
Can Nuclear Power Offer a Way Out of the Climate Crisis? - ericdanielski
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/can-nuclear-power-offer-a-way-out-of-the-climate-crisis-a-06a8a27f-d492-45d3-8134-30187eefbdf3
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olivermarks
'The core of the reactor will be almost entirely filled with nuclear waste,
which is a great way of disposing of it. Furthermore, the reactor should be
able to operate for 60 years without refueling. Indeed, the spent fuel rods
from nuclear power plants in the United States alone would be sufficient to
cover the entire world's energy needs for centuries to come.'

I've always liked this win win way of disposing of nuclear waste. What isn't
apparent in the article is the size of the 'mini' reactors and what the worst
case scenario is for failures, and ways to lessen failure states.

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pmoriarty
_" What should we fear more: inevitable global climate change or the regional
dangers associated with a possible reactor meltdown?"_

But earlier in the article, the author said:

 _" There is one thing almost all model calculations do agree on: Moving
forward, the majority of electricity will be supplied by a mix of solar,
biomass, wind and hydro power."_

So if the majority of power will be non-nuclear, how is nuclear supposed to
prevent inevitable global climate change? And why aren't we just pushing to go
for 100% non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel energy? Why is that not an option?

In another part of the article, they say _" Qvist believes the lower costs are
the primary advantage offered by the smaller nuclear power plants."_

So even according to this pro-nuclear consultant, the primary advantage of
nuclear is not its ability to prevent inevitable global climate change.

There are some other important things this article does not touch on, one of
them being the gross mismanagement of Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the record
of nuclear power companies and corrupt regulators not taking safety seriously
enough, leading to accidents.

You can have the best technology in the world, but when the companies managing
these plants cut corners and don't prioritize safety the ostensibly wonderful
technology might be broken, missing, inactive, or inadequate when its needed
most. Fukushima and Chernobyl were cases in point.

I'd also take authoritative-sounding pronouncements on the safety of nuclear
power in threads like these with a couple of grains of salt.

I remember paying close attention on HN when the Fukushima accident was under
way, and there were plenty of people on HN and elsewhere swearing that the
Fukushima reactor would never melt down, that it was designed to prevent just
such a meltdown. It melted down nevertheless.

~~~
Recurecur
> I remember paying close attention on HN when the Fukushima accident was
> under way, and there were plenty of people on HN and elsewhere swearing that
> the Fukushima reactor would never melt down, that it was designed to prevent
> just such a meltdown. It melted down nevertheless.

Yep, there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet. That said, the Fukushima
reactors would have been fine if the backup generators to power cooling had
been available. However, they weren't in a watertight compartment (as
recommended), and were flooded by the tsunami. Even then other backup
generators would have worked, but were delivered with the wrong connector and
time ran out.

Many Gen-IV designs are, on the other hand, inherently or "walk away" safe.
They literally can't melt down or explode due to basic physics.

------
jillesvangurp
The tricky bit will be not doing it but doing it such that it is cost
competitive and able to keep up with wind, solar, & battery all of which are
currently rapidly improving in terms of cost, economies of scale, and
exponentially growing existing deployments with prices continuing to drop.
0.01 $ / kwh is soon becoming a reality for some of the most competive bids.

When it comes to safety, part of the deal with anything nuclear is going to be
security measures needed to prevent somebody from depopulating an area with a
dirty bomb using the nuclear material inside the reactor. That alone can
prevent this type of solution from ever reaching a point where it is actually
cheaper to use than simple & safe wind/solar deployments. People are putting
solar on their roofs, batteries in their car, and windmills on their farms.
Security is not a cost factor for this. It is for nuclear.

This doesn't have to be a show stopper but it does limit the applications and
contexts where this is going to be useful. Fundamentally solar + batteries is
going to be pretty reliable, predictable, and cheap given enough mass
production capacity. Also most of the timelines nuclear is supposed to happen
on (measured in decades) give us plenty of room to vastly improve output,
price, and efficiency. Therefore, I doubt that nuclear will be very relevant
significant short term but it may help us get rid of the few remaining
gas/coal plants in 2-3 decades.

Longer term that and fusion will be great in supplementing power needs
anywhere solar/wind are just not practical.

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Krasnol
Before some one comes up with the baseload story:

[https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374](https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374)

> Summary

> Arguments that renewable energy isn't up to the task because "the Sun
> doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow all the time" are overly
> simplistic.

> There are a number of renewable energy technologies which can supply
> baseload power. The intermittency of other sources such as wind and solar
> photovoltaic can be addressed by interconnecting power plants which are
> widely geographically distributed, and by coupling them with peak-load
> plants such as gas turbines fueled by biofuels or natural gas which can
> quickly be switched on to fill in gaps of low wind or solar production.
> Numerous regional and global case studies – some incorporating modeling to
> demonstrate their feasibility – have provided plausible plans to meet 100%
> of energy demand with renewable sources.

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SlowRobotAhead
Can you imagine when nuclear would be now without the stalls, delays, feet
dragging, protests, fear mongering?

~~~
keanzu
I don't have to imagine it, none of those things are relevant in China,
they've discovered a different problem - the economics don't work and so
China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-
its-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-
for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
What about once you factor in the long-term economic costs of climate change?
If that was truly factored into the cost of producing electricity, I suspect
nuclear would come out well ahead.

~~~
xxgreg
Or perhaps China would build more wind and solar instead. China generates more
electricity from both wind and solar than nuclear, and the annual installation
rates continue to increase.

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vinniejames
Yes, it always has been a way out. The blocker is public opinion. Nuclear,
taking into account disasters, is far safer for society than any other known
energy source.

~~~
millstone
Nuclear is really far safer than solar panels? How is that?

~~~
keanzu
By measuring deaths per TWhr. Nuclear power plants generate a lot of power and
very few deaths. The amount of energy generated by nuclear is so vast that it
more than outweighs incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima over the long-term.

This source only has "rooftop solar" which is more deadly than nuclear power.

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
worldw...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-
energy-source/)

I don't have numbers for non-rooftop solar.

~~~
millstone
I suspect this is just a proxy measure for rate of construction. Construction
workers fall off roofs because they're installing solar panels. They don't
fall off nuclear towers, because the world has mostly stopped building them.

~~~
DuskStar
I'd think the size of the project matters more. Nuclear power plant? Better
bet OSHA's there. But a rooftop solar installation? Lol no.

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boyadjian
No, Nuclear is not a sustainable system. The nuclear waste are a big problem
for future generation. The only solution, is to lower our energy consumption.

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crystaldev
Humans are ridiculous. Coal, solar, wind are all stone age compared to nuclear
power. If humans went full bore nuclear, they'd have so much energy it would
be nothing to move spent fuel to space. It's sort of depressing how this
technology that can be used to colonize space gathers dust, so little
progress.

~~~
xupybd
The economics of nuclear are good but not as good as you're implying.

It takes a long time and a lot of money to start earning on a nuclear plant.
Given the risks involved it's not that easy to build one.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY)

I don't think firing nuclear waste into space would be wise either. The risk
of that blowing up on launch is high and the fall out from that would be a
disaster.

~~~
crystaldev
In the short term nuclear waste should be stored in remote sites on the earth,
in the future it should all be moved to space by elevator rather than launch.

~~~
keanzu
Nuclear waste is a non-issue.

All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear industry since
the late 1950s would cover a football field to a depth of less than 10 yards.

[https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-
waste](https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste)

------
elchief
deleted

~~~
BurningFrog
Oceans will rise a few mm/year at worst.

The vast majority of land is eternally safe

------
baron816
What still scares me about nuclear power is the black swan events. If we have
100,000 reactors spread across the world, what’s the likelihood that over 100
years one of them, I don’t know, gets hit by a meteor and contaminates half a
continent? With enough reactor over enough time there is bound to be one or
two that fail catastrophically, right?

~~~
claudeganon
I got downvoted in another thread for saying this, but I’ve yet to see any
nuclear advocate explain how these systems will fair in a war or state
collapse. We’re less than a hundred years out from when wide swathes of Europe
were reduced to rubble, but expected to believe that current political
formations are going to be stable as far into the future as nuclear materials
need to managed.

It may be the case that nuclear energy is required to stave off climate
disaster, but given the political instability that’s also likely to engender,
I’d like to see anyone speak to this with anything like a historical
perspective.

~~~
barry-cotter
Do not complain about being downvoted. It’s boring, it often leads to further
downvoting for whining and it shows a complete lack of perspective to be
complaining about meaningless message board points.

As for how nuclear power will fare in the event of war or state collapse,
really badly, like everything else. Any state capable of running a nuclear
reactor built by someone else, never mind building their own, has the capacity
for modern industrial warfare, which is insanely expensive in lives and
capital. A doubling or trebling of cancer rates due to a Chernobyl level
disaster would be background noise compared to war.

I wouldn’t worry excessively about state collapse. There’s a great deal of
ruin in a nation. If North Korea can keep going and there hasn’t been an
instance of non-war induced state collapse in Europe since Rome’s withdrawal
from Britain I wouldn’t worry. Think of Libya, Yugoslavia or Somalia. The
first fell to outside aggression, the second was a civil war massively
prolonged by outside interference and the third had state capacity too low to
be relevant in this context.

------
RickJWagner
I really believe Bill Gates is using his money to try to improve the world.
He's a smart guy, almost all of his decisions are well-grounded.

I think Gates is right again on this one. Nuclear power is efficient and
reliable, day and night, windy or not, rain or shine.

------
breeny592
Nuclear gets pointed to because the mining companies still have a large role
to play in digging material out of the ground for nuclear energy. Lobbyists
gon' lobby.

As an asset, much like coal power stations, they require huge Government
subsidies to be profitable to run.

Renewables are the only way forward - they've proven to be far more efficient,
stable, and infinitely cheaper when mixed across multiple mediums.

~~~
rayiner
Renewables are a dead end if we want to keep evolving society. Imagine what
possibilities there would be with 10x or 100x the available energy. Renewables
are not even at the point where they can currently replace the existing
electric grid. (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional
baseload offline.) You certainly can’t build a Star Trek world with wind
mills. You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining
operations with solar.

~~~
breeny592
Imagine what possibilities there would be if humanity finds a way to power all
its current and future needs that produces no harmful side effects rather than
trying to equate science fiction with reality.

> (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline

Because traditional baseload isn't a concept in a fully renewable grid -
distributed storage and production naturally evens out demand and production,
and also makes the grid more resilient to freak weather events (the kind we
see more and more thanks to climate change)

> You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations
> with solar.

You're not doing them with anything at the moment so whats the point of
conjecture. You really think that energy is the biggest concern over, you
know, the colonisation of space?

~~~
buzzkillington
>Imagine what possibilities there would be if humanity finds a way to power
all its current and future needs that produces no harmful side effects rather
than trying to equate science fiction with reality.

So when do we turn off the giant nuclear reactor in the sky we don't
understand and might evaporate the planet if something goes wrong?

There is no such thing as 'no harmful side effects'. We can put our head in
the sand and pretend that the universe is a friendly place for life and go
extinct in the next 100k years or so. Or we can acknowledge that there is no
such thing as 'nature' and make the universe fit for us.

