
U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Weren’t Built for Climate Change - aburan28
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-nuclear-power-plants-climate-change
======
hamilyon2
Privately owned nuclear power is borderline insanity to me.

What if it is not profitable any more? Who would deal with the mess? Of
course, public! Bit if it public who owns the risk, why is the "good part"
owned by some private interest?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> What if it is not profitable any more?

The main cost of a nuclear plant is the initial construction. Once you've paid
that as a sunk cost, the cost of continued operation is tough to beat. There
is a reason the older reactors operate for so long and it's not because
continuing to operate them isn't cost competitive.

> Who would deal with the mess?

Nuclear plants are required to put money into a decommissioning fund for this.
(Notably nothing else requires this. Who pays to deal with recycling old solar
panels? Coal mines? Hydro dams?)

> Bit if it public who owns the risk, why is the "good part" owned by some
> private interest?

Because they supplied the money to build the plant.

~~~
tmh79
> The main cost of a nuclear plant is the initial construction

the main cost is storing the waste for 10k+ years with zero defect rate

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Newer reactors don't produce long-lived waste, and for that matter can use the
waste from existing reactors as fuel.

So if you don't like the nuclear waste we already have, build newer reactors
to get rid of it.

~~~
carlisle_
That's pretty neat, what makes the newer reactors able to use old waste as
fuel?

~~~
fulafel
They don't - unless we talk about prospective future designs or small research
reactors. There are big downsides to these designs, which is why their
development stalled in the 70s and have been on life support since.

(Technically an exception is the bn-800 but it was modified rebuild from an
80s aborted reactor construction project, to get rid of weapons grade
plutonium, before the the us/russia treaty fell apart... Good story at
[http://euanmearns.com/the-bn-800-fast-reactor-a-milestone-
on...](http://euanmearns.com/the-bn-800-fast-reactor-a-milestone-on-a-long-
road/) )

~~~
Recurecur
"There are big downsides to these designs, which is why their development
stalled in the 70s and have been on life support since."

Not really, what happened is there were "good enough" designs, there was a
China Syndrome inspired move away from nuclear, and the government had little
to no interest in reactor designs that made it hard to recover weapon
materials.

Bill Gates is championing both molten salt and traveling wave reactors that
"burn" nuclear waste.

There are other very interesting designs, including the Xscale helium-cooled
pebble bed design. It, and many of the molten salt designs, don't require
water cooling. Not needing a source of nearby water vastly expands siting
options.

[https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/x-energy-developing-
pebbl...](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/x-energy-developing-pebble-bed-
reactor-they-say-cant-melt-down)

Another interesting design is ThorCon's molten salt reactor, which it
recommends siting 100 feet underground, eliminating almost all security issues
including plane strike.

[http://thorconpower.com/](http://thorconpower.com/)

~~~
fulafel
No, there were no good enough designs, and after decades of effort they are
still elusive: There has been huge amounts of subsidy money poured into
breeder reactors and Pu fuel in the west, much later than China Syndrome.

The subsidies have been in the form of the MOX program, PRISM, and other gov
funded fuel recycling programs in many countries. The problems remain: weapons
grade Pu profileration risk, unviable cost, dearth of demonstrated working
large plants due to technical difficulties inherent in the designs,
difficulties scaling up to commercial sizes competitive w traditional designs.

Yes, there are many interesting designs on the drawing table, same as it has
been for decades...

------
trimbo
> "Nuclear power is weird—it exists to produce electricity, and at the same
> time it can’t exist without electricity... Plants need constant power to
> pump cool water into a reactor’s core"

Well... _50-60 year old designs_ can't exist without electricity to the pumps.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Ironically, the EBR-II reactor in Idaho was the first to demonstrate true
passive shutdown and cooling in 1986. It first operated in 1964, 55 years ago!
Unfortunately, we shut this reactor and the research surrounding it down in
'94\. [1]

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

~~~
crakenzak
Very fascinating, why was it shut down tho?

~~~
pfdietz
Breeders were based on unrealistic projections of there being a thousand
reactors in the US by the year 2000. Under such extreme growth, uranium would
be getting scarce, so breeding would be needed.

But that didn't happen, and, absent uranium shortages, breeder reactors are
more expensive than ordinary thermal reactors. There's also the small problem
of fast breeders being potentially subject to prompt fast supercriticality
during a meltdown. That's one of the few ways to make an accident worse than
Chernobyl.

------
djrobstep
Is there a good comparative analysis somewhere of nuclear vs renewables that
looks at how we should best be focusing on each to beat climate change?

I'd be super interested to read it.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Phwew if only there was a reasoned thing to read on this topic. People on many
sides of these issues are saying a lot very strongly that is in strong
conflict, so it's not a great time to find something totally trustworthy.

Most people agree with the consensus that nuclear and some renewables
(wind/solar/hydro) are low carbon. Other renewables (biomass) are not low
carbon.

Then we quickly descend into a debate that effectively comes down to energy
storage for the intermittent renewables vs. the cost of nuclear. Wind is at
full power ~35% of the time in the US, solar is at full power ~25% of the time
in the US. Recent nuclear builds in the US and Europe have been absolute
boondoggles, though S. Korea remembers what the learned from Combustion
Engineering and can build standard reactors very well now.

Energy storage discussions span daily fluctuations (e.g. the duck curve) and
batteries to seasonal fluctuations (much more challenging for know storage
tech).

Nuclear discussions also inevitability dip into nuclear waste (which has a
scientific consensus solution in the deep geologic repository) to safety
(where more people die every day from coal as-normal emissions than have been
killed by nuclear accidents ever). Renewable discussions dip into land use,
San Bernardino Co's recent ban on new large solar in the desert, migratory
Hoary bats getting their lungs ripped out by wind turbines, and so on.

I consider nuclear a total underdog right now because Wind and Solar are
kicking butt while nuclear plants are getting shut down early. Because of this
dynamic, I advocate for nuclear as part of the low carbon future. I wrote a
thing about these topics in more detail here [1].

Bill Gates recently said that the people who say solving climate change will
be easy are now more of a problem than people who outright deny climate change
[2]. I agree with him. Lots of headlines you see on /r/Futurology and
/r/energy make it seem that decarbonized world is right ahead of us. It's not,
and cheap fracked natural gas is enemy number one. Sure, it's half the CO2 of
coal, but that's still an order of magnitude too high!

Many pro-nuclear people like myself are also very pro low-carbon renewables.
The one vs. the other mentality is strong in both camps, but there's a growing
number of "centrists".

[1] [https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2017-12-17-primer-on-
energy-g...](https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2017-12-17-primer-on-energy-ghg-
intermittency-and-nuclear.html)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1EB1zsxW0k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1EB1zsxW0k)

~~~
audunw
Fundamentally I'm very positive to nuclear, but I feel like it's hard to see
that existing fission tech is going to help in the short term.

The lesson from recent nuclear power plants in Europe is that we can't build
them on budget and on time anymore. Maybe nuclear is affordable if it's on
budget, but is it still when there's massive budget overruns?

How does the cost trend look? It doesn't seem likely that we'll be able to
relax regulations on nuclear.. so is it likely to get significantly cheaper?
If you look at cost projections 20 years into the future, will it still beat
solar- and wind with storage?

And are there developments in load following nuclear power plants? Solar and
wind needs to be paired with load following plants, not base load.

It seems to me like we need to put massive investments in R&D to develop a
small plant (so it's easier to iterate) that can be a perfect match with
solar/wind, yields less dangerous waste and has low proliferation risk..

I've seen some interesting startups in this area. Everyone working on it
should be given more money and regulatory support. I feel like there's a
significant risk that those developments could be made irrelevant if there's
further breakthroughs in renewables and storage, but we need to hedge our
bets.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I appreciate that you recognize the hedge. This is how I think of it too now.
Various parties have differing beliefs about what a world with >50%
intermittent energy harvesting looks like, and how easy the energy storage
issue really is to solve.

Nuclear in the West is in rough shape, but again the Chinese, Russians,
Koreans, and even the Japanese are pretty good at popping them out on
time/budget. They all have established supply chains and trained craftsmen.
Korea, in particular, is amazing. They chose one design and standardized it
and built a bunch of them. This is the model of success in nuclear.

For this reason, it worries me a bit that lots of small startup in the US are
trying to build different reactors in relative isolation. This is not the kind
of industry where that is likely to go well. It takes billions of dollars to
get to first product.

I think the open source model is much more likely to succeed in nuclear. Most
of the tech is commodity anyway, so finding a business plan around this
shouldn't be overly challenging.

The guy who built Korea's nuclear industry just did a great interview where he
basically said that the US taught him how to build nukes, they perfected it,
and now he wants to partner with the US again to decarbonize effectively with
standardized nukes. [1]

[1]
[https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung](https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung)

~~~
pfdietz
About that Korean nuclear industry...

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-
corr...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-corruption-
blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/)

------
petre
More reason to push for SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) until Thorium and other
technologies become available. Eventually these utility scale reactors would
need to be decomissioned and building new ones isn't quite so attractive
today. OTOH deploying a fleet of 10 to 12 SMRs would cover for an utility
scale reactor.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Just an aside, Thorium fuel in itself doesn't actually offer safety
advantages. The cooling configuration largely determines the safety
characteristics of any reactor, and decay heat removal after shutdown has been
the biggest challenge (Fukushima, TMI). Coolants that can move heat with
passive natural circulation give the "walk-away" safety that Gen-IV reactors
flout. This was demonstrated in the EBR-II sodium metal cooled reactor in
1986, (mere weeks before Chernobyl), and it is game changing. Any reactor with
low-pressure coolant and some gas-cooled reactors can achieve this passive
decay heat removal without backup power. Options include sodium metal coolant,
molten salt coolant (fluoride or chloride, note: very different from sodium
metal), lead metal, lead-bismuth eutectic, etc.

People often think of Thorium reactors in the molten salt configuration (i.e.
the Thorium-MSR), which should be very safe. The Thorium gets conflated with
the molten salt, but there are uranium MSRs too which are just as safe.

~~~
Johnny555
There are some other advantages to Thorium fuel besides the inherent safety of
the plant design.

It's harder to turn Thorium into nuclear weapons, so a nuclear state could
provide fuel to a non-nuclear state. Thorium is more abundant and easier to
mine. There's much less nuclear waste from a Thorium plant and it decays to
safe levels of radiation in a few hundred years making safe storage easier.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Partially true on all accounts. See [1].

[1] [https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-
myths.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html)

~~~
Johnny555
I think that article is mostly agreeing with my points:

"Not only can they technically (but with much difficulty!) be used to make
bombs.... It may be difficult to do this several times without going
subcritical, but it certainly could be done"

So yeah, it's technically possible to make a bomb with byproducts from a
Thorium reactor, but it's not trivial.

"Considering that the oceans contain 1.4x1021 kg of water, that amounts to
56,000 tonnes of Th and 4.62 billion tonnes of Uranium. Moreover, mining the
entire crust is difficult, whereas the ocean delivers to you. While seawater
extraction of uranium is not yet competitive with traditional mining (it’s
hovering around 4x more expensive), it is possible and may become economical
in the near future"

Pointing to a source that's not feasible and use some handwavy "Well it might
be done in the future" doesn't really disprove the point that Thorium is more
abundant in the places we can actually extract it from.

"In fact, the long-term decay heat from Thorium-MSRs can be orders of
magnitude lower than that from traditional reactors"

On this point the article agrees.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> So yeah, it's technically possible to make a bomb with byproducts from a
> Thorium reactor, but it's not trivial.

It's not trivial to make a nuclear bomb period.

------
mizchief2
If we build enough Nuclear power plants climate change wouldn't be an issue

------
mavhc
We need 70 times more nuclear power than we have now to replace 50% of fossil
fuel usage. Other 50% can be renewable

~~~
maxnoe
The article states, that 19 percent of power was provided by nuclear plants in
the US.

For what is your factor of 70?

~~~
mavhc
Because we also need to replace all fossil fuels used to move things, heat
things, etc.

100% renewable would require something like 10000 gigafactories to make
batteries, probably not sensible. 50% means we don't need trillions of
batteries.

that's assuming everyone moves to only use 2kW of energy, instead of 6 for
North America and 4 for Europe. Hopefully switching to electricity will
account for most of those savings.

------
oneplane
Why are they even trying to make this a law/politics based tug-of-war, it's
literally pure science. The only non-science parts you'd expect some old men
to have a fit about would be profit, how many people are allowed to die (in
the event of a disaster/during construction/during maintenance) and for how
long the rules can be left as-is. This whole deal seems like the opposite.

