Cheaper compared to every other suggested solution to climate change. If climate change wasn't a thing, sure, I'd probably be on board with writing off nuclear and waiting for some combination of solar and wind and storage to take over.

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).

I doubt the flood-securing work is avoidable. But maybe it could be less bad.

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.

Any such decrease in property value is precisely because of the irrational fear of nuclear power.

> 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.

It's completely rational to reduce property values when there is a risk you will be forced to move and lose all your possessions. If the risk is say 0.3% over the next hundred years paying every homeowner ~20,000$ within 40 miles when the plant is built to offset that risk is completely rational, but would make nuclear Even less viable.

>there is a risk you will be forced to move and lose all your possessions.

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.

If your house explodes due to natural gas, your property and that of all your neighbors and their neighbors and the surrounding community isn't contaminated for a period of time exceeding your natural lifespan. If you have a radiation accident instead, it very well may be. The two scenarios are quite different.

They are identical scenarios. The only difference is the scale.

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.

Saying the scenarios are identical doesn't make them so. And scale matters.

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.

The scenarios are the same.

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.

In the first case you can sell the land in some cases for more than 1/2 the value of the house, thus making them different.

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

You're comparing two different things.

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?

The scenarios are the same.

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

Gas explosion: House destroyed, you still own the land, you can rebuild on the land. Even if you move to a new home, you can sell the land for the going rate in the are (which will likely drop because more land is coming on the market, but perhaps not too much).

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.

Risk X exists has nothing to do with risk Y. Nuclear powerplants increase risks so the local population should be compensated.

Hard to assess that risk. No modern plant has had catastrophic failure like that. Essentially there's no data to extrapolate from.

TEPCO had a modern plan to fix the issue before it happened. They decided not to act. Nuclear power takes the decision out of your hands, and puts it in the hands of organizations like that. I prefer something like solar which keeps power in my own control, local, decentralized, not decided by some huge behemoth that is driven by money and actuarial charts.

Yet the topic is, will future nuclear plants be needed to slow global warming? Future plants (indeed all current plants) will include safety plans and devices. Such plants have not had catastrophic events.

Fukushima exclusion zone disagrees with you. Sure, if we limited reactors to 'safe' locations that reduces risks, but we still put them in stupid areas such as near fault lines.

"No modern plant"

"No true Scotsman." There are recent powerplants built with similar designs that would have had similar failure modes.

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.

Foul! The Fukushima plants were among the oldest in service. They were indeed not modern in design by any definition.

The two direct deaths where from an insufficient sea wall not the reactor design. Saying future reactor designs fix the problem is a mistake. Because again it was not the reactor design that caused their deaths.

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.

When people think of the Fukushima disaster the two direct and unfortunate deaths caused by the insufficient sea wall are not what come to mind. The meltdown of the reactor is the primary concern. If a meltdown had never occurred the Fukushima incident would have never been mentioned on this thread or in any other conversation about the safety issues with nuclear power. So I'm sorry but bringing up the inadequate sea wall is a complete straw man argument when talking about safety issues from nuclear power.

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.

Without the damage from the tidal wave Fukushima would have been far less of an issue. With a proper wall there would not have been significant issues with the Tsunami, thus making that wall a critical safety feature that failed.

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.

I will admit that had there been a better sea wall the Fukushima incident would have much less severe. But I still think it's beside the point.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety goes through the a list, but basically you have active vs passive designs based on a range of features. Generally, passive safety refers to the primary loop.

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.

Sure, but I live underneath an air traffic corridor. I want to be compensated for the chance that a plane crashes into my house.

I doubt the odds of that are anywhere close to the ~2/1,000 odds of a significant nuclear accident over 50 years of operation.

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.

Assuming each homeowner near the power plant has a $1M cost to move, that works out to a $3,000/person cost ($1,900 after time discounting at a 1% discount rate). Assuming there are 100,000 people within 40 miles of the plant, that's $190M, or 5-20% of the cost of a plant.

This hardly seems like an insurmountable barrier.

100,000 homes within 40 miles is probably on the low side. Also, a reasonable penalty for unwanted risk bumps up the costs. Further the value of property and possessions likely increases faster than inflation making the time value equation tricky.

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

Also the average American home price is $189k, not $1M. Round up to $200k for cost to move, and we're down to $380/person.

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?

Cost to move is only part of the problem, you need to move while losing all your stuff which may or may not include your car etc. Further, this is not limited to housing but includes farms / offices / schools / factory's and infrastructure like highways and water pipes etc.

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.

What if you do the same calculation for Indian Point? I suspect the cost of relocating everyone in New York City and boroughs would be pretty substantial.

>100,000 homes within 40 miles is probably on the low side.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center for example is close to and up river of NYC.

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

The costs of solar are decreasing over time. And solar is more decentralized, so you're not stuck with huge government boondoggles, corruption, and corporate overlords.

Source for corruption in private electricity firms? I don't think it's particularly high.

Who are corporate overlords?

Ever heard of Enron? Also just google for "nuclear corruption" and you'll get a lot of reading material. For example this article http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/nuclear-cor... which has links out to sources including the US DOJ about corruption cases in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the US, and more. It's a huge problem. And the key players would like to keep it all hidden, so your being in the dark about it is no surprise.

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.

"It is interesting how you say that nuclear might be cheaper and at the same time accept an incident like fukushima every 30 years like you pay 1000 peanuts and that it alright again. Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power. This has nothing to do with fear about the technology itself but about the decrease in property value in vicinity of the plant. So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows."

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.

I would prefer to live near a nuclear plant than within sight of a wind farm.

What's wrong with a wind farm, out of curiosity? I personally love driving by a windmill farm that's near a local highway.

Driving by it to see a novelty is different from living next to an eyesore.

I don't understand why a large structure is automatically an eyesore. It doesn't emit smoke. It's mostly pretty quiet. Are windfarms uglier than, say... a nicely constructed bridge like the SF Bay Bridge?

As long as we're exploring hypothetical choices, would you prefer to live near a nuclear plant over living in a house with energy provided by solar tiles on the roof?

Works well in e.g. California. May work less well in Maine. Especially when it snows.

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.

Yes, because I like to have power at night ;)

Since you seem not to have thought of it, you can also get power from the grid at night. Or from batteries. The grid gets its power from diverse sources.

So your logic doesn't quite hold up.

Your logic doesn't hold up. You cannot ignore externalities when... arguing against them to begin with.

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.

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

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

Smooth out power delivery with energy storage such as batteries?

Still nuclear. And it would be easier to take the solar advocate more seriously if they weren't also opposed to mining for the very materials they made from.

> Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power.

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.

>"Maybe you will allow a nuclear plant in your backyard but most people already have a problem with wind power."

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?

Transmission of electricity is not free, you have to build and maintain a high-power transmission line, and also waste some of the power for transmission inefficiency.

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.