First, there can be little doubt that a substantial fraction of the high cost of nuclear is down to almost the entire west being scared stiff of the stuff for thirty years. If we gave actual scientists and engineers a real mandate to come up with a pragmatic, realistic (ie accepting a small amount of risk as acceptable, perhaps something on the scale of a single Fukushima every 30 years, just like we accept a small amount of risk everywhere else - driving, living in hurricane country, even flying isn't perfectly safe) regulatory regime, costs would surely come back down.
Second, funny how costs suddenly matter when it's about nuclear. Barely a month goes by without some new unimaginable mind numbing (wholly impractical) 'solution' to climate change that we're being implored to consider, because it's about saving the planet for our children. Nuclear is a perfectly practical, much cheaper (if still very expensive), 80% solution to climate change that we can actually start implementing today, but somehow it's not on the table. Somehow it doesn't seem all that plausible that cost is really the issue.
In short, climate change is the biggest issue facing the world (except nuclear and fracking). I'm very excited that the NYT is being practical here.
It is interesting how you say that nuclear might be cheaper and at the same time accept an incident like fukushima every 30 years like you pay 1000 peanuts and that it alright again. Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power. This has nothing to do with fear about the technology itself but about the decrease in property value in vicinity of the plant. So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows.
So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one? And while I agree that we need some back up plan to stabilize the net load, that also wont be nuclear power as those plants are not fast in start up managment either.
Cheaper compared to every other suggested solution to climate change. If climate change wasn't a thing, sure, I'd probably be on board with writing off nuclear and waiting for some combination of solar and wind and storage to take over.
Also, regardless of who pays, a Fukushima-event every few decades is several orders of magnitude cheaper than flood-securing New York City alone (and there are a lot more places in the world that will need flood securing).
I doubt the flood-securing work is avoidable. But maybe it could be less bad.
Rather than nuclear, which lends itself to big government, corruption, corporate projects, bond issues, and taxes, I'd prefer to see money instead poured into acceleration of the spread of solar, which is less centralized and easier to spread to all kinds of places. Sure, not everywhere, but the potential is pretty untapped.
Any such decrease in property value is precisely because of the irrational fear of nuclear power.
> So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows.
Government should not fund or provide any guarantees to such projects; we should tax carbon and let people decide what to do (in which case, we wouldn't even need to argue which is cheaper and we can just let power companies figure it out).
> So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one?
Isn't solar more expensive when you factor in the cost of batteries (which would be required if solar scales up; i.e. a diseconomy of scale)? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It's completely rational to reduce property values when there is a risk you will be forced to move and lose all your possessions. If the risk is say 0.3% over the next hundred years paying every homeowner ~20,000$ within 40 miles when the plant is built to offset that risk is completely rational, but would make nuclear Even less viable.
If your house explodes due to natural gas, your property and that of all your neighbors and their neighbors and the surrounding community isn't contaminated for a period of time exceeding your natural lifespan. If you have a radiation accident instead, it very well may be. The two scenarios are quite different.
They are identical scenarios. The only difference is the scale.
In both scenarios I am "rolling the dice" on a catastrophic failure in exchange for energy - and if I am home when it happens it will shorten my lifespan significantly.
Saying the scenarios are identical doesn't make them so. And scale matters.
But... I'd say with truly modern nuclear power, safety is less of an issue. Perception of safety is still an issue. So your home value will go down. No biggie; you may be ok with that.
The issue that really bugs me though is that with nuclear, a large government or corporate entity has decided to roll the dice for you on your behalf. With something like solar, there is more possibility for local and individual control. So instead of bond issues, taxes, state-mandated insurance fees, contracts, and control by faceless entities with names like TEPCO who make decisions like "no let's not do the safety retrofit" you get to decide for yourself.
And, no gas explosions either! So, the best of both worlds.
I prefer local control. Nuclear is too centralized.
Gas explosion: House destroyed, you still own the land, you can rebuild on the land. Even if you move to a new home, you can sell the land for the going rate in the are (which will likely drop because more land is coming on the market, but perhaps not too much).
Nuclear incident: You own irradiated land. Good luck, maybe the government will buy it off you, or the power company if stipulated as some penalty.
One destroys some of your local property, the other destroys the value of all your local property.
TEPCO had a modern plan to fix the issue before it happened. They decided not to act. Nuclear power takes the decision out of your hands, and puts it in the hands of organizations like that. I prefer something like solar which keeps power in my own control, local, decentralized, not decided by some huge behemoth that is driven by money and actuarial charts.
Yet the topic is, will future nuclear plants be needed to slow global warming? Future plants (indeed all current plants) will include safety plans and devices. Such plants have not had catastrophic events.
Fukushima exclusion zone disagrees with you. Sure, if we limited reactors to 'safe' locations that reduces risks, but we still put them in stupid areas such as near fault lines.
The two direct deaths where from an insufficient sea wall not the reactor design. Saying future reactor designs fix the problem is a mistake. Because again it was not the reactor design that caused their deaths.
So again, saying some hypothetical perfect design exists and it would obviously have a large enough see wall, and that is what your defending is a true Scotsman argument.
PS: Remember, future designs also have future defects.
When people think of the Fukushima disaster the two direct and unfortunate deaths caused by the insufficient sea wall are not what come to mind. The meltdown of the reactor is the primary concern. If a meltdown had never occurred the Fukushima incident would have never been mentioned on this thread or in any other conversation about the safety issues with nuclear power. So I'm sorry but bringing up the inadequate sea wall is a complete straw man argument when talking about safety issues from nuclear power.
Now, back on topic, the nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima was caused by a faulty reactor design. Really it was a poorly designed safety system. The Tsunami that came after the initial earthquake took out the backup power generators at the plant. These backup generators were responsible for powering the cooling pumps that are supposed to prevent a meltdown. This is the main fault in the design and one that is not present in modern reactor designs. Modern reactors now have passive safety systems, i.e. if the power fails the safety measures will be triggered automatically and will not depend on outside power to complete their task. One example of this is using an elevated water tower to store the cooling water with a valve that is kept shut electronically. In the case of a power failure the valve would automatically open (since that is where it's in a stable equilibrium) and gravity would 'pump' the cooling water onto the reactor preventing a meltdown.
Without the damage from the tidal wave Fukushima would have been far less of an issue. With a proper wall there would not have been significant issues with the Tsunami, thus making that wall a critical safety feature that failed.
As to passive safety systems, many modern designs can't be left unattended for a month. Because they are not passively safe only being able to go longer without issues.
Anyway this is all abstract pick a design that would have been safe without a sea wall or direct intervention after the fact. While being both proven and cost effective.
PS: On second thought as you said modern design, the worst plant built in the last 10 years is still a 'modern design' and close to where many people live.
I will admit that had there been a better sea wall the Fukushima incident would have much less severe. But I still think it's beside the point.
As to your point about passive safety systems only working for a finite period of time before causing issues, would you mind providing some sources for this claim? As far as I know this is completely false. The very nature of 'passive' safety system is that the laws of physics provide a negative feedback loop that stop a chain reaction and dissipate heat away from the core. This isn't the case for every reactor design of the past few decades, but that's not my argument, I'm simply stating that there are reactor designs out there that are completely passively safe (in terms of preventing a meltdown). You will still be left with the radioactive remnants of the (non-active) core but this can be easily shielded by water for an indefinite period of time.
A nuclear battery can be 100% passively safe for decades but they don't produce a lot of power. A pure passive system that's producing 1GW of electric power is producing 2.5GW worth of heat. Which is really hard to dump into the environment passively without connections to external systems. In the event of a tidal wave your pipes to and from the sea are likely blocked which means there is some pool that is going to boil.
Even cooling tower designs often actively cool the tower through the use of water curtains. It's not needed but significantly reduces costs. Now, that that is building up the internal passive designs starts to reduce power. But thus only operates over a range. Further it is going to produce as close to 2.5 GW of heat as it can.
So, now there is no external pool or connection to the sea and here is where you see problems.
PS: Which all comes back to passive designs costing more and being less efficient. Sure, it 100% passive is possible physically just not economically viable.
I doubt the odds of that are anywhere close to the ~2/1,000 odds of a significant nuclear accident over 50 years of operation.
Granted, it's hard to get real numbers and future designs may be safer. But, if you include military reactors there have been more than 2 significant accidents per 1,000 reactors. So while some people say they are very safe, people also said that about the Titanic.
Assuming each homeowner near the power plant has a $1M cost to move, that works out to a $3,000/person cost ($1,900 after time discounting at a 1% discount rate). Assuming there are 100,000 people within 40 miles of the plant, that's $190M, or 5-20% of the cost of a plant.
100,000 homes within 40 miles is probably on the low side. Also, a reasonable penalty for unwanted risk bumps up the costs. Further the value of property and possessions likely increases faster than inflation making the time value equation tricky.
More importantly Nuclear is already to expencive before this cost, increasing things further and it's really not worth it.
Also the average American home price is $189k, not $1M. Round up to $200k for cost to move, and we're down to $380/person.
Add in the fact that the worst disaster (Chernobyl) has an exclusion zone of 1004 miles^2 (equivalent to a 17 mile circle, rather than your 40 miles) and we discover that my initial estimate was about 25x too pessimistic.
I'm beginning to think your concerns about cost are FUD. Out of curiosity, since cost is such a big concern for you, do you hold similar concerns about our bloated infrastructure costs? For example, given the bloated costs of the 2nd ave subway in NYC (1 mile of track there costs as much as the entire Delhi Metro), should we also curtail this project? Or is cost only an issue for nuclear energy?
Cost to move is only part of the problem, you need to move while losing all your stuff which may or may not include your car etc. Further, this is not limited to housing but includes farms / offices / schools / factory's and infrastructure like highways and water pipes etc.
As to area, nobody lives in the ocean and houses next to an exclusion zone also have huge drops in property values. So, yes some sort of decreasing metric, as a sanity check the property value drop from being within sight of a nuclear power plant is going to be more than 300$. Further, actual exclusion zones may depend on wind so risk really does extend out to 40 miles.
Edit: As an upside, if you included these costs then there would be a push to place reactors in the middle of nowhere to lower costs which IMO is a very good thing.
PS: As a sanity check fukushima is estimated to cost tax payers ~188 billion$ and many people are worse off after the disaster so real costs are higher than that. If the odds are 0.2% that's ~400 million vs your estimate of 300 * 100,0000 = 30 million.
What if you do the same calculation for Indian Point? I suspect the cost of relocating everyone in New York City and boroughs would be pretty substantial.
The costs of solar are decreasing over time. And solar is more decentralized, so you're not stuck with huge government boondoggles, corruption, and corporate overlords.
Ever heard of Enron? Also just google for "nuclear corruption" and you'll get a lot of reading material. For example this article http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/nuclear-cor... which has links out to sources including the US DOJ about corruption cases in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the US, and more. It's a huge problem. And the key players would like to keep it all hidden, so your being in the dark about it is no surprise.
Corporate overlords (can't tell if you are trolling, but I'll answer) is just a shorthand for corporate decision makers who prioritize corporate profits over other considerations like consumer benefit, care of the environment, freedom of consumer choice, fair dealing, etc.
"It is interesting how you say that nuclear might be cheaper and at the same time accept an incident like fukushima every 30 years like you pay 1000 peanuts and that it alright again. Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power. This has nothing to do with fear about the technology itself but about the decrease in property value in vicinity of the plant. So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows."
Nuclear done right will be a great solution going forward. We need a SpaceX of nuclear to out-compete the dinosaur companies like GE. Thorcon Power (thorconpower.com) is one good candidate.
With molten salt technology, there is zero chance of a meltdown or explosive distribution of material. Thorcon's plan is to site the reactors 30 m underground.
"So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one? And while I agree that we need some back up plan to stabilize the net load, that also wont be nuclear power as those plants are not fast in start up managment either."
Thorcon's estimate is that power cost $.02-$.05 per KWH. The ramp up or down for a nuclear plant is a non-issue because fuel costs are negligible.
I don't understand why a large structure is automatically an eyesore. It doesn't emit smoke. It's mostly pretty quiet. Are windfarms uglier than, say... a nicely constructed bridge like the SF Bay Bridge?
As long as we're exploring hypothetical choices, would you prefer to live near a nuclear plant over living in a house with energy provided by solar tiles on the roof?
Works well in e.g. California. May work less well in Maine. Especially when it snows.
Much of Europe and US is situated too far north for trouble-free solar operation. Other power sources do make sense there (or, for me, "here").
I keep hearing that several hundred thousand square miles of solar panels in Sahara could power the entire hemisphere. They could if transportation was 100% efficient. Even if we pretend that we can build humongous power lines out of superconducting material, maintaining them is going to cost us a lot still.
Since you seem not to have thought of it, you can also get power from the grid at night. Or from batteries. The grid gets its power from diverse sources.
Your logic doesn't hold up. You cannot ignore externalities when... arguing against them to begin with.
I'd much rather live with a nuclear power station in my backyard, than install solar knowing I'm robbing those who can't afford it for my usage of the free grid battery.
Rooftop solar as implemented today is not sustainable, and is a regressive tax.
So the only honest way to do this is with your own energy storage - e.g. batteries. I do agree the allure of being completely off-grid sounds great, until you price it out. So I choose nuclear reactor in my backyard until energy storage tech catches up.
Still nuclear. And it would be easier to take the solar advocate more seriously if they weren't also opposed to mining for the very materials they made from.
> Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power.
In fact, I do have a nuclear power plant in my backyard (relatively speaking). Per Wikipedia, it's the largest power plant in the US by net generation. I'd be happy to see them add 3 more reactors to the site and double operating capacity to ~8GW.
>"Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power."
I don't understand. Why can't we put these things in the absolute middle of nowhere? Workers live on-site and you don't turn the camp into some sort of "work town". Problem solved, unless I'm missing something?
Transmission of electricity is not free, you have to build and maintain a high-power transmission line, and also waste some of the power for transmission inefficiency.
Getting people live in a work camp, transport them to and fro, and otherwise compensate them for their strange living conditions takes money, too.
This may be a significant fraction of operation cost, even if the power at the generator's output connectors is produced cheaply. More expensive -> less competitive.
In 30 years, solar will have taken over. Using safe existing nuclear power plants is OK for me, building new ones seems stupid. For some countries, replacing an old unsafe one with a good new one seems plausible, but more seems a bad choice.
Perhaps the train has indeed left the platform, but the inflection point for solar only happened this year. If the parties to Kyoto had gone home back then and created said regulatory environment for nuclear and gotten on with it, we'd be looking at a 80-90% carbon emissions free electrical grid across the entire western hemisphere today. Climate change would have been more or less solved, and yes, we knew that then, this is not benefit-of-hindsight stuff.
There's a lot of histrionics around putting oil companies in the dock for crimes against humanity, but anyone who's campaigned against nuclear in the last 30 years can go right up and sit next to them.
A coal power plant that is operating normally kills and injures more people, and releases vastly more radioactive particulates into the air, than the Fukushima disaster did.
The Fukushima reactor was old and outdated. Modern reactors are built with passive safety systems that essentially make it impossible for a Fukushima style meltdown to occur.
There's still the centralization problem. Nuclear power is centralized and lends itself to government or corporate control of the energy system, in contrast with solar which gives each property owner individual control.
I'm not saying we can't have both, it's just that the problems with nuclear are not only (perceived or real) safety problems and the fact that it yields byproducts the most tempting use of which is to make nuclear weapons.
I guess the flipside on centralisation is it allows you to build much simpler (and much less) transmission infrastructure (unless we're talking about a scenario where everyone is 'energy independent' at the household level).
I do somewhat agree with you though: the sheer scale of current nuclear power plants (and the technical complexity) means the market is fairly uncompetitive. From what I understand, companies like Westinghouse will practically sell you the plant 'at cost' and then gouge you on the fuel supply contract.
Then again, some of the gen4 designs can work as small, modular fission reactors that might power a small town or community. I know the molten-salt reactor's initial intended applications were: (a) powering army bases and (b) powering a nuclear-powered strategic bombers (which seems rather insane to me).
I agree with you. There are undoubtedly issues with nuclear power but the possibility of a Fukushima/Chernobyl meltdown happening in your backyard is not one of them. The main downside is that this understandable but unfounded fear get in the way of politicians having a meaningful discussions about the real issues of nuclear, such as the one you mentioned.
Admittedly solar does not work everywhere, but there are transport mechanisms, and batteries, and it does work in some places. And we have to decide where to spend our money. Spending on solar is a choice that leads to more local control and less centralized control, as compared to spending on nuclear.
And it's not necessarily totally one or the other in every situation. I'm just saying I have a preference for things that favor local control.
If you are talking about grid-scale transport and storage mechanisms that move power in from "someplace [else]" we are back to a centralized power system.
Moreover, you still have yet to make a case for why a decentralized system is inherently good.
There's a strong argument for centralized systems where they are feasible, and that's that centralized systems are easy and decentralized systems are hard. We all know this from our own experience - it's easiest to use a Single Big Server if you can get away with it, it's tougher to use a cluster of systems coherently (CAP theorem comes into play), and as you continue to decentralize further and further you eventually need something like a blockchain to have any hope of consistency, latency becomes measured in minutes, etc.
Distributed systems are hard and we don't want to make the power grid any more complex than it needs to be. A few big centralized power sources are greatly preferable to many decentralized power sources from an engineering perspective, although perhaps not from your political perspective.
That's another problem with Nuclear. After investing a large capital stake into a nuclear plant, the operators are unwilling to make hard decisions on safety because of how deeply they're invested. The Fukushima reactor design was "safe" for the time it was built, and flaws were found afterwards, yet the plant wasn't taken offline.
Modern passive safety systems are safe as far as the designers can anticipate, just like Fukushima, and there is a lot which can go wrong.
You have to think about the trade-offs... even Chernobyl only caused 56 direct deaths and a five-fold increase in the incidence of normal rate of thyroid cancer (a fairly treatable form of cancer) amongst the 18m children exposed.
I say "only" there not to diminish their suffering (it's a terrible thing happening to a huge number of people) but because the consequences of continuing to rely on coal are orders of magnitude worse.
Every design will be old after a few decades. If, when these old designs were being built, people were saying "they're not so safe, but in a few decades we'll have a much safer design" and are now saying that we have a safer design, then, it seems reliable. However, if people were saying a few decades ago, "These new designs are much safer than the old ones" and are now saying "Well, THESE new designs are much safer than the old ones" and in a few decades when these designs are old will be saying, "But really, THESE NEW designs are much safer than those old ones" than it's not surprising that there's so much fear and uncertainty from the general public.
Most people aren't experts in nuclear plant design and regulations. They rely on authorities, but when accidents that aren't supposed to happen end up happening, they (rightfully) start to distrust the ability of the authorities to provide them with proper risk assessment. If you tell someone that one Fukushima type disaster will happen every 30 years and that occurs, then they can at least judge the risk and decide whether or not it's worth it. If you tell someone there's little chance of that kind of disaster and then it happens, they're naturally going to be skeptical of your later pronouncements that "Of course that happened to THAT plant, but now there's REALLY little chance of that happening."
People might make a bad decision because of this, but the concern isn't irrational.
You've somehow managed to miss the entire point you were responding to. A power plant that is designed today is designed with 50 more years' knowledge of possible failure modes than a plant that was designed 50 years ago.
Does that mean that it cannot fail? No, but as adults we are constantly exposed to risks of all kinds and life is simply a matter of weighing risks and benefits. The car you drive to work is not perfectly safe, and in fact all Americans have an extraordinarily high risk of dying in an auto accident compared to most other causes of death. But you decide that having a job is worth the risk of driving to work, and the cars today are certainly far safer than cars engineered in the 50s or even the 70s.
The risk of a modern nuclear plant is far lower than one engineered during the 50s (as most current reactors are). And truthfully, even those present a much lower health/safety risk than coal plants do.
The biggest problem at this point is that NIMBYs who don't want any upgrades or modernization to take place have stifled replacement of older reactors with safer and more modern ones, and prevented proper reprocessing and disposal of the waste in safe repositories. Instead we just run the older reactors far past their design lifespans and allow the waste to pile up on-site. If you want to bring up Fukushima - most of the contamination was caused by discharging water from the spent fuel pools that are needed to hold all that waste that piles up due to lack of proper disposal.
In other words - NIMBYs literally caused the vast majority of the contamination from the Fukushima accident.
On the other hand, you didn't offer any rebuttal to the arguments I offered, either. You just found fault with a single line and decided to go with it.
A tone argument is a logical fallacy, and I made a substantive post. Do you care to offer anything else in response?
I'm not talking about frequency of disasters but rather their severity. It's not that one Fukushima-type disaster every 30 years is much better than one every 50 years, but that one Fukushima-type disaster is a lot better than one Chernobyl-type disaster.
Fukushima type plants have Chernobyl type disasters approximately never. That part was not a lie.
Supposedly new plant designs never have Fukushima type disasters.
"In 30 years" lol, at least the amount of time claimed for the solution is becoming more realistic. 20 years ago, people claimed solar was going to take over in "10 years".
You completely misunderstood me. I'm saying nuclear isn't going to get much better on the next thirty years, while solar has been and is already better, and is getting even better every year. Nuclear costs have been understated since they came out.
This is all predicated on fusion not panning out, correct? I'd also be very surprised to see that there have been no advances that made nuclear more efficient or safe in the last 30 years.
Indeed. Production and use of solar and wind cause more deaths for GW/H than current nuclear fission (which is responsible for around 19.5% of the US' energy generation [0]). The problem is that deaths from nuclear generation are concentrated in very short, dramatic events. I mean, if you're looking for the biggest killer (by at least an order of magnitude), it's fossil fuels: boringly due to the reduction in air quality, leading to higher incidence of asthma/respiratory related deaths.
And although this guy is clearly keen on nuclear fission (MSRs specifically), he's actually gone to the trouble or running the numbers on cost, which you are free to critique (http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear...). Here are his four conclusions:
- It would cost over $29 Trillion to generate America’s baseload electric power with a 50 / 50 mix of wind and solar farms, on parcels of land totalling the area of Indiana.
- It would cost over $18 Trillion with Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) farms in the southwest deserts, on parcels of land totalling the area of West Virginia.
- We could do it for less than $3 Trillion with AP-1000 Light Water Reactors, on parcels totalling a few square miles.
- 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.
As for those arguing against nuclear power because of well publicised nuclear accidents, it's worth considering the facts:
- Three Mile Island: no direct fatalities, average exposure dose equivalent to a chest x-ray. Some academic dispute about whether it increased cancer-related deaths, in many cases because the numbers being argued over are incredibly small.[1]
- Fukushima: WHO 2013 report concluded health impacts likely to be below detectable levels, although slight increase in cancer probability if linear no-threshold hypothesis applied. More people were killed because of the (probably unnecessary) evacuation of the surrounding areas.[2]
- Chernobyl - UN estimates final total of premature deaths from disaster will be around 4000 (49 of these were immediate). Also made a sizeable area of land uninhabitable for some time.[3]
A 2012 estimate of 'deaths per trillion kWh' [4] from various energy sources has it at:
Like, that there's still unsolved engineering problems with finding naterials that survive the corrosive environment within of molten salt reactors.
Like, that he didn't inckude waste storage at all.
Like, that he calculated prices for renewables based on buying the most expensive panels, but for nuclear, based on the lowest estimates.
In reality, the ROI level of renewables has already won against nuclear.
And then there's the problem that also plagued plants in Germany, massive corruption and bribing of investigators because it's cheaper than actually building safe plants. It's no coincidence that the only success story for nuclear is a country where all reactors are government-owned and don't have to turn a profit necessarily.
And this brings us to the last problem:
Most new CO2 will soon be produced in developing countries, with unstable governments and unreliable public systems.
And you want to give those governments nuclear reactors? Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc?
Your point about the materials challenge for MSRs is very true: for the designs I've seen the 'solution' is super corrosive. However, I don't think it's an insurmountable challenge, and its more a question of durability over time (and then subsequent maintenance costs). Our water plumbing systems will eventually succumb to the rigours of time; it will just be a very long time...
On waste storage, MSRs product much much less waste. A solid fuel, light water reactor achieves maybe 3% fuel efficiency, whereas it's somewhere north of 90% for the thorium MSR. In addition, the byproducts it does produce are mostly useless for nuclear weapons. Dr Carlo Rubbia (former director of CERN and 2016 Nobel Laureate) has stated one of the reasons funding for MSRs was cut by the US in the 70s was precisely because it's difficult to use them to produce nuclear weapons. There are even proposals for MSRs that are fuelled specifically by nuclear waste transuranics (e.g. http://www.transatomicpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/N...).
Honestly, I'm not so sure the ROI for renewables is anywhere close to 'winning', unless you ignore stuff like renewable intermittancy (meaning you need to build a crapload more highly expensive transmission infrastructure, or attach highly cost-effective batteries to the grid i.e. lead-acid batteries atm).
As for German nuclear, I suppose that won't be a problem once they've completely shut down all their nuclear reactors. Pity that the government official estimated cost of this is 55 billion Euros over the next decade. Although the (frankly more credible) 'unofficial' estimate puts the cost at 250 billion euros over the next decade. Not to mention the fact it's resulted in their co2 emissions increasing in both 2015 and 2016 (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhou...). Their own environment ministry now predicts they will probably not make their 2020 co2 reductions targets.
So other than the enormous cost and increase in co2 emissions, good policy.
- We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors
Seems very dubious. The first successful MSRs were built over 60 years ago. The reason none are in commercial use is probably because the costs would work out higher than conventional reactors.
Yeah it's possible he's overstating the case, although he seems to have gone in to quite a bit of detail estimating the costs. But you'll see from some of the comments above those might be distorted.
My own very crude back of the envelope, for replacing all worldwide coal generation with AP-1000s (at $7bn a pop) puts the cost somewhere in the $6T range. This is assuming I got the unit conversions correct...
As for MSRs, there's some very interesting history there. There is, of course, the fact that MSRs weren't as good at producing the necessary byproducts for making nuclear bombs (remember this was during during the cold war). But the other accident of history was simply that Oak Ridge National Labs (who ran a prototype MSR for a few years) just happened to be in the wrong part of the country: the story goes that Nixon apparently wanted to shore up political support in (California?...) and so pushed money more in the direction of the LMFBR.
Nixon also fired the director of ORNL too, apparently because his support for MSRs and advocacy for increased nuclear safety didn't gel too well with that administration. At that point MSRs were kind of forgotten about...
It definitely seems like the big challenge for MSRs is of the materials/chemical engineering variety. I guess some of these could be designed around: for instance I've heard Kirk Sorensen (LFTR advocate) suggest situating the entire reactor and plumbing complex in a drain/basin of sorts. In the case of a pipe break the fuel(s) simply drains in to a passively cooled storage tank (deep underground).
Also some of the chemical handling would require great care. Fluorine, for instance, is not something I'd want to mess around with...
> It's no coincidence that the only success story for nuclear is a country where all reactors are government-owned and don't have to turn a profit necessarily.
I don't have the numbers, but I would also have to imagine that the government-owned reactors are the most expensive on paper because there will always be political powers that will want to make it appear more expensive than it is.
This to me is one of the biggest issue with solar (and wind) is you need huge amounts of land if you want to really try to replace what is being generated by fossil fuels. Sunlight just doesn't provide all that much energy per square foot. When we stand in the sun on a clear day, we feel comfortable warmth not searing heat.
Do all the cost estimates showing Solar is competitive include the land acquisition costs?
This is a good question. I suspect the answer is no, given most of the exuberant headlines about renewable costs don't even factor in the renewable intermittancy problem (which massively increases the total cost of generation and transmission/storage).
It's the same problem when people propose building giant solar arrays in the desert. Unfortunately, our large population centres tend to be concentrated in coastal areas, and transmission infrastructure isn't free (it's actually super expensive).
EDIT: Just to be clear, I have nothing against renewable energy (I suspect I'm coming off as a little negative here). I just hope that people aren't misled when costs aren't properly factored in (or overstated, in other cases). I actually think there's something rather special about solar PV: it's one of the few forms of electricity generation that isn't just another method of making heat to spin a turbine. Hell, despite its sophistication, fission is just a fancy way of boiling water...
Yes, that is a huge amount of space if you concentrate it, but think about all the idle space out there -- the many many acres of rooftops of a city, for example, or the acreage of interstate highways. There are a number of places where solar can be placed where it can be ubiquitous, but at the same time, invisible. Nuclear needs a significant amount of dedicated space, whereas solar can coexist with a significant amount of uses.
The fully-baked lifetime costs of nuclear power are quite vigorously debated; it's hard to get accurate numbers, since in general there are unpriced government insurance policies backing the plants (i.e. the government will step in to pay the $10B cleanup costs in the unlikely event that something goes wrong).
One way of attempting to answer this question is to look at France, where 75% of their power is nuclear; their price per KWh for consumers up to 2015 was lower than the average for Europe (12th-cheapest in Europe according to Wikipedia, and 2nd-lowest for commercial), but that almost certainly doesn't price the government insurance mentioned above [2].
Note that due to a lot of electric heating in residential stock, France is very susceptible to increased demand in cold winters; in such situations they have to import from the rest of Europe, sometimes at peak hours. And as of 2016, a bunch of French reactors were shut down over safety concerns, so the prices there are spiking dramatically [3].
Another approach; let's look at cost per installed MW of power for current projects. For solar, that's now beating wind (and half the price of coal) for the newest installs, at $1.65M/MW [4]. According to the World Nuclear Association (who I'm going to assume will give the best possible numbers that can be said with a straight face), nuclear installs are ranging from ~$2.5M/MW to $7M/MW of capacity, with most cases closer to the high end of that range [5].
Now, load factor appears to be around 20% for US desert installs [6], so you need 4.5x more installed capacity to meet nuclear's load factor of 90%. Load-factor-adjusted costs: solar $8.25M/MW, nuclear $2.8M/MW - $7.8M/MW. That makes it look a lot closer than your numbers suggest. A deeper analysis would include pricing energy storage (which increases the cost of solar more than nuclear, but does need to be considered for an all-nuclear mix) and subsidies (which predominantly increases the cost of nuclear).
I haven't done more than skim your link, which seems interesting reading, and I'll dig into that later. But the from-first-principles analysis doesn't seem to be using the right costs for solar; it has `Cost: $12.3 Billion` for a 500MW CSP installation, or $24.6M/MW. That's a factor of 15 above the observed cost of installing a modern solar plant. It might be accurate for a CSP plant, but that's not the cheapest solar available.
In summary, I'm somewhat agnostic on this issue, but the energy storage issues with solar/wind seem like they could push the cost up substantially as we start to get towards majority-renewable on our grid, so I tentatively support building some new nuclear as a short-to-medium-term hedge. But we should be sure to do so with as little subsidies as possible, so that the installation price reflects the true cost, rather than kicking the can down the road on billions of dollars of decommissioning costs. And entirely new reactor designs (e.g. fast breeders) could change the calculus entirely.
Caveat emptor; I'm not in the energy business, so there's probably some missing steps here. Please let me know if you spot one.
My thinking is pretty similar to yours. Especially the point on subsidies, although I would modify it slightly: if subsidies are employed (explicitly, or implicitly in the case of 'nuclear insurance'), governments should aim to keep them as technologically neutral as possible. I'm not arguing against subsidies (especially at this point): if it's a choice between climate catastrophe or handing out subsidies I'd definitely go with the subsidies. However, I think it's counter-productive (and more costly in the long-run) for governments to distort alternative energy markets by 'picking winners' (as they always seem to do). In other words, subsidise equally.
Carbon pricing always seemed like the elegant, 'neutral' solution to me, but it doesn't seem very popular. Also people seem to have trouble understanding that it makes perfect sense to cycle the revenue back to individuals (e.g. tax cuts), as the point is to make co2 emission intensive activity relatively more expensive (meaning people efficiently substitute away).
On the solar costs, it sounds like you've made a fair calculation (although I'm by no means an expert either, so not really qualified to make any kind of judgement). Although one other factor (which you might have already built in to your unit price) is the cost of transmission infrastructure: renewables (particularly wind) need to be geographically distributed to ameliorate their intermittancy issues (i.e. the wind only blows in some parts or the country at any given time, the sun is only visible from some perspectives etc.). Either that or, as you pointed out, you need quite a lot of energy storage capacity. Most likely there's some optimal mixture of both.
And I should probably correct something that I think I (mistakenly) said earlier as well: nuke plants, although they can scale up and down to try and match demand, it apparently is not a fast process (meaning at least some energy storage or 'peaking'/'energy sinking' capacity is required, somewhat mitigated by good predictive models of demand).
>>It's sad that you seem to think that we need to "accept" man-made disasters.
There will never be a completely safe man-made system.
For example, when designing a system for Functional Safety[0], none of the applicable standards (IEC 61508, ISO 13849, etc.) require that the product eliminate risk completely, because that is literally impossible in any complex system.
Instead, you reduce the risk based on the expected harm according to the function "[likelihood of dangerous incident / time unit] * [amount of harm caused if dangerous incident occurs]" until that expected harm is below a certain threshold.
Even accounting for Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, etc., nuclear already outperforms other sources of centralized power generation when you measure the deaths per unit energy produced[1]. Politically, the public may never accept this simple truth, because we are afraid of "big" things far out of proportion to their average actual danger to us. But it is a simple truth nonetheless.
1 Fukushima/30yrs? You remember that places linke Fukushima and chernobyl are contminated for the next couple hundred years, right? Not to mention nuclear fallout, endangered species in those regions, groundwater being poisoned, etc
Second, funny how costs suddenly matter when it's about nuclear. Barely a month goes by without some new unimaginable mind numbing (wholly impractical) 'solution' to climate change that we're being implored to consider, because it's about saving the planet for our children. Nuclear is a perfectly practical, much cheaper (if still very expensive), 80% solution to climate change that we can actually start implementing today, but somehow it's not on the table. Somehow it doesn't seem all that plausible that cost is really the issue.
In short, climate change is the biggest issue facing the world (except nuclear and fracking). I'm very excited that the NYT is being practical here.