>As a former navy nuke: no. I don’t want commercial vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland to have nuclear power. Fuck no.
These nuclear vessels will likely have to be registered in countries with nuclear power already deployed. Nobody will allow Panama or Costa Rica to have an atomic ship - I am with you on that.
>It’s also not even a little economical.
If somebody is ready to put money to try making it economical, I would be cheering for them. Just put transparent rules & regulations and wait. If somebody comes up with a safe & profitable atomic ship, we all win.
The hard part is the very highly enriched uranium. To make a compact and light naval reactor you need very pure U-235. I am not allowed to even say how pure, but trust it costs obscene amounts to do so. If it could be done safely I’d be for it, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
>To make a compact and light naval reactor you need very pure U-235
Yes, with the reactor designs used by US Navy.
Akademik Lomonosov ([1]), a floating nuclear plant, uses "low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, with 14.1% average enrichment, with a fuel cycle of 3 years".
Commercial atomic container ships will likely be closer to Akademik Lomonosov than the US Navy fleet. And that's fine.
Cool, yea it looks like the "KLT-40S" reactor can do LEU, so at least that part is a bit cheaper. I still think it's not a great idea, nor would it still be economical except for maybe some very specific applications, but perhaps it's more realistic than I thought.
Maybe you could have a very large ship, larger than could go into a port, and it could perhaps ferry cargo around the world and as it reaches ports it offloads the cargo onto some waiting barges to be tugged into port? I imagine you would need to ship a LOT of goods FAST to make it worthwhile to use nuclear.
Well by definition if nosafetystandardsland decides to build a nuclear ship you won’t have a say in it anyway. It just won’t get to enter ports in safetystandardsland.
For nuclear shipping to become viable a reasonable set of trading countries would need to come together and set the standards that it’ll operate under.
I'm in the anti-nuclear camp. Mainly because I think the inertia around current consumption patterns is too strong to overcome, so adding a lot of nuclear to the mix would make things a lot more dangerous without making things much better.
This is how I think about the danger of nuclear power. Imagine a really safe nuclear power plant. How often will it fail? Let's say, once every 100,000 years. Assuming this probability is uniformly distributed over the 100,000 year time period, it has a 1/100,000 chance of failing in any given year. A failure seems pretty unlikely. But, there are something like 450 operating nuclear power plants in the world. The chance of a single power plant failing in a year is then 1 - (99,999/100,000)^450 which is around 0.5%. That's starting to look a lot more likely now. After 30 years, there is a 78% chance of a nuclear power plant failing somewhere on Earth.
Now what's even more interesting is if you look back on historic nuclear power accidents at INES level 6 or higher. 1957 - Kyshtym disaster, 1986 - Chernobyl, 2011 - Fukushima. And of course there have been other close calls (e.g. Three Mile Island). The cadence of these accidents seems to match the data from the thought experiment above.
> I'm in the anti-nuclear camp. Mainly because I think the inertia around current consumption patterns is too strong to overcome, so adding a lot of nuclear to the mix would make things a lot more dangerous without making things much better.
Adding lots of nuclear would vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the single biggest threat to humanity and life on earth.
> This is how I think about the danger of nuclear power. Imagine a really safe nuclear power plant. How often will it fail? Let's say, once every 100,000 years. Assuming this probability is uniformly distributed over the 100,000 year time period, it has a 1/100,000 chance of failing in any given year. A failure seems pretty unlikely. But, there are something like 450 operating nuclear power plants in the world. The chance of a single power plant failing in a year is then 1 - (99,999/100,000)^450 which is around 0.5%. That's starting to look a lot more likely now. After 30 years, there is a 78% chance of a nuclear power plant failing somewhere on Earth.
> Now what's even more interesting is if you look back on historic nuclear power accidents at INES level 6 or higher. 1957 - Kyshtym disaster, 1986 - Chernobyl, 2011 - Fukushima. And of course there have been other close calls (e.g. Three Mile Island). The cadence of these accidents seems to match the data from the thought experiment above.
Yes nuclear power plants fail at some rate. Contrary to the pro-fossil-fuel / green propaganda, even quite serious failures are just not very serious in the scheme of things. A single coal mine collapse will easily kill many more people than all the direct deaths attributed to nuclear accidents combined. As for indirect, coal mines (EDIT: that should be coal power stations) will pump out chemicals and radiation that kill vast numbers of people _when they are operating normally without any failure_. Other fossil fuel plants less bad than coal, but still very damaging.
> Adding lots of nuclear would vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the single biggest threat to humanity and life on earth.
Does it though, or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade?
Let's say there's a trillion dollars to spend today.
What is the net reduction in emissions between now and 2040 achieved by spending it on nuclear (hint: if the project takes as long as most in the west do it's negative)?
What is the net reduction achieved in the same timespan by spending it on renewables?
Even if there weren't a bunch of other problems (and there are) it's like claiming you need to stop and build a new engine so your car can go faster on the last lap of a race.
> or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade?
Nuclear is the real solution. The past 40 years of people alleging nuclear is too late and there are magical other solutions that should be employed instead is what has been propping up fossil fuels for decades.
The Hinkley C is a real project which is under construction in the west right now. It's prpjected to take 19 years since approval and 10 years since construction began and cost 26 billion pounds for a nameplate 3200MW capacity. Taking the ratio between nameplate and net for its predecessor of about 62%, we can expect around 11.8 pounds per watt. This does not include operating costs or the decommissioning when the taxpayer gets left holding the ball, or any of the other hidden costs such as the externalised costs of security and publicly funded administration overhead. Nuclear has a zero or even negative economic learning rate so there is no reason to believe any additional plants will be cheaper.
It will pay itself off before any nuclear project started now even opens. By that time batteries will be a third of the price and solar panels will have halved.
Wind is anti-correlated with sun and you can purchase a 10kW wind turbine right now for around 6000 pounds. Put 5kW of nameplate wind capacity into a copy of the same storage system and you have another 2kW average with lower price and even less downtime.
A hydrogen electrolyzer you can purchase right now costs $1000/kW, a 1kW fuel cell is around $4000 and low pressure hydrogen tanks are on the order of $20/kWh. These make weeks or even months of storage possible.
Nuclear is so expensive that even the fudged numbers of a gigawatt scale project with outcomes over a decade away do not compare favourably to end user retail prices of a system you can install in a month.
Any argument about the fission plant running longer are invalid, because the system outlined only has to make 9p/kWh (the same 9p that Hinkley C is being guaranteed via taxpayer funds even when electricity predictably falls below 4p/kwh wholesale) to pay itself back with enough left over for replacement in the two decades before it opens.
So to answer my question for you: money spent on a nuclear project will have a net increase in CO2 before 2040 because it will require concrete and steel and produce no power.
The same money spent on renewables and storage will produce net-zero carbon energy for at least 10 years of that timeframe.
It is only when we have enough renewables that the gas backup stays off even when there is 10% of the average solar or wind that we should consider diverting funds to nuclear.
Current consumption patterns didn't exist a century ago. Some alternatives to petroleum-powered consumption are already cheaper and more convenient than their petroleum-powered equivalents. Today landscaping tools and heat pumps, tomorrow cars and trucks, later ships and construction equipment, and maybe someday airliners. That combined with regulatory carrots and sticks will change consumption patterns. A century ago, people in cities burned a LOT of coal for heating. Air pollution in urban areas was pretty awful. We've changed consumption patterns before and we can do it again.
Imagine that we decarbonize most of our economy and mostly stop accelerating climate change, with a combination of renewables and nuclear. But somewhere in the world, a nuclear reactor melts down every 5 years. Sometimes it's like TMI and sometimes it's like Chernobyl.
Is that better overall than destabilizing Earth's climate?
Mister Martin: Another great post! Thank you to raise the idea of change. When I talk with people from developing countries, they frequently despair about the state of their environment, including air, soil, and water pollution. I tell them that Japan, UK, Germany, and the United States was a dirty mess in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, all of them awoke to environmentalism. Today, these are some of the cleanest countries in the world. In particular, Japan and German are still major industrial power houses (steel, chemical, manuf, etc.). Their air, soil, and water pollution declined dramatically in the last 50 years. Yes, sadly, some of this pollution has been exported to poor(er), developing countries. However, a lot of industry remains onshore and people and companies are fully committed to a clean environment. Really, I cannot stress enough how large are chemical companies in Japan. When you fly into Haneda (Tokyo) Airport, it seems like a 50km continuous line of chemical plants on the waterfront in Kanagawa-ken! The environment regulations are incredibly strict. Places that were an environmental disaster 50 years ago are now a "factory neighborhood", but no longer a polluted mess. Recovery and change is possible!
For other readers, I assume "TMI" means "Three Mile Island" nuclear accident. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
> Imagine that we decarbonize most of our economy and mostly stop accelerating climate change, with a combination of renewables and nuclear. But somewhere in the world, a nuclear reactor will melts down every 5 years. Sometimes it's like TMI and sometimes it's like Chernobyl.
Probably it would be better to de-carbonize the economy. But the global economy is literally a tragedy of the commons. There's really no hope of massive collective action, even has humanity faces greater calamity. My point is that building a bunch of nuclear power will make it more likely that a Chernobyl happens every 5 years, but it won't have a large impact on climate change.
As long as we need to fill the gaps around supply of renewables, we will need to build either nuclear or fossil fuel plants. Imagine a new 1 GW nuclear plant compared to a new 1 GW natural gas plant. Which is better for the world on the margin?
Also, the trend I perceive is that as societies develop, they gain both desire and ability to make the commons less tragic. China is the world's largest carbon emitter yet somehow their strategy to decarbonize feels more credible than the USA's (to the extent that we even have one at all).
> As long as we need to fill the gaps around supply of renewables,
There are several assumptions hidden here.
One is that it's a choice between building new renewable and fossil fuel plants vs. new nuclear. The real choice is between moving some fossil fuels to renewable immediately, or leaving fossil fuels online while a nuclear plant gets delayed 5 times.
The second is the assumption that all capacity to consume energy much be fulfilled and must remain constant. We can turn down the aluminium smelter. We can smelt steel with electricity. We can use renewables to drive chemical reactions. We can make fertilizer with electricity. Noone dies if we stop doing these things sometimes. The only downside is it costs a little more.
But this is the downside of nuclear anyway, so where's the problem?
We can also time shift energy with things like thermochemical storage. A huge amount of emissions come from burning natural gas for heat. Thermochemical storage is a fraction of the cost of batteries and is compact enough to store a year's worth of energy.
(for those who think that estimate is far too pessimistic - dont try to convince me - try talking some sense into those pesky insurance companies who absolutely positively refuse to insure nuclear power without a liability cap of $375 mil or 0.04% the cost of 1 Fukushima)
So you want people to convince actuaries because you think the actuarial risk profile is incorrect before you’ll admit the perceived risk profile is incorrect? Seems circular and possibly a distraction.
I'm stupid, so you'll have to elaborate on that. Are you saying that fusion power is close? Are you saying that fission nuclear power is infinite energy because we have so much uranium? Probably the former?
By the time we exhaust all nuclear reserves on Earth (after saving the planet via using environmentally friendly nuclear energy, the greenest energy known), we will have unlocked space via nuclear rockets (fission or fusion, makes little difference. People will be more okay launching from Earth’s surface via fusion rockets).
Space has boundless access to nuclear energy.
As soon as we could do fission as a civilization, our energy needs ceased being a concern intellectually speaking. So in a manner of speaking, yes — uranium gives us unlimited energy.
Okay, thanks for explaining. I get the idea, but I'm skeptical of the practical use of fission, because we haven't shown that in the last 40 or so years we can create reasonable new power fission generation systems. They always seem fragile, need huge unexpected maintenance and cost way more than projected. Of course they work, it's not like the uranium fission process doesn't work as expected. So there's this practical problem we have not solved yet. Of course vastly more clear than fusion's enormous potential.
What about all the new renewable things that are working and coming online more every day?
The unsolved question with nuclear, in my opinion, is how to make constant money with it for the already rich and powerful using unskilled, unintelligent workers.
With oil, you use a certain level of thought and programming in a human to generate massive profits on a recurring basis.
With nuclear, the power shifts. You need more thoughtful people, which means more distribution of the wealth. Providing unlimited, clean energy is bad for economic interests of the powerful, because of many reasons including it has less side effects and higher education requirements. A more educated populace demands more equitable treatment, which results in significantly diminished recurring profits.
I can explain the idea further, but the summary is that the physics of it make sense. The economics for benefitting general society is orders of magnitudes superior. The economics for the rich do not make sense in the least.
The question is how long will we all accept excuses so that a cluster of greedy, small-minded human beings at the top can continue to be comfortable? It is a delicate dance. Jeopardize the safety and security of these weak egomaniacs, and they may plunge our entire planet into an abyss.
Infinite energy directly threatens infinite profits. Scared energy. Our systems rely on scarcity. When scarcity ceases, it shifts to forcefully demanding scarcity. The mechanics of this are all explainable.
In response to your question more directly: renewables are not renewable. Solar panels need to be replaced every ~25 years or so. This makes them a kind of fuel like any other. They just generate electricity slower and with lower energy particles so the frequency of maintenances shifts. This extra time affords it less risk, but with increase “rent” in the space it occupies over time.
There is no such thing as free energy. It is a generation vs risk equation.
I find renewables to be mathematically inadequate for existing and growing energy needs by every metric imaginable, save we are in space constructing a dyson sphere and harnessing all the energy of the sun. Perhaps then, optimized solar panels will be very useful.
But given our time constraints as a species, renewables are a cliff. More importantly, they enable existing power structures to satiate public demand on taking action while simultaneously not realistically threatening the boundless streams of revenue from oil based energy. This provides a social comfort for them at the cost of our entire planet, and species, future.
Greed does not care about the future. It is reactive. When the cliff comes, greed will not see it.
Yes. The second all the anti nuclear sentiment relents is the same second the exact same people that have been cutting corners and killing us for centuries with oil and coal start cutting the exact same corners with nuclear. We can't solve the fact that they kill people for profit by giving them more power.
Except it won't just be 20,000 hectares of amazon ecosystem destroyed, it'll be the water tables of entire countries, or 'oops, we illegally buried thousands of tons of hot waste that has now all eroded through and now cannot be recovered'.
Plus it won't help any due to jevon's paradox, and the fact that 'electricity too cheap to meter' will just lead to direct thermal forcing of the climate.
One of nuclear's most important limits is that it is extremely expensive and nearly impossible to construct in modern Western economies.
Ignore all the people complaining about safety. Ignore any waste concerns.
Taking those off the table, nuclear looks incredibly undesirable, due to the uncertainty in ability to construct the project, inability to meet budgets. And the capex heavy, super long life, nature of nuclear which makes both the construction time and budget risks all the worse.
If you're a technologist/capitalist/industrialist without any hippy dippy concerns, nuclear is a damned nightmare.
Harnessing nuclear energy is about more than just saving civilization from extinction via global warming (our more immediate and easily reversible issue, materially speaking).
It opens up the reaches of space.
People can talk all day about cost, dangers, this and that. E=mc^2 doesn’t care about fraudulent, man-made economics.
An educated populace is capable of harnessing infinite energy. Photons will never have the energy density of a high speed neutron.
Even if this planet were covered in solar panels, how much energy will it take to move moons or propel ships the size if cities?
Physics shares a pretty clear direction to save this planet and progress to new heights. It doesn’t need to be so complicated. Just because it’s hard, does not mean it’s wrong. We have the intellect. It will just take work.
You wrote: <<nearly impossible to construct in modern Western economies>>
What is France doing so well / different? As I understand, they have the highest mix of nuclear energy for any advanced economy. My guess: Most of their nuclear power plants were built by a single state-owned company: EDF (or some predecessor), and the designs were remarkably similar. (I have no idea if both are true, but it is my guess.)
Also (Re: "Western"): Is nuclear power really cheaper in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China? I doubt it. And did you see the price tag on UAE's quad @ "Barakah"? Staggering: 20B USD! How many solar panels could UAE lay for that price!!??
France is not doing well, they are sadly failing like everyone else in the Western Hemisphere, quite miserable!
Flamanville is a complete disaster. Olkiluoto continues to be a problem, and is still not running at full power.
Or perhaps you were referring to the reactors built 40-50 years ago? That is exactly what I'm not referring to, that was a different era with completely different economic costs and complete different economic capabilities. France has spent the last 15 years proving that they can no longer build nuclear on time or near budget. And the cost of France's reactors builds decades ago increases with additional reactors. A persistent amount of negative learning curve has been observed in France, and in the US.
Construction productivity has barely improved over the past forty years, and at the same time manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. Since nuclear is a constructed technology, it's unlikely to ever be able to catch up to a power system where most of the costs come from manufactured components.
Excellent reply. Thank you to provide clear counterpoints that "France nuclear power is cheap". My feeling about out of control costs for nuclear power comes from the audit requirements. Each part must be carefully inspected and its origin must be fully documented. Compared to fossil fuel power plants, the cost must be 10x. As a result, nuclear power becomes unaffordable when considering this important requirement.
Real question: I know nothing about the actual realised cost of China nuclear power plants. So far, their safety record appears quite good. However, I assume their audit requirements for each part are much lower than highly advanced economies.
Lastly, you wrote "everyone else in the Western Hemisphere": Let's be real. If Japan were to ever build a new nuclear power plant the audit plus safety costs would be absolutely insane and unaffordable. I guess Japan will run down all of its plants in the next 25-50 years, then replace everything with renewables (including batteries).
And if you and your political tribe have been telling people not to build solar and wind for decades, because it's so expensive, and useless and counterproductive and communism, and the exact opposite reality is arriving on schedule you're going to need some other argument to bring up to avoid looking like a total dupe.
Well, those hippies where right about global warming, and fossil fuels, and solar PV, and wind, and EVs, and insulation, and heat pumps, and government regulation but....
They're still wrong about nuclear, the fools, so we can still ignore them about everything, even the stuff they were right about. If they really think climate change is happening, why don't they like nuclear!!
Spoiler, they weren't wrong about nuclear either, just the fossil fuel lobby paid better than the nuclear lobby and the listen to the experts lobby took a long time to slowly establish credibility over time rather than just buy politicians.
