Bud• 6 years ago

Only, not. The author never sets up any dichotomy at all, nor does he suggest the elimination of renewables. He merely suggests that nuclear have a higher priority, for reasons he then goes on to explain:

"That is why any climate plan that doesn’t prioritize nuclear above all other energy sources is destined to exacerbate climate problems rather than solve them. "

manfredo8• 6 years ago

It largely is a dichotomy, because nuclear power largely makes wind and solar redundant. Peak energy demand occurs right around or after sundown. If we're going to fulfill this demand with nuclear, then we could just run the nuclear plants all day long and build no solar or wind.

Solar and wind are a good complement to natural gas. We can dial back the gas when the intermittent sources of energy are producing. This both saves carbon and money, since fuel is a substantial portion of a gas plant', operating cost.

By comparison, a nuclear plant costs just as much to run at maximum capacity all day long as it does at partial capacity. If you have enough nuclear plants to full peak demand, which coincides with the trough of renewables' generation, then just run the plants at full capacity all day and skip building renewables.

pfdietz21• 6 years ago

It's not a false dichotomy. Beyond a certain level of renewable penetration, nuclear's business case degrades, as the price of power is depressed too often for the NPPs to earn their keep. Nuclear and renewables are both inflexible sources, in their own ways, and they both use up the grid's capacity to deal with inflexible sources.

rch3• 6 years ago

My impression is that the GND is focused on jobs, social programs, and justice issues, which is great, just not environmentalism per se.

It might be more effective to expand E. O. Wilson's efforts on biodiversity to include energy policy than to try to have the GND encompass absolutely everything that's happening at the moment.

wmf2• 6 years ago

When I looked at a semi-detailed analysis of one version of the GND, $14T was for the green part and $2T was for the new deal part. I think of it as a small bribe to get more politicians on board.

iso8859-1• 6 years ago

Greenpeace is actively opposed to nuclear. And then you have articles like https://www.citizen.org/article/nuclear-power-is-not-clean-o...

Why even use the term "green" when you can say "low emissions"? That is harder to disagree about.

jmull• 6 years ago

Nuclear energy should be part of a "Green New Deal"

If Biden’s energy plan is the green new deal, then it already is...

As a political football of a marketing term, people are never going to agree on what composes it.

But it seems that nuclear has become practically mainstream as part of green energy plans. Not that there isn’t plenty of residual resistance from “green” groups with historical objections to nuclear.

Hopefully every group that actually cares about climate change will take a fresh, objective look, to see if they can’t get aboard after all.

dan-robertson• 6 years ago

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.

joncrane3• 6 years ago

the way to make fusion generate power more efficiently without changing the underlying technology is to make it bigger

Actually there was a front page item on here a couple of weeks ago showing that there's a new superconductor that can generate a stronger magnetic field, which will allow new, much smaller fusion reactors. So according to the guy from MIT who gave the talk, ITER is already obsolete technology.

Having said that, with fusion, it looks like every time they have a breakthrough, they find a new limiting factor when then takes billions to overcome, rinse and repeat.

It's amazing in theory but we have yet to achieve a fusion reaction that is energy positive and the path to that is still fraught. In theory with these Lithium neutron blankets you can even create your own fuel (Assuming Deuterim-Tritium reaction) but the hurdles are still insanely high to get something that's actually practical.

Also, I believe fission and fusion can be synergistic in that you can have a fission reactor that not only produces energy, but it produces some of the fuel for the fusion.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 years ago

So according to the guy from MIT who gave the talk, ITER is already obsolete technology.
It's amazing in theory but we have yet to achieve a fusion reaction that is energy positive and the path to that is still fraught.

He also said that fusion has a funding issue, not a science or engineering issue. Also- being able to make them smaller mostly solves the funding issue.

willis936• 6 years ago

Fusion is great and important and if society can afford it they should continue to fund it. However, if the goal is slowing damage to the environment in the next 80 years then fusion shouldn’t be seriously considered. Fusion is the answer to what humanity does to make large amounts of electrical power not from fossil fuels when renewables stop scaling for baseline loads. Humanity will benefit from it, but the window for it to be the technology to keep the planet habitable has passed.

rtx3• 6 years ago

In the end all of us will move to nuclear. Maybe this a necessary dance we have to do to make everyone open to nuclear. I just the hope the whole cycle is accelerated by todays connected world.

asimpletune• 6 years ago

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.

https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...

godelski3• 6 years ago

Whenever I see articles like this I wonder why few people realize the strawman being put up. Having a single energy source for all your needs is pretty dumb. We've always had a diversified portfolio and the reasons for such aren't going away anytime soon.

OneGuy123• 6 years ago

This article makes some good points but forgets this: our knowledge increases constantly.

So today's reactors might not be able to scale well, but the more we build the better we are at it.

rangoon626• 6 years ago

Absolutely. Our knowledge nuclear energy production would have increased more if “environmentalists” hadn’t thrown a hissy fit over gen 2 reactor problems in the 70s.

Its 2020, and I am still breathing in exhaust of a pollution from energy production, as a direct result of their foolishness.

wwweston3• 6 years ago

That's a good counter for some of the points, although there's limits to how much you can count on it.

It's less comforting for others, like the limited amount of uranium available and diminishing returns on how to get it.

pfdietz21• 6 years ago

Some knowledge we gain is negative. We've learned nuclear wasn't as promising as had been claimed.

More generally, in engineering most technologies must fail. That's because there are multiple technologies that can solve any given problem, and only one can come out on top. The number of niches < the number of different solutions.

If you think just wait, we'll learn more and nuclear wins, why doesn't that same argument apply to the technologies nuclear is competing against?

bob10292• 6 years ago

Nuclear providing all of our base electrical generation needs, as well as co-generation applications like cooling & heating, is an obvious engineering slam dunk.

I think there are also some incredible synergies that can emerge with electric cars and batteries. Just a little bit of distributed storage (e.g. Tesla car in your garage back-feeding your home periodically) could potentially obviate the need for peak generation capacity altogether. What little we do need could simply be spinning reserve w/ nuclear generation providers where it's required the most.

In the areas where nuclear is not feasible, we obviously would continue to burn the most appropriate fuels. That said, one big area that could definitely use some attention would be international shipping. Perhaps as reactor costs come down, boats that are bigger than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier could be justified in having nuclear power too.

joncrane3• 6 years ago

I remember a Popular Mechanics cover that indicated that soon, Nuclear reactors would be powering houses and even cars. I don't believe there's a practical limitation that means that a ship has to be huge to be nuclear powered. The limiting factor on cargo ship size is the Panama Canal; there's even a name for it, "Panamax."

(Note, there are ships that are larger (Post-Panamax), as well as Suezmax but they are obviously limited in use and less common)

jabl• 6 years ago

Nuclear reactors per se can be made pretty small, e.g. research reactors typically have a maximum (steady state) power output of a few hundred kW (roughly a car engine). OTOH the minimum economic size is probably somewhat larger.

I would imagine there's similar issues as with nuclear power plants on land, that is, to get the best return on the invested capital you want to run them with as high capacity factor as possible. So some short-range ship that spends a large fraction of its time in port is probably a poor match, whereas a trans-oceanic liner with quick turnarounds, like a container ship, could make for a good fit.

Nowadays there's "New Panamax", after a new set of locks opened in 2016 enabling (much) bigger ships.

sergeykish• 6 years ago

NuScale modular reactor provides 60 MW [1], Emma Mærsk (397 m) propulsion - 81 MW + 30 MW [2].

Problem is not technical, nuclear-powered icebreakers built long ago [3]. It is political — nuclear-powered cargo ship approaches Norway and it is news [4]:

the increasing number of voyages with nuclear-powered vessels along the coast of Norway is something the agency is taking into consideration as Norway updates its nuclear emergency preparedness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Let_Pobedy

[4] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/09/10/russian-nuclear-po...

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

Urg. "We're not going to solve this problem, so let's argue about all the solutions we don't gave the time or money or interest to actually implement".

Consultant32452• 6 years ago

The thing to remember about every major social/political issue is that the organizer class needs the issue more than they need the solution. Once you view the world through this lens the world begins to make more sense.

radford-neal2• 6 years ago

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.

pydry6• 6 years ago

In the UK Hinkley point C got a strike price of £92.50 per megawatt hour guaranteed for (i think) 35 years.

By contrast wind got about £39-£41 for two years. Future years will likely be even lower.

svrb• 6 years ago

A "guarantee" from the state is worth a lot less than face value as it can simply legislate away that guarantee.

0xy• 6 years ago

Ignores the price of inconsistent delivery and the inevitable huge costs of batteries and/or gas peaking plants to supplement the inconsistent power from wind.

Nobody ever factors in these costs to the price of solar or wind, and I find it extremely disingenuous. Nuclear can still be pumping power on a windless sunless day with 100% green energy.

Solar and wind? Either use batteries (expensive, not really renewable) or gas peaking plants (nearly worse than coal, not renewable, expensive).

bilbo0s2• 6 years ago

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.

alkonaut2• 6 years ago

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.

radford-neal2• 6 years ago

Well, that gets into whether or not nuclear plants are actually economic - or whether they only seem so if you don't account for the cost of a possible disaster.

I don't know the answer to this question. But in theory the cost can be captured in an insurance premium. The government could have a role in requiring adequate insurance.

But this is all separate from government actions that destroy legitimate profits, the risk of which may make private financing impossible. (One might think that the risk of government action is just like other possible risks, which investors can account for, but the point is that it's not a risk for the government itself, leading to government financing being preferred.)

ThinkBeat• 6 years ago

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.

It is a huge sinkhole of tax money.

tertiary2• 6 years ago

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.

aplummer• 6 years ago

Define short term; I think by the time a reactor you start today comes online, we are already pretty screwed

melling• 6 years ago

hey, we have been asking for 2 decades.

Somewhere in the past year or so a lot of people have started saying “too late”

Maybe you can humor the people who want nuclear while we continue to add solar and wind.

The world needs a lot of electricity.

eloff3• 6 years ago

It's trite, but it's never too late to start. Certainly starting now is better than doing nothing in this case, and nuclear may be a good option. I'm not convinced that old nuclear tech is economically viable anymore compared to batteries + renewables. New nuclear tech may be. We need investment there.

ci5er• 6 years ago

I don't know. The science and engineering has quietly moved quite a bit over the last 40 years.

These [0] SMRs can, for example - there are several other approaches - can be assembled on a standard assembly line, shipped in a couple of C-Containers, and stood up on a concrete pad (well, not exactly, but close enough that I don't feel like complicating the point.

[0] https://www.nuscalepower.com/

BurningFrog• 6 years ago

If this is a reference to the "we only have 12 years to save the planet" meme, that is just a thing that went viral.

There is no science behind it.

DennisP7• 6 years ago

It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can.

However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

rayiner5• 6 years ago

It’s really already too late. Even if we the developed world decarbonizes in the next 20 years, India, China, and Africa will not. That means what we really need to be looking at is technology to power carbon capture.

bccdee• 6 years ago

Yeah I'm a big fan of nuclear energy, but it just takes forever to get reactors online. We just don't have that kind of time. By all means, let's invest in nuclear, but we need to be building acres and acres of solar panels NOW. "We've got some reactors on the way" is not enough.

speleding2• 6 years ago

Rosatom will sell you a floating reactor you can tow into a harbour and hook up to your grid [1]. So short term can be pretty short if you want. And don't worry about the fuel, they simply tow it back to St. Petersburg when the fuel is expired and keep the dirty stuff there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...

api• 6 years ago

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.

runarberg3• 6 years ago

There is also geothermal energy (Alaska, West Coast, Rockies; I assume we are talking solely the USA here) and hydroelectric power (Alaska, West Coast, South East, and more).

But we often don’t talk about the energy wasted in bad location of industries. E.g. growing water demanding crops in the Mid-West or South East instead of California where water is scarce, or energy intensive industries in Alaska (where energy is plentiful) instead of Texas where it is scarce.

Another thing not mentioned is wasted energy because of lacking infrastructure. This also applies to the rest of the world. A good example is not building high speed rail connection between high travel areas, so people use polluting air travel instead, another is lack of waste management facilities so garbage is left to rot instead of reused or recycled lowering demand for making the same thing again in a far away facility.

DiogenesKynikos5• 6 years ago

You can transmit power over long distances with surprisingly little energy loss with high-voltage DC. Any sane national plan for renewable energy would include a large amount of long-distance power transfer, if for no other reason than to minimize the variance in power production.

wutbrodo2• 6 years ago

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)

tertiary2• 6 years ago

I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past?

[1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...

est314• 6 years ago

Well the currently deployed, old nuclear plants certainly aren't as safe as the new, unbuilt ones the nuclear proponents always like to showcase. Even if you decide towards using nuclear in the future, you should build new reactors from scratch using those new safer designs.

adamsea3• 6 years ago

It's a proposal; it can be negotiated and changed until it becomes law. The main purpose is:

a) Help give future generations a reasonably livable and enjoyable planet. b) Help Americans by creating jobs.

sanderjd3• 6 years ago

A big problem I have with things like "the green new deal" is that they are buzzwords onto which many different policies can be mapped. I think to lots of people it implies no nuclear, and to some others it doesn't. Both are "right" because the buzzword has no implicit meaning.

dane-pgp• 6 years ago

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."

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-crowd-nuclear-renewables...

DennisP7• 6 years ago

This is a biased source but seems to make a good case that that study has serious flaws:

https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/we-need-both-nuclear-a...

acidburnNSA• 6 years ago

That author has been writing this for years and has had to do multiple retractions. A few top climate scientists are working on a rebuttal right now so we can expect this to be retracted soon as well.

mulmen3• 6 years ago

This smells like the old cliche. Correlation does not imply causation.

deepnotderp• 6 years ago

Isn't there an obvious hidden random variable there? The only countries that are really actively building nuclear power are growing developing countries like India, so of course their emissions are increasing.

EDIT: So yes:

"The study found that in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions."

acituan• 6 years ago

there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly

Please don’t ascribe causality without evidence. Even the authors admit upfront that this is a correlational study, with strong confounding variables like GDP.

eeZah7Ux2• 6 years ago

my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.

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.

hcurtiss• 6 years ago

Then build them smaller. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34198830/tw...

cambalache2• 6 years ago

We already have something 10000000X worse: Nuclear Weapons, that cat is out of the bag. So either we dismantle all nuclear arsenals in the world or we stop giving the "potential socio-political inestability"as a reason to not building more nuclear plants.

You are stopping the butcher to use big knives for fear he may go insane in the future and kill some customers with them, when millions of weapons are highly available.

pdonis7• 6 years ago

you can have both

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.

kristopolous6• 6 years ago

It's at least a few orders of magnitude away from ever plausibly getting there. For all intents and purposes, such a concern is imaginary.

And even then, one doesn't preclude the other. Retrofitting power distribution to have less energy loss, buildings with better insulation, more efficient logistics networks for food delivery, these are green new deal issues. None of that is anti-nuclear - they simply aren't related.

By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else. That is simply not how reality works.

throwaway8451• 6 years ago

Intermittency of renewables is less of a problem if one rids oneself of the medieval seeming idea of energy self-sufficiency. Energy does not have to be produced where it is needed. We can transfer it already. The grid would need upgrades but we can definitely transfer large amounts of energy over long distances.

Example from China: 12GW over 3300km at 1100kV DC, for others look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity... .

Europe is also building HVDC (high-voltage direct current) links connecting windparks and consumers with e.g. norwegian pumped hydro power plants for storing excess energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current )

KoenDG• 6 years ago

Future political generations abusing nuclear power for their own goals is something I hadn't yet considered.

Potentially extremely dangerous.

primroot• 6 years ago

If nuclear is so safe then why the subsidized insurance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

marcusverus• 6 years ago

That's not a subsidy. It's a claim by a third party (who, coincidentally, exists to advocate for strict regulation of the nuclear industry) that the government is underestimating the risk associated with nuclear power. Differences of opinion regarding actuarial tables aren't subsidies.

The wiki article claims that CATO also supports this, but that claim does not appear to be supported in the cited material.

monkeycantype• 6 years ago

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.

HappyDreamer5• 6 years ago

Nuclear also externalizes cost -- to future generations, for thousands of years.

Wave energy, wind and solar is different though.

... Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating ...

It's not the only way -- what about heavier taxes for energy from burning oil and coal.

But I guess people like their cars and getting stuck in the daily 08:00 traffic jams too much. Who wants trains or buses or bikes or running shoes.

econcon• 6 years ago

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)

skitout7• 6 years ago

With a diversified mix (with solar pannel facing different position also), energy efficiency, demand response, thermal storage and a bit of electrical storage, we definitely don't need a world grid

carlosdp• 6 years ago

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.

The FAQ AOC released after the document explicitly ruled out nuclear energy, iirc.

Schiendelman3• 6 years ago

No. It said we need to decommission our old reactors, which we do regardless. It’s linked in the first major thread in this discussion.

speleding2• 6 years ago

There is an economic reason you cannot have both: Nuclear power plants need to run near capacity to be economical. If you have a lot of intermittent power from wind and solar then nuclear plants will only be able to get a reasonable price for their output 40% of the time (at night when it's not windy).

Conversely, if the nuclear power plant is running anyway and has enough capacity to cover a windless night, you may as well get rid of the solar and wind.

This equation will change if we ever get storage to be cheap enough so we can store intermittent power, but there is nothing on the horizon that will do that.

kova12• 6 years ago

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

Schiendelman3• 6 years ago

Please please please stop repeating this. It’s an assumption about a solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist yet.

As we build more renewables, we’re also building better grid connections to serve demand response. You build until most places are overproducing.

andrewjl2• 6 years ago

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.

skitout7• 6 years ago

"Nuclear is amazing"... but much much more expensive than wind and solar https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

zingplex• 6 years ago

If humanity is going to survive the next few decades with a quality of life even remotely resembling what we have now, we'll need to stop looking at the pocket book for a short while.

monadic2• 6 years ago

...why not both? Obviously we would still need a green new deal even with massive nuclear investment.

runarberg3• 6 years ago

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.

arcticbull7• 6 years ago

... 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!

r--man• 6 years ago

This article fails to present a fair view and it's too shallow to be taken seriously.

I have had the opportunity to be involved with a big player in the mid-C power market and it quickly showed me that the real challenges are different than what Reddit armchair experts identify.

tl;dr: just head over to [MIT's EN-Road Climate Simulator](https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/en-roads/), move the Nuclear dial to maximum adoption, and see what changes. You have gone from 4.1 degrees of temperature change to 3.9C. The 0.2C that is almost negligible compared to other solutions like reducing methane emissions.

The US's Green New Deal is a comprehensive document not only about climate protection but also about social injustice. The US does need something like this Deal and making a case for a "Nuclear New Deal" does not address the same issues. The internet appears to think of nuclear energy as this misunderstood miracle that the interest groups and politicians have killed.

I do think nuclear has an important role in lowering electrification costs when the carbon pricing goes up and we do need to start looking at SMRs and nuclear fusion much more seriously; below I will try to balance some of the article's points.

Before I start, I'd like to highlight that to my understanding, the biggest sustainable energy challenges come from the demand side not the supply.

when wildfires broke out the following month, a blanket of ash blotted out the sun in some places, cutting the state’s solar energy output by one-third.

Under the wildfire circumstances many of the energy generation plants, including nuclear, may need to adjust. Solar is 20% of california's generation, so the roughly 7% cut is significant but [was not the culprit as someone pointed out](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew...).

Solar has an important advantage over nuclear in a disaster: it is decentralized. Independent communities can rely on their own solar power while they connect to the bigger grid as well. This creates resilience in case one of them is cut.

Energy in California is incredibly expensive for ratepayers

Some reasons for this are environmental restrictions that stops California from buying relatively cheaper hydro power, inefficiencies in PG&E, and just generally not enough ratepayer anger.

Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs and nuclear waste isn’t a glowing toxic ooze.

The reactors work under extreme safety considerations. Prior to Chernobyl the scientists [did not hold the concern](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3d3rzFTrLg) that a reactor is capable of making such disaster. The problem is that like most engineering we need to see what happens to fix it, and the sensitivity around nuclear increases the cost of that. The waste does glow, just not in the visible spectrum.

elements such as uranium and plutonium have such long half-lives, the radiation they emit is low enough to safely hold in your hand.

You probably do not want to do that for a prolonged period. Also, the big issue is not only with the direct radiation but with the particles getting into the body.

The article mentioned half-lives, it is long enough that [we can't quite comprehend what to do about it](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/). That is true even for Thorium, though relatively much better.

The idea behind our green movement is not leaving a problem for the next generations. The nuclear energy at the advancement level of today does not guarantee that.

krdl• 6 years ago

Article praising nuclear power, referencing pro-nuclear think tanks and not referecing Fukushima even once. Yeah, nah.

sradman• 6 years ago

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.

pfdietz21• 6 years ago

Fast reactors could, in principle, blow up like atomic bombs (in the sense of having a prompt supercritical reaction with unmoderated neutrons.)

yetanothermonk• 6 years ago

In practice though, there are control rods and MSRs have freeze plugs into drain tanks right?

manfredo8• 6 years ago

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.

skitout7• 6 years ago

And nuclear is much much more expensive than solar or wind ! https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

xoxoy• 6 years ago

I’m tempted to go in on some long term GE stock options for this reason - stock is very cheap but they are the only major US nuclear manufacturing player.

throwawaysea2• 6 years ago

Green New Deal isn’t an energy or environmental program. It is a greenwashed policy proposal that includes essentially the entire far left’s agenda - it uses the word “justice” affixed to many different causes and the cause of environmental protection (rebranded as “environmental justice”) and a dose of mental gymnastics to drag in many unrelated policy proposals that are part of either the social justice or socialist agenda.

If we want to expedite environmental protection, what we need is an unbundling of individual policy proposals from GND, which will speed up adoption of the pieces that matter (like supporting nuclear energy) without all the controversial social justice or socialist cruft riding on it.

icebraining• 6 years ago

the entire far left’s agenda

Or as the rest of the world calls it, center's agenda. The actual far-left is pretty critical of the GND: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/03/05/deal-m05.html

throwawaysea2• 6 years ago

The “rest of the world” doesn’t call it the “center’s agenda” in my observation - what are you basing that on? I have noticed there is a tendency on HN to treat Scandinavian countries with small homogeneous populations as “the rest of the world”, ignoring other nations out there as well as the diversity of opinions within Scandinavian countries.

In my view, the far left - as far as those in the center are concerned - is “progressives” in America (and their equivalents elsewhere): those pushing for equity (equality of outcomes instead of equality of opportunity), those using a victim/oppression narrative as a foundation for every political position, those seeking collectivist society/policy instead of individualist perspectives, etc. There is room for relativism certainly, but characterizing the GND as the “center” is not just without evidence but in conflict with the reality of political cultures around the world.

xabush• 6 years ago

This excellent video delves into the economics of nuclear power plants and compares them with the alternatives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC_BCz0pzMw

Although nuclear energy is profitable of the LONG term, it is financially infeasible over the short-to-medium term.

croes• 6 years ago

Does anybody know a company or institution that they trust to operate a reactor for decades with the right safety standard? Everywhere safety is being cut back if it reduces profits. We may have the technology for safe nuclear energy but we lack the right society.

KirinDave2• 6 years ago

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.

wtracy• 6 years ago

Folks also get so worked up about highly efficient new renewable power sources that they forget about transit and storage.

I don't know about the situation today, but for years the massive wind farms on Tehachapi weren't even connected to the grid. Even after PG&E bought the electricity to meet their renewables quota, it was cheaper to waste it than to build the transmission infrastructure.

Renewables have the inverse of the problem you described: They are too distributed, and it's hard to get enough to power a community without running transmission lines over hundreds of miles.

Yes, the centralization of infrastructure required for efficient nuclear energy production is a problem. But don't forget that renewables have equivalent problems.

KirinDave2• 6 years ago

Transmission on a local level is a MUCH easier problem to solve. Storage on a local level is plummetting in price and rising in efficiency; while also reducing its reliance in rare minerals.

PG&E's failures should show that running one big statewide grid is so difficult and expensive it shouldn't be done. We should reclaim to copper and use the savings to make communities self sufficient, which for many small communities is entirely possible

telaelit• 6 years ago

Why not both? The Green New Deal doesn’t exclude nuclear power. I know some policy makers are hesitant about nuclear power, but from what I understand the authors of the Green New Deal framework (AOC and Markey) have said they are open to nuclear power.

jackcviers32• 6 years ago

In light if how the U.S. is handling the pandemic, your concern is extremely valid.

dang• 6 years ago

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24747057.

jackcviers32• 6 years ago

The parent comment talked about political policy in the future putting lives at risk with regards to proper decommissioning of nuclear reactors. The administration's current policies towards the covid crisis are an example of the type of possible political irresponsibility the parent comment mentioned. I don't see this comment as a flame war or tangential. It's fine to remove it, of course, next time I'll add more substance to the comment. Hope you are having a good day, and thanks for the hard work on moderating this site.

starik36• 6 years ago

I have one question for all the articles that write, rightly so, about how efficient nuclear is. Can you guarantee that another Dyatlov won’t be put in charge of the plant and potentially cause massive devastation?

corn13read• 6 years ago

Liquid Salt and Thorium are the best wins we have today until we figure out fusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w

Simple facts.

maerF0x0• 6 years ago

+1 And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

And : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySqaLbYBB_c

clows• 6 years ago

As long as Nuclear Power costs don't include the long term waste storage it's dishonest about the real costs (just like the oil industry).

Also - current nuclear power plants need cold water for cooling - france had to turn of plants due to heat [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

defterGoose• 6 years ago

TFA makes it abundantly clear that waste storage is a vanishingly small portion of the cost. Dig a giant hole in a mountain in the desert. Put waste in. Station security guards. Continue for a century. Repeat.

tzs• 6 years ago

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.

EdgarVerona• 6 years ago

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.

spark3k• 6 years ago

My Airbnb host is a full time nuclear engineer and even he doesn’t back the technology. “Too risky”

natch2• 6 years ago

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.

visarga• 6 years ago

That just means we need small nuclear reactors.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-u-s-small-n...

Solar and wind are much more demanding regarding space and greenhouse effects related to manufacturing and installation.

natch2• 6 years ago

Show me a nuclear reactor a middle class family can afford. Solar can be on the roof. Or even be the roof. Hard to get more space efficient than that. The greenhouse gas effects of solar manufacturing are a PR myth pushed by the oil and gas industry.

o_class_star• 6 years ago

Nuclear power is, by far, safer than fossil fuel power. The problem is that it has a branding deficit.

The BP logo is a green-yellow sun; it's happy, because it's capitalism-- shiny and happy on the surface, and please don't read the fine print-- whereas most nuclear projects require government involvement, and government doesn't invest money into advertising or branding, preferring quiet competence (when you hear a lot about your government, that's usually because someone screwed up). So, people have a relative over-focus on the problems with nuclear power (which are serious, and need to be addressed) compared to other sources of energy.

alkonaut2• 6 years ago

Do Nuclear plants really create that many jobs though? Sure it's labor intensive during construction but it's highly specialized work and doesn't exactly create a lot of working class jobs. The key part of the green new deal is the "new deal" bit, not the "green" bit. The "Green" bit is just a good way of spending the money if you are doing a "new deal". If you don't get many jobs per dollar, it's a bad deal.

zaroth2• 6 years ago

Government subsidies of an industry are an important tool where private sector investment is not sufficient to reach positive feedback loops and move up the manufacturing efficiency curve; either at all, or just not fast enough naturally.

The efficiency of public investment is often measured as the ratio of private dollars you can entice someone to invest in return for the public subsidy.

So for example, offer someone a $5,000 tax credit to install $55,000 of solar panels is a 10:1 private investment factor. This has two very important results;

1) If you have a high private investment factor it means that the thing you are subsidizing has substantial positive economic value in the real world. Those private dollars means someone has skin in the game, and actually wants the product they are buying.

2) It means the net total effect of resources being allocated to the industry is much higher per dollar of public funds being invested.

The problem I have with the Green New Deal or similar ideas is they seem to be trying to achieve a specific industrial energy base irrespective of the economic value of that basis, or the current limits of technology.

First, because it’s being driven primarily by public dollars — literally printed money whose only cost is the debasement of all savings. Second, because the goal is not fundamentally economic, it means a significant sustained drag on the economy due to more expensive energy which is a multiplicative negative effect going into the future.

Energy needs to cost less and less going into the future while also being produce cleaner and cleaner. Cheap abundant energy is a necessity for not only a growing economy but even a matter of equitable treatment and human rights.

Over the next 20 years the technological progress in renewables and storage will naturally and fundamentally change our national energy supply. Similar to the mythical man month theory, we can’t spend 10x as much and get there 10x faster.

Smart and efficient public spending with high ratios of private dollar participation has been and will continue to be successful in motivating an economical shift to clean energy. I don’t think we want to or should be spending trillions of dollars here, because frankly most of it will be wasted.

The fundamental solution to cleaner energy is in making the clean energy solutions abundantly cheaper and more reliable. Anything else is akin to trying to stay warm by lighting money on fire.

b34r• 6 years ago

No, we need a geothermal new deal. Nuclear is way too problematic, and MIT has estimated 240+ years worth of GT energy in the US alone.

specialist• 6 years ago

FFS. As Saint Jobs taught us "Real artists ship."

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

deevolution• 6 years ago

“Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15- percent- efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told, we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of biofuels? Something like 4 Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 61,000 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300- foot- diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build three 100- megawatt steam turbines every day— 1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3- reactor, 3- gigawatt plant every week— 52 a year, times 25.” Add it up, and when you’re done, you’ve got an area about the size of America—“ Call it Renewistan,” says Griffith— covered with stuff dedicated to generating humanity’s energy.[1]

The green new deal is just political theater in order for the democratic party to get more money. You're deluding yourself if you think a political party is single handedly capable of solving climate change. As much as I want something like the green new deal to work, it probably won't even make a dent in the grand scheme of things unless they go full nuclear.

[1] Stewart brand whole earth discipline

sanderjd3• 6 years ago

Does anyone here know much about how they validate correct operation of hardware / firmware / software in the nuclear industry? I'm interested in this question but don't know where to start reading about it.

hairytrog• 6 years ago

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

rayiner5• 6 years ago

This mistakenly assumes that the Green New Deal is about averting climate change. It’s not: https://news.yahoo.com/aoc-chief-staff-admits-green-12440835...

The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday.
“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added.

heimatau• 6 years ago

The GND is a quick read (or even a quicker skim). People should just read it [1, 2].

I support GND and it's surprising how the news outlets let this narrative grow. GND is a social justice document more than a Renewable Future. I hope others take the brief time to read it.

[1] - Reader read: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/08/heres-the-full-text-of-...

[2] - Official document, pdf: https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/sites/ocasio-cortez.house.go...

rayiner5• 6 years ago

It’s not merely a social justice document. It’s about achieving social justice in a specific way: through government, union, and activist group-led “national mobilization.”

It’s far from the market-oriented approaches being implemented in Europe, such as carbon pricing.

ncmncm• 6 years ago

It depends on who "we" is.

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• 6 years ago

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

rayiner5• 6 years ago

Matt Yglesias makes a great point about differing views of environmentalism in his new book: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-case-for-one-billion-ameri....

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.

jahaja• 6 years ago

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

This seems to be just another way of saying: "I'll rather go down with the ship than risk losing my current privileges".

Animats• 6 years ago

Not too happy about a liquid-sodium fast breeder reactor as a good example.[1]

The General Atomics TRIGA is a good safe research reactor, and inherently stable, but not a power reactor.

China is plugging away with the Hualong One, which is a classic pressurized-water reactor similar to the Westinghouse AP-1000 and a French design. Nothing exotic. Output is around a gigawatt. Fuel loading on the first one started last month. Full power this year, if things go well. The second one is already under construction. More are planned.

China now gets 5% of its power from nuclear, up from half that five years ago.

[1] https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi...

robertlagrant2• 6 years ago

Elon Musk probably has a couple of hours a night he could devote to getting large-scale private nuclear off the ground.

deeg• 6 years ago

I am very very pro-nuclear and I don't have any major disagreements with this article. However, any such article needs to also address accidents. I believe the most fervent anti-nukers fear accidents and while you'll never be able to fully placate them you can't allow them to accuse the pro-nuke movement of ignoring it.

doggydogs94• 6 years ago

The green lobby would rather have a new coal plant (with no pollution control at all) than a nuclear power plant.

pfdietz21• 6 years ago

There are no new coal plants being built in the US.

known• 6 years ago

Nuclear power is the largest source of electricity in France, with a generation of 379.5 TWh, or 70.6% of the country's total electricity production of 537.7 TWh, the highest percentage in the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

winfortheworld• 6 years ago

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.

We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

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