Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical.
Nuclear fission does come with risks. Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident. Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial. Like most incidents, it was a combination of factors, including some preconditions (the inadequate sea wall, old reactor design), some operational mistakes, and a massive and still unlikely to repeat soon event. Humans are, of course, likely to continue to make mistakes, so the best way forward is of course to try to prevent similar scenarios from happening and invest in safer designs. Things that can be done.
Of course, many would argue now is the right time to instead invest in solar and wind power. I mean, sure. But Japan has multiple nuclear fission power plants currently not in operation mainly just because of fear after Fukushima Daiichi. I'm not a civil engineer of any sort, so I have no idea how plausible it is to implement comparable solar and wind capabilities along with battery storage to make it reliable, in Japan. I know Japan is larger than map projections would have you believe, but it still seems like there could be practical problems. Even if that really were the future, though, today the present is this: they already have fission plants that could be generating cleaner energy, and with rising gas prices, it doesn't seem all that illogical to me.
Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change. Which likely numbers thousands if not tens of thousands of people per day.
> Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical.
My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future because of the two elephants in the room - China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. China might one day blockage Japan. Then again it might not. Ukraine might never have been invaded. Taiwan, might not get invaded.
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.
The price in terms of deaths was low thankfully, but not because the released material was not dangerous, but because they have done an unprecedented cleaning project. 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. Hundreds of people died during the evacuation, but if they had not been evacuated that death toll of one would have been higher too. Also, cancer can show up years/decades later, and linking it to radiation exposure might not be easy. Basically the dying with vs from covid discussion :).
This is extremely misleading. The death rates among evacuees was not significantly different from the death rates among the general population in the same time frame. Dig into the stated causes of deaths and it's usually vague things like "exhaustion".
Out of 300k people 1,400 died over the span of 6 months [1]. Assume everyone lives to 100 and a uniform age distribution (both of these are actually generous: life expectancy is lower and age distribution skewed older in Japan), and 1500 people dying in 6 months is exactly on the mark for old age deaths. Even more telling, actually try and click on the link to the primary source in Mainichi Shimbun and it 404s.
A big issue with those numbers is that they are actually trying to clean up even when its very much not cost effective. There's still an exclusion zone around Fukishima even though everyone moving back to where they were would result in a cancer death toll that rounds to zero.
Spending a billion dollars to avoid a radiation caused cancer death is a very poor use of resources given you could save a hundred lives with other causes of death with that amount.
Any industrial accident causes pollution that has to be cleaned up and has an annular ring around the site you shouldn't be in. There are 1334 superfund cleanup sites in the US. Fukushima is in no way unusual in this regard except that nuclear waste is really easy to detect - with a geiger counter for instance - whereas something like PFAs aren't. We just don't call the area around superfund sites "exclusion zones."
The main thing we learned from US Superfund sites is that it’s better to sell off old polluted assets to small shell companies that can go bankrupt instead of paying to clean up the environmental damage. Cleanups are always someone else’s problem — worst case, the retired CEO’s stock could lose its value — so there’s no real need to worry environmental safety.
Compare Apples to Apples and it’s an extreme outlier. The quick response and extreme expenditure to contain and cleanup Fukushima mitigated it’s impact. But it’s not even close to being safe to walk away from today.
By comparison almost all superfund sites would have been dealt with for a tiny fraction of the cost and effort, assuming a similarly prompt response.
> Spending a billion dollars to avoid a radiation caused cancer death is a very poor use of resources
Not everything can be calculated so coldly! The gov absolutely has a responsibility to help people in an actual extreme situation like this versus the theoretical saving of people in future normal situations.
To be fair, estimations of future cancer deaths are near zero. Some estimations are literally zero, particularly from the WHO and Tokyo University. This is very fortunate of course. The truth is, the trauma from the evacuations is a much bigger concern, or at least it should be, in my opinion.
The evacuations were largely unnecessary in retrospect. That’s not to say they shouldn’t have happened though, given what we knew at the time. But there was almost certainly more evacuations than were strictly necessary.
> 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe.
The fact that they were not safe is disputed.
There are claim that there was some over-reaction and that the evacuation was actually counter-productive.
In retrospect there's no doubt the evacuation was an overreaction. Of course, in the moment, it's a harder decision since you have to act on incomplete information.
David Jiménez Ex Director of the Spanish Newspaper El Mundo was there in Fukushima. In one of his commentaries (extracted mainly from his interview in the podcast of Jordi Wild) explains that he encountered rescuers who showed him Geiger instruments measuring unsafe levels of radiation.
And a really gossip comment comes from JDM car lovers that have gone to Fukushima and show abandoned cars with again unsafe radiation levels.
It is not easy to react to a possible nuclear disaster after a heavy earthquake anyways.
Unsafe based on standards made incredible extreme because of the anti nuclear movement in the 70s based on false science.
This was the great trick the environmental movement bulled, they made so much panic about radiation that acceptable amounts were lowered to absurd levels. This was all based on suds-science. If this science were even remotely true, people in Denver would by dying of cancer at incredible rates.
There are also lots of places that have more radiation because sand beaches (historically associated with healing sands). People living in that region for 100s of years should also suffer from higher cancer rates and don't.
There are still people in Germany flipping out about the fact that some mushrooms have 'unsafe levels of radiation' and yet lots of people eat them and it has no effect what so ever.
Yes, of course the limits are below "dangerous" levels. That, in itself, says nothing about what we should call "safe" levels.
Radiation has two types of dangers, chronic and acute. Our understanding of what levels of radiation cause acute damage is pretty limited and not very precise since we simply don't have that much data. However, I highly doubt that anything close to those levels of radiation were measured anywhere outside the reactor complex.
In terms of chronic danger, the official stance is that there is no safe amount of radiation exposure and the general principle in managing exposure is ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable). Lifetime cancer risk is cumulative so higher levels just add to that cumulative risk faster.
Thus there isn't really a clear "level of acceptable impact" but rather, we set arbitrary levels to to to limit that cumulative addition of cancer risk. Like with many things, that risk is a price you pay for other things that are important to you, like flying, living in denver, or getting xrays.
Media hyperbole and shrieking fear-mongering should carry most of those hundreds of the evacuation's death toll. The panic and stress were fatal. A smaller, slower, calmer reaction was what the region needed.
Even to this day, Fukushima-ken agricultural producers can't compete fairly on their quality, due to the lingering stigma with a half-life longer than any detectable isotope.
These lasting effects of hysteria are vastly worse for the health, prosperity, and wellbeing of the region than the actual becquerels released 11 years ago.
Compared to the literally millions that die every year from carbon-producing power sources and resulting air pollution, no, Fukushima was still not a catastrophe
To be fair, watching THREE reactors explode would be horrifying to anyone, any government would have panicked.
With that said, I think even this old PWR design has actually proven itself to be extremely safe as it effectively prevented Chernobyl-style scenario during such rare and catastrophic event.
I mean, 3 reactors literally exploded, 3 cores melted and… pretty much nothing happened.
But it would be great to see new molten-salt fast reactor designs to gain traction, as they would be even safer, 95% more fuel efficient, not require water for cooling, and produce far less waste.
“According to MoltexFLEX, the cost of electricity generated by the FLEX reactor is comparable to that of wind, at just GBP40 (USD44) per MWh. This is achieved through a unique, patented system which uses two molten salts: one acting as a fuel, whilst the other circulates as a coolant. This allows the heat from the reactor to be extracted through natural convection, without the need for pumps.”
“Once online, the FLEX reactor can be operated with the same skills and equipment used in a fossil fuel plant. The reactor has no moving parts and is fuelled for 20 years at a time, meaning that there is very little operator input and very low ongoing costs.”
“MoltexFLEX estimates it would take just 24 months to build a 500 MW power plant. The company plans to have its first reactor operational by 2029.”
“The SSR-W is a molten salt reactor that uses nuclear waste as fuel. The company aims to deploy its first such reactor at the Point Lepreau site in New Brunswick by the early 2030s.”
I'm not so sure the cleanup was even necessary. It didn't seem to make anything safer. Leave radiation alone, and it will decay to irrelevance on its own.
That's much better than the U.S., where they just let polluters functionally disappear absolved of all responsibility after poisoning the town for decades.
1 death, but also 110,000 permanently evacuated and their homes lost as if burned to the ground, and many billions already spent, with more to come, on a multi-generational clean-up project. I'm generally pro-nuclear but let's not understate the impact of Fukushima.
Look up where the evacuation zone is and the pre evacuation population numbers.
Then plug those numbers into the linear no threshold model (which is thought to overestimate risk).
I'm away from my computer for the holidays, but when I did the numbers you're looking at QALY losses an order of magnitude lower than that caused by the loss of home.
In general people (govs included) drastically overreact to radiation deaths. It makes no sense to spend a billion dollars to avoid one nuclear accident death when you can spend a billion dollars to avoid 100 prostate cancer deaths. Its literally not worth doing the remaining cleanup by any metric.
You are right, but these are political reasons that have to do with the fear of nuclear power in people, not an inherent problem with nuclear power.
The Fukushima plant was one of the oldest plants in the world, and not up to modern standards. If this is what can happen in the worst case scenario.... Then it's our problem that we can't accept it.
The piece has a lot of anecdotes and personal stories and very little in the way of actual quantitative claims about contamination. Mushrooms allegedly tasting weird isn't exactly someone one would base industrial policy on.
Yes, it is probably important to highlight the fact that it was not an event that led to much loss of human life, unlike the normal operation of coal and even natural gas. I agree. I don't think too many people realize this, because the deaths resulting from pollution are both normalized and indirect.
However, when I said costs, I meant it more literally. Aside from the obvious cost of relocating all of those people, cleanup efforts, and so forth, it's also only fair to include the psychological toll as well. It certainly didn't help atop the massive tragedy that was already sweeping away lives and homes.
Sure :) I probably came across as a bit argumentative.
I also meant to add that this was caused by a natural disaster as well, unlike Chernobyl. So nuclear is arguably even safer.
Again, drawing a parallel with fossil fuels - when a hurricane strikes the Gulf of Mexico and causes some sort of oil slick and kills wildlife, it barely hits the news.
Also, whilst writing this, I wondered what the fossil fuel toll was for the Japanese tsunami, and the Boxing Day one, for that matter. It's not something that seems to have concerned people despite the sheer number of cars, bikes, lorries etc. that contained oil, and were destroyed. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind. Oil refineries on the Asian coasts must have been hit. What happened there?
I guess my rambling point is, we really need to compare nuclear to fossil fuels, like-for-like.
And "we", in particular the media, don't do that, because it's hard work to tally up a distributed fossil fuel infrastructure versus one big nuclear power station that was very visibly destroyed.
Australia is a gas supplier to Japan and has headed down the road towards nationalising its gas sector recently, indirectly through local supply mandates and price fixing. Exploration projects have been canceled and frozen there in the last week. Japan may feel uncertain about its ability to source gas on the open market.
Errr, in this instance you're exactly arse backwards.
The gas supply shortages in the eastern states of Australia arose precisely because of a lack of local supply mandate and price capping baked into the original licenses.
Western Australia has such things and had no shortages.
The inevitable result (in the West) was a transnational being limited in its ability to price gouge in a global supply crisis.
The Australian government is bringing in a price cap of $12 per gigajoule (well above historical gas prices, and well above long-term contract prices for Australian LNG in Japan) for domestic customers.
Whatever the merits of this action, it’s a very very very long way from “nationalising the sector”. The Western Australian gas industry (on the other side of the country on a completely separate grid) has long had a regulation mandating a minimum proportion of WA’s gas must be sold to domestic customers, meaning local gas prices there are unaffected by the global shifts in prices. Heck, that bastion of capitalism, the United States of America, completely banned the export of natural gas and oil until 2015.
Many have unaddressed safety concerns that could potentially lead to a disaster. They are exporting at the highest rates while having the local markets vulnerable to the price shocks.
Averaged over all nuclear power, it (even combined with Chernobyl) is a surprisingly small extra cost. I'm not sure world governments will be able to coordinate a mutual insurance policy between each other over this, which is an important factor at this scale, but IMO the economic cost for nuclear is that it's now kinda meh vs. using LiIon to balance PV.
Uranium also needs to be mined actually and there are also fatalities.
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.
Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth
By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'
Even the most pessimistic predictions are dwarfed by the missions of people who die from pollution by fossil fuel plants every year. It's less of a headline grabbing shock accident and human psychology is not good at rationally comparing the two. Rare catastrophic events are given disproportionate relevance by our minds.
Literally everything humans build need mining. And nuclear needs less mining then literally every other form of energy.
Uranium mining is mostly not open pit and has very little impact on people or society. Also the quantities need are vanishingly small.
In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough.
Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Also blaming all old people dying on the nuclear stuff is just nonsense.
ISL poisons the ground for tens of kilometers around and isn't even usable on a lot of deposits. When hydrologists and geologists point this out they are met with 'it attenuates'. Mining and milling is also where the deaths in nuclear mostly happen and looking at the legal fights around basically any past or present uranium mine looks exactly like the fossil fuel or tobacco industries.
The quantity of Uranium is also much larger than you're making out. A 1kw system backed by diurnal storage with lithium batteries would use about the same amount of lithium as the nuclear reactor uses in uranium. The mines are also lower impact per unit output.
Solar uses smaller quantities of everything else involved from chromium to copper to zirconium to cadmium to indium to steel or sand. The only holdout is silver, and the gap for that is getting narrower by the month.
Wind uses more concrete and more steel but less of everything else.
> In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough.
This is just a flat out lie. But I'm glad we agree. Let's just stop uranium mining overnight, and we can see your nuclear utopia emerge.
> Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Scientists who all objected to the report that took their research out of context.
Actually one of the newest trend in architecture are large scale buildings made from (fire-proof!) wood
> Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Yeah and 600,000 people worked as liquidators.
I think a lot of those arguments (in fact on both sides) are overly nitpicky and based on niche facts making reasonable discussions next to impossible.
Nuclear seems this simplistic choice where the risk is shifted to somewhere where nobody can see it. Nobody knows about missing Core catchers, failure modes or insurance.
That said, new Nuclear plants are actually more expensive (LCOE) than other Energy forms with the exception of on-demand Gas
Well, to be fair. There was also that whole thing that caused the meltdown as well.
It's pretty much impossible to get an exact pulse on how many people died indirectly as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster evacuation specifically who would've lived if it were not for that. Particularly because most of the deaths attributed to the disaster were elderly to begin with.
Not trying to downplay the cost of human life, it's really terrible when preventable scenarios or mistakes lead to any cost. With that having been said, there are sometimes going to be events where evacuations are necessary, and some of them we can't prevent. No doubt there were many thousands of deaths unrelated to Fukushima Daiichi due to the massive earthquake and tsunami.
I believe it is estimated that around 1,000-2,000 people died as part of the evacuation efforts, but I am not sure what a good source is, so take that with a grain of salt. If you want to go really deep, it'd be wise to consider the burden that it may have caused psychologically too, but that's even harder to exactly ascertain, especially since it is likely nothing compared to what happened as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.
If the point of this is to compare safety though, factoring this in still would place nuclear fission power plants very low in terms of how much cost of human life they cause overall.
That's true - but it's not like the potential for such a natural disaster wasn't well known. The word we use for such devastating tidal waves kind of gives that game away.
Yes, sure. But let's not understate how unusually bad the disaster really was; a 9.0 earthquake and equally severe tsunami. That's not exactly a common event, and it probably won't be one even in a world with much more volatile weather conditions.
And yet, despite that, it is in fact possible to make nuclear fission power plants survive this kind of disaster, and especially possible to prevent the meltdown that eventually occurred; Fukushima Daiichi is not the only fission plant in Japan, and not the closest to the epicenter of the disaster either. I think it's fair to say given the evidence that the problems that need to be solved with regards to Fukushima Daiichi are the systemic issues that led to the inadequate safety measures and the unfortunate decisions made leading up to the meltdown. Whether the issues be operational complacency, corruption, etc.
It'd be nice to have a way to simply be robust to those issues, but in the end it's always going to be dangerous to human life if the people in charge of decisions that could endanger human life are not adequately responsible. That would still be the case in absence of nuclear power, natural disasters, evacuations, etc.
As I see it, this old-school PWR design has successfully passed a real life crash test under the most severe conditions possible… three times in a row.
It likely wouldn’t. But natural disasters, like tsunamis, on a similar scale large enough to threaten well-engineered power plants may become more common.
The government and media can also just lie to people to influence their actions.
E.g. due to propaganda, people thought that Covid is 100x as deadly as it actually is (people estimated on average that infection fatality rate was 10%, when in reality it’s ~ 0.1%)
I’ve tried googling this but couldn’t understand. How exactly did evacuations kill people? Was it just people being moved out of hospitals that needed to be in hospitals?
The statistics is largely bunk. Out of 300k people, 1,600 died of old age. News outlets just assumed that all these people died due to the evacuation. The original research was retracted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096908
Yes, and the stress of being uprooted. There was a large surplus of deaths in the evacuated population over the next year, without any sign of a radiogenic disease. Communities being scattered suddenly, the stress of losing homes and homeland.
Do you have any reliable statistics showing that there were surplus deaths? Most of the research I've read showed ~1,500 deaths - mostly among aged 75+ people - over 6 months out of a cohort of 300,000 people. This is not a surplus over normal death rates.
Not saying one is better than the other but there were other costs too. Like the people displaced from their homes, the environmental clean up costs, etc.
"-shima" is just 島 'island'. See also Ōshima, Mishima, Fujishima, Furushima, Hiroshima, and even Iwo Jima (硫黄島, "Shima" is sometimes pronounced "Jima" in Japanese for some reason).
Note that Fukushima isn't a "true" island, though some think it might come from a block of land isolated by rivers.
"Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One."
Especially compared to the 19.700 deaths the tsunami took all in all.
But it is still not so simple. There are long term effects of radiation, many people likely will get cancer sooner and the whole mess is still not cleaned up.
And here where I live in germany, it is still advised against regulary eating mushrooms from the wood, because of one incident that took place 36 years ago.
But yes, the coal plants around here contributed worse, so I also believe it is wiser to not replace fission with coal.
In the same report compiled by a WHO body, it is also said that there is no statistical evidence in the increase of cancers in the area. This is science and statistics, everything else is speculation based on nothing, fantasy stories.
I am an Italian living in Germany. The German approach to nuclear power is totally propagandistic and anti-scientific, a very un-German approach to the subject.
One of the nice things about nuclear is that you can literally Google radiation maps from various time period, plug that in to demographic maps and plug those numbers into the radiation->excess death models.
Turns out, lightning is something you should be worrying about more than living 10 miles from Fukishima.
Not from deep research, but just from the known fact, that radiation increases cancer risk and that at Fukoshima was lots of radiation released.
"One of the nice things about nuclear is that you can literally Google radiation maps from various time period"
And there are different types of radiation. Some not so bad as background, or standing next to it, but very dangerous when eaten. I do not know when going in the forest and I do not want to walk around with a geiger counter. They still do not disclose how much wild boar meat has to be thrown away regulary in germany because of chernobyl.
And if the data in Japan does not show an increase, well then it is either all good (because most was washed into the sea) - or maybe not correct data. I don't know about the japanese government, but here in the east block after chernobyl, there was never a official problem in the first place. And the japanese government hopefully is better than the stalinists were, but bending the truth to save face, is a known motive there as well.
And the thing is, like I said, I am not anti nuclear. But solar panels and wind turbines simply do not have this problem ever.
I mean, there might be effect, but do you have a quantification of these. Like maybe you get 0.1% more likely to catch cancer if you eat these mushroom, but when you compare that to the 300% more likely if you smoke then I think you're safe.
Why do we allow smoking but are scared of low dose radiations?
>Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change
Oh go join Greenpeace already.
I really get fatigued seeing people bash oil and gas as if it has zero value. The human population wouldn't have hit 8 billion but for natgas feedstock for nitrogen* fertilizer. People would still be heating their homes with dried animal feces and wood but for propane. We'd still be hunting whales but for kerosene. And damn sure, the ability to enjoy a high quality of life with a relatively modest cost would be all but impossible but for the myriad of uses for petroleum products in general.
But you didn't feel the need to point any of that out, and instead parroted the tired, cliched stance of a stereotypical progressive.
They never said oil and gas had zero value. They never advocated for going back to wood and poo and whalefat. They actually didn't say any of the stuff you're mad at them for saying, and the stuff you're mad at them for not saying isn't really relevant to their point. I think most people reading these comments know oil and gas provide lots of energy we couldn't get from wood/poo/whalefat.
If you see gas and oil as an improvement to w/p/w, why can't nuclear be an improvement on oil gas?
You can tell from their wording that they have a "renewables good, oil bad" mantra. Like I said, they're happy to mention deaths stemming from fossil fuels, but not mention the lives that were helped by that form of energy. It's a tired narrative of people who are too lazy and/or uneducated to discuss the complicated issue of the pros/cons for fossil fuels.
I really don’t. I’m just tired of anti nuclear propaganda when fossil fuels are demonstrably worse of deaths and pollution. For the avoidance of doubt I fly, and drive a dirty diesel car.
Fossil fuels enabled overconsumption of resources at levels never before possible. Can't wait for next year's Earth Overshoot Day! Also, CFCs enabled some true miracles in refrigeration, we shouldn't demonize them. Damned bleeding heart tree huggers ruin everything. >:-(
Daily? Odd unit given Fukushima was over a decade ago. Also, "extracting" gas would compare to mining uranium from the ground, not to running a plant.
I'm only finding US statistics for the "extracting" part, and that looks like about 1000 dead in just the USA, just with regard to oil and gas extraction, in the last decade.
But, given your style and the newness of your account, I find it very hard to trust that you're really "just curious", rather than using the phrase to create rhetorical affect.
Acknowledging the mass extinction event that we caused is sensationalism? We've completely fucked the climate in a bad way, and are triggering the complete destruction of entire species on a daily basis. Denying that is the actual ridiciulousness. So I will ridicule as I please.
Nuclear is not appealing in North America because we have large supplies of cheap natural gas here and it can be burned in gas turbines or combined-cycle turbines that have a low capital cost. We haven't built many coal burning power plants since 1980 for the same reason we haven't built nuclear plants. When it comes to the intermittent nature of renewables, it has been natural gas that fills the gap.
Japan has to import liquefied natural gas at great expense so the economics look different to them. The "plutonium economy" where fast reactors are used to breed fuel from the common ²³⁸U is particularly appealing to them because they have at least a century worth of fuel mined and above ground, some of which is labeled as "nuclear waste". Such a system uses uranium so efficiently it seems it could be made sustainable by extracting uranium from seawater.
The last round of interest in fast reactors was mainly about fuel economy and people believed then that fast reactors would have a higher capital cost, but the next generation of nuclear plants has to be economically competitive and that's not going to happen so long as the powerset is a steam turbine so the main appeal of alternative reactor types today is getting rid of the water so you can run at higher temperatures with a dramatically smaller and potentially cheaper gas turbine powerset.
Such "5ᵗʰ generation" reactors are still under development and won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade, but clean energy is a marathon and not a sprint.
Natural gas is attractive from a capital, operations, and expense perspective because we wave away most of the real cost as something we don't need to care about. Pesky externalities like carbon emissions are someone else's problem. If we accounted for them in the same way we account for the costs of storing spent nuclear fuel natural gas generation would be extraordinarily expensive. We basically let natural gas plants dispose of their waste product by venting it into our communities and then claim that natural gas is less expensive.
Well, duh. Of course it's less expensive if you only have to care about the lifecycle of half of your process.
It evens out a little if you include GHG effects of methane leaked during extraction. Recent work suggests we might have been undercounting that.
Gas still leads coal and is cleaner burning so less polluting in othet ways but its not quite the GHG slam dunk it is if you just compare CO2 from combustion.
In terms of the plant yes, but of course coal is horrible so yeah.
However, leakage in both new and existing gas wells, plus leakage all across the gas distribution infrastructure make this worse.
However you are right, and its kind of funny. The US despite not signing the Kyoto protocol actually achieved those goals because of gas while most other nations failed. France of course was already green by the time the conference happened.
Well, gas leakage in coal mines isn't irrelevant either.
I don't think anybody knows which of the fossil fuels leaks more methane. They all leak lots of it, but the people with access to measure the leaks won't.
It's better than any other carbon fuel that we could use, and not by a little but by a lot because emissions of mercury and other very bad things are much much lower with natural gas than with other carbon fuels. It's not just a bit better than coal.
I'm not sure why people are replying to this thread to talk about coal, other than GP post the entire discussion is about nuke and natural gas. Yes. Coal is very bad. Natural gas is less bad. Literally nobody is arguing against this point. Both are very bad.
> won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade
Or ever. Breeder reactors aren't a new idea. The concept has been around half a century, and they were put in commercial use 35 years ago. Thus far with enormous cost overruns and spectacularly bad uptime.
It's good that we research these things, but we shouldn't base our energy infrastructure on things which aren't commercially available for good reasons.
It's sad for everyone that energy infrastructure turned out to be a really, really hard problem, but wishful thinking doesn't make it go away.
I thought that the main problem with the breeder reactor design is the proliferation risk, because they also produce (and can burn) plutonium usable for building a bomb.
I frankly think that these considerations are exaggerated in countries which already have nuclear bombs (like USA, Russia, China, France, UK, India, Pakistan, Israel,..). Japan does not have a nuclear arsenal, but, frankly, a normal nuclear power plant can also produce plutonium, maybe only somehow more visibly, so Japan might have built nuclear warheads on a year or so, had they decided to do so (and violate their Constitution).
No the problem was that 'proliferation risk' was used by the enemies of nuclear to oppose all these programs and get them canceled. Even when the main use of those reactors would have been to consume the nuclear waste from the existing PWR reactors demostically.
But sure lets kill a great program to build next generation reactors and solve the 'nuclear waste' 'problem' by preventing that.
Just another one of the many ways the public opposition to nuclear has prevented all the progress.
Somehow, the Russians got breeder reactors to work. They have two currently running and are planning a new 1200 GW one. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-Reactor
In 2015, after several minor delays, problems at the recently completed BN-800 indicated a redesign was needed. Construction of the BN-1200 was put on "indefinite hold", and Rosenergoatom stated that no decision to continue would be made before 2019. In January 2022, Rosatom announced that a pilot BN-1200M would be built by 2035.
The BN-800 reactor connected to the grid in 2015. That's a gap of 20 years between building more BN-series reactors.
Meanwhile Russia has completed 6 conventional pressurized water reactors in the last 5 years:
I think it's fair to say that breeders are still too expensive and complicated to compete with conventional reactors. The money saved on fuel is just not enough to justify the extra complications considering how inexpensive uranium remains.
There is nothing to suggest these reactors technically can't be built, but that the upsides are heavily outweighed by the increased cost and reliability issues.
We have several decades of empirical data to suggest this. A regime that has other basis of considerations can of course do what they want.
The argument about north america having natural gas is flawed, on several fundamental levels. Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this.
Second, natural gas is a finite resource and the vast reserves are vast… for now.
What north america also has are vast tracts of land. The ideal place for nuclear reactors since large bodies of water are often close by. Same argument for wind turbines.
Gas is not a global market like oil. Gas is traded internationally only in two ways: one is if you have a direct pipeline, e.g. from Russia to Europe. That's a very localized market. The only real global market is liquified natural gas, transported by those ships with giant spherical tanks, requiring specialized terminals on both ends. That's way more expensive than pipelines. The US exports a fair amount of LNG, especially right now to Europe, but for its domestic gas it pays far lower prices than LNG, and significantly less than most countries with less abundant gas resources.
I wish we would move from gas to nuclear since gas has a major climate impact, but low US gas prices do make that more difficult.
The US also happens to be especially well situated for solar and wind, making life even harder for nuclear. That comes with some bad news too, because we don't really have great storage solutions yet and we're terrible at building long-distance transmission.
It's not as clean as you describe - natural gas is certainly a global market, as demonstrated by the price correlations: futures in the united states are typically based on the henry hub price, as determined by the price at the henry hub located in Erath, Louisiana. If we compare this to rates found at, for example, the UK national balancing point, we will find that there is a definite correlation. The international trade in natural gas is definitely non-trivial. Grandparent post is making the claim that gas is traded internationally and north Americans are generally not insulated from global prices. This is demonstrably true.
Sure, I'm not saying they're completely separate. If demand for LNG increases a lot (as happened recently) then some US gas is going to go that way. But a country like Japan, subsisting on imported LNG, is still paying way more for its gas than domestic consumers in the US, and that's the point that matters if we're discussing nuclear's market challenges in Japan vs. the US.
> Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices.
It is traded internationally, but oceanic shipping of natural gas is expensive, and capacity is limited (export ports, import ports, vessels), so the domestic market doesn't see the full effect of international pricing either.
"Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this."
The difference when you have your own supply is that the price becomes a policy choice. The government can easily decide to prioritize the domestic market and limit exports.
> The government can easily decide to prioritize the domestic market and limit exports.
They can, and have done this in the past, e.g. the US ban on export of crude oil.
But this does not change the point materially. Not exporting and consuming gas domestically at lower prices incurs an opportunity cost as the same gas could have been sold for more aboard. So net-net the people will pay for such a policy choice.
"Not exporting and consuming gas domestically at lower prices incurs an opportunity cost as the same gas could have been sold for more aboard. So net-net the people will pay for such a policy choice."
I don't think it's so simple. Cheap energy can make entire industrial sectors viable that otherwise wouldn't be. You could easily end up ahead by putting that energy into production of goods that are higher up on the value chain rather than exporting it directly.
There will be higher order effects, there always are. I don't think the second order you brought up above changes the argument either. If investing in a certain industrial sector is desirable, then why not sell gas at the international market price, and use the extra proceeds to do the investment at the level that makes sense. That way you can at least tune the investment to a level that makes sense, rather than having it depend on the delta between the local and global market price which will depend on a ton of other factors.
Note that I'm not saying that's always bad to protect a local market. The assertion was that North America has enough gas causing it to be isolated from the global market pricing, and I'm still very skeptical about that claim.
The other factor is that the price is necessarily much higher for exports than for domestic use, because converting NG to LNG and transporting it via ship is difficult and expensive. For domestic use, none of that is necessary. NG isn't like coal that you can just shovel onto a ship and haul across the ocean to burn somewhere else, it's a gas.
I think China has already deployed such a (Thorium cycle molten-salt) reactor in Gobi desert, with the plan to build commercial version of it in just a few years, and with the end goal of making it cheap and mass-produced.
> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so.
this is the whole thing about nuclear power. There's always plenty of data on how, from a technical standpoint, nuclear energy can be generated completely safely. There's always the hindsight observations how, none of this had to happen. But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off.
Case in point if you google for "Fukushima Was Preventable" you get a ton of hits that refer to well regarded studies, interviews, and journalism that refers to the ways in which TEPCO failed to plan and respond appropriately to the disaster.
But if you google for "Fukushima Was Not Preventable" then you get this: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fuk... just this year, Japan's legal system still claiming it was not preventable. It's easy to read between the lines on that, as the reason they decided this is because they are avoiding paying out damages to thousands of people harmed by this negligence. That is, they are lying.
From this, I draw the same conclusion I always have about nuclear power. Sure it can be done safely. But who is actually willing to do that enormous, massive effort, without cutting corners, covering up problems, acting negligently, and then ten years later just continuing to lie about it? Private companies? no way. Governments? we would hope, but wow, nuclear is really , really expensive and complicated to get right, and often not sufficient as practiced by mere human instutitions.
I agree with you. (I was a nuclear engineer for a few years.) The problem seems to be human institutions. There always seems to be corruption and stupidity.
Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions.
Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here
Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up.
Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization.
The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades.
It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.
On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.
Agree. I majored in physics with the plan of working on reactor plants. Not how the cards played out, but I still got the degree and have seen reactor operations up close for years.
My general position is that even if many more people die installing rooftop solar and wind turbines, just falling off roofs and ladders, it's a better plan, politically, than nuclear. Not that nuclear can't be done safely, but that even done safely, the optics of single-point failures, which will happen, are so bad that nuclear becomes political loser. Just build more wind and solar and the distribution infrastructure to move it around.
the people who were just denied damages from a court in Japan aren't "optics". They are real people, harmed, denied justice. Due to nuclear being just too big a fish to catch for an institution like Japans' nuclear industry and too big to admit it by their judicial branch.
The "very big CO2" problem is another argument against nukes: you displace much more CO2, and notably sooner, by spending the money building out renewables instead.
Furthermore, the near-zero opex for renewables frees up more money to build out more renewables and eventually, when needed, storage.
Well, France in 15 years made its grid nearly 100% green. For the last 50+ years France had really low energy prices, high energy reliability, an incredibly green grid, no emissions, almost no money going abroad instead supporting high paid technical jobs domestically.
The cost for that transformation was mostly on the books of the utility and were being paid down despite the low energy prices they were offering.
That a huge success, and any signification technical industrial nation could do the same. France was already going towards that path so if you would replicate it it would likely be 25 years but i that time you could like build 80 much more modern higher utilization reactors.
Germany had a Green transformation that with all the subsidies and everything will have cost 100s of million and they still have lots of coal (and their remaining nuclear) and will not have fully solved the problem for quite a while yet. In the time since French built nuclear the Germans mostly paid higher electricity prices and the most recent subsidy for energy prices will cost Germany 100s of billions. Not to mention the huge cost in terms of health and the environment to operate all the coal plants.
So had the Germany 'Energiewende' been to go from 30% to 100% nuclear, they could likely have done it in 20 years flat. Assuming a start date of 2000, that would be now. They could be 100% nuclear by now with reliable low cost energy prices, a 100% green grid. I don't think there is really any question if this would have been possible. Germany had all the knowlage and skills required. Even assuming some plants are delayed, they by now could easily finish 8 plants at the same time, they would be done within the next couple of years for sure.
This could have been financed easily as well. Assuming they build 50 new reactors (lets say 1.4GWe), assuming a conservative of 5 billion per reactor (prices way lower if you actually mass produce). 250 billion $, that's 6% of their GDP. Germany debt is 60%, and would go to 66%. German 30 year bond yields of 2%.
In return they would get assets that would produce green energy reliably at fixed price for literally the next 80-100 years. And that is assuming they do it with mostly the same tech that France did.
This would have clear been a superior path for Germany in almost any way you look at it. Their citizens would breath clean air now. They would have reliable low energy prices (as most of the French consumers of nuclear plants still enjoy). And they could tell Russia to go fuck themselves.
Likely the would also get contract from the Polish and all over Europe and continue to build them making it a profitable export.
You neglect that they would have to be breeder reactors, or run out of fuel. And, that those would cost many times over what the renewables they could build, instead, cost. And would cost overwhelmingly more to operate than their neighbors' renewables. Those neighbors will be selling power at far below the nukes' base operating cost.
France would then have to choose between mothballing their reactors and buying neighbors' power, or taxing their own citizens to keep the breeders operating at their radically higher cost. The latter would be an unpopular choice.
In summer, of course, the reactors would all need to be shut down in any case, because there is not enough water in the rivers to cool them. France would be buying neighbors' power, then. They could continue, in fall, or spend big bucks to fire up the reactors again.
Why can we only rely on wind and solar to 70 or 80%? South Australia had more than a week of more than 100% net wind+solar generation without much tranmission or storage or hydro, and they're still building more!
Overbuilding, storage and transmission for sure allows very close to 100% renewable generation. It will not be as _cheap_ as it is today though.
We could make a law today that forbids the construction of new fossil fueled plants. We could make a law that said that by 15 years the national grid will not allow the use of fossil fuels to stabilize the grid when demand exceed supply, and that by then people will either have to live with power outage or creating storage that match capacity with demand.
What we can observe in the world is an significant and continued increase in fossil fuel capacity, and energy politics being dependent on fossil fuel costs. Even in country with way over 100% wind capacity like Denmark, they still can only consume about 40% from wind. The remaining 60% comes from other sources like imports that are directly linked to fossil fuels. Getting those 60% to be generated from storage would be a major victory.
Looks like JMA says 9.0, USGS says 9.1. I don't really have enough expertise to know which number is more accurate, and I suspect it doesn't make a huge difference. It's in any case the highest magnitude earthquake ever recorded in Japan.
Japan gets earthquakes every day, and is much more seismically active than the US, so I would favor their expertise more. But yeah, it was the highest ever recorded. According to Wikipedia, it actually moved Honshu (the main island of Japan) by over 2 meters to the east!
The available amount of economically viable geothermal and wave power available in the US is pretty limited. Those sources should certainly be part of the mix, but they aren't scalable and won't replace the long-term need for fission power to deliver the base load.
always that mono-metric of "deaths" and not, "350,000 people had to leave their homes and 37 million acres of land wont be inhabitable for 3000-20000 years" (actual stats on chernobyl)
Again most of that is political. People living in the exclusion don't have significantly higher rates of cancer.
And again, this is soviet union reactor technology that doesn't apply anyway.
Instead of moving those people investing even 10% that amount of money in new hospitals, trains and bike lanes (or name X other things) would have saved far more people.
So if you want to be really hard core you could say, right, we should never built that type of reactor again. But we have never done so in the West anyway so its really none issue in any rational discussion about energy policy.
This is true, but the problem is that you need electricity from somewhere, and the only viable alternative to nuclear is burning coal. How much damage and death is caused by negligent nuclear vs. coal?
The Fukushima design was a textbook example of the zipper effect. One failure led to another to another to another until it melted down. At every point in that chain, simple (and cheap) design changes would have prevented it from propagating.
For example, if the diesel generators had simply been put up on a platform (so they weren't drowned when the seawall was topped), nothing further bad would have happened. If the hydrogen relief values vented outside rather than inside, the reactor buildings would not have blown up. Etc.
The same goes for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The designers of both should have consulted some airplane engineers. At Boeing a lot of effort was expended preventing cascading zipper effects.
The fact is, those design changes did not happen, and not because they were not thought of. Rather, management rejected adding them in each case, in detail.
Fixing faulty engineering processes has been demonstrated. Management, not so much. We have sound reasons to believe no systematic management improvements would be evident in future nuke projects.
Regarding venting the overpressure hydrogen gas outside instead of inside - was that rejected in detail?
Besides, my experience is that engineers do not think of these things until after the fact. Have you noticed them in any academic book on engineering? I've never noticed them in any, nor in any software engineering book.
Venting hydrogen is a thing after you already have a meltdown. It is already too late to forestall disaster. You already have one.
What was rejected include an adequate seawall, and backup generators where a tsunami would not flood them. We know the ideas were rejected, because at a sister site only a few miles up the coast, rejections were overcome.
Worth noting from a system safety perspective that it's not just about how to prevent the accident, but also how to limit the consequences once it does happen.
From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards.
This is a natural thing for management to say -- they're sitting there in Tokyo not fully experiencing the severity of the problem.
The problem is that Japanese culture puts an emphasis on obeying your superiors, so it took a long time until people disregarded those orders and started cooling with sea water anyway. That sort of obedience culture is not really compatible with systems designed to suffer rare but potentially catastrophic failures.
I wonder if that had been the case if the wind had blown in another direction at the time, towards Tokyo, instead of mostly the open sea.
I also think it's difficult to come to conclusions in seeing this in an isolated way. Everything was in chaos and much destroyed because of the tsunami, surely that delayed communications, and assessment of the 'real' situation?
Sometimes when I read about the history of all that, and all the talking about, I get the feeling like the commentariat views this like a clean room laboratory exercise. Like in a model, this happened, what to do now?
The reason I brought that specific thing up is that it's not an isolated thing. It happens over and over in complex situations when the system is top-heavy in its steering. In any complex situation, you need to have people on the ground with the trust and authority and safety to do what they think is best, precisely because of the reasons you mention with the chaos and delayed communications, and so on.
Some searching for 'Fukushima US-NAVY cancer' will bring up endless stuff from all sorts of sites.
The thing is, regardless of the sites reputations, there is a signal that those ships took a large dose, because some of their sailors claim their sudden leukemia was caused by that.
I don't know. Can one call that psychosomatic? Did they sniff too much JP-7 instead?
> From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards.
Well, not really. Some of the early damage might have been prevented by this (at the cost of destroying the reactors), but Fukushima really had no way to reliably cool their reactors without auxiliary power. Once that was gone, there was going to be serious trouble, and likely destruction of some of the reactors.
That saying is true for shorter lived things. If you make nuclear power plants after a disaster, the plants will still be there after everybody forgot about the disaster and becomes careless again.
Because "safety regulations are written in blood". Disaster happens, reactive preventative measures help keep the disaster from reoccurring in that specific manner.
...in fields governed by science and stricture, anyway, like nuclear power or aviation.
You can actually predict by that metric how safety aware your current surroundings are in production facilties.
Time of last incident, average promotion time (over time reduces safety awareness again), calculating that, one can behave acyclic until the next accident.
Sure. I noticed this at a hardwood flooring warehouse, in another life. In fields governed by science and stricture, however, the safety increase is effectively permanent.
Much like cybersecurity, the safety of nuclear at this point pretty much comes down to people, and whether or not they choose to invest in the best practices or if they get too lax. Right after a nuclear accident, the math suddenly looks different to the bureaucrats and investing in safe, reliable operation suddenly becomes worth it again.
The valuations will be cheap, but they will have gained extremely valuable insights that will hopefully lead to new and better designs? Personally, I think there is more likely to be a period of culls and bankruptcies.
Nukes are not competing with carbon sources. Against renewables (+storage, eventually) nukes lose on every axis: safety, capex, opex, construction time, other environmental impact (e.g. U vs other mining).
There is no place where nukes come out ahead, so no place where building more is the right choice. Continuing to operate them where they are can be OK, for now.
It's higher than nuclear accidents. I have never seen a comparison that includes nuclear installation, and it would be moot anyway, because most of the nuclear plants were built by different techniques people use today.
Death toll of wind is higher only if you artificially set uranium mining and refining deaths, and concrete, steel, and industrial plumbing construction deaths to zero.
All the other points remain, too. Nukes come in last.
Those places can continue burning cheap NG as they do today, during times when renewables flag, and upgrade to cheap synthetic fuel, imported from the tropics, as it becomes available.
Whatever renewables + storage they build reduces their operating cost.
What is this "cheap NG" you refer to? In places like Japan, NG is anything but cheap, because it has to be imported. Plus, where are you going to buy it from? The main supplier near here is Russia.
Again, where are you going to get it from? Russia? And, no, it's not cheaper than oil, since the transportation process is so expensive and difficult. It's a gas, remember? In case you haven't noticed, Germany's NG has been severely curtailed because of the troubles with Russia, and they're facing a cold winter without much heat. So again, I ask you: where exactly is all this "cheap NG"?
Maybe do some research? NG is transported in liquified form, in the millions of tons, routinely. Germany just constructed a new LNG terminal in record time, to use LNG so imported.
Liquifying and shipping NG is far more expensive than just pushing it through a pipeline. Why do you think the NordStream pipelines were even built?
And again, for the nth time I'm asking you here, where the fuck are you going to get it from? If it was so easily available, Europe wouldn't be screaming right now, and no one would care about Russia.
Japan's renewable resources are actually quite poor. Unless tidal takes off or deep offshore wind gets a lot cheaper it makes a lot of sense to restart existing nuclear.
It’s one thing to build wind farms in the flat and shallow North Sea. It’s quite another to do that on the Japanese coasts, where the sea floor is really not flat at all.
Really, the North Sea is the ideal case for offshore wind. It is very windy but easily accessible and with a nice topology. Almost any other location is worse or much worse.
> Way, way cheaper than nuclear and can get online much faster.
It is not way, way cheaper. It is cheaper than nuclear if you consider only nameplate capacity. Once you account for the load factor it becomes worse. The capital cost for the wind turbines EDF is building in the UK is broadly comparable with the nuclear equivalent. And if you include the storage that will become more and more necessary as the share of renewables increases, it is much more expensive.
It can get online faster, true, and it does not have the same issues regarding waste. They are also more modular, because you can build only 5 of them, whereas you cannot build a half reactor.
That being said, it still has issues with waste because we cannot really do anything with the turbines once we decommission them. Also, whilst they are operating, each single turbine consumes several tonnes of aluminium each year.
Japan has quite different geology to western europe or USA off their coast where the wind resources are. The only option is floating and that's still very much under development.
Plus offshore wind isn't that cheap. It's still on the order of $5000/kW of net generation for shallow water, and Japan hasn't had a lot of success breaking $8000/kW as yet. Plus their utility solar market is also a bit borked.
There are countless reasons not to build a new nuclear plant, but the costs and risks of using old ones are less than not using them in this case. Especially given that they're also pulling the renewable encouraging levers pretty hard without much success.
In the north sea it is, relatively. Now factor in typhoons, cyclones, tsunamis and other local weather phenomena like very low average wind speeds, plus unfavourable geological conditions, and it makes many of the economic assumptions invalid when applied to the Asia pacific.
Renewables are cheap when they produce. The problem is when they don't produce. Wind cannot be predicted, and the sun disappears for several hours during the day.
How much does some renewable energy cost me at night when there is no wind, +infinity?
Just look at the average capacity factor of renewables, on average it is as if 60-70% of the time they produce nothing during the course of a year.
In contrast, a nuclear plant can easily reach 90+% capacity factor, which makes it very reliable as a power source.
I am not saying that renewables suck, but to say that they cost little and are the solution to all problems is simply false. Some countries may go 100% renewable, but to claim that everyone must adopt renewables is ideological propaganda.
P.S. It is useless to talk about batteries and storage systems, which do not exist on a large scale, except through dams, whose existence is highly dependent on the geology of the country. (By the way, these would be projects that would greatly increase the price of renewable energy, but they are always omitted for idology)
90% EAF for nuclear is a complete fiction, even in the US it only looks that way because the nameplate value isn't increased when expensive upgrades are made so you're averaging 120% output for 75% of the year with 30% or 0% in the rest. Before Fukushima, Japan's program was around 65%.
Cost for cost, a mixed renewable system will produce at least as much as a nuclear plant for at least as large a portion of the year.
Nuclear can be a good choice and probably is in this instance, but the only ideology here is the same set of slimy lies that the fake pro-nuclear crowd always uses to attack renewables.
I generalized. Over a broad time period (like a year), you can predict the wind production of a wind farm, but on a daily basis you cannot consider wind a reliable source of energy. You can't make predictions today about the next day, and that makes wind a not very reliable source of energy if you have to run a country on it.... The only solution to this problem are seasonal storage, which is a lot of lithium, or energy mix with nuclear (imho, the most logical rational and economical way).
> The only solution to this problem are seasonal storage
No one will deploy seasonal storage, so the point is moot. NG backup works today, and will continue working into the indefinite future.
Chemical batteries are the most expensive of many storage alternatives, with advantages for very short-term use. Lithium is a poor choice for utility requirements, so its supply is irrelevant.
There is no place for nukes, which cost radically more than all other alternatives, most especially for only intermittent use.
"The only solution to this problem are seasonal storage, which is a lot of lithium"
You are maybe not aware, that for stationary batteries, there are way more options than lithium based.
Natrium for example, is quite common, so you can make literal saltwater batteries.
It is not all perfect, salt (molten) batteries have an operating range of about 300 degrees. In addition to having very long preparation times after discharge. If you don't use them in daily use they tend to discharge over time. And they have very low energy densities.
We can wait for some scientific advances, but it is whishful thinking to hope that in a few decades they will invent the ultimate solution.
Hydroelectric plants are the only large-scale storage, but they are highly dependent on the geology of the country.
They are not a solution to seasonal storage.
For me it is useless to go on all these big trips, the solution is very simple: mix of nuclear for base load, and renewable for peak.
Hydroelectric plants are not, in fact, "the only large-scale storage". Numerous practical storage methods are being fielded, many suitable at any scale.
Pumped hydro is not, in fact, "highly dependent on the geology of the country". It needs a hill. Hills are very, very common. I can see them in every direction, here. Maybe you can, too.
A "solution to seasonal storage" is not, in fact, needed or useful. NG backup works and will continue working into the indefinite future.
Renewables + some storage are good for baseline. NG is good to fill in lulls longer than storage covers. Nukes cost so many times more than all other alternatives, there is no legitimate place for it.
Yeah, if you want to destroy whole landscapes and ecosystems to do pumped hydro, you can.
But then it also becomes a little embarrassing to call yourself an environmentalist.
Simply put, you'd rather destroy dozens if not hundreds of square miles per industrialized country instead of a few nuclear power plants? And you also propose to continue to pollute with NG. Wow, do you even get paid to state such things? Lol
"Nukes cost so many times more than all other alternatives, there is no legitimate place for it."
Data? No because in one comment you talked about renewables, destroying km2 of land, building storage, and keeping NG (which a few billion per gas plant you pay them).
I have the data (which are public on the various reports of international agency), but at this point I am curious to see how the fantasy story will turn out.
At this point I wonder why you have such beliefs? Clearly you are not an environmentalist because you want to destroy whole landscapes, you don't care about polluting less because you proposed NG as a backup, what are you fighting for? That sounds like anti-scientific propaganda to me.
Anyone obliged to invent falsehoods to make their case reveals they have no case. No one has ever suggested we "destroy whole landscapes" for solar. You made that up from whole cloth.
In Japan's case, I expect they have strategic reasons for wanting to maintain the domestic expertise and equipment to rapidly develop nuclear weapons, which AFAIK still means they need reactors (unless they want to have an outright disconnected-from-peaceful-use nuclear program, which they currently do not want to do).
They've long been regarded as a "technically non-nuclear... but only if on short notice" state, ready to join the Big Boy Club quickly if confidence in their position under America's nuclear umbrella wavers. I doubt they want to lose that, so they're going to want some amount of nuclear power as a plausibly-deniable way to keep up some of the equipment, material, and know-how they'll need to maintain that latent threat, even if it's not the most economical option.
Storage is a solved problem. Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world, and battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged and alternative battery technologies have matured. Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed.
I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages.
Also, it's being deployed commercially for resiliency and off-peak rate utilization. It's integrated into an increasing number of EV charge stations because one of the biggest barriers to DCFC system deployment is getting a beefy enough feed from the utility to handle peak usage.
Also, it's being deployed at the residential level, for many of the same reasons.
> Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world,
Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands.
> battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged
They are nowhere near the right scale. Bear in mind, in Europe they’d need to store energy over several weeks or months. The continent is prone to winter anti cyclonic conditions that go on for weeks, with no wind and no sun light. It’s quite different from, say, most of Australia.
> alternative battery technologies have matured
I’d like to know which one, because as far as I know none of the alternative are anywhere near maturity. Progress is being made, but you’re overselling it.
> Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed.
These are no silver bullets and have several drawbacks, including the “flow” bit, which requires pumps and valves. Efficiency is also not that great. There are sulphides, lithium-air, and Na-ion designs that are more promising. But again, none of that is mature, or even really produced at scale.
> I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages.
It’s the counterpoint of all these “lol renewables all the way” posts that crop up any time we discuss energy policy.
Most people would say that there are very good use cases for renewables. But they won’t be enough. If you read analyses at the grid level (some of that is in the IPCC reports), constant base production is very much required, otherwise you need to vastly overbuild and your grid has one huge point of failure (yes, freak meteorological events do happen).
Just a minor nit -- and some links for those who might not know where to find them. I of course agree with you.
> Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands.
It works in Wales and Scotland -- but not in England where it is needed the most.
> Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams.
This falsehood has been corrected numerous times on HN. It need not be repeated.
Pumped hydro is in no wise dependent on any of those. All it needs is a hill. Even England has hills. Even Australia has hills. The Netherlands are in Europe, which has hills.
Another falsehood is that "you need to vastly overbuild". This too has been frequently corrected. We use, today, NG for backup. We will have no need to demolish any of that infrastructure, even after storage is built. Overbuilding renewables to charge storage makes compelling economic sense, just because it is so cheap, but the NG backup remains. Eventually, synthetic fuels will be cheaper, for such occasions, imported from solar farms in the tropics.
So, renewables have no such "single point of failure". This falsehood need not be repeated.
Finally, pumped hydro and batteries are just two of numerous practical storage technologies being deployed. Their round-trip efficiency is of minimal importance when they are charged from free surplus. Storage with NG backup provides fully ample 100% service with exactly zero "constant base production" needed or wanted.
My I-think-conservative WAG for the cost and land-area-use differences between England and Switzerland, for this kind of storage, would be about 50x and 5-10x, respectively, for similar amounts of stored energy. Both elevation and grade of the surrounding land matter a lot for how much energy you can reclaim per stored liter, and having two or three sides of your reservoir provided by nature in the form of steep-walled valleys has to provide serious cost savings.
Like of course any water you push up a hill is gonna gain potential energy, but I think a reasonable reading of "works" in that post was "works efficiently enough that it's actually worth doing", not "is technically possible".
Your "wild-ass guesses" for costs are worth as much as you say. Grade, less: it affects mainly how long the penstock must be, but pipe is cheap.
An earthen berm is a very cheap construction project. Classically those were achieved with hand labor worldwide, for millennia, eventually augmented with wheelbarrows starting in China, and oxcarts. They cost less today.
Nature providing one, two, three, or four walls (steepness optional) reduces construction cost, but the turbines and pumps are a substantial part of the total.
Opex is of course extremely low. Bonus points for solar farms floating on the reservoirs. Round-trip efficiency of pumped hydro is near the top of all alternatives, although efficiency is relatively unimportant when the power being stored was free.
Not seeing how the physics can possibly work out for the real costs and land-area-use being too much lower than my guesses to achieve the same total stored energy, but sure, maybe there's some engineering magic I'm not aware of. Could be. In particular, maybe I'm overestimating how much more energy one can efficiently extract from, say, a liter of water dropping 5,000 feet over three miles, versus a liter of water dropping 600 feet over three miles.
Anywhere pumped hydro would cost more than another of many storage alternatives, the other alternative will reliably be chosen. England is, e.g., preparing hydrogen storage in depleted NG cavities. Pumped hydro will be built in the places where it is cheapest, favoring high hills and variable topography.
Costs for many storage alternatives are falling fast, and it is unclear which choices will win. Adding pumps to existing dams has lately been cheapest, by far. Future people will choose according to local conditions without asking us.
Right, I get that there are alternatives that would be used instead, what I was surprised at was characterizing "hydro only works in mountainous areas" as flatly false, if we take "works" to mean "is worth doing", which is a common usage and I think a fair reading of it, and since it seemed to me like there would be large differences in the economics of it, depending on local geography.
Low hills, where the hilltops are not otherwise in use, may suffice. Some places have very deep gullies or underground cavities that would serve in place of or augment hills.
The point is that whether a storage medium is practical in an area depends more on the landscape of choices than on the physical topography. Even Nebraska might have deep cavities that would serve in place of hills. But the extrema are extreme.
Pumped hydro also works if you have water at all, which my country doesn’t. So, some kind of new molten-salt reactor which doesn’t need water for cooling and can be built in the desert could work very well for us.
Then you can look up country power consumption and wind cost per KWh and half life.
Then it's just some arithmetic.
You're not helpless consumers of data, you CAN look this up and figure it out.
To save you some trouble, the bottom line is that for countries like the UK pure renewables would triple electricity costs. Is that an acceptable price? Maybe.
Nobody expects, demands, or plans "UK pure renewables". So all of the above, conditioned on it, is specious.
Renewables are the cheapest power generation the world has ever seen, by a large and growing margin. Storage in many practical forms is being deployed.
Everything that has always worked still works, and will be abandoned only when it is not needed anymore.
The issue is the amount of storage required. It depends a lot on the country, but here in Germany I think everybody agrees that we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels. That's a lot of batteries. And currently there's not enough storage for a single hour...
In these dimensions, resource availability becomes a limiting factor. Pumped hydro requires a lot of space and geography that many countries can't provide. It may be an option for Norway or Austria, but not for Germany. And even if Germany would buy the planned world production of lithium batteries for the next 10 years, we still wouldn't have enough. The math just doesn't work out for both. Hydrogen looks more realistic, but is not a mature technology at the required scale.
> we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels.
Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I personally am not offended or concerned by keeping natural gas generators around for decades, even, as insurance for catastrophic disasters, if in practice they're unused 99% of the time because storage infrastructure has reached 24 hour capacity. We reach diminishing returns on increased storage.
There is, in fact, no need to "get rid of fossil fuels", and no plan or desire to do so. So all the remaining claims are irrelevant. NG backup for renewables will remain. More storage mean burning less frequently, which is a pure good.
Pumped hydro storage does not, in fact, require "lot of space". Hydro power generation needs a watershed. Pumped hydro can reuse existing hydro infrastructure, but does not depend on it, and does not suffer its failings. Pumped hydro needs only a hill.
There will be no need to repeat the cited falsehoods.
Finally, a multitude of practical storage methods are being deployed. Batteries are the most expensive, so are only ever used for very short-term storage. NG backup for renewables works and will continue working; storage forestalls need to use it, decreasing opex.
So simply plan really, overbuilt massively on renewables. Then build a while bunch of storage. And then also have inactive low utilization natural gas plants and infrastructure.
Germany will spend like 40 years building this massively complex production system with massive overcapacity of solar and wind, quite a bit of storage, natural gas backup and lots and lots of distribution networks to move around power everywhere requiring a massively complex to operate country wide grid.
Man o man, France in 70/80s solve the same problem with 60 technology and it took them less then 20 years. The mostly build the nuclear plants on sits of existing oil plants and didn't even need to make their grid complex. And they didn't even want to produce green electricity, they did it by accident.
Really hard to see what the better plan is. Germany could have literally had 100% green energy by now if the 'Energiewende' had gone with nuclear, but instead they will spend the next 20 years shutting down their remaining nuclear, then shutting down all their remaining coal, and also building more gas plants.
If you take a moment to read what you replied to, you will see that your each assertion is directly disposed of there: there is no need for "massive overbuild" of renewables, or for much storage. The backup NG infrastructure is already in place and in use, and will continue working.
Germany's only problems just now are that Russia turned out to be an unreliable supplier, and their renewables build-out is incomplete. Both are being dealt with.
> Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world
They were used last time in Europe when there were an energy shortage. Almost all was decommissioned quite quickly afterward when they became economical unsustainable.
They are generally expensive. They are generally located in places where there already exist a lot of hydro power. They generally need a lot of land and connecting power infrastructure. They generally tend to compete with hydro power. They generally need a lot of subsidies.
With energy prices skyrocketing in eu there is some lukewarm interest to restart those old pumped hydro (those that still exist and with existing power infrastructure in place). They are however not a drop in replacement for existing nuclear power plants nor existing natural gas power plants. There is however a energy shortage and so any source might be economical viable if used correctly.
For the foreseeable future, electricity storage will stay expensive when you compare it with fast to cycle natural gas generators. This will only change with a carbon tax or after we consume most of the natural gas available on Earth (looks like it would take 2 or 3 decades on the shortest predictions).
That applies to any kind of electricity storage.
Compared to the alternatives, pumped hydro is currently a cheap highly efficient storage. It gets the best qualities of synthetic fuels (low cost) and batteries (efficiency). But it's not available everywhere. Things are changing fast, and I do expect pumped hydro to not be competitive when we fully deploy storage, but it's currently the best option you will see.
1) There are countries that simply cannot rely on hydropower.
2) I am Italian, so I will talk about Italy. The Italian plan to get to 100% renewable requires 70x the current world production of lithium.
3) Rare earth mining for batteries, panels and wind turbines has a non-negligible impact.
4) You are implicitly stating that the cost of wind power is not that, but 3/4x higher, since you also need storage, and therefore it is much more expensive than nuclear the "real" cost.
5) You are talking about distributing storage over the electrical infrastructure. So you're talking about completely redoing existing grids. Other additional costs.
In short, the reality of the facts is very different from saying "renewables are cheap."
Well, usually you have many dams in sequence on a river and you can often turn them to pumped hydro by pumping the water from the lower dam back up when you need to store some power.
And Japan has a lot of such cascades - even just in Kurobe there are at least 4 major dams one after another.
But all that capacity is built out. Japan has about the same as the USA in pumped storage capacity...which is a bit amazing considering Japan is just the size of California.
Hydrogen is part of the answer, for steel and perhaps concrete manufacturing. And also to fuel container ships, in the form of ammonia. But as a storage medium it is not very efficient. At least not now.
And once you realize that nearly all renewable energy production has a marginal cost of zero, then it quickly becomes the overwhelmingly best idea for energy storage.
Yet, the marginal cost of producing hydrogen using that infrastructure is zero: the only inputs are water and energy, and the marginal cost of that energy is zero.
Will be fantastic when we have all those hydrogen production plants who only run with 30% utilization because they only make sense when you massively overproduce renewables.
None of these are in the oceans i believe. Instead they're using a sea that's between UK and mainland europe
It shouldn't be a deal breaker, but doing the same on oceanic water will have it's own challenges with significantly higher wind variance and more flotsam dangers
It's coming down. Though massive supply shortages and failure of a bunch of companies to hedge against commodity prices needed to fulfil budgets are going to be pretty rough for anyone who isn't China for a few years. Note how much more Japan's renewables cost than world median. The reasons aren't just policy -- Japan has ben dealt a uniquely terrible hand for renewables matched maybe by Slovak Republic (which at least has close allies to trade with).
You're glossing over the fact that Fukushima happened because the power company never should have been allowed to construct or operate a plant in such a location.
When they were allowed to build the plant, emergency systems were not protected from tsunami damage/flooding. If the infrastructure around emergency cooling had been protected, then none of this would have happened.
When the tsunami happened, both the power company and government appeared to have no emergency action plans or preparedness for the obvious scenario of the emergency cooling system failing.
When they were caught with no plans and an unfolding catastrophe, instead of being open and seeking assistance from anyone they could, they clammed up and hid as much as possible.
It was a disaster predicated on incompetence and arrogance at every step by every organization involved, up to and including the most senior Japanese government officials who sat by and let the TEPCO bungle everything.
So yes, given such a systemic failure - much of it enabled by too-cozy relationships, incompetence, and (likely) corruption - I think it's quite wise to say "well, we're not qualified to do more of this."
Solar and wind don't have anywhere near the operating expenses, supply chain requirements, or dangers nuclear power has. They're highly distributed. And nuclear power is increasingly unreliable due to (cough cough) extreme weather events from climate change, though usually this is more inane stuff like cooling water sources drying up, or becoming too hot, or clogging up from invasive species that are able to survive where they weren't before.
This is a really good point - what measure of assurance do we (or, rather, the Japanese public) have that Japanese government officials and power company execs won't make the same mistakes again? Have any of the responsible parties been penalized at all?
Even if the technology advances, if the problem was the people last time, technology alone won't be enough.
I don't know about individuals in the government, but the government was held liable for some amount (seemingly <$10MM)[0][1] and top company executives were fined tens of billions[2].
Before the accident, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, who promotes nuclear, also did regulation. It shouldn't be. After the accident, Nuclear Regulation Authority was made. They inspect nuclear plants strictly so some plants is stopped despite energy company want to operate.
Solar are wind are also increasingly unreliable due to the same extreme weather events. It is truly mind boggling how easily all legitimate criticism of wind and solar are brushed aside by the belief that they are the future.
With changing weather patterns, wind turbines are exposed to more ice events - events during cold weather that cause the shutdown of hundreds of wind farms. And no, i am not referring to wind turbines being affected by the cold, this is specifically wind turbines being affected by temperatures around freezing where ice forms. And what of long periods where winds speeds are too low across half a continent - a la the UK and western europe very recently? Same with solar - the world’s largest power grids are mostly not tropical.
There will likely come a future where continents are powered by wind and solar, but that future is not tomorrow nor is it in ten years time. In the meantime, we continue to hurtle towards a climate disaster while quibbling about the problems of nuclear power - a technology that has the potential to get us to that sustainable future.
Fair point. I hope they can resolve the systemic issues.
Just so we're clear though, the location itself isn't inherently a problem as far as I know. There was in fact a power plant closer to the epicenter of the disaster that survived just fine, which is pretty impressive given how cataclysmic of an event it was.
That one survived solely because one man put his career on the line, over and over, ensuring that it would. Depending on such devotion is not sustainable.
There is no possibility that any new construction would observe the same standards as that engineer. It might try, but management would overrule it.
Your first two paragraphs seem to contradict each other. I guess I disagree with the first and agree with the second.
If you're going to build a plant that requires active backup cooling in a tsunami zone then you should protect your backup cooling system from tsunamis.
It's ok to build nuclear fission reactors in challenging locations. We have many that run underwater and a few dozen that run in outer space. We ran one under the ice sheet of Greenland and one in Antarctica. As you say, you just gotta build the necessary infrastructure.
We don't have any currently operating nuclear reactors in space right now but there were quite a few in the past - a couple test satellites from the US and a couple dozen active radar satellites for ship hunting from the USSR:
While none are operational right now, the highly radioactive reactors cores that didn't burn up over Canada by accident do remain a reasonably stable disposal orbit today. :-)
Long term, we will certainly need nuclear reactors in space - possibly not necessarily in Earth/Luna space that much, but already on Mars and especially the Asteroid Belt solar panel are really becoming too heavy to provide any useful power.
Thankfully reactors in space have a lot of benefits compared to terrestrial use - ships and space stations can use the so called shadow-shield to protect the ship/station in its shadow and just let the radiation go into the void of space in all other direction. Makes docking a bit tricky as well as running multiple reactors (you need to take neutron cross-propagation into account), but should be still doable.
For surface or asteroid stations - there shouldby plenty of mass for any shielding and no biosphere to contaminate or possibly not even any hydrosphere or atmosphere to spread radioactive particles - on the other hand, this also makes cooling harder.
Nukes in space offer myriad opportunities not practical on Earth. Lofting them directly from Earth is a tricky matter. I believe it could be done safely, but I know many never will.
On Titan, all you need is a naked pile in a gore-tex sleeve with a wind turbine at the top, catching convection. Or maybe plunge it into a methane sea and drive a wind turbine from the boil-off. No need for cooling.
On orbit or on an airless body, a naked pile at the end of a long boom can be allowed to heat to a fierce glow. Photovoltaics ranged around it, at a distance, produce power directly. Again, no need for cooling.
Indeed! That's why even though renewables now do often make more sense than nuclear plants, I'm worried about all the know how and industrial base possibly being lost, as that might slow us down as we move further into space.
BTW, there is a recently released grand-strategy game called Terra Invicta that gets it right - the same solar panel module that gives you 40 power units in LEO (or 260 at Mercury!) will produce just 3 power units at Ceres. So its all fission, followed by various fusion designs for any stations further from the sun than Earth/Luna & for basically all the ships.
As for launching reactors into space - I think that at least the fuel elements will have to be launched for quite a while, the industrial base required for nuclear fuel refining and fuel assembly fabrication is just too massive for early deployment space-side.
Lot of other stuff - dirt for shielding, coolant, possibly even some primitive radiators - could likely be made in space relatively quickly.
Still, nuclear fuel that has not yet been through a reactor is just a bunch of toxic heavy metal - not ideal if it burns up, but possibly quite a bit better than plutonium from an RTG. Also being dense and quite small in volume, it could very well be shipped in a big ball of ablative shielding, just in case.
Loss of knowhow for terrestrial plant construction and operation doesn't worry me, because conditions and designs for uses in space are completely different. You are better off with people who are completely free of all the assumptions embodied in old designs.
> it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so.
This is not that interesting an observation by itself. For example, they could have shut down and decommissioned the reactor.
What I believe you're trying to imply is that they were aware of problems and they could have fixed them in advance of the tsunami, and fixing them would not have been prohibitively expensive. But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.
The last bit is critical here; and it's why I disregard the narrative of Fukushima Daichi being "preventable". There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe; all of them rely on active measures to ensure safety in the event of system failures. When the next disaster strikes, it will hopefully has as small an impact as Fukushima, but what I can guarantee is that afterwards we will have a laundry list of all the reasons why it was completely preventable based on the knowledge we had at the time.
Even datacenters know the backup generator has to be above where it can flood. Fukushima was very much preventable. Elevating the backup generator would have prevented the meltdown.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all. How many other problems were identified at Fukushima and other reactors throughout Japan that were considered to be equally or more risky? If you cannot answer this question then how can you conclude that this was "preventable" in any useful sense?
> There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe;
That is fundamentally false. There are lots of designs and many tested reactors. Passive fail safety without any active effects are very much a common thing and mostly a standard feature in pretty much all modern designs.
Unless you have a different definition of 'active' then me. In the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment they literally hit the 'off' switch and went home for the weekend, shutting down the reactor was so basic. And the MSRE isn't the only reactor that has managed to do that.
There just not currently available commercially to buy of the rack.
If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years.
All the companies working on these designs have greatly limited, need to deal with very long wait times very limited facilities, need to overcome regulatory system not designed for those reactors.
If a nation picked a design, and really fast tracked development and deployment with all the needed work being done in parallel, a lot could be done.
To give you one example, the IMSR (Integrated Molten Salt Reactor) from Terrestrial Energy is in the very final stages of Phase 2 of pre-vendor design review. They are expected to finish Phase 2 within the next couple of months and that basically means the CNSC (Canada) has considered the design and there isn't any reason why appropriate construction license request wouldn't be approved.
> The objective of a review is to verify, at a high level, the acceptability of a nuclear power plant design with respect to Canadian nuclear regulatory requirements and expectations, as well as Canadian codes and standards. These reviews also identify fundamental barriers to licensing a new design in Canada and assures that a resolution path exists for any design issues identified in the review.
> A vendor who has completed a Phase 2 Pre-Licensing VDR, has committed to increased regulatory efficiencies at the time of licensing. The results of Phase 2 will be taken into account mainly for the Construction Licence Application and is likely to result in increased efficiencies of technical reviews.
So if a nation like Germany did a 180 and said, we need new reactor and we need them fast, but we only accept reactors that are passively safe, but all German industrial resources are used and this is a high priority project. They could probably build such a reactor in 3-4 years.
There are others one could talk about but I do like the IMSR.
> But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.
Actually it was known that the sea wall was a particular weakness and it wasn't done, but not because of cost reasons. It was not done because it would have given anti-nuclear people a reason to say 'see it wasn't safe'.
So really like Shuttle issue, its a flawed safety culture that was the real reason. The required expense wasn't that high. And that matters just as much as cost issues.
However I generally agree. Saying 'it was preventable' isn't a good defense.
There are any number of speculative designs that are naturally fail-safe, but none of them in operation (outside of test facilities).
I'm not a betting man, but I would wager a significant amount of money that by the time IMSR becomes widespread and approved it will require a large number of active failure measures to be considered "safe".
> If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years.
Sure -- they could do that with existing designs as well. But these things have a great deal of natural complexity, and once again, I would practically guarantee that whatever designs they choose will have active fail-safes, even if the concept does not require it in theory.
Yeah. What primary discussed in Japan is to restart existing stopped nuclear plants with safety fix. It's far more make sense than planning new plants. Some analyst say that restart helps developing world after uklaine because Japan buy much LNGs for generation.
> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial
As a matter of fact, everything is preventable in hindsight. We are all very clever in hindsight.
Finally someone gets it. I highly doubt Japan is going to make the same mistakes again and they're just utilising what they have already built. A great step towards green, efficient and abundant energy.
That's area; another thing to look at is how much distance it spans. It's nearly as long as the US is north-to-south, from Maine to Florida, so it covers a lot of total area (much of it water) and has highly varied climates.
Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online. This move by Japan makes no rational sense. It is clearly driven by nuclear industry lobbying and constant spread of the canard that we "need" nuclear. There is no need in 2022 when renewables and storage are here today and cheaper.
Yet somehow in 2022, peak coal is now in front of us again, and even at these unprecedented production levels, people are buying it for over $400 per tonne. Despite the fact that solar and wind were alleged to have killed coal 10 years ago when it cost $50/tonne. Coal was completely uneconomical, they said. Coal is a stranded asset, they said. How did so many of the "experts" get it so wrong?
At this point it's clear that we can't keep waiting for renewables. You think nuclear takes way longer to get online, non-hydro renewables haven't even matched existing nuclear electricity production yet. They haven't even been able to halt the rise in demand for coal, let alone kill it, 10 years after it was supposed to be dead.
The best time to stop listening to anti nuclear / pro fossil fuel propaganda and save the climate was in the 70s. The second best time is now.
This is a bit like saying mp3s will never take off after napster got shut down and cd sales briefly went back up
You're using a black swan event (russian invasion of ukraine) like it's a baseline of what to expect in the future, ignoring that the world has invested more money into renewables this year than ever before
The world is definitely moving on from coal and gas and I reckon this coal crisis will be the last, I expect to see a lot more articles like this coming up around the world:
South Australia’s remarkable 100 per cent renewables run extends to over 10 days
> You're using a black swan event (russian invasion of ukraine) like it's a baseline of what to expect in the future, ignoring that the world has invested more money into renewables this year than ever before
No I'm not. Coal went to record highs almost a year before Ukraine was invaded and before any disruption to fossil fuel exports from the region, and many many years after renewables were said to have killed it. Do you really not remember? Stranded assets? Coal is not price competitive at $50/tonne?
> The world is definitely moving on from coal and gas and I reckon this coal crisis will be the last, I expect to see a lot more articles like this coming up around the world:
Not moving on, as record production and demand shows. Will one day in the future move on and won't move back, hopefully according to experts and random internet commentators who said it was definitely dead 10 years ago -- is not going to cut it for climate change though. We obviously need more baskets to put the eggs into.
> South Australia’s remarkable 100 per cent renewables run extends to over 10 days
One tiny state with almost unlimited solar and wind resources in one small country? That's great. Doesn't change the fact that we've run out of time waiting for wind and solar and they've still barely cracked 10% globally yet.
That's it's also hilariously weasel worded -- obviously that state is still burning a lot of gas to generate electricity. Strange why they don't feel they can be honest and up front with the public, why are they still trying to fool people about those things? Doesn't really lend a lot of credibility or confidence to what they're selling.
Looks like a black swan to me, prices steady and trending downwards over the previous 20 years until Covid/Russian invasion which resulted in insane Euro demand
> Not moving on, as record production and demand shows.
We can see that renewables are soaking up a lot of the increase in demand, for example you can see South Australia go from coal and gas making up 100% of supply 10 years ago to just gas making up 16% and with the installation of new batteries and hydrolisers in the next few years to drop even further.
It just so happens that SA went hard on renewables because they had some of the most expensive power in the world. I'm sorry that it's not impressive to you. :(
Increases in power demand are being met by renewables and it's now taking a bite out of fossil fuels with the largest ever investments by a long shot this year. I've never seen so much money thrown at an issue.
They are also all connected to an Australian grid which connects SA, VIC, NSW, QLD and TAS together, so when for example SA has excess cheap renewable power it can export it to another state reducing their power costs and thus their fossil fuel usage.
> obviously that state is still burning a lot of gas to generate electricity.
Yes but the point is that it has gone down significantly over the last 10 years and this is happening all over the world.
> is not going to cut it for climate change though.
At the end of the day if China/India/Vietnam and Indonesia seek to continue to build coal power plants then that's on them and I will continue to push against buying things made in those countries.
Is coal dead? no definitely not, will renewables have replaced significant amounts of coal in the next 20 years, I'd bet the house.
Autocratic countries with natural resources being dangerous and unreliable is not a black swan event. That's their normal mode of operating. Russia has always been behaving like they are now. The west could just ignore Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia, and Ukraine (the first time). This time around the west woke up and pushed back. But we could have had an energy crisis and economic warfare from multiple of the other russian conflicts. If we had minded to intervene.
Nuclear projects aren't getting financed due to propaganda against them, it is because they are bad investments. When people are putting their own money on the line, they don't believe nuclear will be cheaper than renewables + batteries in 10 years.
It is more that nuclear hasn't been competitive against natural gas in places that have natural gas since 1980.
Betting on renewables + batteries in 2022 is like betting on the fast breeder reactor in 1955. There certainly is going to be development in batteries and other forms of storage in the next decade but we don't know where the minerals will come from, we'll have more grid scale batteries catch on fire, face more challenges siting solar farms because, as a major land use, they could affect endangered species, etc.
There will be progress there but remember that decarbonization is not just replacing the current electricity grid but it also involves replacing gas appliances with electric appliances, using electricity for heat in buildings (probably with heat pumps), electric cars (that people will want to charge at night and thus require more grid storage as well as competing for battery materials), replacing industrial uses of energy, synthesizing e-fuels for aviation and other special applications, etc.
Nuclear as we know it faces two problems: (1) the steam turbine and heat exchangers of the LWR are enormous such that an LWR would have a hard time competing even if the heat was free, (2) every country other than Russia has built LWRs sporadically and faced terrible project management problems; China is catching up with Russia with their Hualong One (4 completed in the past 2 years, 12 under construction now.) Long term the industry has to get rid of the water to get the temperature up so the powerset can be made more economical and you can use the heat for industrial applications such as thermochemical hydrogen, with the big plus that a reactor without a moderator can get roughly 50x the energy out of a pound of natural uranium than LWR.
Grid stability is the real bad investment. In a free market we should have events where demand exceeds supply and when, and if the state didn't pump large amount of subsidies into grid stability we would see regular power outages. Those that would be hurt most by power outages would then invest into backup generators.
Grid stability cost money and power companies do not want to carry that cost. It is a much better investment for them to let society carry those costs and simply produce as much energy when its most cost effective to do so.
Great, except it's more expensive for everyone to run a backup generator than for power companies to overbuild capacity and bundle it into the cost of electricity. Making "society carry the costs" makes everyone poorer so that power utilities can have a thicker profit margin.
There's also a related problem: once everyone is already paying the cost to purchase and operate backup power on a regular basis, they're not going to bother paying their power bills. They're just going to disconnect from the grid, because people aren't paying them for "power when its most profitable". They're paying for "power when they need it". Grid stability is the literal job of your power company, arguably moreso than power generation.
It would indeed be a more expensive grid for everyone. However customers tend to pick which ever producer has the cheapest sticker price and a large number will not consider the cost associated with potential blackouts when going into contract. Those situations tend to result in a rush to the bottom if there is no other forces involved in the market. In a market where the government guaranties stability people think they are paying for the kw/h, not power when they need it. It only if they are somehow forced to to consider "power then they need it" that they consider such thing when deciding which power company is cheapest.
Which returns back to investments. If consumers will reward companies based on the cost of kw/h, and they will assume that governments take care of balancing the grid, then companies that invest in technology that produce the cheapest kw/h and ignore grid stability. The only way out would be for governments to subsidize less economical ventures but which consider grid stability.
Right, they're not getting financed because of things like government prohibitions (as in the case here) and unequal consideration making them bad or impossible investments. The propaganda is presumably to get the public to go along with it.
>Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online
It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.
I think it's incorrect to say that nuclear does not require energy storage.
The energy demand is not flat, it has peaks. If you don't flatten these peaks with storage, you need to build a production system that should be able to generate enough energy during the peak, but then, some of the generators will have to be turned off the rest of the time.
To illustrate the idea, let me invent some numbers: with storage, you have, let's say, 10 power plants to build that are running relatively all the time, producing an integrated total of electricity of, let's say, 100. So, if you paid X$ for building the 10 power plants, you will have X/100 per unit of electricity. Without storage, you may end up with, let's say, 15 power plants, but some are turned off 90% of the time. At the end, you also produce an integrated total of electricity of 100 (the integral is the same, the time of consumption is just shifted to create peaks). The cost of build is now 1.5X, and you will have to 1.5X/100 per unit of electricity.
On top of that, turning on and off a nuclear plant is less efficient than producing continuously, so the price of electricity increase even more.
So, even with nuclear, storage needs to be built. Once the storage is built, it means that the problem of intermittence of renewable is way less problematic.
Nuclear power needs storage on the scale of a day or two. Wind needs storage on the scale of a few weeks. Solar needs storage on the scale of 3-6 months. You can work around this a bit with demand scheduling and it's much less of a problem in the tropics, but we're talking about Japan: it's northern, densely populated and cloudy.
If you can turn a nuclear plant off (summer) and on (winter) once a year, the storage requirement for solar drops by a lot.
1) week storage and 3-6 months storage are extreme events, similar in probability as overlapping technical shutdowns in nuclear facilities. In practice, with interconnection, it is even arguable that such long term storage are even needed.
2) the technology built for short term storage is usually not that bad for medium term storage either. In any case, if you want a nuclear grid, you will need to invest in storage technology, and there is no reason the progress in those technology will only improve short term storage solutions.
But I 100% agree: a nuclear plant turned on during winter will help. I'm not against nuclear, I just want to react to the incorrect view that storage is just a renewable problem.
Well, you cannot really export it if no one around needs it because they also are not in a peak. If they rely on importing electricity when in non-peak time, what do they do in peak time? By construction, the non-peak time is the worse time to export. Unless you export to a different part of the world, but then, the same argument works with renewable (said simply: if you can export at midnight to a country where it is 4pm, then you can use solar and import at midnight from a country where it is 4pm).
What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.
Bauxite is so cheap and abundant that the cost of aluminum is almost entirely in the electricity required for smelting. And because aluminum is such a critical material for industry, it is effectively equivalent to energy exportation. This is why tiny Iceland is a top 10 global exporter of it: abundant free geothermal energy with nowhere else to go.
No one is going to invest in an aluminum plant unless they have some assurance of cheap electric power for many years. The capital expense and fixed operating costs for those plants are tremendous. It's not economical to start and stop production on a daily basis as power prices fluctuate. How would you even schedule the production workers? And you still have to pay things like property taxes and insurance whether the plant is producing or not.
Also the local district heating company installed an electric 30 MW water heating boiler recently, which they can run on excess electric power and throttle down the regular combined cycle plant powered by natural gas.
Also IIRC you can design the reactors to support a degree of output scaling, if not shutdown. IIRC French reactors are designed to do that - they have some issues right now with premature fatigue but I'm not sure it is related.
Yes, I believe it's the case. The French nuclear plants can do some load following. But they are not doing it, because it's more inefficient for a nuclear power plants, and as the nuclear is anyway not 100% of the mix, the load following is done by the other parts of the mix that don't have such problem.
On my mind, the main problem of scaling down production for nuclear plant is that a nuclear plant is very expensive, and if it produces only at submaximal capacity, it means that the construction cost is spread on less electricity production.
Operating a nuke at less than 100% is untenable: if run at 50%, each kWh costs twice as much as at 100%, but even running at 100%, it costs radically more than all other choices.
Exactly. People who shout about how wind/solar are not reliable and need storage / fossil fuel backup and then spout about nuclear have no idea how grid-scale energy generation works.
Nuclear takes hours to days to respond to load change, so there has to be much more reactive power available. And nuclear plants need to be able to draw megawatts of power from the grid any time they're not generating power. You can't "cold boot" a nuclear power plant without a massive external power supply and it takes days to weeks to do so.
It's so bizarre hearing people advocating for nuclear talking about storage like it's some barely-understood, dangerous, hideously expensive sci-fi pipe dream. Grid-scale energy storage is almost 100 years old and battery based systems have been actively deployed for many years at all levels of the grid, right down to residential.
The entire United States has something like 3 seconds of energy storage, total.
Just getting that to an hour means a three order of magnitude change in the amount of connected grid storage. Good luck finding that much pumped hydro! The easy spots are taken already!
An hour is not enough, of course. That might handle some small variations in wind only. Of course, one diurnal solar cycle means you need to store power for 8-12 hours. That is another order of magnitude. So in order to do this, we need to increase our battery capacity by four orders of magnitude. Multiple days? Weeks?
Now consider that the demand curve will become even more extreme, as climate change increases demand for electric heating and cooling. And consider that you will also need to account for electrifying the cars on the road (because building out storage like this is a multiple decades project), which will place additional capacity demands on the grid.
The thing with storage is not that it's difficult, it's that it's big. Like the scale is you need to nationalize your extraction industries and turn your economy into a wartime economy whose singular purpose is producing batteries big. It's not a Tesla or Google or even a DOE scale problem.
Well, 3 seconds if you turn everything off, but it is not what we are talking about here, especially if the question is peak shifting. The majority of peak shifting is done at local level, with solution like, for example, domestic wall battery like Tesla or electric-vehicle-to-grid. Still not ideal, but I don't think your depiction of the situation is very fair if it presents it in a totally unrealistic way.
I also don't understand your argument about solar cycle: solar is producing close to peak hours, while nights are non-peak hours. So, in practice, it's not like you need to store the electricity locally for more than a couple of hours. I guess you are talking of a situation where the grid is 100% solar, but that's obviously a ridiculous scenario that no one has never pushed for.
I agree with the fact that the demand curve will become more extreme, and it is exactly the reason of my intervention here: this is a complicated situation, and it does not matter if the grid is mainly nuclear or mainly renewable, it is still problematic.
I agree that the storage problem is tricky and that the scale is a challenge. But this challenge still exist in full nuclear grid, unless we end up with a lot of idle nuclear plant running only few hours per day.
The United States added more battery energy storage to the grid in 2021 than the United States had at the beginning of 2021. The situation here is one of rapid transition.
> Nuclear takes hours to days to respond to load change
Days? Seriously? You know that is not true, don't you? The French nuclear power plants are an existence proof of that.
Nuclear does need to be supplemented with something else with low construction/fixed costs for handling the rare, extreme peaks. That will most often be some sort of gas-powered plants. This has nothing to do with nuclear powers "inability" to "respond to load change" and everything to do with the cost of building enough nuclear power capacity that will almost never be used.
On the other hand, we are still very, very far from being able to do really large-scale battery storage. We don't have the manufacturing capacity for the enormous number of battery cells needed and even if we did, the cost would be prohibitive. This will of course change for the better in the future but that is how things are for now.
I thought French nuclear were only doing base load, the load following part being done by other sources.
I believe the French facilities have the capacity of doing load following, but are not doing it because it is less efficient (and therefore more expensive). So I would also not say "days", but it is also true that one cannot directly take a situation where nuclear has, so far, being used only for base load and pretend that load following will work exactly the same way.
I'm not sure why you say "rare, extreme peaks": the current demand is non-flat every day, with a difference between the trough and peak that is typically ~50% of the peak.
I agree that large scale battery storage is challenging. Maybe the solution would be to have some storage and some "wasted efficiency" by using nuclear plants in load following and turning them in stand-by every day during off-peak hours.
Correct, French nuclear is base load, but it still does a non-trivial amount of load following to e.g. absorb peaks. Check out [0] for some cool live graphs!
Nuclear plants can respond to changes in reactive power demand in ~100ms. It is a function of the voltage regulator and not the prime mover. Perhaps you didn’t mean reactive?
On the very large scale is not as scalable with current technology compared to renewables, since the uranium runs out before access to sunlight runs out. Breeders are needed, and we have exactly two working commercial scale fast reactors in the world. For Japan alone that's not a problem though.
This is not intellectually honest in any way. You might as well be parroting nuclear industry talking points. I could get ChatGDP to make your argument better than you.
Frustrated German here, hoping that the government will at some point realize that investing in nuclear is more useful than dismantling the German economy, so that others will burn the fossil fuels that Germany does not need then anymore.
France and their reaction to the opec cartel under DeGaulle should be taught in schools.
Please look up how modern French politicians sabotaged that country’s incredible nuclear rollout and replacement plan since 2015 by adopting laws that forced their energy industry to stop investing and roll back nuclear. You might break a screen or two if you aren’t familiar with those events seeing how stupid and evil it was.
Well, thats a good point: they don't. Germany had to produce a lot of extra electricity to fill the gap left by too many French nuclear power plants not working. Fortunately they got some more back to the grid recently, but far too many are still out of order. And their only attempt at building a new reactor is many years late and over budget.
They absolutely do. Looking at November, https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/cross-border-electrici... will show you that Nov 19th was peak import with about 8GW net import at peak. On that day the French NPPs were on average producing 30GW of electricity out of a 55GW peak demand.
When looking at electricity imports/exports it's also important to remember that France is a pretty big interconnect between the UK, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany. A bunch of electricity might be imported in France just to resell it to Italy, which is notoriously lacking in electricity production.
I am confused. You say yourself, that in November they needed to import 8GW. Which was necessary because the nuclear power plants didn't produce enough electricity. It was even worse in summer, where they were not only dealing with reactors down for repairs but also reactors with reduced power/shut down due to lack of cooling water.
So yes, France has a huge nuclear peak capacity, as they built a lot of reactors up to the 80ies. But basically none still then which means that they are increasingly fighting with keeping the old reactors running. Perhaps I was a bit short in my first post here, but they don't really have a strategy to deal with the situation. They would need to replace at least 50 power plants over the next 20 years to have a really good perspective, but no such plans in sight.
justin66:
> Somehow France manages to get most of its electricity from nuclear reactors.
you:
> Well, thats a good point: they don't.
The data I linked to you absolutely proves that they do, nuclear is the majority of electricity production in France even in its current production crisis state.
You are moving the goalposts in your reply, and I'm not interested in engaging any further given your dishonesty.
As far as I can tell France understood their role in holding things together in the absence of cheap Russian energy, hence the push to get as much as possible back online by December. I assume they also understand they need a longer term solution since their reactors are pretty old.
This is all orthogonal to the original topic, that it's not the EU and the EU commission who are responsible for Germany's massive failures regarding nuclear (any more than they are responsible for France's successes regarding nuclear).
First of all: please stay polite and don't accuse people of dishonesty.
Second: yes, the nuclear production is more than 50% of their electricity production. In that sense you are right. But the problem is what I wrote: it fell behind the required production capacity badly. France was no longer able to completely power its own grid for months. And the bad state of their reactors - they don't get any younger - will make this an increasingly larger challenge.
Yes, they’ve spent HUNDREDS of billions on “green” tech without a plan. How’d that work out for Germany.
They forced France to adopt laws to cut off their nuclear plants back in 2015. INSPITE of a law that mandates lower energy production from nuclear right now, France still produces much more than that and the shortfall is from whatever the French government invested in as the replacement, which is green bullshit.
The main issue with green tech is that it sometimes doesn't produce electricity, but when it does, it is great. I think Germany has to import electricity for about 8 days/year.
With a bit of nuclear this could be brought to zero, now that natural gas is not a cost-effective option anymore.
“Net” doesn’t really matter when there are large periods of time like the present where the population is burning firewood and coal to meet their energy needs. Very little documentation about that and much of it is labeled “green” under “biomass” which is very convenient.
Where Germany certainly fails is providing energy at consumer-friendly prices. We pay almost three times as much for electricity as people in the U.S. on average. Close to Denmark, who lead that ranking. Japan has to pay about half as much.
I agree and it's not a great situation to be in. They also fail in long term energy security.
The vice chancellor Habeck as gone on record to fanatically oppose nuclear when his countrymen(and women) are suffering through his idiotic stance made years ago.
Have a fuckton of non carbon electricity and then, sitting in that position of luxury, take the risk of further cleaning anything up you think is dangerous. Its very very very dumb to deny your citizenry near unlimited energy in this day and age , as an advanced country for cheap.
I think there are three major reasons why japan is doing this:
- technological. There are new, safety-focused designs that japan is going to relaunch their nuclear program with. They're enough to satisfy the japanese regulators
- geopolitical. Don't want to rely on russian fuel sources, don't want to fight against china for the end of a very long supply chain to get middle east petro.
- crony. Honda and toyota made long term plans to ignore EV in favor of hydrogen, hydrogen battery economy is basically nonsensical unless you have nuclear power plants churning out the stuff as demand bleedoff.
Hydrogen for auto transport doesn't make sense but it is a good candidate for use in steel production, fertilizer, and to fuel ships in the form of ammonia. Which is a great way to use excess and intermittent energy production.
Nuclear is less dangerous than people imagine. Studies on survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4981260/ have shown that exposure to 1Gy of radiation (the equivalent of receiving ten thousand chest xrays simultaneously) only reduces lifespan by 1.3 years on average, and 0.1Gy of radiation only reduces it by 0.12 years.
Perhaps, but the real reality behind this 1.3 years figure is that someone somewhere dies too early. That's something people won't easily accept - especially if we talk about cancer, one of the most feared diseases.
It's like saying, you can let your children go alone in the streets, stats show that it "only" reduces their lives by 1.3 years in average. Ain't gonna fly with any parent.
Yeah, that's emotional arguments. But feeling safe and good is also valuable. That being said, it seems that we have no choice but rely on nuclear power until we find a viable alternative.
I think you imagine what people imagine. People are very well aware of what a nuclear meltdown means. They have Chernobyl and Fukushima as well-documented cases: populations forced to move from their home permanently, contamination of the food supply chain that basically ruins the economic activity of the region, and the extreme difficulty to prove that your health issues are long-terms effect of the disaster.
Yes and most of those things are pure misinformation. East Germans panicking about nuclear mushrooms is simply imagination and misunderstanding of the science.
citation needed - and whenever I read this claim, I wonder: if a country is incapable of regulating its coal plants well enough so they don't kill people via pollution, will it be capable of regulating its nuclear plants well enough so they don't blow up?
I feel like this is a poor comparison. By default coal is going to pollute and there's very little that can be done in an economical way to counteract this. There are plenty of countries that have banned or have concrete plans to phase out coal, which I would consider the same as regulating against coal plants killing people.
The fear for nuclear power is a manufactured one because there is almost no technological difference in the capabilities required to use nuclear power for energy and for weapons. Having many nuclear capable countries would mean a major shift in geopolitical situation of the planet, it would end up in choice of catastrophic destruction or permanent peace.
I believe that countries that are already nuclear capable would always prefer to keep their advantage while using overblown fear propaganda about nuclear energy to create a deterrent for their population about nuclear power in order to maintain the status quo especially during difficult times.
Also, that is for acute radiation. Humans, and most other animals, appear to be far more resilient to continuous exposure to lower levels of radiation, which is the more common outcome for a major nuclear power accident.
There is a geopolitical component to that as well. The geopolitical landscape, including the rise of China and the weakening of the US, as well as the uncertain peace in Ukraine, may lead to an increase in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This is because the situation in Ukraine demonstrates that even if a country is able to win on the battlefield, they may still be forced to make concessions when facing a nuclear-armed adversary.
As a result, it is reasonable for countries like Japan to consider investing in nuclear energy as a potential means of securing their own nuclear weapons in the future, should the need arise. It's much easier to "pivot" into weapons than to start everything from zero.
Civilian nuclear energy has little to do with nuclear weapons. If the goal was nuclear weapons, you would do it very differently. This is not about nuclear weapons.
I have no doubt in my mind that it is related to Japan's intention to prepare for the future where they might need to create their own nuclear weapons. While it is true that the processes and technologies used for producing electricity and weapons-grade materials are distinct, there is a clear link between the two. Many of the same principles and skills that are used in the civilian nuclear sector can be applied to the development of nuclear weapons, and countries with advanced civilian nuclear programs often have the technical capabilities and resources to pursue nuclear weapons if they so choose.
Yes just as there is a clear link between nuclear weapons and rockets. Just as there is clear link between nuclear weapons and computers. Just as there is a link between nuclear weapons and a logistical network of ports/trains/roads.
Its almost like engineering is pretty universal and can be used many different ways.
A country that has no nuclear power, but is advanced in all the other fields of engineering could probably slap together a nuclear weapon within a few years if they really needed to.
So its pretty simply real, if you are an advanced industrial economy with lots of lots of engineering's, the science is there and you can just throw a lot of money on it.
Japan already has developed all the 'secret' technology needed and could spin up a program quickly, if they had nuclear reactor or not.
It is all about creating the industrial base with people going through university specializing in it. In 2017 this angle was up in the news in the UK. Take the responses as you like.
> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.
> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.
> [...]
> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.
> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.
> [...]
> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.
> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”
> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.
> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.
Oh, boy. This is 1950s propaganda against nuclear weapons and is 180 degrees from what hapend, and is just an attempt to create a chicken and egg circular argument. The military investment is what enabled widespread civilian nuclear power - for example, the US Navy trained thousands of engineers, operators, technicians and electricians who made it possible to build and staff civilian reactors.
There are many industries like nuclear where the drive for military superiority led to the birth, acceleration, and sustenance of entire industries. We don't like to admit it sometimes, but if you look at Silicon Valley, you can see the military roots that gave rise to the semiconductor industry and internet industries in plain sight.
Arguing that nuclear submarines are somehow subsidized in your electric bill is a far, far stretch - if anything those submarines are subsidizing the utility company, training their future employees and most importantly guaranteeing the viability of the government that issued the bonds to build the power plant, and guarantees the safety of it's operation.
> Andrew Stirling
Is an antinuclear activist, a former board member of Soviet funded Greenpeace and is not a credible name to raise in any argument about energy policy, save raising money for anti-nuclear groups.
You are missing the forest for the trees in your blind defense of everything nuclear. There is no problem with the fact that the civilian nuclear programs came from the military ones.
The point is that we have come full circle. For a nation not the size of the US, you today need to have a civilian nuclear program to have the industrial base to enable the military ambitions.
Look at Sweden, a country once capable of building nuclear reactors. Today you can not even study nuclear engineering at any of the universities at the graduate level. The demand does not exist, so the programs died out.
That is why you need to civilian complement. Otherwise, it is simply too costly.
I think you'd be better served by a different argument served with a lot less bluster directed at me (forest for the trees, blind defense, etc...).
What you are arguing is that an industrial sector that was created with military funds, has a market far bigger than it's original military application. Nuclear is no different than nearly every other industry that relied on military research money, then early purchases that fueled initial industry growth, followed by growth where the sector's market grew to dwarf it's military purchases. In all cases, the military does benefit from less expensive chips, or pre-built utility communications infrastructure, or even less expensive fuel for submarines -- it is a simple and natural economic effect of scale.
The market exists, and nuclear power is expensive only because of artificial regulatory expense. Hinkley Point is the poster child for this. I'm sorry you feel so strongly about nuclear power. Since you raise the spectre of military ambitions, I'll point out that the war in Ukraine is an autocrat trying to control more of the world's oil and natural gas. Russia's war was financed largely by oil and gas and clearly is about controlling it's distribution. There's not one right answer to the world's energy needs. Nuclear is a part of it, as are renewables.
Which regulations should we remove then if it is that easy? We tried to solve the climate crisis with nuclear energy 15-20 years ago. It was the right thing to do at the time but it did not work out, instead renewables have exceeded all possible expectations.
Lets embrace that instead of living in the past and hoping another 40 years of taxpayer and ratepayer money into the blackhole that is nuclear is a worthwhile exercise.
So basically what you are pointing out is that a bunch of people believe this, people who are high up in the government and the best they came up with is this:
"So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills."
Must be sad to have to base claims on so little evidence.
Energy independence is rapidly being realized for it's value I agree but I don't think it has much to do with a weakening USA. I'd argue it's more to do with a shift in national strategic considerations around the globe towards a model that acknowledges energy independence as a component of maintaining sovereignty. If anything the situation in Ukraine shows that with even limited American material support a small nation can make a go of defending itself from a nuclear armed adversary as long as that adversary isn't part of NATO. The Russians were originally saying they'd be done by Christmas.
The shift towards energy independence can be seen as a response to the crumbling global order, particularly in the context of America's role in enforcing this order after World War II.
The global order that emerged after World War II was largely shaped by the United States and its allies, who established institutions and frameworks that facilitated globalization and economic interdependence. As a result, many countries became reliant on the global supply chain and the free flow of goods and services.
The current situation can be attributed in part to the damage done to the United States' reputation as a security guarantor due to the failure to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine and the negative outcome of the Afghanistan disastrous withdrawal.
From my personal experience and through my connections with people in Eastern Europe, I have noticed a shift in the perception of the United States and NATO as reliable sources of security. While there was previously a belief that these countries could always be relied upon for protection, there is now a sense of uncertainty and concern following the failure to deter Russia and the refusal to provide offensive weapons. This has led to a greater focus on acquiring their own weapons for self-defense (including ! talks about acquiring nuclear weapons). I very much doubt things are much different in Japan.
Many countries were already on the path to using more and more oil. And many countries simply don't have coal resources, see Switzerland needing coal imports from Nazi Germany.
So in energy terms I think the use of oil naturally leads to globalization as people had few other options.
Coal is more widely distributed and would likely have seen some more use, but oil and gas were gone increase in use WW2 or not.
Japan's breeder program can be thought of as providing a rationale for accumulating thousands of weapons worth of reactor-grade plutonium (and yes, reactor grade Pu can be used in weapons, with some effort.)
And the solid fuel space launch rocket is even consistently advertised as highly automated & requiring minimal personnel to launch. Wink wink, nudge nudge. ~_^
I think you make valid points. I'm curious about "peace in Ukraine", given Zalinskyy's speech before US Congress just last night. I'm not an expert but it seems to me there's still a shooting war in progress in Ukraine. What am I missing?
Ukraine's goal is to regain control of territory currently occupied by Russia, including Crimea, and potentially see Russia break up into smaller countries. Meanwhile, the United States aims to weaken Russia as a potential threat to NATO countries, but not to the point of its collapse, as they prefer to avoid having Russia become dominated by China. While some NATO countries, particularly those in Eastern Europe and the UK, may support Ukraine in its efforts, others would have been quite content with Russia taking over much of Ukraine and ending the conflict in March 2022.
There are powerful forces at play that are attempting to pressure Ukraine into accepting a compromised peace out of fear of a nuclear conflict with Russia.
There are concerns that the support provided by the United States may not be sustained in the long term. As a result, Ukraine has considered adopting a more self-reliant approach to defense, similar to that of Israel, which is known for being proactive in its self-defense efforts. Those same ideas are now circulating in much of Eastern Europe, and I suspect in many other middle size countries.
The message is clear as day, if you want to be safe, you too have to have nuclear weapons.
I don't think this is really suistainable long term for Russia, with all the sanctions, international isolation, let alone all the people the front consumes even when relatively static.
Not to mention the already disastrous demograhic curve in Russia before this all started.
I thought so too until recently, but they are raising the stakes with Patriot missiles and "need to win" rhetoric, so there is a certain chance it will keep escalating.
The "need to win" rhetoric... its an odd way of looking at it. Ukraine territory is invaded. What do you expect them to do.. just surrender? Of course they need to win. It's their home, their land, there is no reason whatsoever why it should become Russian territory.
no, i don't expect them to surrender or any of what you mentioned. The US is continuously escalating by now supplying Patriot missiles - just the most recent in a sequence of more and more destructive weapons - and drumming up the "need to win" rhetoric.
So, back to the point, it might not just be a "long-simmering", this one.
> The US is continuously escalating by now supplying Patriot missiles - just the most recent in a sequence of more and more destructive weapons
An anti-air system is not really a destructive weapon, it's for self-defence. And saying the US is escalating is really weird considering Russia is the one invading and escalating with brutal attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
The whole US war machine is called the "Department of Defence". And they have defended halfway around the world in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. But obviously that isn't destruction, it's just defence. /s
Are you claiming that Ukraine aren't defending themselves? Or that an anti-air system, one that shoots down planes or missiles around a limited range (over your own territory), isn't defensive?
I see some comments further down that say "Japan should have avoided Fukushima because they knew the Tsunami and earthquake risk".
On the subject of earthquakes, I think it's fair to say that Fukushima, like all other buildings in Japan will certainly have been designed with earthquake risks. Japan has a long and proven history of constructing buildings that are safe in earthquakes.
On the subject of Tsunamis, all I will say is that I have been fortunate enough to be able to visit part of the affected stretch of coastline. All I will say is that you really don't comprehend what a Tsunami is until you go there and you see 4/5 story apartment blocks, some of which are maybe up to 1 – 1.5km (appx 0.5 – 1 mile) inland which have clearly suffered substantial Tsunami caused damage on their UPPER floors. Then you extrapolate in your mind, that if this was the upper floors inland, then just imagine the sheer wall of water that you would be facing at the water's edge, which is where a nuclear plant would be !
At great local controversy, and great expense (appx 12 billion US dollars) in order to encourage re-population by residents and businesses, the Japanese have been busy building a massive wall along that stretch of coastline. The pictures you can find on the internet[1] don't do it justice. This is not a US or Israel style wall built purposely high in order to stop people climbing it, it is built so high because that represents the size required to break up a full-scale Tsunami wave. Again, going there and standing next to the wall, it really drives home to you the sheer scale and might of a Tsunami !
Could they have protected the nuclear plant by building a wall at the time of construction ? I don't know, I'm not a subject-matter expert, but after visiting the region, I think its safe to say its probably one of those "its not that easy" problems.
Even my email provider knows not to put its backup generator in the basement where it can flood. Fukushima would have been fine with proper placement of its backup generator.
I want to back this up too, unless all reports are wrong, it was recommended for a long time that the operators of Fukushima put the generators on the roof, they didn't and this is the outcome.
An unimaginably high price to pay for a very negligent act. I really hope those responsible were held to account.
Looking at social media in Japan, I tend to see strong enmity towards solar -- eg large solar farms destroy the surrounding environment, they don't fit in with Japan's mountainous terrain and are prone to breakage during storms and landslides, failure to generate after snow, processing of obsolete units, etc. While there seems to be merit to many of the arguments made, the overall hostile attitude towards solar in general comes off as surprising; it's as if they think solar is by default evil. Wondering what shaped this attitude.
It's sad that solar overall is hated by some people. Tokyo decided that every new built house must have solar, that is good IMO because it's free space, but now criticized. Anyway note that Twitter and Yahoo News is heavily biased.
Due to a shrinking population in Japan, there are a lot of left over farms (which are quite flat) being converted to solar farms, it's quite surprising how much solar you see in Japan nowadays.
There are also old mountains (which have been decimated from mining) being covered in Solar panels on their south facing side, these are rock faces so not really prone to intense land slippage. I can't think of a better use for them right now.
Yes Japan has a lot of eathquakes etc, but I don't think this means you can't build solar farms.
Yes, there was a case where a landslip killed a lot of people due to an illegally installed solar farm in a slippage area? It doesn't mean solar was to blame though?
I myself don't strongly agree nor disagree with the individual arguments -- I'm not knowledgeable enough on the subject to form an opinion either for or against -- but the point was rather on the very strong hostile emotions displayed by the people posting them. It's like the hatred comes first and the individual arguments are brought up afterwards to justify it. I'm wondering where and why such negative sentiments come up.
Yet Tokyo is mandating rooftop solar for new buildings. The good thing is that solar can be adapted to the environment to the point where it just doesn't make sense not to use it.
I don't understand why Japan doesn't make more use of geothermal power. There are numerous sources of geothermal power all over Japan but it's barely exploited at all.
Iceland is the geothermal poster child, which may cause this idea, since both countries are volcanic. But Japan's population density (330/km^2) is nearly 100 times larger than Iceland's (3.6/km^2). So the intensity of geothermal extraction must be correspondingly that much higher, which turns out to be impractical.
Japan has generally always had a very sober attitude in most policy decisions, so this decision to reinvest in nuclear is more important than it seems. If the Japanses are doing it, it means its been thought through and found to be optimal.
The thing, in Japan things are not always working according to the policy but rather according to traditions and social pressure, for good or bad. They still wear masks there, everywhere, even though the policy is that you can remove the masks outside already.
The post tsunami Fukushima disaster usually comes up as an example of nuclear disaster. And it is, but how much of the disaster was nuclear vs bureaucratic? I changed my perspectives on it, a little, after hearing this podcast episode, highly recommend: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-tsunami-o...
So what if the cause was bureaucratic rather than technical? That's worse in many ways. It means countries can't be trusted with making nuclear technology. All the flaws in the design and location of this plant were fully known and simply ignored. It's a fallacy to expect this won't happen in other places.
I think you're missing the distinction. It's not that bureaucracy caused the meltdown, it's that the bureaucratic reaction to the meltdown was the source of the damage.
wkat, please, in the context of the resource (a well cited podcast episode) you're arguing against your own point. If this is important to you, check the research. If this is not important to you, well, ok.
Energy diversification, not missions to end co2 emissions, should be prime energy policy. And every industry player in energy market should be put on notice. It’s competition and innovation that will solve all sorts of problems from safety to emissions to efficiencies, in each of the respective energy sources.
The Bush admin listened to established industry players (a key factor in their unpopularity) more than new innovative markets to determine policy. Obviously this was not the right way to go (at this time). The Obama era admin took enmity and idealism in energy policy to the forefront and that hurt a lot of people because it artificially put them out of business (and gave rise to Trumpian anger).
Assuming avg cost of 5 billion $ per APR-1400 and building 50 reactors over a 25 year span. The cost of that would have been $250 billion. Assuming also they would not have shut down their existing reactor fleet.
This would basically result in 100% green energy for all of German consumption.
If you want to add future proving for electric, cars and trucks, add say 10-20 extra reactor.
This results in a increase of the % to GDP ratio from around 60% to around 70% and that debt given reactor live-time of 80 years could have been financed at something like 1% yield.
There is no universe where this isn't a better deal for Germany.
And P.S: Yes I know the APR-1400 was licensed in 2002 in Korea, I just took it as a reasonable example of a modern PWR.
I'm very anti-nuclear, but not for technological reasons. It's purely political, but I'll try to be as neutral as possible.
The baseline is that the probability of failure is so low, but the effects are devastating, which gives a company (or a state, for that matter) all the incentive to focus on short-term savings, while increasing the tiny probabilities, because in all likelihood, the people taking the decisions today will never see the effects of it.
Yes, from a technological standpoint, we could build safe nuclear, but we haven't found a political system to do it yet.
We all get that Fukushima was preventable... but it wasn't prevented.
A lot of pro-nuclear people just blow off Fukushima, which tells me you just aren't really engaging seriously.
(BTW, I lean pro-nuclear... but a lot of the pro-nuclear comments here on the risks amount to "don't worry about it" and whaddaboutism. This is not remotely compelling.)
It was one of the worst accidents in nuclear history.
... that killed ~1 person.
I think the disconnect here is that the "whaddaboutism" type arguments are actually relevant for once. Arguing against nuclear (or anything else) is implicitly an argument to use alternative sources of power, as society isn't generally leaving people in the dark with no electricity. If the Fukushima reactor hadn't been there, then it would have bean a coal or natural gas plant. Both would have killed far more people over the lifetime of the plant.
I think people have an allergic reaction to nuclear power that goes beyond rational, given the underlying statistics deaths/TWh. Having a single terrifying moment certainly imprints a lot more heavily on people's minds, though, than distributed deaths.
A whole region where 170 000 people lived was evacuated, some of them were not able to return for years. That has a cost as well, one that is hard to quantify.
Replacing nuclear with coal is obviously a bad idea. But replacing it with hydro, wind, solar power is so much better.
I don't have the numbers but I'm pretty sure that more people have died from hydro (dams collapsing) than nuclear. Three Gorges Dam displaced over 1 million people.
Not saying hydro is bad, but I'm not sure that nuclear is worse.
Solar and wind are the best as they seem to have few downsides providing the conditions are right .
I think perhaps you didn't take the "one of worst nuclear accidents in history" part as much of an acknowledgement as intended. Disasters are not the norm, so focusing on the disaster intrinsically misses the global cost/benefit trade-off, which I think seems more important to people trying to have broad policy discussions.
To your point, the primary impact was the large scale evacuation. Horrible for anyone living immediately nearby. On the scale of terrible power-plants, maybe worse than living next to an active coal plant, but better than living downstream of a collapsed hydro-dam.
And a lot of renewable activists just blow off the Banqiao dam catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands. And rightly so: averages, not outliers, are what matter.
I'm extremely uninformed about this, but isn't it the purpose of international atomic energy boards to physically review all plants frequently to reduce this? I'm not suggesting it's a perfect solution, and I suppose Fukushima proves that, but the incentives are a much lesser issue than otherwise.
They know coal is doomed. But each nuke start guarantees a decade's extension on the coal contract. It furthermore burns capital that could build out several times as much wind and solar generating capacity, that would start displacing all that coal almost immediately.
They love solar and wind because both result in a grid that for the forseeable future requires peaker plants. Usually LNG which they see as their greenwashed future.
They hate hydro for the same reason they hate nukes, they are too damn stable, entirely removing the possible need for fossil fuel based plants in base load generation or grid stability.
Lets build solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. If you can't build hydro though nukes really are the best alternative and the sooner people come around to that idea the sooner fossil fuels die.
Hydro is moot. There is noplace left to build hydro generation (storage is completely different), so there is no reason to mention it, except to note that an existing reservoir is an excellent place to float a solar farm.
Yeah they don't burn coal, they are hoping to transition to natural gas and we shouldn't stand for that shit. That is literally the whole point of my comment.
NG will be displaced by cheaper synthetic fuel, in time.
Demand for NG will fall off relentlessly as it is displaced by renewables and storage, and finally be pinched off by synthetics generated from renewables' surpluses.
You are maybe unaware of exponential growth of renewables deployment, worldwide, with no expectation it will slow? Each installation displaces coal, oil, and NG generation in direct proportion.
But you did say ng would be replaced by synthetics. Synthetic what? Again I will ask, but I don't know why at this point, who do you think you are impressing?
I'm not anti-nuclear, but here's how I see it. It has many upsides, but it has two major downsides:
1) You have to handle the spent fuel (either by storage or recycling, neither of which is easy).
2) When it goes wrong, it goes WRONG. See Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Both your points are valid (and highly common) talking points in the debate, but coal and petrol aren't exempt from these matters.
1) There is no handling of spent fuel. The atmosphere handles it. At least nuclear lets us capture and store it for handling it later.
2) Oil drilling and coal mining both go wrong constantly, with enough deaths and environmental impact to swallow nuclears' very short list of disasters
I'll add that these numbers are likely deflated due to me mostly focusing on US stats. Dare I say that the problem is even worse than these articles portray.
1. Is not a real problem because it doesn't take up much space.
2. The total death toll from the Fukushima incident is 1 (so far). For comparision, the tsunami & earthquake that caused Fukushima to meltdown killed 20000 and injured 6000 more.
And Chernobyl doesn't really count, as no reactor worldwide is capable of Chernobyling, and hasn't been for the past 25 years at least.
Chernobyl is a horror story that can be told to childen about Soviet/Russian incompetence, not as a valid example about the dangers of nuclear energy.
Likewise, Fukushima can be used as an example about how safe a worst case scenario actually is.
Some of the design flaws of RBMK were retroactively addressed in existing reactors post-Chornobyl. In particular, the flawed control rod mechanism was addressed. It would cause power excursions/criticality when the rods were inserted. However, neither the high positive void coefficient nor the lack of containment buildings was addressed in RBMK. These unsafe features of the reactors led to the shutdown of the only two RBMKs that were ever in the EU (in Ignalina NPP).
While it is difficult to argue the idea that no reactor is capable of "Chernobyling", as "Chernobyling" is a very particular scenario, RBMKs are generally considered unsafe. The lack of containment buildings is particularly concerning because, without containment failure, we would not have had either the Chornobyl or the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.
While RBMKs are not built anymore, and the new Russian VVER reactors are much safer, they still don't meet EU safety requirements. A future evolution of VVER-1200 called MIR-1200 should, although it is difficult to find much information about this.
Overall, I am saying that "Chernobyling" can mean different things as several design and operation faults needed to align for that disaster to happen. Some design faults in Russian NPP reactors have been addressed, some not. Overall, VVERs look very safe as they address all major RBMK design faults, but for some reason still don't meet EU safety requirements. So I wonder what design faults persist. I do agree that Gen 3+ reactor designs look very safe.
I wonder if RBMK with a containment would help - the power spike they managed to trigger in Chernobyl was couple orders of magnitude over the design specifications so I wonder if any realistic containment building would be able to handle that withou still bursting in the end.
Why stop at a containment building? It's economical to build underground mines to extract coal and minerals. Might as well build mines to house nuclear reactors in stable geologic structures. If it goes wrong seal it and return a hundred years later to scoop out the corium and burn it in a breeder reactor.
IIRC there was such an underground reactor project in a Nordic country. They hit a relatively minor problem, which due to the limited accessibility of the underground site could not be addressed quickly, resulting in reactor being damaged.
Not saying its a bad idea overall, just noting an example. Other issues could be getting enough cooling in and out & avoiding ground water/aquifer contamination if it does indeed melt down.
> The total death toll from the Fukushima incident is 1 (so far), and Chernobyl doesn't really count, as no reactor worldwide is capable of Chernobyling, and hasn't been for the past 25 years at least.
Except the 8 RBMKs still in service perhaps? Their problems were only partially fixed.
Of course, the alternative of this is that burning coal goes really wrong when it goes right—coal leads to 1,000 times more death per kWh than nuclear.
It’s worth noting we’re really bad as a species in judging long term negative impacts and hyper focus on short term tragedy. Point 1 is fair, but how wrong coal burning has been over an extended time frame is far worse than all of nuclear. It’s the whole plane crash vs car crash issue.
I don't actually think recycling is hard. Its hard in a society that wants to kill of nuclear reactors.
A society that has a large amount of nuclear and intends to go to 90% nuclear its just flat out logical to go to fast reactors at some point.
This was planned in all nations that were on the nuclear path. The US planned it, but this was prevented by the anti-nuclear people.
French planned it, but it was prevented by anti-nuclear people.
I think if you really have a society that relieas on nuclear and want it for the long term, eventually building some fast reactor and burning up that 'waste' isn't really that hard, I think its actually beneficial.
You can make interesting things like medical isotopes, nuclear batteries and many other things from this 'waste'.
> 2) When it goes wrong, it goes WRONG. See Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I mean, Fukushima the only one relevant for this discussion isn't really that bad. Damns have caused devastation on a much larger scale. So have coal plants. So have gas plants and even worse gas infrastructure.
Even most hard core renewables people believe gas as a back up need to remain, that means, gas pipelines remain for decades. A failure in a gas pipeline can easily be as bad and kill more people then Fukushima.
So really, I think going 100% nuclear is not a huge risk reduction for society and even in case of an accident the consequences are not that unreasonable for what you are getting.
Lets assume a nation like Germany, lets say the need 70 modern PWRs to power their nations. Assume every 50 years you get one Fukushima. I would easily take that deal. And I think reality is that in a nation not prone tsunamis that once per 50 year number is aggressive.
> When it goes wrong, it goes WRONG. See Chernobyl and Fukushima.
This is a very weak argument. It's akin to comparing driving vs flying in terms of safety. Flying also goes WRONG when it goes wrong. But how would a comparison based on energy output vs material/human damage look like? I mean coal also goes WRONG, see the Aberfan disaster.
At least the disaster is localized to a single terrible place. With coal and gas it undermines the integrity of the planet contributing to climate change.
Nuclear disasters are not localized. Geographically the radioactive release travels large distances with the wind and causes severe radiation effects hundreds of miles away. Chernobyl was basically a prevented disaster (the worst we have seen but nowhere near a worst-case scenario) and the effects are still costing money to deal with today hundreds of miles from the site.
But the main problem is that it's not localized in time. Chernobyl is a problem for several countries still to this day, and the actual site itself will continue to be a problem for generations to come.
> 1) You have to handle the spent fuel (either by storage or recycling, neither of which is easy).
This is easy to solve. Just launch the waste into Space. A typical large reactor produces 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year. That’ll take one space trip for Falcon 9 to launch it into Space on a trajectory to nowhere. It’ll destroy itself over millions of years or immediately. Either I make no sense at all or why else has no one tried it yet?
> A typical large reactor produces 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year.
Falcon 9 carries that to Low Earth Orbit. You do not want the waste hanging around there. To get it out of earth's orbit, F9 can do 8 tons.
That's 3 - 4 flights per year per reactor, so about $250m per year. Plus Falcon 9 did 60 flights this year, so this even capacity-wise this would only be enough for 20 reactors worldwide.
Plus like other commenters mentioned, a launch failure would be catastrophic.
1) Because storing spent nuclear fuel on earth isn't actually hard, it is just brought up anytime people talk about nuclear because it's the obvious thing to talk about.
2) Rocket fleets have a ~97% success rate (e.g. see Vega C this week). Spreading 3% of the radioactive material globally isn't a great idea.
No, that’s the other way around. We should be building and launching reactors from low/microgravity into microgravity, and somehow bring down only the energy e.g. as synthetic fuel. We shouldn’t be building and operating fission reactors on Earth, where we eat and sleep, for long.
Because nuclear is enormously expensive and has always been subsidized by taxes or ratepayers. Subsidizing nuclear made sense when we were in the first R&D and commercialization phase 60 years ago. The idea to keep shoveling money into that black hole stopped making sense decades ago.
Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy, and it still makes a loss.
Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants get around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale.
Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist, but that's about it.
> Because it is enormously expensive and have always been subsidized by taxes or ratepayers.
I don't understand what this means. Are you suggesting there are utilities not funded by taxes?
Power generation will always be expensive and heavily subsidized by the state along with Water and agriculture.
Coal is the next best thing. Plentiful, cheap, super polluting.
I'm not sure a grid can rely on solar and wind. They are getting cheaper ofcourse but they need a lot of land, high maintenance, and not exactly the most reliable. We wil figure it out eventually.
Usually electricity transmission is funded by taxes since that is centralized infrastructure. Production is often a commercial endeavor where energy is trade by the hour, or through longer contracts, on open markets. This depends on the country though.
Are you sure we aren't still in that "first R&D and commercialization phase"? One might argue that we never moved beyond that point, after disasters caused by early reactor designs killed any interest in further advancements.
That's a bit hard to argue. There were plenty of early meltdowns in the 1950s and we kept on going. Now as we add it all up we see that fossil and biofuel combustion kills the entirety of commercial nuclear power industry's lifetime death toll ever 8 hours. And nuclear is low carbon and 24/7 and low footprint. So yeah it still looks pretty darn good. Hence Japan's announcement.
Renewables don't yet exist with the capability to do all season power. See Germany last month. Notice also how much gas is being built as we speak. So the straw man is actually renewables. Also the world is about 82% fossil and biofuel.
So it is impossible until it is possible? Gotta prove it physically instead of engineering a system that is known to work.
> Also the world is about 82% fossil and biofuel.
Primary energy usage, so an utterly irrelevant metric. With a completely electrified society, the primary energy use decreases heavily. As we all know, heat engines throw away 65-80% of the incoming energy as heat leading to that number.
I've seen the LCoE numbers [1] everyone uses to argue that solar + storage is cheaper than nuclear. It does show a price premium for nuclear. But it is not "enormous" (it's maybe 2-3x more expensive). It's also plausible that nuclear, being an older technology, is less likely to run into unexpected costs, particularly those associated with the rate of implementation — production bottlenecks, increased land prices, etc.
Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer and NuScale that predictability leans heavily towards renewables. They get built on time and within budget.
The EPA numbers are from 2022, so assuming a modestly competent methodology they've already taken these issues into account. Choosing the six worst projects you can find is hardly a good analysis.
The scale-up issues I mentioned would not be applicable until you actually have very high construction volume, which currently does not exist anywhere. For example, the US built some 20 GW of PV in 2021, which is worth about 40 TWh/year assuming a typical capacity factor. But at that rate it would take some 90 years to build enough for the whole country, ignoring a likely increase in electricity consumption for heating and transportation (displacing gas), and ignoring any replacement. So the actually needed rate of solar installation is probably around five to ten times the current rate. Certainly, there is plenty of land and silicon in the long run. But there is still the question of whether it will be bought and produced at similar prices when the market pressures are that much larger. And the US still beat e.g. Germany in PV installs per capita in 2021.
The goal is not only to get off fossil fuels, but to do it fast.
Nuclear is expensive to build yet it's the most efficient solution.
Electricity (and water, school, roads, etc...) is a requirement to live a decent life. The fact that is unthinkable for you that it could be done without profit is saying a lot.
> Because nuclear is enormously expensive and has always been subsidized by taxes or ratepayers.
Pretty much all modern electricity has been subsidized massively.
As for nuclear being expensive. France built its initial fleet in 15 years, the debt of those programs was commercially financed and was paid of over the next 30-50 years. During that time virtually all French people also paid a very low amount of avg cost for their electricity.
Modern coal can actually use modern turbines and those would certainty not be un-competitive with free fuel.
Modern nuclear can do the same.
And PWR nuclear over long term, as it can exist for 60-100 years actually delivers stable energy, if that was currently priced in to current market, it would actually make sense.
If you had to rebuild a huge grid today, from 0 to say 1000TWh. Nuclear is the nobrainer solution still, even with PWR.
My disillusionment with the promises of nuclear actually came from hearing a professor of nuclear energy speak. He himself was brilliant and staunchly pro-nuclear, but his rhetoric turned me off it, probably forever. Here's what happened: He was holding a presentation on nuclear power and mentioned safety, claiming that according to the best models there would be one large nuclear accident every million years. This was shortly after Fukishima, and counting that along with three mile island and Chernobyl, it's clear that the actual number is closer to every twenty years. To have someone with a higher IQ than me talk about a model off by a factor of 50 000 and indicate no need to update it tells me this is an industry with way too much kool-aid.
My low opinion was solidified when in the same year I overheard a nuclear proponent criticizing Japanese 'housewives' who had the temerity to get their own Geiger counters after Fukishima and note when radiation levels passed the official guidelines in their area. I'm sorry, but if you're against a citizenry informing itself you're against democracy, and the industry you advocate for is going to take a hit by association with you. You might say that these two examples aren't representative of the industry as a whole, but they're the representatives I met and I've yet to see a good counterexample.
A couple other criticisms:
-Refining nuclear material for peaceful purposes does make it easier to refine it for less peaceful ones. This is probably the source of the 'fear' you're referring to.
-Nuclear is nonrenewable, fissionable material will run out in time like fossil fuels
-focusing on EROI hides the cost of capital, which is substantial. Investing in nuclear requires a huge concentration of capital and risk. Capital isn't free, something the economic arguments for Nuclear tend to gloss over.
-I don't see how that much concentration of capital and hence payback can avoid increasing wealth inequality. With solar there's a plausible and peaceful way for the poorest people to eventually own the means of production - not a share where their votes don't count but the physical tool that creates energy. That can't happen with a nuclear economy, it will always be owned by an elite, managed by an elite, and leave most people as unimportant economic actors.
-Pro-nuclear arguments frequently insult the opposition. It gives a bad impression.
So your critique of nuclear energy (a position) is somebody who over-zealously evangelized the technology (their character)? This is about as ad hominem as stances come.
I also have all the practical concerns I put in bullet form at the end of my post. The characters I met in the nuclear lobby just motivated me to think about it.
No, it is not, and I'll go so far as to suggest that you actually know that but are choosing to misrepresent the perspective (aka a strawman fallacy). The value of a politician is very much measured by the nature of their rhetoric, and it's very often not indicative of their underlying character. To point out deliberately vitriolic rhetoric in politics is not an ad hominem.
To say that Trump was a bad president because he's a misogynistic egoist would be an ad hominem, no matter how true it is.
> He was holding a presentation on nuclear power and mentioned safety, claiming that according to the best models there would be one large nuclear accident every million years.
This part reminds me of how NASA's calculations for crashes/failures were very low, like 1 in a million officially, but when casually asked most engineers estimated it at 1 in a few/one hundred (my memory is fuzzy) - which was about the actual rate of crashes.
Humans, even smart ones, have biases unfortunately. (I personally still think nuclear is the best, even if we end up with ~3 more medium accidents in the 21st century.)
> -Refining nuclear material for peaceful purposes does make it easier to refine it for less peaceful ones. This is probably the source of the 'fear' you're referring to.
This is mostly a non issue as nations who want to make nuclear weapons have far better pathways to getting to what they want.
In fact, you can as a nation build nuclear reactors from the ground up and never develop the technology to make weapons grade material.
> -Nuclear is nonrenewable, fissionable material will run out in time like fossil fuels
By that logic, solar is also of that material, you realize that?
The reality is uranium and thorium are incredibly common. We could use it for 1000s of years and we would not even remotly run out.
In addition, if you want to talk 'renewable', volcanic activity is constantly circulating new thorium out of the earth and thorium is part of why the internal of our earth is hot.
So basically, running out of thorium and uranium is about as likely as running out of sunlight. If we ever run out of either, we are basically fucked.
> -focusing on EROI hides the cost of capital, which is substantial. Investing in nuclear requires a huge concentration of capital and risk. Capital isn't free, something the economic arguments for Nuclear tend to gloss over.
Governments can get capital on 30+ year bonds for 2% yield. Modern nuclear plants can operate for 80 years. So you could likely issue special bonds that pay for 80 years.
Given how long these plants stick around, its actually really low capital, specially if you are building many plants.
And even more so if you are building next generation plants that have far lower capital cost.
> -I don't see how that much concentration of capital and hence payback can avoid increasing wealth inequality.
Not sure how that makes sense. Nuclear reactors own by the government provide quite a few high paying jobs (in France all union) that give jobs and whole generation of families a good income.
> With solar there's a plausible and peaceful way for the poorest people to eventually own the means of production
I think this is fantasy illusion. Poor people don't own enough land to put up solar. How will they own their own solar. Solar requires own or renting of land.
In reality poor people will have access to some kind of place they can plug into and get power for money. And solar or nuclear makes no difference.
> That can't happen with a nuclear economy, it will always be owned by an elite, managed by an elite, and leave most people as unimportant economic actors.
So French nuclear reactor owned by the government that have given people a long term contract for really cheap access to electricity 'are owned by elites'?
> -Pro-nuclear arguments frequently insult the opposition. It gives a bad impression.
Sounds like confirmation bias. If you argue with people you will get insults. I have been insulted often by people who don't like nuclear.
Online discourse is not representative of the real world. I can link you to some debates between 'experts' where the renewable guy was incredibly rude and the nuclear guy was incredibly accommodating.
Generally actual nuclear people are incredibly technocratic in their speech.
There's a lot here, so I'll just focus on the part that lets me raise my preferred talking point.
>Poor people don't own enough land to put up solar. How will they own their own solar. Solar requires own or renting of land. In reality poor people will have access to some kind of place they can plug into and get power for money. And solar or nuclear makes no difference.
There are farmers in Afghanistan and India right now that find pumping water with solar panels more economical than diesel pumps. Nobody is going to build an access point for these kinds of places to plug into electricity from a nuclear plant, they're that poor. And yet, solar technology is allowing them to increase their production today. Nuclear is too large and unwieldy to do much in marginal cases like that. At best it would provide cheap energy so subsistence farmers can get more handouts from an industrial center, but there's no way of increasing margins/ownership of the poorest.
The optimistic Nuclear vision sees to be one of industrialism perfected, an age of Big Everything. But the world isn't moving to better industrialism, it's moving to postindustrialism. Solar is postindustrial, it's proven in rural Afghanistan because it's cheap and distributed and empowering. Even in a place where a $100 for a panel is a huge investment, it's often worth it when locals have small electricity requirements like charging mobile phones. That's the kind of poverty where solar is a technology that can help today, no central planning needed. Which IMNSHO is a very good good thing if the planning would be done based on models off by factors of 50 000.
TL;DR: Good Postindustrialism > Better Industrialism.
The waste majority of humanity is living in urban places. Experience of Afghani subsistence farmer is interesting but not actually that relevant.
Unban living will continue to exist and industralism will not simply go away as long as
> industrialism perfected, an age of Big Everything
No, nuclear plants are not actually that big. They serve a gigantic community and the building themselves are tiny and almost inadvisable compared to how much energy they make.
When you are driving threw Germany, you are always aware of the wind power, of the solar and in some region of the coal. In France you barley ever see a nuclear reactor.
I think the tech is fine, but obsolete at this point. It's just won't work economically or politically.
Economically speaking it's too expensive to build. It doesn't compete well with renewables and is a very long term plan, which is bad news if you're on shaky ground to start with. It may never pay off if you build it today. So nobody is rushing to build them on their own. Now maybe with government help, but...
Politically, it takes way too long to build. So even if you expend the political effort on making it happen, you likely won't be around to reap the benefits, which makes it a bad political project. It also tends to be late, and more expensive than planned.
Many old reactors sell energy at very good competitive prices. French people still have low energy prices because the nuclear reactors operated signed long term supply deals.
The US has some reactors that are being certified for 80 years now.
Nuclear fission has uniquely long-term risks for mistakes or natural disasters. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to use it but there’s a lot of extra precautions needed around how fuel is refined, transported, used, and disposed of which nothing else has.
> uniquely long-term risks for mistakes or natural disasters.
Fossil fuels have unique long term risk WITHOUT mistakes.
Hydro has incredibly high risk for long term destruction and has proven it often.
Even pro renewable people agree that gas will need to stick around as backup, so gas infrastructure needs to stick around, with incredibly risk of accident and gas leakage.
A unique vulcanic event can make solar massively under-produce and if a society doesn't have enough backup it can have incredibly severe long term consequences. Such a volcanic even is probably more likely then a major failure of a nuclear plant causing much risk.
An extraordinary storm could do the same for off-shore wind.
> That doesn’t mean we don’t need to use it but there’s a lot of extra precautions needed around how fuel is refined, transported, used, and disposed of which nothing else has.
And the others have huge AMOUNTS of waste that needs to be refined, transported, used and disposed off. A lot of those are not well captured and there is little regulation to control that. Wind turbines don't exist for that long and when they fail they have a unique disposal situation.
Nuclear at least has a fuel that is 100% captured at the end of use. And nuclear reactor itself is tiny in the amount of resources required. A modern next generation reactor isn't much bigger then the next generation off-shore wind plants but produces 100x the energy at higher capacity factors.
Dude, ease up on the sales pitch — you've been spamming this thread with generic copypasta but that shotgun approach isn't very effective. For example, it's not clear to me that you noticed that I said we need nuclear power or that we're talking about green power options so the fact that fossil fuels have downsides is a given.
Radiation is a little out of the ordinary, sure. But it is not uniquely hazardous or long term. Particulate air pollution from normally operating fossil and biofuel combustion kills 8 million people per year according to the WHO. Climate change from CO2 causes long term ecosystem damage.
Radioactive waste uniquely becomes less hazardous with time, unlike forever non-decaying thing like mercury. It's also small and easy to place into 500m of crystalline bedrock or massive salt where it will not impact anything.
Well, fossil fuels aren’t the clean technology we’re talking about but again the thing I was referring to is timeframe: coal plants are nasty but the air pollution stops as soon as you shut them down and ecosystems recover. Not good, but beats the situation around, say, Chernobyl for coming centuries.
And, yes, I’ve heard all of the boosters’ claims. Easy is not an accurate description but possible is and as I said before we’re going to need it. We just need to fully accept the responsibility that entails.
Nuclear waste can be cleaned up Fukushima was cleaned up 11 years after the incident. Since Pripyat and the area around Chernobyl was only built to support the nuclear plant, there was no incentive to clean it up.
Wont some of the heavy metals and radioactive particles from burned coal stick around for quite a while in the environment? All thy fly ash is also nasty to handle and store.
Sure, again, I'm not saying everything else is perfect but note that this thread is about the clean energy transition — nuclear is better than burning coal but when you're comparing it to wind/solr/hydro/geothermal none of those have anything like the same need for long-term planning.
"Invest" means to spend money with a reasonable chance of a net return.
There is no chance of a return here that outweighs the expenses. That's why Japan simple calls it spending. Maybe that spending is worth it for science or carbon neutrality or energy independence. Reasonable people may differ.
Do some research into Japans track record on building Nuclear. They’re one of the few countries that didn’t let green peace idiots ruin their regulatory bodies so they’re still able to build nuclear plants in the same amount of time it takes to build a coal burning plant.
This is an interesting take when regulatory capture enabled TEPCO to keep operating those plants that melted down even in the face of what should have been clearly dangerous compromises.
People who complain about nuclear regulation are really just saying "let us have some meltdowns, they aren't really that bad." That's also why they go on saying mixed up nonsense about radiation hormesis.
They’re going to spend well over $100B and potentially up to $1T cleaning up Fukushima.. either figure would’ve been better spent on literally anything else.. hard to call Japan’s nuclear regulatory backdrop a success story. And I’m sorry, there’s absolutely no chance that the next reactor is built in under a decade. Working on Vogtle bankrupted Toshiba’s nuclear unit.
Everything has trade-offs, there is no simply "better" option on the table, every option sucks. Fossil fuels have co2 emissions, price fluctuations and energy security as issues (as seen with Russia today who weaponised their supply), renewables have consistency problems which is problematic until we solve our energy storage issues, nuclear has massive issues around waste and runtime danger and hydro is limited by geography.
Last numbers I looked at had Unsubsidized Battery backed solar as already significantly cheaper than unsubsidized nuclear at scale.
Things presumably look slightly different in Japan, but this is looking like political rather than an economic decision. Right this moment they have some cover to save the industry even if little is going to change any time soon.
Last numbers I looked at had nuclear much more profitable than solar, especially during winter, hence why China is currently installing 20 new reactors, with a goal for much more in the future.
5GW / year @ 90% capacity factor ~= 3 million 200W panels @ 30% capacity factor + 40-60GWh of batteries. It’s not completely equivalent, but they both need roughly the same amount of peaking power plants to make up the difference.
Plus Solar’s costs are front loaded, with China’s rapidly growing economy they can ignore decommissioning or even long term operating costs as largely irrelevant.
> Last numbers I looked at had Unsubsidized Battery backed solar as already significantly cheaper than unsubsidized nuclear at scale.
That's interesting. Two queries: Are they real world numbers or projections vs real numbers? And are they done in the sort of setup that we have in the UK, where renewable is soft-subsidised by always winning the bids for demand when it's available, and non-renewable gets what's left.
Those are LCOE marginal numbers that don't consider systems costs like overbuilding capacity to charge batteries, extra transmission, long-term backup capacity, etc.
Yeah, imagine how great it will be when we can dimension the electricity grid for the average consumption rather than peak due to distributed generation and storage.
I think the issues you list for nuclear are exaggerated. The real problem is the cost and complexity of construction, which could be solved with mini reactors where the technology is still not quite there for mass production. The licensing is also a problem at least in some countries, as getting a permit is very difficult it makes sense to only build massive power plants.
> I think the issues you list for nuclear are exaggerated.
I don't. Current estimates for the dismantlement of Sellafield in the UK is £121 billion and that figure is likely somewhat lower than the final cost.
Given that most proposals are created in order to be accepted there is a high chance the total costs of the plant (including decommissioning) are understated.
Reading the article, you can see why it's not an honest example to back up your point. Sellafield was built partly without decommissioning in mind, it was originally used for something else (making plutonium for weapons) and still has 140 tonnes of that plutonium on site. It was built with world war 3 in mind. It's not a modern nuclear reactor.
Sellafield has more unknowns that most, but I doubt it's been underbid. I think nuclear proposals undergo a great deal of scrutiny and are some of the most cost-complete in existence. Hinkley Point C in the UK, its masterful government negotiation aside, has I believe a total lifetime cost of around £40bn.
I wouldn't consider the existence of a start-up proof that a problem has been solved, especially given the need of hyping one's own product (and possibly downplaying any remaining challenges) as a nascent organisation.
Sure but until it is actually utilised and proven to work on the scales required for existing nuclear deployments it still remains an estimate and not a precise cost.
Now do grid scale batteries. "Renewables" have the same issue and are looked at rather uncritically. We dig boreholes like this on a regular basis, all that's left is tossing the waste containers in.
You're not wrong, but that's not my point. If people want to spend money on X, that's up to them. But it isn't an investment unless they expect to make their cash back plus a profit. So as soon as people want to pretend it is an "investment" there very much is a simple better option: whatever costs less and generates more revenue. On that basis Nuclear is never the right answer.
This is pedantry, and incorrect at that. To invest in something simply means to spend some resources and expect a material result. Energy independence, carbon neutrality, scientific progress, etc. are all material results one could hope for while "investing".
If you think another form of energy production is better, that's a perfectly reasonable objection. Twisting the discussion into a debate over the precise definition of "investment" is silly.
> Property or another possession acquired for future financial return or benefit.
Invest:
> to commit (money) in order to earn a financial return
> to make use of for future benefits or advantages
invested her time wisely
> to involve or engage especially emotionally
were deeply invested in their children's lives
Clearly you can outlay capital now for a future benefit tomorrow that isn’t just your original capital back + the investment. Making sure you’re energy supply is stable so that your economy is working better and your national security is a bit more stable seems like a clear ROI even if you don’t make your capital back + profit directly (it does have potential indirect financial benefits too though).
> But it isn't an investment unless they expect to make their cash back plus a profit.
If that is the bar you're going to use for "investment", then no power generation spending is ever an investment. Not coal, not batteries, not geothermal, not renewables, nothing...
Because none of the above make their cash back plus a profit; they're all subsidised by taxpayers.
Japan's solar and onshore wind resources are pretty abysmal and their ocean shelf is steep. Unless you expect them to cover the entire early adopter costs of floating offshore wind (and too quickly for the devopment money to be efficient), then there's not really a viable renewable option for bulk power the next 8 years or so.
Even if it costs on the order of $150US/MWh to restart their reactors it makes sense.
The offshore wind market is going through some growing pains right now so we can't rely on the price decreases in the short term like usual, and Japan's coast is quite different to the UK's. There are superstorms, tsunami, and even laying cable is hard and expensive.
Hopefully the reactors are obviously obsolete in 2032 and offshore wind, tidal, or imported ammonia replaces them, but for now it makes a lot of sense.
If Japan is forced to go with nuclear they are still competing with cheap renewables elsewhere in the world. This is bad news for Japanese heavy industry. In a defossilized world some places will be energy ghettos. This is probably bad news for Europe, too.
They have good, but extremely challenging off shore wind and some top tier tidal resource. Hopefully it would be just restarting old plants until they wear out and not needing to build new.
As more people are finally recognizing, LCOE is wholly unrelated to systems costs of large scale decarbonized systems. It assumes you have a free and giant fossil based grid hanging around to back you up when you hit a calm month.
I do not get where you think that need of a fossil grid comes from? Seems like a hyperbole based on preconceived notions? Research has consistently shown that a 100% renewable grid is feasible and economically sound.
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
Or we can take a look at Wikipedia for an even broader view
> 100% renewable energy means getting all energy from renewable resources. The endeavor to use 100% renewable energy for electricity, heating, cooling and transport is motivated by climate change, pollution and other environmental issues, as well as economic and energy security concerns.
> Research into this topic is fairly new, with very few studies published before 2009, but has gained increasing attention in recent years. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and desalination – is feasible and economically viable.[5][6][7][8] A cross-sectoral, holistic approach is seen as an important feature of 100% renewable energy systems and is based on the assumption "that the best solutions can be found only if one focuses on the synergies between the sectors" of the energy system such as electricity, heat, transport or industry.[9]
> I do not get where you think that need of a fossil grid comes from?
This comes from the assumptions made when computing LCOE. For example in Germany last month they ran on almost all fossil for a whole month. Paying for the ability to not do that is not included at all in Lazard LCOE numbers.
Who cares if 100% renewable is possible. Of course it is. Things are either forbidden by the laws of physics, or possible. Things that are possible are not necessarily desirable or logical. For example, "renewable" is a meaningless term. Biofuel is included in renewable, though it leads to a high ("but stabilized!") atmospheric concentration of CO₂ and deadly particulate emissions.
Sustainable and low-carbon are much more specific, well-defined, and important characteristics for a future world energy system. If you go for 100% sustainable and low-carbon, nuclear is in and biofuel is out.
The main people publishing 100% renewables papers are hardcore anti-nuclear leaders like MJZ. For every 100% renewable publication, there are many others showing that a judicious mix of 24/7 nuclear plus renewables is a far more flexible, resilient, robust, and cheap mix.
I don't understand why people want to fight nuclear so much. With so much fossil and biofuel in operation, there's way more than enough room to build everything that's low carbon, sustainable, and safe.
Nuclear fission does come with risks. Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident. Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. There's ample evidence of that, it's not very controversial. Like most incidents, it was a combination of factors, including some preconditions (the inadequate sea wall, old reactor design), some operational mistakes, and a massive and still unlikely to repeat soon event. Humans are, of course, likely to continue to make mistakes, so the best way forward is of course to try to prevent similar scenarios from happening and invest in safer designs. Things that can be done.
Of course, many would argue now is the right time to instead invest in solar and wind power. I mean, sure. But Japan has multiple nuclear fission power plants currently not in operation mainly just because of fear after Fukushima Daiichi. I'm not a civil engineer of any sort, so I have no idea how plausible it is to implement comparable solar and wind capabilities along with battery storage to make it reliable, in Japan. I know Japan is larger than map projections would have you believe, but it still seems like there could be practical problems. Even if that really were the future, though, today the present is this: they already have fission plants that could be generating cleaner energy, and with rising gas prices, it doesn't seem all that illogical to me.