There is a really unfortunate assumption about nuclear baked into the engineering mindset -- and this piece is a perfect example of an engineering mindset.
All complex technologies are really best understood as socio-technical systems. They depend on people and machines, data and economics, and, in the case of nuclear, especially fickle things like geopolitics and warfare. It's all about unknown unknowns, and not the engineering kind.
If it weren't for the unknown unknowns we are going to face in the 21st century from climate change alone (and not just the first order effects, but the second and third order effects on economics and geopolitics, which are basically unknowable), nuclear might make sense. But we have cheaper (solar PV + storage is cheaper, soon others will be too) and safer alternatives.
The easy test is this: if a country has a currency crisis, a coup, two back to back 1000-year storms, another pandemic, or any number of other major events, and the plant gets damaged and nobody shows up to work for a month, is everything going to be fine? Will someone break in and steal something dangerous? Will something dangerous leak out? With modern renewables the cost is low, the tail risk is basically zero, and the power is compatible with hard times.
Solar and storage get cheaper as they scale because they are highly iterable simple technologies with low consequences of failure. Solar has gotten cheaper by 15% compounded over the last 30 years. Batteries are getting cheaper by ~20% per year for the last 20 years. This trend is likely to continue.
Nuclear does not enjoy the benefit of scalability because it is complex, highly regulated, and the risks associated with failure are large.
Neither is nuclear. And solar PV is vastly easier to scale up. The peak rate of fission power plant nameplate capacity construction was ~1985 and at that peak rate it would take something like 60 years to build what is needed globally.
You can't "scale up" the frequency and regularity of sunny days in a year, the weather is beyond your control. In contrast, nuclear fission is one of the most predictable physical processes known to science; you just need to build the plants.
I think we're going to end up looking back on the last 50 years as a lost half-century for nuclear energy. It's unequivocally the safest, cleanest, most abundant and zero-carbon energy source we have. With seawater extraction, it qualifies as renewable.
Chernobyl was an awful incident no doubt, but the USCEAR report shows that it killed about 4000 people over the full course of time. Meanwhile, the US reliance on coal currently kills 25,000 people per year. The next-worst nuclear accident of all time, Fukushima, killed either 0 or 1 person. The next, Three Mile Island killed exactly zero.
We've surely lost millions of lives globally over the last 50 years thanks to sticking to coal when we could have just moved huge quantities of power generation over to nuclear.
In terms of cost, the reality is that a renewable + storage grid is still more expensive that nuclear power is today, let alone has been for the last 50 years.
I agree coal's terrible, but death isn't the best way to compare. I think a better indicator is insurance cost. Nuclear power gets a major subsidy from the federal government via the Price-Anderson Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
The basic upshot is that nuclear power was not seen as economically viable if operators had to buy insurance to cover actual risk. The federal government (meaning taxpayers) pay everything above the $15 billion mark. Fukushima's cleanup cost is still unknown, but estimates went from $13 billion to $96 billion to $187 billion. If nuclear power is as safe as you say, then they shouldn't need these kinds of subsidies.
Going further, between American business culture and American regulatory culture, I have real concerns about our ability to safely and economically operate nuclear plants. Is a nuclear plant really compatible with a reward system that prioritizes short-term cash extraction? Where it isn't, can we really count on regulators to keep things safe without drastically inflating costs? Looking at the recent spate of bank failures leaves me with a lot of questions there.
Thats only because coal (and oil/gas) have gotten a bye on their externalized societal costs. If you held them to the same standards, the insurance companies would shut them down tomorrow.
Sure, and I'm all for removing that subsidy too. Let's start with a carbon tax, for example, and then we can move on to taxes for other pollutants. But having made that mistake with coal is no reason to make it again for nuclear power.
> Fukushima's cleanup cost is still unknown, but estimates went from $13 billion to $96 billion to $187 billion. If nuclear power is as safe as you say, then they shouldn't need these kinds of subsidies.
Insuring long tail risk is really, really hard to do and is likely to be very overpriced in the market.
It's certainly hard to do. Which means you can't declare it overpriced, in that to know something is overpriced, you have to know a true price.
Regardless, I think nuclear power should pay its own way. I don't want to be on the hook for hundreds of billions in cleanup cost because some CEO got greedy.
> Regardless, I think nuclear power should pay its own way. I don't want to be on the hook for hundreds of billions in cleanup cost because some CEO got greedy.
In general, we do not require industries to insure for limitless, pie-in-the-sky risk. Sometimes the state is left holding the bag. Requiring infinite insurance would price every industry out of existence.
That's obviously not true, because most industries do not need special subsidies just to exist.
And the notion that Fukushima is just some sort of "pie-in-the-sky" scenario is bonkers. It is a thing that actually happened. An actual nuclear plant caused actual hundreds of billions of dollars in costs. If the best nuclear power advocates can come up with is, "Well that shit just happens, and we're sure not going to pay for it," then I think the state is better of spending its money on solar panels, wind, and other things where the downside risk is not sized like a major hurricane.
> That's obviously not true, because most industries do not need special subsidies just to exist.
What you're talking about -- requiring insurance for outsized losses -- is not something we require of most industries. A chemical plant (say, making feedstocks for solar panels) can contaminate a water table and cause tens of billions of dollars in losses, but we attempt to address this risk with front-end regulation rather than requiring insurance for uninsurable losses.
Most industries don't cause outsized losses. A chemical company that causes tens of billions in damages has to pay tens of billions of dollars or it goes out of business.
Nuclear power was given a special subsidy because nobody wanted to run the risk of running a nuclear power plant if they actually had to be on the hook for it.
I never said we should require insurance for nuclear power, although that's not a bad idea. Plenty of states do it for cars, after all, so you could make a case that it should apply to bigger things. I am just saying that nuclear power should be priced fairly, which would include removing the special liability cap for nuclear plants.
Levelized cost of energy doesn't take into account time effects, so is a poor tool to compare nuclear to intermittent energy sources like solar and wind. If you require a 99.99% guaranteed output at all times of the year, solar and wind require a prohibitive amount of storage, and significant over-provisioning. LCOE does not account for this.
This is not to say solar and wind + storage are less economical than nuclear. But LCOE is not a good measure of real costs.
In general, long distance transmission across climate zones and across diverse generation types (solar, wind, pumped hydro) along with some limited local storage gives sufficient reliability to meet those requirements.
But note that even with significant over provisioning solar and wind is still cheaper than the cheapest nuclear costs if you over-provision in the low cost, high generation areas (another argument for transmission)
There is no doubt that a mixture of over provisioning, a mix of energy sources (wind, hydro, solar), mix of storage, an extensive and resilient grid can successfully replace less-intermittent power sources. What I am interested in is what it will cost, and how that compares to nuclear.
People from both "sides" always make claims that make their preferred solution look more favorable. The non-nuclear people point at measures like LCOE which are misleading. I'm sure pro-nuclear people are doing the same thing.
Personally, I do not have a side, I just want real numbers for replacing coal/gas and getting a similar or better level of grid stability.
> But note that even with significant over provisioning solar and wind is still cheaper than the cheapest nuclear costs if you over-provision in the low cost, high generation areas (another argument for transmission)
Can you provide some sort of evidence for this claim? How much does a UHV line cost per KM? How much will it take to build out? How much storage is required? How much over-provisioning is required?
The numbers are in the OP. Low cost solar with storage is $46/MWh or $24/MWh without storage. Wind is $42/MWh with storage or $24/MWh without. Nuclear low cost is $141/MWh.
You can over provision wind (without storage) 5x or 3x with storage and still be cheaper than nuclear.
> How much does a UHV line cost per KM? How much will it take to build out?
Electrical transmission is historically $41.50/MWh/1000 miles in the US and build costs are $1502/mile.
So transmission from Kansas (high wind zone) to California would be around $1.7B.\ to build out.
Given the average cost of a nuclear power station is at last $19B[2] it's pretty easy to see how economically far ahead renewables are.
> How much storage is required? How much over-provisioning is required?
I can't find any useful modelling to on this which is pretty astonishing really.
The closest I found was [3] which is German specific, where they find around 8 potential days of every 10 years are below the low wind power events for power from on land wind farms within Germany (so no offshore and no transmission) using 40 years of data.
The distribution of these events is more problematic: there was a 4 day lull in 1985, or 10 days with a broader definition of "lull".
You have summarized the argument for long distance transmission better than I could have!
Fortunately wind power and solar power are often seasonally reversed in many parts of the world (ie, lots of wind in winter, more solar in summer), which helps a lot too. See for example wind levels in the North Sea[1] where there is the most wind in January and December, and least in July. Perfect for Nordics!
(And of course with pumped storage it is perfectly feasible to power for days or weeks off storage anyway)
Relying on only renewables and long distance transmissions introduces significant geopolitical risks and fragility.
It would be, let's say, less than ideal if Europe were dependent on North Africa for their energy security.
In practical terms this would mean that large countries would feel the need to establish military control over critical energy production areas.
Energy security is no laughing matter in the Nordics. In the winter, without power, people die.
Even if the political and operational risks are acceptable, building long distance transmission is no simple matter. Everybody knows that more transmission lines are needed between Norway, Sweden and Finland, but regardless no real progress has been made. Heck, Sweden can't even manage to connect their north and south regions!
The vagaries of weather and the requirement for redundancy would require significant over-investment in generation capacity and long distance transmission networks.
Looking at averages in weather and wind is also very myopic. Power generation is instantaneous, so you have to look at sustainable base load. But the question is, can wind sustain any kind of base load since it is so variable?
On Saturday wind production was down to 53 MW in Finland, less than 2% of peak production. And that wasn't even the lowest this month. What are you going to do, build 100x more wind power? And even if you do, you are only producing less than 20% of total power required to power the country, so it's more like you need 500x more wind power.
Since you cannot do base load with wind power, nuclear is off the table, what are you going to do? Hydro power?
You cannot run off hydro power for days or weeks since the generation capacity just isn't there. For the Nordics, Denmark has no hydro, Finland only has about 20% of generation capacity and Sweden has about 45%. Norway is the only country that can run off hydro and Iceland is a very far away.
This means you are back to peaker plants. Say bye-bye to zero carbon emissions.
So all this brings us back to the questions, are renewables really a realistic and cost effective option compared to nuclear?
BTW, I don't think LCOE is misleading. It's true that you need to localize it depending on the exact circumstances of a particular place, but it's a pretty reasonable general measurement.
The way LCOE is calculated, it does not provide any indication of how stable the source it. Solar doesn't work at night, it has significant seasonal swings in output. Wind has similar ups and downs.
Stability of output is a very important (and valuable) characteristic of a power source, and it is completely ignored in the LCOE calculation.
One major thing going for nuclear is that is has a stable and consistent output. It's great that solar and wind beat all options on a $$ when you ignore time effects. But if stability is important (and many argue it is), then solar and wind rely on masses of storage, overprovisioning, and extensive upgrades to the transmission network, then let's bring those into the discussion and do a fair comparison.
4-9's of uptime doesn't match my lived experience in the US, that's one days worth of power outage every 10000 days, or about once every ~30 years. 2-9's is closer to what civilians in the US are used.
The over provisioning could be considered more of a feature than a bug, offering new economic periods where the marginal energy cost of production go negative at times.
That's fine. 4-9's was just an number I pulled out of my ass, and it wasn't really my point. My point is that when talking about energy sources, LCOE is not a good measure as it doesn't take into account things like reliability over time (whatever your target reliability is).
Over-provisioning has a cost. If it is required to achieve characteristics required to do a like-for-like comparison, it should be accounted for.
The problem with these Nuclear conversations is that people are pushing their preferred option, always without coming to some sort of agreement on what the requirements are for the power generation option. Without agreeing on what needs to be achieved, everyone talks past each other, arguing with straw-man solutions.
OK great, then we agree that the current administration should enforce the UFLPA and seize most solar panels which are attempting to be imported into the US.
Oh. A private financial think tank that grossly underestimate the cost of storage when solar/wind investment actually can yield 10% ROI in some country.
It's hard to argue they underestimate the costs when they have costed, deployments listed you can check that back up the costs. See page 21 and 22 of the linked PDF.
But if you choose not to believe them there are numerous other sources that give the similar numbers.
None of those sources has any relevance to the bottom line accounting cost of large scale utility storage for intermittent renewable energy. You presumably have to over provision both storage and baseline power generation to assure the grid of enough reliability. The assumptions you make in doing that drive the cost of the entire solution.
Lazard has mostly ignored those costs when it tries to come up with a LCOE for intermittent renewables. A real world grid operator can't ignore those costs. To take a real world example, Germany requires dramatic subsidies to build out its renewable energy portfolio. These subsidies occur at every level of electricity grid. There is no simple way to untangle the costs and come up with a single number that can be compared to non-intermittent sources of energy. The share of biomass in the German grid is strongly suggestive of the fact that renewable energy isn't cost competitive without significant subsidies.
There is no free lunch, decarbonizing energy generation requires more expensive sources of energy.
There is not a single line mentioning the effect it would have on lithium (or vanadium) price and supply if this would be adopted at grid scale.
Which of course, like common sense would say (irony), would stay perfectly flat or decreasing when it already struggle to match the supply for EV which is two order of magnitude inferior to what would be needed.
Which make me back to my point: Yes, this is oriented garbage done by people that has financial interest in what they are selling.
I get very tired of pro nuclear posts that ignore entirely the legitimate downside of nuclear energy. It's the only energy generation which has made an entire city uninhabitable. An please enough with the "this could never happen again with modern reactors" nonsense, as if all possible outcomes can be anticipated.
Nuclear energy is hardly the only power source that has made an entire city uninhabitable. The Banqiao dam failure flooded 30 cities and affected over 10 million people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
And we're not even considering the effects of global warming here. Sure, nuclear has risks, but our civilization needs energy and nuclear has proven to be one of the least risky ways to produce it.
This is a complex issue, no way around it, and I'm not an expert in the field. My thought in response to this is to consider the way coal, oil, copper, uranium, silicon, [...] shape human activity and culture. More specifically, I wonder about:
- major oil spills
- "mining towns," boom & bust
- generally any of the costs associated with resource extraction (copper's mined with diesel, they say)
It's complex because it's hard to tell if any of us are making apples-to-apples comparisons in these discussions (broadly). And...
I hope we figure it out before our current energy generation makes an entire planet uninhabitable.
Nuclear power plants still heat up cooling water (like coal plants), causing damage like killing thousands of fish in rivers in France recently. This is a real problem. And also water is getting too hot to cool plants.
How do do you think we harness the heat from a coal fired plant? We boil water! The steam turns a turbine and then the water is cooled in a tower and then expelled.
Nuclear replaces the first step, heating the water. The other steps are the same.
If you need guaranteed power at any time of day, fossil fuels and nuclear can provide that, solar and wind can't – while batteries can smooth over the intermittency, the amount of battery storage required to provide the same power availability as a coal or nuclear plant is cost-prohibitive. So, if we are comparing apples to apples, coal plants vs nuclear is a legitimate comparison, wind and solar aren't.
Pumped hydro does better than batteries, but building new dams causes massive ecological damage, and in some parts of the world fresh water is a rather scarce resource. The heated water from a nuclear power plant arguably does less environmental damage overall than a big new dam does.
Warm water is an easy fix though, while the substantial pollutants and global warming from fossil fuels are not. Every time this topic comes up I encourage people to look at The Oregon Garden - all the water that cycles through The Garden is treated city waste water that, after being zapped with UV light to sanitize it, is too warm to reintroduce directly to the water system. So it is pumped up to The Garden where it filters through a man-made wetlands system, cools down, and then goes back in to a natural stream. This wetlands system is also teaming with plants and animals. It’s pretty awesome.
1. Because they were not built with cooling by evaporation tower; easily remediable.
2. How do you think other thermal powerplants (gas, coal, ...) work? They, too, need to heat water and dispose of it afterwards, so that's definitely not nuclear-specific.
It's pretty ironic how this article talks about how new designs are unsafe and yet commentators here are saying how much safer new designs are:
> The Europeans at the WNA Symposium were talking proudly of how their latest reactor design, with its core catcher and superior leak-tight containment, is safer than the current plants’ designs. This is wrong in concept. Adding provisions to solve a nonproblem merely provides additional potential paths to failure.
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by human idiocy.
There are still a few reactors of the same design as Chernobyl, generating power today.
These reactors have not exploded. Simply because they follow strict procedure.
Fukushima was a consequence of continuous cost cutting by management. It was fully preventable, and construction of improvements even started! They were cancelled due to "cost".
Onagawa Nuclear Powerplant survived the same earthquake and tsunami, despite being closer to the epicenter.
An analogy: All planes are dangerous because a human can push a red button, or cut costs and crash the airplane.
Nuclear Power has the same issue stemming from human idiocy and incompetence. This can be fixed, if only politics and MBAs got out of the way.
I think we should have been building nuclear plants as fast as possible for the last 50 years or so.
But does anyone foresee a modern America with a regulatory or financial environment that will allow for controversial projects that take decades to pay off? I don’t.
Onward to solar and wind. You can install it on your own house, and it doesn’t make the nightly news if somebody falls off their roof and dies while installing solar.
As for the second Fukushima. Look at France. They are IMO one of the best examples of well regulated and managed nuclear power.
You will find mentions of maintenance recently, but this I because COVID delayed scheduled maintenance. (No one wanted the older specialized engineers catching COVID)
Just 3 years later in Japan, an incident occurred where zero people died attributable to the fact the plant was nuclear. As of last year, they're back on the nuclear train. [1]
What's so interesting about this is that it wasn't radiation that had the biggest direct effect here (like most would assume), even the CDC and WHO recognizes this, it was the social after effects of having zero systems in place to support safe relocation.
Let that sink in, after a nuclear disaster (and two MAJOR natural disasters), the most devastating impact of living in the area was having to live in underfunded temporary housing and the stigma of being viewed as "contaminated".
This is something every society needs a solution for. It's not just about nuclear, natural disasters happen all the time and the best system we have in place is "leave". We can do so much better. This is another instance where improving temporary public housing isn't "just for homeless people", it's for everyone.
1 direct death from the nuclear incident, 2313 deaths due to the mental and physical stress of evacuation required partially due to the incident (there was an earthquake and tsunami ofc, but the evacuation zone was broader because of the nuclear incident), per official Japanese numbers.
> The year after the 2011 disaster, the Japanese government estimated that 573 people had died indirectly as a result of the physical and mental stress of evacuation.17 Since then, more rigorous assessments of increased mortality have been done, and this figure was revised to 2,313 deaths in September 2020.
> No one died directly from the disaster. However, 40 to 50 people were injured as a result of physical injury from the blast, or radiation burns.
Since then one worker has died of lung cancer, and that is likely attributable. So zero or one death for the second worst civilian nuclear power incident in history.
It's very likely that area would have had to be evacuated one way or another, no? I think it's far more fair to attribute those 2313 deaths to the tsunami and earthquake.
If it was a coal plant, I don't think anyone would have been attributing 'stress deaths' to coal. Ditto any other kind of industrial or chemical plant that may or may not have been on that land.
The issue seems to have been a failure to properly safely evacuate people from an industrial zone.
Again the evacuation zone was larger due to the nature of the plant, so yes it caused more stress, to more people than a similar incident in a coal plan would have.
It still is an exceptional incident and it is a ridiculously small death toll compared to the "normal" operation of coal plants yearly death toll... but it isn't a reason to minimize the numbers. As for the 1 direct death, I was referring to this part of my source:
> In 2018, the Japanese government reported that one worker has since died from lung cancer as a result of radiation exposure from the event.
Going by the official statement, I let them do the judging, they don't really have an interest in over-reporting as far as I know.
> Again the evacuation zone was larger due to the nature of the plant, so yes it caused more stress, to more people than a similar incident in a coal plan would have.
Do you have data for that? Or as compared to some other chemical or industrial plant?
Again, I think this just has to do with a failure to have an adequate evacuation plan, not the specific land use.
For Fukushima the evac zone was 20km around the plant. A similar scenario in the US would see a 50 miles (80km) radius evac zone recommended by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (at least the the time of it happening in Japan: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-evacuations-... ).
I don't think I have ever heard of such large zones for other industrial disasters, the estimatated maps I've seen for Bhopal, one of the if not the worst industrial chemical disaster ever, had a radius for the gas spread of about 7km (and it killed a lot more people really quickly). It is of course annecdotal, but each disaster has its own circumstances: wind, water/soil contamination, etc. that impose different measures to take... but in general nuclear disasters have a much wider radius for the fallout, that's why the security/processes for it are way more demanding and generally successfully applied.
But the main point was that we can't discount these risks and their results (deaths) when a disaster happened, as rare as they are (thankfully). They are part of it, and counting these deaths is just honest, as I said other sources of energy in the course of their "normal" operation kill way more people and destroy our environment in the process. It's a no-brainer to choose nuclear power over them.
...an old, deprecated design which had been mismanaged was struck by both an earthquake and a tidal wave, and no one died from the power plant failing.
Meanwhile, coal kills tens of thousands every year from pollution, windmills kill engineers and maintenance workers, and shoddy solar installs and battery banks set fire to buildings.
Nuclear is far from perfect, but Fukushima is a terrible example of the dangers of nuclear power.
But all nuclear power plants get old - it's the only way they can make the huge up front costs work.
And it seems every single technology proposed by nuclear advocates is rapidly deprecated. Notably replacement designs are almost all completely experimental.
A lot of why they're "experimental" is that large industrialized countries (especially but not exclusively the United States) decided to stop making them long enough for multiple generations of theoretical designs to pass by.
A single nuclear power plant will in no way make Europe uninhabitable. Not to say that it's okay if they do, but it's not the doomsday scenario you propose.
I’ve always wondered why not put an obscene amount of nuclear power underground in the deserts of Nevada and then distribute that across the west coast and maybe even middle America?
I guess the physics of power loss make it uneconomical?
The transmission isn't the problem, extracting the energy from the reaction is the problem. Nuclear plants are mostly located near abundant water because the water is a key component of the energy extraction.
Modern nuclear technologies are actually very safe.
Leveraging an alternative model about eight years ago, this plasma generates its own magnetic fields, avoiding the multi-billion magnet infrastructure required by Tokomak. This plasma stays "lit" almost indefinitely with less than 280 watts of power input.
No. Looks like no peer-reviewed papers. No prototype that is independently verified. Considering their extraordinary claims no evidence can be found. If that thing works and can be independently verified it's Nobel prize territory.
That's a fusion (as opposed to fission 0 discussed in this article) reactor . Once that becomes economically viable it's pretty interesting. It remains a way off though.
Fukushima was neither best precautions nor best designs. And, as multiple posters have said, still far fewer fatalities, and less environmental damage, than any fossil fuel.
All complex technologies are really best understood as socio-technical systems. They depend on people and machines, data and economics, and, in the case of nuclear, especially fickle things like geopolitics and warfare. It's all about unknown unknowns, and not the engineering kind.
If it weren't for the unknown unknowns we are going to face in the 21st century from climate change alone (and not just the first order effects, but the second and third order effects on economics and geopolitics, which are basically unknowable), nuclear might make sense. But we have cheaper (solar PV + storage is cheaper, soon others will be too) and safer alternatives.
The easy test is this: if a country has a currency crisis, a coup, two back to back 1000-year storms, another pandemic, or any number of other major events, and the plant gets damaged and nobody shows up to work for a month, is everything going to be fine? Will someone break in and steal something dangerous? Will something dangerous leak out? With modern renewables the cost is low, the tail risk is basically zero, and the power is compatible with hard times.