Nuclear can be done safe, efficient, cheap and at-scale. All it requires is to allow for the secondary market of spent fuel like was originally started when nuclear first starting to get rolled out. The security concerns can be handled in other ways than crippling nuclear from being self-sustaining I think.
Nuclear power plants have zero tolerance for serious accidents. And zero-tolerance is never a good margin to operate on.
All of that costs money, and sooner or later some MBA / politician is going to ask why we’re spending so much on something which hasn’t come anywhere near a major event – surely we’d be just as safe spending 10% less and using the money for something else like rewarding shareholders? Setting up governance structures which can resist that kind of pressure for millennia isn’t something we have much experience with.
Micro molten salt reactors make a lot of sense if looked at rationally. Can burn what we currently call "waste" too.
When talking on this kind of scale about a system level failures, the social issues are going to dominate unless it’s something like a fire-and-forget space probe. If you want to see nuclear succeed, the first thing I’d be thinking about is how to ensure that someone doesn’t cut safety to boost their profit margin, accounting for possible future regulatory capture and austerity budgets. Since nuclear is never even going to be within one order of magnitude as distributed as wind/solar, I’d especially think about what would prevent some unscrupulous CEO from pocketing the difference comfortable in the knowledge that their family doesn’t live anywhere nearby.
Nuclear seems more dangerous for the same reason planes seem more dangerous than cars—when something goes wrong, it's a big news event.
Also, the video indirectly suggests that we can replace flood protection with nuclear energy. :-/ Dams are built mainly to protect population from floods, so they SAVE millions of lives every year, while also generating electrical energy, which is used to upkeep dams.
Banqiao incident is pictured like Chornobyl`, but, in reality, a bunch of people lives was SAVED by lower dam. The flood broke 62 dams. Just imagine what may happen when 10 nuclear reactors and/or nuclear waste sites will be flooded instead.
I'd be careful to draw conclusion from such an outlier.
The hysteria of your statement doesn’t appear to be substantiated by a dispassionate look at the facts.
And it's sometimes forgotten that 10s of thousands of people had to leave their homes.
Though some googling reveals that the main contaminant is Cesium-137, which has a 30 year half life. That will fade into background radiation long before that, even ignoring cleanup operations.
They've already reopened parts of the closed area.
188,000 people were evacuated in California following some unexpected rainy weather.
I feel like a broken record posting this in every thread about nuclear. There's too many people on this forum that have some sort of smug attitude about not being "scared" of nuclear power and don't bother to learn what's actually constraining things.
The reality is that renewables have no plan to eliminate carbon emissions that isn't contingent on a massive breakthrough in energy storage. The US currently had under 10 minutes of energy storage. Renewables offer better carbon emissions reductions on a dollar by dollar basis until they saturate the market during peak production. Then they don't help.
Sure, nuclear is more expensive but it is the only existing solution that aims to actually eliminate carbon emissions. Not just supplement fossil fuels.
It's completely disingenuous to claim that nuclear is the only solution that aims to eliminate CO2 emissions.
Lazard uses current commercial cost figures. If people actually tri d to deploy grid storage on a wide scale, prices would skyrocket as supply fails to match demand.
While scaling up the industry isn't trivial, it's absurd to claim it's impossible or that demand outpacing supply will somehow reduce investment in greater supply.
You haven't actually given a plan to provision this much storage - or even specified how much storage we'll need for that matter - so yeah I'm still very comfortable in claiming it is not possible. At least not without some massive breakthrough in storage technology, which doesn't yet exist.
While it's unlikely to reach this value, it's such a high figure that actually can solve the energy storage problem altogether.
Again, the answer is point to an unproven form of storage and assume it'll be a silver bullet.
It's pretty well-established tech at this point.
I'll come back at you: what technological component involved in underground storage of hydrogen is not already demonstrated?
Operating costs are low for nuclear, it's the construction that is the problem.
There's significant latency in oil supply chains. Weeks if not months. Keeping a refinery online does not somehow keep a power plant online or the lights on in the cities in the proximate sense. Oil refineries are irrelevant to what happened.
It's not because concrete is some arcane technology that isn't cost effective, or doesn't work. It's because we just aren't very good at building things anymore.
However I do agree. Our politicians prefer to wank over unimportant things instead of working on things that actually would benefit the people. And the government contracting system is horribly broken.
There is no incentive to putting in the hard work to accomplish projects like before.
Or compare it to the amount of land used for parking. Or for roads. Or for roofs of buildings.
I've never, not once, ever seen a comparison of this sort that sounded the least bit scary.
2. I'm a bit flabbergasted that you think we can scar nuclear production to what we need. We can't even scale nuclear production to hit replacement rate of our existing reactors. Nuclear does not scale, because it can not be built.
And I'm similarly flabbergasted that you think storage would hit scaling problems, when we build new factories for storage all the time, use new chemistries all the time to reduce the use of limited input components.
Storage production is growing at a massive pace, problems are getting solved all the time. Nuclear is shrinking all the time, gets more expensive all the time, and we can't even figure out basic concrete pours and welding. These industries are hugely contrasting, but I don't know how you can reach your conclusions when looking at the reality of storage and nuclear as they are in the real word.