Why fans of nuclear are a problem today

https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/why-fans-of-nuclear-are-a-problem

by locallost • 2 years ago

23 114 2 years ago

jeromeaparis.substack.com

anovikov6• 2 years ago

It's a lot simpler: nuclear ran out of time. It will take more time for any new nuclear plant approved today, to start operating, than for renewables solving electricity forever. It takes 12-14 years to build a nuclear power plant from scratch, even in jurisdictions where regulations are not a problem at all (Belarus for example). EU plans to eliminate all fossil-based electricity by 2040. It basically means: too late for nuclear.

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

And nuclear ran out of time because it had poor learning. A technology with little or no experience effect can be expected to eventually fall to technologies that do, even if it has an initial advantage.

anovikov6• 2 years ago

Worse than that, it had a negative learning effect. Nuclear did have some learning but over the course of it positive effect (Wright's law) was more than counterbalanced with discovering many, many things that can go wrong, requiring very expensive design changes and even more expensive retrofits to existing reactors, and eventually required designers to become so paranoid about new designs they became prohibitively expensive to implement because of extended safety measures even in areas where they were probably unnecessary. Simply put: too many things can go wrong, price of mistake is too damn high, and any mistake is probably unfixable because even if a reactor is fine, retrofitting an existing reactor to accommodate safety-related change is frequently impossible because it's guts are forever radioactive even after a short runtime.

It was a political mistake to ever move with the nuclear power to outside of it's initial role: production of plutonium for nukes. Ironically, plutonium-producing reactors are much much safer because they don't need to produce high-pressure steam so can remain at atmospheric pressure cooled by vast amounts of cooling water, and they never develop too much radioactivity within themselves because fuel is irradiated there for 20x-100x shorter durations than in energy-producing reactors (to ca. 1 MW thermal*day per kg) because doing more increases posioning with Pu.240, so even a potential accident on an industrial reactor is much less dangerous, and much less likely.

firesteelrain• 2 years ago

Nuclear has had issues with scaling, but new small modular reactors (SMRs) could help.

m4rtink2• 2 years ago

That is quite possibly what will happen - for terrestrial applications. But anything past the orbit of Mars will require nuclear power - or very robust beamed power infrastructure.

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

Space applications cannot, of course, provide any justification for imposing nuclear on terrestrial markets.

exe342• 2 years ago

the problem with this argument is that we've been hearing it for the last 40 years - we could have had multiple generations of nuclear by now if it wasn't for the nimbys.

anovikov6• 2 years ago

What were the potential alternatives to nuclear electricity 20-30 years, let alone 40 years ago (not counting fossil fuels, of course)? Today, wind produces about as much and probably a bit more electricity as nuclear (~12% less last year and growing quickly), next year, solar will produce more.

There are no nimbys in non-free countries, and nuclear has been pretty much stuck there, too.

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

if it wasn't for the nimbys

But the nimbys weren't the problem, it was the financiers. Nuclear has been too expensive compared to alternatives. It's always about the money.

tourmalinetaco• 2 years ago

It’s only too late for nuclear if we continue to let oil barons decide to stunt the growth of genuine competition in the market. The reality of renewables is they are not and have never been consistent enough to provide full power, and we don’t have the battery technology to keep an energy grid’s worth of electricity on standby. If coal is too ecologically damaging then we need another on-demand power source to replace it since solar cannot supply us entirely and cannot respond to upticks in demand.

I am genuinely convinced most of the people discussing energy have no practical understanding of the power grid. Coal is useful because it can be turned on/off relatively quickly as demand required. Nuclear can do similar, renewables cannot.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

I don't doubt renewables and batteries to be able to handle say day or two of power demand in most scenarios... Question really become about seasonal handling. Specially if we move heating from fossils to electricity even with heat pumps.

Doing the seasonal bit at scale in whole Western world(not just select blessed locations). Seems very far. At least if anything closing reasonable costs per kwh spend during low production times is considered.

roenxi6• 2 years ago

This is a centralist argument. If the market were structured in a sane manner, you wouldn't need politicians to be involved in these choices. In fact, I think the argument in this article is defunct for a similar obvious reason - people can just build solar panels because they are cost effective. Bam. These alleged legions of nuclear supporters have ceased to be a roadblock. Just go do it, we may well all already agree that any blockages to building solar are a bad idea.

Of course the real case that the nuclear people are making is that if we stopped putting all the bizarre political blockages in front of nuclear it'd be perfectly competitive and people would invest in that too. But this idea that we want politicians to be the bottleneck in deciding where our power comes from is even more bizzare. We should decide power is generated, by paying people who generate power in a way that works for us. The tech is not so important [EDIT not so important that we need to do it through the political process].

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

But politics cannot be avoided.

If nuclear is to be built, there will be risk of serious accidents. The rational private response to this is to bound the liability to the nuclear operator via bankruptcy. So, in a severe accident, the cost imposed on society will not be covered by the operator. What's the response to this problem? Either imposed safety regulations, or requiring insurance (and the insurers then impose regulations as condition for insurance.) If de facto public insurance is provided (as in the US limited liability for accidents) then public regulation is a necessary consequence.

roenxi6• 2 years ago

Well yes, that is what limited liability is. No argument there. We applied that concept to every industry and got fantastic results even though the absolute damage done by most industries is absurdly more than nuclear does. If you applied that exact logic to fossil fuels we'd never have made it to the industrial age. If you applied that logic to the industrial age we'd never have entered the industrial age, it was an OH&S disaster even before what happened to the health of the bystanders.

I'm not sure why we've looked at our collective history and decided the West's biggest mistake was ignoring the Luddites. The costs of nuclear are nothing compared to the potential we walked away from or even the costs we accept as part of standard day-to-day existence.

RandomThoughts35• 2 years ago

This is a centralist argument.

It’s a French writer and not a very convincing one from my point of view after reading some of his other articles.

He seems to view things through a very French prism so expects strong statism and ecology dominated by a mostly alter-mondialist view when it’s not openly Trotskyist.

ViewTrick100214• 2 years ago

Nuclear power has spent its entire life being forced into existence using subsidies.

A technology agnostic subsidy market for green power leads to exactly zero new nuclear power being built.

Thus the huge push from the nuclear lobby and fossil lobby loving a power source not generating a single kWh for 20 years to create targeted subsidies only for nuclear power.

roenxi6• 2 years ago

Sure. What if we remove the nonsensical barriers and then let it fail on its own in the market? Like, say it only has to be 2x safer than the next safest popular form of energy? That always seemed like a reasonable compromise to me. A radical reduction in the standard of safety we hold nuclear to.

snapplebobapple3• 2 years ago

Your first statement is factually untrue. You could say it was initially forced into existence to generate the fuel for nuclear weapons but beyond that it's way more accurate to say it has spent the last ~50 years having the utter insanity of the regulatory body overridden by large subsidies with the last 30 or so of those years having people that don't like nuclear point at the subsidy and say nuclear is uncompetitive while ignoring the massive cost and uncertainty created by the nuclear regulator. There is no real free market here, most real innovation has been utterly destroyed by the regulator driving massive uncertainty into private investment by removing any certainty of the effectiveness of a company structure containing the cost liability of problems (this is not the same as liability flowing through to management/the board for obvious dereliction of duty, this is flow through happening automatically if you don't do every stupid thing the regulator comes up with, which is mostly unecessary and highly cost additive to your project).

This has stopped any sort of commodification of reactor construction and kept every project a bespoke, highly expensive, one off. Further, throwing solar panels everywhere ignores the total cost of solar because it ignores the large ancillaries cost having a non demand resource causes so it's incorrect to compare the two directly, you need to look at total cost including ancillary costs of grid connection (which is much closer, especially when looking at asian construction costs where the regulators are much less idiotic but still excessive and where production of these bespoke installations continued so skills of the labor force were maintained).

If we get the stupidity of the regulator out of the way we could have commodity built new generator designs with drastically cheaper total costs and eventually much better technology like molten salt that should be dramatically safer and that would be a fair comparison to solar, which has had the support to commodify and drive production cost into the ground over the last thirty years and is still questionably competitive when the total cost of running including ancillary costs is included against the worst version of nuclear (what we currently have). This is starting to become a national security concern because China is going hard on these newer, better technologies and they could end up owning the market on a decade or two timescale, which is a huge strategic issue since their main achilles heal right now is energy imports.

wdb• 2 years ago

I think I read somewhere that you need 800 wind turbines to replace a typical nuclear plant or 5 million solar panels. Personally, I prefer solar panels on roofs over wind turbines as it's less of an eye soir and noisy.

energy123• 2 years ago

The subjective "eye sore" argument isn't going to work anymore. It's too frivolous and doesn't give you the right to dictate what others can build on their private property.

Wind and solar work well together. It's windier at night and in winter when solar underperforms. It can be built in farmland wherever agrivoltaics may not be appropriate. It is especially valuable in Europe which has high wind and lower insolation.

skywhopper• 2 years ago

Wind turbines are beautiful. Solar panels on roofs are great too. Not sure why you think it’s one or the other.

aklfHa• 2 years ago

I do not believe that the claimed grid problems cannot be overcome. If it is really a problem, connect nuclear reactors to a separate grid for the railway and heavy industry.

In Germany, the Energiewende has been an expensive failure that led to astronomical electricity prices that no one can afford.

China will out-compete us yet again with their new pebble bed reactors.

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

The Energiewende was expensive because it supported PV over 2009-2012 when it was much more expensive than today.

The Energiewende was an enormous success, because that success was instrumental in providing demand that drove PV manufacture down an accelerating experience curve. PV is now much MUCH cheaper than it was then and this impetus is a big reason why.

Nuclear in China is sputtering compared to their renewable rollout.

cauch12• 2 years ago

The electricity prices argument is very simplistic. What drive electricity prices is very complicated, and sometimes misleading (in France, the low electricity price is a huge mistake, they are not collecting enough money for the medium and long term support of their infrastructure), and Germany is not worst than other country, even some with nuclear (Belgium, UK).

Sure, the Energiewende was a failure. It does not mean that 1) there is only one way to transition outside of nuclear (or that there is only one way to do nuclear: similarly pointing at the failure of France is not a good argument to reject nuclear pathways), 2) the situation has evolved and the advantages / disadvantages of the different generations are still the same.

I don't agree with everything in the article, but I also keep seeing pro-nuclear people having very very simplistic view on the situation. I prefer a lot people who are able to recognize the pro and the cons of all generation, without showing that they will minimize strongly the real facts that don't support what they want to hear. Nowadays in the energy sector, it is very very very clear that nuclear is, intrinsically, not competitive (not because of regulations, not because of ideology, just because it's an extremely complex enterprise). As long as the pro-nuclears continue to find bad excuses, I will agree that they are not reliable.

tlb• 2 years ago

If nuclear made sense, Microsoft ... would finance the construction of a few plants to feed their ever growing appetite for reliable carbon-free energy

Companies focus on their strengths. Microsoft isn't building its own chip fabs, or lots of other things it has an appetite for, because it's not one of their strengths. Companies can only be good at a few things. So them not building their own nuclear plants isn't a reason to believe it's a bad idea.

There are a few startups building small modular reactors. As I understand it, while data centers are certainly on their list of potential customers, they're getting more immediate sales commitments from remote mining operations where they're replacing diesel generators instead of competing with the grid.

Almondsetat• 2 years ago

If nuclear made sense, Microsoft or Amazon or Rio Tinto would finance the construction of a few plants to feed their ever growing appetite for reliable carbon-free energy…

But they are starting to do it [1]. I'm sorry, this is not a well though out article.

[1] https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow...

ViewTrick100214• 2 years ago

Existing nuclear power is cheap enough to be viable in some locales. In others huge subsidies are being pushed through.

The article talks about new nuclear power plants.

Neither of those companies are even close to breaking ground on any new nuclear power plant.

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

They have not started to do it. No nuclear power plant has been constructed for them. Nor have any even started construction. The article you linked to is purchase of power from an existing nuclear plant. This would be a fine precedent if one can build additional power plants for free, with all construction costs sunk. But the Nuclear Fairy is not available to wave her magic wand and present us with such free power plants.

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

That article is about Amazon buying electricity from a 40+ year old nuclear plant[1] which will operate for another 20 or so years.

Hardly what one could call financing the construction of new nuclear power plants.

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

i_am_proteus• 2 years ago

If a few nuclear plants could easily be built on budget and on time in a given system, it would not be an issue...

Then it must not be an issue, because the People's Republic of China has been building dozens of nuclear plants on time and on budget for the last decade.

ViewTrick100214• 2 years ago

Authoritarian state still keeping a toe in for military and pragmatic reasons. With communistic 5 year plan system you can through sheer force build a few reactors to keep the option open.

For every passing year they’ve been pulling back their nuclear ambitions in favor of renewables.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

China's new nuclear connections have slowed way down since 2018. Last year, China connected just 1.2 GW(e) of new nuclear to the grid (a 1000 MW PWR and a 200 MW HTGR).

In contrast, they installed 217 GW(e) of PV in 2023.

Smithalicious• 2 years ago

Meanwhile China can keep building nuclear plants at breakneck pace no problem. It's the same playbook for decades -- first we block nuclear at every opportunity, then we set impossible standards that make it impossible to build, then we say it's "out of time" and "taking away energy from renewables".

For decades these people have been saying "sure, nuclear would've been great if we'd built it decades ago, but there's no time now!" -- at this rate, we'll see those exact same articles keep getting written in 2064.

Of course solar is great too -- I'm highly in favor of having a diverse set of energy sources. Solar has base load problems, nuclear needs fuel, etc -- many strategic benefits and downsides for both.

ViewTrick100214• 2 years ago

Authoritarian state still keeping a toe in for military and pragmatic reasons. With communistic 5 year plan system you can through sheer force build a few reactors to keep the option open.

For every passing year they’ve been pulling back their nuclear ambitions in favor of renewables.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

China connected just 1.2 GW(e) of new nuclear to their grid last year.

In contrast, they connected 217 GW(e) of new PV to their grid last year.

cheschire2• 2 years ago

From a defense perspective, Ukraine has shown that power plants are a vulnerable asset. Even sidestepping war, power plants represent a centralized risk that renewables could conceivably mitigate.

On the other hand there’s a little uptick in France’s nuclear power at the very end of the article, at the very end of the graph, that represents one of the key benefits of nuclear. Even with the huge push by Germany to go renewable, they didn’t have enough power to survive when the Russian gas got shut off and they had to import France’s nuclear. It just makes so much damn power.

rich_sasha4• 2 years ago

Arguing in good faith: places like Ukraine would need significant storage. If it's battery-based, how vulnerable is that? How big a boom do you get from a fully charged, ready for winter seasonal battery storage?

cheschire2• 2 years ago

Sure, these are important questions.

Battery storage is more versatile than nuclear power due to its distributability. For example in Puerto Rico there is a concept[0] of a virtual power plant which requires battery owners to sign up to contribute in return for compensation. There will of course be economies of scale possible by centralizing battery storage, for example with non-chemical battery storage such as water batteries[1] that are more vulnerable than the highly distributed model. The point is more that there's more flexibility and variety available to deal with risks of many types.

0: https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/virtual-power-plant/pue...

1: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-giant-water-batt...

hi-v-rocknroll2• 2 years ago

Nope, you made a strawman while claiming not to be. PES and distributed battery V2G also exist.

m4rtink2• 2 years ago

Well, no one really dorectly struck a nuclear power plant in the war so far (though watchin the Russian infantry fight for the Zaporozia one on a livestreem back in 2022 was kinda hair raising) and thus nuclear powerplants provided important source of power for Ukraine.

No one wants to risk serious damage to a nuclear powerplant, given not just international outcry, but even just bad weather ending up contaminating you own country for decades.

In that regard nuclear powerplans end up being an important sanctuary in a conflict.

vfclists• 2 years ago

This seems to be a case of Westerners making excuses to screw up their economies.

The Japanese and Koreans have reduced the times for building power plants to 5 years and have even built some in 4.

This sounds like the Western worlds manufactured problems like trans issues and other such nonsense.

What happens to solar in the case of Krakatoa or a Sumatra volcanic event?

Why depend on unreliable weather to produce stable energy?

We are told over and over again that climate change implies weather disruption, so why depend on unreliable weather to produce reliable energy in the long term?

The Western world basically offloaded a lot of its own pollution to China then turned round to claim that they are making progress in achieving the green targets.

I mean the US spend trillions waging war in the Middle East, and yet couldn't invest the same amount on carbon-free energy, nuclear or otherwise. The West have become a joke.

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

Why depend on unreliable weather to produce stable energy?

Because it has been incredibly cheap to do so.

The Western world basically offloaded a lot of its own pollution to China

The overall effect of this on US emissions has been modest.

Kuinox9• 2 years ago

France has lost more annual kWh from nuclear than Germany since 2011

Maybe because we are forced to buy renewable energy (this summer nuclears plants were offline because of overproduction).

Also because Germany fund anti nuclear movement in france to sabotage our nuclear industry: https://www.ege.fr/sites/ege.fr/files/media_files/German_Int...

Author stats also doesn't include projection for 2024, where France exported a record amount of energy, and nuclear recovered from the maintenance schedules issues due to covid. The currently amount produced is already greater than 2022.

Germany also imported 9TWh this year because of the weather. Germany energy grid profit of the stability of it's neighbor.

cauch12• 2 years ago

I keep seeing people saying that kind of things, and at the same time, seeing _professional_ in the sector all agreeing that the way France managed their infrastructure was terrible.

It does not mean a nuclear pathway is not good. But it really makes you look very uneducated on the subject and very biased when you need to twist the reality that way.

Kuinox9• 2 years ago

Thanks you for this ad homimem attack. Adding additional information the author didn't mentioned looks very uneducated, thanks you for this observation.

lumb63• 2 years ago

It would’ve been nice if this post compared the costs of various energy sources per kWh, duration to bring capacity online, externalities related to energy sources (e.g. mass land use for solar, risk of plant failure for nucleae, etc.). That could’ve made it a very informative piece that might have convinced someone who was not already convinced. Instead it reads more as an ad hominem hit piece against nuclear proponents. We should be aiming to compare policies, not people.

reissbaker2• 2 years ago

The primary argument against nuclear here seems to be that, given that people argue against it (such as the author), it's slow to build because of all the people arguing against it. That seems pretty... tautological, and the same kind of thinking that resulted in Germany replacing its nuclear power plants with coal (and attempting to use Russian natural gas, too, until...). If the arguments against nuclear are so good, why doesn't the author make any?

If you care about reducing fossil fuel usage, IMO you should be all-in on: nuclear, solar, wind, etc. And nuclear solves a lot of difficult problems: solar doesn't work at night — California has enormous amounts of solar during the day and the majority of daytime electricity is solar-based, but at night nearly 40% of our energy comes from natural gas [1] — and storage is extremely expensive. Wind, hydro, and geothermal don't work everywhere: you can only run them near somewhere with natural features that make them possible. But a nuclear power plant? There aren't really practical limitations on where you can build them, or when they can operate. Any electricity market that has nuclear — CA, Texas [2], New York [3], PJM [4], etc — has an extremely steady base load taken up by nuclear, and everything else is super variable, and the variable gaps from other renewables that aren't plugged by nuclear are plugged by fossil fuels.

Nuclear is good.

1: https://www.gridstatus.io/graph/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=2024...

2: https://www.gridstatus.io/graph/fuel-mix?iso=ercot&date=2024...

3: https://www.gridstatus.io/graph/fuel-mix?iso=nyiso&date=2024...

4: https://www.gridstatus.io/graph/fuel-mix?iso=pjm&date=2024-0...

ViewTrick100214• 2 years ago

Please do the calculation on cost for consumers for a nuclear power plant which can’t produce a single kWh for the grid any time the sun is up.

reissbaker2• 2 years ago

...Do you think nuclear power plants stop working during the day?

Look at the (many) graph reports I linked: in every major American market, nuclear produces consistent power throughout the day and night. That's why they're useful!

RandomThoughts35• 2 years ago

Please enlighten us about where countries which have gone all-in on solar get their base power when the sun is not shining enough and there is no wind.

I don’t understand why people who have an axe to grind pretend to be more stupid than they are in these debates. The question is not average price per kWh and never was.

The question remains the same: where should we get base power when intermittent sources are off? The solutions are gas, coal, nuclear or some form of large scale storage.

Germany seems to be ok with polluting a lot with coal to appease the proportion of die hard antinuclear activists in its population. From my point of view, nuclear is not the worst of all the options - it’s actually unclear to me if it’s not even cleaner than building all the batteries required for large scale storage - but you might disagree.

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

I just noticed this gem:

the same kind of thinking that resulted in Germany replacing its nuclear power plants with coal

Germany did not replace its nuclear power plants with coal.

rich_sasha4• 2 years ago

I'll stop advocating more nuclear the very nanosecond someone shows me the fabled cheap-as-water seasonal battery storage.

Renewables make cheap energy, but not when you need it, or even predictably, especially outside of California. But you need to store it, according to renewables maximalist this is imminent and a non-problem, until that is obvious I'm in favour of nuclear.

ViewTrick100214• 2 years ago

Love how the topic has shifted from “even an hour of storage” a couple of years ago to now demanding a complete seasonal storage solution without even specifying based on which data it is needed.

It is funny when reality outpaces contrived made up arguments by conservative detractors.

rich_sasha4• 2 years ago

I never made the "one hour of storage" argument so that's a straw man as far as I'm concerned.

And my comment is made sincerely. Seasonal storage is make-or-break for renewables in many geographies (or has to be propped up by fossil fuels, which is the status quo).

hi-v-rocknroll2• 2 years ago

Texas has been adding metric craptons of solar because it's cheaper to deploy than nuclear. The market forces are already on the side of renewables in most advanced economies. PES and neighborhood/distributed battery including V2G are ways out, and hopefully NMC battery technology will gradually be replaced with something safer. At this point, ostensible talk about nuclear that's not going to happen is crypto-techno-religious political virtue-signaling.

TheChaplain• 2 years ago

Nuclear power is a complement, not a replacement. Together with wind, solar and water it helps keeping energy supply stable and cheap for all days of the year no matter the weather conditions.

That is why I support it.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

Nuclear power is not a good complement for solar power. Nuclear works best as baseload power with constant production. To complement solar power you need peaking power plants. It is possible to build nuclear peaking plants, but the cost of that power is many times higher than from a baseload nuclear plant since most of the cost is upfront capital cost.

Buxato• 2 years ago

Why ignorance is a huge problem today. https://app.nuclearplanet.ch/nuclearplanet/kkw-world

We need a energy mix and push all technologies to the next level. "Renovables" (btw there is not single 100% renovable energy plant) have a huge impact in area destroyed (directly and indirectly) and a nefarious end of life.

pfdietz22• 2 years ago

It's difficult to see where we would need new nuclear power plants. Maybe for ship propulsion?

guerby• 2 years ago

Nuclear lost its "reliable baseload power" badge in 2022 when more than half of french nuclear reactors (32/56) were offline at the same time, some scheduled and most unscheduled.

How much backup do you need for nuclear?

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/la-moitie-du-parc-nuc...

I read lots of "Germany needs french nuclear fleet" here (as usual), but obviously no one mentionned when France needed European grid big time due to nuclear failings.

Why fans of nuclear are a problem today

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