Former nuclear leaders: Say ‘no’ to new reactors

https://www.powermag.com/blog/former-nuclear-leaders-say-no-to-new-reactors/

by guerby • 4 years ago

39 110 4 years ago

powermag.com

guerby• 4 years ago

slashdot : https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/01/28/2251238/former-...

The Verge : https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904943/nuclear-power-cl...

toomuchtodo2• 4 years ago

“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction. The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. Perhaps most importantly nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.”

boppo1• 4 years ago

Could this guy be a partisan? That seems like a pretty brash statement.

dmitrij• 4 years ago

It's 4 guys. Former heads of nuclear regulation US, UK, Germany, France.

" Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany Dr. Bernard Laponche, former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety Dr. Paul Dorfman, former Secretary UK Govt. Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters "

Reasons:

    Too costly in absolute terms to make a relevant contribution to global power production
    More expensive than renewable energy in terms of energy production and CO2 mitigation, even taking into account costs of grid management tools like energy storage associated with renewables rollout.
    Too costly and risky for financial market investment, and therefore dependent on very large public subsidies and loan guarantees.
    Unsustainable due to the unresolved problem of very long-lived radioactive waste.
    Financially unsustainable as no economic institution is prepared to insure against the full potential cost, environmental and human impacts of accidental radiation release – with the majority of those very significant costs being borne by the public.
    Militarily hazardous since newly promoted reactor designs increase the risk of  nuclear weapons proliferation.
    Inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents from human error, internal faults, and external impacts; vulnerability to climate-driven sea-level rise, storm, storm surge, inundation and flooding hazard, resulting in international economic impacts.
    Subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems associated with newer unproven concepts, including ‘Advanced’ and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
    Too unwieldy and complex to create an efficient industrial regime for reactor construction and operation processes within the intended build-time and scope needed for climate change mitigation.
    Unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation needed by the 2030’s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction costs of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.

a9h74j• 4 years ago

One unfortunate but plausible take: wind and solar advocates correctly argue that nuclear cannot scale up, and nuclear advocates correctly argue that wind and solar cannot scale up. I have seen 15 years of peak-oil debate characterized this way.

One figure-of-merit, seldom emphasized, is how many tonnes of material per MW are required to create a generating facility/installation.

EDIT: That's a figure-of-demerit. MW/tonne would be the figure-of-merit, I suppose.

adventured• 4 years ago

It's a clown argument as it pertains to climate change or climate issues in general.

For example:

Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly.

We don't need it to be cheap (and it should be subsidized as far as consumers are concerned re cost). Who in the past few decades has successfully argued that nuclear is inexpensive? Nobody is making that argument, it's a straw-argument the author set up. We need it to produce energy at massive scale and reliably. Nuclear does that, and it's a technology we can keep improving upon (we should have spent the last 40-50 years aggressively improving upon it with large R&D expenditures; best time to plant a tree and all that).

Current US energy mix is coal at ~19.3% and nuclear at ~19.7% (2020 EIA numbers).

That's 93 nuclear reactors or less to wipe out US coal use. Hit the print button, get it to it already. In terms of US contributions on climate, that'd be a huge win. And more realistically, we could build toward 1/3 nuclear mix (instead of ~40%), while traditional renewables continue to expand, which would wipe out coal's share in tandem.

toomuchtodo2• 4 years ago

So your non expert opinion is superior to that of four regulators who oversaw the tech in question? Show your work. Wind and solar are cheap and abundant, and will continue to be so. No waste risk, no proliferation concerns, no catastrophic failure modes, and very little permitting (compared to nuclear). Clean power for decades once installed.

It boggles the mind that the armchair engineers continue to advocate for a technology subject matter experts conclude is a dead end. Nuclear advocates might as well be in the same camp as climate deniers.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416 (Renewables account for most new U.S. electricity generating capacity in 2021)

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.01.11/main.svg

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818 (Solar power will account for nearly half of new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2022)

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2022.01.10/main.svg

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/26/sunrise-brief-the-int... (Solar interconnection queue in the US jumped from 139GWac in 2019 to 639GWac today)

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... (US renewable pipeline poised to add 172.5 GW through 2024)

cbmuser4• 4 years ago

Russia built two Gen III+ reactors with 1200 MW each at the site of the existing Novovoronezh nuclear power plant for just about three billion Euros (250 billion Rubles).

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

Germany spends 20-30 billion Euros every year on its subsidies for renewable energies (EEG-Umlage):

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Mediathek/Monito... (page 32)

Nuclear isn’t expensive if you do it right.

coldtea6• 4 years ago

It's a clown argument

Yeah, what do the experts in charge of nuclear evergy policies in 4 major western countries know.

It's better to trust the opinion of random nuclear fans on the web, or the "facts" of nuclear commercial industry astroturfers...

cbmuser4• 4 years ago

Both France, Japan and the US have proven that nuclear scale up perfectly well.

antupis• 4 years ago

Yeah it can currently nuclear has pretty bad technological and regulatory problem. 4/10 most expensive buildings are regular nuclear plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_build...

Gwypaas6• 4 years ago

So well that the french one even had a negative learning curve.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

fsh• 4 years ago

In the US and Japan the fraction of primary energy supplied by nuclear power is almost negligible (8% [1] and 3% [2]). Even the famously large French nuclear industry only manages 39% [3]. Nuclear power would have to be scaled up by orders of magnitude worldwide in order to make any difference to the global CO2 budget.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/USA/total-ene...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/jpn/total-ene...

[3] https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/FRA/total-ene...

wbl2• 4 years ago

It's costly because the author made it excessively costly in his previous job.

number63• 4 years ago

And if a reactor blows up (happens roughly ever 35 years) there are huge additional costs. Last time we were extremely lucky that we hadn't to evaluate Tokiyo. If something like this would happen in Central Europe it would be extremely costly for the whole world.

But something like this could happen trice right?!

coldtea6• 4 years ago

Yes, if they could only throw caution to the wind, give it to the lowest bidder, and relax quality and safety standards!

arcticbull4• 4 years ago

The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm.

It's unbelievably safe, it has the among the lowest death toll per TWh of generated electricity. Depending on who you ask, it's lower than or in the same order of magnitude as solar and wind. [1]

It's definitely clean, they're ultra-low-carbon - and especially breeder or fast neutron reactors, generate tiny quantities of waste relative to the amount of power that comes out. And these spicy rocks can just be placed back down into the earth from whence they came.

Is it cheap? No. And that's ok, because that's not always the most important thing. However it's important to remember that nuclear prices in all externalities due to the public's fear and distrust. However, coal does not. The NRC uses a price of about $9M per additional death, and coal kills 9 million people per year. [2] If you price them at the same $9M per life, and divide by coal power generated - nuclear is cheaper than coal.

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

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...

Gwypaas6• 4 years ago

Irrelevant comparing to coal. It is a dead industry sharing the same issue nuclear has, steam cycles are too costly to build and operate[1]. A dollar spent on nuclear power plants is a dollar not doing more work with renewables, that is the issue. Keep some R&D for the future magical break through, but current designs are dead in the water.

You are also not taking into account that it is impossible to insure nuclear power plants, the public does that. I.e. they do not bear their full costs, not even close. Look no further than at Fukushima's $500B - $1000B clean up cost.

[1]: Table ES3 https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_G...

xg15• 4 years ago

It's unbelievably safe, it has the among the lowest death toll per TWh of generated electricity.

I have never understood the rationale behind that measure. First of all, radiation only directly causes death in most extreme circumstances - but even before it will increase the likelihood of severe diseases like cancer or will cause birth defects in the next generation. Deaths/TWh captures none of that stuff.

Second, why is the energy output even in there? We know nuclear is a high-yield energy source. That doesn't tell me anything about the likelihood of accidents over time or my personal risk while living next to a power station (or next to a disposal site).

By the same logic, you could conclude that binge-drinking alcohol is safer than drinking water as it's deaths/hours of fun measure is lower.

Or that chucking Earth into the sun would actually be an even safer method of producing energy than nuclear: Sure that would cause some 8 billion deaths, but look at that energy output!

_3u102• 4 years ago

Of course it isn't. If climate change were a scientific reality in which if we didn't switch off fossil fuels immediately we'd face drastic consequence people like this would be gung ho on any technology that could save the planet, but would destroy a single mountain in Arizona.

Since climate change isn't a reality but is a political problem created to benefit solar and wind we can safely ignore nuclear as a solution to climate change because it also has some but very limited environmental costs.

It's the same reason in BC where I live all the climate change people are against hydro power (Site C).

It's very clear to me that anyone against nuclear doesn't really believe that we're on the brink of destroying the planet.

7thaccount2• 4 years ago

I think it's possible that many feel that either option (global warming) or (nuclear meltdown) could easily doom our nation. In other words, if one solution to freezing to death would be to burn down your house, they wouldn't take it. Sure it would fix your problem for a few minutes and then you'd be dead.

Note that I'm not against nuclear, just trying to point out how those you're referring to would view the situation.

_3u102• 4 years ago

When I was growing up my dad and I would talk about the people who froze to death in their cars out in the valley every few years when there was a freak storm and chat about how to burn the family car down to survive should we get stuck in a storm like that.

I'm definitely more in the Dudley and Stephens camp than most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens

I think the US comes out slightly ahead in the worst case climate change scenario, Canada is a huge winner.

gruturo2• 4 years ago

[Edit: Title was changed, it previously only mentioned "former NRC chair".]

so, let's see who that may be.....

.....aaand it's Greg Jaczko, nothing to see, move along, dude's biased as hell, with some really poor work ethics on top.

From his wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko):

A report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Hubert T. Bell accused Jaczko of "strategically" withholding information from his colleagues in an effort to keep plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from advancing.[11][12]

In October 2011, all the other four NRC commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—sent a letter to the White House expressing "grave concern" about Jaczko's actions at the NRC. On December 14, 2011, Commissioner William Ostendorff, a Republican, told a House oversight committee that Jaczko's "bullying and intimidation... should not and cannot be tolerated."[13]

At a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee hearing on December 14, 2011, NRC Commissioner William Magwood, a fellow Democrat, testified about what he called Jaczko's abusive behavior towards employees, especially female subordinates. “One woman told me that she felt the chairman was actually irritated with someone else, but took it out on her,” Magwood said. “Another said she was angry at herself for being brought to tears in front of male colleagues. A third described how she couldn’t stop shaking after her experience. She sat, talking with her supervisor until she could calm down sufficiently to drive home.”[14]

kyrra• 4 years ago

One interesting take on radation was what I saw in a commentary piece a few months ago in WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... (mirror: https://archive.fo/LITQT)

A key passage:

In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less than a third of natural background radiation.

It makes me question some of the people that are on the NRC. Government regulators want to err on the side of caution, as they don't want to be responsible if things go wrong. So many of these bureaucrats hold positions that likely aren't actually the optimal for society at large.

gruturo2• 4 years ago

To the poster who deleted their reply to my post:

I'm not sure how anything you said is a reason to discount him. You seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't take his position seriously because he backs up his beliefs with action. And what about the others standing along side him??

Yeah when Democrats and Republicans manage to agree on something, and that something is that you are apparently a not very ethical person (with alleged bullying on top) and the same President who appointed you made you step down.... I indeed stop taking your position, and everything you write/say, seriously. I won't discount the other 3 experts from France, Germany and UK, I'll read the article, but Jaczko's name is a sizeable black stain on the paper.

MattGaiser8• 4 years ago

The reality is nuclear is neither clean

This argument relies on fiddling with the definition of "clean" in a way it is not otherwise used when discussing climate change. In the context of climate change, nuclear is clean because it does not release greenhouse gases.

It is the same tactic used by climate change deniers when they go on about how a wind turbine ended up in a landfill and as a result how there is no such thing as “clean” energy.

godelski• 4 years ago

I really dislike how people talk about waste. We can sit on it safely for a few hundred years. But people call that passing the buck. It's not if we pursue more recycling technology. It isn't if we pursue more long term storage options. I promise you that we'll advance in technology in the next 300 years. (The waste also doesn't have a feedback loop like carbon emissions do). It's naive to think we can safely store things for tens of thousands of years for civilizations that won't be able to speak our language. There's a lot of artificial constraints on this problem that people don't understand. They also seem to not understand that there's far more dangerous materials that we dump every day that don't have half lives, meaning they are forever. Lead doesn't go away. Most heavy metals are stable.

Most of the anti nuclear points that the average person knows comes from oil propaganda. The same people who brought you the "reducing your carbon footprint" propaganda. It's basically the argument for perfection. Which we know perfection is the enemy of good. Because if they can sell this notion then we'll keep doing what we've been doing because momentum is also a powerful force.

Ourgon• 4 years ago

Furthermore, solutions for the waste problem already exist in the form of fast breeder reactors [1] which can be used to create new fuel for (conventional) reactors. Using these the total amount of waste needing storage is reduced by a factor of 10. The remaining waste has a far shorter half life (none of the reaction products has a half-life between 100 to 210.000 years, all actinides are consumed in the reaction) which results in a relatively short (200-300 years) storage period instead of the thousands for spent fuel.

This is not just some piece of fiction, there are several active FBRs with several more on the drawing board or under construction.

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

dylan6043• 4 years ago

I don't think "clean" means used soap and water. ;-)

Can you eat it, can you drink it, can you breath it?

Does it actively destroy/damage other living things that come with in proximity of it knowingly or not?

Does it pollute when used? Now we can have a similar debate on the word pollute.

Does it make the air/ground/water toxic from the use of it?

Can it be freely released without harmful side effects without being securely contained.

Nicksil• 4 years ago

Can you eat it, can you drink it, can you breath it?

Yes.

Does it actively destroy/damage other living things that come with in proximity of it knowingly or not?

No.

Does it pollute when used? Now we can have a similar debate on the word pollute.

No.

Does it make the air/ground/water toxic from the use of it?

No.

Can it be freely released without harmful side effects without being securely contained.

Yes.

MattGaiser8• 4 years ago

Soap itself would not pass your standard to be deemed clean. It can be pretty harmful as well in the environment uncontained.

Most human activities, including all methods of power production except hydro (and it has other problems), would fail this standard.

That is a reason to treat sewage, not ban soap.

cbmuser4• 4 years ago

James Hansen, long time head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS), thinks otherwise:

https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html

madaxe_again• 4 years ago

I’d take this with a hefty pinch of thorium salts.

These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate. The current political climate says nuclear bad, because it’s a safe position for re-election - no government wants to invest in nuclear power because the optics of nuclear disasters are terrible, and because the payback time is much longer than an election cycle.

The slow death of poor air quality (fossil fuels kill millions a year) and climate change are easy to wrangle politically, because you can treat them as externalities.

seehafer2• 4 years ago

These guys are politicians first, scientists second - you don’t ascend to the head of their respective agencies without toeing the line, and being savvy to the political climate.

See also: Fauci, Anthony

baq• 4 years ago

The biggest problem with nuclear isn’t waste management, fuel procurement, nimby, not even black swans. The top problem is that if we commission enough nuclear plants today, they won’t produce the first watt until after it’s way too late to prevent catastrophic climate change. It could have been a solution 20 years ago, now you can build, operate and decommission a wind farm or solar plant in the time it takes to design and build a nuclear reactor.

zbrozek• 4 years ago

That's a problem of our own making, and we could revert. The timelines are driven by permitting (both at the local level and at the NRC) and the customization of each reactor.

We desperately need reactors to roll off of an assembly line to drive down physical costs. And we also desperately need to trim down the regulatory burden. Together, those changes would dramatically speed up deployment and cut costs.

This was an interesting essay and I will probably read the book it is reviewing: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

rib3ye• 4 years ago

For me the pessimism is really starting to set in. Those most extremely passionate about climate change are ignoring the most immediate solutions and instead waiting future tech and economies of scale for expensive half-steps. If projections are correct, the chance of the global community figuring out the political solution seems nearly impossible.

MattGaiser8• 4 years ago

I am at the point where it is something that comes out of Y Combinator or defense companies that solve the problems of climate change. Either tech solves the problem or we fight over what is left.

kergonath• 4 years ago

Any technological solution at this point is going to face an impossible political situation.

We have plenty of technological solutions already, and look at the mess we have. Sure, none of them is perfect, but none ever will be, either.

duped2• 4 years ago

Tech is the problem of climate change. Tech powers economic growth, which has a price in joules, that incurs a debt in carbon.

And not only that, the solution to the problem is already known. Have fewer babies and reduce the population over time, travel less, produce goods closer to where they are needed, eat more produce and less meat, and increase prices for goods and services that require more energy and produce more carbon emissions.

Those are not technical solutions, they're political and economic.

ayngg• 4 years ago

I don't think there ever was another solution.

Climate change policy will always incur asymmetrical costs, and the people who it effects wouldn't willingly enact them, and others would rarely share that burden in a meaningful way. Outside of innovation, any other policy will most likely incur economic cost which politicians are hesitant to do, especially now with how stretched lower classes are.

I think the only way out is to make non hydrocarbon based energy production cheaper and as dependable as hydrocarbons.

dale_glass• 4 years ago

Which is the immediate solution, nuclear? Unfortunately it isn't. Solar and wind are way more immediate.

Nuclear takes bloody ages to build and is too expensive, both in building costs and in the power it delivers. It's not being built because effectively nobody wants it.

* Energy companies don't want it because it's long and tricky to make it actually happen -- if you're in the business of producing power, most anything else is an easier option.

* Financial entities don't want it because it's billions of dollars upfront that may not ever make a profit.

* Governments don't want it because it takes ages to build, so you're signing up for investing lots of tax money into something that your successor might cancel, and that they won't see the benefits of.

* Consumers don't want it because the power costs more, and if given the choice pretty much will choose to pay for something else.

At this point a single nuclear plant can take a decade to build, and if you were to try to have a huge build-up, it would take much longer. Because we're talking about a small and very specialized industry. You can't just get a nuclear reactor made down the street, and there isn't factories out there with an enormous amount of unused capacity for that because that makes no business sense.

throw0101a2• 4 years ago

Which is the immediate solution, nuclear? Unfortunately it isn't. Solar and wind are way more immediate.

How about:

* stop shutting down current nuclear electrical generation capacity

* build more solar and wind capacity

* as more renewable capacity comes online use it retire fossil fuel generators

Once all the carbon-emitting stuff is offline then perhaps look at shutting down current nuclear.

You know: the opposite of what Germany is doing.

epistasis9• 4 years ago

I'm more optimistic than ever. The past few decades have been an absolute revolution in the economics of solar, wind, and storage. They are both getting cheaper than fossil fuels and scaling their production levels to just barely replace our carbon-emitting energy system with a carbon-free energy system on the schedule we need it.

The biggest hurdles will be traditional powerful economic forces resisting the disruption of cheaper, cleaner technology eating their lunch. This will be a biiig problem in places like the US. But once we have clean, cheap electricity and storage, a lot of the other problems become so much easier. A lot of chemical processes will need to be sorted out, like ammonia for fertilizer and concrete and aviation/shipping fuels, but all these will be far easier when we have the cheaper form of electricity.

We are in such a better place than we were a decade ago. There is tremendous reason to have hope, all we have to do is stay the course and speed our pace.

MrYellowP2• 4 years ago

I don't care what it is that keeps power running. If removing nuclear reactors means that the whole energy grid is at risk, then I prefer having nuclear reactors compared to suddenly having a huge chunk of a population out of power.

No fucking thanks.

MattGaiser8• 4 years ago

They are deciding to use natural gas instead.

enragedcacti• 4 years ago

I don't understand how your response relates to the article. Only two of the ten arguments apply to existing reactors: cascading accidents from internal or external problems some of which will be amplified by climate change, and dealing with nuclear waste.

His position is that building more reactors isn't the most effective method for combating climate change, primarily because the vast majority of reactor projects have been massively late and massively over-budget. Because of this, the window for investment in nuclear to stop the most severe results of climate change has already passed.

If he has argued for shutting down existing reactors then I apologize, but to me that is a major misrepresentation of the argument.

MrYellowP2• 4 years ago

I'm sorry. Let me explain.

My perspective is a european one. Germany turned off three of its reactors while at the same time tons of people are screaming out of their lungs that it's a really bad idea doing so, because of technical reasons related to the safety of the european power grid.

From our, the people's perspective, we should only care about making sure that the power keeps running, while it does so without harming the environment more than really necessary.

I don't care about governments building new reactors when they shut down the old ones. New ones aren't going to help us, when the grid starts to fail, because they're not even going to be built yet.

Talking about new reactors is just distracting from the fact that powergrids need to be in order, which apparently they aren't. The reason, why talking about new reactors is a waste of time, is because more reactors help NOTHING when the powergrid fails, which is a far more pressing matter than literally anything else related to power and energy.

The reason, why my words don't really relate to the article, is because it's bullshit. Complete, utter bullshit.

VLM2• 4 years ago

Power loss shouldn't matter.

Its a chicken and egg problem. It would be trivial in 2022 at a technical level for my electric clothes dryer to "pause" for five minutes mid cycle if a cloud passes over the solar farm. Nobody implements that because its not needed. It can't be implemented because nobody uses it now. We can't have it in the future because we didn't have it in the past. If solar power was "too cheap to meter" I'd use 10 KW to dry my clothes in 30 minutes instead of 60 and I wouldn't care if a cloud interrupted the solar panel and it took an extra five minutes at 35 minutes. But we can't have that because we never had that in the past so we'll never have that. We'll have uninterrupted electric clothes drying until we have no electric clothes drying at all due to catastrophic system collapse.

Nobody insulated aluminum refinery crucibles, in fact they worry about cooling. Because nobody ever considered cutting power to a crucible, its now impossible to cut power to a crucible without destroying it.

Nobody ever built a battery backed up CNC machine tool, because nobody ever needed to, so flipping the circuit breaker at a machine tool shop will cause thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. It would be trivial to include circuitry and CAM design models to prevent that but the first guy to spend the money will go out of business because it provides no advantage next quarter. Therefore its impossible to interrupt power to a CNC machine tool without mass destruction therefore solar powered factories are "impossible". Although if someone wanted to, it would be pretty trivial to implement.

The load on the grid at midnight for charging cell phones must add up to a nuclear power plant or two. We can't tell those chargers to chill and charge up later if there's a lull in the breeze and advertisers market how fast they charge. So we can't charge phones, or cars, with wind power we must use coal or nuclear. There's no technological reason interrupting the power would matter.

This even gets to house or hospital issues. Don't want to lose power during a surgery? Who cares, just make sure the UPS is bigger than the surgery. The batteries should last a long time if they're rarely used. Ditto my TV, I don't care if it runs off battery for five minutes as long as I can't tell the difference. But no TVs can do that right now so they MUST be coal or nuclear powered instead of wind powered.

Repeat thousands of times for every device that makes power interruption "impossible". If everything you owned was like your laptop and as long as on average the charge rate was higher than the use rate and the battery was "big enough" then you wouldn't care if the power was out 50% of the time, as long as it was 100% green and "too cheap to meter" the other 50% of the time.

VLM2• 4 years ago

It can't be clean, safe, smart (what does that mean?), or cheap because each installation must be handmade and completely custom and bespoke.

Much like for better or worse we could never have had "car culture" if every car ever made had to be custom designed and hand-built.

Also note that we could never produce tens of millions of custom designed cars per year because there are not that many human car designers alive; likewise we simply cannot built 10,000 more nuclear reactors because we do not have that many living nuclear engineers such that we can afford to custom design 10,000 totally bespoke reactors.

Also note that it took a century or so, but mass produced cars allow massive simulation for safety resulting in mass produced cars being VASTLY safer and less polluting than ancient 120 year old handmade cars.

The argument in the linked article essentially boils down to a list of huge advantages that would come from mass production and mass investment in nuclear energy that cannot be permitted to happen because simple linear extrapolation of handmade production shows it would be "impossible" to reach those levels because there are no advantages from mass production. In summary, the authors can't make their minds up, do the economic gains from mass production exist or not exist?

Now in practice, screwed up planet earth in 2022 might not be able to pull off mass production of nuclear power any more than we can currently pull off an interstellar space ship or similar technological daydreams. That's a serious argument against nuclear power, but the authors chose to be wishy washy instead and claim both sides of the argument that mass production either is awesome or doesn't exist, both at the same time.

seehafer2• 4 years ago

The title of this article ought to be: Former nuclear _regulators_: Say ‘no’ to new reactors

To which I say: “this is my shocked face”

indymike7• 4 years ago

Former nuclear reactor operator here. It's time for this 1970s style fear mongering to stop so we can get the planet fixed.

Dr. Jaczko is one of the worst NRC commissioners in history and was appointed by an anti-nuclear president to be obstructionist. Every one of the arguments in the letter are valid only because of regulations that have been put in place to make nuclear reactors impossible to build quickly or on budget.

epistasis9• 4 years ago

The fear mongering isn't the problem with nuclear these days. The problem is that the US can't build it. VC Summer was a scam, billing rate payers of something like $9B for an abandoned construction site, and jail time for executives.

Vogtle is little better, and by the time it's finished, it will be some of the most expensive energy on the grid, and spending that money on solar and storage would have had a much much bigger climate impact.

Utilities know the financial risk of attempting nuclear construction, and the only reason these two sites attempted new nuclear is because laws were passed to pass all financial risk on to the public when there are construction failures. The public deserves better.

Though this editorial may be annoying, it's a complete distraction from the true cause of nuclear's failure in the 21st century, and that cause is entirely the nuclear industry's own fault.

indymike7• 4 years ago

The problem is that the US can't build it.

With the current regulatory situation that is accurate.

halpert3• 4 years ago

Reading Voices from Chernobyl changed my opinion on nuclear. The potential human cost is so great it doesn’t seem worth it.

One other way of thinking about the issue is this: what would you consider a safe power plant? How about one that has a probability of failing once every ten thousand years. That sounds pretty safe, doesn’t it? Well with hundreds of power plants, the probability of a single one failing starts to get quite high on any given year. And that matches reality: three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, among many others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide...

The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Is that really a wise bet to make in the face of climate change?

funklute3• 4 years ago

The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable.

Modern reactor designs cannot explode high into the atmosphere the way that Chernobyl did. That is, their contamination will never be as far-reaching as Chernobyl was. With modern designs, it's really a question of local contamination. Pit this against the global impact of climate change and it's pretty clear which issue is the more serious one. The potential impact of climate change is big enough that we shouldn't let potential local contamination be an obstacle to building out nuclear power.

halpert3• 4 years ago

So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? It’s undeniable that there are failure scenarios that are unknown with any design.

epistasis9• 4 years ago

While most of the nuclear debate focuses on this concern, I think it misses an even earlier concern: we do not have the capability to build nuclear at the scale needed for it to deal with the problem.

We would need to start and complete ~100 reactors in the next 20 years just to keep our current level of nuclear. Back in 2008, we started 4, have abandoned two due to construction incompetence, and the other two are taking 2-3x as long as expected, and cost 2-3x as much. This is with only four reactors. If we tried to scale this 25-50x, our problems would multiply, not get easier. And that's just to keep our current level of nuclear, not switch to a high level of nuclear like we would need to do in order for nuclear to be a significant part of our energy interchange.

We have far better routes to a carbon-free energy economy than paying contractors Thai have no clue what they are doing.

Former nuclear leaders: Say ‘no’ to new reactors

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