Is nuclear power our best bet against climate change?

https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/samuel-miller-mcdonald-nuclear-power-our-best-bet-against-climate-change

by gumby • 5 years ago

302 601 5 years ago

bostonreview.net

melling• 5 years ago

Imagine if the United States had gotten 80% of its electricity from nuclear over the past 4 decades.

China might have adopted it instead of coal.

We’d been talking about the danger of climate change in 2150.

Hokusai2• 5 years ago

Oil Buddhists will have have allowed that. The dangers of greenhouse gases was already there, and it did not matter. It has caused wars and the rise of authoritarian governments, and it did not matter. When money is the main motivator for a country it's impossible to do what is good for the long term.

smell-my-bacon2• 5 years ago

So what truly matters to the Oil Buddhists?

dotancohen4• 5 years ago

  > We’d been talking about the danger of climate change in 2150.

More importantly, people would be terrified of fossil fuel production. Spills, mining accidents, radioactive pollution (yes, coal puts out more radioactive pollution than does a nuclear power plant), particulate-related respiratory diseases, and so forth.

To think that people are afraid of nuclear energy is just crazy, I cannot comprehend how nuclear is perceived dangerous yet fossil fuels are somehow not.

i_am_proteus4• 5 years ago

I cannot comprehend how nuclear is perceived dangerous yet fossil fuels are somehow not

[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

mattnewton• 5 years ago

I think it has to do with how humans are wired; slow burning dangers don’t seem to be registered the same way that nuclear fallout and the dread of meltdowns as one big catastrophe are.

agumonkey7• 5 years ago

To me it's always about the lack of control.

A nuclear plant failure, I'm faced with something I can do nothing about. Coal .. well unless our case of whole-plane-pollution .. you can mitigate.

Same for cars vs planes. In a plane, I delegate my life to stats. Anything happens, I can do nothing about. My car.. I can always use slower, lighter roads, keep larger safety distance. Even if the odds of car crash are higher. (also if I were to drive alone in the midwest, my crash stats would probably be as high as planes.. density is a factor it seems)

xyzzyz2• 5 years ago

China did adopt nuclear. They are building 15 nuclear power plants right now, more than anyone else in the world, and almost a third of all the plants under construction. It's just their needs grow very, very fast, so they make it up with coal.

systemvoltage2• 5 years ago

Meanwhile Californians will tell us to manage power and power cuts.

I can’t get behind this agenda. It’s infuriating to see the west considering itself done. It’s in the name “Developed”, past tense. No need to develop anymore. We’ve thrown in the towel, large swaths of people are against population growth and against progress.

delecti• 5 years ago

From what I can tell from a quick google search, China has over 1000 coal plants, and is building almost 200 more [2]. The fact that China is building 15 nuclear plants instead of 150 feels like they're only dipping their toes into nuclear, not fully adopting it.

And it looks like the US has about 50 nuclear plants, with only 2 more under construction [3], so they're doing better than us, but that's a low bar.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/859266/number-of-coal-po... [2] https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-buil... [3] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=207&t=3

jlelse2• 5 years ago

But nuclear meltdowns would have killed a lot of people and made a lot of land uninhabitable.

jedimastert2• 5 years ago

More than coal has? Honestly, I kinda doubt it.

beeboop3• 5 years ago

There is no evidence for this and it's baseless speculation at best.

celestialcheese2• 5 years ago

I count 12 deaths in the US from nuclear related accidents in the US since 1955. [1].

Chernobyl, the worst recorded nuclear disaster, was directly responsible for 33 deaths and estimates on total attributable deaths due to health complications from radiation range from 4,000 to 60,000 [2].

In 2018, it is estimated that fossil fuel air pollution was responsible for over 8m deaths worldwide. [3]

Mortality rate by tWH isn't even close [4]. Fossil fuels are significantly more damaging both in terms of loss-of-life and habitability on this planet.

1 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t... 2 - https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher... 3 - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p... 4 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

NaturalPhallacy4• 5 years ago

Aren't the biggest greenhouse gas polluters concrete manufacturing and container ships though?

rsj_hn9• 5 years ago

Wouldn't that be the people who buy products shipped from overseas and those who buy buildings made with concrete instead of wood and brick?

That's the problem with an economy in which there is a circular flow of commodities.

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

Container shipping accounts for ~2.2% of CO2 emissions:

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

You're probably thinking of other emissions. They burn heavy fuel oil, so they emit a lot of sulfur.

dcolkitt• 5 years ago

Couldn’t you just build nuclear powered container ships?

The biggest reason nuclear powered shipping isn’t mainstream is because many countries have local policies to prohibit nuclear vessels from docking.

If the major powers coordinated they could force the minor powers into cooperation. If a country like New Zealand refuses to let nuclear ships dock at their local ports, then simply throw them out of the WTO. They’d have no other option but to change their irrational anti-nuclear policies.

jeffrallen• 5 years ago

Oh, thank God, finally a counterfactual to Betteridge's law of headlines.

iamgopal• 5 years ago

Last I calculated all USA energy need can be fullfilled by about ~800 ( + 150% to cover all kind of storage and transmission ) Billion USD investment in solar.

On the other hand, do we have any idea about how long Nuclear power will last, If we produce lets say, 50 percent of all our energy needs from it ?

jdavis703• 5 years ago

That means we only get electricity, when the sun is shining. Yes, solar can be good. But it’s got to be mixed with other tech such as battery, and perhaps even nuclear.

abacadaba• 5 years ago

Or we adapt to the variability, charge our laptops and routers during the day, live in earthships.

epistasis12• 5 years ago

The comment you are replying to mentions storage and transmission.

It doesn't take much storage to operate solar in a "baseload" manner. Already, most new utility scale deployments are shipping with storage.

For a long long time, the DC electricity side of a solar installation has been cheap enough that the design of a system will have an 20% extra DC over the capacity of the inverters change the DC to AC electricity for the grid. As panels have gotten cheaper, this loading factor has creeped up to 1.5 and 1.6 in many installations.

Since battery storage is also on the DC side of the installation, adding storage of the doesn't even require adding more panels, it can just use the existing clipped solar energy. And when we start adding more panels to get the loading factor up to 2 or 3, the solar power installation becomes nearly completed dispatchable to meet grid needs. This is simple and straightforward changes of parameters in existing designs.

yesbut2• 5 years ago

Do you have any estimates for the amount of coal that would be required to burn in order to manufacture the required solar photovoltaic cells to cover US energy needs? Does that include the increased energy requirements from shifting transportation to electric? Also, considering that energy consumption increases from year to year, how is that factored into your calculations?

epistasis12• 5 years ago

Why not use solar panels to produce more solar panels, as they are produced?

Nuclear has the same bootstrapping problem as any other power source, but it also has the problem that we don't yet have a way to produce concrete without emissions, and our carbon-free steel methods are still in their infancy, and those are serious inputs to any new nuclear build.

conjecTech2• 5 years ago

Solar's return-on-energy is quite large - on the order of 10x, so you could bootstrap the process of creating all the solar panels you would ever need with a trivially small investment of non solar energy. In practice, it will be higher, but given those economics, every solar panel you manufacture deters 10x the same amount of non-solar electrical consumption.

You need to be precise with how you talk about the shift in energy demand due to EVs. It's not a net energy increase. EVs are far more efficient than gas vehicles. I assume what you mean is increased electricity demand. You can back this out based on typical driving metrics - 250wh/mile is a typical efficiency for electric vehicles. If each driver does 10k miles/year and there are 200M drivers in the US, then this equates to a 13% increase in electrical demand for full adoption[1]. You could probably add on 2% more for efficiency losses in transmission and charging, so call it an additional 15%. That's effectively worst case as it assumes no reduction from the removal of the current infrastructure(ie pumps for gas pipelines, heating for refining, trucking, etc). Those are huge users of energy (though much in forms other than electricity). Oil refinement alone accounts for ~4% of all energy use(not just electricity) in the US.

EVs are so efficient, transitioning to them will probably consume less energy than just the energy we currently spend producing and distributing gasoline. We'll probably need to add to electrical infrastructure, but compared to the savings that is easily justifiable.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=250+wh%2Fmile+*+10000+...

karaterobot• 5 years ago

do we have any idea about how long Nuclear power will last, If we produce lets say, 50 percent of all our energy needs from it ?

This is hard to estimate precisely, since we don't know how much uranium is yet to be discovered. At the low-end, using current estimates for mineable Uranium, and today's light water reactors, about 460 years. At the high end, using newer breeder reactors and extracting uranium from seawater, as much as 240,000 years. Using a reasonable estimate for mineable uranium, and newer breeder reactors, about 120,000 years.

Let's be conservative and say "at least a few thousand years".

Personally, I'd say if we can't get off Earth and find some new fuel sources in a few thousand years, we deserve whatever happens. And frankly, if it takes us more than 200 years to get useful fusion reactors, something has probably gone wrong, and we're back to burning wood in caves anyway.

Here's a source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

runarberg4• 5 years ago

A follow up question: If $800 Billion investment in solar will provide USA with iŧs current energy needs, why bother with the slower and more polluting process of building nuclear reactors and mine for uranium at all?

The sun will keep shining 10.000 years from now, there is no need to move of the planet to find new fuel sources if we just keep letting the sun shine on us.

fsh• 5 years ago

Your source directly contradicts the "460 years" figure.

There they estimate a 230-year supply at today's consumption rate. Nuclear energy currently supplies 4.0% of the global primary energy production [1]. According to that estimate, producing 50% of the primary energy using currently available reactors would exhaust the world Uranium supply in around 18 years.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix

jherdman• 5 years ago

You can't ship solar power to remote places that need power in the way you would a barrel of oil, or coal. We also don't have batteries that are up to the job of storing power.

epistasis12• 5 years ago

What tiny fraction of world energy use is that, however? And of existing world use of energy like that, most of it is used to extract fossil fuels. There's not much reason to be out in remote areas except for resource extraction.

aqme28• 5 years ago

On the contrary, remote places are some of the best served by solar and wind because shipping fuels is expensive.

gpm9• 5 years ago

I know exactly one family that lives off the grid. I also know exactly one family that lives entirely on solar panels and batteries.

It shouldn't be a surprise that they are the same family, solar is really the only electricity generation solution that scales down nicely for remote places.

Solar fails at high power density applications, like airplanes, not remote ones. I suppose it also fails at "remote and north of the arctic circle/south of the antarctic circle" ones, but that's a pretty tiny rounding error of energy usage.

fallingknife2• 5 years ago

A coal plant costs about $ 2 billion, and there are 241 of them in the US. So that's $481 billion. They provide 23% of US generation capacity. So if we assume a similar cost, that's $2.1 trillion for the total US generating capacity. But you say solar can do it for $800 billion. So now you have to explain why, if solar is really that cheap, the power companies like to throw away trillions of dollars on more expensive tech.

conjecTech2• 5 years ago

The answer is pretty obvious: those plants aren't new and solar wasn't an option when they were built. There haven't been new coal plants built in the US in some years, and the reasons are purely economic. Wind and solar made up 76% of the generation added last year for that reason[1]. The companies have sunk costs in their existing coal plants, but the economics of solar/wind have become so favorably they've been prematurely retiring them in droves.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42495

culi• 5 years ago

Does that take into account battery costs and the costs of building up our manufacturing capabilities to build all that? What about the fact that the average lifespan of a panel is about 20 years and solar panels contain very toxic chemicals. There's already a solar waste crisis that's about to grow exponentially and we still don't have a solution for recycling them

macspoofing2• 5 years ago

Last I calculated all USA energy need can be fullfilled by about ~800 ( + 150% to cover all kind of storage and transmission ) Billion USD investment in solar.

And what do you do at night, or on a cloudy day?

There is no grid-scale storage solution.

andrekandre3• 5 years ago

  > And what do you do at night, or on a cloudy day?

with photovoltaic generation that is true, but not with molten salt

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16012018/csp-concentrated...

pg_bot• 5 years ago

I've been doing some research into cryogenic energy storage and it seems like a universal solution to the grid scale energy storage problem. It uses off the shelf industrial components, can be located almost anywhere, doesn't use any rare or expensive elements, and there is no pollution in the cycle. The general idea is you cool air until it liquifies and store that in large storage tanks when you have an excess supply of energy. Then when you need to discharge the battery you boil the air and run the resulting gas through a turbine. It's also fairly cost competitive with a LCOS of $140/MWh, which is less than the cost of generating a MWh with new nuclear power plants.

cletus5• 5 years ago

According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant.

The standard concerns apply:

1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;

2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;

3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and

4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone

From the linked post [2]:

Also worth noting:

The study shows that more than 8 million people around the globe die each year as a result of breathing in air containing particles from burning fuels like coal, petrol and diesel, ...

So it's including vehicles. You could be 100% nuclear power generation and that part wouldn't change. The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/fossil-fuel-air-pollutio...

bwestergard• 5 years ago

I think the main objection, which is mentioned briefly in the article, is that the infrastructure for nuclear energy generation is largely identical with that required for nuclear weapons production and maintenance. It is difficult to envision nuclear energy as a global solution without also envisioning new nuclear weapons proliferation problems.

One position that seems attractive is keeping some nuclear plants online where they exist, but not building any new capacity. On a long enough time scale, we can engineer around base load requirements.

Ericson23143• 5 years ago

Internationalize the Gid (which is also good for amortizing renewables), and then invest more in thorium research.

Ideally, if we do the small nuclear reactors, we can switch assembly lines from one to the other with relative ease.

Ericson23143• 5 years ago

Internationalize the grid (which is also good for amortizing renewables), and then invest more in thorium research.

Ideally, if we do the small nuclear reactors, we can switch assembly lines from one to the other with relative ease.

cletus5• 5 years ago

I honestly don't buy into the nuclear proliferation objection to fission power for several reasons:

1. Uranium is abundant. There are parts of the US you can walk around and pick up rocks that contain Uranium compounds that can be extracted without anything complicated;

2. Enriching uranium is relatively trivial. You basically need the ability to make UF6 and to make and operate centrifuges. That's it. This is 80+ year old tech; and

3. The design of an atomic bomb as was dropped on Hiroshima is likewise "primitive" and easily reproducible.

There is really no substantial barrier-to-entry to nuclear weapons. The only thing that's missing now is the political will.

The biggest factor in nuclear proliferation is nation-states seeking to guarantee their future existence (ie North Korea, Iran). Foreign policy by the dominant developed powers is far more significant than any imagined or real technological or industrial barrier.

panick2114• 5 years ago

infrastructure for nuclear energy generation is largely identical with that required for nuclear weapons production and maintenance

Total nonsense.

It is difficult to envision nuclear energy as a global solution without also envisioning new nuclear weapons proliferation problems.

Totally false. In fact to opposite is true. Many nations with civilian nuclear power don't have nuclear weapons. While many countries with nuclear weapons don't have civilian power.

Very different technology.

One position that seems attractive is keeping some nuclear plants online where they exist, but not building any new capacity.

Very attractive if you are pro climate change I guess.

On a long enough time scale, we can engineer around base load requirements.

Yeah ok, so we are faced with climate change and we have a 100% proven technology, both in scale AND in terms of being green.

But you would rather wait for some hopeful future technology that might happen as some point and then might be able to scale.

ars• 5 years ago

Your point 1 and 2 are simply untrue, and I wish people would stop repeating them.

Breeder reactors will consume all of those waste products leaving only short term waste. Right now we use barely 1% of the energy in Uranium - all the rest is that terrible waste.

With a breeder reactors we can consume substantially all of it.

himinlomax7• 5 years ago

It's not exactly wasted as it's safely kept around and could be reused should the need and will arise. Compare and contrast with hydrocarbon waste, those are truly wasted.

Maakuth• 5 years ago

A large share of the other GHG emitting sectors could also shift to electricity. For example various heating processes in industry and commercial sectors burn fuels such as natural gas and could switch to electricity.

And the externalities of providing energy to electric transportation is very much what we are talking about: where are we getting the power from.

ttul• 5 years ago

Waste heat from nuclear can also be used for industrial processes. And it’s waste heat. It’s free.

epistasis12• 5 years ago

That's exactly it. All of our decarbonization plans rest on electrifying everything. Even many chemical feedstocks, like hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer, will be produced through electricity.

Clean electricity is the plate at the decarbonization BBQ. Everything else gets loaded onto it. Without clean electricity, things get messy.

- Costa Samaras

zepto5• 5 years ago

I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

This is my biggest concern as well. However it needs to be balanced against the alternative, which is trusting governments and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways.

A reality check tells us:

1. Governments and corporations have not responded to climate change adequately so far and there is no evidence that this is about to change.

2. Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer excess deaths than coal.

It’s far from ideal, but it is here and it works.

ravenstine4• 5 years ago

Then I guess we're effed then. After all, if we can't trust non-government entities like Equifax with private records, why even go as far as trusting some other non-government entities to handle nuclear reactors?

We're all to die then, if we're to believe that letting climate change take its course is better than the occasional nuclear meltdown.

Governments and corporations have not responded to climate change adequately so far and there is no evidence that this is about to change.

How else are they to fill their pockets with wealth taxed via inflation if there are no crises? There must always be a crisis looming to get people to part with their wealth.

Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer excess deaths than coal.

Leadership knows full well that this is a fact. Think about that.

nuerow11• 5 years ago

This is my biggest concern as well. However it needs to be balanced against the alternative, which is trusting governments and corporations to deal with climate change in other ways.

Isn't the alternative actually looking into renewable energy sources?

Portraying things as either Nuclear or nothing is a false dillema, specially as we're seeing highly developed and industrialized countries such as Germany where renewables already cover close to half it's energy demands.

cletus5• 5 years ago

Governments and corporations have not responded to climate change adequately

This is something that's both true and untrue. On the face of it, it's absolutely true. But what are governments, really? They're a reflection of the people they govern. So governments haven't responded because it simply isn't a priority for most people.

I've long held the view that we'll only have a solution to climate change when it becomes economic to do so. The pandemic has only strengthened that view. We have millions of people who won't even mildly inconvenience themselves to help stop others (and themselves) from getting seriously ill or dying.

And you want those same people to do something about climate change?

By "economic" I mean we simply need cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels. That could be because something else gets cheaper, fossil fuels due to scarcity simply get more expensive or some combination of the two.

The biggest hope for that currently seems to be solar, which has seen its price plummet in the last 20 years.

We already have the technology to make fuel from the air but there's no point burning fossil fuels to do that. If however your energy came from a cheaper source there is a price point where that would make sense. At that point, gas-guzzling vehicles become carbon-neutral.

LaGrange2• 5 years ago

2. Even with the high profile accidents, nuclear power is something we know we can actually do, and has produced fewer excess deaths than coal.

...can "we", do it, though? AFAIR (this is based on an internal study for a policy proposal done in 2015 by a minor Polish party, so take it with a grain of salt) one major issue is the lack of expertise. To build a nuclear power plant safely you need specialized and experienced engineers, and after a long lull in construction, most states don't have that many of those. And we would need _a lot_.

And Chernobyl is an interesting example here, because one of the reasons for its (and many other Soviet and Russian projects) low quality is that Soviet Union/Russia have been stuck in emergency mode since the Tsars. You just needed that many flats and that much power like two decades ago - so you winged it. Thus I am wary of industrial facilities handling hazardous materials that are built in emergency mode, and the only way I see EU building enough reactors in 10 years to handle our energy needs without _major_ cuts is by winging it quite a bit.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't - if we don't build reactors, nobody will go into engineering those, and the issue will persist. But I don't think we can stake our near-term future on them. That fight was lost a while ago.

chernobogdan• 5 years ago

Is that really worse then the current geopolitical situation where you are indirectly trusting 3rd party governments (e.g north korea) not to start a nuclear war?

adventured2• 5 years ago

I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

What can they be trusted with then?

National defense. Social programs, healthcare systems, tax collection, regulation, various infrastructure & safety matters.

You'd have to abolish nearly all governments on the planet if you applied the standard across the board to their responsibilities and the innumerable ways they can - potentially - severely harm the people of a nation.

Whether Europe, the US, Asia, Latin America, Africa, corporations already provide nearly all of the world's food from start to finish, and are (typically) overseen / regulated by the governments of the world. But they can't be trusted to operate nuclear power plants? That doesn't make sense.

So who else is going to manage the global food supply if not people? (small businesses, large businesses, governments, whatever the case)

They're also charged with overseeing drug regulations around the world, which can easily kill large numbers of people if it's not done correctly. Who should regulate and manufacture drugs if not people? (small businesses, large businesses, governments, whatever the case)

Besides, nuclear power plants as a risk have nothing on good 'ol fashioned war. Would the plan be to take all national defense and all military control responsibilities away from governments? The point being, applied fairly, the actual replacement standard you're suggesting at is anarchy.

tomp• 5 years ago

Invest in small-scale, distributed breeder reactors. Store waste (the little amount that there is) in old oil wells/mines. Use the resulting power to charge electric vehicles. Use excess power to capture CO2 into artificial gas/diesel/methane to power vehicles that cannot be electricised (planes, rockets, cars far away from civilization).

The solution is right there. People just refuse to take it.

As my Zen teacher used to say: The best time to invest in nuclear is 50 years ago. The second best time to invest in nuclear is today.

Accujack7• 5 years ago

Invest in small-scale, distributed breeder reactors. Store waste (the little amount that there is) in old oil wells/mines.

I believe completely that nuclear power is the way forward for us, but your assumptions here are just bonkers.

Breeder reactors of any kind are a proliferation risk. We also don't need them. Thorium fueled reactors are a better choice, both for the availability of fuel and the lowered risk.

Storing nuclear waste in any location not designed to store waste is just stupid. Oil wells aren't big holes where nothing exists once the oil is gone, putting anything in them probably affects aquifers locally (see fracking). Plus to store waste in a well we'd have to liquify it, making it more likely to leak. We also would have no way to really determine if it's leaking or if it's not, plus no way to deal with it if it does leak.

Mines are about as bad... even placing waste in a very stable, dry mine could leave it prone to escaping and travelling elsewhere.

The problem isn't finding a place to put the stuff that's out of the way, it's building a place to put it that will not allow it to leak/migrate for a significant amount of time. Yucca mountain would have been good, but the NIMBY crowd is too afraid of waste to store it there.

Fortunately, newer reactor designs produce less waste. It's still a concern, though, and not anywhere near as easy to deal with as you're making it.

sentinel• 5 years ago

The newer types of reactors - gen 3 are way safer than a Chernobyl. I.e. a meltdown could not happen

antattack3• 5 years ago

Safer does not mean safe however.

NewEntryHN2• 5 years ago

a meltdown could not happen

Gen III reactors have a core catcher[1] to handle a meltdown, in addition to many features making a meltdown even less likely to happen.

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

unchocked• 5 years ago

The Chernobyl exclusion zone, terrible as it is, doesn’t hold a candle to the realities of climate change.

Geological repositories are the solution for long term storage. They are not only technologically feasible, but actually constructed and waiting for use.

Ignoring the solution is not the same as there being no solution.

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

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

chiefalchemist4• 5 years ago

Um. I'm not so sure that's accurate. Chernobyl and Fukushima are uninhabitable, and will be as such for many years to come. As we increase fission reactors, risk will increase as well. Ironically, perhaps due to climate change.

The question is: if we commit to fission, are we simply trading one problem disaster for another? Put another way, given our collective (lack of) response to CC, should our track record on decision making be trusted?

gpm9• 5 years ago

The Chernobyl exclusion zone as terrible as it is, is very far from a worst case. It's what you get from a moderately bad meltdown with heroic mitigation efforts as a follow up. The risks are far greater than that. Holding it up and saying "this isn't bad" is missing that that's the point, this is what happens in a "good" meltdown.

An article describing some of it... https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...

godelski18• 5 years ago

One might even say that we have no long term waste storage solution for fossil fuels or other greenhouse gas emitting sources.

I'd also say that the climate zone is much larger and deadlier than the Chernobyl zone.

TheCondor• 5 years ago

Yucca Mountain is sort of ready but the state doesn't want waste to be moved there and more and a few places don't want the waste transferred through them to get there.

I think if nuclear energy is to be part of the solution here, as things are we have to plan for indefinite storage of waste on site with the energy production. And ideally we could minimize waste or process it in to such a state as it could conceivably be transported somewhere else but those costs undermine the profitability of energy production as it is.

konspence• 5 years ago

False dichotomy of saying we have the consequences of climate change OR we have a few Chernobyl like incidents.

We don’t need to choose between these options. We can avoid climate change without nuclear energy

forgotmypw179• 5 years ago

The effects of Chernobyl are not limited to the exclusion zone. In the 100km radius zone, my family had to test all our food with a Geiger counter because anything grown in the area was poisoned.

(The government made Geiger counters illegal to own, btw.)

ohgodplsno• 5 years ago

1/ UF6 is not a necessary byproduct (only if you go through gaseous diffusion or centrifugal separation). Laser-based enrichment methods are, while not industry ready yet, very efficient. If we had more research and weren't forced to sleep on it for years, we could have made more progress.

2. We do. It's called breeder reactors (The Phenix and Superphenix projects in France for example, were used for research, produced energy, and were closed because of political maneuvres). As for the rest... Burying is legitimately the best option. 150 years of nuclear waste (planning for future use) can easily be buried in underground complexes, with the ability to pull things out should research advance.

3. Modern reactors designs need active energy input to keep the reaction going. Said input it decoupled from the reactor itself, preventing things from going wild. Your only example is Chernobyl 40 years ago, as the USSR were swaying their dicks around and trying to show who has the biggest. And before anything, no, Fukushima is not a disaster. Yes, people were evacuated (as a matter of safety), but as it stands, you get more radiation taking a flight than being next to it.

4. Cool, that's why countries don't give that up to governments. Taking France as example, the ASN is a fully independent entity. They have the ability to unilaterally shut down reactors at the most minimal event, and every single event is listed for everyone to see. They are the very reason our EPR is taking a super long time to build, because of the insane security requirements.

natmaka13• 5 years ago

1/ "Not industry ready" while (AFAIK) being researched for at least 4 decades is a real problem

2/ Superphenix had numerous non-'political' problems/challenges, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

3/ Fukushima (not the max-case: half of the reactors weren't running at the time of the accident, not built in a densely-populated area...) will costs billions to cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...

4/ This is either justified, or not. If it is, as we probably both think it is(?), this adds complexity (delays and costs), calling for margins (delays, costs), even w/o knowing the requirements in advance. Every EPR project (in France, Finland or China) largely blowed-up both its schedule and budget.

fighterpilot6• 5 years ago

You say the Chernobyl failure mode is "huge", but I would argue the opposite. If you compare the number of deaths across types of energy, nuclear is only slightly higher than solar/wind (about 2x) but when compared to deaths due to fossil fuel it's effectively zero. The big picture must be kept in mind. The other thing to note is that nuclear reactor design has improved a lot since Chernobyl, so it's not honest to say that the probability of that incident occurring again hasn't declined substantially. You can also build the plant far away from cities and send the power via lines fairly efficiently, if you must reduce an extremely small risk to a zero risk situation.

borski5• 5 years ago

I agree with you in general, but I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans.

I also agree the probability is way lower now, but the failure mode is huge nonetheless.

kelnos• 5 years ago

I think a more accurate comparison would be number of deaths per unit of electricity generated. Yes, in absolute numbers, there have been more deaths due to fossil fuel burning, but we've also generated a hell of a lot more electricity by burning fossil fuels then we have anything else.

I suspect nuclear will still come out as being safer, but I think we should be a bit more rigorous with how we do comparisons.

bobthepanda4• 5 years ago

There is also the fact that the "small, cheap" nuclear reactor has never really happened in a commercial context. I have literally heard about those since my childhood and one has actually yet to happen.

The current very large nuclear plants are expensive to build (the ones that have opened on time and on budget are the exception, not the rule).

diordiderot• 5 years ago

have literally heard about those since my childhood and one has actually yet to happen.

What's your point?

pjscott• 5 years ago

Most of the recent construction of large nuclear plants is in China, and they're actually doing quite well at building them on time. The ones that are super late and over budget are the exception worldwide; they just make the news more often.

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

loeg7• 5 years ago

The US Navy regularly buys small, cheap reactors for submarines and carriers.

panick2114• 5 years ago

The regulatory system makes them ESSENTALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Seriously, if people only knew how fucked up the regulatory system is.

Unless you are NASA or DoD you can fuck right of with that stuff.

The regulatory system is HARD LOCKED to one technology. No sane person would invest money in an alternative (unless you are planning on selling it to DoD). The regulatory system had to be changed a huge amount, just for NuScale PWR in a module reactors.

If you wanted for example to build a Molten Salt reactor there is no established regulatory path. Or a small reactor either. There is only tiny research reactors, or fully operational reactors. So you can't even build a small version of your reactor to prove things out. No prototyping for you.

You would basically have to show up with a full design (literally invest 100s of million) then go to the regulator and hand it in. You would also pay them to review and you would literally have to wait years, and potentially decades for them to tell you if your design is good. You would get no early feed-back on what they might consider problems or issues. And there is no criteria what exactly the application needs to look like or how much detail they want and so on. There is no established software that they accept as valid for modeling something like uranium in molten salt. If you are not providing real data its very hard convince them on anything, but of course, you can not actually get real data from anywhere.

That is why essentially no progress has been made. Thankfully in the last 5 years or so, actual progress has been happening and the regulator has admired that there is a problem. The don't have actual solution yet but they are apparently working on improving the situation. That is why, almost all GenIV nuclear startups have converged on Canada. The Canadian regulator after its privatization of CANDU was looking for something to do and they were very open to next generation technology. Their regulatory process is a multi-step process that is technology independent.

It looks like US regulator and the Canada regulator are working together so hopefully Canada can lead the US out of its idiocy.

What you must realize is that the turn against nuclear was hard, on all fronts. Population, Politics, Regulation went totally anti-nuclear and specially for anything that wasn't established. Since Nuclear Commission was abolished, progress has been glacial.

fallingknife2• 5 years ago

1 We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;

We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of coal mining waste.

2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;

We don't even have a short term solution to the storage and disposal of combustion waste products.

3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and

The failure modes of hydrocarbon based power are huge. Most notably cooking the entire planet, which stands at 197,000,000 square miles.

4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

The US government and corporations have managed all of the nuclear reactors in the US so far without any significant failures (3 Mile Island is not significant).

nuerow11• 5 years ago

The failure modes of hydrocarbon based power are huge. Most notably cooking the entire planet, which stands at 197,000,000 square miles.

It's a good thing then that hydrocarbon-based power is being phased out as well. For example, the EU just announced their target to eliminate emissions by 2050.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-unveils-plan...

midrus2• 5 years ago

Well, it's not ideal but what is the alternative? To me it is either nuclear or watch how the next generations are going to be the last ones, because there is no other solution (or improvement at least) at sight right now.

gumby2• 5 years ago

The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact…

The fossil fuel inclusion zone is 197 million square miles.

Many of the current problems of nuclear come from its small volume (small unit count). Of course, as with fossil fuels, many new problems will emerge if volume comes up (waste storage is already an unsolved problem). But they may be resolvable if there is determination and incentive to do so,

umvi• 5 years ago

We don't have a long term storage plan for coal/gas plant waste either (apparently).

chromatin• 5 years ago

On its face this sounds so trite, but after initially scrolling past I did a double take and thought deeply about it. Kudos.

midrus2• 5 years ago

To me right now it is the uncertainty of all the things that maybe could go wrong with nuclear power vs the certainty of a global collapse.

Accujack7• 5 years ago

Like what? And have you researched new generation reactor designs, like molten salt reactors? They address most of the problems with existing reactors, which are for the most part 50 year old technology.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

Chernobyl was the literal worst case scenario, the thing exploded. I'm big on nuclear but I also worry when humans are involved. There is a town near mine where the groundwater is polluted from a chemical company a long time ago. I've often wondered how long until all ground water everywhere is ruined given enough time. Then I think of nuclear power and it scares me.

himinlomax7• 5 years ago

Nuclear is dangerous, just like flying is dangerous. Yet we can manage that danger so well that flying is literally the safest form of transport around, thanks to a culture of safety, strong oversight and regulation.

cute_boi2• 5 years ago

Chernobyl incident would be way more worst if those 3 people whose name I can't remember had not sacrificed their life. Those 3 people died within a week and if they were not there I guess Europe would probably be suffering for millenniums.

https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...

csallen• 5 years ago

4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

Genuine question: Don't we already trust governments to do all of the above for nuclear submarines, arsenals, etc? Are power plants so much riskier?

antattack3• 5 years ago

We do try to keep nuclear know how away from some governments and punish others who try to acquire it.

Just recently US military Genaral was apparently concerned about POTUS having access to nuclear codes.

vimy• 5 years ago

1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive; 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;

Why do we even consider this a problem? For more than 50 years nuclear waste has been sitting above ground in warehouses. Nothing happened. Seems to me there is no problem and we should just keep doing what we're doing. Why even bother with expensive underground storage at this point.

twofornone• 5 years ago

I think its an insidious remnant of 70s era anti-nuke propaganda that refuses to die. Nuclear waste is spooky, especially when you don't have a concept of scale, and don't realize that the risk from spent fuel is orders of magnitude lower than what's allegedly at stake.

I'm surprised by how long this myth has persisted.

arrosenberg• 5 years ago

4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

I trust private corporations even less when it comes to fixing the current problem with carbon pollution. It's going to cost money, and they aren't going to do it.

ComputerGuru• 5 years ago

According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.

As we increasingly seek to electrify everything, that number is sure to (slowly) inch up.

yodelshady• 5 years ago

So, the worst nuclear plant ever occupies about twice as much land as the comparable solar installation would need.

Except they're not comparable are they? A decent chunk of that 75% is winter heating. Which, weirdly, lots of Russian districts have pretty much solved, somehow, without gas. Wonder how?

headmelted• 5 years ago

I don’t think this is being fully fair to the EV case.

You’re implying that the externalities of getting electricity to power a car (i.e. fossil fuel burning) would be a barrier but the thread is explicitly about having that electricity come from nuclear generation.

In terms of storage, I’m actually significantly less worried about this and would go as far to suggest it won’t even be an issue once we have EV’s at scale. V2G exists now for current EVs and essentially converts every car into a large battery for grid storage.

swebs• 5 years ago

We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts

Currently fossil fuel plants vent all waste into the atmosphere, including radioactive byproducts. At least in this case, the waste is in solid form and can be contained somewhere.

xwdv• 5 years ago

Dealing with nuclear waste is a can we can kick down the road for quite a long time. Climate change will kill many of us off by the end of the century.

dillondoyle• 5 years ago

Transportation seems to be about 29%, so as we go electric that becomes >50%.

Though seems cheaper and easier to just build more solar, wind etc

agumonkey7• 5 years ago

what cultural change would help reduce the 75 remaining percents ?

a few ideas I've seen:

- leaner diet => less energy / land used to breed beef etc

- more walking / bike / clean transport

what else ?

loeg7• 5 years ago

It’s just electrifying processes that use fuel today. Electric cars. Electric heating. Etc. That means we need more generation than we have today, especially in poor countries.

SquishyPanda23• 5 years ago

I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

I think this is a big point. This would be expensive and there will be a temptation for politicians to underfund the operations and give the difference back as tax cuts.

snewman• 5 years ago

According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes, but realistic plans for addressing climate change generally entail converting a lot of other activities to electric power; this is on the table for everything from transportation, to heating + cooking, to steel manufacturing. Not to mention carbon capture; many of the options there require a lot of energy. Even if some modes of transportation continue to require chemical fuels, we may be using electricity to produce some of those fuels.

It's reasonable to quibble at the margins, but in the big picture, we are going to need a LOT of carbon-neutral electricity and that is going to drive a lot (the solid majority?) of greenhouse gas mitigation.

The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.

What point are you making with regard to externalities? Everything has externalities, you just need to add them into your calculus. Are you suggesting the externalities of electric vehicles imply that we should stick to fossil fuels for transportation?

As for higher cost: cost should continue to come down as we continue to climb the learning curve. I don't know if / when the lines cross (and of course it will be different for different use cases and locations), but again - if we're going to address climate change, we don't have a lot of choices; we will have to find a way to bring costs down and/or subsidize the higher cost.

"Limited utility" is absolutely going to be an ongoing challenge, but again it's not like we're helpless to do anything about it. More charging stations, longer range, possibly adjustments to usage patterns. In some cases, yes, we might need to stick to chemical fuels and find carbon-neutral sources, but this is not ideal and my expectation+hope is that it will eventually be very much a minority of usage.

I should note, I'm not advocating for nuclear power as the source of all this electricity we'll need; the feasibility of scaling nuclear power is a complicated topic and personally, I honestly don't know what to think or expect. The point I am trying to make is that a BIG part of "how to stop emitting GHGs" is going to boil down to "how to generate a stupendous amount of carbon-neutral electricity".

hikingsimulator• 5 years ago

My own take on this state of affair is that I would trade a localized, visible and accountable (in all meanings of the term) pollution with our current globalized, amorphous and invisible (for now and still...) pollution that will lead to terrifying effects down the line (given some are already there).

Nuclear is not clean per se, but in scale, it is much, much more preferable.

zamalek• 5 years ago

1, 2

What about the long-term solution for the storage and disposal of combustion by-products? Do we just keep dumping them into the atmosphere?

This argument against nuclear waste is an emotional one: the fact that we can see, store, and move nuclear by-products is an advantage. We completely lose control of combustion by-products that we dump into the atmosphere; they are simply perceived as less dangerous to our monkey brains.

3

The failure mode of coal power plants is continuous, and the damage caused by the sum of all fission disasters is nothing compared to the damage caused (including radioactive) by burning coal under normal circumstances, each year.

There is obviously no contest compared to wind/solar.

capkutay• 5 years ago

"The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact"

We can also talk about all the tragedies and catastrophic events related to commercial aviation. But no one in their right mind would propose that we stop or slow down the airline industry because of the 'failure modes'.

tuatoru8• 5 years ago

I may not be in my right mind, but there is a #nofly tag on twitter.

Edit: tourism is a low productivity, low value, environmentally harmful industry. Fiji's coral reefs, for example, were beautiful, diverse, and productive, according to old National Geographics. Now they are gone.

We could do better with VR, as in the film "Soylent Green".

Edit. I agree with your point, which is that all technology choices have costs. There are no Disney miracles.

air7• 5 years ago

According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.

I feel this is a misleading statistic, as cheap green (perhaps subsidised) electricity would offset more that that. The report states:

Transportation 29%: With cheap electricity I can easily imagine a huge shift to EVs within a decade.

Industry 23%: "Greenhouse gas emissions from industry primarily come from burning fossil fuels for energy".

Not sure what they mean, but energy could just as easily be created with electricity in an industrial setting.

Commercial and Residential 13%: "Greenhouse gas emissions from businesses and homes arise primarily from fossil fuels burned for heat".

Same. Heat could easily made from electricity.

So it seems to me that dirt cheap clean electricity could fix a huge chunk of our problem.

jollybean• 5 years ago

1) Electricity could replace most carbon usage, the amount generated now from carbon is almost besides the point.

"So it's including vehicles. You could be 100% nuclear power generation and that part wouldn't change."

? We're going to electric cars. Cars currently run on fossil fuels because it was cheap and convenient, that will change.

2) We have at least mid-term storage and there are plenty of options on the table for long-term we just have to make up our minds.

3) The 'failure modes' are not that bad - nobody died in Fukishima - and - we can limit them. Neither Fukishima nor Chernobyl plants should have ever been running.

At this point, the only thing stopping us is ourselves.

To the extend we are organized and competent we can do it just as well.

tuatoru8• 5 years ago

Nitpick: in the Fukushima incident, one worker died of radiation poisoning and 273 (elderly) people died of evacuation-related stress.

Still negligible compared to the deaths from coal burning. And as you say, the Fukushima reactors are much worse than current designs like Hualong One.

closeparen• 5 years ago

What is the long term solution for "the last few weeks have been cloudy"?

tuatoru8• 5 years ago

Diversity.

Long distance (1000 km) transmission, wind AND solar, short term storage, load shedding agreements, and long duration storage.

Iron-air looks economically viable already for timescales of two days to two weeks. Hot rock storage, the same.

It's rare to get cloudy calm periods lasting longer than two weeks over 1000 km distances, but there are readily available seasonal storage choices.

Electrolysed hydrogen, either stored directly or as ammonia. Just need PV prices to fall a bit, which is expected, and the cost of electrolysis to fall, which is happening.

I have only hit the universals here. Depending on geography and mining history, there are a bunch of other storage options available in many places. Mechanical (gravity) storag other than pumped hydro is another possible technology. So is methane synthesised from CO2.

Edit. I'm in favour of nuclear, if the numbers work. The LNT theory should be exposed as the bull** that it is and ALARA abandoned in favour of specified limits. Then let nuclear compete with renewables.

stjohnswarts3• 5 years ago

Our biggest issue right now is climate change, full stop. Nuclear power basically solves that. Currently renewables do not. You other points are in the noise of what global warming is going to do to us if we don't use the solutions that are available to us now. We literally need a Manhattan style project on even better nuclear than we currently have. We have plenty places where nuke waste can be stored. It takes up a very very small area compared to the problem that gets solved.

Jeff_Brown• 5 years ago

1000 square miles is the area of a square 33 miles on a side. Assuming it's in a remote place, it's nothing relative to a aworldwide climate disaster. (If it were in a highly populated area, that would be a tragedy -- but surely nobody is going to put a nuclear plant next to a city.)

cletus5• 5 years ago

You mean other like within 50 miles of New York City [1][2]?

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

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-you-live-wi...

envengineer5• 5 years ago

And to add: there is another huge negative to nuclear. The hidden and forgotten costs of uranium mining and waste are almost always glossed over and forgotten. The only solution for secure disposal of mines, and mining waste, is flooding. So now you have massive (50-5000 acres) ponds or lakes, to manage in perpetuity. We often hear of regular mining tailings ponds failing. Now imagine acidic, toxic and radioactive, water and sludge flooding down stream. Example: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-min...

tuatoru8• 5 years ago

massive (50-5000 acres) ponds or lakes

Pretty sure you meant to write "tiny" there. Compare the numbers with copper mining. Going to ban copper?

jcoq2• 5 years ago

Well we have no solution for the byproducts of fossil fuels except to spew them into the atmosphere. So I'd say that nuclear fuel is superior.

We're not going to solve climate change while maintaining the same level of energy consumption without making some tradeoffs.

I feel like the environmentalist movement's sentimentalism is what helped to get us here. We change Earth - it's what humans do. We at least need it to be habitable.

Nuclear energy's risks are known and have solutions that exist today.

envengineer5• 5 years ago

Actually we have solutions for All those byproducts. Just as with NO2,SO2 capture was enabled after we found those are bad. We can scrub CO2 too. It is just a matter of cost. And desire.

philwelch4• 5 years ago

We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive

Depleted uranium is a useful and valuable material and not just a “byproduct” to be “disposed” of.

We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products

Long-lived fission waste products can be fed into breeder reactors to produce new fuel. We don’t do this because we haven’t chosen to grow the deployment of nuclear power. The need for long term storage of long-lived fission waste products is a consequence of self-inflicted decline that the advocates of self-inflicted decline can turn around and use as an argument in favor of self-inflicted decline.

spfzero5• 5 years ago

"you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them."

Presumably that would be power from nuclear power plants, making electric vehicles that much more carbon free. So the vehicle part could change, and dramatically as electric vehicles replace fossil-fueled vehicles.

na85• 5 years ago

I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

The US Navy has 300+ reactors and has been operating them for decades without incident.

cletus5• 5 years ago

Oh really? [1]

The most serious incident is probably the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. While it wasn't as serious as Chernobyl or Fukushima, "without incident" seems at best a stretch.

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

andbberger8• 5 years ago

How often do you drive over a bridge? Or get a in a building that could collapse on you? Or fly in a plane?

That's not really so different than nuclear energy is except some of us have lost our collective minds and come to the erroneous conclusion that nuclear energy is _scary_.

The climate change potential of nuclear energy goes far behind the direct greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production. With cheap abundant electricity (as could be produced from nuclear energy in a sane world), industrial processes that burn fossil fuels could be switched to electricity and carbon skimmers could be run.

Not to mention your other concerns which I think can be aptly dismissed with a nice tech brain metaphor: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame"

Adapt or die. The water's lapping at your feet and you're looking at the spec sheet for a nuclear first-gen ipod and concluding there's nothing there.

And don't even get me started on your electric vehicle hot take. Battery vehicles are not the answer. We here in the Us practice a particularly perverted form of urbanism. Gimme a fucking train. Gimme more trolleybuses. Gimme walkable neighborhoods and dense design.

I am so sick of all of this bullshit, the answers are obvious

collegeburner2• 5 years ago

Dense neighborhoods kinda suck everywhere Ive seen it tho? I like having a backyard and not sharing walls with my neighbors, and having some quiet, and low crime, and not having to hunt for seats on buses and trains, etc.

splitstud2• 5 years ago

Storage safety requires a stable civilization for a longer time than we can possibly guarantee. There is no obvious to this problem.

dang• 5 years ago

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Your comment here is a noticeable step in that direction, and we're trying to go the opposite way here. I'm sure you can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead.

Edit: unfortunately, you've been doing this a ton lately, and we've had to ask you to stop before. That's not cool. We ban accounts that behave like this, regardless of how right they are or feel they are. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful.

greentissue• 5 years ago

Comparing a bridge or a plane to a nuclear meltdown seems pretty disingenuous. If a plane crashes at an airport that does not prevent the airport from being accessible by humans for 50+ years. If a bridge collapses that does not prevent you from building a new one at that location for 50+ years.

I don't think anything they described applies only to 1st generation plants. They all still hold true today. The thing with coal and fossil fuel power is that there was not enough planning of the entire system. The end result was the production of gases directly into the environment.

If we want to go down the nuclear route we need to design a well oiled closed looped system that can completely handle poking without any easily recoverable problems. There are many ideas in the pipeline such as molten-salt reactors. These take time to test, validate, and integrate into a cohesive system.

The biggest worry for me is shortcuts and penny-saving. How many parts of this system will be skipped do to being "to costly", "not financially feasible", etc...

natmaka13• 5 years ago

There is a fundamental difference: flying isn't really dangerous (statistically) for those deciding not to fly. Nuclear is dangerous for everyone ('indiscriminately'), even for many generations to come (hot long-lived waste).

fredophile• 5 years ago

I think the concern about long term storage is somewhat overemphasized. In theory it should be possible to choose a fairly remote, geologically stable area and make it the storage site. The problems are more political than technical.

If it turns out that finding such a site isn't possible why don't we just grind the waste into a very fine powder and disperse it into the atmosphere? Coal ash is radioactive too and that's what we do with it. That was originally meant to be tongue in cheek but now I'm legitimately curious about how big an area you'd need to disperse a nuclear reactor's waste to get radiation levels no higher than you'd see from waste from a coal plant.

m0zg• 5 years ago

Chernobyl, famously, did not have a containment building around it. We don't build reactors like that. In addition today you can build reactors which simply do not have the failure modes that led to either Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone

This is a pet peeve of mine. They always use flimsiest of statistics to "attribute it" so, but never mention how many people would die if it _wasn't_ for fossil fuels. The number would be in the billions. Much of Canada, and all of Russia's north would freeze to death. People in Africa, India and China would starve. Industry (and with it livelihoods of billions of people worldwide) would collapse. Europe would erupt in a war. And so on. Hardly a wortwhile tradeoff. And no, it is not possible to replace all uses of fossil fuels with electricity. Not now, not in the foreseeable future.

throwawaylinux• 5 years ago

While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant.

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Replacing fossil fuels outside electricity generation will require large amounts of electricity. Hydrogen production using electrolysis, electric arc furnaces, battery charging, etc.

ashtonkem2• 5 years ago

Also, a huge percentage of industrial emissions is due to fossil fuels being used for direct heating (e.g. natural gas used to fire a boiler or furnace). These loads can be electrified, they must be electrified, but electrifying them will take an unbelievable amount of power even compared to what we produce today.

Our grid will probably need to produce 3-4x what it currently does to get us electrified fully. A rapid paced plan to build a standard reactor design en masse is the only reasonable way to do that in a short period of time.

panick2114• 5 years ago

According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant.

We need all heating and all driving replaced with power, so an ever increasing amount of stuff falls into electricity. In France, where they had green nuclear power for 40+ years electrical heating is the norm.

All driving and heating should move to nuclear.

Modern nuclear can also be used to drive many industrial process including making potentially hydrogen and other chemicals that can then be used as feedstock for chemical industries.

1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;

If we switch to breaders we basically never need to actually do that.

2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;

Most of the bad stuff can be burned up in advanced reactors. We even have the money to design such reactors already but sadly idiot politicians have deadlocked themselves on this idiotic Yucca Montain plan.

There is still some very little real waste left, but even if you power all of the US, you can literally store it all on a single parking lot for next couple hundred years without any issues. If we really use this technology it totally reasonable not to have a solution for the next 300 years. The amount is so limited that in 100 years you might as well be able to shot it into space or drop it deep into the earths core.

In the absolute worst possible case, you have a parking lot full of stuff that needs to be monitored and in very, very few scenarios it has to be moved or repackaged. But that is very unlikely. And if we are at a point where we can not even monitor a few inert boxes on a parking lot our society has way bigger problems then slightly radioactive inert boxes.

I literally mind-blowing that people believe this is a show stopper.

3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and

Tons of people live in the Exclusion Zone and they are perfectly fine. And comparing Cheernobyl to a modern Gen4 reactor is like comparing a first generation Zeppelin to a modern airliner.

And btw the Cheernobyl reactors were designed to make nuclear weapons, not civilian nuclear power.

4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

I have bad news for you buddy. The government already build and maintains and inspects NUCLEAR WEAPONS. That are literally 100000x more dangerous.

The US Navy has been using nuclear power for 50+ years and had very few issues.

And we HAD nuclear reactors running for a long time. France has literally had green energy for 40+ years and seem to be doing reasonably ok.

The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.

Electric vehicles actually have MORE utility, not less. They are far quicker, more comfortable, have more interior space, less noise, better handling, safer and more reliable.

The lift-time cost of an EV is already beating ICE. The initial cost is higher so that is not fully felt, but even that is dropping fast.

you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them

And that's why we want nuclear power.

tekknik• 5 years ago

4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

The US navy has been operating mobile nuclear power plants on water for decades with not a single issue. Why don’t you trust them? The people guarding the freedom in this country have no problem sleeping right next to one that has a high chance of being shot at and destroyed.

(Also don’t forget their in water!)

Beldin3• 5 years ago

Significantly reducing population (to, say, 3 billion or less) is probably our best bet against climate change. However, to do so in any remotely ethical way takes a lot of time.

The next step is energy use: both reduction of consumption and reduction of wasted energy, ie. less energy, more effectively used. Things like insulation fall under this category.

Because we're simply using too many resources for the world to remain unchanged in the medium term. We need to change.

Changing the energy mix without addressing this just postpones the consequences of our actions - and not even that much.

Basically: massive, world-wide societal changes are our best bet against climate change. Nuclear energy is our best bet to push the hot potato to (at best) the next generation.

csisnett7• 5 years ago

Funny how people who think the earth overpopulated always think is other people who are overpopulating it, and not themselves.

Wealth can be created. There's no limit to how much wealth can be created. Focusing on deleting the population is immoral.

rcMgD2BwE72F2• 5 years ago

Ask the pro-depopulation who should not be allowed to have X+ children. I not those people, how many they maybe, pollute less all together than those blaming population growth.

The issue is not with the population but the few who ruin everything for everyone.

rahen4• 5 years ago

Nobody asked to delete population. The challenge is to allow people to access familial planning, make contraception and abortions more widespread in developing countries, and stop or at least reduce pro-natal fiscal policies in the West.

Besides, morality is highly subjective.

jedimastert2• 5 years ago

Funny how people who think the earth overpopulated always think is other people who are overpopulating it, and not themselves.

I would assume that most of these kinds of folks would be childless?

tzamora2• 5 years ago

Why is inmoral? It's just population orderly control, and it will at some point just get constant so wealth will be limited to that constant and it will not grow anymore, economy doesn't need to grow to improve human welfare.

It's completely sane to think and discuss how we can in someway "delete" population.

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

Wealth can be created. There's no limit to how much wealth can be created.

Traditionally wealth means stuff or ability to acquire stuff, which inherently consumes resources. I'm assuming you are referring to a reinterpretation of the term "wealth" to mean "a number in a computer system"?

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

There's no limit to how much wealth can be created.

Citation requested.

That, and other statements of your comment, are articles of ideology and belief, not scientific statements. You're attempting to moralise what is a factual matter. That is as effective as a moral theory of disease, which is to say, not at all.

rahen4• 5 years ago

I agree we should help curb down our fertility rate worldwide. However this would take at least 50 years before it starts showing effect. It's too long a time when facing an environmental emergency.

rcMgD2BwE72F2• 5 years ago

Fertility rate is already decreasing fast, worldwide. The environment problem today is due to the carbon footprint of the rich, not of the majority.

holoduke2• 5 years ago

People who claim the world is overpopulated probably live in a big city and never really travelled the world. Because there are vast remote places thousands of miles across without anyone living. I believe the world can easily hold 100 billion people without issues. And besides, downscaling the world is not an option. Every organic structure needs to expand indefinitely. The only reason you would have decrease in population is world scale war. Sure we don't need that.

rahen4• 5 years ago

Not really, not all land can be used to host people. We need space to grow food, produce energy, have factories and offices, infrastructures... We're already using more than what the entire emerged land can provide us each year (with the help of massive supplies of fossil fuel and derived products, which will eventually run out).

If we want to offer everyone a western lifestyle while being sustainable on the long run, the optimal world population is indeed estimated at around 1.5-2 billions (world population of 1950), and definitely under 3 billions.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-po...

Or just Google "Optimal world population".

demosito6663• 5 years ago

Currently 60% of landmass is being used by humans directly (human habitat, pastures, crops). Of remaining 40% about a half is still being continuously influenced by humans (residential forests, patches of land between roads, etc.). And the land is being used unsustainably and almost all unused land is beyond the polar circle. So no, the Earth can not hold 100B people with current level of consumption.

And generally you don't want current consumption level, you want much higher standards, because majority of world's population is living in poverty. Which means that Earth can't hold 8B people either unless humans improve their land use efficiency significantly, which is unlikely.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/9/5/129

natmaka13• 5 years ago

In many cases the very reason why some places aren't populated is that living there is difficult (lack of water/arable land, weather conditions...), and in many cases they are useful (as forests, grasslands...) for living beings thriving elsewhere.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

Joel E. Cohen is the Earth's leading authority on the question, and lives and works in New York City, which I strongly hope is not too rural for your taste. He's the first to say that the question and answer are complicated, but that does not mean that there are no limits.

For a brief introduction to his research, see "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/10/08/how-many-people-...

Paywall: https://archive.is/E5AB8

He makes a much more complete exploration in his 1995 book, How many people can the earth support?, Cohen visits many estimates and/or claims regarding carrying capacity and explores the assumptions or logic behind many of these, which range from a low of about 100 million to highs over 12 trillion. Most such estimates cluster around 1--10 billion, and seem more credible than outliers, especially of the high-end group.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-many-people-can-the-earth...

https://archive.org/details/howmanypeoplecan00cohe

There are also a few articles discussing the question, though not with the detail of the book. Most are either paywalled or in PDF formats (which seems to strongly discourage online readers). Their quality and expertise strongly reward expended effort, do please read these if you're genuinely interested in the question.

https://lab.rockefeller.edu/cohenje/assets/file/257bCohenHow...

http://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/allenth/Class-Readings-Passwo...

A review of Cohen's book, "On Human Carrying Capacity: A Review Essay on Joel Cohen's: How Many People Can the Earth Support?"

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2137692 (http://libgen.rs/scimag/10.2307%2F2137692)

And a hearty recommendation from science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/12/there-is-no-pl...

mynameishere• 5 years ago

That is obviously the only answer (unless cold fusion comes out soon) but it's also the only answer that can't make anyone money. (Except maybe Pfizer, if the tinhat crowd is right.)

NoblePublius5• 5 years ago

Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced anthropogenic climate change is a thing, or that if it is a thing that it is more significant than natural variations of climate. The economic and political consequences of the proposed solutions to this alleged crisis (enrich these corporations and these nations at the expense of these corporations and these nations) are too glaringly one sided to suggest empirical impartiality.

It also continues to astound me that proponents of the “climate crisis” narrative never make any mention whatsoever of the fact that the most valuable energy company/car company in the world makes solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. Instead climate crisis actors demonize Tesla for not being unionized (eg, Tesla excluded from the White House American Electric Car Summit) and are lining up at the piggie trough for exclusive Biden bucks that will fund infrastructure investments that will help Ford and GM catch up to Tesla.

To wit: our best bet to speed the transition to sustainable energy is to get out of the way of the capitalists who have already solved this problem with superior transportation and energy products.

epistasis12• 5 years ago

Just going to be the guy that says that not only is human caused climate change a massive threat to humanity's economic future, but also that even if it were not, it would be far cheaper to switch to carbon-free tech than continue on our current path. Carbon free electricity is cheaper than fossil fuel, and as we electrify things like home heating and transport, we typically see efficiency increases of 200%-600%, meaning we need far less primary power to begin with.

Any objection to the scientific basis of anthropogenic climate change is based on political ideology and false propaganda. We need to stop having allegiances to politicians and bad news sources, and maintain allegiance to truth and the unbiased pursuit of it. Far too many in our country are tools of fossil fuel interests. So while I agree that some environmentalists are tools of weird political ideologies, they are staying closer to the truth than those who oppose climate change. Unless most of your wealth is tied up directly in fossil fuel assets that you can't sell, you are also shortchanging your own economic future by not embracing newer and better technology.

NoblePublius5• 5 years ago

The humanity that lives in Siberia is very much looking forward to the climate change you fear so don’t act like you speak for the entire world. Rising oceans might make Central Africa look more like North America. My original point is that this problem (if real) has already been solved by Tesla, and that the progressives who still think it is a problem are suddenly more concerned with supporting the unionized competitors of Tesla than acknowledging the supremacy of solar + batteries + EV transport.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced anthropogenic climate change is a thing, or that if it is a thing that it is more significant than natural variations of climate.

Facts are true whether you believe them or not. Sure, there are wide error bars on some of the margins, and the feedback loops in the climate system are difficult to tease out. But if you look at a graph like this, https://www.co2levels.org/ , and are still attempting to argue that you're not "convinced" that doubling the primary greenhouse gas in our atmosphere isn't going to have huge effects, well, can't do much for you there.

NoblePublius5• 5 years ago

There are more significant changes of climate in recorded history that predate the Industrial Revolution. If I learned anything in the many science classes I took to get my physics degree, any prediction based on a single controlling variable is usually wrong.

simion314• 5 years ago

Just gonna be that guy on this thread who is not convinced anthropogenic climate change is

Are you amused how some idiots are convinced Earth is flat where is so easy to prove is a sphere or some round shape?

Similarly it trivial to show that if you put CO2 from the ground in the atmosphere stuff happens, so if you have the brain to do some math, if you believe that coal burning releases CO2 in the atmosphere and if you trust the physics laws then you should be convinced that climate change exists exactly the same as you could be convinced that the planet os round and it rotates, but you need to be 14+ years intellectually AND not a conspiractionist that don't belive in physics laws.

NoblePublius5• 5 years ago

I have a degree in physics. There are more significant periods of climate change in recorded history that predate the Industrial Revolution. Just because we put more carbon in the air doesn’t mean that subsequent “changes in climate” are caused by that additional carbon.

envengineer5• 5 years ago

I admire your comments. Of course everyone jumps on you, ignoring the valuable summary of actions that truly need discussion, and of what one person has accomplished, to move us forward with a real answer to our dependence on fossil fuels.

redisman2• 5 years ago

It’s naive at best. If there’s no mechanism for externalities then why would we stop burning coal and oil when the infrastructure is already in place?

carapace• 5 years ago

It's a bit cheeky but I like to point out that the Sun is nuclear power. It's a maintenance-free fusion reactor so powerful that it can blind you from 150 million km away.

- - - -

Anyway, Robert Bussard believed that he was on to something with his polywell fusion plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU

He claimed that it would only take about $200M of engineering development to become viable.

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

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

It's too late to fight emissions. It's time to build flood defenses and irrigation systems and move cities north...

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

You're being downvoted, but I think there is some truth to what you are saying:

1. Humans have shown time and again that they simply aren't capable of the global wide self-sacrifice that would be required now to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Just look at a chart for global greenhouse gas emissions over time. The only time you even see a slight reduction is when there is a massive global recession or pandemic. We basically need about "2 or 3 pandemics-worth" of reductions annually to hit our goals. This just isn't going to happen.

2. That said, I think it will be possible to transition over to primarily renewables, but the main driver for this will be economic (solar and batteries are continuing to plummet in price). It will just take a long time (or, at least, longer than we really have) before this increase in renewables really starts to dent CO2 emissions. Thus, I think maintaining a focus on emissions is a good thing, because it will still help that transition to renewables happen faster.

3. Your second sentence is absolutely true though. I think at least a 3 meter sea level rise by 2100 is pretty unavoidable by now, and that will have a massive impact on coastal cities. Significant impacts from climate change are unavoidable at this point, so we should start planning for this.

redisman2• 5 years ago

Why not both

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

Well for the last 50 years we haven't had the budget/motivation to do meaningful emissions cuts. So the idea that now it's urgent that we do mitigation, we can split that budget/motivation seems... Hopeful.

himinlomax7• 5 years ago

Regarding reserves, the article makes the usual mistake of taking currently known and cheap sources as definite. But consider how Mad Max came out in the late 1970s, when the fear of completely running out of oil was evident to everyone. And yet, we have now found so much more oil that we have to force ourselves to stop using it.

We haven't been looking for more uranium simply because there is no need for it. The known _cheap_ reserves are barely tapped. And there are many known sites that are simply not tapped yet because the aforementioned ones are just so cheap. If there was a need for more, prospecting would be profitable and would be done.

(As an aside, taking uranium out of sea water is almost certainly never going to be worth it.)

And the same applies to thorium or fast breeder reactors. They're just not worth the effort at this time. But again, if the demand was there, it would take just 10 years to build them.

envengineer5• 5 years ago

See above comment about radioactive mining waste. More mining, more waste. Forever. Of course, it's not in all the proponents back yards.

himinlomax7• 5 years ago

Coal mining waste is also radioactive. It also damages thousands of times larger areas.

antattack3• 5 years ago

History of accidents, design flaws, shortcuts taken during construction show that we are not ready for Nuclear Power.

lettergram• 5 years ago

The obvious answer is no, because we likely cannot stop climate change. We’re exiting an ice age (the natural state of the world is no massive ice sheets), we don’t know the actual causes of climate change, and even if we believe we know what causes climate change (say, carbon), most of the green house gas emissions aren’t from energy production.

That said, nuclear is likely better for the environment. I’m very bullish on nuclear.

gorgoiler2• 5 years ago

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a truism that, in the 20th century st least, civilian nuclear power plants were simply a wheeze for the actual grand plan: weapons manufacturing? The two are coupled in a way that doesn’t feel comfortable.

Imagine a different timeline in which something called an Apricot bomb became the ultimate must-have weapon of mass destruction to ensure a seat at the big boys diplomatic table. E.g. you smash apricot stones together to produce annihilation.

Suddenly we have government programmes researching the health benefits of apricot juice, a system of distribution of apricot juice to all elementary schools, university departments funded specifically to produce generation after generation or stone fruit experts, oh and sure, a bomb or two, but trust our top men: that’s not the main focus, silly citizen!

bjourne• 5 years ago

True, and this is the reason why no one believes the Iranian government's claim that they are enriching uranium only for civilian purposes.

pomian• 5 years ago

Imagine all the left over arsenic waste.

gorgoiler2• 5 years ago

Come friendly bombs. Sweet almond flavoured release.

sien• 5 years ago

This isn't true. There are many countries that have had nuclear reactors for decades and have no nuclear weapons.

Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Canada and more.

List of countries with nuclear power :

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

doikor2• 5 years ago

Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct solution is to hedge your bets by betting on just about every possible solution. The local resources available dictate just too much what is the "best" solution but even then one should not put all the eggs in one basket.

But solving the electricity problem is just solving one part (~25%) of the equation. There is still a lot of greenhouse gasses being released from cars, construction (concrete), farming and various industrial processes. But the electricity seems to be the easiest problem to solve and once we have that on track to being fixed we can move more resources into the other issues.

jabl5• 5 years ago

Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct solution is to hedge your bets by betting on just about every possible solution. The local resources available dictate just too much what is the "best" solution but even then one should not put all the eggs in one basket.

It aggravates me to no end that people are fighting this pointless nuclear vs. renewables war, all the while fossil fuels are laughing all the way to the bank.

Should be invest in building nuclear? YES! Should we invest in wind and solar? YES! Should we invest in grid-scale storage? YES! Should we invest in transmission capacity? YES!

But solving the electricity problem is just solving one part (~25%) of the equation. There is still a lot of greenhouse gasses being released from cars, construction (concrete), farming and various industrial processes. But the electricity seems to be the easiest problem to solve and once we have that on track to being fixed we can move more resources into the other issues.

Electricity is in some ways the easiest problem, yes, but also once we have clean electricity we can use that to decarbonize many other sectors. Transportation, to a large extent. Heating, yes. Many important industrial processes can use hydrogen, like steel production. Etc.

ncmncm18• 5 years ago

Not true: solar is the clear winner. Thus far, storage hasn't been important, but will become so soon. Very cheap iron-air batteries will roll out in 2023. Wind will remain important, as will long-distance power transmission.

Spending on other methods is not just wasted; it means not spending those dollars on solar.

But replacing Portland cement with one of the numerous carbon-neutral alternatives is urgent, as is building out all-electric ammonia and hydrogen synthesis: hydrogen for steel production, and ammonia to fuel retrofitted container ships.

civilized• 5 years ago

I hope you're right about the iron-air batteries. I heard good things about them a couple months ago and hope it's going well.

loeg7• 5 years ago

Every unproven battery technology is "right around the corner." I would love cheap, scalable iron-air batteries to be available in 2023, but I am not holding my breath. We need to plan around technologies that exist, because we need to act now rather than wait 5 years before acting.

doikor2• 5 years ago

Ok how do you use solar in Northern Europe during the winter? For 3 months you get less than 1% of the normal summer output (in most cases you will spend more energy just to melt the ice and snow off the panel)

Also hand waving the storage problem away with “just buy it from someone else using transmission lines” is naive. Basically that just makes you ultra reliant on those other countries that the line goes through of and whoever is on the other end of it. At least with coal and gas you can just ship it from some other party if politics block you from getting it from your current provider.

Hypx_9• 5 years ago

Very cheap hydrogen-air batteries already exist. It funny people are praying for a complete reinvention of what already exists.

joe_the_user3• 5 years ago

Nothing really is the "best bet" in this. The correct solution is to hedge your bets by betting on just about every possible solution.

This seems like a "fallacy of the option spectrum". Of course we don't try cold fusion or discredited options. Trying options based on how credit they seem is a reasonable approach but "try it 'cause it's a thing" isn't argument.

dane-pgp2• 5 years ago

I agree, but would point out that "Try every option based on how credible it seems" is also an insufficient or under-specified answer, because the viability of each option depends on how much resources are invested in that option.

For example, if a trillion dollars were invested in nuclear reactors, it would probably be possible to build them fast enough and safely enough to satisfy most people, whereas spending just ten dollars on nuclear energy would not be enough to solve climate change. Similarly, over-building renewables and researching batteries with a trillion dollars might be enough to start reversing CO2 levels, but ten dollars won't make a difference.

Given limited resources, determining how to allocate them to maximise the probability of success is really the essence of the problem, rather than just identifying that there are several approaches that could be tried simultaneously.

ashtonkem2• 5 years ago

But solving the electricity problem is just solving one part (~25%) of the equation. There is still a lot of greenhouse gasses being released from cars, construction (concrete), farming and various industrial processes. But the electricity seems to be the easiest problem to solve and once we have that on track to being fixed we can move more resources into the other issues.

With the exception of concrete and farming, the answer to the rest of these is "produce a shit load of power cheaply". A lot of industrial uses of fossil fuels are merely using them to heat something directly, like a boiler or a furnace. These kinds of work loads can be electrified, but the demand on our grid will go up massively.

Ditto with transit. We can make EVs now that are superior to ICE vehicles for 98-99% of use cases. We can make electrified rail transit a reality again if we want to. The issue is that we currently don't make enough electricity to meet current demands, industrial demands, and transit demands. We need a lot of electricity to do that, and we're currently nowhere close.

deeviant• 5 years ago

No, by virtue of Betteridge's law of headlines.

Also by virtue that nuclear plants are too expensive, take far too long to plan, authorize and build, only make sense in stable developed countries where the dirtiest and fastest growing carbon emissions are generally in more unstable third-world countries. Oh and they aren't fairing well against solar and wind plus storage in terms of price: It will probably be less than a decade before wind and solar + storage are cheaper than nuclear.

tejohnso• 5 years ago

How could it be our best bet? I hope not.

It does nothing to reduce the consumption frenzy, and it does nothing to remove CO2 / CH4 from the atmosphere, and it does nothing to reduce insolation.

Something like the MEER:ReflEction project[1] seems to be more appropriate to me.

[1] https://www.meerreflection.com/home

defterGoose• 5 years ago

It can cleanly (zero excess carbon) provide vast amounts of energy for direct air capture of CO2 (energy is the biggest barrier for that).

The efforts proposed in the site you linked require huge geological-scale engineering efforts never before attempted. Nuclear is really here and it works well the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time.

Don't get me wrong, changing mindsets and reducing consumptive behavior are at the root of the problem as well, just remember that 'perfect' is the enemy of 'good'.

newbamboo• 5 years ago

I guess there are two types: 1) those who oppose nuclear because they fear science and don’t grasp the logistics involved in solar, 2) those who might have been able to prevent climate change if they had more political sway many decades ago.

I think the first group will win, because it will always be the larger group. It will always be a smaller group that have greater intelligence and foresight. For this reason I think discussion and public debate about climate change is counter productive. Trying to involve more people in a solution will just bring more mediocre minds to the discussion and hinder our best attempts to solve the problem with their innumeracy, ego and lack of scientific understanding.

RobertRoberts• 5 years ago

This is maybe an oversimplification.

My biggest concern comes from waste storage, of which my information came from a congressman who had to directly manage the waste in a particular state.

To store this waste you must trust many moving parts, including greedy politicians, greedy corporations and more.

None of which have ever proven to be trustworthy indefinitely.

I'd rather have less electricity and peace of mind than nuclear and be forced to trust the untrustworthy to protect our lands forever.

46756e• 5 years ago

I feel like saying "discussion is bad because it brings mediocre minds" to a discussion is a bit gatekeep-y. That applies to every discussion.

That being said though, I do agree somewhat with the premise that "democracy is great because anyone can vote, but it is terrible because anyone can vote."

It sucks when some field becomes political, because the attitude around it changes from "lets listen to the experts" to "it is my God-given right to have an opinion on it regardless if I understand the issue."

rsj_hn9• 5 years ago

The problem with "listening to the experts" is that at some point people figure out that the experts are very easy to bribe/intimidate/silence. So if we hand over the reigns of the nation to experts, then that's basically ceding our decision making to whoever can best organize to control the most experts. Don't think that academia and the tenure process aren't rife with groupthink, forbidden thoughts and positions, etc. And it's hard to find a group of people with less integrity than researchers chasing grants or academics trying to get tenure. Today, universities are the places where freedom of thought and expression are most suppressed, and groupthink runs rampant. Academics are under the thumbs of administrators and terrified of angry student groups. Researchers are sometimes afraid of being physically attacked if they espouse the wrong opinion. This is not who you want to hand control of society over to.

So there is really no substitute for wisdom and intelligence. A foolish population is going to make foolish choices and a wise population will make wise choices. Both science and politics are downstream of culture.

jacquesm15• 5 years ago

There is an endless stream of pro-nuclear articles ever since the nuclear lobby figured out that their best bet to get re-instated as a viable source of power is to hitch their wagon to climate change. But it doesn't change a thing about the underlying issues: non-proliferation, radio active waste, potential for accidents, very bad economy over the total operational life-span.

beeboop3• 5 years ago

Waste has never been a problem and especially isn't a problem with modern reactors. They're safer than coal burning plants. Their economies are much better than alternatives when you account for the cost of environment, life, and pollution for things like coal burning plants. I feel like I've had to debunk all of these points literally a dozen times on HN and I'm really tired of putting in the effort.

jacquesm15• 5 years ago

Sure, pull the other one. You can't credibly debunk any of these because they've been a problem with every reactor built to date. You can pretend that they won't be a problem for any of the 'new and untried designs', however, I'm pretty sure that by the time that we build them and operate them for a couple of decades they'll turn out much the same as the previous lot, which were also supposed to be cheap, non-polluting, reliable and absolutely never subject to anything remotely like an accident.

Why people keep falling for this is a mystery to me.

Comparing with coal burning plants is nonsense, compare to wind/hydro/solar on a long enough timescale rather than to compare with the most polluting fossil fuel. That's stacking the deck in favor of nuclear.

I'm sure nuclear has its place in this whole story, but let's not pretend that it is without problems, at best it will be a stepping stone.

kvakkefly• 5 years ago

It seems like you assume that other sources of energy are without waste and accidents. Nuclear power has by far the lowest number of deaths / produced energy and the total volume of waste is not that much. During all time of nuclear, the total volume of waste is about the annual waste produced by solar cells.

See a nice summary (with sources you can check) at https://energy.glex.no/calculator

jacquesm15• 5 years ago

That's if things go well. If they don't...

missedthecue2• 5 years ago

If a solar panel has a catastrophic incident, you replace it. If a windmill has a catastrophic accident, you replace it. If a gas plant has a catastrophic accident, you replace it and have five funerals.

If a nuclear plant has a catastrophic accident, Western Europe could be uninhabitable for generations. Likely? No. But completely possible.

kkjjkgjjgg3• 5 years ago

Whereas solar panels and wind energy of course have no lobby whatsoever and are only being promoted by idealistic, well meaning activists that can be trusted 100%.

jacquesm15• 5 years ago

This is attempting to put the solar and wind lobby on equal footing with the nuclear lobby: it isn't even close.

envengineer5• 5 years ago

Interesting to consider how much that lobby has quietly funded CO2 research projects, to prove anthropogenic effects. Also interesting that the big push to consider CO2 and it's impacts, started about the time a 30 year moratorium on nuclear power was coming to an end.

ncmncm18• 5 years ago

The most enduring product of any nuclear power project is not radioactive waste, but corruption. Nuclear power construction projects, at least in the western world, invariably become conduits for wholly legal, long-term corruption, making nukes about the most expensive kind of power (ignoring externalities from coal). This is a common feature of big-ticket public-works projects, particularly also including tunnel projects and military procurement.

Nukes take so long to build not because it is so hard to do -- it is mostly just concrete and plumbing -- but because nobody actually involved wants the construction money ever to stop flowing. No output is even promised for years, which is easily stretched out, often beyond a decade. Sunk-cost fallacy helps this process: once a few $B are burned, it is easy to unlock more against the prospect of admitting what was already spent bought nothing.

As bad as is the corruption around fission, fusion has been and must be much worse. A fission plant is expected to produce power eventually, or the plug will finally be pulled. One recent fission failure has cost $30B, so far, which seems like a lot, but fusion has burned more already without even breaking ground on a plant. ITER, even if 100% successful, will generate zero watts: no turbines are in the site plan. A plant built after it would cost, conservatively, >$50B and take decades to finish. (The most likely outcome would be that it is never finished.) Meanwhile, the costs of solar, wind, and storage are still plummeting, with no hint of a lower limit.

Thus far wind and solar have mostly avoided becoming conduits for corruption, probably because it is easy to see how the money is spent, and maybe because of the high fraction of idealists involved. (The exception is solar thermal.) Power can begin flowing almost immediately, after a small fraction of the whole installation is done, which can then fund further construction. Thus, the up-front capital needed is small, and costs are constrained by immediate revenue.

Thus, every penny diverted to fission and fusion (not to mention feeding and maintaining coal) from solar and wind brings climate catastrophe ever nearer.

joe_the_user3• 5 years ago

This is a key point.

The US especially needs to solve the construction generates corruption problem before it can have sane nuclear power.

It needs to do this for public transit as well. But the thing with solar is you can ramp it up and then worry about how to store the cyclical excess and this means you can make the storage mechanism competitive.

danny_codes2• 5 years ago

This seems pretty naive to me. Big public works projects are big so they take a lot of time and money. Of course there's political overhead and graft, etc. However, I'd argue that doesn't really matter.

Let's say it costs $10 billion to build a nuclear plant producing ~2 GWatts (something about what has costed historically). This includes all the graft and corruption of which you speak.

We need around 500 of them (need ~1 TWatt) to replace all existing electric power generation for a total cost of $5 trillion. Financed over 15 years that's $50 billion a year (~8% increase in federal spending).

So really who cares if public works projects are inefficient? For a modest tax increase (or modest debt increase) we're done with primary energy-production related emissions.

Added benefit is we can almost certainly export our now resurgent and world-leading fission power plants around the world. This would (a) solve a big part of the climate change problem (b) make America look good, particularly if we provide fission technology at-cost (c) position us as a technology leader in the sustainable/renewable energy sector.

As a sidenote, it's also VERY likely that building 500 hopefully identical power plants would drive costs down significantly. Numbers given are worst-case.

ncmncm18• 5 years ago

That price is at least 5x solar+wind+storage.

I estimate 3/4 the cost of a nuke plant (when it gets finished at all) is graft. Besides the waste, it enriches crooks who go on to poison public decision making. That is how we got where we are now.

It costs more just to operate and maintain an existing nuke than to build out new solar. That is why they are being retired, and new projects are cancelled. Their power gets less competitive with every day that passes.

PostOnce2• 5 years ago

ITER isn't a commercial project. It's a multinational research project.

You're basically saying "research is corruption because it isn't guaranteed to produce a result", well, if it was, it wouldn't be research.

The plan for fusion: First, prove it can work. Then, worry about commercialization and cost reduction after we know it works.

You're also glossing over the fact that if fusion works, it solves a lot of problems other renewables don't: density, reliability (at night, on a still day, etc), possibly cost overall. Probably more, I'm no expert.

ncmncm18• 5 years ago

ITER is a research project that is costing more just to build, before any research happens, than a full-scale commercial production fission plant. (The scientists are not getting much of that. But somebody is.)

There is much that nobody knows about getting fusion working. What we can be confident about is that if ever made to work, it will cost way more than a fission plant of equal capacity. Fission is itself not competitive today, and gets less so every day.

A>B>C => A>C

Is this logic hard to follow? Cost of fusion is unknown, but already very large. Cost of renewables is known, small, and reliably decreasing.

ThinkBeat• 5 years ago

Nuclear power not renewable.

There is a very finite supply of uranium. The same as with coal, natural gas, oil etc.

If we build a substantial number of nuclear power plants all across the world, that resource may run out within 200 years.

We have then left our future generations with several hundred new sites that cant be used for anything productive for 100s of years or a lot more.

A ton of nuclear waste nobody knows what to do with.

Transporting highly dangerous uranium from where they dig it up, to the power plants and then from there to somewhere safe is risky. It would be the top mission of terrorist groups to capture.

They dont have to make a bomb, or anything very advanced. Just spreading it over a city like NYC would be bad.

Some say we reached peak uranium in the 80s, some say in 30 years ahead. All agree that it is going to happen.

The usual retort from nuclear lobbyists is that we will have nuclear power that is new and advanced so there won't be any nuclear waste left that we must worry about.

And that new nuclear powerplants will not have the errors the hold ones did, so Fukushima, Chernobyl could never happen.

These new advanced nuclear reactors do not exist in any numbers and a lot of them do not exist period. They are ideas on a drawing board.

Thorium reactors would have access to fuel that is a lot more plentiful and easier to extract. Nobody has yet built a proper Thorium reactor that is reproducible and affordable. Waste would also be less dangerous. Yet some of the transitions the thorium reactor process would have would be extremely dangerous. Hopefully, they would not stay in that state awfully long.

Breeder reactors would extend the uranium supply for an extremely long time. There are two reactors that are in part based on this concept.

If we were to start investing in nuclear power, then we need to finance building one these new reactors and observe it over 10 to 30 years. That should be enough time to learn about most bugs, dangers, faults, and problems.

If it looks good, we build a few more and see what happens.

Over several hundred years we could have enough new reactors running.

Planning to construct a lot of untested reactors in parallel around the world is to me an exceptionally bad idea. We need to test learn, fail and learn in an iterative process

IMHO Focus of financing and building sources for electricity should be focused on renewable energy that can keep going for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

korantu3• 5 years ago

Uranium is very common element. From your linked article :

If one is willing to pay $300/kg for uranium, there is a vast quantity available in the ocean.[63] It is worth noting that since fuel cost only amounts to a small fraction of nuclear energy total cost per kWh, and raw uranium price also constitutes a small fraction of total fuel costs, such an increase on uranium prices wouldn't involve a very significant increase in the total cost per kWh produced.

So countries could build known and will tested reactor types to decarbonize world electricity production.

Further, given weather calamities due to global warming are detected, having dispatchable power less dependent on weather conditions is super important.

Eventually we would need to remove co2 from atmosphere as well, which is requires additional energy

mem0r1• 5 years ago

Yes, it is.

crubier• 5 years ago

Put simply: Yes. Nuclear Power is (part of) our Best Bet Against Climate Change.

I don't even think this requires further arguments, in 2021. This fact has been known for like 20 years, by anyone having a clue about orders of magnitude and energy.

poormystic• 5 years ago

Is the practise of Love our best defense against our own carelessness?

avidphantasm2• 5 years ago

I think we are past the point of being so picky that we think we can afford to ignore all non “perfect” solutions. We have to recognize that to engineer our way out of climate disaster we will have to employ solutions that create new problems (e.g., nuclear waste) that we will have to solve in the future. As long as these problems can be solved later (which to an extent is true with nuclear waste), then we must proceed.

edem• 5 years ago

What about fusion? Is it still a pipe dream?

mac010212• 5 years ago

This forbes article from 2 years ago (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero...) explains that, to replace the world's fossil fuel consumption with nuclear power consumption by 2050, a new nuclear power station would have to be brought online every day between now and then.

I intuit (perhaps wrongly) that even one per 10 days is extremely far fetched.

So, if 2050 is the deadline by which we must become carbon neutral in order to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change, I guess nuclear power cannot amount to as much as 10% of the solution.

sesuximo• 5 years ago

Nuclear power already produces about 10% of world electricity

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

mac010212• 5 years ago

That's true, but does not contradict any of the above.

First, because much of our energy use is currently not electric.

Second, because we're concerned with the energy consumption that is currently _not_ accounted for by nuclear power, not the portion that already is.

natmaka13• 5 years ago

The first part of this piece seems weird because this is not anymore about developing "nuclear vs fossil" but about developing "renewable sources or/xor nuclear".

entropicgravity• 5 years ago

No.

noetic_techy• 5 years ago

Nuclear in the short term, Fusion or Thorium reactors long term should be the goal. Get MIT's Spark reactor funded and built and lets hurry up and finish ITER, while we prototype Thorium in some medium sized cities.

High density power generation is the key. Look at all the problems that come with wind and solar: land usage, transmission lines, loss of energy when weather becomes unfavorable, the amount of battery storage you need to manufacture.

simonebrunozzi• 5 years ago

Let me arrogantly simplify the problem a bit and offer a solution:

1) bet everything on renewables - solar and wind. more scale means lower and lower production/maintenance costs over time.

2) bet on the cheapest, most effective, least polluting energy storage solution, and add huge scale to it, hence vastly reducing costs over time.

Cheap and clean energy storage makes the intermittent production problem of most renewables go away.

No nuclear meltdowns. No waste disposal.

And no coal, no gas, no pollution from burning that stuff.

Ok, end of arrogant rant.

LargoLasskhyfv10• 5 years ago

No waste disposal is wrong. For both solar cells and wind power. The panels are hazardous waste, and the carbon fiber blades are so far not economically recycleable, thus land fill material. Both last no longer than about 10 years, after that they are degraded too much, blades of wind turbines sometimes degrade even faster. Furthermore you can't put a wind turbine into the ground like a toothpick, especially not one about 200 meters high. They need massive concrete foundations, and if in a forest, broad ways to deliver and maintain the stuff. Guess what producing all that shit at scale means? More emission of the stuff you want to counteract the atmospheric effects of.

Never mind, shit happens.

Also stuff at sea degrades faster, and usually needs a shitload of continous maintenance to counteract that degrading. There is no cheap and clean storage at the scale needed, at least if you don't play stupid externalization games.

The needed stuff does not grow on trees and needs to be produced in energy-, material- and transport-intensive ways, emitting even more of the stuff whose atmospheric effects it is supposed to counteract.

Where were we?

Is nuclear power our best bet against climate change?

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