>I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons.
That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the areas around them are contaminated.
If you want to use this as an argument for the safety of nuclear waste disposal, you would have to explain why the armed force's problems with waste disposal are specific to them and will never spread to regulated private industry. (P.S. the history of that is not great either and you might end up arguing that something which has already happened never will.)
>That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the areas around them are contaminated.
No, it's a plain statement, not a "tactic". Power plant waste is different from weapons waste, and disposing of power plant waste has never been a real problem. She's talking about power plant waste because one major barrier to replacing climate changing coal fired power plants is the usual indoctrination people face regarding nuclear waste, with no distinction drawn between power plants and nuclear weapons waste.
Talking about weapons reactors or the military not disposing of chemicals properly is entirely irrelevant to the article and the discussion at hand.
> disposing of power plant waste has never been a real problem.
Germany has been trying to find a location to safely dispose power plant waste for about 40 years or so. All the solutions so far didn't work out [1], they are still searching.
If you have a recommendation that actually works, I am sure they'd be happy to hear it...
For the period 1906 to 1988, when Asse II was an operational salt mine, there were 29 documented water breaches.[27] They were sometimes successfully sealed off, partly dry or sometimes with negligible inflows (less than 0.5 cubic metres (130 US gal) per day).[28]
Between 1988 and 2008 32 new entry points were recorded. In 1996, the BFS notified the Bundesumweltministerium that there was a risk of severe radioactive contamination if the mine ran full of water and that further investigation was urgently required.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. If prescription drugs were handled as badly as weapons waste was historically, it would be a problem too.
Same for e.g. plastic waste, food waste, or just about anything else. Military developing weapons tends to make a mess, which is why most countries are trying to change that.
Separating plutonium is separating plutonium. It's filthy no matter why you do it, and the past military fuckups are used to cover for the ongoing civilian fuckups.
This is conveniently forgotten whenever the subject of breeders is used to deflect from the lack of U235
Or more importantly, would the same motivators for the military exist for private industries. My example would not be nuclear, but waste in general. I did 5 years in the Navy. Out at sea, by regulations, we have really strict standards of how certain materials get disposed. Clean metal, like aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard, into the ocean, and so can food waste. Plastic can't, batteries cant, etc. Do batteries and cut up fuel hoses find their way into the ocean? Yes. Is it because the Navy said so, no. From what I noticed, its about how easy it is to dispose of properly and you could notice it. When someone who made the process easier to dispose of batteries properly, most to everyone did it properly. When they changed out who was in charge of the trash detail and the new person in charge of the trash detail damn near required a 7 page dissertation and interrogation to allow you to turn in your dead batteries, people threw that shit in the ocean late at night when no one was out and about on the skin of the ship.
My point being, usually when waste disposal is an issue in the military, its not necessarily because the military doesnt care. Its because the process to do things properly became to grueling for people to put up with (not right, but it happens). Sometimes that grueling process is from big Navy, sometimes it is because DC1 had a bad day and making your day a pain in the ass somehow makes him feel better.
So, what you are expressing is one perspective on accidents, and it's true - the one guy who cares about cleaning up a spill is a good guy, the one guy who hoses it into a drain is a bad guy. I would like to offer another one.
The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination. On the other side, although an individual person can decide whether they're going to make disposing of those batteries easy or a bureaucratic power trip, when you are at the top and are going to fill 1,000 positions like that, you know in advance that some of them are going to be awful about it. So, from the top like from below, individual personal decisions become fixed quantities. Sending out 1,000 people and allowing 250 of them to make the independent personal decision to do it wrong is really the same thing as doing it wrong yourself, because it's guaranteed to happen.
That's essentially the story behind why you should think about accidents as an institutional problem even when they involve bad personal choices on the part of the people who did them. That One Guy is actually hundreds of people and although you can't tell in advance whether one person will do it you know that out of thousands, hundreds will.
There definitely are roots that can be traced to institutional problems. The case with a certain DC1 who thought being a pain would make him feel better, it is an institutional problem that someone like that was able to get to a position they were in. If someone with that kind of a personality rose up to being a DC1 and supervising the trash crew (although these kinds of duties are usually when someone is sent TAD because their division doesn't want to deal with them), that is a problem. So yea, you can boil it down to institutional problems, however it can be a little tricky because those institutional problems sometimes do not correlate directly.
> The water is going to take all of the people who did it right, and all of the people who did it wrong, and average their actions together into a single number, the amount of contamination.
I imagine that batteries, for one, would tend to sink to the bottom of the ocean (if not gulped up by a large animal), and would thus cause highly concentrated local contamination. It would really depend on exactly where the batteries were thrown overboard on how much damage each one caused.
I know people who were so sick and tired of trying to figure out where to dispose of their fluorescent light bulbs that they just threw them to the side of the road on the highway at night. It’s completely undetectable.
Yup, same issue with e-waste. It can be a pain to properly dispose of your broken 10 year old laptop. So many people don't do it. It just does in the trash can with everything else. Make it easy, people do it, minus a few edge case shitheads. But I'd rather 75 out of 100 people do it right and have 25 shit heads than 75 shit heads and 25 people doing it right.
Over here every municipality has a center where you can just hand in any domestic waste unsuitable for the trash can. It's a bit inconvenient because you have to go out of your way, but it is definitely quite doable.
And electronics can be handed in at any store which sells electronics, which includes stores like the equivalent of Walmart or Home Depot. You'll be going there anyways, so it's literally zero extra effort.
Its pretty spotty in the US. Where I specifically am, the city dump has a place and best buy will take small electronics. Someone else mentioned their TV being big, same at my local best buy. If you even have a local best buy or those stores anymore since quiet a few have closed in the medium to smaller towns. I think Best Buy is the only local store I know of that takes at least some e-waste (once again, only if it is on the smaller size like cellphones). But my local municipality does have an e-waste center at the city dump, but there are definitely areas in the US where there isn't, or it just isn't advertised/talked about. Even though we have one in my city, I would say probably most people have no clue it exists. Everyone can tell you when free dump day is to toss lawn garbage or couches or they can tell you when the county yard burn day is in the summer, but they can't tell you where to go to find the e-waste collection that is open most days of the year (in the same area as the regular dump). The city also doesn't really advertise it like they do when free trash day at the dump happens or the county during the county lawn trash burn day.
But I do know in my community, more awareness needs to be raised. Every year I get 3 fliers through out the year for garbage disposal, they really should send out 4. The 3 I get every year are, when we can burn lawn garbage, free dump day and when they do christmas tree pick-up. They should send out a 4th one once a year to just say, "hey these are the locations you can take your e-waste to."
Recently I tried to figure out where to send a smashed TV. It was a 50”. Typically they barely sell any TVs smaller than that in the US these days. Best Buy won’t take any TVs for recycling if it’s over a certain screen size. Mine is too big. Once a year or something the town does a e-waste drop off. I’ll have to borrow a car big enough to fit this thing. It’s no wonder so many people toss them in a dumpster.
I think the biggest difference between the military and industry is that the civilian side of the government enforces laws on industry but does not enforce laws on the military. I know many people who would love to not have to deal with their company's waste disposal processes, but the consequences are quite severe (e.g. the fines are huge so you would be fired if you were found out).
> Out at sea, by regulations, we have really strict standards of how certain materials get disposed. Clean metal, like aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard, into the ocean, and so can food waste.
Not really. Clean metal is fine and so are food products. Clean metal can help form reefs and such, why the Navy sinks ships. Food waste, like apple cores and such, all biodegradable. But the trash has to go somewhere. So things that doesn't really hurt the ocean and break down, it goes in the ocean. Things that can actually hurt the ocean and won't break down get flow off the ship during resupply missions and get disposed of properly on land somewhere.
It tends to be a lot harder to detect too. With radioactive waste, we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher standard than most other industries.
This is also the reason we can say with a high degree of confidence that first-world militaries have actually been very good at handling nuclear waste for a while now. The Manhattan Project era and a few years after that were very messy, but they have demonstrably cleaned up their act and figured out how to do things safely. Meanwhile the non-radioactive chemical pollution continues largely unabated. Never live near a military base if you value the well-being of any children you might have.
>we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher standard than most other industries.
The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get leaked around bases, taking soil samples might be more expensive than walking around with a Geiger counter but it's well within the budgets of even local municipalities. The problem is that they don't really care all that much. Even something as simple as "standing far away from the pit where you're burning plastic," a practice that even law-breaking rural trash burners can manage, was too much for them in Iraq, shows you something about their institutional culture.
> The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get leaked around bases
Even they will be hard pressed to detect chemical polutants at the extremely low concentrations that radiation can be trivially detected. But also, they know what to look for. What about everybody else in the area who don't even know what they should be looking for in the first place? With radioactive leaks it's easy, but DOW's chemical catalogue is thicker than a phonebook; you've got to be looking for something in particular or looking for half a billion different things all at once.
I'm not sure what you're saying - people living in towns near military bases do not* walk up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic chemicals. Maybe they should start, but I mean, that's not a good normal.
There are a lot of geiger counters around operated by various organizations. Every time there is a radioactive leak just about anywhere in the world, it is promptly discovered even if that government wants to keep it a secret. In fact it is practical for you to own your own geiger counter if you live near a nuclear facility and are worried about it. The equipment needed for general analytical chemistry, which you'd need to detect a great deal of chemical pollution, is a lot less practical. For some specific chemical pollutants, there simple and cheap tests which are practical for laypeople. But there's no such thing as a simple hand-held meter that will detect any arbitrary chemical pollutant.
Hence, chemical pollution very often goes unnoticed for decades until somebody starts to wonder why half the babies in town are born without brains.
The radioactivity accidents that are picked up by environmental sensors tend to be very large-scale. The little, nasty ones, like the mining source that was lost in Australia, tend to disappear.
Minuscule tritium emissions are detected around nuclear power plants all the time, far below the level at which anybody should be concerned.
There was even a case where alarms were sounded when a power plant worker was found to be radioactive due to radon in his home, which triggered detectors at work. The general chemical industry doesn't operate with anything even remotely close to this degree of care.
That's a gas, making it the easiest possible case. I think a more plausible threat are the decaying temporary storage containers that a lot of low-grade waste is sitting in because nobody can find a permanent location for it. (Yes, that's largely due to political reasons, but political reasons are real!)
A gas is quite difficult to detect because it diffuses. This also makes them typically less dangerous because diffusion also means dilution. Levels do matter. Tritium is also pretty low in terms of radioactivity. The radiation cannot penetrate the skin except in very high levels (you can find keychains, watches, gun sights, etc with small bits of tritium and phosphorous to create long term glow objects). Ingestion and inhalation are more serious since your internal organs are more susceptible (see weighted dosage). The real cool thing is that we can measure radiation with high precision and in real time, so we can detect these dangers. Mostly because these devices are cheap.
In addition to the requirement of a more active approach needed to detect ground/water contaminants there are also a larger variety of pollutants that are harmful. Many of these need specific tests, which can consume your samples. Of course we can do pretty good guesstimates for what we should look for, but we do need to recognize that the process is both more fuzzy and more involved. We can grow these projects by making them cheaper, but that's a tall order (it is happening though).
Edit: I do want to note that most radiation detection devices do not distinguish between types of radiation. These differences do matter in danger levels. This can add complications the above but there is a decent signal that is still useful. But as with everything, some expertise and domain knowledge is quite important.
From what I understand, in the case of the radon-contaminated nuclear worker, what they actually detected were the "radon daughters", the decay products of radon. Radon itself doesn't stick around very long, but when it decays it produces an atomic dust of polonium, lead, etc. That dust is what tripped the alarms.
Anything like that radioactive source from Australia would set of tons of alarms in a nuclear power plant. You wouldn't get it out the door. Incidents like that missing radioactive source in Australia happen where there are far fewer safeguards than at a nuclear power plant. Those sources generally go missing from abandoned medical equipment, food irradiation facilities, and that sort of thing. You'd be hard pressed to smuggle (let alone accidentally convey) something like a spent nuclear fuel pellet out of a power plant.
> people living in towns near military bases do not walk up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic chemicals
Not quite true. There are pretty big and active citizen based radiation detection projects [0,1,2,3]. The reason for this is that radiation monitors are quite cheap now and the same people who build weather systems often connect a geiger counter. They're cheap and sensitive since the gov spent so much money trying to detect radiation from space, across borders, and even the smallest traces on people (to detect spies, scientists, etc) all from the Cold War. There are also citizen based communities monitoring water and soil, but this does require more work from the participant. They have to go out and collect samples. Processing can be both expensive and quite a bit of work. This isn't the same as hooking up a $100 device to your weather station, which is a leave and forget type system.
We should note that both these communities are far more active in regions where there are greater dangers (history of nuclear sites/projects, oil facilities, military bases, etc). I'd also like to thank both these communities and others like them. They're all doing important work.
The soldiers who got sick from the burn pits often knew it was bad for them, but had to follow orders. Personal apathy on the part of people who are giving the orders is institutional apathy.
Nuclear reactor fuel is pre-assembled. There are licenses to produce/consume/export/import/store/dispose the fuel assemblies, with the quantities and weights being an exactly known scientific fact. Everything is meticulously recorded and tracked from source to destination, with stringent security measures. Local, international and inter-governmental regulators monitor, inspect and verify; penalties are serious.
Why would you compare commercial nuclear energy production to the military scenarios, which have a completely different legal, supervisory, penalty and authority structure?
>Why would you compare commercial nuclear energy production to the military scenarios, which have a completely different legal, supervisory, penalty and authority structure?
Because the article took away their usual talking points regarding "nuclear waste bad" and "dangerous for 10,000 years!".
They're moving the goalposts to "You can't argue that nuclear waste disposal from power plants wouldn't cause a problem because the military doesn't dispose of most things correctly and private companies are probably just as bad or worse than the military, therefore you're wrong."
I think this part stems from a common response you see from anti-nuclear folks, who frequently point to the issues at Hanford as a reason to be against civilian nuclear power. She's trying to make clear the difference between civilian nuclear power and waste management and historical waste from military nuclear weapons programs. Remembering also Hanford waste issues date as far back as the Manhattan Project during WW2.
Civilian nuclear waste management has a better track record than military nuclear waste management and civilian chemical waste management. Is that a permanent condition, or a fluke?
We are talking about 32 countries with civilian nuclear power operating for several decades. With oversight by an international body that tracks every bit of nuclear material. Using processes that differ from what was done at Hanford, producing waste different from Hanford. That has been working well, stored well and safely without issue. The military didn't start from that position, it started from "Joe just throw that shit in a pit over there, don't even bother keeping records." Hanford has no resemblance to civilian nuclear power. I think the onus is on those who keep saying it does (despite the evidence to the contrary) to demonstrate it.
> "the Japanese government approved the dumping of radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific Ocean over the course of 30 years."
A minuscule amount of tritium, dumped into an ocean that has billions of tons of uranium dissolved in it. This Fukushima water issue is a perfect example of people letting emotions overrule rational thought.
> A minuscule amount of tritium, dumped into an ocean that has billions of tons of uranium
(And then marine life enters the room, accumulating this while ignoring that, and all those carefully raised math models, simulations and speeches fall like a house of cards).
The "National Association of Marine Laboratories" publishes a Position Paper titled "Scientific opposition to Japan’s planned release of over 1.3 million tons of radioactively contaminated water from the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster into the Pacific Ocean."
> Fukushima Daiichi. In case those two words aren't enough to jog your memory:
Yes, I get that nuclear power scares people, which is why we should put aside our emotions on the subject and just deal with the facts. We've had decades of empirical evidence about nuclear safety at this point.
Zero radio-logical related deaths from Fukushima. And zero deaths in all history from all other civilian nuclear waste.
> "the Japanese government approved the dumping of radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific Ocean over the course of 30 years."
It sounds scary. "Radioactive water!" But it's not an issue. How many will die or have shortened lifespan from this? Let me know and we can add it to the zero above.
"Inadequately trained part-time workers prepared a uranyl nitrate solution containing about 16.6 kg (37 lb) of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass, into a precipitation tank at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura northeast of Tokyo, Japan. The tank was not designed to dissolve this type of solution and was not configured to prevent eventual criticality. Three workers were exposed to (neutron) radiation doses in excess of allowable limits. Two of these workers died. 116 other workers received lesser doses of 1 mSv or greater though not in excess of the allowable limit.[39][40][41][36]"
You find 2 dead workers from an industrial accident over a 70 year history that was not actually about nuclear waste but was a fuel processing and fabrication facility making fuel for experimental reactors. Not civilian power reactors. [1]
Even if you included it (which clearly it's not related to waste so shouldn't) it would still be the safest and best managed waste of anything we have!
The exclusion zone is not nuclear waste. It is interesting though because a lot of research after the event seems to show that the evacuation and such a large exclusion zone was a mistake and we should evacuate less in such events. But in the moment I get everyone was scared and didn't have a good idea of what to do.
"Re-processing facility" means it comes from used rods (i.e. "waste").
This is fine, you can have your thread dedicated solely to waste. Though I do think that waste reprocessing should also be included in such a thread.
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As to the more general matter, people aren't concerned so much with waste, as with everything about nuclear power. Including "accidental waste" such as that caused by the Chernobyl civilian reactor failure.
Yes, I'm glad we're designing and building meltdown-proof reactors.
The long-term waste, regardless of how it originates (whether from conventional waste, decommissionings, or what have you) needs to be processed such that people a hundred, thousand, ten thousand years from now don't have to do anything special about it.
I think this can be done. But without stringent, real-time regulations I am not confident industry, or even government, will do what's necessary.
Well the author by her own disclosure is the founder of a nuclear energy lobby group. Or as she calls it "climate activist group". So yeah, I'm sure she was very confused and in doubt with herself, I'm happy it all turned out fine and she finally discovered that nuclear power is the solution to all our problems.
While it's good the author has gained a better understanding of nuclear waste, I feel that they're almost repeating their mistakes in their discussion of renewable waste. I'm fairly sure that everything they listed - solar panels, turbines, batteries - can be recycled; the question generally is whether its cost-effective to do so. (Another important question is probably on whether we want to spend the money on developing recycling methods for these types of things in the first place).
I'm increasingly of the opinion that if we want effective recycling solutions for stuff like this, one of the biggest steps we could take is strong right-to-repair laws. There should be a push for designing things in such a way that they are easy to disassemble, part out, and replace pieces of. Not only does this make things easier to fix and extend their lifespan, but it also would make them easier to disassemble for recycling/waste purposes.
Requiring manufacturers to release documentation (design, components, most common failure modes, common repairs) on their products at some point after they no longer manufacture them is probably a harder sell but would be pretty nice - trawling old forums to figure out how to repair my 12-year-old subwoofer is a pain and unreliable, and having manufacturers responsible for hosting that information would make it more consistently available.
Right to Repair is incredibly important, but also feels incredibly insufficient in this context. What we really need is Obligation to Repair, or something of that nature. Producers of goods need to be accountable for the lifecycle of those goods.
And further, the seller of a product should be responsible for the disposal of waste from that product (subtracting the recyclable parts). For example, supermarkets would be less inclined to wrap _everything_ in plastic if they were on the hook for the disposal of tonnes of wrap arriving at their stores every day and the disposal part of a products lifecycle would have to be taken account of in its costing - if the waste isn't free to the person who makes it, the waste will be minimised in the design
I don't agree. If we move to goalposts too far down the field the political resistance will guarantee that we accomplish less. We have to focus on making repairing stuff possible and economically feasible first. And I think it will need to happen somewhat gradually so the industry can learn how to design things that can be repaired. We also need to build a robust repair industry. With training for repair personnel as well as the supply chain and logistics side.
Make repairs attractive, and cheap enough and we might not need to bring up a wall of legislation that makes market access too hard for new entrants. This could quickly develop into a game where only companies with really deep pockets are even able to produce anything.
(I work for a startup. We occasionally have to make hardware. Enabling people to repair the stuff we make is something we're happy to do. But if we had to be accountable for the entire lifecycle, that would be another thing. What happens if we go tits up?)
> I work for a startup. We occasionally have to make hardware.
> What happens if we go tits up?
I think if you go tits up, it's the same situation as when a business goes bankrupt and leaves behind a contaminated site. But goods produced by small businesses and startups are marginal compared to those produced by big businesses. There should be strong incentives for businesses to manage the end of life for their goods, so they will attempt to recover those goods and see that they are recycled. That will also incentivize them to design products that can be recycled, and as profitably as possible.
Saying that a turbine can theoretically be recycled, but at such a high cost that people simple bury them in a field is pretty much the same as saying they can't be recycled.
> one of the biggest steps we could take is strong right-to-repair laws
I could not agree more. Thank you for bringing this up.
I think part of why this doesn't turn up more often when green parties try to get elected is that it isn't sexy enough. It is much more fun to imagine building new and shiny stuff or have an opportunity to strongly signal values. But something as boring as laws that would require all manufacturers to design for repairability and banning any manufacturer who even looks like they are trying to limit who can repair stuff, is too boring.
I agree: this would be a very good place to start.
> trawling old forums to figure out how to repair my 12-year-old subwoofer is a pain and unreliable
A few years ago I had the same experience. It cost me $30 and 10 minutes to replace the subwoofer speaker in my 20 year old Mission home theatre, but finding the right speaker was quite difficult. I trawled forums and ended up ordering a speaker from a German manufacturer that had all sorts of speakers for specialised applications.
Most people would have just thrown out the entire setup and bought a new one, expensive and wasteful. Yet it was so trivial to fix with the right knowledge. And it sounded great, better than most setups I hear today.
It makes me wonder whether home theatres bought today will still be functioning in the 2040s. It seems unlikely as soundbars are all the rage these days which communicate over bluetooth/hdmi protocols that get superseded every few years, forcing you to constantly upgrade. Makes me appreciate the “dumb” aspect of that old setup I had.
Just on technical grounds, this is just not a very educational article. Any discussion of waste from the nuclear fission process should begin with an image of the periodic table and a chart of the curve of binding energy (whose peak, or trough, sits on Iron, which the most stable nuclei relative to fusion or fission processes). From there we can take a look at thermal fission product yield:
Notably there are two peaks in isotopic distribution, but there are a great many species generated, with varying impact on human health if ingested, depending on whether they mimic species like calcium (in the same column on the periodic table) or are actually used (iodine in the thryoid gland for example). Note also there are some transuranics (plutonium etc.) formed by neutron capture in addition to the fission products.
The risk is that these products don't stay sealed in their cooling pond containers (note that 'spent' is hardly the right term, it's really 'too hot to safely remain in the reactor' as they're still generating lots of energy by decay of the unstable isotopes). Eventually they cool off enough to go into dry cask storage (also a long-term risk).
Usually in these discussions someone trots out a line like 'airplanes are risky, too, but we don't stop flying just because of the rare plane crash, do we?'. The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice about flying (note the nuclear-reactor-powered airplane was on the drawing boards for a while).
The end result of this issue is that nuclear reactors have to be heavily over-engineered to take into account so-called 'black swan' events, see Fukushima. This inevitably raises the costs of nuclear power well above those for any other energy source, which is why many people (myself included) think it doesn't have much of a future except in certain niche situations.
There are other issues, of course - high demand for cooling water, nuclear weapons material proliferation, uncertainties over high-grade uranium ore supplies (i.e. price fluctuations etc.), and so on, but attempting to claim long-term storage of nuclear waste is not a seriously problematic issue is just blatantly dishonest.
> The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination
Thing is, that's genuinely not what's needed.
You can live quite happily within a couple of miles of Chernobyl with a life expectancy difference much smaller than going from middle class to working class.
Fukushima today is even less dangerous, basically negligible danger unless you're on the plant grounds.
> The answer to this is that if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice about flying
I'm not sure we would if planes only crashed once a thirty years. Especially if crashes were limited to experimental or old planes with known design flaws.
> if every plane crash created a 50-mile diameter exclusion zone that had to be kept off-limits for 50-100 years without extensive decontamination, then we'd think twice
If every reactor accident created an exclusion zone like this that had to be kept off limits for that long, we likely wouldn't use reactors at all.
Most of the nuclear accidents that have happened don't create problems that big, only Chernobyl and Fukushima. There have been hundreds of other incidents, but almost all of those have no after effects at all.
For example, another well known accident was Three Mile Island. There were no detectable health effects from it and the background radiation was increased by 0.5% or so in the immediate area. No exclusion zone required.
> All the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately ten yards.
> The amount of high-level waste produced during nuclear energy production is also small: a typical large reactor produces about 25-30 tonnes of used fuel per year.
That's such a propaganda way of phrasing it, because it considers the waste is essentially pure uranium you would never be able to store it like this. It is actually quite a lot.
Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year.
> Worldwide, 97% of the waste produced by the nuclear power industry is classified as low- or medium-level waste.
So essentially the actual amount of nuclear waste is 30 times as high. It's also funny considering the later part of the argument is how highly radioactive waste is not such a problem because it decays quickly. Well guess what mid and low level wast has often much longer lifetimes and it's still as dangerous as much hazardous chemical waste.
The whole piece reads like a giant fluff piece, sprinkled with lots of nuclear industry talking points.
> Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year.
Who are "we"?
The US alone consumed about 545 million short ton of coal in 2021 [1]. From what I can tell, that's in the range of 400 million m^3. Did I get the numbers wrong? (I just semi-randomly picked a converter online as I have no reference point to how heavy a cubic meter of coal is). Because that does not seem at all like about the same amount.
That's the whole point about my criticism. Uranium is incredibly dense so phrasing it in terms of volume of the uranium is just misleading.
Regarding the calculation https://www.worldometers.info/coal/ says we are burning 1,147,083 cubic feet of coal which is about 30000 cubic meters which is about the same as a football field up to 10 yards (~50mx90mx10m).
> The world consumes 1,147,083 cubic feet of coal per capita every year (based on the 2016 world population of 7,464,022,049 people) or 3,143 cubic feet per capita per day.
(My emphasis).
So closer to a football field per person according to this. That sounds excessive to me, so I'm not sure I trust those numbers.
This [1] says "1 ton of coal is approximately 40 cubic feet per ton, might be a little less, might be a little more....". Using my earlier numbers from DOE, that gives 545 million short tons * 40 = ca. 21,800 million cubic feet, or ~ 600 million m^3, or ca. 1.67m^3 per capita in the US. That sounds low, but as a global average, maybe not.
You're right that the worldometer number is excessive and not to be trusted.
They properly calculated 1.147083 tons of coal per capita per year, but then incorrectly multiplied by it 1,000,000 cubic feet per ton.
The actual conversion factor for coal seems to be 20-60 cubic feet per ton, depending on whether you use bulk density or particle density. Their per capita calculation is too high by a factor of about 15,000-50,000.
You're right that the amount of coal consumed is not similar to the amount of uranium byproduct generated. The original commenter's intuition was misled, not by uranium's density, but by its energy density. Of course there is an xkcd for this.
https://xkcd.com/1162/
I've been a bit of a nuclear nerd for a long time, and somehow the author still shares information that is new to me: I had no idea how quickly high-level waste dissipated, love the plots of the radioactive decay.
> The decay of heat and radioactivity over time means that after only forty years, the radioactivity of used fuel has decreased to about one-thousandth of the level at the point when it was unloaded. Less than 1% is radioactive for 10,000 years. The portion that stays radioactive for longer is about as radioactive as some things found in nature and can be easily shielded to protect humans.
It's an often (deliberately?) overlooked aspect of nuclear waste discussions. People will loudly say "radioactive waste needs to be stored for thousands of years", and "you go near some radioactive waste, you will surely die from radiation exposure". This gets combined into something like "This highly dangerous stuff, that you cannot approach stays highly dangerous and unapproachable for 10k years". Then people say "how can we possibly hope to store this incredibly dangerous stuff for 10k years, it's such a hard problem to solve, better not create this stuff in the first place, no more nuclear!".
But the stuff that lasts 10k years is a very different beast from the stuff that kills you quickly from just being near it. The supremely radioactive stuff tends to have a very short half-life. We can think about storage methods in very human time-frames, it's much more achievable. The other, long half life stuff needn't be stored with nearly the same extremly stringent standards, because it just isn't so extremely dangerous.
IMO that's quite misleading. It's true that the amount of radition will dramatically decline. But it does so unevenly, and certain isotopes last much much longer. That's not really a problem if the waste stays contained in one location, but if that waste somehow leaked into water sources or similar then it could have significant consequences. Even a very small amounts of these isotopes can be dangerous if inhaled or ingested.
It is somewhat logical. Radiation isn't free and if something radiates a lot, it loses quite a lot of energy while radiating.
Typically: intense radiation is caused by massive presence of isotopes with short half-life, which means that they go away quite quickly.
Even the notorious Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl, made of molten core content, is now much safer than it used to be, to the degree that people are now willing to enter the room and make photos of it [0]
So it goes from killing you if you're in the same room in seconds to merely bioaccumulating and poisoning the top levels of the food chain for thousands of square km in a few centuries.
I'm all for fighting the good fight on this, but I'm also a realist: consumer sentiment isn't going to change much. People on the extremes will still fight to the nails on MSG, Flouride in water, GMO, etc. But the median person doesn't really care where their power comes from when they hit a switch so long as it's cheap.
If we want any serious progress on Nuclear you need regulators with authority to ignore organized civilian protestation. And the only way that happens is when politicians have their backs against the wall when it comes to energy options.
Virtually no one who is critical of nuclear thinks that "it's scary" is the best, or even a good, reason for not having nuclear. But loads of analysis have been done on the financials of different energy generation methods and shows very clearly that, except for those contracted to build and maintain the thing, no one sees a real benefit. It simply doesn't pan out to plan and build new nuclear reactors today, considering what we could do with that money (solar, wind) over the 10 years it takes from groundbreaking to first day online for nuclear facilities.
The financials don't live in a vacuum though. Nuclear is only so expensive because there is a lack of supply chain on reactors and absurd regulations.
The average nuclear reactor is over 40 years old(!) and well past due for replacement. So the cost is skewed by unrealistic maintenance demand on reactors that are 3 generations old because we can't politically replace them with anything other than a Natural Gas plant.
Meanwhile, renewables enjoy fast-tracking and subsidies. But keep in mind renewables currently only benefit places that are either windy or sunny. There are going to be diminishing returns as they fill up our power diet. We are still going to need power supplies that can keep New York powered in the winter. Or power that can be turned on/off to meet seasonal demand. So unless we want to keep natural gas and coal plants around indefinitely, we are going to need some amount of nuclear power in the mix.
A lot of people say that new reactor designs will be a game changer but I can't help but wonder how much more benefit they'll provide over plain old solar and wind with hydrogen for storage and transport.
After the Ukraine invasion, I think it's also worth considering future political instability in reactor permitting and design. I believe the molten salt reactors negate a lot of the problems we've had to consider with the Zaporozhye nuclear plant being in a war zone, but I'm not sure it comes out to something much better than solar and wind.
If anything, the Ukraine invasion changed my opinion the other way. Germany had the largest investment in solar and wind anywhere in the world. But their dirty secret was that they were dependent on malicious petrostates to keep the lights on this whole time.
Meanwhile, the Nordics and France that when all-in on nuclear are enjoying relative energy independence.
> Virtually no one who is critical of nuclear thinks that "it's scary" is the best, or even a good, reason for not having nuclear.
That's 99.9% of Germany's anti-nuclear movement. The "it's just not economical" is a super recent addition (last 3 years, I'd say) to the public debate, and it feels very much tacked on. If anyone discovered a method to bring down cost, most of those who are against nuclear energy wouldn't change their mind, because that's not an actual concern to them.
To further add to this, most arguments against the economics of nuclear are kind of dumb and circular. "We shouldn't bother making nuclear cheaper, it's too expensive!"
Meanwhile, we are just supposed to take for granted that unforeseen technology will make energy storage and transport cheaper.
I don't know if I agree with the "organized civilian protestation" entirely. While NIMBY did play a role historically, this seems out-of-touch when I consider the mothballed & troubled builds which are currently in South Carolina.
I do believe regulators have their foot on the brakes, and there are some really telling stories from people in the actual industry. The level of paperwork and scrutiny are hard to fathom for people in other industries. But right now, in the US, that is more of a Federal political issue. The AP1000 lost crucial time due to added missile shield requirements. That doesn't scream local on-the-ground public resistance. You can pin some of this nearly directly to anti-nuclear views from (let's be honestly) Democratic senators (not from the south). Federal policy both encourages and discourages nuclear, but the domestic industry was too weak, and the regulatory policy took critical hits during a formative time.
I care very deeply about addressing carbon emissions. I want nuclear to work, but that's not an argumentative hill I should die on when solar has seen costs go bananas. Maybe another human generation will change things, but from lived experience, I would bet not.
As an engineer, I admit that either nuclear or solar COULD HAVE become the backbone of our energy system. But time is out for climate action. Solar is modular, proven, and roaring. Further deployment will create a new engineering problem of storage, but we don't have time to turn that into a delay tactic. There will be solutions to energy storage, just as there are solutions to nuclear waste. Neither are cheap, but either are a drop in the bucket compared to the climate damage we face.
Well, I largely think that NIMBY is still at play. If you are a senator you have nothing to gain with a nuclear reactor in your district. Compare this to Japan that doesn't have ridiculously cheap natural gas, and yet is still doubling down on nuclear despite Fukushima and constant protest.
I think renewables are amazing and have a long way still to go, but I look at the current energy mix and it's hard to see a 100% renewables grid in our lifetime with foreseeable technology.
> Well, I largely think that NIMBY is still at play
Citation needed? The argument that "those gosh-darn environmentalists ruined nuclear" have been countered repeatedly by simply focusing on the huge economic headwinds facing any nuclear project, while renewables gallop into an ever-cheaper future.
Even making the claim that environmental activism resulted in overaggressive regulation is hard to back up, since agencies like the NRC and IAEA are made up of mainly nuclear industry figures who are hardly anti-nuke.
If you take the climate science seriously, then you really must accept net-zero by 2050. After that, maybe net-negative.
Assuming you're an educated person, the question we must ask is if natural gas is viable to fill in the gaps from renewables in 2050. Given the net-zero requirement, that means a natural gas plant that puts its CO2 emissions back in the ground. That can make sense with direct carbon-capture and storage, but the problem is high capital costs totally undermine the low capacity factor which is why we use it today.
If we go natural gas CCS vs nuclear in 2050, maybe it's a tossup, but they're BOTH poorly suited for the job, if we're talking about solar at >50%. Daily storage will be solved fairly well by then, and seasonal energy storage will be the challenge. But nuclear is baseload.
There are interesting ideas like running nuclear to heat a vat of salt which is used as a means of energy storage so that it would work in a grid with lots of renewables. But that's peak smoothing over several days. Seasonal thermal storage has been written about but is basically crackpot stuff.
So I've kind of come around to seasonal storage of green hydrogen. The technology is at least focused on the right problem. Duration of storage and energy density arguments favor chemical energy, and low capital costs per nameplate capacity are the primary driver.
Solar electricity is a cheaper and less mining intensive source of heat than nuclear thermal energy.
Burning green hydrogen is also largely not going to be needed outside of emergency conditions. Capturing the many thousands of twh per year of waste stream methane is essential anyway and can easily cover what hydro and a few hours of battery cannot.
In France approximately 2/3 of the final energy consumed (don't get fooled by statistics expressed upon primary energy, they are misleading) is produced by burning fossil fuels.
> ...consumer sentiment isn't going to change much.
> ...the median person doesn't really care where their power comes from when they hit a switch so long as it's cheap.
> If we want any serious progress on Nuclear you need regulators with authority to ignore organized civilian protestation.
The reason sentiment isn't going to change is because much of the situation is dictated by greed. People want cheap power, the companies want money; both are driving forces compelling them to act not in their best interest but cheaply.
Unless regulators can ignore commercial and private interests a like, then greed will always taint regulation. Which is why sentiment will never change.
There's a complete lack of trust that the industry will do the right thing and sustain it long term because it is under constant pressure to be both profitable and cheap.
> But radiation hasn’t harmed anywhere near as many people as fossil fuels.
The implication with both this statement and the map is that we should be comparing the total number of people who died from radiation, and the total from fossil fuels, and see which is bigger, but there are other ways of evaluating (potential) harms.
Nuclear power and other radtech is not equally common around the world, and neither are fossil fuels. In the context of promoting transition from one to the other, the important question is the relative harm of these two choices as a function of their deployment over time. There have been events from minor leaks to world-changing disasters, all of which are contingent on human factors which vary widely across time and space. So it's not clear that increasing global rollout of nuclear power will be as consistently safe in the future as it has been in the recent past.
In deaths per KWh nuclear is king, with a thousandth of the deaths of gas and ten thousandth of coal. Until recently even solar was worse due to installers sometimes falling off roofs!
I really do not understand why almost no one bothers to spend a couple of minutes looking up the actual numbers and analysis that people have been doing for decades... its universal in all subjects, not just nuclear.
Because the 'actual numbers' were protested against even by the scientists on whose work they are based and represent (or rather misrepresent) what an industry that is constantly trying to cut corners does when there is enough attention and scepticism to go around to stop them before they do anything critically stupid.
In spite of various plant operators' attempts, no serious accident has ever occured because there are mass protests and an industry regulator which hasn't been captured (yet). There is no precedent for this ever continuing if a toxic industry is accepted by the public and every precedent of it turning into a relationship like chevron has with the amazon.
Solar is also front loaded, whereas nuclear stays an existential threat to an entire region for decades after decomissioning at the very least. The risk from plants that shut down in the 60s has not yet passed.
Of course they cut corners! They're so overburdened with endless overly cautious regulations that see spending a billion man hours as better than letting a single curie of material get loose into the wider environment (which is incredibly stupid given how much more good a billion man hours can do in, say, healthcare). If they didn't cut corners nothing would get done.
And once corner cutting starts it doesn't distinguish well between the actually important rules and the ineffectual or overly cautious ones. Overregulation is an actual safety threat.
"Of course they're going to be willfully negligent! Just change the rules so they're allowed to kill you and they won't have to break them." While being novel isn't particularly compelling. It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.
We allow people to drive. We allow burning of fossil fuels and use of tires.
These things kill people. Life is not infinitely valuable, a higher quality of life for years can be worth a few life hour reduction in life expectancy.
In the domain of public policy, money is lives. Spending more money on nuclear safety means less money on cancer detection or rare disease research, which costs lives. Spending money inefficiently costs lives.
> It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.
However rooftop solar reduces the need for a grid and grid maintenance. Are the deaths due to grid building and maintenance accounted for in these figures? It looks to be based on just production, not production plus distribution.
And solar increases the need for storage. There are certainly all kinds of indirect effects that might skew those numbers, and so it's very much possible solar does better. That isn't really the point - the point is that nuclear is a whole lot safer than many widespread alternatives.
While some would like nuclear to replace solar as well, I think most of those of us who see nuclear as unnecessarily maligned are more frustrated by how e.g. coal and fossil fuels remain in the mix despite the massive number of deaths they cause. E.g. the German decision to shut down nuclear plants and as a consequence needing to run coal plants longer will likely cause more deaths than all nuclear plants combined through the history of nuclear power.
Sure. I too am annoyed by the shut down of nuclear power plants. Any marginal ultra-long-term safety gain of not generating new waste is more than offset by the already sunk costs of the nuclear power plant. And the bad effects of coal burning.
Also, spent nuclear fuel is very easy to safely dispose of, we just don't want to because:
A. It's useful and can be reprocessed into useful fuel once that's allowed and we can do it cheaply.
B. The media and public would throw a fit if people started dumping (glassed) nuclear waste on the ocean floor. Because the media and public are completely innumerate and cannot do things like multiplication required to calculate the less than 0.1% radioactivity increase the ocean would experience.
> German decision to shut down nuclear plants and as a consequence needing to run coal plants longer will likely cause more deaths than all nuclear plants combined through the history of nuclear power
That's a funny way of spelling cancelling tens to hundreds of gigawatts of renewable investment which was to replace those nuclear reactors and the fossil fuels and replacing them with gas.
If they'd come through on that, before shutting down the nuclear plants, you'd have a point. Without shutting down the nuclear power plants a lot of that money wouldn't have been needed in the first place. But it didn't happen, and so it's perfectly reasonable to blame them for either or both of those decisions. Fact remains that in retaining the coal power they've caused a huge number of unnecessary deaths.
My "bad propaganda" does not rely on the intent of any of the people who did this cancellations. All it relies on is the fact that the shut down of nuclear ensured a reliance on coal that has killed and will kill a huge number of people.
Still incoherently blaming the cancellation of wind and solar on the installatin of wind and solar. It's like having your junkie housemate steal the money you were going to spend on a LEV after you sold your car and spend it on drugs, then blaming the LEV.
There are a few ways of comparing these numbers. I think you're suggesting that something like deaths/kWh is a better metric, which I agree with; if we just go with total deaths than something like pedal-driven generators are the safest way to generate power, which is obviously an unhelpful statement.
However, the greater point is that although nuclear power is dangerous by default because of the waste and risks of meltdowns it can be made very safe with engineering and still be a cheap generation method. By all accounts I'm familiar with fossil fuels cannot be made safe for either the environment or people while still being cost-effective.
A major issue in the nuclear vs fossil fuels argument is perceived vs actual risk. I don't have the numbers, but even though Fukushima was a huge disaster, the death toll is officially 1. But the cleanup has been very expensive and very visible. Meanwhile, coal/gas/oil plants deflect the equivalent costs of their cleanup onto workers and people in the communities in increased mortality and healthcare costs.
More succinctly, nuclear can be safe with effort, but fossil fuels seemingly can't be safe, no matter how much effort.
I agree deaths/kWh is a better metrics, and I was probing into your point about how nuclear can be safer due to better engineering. Is the engineering alone enough? Can we engineer out the risky human parts? Perhaps today that looks like increasing automation of reactors, perhaps in future it means a computer could run an entire station without human inputs or oversight.
Also great points about perceived vs actual risk, and observability of effects, as other things affecting the political landscape of nuclear!
I grew up very anti-nuclear, but a lot of it was conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons which, back in the 80s, felt like they could fall any moment.
But the technology has changed (though most reactors are not new), and more importantly, when compared with the effects of fossil fuels on climate, nuclear is by far the lesser evil. Sure, solar/wind/hydro renewables are important but they're not practical or feasible everywhere. I'm now pretty convinced nuclear needs to play an important part if we have any hope of significant emission reduction. So in that respect, as well meaning as the anti-nuclear green movement has been, they are wrong in opposing it today (in terms of power generation; nuclear weapons are an abomination).
> conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons
"Conflation" means (or at least implies) that one thing has been mistaken for the other.
Nuclear reactors have been entwined with nuclear weapons production since the very beginning. The British MAGNOX reactors were designed (and used) to produce warheads as well as energy. Iran is under sanctions partly because it's feared they'll use any reactor they build to make warheads.
>"Conflation" means (or at least implies) that one thing has been mistaken for the other.
Yes, and the word is being used correctly here.
>Nuclear reactors have been entwined with nuclear weapons production since the very beginning.
No, they have not. While it's possible to get civilian power plants to produce (breed) nuclear materials, they aren't designed for it. Almost all weapons production at places like Savannah River and Hanford was done with purpose specific plants that created plutonium and U-235 by design.
Iran is under sanctions not because it's feared they'll use power plants to make warheads but because they are working on enriching nuclear fuel to a level useful for weapons. IE, they're taking the same stuff that powers power plants and trying to concentrate it so they can make a weapon.
> Almost all weapons production at places like Savannah River and Hanford was done with purpose specific plants that created plutonium and U-235 by design.
That's as may be. But Wikipedia says that the "civilian" Magnox reactors were indeed used to manufacture Plutonium:
There aren't any of that design operating any more, and no more will be built, so they're not a proliferation issue. That particular design could be used that way (and was by the UK) which is a major reason no more will be built.
1) I support Sizewell c & d. There's already two big reactors there, a third and fourth one make no difference to be fair.
2) I live about 20km from Sizewell.
3) The road that will be choked with traffic from building it is 1.5km away, the rail track is also 1.5km away - they should really build a sea pier like last time.
4) 5 years ago the wet storage at Sizewell suffered a leak.
5) No one noticed, until someone decided to do a wash [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jun/11/nuclear-...]
6) If they hadn't noticed then pond would have boiled enough to expose the rods. This would have taken just a few hours.
7) A column of fire would have erupted out of the pond, creating a radioactive plume that would have rendered my house uninhabitable, for like, 200 years.
So, I do not give a toss about whether it glows green or not... but it's definitely scary stuff that needs to be watched.
> In recent days, former Extinction Rebellion spokesman Zion Lights has announced her conversion to the cause of nuclear energy, while so-called “eco-modernist” Michael Shellenberger has gone further, and apologised for the years he spent scaremongering over climate change in a long article at Forbes website.
> Welcoming these developments, GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
> It’s great to see these prominent green campaigners disavowing the eco-extremism that has done such damage to the world. When Michael Shellenberger says that climate change isn’t even the biggest environmental problem the world faces, he’s echoing a view that the GWPF has highlighted since our inception.”
Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image):
> There have been a number of stories in the press in the last few weeks with criticisms about Extinction Rebellion by Zion Lights, UK director of the pro-nuclear lobby group Environmental Progress. It appears that Lights is engaged in a deliberate PR campaign to discredit Extinction Rebellion.
> For any editors who might be considering platforming Lights, we would like to make you aware of some information about the organisation she works for and her employer, Michael Shellenberger.
> Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image
Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today anyway, because renewables have only become cost competitive relatively recently. Even without lobbying by the oil industry people had powerful incentives until now to stick with the technology that didn’t require them to put on a sweater or pay more for energy.
The anti-nuclear movement by contrast knee-capped the last best hope for climate change mitigation. A technology that could have been deployed—and catalyzed electrification and energy storage efforts—decades ago when we had more runway.
> Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
I've always hoped they're secretly funded/friends with the oil lobby, because otherwise that's just pure sadness.
I'd like to also echo this. Best analysis of the history behind the anti-nuclear craze of the 60s and 70s is basically Russia infiltrated the Hippie Movement of the 60s to exploit the "government is bad" soft anarchism (=minarchism) in the movement to delay America from getting a leg up.
For the past 100+ years, Russia has been one of the largest energy players in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. You can see this today in the Russian Invasion in Ukraine, as Germany tries to comply with the international regulations and shut the Russian Nord Stream pipeline off and can't; Russia has a stranglehold on everyone on that side of the world.
So, given that, they feared an America that could meet its energy needs without pollution, heavy investment, and significant cost; while Russia was literally killing its own people to make the oil and gas flow as a cost of doing business. Thus, they slipped right in and used the Hippies to astroturf an anti-nuclear position.
Reagan may have torn down that wall, but Russia won the cold war; and then they made sure, post-Soviet, to make sure we'd never attain energy independence. The end result of that trainwreck is currently under investigation by the FBI as per the recommendations of the Jan 6th Committee.
Russia produce not only oil and gas but also is one of the biggest nuclear plant equipment exporters. If I were them I would rather sponsor articles on how it is hard to dispose of solar panels…
I agree and I think the damage to humanity that the anti-nuclear movement has done is incalculable. So many years of progress have been missed out on... and while some of it was due to greed (fossil fuel industry funding), most of it was just misplaced fear, whether propaganda induced or from an inability to see the full picture.
The anti-nuclear movement is also still alive and doing well
but at this point it's like arguing over spilled milk, the damage is mostly done and a lot of is irreversible. We can try to salvage nuclear but we've already regressed to further impure sources in some countries so progress seems unlikely.
I can't believe you're blaming "tree huggers" for this, when the clear beneficiary is the global fossil fuel industry, who've been lobbying against nuclear power since the 50s. Shit, many anti-nuclear groups have been funded by fossil fuel industry for decades. At best, their protests were political cover for governments to do what the oil industry paid them to do.
General nuclear paranoia stemming from Cold War M.A.D., Chernobyl and Three Mile Island seem to spring to my mind. Not so much your naked tree-hugger in a historical vacuum theory.
> Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
You would have thought that France would have supplied the European continent with electricity now that Russia cut its gas supply, but it turns out that France received electricity from Germany even during this time.
It turns out that even new builds of nuclear power plants take years to be completed. Getting safety right is a challenge, the more we know about engineering and material science for nuclear plants, the more we know about challenges in building them, the more we need to do to avoid these risks, the harder it is to build a safe power plant.
Our national energy company EDF has been the largest energy exporter in Europe for ages, in 2019 it was the largest in the world. In addition to that it's made us the cleanest country in the continent for close to 40 years (along with hydro-rich countries).
The notion that 2022 is a smoking gun for nuclear is ridiculous. All it reflects is the past 12 years of successive liberal governments writing laws and reforms to gut our nuclear fleet and EDF in favour of private companies.
Covid maintenance postponed + corrosion issues led to this bad timing; otherwise looks like it worked pretty well for decades.
France closed a working-order nuclear plant for political reasons just two years before, so we're not making exactly the brightest decisions here either.
France was strongarmed by Germany and by shitty election related deals to elect Hollande into massive nuclear power closures and reductions, coupled with presidents unable to see more than 5 years ahead means that nuclear plants both do not get renewed and also get closed for absolutely no reason. See Fessenheim.
The issue with construction isn't that it's hard to build a safe power plant, it's that there's been no will from anyone, or active harm from incompetent shitheads.
Hollande wanted to diversify France because it's not and they had to pay for this stupidity and still do to this day.
Fessenheim is the perfect reason for why Hollande wanted to close some of those plants: old, accident ridden, one of those which have to be closed down in summer due to possible overheating of nearby rivers and to top that off: it's in a region which may have earthquakes for which it is not prepared...
> The issue with construction isn't that it's hard to build a safe power plant, it's that there's been no will from anyone, or active harm from incompetent shitheads.
Weird because there are plenty western countries which do have popular support for nuclear energy but still struggle with construction times and costs in astronomical ways.
Fessenheim was amongst the top performing nuclear plants, and had no issues being given a 10 year renewal because of how safe it was before it was closed for political reasons. The EELV/Die Grunde kool-aid is not a good thing to drink considering how anti science they are.
And as always, the same awful arguments about "don't overheat the rivers", when the limits set by the safety regulations are way under anything that could damage the environment. You could triple the output heat in the river and it would change absolutely nothing.
Hollande did not want to diversify our energy production. It was a purely political play to get EELV's support and used Fessenheim as a sacrificial chip. Glad to see the German energiewende led to such diversification that you're running half your country on coal right now btw. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
> essenheim was amongst the top performing nuclear plants, and had no issues being given a 10 year renewal because of how safe it was
That is false. It was an old and accident ridden plant.
> And as always, the same awful arguments about "don't overheat the rivers", when the limits set by the safety regulations are way under anything
Luckily those limits are set by people who know what they're doing and not the nuclear astroturf online.
> Hollande did not want to diversify our energy production. It was a purely political play to get EELV's support and used Fessenheim as a sacrificial chip.
That's pure propaganda from the opposite political spectrum and is not even worth the discussion anymore at this point.
> Glad to see the German energiewende led to such diversification that you're running half your country on coal right now btw. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
We even had to get some coal plants back from retirement (just like you did) because your rotting nuclear fleet isn't performing and it's cold outside. You're welcome :)
Exactly, the phase-out plan was initially delayed in late 2010: the government decreed a 12-year delay of the schedule. Then something unpleasant happened at Fukushima.
What you don’t know is that in the 2010’s the left wing had a agreement with the Green Party to stop all nuclear by 2050. That’s why we stop financing and maintaining a lot of nuclear plants. It turned out it was a bad idea..
A huge program (55 to 95 billions euros) aiming at upgrading all existing reactors in order to run them for 60 or even 80 years was launched and runs:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_car%C3%A9nage
Governments also sold reactors to Finland (running project, way over-budget and delay), China (2 reactors, over-budget and delay, and they stayed offline or at low-power for a full year after an incident) and the U.-K. (this is a running project, already late and over-budget).
Which ones? Are we talking 90%, an the entire year, without creative accounting?
Disregarding electric dams because, while wonderful, those depend heavily on the country geography and I assume a lot of countries cannot build enough of them. (but we should build as much as we can of those, just don't expect 50% hydroelectricity everywhere)
Norway 98% since 2016.
Costa Rica 98% since 2015.
Scotland 97% in 2020.
Uruguay 98% in 2021.
New Zealand pushing close to 90%.
> Are we talking 90%, an the entire year, without creative accounting?
I don’t know what this means. If a country reports that X amount of energy came from a particular source in a particular year, that means the entire year. And if you believe these countries are lying and doing “creative accounting”, then the burden of proof lies with you to prove it, not for me to disprove it.
Norway: large hydro resources, low population.
Costa Rica: 80% hydro.
Scotland: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-56530424 says that renewable met 97% of energy demand, which does not mean that clean electricity was produced when it was needed in Scotland. Considering that this means the country could run at 97% of its production potential with only RE is what I consider "creative accounting". (the article does not lie but interpreting it that way is mistaken).
Uruguay: only 31% hydro, that's more interesting.
New Zealand: 55% hydro, 13% geothermal.
So except for Uruguay (which does look interesting), most countries mostly use renewable dispatchable sources which are perfect. But not all countries have the hydro potential / population ratio of Norway. We should use hydro as much as we can but we are limited by geography; once everything that can be used is we are stuck with nuclear, wind or solar.
Maybe Uruguay could be an example of country that manages somehow with mostly solar/wind; I need to look into it. Thank you.
Keep in mind it is also possible for countries to export electricity; for the world to be powered by renewables each country needs not produce 100% of it’s own energy demands.
I don't think so. People in the US have and have had net-positive views on nuclear energy. It's not like public sentiment has turned against nuclear energy because of naked tree hugging protesters. For example, this polling [1] from Pew shows that only 27% of the US public thinks the government should discourage nuclear power with everyone else saying the government should either encourage or be neutral towards it.
Of course some green energy climate tree hugger whatever protesters oppose nuclear energy, but they are powerless and don't change public opinion much and certainly don't influence outcomes. To my knowledge it's government regulations and laws that stifle nuclear energy - not protesters or climate people.
Is it though? The US Navy has a pretty impressive nuclear safety record for the number of reactors they have in service.
To flip it, would you have more trust in a private company with nuclear safety? If the same decisions being made that allows PG&E to cut their funding for maintenance that allows their lines to be the cause of California's forest fires, why would we trust they would pay for the upkeep on a nuclear reactor?
I've worked in the energy industry. There is complete capture there. When PG&E is the "bad guy" it's because the government needs them to be. ERCOT works the same way (though is better).
If the government wanted PG&E to properly fund their line maintenance, PG&E would properly fund their line maintenance.
Smith-putnam was early 40s and both PV and the concept of an economic learning curve have been known since the 50s.
We could have had the wind and solar revolution any time in the last 70 years. Instead trillions were gifted to fossil fuel and nuclear con artists.
This blame of the failure of nuclear on them being forced to sort-of clean up some of their mess rather than just sending native people to mine with no PPE and dumping tailings and waste wherever is a sad attempt at gaslighting.
To me - it seems the existential fear around climate change is the topic of the day for environmentalists only because nuclear ended up not gaining traction. Nuclear waste/proliferation is not the number one existential threat these days only because it's used so little (both because of PR issues and lack of economics/long term maintenance challenges).
The masses of environmentalists moved on from nuclear in the 80's but would surely return if nuclear regained traction.
Not sure if that's controversial? I don't think the fossil fuel industry (or Putin) could've wished for better allies than the Energiewende (anti-nuclear, pro Russian gas with a bit of solar and wind) supporters in Europe.
Whoever was behind it successfully managed to delay nuclear fission adoption by about 60 years for all of the EU and UK except France causing massive amounts of totally unnecessary CO2 emissions in the process.
Putin is an omni-present monster, sure, and an oil and gas monster to that. But he also is THE biggest nuclear power monster:
[Rosatom] ranks first in the overseas NPP construction, responsible for 76% of global nuclear technology exports: 35 nuclear power plant units, at different stages of development, in 12 countries, as of December 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosatom
At some point it will, but has fossil fuel use actually declined so far? From what a I’ve read, the Arctic is being looked at as a new frontier for oil and gas exploration as the ice retreats.
There is so much wrong with this comment I'm not sure where to begin.
0. Nuclear is not forbidden.
1. Nuclear power is exceedingly common in many countries.
2. Electricity production is not (by far) the only source of carbon emissions. Why have we also not seen any major action to reduce emissions from other sources? Or did the treehuggers also force people to fly, eat meat and drive large cars?
3. > Last best hope.
Energy efficiency. Regulation incentivizing fuel efficiency. Low carbon public transportation. Incentives to reduce the carbon emissions from agriculture. Renewables. The list of available remedies is long.
But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the destruction profit driven market capitalism caused. If that soothes your cognitive dissonance.
> But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the destruction profit driven market capitalism caused.
The alternative economic systems are even worse on environmental grounds, and their only saving grace is their ineptness and inefficiency, which limits the amount of damage they cause.
Like, have you heard about environmental disaster of Aral Sea? About how Soviet Union explicitly pursued maximizing fossil extraction as its core economic policy? About the environmental disaster of Great Leap Forward? Check out the list of 10 most polluted places in the world, where are they? Literally the only one that got its pollution under capitalism is in Zambia, all the rest are in former Soviet Union, China and India, which started doing market economy when they were already high polluters.
The regulation is there for a purpose. The idea that nuclear was "killed" by regulation is a kind of "stab-in-the-back" conspiracy theory.
If nuclear was truly this obvious answer to aquire abundant clean energy, wouldn't our business friendly leaders embrace it with open arms?
A couple of treehuggers didn't stop them from allowing overfishing the sea, or from extracting fuel from oil sands. Despite those things having very clear negative environmental consequences. And strong popular opposition.
But for Nuclear apparently they went totally in the opposite direction. Deaf to the cries of businessmen they heavily regulated an obviously harmless and extremly profitable energy industry to death?
The regulation is there for a reason, but it doesn't have to be a sensible or proportionate reason. Nuclear power is held to a ludicrously higher safety standard than fossil. You are right to suspect that business interests had a hand in subverting nuclear power - the issue is that while nuclear was getting off the ground, the fossil fuel industry was already well established and integrated with government. The anti-nuclear movement wasn't the ultimate cause, but it allied public opinion with a business interest it should have been viciously fighting.
> But sure, go ahead and blame environmentalists for the destruction profit driven market capitalism caused. If that soothes your cognitive dissonance
This is laughable. I come from a country that’s officially socialist. But even people from there want to come to Texas and drive a big SUV and live in a big house with a pool. Better yet, they want to attain that same standard of living in their own country.
If environmentalists tell people to turn down the thermostat and stop eating meet and crowd into public transit, they will lose every time.
Because people in India and China want air conditioned malls, meat for every meal, and private cars. The governments in these regions are absolutely dependent on keeping those countries on a path to western prosperity for their legitimacy. Any climate change plan that contradicts that isn’t a serious plan and will fuck us all.
Then let the west (which has by far the largest carbon emissions per capita) lead the way! Show the world that prosperity isn't necessarily 2 cars and a heart attack at 67.
And to people saying it is not possible, I call bullshit.
There are large carbon footprint variations within the West. Of course countries have different circumstances, but it's also very clearly a question of political will.
While these are reasons to be suspicious, they do not counter a single point she made in her article. Her logic and her facts were solid.
If they're not, I'd love to see a take down of that. But I see no problem with anything she wrote, I remain convinced nuclear is the only rational energy source left, and all this fear mongering about nuclear is causing us to slowly kill ourselves.
The fossil fuel industry is not funding pro-nuclear arguments because they want to see 50% of their business lost to nuclear. They are not worried about losing huge profits to nuclear because from a purely economic perspective nuclear is not cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Hence it doesn’t pose a major threat, absent massive government-subsidized build-outs (which aren’t remotely on the table now.)
The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR because they realize that renewables do pose a major economic threat to their business in the short term, since they are now cost-effective enough to replace vast chunks of their business (even if not 100% of it.) Pro-nuclear (and coincidentally anti-renewable) PR is the most efficient way to protect their business. If they can convince the public [incorrectly] that the best way to decarbonize rapidly is to abandon/block renewable build-outs because “nuclear is the only way” then they’ve paid enormous dividends to their shareholders.
If your response to the above is “these random technical points are correct, what’s the problem”, then the problem is: those random technical points are largely a distraction from the important questions of how we decarbonize quickly. The fossil fuel industry understands this perfectly, because they have a lot of skin in the game.
> The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR because they realize that renewables do pose a major economic threat to their business in the short term
Last time I heard, it wasn't pro-nuclear France that urgently built a new LNG terminal, it was staunchly anti-nuclear Germany (in 2023!!). So I have doubt about your analysis.
I hope you also heard that Germany exports electricity to France. The natural gas is mostly needed for heating and industrial processes and that cannot be simply replaced by nuclear electricity.
You're sharing misleading information here. While this is true recently, it's not like France has been consistently short of energy. Typically it's Germany that imports energy from France.
"Due to the technical problems affecting French reactors, Germany for the first time sold more power to France than it received from its neighbour, doubling its year-earlier export volume there.
France produced 15.1% less power in 2022 and the volume fell short of national usage by 1%."
It's not an externally imposed constraint that Germany's heating and industrial processes require natural gas; it's the result of Germany's conscious decision to build them on gas instead of electricity. Hard to interpret it as anything but pro-fossil-fuels.
> The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR because they realize that renewables do pose a major economic threat to their business in the short term, since they are now cost-effective enough to replace vast chunks of their business (even if not 100% of it.)
I wonder if it's not even more cynical than that because it doesn't seem right. We still need an alternative controllable* source of energy when renewables can't cover the demand (no wind, no sunshine), and it needs to cover peak demand... For now aside from hydro it's mostly fossil fuels: coal, gas and oil.
As far as the current tech goes, my understanding is that "renewables" are much more compatible with profits from fossil fuel than nuclear power is.
* is "controllable" the right word in this context in english?
Nuclear is not cost-competitive in the US because it is defined as not being competitive! The problem is the standard for radiation is as low as reasonably achievable. Oops, that means that if nuclear isn't expensive that means you could pile more safety systems on it. It's a stealth ban.
Now, if your objective is public safety you should use a different standard: Better than any viable competing technology. Within the limit of rounding nuclear is currently 100x safer than it's closest competitor: natural gas. By mandating that level of nuclear safety we are actually increasing deaths by causing the use of a far more dangerous technology instead.
(And note that her post repeats a common mistake about nuclear safety--assigning the Fukushima deaths to the nuclear plant rather than to the politicians. The evacuation of the city did not make sense from a safety standpoint. Growing food there will not be a good idea for some time but the expected death toll from sitting put was zero. The only non-worker nuclear power deaths are from Chernobyl.)
> If your response to the above is “these random technical points are correct, what’s the problem”
I don’t disagree whatsoever that the fossil fuel industry is up to tricks. What I’m saying is I don’t care what their intentions are. I care about results. If Hitler came back and found a way to fix climate change, but his intention was in order to create a better planet for Aryan people, I’d simultaneously despise him and support the fix.
That’s an extreme example of course, but trying to make my point that when we’re facing extinction, we shouldn’t take solutions off the table. We should ignore intentions and look at results.
To me, all this arguing about their intentions is a distraction that keeps us from solving the problem.
We have a slim chance of fixing climate change, and I have yet to see a single fact to dissuade me from believing nuclear is our best hope. Even if the people behind the push turned out to be scumbags.
How are renewables more competitive with fossil fuel than nuclear when it comes to storage and transmission? At least nuclear can keep producing when the sun is down and the wind isn't blowing. It's also more energy dense, so it can scale to cover demand. We're not decarbonizing the economy without those factors being accounted for.
> The fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear PR because they realize that renewables do pose a major economic threat to their business in the short term, since they are now cost-effective enough to replace vast chunks of their business (even if not 100% of it.) Pro-nuclear (and coincidentally anti-renewable) PR is the most efficient way to protect their business. If they can convince the public [incorrectly] that the best way to decarbonize rapidly is to abandon/block renewable build-outs because “nuclear is the only way” then they’ve paid enormous dividends to their shareholders.
This is an interesting theory devoid of evidence to back it up.
chat.openai.com claims it is true, albeit without specific sources:
Yes, there is a significant amount of data and research that supports the increasing competitiveness of renewable energy compared to oil. Here are a few examples:
The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that in 2020, the average global cost of producing electricity from solar photovoltaic (PV) systems was lower than the cost of producing electricity from new fossil fuel plants, including coal and natural gas.
A recent study by the consultancy firm Lazard found that the cost of utility-scale solar and wind energy in the United States has fallen significantly in recent years, and is now cheaper than the cost of power generated from coal and natural gas in most regions of the country.
The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reported that the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for wind and solar energy in the United States has fallen by more than 50% over the past decade, and is projected to continue to decline in the future.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the cost of solar PV and wind energy has declined by over 80% and 60%, respectively, since 2010. IRENA also found that renewable energy is now the cheapest source of new power generation in many countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and the United States.
These are just a few examples, but they demonstrate the trend of declining costs for renewable energy and increasing competitiveness with oil and other fossil fuels.
Out of curiosity, I asked "How can we fix the climate crisis? Be specific."
Obviously we shouldn't rely on ChatGPT for our answers to life, but it's not a terrible list. Except for the absolute lack of any mention of nuclear, which I think fairly reflects the zeitgeist but not the real science.
Here's what it said:
1. Switch to Renewable Energy Sources: We should phase out the use of fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower. This would reduce carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants from burning fossil fuels.
2. Increase Energy Efficiency: We should invest in technologies and practices that reduce energy consumption, such as LED lighting, efficient heating and cooling systems, and better insulation.
3. Plant Trees and Protect Forests: Trees absorb carbon dioxide, so planting more of them can help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We should also protect existing forests and prevent deforestation.
4. Reduce Food Waste: Food waste is a major contributor to climate change, as it releases methane and other greenhouse gases when it decomposes. We should reduce food waste and increase food recycling.
5. Reduce Meat Consumption: Animal agriculture is a major source of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants, so reducing meat consumption can help reduce emissions. We should also promote plant-based diets.
6. Improve Transportation: We should invest in public transportation, electric vehicles, and other low-emission transportation options. This would reduce emissions from cars and other vehicles.
7. Educate and Advocate: We must educate people about the causes and consequences of climate change, and advocate for public policies that can help mitigate climate change.
No. They are not remotely cost competitive, the data saying otherwise is a case of lying with statistics.
Yes, the cost of generating a watt-hour of power from renewables is competitive with fossil fuels. If you could put those watt-hours in a tank somewhere those numbers would work. However, a tank for a watt-hour is called a battery--and storing that watt-hour is going to cost you more than creating it.
In practice what happens is that renewables reduce the fuel use by gas plants. You still need just as many gas plants, though, and once you count those costs the renewables are no longer the cheapest.
If we had started a serious decarbonization 20 yeats ago, sure, but solar is now so cheap and easy that it will be harder for large scale nuclear to ramp up in time to matter. Maybe those container nuclear plants and maybe the last 20% of base capacit by 2040. But slowing solar in deference to nuclear would prolong the era of high atmospheric carbon.
> but solar is now so cheap and easy that it will be harder for large scale nuclear to ramp up in time to matter
There's still the storage and base load problem. But I am 100% with you that we shouldn't slow solar in deference to nuclear; what we should be doing is mapping out what we want our next generation energy mix to look like (solar, wind, pumped storage, nuclear, geothermal, etc) on a regional basis, stop fucking around and arguing about it, and just get on with building it.
I live in an area (Canadian prairies) where max energy consumption lines up with with minimum solar and wind production (-40C in December on a calm night). Even during the day, those calm bitterly cold days only have about 8 hours of sunlight from a sun that barely comes over the horizon. We're starting to build solar, we've had wind for a while, but even though we've committed to building SMR Nuclear, we're still in a situation where we've got coal and natural gas plants that are approaching EOL and they'll likely be replaced/retrofitted to burn more fossil fuels because we won't have any sufficiently reliable baseload ready.
The Canadian prairies have fabulous solar production, even in the winter time. They also have a good amount of wind.
And BC has tons of hydro.
So build out enough renewables to supply BC when the sun is shining, maybe even enough to pump some water uphill, and then have BC hydro supply the prairies at other times.
So I’m looking at this from the perspective of completely eliminating fossil fuels from my home. Not just electricity, but heating as well. I want solar to win, but here’s the numbers I get from looking at December/January this year (my bills don’t quite line up cleanly on month boundaries):
863 m^3 of natural gas -> ~9100 kWh of heating energy
Assuming (generously) that I can get a COP of 3, even though that’s unrealistic at the miserable temperatures we had over the last few months, that’s ~3000 kWh for electric heat pump heat.
Electricity was about 745kWh for the month, so 3750kWh total between heat pump heating and electricity.
3750kWh/mo / 4.4kWh/mo/m^2 = 852 m^2 = 9170 sq.ft. of solar required to cover both my electricity and heating needs.
If I look at just electricity it’s a lot easier. 745 / 4.4 = 169m^2 = 1800 sq.ft. which is essentially the same footprint as the house. Heating completely kills it though and is, I suspect for most people, an even larger source of carbon than their electricity use. At least looking at those two bills, there’s an $88 carbon tax charge on the natural gas bill and only $8 on the electrical bill.
Yeah, I'm not sure if rooftop can quite cut it for Saskatchewan like it can for Australia for instance.
I've got one family member in Saskatchewan with rooftop solar looking at numbers similar to you. Another has 40 acres and a honey operation so just has ground mounted solar and often zeroes his electricity bill even during winter months, although he's still using gas for heating. Just got a heat pump water heater, so he's heading in that direction.
Saskatchewan has lots of land, so we we can do it collectively even if we can't do it ourselves just with roof tops.
Yeah, like, the nice thing about those numbers is that it does work out that solar can very clearly be an effective part of the mix. Out at our family’s farm, there’s a pretty much perfect spot for a long line of solar panels at the south end of the yard that would have no problem zeroing out the electrical bill (is SaskPower still doing net metering? I don’t even know) and probably reducing some of the gas bill as well.
As far as the urban spots go, my electricity+gas numbers there approximately match the size of the entire lot. Extrapolating a bit and assuming that my house is “average”, that works out to needing a solar farm about the size of Regina to power the city in the winter. Maybe half the size when considering all of the street area.
How about we stop this ridiculous nuclear vs. renewables culture war, while fossil fuels are laughing all the way to the bank? Yes, we should build more solar (and even as a 'nuke bro', seeing solar prices drop at the rate they have is one of the genuinely positive news in the otherwise pretty dystopic climate change discourse), we should build more nuclear, we should build wind, we should build more hydro (though not that much potential left), we should build transmission, we should build storage.
Both certainly have their place and the balance has definitely shifted from where it was thirty years ago - renewables are much more competitive now but I think Nuclear has a pretty critical role to play when it comes to surge capacity.
I think we could build 100 plants in under a decade - it takes us being willing to build them assembly line like, meaning no more 'designed for the site' plants.
The EPR and AP1000 reactor designs were supposed to be the end of "designed for the site" reactors, and they were. The same designs get built at different geographic locations. The problem is that they're no better at meeting cost and schedule targets than older reactor designs. They're still late and over budget.
Can small modular reactors like those designed by NuScale do better? Maybe. But we're not going to find out sooner than 2030, which is when NuScale plans to have its first plant operational: https://www.nuscalepower.com/en/about
> I also learned that batteries cannot be recycled.
That seems factually incorrect, and the anti-renewables paragraph was the thing that jumped out at me most, though the author claims not "to say that we should abandon renewables altogether, but to illustrate that all energy generation carries an environmental cost, and no solution is perfect."
It takes a decade to bring a nuclear plant online, at astronomical cost. Instead, why not take that money and start building wind turbines, solar PV and grid-scale batteries? They can start generating (ie. delivering ROI) in a matter of months, be constructed incrementally and are cheaper per KWH.
If Wikipedia isn’t missing some examples, there’s exactly one of those operating now in Russia. That seems like we might need more data points before proclaiming them cheaper and faster in the present tense.
I’m totally on board for building more but it doesn’t seem like this is a solved problem yet.
> While these are reasons to be suspicious, they do not counter a single point she made in her article.
True.
> her logic and her facts were solid.
I came to a somewhat different conclusion after reading that article: I felt it was sufficiently blatant, manipulative, and simply wrong that no one would fall for that. Ah well.
Nuclear should be a part of decarbonization, and you can search my comment history here to see I've said so for a long time. But the breezy 'I was misinformed!' tone of this article is PR because it dismisses rather than engages with criticisms of the nuclear industry.
For contrast, consider that British Nuclear Fuels used the Irish Sea as a dumping ground for nuclear waste through the 1970s, becoming a significant bone of contention between the UK and the Republic of Ireland: https://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2012/11/filedownload31607en....
Though practices have since changed and risks appear to have been mitigated, the substack article just ignores the uncomfortable reality of past abuses which should inform policy assessments. When someone tells a just-so story, even if you agree with it - in fact, especially then - you should question whether it's purpose is to educate or to manipulate.
I would like to see a MASSIVE increase in the amount of nuclear power in use around the world.
AND, I appreciate calling out conflicts of interest, astroturfing, and artificial "viral" information campaigns.
There is one problem with Nuclear power that was never talked about before the Ukraine War: War itself. More specifically, war in the area that is powered by nuclear. Damage to reactors, power plant workers fleeing, damage to nuclear waste containers, and more.
It actually seems to be a case study that empirically proves the opposite. Hundreds of thousands dead in the Russian invasion of Ukraine so far, untold injuries. Incredible amounts of destruction of cities and civilian infrastructure. But yet none from an exploding nuclear power plant. Why? Because its not really possible and it serves very little point. If the goal is to terrorize people and inflict damage there are much better ways as has been demonstrated.
> power plant workers fleeing
That is an argument for no power plants with workers anywhere.
In WW2 dams were attacked causing lots of damage. I haven't seen anyone using that as an argument that we should demolish all hydro dams lest they become targets in a future war. Strangely this kind of thinking only applies to nuclear power.
> But yet none from an exploding nuclear power plant. Why?
Interesting question.
I think the answer is that Russia didn't plan to occupy the largest nuclear power plant in Europe; they occupied Ukrainian territory, and there was a NPP in it. I think it's inconvenient for them to have international inspectors paying attention to the ZNPP. It's right on the frontline; it's on the shore of this huge reservoir on the Dniepro, and Ukraine occupies the opposite shore.
Russia doesn't need the energy from ZNPP; if there's one thing they have plenty of, it's energy.
And for Ukraine's part, they are playing a slow game. I think it suits them that Russia has this inconvenience in the middle of their frontline.
Control/operation of nuclear plants has already been a target of brinksmanship. And while your point about dams is a good one, disasters like a dam collapse (which just happened as a result of the Turkey/Syria earthquake, and is adding to the already catastrophic devastation), are more localized in time than nuclear incidents which present long-term environmental challenges. Sometime I'd like to visit Chernobyl, but I'm not sure I'd live there.
If a pressurized water reactor is hit breached with explosives, it instantly releases superheated water vapor carrying radioactive iodine and caesium.
For reactors that could be threatened, they should be "walk-away safe" and even more focused on recycling spent fuel so large quantities are not necessary to keep on hand.
As an add on to that - if nuclear energy did start becoming mass produced in the developed world where some modicum of safety/regulation around waste can be assumed, once all of the necessary reactors are built out to supply first world energy needs, at best, those same private developers/contractors will start lobbying efforts in more questionable parts of the world to build these things. Then it be framed as an equity issue - why is the first world preventing the rest of the world from catching up - even though its actually just a plain "it's not safe to build it in a country in the middle of a civil war".
The more likely scenario I would envision is that - under the guise of business "joint venture partnerships in next generation energy" - the technological know how and access to a steady stream of the requisite raw materials to build weapons will leak to more questionable parts of the world.
I think this is rather a silly thing to be concerned about given the consequences of the world either running out of cheap energy or continuing to dump huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. I will roll the dice on your crystal ball being defective rather than the alternative.
My hot take, pretending I was an environmentalist, is that fossil fuel/climate change is the object d'ire for environmentalists only because nuclear ended up not gaining traction. The masses of environmentalists have moved on to a different front of the battlefield for protecting the earth but would return if nuclear gained traction.
It's kind of like now that humans conquered polio and smallpox, the next challenge toward advancing the human race is ridding ourselves of cancer. If polio and smallpox returned, we'd be back to fighting those.
Your baseless theories ascribing borderline malicious intentions on the part of actors like environmentalists and nuclear construction interests are amusing, but I fail to see why they should be taken seriously.
afaik all modern designs for nuclear power are aimed at being small so they can be installed underground, which would make them much safer during these events.
Radioactive material is not something you can only find in nuclear plants (you can get same levels of radioactive materials in hospitals for example), there are also much easier ways to cause worse disasters (think about destroying a dam for example)
A destroyed dam is temporary damage. There are going to be eventually gravely ill Russian soldiers last year because they ignored the warnings in the Chernobyl exclusion area.
> In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his bare hands, exposing himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of a Geiger counter, Mr. Simyonov said. It was not clear what happened to the man, he said.
> But in invisible hot spots, some covering an acre or two, some just a few square yards, radiation can soar to thousands of times normal ambient levels.
> A soldier in such a spot would be exposed every hour to what experts consider a safe limit for an entire year, said Mr. Chareyron, the nuclear expert. The most dangerous isotopes in the soil are Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and various isotopes of plutonium. Days or weeks spent in these areas bring a high risk of causing cancer, he said.
"Temporary damage", really? The deaths of those downstream from a burst dam are no less permanent than the death of an irradiated Russian. And there are a lot more of the former than the latter.
how is destroying an entire dam easier than making an armed incursion into a nuclear power plant to steal radioactive waste? Just in terms of metric tons of ammunition needed
not to mention, maybe the place you want to attack doesn't have a dam?
The only real debate is whether completely upending the climate in a very short (ecologically speaking) time frame will be net beneficial for humans or net detrimental for humans. We know it will be net detrimental for the general ecology and currently existing species.
And from what I've read a bunch of the people claiming it will be a benefit for humans are speaking strictly on an economic basis, not a quality of life basis.
There's a lot of noise made by those whose ox is going to get gored by getting serious about the climate. There's no scientific debate other than in the size of the debacle. (For example, methane hydrate--it's not included in the IPCC reports at all because our estimates are still too wide. Note that on the high end it's *worse* than the high end estimates for the effects of CO2--and they will add. Earth has seen that kind of temperature before--most of the rocks laid down at that time don't have fossils.)
No, there's not. Virtually all scientists with any knowledge of the relevant science concede that global warming is occurring, largely due to human activity.
What's more, the core facts of anthropogenic climate change are based on fairly basic thermodynamics, and were predicted with decent accuracy as far back as 1896. A great little book covering this is the recent The Physics of Climate Change.
To point out the perhaps obvious, there's nothing in your post that addresses anything presented in the article on the fact or argument level.
"I don't like her and someone she works with" isn't persuasive. On a controversial topic, everyone with a view is going to be disliked by someone - it carries to significance.
You accuse someone to have a "cavalier attitude to science" and "being in cahoots with" parties you allege are suspicious and then you proceed to use Extinction Rebellion as a source? You should worry more how cavalier Extinction Rebellion are, and who they are in cahoots with.
Good pickup. Reading it I really couldn't see someone that was anti nuclear yet claims to have not been aware / motivated enough to learn about key, basic concepts like radioactive decay now being capable of writing a piece like this. It is very well crafted to apologetically make an antinuclear view point look juvenile and immature.
> It is very well crafted to apologetically make an antinuclear view point look juvenile and immature.
That was my reaction; but the way she characterizes her younger self was not at all convincing. People who change their views show more sympathy and understanding for their younger self than the author does, who just dismisses herself as a naive idiot (before moving on to explain the rather basic things she's "learned" about radioactive materials in the meantime).
This message feels like you're trying to make a case that the author must be dismissed because of her group affiliation. Is there anything in the argument itself that you find incorrect or misleading?
This is definitely the reddit or twitter style take I would expect from someone outside the industry.
I worked in the industry for about a decade on nuclear, solar, wind, coal, and natural gas. I mostly worked in capacity planning and did some light industrial engineering.
There is not some massive split between 'Big fossil fuel' and 'big renewable'. Most of the generators are diversified in a blend of all different types of power plants. It's ridiculous to advance these conspiracy theories about companies running marketting campaigns against themselves.
This claim that every statement about nuclear power is some 'industry shill' narrative is really ignorant and misinformed. Then there is the lines-on-the-corkboard about what organizations they belong to... trying to infer that this is some sort of nefarious pysop.. when in reality most people in the industry are part of organizations that span every power source.
I did alot of work with SCE and Nextera which are both incredibly diversified and have a variety of power plants.
Even the infamous Duke (typically considered heavy on fossil fuels) has plenty of renewable and nuclear generation.
There is also a complete lack of knowledge about base load versus peak load, and other aspects of power generation in the thread below. The commenter in the thread claiming that 'Renewables are ALWAYS cheaper' is not correct and is running an interesting theory that energy companies want to create pollution so badly that they will throw away potential profits and lose money.
This entire discussion is pretty much the peak of software engineers who can't tell the difference between a crescent and a ratchet weighing in expertise about an industrial field they do not comprehend.
Yeah, if the fission industry wants to be taken seriously they need to hire assassins to murder Shellenberger in his sleep. I have some sympathy for the scientific and technical justifications for fission, but I have some doubts about the economics and whether capitalist private utilities can be trusted to operate the reactors. I have zero doubts that Shellenberger is a mendacious tool of the fossil fuel industry who will say or do literally anything that will lead to a repeat appearance on Fox News. Therefore with him on the side of fission I am firmly 100% against it.
The fact that the most publicly visible spokesperson for nuclear energy is regularly on Fox News saying that Climate Change isn't a big deal, is mind blowing to me. That's like it's number one selling point, and their salesman is pretending it's not real.
> The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the industry
This is a pretty serious claim.
> edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting.
This is an EVEN MORE serious claim.
Both of these need some serious backing. I don't see how what you're following up with is evidence to this claim. Maybe there's something I'm not getting because it just looks like typical group fighting to me. Political groups use strong language and often are quick to criticize other groups who are not aligned to a goal in the way that they are aligned (including wanting similar high level outcomes but through different means). I watched the Shellenberger Fox news link that they provided. More than half is Tucker on his typical idiotic rant then Shellenberger saying things that are like 70% true but out of context. Can't tell if he's just an idiot that doesn't grasp what "the nerds" are telling him or malicious (often difficult).
For the fossil fuel funding claims, I didn't dig in but I'll say that I actually wouldn't be surprised. These companies have a long history of funding several environmentalist groups. They had a history of funding Sierra Nevada Club[0] to promote anti-nuclear sentiment (this was highly successful btw). But the story here is actually more complicated than it would seem at first glance. I do think the Sierra Nevada Club members and even leaders (mostly) had good intentions and did believe that they were acting in the best interest of the environment. The same is probably true about the above group. But to see why this may be true we need to ask who benefits the most if you have differing groups that are concerned with reaching 0 emissions fighting one another? Fossil fuels. They are the current de facto solution to energy and unfortunately momentum is a powerful force. They've gladly promoted this war. (It's also not like they don't often try to paint themselves green. They fund plenty of green campaigns and even carbon scrubbing technologies. This is done for PR but those groups still get money. Kinda like filming yourself giving the homeless food and putting it on youtube. You get rich but the homeless probably (?) did get more food than they would have otherwise. The ethics is complicated here even if it is clear you're not a saint)
The fossil fuel industry wants us to think that the conversation is "renewables vs nuclear" instead of "renewables + nuclear vs renewables alone to fight fossil fuels". Moreso, they want us to think that energy can be acquired homogeneously. They both fund the nuclear bro idiots that want a 100% nuclear grid (ludicrous notion) as well as the renewable bros that think solar + batteries are going to work well in major cities that have weeks with no sun. Neither of these groups are listening to the real scientists working on this shit. These same scientists will even tell you that this is a complicated issue and they may not even know the full answer themselves but are working as a community to solve this. Why? Because climate change is the most complicated threat humans have ever faced and unfortunately no singular person has enough expertise to answer half these questions accurately (though can have relatively good accuracy). The honest to god truth is that while we have our stupid uninformed quibbling online we aren't actively building out zero carbon solutions and the fossil fuel industry not only continues but grows because our energy needs also do. The honest to god truth is that the scientific community generally just says "let's just not take nuclear off the table. We'll use renewables where they best fit and nuclear is a good option if/when there are gaps to fill." While we quibble the threat grows[1] and the cost to turn back balloons.
[1] There have been grounds made and we're not actually on the "business as usual" trajectory, but we are still not building nearly fast enough. Carbon neutral isn't enough, we need to be carbon negative. A much tougher goal. The truth here is that even to reach net zero we're going to have to learn how to scrub chemicals from the atmosphere and oceans. Emissions are far more than vehicles and energy, and many of these are more difficult to decarbonize.
Shellenberger is such a hack it's hard to stomach, it's a shame that he went full throttle into the tedious IDW culture wars rather than doing something useful with his time.
That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the areas around them are contaminated.
If you want to use this as an argument for the safety of nuclear waste disposal, you would have to explain why the armed force's problems with waste disposal are specific to them and will never spread to regulated private industry. (P.S. the history of that is not great either and you might end up arguing that something which has already happened never will.)