

No to Nuclear Power - psawaya
http://reason.com/archives/2012/06/25/no-to-nukes

======
TelmoMenezes
Even if the article is right about the cost of nuclear energy (for which it
provides zero evidence), it is ignoring some major points:

\- peak oil: eventually (probably not in a distant future) oil is going to
become too expensive. What then?

\- coal causes horrible pollution

\- natural gas is non-renewable, just like oil

\- nuclear power technology hasn't stagnated in the 70's

On a more empirical note, I live in France and energy here is much cheaper
than anywhere else I lived (and this includes public transportation, which
runs mostly on nuclear power in Paris). My home country, Portugal, has
destroyed its industry with a government-subsidized windmill scheme. 70% of
your energy bill there is tax.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
Yeah, this article reads like a propaganda piece. Littering in little bits
such as "Surprising as it may seem, the United States still generates around
20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants." It's like the author
WANTS you to think that nuke plants are worthless.

Also, yes nuclear does have its associated costs and risks, but they are
capable of making shit tons of power, on the order of magnitude that solar and
wind and hydro combined are not yet capable of doing.

Also, I grew up in Pennsylvania, and nobody thought any the worse of it that
there is a nuclear power plant at three mile island.

And this is just my guess, but I would be a big big cost of nuke plants is the
regulation and permit process. Not that this isn't necessary, but I would
wager it's a reason the costs are so high still.

~~~
eigenvector
> Also, yes nuclear does have its associated costs and risks, but they are
> capable of making shit tons of power, on the order of magnitude that solar
> and wind and hydro combined are not yet capable of doing.

Wind and solar yes, hydro no. See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Quebe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Quebec#Hydroelectric)

Hydro is capable and proven in GW-scale generation.

~~~
pjscott
Hydro is great and proven technology where you have the geography for it. The
Three Gorges Dam, for instance, provides up to a staggering 22.5 GW. The
limitation is geography.

------
jarrett
As an engineer working on expensive and safety-sensitive systems, I really
have to disagree with everyone claiming (without evidence) that the high cost
of nuclear power stems largely from over-regulation.

My experience has been that good engineers genuinely care about building
things safely. And we burn through a lot of money doing so.

Every mark on every blueprint gets checked and rechecked by multiple, well-
paid engineers. We go through elaborate and time-consuming testing procedures.
Multiple layers of redundancy are built in.

All of this costs. And the greater the danger, the more of this kind of stuff
we have to do. Nuclear accidents are black swan events. Though unlikely, their
impact can be huge. So for nuclear power, the engineering requirements are
extreme. This is as it should be.

If nuclear power were deregulated, the industry would still have to spend
boatloads to provide adequate safety. And if the industry instead cut corners,
they'd eventually get bit by another disaster, and the business would once
again stagnate.

This, by the way, is coming from a guy who doesn't work in the nuclear power
industry. I'm just extrapolating from my experience with safety-sensitive
engineering.

~~~
jfoutz
The author is in a tough spot. Nobody is really really sure a free market
system can actually build black swan proof things. If your competition can be
slightly less safe and therefore charge less money that solution will find its
way into production. You know, perhaps more than anyone else in the thread,
that we can increase reliability a bunch of ways, but they're all expensive.

It's easier, from a libertarian point of view, to sidestep the issue. So, the
author says this problem is irrelevant in the real world, cause nukes aren't
feasible.

------
younata
> The main reason no new nuclear power plants have been built in the United
> States in 30 years is that they have proven to be poor investments

Uh... no. The main reason no new nuclear power plants have been built in the
US is because 3 mile island and chernobyl scared the shit out of people.

Both of those incidents were caused by people going outside the safety
protocols. Nuclear power, just like anything else, is VERY dangerous if you
ignore safety.

------
JumpCrisscross
Potential conflict of interest here. The author is a senior research fellow at
the Mercatus Center, a think tank affiliated with the Koch family, who make
their money in oil and gas (among other things).

Not reason enough to throw it away, but perhaps to suspect the absence of any
evidence to back the cost claims.

~~~
nosse
Just checked the same stuff.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center>

------
3xP053r
What is missing in the original article and what some "I'll just leave it here
(bar of consumption vs. bar of green production)" comments omit is the grid.

The electricity is not some component part which you order in China, stock it
up in thousands in your warehouse and wait until you need it.

The total electricity production and consumption must be absolutely equal in
ANY. GIVEN. MOMENT. If you are not generating enough, the generators would be
overloaded, start slowing down and bad things would happen (frequency would
lower, your own generators and/or power lines between countries will go out of
phase and bang, you have a nice large several-country-wide blackout). Similar
things happen when you generate too much.

Therefore, mentioning the current AVERAGE green production per day and
consumption per day is totally out of reality, as the "base" energy is still
provided by the dreaded nuclear, peak oil and very dirty coal power plants. In
order to cover the consumption with the "holy" green energy, the capacity of
such power plants would have to be several times the current consumption in
order to generate the energy for times when there is no wind, no sunlight
(night!), etc. AND many storage plants (e.g. pumped storage) have to be built.
And one pumped storage plant alone (without the power plants providing the
electricity into the storage!) cost the same as adding the same net power
capacity in nuclear, which goes by the projections until the next scheduled
shut down, no wind onsets, etc.

Also, please do not be fooled with the "Austrian model" - ban nuclear energy
in the constitution and import (nuclear!) energy from surrounding countries.
Or with the "German model" - promise to stop nuclear power plants and: a) use
"green" government subsidies to start COAL power plants instead (yes,
environmental funds are being used to build new power plants of the most dirty
kind!), b) overload surrounding grids (Polish, Czech) to dissolve peak effects
of current, very unstable, "green" sources, c) start inventing crazy things
like using home water heaters running on fossil fuels (!) controlled by
computers to generate electricity into the grid when the green sources are not
enough...

Whenever anybody is speaking about noes to nuclear power or green sources,
these issues should be foremost addressed. Otherwise it is the same beating
around the bush, as when biofuels are governmentally subsided and made
mandatory by law to be mixed into ordinary fossil fuels, but it is kept secret
that the agricultural vehicles running on the fossil fuels, spreading
pesticides and fertilizers made from fossil fuels, use more energy than is
finally made in the "biofuel". However, this happens in some other country
across the globe, so it is none of our business and it is very "green" in our
"bio"fueled country...

Source: electrical engineer controlling the power grid of a European country.

------
ap22213
Since I live near DC and work in the energy field, I occasionally get the
pleasure to attend seminars on nuclear power. I'll preface by saying that I
know practically nothing about nuclear power. That said, people seem to be
very pumped up about Generation IV reactors.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor>

------
nine_k
No mention of thorium fission reactors, that would be far cleaner and would
consume 232Th which is far cheaper and more abundant than 235U.

~~~
phon
For anyone unfamiliar with the Thorium fission cycle, the first five minutes
of this Creative Commons film give a good overview with a more detailed
exploration of the topic later in the film:

<http://thoriumremix.com/2011/>

~~~
PythonDeveloper
Yes. Thorium is the yummy chocolate and sprinkles donuts version of todays
nuclear reactor. All the benefits and almost none of the drawbacks.

~~~
pjscott
You're talking specifically about liquid fluoride thorium reactors. Other
types of thorium (or thorium-uranium mix) reactors exist, and are in
commercial use now. Canada's CANDU reactors, for example, can run on thorium.

------
aphyr
The strongest source in the article appears to be Moniz and Kazimi 2009. Not
sure if I've tracked down the one they're referring to, but the MIT Nuclear
Power Update, on which they are coauthors
([http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/nuclear-
update.sht...](http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/nuclear-
update.shtml)) states:

 _The 2003 report found that “In deregulated markets, nuclear power is not now
cost competitive with coal and natural gas. However, plausible reductions by
industry in capital cost, operation and maintenance costs and construction
time could reduce the gap. Carbon emission credits, if enacted by government,
can give nuclear power a cost advantage.” The situation remains the same
today._

... citing increased construction costs across the board, increases in
interest rates during construction of recent plants, and a decline in the cost
of oil and gas costs after a spike in the mid-2000s. Their base case suggested
nuclear at 6.7 cents/kWh, and coal/gas at 4.3/4.1. With carbon corrections,
coal/gas rises to 6.4/5.1. With capital corrections equivalent to coal plants,
nuclear falls to 5.5 cents/kWh.

Keep in mind that US data on nuclear efficiency is limited _because we haven't
built any new reactors_ in the last 30 years. We're running plants a
generation (and a half) behind current technology, and they're _still_ this
efficient. Meanwhile, extracting gas and coal is becoming more difficult, and
not likely to get any easier. Just take a look at the economic feasibility
studies of Alberta's tar sands.

MIT's opinion?

 _In sum, compared to 2003, the motivation to make more use of nuclear power
is greater, and more rapid progress is needed in enabling the option of
nuclear power expansion to play a role in meeting the global warming
challenge. The sober warning is that if more is not done, nuclear power will
diminish as a practical and timely option for deployment at a scale that would
constitute a material contribution to climate change risk mitigation._

Honestly, the phrase "clean coal" should have have been clue enough to stop
reading. :-/

------
gte910h
Coal plants pump out TONS of radiation into the air, far more than living near
a nuke plant causes not to mention megatons of CO2 (coal is the range of a ton
of CO2 per megawatt, if not a little north of that)

They put out regulations in March that basically made fossil fuel plants
require a redesign before constructing more of them (Gas currently has a small
enough CO2 footprint)

------
jfoutz
The costs are regulatory. Just cut out the NNSA oversight and nukes will be
cheap.

 _edit_

ok, unsubstantiated assertions are bad. Here's just one example of regulatory
overhead that other types of power don't have to deal with,

"Since it may cost $300 million or more to shut down and decommission a plant,
the NRC requires plant owners to set aside money when the plant is still
operating to pay for the future shutdown costs." straight from the nrc
[http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-
ref/students/decommissio...](http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-
ref/students/decommissioning.html)

~~~
CWuestefeld
The OP shows this not to be the case. US costs are in-line with French costs,
while the US has much greater regulation than France.

~~~
jfoutz
Is it possible france's costs are higher because of all the other stuff they
provide, like free health care and six weeks of vacation?

The op blew off 30 years of thinking on the expense of nuclear power with a
reference to an unlinked paper. Sure. It's possible nukes are just kind of
expensive "because", but there's nothing compelling in that article to change
my thinking that it's regulatory cost.

------
voidr
Say no to moronic articles like this. There are ways to make nuclear power
better, just because some governments fail doesn't mean it's impossible.

Fossil fuel kills more people than nuclear power, the reason people seem to
ignore it, is because nuclear disasters kill a lot of people in short time.

This article should not be taken seriously because it fails to examine the
possibilites of nuclear power, and by that it fails to backup its claim that
nuclear power should be totally rulled out.

------
salem
Several omissions in this article, for example compared to oil, uranium is
available from more stable trading partners with huge reserves (Australia).

------
davmar
this article is garbage at best. clear bias from the very first sentence and
only argues from a current cost structure perspective.

------
Palomides
tl;dr argument: currently existing nuclear power plants produce electricity
that costs more than using coal

my comment on this argument would be that I find it less persuasive than the
article seems to want it to be.

------
rsanchez1
I think it's irresponsible to just say no to nuclear power wholesale. The holy
grail of nuclear energy is cold fusion, of course. But in the meantime, we can
get safer nuclear energy by using thorium in our reactors instead of uranium.
The reason why uranium is used over thorium is because uranium has
applications not only in energy generation, but also in nuclear weapons.
Uranium was more lucrative to mine than thorium because governments around the
world bought so many of it to create so many bombs.

Here is an article explaining some of the advantages and drawbacks of using
thorium as a nuclear power source:

<http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1141/>

Cold fusion is the ultimate clean energy, but until that is accomplished (if
it can even be accomplished), we shouldn't bury our heads in the sand with
regards to nuclear energy. Thorium isn't very clean energy, it still produces
radioactive waste like uranium reactors, but thorium reactors have the
potential of meeting our energy requirements while being safer than uranium
reactors, so there's less of a chance of a Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and
Fukushima happening.

------
tubbo
The idea behind nuclear power isn't "cost-effectiveness", you fucking idiot.
It's about staying away from energy resources that fuck up our planet and our
atmosphere. This world's thirst for energy has gone far beyond the
capabilities of oil, gas and coal to provide without seriously damaging our
planets infrastructure. Nuclear accidents can be prevented with proper care
and maintenence, whereas "the moment we stop being able to produce oil"
(whatever you want to call it) is GOING TO HAPPEN at some point, and we've
seen the horrible effects of coal and gas on our ozone already.

Regardless of your views on nuclear power this article is a load of BULLSHIT
and I wish I could vote things down on HN.

~~~
tzaman
You could vote things down if you behaved properly ;)

~~~
CWuestefeld
While the parent post wasn't behaving properly -- not adding anything to a
rational debate -- it's not true that he could vote things down.

Newbies can't down-vote comments, it's true. But there is no down-vote for
articles themselves.

------
TeMPOraL
Because the energy grows on trees and it will be enough to sustain our
civilization after it runs out of coal and oil to burn.

~~~
fus
I will just leave it here:
[http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_161.shtml)
and
[http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c18/page_10...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c18/page_103.shtml)

~~~
Symmetry
"Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" is a great book, but I always
wondered about using a 1,000 time horizon. I don't expect the development of
fusion power anytime soon, but I'd be very surprised if it took more than 200
years!

