Second, funny how costs suddenly matter when it's about nuclear. Barely a month goes by without some new unimaginable mind numbing (wholly impractical) 'solution' to climate change that we're being implored to consider, because it's about saving the planet for our children. Nuclear is a perfectly practical, much cheaper (if still very expensive), 80% solution to climate change that we can actually start implementing today, but somehow it's not on the table. Somehow it doesn't seem all that plausible that cost is really the issue.

In short, climate change is the biggest issue facing the world (except nuclear and fracking). I'm very excited that the NYT is being practical here.

So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one? And while I agree that we need some back up plan to stabilize the net load, that also wont be nuclear power as those plants are not fast in start up managment either.

Also, regardless of who pays, a Fukushima-event every few decades is several orders of magnitude cheaper than flood-securing New York City alone (and there are a lot more places in the world that will need flood securing).

Rather than nuclear, which lends itself to big government, corruption, corporate projects, bond issues, and taxes, I'd prefer to see money instead poured into acceleration of the spread of solar, which is less centralized and easier to spread to all kinds of places. Sure, not everywhere, but the potential is pretty untapped.

> So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows.

Government should not fund or provide any guarantees to such projects; we should tax carbon and let people decide what to do (in which case, we wouldn't even need to argue which is cheaper and we can just let power companies figure it out).

> So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one?

Isn't solar more expensive when you factor in the cost of batteries (which would be required if solar scales up; i.e. a diseconomy of scale)? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Can you give me a street address for somewhere that this isn't a possibility?

My house is heated by natural gas - it could literally explode while I'm at work today.

In both scenarios I am "rolling the dice" on a catastrophic failure in exchange for energy - and if I am home when it happens it will shorten my lifespan significantly.

But... I'd say with truly modern nuclear power, safety is less of an issue. Perception of safety is still an issue. So your home value will go down. No biggie; you may be ok with that.

The issue that really bugs me though is that with nuclear, a large government or corporate entity has decided to roll the dice for you on your behalf. With something like solar, there is more possibility for local and individual control. So instead of bond issues, taxes, state-mandated insurance fees, contracts, and control by faceless entities with names like TEPCO who make decisions like "no let's not do the safety retrofit" you get to decide for yourself.

And, no gas explosions either! So, the best of both worlds.

I prefer local control. Nuclear is too centralized.

Gas explosion: house destroyed, possessions gone, death if I am home, move to a new home.

Nuclear incident: house is uninhabitable, possessions gone, possibility of shortened lifespan if I receive excessive radiation, move to a new home.

Actually you are right: they aren't the same because the nuclear incident has a better outcome.

>I prefer local control. Nuclear is too centralized.

I'm willing to bet that you don't actually believe this about any other type of government.

Not to mention the number of homes destroyed in a gas explosion world wide is tiny by comparison.

If your house explodes, fix the source and rebuild the house. Maybe it's time for a major remodel anyway.

If there's a nuclear incident, what are you going to do?

Gas explosion: house destroyed, possessions gone, death if I am home, move to a new home.

Nuclear incident: house is uninhabitable, possessions gone, possibility of shortened lifespan if I receive excessive radiation, move to a new home

Nuclear incident: You own irradiated land. Good luck, maybe the government will buy it off you, or the power company if stipulated as some penalty.

One destroys some of your local property, the other destroys the value of all your local property.

The core issue was the sea wall not the powerplant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant was closer to the quake but it's giant sea wall made a huge difference.

So again, saying some hypothetical perfect design exists and it would obviously have a large enough see wall, and that is what your defending is a true Scotsman argument.

PS: Remember, future designs also have future defects.

Now, back on topic, the nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima was caused by a faulty reactor design. Really it was a poorly designed safety system. The Tsunami that came after the initial earthquake took out the backup power generators at the plant. These backup generators were responsible for powering the cooling pumps that are supposed to prevent a meltdown. This is the main fault in the design and one that is not present in modern reactor designs. Modern reactors now have passive safety systems, i.e. if the power fails the safety measures will be triggered automatically and will not depend on outside power to complete their task. One example of this is using an elevated water tower to store the cooling water with a valve that is kept shut electronically. In the case of a power failure the valve would automatically open (since that is where it's in a stable equilibrium) and gravity would 'pump' the cooling water onto the reactor preventing a meltdown.

As to passive safety systems, many modern designs can't be left unattended for a month. Because they are not passively safe only being able to go longer without issues.

Anyway this is all abstract pick a design that would have been safe without a sea wall or direct intervention after the fact. While being both proven and cost effective.

PS: On second thought as you said modern design, the worst plant built in the last 10 years is still a 'modern design' and close to where many people live.

As to your point about passive safety systems only working for a finite period of time before causing issues, would you mind providing some sources for this claim? As far as I know this is completely false. The very nature of 'passive' safety system is that the laws of physics provide a negative feedback loop that stop a chain reaction and dissipate heat away from the core. This isn't the case for every reactor design of the past few decades, but that's not my argument, I'm simply stating that there are reactor designs out there that are completely passively safe (in terms of preventing a meltdown). You will still be left with the radioactive remnants of the (non-active) core but this can be easily shielded by water for an indefinite period of time.

A nuclear battery can be 100% passively safe for decades but they don't produce a lot of power. A pure passive system that's producing 1GW of electric power is producing 2.5GW worth of heat. Which is really hard to dump into the environment passively without connections to external systems. In the event of a tidal wave your pipes to and from the sea are likely blocked which means there is some pool that is going to boil.

Even cooling tower designs often actively cool the tower through the use of water curtains. It's not needed but significantly reduces costs. Now, that that is building up the internal passive designs starts to reduce power. But thus only operates over a range. Further it is going to produce as close to 2.5 GW of heat as it can.

So, now there is no external pool or connection to the sea and here is where you see problems.

PS: Which all comes back to passive designs costing more and being less efficient. Sure, it 100% passive is possible physically just not economically viable.

Granted, it's hard to get real numbers and future designs may be safer. But, if you include military reactors there have been more than 2 significant accidents per 1,000 reactors. So while some people say they are very safe, people also said that about the Titanic.

This hardly seems like an insurmountable barrier.

More importantly Nuclear is already to expencive before this cost, increasing things further and it's really not worth it.

Add in the fact that the worst disaster (Chernobyl) has an exclusion zone of 1004 miles^2 (equivalent to a 17 mile circle, rather than your 40 miles) and we discover that my initial estimate was about 25x too pessimistic.

I'm beginning to think your concerns about cost are FUD. Out of curiosity, since cost is such a big concern for you, do you hold similar concerns about our bloated infrastructure costs? For example, given the bloated costs of the 2nd ave subway in NYC (1 mile of track there costs as much as the entire Delhi Metro), should we also curtail this project? Or is cost only an issue for nuclear energy?

As to area, nobody lives in the ocean and houses next to an exclusion zone also have huge drops in property values. So, yes some sort of decreasing metric, as a sanity check the property value drop from being within sight of a nuclear power plant is going to be more than 300$. Further, actual exclusion zones may depend on wind so risk really does extend out to 40 miles.

Edit: As an upside, if you included these costs then there would be a push to place reactors in the middle of nowhere to lower costs which IMO is a very good thing.

PS: As a sanity check fukushima is estimated to cost tax payers ~188 billion$ and many people are worse off after the disaster so real costs are higher than that. If the odds are 0.2% that's ~400 million vs your estimate of 300 * 100,0000 = 30 million.

Homes, not people. 100k would be a very high number.

So, as an average 100,000 seems low even if the median might be below that.

Who are corporate overlords?

Corporate overlords (can't tell if you are trolling, but I'll answer) is just a shorthand for corporate decision makers who prioritize corporate profits over other considerations like consumer benefit, care of the environment, freedom of consumer choice, fair dealing, etc.

Nuclear done right will be a great solution going forward. We need a SpaceX of nuclear to out-compete the dinosaur companies like GE. Thorcon Power (thorconpower.com) is one good candidate.

With molten salt technology, there is zero chance of a meltdown or explosive distribution of material. Thorcon's plan is to site the reactors 30 m underground.

"So if I have two solutions that are equally expensive but one leaves me with radioactive waste, why would you chose that one? And while I agree that we need some back up plan to stabilize the net load, that also wont be nuclear power as those plants are not fast in start up managment either."

Thorcon's estimate is that power cost $.02-$.05 per KWH. The ramp up or down for a nuclear plant is a non-issue because fuel costs are negligible.

Much of Europe and US is situated too far north for trouble-free solar operation. Other power sources do make sense there (or, for me, "here").

I keep hearing that several hundred thousand square miles of solar panels in Sahara could power the entire hemisphere. They could if transportation was 100% efficient. Even if we pretend that we can build humongous power lines out of superconducting material, maintaining them is going to cost us a lot still.

So your logic doesn't quite hold up.

I'd much rather live with a nuclear power station in my backyard, than install solar knowing I'm robbing those who can't afford it for my usage of the free grid battery.

Rooftop solar as implemented today is not sustainable, and is a regressive tax.

So the only honest way to do this is with your own energy storage - e.g. batteries. I do agree the allure of being completely off-grid sounds great, until you price it out. So I choose nuclear reactor in my backyard until energy storage tech catches up.

So are electric cars. Both are solvable problems, and will be solved as adoption increases.

In fact, I do have a nuclear power plant in my backyard (relatively speaking). Per Wikipedia, it's the largest power plant in the US by net generation. I'd be happy to see them add 3 more reactors to the site and double operating capacity to ~8GW.

I don't understand. Why can't we put these things in the absolute middle of nowhere? Workers live on-site and you don't turn the camp into some sort of "work town". Problem solved, unless I'm missing something?

Getting people live in a work camp, transport them to and fro, and otherwise compensate them for their strange living conditions takes money, too.

This may be a significant fraction of operation cost, even if the power at the generator's output connectors is produced cheaply. More expensive -> less competitive.

There's a lot of histrionics around putting oil companies in the dock for crimes against humanity, but anyone who's campaigned against nuclear in the last 30 years can go right up and sit next to them.

Ignorance and coal are not the answer.

I'm not saying we can't have both, it's just that the problems with nuclear are not only (perceived or real) safety problems and the fact that it yields byproducts the most tempting use of which is to make nuclear weapons.

I do somewhat agree with you though: the sheer scale of current nuclear power plants (and the technical complexity) means the market is fairly uncompetitive. From what I understand, companies like Westinghouse will practically sell you the plant 'at cost' and then gouge you on the fuel supply contract.

Then again, some of the gen4 designs can work as small, modular fission reactors that might power a small town or community. I know the molten-salt reactor's initial intended applications were: (a) powering army bases and (b) powering a nuclear-powered strategic bombers (which seems rather insane to me).

Admittedly solar does not work everywhere, but there are transport mechanisms, and batteries, and it does work in some places. And we have to decide where to spend our money. Spending on solar is a choice that leads to more local control and less centralized control, as compared to spending on nuclear.

And it's not necessarily totally one or the other in every situation. I'm just saying I have a preference for things that favor local control.

Moreover, you still have yet to make a case for why a decentralized system is inherently good.

There's a strong argument for centralized systems where they are feasible, and that's that centralized systems are easy and decentralized systems are hard. We all know this from our own experience - it's easiest to use a Single Big Server if you can get away with it, it's tougher to use a cluster of systems coherently (CAP theorem comes into play), and as you continue to decentralize further and further you eventually need something like a blockchain to have any hope of consistency, latency becomes measured in minutes, etc.

Distributed systems are hard and we don't want to make the power grid any more complex than it needs to be. A few big centralized power sources are greatly preferable to many decentralized power sources from an engineering perspective, although perhaps not from your political perspective.

Modern passive safety systems are safe as far as the designers can anticipate, just like Fukushima, and there is a lot which can go wrong.

I say "only" there not to diminish their suffering (it's a terrible thing happening to a huge number of people) but because the consequences of continuing to rely on coal are orders of magnitude worse.

Most people aren't experts in nuclear plant design and regulations. They rely on authorities, but when accidents that aren't supposed to happen end up happening, they (rightfully) start to distrust the ability of the authorities to provide them with proper risk assessment. If you tell someone that one Fukushima type disaster will happen every 30 years and that occurs, then they can at least judge the risk and decide whether or not it's worth it. If you tell someone there's little chance of that kind of disaster and then it happens, they're naturally going to be skeptical of your later pronouncements that "Of course that happened to THAT plant, but now there's REALLY little chance of that happening."

People might make a bad decision because of this, but the concern isn't irrational.

Time passes. A truly stunning insight.

You've somehow managed to miss the entire point you were responding to. A power plant that is designed today is designed with 50 more years' knowledge of possible failure modes than a plant that was designed 50 years ago.

Does that mean that it cannot fail? No, but as adults we are constantly exposed to risks of all kinds and life is simply a matter of weighing risks and benefits. The car you drive to work is not perfectly safe, and in fact all Americans have an extraordinarily high risk of dying in an auto accident compared to most other causes of death. But you decide that having a job is worth the risk of driving to work, and the cars today are certainly far safer than cars engineered in the 50s or even the 70s.

The risk of a modern nuclear plant is far lower than one engineered during the 50s (as most current reactors are). And truthfully, even those present a much lower health/safety risk than coal plants do.

The biggest problem at this point is that NIMBYs who don't want any upgrades or modernization to take place have stifled replacement of older reactors with safer and more modern ones, and prevented proper reprocessing and disposal of the waste in safe repositories. Instead we just run the older reactors far past their design lifespans and allow the waste to pile up on-site. If you want to bring up Fukushima - most of the contamination was caused by discharging water from the spent fuel pools that are needed to hold all that waste that piles up due to lack of proper disposal.

In other words - NIMBYs literally caused the vast majority of the contamination from the Fukushima accident.

completely unnecessary sarcasm.

A tone argument is a logical fallacy, and I made a substantive post. Do you care to offer anything else in response?

Fukushima type plants have Chernobyl type disasters approximately never. That part was not a lie.

Supposedly new plant designs never have Fukushima type disasters.

And although this guy is clearly keen on nuclear fission (MSRs specifically), he's actually gone to the trouble or running the numbers on cost, which you are free to critique (http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear...). Here are his four conclusions:

- It would cost over $29 Trillion to generate America’s baseload electric power with a 50 / 50 mix of wind and solar farms, on parcels of land totalling the area of Indiana.

- It would cost over $18 Trillion with Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) farms in the southwest deserts, on parcels of land totalling the area of West Virginia.

- We could do it for less than $3 Trillion with AP-1000 Light Water Reactors, on parcels totalling a few square miles.

- We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors, on the same amount of land, but with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel.

As for those arguing against nuclear power because of well publicised nuclear accidents, it's worth considering the facts:

- Three Mile Island: no direct fatalities, average exposure dose equivalent to a chest x-ray. Some academic dispute about whether it increased cancer-related deaths, in many cases because the numbers being argued over are incredibly small.[1]

- Fukushima: WHO 2013 report concluded health impacts likely to be below detectable levels, although slight increase in cancer probability if linear no-threshold hypothesis applied. More people were killed because of the (probably unnecessary) evacuation of the surrounding areas.[2]

- Chernobyl - UN estimates final total of premature deaths from disaster will be around 4000 (49 of these were immediate). Also made a sizeable area of land uninhabitable for some time.[3]

A 2012 estimate of 'deaths per trillion kWh' [4] from various energy sources has it at:

- Coal (global): 100,000

- Natural gas: 4,000

- Solar (rooftop only): 440

- Wind: 150

- Nuclear (global): 90

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident_hea...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities

Like, that there's still unsolved engineering problems with finding naterials that survive the corrosive environment within of molten salt reactors.

Like, that he didn't inckude waste storage at all.

Like, that he calculated prices for renewables based on buying the most expensive panels, but for nuclear, based on the lowest estimates.

In reality, the ROI level of renewables has already won against nuclear.

And then there's the problem that also plagued plants in Germany, massive corruption and bribing of investigators because it's cheaper than actually building safe plants. It's no coincidence that the only success story for nuclear is a country where all reactors are government-owned and don't have to turn a profit necessarily.

And this brings us to the last problem:

Most new CO2 will soon be produced in developing countries, with unstable governments and unreliable public systems.

And you want to give those governments nuclear reactors? Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc?

On waste storage, MSRs product much much less waste. A solid fuel, light water reactor achieves maybe 3% fuel efficiency, whereas it's somewhere north of 90% for the thorium MSR. In addition, the byproducts it does produce are mostly useless for nuclear weapons. Dr Carlo Rubbia (former director of CERN and 2016 Nobel Laureate) has stated one of the reasons funding for MSRs was cut by the US in the 70s was precisely because it's difficult to use them to produce nuclear weapons. There are even proposals for MSRs that are fuelled specifically by nuclear waste transuranics (e.g. http://www.transatomicpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/N...).

Honestly, I'm not so sure the ROI for renewables is anywhere close to 'winning', unless you ignore stuff like renewable intermittancy (meaning you need to build a crapload more highly expensive transmission infrastructure, or attach highly cost-effective batteries to the grid i.e. lead-acid batteries atm).

As for German nuclear, I suppose that won't be a problem once they've completely shut down all their nuclear reactors. Pity that the government official estimated cost of this is 55 billion Euros over the next decade. Although the (frankly more credible) 'unofficial' estimate puts the cost at 250 billion euros over the next decade. Not to mention the fact it's resulted in their co2 emissions increasing in both 2015 and 2016 (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhou...). Their own environment ministry now predicts they will probably not make their 2020 co2 reductions targets.

So other than the enormous cost and increase in co2 emissions, good policy.

- We could do it for less than $3 Trillion ...

- We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors

Seems very dubious. The first successful MSRs were built over 60 years ago. The reason none are in commercial use is probably because the costs would work out higher than conventional reactors.

My own very crude back of the envelope, for replacing all worldwide coal generation with AP-1000s (at $7bn a pop) puts the cost somewhere in the $6T range. This is assuming I got the unit conversions correct...

As for MSRs, there's some very interesting history there. There is, of course, the fact that MSRs weren't as good at producing the necessary byproducts for making nuclear bombs (remember this was during during the cold war). But the other accident of history was simply that Oak Ridge National Labs (who ran a prototype MSR for a few years) just happened to be in the wrong part of the country: the story goes that Nixon apparently wanted to shore up political support in (California?...) and so pushed money more in the direction of the LMFBR.

Nixon also fired the director of ORNL too, apparently because his support for MSRs and advocacy for increased nuclear safety didn't gel too well with that administration. At that point MSRs were kind of forgotten about...

It definitely seems like the big challenge for MSRs is of the materials/chemical engineering variety. I guess some of these could be designed around: for instance I've heard Kirk Sorensen (LFTR advocate) suggest situating the entire reactor and plumbing complex in a drain/basin of sorts. In the case of a pipe break the fuel(s) simply drains in to a passively cooled storage tank (deep underground).

Also some of the chemical handling would require great care. Fluorine, for instance, is not something I'd want to mess around with...

I don't have the numbers, but I would also have to imagine that the government-owned reactors are the most expensive on paper because there will always be political powers that will want to make it appear more expensive than it is.

No, we want to sell them access to our grid and cheap power.

This to me is one of the biggest issue with solar (and wind) is you need huge amounts of land if you want to really try to replace what is being generated by fossil fuels. Sunlight just doesn't provide all that much energy per square foot. When we stand in the sun on a clear day, we feel comfortable warmth not searing heat.

Do all the cost estimates showing Solar is competitive include the land acquisition costs?

It's the same problem when people propose building giant solar arrays in the desert. Unfortunately, our large population centres tend to be concentrated in coastal areas, and transmission infrastructure isn't free (it's actually super expensive).

EDIT: Just to be clear, I have nothing against renewable energy (I suspect I'm coming off as a little negative here). I just hope that people aren't misled when costs aren't properly factored in (or overstated, in other cases). I actually think there's something rather special about solar PV: it's one of the few forms of electricity generation that isn't just another method of making heat to spin a turbine. Hell, despite its sophistication, fission is just a fancy way of boiling water...

They claim that their solar roof costs less than a traditional roof, and lasts longer. And produces sufficient power for the house.

This approach nicely works around a lot of the very real problems associated with the traditional, more centralized solar generation methodologies.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/27/forbes-reaches-to-fi...

One way of attempting to answer this question is to look at France, where 75% of their power is nuclear; their price per KWh for consumers up to 2015 was lower than the average for Europe (12th-cheapest in Europe according to Wikipedia, and 2nd-lowest for commercial), but that almost certainly doesn't price the government insurance mentioned above [2].

Note that due to a lot of electric heating in residential stock, France is very susceptible to increased demand in cold winters; in such situations they have to import from the rest of Europe, sometimes at peak hours. And as of 2016, a bunch of French reactors were shut down over safety concerns, so the prices there are spiking dramatically [3].

Another approach; let's look at cost per installed MW of power for current projects. For solar, that's now beating wind (and half the price of coal) for the newest installs, at $1.65M/MW [4]. According to the World Nuclear Association (who I'm going to assume will give the best possible numbers that can be said with a straight face), nuclear installs are ranging from ~$2.5M/MW to $7M/MW of capacity, with most cases closer to the high end of that range [5].

Now, load factor appears to be around 20% for US desert installs [6], so you need 4.5x more installed capacity to meet nuclear's load factor of 90%. Load-factor-adjusted costs: solar $8.25M/MW, nuclear $2.8M/MW - $7.8M/MW. That makes it look a lot closer than your numbers suggest. A deeper analysis would include pricing energy storage (which increases the cost of solar more than nuclear, but does need to be considered for an all-nuclear mix) and subsidies (which predominantly increases the cost of nuclear).

I haven't done more than skim your link, which seems interesting reading, and I'll dig into that later. But the from-first-principles analysis doesn't seem to be using the right costs for solar; it has `Cost: $12.3 Billion` for a 500MW CSP installation, or $24.6M/MW. That's a factor of 15 above the observed cost of installing a modern solar plant. It might be accurate for a CSP plant, but that's not the cheapest solar available.

In summary, I'm somewhat agnostic on this issue, but the energy storage issues with solar/wind seem like they could push the cost up substantially as we start to get towards majority-renewable on our grid, so I tentatively support building some new nuclear as a short-to-medium-term hedge. But we should be sure to do so with as little subsidies as possible, so that the installation price reflects the true cost, rather than kicking the can down the road on billions of dollars of decommissioning costs. And entirely new reactor designs (e.g. fast breeders) could change the calculus entirely.

Caveat emptor; I'm not in the energy business, so there's probably some missing steps here. Please let me know if you spot one.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-ene... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Manage... [3]: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-27/french-shocked-powe... [4]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-ene... [5]: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-as... [6]: http://euanmearns.com/estimating-global-solar-pv-load-factor...

Carbon pricing always seemed like the elegant, 'neutral' solution to me, but it doesn't seem very popular. Also people seem to have trouble understanding that it makes perfect sense to cycle the revenue back to individuals (e.g. tax cuts), as the point is to make co2 emission intensive activity relatively more expensive (meaning people efficiently substitute away).

On the solar costs, it sounds like you've made a fair calculation (although I'm by no means an expert either, so not really qualified to make any kind of judgement). Although one other factor (which you might have already built in to your unit price) is the cost of transmission infrastructure: renewables (particularly wind) need to be geographically distributed to ameliorate their intermittancy issues (i.e. the wind only blows in some parts or the country at any given time, the sun is only visible from some perspectives etc.). Either that or, as you pointed out, you need quite a lot of energy storage capacity. Most likely there's some optimal mixture of both.

There's two other bits of fission tech that could be real game-changers: small modular reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor) and sub-critical reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier). Although I get the sense the latter is a bit more speculative (even though we have all the bits of technology to make it work in theory).

And I should probably correct something that I think I (mistakenly) said earlier as well: nuke plants, although they can scale up and down to try and match demand, it apparently is not a fast process (meaning at least some energy storage or 'peaking'/'energy sinking' capacity is required, somewhat mitigated by good predictive models of demand).

There will never be a completely safe man-made system.

For example, when designing a system for Functional Safety[0], none of the applicable standards (IEC 61508, ISO 13849, etc.) require that the product eliminate risk completely, because that is literally impossible in any complex system.

Instead, you reduce the risk based on the expected harm according to the function "[likelihood of dangerous incident / time unit] * [amount of harm caused if dangerous incident occurs]" until that expected harm is below a certain threshold.

Even accounting for Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, etc., nuclear already outperforms other sources of centralized power generation when you measure the deaths per unit energy produced[1]. Politically, the public may never accept this simple truth, because we are afraid of "big" things far out of proportion to their average actual danger to us. But it is a simple truth nonetheless.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_safety

[1]http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energ...

[1] https://thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

And cost should anyway be the least of concern as global warming costs will be higher no matter what if we fail to control it.

Only this not true any more. Over the last decade Solar has become price competitive sans subsidies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU

Even before that the subsidies for solar have been dwarfed by the subsidies that are in place for nuclear power. Recently in Germany the nuclear companies' lobbyists managed to get rif of the problem of end storage of nuclear waste by shifting that burden to the general public. Great job!

// I haven't watched the video. Would love to see a text version thereof if it exists.

Is it per unit of power that can be produced under optimal conditions or per unit of power averaged over a year? Note that half of the time in a year it's dark, so in order to produce the same amount of energy in a year you need a solar power plant with at least 2x power rating of a power plant that can operate continuously.

Does this include the cost (monetary (capital) and in additional energy that has to be generated due to storage losses) of storing the energy over periods of darkness and inclement weather?

This also means you need 5-6 times the amount of transmission infrastructure compared to if you have centralised power generation that can be rapidly scaled up and down. Burning coal is one such solution (obviously a terrible one given climate change). Gas is good for intermittent 'peaker' plants, but it's not exactly cheap nor co2 free.

Contrary to what's being said above, I think fission absolutely must be explored to avoid a climate catastrophe. Our current fission reactor tech is basically the same tech we had in the 50s and 60s, which manages about 3% fuel efficiency (mostly due to the use of solid fuels). Despite this, it's still at least 'in the ballpark' cost-wise, and also the second safest form of power generation, according to the IPCC, over its entire life-cycle (from mining to waste disposal and remediation). Incidentally, hydro is the first.

If we could invest even just a little bit of money into furthering fission research, we could very well end up with an abundant, cheap and safe method of generating baseload power. Or we could yammer on about the cost of 'political capital' and accept a much higher probability of extinction because a section of the population are either misinformed or just flat out ignorant. Yeah, let's do that.

Do you think grid-level energy storage needs to be batteries, as opposed to other forms? If so, why?

Come to think of it, I've only ever looked at the per KW hour cost of batteries (lead-acid seems to be the clear winner). You wouldn't happen to have references for other energy storage methods?

This is comparable efficiency to batteries but less expensive and with significant reuse of well-established technologies and industries (e.g. most of the construction work can be done by existing rail contractors).

Although battery technology continues to advance, my suspicion is that large-scale electricity storage is going to tend to be mechanical for cost reasons.

Very interesting though. I wonder how far those trains travel, and if there's some way to use them simultaneously as energy storage and transmission infrastructure. I guess it depends on how the energy is recaptured. I'm just wondering because that could solve some of the cost issues associated with putting big solar arrays out in the middle of the desert...

Something like a linear alternator maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_alternator

Love that they call it the ‘Sisyphus Railroad’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage

I think it's an interesting field though.

http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/.

It's a "hard-headed" engineering look at our energy options written by a physicist. It might be a bit outdated (published in 2008), but when it came out it was the best compendium I'd seen.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_41....

"If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside, what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have 10% × 100 W/m^2 × 200 m^2 per person ≈ 50 kWh/day/person.

I assumed only 10%-efficient panels, by the way, because I imagine that solar panels would be mass-produced on such a scale only if they were very cheap, and it’s the lower efficiency panels that will get cheap first."

This assumption was invalidated by the actual trajectory of solar power since 2008. Nobody is building solar farms with 10% efficiency panels any more. Low efficiency is too expensive -- because it requires more glass and aluminum for the panels, more cabling, racking, and labor for installation. Low cost, low efficiency Chinese panels, like the GCL Poly ones used at India's giant new solar farm that HN just had an article about, are now in the mid-teens. (I looked up the data sheet after getting a glimpse of the GCL shipping crates on that Indian project site):

http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/PV-Specials/GCL%20245.pdf

If they used the middle-of-the-road GCL‐P6‐60‐240 that's a 14.7% module; 47% better than MacKay estimated as the best one could hope for from large scale solar projects. And the minimum competitive efficiency for even low-price panels is still creeping up. (Though large scale storage sufficiently affordable to get UK energy primarily from PV is still but a dream.)

MacKay also made the challenge look even bigger than it is by estimating the energy consumption of a "typical moderately-affluent person" and then multiplying that value by the whole population of the UK: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c2/page_22....

This leads to large over-estimates relative to actual measured UK energy consumption, particularly from air travel and automobile travel.

> MacKay also made the challenge look even bigger than it is by estimating the energy consumption of a "typical moderately-affluent person" and then multiplying that value by the whole population of the UK (...)

Here I'd agree with him: we need to find energy sources that will deal with projected future demands.

http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Energy-Consumption-per-Capita...

You might think that's just because the UK doesn't do manufacturing any more, but look at manufacturing powerhouses Japan and Germany: they also have seen per-capita declines since 2008.

Ecologists and economists alike seem to have a default assumption that human resource consumption is insatiable; they just have different attitudes about that assumption. I don't know how many years of trends like the one I just linked it will take before they reassess resource satiety.

EDIT: here we go - http://www.nature.com/articles/srep04315 . Lithium iron phosphate batteries (LiFePO).

Although I'm assuming this particular combination doesn't provide favourable enough economics (or it would probably be a household name already), I can definitely see how this approach in general could. You could have the best of both worlds: cheap, but slow charge/discharge storage combined with the ability to very quickly scale up to meet peak daily demand for a limited (but sufficient) period of time.

But temperature differential storage, pressure differential storage, and creating hydrogen all seems to scale better to me.

I'm surprised that hydro could be considered safer than nuclear. That seems incorrect based on past experience.

Hydro dam failures have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths during the past 50 years or so. That's far more than Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters, even accounting for later deaths due to radiation-related diseases.

The Banqiao Dam failure alone in 1973 killed 171,000 and displaced more than 11 million people.

First and foremost, it was an administration, planning and design failure, compounded by weather, enineering, response, and other factors.

The background was adminstrative pride, ignored engineering warnings, insufficient spillways, poor communications, and no disaster planning.

The immediate trigger was an unprecedented "perfect storm" -- the collision of a tropical typhoon and a cold front -- unleashing 1,000+ mm of rain in 24 hours, completely overwhelming the dam.

The area was densely populated, what communications there were were down on account of the storm, and rougly 20,000 people were killed in the immediate flooding. The remaining 100,000 deaths occurred due to disease and starvation in the area as a result of no effective disaster and recovery response.

The most telling characteristics of Banqiao though are these:

1. Some 40 years after the incident, the region is not a nondiscretionary multi-centennary wildlife preserve and exclusion zone, but home to some 17 million inhabitants. That is, once a flood zone stops being a flood zone, it returns to its previous state relatively quickly.

2. Banqiao itself is far and away the most extreme accident of its type. There have been other major dam-related incidents, in India and Italy (Vajont Dam tsunami), but each was some two orders of magnitude lower in deaths than Banqiao.

The common elements in virtually all dam disasters are 1) poor understanding of risks, 2) suppression of criticisms, and 3) poor or no warning systems.

Keep in mind that dams are simple systems from an engineering standpoint: a large mass of material which regulates water flows. And yet these do fail with some regularity most especially in less-developed areas. The premise that the complexity of nuclear power plants will somehow pose fewer risks lacks credibility.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

https://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/the-forgotten-...

Regarding storage and distribution the video reports on a current project in Utrecht/Netherlands where they are combining the untapped storage capacity of electrical cars. As a Tesla owner you can set the amount of milage you will need the next day and the rest of the capacity can/will be used for storage and distribution.

Imagine that, if demand is high and your Tesla is charged you can take the bike and sell the electricity for profit. So the Tesla might pay for itself over time.

Regarding potential over capacity by solar generation I think the electric car revolition is just about to start. There will be huge demand for electricity in the near future.

On the contrary to the costs of storage and distribution, which are often cited and remarked upon in discussions about renewables, the cost of enviromental damage is also not included in the power generation costs. If you factor in the value of the land that became virtually unusable by fukushima, I guess the power generation costs will unlikely be as low as the are presented to be. I vaguely remember figures from someone who did the math for nuclear, this person also subtracted the nuclear industry subsidies, and I think it was 69$/kWh. Yes, sixty nine dollars per kilowatt hour. I wish I had saved that reference. I can not vouch or this value, it is only from the back of my head.

In a worst case scenario, if we go full solar, but are unable to slow a climat change that induce more cloudy weather (because more global evaporation) we are actually solving nothing.

Nuclear have a lots of cons, but the one of the pro is that we know them, while renewables are mostly untested at scale that approach current global electricity demand. (PS: Indeed lowering electric need is also a safe way to to reach the goal and should be the top priority)

In the worst case scenario, all of the nuclear reactors simultaneously explode (because more earthquakes), raining down a radioactive armageddon on the hordes of screaming peasants below.

Worst case scenario is that it gets more cloudy and our solar doesn't work as well. But lets not forget solar power still works on a cloudy day, just not as well

2013 world electrical energy generation was 23,322 TWh, with 41.3% being coal (so, 9,632TWh from coal). Presumably consumption was somewhat less (overproduction, transmission losses etc.), but let's just use this figure as it's probably grown anyway in the last few years. So:

(a) Coal generation in MWh: 9,632 * 1,000,000 = 9,632,000,000MWh

(b) 1 AP-1000 running full-time: (365 * 24) * 1,117MWe = 9,784,920MWh

Number of AP-1000s needed to replace all coal plants = (a) / (b)

Total plants to replace coal = 984.4

That seems absurdly small, so I assume I've gotten a unit conversion wrong. Any engineers able to help me out here?

EDIT: If 984.4 is indeed correct, if an AP-1000 costs $7bn to build on average (using the expected cost of the two US Vogtle plants), this works out to $6.89 trillion. That doesn't seem too bad, particularly given US safety standards appear to be a fair bit better than the world average...

On the other hand, I would expect repeated installation of the same AP-1000 model to reduce in cost over time, so that will help out a bit - although R&D into more interesting plant designs may bring prices up as well.

For some reason people are still scared of radiation even after seeing how harmless Chernobyl turned out to be compared to predictions.

except for the people that literally had to give up their lives in order to save the situation and not let it grow many times worse. knowing they were stepping into the radiation that would kill them in a few hours (if they were lucky).

hey if it's not very deadly, why don't you volunteer for being one of those heroes the next disaster

also Fukushima is not yet done doing damage, not by a long shot.

let's evaluate the "once every 30 years is no biggie, really" thing once we spent 30 years trying to clean it up.

> how harmless Chernobyl turned out to be

because all those malformed children being born must've been a hoax, or something.

btw I wasn't against nuclear energy at all (except by now it's kinda too late really, and once we realize the next plan B will be too late, but at least we'll keep on making new humans to witness the carnage) but it was because I thought we could actually do better than Chernobyl and Fukushima, not to take it as a calculated risk. That is horrible. I'd easily give up "air-conditioning and data centres" to prevent that shit (easy to say, I don't have AC, and data ... well we could really do with a little bit less of those, take a moment and think about what is stored in those because it's so ridiculously cheap, at best it's worthless data).

I know we've passed the 400ppm threshold, it's too late to prevent that, but its not "too late" to switch the planet to renewable energy. It can never be too late for that. We can't stop the catastrophic effects of climate change that we'll likely see in our lifetimes, but we can hopefully stop it from being even worse

http://m.nautil.us/issue/25/water/the-hidden-importance-of-c...

Increasing of earthquake on the other hand is a far as I know a scenario you just made up, but feel free to elaborate.

What might happen in disaster situations is the backup generators that power the cooling systems explode. But that wouldn't cause radioactive material to rain down either since these generators would be running off a petroleum (or similar) fuel.

Renewables being tested at scale isn't really a concern. There are now multiple cases of islands being 100% renewable, with energy storage in the form of pumped hydro, or as is becoming increasingly common, lithium-ion battery storage. I live on a college campus that's in the middle of a massive wind-farm, and is almost entirely renewable most days. And this isn't some small wind-farm; it has a peak output of over a GW.

Scale, isn't the problem with renewables - it's storage. However, with the current cost reductions that we're seeing with batteries, I think it'll be a solved conundrum within the decade. It won't be too long before solar with batteries is cost-competitive, as both technologies are getting cheaper exponentially.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

Me neither. Unfortunately, that's all we have, since we're not building any more :(

http://www.enr.com/articles/41134-turnaround-eludes-nuclear-...

Last spring, at the Plant Vogtle construction site near Waynesboro, Ga., executives representing Georgia Power, its lead contractors and trades groups gathered to commit publicly to turning around the $16-billion nuclear power plant expansion. At least three years behind schedule and billions of dollars over its original budget, the massive effort—the first U.S. project of its kind in decades—is a closely watched bellwether of the country’s nuclear plans, which could fizzle if this project fails to deliver, many believe.

Executives with Westinghouse and Fluor, which represent the contracting team that took over on Jan. 1, publicly vowed to do what they already had contractually agreed to do: deliver the project according to schedule by achieving the in-service target dates of June 2019 and June 2020 for Vogtle Units 3 and 4, respectively.

Now, nearly a year into Westinghouse and Fluor’s Vogtle project takeover from former contractor CB&I, the site’s workforce has swelled, but productivity and schedule have actually slipped, say state construction monitors. In joint testimony, PSC analyst Stephen Roetger and construction monitor William Jacobs noted, “The contractor has failed to achieve the project’s critical milestones in accordance with the January 2016 Integrated Project Schedule, which reconfirmed the June 2019 and June 2020 Commercial Operation Dates.” Jacobs, the state’s construction monitor, holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering and has more than 12 years of nuclear-plant construction and start-up experience.

AP1000s are also behind schedule in China. Whatever problems are causing the schedule/budget misses, they seem to be coming from inside the nuclear industry itself.

Have we lost something? Have tradespeople lost the ability to deliver these massive projects on time and on budget? Their managers? Which layer(s) is/are dropping the ball.

The structural steel fabrication has become increasingly complex. Our workshop has become dependant on robots (a laser cutter and a 20 meter drill-line machine, and a small fleet of button clicking humans to do all the CAD modelling) that a breakdown can bring fabrication to a rapid grinding halt.

It makes me shudder a bit to imagine the technical complexity of the design and fabrication of a modern mega-project.

At least wind turbines are relatively simple in comparison.

I worked a few summers in a small, wood-burning power plant. A couple times a year, they would shut down for one or two weeks, and do some heavy maintenance on different systems. One of the times I was there, they replaced all of the tubes for making steam in the boiler. Every single weld joining together the panels of tubes had to be inspected, and xrayed to ensure that there were no gaps and sufficient penetration. Finding people that can weld to that standard is a more difficult task, because it's not easy, and takes skill, and training, and experience. Moreover, those people who have those skills can command higher rates.

Ft. St. Vrain was a sad example. That was a nice gas-cooled reactor. But they had some leakage in the helium circulator, which was supposed to keep water and helium separate. This resulted in corrosion and eventual reactor shutdown and decommissioning.

The Three Mile Island meltdown was due to a valve problem. Nobody was hurt, but cleaning up the mess cost billions.

That's part of the problem with all these new reactor designs. A good design with 20 years of operating experience is preferable to a new design, where you don't know what's going to give trouble.

Hyman Rickover on reactor design: "An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."

Why were those plants cheap? First a) they probably actually weren't, thanks to hidden costs, and b) they probably weren't nearly as safe.

I'm not so ok with it, but not just for safety reasons. New designs may be safer but they are still part of a globally destructive system of dirty mining, byproducts that go to weapons, and still non-zero risk of inflicting lifelong and community-wide damage in catastrophic situations.

Also it bugs me that nuclear is perpetuating the interests of large players who would prefer to control all the energy. I'd like to see energy democratized more, meaning instead of having contracts or bills from a power company, you make your own energy at home. That's an ideal, and we will probably end up with a mix, but I'd rather see money put into trying to tip that mix toward the decentralized side of things, which means toward locally installable technology like solar.

Nuclear seems like a solution to that gap. What are others?