

Back to the Future – Advanced Nuclear Energy - markmassie
http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/backtothefuture

======
melling
China is producing 60 new nuclear plants while the U.S. is making 5.
Everything in China is happening much faster and on a larger scale. We should
recognize this fact and more actively work with them to further develop
nuclear energy.

A couple other examples of China's ability:

* This week China opened 32 new high-speed rail stations: [http://rt.com/business/212719-china-opens-high-speed-train/](http://rt.com/business/212719-china-opens-high-speed-train/)

Their current 10,000 miles of track probably cost them only 3x-5x what the
high-speed train in California will cost when it's done.

* A decade ago, they built a 20 mile maglev train for $1.2 billion: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train)

* More airports:

"According to the Chinese government’s 12th five-year plan, the total number
of airports is set to expand from 175 in 2010 to 230 in 2015."

[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fedb9308-8501-11e3-8968-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fedb9308-8501-11e3-8968-00144feab7de.html#axzz3LhN82SLn)

\---

China simply has the ability to move much faster and cheaper than the U.S.

~~~
olau
Wages are lower in China. You can't compare the costs directly.

~~~
jerf
I doubt wages are why our stuff is so expensive... or, more accurately, I
doubt that wages for people _actually doing construction_ is why our stuff is
so expensive.

Some of the speed China has is that their government is willing to just stomp
over anything and anybody in the way and Get It Done. We don't necessarily
need to copy that element. On the other hand you can make a damned good case
that we are far, _far_ too good at paying very expensive people lots of money
for months and years at a time to come up with reasons why we can't do
something, and once finally placated, reasons why we have to do it more
expensively than we initially planned.

~~~
olau
Wages: so I just googled the average Chinese wage and the first answer I got
was around $5000. you don't think a difference of an order of magnitude in
wages could explain the difference?

Regarding waste in administration: I'm sure the same happens in China.

~~~
jerf
For construction wage differences to matter, we have to be actually
_constructing_. Spending billions of dollars on clearing red tape isn't due to
construction wage differences. Of course we are paying the people implementing
the red tape much better than the Chinese do, that is true. And we probably
pay a lot more of them.

And please spare me the obvious black & white "oh, so you want _no_
regulation, then?" I want reasonable levels. Not levels that were clearly
designed to be punitive.

------
phasetransition
Regardless of how much you hate (or love) nuclear power, it is important to
remember that radioactive decay is a stochastic process that doesn't give a
crap about politics, policy, or nation states. As such, any prudent forward
looking nuclear path needs to include methodology to transmute the unfortunate
nuclide spectrum left over from light water reactors (LWR) into shorter lived
species that don't need storage measured in epochs. New nuclear reactor
technology with different neutron spectrums is likely the most prudent
approach to effect this transmutation at scale.

The "green movement" anti-nuclear camp cannot seem to see the scientific need
to continue with nuclear fission at least long enough to clean up most of the
mess we've already created. A coherent "full stop" nuclear policy should still
include reprocessing and transmutation of the existing waste stockpile.
Stopping short of this makes the extant waste problem catastrophically worse.

\---

I took radiochemistry in graduate school several years before the the origin
story in the Brooking's article, and the appeal of molten salt reactors was
well known then, albeit with more conventional fuel loads.

The engineer in me gravitates towards the elegance of the proposed "Gen IV+"
nuclear technologies, but the convoluted realities of nuclear power in today's
form makes it hard for me to justify continuing the current path towards
bigger and bigger light water reactors.

My personal opinion is that we need to diverge from, or stop, the building of
ever larger LWR. Because these reactors operate at elevated pressure, and have
multi-megawatt levels of decay heat, accidents are always a specter.

Research energy must then be diverted into technologies that will consume most
of the long lived TRU waste. By the time the existing waste is transmuted, the
performance of the transmuting reactor systems will be established enough that
retaining or shuttering of those systems should be more clear. There will also
be a long enough stretch of time in parallel to ascertain the asymptotic
maturity state of the various renewable energy technologies.

~~~
sliverstorm
_The "green movement" anti-nuclear camp cannot seem to see..._

As a bleeding heart treehugger myself, the "green movements" are routinely
susceptible to "letting perfect be the enemy of good", which is where a lot of
my objections to those movements come from, and IMO where your particular
point stems from as well.

~~~
aetherson
That's the proximate cause, but you need to go back one level to the root
cause:

The environmental movement of today is a political alliance between a group of
essentially science-oriented types who see a looming problem and want to solve
it most efficiently, and an essentially anti-scientific group who have a
philosophical objection to aspects of modernity that they see as being opposed
to a desirable state of nature.

This alliance happened more than a generation ago, and like most close
political alliances, it has resulted in a lot of cross-pollination of ideas
from the two camps. So now you'll see people who are fundamentally anti-
science use scientific arguments on, say, climate change.

But nuclear power, GMO food crops, and geoengineering are none-the-less dead
issues for the modern environmental movement because about half of that
movement is not interested in the science of whether or not those things are
on balance good: they are ultimate expressions of the un-natural modernity
that that half of the movement wants to get rid of. They aren't being
irrational, and they aren't just waiting to hear the right argument for why
nuclear power is less likely to provoke a catastrophe that will lead to the
loss of human life than the status quo. They are opposed to nuclear power per
se, for what it inherently is, not for the specific effects it will have on
humans or particular animals or anything.

This isn't going to change unless the current big tent breaks up, and it's not
clear that, like, scientific environmentalism has enough political clout to
pass any part of its agenda if the current tent does break up.

Edit: To make it more explicit, there are people within the environmental
movement who prefer solar and wind power to fossil fuels, and fossil fuels to
nuclear, not because they believe that the damage to current living things
goes renewable < fossil < nuclear, but rather because the sun and the wind go
on around us all the time even in a state of pure nature, and we're just
redirecting the energy a little with windmills and solar cells, whereas fossil
fuels are in a state of nature sitting around underground and should remain
there, but at least they are in and of themselves natural objects, whereas
nuclear power creates isotopes and elements that simply do not exist in any
measurable quantity in a state of nature. It's about being as close as
possible to that state of nature, not about the harm to humans or animals that
nuclear waste does versus the harm that fossil fuel waste does.

------
crdoconnor
>Compare that to the amount of electricity produced by the other main non-
emitting sources of power, the so-called “renewables”—hydroelectric (6.8
percent), wind (4.2 percent) and solar (about one quarter of a percent). Not
only are nuclear plants the most important of the non-emitting sources, but
they provide baseload—“always there”—power, while most renewables can produce
electricity only intermittently, when the wind is blowing or the sun is
shining.

He neglected to mention that renewables are cheaper:

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/13/wind-
powe...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/13/wind-power-is-
cheapest-energy-unpublished-eu-analysis-finds)

Of course, since the piece seems designed to promote nuclear subsidies of some
kind, this isn't entirely surprising.

~~~
thefacts
No.

The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is estimated to be far greater for PV
and wind. Why? The operation and management (O&M) for PV and Wind is insanely
high. Grid scale PV has to be continuously cleaned with deionized water
because dust and greenery can dramatically decrease efficiency. If a leaf
lands on a cell, energy builds up like a capacitor in the shadowed area, and
it can eventually decimate the whole cell.

On wind: the intermittency is overwhelming, and the cost to deal with that at
base load is estimated in the trillions without even adding an extra megawatt
to the grid.

In an urbanized setting, plants must be able to concentrate energy using small
land mass. Neither wind or PV can do this at scale.

Some panel data on LCOE in this paper:

[http://www.nber.org/papers/w17695.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w17695.pdf)

~~~
cwal37
Naw, you're still oversimplifying it and being way too pessimistic. Renewables
aren't 100% the answer yet, but their LCOE in practice isn't that bad right
now at all[1]. I realize this is at relatively low levels of penetration, but
their uptake has been extremely rapid and tech progression has been quick.
Solar is still expensive as fuck, but everyone knows that. Look at those
variable O&M costs though, those are some sexy zeroes if you can lock in your
other costs adequately.

Pages 10 and 11 here [2](warning, pdf), discuss wind curtailment in MISO,
where they've tackled the curtailment problem head-on with great success. They
also estimate that they can keep manual curtailment incredibly low until wind
doubles in capacity from the time of the report. The intermittentency is not
overwhelming until you have much more wind in the system than we currently do.
Additionally, there are exiting traditional storage techniques that don't get
much traction for a variety of reasons (like pumped storage), which we could
build out hard if we actually needed to.

A healthy mix of renewables, storage technology, grid upgrades, and more
efficient traditional generation technologies would leave us in a fine
position.

[1][http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm](http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm)

[2][http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrel.gov%2Fdocs%2Ffy14osti%2F60983.pdf&ei=fC6LVOWGIoWxyQSz9oG4Dw&usg=AFQjCNEy89XmStkVVRMwFMfx91TwP78Lfw&sig2=-g9dh3myK0l8mh-
NZeWmPA&bvm=bv.81828268,d.aWw&cad=rja)

Hmm, never been downvoted before for providing a sourced comment with relevant
information. Guess people aren't down for discussion today.

------
MrBuddyCasino
The usual TerraPower and Transatomic stuff. An interesting aspect is that the
molten salt reactor can chew up large parts of the light water nuclear waste.
So even if we decide that nuclear power is not the way forward, and even if we
have a working fusion reactor - is there a case to be made for reducing
nuclear waste by processing it in such a reactor?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yes, and some are making the argument that the remaining funds in the disposal
account be used to fund this as it is a much more credible disposal solution
than Yucca Mountain was. And it should help pay for itself with "free" power.

------
olau
The nuclear dream. Is it coming back - or not?

There was an interesting article some time ago:
[http://thebulletin.org/2013/march/how-close-us-nuclear-
indus...](http://thebulletin.org/2013/march/how-close-us-nuclear-industry-do-
nothing)

Unfortunately it is now paywalled.

I personally doubt a come back - costs have gone up while the competition
(wind, solar) is getting cheaper. When you factor in the time and associated
costs to develop new nuclear designs and field test them, it doesn't seem to
me that it can work out.

~~~
spacefight
As long as proper and real scrapping costs are not flowing into the price for
nuclear generated electricity, there will be a comback.

Just have a lock at what's happening in certain european states, i.e. Germany:
Costs for dismantling are or will be exploding.

[http://www.dw.de/scrapping-nuclear-plants-to-cost-
billions/a...](http://www.dw.de/scrapping-nuclear-plants-to-cost-
billions/a-17439221)

------
cjslep
> More than 1,164 nuclear engineering degrees were awarded in 2013—a 160
> percent increase over the number granted a decade ago.

> So what, after a 30-year drought, is drawing smart young people back to the
> nuclear industry? The answer is climate change.

I am one of those 1,164 and graduated in a class of ~100 for a Bachelor's
Degree. (About a third of my classmates upon graduation went straight to Navy
Power School in Charleston, SC or other Navy schools -- so climate change
probably was not their motivator)

I would argue that the _climate change_ implied by the article is the
incorrect one that motivated a lot of people in our class. There were far more
dicussions about the (USA) _political_ climate than the _weather_ climate and
how to properly dispel myths without misinforming people.

EDIT: Formatting

EDIT2: Reading other comments, it does seem like a consistent theme within the
nuclear industry is to properly educate the public -- being honest about the
physics and challenges without getting too technical, but with enough detail
to understand the significance and consequences of the problems.

------
panzi
Meanwhile barrels of nuclear waste that are supposed to last for thousands of
years are rusting, leaking or are all together missing. We really need that
fusion thing to get going. All the waste from fission power is a disaster
waiting to happen.

~~~
maaku
"All that waste" ... you mean the 60 years of waste that if you amassed
together would fit in the endzone of a typical football field?

You mean that "waste" which could actually be separated into medically and
scientifically useful radioisotopes, and a large portion of the remainder
reprocessed as fuel for a 2nd or 3rd generation nuclear reactor?

You mean that waste which, after having its useful components removed, reduces
to less than background levels in under a hundred years?

~~~
altcognito
Oh, this must be a cheap thing to do then - how much would such an operation
cost? We'll have it done by this afternoon!

~~~
maaku
Oh one little snag: that reprocessed fuel for the 2nd gen reactors I referred
to? It's plutonium. You know, the kind you use to make bombs and really
awesome spacecraft. If we actually started doing that you might end up with a
_plutonium economy_ , where there are well guarded warehouses and armored
transports full of this stuff. Then anybody with an extremely specialized
remote operated machine shop for shaping explosive lenses, having insanely
accurate detonators, and the balls to brazenly steal the most well guarded
commodity in existence might be able to build a bomb! One big enough to take
out a few city blocks!

We can't have that, obviously. No, better that we just stockpile this stuff in
rusting metal bins.

