I should clarify that I'm not against solar as an important part of the energy mix, but it seems incredibly wasteful when we consider the sheer amount of material required in panels + storage to replicate the sustained output of a single fission plant, not all of which can be easily recycled. Solar hasn't historically been widespread enough for us to experience the issues associated with widespread end-of-lifing of components, but one look at the electronics industry and the waste it produces should tell us that it could be a massive problem we're kicking down the road. The sheer amount of material required to run the world on solar energy is staggering. Nuclear waste is comparatively a tiny and easily tractable problem by comparison - all the world's nuclear waste over a 50 year period could probably fit in a single underground site of sufficient volume.
There has been plenty of work done on smaller, safer fission reactor designs over the last 50 years, but the regulatory burden to get new designs approved & operational is extremely limiting. There's no way to do it without the support of government as things currently stand, and it's a pity - nuclear could provide 50%+ of the global energy mix emission-free with a relatively small footprint compared to solar, and certainly with far less in the way of materials input between plant construction & fissionable material (the latter producing 24,000,000 kWh from a single KG of U-235).
Nuclear is worse in every other way except space used, and Earth is huge.
I will never understand the fawning over a technology that has proven so lackluster under human control. (Nuclear is fantastic with rigid controls such that the US Navy implements, but this never happens is commercial fleets)
Australia will be at 100% renewables before the first nuclear generator would come online if you broke ground today. We should stop mourning nuclear and keep ramping renewables and battery production. The model is proven at scale.
This was already a little sad, but now that the economic case has turned decisively against nuclear power, with things going badly for basically every nuclear project and things going better than expected for most renewables it's becoming absurd.
Sorry, but you are the one making judgment calls and "enjoying being correct" here. I'm advocating for nuclear power, and I also understand the battle is mostly lost, so please don't act smug like this. Other than the economic case, there are massive hurdles on the way of a 100% renewables world, which I hope will be overcome, since that's obviously the way the world is going forward to now.
1. Producing large quantities of power
2. Continuously, for several decades
3. Hiding most of the costs until long after those responsible have become unaccountable
On top of that, while reliable and cheap renewables are “nearish future”, fusion tech is potentially not much less “nearish”, and would enable people to go back to living in Northern Europe, America, Asia, etc.
Note: I’m not trying to espouse or argue for a particular approach here; I’d trying to suggest some reasons why there might be so much (and such long-lived) “fawning over [nuclear] technology”. This is just some mildly educated guessing on my part.
Hence why the article describes one of the projects under consideration is a massive renewables concentration in northern Australia (the population of that area is a rounding error), with the goal of exporting to Asia via undersea cable.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-total-mass-and-volume-of-a...
Note also that this is mostly just considering high level waste (like, the actual spend fuel rods and reactor parts), and not all low- and intermediate-level waste, of which there is a lot more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Classificati...
If I follow your link, I read this: Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced about 62,500 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. That's the high-level waste.
The rest of the comment goes on to explain that including all low- and intermediate-level waste, plus legacy waste from military activities, then it may reach the millions of cubic feet you're citing.
Low-level waste is not much more dangerous than the extra natural radiation you receive from a plane trip, so the real danger is high-level waste. And that can fit in a fraction of the space required for a single solar park.
https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast...
This is really hard in the U.S. because the NRC is very unfriendly to R&D, but T.E. has already gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process and expects to have the first IMSR running by 2025 or so. Moltex and Elysium also have MSR projects in Canada.
Nuclear naturally looks bad if you compare today's nuclear to the future of wind/solar/storage.
You're comparing vaporware to technologies with a proven track record.
A couple years ago I got to sit in a meeting between people from a dozen GenIV reactor startups and a former head of the NRC. The reactor people said their biggest problem was that the NRC required a near-complete design before they would even take a look. At that point they either said yes or no. If no then that was the end of it, you were out of business. If yes you still had only a paper reactor. Getting to that point required several hundred million dollars.
That's a very difficult sell to investors. They said just a more phased process would help a lot. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop or promote nuclear technology, and was uninterested in climate change.
Canada has a more rational approach to R&D, while maintaining rigorous safety. That's why MSR companies are moving there, and why the first one, Terrestrial Energy, is making solid progress.
(And as a side note, molten salt reactors are a lot simpler than light water reactors, because they have safety advantages inherent to the physics of the fuel and coolant.)
I don't know. MSR's are certainly interesting, but they have downsides as well as upsides.
Some of the PWR SMR's like NuScale also sport passive safety features, which should make it simpler and safer. Being a PWR, it's still a high pressure design, of course, which MSR's avoid.
While MSR are very cool, in some ways they're pretty scary too. I mean, you're pumping around tonnes of super-radioactive goop. What if you have a leak? At least with a traditional design you have a couple of extra protective layers, with fuel being contained in solid pellets contained in tubes. And you have to be very careful with the chemistry of the fuel salt; IIRC one of the early MSR's (ARE?) had to be shutdown since they messed up their redox chemistry which lead to fissiles plating out on the heat exchangers. Eek!
There's the famous Rickover quote that anybody can design a paper reactor, but real reactors tend to be complicated, over budget, and over schedule.
Moltex Energy agrees with you on pumping fuel salt. They keep their liquid fuel in a fuel rod, open at the top, no pumping. All the rods are immersed in a pool of liquid salt coolant, which just sits there. Secondary coolant in pipes through through that.
(I didn't answer your previous points about the NRC process, but for the record, I completely agree with you.)
> Moltex Energy agrees with you on pumping fuel salt. They keep their liquid fuel in a fuel rod, open at the top, no pumping. All the rods are immersed in a pool of liquid salt coolant, which just sits there. Secondary coolant in pipes through through that.
Yes, Moltex is an interesting design. The main drawback, AFAICS, is that since the fuel concentration in the fuel salt is quite low compared to solid fuel designs, they have to use pretty enriched fuel. I think their current plans call for 40% Pu. And the breeding ratio is poor, around 0.5 according to a paper I skimmed through a while ago.
Yes, they also have the thermal design which I'm quite sure requires much lower enrichment, but AFAICT is more a concept than something they're actively developing. It makes sense of course to focus on one design at a time, unless they have infinite money.
One of the other fast spectrum MSR startups, Elysium, also proposes using spent fuel + maybe leftover military Pu for startup. The interesting thing about Elysium is that their design at least breeds, so they only need enriched fuel for starting up. They're saying that they can run up to 40 years before needing to reprocess the fuel, just by adding U238 online to the salt.
Sure. But at some point physics limits how far you can go. We had a good run for many decades with micro-electronics because it's possible to cram a huge number of transistors on a tiny microchip. For solar cells and batteries we're not that far away from fundamental physical limits.
So even though batteries look poised to replace gas for services like frequency control and some peak shaving, they're still orders of magnitude too expensive to allow us to completely run a grid on wind and solar, with no guarantee they will ever actually hit those price levels required.
However, for the last 20 or so years there were chants about the end of Moore's Law. Still appears to be going strong, "somehow".
My take on battery storage: several incremental developments coming down the pipeline on the anode and cathode side of li-ion batteries (improved chemistries, less cobalt, increased silicon %, new electrolyte mediums, etc). Combined with the "coming surge" of li-ion batteries and development for upcoming EV models with billions invested in new battery factories, it's hard to not see significant changes to the price within even a decades time.
Well, Moore's law has already slowed down quite a lot, and in the not too far future we won't be able to miniaturize further since atoms are only so small (e.g. lattice spacing of Si is, from memory so might be wrong, 0.54 nm).
Of course, there is hope for various non-Si based electronics; we'll see.
> My take on battery storage: several incremental developments coming down the pipeline on the anode and cathode side of li-ion batteries (improved chemistries, less cobalt, increased silicon %, new electrolyte mediums, etc). Combined with the "coming surge" of li-ion batteries and development for upcoming EV models with billions invested in new battery factories, it's hard to not see significant changes to the price within even a decades time.
To clarify, I didn't mean to say that we're at the end of the road for battery development today. Just that we cannot expect decades of exponential improvement like we have seen with microchips.
I don't think an order of magnitude improvement in price/kWh is out of the question (in terms of kWh/kg it probably is, though?). But two orders of magnitude? Color me skeptical.
I don't think an order of magnitude improvement in price/kWh is out of the question (in terms of kWh/kg it probably is, though?). But two orders of magnitude? Color me skeptical.
Wrt cars, I think batteries are not too far from being viable to replace most uses in cars, city buses etc. And that will be a massive, and welcome change, in our society.
For long-range ships, planes etc. I don't see batteries as viable. My guess would be, for a future decarbonized society, synthetic hydrocarbons for planes and ships; some ships might use hydrogen or nuclear reactors.
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/batteries-renewables-...
I do not understand how spending 2 billion on a plant and 50 billion in case of a major meltdown is better that putting 2 billion into covering the country in solar panels and batteries.
The reason, as many commenters have said, is the vested interest of powerful players.
And 2 billion may be very optimistic even. The current price tag estimate for the nuclear plant being built in Finland is almost 10 billion euros, and over 10 years late. It'll likely be the second most expensive building in the world.
For Finland specifically, I understand it is difficult to rely on solar. May be in a 100 years, when we can run a superconducting cable through Russia to more Southern places.
On the other hand, imagine a scale of disaster if Fukushima-style meltdown happens in Finland. Is it really worth it?
A very quick google search will show you that there is sizeable documentation out there on the learning curve for li-ion batteries.
See: https://www.solarchoice.net.au/wp-content/uploads/Solar-PV-l...
Additionally, while nuclear is definitely a good option for delivering clean, always on electricity - the reason nuclear power plants aren't being built is because whoever is financing it / coming up with the money has to deal with not only a 5-10 year construction lead time but also a 50 year operating period. Given the cost reductions of renewables, how do you price in the risk that your plant will become completely uneconomic at some point in that time period?