Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/nuclear-fission-fuel-is-inexhaustible/1257

by mutant_glofish • 3 years ago

254 334 3 years ago

scanalyst.fourmilab.ch

LatteLazy3• 3 years ago

Expensive though.

JDEW• 3 years ago

You know what’s expensive? Treating 100s of millions of people for pollution related illnesses.

mnky9800n• 3 years ago

Not to mention new hazard mitigation due to climate change

bluescrn• 3 years ago

Nu-cu-lar is scary. And it's much cheaper to just tell the working class they can't heat/cool their homes any more, the little people have just got to stop using energy...

HPsquared4• 3 years ago

Yep, no way that could ever backfire

LatteLazy3• 3 years ago

I mean they won't be able to afford nuclear...

himinlomax• 3 years ago

Solar panels are cheaper. They're also useless at night or in winter at higher latitude.

The question is not whether it's expensive, the question is whether it's worth the price.

BiteCode_dev2• 3 years ago

Not sure about that.

On paper, it looks like it.

On practice, my mother pays 30€ a month of electricity in France, where nuclear energy is everywhere. She asked for a quote to get panels on her house, and they got back to her with 20000€.

Sure you can move the needle by noting I drain way more power than her, than she heats her house using fossil fuel and that the quotes could be have been reduced in many ways.

You can also note that solar panels have to be replaced several times, take much more space, don't have to including wiring in their ROI calculation (while nuclear does for some weird reason) and are created by electricity generated by fossil or nuclear fuel, so their building price is already cheap.

I wouldn't say the answer is that clear cut.

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

Renewables != solar.

Renewables = a mix of solar, wind, hydro, geo, and wave, backed up by storage and a more efficient grid, supplement by various local - down to household - generation options. Supported by smarter and larger grids.

The absolute criminality of the last few decades means that renewable tech is decades behind where it could have been with a no-compromise crash development program starting in the 90s.

The real problem with renewable has always been political. Renewables are inherently diverse and distributed. They're not limited to a very small number of critical supply chains and economic choke points. And some people are really unhappy about that.

pfdietz21• 3 years ago

We're close to, or even at, the point where hydrogen made with solar, then burned in combined cycle power plants, produces power more cheaply than nuclear. Of course, in a renewable energy system, only a fraction of the energy has to go through hydrogen; much will be consumed directly from the grid (or through short term storage.)

jvanderbot6• 3 years ago

I would recommend reading the article. The paper they discussing projects .003 USD per kilowatt hour.

LatteLazy3• 3 years ago

The minute someone builds one and has the receipts and waste disposal set up, I am all ears. Really.

But every generation of nuclear plant has promised "power too cheap to meter". The last 3 generations all failed to deliver (and have been ruinously expensive). Gen 4 isn't expected to start commercial operations until 2035 I think?

This is my key objection to nuclear: I feel it cannot even be assessed because people insist on talking in theory. And with tech as complex and power dense etc as this tech, theory is never even close to reality.

I am open to some of the SME concepts (mass manufacturing, large numbers of small units) because they seem to deal with at least some of the economic issues nuclear has.

But I cant help feeling nuclear fission is as far from an economically viable, reproducible, sustainable product as fusion is.

I actually think that being small, simple, short term, politically unimportant with commodity parts is to other renewables (wind, solar etc) what reliability is for nuclear.

zokier6• 3 years ago

If humans were perfect then all problems are trivial. In cryptography there is the idea of misuse resistance, and the same line of thinking applies to other fields where things are expected to be used at scale. Wind and solar are pretty much idiot-proof, and their low density means that the risks are spread out also.

As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.

zerodensity3• 3 years ago

Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.

If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement.

We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there.

Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes.

Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.

zokier6• 3 years ago

Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.

It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact. That is simply the nature of having existential crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.

yawaramin6• 3 years ago

If you apply this logic universally then we basically can't have a modern human civilization, because airplanes, steelmaking, chemical manufacturing, and many other heavy industrial applications will also be considered too dangerous. This is exactly tackled in the post:

Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks

massifist• 3 years ago

That's a little short-sighted. Wouldn't that pose a danger to the grubs?

Why won't anyone think of the GRUBS!!

Tade0• 3 years ago

But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise.

Perhaps that promise was empty?

Blaming government regulation is especially a red flag to me here. It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating, even though the laws are, to put it mildly, draconian. With all that it's the safest mode on transportation by a wide margin.

China is currently in the process of realizing nuclear power's potential and it appears that in terms of energy delivered it can't actually keep up with renewables - despite no systemic obstacles like in the west.

Eventually everyone is going to just build renewable capacity and storage because that's simply the fastest, cheapest way to get energy.

Developing countries especially have an interesting approach to renewables, because grids there are notoriously unreliable, so there's no expectation of having power 24/7. For this reason they opt for renewables instead of waiting for that nuclear power plant to happen.

roenxi5• 3 years ago

It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating

Planes still crash from time to time. The regulations on the aviation industry are the ant version of regulations compared to the elephants that the nuclear industry has to put up with. planes are only 600x safer than driving by death toll [0]. That would be a shut-the-industry-down safety stat for nuclear plants.

That is why people are pointing out the nuclear safety rules are stupid. There is no comparable regulation on any industry. If nuclear plants were regulated to airline safety levels I would just be saying "meh, too expensive" in HN debates on the subject. The fact that it is still in the running despite crazy regulatory requirements is why there is reason to think it'd be a new age of energy if the technology was regulated sensibly.

[0] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

gmerc• 3 years ago

Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…

TheLoafOfBread• 3 years ago

If nuclear safety rules would be applied to dams, we would need to tear them all down, because those devilish things killed thousand times more people than nuclear ever did.

Also a big chemical plant failure has potential to kill more people than all nuclear failures combined - See Bhopal disaster

jillesvangurp4• 3 years ago

The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc.

Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.

Important to note that the image is for 2018. So, things have shifted a bit in favor of wind and solar since then. There's an updated chart for this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/E...

A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph:

- Wind and solar grew a lot.

- Nuclear declined.

- Gas grew a little.

- Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up.

- Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy.

- fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less.

- Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted.

- Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years.

- We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less.

Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance.

Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.

melling2• 3 years ago

“Coal declined a lot”

Yes, in the United States (4% of global population), coal usage declined.

Unfortunately, globally coal usage is at all time highs.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons...

I’d say it’s ok that we overlooked that but we were warned 45 years ago about global coal usage being a large part of the problem.

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

olddustytrail2• 3 years ago

4% of global population but 28% of global CO2 emissions. You forgot to mention that.

PaulKeeble• 3 years ago

Another aspect is the power it costs to make the power. Oil is a huge industry with enormous transport fuel usage. Nowadays about a 6th of the energy goes into collection. The more we electrify the more that will be saved too coming off the total power we need. Solar, Wind, Hydro and Nuclear are all vastly better in this aspect on production costs and little ongoing transport.

jillesvangurp4• 3 years ago

Good point. Oil tankers by themselves put out a measurable percentage of CO2. Also oil refining is an energy intensive industry. Ironically, a lot of that has been cleaned up. It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product. That's why Texas has so much renewable power.

zokier6• 3 years ago

The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc.
Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.

To uninitiated like me the chart was really confusing. In many sectors doesn't almost all energy get ultimately lost in some way? Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat, or in transportation unless you move goods up a mountain all the energy is just lost?

Trombone12• 3 years ago

Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat

I mean, not all of the IT sector is ad-tech you know; for example, many would argue that the systems durably recording how much money you own provide a useful service.

IggleSniggle2• 3 years ago

"Lost" means spent towards nobody's useful purpose. Nobody used the output in any way. In transportation, you used your car to get from point A to point B. You don't care about the heat or noise or whatever that you generated. That energy was "lost." If somebody harvested that same energy directly from your vehicle for some purpose, like making fried eggs on your engine block, then the portion used to fry your egg would no longer be "lost"

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

The text line under it tries to explain the concept, but fails due to brevity. I believe (by looking at the numbers there) it counts as "loses" everything that happens due to energy conversion, and "useful work" everything that happens with the final form of the energy. If that's the case, friction inside an internal combustion engine counts as loses, but at the wheels of a car counts as useful work.

polotics2• 3 years ago

This chart distresses me: solar at 0.9 is only about a third of petroleum at 36. It is making it look like new renewable (ie non-hyrdo) are a lot more sizeable than they really are. From Lawrence Livermore this is hard to swallow. If the boxes sizes are on a weird logarithmic scale, then this should be explicit in the legend.

aurelwu• 3 years ago

the lines are what shows the energy amount, the boxes have a minimal size for readability and are acting as the legend of the chart.

jillesvangurp4• 3 years ago

That's the 2018 one by 2021, it hit 1.5. And you forget this is the entire US energy economy; not just electricity.

Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs. renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage quickly.

If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that matters is the useful part of that.

bostonwalker• 3 years ago

You are eagerly reading an agenda into what is probably just an artifact of the plotting software intended to make the plot easier to read. Hanlon’s razor applies here.

HPsquared4• 3 years ago

That chart overemphasizes waste heat. 1 MJ of heat at 50°C is a lot less valuable than 1 MJ of electricity. They are not interchangable. The 1 MJ of electricity could pump much more than 1 MJ of low-grade heat, and it would take a lot of low-grade heat to generate 1 MJ of electrical energy.

The parameter of interest is exergy. That is, usable energy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy

baybal2• 3 years ago

And important note that relatively modern coal and gas powerplants are more thermally efficient than nuclear.

Nuclear is ran in between 250C-350C, which is rather inefficient, and requires very big turbines.

_n_b_• 3 years ago

Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline.

In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years.

Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.)

This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too.

[1] https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...

tomrod• 3 years ago

That's great news!

Andrex• 3 years ago

I suppose we're going to see the nuclear debate play out as an A/B test with the US vs. the countries mentioned. Should be some interesting data eventually.

jillesvangurp4• 3 years ago

Well according to the two graphgs for 2018 and 2019, nuclear declined a bit in the US. Not surprising because there were some plant closures and not a whole lot of plant openings. And nothing is on track to be added any time soon. Maybe one or two plants.

New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended, sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you are talking about is so far not adding up to a lot of capacity being delivered. We're talking a few gw here and there. Solar and wind are being deployed by the tens of gw per year. Same with battery.

I believe we'll see some nuclear plants being approved for the next decade. And maybe these modular reactors start delivering on their promises. I still think they are expensive. But why not? Unless something happens on the cost front, that will remain a minority of useful output.

Krasnol2• 3 years ago

Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom

This is not what a boom looks like: https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/18acef23-4f61-4e14-b66e-7...

and it won't be better if you have a closer look. Take Europe, for example. Nuclear plants over budget and overdue (France, UK), projects which are highly unlikely to be ever build (Poland), a rotting nuclear fleet (France) and a final exit in Germany.

Then there are all those plants in poor countries which depend on Russia.

And then there is China with their magically fast build reactors but also with massive coal and renewable construction.

Nuclear peaked years ago, and it's going to be a decline in the future since it is money in the end deciding the fate and nuclear isn't worth it.

vmladenov• 3 years ago

We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output.

This was Tesla’s main claim at their recent energy presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to useful work is roughly 2 to 1

[1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

bscphil• 3 years ago

Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven.

This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows only 97.3 quads, a reduction.

The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its proportion of US energy generation!

Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal combined. Given the sheer number of solar and wind farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it's really not great that they generate such a small portion of our energy needs.

My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power sources.

bullen• 3 years ago

Maybe, but the heat added to earth has to be radiated away from earth.

We have never added energy from matter at this scale before.

Same for fusion.

defrost• 3 years ago

You really should look up the daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight and compare that to annual total energy use by humans.

The vast majority of daily solar energy is radiated away already and it dwarfs human energy consumption.

Climate change is a result of human activity adding more insulation (via C02, methane, increased water vapor) to the atmosphere and trapping more of the energy from the sun that would previously have radiated away.

The increasing global average tempreture is caused by humans adding more blankets .. not by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.

zapataband1• 3 years ago

Interesting way of putting it, thanks for the explanation

a3w2• 3 years ago

AFAICT, you are probably wrong. Here is some points as to why:

daily energy reaching the earth's surface from sunlight

... which is exactly the same as the amount of energy radiating off, in a state of equilibrium. But here comes the problem, if we add heat, e.g. from fission, we are not in an equilibrium anymore, are we?

Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change make that claim all the time: Absolute numbers are huge, so they do comparisons like

- 99.998% if Carbon does not take part in Carbon Cycle, or

- heat radiation from the sun is more than X by a scale of Y.

But in balance, so any addition without compensation can compound to be fatal to human life on earth.

After increasing the temperature by storing energy, then radiation off the surface and air layers will increase. But the heat build up is strongest at ground level, yet radiating to space is hardest from that layer. So the effectiveness of heat dispersal in a layered, in-vacuum geoid is not ideal.

Not only[addition by me] by humans adding more heat under the existing blankets.

Volker Quaschning hat an article, in german, on that. A comparable, unfavourable look on heat introduction instead for a post-co2 energy generation, was also cited in minkorrekt podcast (german, too).

But that that is a small factor, too. I did back of the envelope calculation, and - if every of the 8 billion humans increases their consumption to western standards, - their energy from unlimited fusion or unlimited fission, earth still boils.

It might be 2-5 % of the effect of greenhouse gases, by heat introduction is real and at scale deadly, too.

With water, wind and solar, we have no added heat, since moving gases and fluids evoke heat anyway, which just is not converted to electricity in between. And solar changes the albedo of the place where the panel was placed to a reflectivity of that of a green meadow, which might be worse than some kinds of coating, but usually is better then other roof tiling [citing needed, do IR/VIS-white-painted roofs exist?].

TL;DR: Smaller problem by a few orders of magnitude, but unless dangerous geoengineering takes place[1], still unsustainably cooks mankind.

[1]: Please don't. IPCC report says "keep the idea of geoengineering out of media, for it is not a solution but pandora's jar"

audunw• 3 years ago

I was surprised to learn how significant the heat added from thermal power plants can be for global warming. Without technological improvements a massive scale up of nuclear energy would probably be a bad idea.

There are panels that can radiate heat directly to space though. So it has made me wonder if the nuclear power plants of the future could use such panels to radiate their heat directly to space. Essentially they’d be like reverse solar power plants, that also work at night. Wonder if it’s feasible and economical.

Personally, I think the future will mainly just be solar, hydro, geothermal and energy storage. As world population decline we’ll end up having more than enough materials if we recycle them. Energy use will go drastically down.

Question is if we need nuclear in the transition.

And we should have nuclear R&D anyway as we need it for space exploration.

Matumio• 3 years ago

Seriously? Everything on earth's surface is radiating thermal energy into space. In such a massive amount that you'll feel a distinct temperature drop in a cloudless night. If you want to radiate more heat into space (at a global level), you'd have to start by removing the clouds, or the greenhouse gasses.

zokier6• 3 years ago

The total energy consumption of humanity is still very tiny compared to the total solar irradiation that earth receives. Maybe at some point that might become a concern, but not anytime soon.

goodpoint3• 3 years ago

THIS! People seem to forget basic physics sometimes.

Any source of free, unlimited "clean" energy would be an environmental catastrophe because energy used is released into the atmosphere as heat.

We need sources that *capture* energy already in the environment, like solar, wind and similar.

goodpoint3• 3 years ago

Silent downvotes do very little.

acidburnNSA5• 3 years ago

See other replies above. Thermal energy emissions pale in utter insignificance compared to the solar heat flux. What matters is things that control what happens with that solar heat flux, aka greenhouse gasses.

Vecr• 3 years ago

If that was actually a problem you could use geoengineering to make the planet more reflective overall, letting you use more nuclear power.

refurb• 3 years ago

Global energy production in 2019: 617 x 10^18 J

Global energy from the sun per day: 430 x 10^18 J

rainworld• 3 years ago

Indeed we are 2–3 orders of magnitude away from the point where our energy output itself non-negligibly, globally heats the earth. And if we kept growing, an incandescent Earth would not be too far off. There are hard limits.

abecedarius• 3 years ago

Curious: for the latter I get 7e21 J, using Wikipedia's normal-insolation figure of 947 W and its Earth albedo of 0.3. That's an order of magnitude greater. I'm probably missing something, do you have a source?

(Of course my figure would only increase the difference you're pointing out.)

goodpoint3• 3 years ago

This does not take into account that the planet was in balance before human activities has started impacting it. Plus earth reflectivity is decreasing due to human intervention e.g. deforestation.

rayiner2• 3 years ago

Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution—I.e. one that could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than rationing. Forget simply replacing today’s energy generation. That’s sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? Moreover, technology that will “level up” civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of nuclear development, or something similarly energetic, rather than windmills or solar.

effed312• 3 years ago

What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available?

What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal.

Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable. This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consumption.

zerodensity3• 3 years ago

Having excess energy is great!

We can use it for alot of useful stuff. For example to:

- Recycle waste products. Most (not all) things are recyclable you just need the energy.

- Grow food vertically so more land can be nature.

- Siphon greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.

- Desalinate Water

rayiner2• 3 years ago

What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use

Energy efficiency improvements of that magnitude don’t exist. In most industries, getting a 10% efficiency improvement would be groundbreaking. These are limits dictated by physics.

bob10292• 3 years ago

This is the right question/goal.

No. I have seen the effects of this "goal" at scale in my personal life. Semi-non-effective HVAC systems that I now have to run 24/7/365, LED lights with weird flicker that perpetually antagonize me everywhere, vehicles with obnoxious start/stop mechanisms that absolutely induce premature wear (causing much more serious waste than otherwise). Oh yeah - my washing machine doesn't really fill up with water all the way, so I run FOUR cycles just to make sure everything is properly rinsed. This one isn't even directly about energy (someone was trying to save water), but it consumes more energy as a consequence. Is this what the environmentalists were going for with the fake "deep fill" selector knob on my ultra-high "efficiency" machine?

The people pushing "efficiency at any cost" are either completely blind to the idea of 2nd order+ consequences or are evil/anti-human. I cannot fathom a different set of options. Do you realize that you have to live on this damn planet with all these side-effects too?

I am completely over it. Let's figure out how to make energy carbon free and infinite. Let's stop fucking over the user experience in every possible way just so we can feel like we are doing something to "help".

mcpackieh8• 3 years ago

I fear this sort of argument will fall on deaf ears here. This is a forum where tons of people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle. It works for them, so it should work for everybody else.. Getting people to live in dense urban housing and be dependent on public transit is considered a desirable outcome, not a regrettable but necessary consequence of reducing emissions. Talk of reducing emissions is used as a justification, but isn't the root motivation for these urbanization advocates. Offering up technical solutions that reduce the environmental toll of the present social order isn't met with enthusiasm because it misses the point, which is to change up the social order.

If you find a way to explain how nuclear reactors will get more people riding buses and bicycles in cities, then you'll have their attention.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

This is a forum where tons of people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle.

This is a forum where a few people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle, and say so very vocally. Don't mistake that for a consensus. It's not. You can find a lot of other viewpoints here as well.

a3w2• 3 years ago

After having read the IPCC report, no. A mix of energy is a very viable solution. And if states would not cater to the needs of the nuclear industry, we would have zero plants right now because the price of electricity was never high enough to get the plants insured. Which might change if the price for power climbs, but with renewables on the rise, a limit to that rise or even decline is to be expected.

And for some reason, mainstream social media loves nuclear, so I do question if there is a bias for a technology that every spacefaring state, except for india and china (AFAICT?), has botched at some catastrophic event so far.

effed312• 3 years ago

All the analysis like this forget to count the cost of decommissioning the nuclear technology, reactors and fuels. Cost for end of life reactors are an order of magnitude those of contruction, and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist, both payed by -public-.

The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane crash, not at all.

The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by economic/financial reasons. If all the world, developing or not, will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers will be very different.

Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels, the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones.

Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis.

One key of green energy is the distributed nature of solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less dipendence on big company, more public control.

Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy use. EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not illuminate the belly of airplanes).

The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good candidates too)

karaterobot• 3 years ago

and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist

This is certainly wrong, unless the word "definitive" is used to shift the goal post such that it's effectively impossible to meet. Like the people who said, of Yucca Mountain, that "sure, it's been geologically stable for millions of years, but we can't definitively say there won't be an earthquake tomorrow", or "what if society collapses and, ten thousand years from now, a tribe of stone age explorers breaks into the concrete and reinforced steel facility buried under a mountain in the remote desert, and then goes 700 meters down, uses their lithic tools to bust down a few more steel doors, and gets irradiated? Those hypothetical 10-20 people in the distant future might die, thus we can conclude there is no definitively safe storage solution".

effed312• 3 years ago

we dont have a time machine, so seems to me the right aproach to search for maximum safety, not a relative one.

No definitive solution exist even for plastic/polymers, there substances discarded are spreading the world, and the effect are still unclear.

Dah00n5• 3 years ago

At a minimum definitive must mean from today and until we can and will make any radioactive waste not radioactive waste anymore. If that requires safety against stone age explores or not I can't say. History has an abundance of tales of how we store things safe enough and then decades (or a few years) later we learn that dumping thousands of barrels of radioactive waste in the ocean was stupid, that slapping some concrete on top of a nuclear bomb test site didn't really contain it, that mixing chemical waste with earth and letting it sit near a river was pretty stupid, etc. etc.

Definitive means it is 100% certain this is not happening with any radioactive waste as there's no lower limit where radiation isn't dangerous. "Definitely safe against human stupidity and error" seems fine to me for radioactive waste when there's zero need to produce any. Again, is that timescale up until stone age man in the future? I can't say but the producers of radioactive waste need to know the answer before they can built a storage facility or they'll have to make it safe enough for anything less than the earth going pooof.

acidburnNSA5• 3 years ago

Decomissioning is factored into all nuclear lifecycle analyses. Long term waste solutions are in operation today (see WIPP) and expanding soon (see Onkalo).

https://whataboutthewaste.com

effed312• 3 years ago

On the technical level, i think yes, there are analysis and solution.

But at practical level (economic/politics) decommissioning is left to the posterity (cost rising years after years, shifting of milestone, more taxes.. and so on)

Detrytus4• 3 years ago

Nuclear technology is safe enough, and the storage of the waste is non-issue: the amount of waste produced thorough last 80 years since we first split atom would fit in a single storage facility of the size of the football stadium. If we want to move away from fossil fuels then the nuclear is our best bet, solar and wind are just impractical toys.

effed312• 3 years ago

Nuclear technology is safe enough "enough" is a point of view, is your, so ok for you, not enough for me. Fukushima was not enough safe, but again, for me. And there are many others "not enough" situations others than 3 famous.
storage of the waste is non-issue.. To me, is not a volumetric problem, but for time ad long term safety. At fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is still a big problem now, imagine the big part of plants, and there is a 90km avoidence zone for many years.

Make nuclear really safe maybe can be done, at witch cost? Will stay still in market? I doubt. Probably some nuclear technology will remain and can be used and developed for research and bootstrap, not for supply the whole.

solar and wind are just impractical toys These toys are in lowering cost, rising efficiency and world wide spread and deployment, more than any others technology, and 10 yrs. ago was difficult to think, now is reality, and investing resources on solar/wind/others will make a difference -now-, can be widespread, create more workplaces, where building more nuclear will make some effect to 10 years, and can be done only by few big companies (apart environment issues).

cycomanic6• 3 years ago

This is such a rubbish argument I wondered where it came from and it's even the DOE who writes this (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...). It is completely misleading, so yes the volume of the spend fuel if packed together would fit a football field to a height of 10 yards. However, you could (and hopefully never would) store your nuclear waste like that, you need containment vessels, cooling (air circulation) etc. and this number also completely ignores the amount of "non-fuel" nuclear waste that you have as well.

The whole statement is designed to mislead.

IX-103• 3 years ago

I'm not sure they forget about cleanup for nuclear so much as it just isn't included for any power generation method.

The residual ash from coal plants are called coal tailings. They basically contain everything in the coal that didn't burn. Currently this is all piled up near the coal power plant. So you have chemicals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, as well as a smattering of radioactives like uranium sitting in a pile. Occasionally weather washes out these "piles" and they find their way into streams or leach through the underlayment to hit the ground water. When a coal plant is decommissioned the owner files for bankruptcy and the pile of coal tailings becomes another Superfund site.

Yet somehow nuclear is different. Even though if nothing is done, in a thousand years the coal tailings will still be just as toxic as today. While the radioactive waste will be near a background.

Brian_K_White2• 3 years ago

original title is in quotes

backtoyoujim• 3 years ago

The space to keep exhausted fission fuel is not.

jvanderbot6• 3 years ago

It's quite a lot less space than you think. There's a giant dump outside Denver international airport that is orders of magnitude larger than we'd need. There are of course other factors, but space is not one of them.

ars• 3 years ago

One of the great parts of using a breeder reactor is it burns up all the harmful fuel. What's left decays very quickly, so there just isn't much to store.

acidburnNSA5• 3 years ago

Nuclear engineer here. I did a similar write-up (gratuitously leveraging GNU Units) since most people don't seem to know this fact about fission breeder reactors. I added some other references at the bottom of people pointing this out throughout nuclear fission's history.

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.

credit_guy• 3 years ago

Since you are an industry insider, do you have an estimate when we’ll have commercial fast neutron reactors in the US?

ryathal• 3 years ago

5-10 years after the US is serious about wanting them.

krupan4• 3 years ago

Interesting (maybe?) background info, this is John Walker, the creator of AutoCAD, an o.g. software entrepreneur. Also the author of The Hacker's Diet: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

Gwypaas2• 3 years ago

After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder.

It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.

throwaway1777• 3 years ago

Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste

ben_w10• 3 years ago

Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid.

People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.

Joeri• 3 years ago

China and Russia do not build and run nuclear power plants at dramatically lower costs, despite having none of those handicaps.

Edit: Hmm, actually, I find wildly diverging LCOE numbers in different locations online. Some indicate they build at half the cost from France, while others say at a similar cost. So, if anyone knows which LCOE numbers are reliable please indicate.

pyrale20• 3 years ago

without billions in red tape

I would prefer to keep the red tape, thank you very much.

Sure, nuclear is an expensive industry, but it's also a very safe industry, and I believe we should keep this part of it.

monkaiju• 3 years ago

People also dont like to mention that even the current, far from 'green', extraction is because we currently only mine the easiest to access deposits of uranium. There are not many of these and we would shortly need to start accessing much more challenging (read: dirty) deposits were we to scale nuclear.

Also of the handful of breeder reactors we have (i think the only 2 running are in Russia) they are incredibly far from economical and have a really annoying tendency to catch fire...

hedora• 3 years ago

The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess.

The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant.

Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding process scheduling and I/O.

The French did this totally unprecedented novel thing where they manufacture more than one identical part at a time in a line of assembly stations, and the parts of the plants are interchangeable. I doubt such things transfer to other countries or industries though.

Zigurd9• 3 years ago

The French have discovered that they vastly underestimated end-of-life costs. And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.

pyrale20• 3 years ago

The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess.

As a french Engineer, I can confirm this. For work inquiries, please reach me at pyrale@oversized.ego

The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design

In fact, we don't keep building them. The last N4 reactor was delivered in 2003. Since then, aside from the failed joint-venture with Germany that is the EPR, France essentially delivered nothing. That's not really an engineering issue so much as a political one.

Also France didn't "keep building the same reactor", and didn't build "obsolete" reactors. From the initial reactors (the CP generation) to the N4, the buildings got larger, late reactors produced 60% more energy than the original ones, and significant safety improvements were made. Safety changes were also backported on previous installations. In fact, the major reason why Framatome freed itself from the Westinghouse license is that it provided significant independent contribution to the original design.

adrianN• 3 years ago

It is my understanding that the French massively subsidize nuclear power because they essentially run it as a job program to keep nuclear engineers employed so that they can build nuclear bombs.

antonvs4• 3 years ago

According to https://www.ad.nl/economie/duur-en-gevaarlijk-elke-kerncentr... (translated with Google):

"The leading German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin investigated whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy. The answer is negative: all 674 nuclear power plants that were built worldwide between 1951 and 2017 were built with substantial government subsidies. Without such support they would never have come about."

Panino• 3 years ago

The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design

Wikipedia has a list of nuclear reactors in France.

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

According to the list, most power plants came online in the 1980s, so it doesn't sound like they "keep building" more of them. The most recent ones, Civaux and Chooz-B, came online in 2000. Flamanville appears to be incorrectly stated as having came online in 2020. Clicking the link, you see that its 2 reactors came online in 1986 and 1987, and as for the third one -- "as of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial introduction date to the end of 2022. In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023, and again in December 2022, delaying fuel loading to early 2024."

All of the nuclear reactors in France were built by previous generations.

As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.) However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables. And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements. My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc. I think nuclear proponents who say that nuclear is so cheap and so easy should prove it by building their own nuclear reactors and make tons of money. Go ahead, just do it. Stop talking and do it.

devonkim• 3 years ago

You'd be better using South Korea as an example rather than France these days. To add more context, South Korea is an incredibly, incredibly corrupt country that sends its exiting president to prison to the extent that I joke that we need a special prison just for presidents. Yet there are basically no nuclear accidents at the kind of scale that we saw from Japan. 100% speculating but it's almost as if the nuclear power plants are used as a deterrent and part of the national security apparatus perhaps similar to the logic that Ukraine may have had in the past.

The anti-nuclear crusade in the West is a bit worrisome given that if we had been better at dealing with nuclear as a whole there would be less coal and gas power plants all over the West now. As much as I can sympathize with the concerns about nuclear power related supply chain issues and risks of meltdowns + radiation almost all the problems I've seen in nuclear across countries and cultures don't come down to technical issues as much as structural ones due 90%+ to politics causing massive over-regulation of nuclear to become unviable both financially and politically. This seems silly because I strongly believe such efforts should be directed at the much greater, immediate, far more supportable threat to humanity's IMO of fossil fuels. Of course we kind of depend upon them now but given the problems we had from the 1980s into the 2000s with fossil fuels all the way to now the kind of resources we could have spent on renewables may have had better results simply stepping away from lobbying constantly against nuclear power and letting engineers do their best work in all areas of energy research.

Seriously, almost all the "but nuclear costs too much" arguments are a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad faith where people pile on more and more requirements like it's a really bad DoD project when it's much more complicated honestly. US DoD has operated tons and tons of nuclear reactors, for example, quite successfully with a pretty darn good safety record last I saw despite all sorts of other failures within the US Jobs Program - they're used in submarines!

cycomanic6• 3 years ago

Except for the fact that french nuclear power is highly subsidized (partly by military budgets, partly other subsidies, partly by grossly underfunding for storage and decommissioning costs, which they are required to put funds aside for), is breaking at the seams last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance (picked up by "intermittent solar and wind").

pfdietz21• 3 years ago

The French breeder program was such a "success" that it's been mothballed. They've put the work on a shelf and terminated any follow on reactor.

This tells me the French don't believe nuclear will power the world any time soon. If they believed that, they'd understand breeders would be needed, and would be working on them.

Zigurd9• 3 years ago

If you have money, you can make energy. Therefore you should spend your capex on the things that will get you the most power soonest. And that is what is happening: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/ove...

Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio. So you get articles like this that position uranium fission energy as "renewable."

Brian_K_White2• 3 years ago

I would think that nuclear is popular with the money class because you can own & control the means of prodution. It requires things that only the existing big boys can afford.

Same goes for various battery & solar techs. If they can't prevent solar panels from becoming common, at least they can make sure that solar panels and batteties rely on at least some key ingredients or processes they can own & control access to.

Somehow, one way or another, through safety regulation if not through artificial scarcity or patents, there will be no cooking up good batteries or solar panels in garages, and I bet it will never be down to actual physical impracticality.

skissane3• 3 years ago

Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of energy. The graph above uses “quads”, or quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ),

Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well that isn’t SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least see the point to it. But “quadrillion BTUs” and calling that “quads” doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose

brutusborn• 3 years ago

I agree it’s annoying. I think it comes from historically defining large energy sources such as gas formations in BTU.

yawaramin6• 3 years ago

It's explained in the post. It makes the total amount be roughly 100 quads, which makes it easy to estimate all the numbers in the graphic as percentages.

skissane3• 3 years ago

Given an exajoule and a quad are close in value, you’d get roughly the same result with exajoules instead.

Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would not have been true in the past and will not be true in the future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of a temporary coincidence in the data

VonGuard• 3 years ago

One thing this doesn't really address is that the way you separate plutonium from uranium is via acid. At the end of the process, you have a barrel of radioactive acid to deal with. Not nice stuff to handle. Toxic AND corrosive waste.

acidburnNSA5• 3 years ago

The pyrometallurgical methods of separation are a bit nicer. Way less liquid waste than Gen 1 WW2-era separations like PUREX.

https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6...

epaulson• 3 years ago

Yes, we could get a lot more energy out of our fission fuel. The reason the USA doesn't is because Jimmy Carter set a policy of not reprocessing fuel because he felt it encouraged nuclear weapons proliferation, coming just a few years after India exploded its first device. Carter's statement: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf

acidburnNSA5• 3 years ago

Considering that Reagan reversed this policy by unbanning reprocessing in 1981, this isn't the only reason we don't do it today. Other reasons include that reprocessing is expensive and that we found a lot more uranium ore than originally expected.

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf

sbierwagen• 3 years ago

The Indian test used weapons-grade plutonium produced in the low power CIRUS research reactor, much like how we were making plutonium in 1945. It's thought that Carter banned civilian reprocessing because a nuclear test in 1962 showed that a weapon could even be made from what the DOE described as "reactor-grade" plutonium: https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/websites/osti.gov/www.osti.... https://npolicy.org/greg-jones-americas-1962-reactor-grade-p...

A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.

pfdietz21• 3 years ago

This is a common nuke bro story, but it's nonsense. The actual reason is that plutonium has negative value. It costs more to incorporate it in new fuel rods than it would cost to make fuel rods with freshly enriched uranium.

unethical_ban• 3 years ago

What about the costs of launching the first-cycle spent fuel into the sun or building caves that protect humanity for 10000 years?

It's probably worth it to reprocess if only to shorten half life.

lost_tourist• 3 years ago

That seems to not account for societal and storage costs. I see too many people extrapolate stuff into "it's not the absolute cheapest we can diversify into pushing the cost off to future generations rather than being responsible for our own creations".

JackFr• 3 years ago

They had me until the antepenultimate paragraph:

Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks, and design, construction, management, and operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”.

For me that turned the whole piece from a level-headed well-reasoned argument from domain experts to a Facebook political rant. That isn’t to say I agree or disagree with DEI initiatives, that sentence simply undermines the credibility of all that came before.

mkl95• 3 years ago

Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century

A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries there is an irrational fear of that technology.

Julesman• 3 years ago

Absolutely false premise from the first sentence. It is NOT possible for the world to live like the first world did in the 20th century. And nuclear energy is an apocalypically short-sited solution, mostly favored by the current energy industry for maintaining the current model of distribution.

cyrillite• 3 years ago

This is brilliantly interesting. However, I lack a taxonomy for understanding nuclear power. What’s outdated, what’s just old, what’s new and promising, what’s just nonsense, and what are the ways we expect to deploy nuclear energy?

Finding reliable and accessible sources is tricky. Does anybody here have a good starting point for a technically minded non-expert outsider?

philipkglass• 3 years ago

The vast majority of new reactors built each year are still light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel. There's a smaller but notable fleet of power reactors of the pressurized heavy water type. Everything else is a rounding error.

My newest nuclear engineering textbook is from 1983 [1] and it's still fine because in the last 40 years very little has changed at a high level. In online discussions you'll see a lot of excitement about other kinds of reactors (molten salt reactors, gas cooled, metal cooled, pebble bed, breeders, etc.) and this older textbook mentions all those kinds of reactors too. But if you want to understand what the nuclear industry actually builds and operates, a used textbook from the 1980s or later will be fine.

[1] Introduction to Nuclear Engineering 2nd Edition by John LaMarsh.

api• 3 years ago

"Inexhaustible" means at any reasonable human / terrestrial scale of course. Humans use a very tiny amount of energy in cosmic terms.

codethief• 3 years ago

Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago.

Thermodynamics would like to have a word:

[…] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

Ratalala• 3 years ago

Interesting read. I once wondered what would be the contribution to atmospheric heat of the combustion of cigarettes, and waved it as probably insignificant. A quick googling suggests burning a cigarette releases 7.8 J/mg of tobacco[1], that a cigarette weighs around 1 g, and that about 5 trillions (5e12) cigarettes are smoked annually [2]. This amounts to 3.9e16 J, or, averaged over one year, 1.2e9 W; corresponding to the total US energy consumption around 1730, according to the figure in parent's link.

Insignificant today, but not a few centuries back.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307705601_Heat_Emis... [2] https://www.vitalstrategies.org/tobacco-atlas-global-tobacco...

whatever1• 3 years ago

Solar is inexhaustible. Wind is inexhaustible. So what?

The only thing that matters is cost.

mharig• 3 years ago

Small breeder reactors bear the risk of breeding weapon grade Plutonium, e.g.

Nice for the next generation of Daesh.

Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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