The costs for proper decomissioning of a nuclear plant and safe storage of the used materials are excluded in most analysis, as the time and cost horizon is so large.
On Solar Panels: there are some very interesting projects by large environmental service providers underway that use high pressure water or very high temperatures, to separate the glass from metal frame.
I think a similar hurdle are carbon fibres, you can't burn or shred them (carcinogenic micro fibres).
There are some interesting projects that try to clean and reuse the fibres through some kind of chemical baths..but most of the old e.g. wind turbines are just stored at a giant wind turbine graveyard right know.
It's a fascinating field!
From what I’ve seen of modern designs that can’t be used for weapons programs, there’s significantly lower costs associated with disposal and decommissioning plants.
Also, I keep seeing figures for rooftop solar and not solar in general, and the risk for rooftop solar is due to the risk of working on a roof. If solar was mandated in new build and major roof repair, wherever it made sense to install it, this risk can be greatly reduced as the largest risk is during putting the scaffolding up and taking it down again.
Meanwhile, four people died as a result of a nationwide campaign to install roof insulation and that became a massive political controversy.
I don't doubt people die installing solar, but it's interesting that we never seem to hear about it.
The concern that some future civilization will manage to dig so deep, in an area with no natural resources, crack open some of the waste caskets, and then die because they fail to figure out it is poisonous is one of the most ridiculously far fetched concerns. Contrast that extremely remote possibility with the certainty of pumping toxic greenhouse gases directly into our atmosphere. I cannot fathom why one would believe the former is preferable to the latter, but some countries like Germany seem to have made that conclusion.
And this is why nuclear waste disposal is _not_ an overblown challenge. Because even though there are already digs in place, almost all of the waste still sits right by in-use reactors. The US has been trying to fix this since the 80s, and afaik real progress has not been made since the bill to put it in Yucca mountain was killed in 2010. It might be a political challenge rather than a technical challenge, but it is an _extremely_ difficult political challenge that should be deeply considered when supporting nuclear energy. It is not really safe or cheap for it to stay above ground by reactors forever.
We're already fucking over future generations with a massive carbon footprint. Replacing all that with nuclear would be objectively less bad.
It's too bad the article has to lie in order to give that impression.
When you consider the timescale of nuclear power plants and how long nuclear power has existed, safety stats seem to have a pretty low sample size with a lot of uncharted territory.
That fear you mention is a very real and important one, because even if 99% of plants operate under strict safety, it only takes one failure to cause massive damage. Beyond lives and into land and resources, and additional risks of further ecological harm.
For me, when considering if nuclear power is worth it, I think that we have so many alternatives that will work well enough for a long-term horizon (let's say 200 years) that any sort of risks of charting that new territory in nuclear power and having that very large risk is not worth it currently.
That's not to say it won't be worth it in the future perhaps as climate change worsens or in a century with additional safety tools possibly fueled by additional scientific insight, but right now I think you're severely undermining that some (not all) fear of nuclear power comes from a very rational place.
for me it's the ultimate of the bad / destructive ways to create energy and should be avoided (opinion.)
i'd say with those stats in mind hydroelectric and wind power are some of the winners, even though of course the equipment manufacturing and decomissioning of these isn't totally clean, they are a big step in the right direction of non-destructive cleanER energy source.
That's true of literally all of our modern sources of electricity aside from maybe coal and oil.
As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat.
if you look at failure rate, there are only 450 nuclear power plants currently in existence as of 2016. To save time, let's do some napkin math and estimation with charitable rounding. Let's say there are 1000 in existence. So far we have seen at least one critical failure. For the sake of rounding, let's charitably round that to 1 failure. Let's say that of those 1000 power plants, the average time of existence is 40 years. That means that we have about 40000 years of nuclear power plant testing so far. And we've had 1 failure in that, so if we use years, we have 1 in 40000 years.
Even adjusting to days, we get 1 in 14.6 million.
Looking at air travel, the crash rate is about 1 in 4 million.
Now consider the consequences of that one catastrophic failure compared to the cost of a plane crash on average. You can't be serious when you say those are the same.
Even with incredibly charitable looks at nuclear power safety stats it's nowhere near your uncited "orders of magnitude" safer.
I think you really don't get the risk formula here. It's not about failure percentage, it's about the consequences of any failure at all, no matter how rare. An increase in nuclear power only increases the chances of any failure.
https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-powe... https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/22/travel/flight-crash-app/index...
One flight serves 100-400 people for a few hours. One nuclear reactor serves N million people for N decades.
Everyone in a plane crash dies. What percentage of electricity users die in a typical nuclear disaster? 0.001%?
Assuming there won't be any disasters worse than what has already occurred.
Presumably any new nuclear capacity would use safer designs, but still, the tail end single event worst case scenario is a lot scarier.
(Before you say Fukushima, remember the carnage and death was caused by an insanely catastrophic tsunami. Despite massive incompetence and disastrous consequences, it has resulted in a grand total of 1 death so far, with perhaps a few dozen over the lifetime of all people in the area. Not nothing, but it shows just how safe this stuff is when you extricate paranoia from the equation.)
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/65198/what...
Choice quotes:
"Short answer not much would happen. There just is not enough of them and even in the worst case breakdown they don't release that much radiation."
"Even if every single reactor in the US 'failed' today, I doubt there would be significant radiation leakage ... without a 40 foot tsunami, I think this is more like Three Mile Island."
"The problem is that there is a great deal of exaggeration in the public's idea of radiation - the "Omigawd, it's radioactive! We're all gonna DIE!" effect."
Maybe we could, you know, not store radioactive waste above-ground?
I do.
The number is zero.
Any disasters that occur due to that are artificial disasters, not natural ones, even if a natural disaster is also part of the chain of causality.
Yes, I know, engineers are somewhat insulted by the public's refusal to accept their risk modelling. That's why this has become somewhat of a cultural fight. It sometimes feels like there's a segment of armchair scientists, forever stuck in the science-fiction of the 50s, and not noticing that the real world has long since moved on, to something far better than their vision of a nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner for every happy wife.
Even if you somehow manage to change the perception (which is unlikely, considering you probably wouldn't even accept "perception" as anything real worthy of consideration), it doesn't matter: Actual scientists have long moved on and, with a lot of help of forward-thinking politicians, invested into wind, battery, and solar technology, making it cost-competitive with even coal today.
I'd say that BNFL killed itself through dishonesty. They may have had a viable business otherwise.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199798/cmselect/cmtr...
https://www.wired.com/2000/02/uk-nuclear-fuel-scandal-widens...
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sellafield-crisis-...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bnfl-to-be-wound-up-by-en...
Looking about the place, this seems unlikely.
>"The domestication of cats took a different trajectory. Wildcats are improbable candidates for domestication (see Table 3). Like all felids, wildcats are obligate carnivores, meaning they have a limited metabolic ability to digest anything except proteins (33). Cats live a solitary existence and defend exclusive territories (making them more attached to places than to people). Furthermore, cats do not perform directed tasks and their actual utility is debatable, even as mousers (34). [In this latter role, terrier dogs and the ferret (a domesticated polecat) are more suitable.] Accordingly, there is little reason to believe an early agricultural community would have actively sought out and selected the wildcat as a house pet. Rather, the best inference is that wildcats exploiting human environments were simply tolerated by people and, over time and space, they gradually diverged from their “wild” relatives (35, 36). Thus, whereas adaptation in barnyard animals and dogs to human dominion was largely driven by artificial selection, the original domestic cat was a product of natural selection."
- From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication
Hopefully more countries start reprocessing spent nuclear fuel the way the French do, though this does raise proliferation concerns.
Look, if you want nuclear power, then the government will need to finance it. Some of these other sources are at 1-2 cents a kWh, how is a private investor supposed to finance a nuclear power plant that competes with those rates? Even if there were no safety or environmental regulations at all, you still couldn't get there. I'm sorry, but there exists no private investor dumb enough to finance a power generation facility that expensive, that would reside that far down the dispatch stack. It just won't happen.
I am not so sure. I mean, if you really do not have to care about safety and waste, how expensive it can be to dig up uranium, centrifuge it for enrichment and mold it to a shape that heats stuff around it?
Solar energy is great, we need more of it, and I think the long-term future of power includes a microwave transmission solar station at one of the Lagrange points.
However, when you look at the total externalities, nuclear is actually the safest and cleanest form of power that we could use in the medium term.
Except that everyone is afraid of it, and no one wants to spend the money.