> “With the goal of completing the decommissioning in 30 to 40 years [...]"
Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning towards success:
- ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less safely sitting in steel enclosures
- we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may only (ahem) take a couple generations
- OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to the environment...?
The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.
The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere.
Meanwhile, the precious fuel remained safely entombed within the concrete and steel vessel that was designed to contain it. Without cooling, the fuel got hot ("decay heat") and melted, always safely enclosed within the vessel.
Unfortunately, during attempts to cool the fuel in the aftermath of the earthquake, some radioactive fission products were released into the environment: caesium, iodine, xenon, etc. These fission products have been diluted and are harmless. See the section "Radionuclide release" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
How much harm did the radioactive fuel cause? Quoting Wikipedia:
No adverse health effects among non-worker Fukushima
residents have been documented that are directly
attributable to radiation exposure from the accident,
according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on
the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
Insurance compensation was paid for one death from lung
cancer (4 years later), but this does not prove a causal
relationship between radiation and the cancer.
Six other persons have been reported as having developed
cancer or leukemia. Two workers were hospitalized because
of radiation burns, and several other people sustained
physical injuries as a consequence of the accident.
The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.
This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").
Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.
It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.
It could be reprocessed for use in a breeder reactor, but breeders are not attractive at present or foreseeable uranium prices. They make the expensive part of nuclear power (capital costs) even more expensive to save money on the part that doesn't cost much at all (making fuel from mined uranium). If nuclear power expanded drastically then breeders might be more affordable than exploiting really marginal uranium sources, but otherwise they make the economics of nuclear power worse.
Yeah it’s all fine, it only displaced a few thousand people from their homes and made an area an uninhabitable wasteland. It’s only going to cost ~$500 billion in total for cleanup[0]. Nevermind the capital loss from the destruction of the power plant itself. Nuclear is definitely a great idea.
Sarcasm aside, it's extremely frustrating when deaths are the only dimension people use to compare with other electricity sources. You can't just put on a blindfold and ignore all of the other factors. Just because only a handful of deaths can be directly attributed, doesn't mean nuclear isn't an absolute nightmare when it goes wrong.
The primary source for that wikipedia quote argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred.
Over 65,000 people were evacuated from the vicinity. One such death, for example, was 102 year old Fumio Okubo who lived 30 km inland and hanged himself after being forced to move for no good reason.
There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima\*, according to the government’s Reconstruction Agency, from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide; so far, there has not been a single case of cancer linked to radiation from the plant.
That is prompting a shocking reassessment among some scholars: that the evacuation was an error. The human cost would have been far smaller had people stayed where they were, they argue. The wider death toll from the quake was 15,895, according to the National Police Agency.
Of the disaster-related deaths, 1,984 were people over the age of 65.
Obtaining the amount of victims of an evacuation is difficult, and official figures are conservative for many reasons, the main one being that each victim's family obtained financial reparation (see also the "Limitations" section of a pertinent study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266676572... ).
During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ).
This is biz as usual: after a war many armchair experts, especially those acting upon one of the parties, are quite sure that "tackling this was easy". During the event, they are nowhere to be found.
It's clear that a small number of mostly older people suffered unduly from the stress of an imposed evacuation.
It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue.
Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable, due to extreme bushfires destroying every building, would the stress on the elderly be any less?
> It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue
An evacuation triggered by a nuclear major accident seems specific to nuclear to me, in the sense: if, instead of this nuclear plant, some field occupied by wind turbines or solar panels were build, there would be no need to evacuate.
> Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable
No human being can control nor counter this sort of event. We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.
> We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.
Or add passive safety measures to nuclear power plants. Fukushima failed because it was still generating too much heat, but that excessive heat couldn’t power a turbine to cool itself down.
After such an accident some armchair experts are quite sure that it "could have been easily predicted". Before the accident (to "easily" prevent it) or during it they are nowhere to be found.
I won't try to summarize here, but long story short, the conditions which led to the Fukushima disaster were well known and TEPCO was warned as early as 2000, but they did nothing to prevent it. There a number of good sources on the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Pri...).
“What happens if we lose the generators?” is not a hard question to come up with. I have a great imagination and a long career built on, among other things, asking pointed questions. I would have asked that very same question, as well as “how unlikely?” as the next one.
> We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.
That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)
No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.
So let's see :
- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).
- They don't want nuclear because politics.
- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")
- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.
The two main end results of this policy are :
- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...
Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?
Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.
No. Because Fukushima. At the end of 2010 Germany enacted a law extending the operating life of nuclear reactors. Then Fukushima happened and all political parties in Germany closed nuclear reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
Yes, coal is a disaster. Nuclear risks (major accident, waste, proliferation...) is a potential disaster.
> deaths in neighbouring countries, every year
True, and quite sad. No nation yells because each is a culprit: emissions caused by France's fossil fuels (transportation, industry...) is far superior to those of the German gridpower system. We can agree that all this is a catastrophic state of affairs. Germany's nuclear phaseout is a drop in the sea and wasn't conducted due to some whim.
> Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer
The amount of victims of past accident is controversial, therefore this is controversial.
> The source argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred.
We'll never know. Doing history fiction, a more probable outcome would be a lot of people dying by "natural causes" in the next months. We talk about places that were mostly ghost cities for a decade, for some reason.
This common discourse of "but nobody died ever by the direct impact in the left eye, of a radioactive atom called John, on a Thursday", seems a little ridiculous frankly. If we have a pool of people that died, and we dismiss all this people one by one with different tricks and shades of "can't prove, not my fault", yes, of course, "nobody" died.
And Santa Cancer doesn't exist, is the parents.
They know that is false, we also know that is false, and they know that we know it, so what's the point of keeping saying that?
There is a pool of people who definitely died. That's not in dispute.
What is questionable, as you point out, is the application of different tricks and shades of "can't prove, must be nuclear" to claim all deaths in the pool as a direct result of nuclear.
As others have pointed out there are similar yearly figures for tenuous "coal deaths" as there are here for seven years of post disaster "evacuation deaths".
Invasive cancer statistics in Japan were compiled for the Fukushima Cancer Registry database and published by the National Cancer Center Japan.
If we review average annual percent change on Thyroid cancer incidence, there was a more or less stable value between 2008 and 2011. Then in 2012 there is a sudden increase of 10,8% on Fukushima, versus a 3,7% for the whole Japan in the same year [1]. Some increase is normal in a population that is growing and aging but a jump, not so much.
We even have a control population: The Tochigi prefecture (at the South of Fukushima and bordering it). This landlocked prefecture has a big industrial complex, including a strong sector of X-ray machines makers. Tochigi has the lower increase on Thyroid cancer of the three between 2011 and 2012 (3,2% increase). [1]
The death ratio didn't changed, but people that is diagnosed with cancer does not die immediately, so just looking for mortality increase that year is a deceptive measure.
So, something happened in 2012 that increased Thyroid cancer on Fukushima more than in the rest of Japan.
Lets assume that we forget all about the elephant in the room, and past experiences where radioactivity accidents typically increased thyroid cancers. How would you explain that? Any alternative hypothesis?
-----------------
[1] Shibata A, Saji S, Kamiya K, Yasumura S. Trend in Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Fukushima From 2008 Through 2015. J Epidemiol. 2021 Dec 5;31(12):653-659
(The article covers only up to 2015 to remove artifacts from 2016 when the way to report cancer changed, causing another increase on the registers).
> So, something happened in 2012 that increased Thyroid cancer on Fukushima .. How would you explain that?
The obvious answer would be that radioactive iodine-131 entered the food chain and that strontium-90 also was being ingested by dairy cattle and was being concentrated (biologically magnified) in cow’s milk.
As demonstrated in Australia by Hedley Marston.
This seems unrelated to what was being discussed .. the direct attribution of deaths amoung the excavated cohort to nuclear causes.
It is a bit strange that we don't see death counts from other evacuations. It is not that uncommon to see mass evacuations from flooding, like the one we had in Europe this year or 2021, but its only death caused directly by the flooding that get reported. There the recurring hurricanes in the US and the also recurring evacuations when it happens. Taking a more direct 1:1 example, the Oroville Dam crisis in California evacuated 20,000 more people than Fukushima and to my knowledge there isn't any official numbers on attributed deaths.
A key difference is that an evacuation triggered by a major nuclear accident could have been avoided (typically: by building renewables instead of a nuclear plant).
> Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?
This is a matter of debate. During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ). The extent of the implemented evacuation was considerably inferior. Nowadays, after the battle, according to some pro-nuclear no evacuation was necessary.
The Oroville Dam crisis could have been avoided if the power plant did proper maintenance on the dam, and the power plant management was found as being the primary cause of the accident. Dams are in general man made and maintain multiple nuclear bombs in terms of energy in potential, which need to be handled with care. The crisis had as much to do with the weather as Fukushima had to do with earthquakes.
Much of the damage caused by natural events can be avoided with proper planning and prevention, but they cost money. Most natural defenses against extreme weather are also removed in order for developing land or extracting natural resources.
> handled with care
> proper planning and prevention
I agree. Everyone can fail. Letting very dangerous tiny material undetectable without a complex equipment and active for years getting out then be dispersed on huge areas by wind/rain/... is a nuclear exclusive. Moreover the most risky type of renewables (dams) has more inertia (it cannot trigger an accident in mere minutes, it is more robust). As we now have industrial renewables there is no reason to deploy nuclear anymore.
How can you claim that there wasn't a single victim when they evacuated 180,000 people (including hospital inpatients and elderly people)? If we use the same evacuation-to-death ratio as Fukushima, the Oroville Dam crisis caused 2416 deaths. In addition it should have costed the government hundreds of millions in evacuation costs, repairs of infrastructure, and lost revenue because of damages cause by the spillway.
Oroville: no radiation, no panic. The evacuation started on February, 12 and people were back home 2 days later. Moreover such event in the USA in 2017 caused deaths and nobody took note?
To add to your point. Disposal of nuclear waste at sea was common up until 1993. There is still a couple hundred thousand tons of such waste sitting in the ocean right now. In addition, about 214 times as much radioactive material was generated by nuclear testing than the Chernobyl breach. Fukushima wouldn't even come close to the waste that has already been released prior to the 1994 ban on Oceanic dumping.
While intuitively dumping nuclear waste on the ocean seems like a terrible idea, if one actually does a cost benefit analysis of dumping glassed and cannistered nuclear waste on the abyssal plane it becomes tricky to find downsides.
The ocean already contains a billion tons of uranium and is mildly radioactive, the cannister and components are far too heavy to float or get carried much by currents, water is a fantastic radiation blocker (a few meters away and you're quite safe) and carries away exces heat and there's almost no life on the abyssal planes.
I really should get around to properly writing up all the details and background knowledge in a blog post at some point... (the above is missing a lot, including references, common objections and numbers)
We could just trash it between two tectonic plates, so it gets eaten up by earth. It will take some time, but it would be perfectly safe. Somewhere very deep in the ocean.
> That we dumped so much crap into the ocean a little more won’t hurt?
Something I found out recently was that the city of Brussels discharged raw sewage into the rivers until 2007. This from a wealthy city at the heart of the European project.
Radioactive waste disposal is seldom paired with a cost-benefit analysis. Perhaps this is because the benefits are harder to quantify.
Does anyone know how many lives will be saved by spending an estimated 4.7B EUR to commence retrieval of the low and intermediate level waste from the Asse II mine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
4.7B EUR could provide humanitarian aid to many around the world, saving lives and enabling yet more to more fully reach their potential.
Everyone has consistently treated mining waste as an unavoidable side effect of mining, which only economical solution is to dig a whole in the ground and put it there. The only minimum standard that get enforced is that the waste should not leak into the ground water.
> The only minimum standard that get enforced is that the waste should not leak into the ground water.
In the case of the Asse II mine it is not clear how strongly connected the water at the mine is to water at the surface. Given it is a salt mine I would not expect a strong connection.
> Everyone has consistently treated mining waste as an unavoidable side effect of mining
Yes, there are better and worse ways to dispose of it. Tailings are a huge problem and have caused many a dam disaster. Plainly Difficult Youtube channel dam disasters makes for sobering viewing. https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/playlists
And then you have to read about how expensive nuclear is today compared with a few decades ago because of the excesive regulations. Regulations that pro-nuclear usually want to relax, to make nuclear more economically viable.
No wonder that dumping nuclear waste to river and oceans is cheaper than having to safely store it for at least a couple of centuries.
Regulations don’t change the cost that much. Yes, you can save money by not having a containment vessel around your nuclear reactor but that’s a major risk which has inherent costs. On net it’s cheaper to have that containment than not irregardless of regulations.
Dig into the rising costs, and you find root causes like 3 mile island showing the industry it needed to increase maintenance spending. It wasn’t some arbitrary overreaction but simply the damage accumulated enough to cost a billion+ dollar asset. Thus much of that “increased” spending is simply asset preservation.
Most of the regulations nuclear proponents want relaxed are around plant construction, not waste disposal. The older generations of western nuclear plants have a strong track record. The justification for regulation need to be weighted against the damage of continued carbon emissions due to higher plant costs.
Rivers are a bad idea because they change course, get dredged, dammed, etc. Into the ocean is best, preferably somewhere deep and remote (simply to reduce the risk of people messing with it.) Deep trenches that would fuck with fish nets anyway are a good place for it.
Sure, but who defines "remote"? We've explored a small percentage of the ocean [1] and most of the places we have explored we've been surprised to find life. In fact NOAA estimates that 91% of species in the ocean have yet to be classified [2]. We'd be dumping what is basically a forever chemical into places that we don't understand.
If we can't responsibly keep track of the waste we're producing then we shouldn't produce it. I'm pro-nuclear, and I think we can do it, but we need to be the kind of civilization that can plan beyond the next quarter first.
Also, there’s the Godzilla factor you’d need to consider. It’s cheap to dump radioactive material near a deep-ocean vent until something decides to grow and destroys Tokyo. Again.
Now, seriously, screwing with ecosystems we know nothing about is a very bad idea, even if for no other reason than we being unable to study them after we turn them into radioactive deserts.
Yes. We've dumped tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste into the ocean, with no observed ill effects. This is very strong evidence that another 900 tons will have no effect either.
I don't think that's how it works. For all we know, in ten years, parts of the Atlantic Ocean could become uninhabitable by marine life due to radioactive plumes. Or not. The history of radioactive waste disposal is very short. Dumping further could exacerbate future problems. That's kind of why we banned it.
Personally I think deep bore hole disposal in geologically inactive regions makes the most sense.
The areas around the nuclear waste disposal sites are monitored for radioactivity. Radiation drops to ambient levels very sharply. Radioactive material decays over time - it'll get strictly less radioactive as time goes on.
Radiation levels at such sites generally drops due to dilution. As we have seen in the case of other wastes like mercury and dioxins, you can get bioaccumulation of this waste in the food chain causing environmental damage.
Spending nearly 1/6th of Japan's GDP to clean up 0.45% of the nuclear waste dumped into the ocean is worth consideration. If the earthquake had happened 20 years earlier (nothing on tectonic timescales) this wouldn't be up to much discussion.
If you were to commit such a large amount of cash - a reparation for the disaster - would you spend it all on this?
Do you mean that the Fukushima nuclear accident dumped locally in a few days 0.45% of all dumped nuclear waste during the last ~80 years?"?
If so it seems non-negligible to me.
> 20 years earlier (nothing on tectonic timescales) this wouldn't be up to much discussion
Not sure about this. Maybe ~50 years ago, and even so the accident at Three Mile Island (1979) didn't pollute much but triggered quite a bunch of discussions.
> would you spend it all on this?
Yes, because there is no other realistic way: it is about losing citizens' trust and having to cope with other nations' claims, whatever the real risk.
Associations of women were created to periodically measure radioactivity in various areas! In Japan! No government exposed to such distrust can decide to ignore it. A stain was made, it has to be cleaned.
Nukes, as with rockets, are complex. Many things have to go right and keep going right for them to operate as intended.
(See Rickover's "Paper Reactors" paper for a similar take on this.)
Another factor that contributed not only to Fukushima but other inundations following the Tohoku earthquake was that in response to the megathrust-fault slip, the east coast of Japan sank about a meter lower.[1] Engineers building seawalls failed to take this into account, as I understand.
I'd first realised that such quakes could lower land on the continental plate of megathrust faults when looking over satellite imagery of Banda Aceh after the 2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami. Regions along the coast were flooded long after the tsunami had passed, which I realised must have come from a lowering of the land itself.
Seattle and the Pacific Northwest may face similar issue should their Big One occur eventually.
There are a number of cheap-as-dirt things that could have been done to prevent the disaster. Putting the generators on a platform was one. Venting the hydrogen outside instead of inside, another. Having emergency repair parts on site is a third. Having a gravity-fed way to cool the reactors with external water, a fourth.
If you were a Japanese tax payer, would it be a success ?
The total cleanup costs were estimated to be between 50.5 and 71 trillion yen ($470 to $660 billion). For the cleanup, only 184.3 billion yen was reserved in the September supplementary budget of prefecture Fukushima, and some funds in the central government's third supplementary budget of 2011.
> What technologies are Japanese companies developing here,
Do you think the technology already exists off the shelf already?
> does the tax payer get any of that privately held revenue back in return?
Japan's taxpayers also happen to be Japanese people employed in these companies, so they get their share of that revenues. And the price doesn't even account for the taxes that are paid back to the government directly.
Japanese wages are notorious for being lower that a lot of the developed world and there is a problem with stagnant wage growth.
I don't think there is any need to try justify a screw up on this level as being good. Fukushima was a disaster, economically and for the image of nuclear globally.
“Desperately”, you’re a funny guy. I live in Japan, no tax payer here is sitting around going, “how wonderful the nuclear disaster was, now we’ll get all this new tech to boot”.
Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade. This was a disaster, politically, economically and environmentally. Yes some good will come from it, but ultimately, it was better off not happening. All that money could’ve and should’ve went on new and safer power plants.
1/ 'Cour des comptes' (France's supreme audit institution) established the cost of the nuclear fleet at approximately 228 billion € (2012 Report "Les coûts de la filière nucléaire"). It was contested and is probably under evaluated because some costs were paid for on various budgets (defense, scientific research...) but isn't too far fetched.
I cannot read German, Google Translated it, and could have misunderstood but could not find how those waste sites may trigger such major accident, nor about untreatable waste and one of them stores nuclear waste ("from the Greifswald nuclear power plant")!
Chemical industry also produces very dangerous waste (Seveso...), I agree. This cannot serve as an excuse for nuclear, especially as, nowadays, we know how to industrially obtain electricity from renewable sources (no major accident similar to a nuclear's one, nor such dangerous waste).
Unfortunately the two sites have no english entries in Wikipedia, I just put them there because they are the two largest, but still mostly unknown to the general population.
With the exception of the locals, who fear for them leaking into their groundwaters.
Which may be unfounded for Herfa-Neurode because that is sitting in a real stable formation, for now...
...which says nothing about larger timescales, which we are dealing with here, because much of the stuff stored there has no 'half-life', and is way nastier than anything which caused Seveso.
The other site, Ihlenberg, formerly called "Schönberg" ('nice Mountain', get it?) has a more interesting history. It's located right next to the former border between West-Germany and East-Germany, seperating them from the end of WW2 until reunification.
In those times they buried much western trash for money in rather 'hush-hush' and corrupt ways there. The nastiest ones. They were poor and needed the money. What exactly, and how much, at which position und which conditions is still unknown, and not easy to assess, because that probing would disturb the other nasty stuff which it is embedded in.
The fear there is much more founded, because it happend in rather uncoordinated ways, because of the 'hush-hushness' due to corruption, and that site is not stable. If it leaks, it has the potential to poison the whole Bay of Lübeck.
It also sits on something like a geologic fault line roughly spanning from Kiel in the Northwest to there, caused by glacial rebound of Scandinavia. Slowly and gentle for now, but one never knows, right?
That was that. As to an excuse for nuclear...
Do you really think all that oh so sustainable green shit is growing on trees?
Maybe look into so called 'superfund sites' in the USA, and how they overlap with semiconductor production sites, which also applies to solar cells. Japan should have had some of those 'oopsies', too. But probably not spoken about, because the nail that is standing out has to be hammered in, right?
Wind? How long do they last? What's with the abrasion of the (mostly the front edges) blades while they operate and the entry of those stuff in form of microplastics into the environment?
Their disposal after use?
The large fundaments they need in the form of concrete, and the OH MY GAWD ALL THAT NASTY CARBON!1!! that is causing? Not to speak of the disturbance of ground water tables, when they have to go 15 to 40 meters (or even more) deep for stability.
Geothermals? You have much of that. Why is it used so rarely?
> What's with the abrasion of the (mostly the front edges) blades while they operate and the entry of those stuff in form of microplastics into the environment?
Are you aware about the current economic and demographic situation in Japan ?
It’s not good here. That money could’ve went to a lot more useful things. Also remember this was a man made disaster. The plant was not upgraded (as recommended) to meet new safety guidelines, because, as if a mega tsunami would actually happen, right ? Then right after the event the operator was downplaying the extent of meltdown for too long. The PM had to step in and get a proper response team organised.
The Onagawa nuclear plant, albeit more exposed, resisted thanks to a single man (Yanosuke Hirai), deciding in conscience, and the Big Complicated System of Central Authority "controlling everything" failed miserably at Fukushima.
What works is local and managed by a few people, any Big Thing is a colossus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... feet of clay collapse is all the more painful. This state of affairs doesn't seem to benefit to nuclear (vs. 'renewable sources').
The Fukushima #1 meltdown was man-made, namely the absolute ineptitude of the Japanese government at the time. As disasterous as the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami were, those were not what ultimately caused the meltdown.
The government was no more or less inept than any other organisation - government or private - anywhere in the world.
When faced with pressure to save money but still deliver, weighed up against a very low risk of catastrophe in their time, they did the mental math and cut corners, found ways around the safeguarding policies previously put in place and kicked infrastructure spending down the line.
The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it’s guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years.
When the tsunami hit and Fukushima #1 lost power and was at risk of meltdown, TEPCO was ready to scuttle the reactors by dumping seawater in them. It would have rendered the reactors unusable, but meltdown would be prevented.
The Japanese government at the time, coming from the Prime Minister (Naoto Kan) himself, denied TEPCO from scuttling them because the government wanted the reactors usable. TEPCO was begging for authorization but it was not meant to be.
So what happened was the meltdown happened and the reactors became unusable anyway.
The blame was then scapegoated on TEPCO, because elite politicians surely can't and shouldn't be prosecuted for their ineptitude.
What happened at Fukushima #1 was a human failure that did not have to happen.
Bittersweet revenge was that the incumbent party at that time, the Democrat Party of Japan, lost the subsequent general election and the party subsequently fell apart.
This story has a very bad smell of urban legend/history rewriting on it. I don't say it is, but without good sources (for instance good investigative journalism by renowned journalists and backed by leaked documents) the stink doesn't go away. Just to say it "transpired" doesn't suffice. Where are the sources and references for the story you tell?
How does that refute what the parent comment was saying? Sounds like you are agreeing that the problem is not the technology but the people and processes in place.
The problem is (or at least was) with the people in political chairs playing power games. No amount of better regulations or technology can prevent fucking morons going on power trips screwing everything up and then get away with it.
The nuclear (TEPCO) people in the field were and are amazing, and it is a cardinal sin they got scapegoated for political purposes.
But that's kinda the point: name one government in the world where politicians don't play political games, sometimes in ways that put their citizens in danger. I'm sure you can't, because no such government exists.
"Everything would have been fine if it weren't for the politicians" is not a path forward. These sorts of disasters will continue to happen.
I agree, but then that should not be falsely characterized as a failure of the nuclear industry and technology. The failure was humans, and a very specific subset at that.
As we cannot avoid committing errors it seems better to prefer a way without any risk of major accident (very dangerous radioactive things, difficult to cleanup, travelling long-distance thanks to wind, rain...). No wonder renewable sources quickly gain traction.
Refusing to understand that everyone (politician or not) can fail and that if we now can replace something dangerous in case of failure (nuclear) by something new which isn't (renewables), we should do so... is the error in logic I am talking about.
Renewables can be a complement to other power sources, but to even suggest they can be a "replacement" for nuclear power indicates either naivety or ignorance.
Quantitatively this replacement is already done (renewables produce way more than nuclear) and is running (nuclear produces less and less), right now, nearly everywhere (explore using 'Change country or region'): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
You cannot separate the human equation from the technology.
As I said: "The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it’s guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years."
> should not be falsely characterized as a failure of the nuclear industry and technology. The failure was humans
Humans working in the nuclear industry are "the" nuclear industry. By definition all economical sectors are arranged around human workers. Remove each human and the industry will lose its reason to exist.
> No amount of better regulations or technology can prevent fucking morons going on power trips screwing everything up and then get away with it.
I mean. If the story is true (which I have my doubts about). Then the simple change required would have been to make it clear that TEPCO has the sole authority to decide to scuttle the reactors. The politicians could have been morons going on a power trip all they wanted, and the reactors would have been safely scuttled.
If you are a firefighter you wouldn't ask the government if you should pump gasoline or water on a fire. Why did the people managing the nuclear reactors gave the government an opportunity to choose wrong? (Or rather, why was the system set up such that it was not already clearly defined under which technical circumstances the reactor must be be scuttled.)
>why was the system set up such that it was not already clearly defined
For the simple reason that the 3/11 Tohoku Earthquake defied and rewrote essentially all the geological/maritime scientific and political expectations up to that point.
I doubt the same errors will happen today, but hindsight is 20/20.
Congratulations, you're armpits-deep in the Japanese political propaganda machine.
PM Naoto Kan infamously declared "I know nuclear!" in unilaterally ordering TEPCO around during the crisis and ultimately denying their request to scuttle the reactors. Nevermind that TEPCO had the finest nuclear engineers Japan could muster at that moment.
For his valiant achievement of causing a nuclear meltdown and turning back the clock on nuclear power for the better part of a century, PM Naoto Kan was rewarded with merely the loss of his premiership, loss of his parliament seat in the subsequent general election (regained in the same election by proportional vote), and the victim card (sympathy from guys like you).
TEPCO's engineers meanwhile got dragged through the judicial mud before they were finally cleared a few years ago, the train to repair their reputation having left the station long ago.
The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they’re reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal, trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.
61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely.
The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation in nuclear and saving the environment 2024 means acting fast. Nothing about nuclear is fast.
PS. because it automatically comes up: no, Germany could not phase out coal before nuclear because there are much more jobs connected to coal and no politician would survive such a fast exit. How important it is, can be seen from the name of the commission tasked with the coal phase out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
> 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources
Now. For years they switched to coal. Even today, Germany falls to the siren songs of the gas lobby, who promise a €1.5tn investment into gas infrastructure will be happily written off for the sake of the planet.
A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now.
For gas use electricity production is just a minor use. Most gas is consumed by industry and for heating purposes. Not enough happened in Germany in the last years electrifying them.
Here are some key events in Germany's nuclear phase-out:
1998
A coalition government includes the phasing out of nuclear power in its policy
(this was later un-done in 2009 and then redone in 2011 which is the cause of confusion).
IE. Germany got INCREDIBLY lucky that China went hard into renewables and dropped the price of them dramatically. Because they did basically replace or plan to replace all the nuclear plants with coal plants.
Man I know this. But the simple undeniable fact is - if nuclear was kept on - even less gas and coal would have been used, it's an obvious thing. Renewables did help ditching some of fossil generation, but with nuclear it would have been even more
Nuclear wasn’t completely replaced. The graphs you link to show that Germany’s electricity generation have dropped to the level it was at in the year 2000, and that’s before the last of the nuclear plants were turned off.
As a result, Germany’s industrial production is falling. Which will be great for the environment if countries who previously imported goods produced by Germany’s clean nuclear power don’t just switch to goods produced by China and South East Asia’s far dirtier electricity.
Of course, China is steadily increasing its own nuclear energy production, so it’ll end up being clean eventually, and likely sooner than us given how efficient they are.
But it’s not like we’re reducing dependency on nuclear power. It’s more like we’re trading the risk of nuclear accident in our own backyards for something else. I tend to think that the something else is the risk that the eastern world’s factories stop accepting the western world’s increasingly worthless paper money, which they’ll be in a much stronger position to do once we’re no longer able to manufacture what we need due to environmental concerns.
It's true that energy intensive industry has been hit hard in Germany. But is also true that the sector has been heavily subsidized for decades. As the carbon mining sector. That was effectively paying the energy cost of those industries with taxes.
In Spain, where we didn's shut down nuclear energy nor have oil or coal, energy intensive industry is also threatening or shutting down (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/alcoa-threatens-to-shut...). The threats are barely hidden "subsidize our costs or else...".
Indeed: if cheap (for the consumer, not for the taxpayer...) nuclear electricity was sufficient France industry would thrive. Reality: it (sadly) is dying.
Well then it sounds like they are progressing in the right direction. If in the future you get to a point where 80% of all energy is renewable and 20% are peaker plants that’s a pretty good place to be in. I’m all for nuclear but a 1 in a 1000 year event causing a nuclear spill, say by the Danube, that makes multiple countries unlivable is a pretty scary proposition. That being said, I have no idea what the state of the art is when it comes to nuclear power plants so maybe plants are very, very safe now.
This is a popular internet myth. The actual data shows that coal consumption is way down and even in the year of the shutdown the percentage of coal/gas went up by an insignificant amount.
FYI: In Germany the same companies who have nuclear reactors, have coal, gas and renewables. They do not lobby against themselves. Therefore, your "lobby" phrases do not work for Germany. You should stop repeating that. It only shows that you have not sufficient knowledge to participate in this discussion.
ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be ramped up and overused in Germany, Nuclear is safe and effective and until we actually solve the battery problem most of the world should switch to nuclear if we want to survive, Yale has tried to fit the numbers on many occasions but not even them can disagree that nuclear is required
> ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be ramped up and overused in Germany
This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been declining consistently in Germany and especially since the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.
Looks like coal usage for electricity production indeed only went up for ~3 years around 2011, probably we can consider that a mere blip within the downward trend.
Wind and solar indeed seem to pick up what nuclear used to bring to the energy mix. Gas usage is only slightly up over 30 years, which doesn’t look like it’s directly substituting nuclear — but surely it could have gone down had nuclear be kept around?
(Personally, I wish politics would have pushed harder against coal and simply ignored nuclear for a couple more decades. But political feasibility is important ofc, and I don’t know how hard of a sell that would have been in 2010.)
I don't know what would've surely happened. It's easy to think well if they did this not that all the positives would remain they'd just be better. I think life is more complicated than that.
In general what I think is people make a pariah out of Germany and its energy choices, but this is mostly based on false data, which tells me enough. The debate is riddled with false data which lead to even worse conclusions. In the end the numbers are positive and that's all what's important for me. There are better candidates for criticism when looked at individually or even globally, what the individual strategies accomplish on a global scale. So when looked at globally, the German energy transition has accomplished a ton. E.g. the 600TW of solar this year never would've happened without it, which more than offsets the 10-15GW of nuclear they switched off, most of which was past its retirement age.
While this is true they are among the worst polluters in the EU. England, Spain, France, even italy has a better CO2 balance than Germany per kWH. The amount of energy that comes from renewables is a meaningless number. The only thing that matters is how much CO2 they emit per kWH and due to their coal power plants, the number is quite bad.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Yes, Germany has a historic debt there. However, the transition is working and in 2024 Germany has used less coal than any year after 1960. Coal power usage is in a strong decline. The nuclear reactors have been more than replaced.
Texas, where new nuclear has been dead in the water for years.
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(passage from Dec. 2018 Physics Today; Texas natural gas is even cheaper than that now)
It's a system where it's more difficult for utilities to ram through uncompetitive capital intensive projects by way of capture of the state regulatory agencies. If that's "unhinged", hinge-ness is overrated.
Nearly each and every nation imports and exports, in order to optimize (better import low-cost or low-emission electricity than locally generate it thanks to some expensive and dirty plant).
my OG comment clearly stated 'this year so far'. It's also obvious imports increased if you look per month net imports 2023 vs 2024. It doesn't matter the gateway, net imports do matter. Germany net imported 20TWh in 2024 so far and that's a fact. Germany net imported a lot more from neighbor states compared to last year and again, that's a fact.
The fact which is missing here is how much money Germany made with those trades.
As the other commenter wrote: trading, transfers, etc. is normal in the EU grid. You buy cheap, you sell expensive. Just because Germany imports electricity, doesn't mean it has to. The German grid, even in its unfinished state, allows turning off power generation where it doesn't make sense financially, and they can do that fast because they don't have those slow nuclear power generators clogging up the grid.
We'll see what comes of it when the year is finished and official sources release their information. Until then, you can translate this page here from the Federal Network Agency: https://www.smard.de/page/home/topic-article/444/213848
In the last paragraphs they write on in/exports and that they've bought cheap from France and Belgium in the last quarter. Why shouldn't they? France needs to have their reactors running. They are a constant deficit on the French taxpayer. Therefore, it is cheap on the EEX.
nuclear can be turned modulated pretty fast too, look at France. We indeed should look at final year balance.
Edf indeed needs to sell as much as they can, because of arenh. Afaik it'll end in the end of 2025. "In France, alternative retailers (i.e. those who aren’t EDF) can currently secure regulated access to energy produced by EDF’s existing nuclear fleet under the ARENH mechanism. It places an obligation on EDF to sell up to 100 TWh of nuclear power annually (about 25% of its production in France) at a regulated price of €42/MWh." It's interesting how the things will turn the next year indeed and how edf will handle it's new freedom
Details: there are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...) to nuclear load-following capacity, and the very combustible status is a major parameter.
« un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
> Edf indeed needs to sell as much as they can
No. EDF always needed to sell as much as they can, even before AREHN, because maintaining a high load factor for their nuclear reactors is financially key. An idle industrial reactor is a financial disaster.
> 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely.
472g of C02 per kW/h as we speak[1]. 20 times more than France and its nuclear.
Whether the number for France is correct, is debatable. While I like the electricitymaps app, they are quite optimistic about nuclear power. But that isn't the point. The point is: Germany is strongly reducing the usage of coal. Yes, historically we have burned far too much coal, but that cannot be changed retroactively. What can and is being done is to replace coal as quickly as possible and that is happening.
Ironically there was a spike in coal usage in 2022, that was caused both by the war Russia started against Ukraine and even more so by France having to shut down too many nuclear reactors for repairs - German coal had to fill part of that gap.
Centrifuge enrichment and improved extraction techniques (high quality ore in Canada or else in-situ leaching) mean CO2 emissions are very low.
Would you care to provide references for CO2 emissions from already built nuclear power stations (preferably not the infamous StormSmith and Sovacool papers)?
Germany was the country that pushed natural gas to be defined as "green investment" in Europe. They are also building new and fresh thermal power plants to burn even more fossil fuels in the future. There is no end date to when Germany will stop burning fossil fuels.
What can be done and what is being done are miles apart. Investing into new fossil fueled power plants is not what the best thing Germany could be doing, nor is it what they should be doing. In 20 years there will be a large fleet of fossil fueled power plants and people will be again arguing that historically they burned too much of it but nothing can be done retroactively. Changing the current plans of new fossil fueled power plant would not be a retroactively change today, but it will be in 20 years.
That is not correct. Yes, we are building more gas power plants. As peaker plants to pick up the residual load. That can in theory be the total net power requirement, which is why we need many of them. However, they are not running continuously. Already today, most gas power plants are idle most of the time. Gas usage by Germany is going on a steep decline as renewables are built up and especially as heating systems are converted to heat pumps.
> Whether the number for France is correct, is debatable. While I like the electricitymaps app, they are quite optimistic about nuclear power.
They aren't “optimistic”, nuclear simply doesn't emit CO2 directly, and indirect emissions are dwarfed by direct emissions of fossils fuel plants.
> What can and is being done is to replace coal as quickly as possible and that is happening.
It has been happening for the past 13 years, and there's no end in sight. We'll be able to have the same discussion in 13 years with only marginal progress (maybe they'll be around 200g/kWh at that point if we're being optimistic…).
> and even more so by France having to shut down too many nuclear reactors for repairs - German coal had to fill part of that gap.
And so what? French nuclear has been filling the gap for defunct German nuclear for more than a decade now … And Germany could have filled this gap with coal even if they had much less regular coal use thanks to their nuclear.
The nuclear emissions seem to be optimistic in their absolute amounts - mining and producing nuclear fuel causes a lot of emissions. No one claimed it exceeds the one of fossil fuel power plants.
There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years, both because the CO2 prices have started to move the balance and also because the buildup of renewables has been accelerated again.
And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.
> mining and producing nuclear fuel causes a lot of emissions
It may cause a “lot of emissions” per kilogram of enriched Uranium, but it is very low compared to the amount of energy it produces because you really need little Uranium to produce tons of energy (that's also why all French nuclear fuel waste over 60 years of nuclear industry fit in a single room).
> There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years
This has been the narrative for the past 10 years, yet here we are. And in ten years Germany will still be producing way too much CO2 from its coal plants…
> And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.
So is France, but that doesn't mean there's no gap to fill when the wind isn't blowing…
61.5% sounds like a lot, but how much electricity is needed to replace everything that fossil fuel is now used for? I think it needs to increase to 400% or so to do that.
An EV is 85-90% efficient with power coming out of the batteries. However, the charging efficiency of the batteries is at about 80%. So the overall efficiency is 80% of 90%, or 72%.
For the sake of replacement, we should not include the charging efficiency, because the context is that of "how kuch energy the car can store" rather than "where it comes from"
It is not about how much it can store. You cannot wish away the charging losses. There are no losses to pumping gas into a tank. Nor can you wish away the losses in the charger itself. Converting AC to DC is hardly 100% efficient.
Somewhere between 2-3x the electricity consumed right now (which is way down from the peak several years ago as efficiency increases, e.g. LEDs instead of light bulbs etc.). It would be crazy expensive to build nuclear reactors to produce so much electricity, with renewables it is still quite a task, but a much more manageable one.
in fact for germany building a similar renewable output will be much more expensive. Don't forget about transmission and balancing. Needless to say Germany doesn't have an actual plan to ditch gas, even h2-ready plants will either use a mix with gas(most probably) or pure h2(if it'll even be deployed) will still have huge NOx emissions
No, the Fukushima accident was decisive. Just before, at the end of 2010, the operating life of nuclear reactors has been extended by law. The Fukushima happened and public opinion reversed, wanting an as-quick-as-possible nuclear phaseout. Not a single political party could save those reactors:
https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
Japan has (within reason) concerns other than the total cost of electricity: having to haul in coal, oil and LNG over an ocean contested by an increasingly hostile neighbor must be very worrying to them.
Money is numbers in computers, joules and watts are real things.
Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.
On the other hand, the existence of coal power proves that releasing small amounts of radiation is fine, really. So we should be able to build a lot more nuclear power plants; it would take a lot of accidents like these to match the releases from coal.
The explosion of Chernobyl released a few thousand PBq of activity. Coal contains a few tens to a few hundreds of Bq/kg. You would have to burn something like 50 times the world coal reserves (and make sure not to use any exhaust filters) in order to match the radiation release of Chernobyl.
> Coal contains a few tens to a few hundreds of Bq/kg
Presumably these are from very long-lived isotopes, so will continue to emit at this rate for the forseeable future.
In contrast, the fission products (from Chernobyl) tend to have short half lives of the order of a few days, giving a short burst of radiation. Caesium 137 looks to be the most troublesome isotope in the long term (with a half life of 30 years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...
Yet we've had Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Sellafield and many others (military ones too). Unforeseen accidents happen. Wars too, which tend to destroy safety equipment.
Artillery was fired around Zaporizhzhia when the reactors were still online, Ukraine is currently invading Russia near Kursk where two of the mad-graphite RBMK reactors are still operational today. I hope they try to avoid those when blowing stuff up. Because they don't have containment vessels.
And then see how difficult it is to clean up an accident like Fukushima where the containment mostly held. It feels like playing with fire.
I love it, we went from "it's impossible" to "it's not happening", to "it's happening but it's too early to waste money on it", to "it's happening but it's too late".
> externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.
is this the "nuclear would take 20 years" we've been hearing for the last 60?
Fukushima also released more radiation than all the coal that has ever been burned (a few hundred PBq, ignoring the thousands of PBq of Xe-133). The amount of radiation created by a nuclear power reactor is on an entirely different scale than any natural source of radiation.
Are there safer plants still, that focus on eliminating the daughter nuclei?
I understood that one benefit of molten salt reactors is that the fission products were easier to process or burn.
Edit: "MSRs enable cheaper closed nuclear fuel cycles, because they can operate with slow neutrons. Closed fuel cycles can reduce environmental impacts: chemical separation turns long-lived actinides into reactor fuel. Discharged wastes are mostly fission products with shorter half-lives. This can reduce the needed containment to 300 years versus the tens of thousands of years needed by light-water reactor spent fuel."
While I like nuclear on the paper and its theoretical env impact, this one is hard to ignore. Add costs of current projects which became ridiculous in reality. Plus as we see with various wars nuclear powerplants would be a prime target for terrorists or even state actors, they are certainly not considered as excluded from wars, in contrary.
If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.
Do pray tell calculate a world's energy system looping back while running purely on renewables, with electric powered mining, transport of ores, refining, panels production...
You will find that you cannot, cheap (for now) fossil fuels are subsidising solar panels and wind farms massively.
The mining for renewables would be a small fraction of the mining for industrial society as a whole.
So, if electrification cannot be done on this, industrial society as we know it is doomed, and nuclear cannot save it. Unless you're thinking we're going to have nuclear reactors in our mining vehicles...
On site mini reactors with directly wired machinery isn’t entirely inconceivable but would require a massive restructuring of industrial layouts and processes.
SMRs are being touted now, but (1) they aren't that small, and (2) they have to be grouped together or else fixed labor costs become unacceptable per unit of power output. The result is a collection whose power output isn't too different from conventional large reactors.
It really makes me so sad to see that some people can be so confidently so wrong.
It really does appear that believing in renewables as a way to perpetuate industrial society at scale has become part of some people's identity, and regardless of any actual study on the subject, this belief appears to be a necessity to be part of non-deplorable human society.
Nuclear reactors are a safe way to electrify as much as can be and reduce the body blows societies are going to take in the coming decades. Some industry is not doomed, and social stability can be maintained, at some cost, if and only if we use all technologies at our disposal for what they are, and calculate the risks and rewards right.
Facts are sadly unmoved by any faith, and the real path forward as painful as it may be, is only open to those that accept that they can always be wrong, and will always have to learn more.
Please pfdietz cite your sources and please prove me wrong.
I note that your polemic is long on faith in nuclear but short on the same sources you’re demanding. Perhaps you could model the standard you expect from other people by providing sources and some analysis of the very sweeping assertions you’re making.
The one specific slide about the low EROEI of solar panel is in: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJvoAm__WVtumohStkF4KwT66cS...
The 2.7 value is from 2019, as calculated for Spain, this one slide is in english. Panels have not made a x10 EROEI explosion in the past 5 years, a lot of the energy costs in that calculation are independent of panel technology improvements.
A typical game for making EROEI look bad is to expand system boundaries. That is, you say "we're paying these workers, and they're consuming products and services that use energy, so ascribe that energy use to this effort". Cast the net widely enough and all energy use in society can be included. But if you do that, EROEI converges to 1, since all energy that is produced is also consumed. And this is perfectly ok.
Elsewhere, with more reasonable boundaries, one finds EROEI is much higher, and has been found to be better than for fossil fuels. An EROEI of about 8 for PV in Switzerland, for example (and Switzerland is not the sunniest place on Earth; the EROEI would be even higher at those locations; it also becomes higher as renewable technology advances, for example with longer lifespans and thinner PV cells.)
That EROEI can't be bad should be obvious. Energy is only a small fraction of the cost of making renewable equipment. If EROEI were bad then renewables could not be as cheap as they are. That they are being sold so cheaply debunks the EROEI arguments directly.
No! China cornered the solar panel market through the use of megawatts of coal-produced electricity! Transportation for all the ores etc is not gaming the metrics.
It's certainly the case that China has been burning a lot of coal. But that doesn't mean China's PV depends on the existence of coal power to produce it. The objection here seems to be that a renewable economy is impossible because it hasn't sprung into existence fully formed.
And isn't coal responsible for all that concrete nuclear plants there are built with? The vision of a nuclear-powered world implicitly assumes concrete will produced in some other way; this is a harder task that replacing coal electricity with renewable electricity.
Where do you see a vision a nuclear powered world? No-one touts that. Look, if you have numbers, actual data, please provide it. So far all you provided pfdietz is sneer and words.
So, if the world isn't going to be nuclear powered, what is your alternative? Sticking to fossil fuels until we're in Permian-Triassic extinction 2, Electric Boogaloo?
If the world and industrial civilization are going to survive, it's either nuclear or renewables.
Why either-or? it's:
(1) a lot of sobriety
(2) any and all available technology with a well understood and well modelled risk/reward impact/scale plan
Also note that you seem to mean new-renewables (wind and solar) when you write "renewables". At this point and for a long time the large-scale and frequent renewables are hydropower and biomass, that are renewable, but are not new.
Well, my feeling it the exact mirror of that. It is you who I view as hopelessly wrong, someone who has cultish devotion to a failing technology.
What would a disinterested observer make of this?
They'd look for objective evidence to determine which of us is closer to reality.
For example, they might look at what the world is doing right now. What is being installed, renewables or nuclear? Presumably those who are spending money are trying to get the most bang for the buck.
If we look at that, renewables are soundly trouncing nuclear. Even in China, that country that is held up as the last best hope by nuclear advocates. New installs (which reflect the current conditions better than total installed capacity, which is a lagging indicator) are massively in favor of renewables there and elsewhere.
The nuclear advocate who explains away nuclear's troubles as due to the selective omnipotence of greens (selective, since they don't seem to be doing nearly as well on other issues) must really stretch their conspiracy theorizing to explain such a widespread result.
I will also note that you didn't explain how nuclear can power mining in a way that renewables can't.
Both are small compared to the mining needed for society as a whole. So why the hand wringing? You are desperately straining to make a mountain out of a foothill.
Well no, I am simply certain, from study, that the 100% renewables future being touted is a pipe dream at anything approaching mid 20th century energy consumption levels.
Show me one model that does work with any technology, please, any source anywhere I promise I will review.
Mining to get renewables to anything like the GWHours needed is very significant, look at the graphs in the data I provided
Instead of any kind of data that would show me how I am wrong, all the data I am getting is downvotes and wordage.
You may feel certain, but by the arguments you've given so far that belief does not appear to have any rational basis.
Are these arguments what led you to the belief, or are they rationalizations you've tried to construct after the fact? They don't appear to be things that a skeptical, rigorously rational person would have come up with.
ps. During the 2000s, around ten new copper deposits were discovered each year worldwide. In the 2010s, it was more like 3 to 4 on average. And over the past three years, there has been a total of... one discovery, according to Les Echos: https://t.ly/yhqQr
For copper, as with many other underground resources, discoveries eventually decline over time. It's similar for oil: the peak of annual discoveries of "conventional" oil fields—everything except shale oil—was 60 years ago, and 50 years ago for gas.
Additionally, the copper content in new mines tends to decrease: it is now about 0.5% on average (it was ten times higher a century ago). This means that to extract one kg of copper, you need to extract, crush, and process 200 kg of rock. The higher this number, the more energy is required for a mine to maintain the same production.
For the current production of 20 million tons of copper per year, a few billion tons of ore need to be processed annually—more than for iron! Incidentally, over a billion tons of rock is also processed annually to extract 3,000 tons of gold.
The International Energy Agency has long pointed out that copper production may start to decline in the coming years (even though more is needed in its decarbonization scenarios). A 15-year forecast is reasonably relevant because it takes this long—or even 20 years—to bring a new mine into operation after discovery.
It's not just about permits: roads must be built, a power network for high-power machines, water supply and wastewater treatment facilities, processing plants, etc.
Thus, the production from existing and planned mines is fairly predictable over the next one to two decades. Is it serious if there's less copper?
Maybe, for electrifying 1.5 billion two-ton vehicles. For having only half or a third of that fleet consisting of small vehicles (an electric bicycle requires 100 times fewer materials than an electric car, and there are, of course, intermediate possibilities), maybe not.
For energy, the economic world has not understood that the signal of its decline won't be an indefinite price increase but a contraction of "physical" production (happening in Europe since 2007). A decline in energy means a shortfall in production, hence incomes, leading to less energy but less solvent consumers, with a new price that could settle "anywhere."
For a systemic metal, it will be the same: reduced supply will result in decreased material production, but not necessarily an indefinite price increase. The economy is primarily about the physical!
> If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.
Of course if we ignore the need for batteries. Renewable advocates conveniently forget to include that in the calculus (there’s active action in progress to strip mine the ocean floor creating untold ecological damage to try to keep up with requirements for batteries). And they also tend to ignore the fact that renewables can’t be used in various industrial processes. Nuclear fission remains the best option for large scale power and is still cheaper than directly comparable renewables with batteries included despite being divested from raising overall costs.
Hopefully we get fusion soon and renewables and fission become a thing of the past.
In the renewables case they’re needed for transportation AND grid. The dream that car batteries are used as grid storage afaict remains a dream with no forward movement on that front.
> In the renewables case they’re needed for transportation AND grid.
Indeed. So? There are more and more vehicles, and the average amount of electricity they store (reflected by their autonomy) grows. One of the reasons is well-known: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
The drawbacks section is pretty damming that this is unlikely to work:
> JB Straubel, then chief technology officer of Tesla Inc, discounted V2G, claiming that battery wear outweighs economic benefit.[87] A 2017 study found decreasing capacity,[88][89] and a 2012 hybrid-EV study found minor benefit.[90]
A 2015 study[91] found that economic analyses favorable to V2G failed to include many of the less obvious costs associated with its implementation. When these less obvious costs were included, the study reported that V2G was an economically inefficient solution.
This is true. However this is to put in perspective with the financial impact: batteries are (from a technical viewpoint) more and more able to cope with this and charging during cheap electricity times then partially discharging when electricity is expensive will reduce the overall cost of the vehicle.
The difference is the cost coming from handling it. The latest figure on the cost to handle Fukushima is $190B from 2016.
The great thing today is that we don't need to accept radioactive releases from either nuclear power or coal. Simply build the cheap scalable option instead: renewables.
you replace nuclear waste (that can be reduced with purex or reused with fast reactors) with non recyclable toxic renewable waste in much greater quantities
For accidents - just need to build newer reactor models. ap1000 is a marvel of engineering
Please name an industrial ready-to-deploy fast reactor. AFAIK there it doesn't exist, therefore its (after decades of expensive R&D in many nations) just a vague hope, not a potential part of the solution.
many proved it worked, including the Phenix and Superphenix, but were closed due to political reasons. Now russia is the leader with bn-600 and india/china are catching up
Phenix was not industrial (250 MWe) but a research reactor. Superphenix was an attempt to haul it to industrial scale and it failed to do so, just as every other similar project.
Russia BN-600 is obsolete and was so leaky (sodium!) is isn't even funny. It was superseded by the BN-800 which started in 2014 and has various problems (most related to fuel, the core of this challenge). This path is officially paused (a planned BN-1200 project didn't start). If it works satisfactorily, as you implicitly claim, please state why it isn't declined (other units built) while Russia tries another breeder architecture (BREST-300, using lead instead of sodium)?
phenix and superphenix were closed mainly for political reasons, not because these didn't deliver|
"This path is officially paused" - meaning the reactor is closed?
> phenix and superphenix were closed mainly for political reasons
Phénix is not pertinent, it worked perfectly but was a research reactor (small, expensive...).
Superphenix never reached the industrial stage, even the enterprise exploiting it (NERSA) never said so. They simply declared that they were willing to continue and hoping to reach the goal (13 years after first reactor divergence, 24 years after project start, with gigantic amounts of money poured at the project).
they did build the stuff, so 'catching up' is a pretty correct statement. I didn't say they catched up, for that they'll need much more time and effort, but they do have progress
It’s still a non-answer to the original question. Look, we all get that you’re a fan and there’s nothing wrong with that (especially here) but overstating things does not help the cause. Nuclear power proponents often act like there’s some conspiracy to suppress the technology when basic economics is a simpler explanation. In this case, it’s great that progress is happening but it’s still the case that if our goal is decarbonizing you’ll see almost immediate reductions taking the same money and bringing renewables online a decade or more sooner. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider nuclear for some of the edge cases but there’s still too much R&D needed for it to be a primary source.
while cheaper in some contexts and somewhat scalable, renewables are nowhere near being as scalable or effective as nuclear, specially as tensions with China rise
Renewables are vastly more scalable and effective than nuclear.
You mentioned China. Last year, China brought more than 100x more PV on line than they did nuclear (on a rated power basis; levelized basis maybe 30x as much.)
Nuclear power which currently has zero new commercial reactors under construction in the US while backsliding as an energy source due to cost and construction timelines now apparently is "effective" and "scalable".
Renewables can be destroyed by a war, but it will not take ten years to rebuild and connect it again to the grid when the war is over. Is not only cheaper, but allows a gradual recover of the electric supply. With nuclear a recover is much more rigid and rushing it is potentially catastrophic.
Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do.
This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.
Your argument would be valid if nuclear power would be the only option to prevent climate change. But there are other options: the various renewables, most importantly solar and wind. So it is not nuclear vs. climate change, but nuclear vs. solar/wind.
Any one power plant has no measurable effect on global climate. (All fossil power plants combined worldwide have about the same emissions as all cars; about 1/6).
So, if your fathers started coal plants, you close them, stop paying for them and can forget about them. this is not at all the case if your fathers started nuclear plants, not only do you have to pay, your children have to pay, all their lives, and all your grandchildren, and so on.
What bugs me is the tendency of proponents to pretend that the decision is no biggie. It is a biggie. At least understand that, then we can have a rational discussion about it!
Energy storage solutions and infrastructure for generating synthesized fuels (hydrogen and others) will require investments, but those investments will be a gift to the future. We will bear the burden of building the infrastructure now, but future generations will benefit from what we have built.
Nuclear is the opposite, we get the benefits and the future gets the burden.
So basically you’re so caught up in this infighting between two carbon neutral energies that you’d rather spread disinformation about climate change and the negative effects of coal…
I have spread no disinformation. Seems to me you fail to come up with arguments against what I actually said so instead you create a strawman.
Nuclear costs are way higher than anyone has ever accounted for and they are kicked to future generations. This is a fact and we can do better.
The right thing to do is surely to spend now on tech that continues to pay dividends in the future. Maybe we ourselves won't see the benefits directly in our wallets but the future will.
You misunderstood the point: yes, burning coal is bad. The argument is that once you stop doing that, it’s over. I don’t think that’s completely true - the impact of mining and ash won’t instantly disappear - but if the question is whether we should switch from one thing which has significant environmental hazards to another which poses significant risks or alternatives which do not, that past example suggests that we should be having that conversation about how realistic it is to assume that a multi-century mitigation effort will be effective. Coal is especially interesting as an example because we’ve seen how the mining side of it became a powerful political force where even people whose families were negatively impacted by the pollution still lobbied for its preservation. Nuclear would be smaller but still likely to have that factor to account for as we’ve seen with “temporary” storage becoming de facto permanent.
> The argument is that once you stop doing that, it’s over.
My issue is that this statement is wrong, though. All the greenhouse gas from coal that was burned in the past, and all the coal we're still burning, will still be around and is still going to slowly bake the planet we live on for the next millenia [1].
Effectively, coal emissions are only considered this way because, after we stop producing, we stop seeing the smokestacks and we forget that the byproducts are still there. This is also true for most other pollution sources: industrial sites with heavy metal pollution don't magically clean themselves when the factory closes. WW1 battle areas are still deeply polluted and some are still unfit for agriculture. "Eternal" chemicals are never going back to the oil well. And, for us technologists, ewaste does not magically disappear [2].
It's really maddening that some people develop an acute perception that radioactive waste is "forever", but somehow fail to understand that the same is true for a very large part of the waste we create now, for which nature hasn't (over millions of years) evolved organisms able to eat them.
This also unfortunately makes a case against nuclear. For instance the worst coal burning country in Europe is Poland, which 5 years ago decided to build nuclear plants. They are set to break ground in a couple years and the first plant will be finished 2033 or so. The last ones 2040. And this all if it goes according to plan, which it won't. And even then they will be left with a significant amount of coal burning plants in the system.
So at least 15 years of effort to get one plant online during which time the country will continue to pump CO2 to the tune of 70% coal in their electricity mix. CO2 that will, as you say, continue to bake the earth. Nuclear is a terrible choice for decarbonization.
Only really true for gev iii reactors. Gen iv reactors don’t have any of the challenges you mention. It’s almost as if you don’t have any faith on the human race’s ability to creatively problem solve and are assuming nuclear technology needs to be stuck in time from designs of the 1960s.
> ...centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what...
OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say) lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother trying that, either.
People keep proposing that nonsense from 70's but can be cured studying some really basic biology and oceanography. In 2024 is at a level similar than saying that smoking is good for your children. Is not even funny as a joke.
> Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up
Why do you think that people spend decades studying and mastering a field where they could just instead read a page of Wikipedia? There are hundreds of entire books about marine ecology and sea physics. Thick books with entire chapters about how energy/matter moves up and down in the ocean. There are more than one type of migration and we don't still know a lot of things about the sea. Physics tell us also that warm water tend to ascend over cold water, and that the water is moved from very deep areas to some coastal areas just because the shape of continents.
To achieve the same effect of leaving a barrel of nuclear waste in the middle of the sea (hoping in vain that nothing will move from there) we could better to put nuclear dust in the way of a stampede, or leave the barrels in the beach before the tornado season. Would achieve the same effect but saving much more money.
Barrels don't last when filled with nuclear material. The radiation embrittles the materials over time, they wouldn't last 100 years. And then all that crap will be released into the ocean and swerve all over the world.
Nuclear material is put in glass which can last many thousands of years.
Geological studies of the locations where the nuclear waste is burried show that it would take millions of year for the isotopes to escape.
Meanwhile, the effects of low dose radiations on health are vastly exaggerated. Every industry is releasing pollution in the ecosystem that are way more toxic and dangerous. And these get barely any attention for some reasons.
Indeed, officially the casks conceived during the 1980's are OK, however in 2011 the MIT discovered that "Cracking related to corrosion could occur in 30 years or less, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is studying whether the casks can be used for 100 years as some hope."
Assume that the folks building the barrels know about the embrittlement, and have both a decent budget and some experienced engineers to mitigate the problem.
Also note my phrase "bury them". Radwaste is not some magical Sealed Evil in a Can. If bound in compounds with substantially higher density that the ocean sediments, and emplaced a few tens of meters below the sea floor, then gravity will quite strongly discourage its upward migration.
Four decades of studies by experienced engineers and a very decent budget to figure out how to store US nuclear waste has resulted in 0 solutions so far. I think we can safely assume that dumping it at sea is not an option.
We have solutions in the US, but politicians keep playing games. Yucca mountain has been authorized and de-authorized back and forth for decades. It isn't an engineering problem at all.
True-ish - but those game-playing politicians don't have much freedom of choice, if they want to keep their jobs. The US nuclear establishment has earned itself a "bungling pathological liars" reputation with the public. Why would the average voter react well to any "we'll store a whole lotta Bad Stuff near you" plan?
My understanding is that the anti-proliferation lobby* is intensely allergic to several of the technologies involved in doing that.
*EDIT - I'm referring to the US-centered anti-proliferation lobby. Though "national security establishment" might be a better term. And yes, its ability to influence French, Japanese, etc. domestic nuclear power policy is much more limited.
i mean, france does purex, japan too, soon us too. fast reactors are slowly rolling out in some countries like india, china, russia, even eu has some projects in mind
As of now, the thermoset epoxy in turbine blades can't be recycled. Turbines optimistically last 20-25 years, which means entire generations of them have either been buried or worse, incinerated.
The same is true for solar panels. These are NOT unique problems to renewables, of course, except they tend to produce more waste compared to their energy output than other methods at the moment.
Recycling is a big area of research, but is not yet especially CO2 positive for solar versus just burying them, and non existent for wind.
The point isn't that the problem is impossible, but that these things are overlooked and green washed.
Most blades are now burnt in cement killns. Burying them is forbidden in most (maybe even all, now) Western nations. Recyclable blades have recently become available (RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...), and there are even new ways to cope with the old ones: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...
Solar panels last a lot more than 20-25 years. There is a guarantee you will still get 80% of the capacity after this time, but the panels will continue to work after that just fine.
Assuming they aren't hit by hail, or large branches, manufacturing defect in an onboard micro inverter, or any other reason, yes, solar panels don't just die at the year 20 mark.
Instead, they supply 1/5 less power than they were originally rated for, which means the system needs to be expanded or replaced to do what it was provisioned to do.
The fact that their system cost is prohibitive in the real world? The fact that we don’t fucking have the slightest idea of how to deal with recycling that stuff on their EOL? Or would be the fact that mining cobalt and lithium in the required quantities to indulge on the fantasy of a solar/wind based grid would poison an inordinate portion of our environment? Or would it be the fact that every single fucking country that went all in on the siren’s song of the renewable industry scammer is now plagued with absurdly high energy costs and are slipping into becoming impoverished third world de-industrialized economies like the UK and Germany?
You provide excellent examples of the bogosity of the arguments. Let me demolish them in turn.
1) System cost
Sure, it's high. That's because we spend huge amounts of money on energy. ANY system to replace fossil fuels will be expensive, in the trillions of dollars.
But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables.
2) Recycling
At worst, we can bury the stuff. Recycling it is not necessary. After all, the amount of material is small compared to everything else we do in society, and it's not some special kind of waste (like high level nuclear waste) that requires some particularly unique handling.
3) Lithium and cobalt
Lithium is abundant. If you hadn't been paying attention, the price has been crashing, as it pretty much always does after a price spike of a mineral resource, when the price spike encourages investment to increase the amount available. As for cobalt: probably the same is true, but why do you think cobalt is needed?
4) poison the environment
This is just emotional bullshit. No, renewables would not "poison the environment". You beclown yourself with this nonsense.
5) absurdly high energy cost
As opposed to those still burning fossil fuels where they are foisting off the cost of the externalities on others? Ignoring those external costs doesn't make them go away.
In any case, the place that's normally pointed to is Germany, where they made a large investment in renewables from 2009-2012. Solar was much more expensive then, and they are still paying that down. But the costs of renewables crash with time, so pointing to past expenditures is grossly misleading. Going forward renewables will be much cheaper. That's why we're seeing so much investment in them now globally.
One can tell the intellectual barrenness of the pro-nuclear position when you have to resort to this sort of deplorable nonsense.
Indeed you have to look at the figures, no amount of wordage without computation will get you a true answer, still calling someone or something deplorable is, I am sorry, a dog-whistle.
So to clear the air I propose you look at this substantive set of answers:
> But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables.
I agree that the nuclear power stations are more expensive per kW of generation capacity. But that does not mean that the overall system must be more expensive (fallacy of composition?). It would depend on the quality of the intermittent resources, their location, demand profiles, cost to build, cost of transmission and storage and so on.
nuclear is not much more expensive, it's cheaper. It's just harder to scale
If the waste is your concern - nuclear is better. And no, you can't just bury renewable waste, it too contains forever toxic materials that can be dispersed in soil and water. Amount of mined stuff- nuclear is better, amount of land used- nuclear is better
No matter how you turn it, renewables were and will be more expensive for germany https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-rejigs-sprea...
it kinda depends: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/
Edit: for lazard study I kinda fail to assume why they assume 4h storage? I mean, looking at California's grid, they need about 10-14 hours of storage of about 10GW each. And at minimum triple their solar. And that's for ideal 365 sunny days case. But they get about 100 cloudy days. Some of it could be covered with wind but it'll still be a lot. What you'll do in case both solar&wind will be low? Needless to say that this overcapacity will need to be subsidized heavily because excess solar capacity will be unused a lot of the time when most of day consumption will be covered, storage too - if it'll be used less and less, youll need subsidies for companies to build more of the stuff to get back their investment
Last but not least... there is no running project.
Therefore writing "US nuclear capacity has the potential to triple from ~100 GW in 2024 to ~300 GW by 2050." in a title is for sure easy, however there is now sign of such potential to become anything else.
As long as the source is not consuming any fuel nor producing much waste any EROI greater than one seems OK to me.
> why they assume 4h storage?
AFAIK because they consider that electric vehicles' batteries will be useful (through V2G).
> What you'll do in case both solar&wind will be low?
AFAIK the idea is to interconnect at continental scale, as this is useful whatever the type of sources (even if it is mainly nuclear), then to benefit from diverses wind (or even solar) regimes.
> overcapacity will need to be subsidized heavily because excess solar capacity will be unused a lot of the time
Not with an electric fleet of vehicles, to begin with. Green hydrogen will also absorb part of it (for industrial applications, electric backup...).
> if it'll be used less and less, youll need subsidies
> AFAIK because they consider that electric vehicles' batteries will be useful (through V2G). - lol, kinda interesting assumptions, especially considering that it'll still imply additional costs
> AFAIK the idea is to interconnect at continental scale - lol, at such scales that sounds as a bigger pipedream than cheap h2 emission free generation
> if it'll be used less and less, youll need subsidies
This will kill basically any peaker plant be that fossil, hydro or nuclear. That's kinda the point. With a renewable grid you'll need huge overcapacity of both production, peaker and storage that'll be rarely used. No matter the technology - any of it will get extremely expensive the higher the renewable share will get. Even Norway starts facing similar problems since they import cheap renewable in peak production, meaning their hydro is earning less
No, your "Advanced Nuclear - Pathways to Commercial Liftoff" plays the usual "we benefit from failures because we learn" card, and concludes with promises "The next AP1000s would also realize substantial cost reductions". This is not IMHO solid, especially given well-known pertinent experience (about gaining from experience!), such as https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
V2G seems solid to me and to most experts (even France seriously studies it!).
based on the fact unit 4 proved there's positive learning curve (30% faster & cheaper than unit 3) they extrapolated this so it seems pretty normal, much more believable than a continental scale grid that'll not need much overcapacity and storage, including because of v2g, that's a pipedream of a solution.
Just think of dunkelflaute that'll affect a lot of northern countries, think how much overcapacity the other members will need to have to cover it.
Unit 4 proved that work units in a given project, sharing the same lapse of time and space, can benefit.
Extrapolating it to a whole set of projects is another matter (see the referenced study).
Yeah, vastly overstated... at this point you're not serious dude.
I'm also very aware of european grid, but I guess you didn't read the part that you still need huge overcapacity
You didn't source this. This vastly depends on many parameters. Moreover as renewables machines are cheap, recyclable, and can be installed in unused places (or even protect them, as offshore wind does for oceans) you have yet to show which challenge this 'huge overcapacity' stems.
I strongly wish we had more comments like the one you're responding to. I find most comments here to be obnoxiously polite and I wish more ignorant opinions were publicly demolished as they should be, rather than continue to spread misinformation because it's the polite thing to do.
Well, I may be ignorant, but the reality of the my relatives energy bill in Germany and the UK tends to agree with my ignorance. Maybe you are just smart enough to regurgitate the propaganda, but not enough to think for yourself.
It's more the fact that you're willfully ignorant which makes you annoying. Numerous people have already explained to you why you're wrong and you just keep repeating yourself. You're a hypocrite and you don't even realize it. I'm not going to waste my time trying to reason with an unreasonable person.
1) it's not the money, it's the EROEI
2) at scale, panels recycling does become a very real issue
3) It's not the abundance, it's the mine-able ore at high enough concentration that matters
4) solar panels, read the docs please
5) again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind scrap a 3, early oil was in the hundreds, nuclear is at around 50
After having gotten 0/5 in terms of correctness on actual facts, maybe tone down the sneer?
EROEI of renewables is fine, some well-debunked garbage studies not withstanding.
No, at scale recycling doesn't become a "real issue" in the sense of being a showstopper. It would be nice if it could save some money (recover aluminum frames, say) but it's only a "nice to have".
"High enough concentration" is dependent on technology. Like other mineral resources, one can expect lithium extraction technology to keep ahead of demand. The doom and gloomers on this sort of thing are never right. Stationary storage doesn't even require lithium; there's a large variety of storage technologies that could be used instead (including some like pumped thermal that use nothing more than cheap materials like common steel.)
> solar panels, read the docs please
Empty nonsense. Solar panels are not toxic. Please stop making things up.
> again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind scrap a 3
If you think Hollywood accounting is opaque and full of shenanigans, look into electric utilities. Nuclear power is not conventionally insurable. The NRC has the most understandable explainer I have found here: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
The current fad of buying old nukes to power data centers is going to be a learning experience for the tech industry about taking on the liabilities entailed.
They import about 90% of its energy requirements. This includes nuclear fuel. So this is far away from "perfect" if you can get wind and sun without having to import it.
Nuclear fuel is both relatively plentiful, and can be sourced from a multitude of countries, both Eastern, Western, and, most importantly, unaligned. A lot of countries have economically viable (for power generation) uranium reserves, but do not exploit them because global prices for it are so low.
It differs significantly from oil in this respect.
This is so weird because despite being so plentiful, the EU has still to throw money at Russia for all kinds of stuff related to nuclear energy. Imagine that: we have all kinds of sanctions on Russia here in the EU. The tone is aggressive. There is fear of a Russian invasion into EU countries, and we still have to get that stuff from Russia.
So it seems not to be such an easy solution.
It gets even worse for poor countries which jumped on the Rosatom train being fully dependent on Rosatom tech, fuel, personal.
Even if it wouldn't be for that, it's far away from the availability of sun or wind.
not all eu, just some countries. And those(some that want it) are gradually replacing ru enriched fuel with the one from westinghouse. France and US are boosting local enrichment facilities to replace the russian ones. You'll basically have the same problems with renewables if china would ban export to eu/us
Those are all things that take a looong time and cost a hell lot of money, which could be turned into electricity in 2 years if you'd spend that taxpayer money into renewable technology. The war will be probably over before those countries dependent on Russia will become self-sufficient.
This is desperate, keeping alive an outdated technology. France slept on the change and now has to do everything to keep the show running.
> You'll basically have the same problems with renewables if china would ban export to eu/us
The solution would only include scaling up existing technology which is already there. Technology which doesn't require safety measures compared to nuclear. Technology which isn't that expensive. It would actually be fabulous if they'd do that because maybe countries like Germany could regrow their potential in this sector. They used to be on the front of it before the Merkel goverment killed a whole sector.
scaling is expensive. France too, for enrichment is doing scaling of what they already did, just like Germany (I'm referring to german enrichment plant) :)
Nuclear is not an outdated tech, why do you say that? Especially the ap1000 reactor. France slept on building more nuclear and was on path to ditch it, reversed only recently, that's why they are where they are, still - in much better shape than Germany in this regard
Westinghouse went bankrupt over that new reactor, and wasn't it supposed to be more cost-effective?
Nuclear has peaked, and its share knows only one way. Down [1]. It neither has become in any way more significant better nor has it become cheaper or faster to build.
Meanwhile, renewables, got better, cheaper and faster to build.
Nuclear is tech from the past. We needed it once. Now it's clogging up the grids, wasting taxpayer money and leaving waste behind for generations to care about.
it was supposed to be more cost effective, but not for foak and untrained staff. That's why china and korea can build basically same design much cheaper and faster - they got experienced staff and costs reduced with each new build
nuclear fuel: nuclear rods can last about 3-7 years, lets say 5 on avg. 150 rods per 1 GW reactor. so its like one or two rail cars of fuel - extremely compact footprint.
how calculate yourself how much fossil fuel you need to power 1 GW power plant for half a decade, and how much CO2 emissions will you generate?
How many rail cars of coal Germany will need to generate 1 GW 24/7/365 for 5 years reliably ?
it is just unfair comparison, nuclear is several orders magnitude better in all aspects compared to fossil fuel and renewable - just due to physics of the process. Nuclear is capturing strong and weak forces, while combustion is capturing electromagnetic force with piss poor thermal efficiency and losses abound.
The only reason countries fumble nuclear energy is because they dont invest enough into new designs and constructions and still employ old design plants.
If there was as much investment into new nuclear plants as it was in renewable tech - we would have solved many of our energy needs long long time ago.
It's not about energy density but availability. If a nation cannot buy uranium (scarce resources, embargo...) it loses at least temporarily its nuclear infrastructure (and gasps for energy).
This is not a real concern for renewables.
> Nuclear is capturing strong and weak forces
Other (way more practical and determinant) parameters are less enticing. For example: it 'burns' uranium and produces dangerous waste.
>>If a nation cannot buy uranium (scarce resources, embargo...)
not an issue at all, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, bunch of other nations mine and sell uranium. Whenever there are big mountain ranges, there is uranium. and it is cheap as a commodity
Current uranium reserves are sufficient, under current obtention conditions, for slightly over 130 years of supply.
Nuclear now produces, worldwide, less than 10% of electricity (which is less than 2.2% of total final energy).
Double the reactor fleet and each new one will only produce under current conditions for 60 years (in other words it will probably be quite difficult to finance).
Canada and Australia pertain to the Anglosphere, therefore if nuclear enjoys a 'Renaissance' in the US they will provide uranium to their friends first, and will not provide it to any nation not aligned with the Anglosphere. For quite a bunch of nation Canada and Australia aren't dependable providers.
Kazakhstan can be subdued by Russia (yeah, I know, their current stance is apparently defiant, however recent history is quite clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan%E2%80%93Russia_rela... ) or even China. Uzbekistan, also extracting uranium, stands in similar shoes. Who wants to have to beg Russia for uranium?
this is not an issue at all, Ukraine is at war with Russia, yet Russia continues to pump natural gas through Ukraine to Europe and even pays $$$ to Ukraine for transit (!!!!)
When it comes to commodity trading - $$$ trumps everything.
uranium reserves are plentiful, given that you dont need a lot of Uranium to recharge the plant
the most importantly: for Uranium producer there is zero reason to withhold uranium. Like what are you gonna do by stockpiling radioactive rock ??? You just gonna lose your customer to another country. Isn't it better to get rid of radioactive rock and get $$$ instead?
even OPEC cannot agree to maintain oil production to keep price stable, there is absolutely ZERO chance someone can cause trouble on uranium market
Uranium has been strategic mineral for nuclear weapons and yet still is traded free on the global market.
Every country that has nuclear weapons does have nuclear reactors, and supply is basically not an issue. The technology is the main moat (uranium enrichment & reactor tech & turbine tech & missile tech)
No, it never was as all pertinent nations could easily obtain enough uranium to 'cook' it for weapons. Even the most eager to build huge amounts of weapons (USSR and USA) never had any problem related to the amount of uranium needed.
Short version: the amount of uranium needed to build an impressive arsenal of nuclear weapons is way, way lower than the amount needed to produce a fair part of gridpower for years.
> Every country that has nuclear weapons does have nuclear reactors
Yes, because a reactor is needed to 'cook' uranium (in order to obtain high-grade Pu-239) for weapons. This very need was what led nations to build reactors, electricity-generating nuclear plants were at best an aftermath and in some cases an excuse (hiding the real objective).
> This very need was what led nations to build reactors, electricity-generating nuclear plants were at best an aftermath
In absolute history, though, this is arse backwards.
The UK and the US both had piles and generation plans before they even thought building nuclear weapons was at all possible.
The US, in particular, had a nuclear science body that were pretty damn sure weapons weren't feasible and had a major focus on atomic power to generate energy.
They ignored the letter by Einstein that highlighted the dangers of a German nuclear program suspected of chasing weapons and only paid heed after several approaches by Tube Alloys (the UK nuclear weapons group) when the Australian nuclear scientist Mark Oliphant visited the US and laid out in detail a method by which a bomb could be feasibly constructed.
In fact the first man-made nuclear reactor was the 'Chicago Pile-1' ( 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 ), which was built by the Project Manhattan, exclusively aiming at building a nuclearbomb.
In WP's article please don't miss this: "Emilio Segrè later recalled that:
I thought for a while that this term was used to refer to a source of nuclear energy in analogy with Volta's use of the Italian term pila to denote his own great invention of a source of electrical energy. I was disillusioned by Fermi himself, who told me that he simply used the common English word pile as synonymous with heap. To my surprise, Fermi never seemed to have thought of the relationship between his pile and Volta's."
The world's first reactor used to generate electricity (another one generated some during an experiment in 1948), albeit it wasn't its main purpose, was the 4th reactor, and it started nearly 10 years after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I
uranium can be stockpiled. Or like in japan/france - reprocessed & reenriched. It'll be more expensive but will cover most of temporary problems of uranium supply.
For renewables - if you don't have local factories at scale and a steady supply of materials, incl for energy storage - the problem will be the same
Imo I find such statements like 100-150 years of supply similar to the statements about petroleum supply that was about to end and suddenly with demand, new supply was found, just like with other materials like lithium
you need to gradually replace renewables, especially for a grid that was gradually deployed.
You still can stockpile nuclear, France does have several years worth of fuel for such emergencies.
France reprocesses only part of the fuel, is expanding Orano facility, but why is this relevant? They do it and they get additional un-enriched uranium stockpile. WTH dude? Are you just throwing random antinuclear statements around? Only in german forums i've seen such strong antinuclear opinions
Indeed, 'le stock stratégique', about 9 years at best (counting the average amount of uranium already present in reactors). 9 years at best for an overall of your gridpower production system... good luck with this!
I mean... france really doesn't have a problem with n fuel... It's not just classic stockpiles but the reprocessed ones. Needless to say that imports are pretty diversified - even if one country will ban exports to France, they'll not face total ban from all partners, so in this regard they are indeed lucky.
So for nuclear power to be successful you just have to change human nature and politics to secure long term investment. And do so in countries that cannot even figure out how to properly fund education.
the fact that we allowed non-technical people with liberal arts education, who have no concept of physics and energy, to make nuclear a political issue is a big failure.
Plus oil rich countries lobbying LNG as a greener alternative for nuclear is another fail
But it is not within your gift to control human nature or suppress politics. Or at least I hope its not. A good design/proposal/plan considers human factors.
And energy production is not some science experiment where you can control all the baseline conditions. It exists within a complex mix of economy, environment, social system, manufacturing etc. There is no scientific method for navigating that. And your industry will probably ignore it if there was. Politics is all we have for deciding complex interrelated questions.
> you just have to change human nature and politics to secure long term investment
Perhaps it will take generational change (and stopping the propagation of anti-nuclear tropes). Perhaps it will take societal selection (where those who invest will out-compete the others).
At least in the US such costs are factored in. First of all, after Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) performed a huge "Lessons learned" exercise, and asked all the power plants to do various upgrades. Here are some links [1], [2]. The ask was not "pretty please, can you do this if it's not much of a trouble for you", it was "you have to do this by this date if you want to continue to operate".
Second, it's the nuclear insurance. The scheme is codified in the Price-Anderson Act [3]. Basically, all the nuclear power plants need to purchase insurance for $0.5 BN per reactor. If anything happens, and the cleanup costs exceed this number, then the rest of the industry has to chime in, and the total is up to $16 BN per reactor. So, if 3 reactors were to have a core meltdown, the industry would have to pay close to $50 BN. The total estimate of the Fukushima cleanup stands currently at about twice that, so one can say that $50 BN is too little, but it certainly is not nothing.
Edit: the efficacy of the Price-Anderson Act was tested at the Three-Mile Island. Virtually no taxpayer money was used in the cleanup [4]. Of course, there were other costs incurred, such as in collecting data, doing investigations, upgrading regulations and enforcing them, but that's how Government should work.
According to [3] the industry is liable for 16b per reactor but the industry doesn’t have that much money to pay out. Entergy for example operates its nuclear plants in a subsidiary that generates about 100 million in revenue per year. They would have to raise the price of nuclear electricity by orders of magnitude to gave any chance of paying 16 bn, let alone the 10x more for a Fukushima-esque incident.
So when things go pearshaped the operators will undoubtedly go bankrupt, and since the cleanup is very mandatory the taxpayers end up paying basically everything.
Also consider who has paid for the decades long paperwork around Yucca mt, who pays the military that has had guards stationed at closed plants for decades (rancho seco) and so on and so forth.
In short, even in the US, the hidden costs of nuclear power are immense.
I think you are under the impression that if a company files for bankruptcy they can discharge debts they owe to the government. Good luck with that. They will get their power plants sold to the highest bidder, and the proceeds will be used to pay whatever cleanup cost they owe under the Price-Anderson act.
Here's a link to a story that BP paid more than $60 BN for the cleanup related to the Deepwater Horizon spill [1].
Japan needs nuclear to have more reliable power source as they have limited land and natural resources. The government may have to just pay for this and learn from the mistakes that led to it. Nuclear is the future.
> TEPCO speculates that radiation passing through camera semiconductor elements caused electrical charge to build up, and that the charge will drain if the cameras are left on in a relatively low-dose environment. It was the latest setback in a very long project.
I found this interesting. I wonder how many of the ICs onboard the robot are radiation hardened, and how many are just COTS with the hope they'll last for the brief mission.
As I understand it, part of the problem is that the vast majority of components simply don't exist in rad-hardened versions. The cost of having a hardened part manufactured and qualified is high, and demand is low; only a few manufacturers bother.
This information is definitely dated and I might be misremembering (but it was given to me right next to the clean room where ICs for satelites were being prepped), but for ICs from a certain manufacturer "rad-hardened" was basically "we take ICs from our normal production batch, and do even more tests on them".
The idea being that failure is bimodal: most stuff fails very quickly, _or_ after a long time, but rarely in the middle. So they just do 100 test cycles in a messy test environment.
ICs for "normal use" also got tests like this, but generally the test suite was a bit nicer. The rad-hardened ones got way nastier tests done to them, and the yield was (of course) much lower. So you charge way more for them.
You might be thinking of temperature ratings, which are indeed just based on more stringent testing.
Radiation hardening is, well, harder. It typically means some combination of different semiconductor processes (often silicon-on-sapphire and/or larger feature sizes) and added internal redundancy (ECC memory, TMR, watchdogs, etc). All of these require that the rad-hard parts be manufactured separately from the commercial ones; some require that the part be designed separately as well.
Both cases occur in industry. The parts that only go through additional testing (radiation lot acceptance testing aka RLAT) are commonly sold as “radiation tolerant”. Parts that undergo hardening via design/manufacturing changes are often branded “radiation hardened”. In either case though, the available part portfolio is much smaller than commercial. Further increasing cost is that these parts are often geared for military/aerospace so have expanded temperature ranges, stricter qc, weird package types, etc.
it definitely wasn't temperature ratings, and it definitely was chips going into satellites. This was part of an internship at a place (I was in the "normal IC chip" testing zone, though).
I just might not be sure on the "space-rated" things being "radiation-hardened" or if it's more just "well they're gonna be more tested".
You're thinking about taking commercial parts and screening them for radiation tolerance rather than building parts from the ground up to be radiation hardened. Sometimes a vendor gets lucky and the chip has a pretty decent radiation tolerance that makes it useful for short duration missions. It's not going to last 15 years in GEO orbit but it could do well on a satellite only designed to last a couple years. It's not cheap to do radiation tolerance screening but it's way more expensive to make small batches of radiation hardened parts.
Sometimes the vendor will add a little more to the substrate that doesn't increase cost much but does provide a little bit more radiation tolerance. Other times there are certain things the customer must do like constantly rewriting registers. It's not perfect but you can save a lot of money taking an off the shelf TI part and flying it versus spending tens of thousands for something of similar performance but with a guaranteed level of radiation hardness beyond what you actually need. I've used a commercial TI ADC that works really well in a radiation environment (perhaps as long as 5 years in GEO) despite not being sold as such. We just decided to screen it to see how well it performed and based on that test data, we made the decision to fly it. I'm not sure who's idea it was but something about the design of the chip led us to believe it might perform decently. TI was not involved and was at first a little concerned when we told our sales rep we were planning to fly it.
Older chip designs use larger features that generally perform better in a radiation environment than newer designs using smaller features. An old 74-series logic chip might actually perform just fine when it comes to heavy ions but may not live as long as something like a 54-series that has a larger substrate that can absorb more gamma over time.
Another method is flying unscreened radiation hardened parts, they were built to a certain standard but you buy them without all the extra testing to save a few grand because you trust the vendor has a good process.
There's a company selling a radiation-tolerant TV camera for use inside nuclear reactors.[1] It uses a vacuum tube imager (a vidicon?). But it may be too big to put on the pointy end of the long, thin Fukushima manipulator.
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Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning towards success:
- ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less safely sitting in steel enclosures
- we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may only (ahem) take a couple generations
- OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to the environment...?