The Chernobyl exclusion zone, terrible as it is, doesn’t hold a candle to the realities of climate change.
Geological repositories are the solution for long term storage. They are not only technologically feasible, but actually constructed and waiting for use.
Ignoring the solution is not the same as there being no solution.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone as terrible as it is, is very far from a worst case. It's what you get from a moderately bad meltdown with heroic mitigation efforts as a follow up. The risks are far greater than that. Holding it up and saying "this isn't bad" is missing that that's the point, this is what happens in a "good" meltdown.
It's also what you get from a reactor with no containment dome, unlike every modern reactor.
On top of that, the Chernobyl reactor had a strong positive feedback: as the temperature went up, the reaction sped up. Modern reactors do the opposite.
Only up to a point. Modern designs tend to be short term passively safe, but shut off the pumps and radioactive decay alone can be enough to eventually cause a melt down in many modern designs. Which is the core issue, there’s a huge cost trade off for protection vs every possible issue no matter how remote.
Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of this. They haven’t caused a major issue yet but they’re potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.
The Soviets were the only ones that built reactors that way. As in, having the ability to blow up.
> Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of this. They haven’t caused a major issue yet but they’re potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.
I think you're also over estimating the danger here. We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.
Edit2: Blowing up isn’t the only risk from a melt down, a major meltdown on a river could contaminate millions of people’s drinking water without any boom.
First pools are shared between reactors so there’s probably only around 200 that have ever been built.
Also, the risk isn’t simply in year X for pool Y, it’s for every pool and every year. At best we can estimate the risk of a pool over it’s lifetime is probably under 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any given year. The risk of any pool over the next 50 years, now that we have very little hard data on. At least in terms of real world data ir could be 0.05% or 50% and we just don’t have enough real world data to validate.
> At best we can estimate the risk of a pool over it’s lifetime is probably under 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any given year
How are you getting this number?
> The risk of any pool over the next 50 years, now that we have very little hard data on
What are you talking about? We have plenty of data. We literally have decades of physical testing and hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars worth of simulation testing. What do you think Sierra[0] (#3 super computer in the world) is doing all day? It is a classified machine at a DOE lab. Even a substantial portion of Summit does this same research (it also does a lot of climate research). But come on, 3 of the top 10 super computers are at US DOE labs, and the 3 exascale machines being built are also targeted for DOE labs (Aurora, Frontier, El Capitan (classified)). LLNL and ORNL spend significant resources on nuclear research.
“We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.”
I was correcting the statistical power comment. People estimate their quite safe, but essentially we ran the test once without problems which doesn’t say anything. 70 years ago there weren’t 500 reactors even today theirs less than 450 at probably under 200 sites. Thus the odds of any specific one having a problem next year is low, but the odds of any one having a problem next year is 200x as high and the odds of anyone having a problem in the next 50 years is ~50 * 200 times that. Or to put it another way they could be more dangerous than nuclear reactors but we just don’t have enough data to get signal from random noise.
As to why these estimates might not be meaningful, they ignore things like active sabotage which is why real world data is more meaningful.
> but essentially we ran the test once without problems which doesn’t say anything.
No, we ran the test over a thousand times (including research reactors). We have been running tests for over 70 years.
Honestly, it just sounds like you don't know very much about nuclear physics let alone nuclear reactors physics. Nor does it sound like you know much about statistics. You are being extremely confident while demonstrating a lack of knowledge.
Honestly, why talk with such confidence about a field you haven't worked in (even adjacent to) nor studied?
Suppose you want to know how soon a CPU will fail. You can’t just test 1 CPU for 1 month and say well each of it’s 1 billion transistors lasted 1 month so the CPU also last a long time. That logic obviously doesn’t work because the part fails when any component fails.
Your trying to apply that same logic to say all spent fuel pools are safe over their lifetime because each individual spent fuel pools is unlikely to fail in a given year.
It’s the same thing with nuclear reactors, each individual reactor is low risk but build 1,000 of them and some will likely fail over their collective 50 year lifespan.
No, we are sampling a thousand different CPUs of about 30 varieties over 70 years. That's enough data to know on average how long a random CPU will last, to know how long any particular CPU will last, and to find trends about the longevity trends of newer CPUs over time.
You are using bad statistics. You are using bad science. And it is clear you don't know anything about nuclear fuel pools, reactors, nor nuclear waste management. Get off your high horse. If you want some books on these subjects I'm happy to recommend some but you got a lot of catching up to do before you have the right to act so cocky.
What’s the the odds that any spent nuclear fuel pool will fail in the next 50 years? That is exactly the number I referred to here and you seem to think we know. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28898610.
Now you might want to use estimates of existing designs, but we don’t have them because new designs will be used over the next 50 years. So what exactly are your hard numbers based on? Effectively one test of roughly that length.
After getting hit by a tsunami. And it was a 1970s design; modern designs would not have blown up, and in fact some other reactors in the area built ten years later faced the same challenges and did fine.
And even the one that blew up released very little radiation to the surrounding area. You'd get more of a dosage living in Denver than Fukushima.
Fukushima didn't blow up. There was no explosion. Taking a bulldozer to a building is very different than using explosives (especially nuclear explosives).
The reactor didn't blow up. The building around it, outside of the containment structure, did blow up because of a hydrogen leak. It wasn't actually a big problem by itself, but it looked pretty dramatic on TV, so it probably contributed to people's overreaction afterwards.
> Fukushima weathered the worst earthquake AND tsunami in decades at the same time.
To also elaborate, all the reactors at Fukushima were designed to be able to handle any earthquake and tsunami that they thought could possibly happen in the region. Problem is that there was an earthquake larger than any in recorded history and larger than they thought the fault was capable of making. Some people are surprised that we've learned a lot about earthquakes and faults within the last 40 years.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That bigger earthquakes can happen? Yeah. That's known. But there's also a maximum quake that a particular fault can generate. The Liquiñe-Ofqui fault is not the same fault line that caused the Tōhoku earthquake. You're comparing apples and oranges. It's like saying that Pompeii could happen in Arizona.
>shut off the pumps and radioactive decay alone can be enough to eventually cause a melt down in many modern designs
The newest designs being built worldwide use natural circulation cooling and do not need cooling pumps in emergencies. Eventually the cooling pool needs to be refilled, but it's external to the containment pressure boundary, so you could refill it with a fire truck.
Note you might need a lot of fire trucks, though. If decay heat is 0.2% of nominal power after a week, we need .8mL per nameplate MW (thermal) per second... which doesn't sound bad, but a 2GW reactor needs 5000L firetrucks showing up every 50 minutes, 24/7, after a week. This could be challenging depending upon the underlying emergency.
((0.002 megawatt) / ((2260 + 250) * (kilojoules / kg))) / (997 (kg / (m^3))) = 0.00079921038 liters per second
Assumption is that you're raising the temperature of the water 60C and then evaporating it, and that all the heat energy goes into the water. In the real world it can be expected to be slightly better than this, but not much...
You're off in your calculation by 3 orders of magnitude, you meant to write 0.002 gigawatt, not megawatt. Then yes, you get 0.7 liters/second, and 5000 L/hour for 2 GW plant. However, in actual reality, the firetruck would just park there, put one end of the hose into the plentiful source of water that surely must be available next to a power plant, and the other one into the entrance for coolant, and start its pump. Pumping 1 liter/second is quite in range of firetruck pumps abilities.
> You're off in your calculation by 3 orders of magnitude, you meant to write 0.002 gigawatt, not megawatt.
No... decay heat is about .2% of nameplate power after a week. So for each megawatt of nameplate thermal power, you need to get rid of 2 kilowatts of heat-- or 0.8mL/second of water boiling off. "If decay heat is 0.2% of nominal power after a week, we need .8mL per nameplate MW (thermal) per second..." Was quite clearly said.
> put one end of the hose into the plentiful source of water that surely must be available next to a power plant, and the other one into the entrance for coolant, and start its pump. Pumping 1 liter/second is quite in range of firetruck pumps abilities.
This is pretty optimistic in many disaster scenarios and doesn't apply to all plants.
Natural circulation gets heat from a reactor to X, but now your dependent on X. This often seems like a trivial detail, but Fukushima failed 3 days after the earthquake.
The issue is you want several things from a passive system at the same time, don’t lose heat in normal operation, quickly lose multiple GW of heat in an emergency and as much as 200+MW of heat for days after a shutdown. The obvious solution is to have a tank of water that boils if the reactor temperature gets to high, but now you need to keep that tank full.
Thus many designs result in a reactor that is passively safe for some number of hours and at risk after that. They describe this as a passively safe reactor even if it’s got external dependencies.
I can't figure out what you're saying here. You're assuming that the control rods aren't in, days later, for the purpose of calculating heat days after shutdown?
If you're going to apply "passive safety" globally, sure.
But what we're talking about here is passive cooling system safety, not that the entire reactor is passively safe. The multiply-redundant shutdown systems suffice to end the chain reaction.
If the chain reaction ends, you're pretty much immediately at 7% of decay heat -- so sure, a 1.5GW reactor will put out 100MW of decay heat, still. But this will rapidly fall off. After about an hour, it's more like 15MW; after a day, 6MW.
Your statement of "200MW of decay heat" days later assumes either a ridiculous initial condition (an implausibly large reactor) or assumes you still have an operating reactor, which... isn't decay heat anymore.
There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely. Assuming a scram will 100% work every time in an emergency simply isn’t appropriate or realistic.
Also, Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station has 3 different 4000MW thermal reactors, 7% of that is 280MW, though sure if everything shuts down properly it should hit ~15MW. Mitsubishi APWR is aiming for 4.5GW thermal in normal operation though some safety margin needs to be considered on top of that.
> There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely
There's Chernobyl, and a few cases where a scram was delayed by 15 minutes or less. How can this produce hundreds of megawatts days later?
> There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely. Assuming a scram will 100% work every time in an emergency simply isn’t appropriate or realistic.
Assuming that every system fully fails is unrealistic, too.
> 7% of that is 280MW,
You said hundreds of megawatts days later.
> Mitsubishi APWR is aiming for 4.5GW thermal in normal operation though some safety margin needs to be considered on top of that.
What, they're going to run it over nameplate for days straight? A small excursion over 4.5GW won't appreciably change the amount of power output days later. Now you're just being silly.
Your boiling a fixed pool of water. 15 minutes of nameplate capacity is boiling over 5 days of reserve at an expected 0.2% thermal output. The margins are often measure in minutes not days which is a long way from anything that could be called passively safe.
> Assuming that every system fully fails is unrealistic, too.
Not if you want to say your system is passively safe. I fully believe nuclear can be operated safety, but a huge part of that is acknowledging every possible failure mode rather than just saying unlikely means impossible.
I think you're trying really hard to salvage a point talking about hundreds of megawatts of "decay heat" days later.
An operating reactor isn't making "decay heat".
The claim made is that the cooling system is passively safe in shutdown. Fudging the amount of decay heat by a couple orders of magnitude, and then arguing about "what if it doesn't shut down" is a bogus argument.
Obviously if you cannot reduce a reactor below nameplate power indefinitely, you have a big problem. Thankfully, we have multiply-redundant protections against this in modern designs: redundant control rod assemblies, neutron poisoning, positive stability, etc. Other than Chernobyl (a clearly bad design), all cases of delayed shutdown experienced so far have been innocuous and we've learned a lot from them.
I can only assume my original point wasn’t clear. The normal amount of decay heat is the best case possibility and should be handed just fine by any reasonable design. I don’t think there’s any reason to assume a design has that kind of fatal flaws. “quickly lose multiple GW of heat in an emergency and as much as 200+MW of heat for days after a shutdown.” Was in reference to something compounding the issue of which their’s two main issues either it didn’t shutdown quickly or it didn’t shutdown completely.
I am objecting to is the assumption that safety systems should assume things are fine in an emergency. Chernobyl had multiple compounding issues, many other accidents where less serious because X and Y happened but Z didn’t happen. Depending on such trends continuing results in a false sense of security.
A passively safe system doesn’t mean there isn’t damage. It’s perfectly reasonable for a design to say in the event of X, Y, and Z stuffs going to break. Causing a billion dollars in damage is a perfectly reasonable trade off, losing containment isn’t.
PS: Part of that is acknowledging bad designs are going to happen, we engineers are going to make mistakes. Which means not all assumptions hold.
This would be the only possible explanation, and it is directly contradicted by calling it "decay heat".
It's pretty tricky to think of a scenario where you'd have 5-10% of nameplate days after attempted shutdown.
The worst incident where there was a failed shutdown-- other than Chernobyl-- that I'm aware of was a 1980 BWR incident.
* The reactor was at nearly no power except decay power for the entire duration of the incident: half the rods fully inserted.
* Manual remediation got all the rods in within 15 minutes.
* Last-ditch shutdown procedures, e.g. SLCS, were unnecessary because there was still sufficient control and rapid rampdown of reactor output.
* This is an old BWR design and...
* Procedures were updated and improved, and even with these old BWR designs we've had no subsequent incidents in 40 years.
Failure to shut down is indeed something really, really bad-- but insisting that cooling be designed to withstand this is a bit silly. Instead, we'd best design to be sure to avoid failures to shutdown, excursions in power far over nameplate, etc... rather than insist cooling systems survive fundamentally unsurvivable events without any intervention. E.g. we don't criticize SL-1's cooling design for not surviving the excursion to 10,000x nameplate.
One could use pumps for increased efficiency during normal operation but the idea is that natural circulation should be able to remove all the heat if the reactor is SCRAMed. NuScale's design for instance only uses pumps for the steam generator, the rest is handled by natural circulation and the reactor sits in a water pool that needs to be replenished after two weeks in case of a major accident.
I know that molten salt reactors have a "salt plug" at the bottom of the tank that will melt if the temperature is too high, dumping the liquid fuel into a boron bath.
I think this kind of reactor is safe in a way that no modern reactor is - operators can remove all power and walk away in this shutdown state. This isn't possible with modern reactors, where 6% of the heat that they produce comes from daughter nuclei, and this decay heat requires cooling power for months after a controlled shutdown.
I do agree, we have to build these safely, with every conceivable scenario, such that walking away is possible.
Converting to thorium fuel would also be far better, as there is only one stable isotope in nature, so no refing is necessary (beyond high-purity smelting), and no centrifuges.
If they would’ve used water as a moderator, built a containment building, and not allowed manual override like every other reactor ever, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s absolutely a worst case scenario.
I'm pretty sure every reactor ever designed was designed to fail safely. Including Chernobyl...
I don't trust humans to design and maintain things that actually always fail safely though. Eventually someone is going to do something dumb and cut the wrong corner or, just do something dumb like disable the emergency core cooling system as part of a test of another system (what caused Chernobyl...)
In a perfect world fission power could be used safely, the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're actually perfect now".
> In a perfect world fission power could be used safely, the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're actually perfect now".
This isn’t a criticism of nuclear power; it’s a criticism of industrial civilization and technological progress. You can make the exact same point about coal mining, lithium mining, power grids, hell, even campfires if you wanted to.
If I went and dug up horror stories about what happened before we had an electrical code and used those horror stories to argue that we shouldn’t have electricity inside our homes, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, “that’s why we have electrical codes”. And I don’t think it would be a strong counter for me to say, “but the electrical code isn’t perfect”.
It's not a criticism of all technological progress, it's a criticism of technology where you cannot accept a single worst case failure, as is the case with nuclear power plants and very little else.
If an electrical fault in your house meant killings 10s or hundreds of millions of people, instead of costing you a home (and if you're really unlucky single digit numbers of lives) we'd be foolish to allow it. As it turns out, electrical faults in a house only burns down the house, not the continent.
A nuclear accident isn’t going to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people. Nuclear bombs—and fusion bombs at that—deployed in large numbers, would do that. But a single nuclear accident isn’t anywhere near the same scale as a full scale nuclear strike.
Chernobyl killed tens of people. And Chernobyl was the “shitty construction with no electrical codes” of nuclear power plants. Fukushima killed like one person.
Chernobyl by all accounts killed thousands of people, and by some (dubious) accounts may have killed many more than that.
Chernobyl was capable of killing millions of people, again I refer you to the article that I started this whole subthread with. What actually happened in Chernobyl was very very far from the worst case nuclear disaster: https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...
> Chernobyl by all accounts killed thousands of people
Fewer than 100 deaths have been directly attributed to Chernobyl. All of the numbers in the thousands are estimates based on assumptions and statistical models around radiation exposure. But if you’re bringing that into the question, it’s only fair to calculate the number of excess deaths that would have been caused by the extra amount of coal mining and air pollution that would have occurred if the Soviet Union did not operate nuclear power plants. And when you work that out, you’ll see it’s likely that the Soviet nuclear power system—which was catastrophically mis-managed not just by 21st century standards but by the standards of the USSR’s contemporaries—still saved many more lives than it cost.
Failsafe fission is a myth, it depends on accidents happening according to the design when everything is built and maintained perfectly. Fukushima was failsafe until a tsunami flooded the backup generators. The danger of tsunami was dully noted of course but as it turns out electricity supply to the reactor cooling wasn't all that failsafe.
The passive systems? They all depend on large groups of people doing their job perfectly during the manufacturing and another group of people doing their jobs perfectly at maintaining these systems and not disabling them when inconvenient. I don't trust people doing everything right every single time.
The fission reaction is a kind of a reaction that can go out of control very fast spontaneously.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against nuclear energy but I think it must be treated as something we can do until we switch to something sustainable.
I tried to find marketing material for Chernobyl and Fukushima but I did not find anything, I wanted to see if they explained the risks or did they described these plants as perfectly safe. People now claim that those designs were flawed and that everyone knew about it but I don't believe it, I will be shocked if people were promised anything less than perfect safety.
As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors and 2(actually more as fukushima lost multiple reactors) of those went bust with significant damage to the communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard to pinpoint but large communities had their lives uprooted and everything could have went worse if we lacked heroes.
With currently %10 of our electricity is coming from Nuclear, in 60 years we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that could have been much worse. If our track record remains in line, with %100 nuclear we can expect to have 20 more places ruined within the lifetime of a junior developer who just started today.
I don't know, maybe we can have nuclear power plants close to photovoltaic production facilities to offset the energy need when building those far away from densely populated places and ramp up our efforts to switch to the fusion reactor in the sky? Turn off the last nuclear power plant when we have enough solar energy equipment?
> we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that could have been much worse.
are they really uninhabitable forever? The nature seems to have returned to Chernobyl, there are still people living there who defied the evacuation order. Sure, as a precaution the exclusion zone makes sense, but to call it uninhabitable practically forever is a stretch.
No, it's flatly false unless "region" is being used in a highly misleading way. There are about 2500 people living right now in the town of Okuma where the Fukushima Daiichi reactor was located.
Lots of things depend on everyone doing their job mostly perfectly, and then inspections and tests, etc. to make sure. Chemical plants, oil platforms, airplanes, etc. We should expect the occasional accident, which there have been for all power generation technologies. Nuclear is one of the very safest, by far, if you account for all of the accidents to date.
> As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors and 2 of those went bust with significant damage to the communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard to pinpoint but large communities had their lives uprooted and everything could have went worse if we lacked heroes.
You could very easily make the same argument about climate change. What about the Amazon fires, Australia fires, California fires? The floods in Germany? Countless people had their lives uprooted from climate change (which was caused by many things, including CO2 emitting electricity generation)
I don't think any of the people who are sceptic about fission are pro-fossil-fuels.
I, for example, see the future in renewables plus storage, distributed and optimized for the local situation.
I accept fission as something necessary right now to buy time.
Maybe I'm wrong and fission is the better answer than renewables, but long term I feel like it's the same can of worms that fossil fuel was all over again.
I just hope we can make smart decisions that help us fight climate change short, mid and long-term.
Realistically, it was the worst case as modern designs are much safer. What are you imagining would be the very-far worse case and how would that arise?
I'd argue Fukushima was a worst-case scenario with a Gen-3 commercial plant.
It's not a question of engineering improvement. The comment at the top of this thread said it fairly well:
> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
I'd add "design" and "construct" to that list as well.
I have pretty much no doubt that it's theoretically possible to design, construct, maintain and operate a safe reactor, I don't believe for an instant though that the decision making authorities are capable of actually requiring in perpetuity that those things and only those things are done despite the huge financial incentives to cut corners and play the 1-in-a-million catastrophic failure lottery.
I quite agree with the dubious government skill levels in general, but considering the task I'd say they made a decent run for a first era so far. 3 big catastrophes (not good not terrible).
Question would be, can we raise the safety levels one order up ?
Also in a way, we will face that soon because the current fleet will have to be replaced by something one way or another.
The amount of coal necessary to replace nuclear fuel is about a million times greater. Do you trust those governments to handle 1000000x as much fossil fuel as nuclear? Especially consider the fact that such a large amount of coal has roughly equally as much natural radioactive contaminants as the amount of nuclear fuel that could replace it.
This is a poor argument, you're comparing nuclear to literally the worst alternative you can think of.
The alternative to building new nuclear plants is not building new coal plants, or keeping existing coal plants in use for longer. It's to take the same money that you could have spent on new nuclear power plants, and to spend them on new power plants of other types. If it's a fossil fuel form in the modern era, that probably means gas (16% of new power generation in the US), not coal (0% of new capacity I believe, rather quickly being retired/converted to natural gas). More likely it means solar (39%) or wind (31%).
But yes, I trust our society to handle coal (and other fossil fuels) more than I trust it to handle nuclear plants, because you can't hide the effects of fossil fuels, but you can hide (and deny) the negative effects of a unsafe nuclear plant until it fails catastrophically.
> you can't hide the effects of fossil fuels, but you can hide (and deny) the negative effects of a unsafe nuclear plant until it fails catastrophically.
What? The subtopic of the thread is climate change. That was hidden from the public eye for over 30 years. We're literally in the situation where fossil fuels have failed catastrophically and now everyone knows about it. Which I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate because a large portion of the population is still denying it.
I'll take the risk of some nuclear reactor accidents compared to the inevitability of world wide calamity and wars that will happen because of climate changes and resource limits. It's going to be some risk vs inevitability because the world is not going to change from fossil fuels until it's too late.I don't live some magic reality where the hippies win and we all will embrace each other and be responsible rather than be the tribal apes that we really all are.
World wide calamity is inevitable at this point. It doesn't really matter if we build nuclear or renewables or both, we cannot stop it, because the root cause is capitalism and we cannot replace that. So given that a calamity is coming I would rather build stuff that cannot melt down when unmaintaned.
What is your idea of a catastrophic failure? A nuclear detonation? Because that actually can't happen. Not because there is some gizmo preventing it that might one day fail, but because it actually, physically can not happen.
Is it a meltdown? That has already happened at Fukushima, and didn't end up being catastrophic. At least not compared to catastrophes like tsunamis and earthquakes.
It's described in the article I linked in the comment two above, I'll link it again here. A steam explosion spreading orders of magnitude more radiation than Chernobyl had already (which was prevented by people entering the reactor in the days immediately after the first explosion).
Incidentally, nuclear detonations can happen, and there is some belief that very small ones did happen in Chernobyl, but the type of the explosion is really besides the point.
>Incidentally, nuclear detonations can happen, and there is some belief that very small ones did happen in Chernobyl, but the type of the explosion is really besides the point.
If you're going to make the claim that this is possible, we need a source.
Lol, I just dug up the first article I could find, admittedly didn't check the news source.
But that source isn't for the claim you're quoting... that's for the (well known) claim that Chernobyl could have gone much worse if not for remdiation efforts, it shouldn't be hard to find alternate sources for that claim.
For the claim you're quoting, see the paper cited in the sibling comment to mine.
>> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.
If this is the coup d'etat then there's no argument. Because if you don't trust them for this then how can you trust them for anything? That's fair, not having trust. But at least be consistent.
the op seems to be missing the fact that the waste from fossil fuels is the thing that is causing the climate change. we definitely don't have a good long term waste solution for that.
Honestly I think a lot of people miss this. Similarly people will look at full cycle for nuclear but not for renewables. Nor include batteries or other storage systems. First order approximations aren't good enough to let us even approximate an understanding of what is arguably the most difficult problem in human history.
ok, well I hear that a lot but does anyone have the figures of how many Chernobyl zones would be expected if all of the fossil fuel usage was replaced with nuclear?
but then questions become - does increasing power generation via nuclear improve or make the systems worse - because maybe the sites we have now are the best of the best and we get more we no longer have the best of the best.
Final question - is there perhaps any sort of interplay from multiple Chernobyl like incidents possible? In the same way that the increase of fossil fuel usage went beyond just local pollution to climate change.
But yeah, fossil fuel usage providing almost all of humanity's energy needs over a century has damaged the environment much more than a much shorter period and much more limited nuclear power usage has.
on edit: I am in fact a proponent of increasing nuclear power usage - just these arguments I see about Chernobyl not being that bad in comparison to climate change are not that impressive without some extrapolation and hard science.
> how many Chernobyl zones would be expected if all of the fossil fuel usage was replaced with nuclear?
Honestly? Roughly 1. The reason Chernobyl blew up is difficult to explain to people that don't have a lot of background in nuclear physics. In addition to this, no western country built reactors that even had the ability to explode.
So a better question would be about Fukushima like zones (yeah, there is a bit of a difference. Their exclusion zone is smaller and won't last as long). This is also pretty unlikely and very difficult to calculate. Some people over estimate the damage from Fukushima, some under. Again, it is hard to explain to non-experts. It's not only nuclear physics, a tough enough subject as is, but also a lot of geology, medicine, and more. The simplest way to put the Fukushima accident is that it was caused by a never before seen earthquake (and subsequent tsunami) and one that was not predicted possible. Now, science did advance and this possibility was learned about, but it was a little too late. A typical response to this is that we also don't know what can happen in the future, but this is also naive because we've clearly gotten better.
There's been close to 700 reactors built and only 2 had major accidents. That's less than half a percent. Supposing we had 10k reactors that would put us at 30. But this is naive for the reasons given/implied to above. The honest answer is probably less than 10. But it is again hard to calculate because that estimate is based on current climate conditions and assuming events like Katrina are common. But I think this is still a high estimate because even the Indian ocean earthquake didn't cause such a disaster at India's Chennai reactor. My more honest guess is 3. But this is even hard because it's based on black swan events and in addition to that climate wouldn't be as big of a problem as it is today if we had continued to build reactors in the 80's. We also have assumed that such production wouldn't have increased safety measures like we see in Gen IV and Gen V reactors. Which if those were around, then I don't think we would have an additional one and I don't think Fukushima would have happened. So 1.
The truth is that asking this question is impossible to answer and not really that fruitful. It is abundantly clear that the 2 accidents that have happened were black swan events. Only Chernobyl was (somewhat meaningfully) predictable. We still don't know how to predict black swan events because by definition they are rare. We can't give a meaningful answer to your question.
And yeah, I agree. It is very clear that Chernobyl is less bad than climate change. Nature is still thriving in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Just humans aren't. And that might not be such a bad thing (though obviously it is bad for all the people that were displaced).
The long-term storage solution we're using now for CO2, is to put it into the atmosphere. Putting that there is much worse than putting radioactive waste deep underground in a stable salt formation. It's even worse than letting the nuclear plant waste sit around in open water tanks, as we do now.
The effects of Chernobyl are not limited to the exclusion zone. In the 100km radius zone, my family had to test all our food with a Geiger counter because anything grown in the area was poisoned.
(The government made Geiger counters illegal to own, btw.)
There are still lots of boars in southern Germany that are far above the official threshold for consumption (which is quite high already), like, almost glow-in-the-dark.
Southern Germany is a long way from Chernobyl, but a substantial amount of the fallout rained down here. Pretty much nothing grown in the areas that got contaminated precipitation was safe to eat, sometimes for years. Milk was way too contaminated even after dilution with milk from other areas, and pretty high amounts of radionuclides accumulated in the bottom layers of sandboxes on playgrounds and other unexpected places.
No one knew at first though, the West German government kept playing down the incident even though they knew that fallout reaching Germany was a big possibility, and thus lots and lots of people got rained on who could have protected themselves (my mom for one, on the way to work, metallic taste and all)
That's a pretty important part of the anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany, by the way. That's why a lot of people simply won't trust the parties involved in running nuclear power plants to do so safely – because the system failed already in an incident that wasn't even a domestic one, and also because of the rampant corruption surrounding those plants and high-level politics in general.
Last time I ran through the numbers I was remembering that you'd have to eat a ridiculous amount of wild boar and/or wild mushrooms (assuming all were irradiated) on a daily basis to even approach dangerous levels.[0]
These stories make the rounds and constantly sound dangerous but the fact is that people just don't understand nuclear physics. I mean why would they? Everyone isn't taking college level physics classes, let alone ones on medical physics. If I wrote an article about how radiation levels in tuna doubled after the Fukushima disaster then people would stop eating tuna. This literally happened even though that doubling was to 5Bq/kg and Japanese limits are 100Bq/kg (US is 1.2kBq/kg). The fact is that our instruments for detecting radiation are extremely sensitive. You can measure radiation in everything. Yeah, the tuna got more radioactive after Fukushima, but that doesn't mean they got more dangerous. That's not how it works. And I'm tired of people that know absolutely nothing about nuclear physics talking as if they are experts on radiation. Both people in the pro and anti-nuclear camps do this and neither are helping.
[0] Cs137 has a dose factor of 0.014mSv/kBq and the high radiation had 600Bq/kg. So that's 0.0084mSv/kg of boar. European rose limit is 20mSv/yr, so that's 6.5kg of boar a day. And we need to note that 20mSv is well within the safety limit. 1 Sv is a 5.5% chance increase of cancer within your lifetime (LNT model which over estimates), so that's 6.5kg (14.3lbs) of boar a day to raise your lifetime risk of cancer by 1% (body shows to actually deal with these low levels of radiation fine).
Edit: If you're eating 14lbs of wild meat every single day, you probably have larger health issue than a 5% increased risk of cancer in your lifetime (the meat is probably giving you a higher chance of cancer).
I think it is really arrogant to assume that you know what the dangerous levels are, and to claim that under a certain level is not dangerous or harmful.
Time and time again, this type of thinking has been proven naive at best, and often criminally misleading: synthetic food additives, tobacco, opiate painkillers, radiation, leaded gasoline, and many, many more.
When it comes to the health of myself and those close to me, I'm going to err on the side of caution, and disregard what the "official numbers" say.
> I think it is really arrogant to assume that you know what the dangerous levels are, and to claim that under a certain level is not dangerous or harmful.
Really? Because I have a degree in physics, studied radiation, and worked for years on radiation transport simulations and shielding. I think I have an above average knowledge of radiation physics and the effects on the human body.
> synthetic food additives, tobacco, opiate painkillers, radiation, leaded gasoline, and many, many more.
I mean yeah, don't trust Shell, Marlboro, or Purdue about their own products. Listen to the actual scientists. Because each of these examples has cases like these where there were other scientists demonstrating how these things were harmful. And each of these cases got political and a bunch of non-experts fought referencing papers they didn't even know how to read. Spoiler, there's no "big nuclear."
> I'm going to err on the side of caution, and disregard what the "official numbers" say.
Cool. But eating 3kg (6.6lbs) of wild boar a day is an absurd amount and under half of what I said was the "official numbers." Even 1kg/day (2.2lbs) is ludicrous. You're going to have way more health problems if you're eating that much boar every day. Be cautious. I'm not saying don't. I'm saying that you could be stuffing your face all day and you wouldn't come anywhere near "official numbers". You're going to kill yourself if you're eating 15lbs of meat every day.
> Really? Because I have a degree in physics, studied radiation, and worked for years on radiation transport simulations and shielding. I think I have an above average knowledge of radiation physics and the effects on the human body.
That is exactly what makes you an unrealiable source in my eyes, because you are biased towards the "we know what we're doing" perspective.
You know a little more than others, but you think you know a lot, enough to make others' decisions and opinions for them.
> There are still lots of boars in southern Germany that are far above the official threshold for consumption (which is quite high already), like, almost glow-in-the-dark.
Citation needed. A wild boar doesn't live more than 10-15 years, so that's three generations removed from 1986. Bioaccumulation doesn't work like that. And glow-in-the-dark is pure nonsense obviously.
The "atomkraft nine donkey" movement has a lot of similar horror stories, few of which have a factual basis. They even made their bad fiction stories about the dangers of nuclear powerplants compulsory reading for grade school kids. No wonder a good chunk of otherwise level headed Germans are brain washed with these lies.
Boars consume lots of mushrooms, which accumulate Cesium very well, hence these boars may end up with lots of Cesium in their systems. This is covered in German media pretty much every year, but I can't find much in English on the topic. [1] is the best I could unearth quickly:
> For example, it is also possible to have 2020 samples of wild boar from the same hunting ground simultaneously below 100 Bq Cs 137 per kg but also of several thousand Bq/kg. In addition, large seasonal variations in contamination can also occur in an area.
You may be interested in my comment above where I calculate the dosage you'd get. Your source shows something different than the source I used (which said 600Bq). But the high of your source is 16,704 Bq/kg, which means you need to eat 85.5kg (188.5lbs) of boar in a year to reach European dose limits (20mSv). That's a 0.234kg/day (over half a pound). That's a lot of meat to be eating a day. And that is the highest reading they found. But the median they found in that same area was 2,857 Bq/kg. That equates to needing to eat 1.37kg/day (3 lbs) to reach limits.
Note that this is also assuming that you receive a full dosage from your consumption, which isn't how it'd work in practice, so these numbers are conservative.
I'm not saying that you should go out and eat a bunch of wild boar, but that you have to be eating pretty much a high protein diet and almost exclusively on wild boar to even get close to yearly radiation limits (US limits are 50 Sv/yr btw, and even that level is not linked to increased rates of cancer). Though eating that much red meat every day is probably going to have other health problems (including likelihood of cancer) unrelated to radiation. It is recommended that you have less than 70g of red meat a day. I mean if you eat a hamburger every day (1/4 lb / 113g) no one would question you getting health problems and you're still under half the EU limits even when eating the most radioactive boar (16,704 Bq/kg) measured (less than a tenth if you're eating a medium boar (2,857 Bq/kg) from the most radioactive area (Bodenmais)).
You kinda have to actively try to get radiation sickness through boar consumption. The same is true for mushrooms.
The Sachsenwald near Hamburg has (had?) elevated levels too.
Though that could have other reasons, because the GKSS is near. Where when some questions because of leucemy clusters in children and allegiations of nuclear experiments arose, the government downplayed, too. Including a file cabinet of the local fire brigade burnt down, by guess what, a fire in the local fire station!
If you're talking about boars and mushrooms, then I'm guessing not. You'd have to eat an absurd amount of meat and mushrooms every day to accumulate enough dose to go over your yearly limits, and you still wouldn't get anywhere near radiation worker limits. We're talking at least a hamburger every single day in the worst case scenario, and let's be real, that much red meat is going to cause other serious health problems.
Yucca Mountain is sort of ready but the state doesn't want waste to be moved there and more and a few places don't want the waste transferred through them to get there.
I think if nuclear energy is to be part of the solution here, as things are we have to plan for indefinite storage of waste on site with the energy production. And ideally we could minimize waste or process it in to such a state as it could conceivably be transported somewhere else but those costs undermine the profitability of energy production as it is.
I wonder if there is a political solution to the storage problem. What if GHG externalities are taxed in a way that can be shuttled to those areas, like NV and NM, that can provide part of the nuclear solution? That might make the Yucca Mountains and WIPPs more palatable while also incentivizing more, better storage solutions.
In the case of Yucca Mountain, a number of proposals were floated to give concessions to the State of Nevada in return for cooperation. There was a proposal put forward a couple decades ago to allow storage in exchange for returning unused Federal land to State control. ~85% of Nevada (and increasing) is Federally controlled. This creates significant economic problems for Nevada due to the practical restrictions on growth and land use. Most of this land has no Federal purpose and is not actively managed, it is simply under Federal control and subject to their whims that change with each administration, creating a sparse patchwork of private property the use of which effectively requires Federal permission.
This proposal was flatly rejected by the Federal government, even though it would have come at no cost (indeed, it would have saved money by reducing administration costs of land they have no purpose for in any case). Generally speaking, the Federal government has been unwilling to grant any concessions to States for taking the nuclear waste.
Massive investments in renewables, capping your personal energy budget to something reasonable rather than what you can afford from a financial perspective, aiming for energy neutrality in buildings (doable, I've seen demonstration setups in the early 2000's).
And even then: we can no longer avoid climate change, you can take that to the bank. The very best we can do is limit the impact of the climate change that is inevitable now.
"capping your energy budget" is a non-starter. I oppose it, the majority opposes it, and this is a good way of getting kicked out of power and then having even your realistic policies rolled back. Unless you're the type of person who enjoys being right rather than being effective, you'll make reasonable proposals that have a chance of being enacted, rather than unreasonable proposals that lose elections.
The future is one of cheap, abundant energy, that is growing in use. It is one of increasing industrialization and output. Increasing consumption and production. If you can't find a way to get there, then you'll be left behind as the rest of the world chooses a different path.
Yes, god forbid we would enact realistic policies. No, instead, let's stick our heads in the sand and kick the bucket down the road a generation. That's worked so well so far.
Elections are great, right up to the point where you are going to have to make very harsh decisions affecting the majority. I predict our democratic institutions will be a casualty of climate change long before we will allow ourselves to become overwhelmed by climate change itself.
Capping total energy usage is not realistic. It's never happened in human history. It's not going to happen in the future. No one in any position of power has even proposed it.
You are putting your head in the sand if you think that this is what will happen.
GDP will grow. Energy usage per capita will grow. Technology will increase. Output and consumption will increase. That is what we do, as a species, as we try to improve our condition. Trying to say that "oh, we'll just stop and cap energy use" is not only unrealistic, but it's impossible to achieve, because any nation that does that will just be outcompeted by rival nations that don't. Then people will flee to the sane nation while the insane nation collapses.
I get that some people on the green fringe don't like industrialization, but opposing rising living standards, rising output, all of which require rising energy usage, is always a losing proposition.
> Capping total energy usage is not realistic. It's never happened in human history.
In a sense, it has happened, but not in the form of an explicit mandate but just due to pre-existing technological and economic trends. Here is a graph of "Primary Energy Consumption per capita" for various countries, showing that the EU, US, and Canada have all passed their peak:
I've done alright. But capital markets are usually much more sane than internet message boards, so it's not like there is a lot of financial opportunity by saying obvious things, it's only when you meet someone steeped in irreality that telling the truth becomes a radical act.
Offloading the problem to the consumer. If you want power continuity then you will have to provide it yourself. If you want reliable power that will be available but a significant premium over the unreliable version, and there will be a limited supply of that reliable power.
Pumped storage where available will help a lot, grid scale battery systems are nowhere near powerful enough to take on a significant fraction of the worlds powersupply so we'll have to make do.
Rationing of critical resources has many historical precedents, it's time we realized that power is not infinitely available at will, even though we would very much like it to be that way.
> If you want reliable power that will be available but a significant premium over the unreliable version, and there will be a limited supply of that reliable power.
Ah yes. What a libertarian view of the world. The rich will get the power while the unfortunate ones won't even be able to refrigerate their food. Medical equipment will fail. People will freeze in winter. Trains will not run. etc.
Also. How do you propose to separate reliable and non-reliable energy sources? By building a parallel energy grid?
How is this a realistic policy?
> Rationing of critical resources has many historical precedents, it's time we realized that power is not infinitely available at will
It's not unlimited. However, it's not as scarce and limited as you want to make it.
It's not libertarian at all, it is simply realistic. Keep in mind that the power grid as it is today is already unreliable, it's just that we've started to think about it as 100% available. But there are many reasons why it can - and often does - fail and we have build our processes around that.
Just like we do not need a separate grid for green energy we do not need one for reliable and unreliable sources, case in point: we already use reliable and unreliable sources right now, it's just that we do not bill differently for them.
As for medical equipment, refrigeration and trains: it is clear that some consumption will need to be sourced from reliable sources or at least sources with sufficient overlap during generation that their chance of failure is small.
Power is not as scarce and unlimited as I believe it well may become in the near future, and if you look at this through a slightly wider lens (developing world vs developed world) then you'll see that in many countries this situation is a reality today, but instead of being billed differently and given a choice the power will simply fail.
> Just like we do not need a separate grid for green energy we do not need one for reliable and unreliable sources, case in point: we already use reliable and unreliable sources right now
That really doesn't answer how you would solve your own proposal. Let me quote it again: "If you want power continuity then you will have to provide it yourself. If you want reliable power that will be available but a significant premium over the unreliable version, and there will be a limited supply of that reliable power."
So. How are you going to solve that? You either make the entire grid reliable, or you make the entire grid unreliable. There's no "both".
The most simple scenario: two neighboring houses on the same grid. One "is paying premium for reliable power continuity". The other is paying cheaply. HOw are you going to provide one with reliable power, and the other one with unreliable on the same grid?
> it is clear that some consumption will need to be sourced from reliable sources or at least sources with sufficient overlap during generation that their chance of failure is small.
They are on the same grid as everybody else. So you are proposing to build a parallel electrical grid?
> you'll see that in many countries this situation is a reality today, but instead of being billed differently and given a choice the power will simply fail.
I come from Moldova. It's been reliably the poorest country in Europe for the past 30 years. For the past 20 years it hasn't had any rolling blackouts. The US had rolling blackouts in California in 2000-2001 and in Texas in 2021.
Power availability and reliability in the modern world is first and foremost the function of corruption and political will.
- it is a parallel grid for all intents and purposes. Because you will have to supply literally every apartment, every house, every building (and parts of buildings) with smart meters.
It's also funny how you don't see beyond this already weird decision. Example from actual reality: TV Pickup [1]. "A phenomenon in the United Kingdom that involves surges in demand on the electrical grid, occurring when a large number of people simultaneously watch the same television programme. TV pickup occurs when viewers take advantage of commercial breaks in programming to operate electrical appliances at the same time, causing large synchronised surges in national electricity consumption"
That's just kettles and microwaves.
Now, with smart meters you've powered down "cheapskates". When we have more power, we now... bring entire households back online. Good luck handling that
- it is a libertarian view: The rich will get the power while the unfortunate ones won't even be able to refrigerate their food. Medical equipment will fail. People will freeze in winter. Trains will not run. etc.
I don't know where you live, but where I'm living they seem to be standard now. By law. With few exceptions. Though the ones in the House I'm living in are continously blinking "E-21", so I'd guess their uplink is down, and they can't do FTP.
I'm just telling how it is. Not what I like, or support.
> I don't know where you live, but where I'm living
Exactly. There's a lot you don't know.
> I'm just telling how it is.
You're not telling it "how it is". You're telling a fantasy and calling it "realistic policies".
You didn't even know about things like TV Pickup, did you? And you can't even imagine how your "realistic policies" would affect the grid.
You didn't even know that smart meters are not everywhere.
You didn't think how selling "good power" only to the rich would affect everyone. (Oh, right, anyone who won't be able to afford it are just cheapskates).
Yup. "Just how it is".
> so I'd guess their uplink is down, and they can't do FTP.
Ah yes. Great smart meters that should be installed in the millions and people should rely on them to properly turn off and turn on gigawatts of power in the blink of an eye.
Dude...chill! Did I get you on the wrong foot somehow?
Of course I know about effects like TV-Pickup, though I don't have TV since 1996.
Maybe I should have marked it as sarcasm?
Furthermore I also know that smart meters aren't everywhere, but I've been aware of them for a long time, and also of regions where they've been installed before they got installed here.
What can I say? I'm living the fucking cyberpunk dystopy where corporations make the rules, politicians are fools, but most people are too, so it actually IS some form of democracy, because it represents the majority, otherwise they wouldn't have elected the fools.
So. How it is... I know about blinking E-21 because I had to walk into the cellar to read the meter and email the counter value to my utility a few days ago.
Anything else? Do you want to have fries with that?
> Dude...chill! Did I get you on the wrong foot somehow?
Sorry, I should've looked at the nickname, but it's been a long thread. I thought it was jacquesm answering me :)
> Of course I know about effects like TV-Pickup
So imagine how you turn off entire households and then bring them online in one sweep as soon as "reliable power" comes on. How do you propose to handle that?
> So. How it is... I know about blinking E-21 because I had to walk into the cellar to read the meter and email the counter value to my utility a few days ago.
So:
- a smart meter that cannot upload something to a remote FTP server
- and a system that's supposed to turn off "cheapskates" if there isn't "reliable power"
Ah, this will work just wonderfully, and reliably.
> Ah yes, disaster thrillers are the source of knowledge and truth we should turn to. Because, as you put it, "it's telling as it is"?
It was actually a suggestion, to have with the fries, but not fully jokingly, because it reads in good way and does need NO suspension of disbelief. Not that it would be my source of knowledge of the subject, k?
By telling as it is I referred to what is here, what I'm aware of elsewhere, not that it would be unconditionally and universally so. Just that it is a trend and a desire of the involved governments, industries, bizniks and utilities.
> a smart meter that cannot upload something to a remote FTP server
In this case YOU don't know why that is. Maybe someone who is wary of such systems spoke with his lawyers and protested? So smart meters are installed but not linked, pending on judgement of several things, the principle as such, because 'the smarts' are wasting energy, the reliability and security of the things, and their accuracy. As long as my insurance pays, or it is decided against. Which is likely.
It's already like that if you look at it on a country-by-country basis, and rolling blackouts have been a thing for a long time even in developed countries, even if their use is for a different reason.
And in combination with an energy budget it's more a matter of whether you need continuity or if you can get by and save some money. I've lived in places where energy delivery was flaky an intermittent and everybody gets by, the only problem is with industrial processes that are hard or even impossible to restart, for everybody else continuity can be optional, especially if there is some possible prediction of when it will be available and when it will not.
It seems a bit peculiar to respond to the question "how can we avoid climate change without nuclear energy?" by advocating renewables and then following that with "we can no longer avoid climate change." Maybe we can avoid climate change with nuclear energy even though we can't without it. And even if we can't avoid it under any circumstances, maybe we can mitigate the net negative consequences more effectively with nuclear than without.
We can't avoid it. We will be able to mitigate, and nuclear will help with mitigation, but it's a means to an end, and not 'our best bet', just one of many bets, and hopefully one that will pay off in time. But weighing the alternatives of investing every $ into renewables rather than into nuclear for a much more immediate pay-off is a difficult matter, hence the all-out push of the nuclear lobby. And as for the 'solar and wind' lobby, it exists, but is far less powerful.
I can just as easily ask: “how do we accomplish it with nuclear?”
The answer—off course—is the same in either case. We build the infrastructure. Renewables and nuclear both require a tremendous amount of infrastructure. Much of this infrastructure would even be the same in either case since we need to move from fossil fuel power to electricity (e.g. electrify rail lines, build high speed train, etc.)
There is off course difference in the electricity generation. Nuclear relies on building really big and expensive plants in locations far away from the consumption. Each design is unique and will take a while from plan to delivery. Renewables on the other hand, have the benefits of diversity of design. It can be distributed and centralized, build far away or close to consumption.
It seems to me that if you want to avoid the climate disaster, doing it without nuclear is actually the easier/more realistic option.
We know nuclear provides baseline power, but we don’t know how renewables can do so. Therefore, it makes sense to go with what is already known than to hope investments in renewable will work for baseline power.
But what we need is not baseline power, it’s load following power. And both nuclear and renewables struggle with this.
Nuclear can solve this by overbuilding and reducing power output at non-peak times. Renewables by overbuilding by and augmenting with storage. Both are proven technologies, both are expensive. I don’t really see that nuclear has an advantage here.
> Overbuilding renewables doesn't help with baseline either.
Yes it does. It means that at times when production is reduced (e.g. cloudy days or not-very-windy or only-windy-in-some-places days) then you can still generate enough power to cover baseline load.
> What storage? There's no storage that can hold enough power to offset times when renewables are not working.
What kind of timescales do you have in mind here. From what I've seen, 6 hours worth of storage would cover 95% of use cases here. Especially if we could be more aggressive about scheduling load around times with abundant generation. We'd still need a backup for the occasional times where you get a few days in row of low production, but this doesn't happen very often at all (every few years) so we could look to solutions like biofuels here, or simply adding extra storage for critical use cases and shutting everything else down.
> What kind of timescales do you have in mind here. From what I've seen, 6 hours worth of storage would cover 95% of use cases here.
Ah yes, the good old "640 k should be enough for everyone".
From November 2020 to January 2021 Stockholm region had less than one hour of sunlight. Yes. This is on top of the fact that in mid-December there's a total of 4 hours of daylight per day.
So, let's pretend Stockholm is 100% powered by renewables. So, to live through that Stockholm would need? Triple the amount of wind farms just in case? Or triple the amount of solar panels to "still generate baseload"? Or to hope that neighbors have excess power they can spare, and import that?
And don't forget: solar and wind are extremely ineffecient compared to almost anything else. It takes 630 square kilometers in an open sea to produce less power than the smallest operational nuclear plant in France (Hornsea Project One vs. Saint-Laurent Nuclear Power Station).
> We'd still need a backup for the occasional times where you get a few days in row of low production, but this doesn't happen very often at all
This happens literally all the time. There are both daily and seasonal fluctuations. And on top of that there is anything from storms and bad weather to maintenance and human errors.
That flaw is by no means inescapable. Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently. If you loose 75% of the energy by storage you can just make 4 times the amount to compensate. So the answer here is still the same: Infrastructure. Note we also have unexplored battery technology which might make storing more efficient in the future so really the answer here is primarily infrastructure (but also research and technology).
And the same goes for the lack of baseline. A flaw yes, but not so inescapable. You can diversify the grid with distributed, stored, and centralized power, each can compensate for the flaws in the other. You can capture wind off shore, dam for hydro in the mountains, and build whole bunch of solar in the desert. You can connect different climates with high voltage power lines such that if one area experiences low solar and low wind at the same time for weeks at a time, excess power generated from adjacent regions could compensate.
> Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently.
What does being cheap have to do with availability?
If there's no wind, you won't have that cheap energy from wind turbines. If there's no sun, you won't have that cheap energy from solar. When you have neither, there goes your energy grid.
> You can connect different climates with high voltage power lines such that if one area experiences low solar and low wind at the same time for weeks at a time, excess power generated from adjacent regions could compensate
Ah, yes. Because "neighboring regions" are immediately adjacent, and have immediate power availability and enough of it to cover any levels of power consumption for weeks on end.
Sorry, you are conflating my arguments. Being cheap doesn’t solve the availability problem, I never claimed that. Being cheap means that you can solve the issue with poor storage efficiency with more infrastructure. I.e. compensating for the inefficiency of storage is not an inescapable flaw of renewables.
Your other point still stands though, renewables are not as robust as nuclear. But the answer is still infrastructure. It just needs to be more diverse then nuclear. With nuclear you still have a problem of demand above baseline, so you need infrastructure to deal with that. Renewables have the same problem except sometimes the baseline it self drops. The answer is the same you build infrastructure that can handle such drops. And that infrastructure is the same as for the problem of demand over baseline in nuclear, storage and more power production elsewhere with a robust grid.
> Sorry, you are conflating my arguments. Being cheap doesn’t solve the availability problem, I never claimed that.
I mean, you kinda did. Quote: "Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently."
Yes, it does. It does matter that you can't store it efficiently.
> With nuclear you still have a problem of demand above baseline, so you need infrastructure to deal with that.
With renewables you already have the problem with the baseline. I love how you just dismiss this as not being a problem.
> Renewables have the same problem except sometimes the baseline it self drops.
Exactly. In addition to having the problem of demand above baseline, they also have a problem that their baseline is zero.
> The answer is the same you build infrastructure that can handle such drops.
You can't solve a baseline of zero with more infrastructure. What you're basically saying is "every country has to have enough renewables to always be able to cover any amount of demand for any of their neighbours for any length of time." This simply doesn't work, and is not scalable in any shape or form.
Additionally, renewable energy is unbelievably inefficient in comparison, and it's extremely hard to "just" build more infrastructure for it.
The largest offshore windfarm that provides 1.2TW of energy covers an area of 630 square kilometers in the North Sea. That's less than Frances smallest operational nuclear reactor (1.8 TW).
And all of those 630 kilometers? Their baseline is exactly zero (if there's no wind). That nuclear reactor? Its baseline is effectively 1.8 TW 24/7.
Um. I'm not so sure that's accurate. Chernobyl and Fukushima are uninhabitable, and will be as such for many years to come. As we increase fission reactors, risk will increase as well. Ironically, perhaps due to climate change.
The question is: if we commit to fission, are we simply trading one problem disaster for another? Put another way, given our collective (lack of) response to CC, should our track record on decision making be trusted?
What area are we taking about here, and is it truly inhabitable or is it just the same flawed logic that caused the Japanese government to evacuate the area when there was no sense in doing so?
Climate disaster? To who? Humans? Mother Nature, on average isn't concerned. She adjusts. She evolves. History is clear on this. Radiation on the other hand is all but permanent. Climate disaster is a self-inflicted death blow by humans to humans.
No it isn't. The purpose of a nuclear reactor is to take highly radioactive material found in nature, cook off a bunch of its radioactive energy (producing power in the process), and create less-radioactive material as a by-product. The waste that comes out at the end is less radioactive than the material we started with, albeit much more concentrated. But that makes it easier to handle and store, compared to the CO2 and other greenhouse gases that are spewed out all over the place.
If we dumped all that radioactive waste into the ocean (BAD IDEA), mother nature would dilute it for us and spread it out until it disappears into the natural background radiation. The drawback is that it'll be dangerous to everything that encounters it before it's diluted, so we can't do that.
> The waste that comes out at the end is less radioactive than the material we started with, albeit much more concentrated.
This is not true. Nuclear fuel not highly radioactive. Their use in nuclear reactors stems from the fact that they emit two neutrons when hit with one, producing a chain reaction. Their byproducts are much more radioactive than the original fuel.
It’s also a bad idea because the “waste” might end up being useful/valuable to future generations. It’s only considered waste right now because we currently have no purpose for it.
As opposed to the raw uranium that we dug out of the ground? I don’t recall nature storing that inside radiation-proof barrels.
Also there’s the pesky fact of half-life. Ignorant anti-nuclear activists seem to think that nuclear waste is extremely dangerous and lasts for centuries. Nope. Nuclear material can either be imminently dangerous or have a centuries long half-life. It can’t be both.
That's fair. I can emphasize :) But this idea of "we need to save the planet..." is a false narrative. It might even be distracted and overwhelming. The Truth is, we need to save ourselves from us. And in that context it's important not to overlook that context and continue with our hubris-based mindset. So yeah, nuclear may or may not be a wise choice. Furthermore, if it isn't enough and we come up short on CC then we'll have at least two high priority lonlong term problems to deal with.
People choose not to live there, but plenty of wildlife does. Which is different from saying it's uninhabitable. People could live there. People haven't because an increased risk for cancer and birth defects. Which is a far cry from saying it's not livable. Chernobyl is basically a wild life sanctuary now. Nature is doing better off because of the lack of human presence.
Geological repositories are the solution for long term storage. They are not only technologically feasible, but actually constructed and waiting for use.
Ignoring the solution is not the same as there being no solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...