But its not cheap, given that nuclear waste disposal will take for so long and companies do not factor the true price of securing nuclear waste for thousands of years. We could see what happened in Germany after the nuclear exit was put into place: Energy companies tried to split up, moving their nuclear business into one company, and their renewables into another - a very apparent move to let the nuclear company (with all the burdens of waste disposal management) go bankrupt into a couple of decades, knowing that the government will take over the burden for free. The german government prevented this through a buy-out deal, where the companies would put a sum of roughly 50bn € into a fund, and the responsibility ownership would go over to the government once and for all.
The issue is, no one can put a real price tag on nuclear waste management that will take thousands of year. It's all some made up number that is used to show that nuclear energy is cheap. But it is not, we are just boworring money from the future. Even if you think from an engineering standpoint that we can secure nuclear waste for generations to come, I don't believe we have the economic system to achive that. Companies don't exist long enough to be responsible for thousand-year long commitments - only society does.
We don't need to store nuclear waste for thousands of years. We need to store it until we have fast reactors that can use it for fuel. After that, we'll need to store the fast reactor waste for 300 years.
Since the decline is exponential, most of the radioactivity will be gone from that waste after the first few decades. Melt it into glass blocks and bury it, and it'll likely be fine.
Several fast reactors are in commercial operation already, and various companies are working on new designs.
We've had fast reactors since the 70s. It is simply that they are even less economical than regular nuclear power plants, and those are already completely uncompetitive compared to renewables.
> Breeder reactors are costly to build and operate. About $100 billion (in 2007 dollars) has been spent worldwide on breeder reactor research and development and on demonstration breeder reactor projects. Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is economically competitive with a conventional light water reactor. The capital costs per kilowatt of generating capacity of demonstration liquid sodium-cooled fast reactors have typically been more than twice those of water cooled reactors of comparable capacity. Although it could be expected that once in production this cost ratio would decline, today few, if any, experts argue that breeder reactor capital costs could be less than 25 percent higher than that of similarly sized water cooled reactors.4
> The breeder reactor dream is not dead, but it has receded far into the future. In the 1970s, breeder advocates were predicting that the world would have thousands of breeder reactors operating this decade. Today, they are predicting commercialization by approximately 2050. In the meantime, the world has to deal with the hundreds of tons of separated weapons-usable plutonium that are the legacy of the breeder dream and more being separated each year by Britain, France, India, Japan, and Russia.
> We need to store it until we have fast reactors that can use it for fuel
Which obligates us and generations after us, to keep using nuclear and develop those in the first place. So, please factor in those costs today into the price.
We have no idea what those costs will be. Given that for-profit companies are trying to develop new fast reactors, at least some people think it will actually be profitable.
However, I guess it's reasonable to include some such estimated cost in today's reactor prices, if we also:
1) Include the costs of climate change and/or ambient carbon removal in the cost of all fossil fuels, and
2) In wind/solar costs, include the cost of all the batteries, long-distance transmission, demand management, and overproduction that we'd need to keep the grid reliable without the fossil backup we're using today. Areas with sufficient hydro can skip this.
You're right about it being very safe and emissions free. It would be a great choice if we wanted to solve CO2 emissions.
But the reporting around last week's attack on Zaporizhzhia illustrates why it's not the future. The "paper of record" reporting vague experts' fears about a "cloud of radioactive isotopes over Europe"[1]. The Ukrainian President saying: "If there's an explosion, it's the end of Europe"[2]
How can nuclear overcome that level of FUD? No idea what it would take, honestly.
> modern nuclear power is very safe and emissions free.
And then you have a war and the house of cards collapses in a week
At this moment nuclear is as reliable as Putin mind will be, (and many people would say that the man is acting in a totally insane way).
Nuclear will never will be more reliable than the less reliable of the people at charge of it, that are the weakest links in this chain. No matter how much technology, laws and wax seals you put on it. Still can be destroyed by the next idiot narcissist in power.
The cited link shows that deaths directly attributable to nuclear power thus far is the lowest based on the data used.
This is not the only definition of safety, and should not be portrayed as such.
The primary objections to fission nuclear power has been the many-thousand-year half-life of the waste products, not that it would kill people while being built or while running. We have no way to project what the tally will look like in 10k years time.
However, we also risk an extinction event if we don't get carbon emissions under control, so turning a known 100 year risk into a several thousand years possible risk feels like a good bet.
I don't know of anyone suggesting that climate change is going to be an extinction event. Changing patterns of human settlement, and the state of human civilization? Certainly. Extinction? Doesn't seem likely right now, from everything I've read.
It's certainly going to be, and is already, an extinction event for many other species. While it's true that humans probably won't go extinct as easily, billions of lives may be lost to collapsing ecosystems. We can't feed ourselves at large scale without an ecosystem to support us. At this point, that risk is looking much, much worse than the risk carried by nuclear waste in the long term.
That's an awfully cynical way of saying that billions of people will be displaced and die because of lack of food, floods, that migratory crises might lead to actual live weapons getting used for first countries to "defend themselves".
But sure, it's not an extinction event. Just billions of deaths over the next century and an upheaval of our society. No biggie.
I'm not trying to downplay the scale and scope of climate change. I just prefer to use accurate terminology. If it was going to or was likely going to lead to the extinction of humanity, I'd want people to say that. Instead, it seems likely to lead to billions of people dying and billions more being displaced and a total reorganization of most nation states/cultures worldwide, along with (as noted above) significant extinction for many other species.
I lived through the fear (and shared it) in the 1970s about a variety of world- and civilization-changing transformations, and while I believe that the talk of them then was largely well-intentioned, the sloppy language that was used then turned into linguistic weaponry to be used against those arguing for the much-more-likely-to-be-true climate change that we are now facing.
Well if the alternative is keeping gas and coal online, we also have no idea what our planet will look like in 10k yrs if we callously keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere
I am not for 1 moment suggesting that gas&coal should be the alternative.
I'm not even arguing against continuing to use nuclear fission. I just don't like descriptions of it like "the safest power generation method" that elide the complex nature of the word "safety".
Nuclear accidents will be devastating for thousands of years so very different things.
This is like saying that high voltage is harmless because high amperage can kill you also. Time to move on further in this discussion and stop talking about that damn. Is a popular stance but useless to compare both
Bury it deep. Either we survive as a species technologically, and will always know where it is, or we become cavemen again and lose the technology to dig down that deep. Win win.
