
Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment - nrcha
http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/
======
yazriel
The article is completely unprofessional. The tone itself is very one-sided -
which is bad enough. However, the factual omissions are ridiculous.

Here are a few examples:

the area used for wind turbines is large, but it is usually re-usable for
agriculture, or increasingly off shore

official nuclear death are low - but there is a lot of dispute on the "long
tail" of long term deaths from the big nuclear disasters of Ukraine and Japan

they (correctly) mention the environmental cost of materials for renewable
energy, but ignore the similar pollution of Uranium mining and enrichment

4th generation nuclear reactor are still not even past the design stage. How
can anyone even put a price tag on these ?

3rd generation nuclear reactor are more expensive than claimed in the article.
The real prices of real reactors in the real world in the past decade are x3
the expected costs.

There is simply not enough uranium for a full build out of 3rd generation
nuclear. 4th generation will be required, and it is still in the r&d stage

There is no mention of the huge problem of load-following when using nuclear
plants. You cant just assume 90% CF and then ignore this.

Most importantly, IMHO, they completely ignore the learning curve for solar &
wind. This is a _proven_ trend, over last decades, appears to be set to
continue, and completely changes the discussion.

And on and on....

My own views are pro-nuclear AND pro-renewable. But this requires a scientific
and accurate discussion!

~~~
paulsutter
Could you clarify the "huge problem of load-following" for nuclear power
plants? My understanding is that it's mostly a licensing issue rather than a
technical issue, and in practice hasn't had a big impact on CF[1]

[1] [https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-
news-29-2-lo...](https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-
news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf)

"Most of the currently operating Generation II nuclear reactors were designed
to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and
Germany operate in load-following mode."

"The economic consequences of load-following are mainly related to the
reduction of the load factor... In France, the impact of load-following on the
average unit capacity factor is sometimes estimated at about 1.2%."

"Licensing of load-following is specific to each country. In France and in
Germany, for instance,load-following is considered early in the licensing
process, and no further authorisation needs to be obtained by the utility to
operate in manoeuvring regime. In other countries, load-following restrictions
apply: for example in the United States, automatic load-following is not
authorised"

~~~
barney54
Load following is a technical issues--nukes are limited in the amount they can
load-follow. But winds cannot load follow at all and solar can help some, but
doesn't necessarily help cover peak daily load. For example, yesterday in
California the system peak load was at 5:49 pm, but solar PV peak was at 9:44
am. data:
[http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20151102_DailyRenewa...](http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20151102_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf)

Nukes aren't great for load following, but they can load follow some--which is
better than wind and solar. To really load follow, you need hydro or nat gas
turbines (though nat gas combined cycle can load follow).

~~~
tempestn
Another possibility would be to add massive storage to the grid. Maybe it's
pumped hydro or this kind of thing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8646787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8646787).
Or perhaps more realistically, if someday soon there are millions of electric
vehicles connected to the grid at any given time, especially during current
off-peak hours, that storage could be leveraged for load shaping.

------
pjc50
"We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors, on
the same amount of land, but with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and
the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel."

This is not a production-ready technology, though. I believe there are
lingering problems with corrosion. And the claim that the MSR doesn't require
secondary water cooling is odd: what's the turbine working fluid heat dump
supposed to be?

I really object to phrasing energy policy as either/or. Build out renewables,
now, because that's ready. Let's give the MSR a fair go at getting to
production-ready, see if the problems can be worked out.

Let's _not_ build a nuclear plant whose output is subsidized to twice the
normal wholesale cost:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22772441](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22772441)

~~~
jandrese
Yeah, there are a lot of alternate nuclear reactor designs that look great on
paper but have never had the full scale engineering done to see if it is
practical. And they look cheap because you don't even know half of the stuff
you have to do that makes it expensive.

It's like rocket design where you go "just put a bunch of explosives in a tube
and go into space, this shouldn't be too expensive or difficult..."

~~~
13thLetter
True; many of these dream reactors probably won't work, because that is the
nature of things. But the full-scale engineering never gets done because of
anti-nuclear propaganda playing on mass public ignorance, so at the rate we're
going now we'll never know.

~~~
beat
Full scale engineering, free of the liberal treehugging you decry, happens in
China, India, Russia, and elsewhere. You'd think we'd be seeing better results
than we are.

~~~
witty_username
Well, at least Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant was being delayed due to
protests by local people. Another reason why better results are not being
obtained is because of the subsidy on CO2 emitting fuels by not taxing the
externalities (which would make nuclear power significantly more profitable)
and also difficulties in obtaining nuclear material (NSG, for example).
Kudankulam power plant generates power at 4.29 rupees/kW.h which is barely
profitable compared to other methods (mostly fossil fuels).

------
Animats
Well, we'll know soon how the new AP-1000 reactor works. The first unit starts
up next year, in China.[1] The first US unit should start up in 2019. It's a
boring old pressurized water reactor and should work.

The history of large exotic reactor designs is poor. Sodium-cooled reactors
have sodium fires. Helium-cooled reactors have helium leaks (The Ft. St. Vrain
story is sad; good idea, but some badly designed components in the radioactive
section.) Pebble bed reactors jam. (A small one in Germany is jammed, shut
down, and can't be decommissioned.) Molten salt reactors require an on-site
chemical plant which processes the radioactive molten salt. Chemical plants
for radioactive materials are a huge headache and have the potential to leak.
With pressurized water reactors, you only have to handle water, not
radioactive fluorine salts.

All designs where the radioactive portion of the system has much complexity
have had major problems. Fixing anything in the radioactive part is extremely
difficult. But the reactor has to run for decades to be profitable.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station)

------
brrt
Actually, renewable energy is, when you actually run the numbers in a sensible
way, pretty cost effective:
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759)
\- this finds that with 90% solar/wind and modest amounts of storage,
electricity would be cheaper in 2030 than it is today, and that the cheapest
option is actually a vast overcapacity. There are plenty of flaws with that
article, but still less than this post.

~~~
Retric
They assumed _electrochemical storage_ which is really expensive and
invalidates there findings, renewables would be significantly cheaper than
there suggesting.

~~~
steffenfrost
Battery cost are projected to drop significantly over the next 5 - 10 years.

~~~
beat
Battery costs have _been_ dropping radically for the past decade, and there's
both aggressive startups (Tesla) and established giants investing heavily in
the technology, which will continue to drive prices down.

------
pippy
I'm in the awkward position of supporting nuclear power in a country that has
its anti-nuclear stance apart of its national identity. New Zealands Prime
Minster David Lange famously argued against it at an Oxford Union debate, and
ever since kiwis have viewed it as us standing against the 'big guy'.

Some people I've spoken to view this as on par with not supporting the All
Blacks. To top this off, they typically have an irrational fear of nuclear
power steaming from pop culture such as _The Simpsons_.

It's New Zealand's dirty little secret that we're no where near the "100%
pure" ad campaigns we're running. Half our rivers are polluted beyond repair.
We have less forest coverage than Japan. We flooded vast tracts of land for
our dams. And we're still dependent on non renewables for our electricity.

~~~
geezer
> We have less forest coverage than Japan.

Japan has forest coverage of 67%, which is very respectable. New Zealand has
31.87%. Next 3 countries after New Zealand are Germany, Canada and United
States.

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_area)

~~~
switchbak
Canada is funny though - with so much arctic and prairie land it throws off
the calculations. That's not necessarily due to deforestation however (even
though there is a ton of that going on).

[http://www.biodivcanada.ca/380C93C6-737C-440D-BA5E-011787F42...](http://www.biodivcanada.ca/380C93C6-737C-440D-BA5E-011787F424B5/1-1-Tree-
Coverage-Sep18.gif)

------
lumberjack
The article looks at the cost of energy over the lifetime of the nuclear power
plant. There is no argument that energy generated through fission is very
cheap when looked at that way. However that totally ignores the enormous
startup costs.

The great thing about wind and solar is that you don't have to build a whole
farm. You can start small and keep adding as you come across more capital.

In any case I don't see why one needs to make it a dichotomy. The entities who
invest in alternative energy are probably not the same ones who could invest
in a nuclear power plant because of the above mentioned startup costs.

It's not clear to me whether fission will come back any time soon but wind and
solar will keep gaining in market share.

~~~
iaw
The startup capital required for nuclear fission is so immense that it doesn't
make sense from an economic time-value perspective. The problem with most
renewables (excl. thermal and hydro) is that they are incapable of meeting
100% of electricity demands by their nature without better storage technology.

The economics are pushing towards renewables but I feel that nuclear makes
more sense for our society in the near-term (we need to get away from coal and
other fossil fuels).

~~~
Retric
99% of the worlds grid storage is pumped hydro because nothing else works out.
Pumped storage is 70% to 85% efficient, can come online within 15 seconds, and
works at scale.

 _The reservoir can provide about 13 GW·h of stored gravitational potential
energy (convertible to electricity at about 80% efficiency), or about 2% of
China 's daily electricity consumption.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhuangping_Pumped_Storage_P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhuangping_Pumped_Storage_Power_Station)

Construction cost: $900 million USD_ maintenance costs are also minimal.

PS: ~14 GWh for 1 billion ~= 14 MWh for 1 million = ~14 kwh for 1000$.
[http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall](http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall) =
7 kWh for 3k or 2.3kwh per 1,000$ and much shorter lifetime.

~~~
ricardobeat
Wow, I'm actually surprised that the battery comes that close. When one of the
newer battery technology materializes those numbers might reverse.

~~~
Retric
Don't forget Li your down capacity after just 3 years and you might get 15
years total. Pumped storage is good for 50 years before a refit and the
reservoir is probably good hundreds if not thousands of years.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Of course, pumped storage (or any kind of hydro) is many orders of magnitude
more dangerous and environmentally destructive than fission.

The Banqiao Reservoir dam failure alone killed over 170,000 people and made
over 11 million homeless.

I worry far more about the hundreds of millions of people living downstream of
the Three Gorges Dam than I do about people living near fission plants.

~~~
Retric
That dam failed when 1 year's worth of rain fell over 24 hours if it had not
been there a lot of people would have died anyway.

On net Dams have saved far more than 170,000 lives in china alone. Flood
control is more or less a necessity in the modern world adding energy
generation on top of that is a minimal risk. ex: From 1998
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_China_floods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_China_floods)
loss of 4150 people, and 180 million people were affected.

PS: Direct deaths where ~26,000 people. The 145,000 died during subsequent
epidemics and famine which where blamed on the dam, but that was a convenient
excuse and far from the root cause.

~~~
RobertKerans
I get that it's important to be objective, to look soberly at costs and
benefits. But 'only' 26,000 direct deaths? Oh, that's fine then.

~~~
Retric
Yes, poor word choice. I was comparing 26,000 from a failure in 1975 to 4,150
in 1998 even with lot's of flood control.

Even with lot's of flood control floods still kill some people. But, dams
prevent many floods, reduce severity, and generally give significant warning
time when there not going to be enough. So, most deaths are from small rivers
that feed major ones instead of major rivers overflowing.

Without them, things would be far worse.

------
bradleyjg
The biggest problem with nuclear is making the numbers work. You end up paying
something like 80% of the cost 1 GW/year * 50 years before you get your first
cent in revenue. That's a very tough thing to finance. Cost and especially
time overruns during construction can easily tank the project financially.
About the only way to make it work is to be a regulated utility that has a
long term captured audience for its power. One that's very likely to be the
same size or bigger for the next half century. Even there you still have to
worry about technological change pulling the carpet out from under you in 20
or 30 years.

That's leaving aside the questions of insurance, local and federal regulatory
approval, and waste disposal / decommissioning costs.

~~~
martinald
That doesn't make any sense. Wind and Solar PV have to be financed for
probably 99% of the upfront cost. All power generation is like that - very
capital intensive.

~~~
mikeyouse
If you can raise $1B/year for 10 years for an energy project, to build
nuclear, you'd have to wait roughly 5 years to accumulate enough capital to
start construction and then it'd be at very least 5 more years before you got
a dime in revenue. If you wanted to deploy solar, you could buy $1B/year off a
manufacturing line, start earning revenue from day 1, and start making
payments to your investors.

~~~
martinald
Understand your point - but you can split nuclear into smaller phases too and
phase them in.

Solar and wind aren't immune to this either. You don't want to generally build
things say 10MW at a time - that would require 100 rounds of planning,
regulator approval, engineering design and the like for a big utlity scale
solar and wind plant. You generally do it in big chunks too. And there have
been big holdups especially in getting grid interconnect.

------
frankus
If they're going to have something called a NERD NOTE, they should at least
get their units right:

"The entire planet’s electrical consumption is right around 5 terawatt-hours."

5TWh per what? Per second? Per hour (then why not 5TW?)? Per year? Cumulative
over all of human history?

~~~
ageofwant
Watt is joule/second.

Write it out and algebraically cancel the units and you'l understand that you
don't understand, and then maybe you will.

As a rule, in future, try to understand before mocking, its a better way to
live, take it from me...

~~~
carpdiem
I think you've misunderstood the point. Terawatt-hours is ambiguous, without
specifying a time period.

In particular, Terawatt-hours can be converted to Joules. To say that
humanity's energy usage is X Joules is meaningless without specifying the time
period that that energy is used over. For example, it means very different
things to say that humanity uses 5 TWh per day than to say that humanity uses
5 TWh per year (versus 5 TWh since the dawn of recorded history!).

~~~
ageofwant
The context is deathprint” (casualties per terawatt-hour) or deaths/joule,
time cancels out. If you read the NERD Note alone your right of course.

~~~
nkurz
That's not the context that everyone else is referring to. They are referring
to this:

"[NERD NOTE: A terawatt is a trillion watts. The entire planet’s electrical
consumption is right around 5 terawatt-hours. One TWh (terawatt-hour) is a
constant flow of a trillion watts of electricity for a period of one hour.]"

The argument others are making (which I think is correct) is that it is
meaningless to say "The entire planet’s electrical consumption is right around
5 terawatt-hours" without specifying a time frame over which that consumption
occurs.

------
ju-st
The German wikipedia does have some interesting references to reports on
thorium reactors from the British National Nuclear Laboratories [1][2]:

> In the foreseeable future (up to the next 20 years), the only realistic
> prospect for deploying thorium fuels on a commercial basis would be in
> existing and new build LWRs (e.g., AP1000 and EPR) or PHWRs (e.g., Candu
> reactors). Thorium fuel concepts which require first the construction of new
> reactor types (such as High Temperature Reactor (HTR), fast reactors and
> Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS)) are regarded as viable only in the much
> longer term (of the order of 40+ years minimum) as this is the length of
> time before these reactors are expected to be designed, built and reach
> commercial maturity.

1:
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCssigsalzreaktor#Kritis...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCssigsalzreaktor#Kritische_Expertenstudien_zu_MSR_und_Thoriumnutzung)
2:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130126205622/http://www.nnl.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130126205622/http://www.nnl.co.uk/media/8241/nnl__1314092891_thorium_cycle_position_paper.pdf)

~~~
kuschku
The reason for this is that Germany had developed and build 2 prototype
thorium reactors, and had its fair share of issues with them.

------
tim333
Hmm... the article has solar/wind costing 6 or more times as much as nuclear

Wikipedia has them costing about the same
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States)

Plus solar etc. are dropping in price in each year in a way that nuclear
isn't. I suspect someone's numbers are a bit off.

------
lolc
Hahaa, look how they considered the cost for nuclear waste storage:

"Because the future cost of safe storage is uncertain, we refrained from
including any numbers."

Of course I'm joking. They just didn't mention it.

------
natch
The word "centralized" does not appear anywhere in their post, which tells me
that they are not thinking about that as an issue. But it is an important bias
of nuclear energy, the bias toward centralization. One of the benefits of
solar is that it can be either centralized, or decentralized, or a hybrid of
the two. Being less biased in this way, it opens up more flexible options.

Another important aspect of solar is that its performance is a moving target.
Because solar cells are improving over time, comparisons against them need to
be kept updated, or else the underlying assumptions of the comparison are
invalid.

~~~
gruez
>The word "centralized" does not appear anywhere in their post, which tells me
that they are not thinking about that as an issue

why is centralized power an issue? It was only recently that power generation
became decentralized (through renewables such as wind and solar)

~~~
lutorm
For one, the argument that "solar takes a ridiculous amount of area" becomes
less compelling if you realize that each home can supply its own energy using
existing roof area.

------
tomcam
I am not reflexively anti-nuclear. However, I have never heard a satisfactory
answer to the simple question: "How do we store nuclear waste safely?"

~~~
toomuchtodo
Everyone brushes over that, the billions of dollars to build a plant, and the
~10 year construction time. Any nuclear power plant that has construction
started _today_ won't be cost competitive with renewables when it comes
online.

It would be like building a new coal plant in the US today. You simply can't
compete with wind, solar, and natural gas (which is still superior to coal,
and I don't mind it being a stranded asset for whomever invested in it as
solar and wind ramp up).

~~~
merpnderp
How do wind and solar provide a solid baseline power. And China builds nuclear
plants a lot faster and cheaper than we do, and no known accidents. Maybe we
can learn something from them. Plus the whole 90% of a nuclear plant's cost is
servicing the debt. Once completed the operational costs are a rounding error.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> How do wind and solar provide a solid baseline power.

Properly built and managed distribution networks, along with utility scale
battery storage.

> And China builds nuclear plants a lot faster and cheaper than we do, and no
> known accidents.

Yet. China still gets more power from wind than nuclear, and they're building
out wind generation capacity far faster than nuclear: [http://www.earth-
policy.org/data_highlights/2015/highlights5...](http://www.earth-
policy.org/data_highlights/2015/highlights50)

> Maybe we can learn something from them.

Indeed. When you're an authoritarian regime, you can operate more fluidly "at
scale" (fuck you, I do what I want).

> Plus the whole 90% of a nuclear plant's cost is servicing the debt.

And yet, someone has to pony up those billions of dollars. A kickstarter
perhaps?

> Once completed the operational costs are a rounding error.

And when you fail hard, it costs billions of dollars to cleanup:
[http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-
heal...](http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-
policy-institute/responses/costs-and-consequences-of-fukushima.html)

I'll take solar and wind, thanks.

~~~
cthalupa
>And when you fail hard, it costs billions of dollars to cleanup:
[http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-
heal...](http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-heal..).

Using Fukushima as an argument against nuclear is such a silly thing to do,
and the decades long freeze on any sort of real progress in meaningfully
upgraded or new commercial reactors makes this sort of thing a self fulfilling
prophecy.

How many industries have catastrophic failures? How many people have been
killed by hydro-electric dams? How much financial damage?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam)

We've created a climate where a completely viable power option that is better
than what we have now has had innovation massively stifled due to politics and
fearmongering, which has in turn made it more difficult for nuclear plants to
be a safe option, which then allows for even more politics and fear mongering.

Fukushima? Yes, it was a catastrophic failure. But it was hit by a 9.0
earthquake and then a tsunami. It was scheduled to be shut down two weeks from
the earthquake. It was a 4 decade old plant that was being shut down due to
it's age hit by some of the worst possible natural disasters, and even then
some better design choices, such as a higher seawall, or not storing the
backup generators underground would have prevented it. The condenser units
also hadn't been inspected or had maintenance performed on them since
basically the reactor's opening. Everything that happened with Fukushima could
have been prevented even with it's old technology despite being batter with
one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. And this is with 4
decade old technology. With a more favorable political climate, how many
advances in safety and efficiency could have been made over those decades?

~~~
JabavuAdams
It's not just about trusting the technology, it's about trusting the human
processes that govern and maintain that technology. You say that Fukushima
could have been prevented, and yet -- it wasn't prevented.

Humans are greedy, generally corrupt, and bad at maintenance when things are
going well. To really trust nuclear, we need better humans, since the
accidents can be so catastrophic.

------
jagermo
I have nothing against nuclear energy, but I have a problem with "let's just
put the waste, idunno, here and let it sit for a few thousand years".

In Germany, several of the energy companies completley distanced themselves
from the waste they produce. I was at a conference once, where one of the
heads of EnKK (a dauthger of EnBW) said after beeing asked what he things his
responsibilities for the waste are:

"Well you know, you don't care what happens to your waste at home. Look to the
law, we are not responsible."

I think this is one of the biggest reasons why nuclear power has run its
course. I might be feasable for contries like the US, Russia or China to find
a spot where to store their nuclear waste, but in densly populated areas in
Europe? No way.

Just look at the catastrophy that is the Asse:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine)

Tl;dr: As long as there is no secure way to store nuclear waste for a thousand
years, nuclear has no future.

------
drzaiusapelord
Considering all the delays involved in getting up new plants (both technical
and political) we're looking at what, a decade out for something with a break-
even point of several decades? How far will renewables be then? There might be
some logic to further invest in renewables instead of spending hundreds of
millions of dollars on a stop-gap solution that's guaranteed to just take us
to peak uranium sooner than later. That said, we shouldn't be decommissioning
existing plants for political reasons like the Germans are.

From a personal perspective I think I'm using less electricity than ever. I
only have CFL/LED bulbs, flat screen TV's use less power than old tubes, every
appliance I own is tons more efficient than the stuff just a generation ago,
etc. Heck, even my powerful desktop PC uses a lot less power than before.

------
intrasight
Utilities are mostly free to build nuclear power plants. They don't because a)
they can afford the construction cost, and b) they can't afford the insurance
cost. So the nuclear industry says "no problem, we'll just ask the government
to subsidize the construction cost and pass laws to shield you from
liability". But they are finding that the "public risk - private profit"
paradigm doesn't sell so well anymore for some reason.

~~~
jessaustin
Here in Missouri, Ameren tried for years to get the CWIP-financing ban [0]
overturned so that rate-payers would build a new nuclear plant rather than
investors. In a rare victory for representative government, they spun their
wheels until the dropping price of natural gas made the whole exercise
academic. They're hoping that other fuels will simultaneously peak at some
point so they can lock their customers into decades of expensive power, but it
won't be anytime soon.

[0] Why is there a ban, you ask? Because the _first_ nuclear plant they built,
in the 1970s, had such catastrophic cost overruns that the entire state swore,
"never again".

------
vanessapu
I absolutely agree that nuclear is our best option as long as the reactor and
the waste is located in your backyard.

~~~
Alupis
They aren't nearly as dangerous as the popular opinion would have you believe.

There has been only a single incident that I'm aware of (Chernobyl), all
others were near incidents (Three Mile Island, Japan, etc...).

In fact, the technology and safety has come a long way since the 60's. Most US
Navy ships are nuclear powered, and have not had incidents (and these are
designed to go to war and survive). Japan was hit by multiple severe
earthquakes and tsunamis (even at the same time!) and managed to keep the
reactors from having an incident (this has got to be close to the worst
possible case).

~~~
peckrob
> all others were near incidents (Three Mile Island, Japan, etc...).

I would hardly call Fukushima [0] a "near incident." It's considered on the
same scale as Chernobyl [1].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale#Level_7:_Major_accident)

~~~
Alupis
> I would hardly call Fukushima [0] a "near incident."

I called it a "near incident" because there was no meltdown, and the issue was
resolved without having to permanently evacuate any area around the plant.

Essentially they got it under control, and given the circumstances it took to
get the plant into that situation in the first place, I'd say it's a flagship
example of how far Nuclear safety has come.

Today Japan is activating even more Nuclear power plants.

~~~
peckrob
> there was no meltdown

Except that there totally was a meltdown.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Core_meltdowns)

* [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/201706-muon-scans-confirm...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/201706-muon-scans-confirm-complete-reactor-meltdown-at-fukushima-reactor-1)

* [http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/09/29/fukushima-watc...](http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/09/29/fukushima-watch-near-complete-meltdown-confirmed-at-reactor-2/)

> the issue was resolved without having to permanently evacuate any area
> around the plant.

Except for the 20 mile exclusion zone that is still in place.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_reaction_to_Fukushima...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_reaction_to_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster)

* [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/11916879/Inside-Fukushimas-nuclear-disaster-exclusion-zone-in-pictures.html)

I'm not an anti-nuclear person by any means, but let's not sugarcoat this
disaster. It was bad.

------
blazespin
A new study in Nature says that using thorium as a nuclear fuel has a higher
risk for proliferation into weapons than scientists had believed.
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-
the...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-the-
superfuel-thorium-riskier-than-we-thought-14821644/)

------
jorangreef
A nuclear researcher from iThemba Labs gave a talk at University of Cape Town
shortly after the Fukushima accident.

1\. During his talk, he mentioned that nuclear plants are designed to have a
very low probability of Chernobyl-scale failure, and that the current rate of
Chernobyl-scale failure given the number of nuclear plants in production is
roughly 1 every 20 years.

2\. He eventually concluded his talk by saying that we should double the
number of nuclear plants in production around the world to remove our
dependence on coal.

I asked a question at the end of his talk, given point 1. then point 2. would
mean 1 Chernobyl every 10 years. He was completely dumbfounded. He had never
combined his ideas with simple probability theory. One physics student present
then said angrily: "Yes, but we will get better at building nuclear plants."

~~~
sooheon
I'd still take 1 Chernobyl every 10 years over breathing Beijing air every
single day of every year.

~~~
kgarten
For you dying every 10 years is better than breathing Beijing air once ... hmm
...

------
Thiz
Or just install solar roofs with power walls in every single american home for
1 trillion dollars and be done with it. No need to occupy extra land or run
expensive machinery and power lines all over the country.

Distributed energy is the future.

~~~
Bluestrike2
Maybe for some applications (low usage residential), but not for all.
Certainly not for energy-intensive industrial applications. And if you're
running lines to industrial sites--which are located all over the country in
all sorts of areas--you might as well hook up residential developments to the
grid as well to be more efficient and cost effective. That's not to say that
distributed generation is a bad idea, or that it isn't going to happen. It's
not, and it will. But it'll still be connected to the grid. No one's really
proposing doing away with grid connections, outside some very limited and
specific types of situations.

------
mbil
I don't know anything about nuclear energy, but a friend who works in nuclear
tech told me that the reason thorium as an energy source hasn't been embraced
is because its byproduct can be used for weapons. That doesn't look to be
exactly accurate (based on a few minutes of googling), but there might be some
truth to it.

[http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-
nuclear-w...](http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-
wonder-fuel.html)

~~~
PolLambert
The reverse is actually true. Nobody uses Thorium since you can't make bombs
out of them. Thorium is very unsuited to weaponize since one of the byproducts
of the fuel process (U-232) decays in to a hard gamma-emitter. This not only
makes the material dangerous to handle, it will also wreak havoc with bomb
electronics, will require heavy shielding and be very easy to detect.

Due to its unsuitability for bombs _, the militaries of the world (in the
'50s) didn't invest into researching Thorium. Industrial inertia (and sunk
costs) and Uranium being good enough lead us to where we are today.

_It is 'technically' possible to make a U-233 bomb but the effort required is
so far above U-235 bombs that for any nation able to do the former, it's much
easier and cheaper to do the latter.

~~~
jandrese
Emitting hard gammas seems like it would be troublesome for a power plant as
well.

~~~
PolLambert
A nuclear power plant has thousands of tons of shielding. There are also no
timing critical electronics sitting right next to the fuel.

------
peoii
It's the sad truth that people seem very for nuclear, but no one wants to live
near it. Of course, I've seen articles regarding people who don't want to live
near wind turbines, so maybe people are just far to fickle.

~~~
interconnector
Have you ever stood next to giant wind turbines? While driving through an area
with hundreds of 100 meter wind turbines, I stopped to take a closer look at
them. They are genuinely fear inducing, and feel alien. I could not stay close
to one for more than a few minutes before I was overcome with dread.

~~~
blakeyrat
How do you feel about windmills like this:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/De_Liefd...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/De_Liefde_Windmill,_Sakura,_Chiba,_Japan_-_20060417.jpg)

Genuinely curious. I've never heard of a phobia like yours before, is it just
because of the motion, or is there something different about steel towers than
stone ones?

~~~
interconnector
I think a few aren't too bad, it was just the sheer numbers that unnerved me.
The wind was quite strong, it felt I was standing next to many powerful jet
engines.

------
jerven
Its a nice write up but I don't believe it. It focusses to much on capacity
factor, which is an interesting easy measure. But not nearly as important as
one might expect. The key measure is actually dispatch-ability. i.e. how quick
can you turn it on and off again. In markets with energy trading this is key
for profitability.

The CSP plants with molten salt storage do really well on the market because
they can turn on and off as fast as gas peaker plants. (For as long as they
have storage of course). They will off course have a low capacity utilisation
as they are peakers in all but name (aimed at daily evening peak load).

Nuclear has a high capacity factor, not because they are base load. But
because once they are on they are on. And being on they will sell all they
produce for as long as possible. Driving all other producers of the market.
i.e. in the current market with 20% nuclear in the US they are rarely forced
off the grid because demand is always greater than what they can supply. Once
we hit 50% peak load supply by nuclear this high capacity factor will drop.
For the simple fact that while a Nuclear power plant can produce, no one is
buying.

So for a whole system using just nuclear capacity factor will be around 60%
not 90% due to market realities on the supply side.

Wind is at 40% capacity factor, not because of technical limits (one could
build 90% capacity factor windmills if you where crazy, you just derate the
generator but keep the same blades, e.g. put an 1mw generator in a turbine
designed for 3mw and you will get your 1mw most of the time, but never capture
the 3mw you could some of the time)

Wind power plants are repowered at the moment after 20 years, not due to
limitations of the tech. But because turbines made today are so much better
than those of 20 years ago. Most of these old windmills are actually resold on
the second market, and its quite difficult to get enough 500kw mills at a good
price. Also upto 2/3 of the value of a wind mill is in its steel tower, value
that exists in 20 years as much as it does today (little rust and easy to
recycle)

He also takes 2.5mw turbines from GE as an example but those are rather small
these days. They are heading into the 8mw territory today and we will see 12MW
plus mills in the coming years.

Critically, looking at it on an economic perspective. Once you start building
a wind farm, it takes 18 days to build on site a turbine, from base to grid
connection. That means you know if its going to work in a month. This leads to
easy financing compared to nuclear, where the average best case build time is
4 years, which often descends into decades of building. Financing wise that is
a completely different game.

Also wind and solar power are added at 100Mw order of magnitude to the grid in
single year projects. This is better for project financing and risk
management. Panel in project phase1 bad buy a different one for phase2, same
for wind turbines.

All in all 500, 1000APs could not be build in 20 years even if we lined them
up one after the other. The infra in forging and assembly is just not there,
not even if we went all in on it.

Wind and solar can be build at that scale. Because its distributed
manufacturing. Best case nuclear numbers barely meet offshore wind numbers
today. Wind which has manufacturing on scale benefits that nuclear does not,
will reduce costs much faster than nuclear.

PV efficiency will go up, e.g. look at the first solar efficiency roadmap.

If you are buying a power plant, then you will quickly see that Nuclear is not
a cheap or easy to finance option. A 1 billion windfarm not working out, you
cancel midway in construction with 500 million of pain. A 4 billion nuclear
power plant not working out, you are decade down stream with a 10 billion
bill. 4 billion is a sum few electricity companies can gather, 500 million
borrowing for 18 days during construction after which a wind farm is sold on a
power purchase agreement made is much easier for many more electricity
companies. Think: if you owe 1 million the bank owns you, if you owe 100
million you own the bank...

Nuclear should work, and if it did it would sell like cup cakes. The problem
really is that these cup cakes cost as much as a trip to the moon... You might
wonder why I am bringing up financing so often. In a energy market like the EU
or US where there is enough current generation this is key for a plant/farm to
be build or not. Often you can only finance if you can drive an other
generator off the market, by being cheaper.

Solar and wind benefit from the law of large numbers, nuclear does not. If a
nuclear plant goes into maintenance you lose 1gw. If a turbine goes down you
lose 10mw, a substation blows up you lose 100mw. A nuclear power plant
transformer fire, and you lose 1gw in a minute, is a major grid issue. Design
issue in your plant, 4gw offline for regulatory reasons, major grid issue.

Nuclear power plants are to big and to expensive, small modular nuclear could
work. But no serious market players are in this field.

Energy storage is currently still to expensive, but even there prices are
dropping utility scale power storage is not just pumped storage. (Funnily
enough in the UK this was build because of the nuclear investment). Hydrogen,
heat, batteries, compressed air, fly wheels are all being investigated and
each has deployments in the market. Currently still rather specialised
depending on local market needs, but getting closer to taking on gas peakers.

~~~
jhayward
This is a robust and cogent analysis of the case for nuclear. Advocates, often
motivated by global warming concern, do not look at the "grid that will be",
and rather look at "the grid today" or "the grid of the past". That nuclear
gets more expensive (lower capacity factor) the more of it there is should
really give people pause.

Thanks for such a good note.

------
bluthru
Great points as to why nuclear isn't our best option:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3nhhOitYmk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3nhhOitYmk)

~~~
vlehto
1\. You can make same argument about any energy recourse. "we need so big
number of them, that it's futile." I guess my grandchildren will die then.

2\. No way to recycle.. Except there is. Over half of current energy
production happens in countries that already have nuclear weapon, or are part
of NATO. So because Ghana can't have heavy water nuclear power plant, U.S.
can't either?

3\. Price going up with the cheapest fuel out there does not sound like much
of an issue. He does not quantify anything.

4\. France needs to use huge amounts of water for cooling because they produce
about 75% of their electricity with nuclear. If average would be even 50% of
electricity produced by nukes, we could breathe lot easier with the climate
change. You can also cool with seawater.

Fukushima proved that even with completely fucked up security culture, dated
power plant and overall completely unpredictable carnage, nuclear is still
safe.

5\. Nuclear is centralized and that's not hip-n-cool. This last point is the
best one IMO. But it's more of an argument why we should not rely only on
nuclear. Not a reason to abstain from it.

~~~
bluthru
>"we need so big number of them, that it's futile." I guess my grandchildren
will die then.

You can build a lot of PVs and turbines in the same amount of time, and place
them closer to where they're being used (reduce transmission loss). You can
also place them on top of buildings (reduces AC load by 2%) and on top of
parking lots (reduces car heat and urban heat island effect).

You're not going to electrify poor parts of the world with big, expensive,
centrally-controlled fission plants.

>You can also cool with seawater.

The video addresses this. Seawater is often near fault lines, but that's not
the biggest issue: transmission loss. If your power generation is on the
coasts then you lose a lot of electricity powering the interior of the
country.

>nuclear is still safe

Even if every nuclear accident was as "safe" as Fukushima, that's still a lot
of wasted money. It will cost over $100 BILLION to clean it up. You can buy a
lot of safe and renewable energy for that amount of money.

~~~
vlehto
>You can build a lot of PVs and turbines in the same amount of time, and place
them closer to where they're being used (reduce transmission loss). You can
also place them on top of buildings (reduces AC load by 2%) and on top of
parking lots (reduces car heat and urban heat island effect).

That was not the point. The argument was that nobody can build all the
hundreds of nuclear plants that we would need. How can we build the millions
of PV's and thousands of turbines?

>You're not going to electrify poor parts of the world with big, expensive,
centrally-controlled fission plants.

Why not? It's probably the cost/watt that matters.

>transmission loss

Most of world population lives close to coastline.

>It will cost over $100 BILLION to clean it up.

Nuclear power might still be cheaper as a whole.

~~~
bluthru
>How can we build the millions of PV's and thousands of turbines?

Those things fall off an assembly line. Nuclear power plants can't be massed-
produced.

>Why not?

Who's going to invest that much money? While you're waiting around for a nuke
plant and all of the infrastructure to be built, a few PV's can make a washing
machine work and then girls can go to school.

~~~
vlehto
You don't make wind turbine pylons or blades on assembly line either. You
don't install solar panels to rooftops by assembly line. If nuclear gets
enough momentum, large portion of the parts can be produced on assembly line
too. But I think this is better covered by cost analysis than any _argument_
about serial production.

If the absolutely poorest parts of the world are not going to get fission
plants in near future, that doesn't mean places like China, India and
Indonesia could not get them. This is what matters if we want to combat
climate change. But I'm not opposed to solar panels either. Whatever can be
done quickly that cuts CO2 emissions.

------
Jean-Philipe
Any idea why the uranium enrichment process is not mentioned in the article?
It's quite expensive and even generates more CO2 than a modern coal based
power plant in its lifetime.

------
skybrian
I skimmed, but I think this is missing the value of the land that people won't
be able to use in case of an accident. A semi-permanent mass evacuation isn't
cheap.

~~~
coddingtonbear
Well, we're definitely making the whole planet unusable just by producing
energy the way we are today.

~~~
merpnderp
Not even counting CO2, yearly coal production is like having nuclear meltdowns
all the time. Mercury, uranium, particulates, lead, heavy metals, and arsenic.

------
roflchoppa
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOgS8gTATv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOgS8gTATv8)

Nuclear Energy is the cleanest energy

------
bigbugbag
Well once again an article that fails to address that the energy production
issue could be addressed with controlling our energy wants instead of
mindlessly using more and more combined with local self-production instead of
centralized giant production plants and transportation.

Let's not forget that nuclear plants are basically huge and optimized steam
dynamos and that a breakthrough in producing electricity would be a game
changer.

------
michaelpinto
Every form of energy generation has positive and negative points, to claim
that one is the best is oversimplification. In fact when I met people who
worked for that industry their argument to me was that no single source of
energy generation could meet full demand. To me the real prize in the energy
game is efficiency, and there's quite a bit of wasted energy if you look
around.

------
moonbug
For a rather more sober -- not to say sobering -- assessment of the state of
the nuclear industry, I do recommend the annual World Nuclear Industry Status
Reports

[http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20151023MSC-
WNISR2...](http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20151023MSC-
WNISR2015-V4-LR.pdf)

------
blazespin
The article neglects to mention the insurance costs of running a nuclear power
plant versus the insurance costs of running solar / wind. It's nice to just
hand wave away insurance, except when you discover that only nation states
have the ability to insure these things.

------
lutorm
I find the argument about area needed spurious. By using the same point, I
could claim that there is no way automobiles will succeed in society, because
of the enormous area that would need to get paved... except that doesn't seem
to have stopped us.

------
garyclarke27
1 cm3 of water weighs a lot more than 1 gram ?? From a quick skim through,
many of his calcs seem to be based on this i.e. major error.

~~~
ksenzee
The weight of one cubic centimeter of water is in fact one gram. By
definition.

~~~
jcranmer
Not by definition: a kilogram is defined as the exact mass of a lump of
iridium-platinum alloy sitting in a vault in Paris (well, Sèvres). But the
kilogram was designed to be the weight of a liter of water at its melting
point, and then later 4°C (where water achieves maximum density).

------
kgarten
I wonder why hacker news is so positive on nuclear power. The article is full
of false information or misguided information. I always recommend "Into
Eternity" to understand why nuclear is one of the worst options for eternity
;)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_\(film\))

~~~
PolLambert
While I strongly disagree with you on nuclear power (especially since
radioactive decay means that 'eternity' by definition is always safe, unlike
chemical waste), I strongly agree that "Into Eternity" is a must-watch.

The only real long-term risk to geological disposal are future humans. The
question the documentary adresses is 'how to communicate to future generations
not to dig there'.

------
DaniFong
The numbers here are off by about two orders of magnitude on the cost of
pumped hydro storage.

------
blazespin
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

------
yk
So nuclear is cheaper if one takes the numbers from the industry for cost,
while ignoring the problem of spend fuel. And ignoring the actual main cost of
nuclear power, which empirically is the property damage in Pripyat and
Fukushima.

~~~
cthalupa
>Pripyat

The USSR was horrendous at building things in a safe manner. Go look at their
track record building submarines vs. the US. Someone making a shitty version
of something and it being bad is not a good argument against making a proper
version of it.

>Fukushima

I've spent a fair amount of words talking about Fukushima elsewhere in here,
so I'll keep this short:

A 4 decade old plant that was being decommissioned was hit by a 9.0 earthquake
and massive tsunami, among the worst in modern history, and still could have
been fine if it had better design choices (Higher seawall, backup generators
not being stored underground) or if the condensers had been serviced in the
past decades rather than being left sitting there to break down since the
plant's opening. The issues with Fukushima were not hard ones to solve - they
were a matter of negligence, and that is an argument for making sure we aren't
negligent, not not doing something in the first place.

~~~
yk
Thing is, catastrophic failure occurs if safety assumptions fail. There is
nothing in your argument that improves my opinion of the current safety
assumptions.

------
stock
Solar PV is less than 3 cents and nuclear is at least 15 cents.

A nuclear meltdown is called a "sacrifice zone" and a solar meltdown is called
a sunny day.

Make me proud, go solar!

~~~
opo
I think you are going to need to add some citations (from a source without an
agenda).

Each country is going to have different costs for energy usage so it isn’t
clear why you are claiming the costs you do without putting them in context.
For example, as might be expected, solar PV is more expensive in Canada. From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants):
“...Independent reviews rarely show that nuclear power plants are necessarily
very expensive,[21][22] but anti-nuclear groups frequently produce reports
that say the costs of nuclear energy are prohibitively high.[23][24][25][26]
This is despite the fact that the cost of electricity in nuclear France is
approximately half of that in Germany and Denmark.[27][28][29] In Ontario,
hydroelectricity and nuclear have by far the cheapest generation costs, at
4.3c/kWh and 5.9c/kWh respectively, whilst solar costs a massive
50.4c/kWh.[30][31] "

For example, on the wiki page, the Brookings Institute (which doesn’t appear
to have a financial stake in supporting or attacking nuclear power):

“...In 2014, Brookings Institution published The Net Benefits of Low and No-
Carbon Electricity Technologies which states, after performing an energy and
emissions cost analysis, that "The net benefits of new nuclear, hydro, and
natural gas combined cycle plants far outweigh the net benefits of new wind or
solar plants", with the most cost effective low carbon power technology being
determined to be nuclear power.[106][107] Moreover, Paul Joskow of MIT has
determined that the "Levelized cost of electricity"(LCOE) metric is a poor
means of comparing electricity sources as it hides the extra costs, such as
the need to frequently operate back up power stations, incurred due to the use
of intermittent power sources such as wind energy, while the value of baseload
power sources are underpresented.[108]”

Also the EU found: “...An EU-funded research study known as ExternE, or
Externalities of Energy, undertaken from 1995 to 2005, found that the cost of
producing electricity from coal or oil would double, and the cost of
electricity production from gas would increase by 30% if external costs such
as damage to the environment and to human health, from the particulate matter,
nitrogen oxides, chromium VI, river water alkalinity, mercury poisoning and
arsenic emissions produced by these sources, were taken into account. It was
estimated in the study that these external, downstream, fossil fuel costs
amount up to 1-2% of the EU's Gross Domestic Product, and this was before the
external cost of global warming from these sources was included.[109] The
study also found that the environmental and health costs of nuclear power, per
unit of energy delivered, was lower than many renewable sources, including
that caused by biomass and photovoltaic solar panels, but was higher than the
external costs associated with wind power and alpine hydropower.[110]”

In the US: “...In 2014, the US Energy Information Administration estimated the
levelized cost of electricity from new nuclear power plants going online in
2019 to be $0.096/kWh before government subsidies, comparable to the cost of
electricity from a new coal-fired power plant without carbon capture, but
higher than the cost from natural gas-fired plants.[98]”

>...A nuclear meltdown is called a "sacrifice zone" and a solar meltdown is
called a sunny day.

Installing/maintaining PV solar (particularly on roofs) is not as safe as you
imply in your comment. Even including Chernobyl, the deaths from nuclear power
have been significantly less: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-
twh-by-energy-so...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-
energy-source.html)

------
blumkvist
Nuclear energy is very expensive when adjusted for building the plant.
Companies building those plants know this and their usual tactic is to
severely underbudget, knowing that a government cannot refuse to pay because
it is committed. The Olkiluoto plant in Finland was estimated at €3bn before
start and at the most recent revision the estimation was €9bn with a 10 year
delay. The plant is not yet operational and I expect there will be even
further delays. Don't drink the nuclear cool aid.

~~~
anon1mous
Exactly. Most of the numbers and arguments in this article are made up. Has
there been a single nuclear plant built anywhere in the developed world on
budget? They all end 3x-6x the budget. Decommissioning those is extremely
expensive as well.

Nuclear waste is a huge problem. The nuclear industry always has magical
solutions 20 years in the future. The US ends up melting that waste into
Depleted Uranium weapons and dumping them on the Balkans or the Middle East
(killing millions in the long term).

A single accident at an NPP can kill millions of people. How much would that
cost? E.g. a Stuxnet clone can destroy complete states/countries.

~~~
akie
> "killing millions"

Do you have a source for that?

------
ebbv
This article is pretty terrible. The bias is just ridiculous. When discussing
wind and solar the author constantly makes assumptions that favor worst cases,
and makes questionable comparisons. For example; stating that "more Americans"
died from installing rooftop solar than have died from construction or use of
nuclear power, cherry picking the most dangerous possible activity related to
solar power (some guy up on his roof, which is a dangerous activity with or
without solar panels) to the least dangerous thing about nuclear energy
(professional contractors constructing the plants and the plants running
normally.)

He cites figures when they will be favorable for nuclear or impressive for the
point he's making, and leaves them out when they would undermine it. He cherry
picks American nuclear experience in the examples above because we have so far
avoided truly terrible disaster here with regards to nuclear energy. (Three
Mile Island wasn't good but it wasn't Chernobyl or Fukushima.)

He also cites figures for the amount of space needed for solar and wind to
replace all current forms of power without sources. Never mind the fact that
actually replacing all of our power with renewables is something that will
take a century or more, nobody's talking about completely replacing our entire
power generation system in the next few decades with renewables or nuclear.

The real question is not "what can replace our whole system today." because
the answer to that is nothing. The real question is, as we expand and replace
generators that are being decommissioned, what should they be replaced with?

The concerns there people have about nuclear are not about whether it's more
cost effective than renewables (if all we cared about was cost we'd keep
burning coal, we know we can't do that), or whether it's safer to build, but
what is the long term effect and what are the long term dangers. The long term
dangers of a solar farm are basically nothing. You cannot get a Fukushima like
disaster out of a solar plant.

The pro-nuclear side will tell you "Oh the new reactors are totally safe, you
could never have a problem like that." But they've always said that about
nuclear plants. "Oh this new design is safe." Then a disaster happens and they
say "Oh well that was the old design, the new design is safe."

~~~
merpnderp
I think ""more Americans" died from installing rooftop solar than have died
from construction or use of nuclear power" includes all aspects of nuclear
power. The "or use" would seemingly include operating nuclear plants. And
given the incredibly low number of deaths in the US associated with nuclear
power production, it seems fair.

~~~
ebbv
It's not everything, though. Because as I mentioned it purposely focuses on
America, excluding the two biggest nuclear disasters (Chernobyl and
Fukushima.)

Also fatalities hardly tell the whole story. Far more people have had their
lives totally upended by Fukushima than have died from it, and then there's
all the people born with defects from Chernobyl, or left unable to reproduce,
and we have yet to see the long term effects of Fukushima.

Pro-nuclear folks tend to focus on a couple of things; cost and mortality
under "normal" circumstances. Because those two things look great. But if you
start talking about the full impact that nuclear power has had on it world,
the picture becomes far less rosy.

~~~
merpnderp
But talking about Chernobyl and Fukushima is like focusing on the Pinto as a
rolling deathtrap and saying we shouldn't have cars. Fukushima should have
been shut down decades ago when it was discovered the danger earthquakes posed
for it, and Chernobyl was such a horrific chain of bad decisions, it might as
well have been on purpose.

------
mtgx
It seems to me that the recent few articles on fusion have inspired a lot of
people - who now seem to be thinking "hey you know what would be great? If we
moved back to _fission_ reactors!"

I'm not talking about people writing these articles. I'm sure there's one
appearing on the Web every week. I'm talking about people who are suddenly
upvoting these articles.

But to me that doesn't make any sense. Fusion, I get. It's something like 10x
more efficient than fission, and it's not radioactive or as dangerous as
fission. But just because I support having more companies and research into
fusion, _does not_ mean that I would support fission reactors.

Despite this article, solar power is still the most _practical_ way of getting
renewable energy in the next 20 years. Thinking about building new fission
reactors is like getting excited about some "breakthrough gas-powered engine
that uses 50% less fuel", when everyone is already thinking about getting an
EV for their next car.

~~~
iaw
One thing I want to point out that a lot of the recent articles seem to
ignore. With fusion reactors there is absolutely no risk of runaway reactions
like those observed at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island but there is a huge
potential (and likelihood) for local material being radioactively contaminated
due to neutron bombardment over long periods of time (this is the principle
material science challenge faced in attempting to make fusion practical).

Fission reactors operating in this country are all over 40-year old designs.
The newer designs actually have substantially improved safety capabilities
over the old models, but political and economic challenges have prevented the
adoption of new plants.

------
sea2summit
I'm really tired of all the internet kids plugging nuclear. The numbers don't
work, and the cost of failure is huge. We can put solar on everyone's roof and
turbines in windy areas and it's completely safe, dumb nuts simple, and
decentralized. Nuclear energy is dead. Let it go.

~~~
ageofwant
The numbers work and the cost of "failure" in gen 4 reactors is zero. Try
reading the article, its written for people like you.

I'm getting tired of old brainwashed hippies pushing their 70's nuclear-hate
narrative while gleefully cooking the planet.

Every anti-nuclear statement is a pro-coal statement.

~~~
lolc
I assume you're talking about the molten salt designs. The ideas sound great
and all. So why exactly are they not being built?

------
wnevets
I'm not willing to live next to a reactor and I'm not willing to force someone
else to. If people really think nuclear is the best option put your money
where your mouth is and raise your family next to one.

~~~
13thLetter
That is certainly your right, but we should base important technical decisions
like this on peer-reviewed science, not knee-jerk emotional reactions.

