Air pollution kills millions of people and costs trillions of dollars, every single year. Much of it is caused by burning fossils.
https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-evaluation/thecostofairpollut...
I don't know about you but I would rather a power plant's exhaust would be contained in small rods rather than dispersed globally and embedded as microparticles in my lungs.
Moreover, it's the environmental activists who prevent the construction and operation of long term storage sites for spent fuel, and in general threaten the industry, disincentivizing the development of new reactors designed to reduce waste. You don't get to do that and also complain that the storage problem isn't being solved at the same time.
Also...how about oil spills? How much money, adjusted for inflation over time, have we dumped into cleaning that shit up over and over? And speaking of costs, what's the cost of entire cities being underwater in a decade or two?
Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no?
Pound for pound, nuclear seems like the most effective option we have at the moment. If fossil fuels were priced according to how much damage they are actually causing the planet, nuclear would seem pretty cheap too. The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels.
Also production of solar panels is quite far from being "green" as well. Luckily most of solar production is handled by China, a country with quite lax environmental standards, so most of the HN crowd does not feel the environmental impact from it.
Proponents for nuclear power will extoll its virtues while completely ignoring the bottom line: if nuclear power were economically viable, nothing, nothing whatsoever could prevent the mass adoption and proliferation of nuclear energy. Energy is enterprise, and enterprise requires investors. So without investors, or with only investors that leave the public holding the bag of paying massive subsidies for construction of nuclear plants, storage of waste and plant decommissioning, all the while charging that same public a premium for electricity, nuclear power plants won't get built and many that did and do were and are abandoned thanks to cost overruns.
IMO, the solution is staring us in the face: decentralize power generation by requiring all new buildings, houses, structures, anything built that needs power, to generate their own electricity on site. If every artificial surface everywhere that got sun was covered in PV, power would be far cheaper than centralizing the generation of everyone's electricity in hundreds of (initially) $20B nuclear power plants.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
If only the government made the stupid investors understand which technologies are cheaper...
---
If renewables are as cheap as advertised they'll sweep the market on their own. But it seems to me that claims of cheap storage are just as far fetched as those of cheap nuclear, despite tons of subsidies and support that renewables get.
Wind and solar are never going to power literally everything everywhere all the time. The sun and wind are not evenly distributed, and no amount of storage or transmission will economically fix that, ever. You'll have several different power sources for different needs, and I find it hard to prefer fracking and coal burning to modern nuclear.
I think you missed one of my main points: "The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels."
Nuclear IS economically viable. We just haven't figured it out yet. I know that sounds snarky, but it's as close to the truth as we can possibly get. If fossil fuels were priced according to their known externalities, not just based on supply/demand, nuclear would be astronomically cheap by comparison.
The problem is the economy itself is completely ignoring the costs of the alternatives to nuclear. We all know how bad fossil fuels are, but we haven't priced that knowledge into their cost. They are not cheaper than nuclear, we are simply lying to ourselves. This in itself highlights a very huge flaw in capitalist markets.
Granted, this is somewhat independent of solar vs nuclear, which is an entire discussion in itself.
Nuclear, which we have built 100s of, never got to a critical mass where the cost started going down. Nuclear plants are just not built on time and budget. The alternatives to nuclear aren't going to be easy, but humanity has been trying to get nuclear to work for over 50 years and has failed.
Yes, but remember that any nuclear plant whose construction is started now will not be available for about 10 years. So it will be competing with the storage technologies of maybe 8 years from now. Given the rate of improvement in cost, it's very likely IMO that nuclear will be more expensive than just synthesizing the equivalent baseload source from renewables and storage.
I'm not convinced there aren't hidden costs with wind and solar, such as finding the land to put them on or the complexity of storing energy for night time usage or cloudy days or lack of wind etc.
What I do know is nuclear is able to power our collective needs just fine, day and night, RIGHT NOW and all we need to do is build the fucking things. So, let's build them...now.
Renewables are still an unknown, nuclear is not, and I'm not comfortable staking the future of the planet on "wellll, it will probably be fine in 10 years."
Storage is addressed at that modeling site. In particular, a mix of energy storage technologies appears to be very useful (not just batteries). A key is to note that a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear plant per kW. So, if we had to totally back up the grid with hydrogen-burning turbines that could, in a rare pinch, supply 100% of the demand, it still would be cheap compared to supplying that same power with nuclear power plants.
Even the oft-cited $200 billion is an exaggeration. Bear in mind these figures from from politicians, nowhere near this amount has actually been spent. As far a figures for the money actually spent, let's go with your own source:
> In 2016, University of Oxford researcher and author Peter Wynn Kirby wrote that the government had allocated the equivalent of US$15 billion for the regional cleanup
Let's see if we can get more recent sources on spending related to Fukushima. Form a 2020 article [1]
> Since fiscal 2014, it has set aside about 35 billion yen annually for the interim storage facilities. The funds come from revenues earmarked for nuclear energy-related projects in the special account.
> But expenditures concerning the storage facilities are running a lot higher than initially envisaged.
> An estimate released in late 2016 by the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry showed that the project will eventually cost 1.6 trillion yen, compared with an initial projection of 1.1 trillion yen.
> The government has allocated an additional 12 billion yen annually for the storage facility project since fiscal 2017.
Okay, so the Japanese government is saying that it'll cost 1.6 trillion yen (about $15 billion dollars) total. They're actually spending 35 + 12 = 47 billion yen annually, which is ~$433 million. $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power.
That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place. It has had its share of accidents too. I wouldn’t be betting against more accidents in the next 30 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_inc...
I think it would be worth comparing to the costs of incidents with other energy forms. Deepwater Horizon comes to mind with a cost 2 or 3 times that number (not counting fines). To say nothing of all the spills/incidents we don't hear about with tankers spilling/leaking on the open waters, just far enough away nobody notices.
And that's assuming newer plants don't have any improved safety over Fukushima. We already feature secondary containment, which would have prevent Chernobyl from being nearly as bad as it was, the Soviets just didn't build secondary containment. The reality is that we only have one instance of a meltdown breaching secondary containment in over 70 years of nuclear power operation.
And lastly, all this needs to be viewed relative to the ecological impact of covering several percent of the Earth's land surface in solar panels, and the environmental damage from fossil fuels that will be necessary until effective energy storage is developed.
Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami. That's how safe nuclear is.
Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations until AFTER the first release which spread contamination south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald Reagan.
Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated.
"That's how safe nuclear is."
And it’s cruel to move thousands of people by force (and some of them died in the process). This is just an appeal to emotions, please don’t do that. There is already plenty to discuss about the effect of low-level radiation and risk assessments. Everybody is contaminated with radionuclides, there are numbers you can use to show that this specific contamination was more important than different background levels. Looking at those numbers show that the exclusion zone was vastly over-estimated.
That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...
https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...
The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives.
All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly.
So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.
> Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment
The two conflicting viewpoints posited in the same paragraph, seems ironic. The first is the issue, but requires veracity. The second is nonsensical. Humans make these decisions every day.
Humans make a lot of stupid decisions rooted in gut feeling and prejudice all the time. A small subset of these decisions involve long-term industrial strategy at a national level or the life of millions of people. For these decisions we ought to do better.
Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation.
There are three more things to keep in mind:
1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year.
2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures.
3. Death is much worse than having to relocate.
Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.
There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the storage facility can be constructed.
But there are other deep geological repositories around the world.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
Is it really that big of a problem? Sure, the cost of dealing with these is not negligible but in the end, it is just a matter of digging a hole in a deserted place and putting things there. It is dangerous stuff and is to be handled with care, but we deal with dangerous stuff all the times: explosives, toxic chemicals, weapons, ... and nuclear waste is not that high on the list.
The usual argument is that nuclear waste can stay hot for thousands of years. In fact, while true, the kind of stuff that stays radioactive on these time scales tends to be weak, The most concerning elements are usually those with decades-long half lives. Compare to stable but toxic elements like mercury that last forever.
Also worth noting that coal contains long lived radioactive elements that end up in the atmosphere after being burned. So, coal plants also produce nuclear waste, but instead of having it conveniently stored in a specialized facility, it is released in the atmosphere to be stored into your lungs. As I said, long life elements are weak, so it is not that much of a problem, but it is not a reason to do the worst thing that can possibly be done with these.
And while we keep talking about waste, this is only waste because we don't use it. Radioactive "waste" is made of rare elements that produce energy, and maybe a treasure for future generations.
It's not like we've hit a dead end with nuclear research, people have just seen too much Chernobyl stuff and cast a large net on the whole science.
The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estimated cost is about $200 billion per the Japanese government:
https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200
So, to obtain a real comparison between the two, you'd have to add up the total costs of cleanup, environmental damage, health damage to people and animals, and all the other total costs of both fossil fuels generation and nuclear power.
Hint: Whether you're looking at total cost of ownership per gigawatt hour or cost to produce electricity per GWh, nuclear is cheaper.
>There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware.
Not as touchy as you think. Most of the contaminated materials that exist are from nuclear weapons production, which is a completely separate problem from power plants. Right now, those power plants (at least in the US) are mostly storing their spent fuel in dry casks on site with few or no problems.
The amount of dry cask storage needed fits within the boundaries of those sites so far.... IE, spent fuel is not a huge volume of material.
> nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
This statement can apply to any real world engineering endeavor. You don't eliminate risk in a large project anyway. You anticipate it and mitigate it. You assume things will go wrong and make sure when they do that nothing particularly bad happens. That's just good design.
I'd rewrite it as
> one of the safest power sources humankind has ever developed[0]
because this is difficult to dispute. Cost is a more complicated matter and depends what you're counting and how you're comparing. Are you including tragedy of the commons? I.e. carbon emissions, mining, storage (batteries, waste, etc), land usage, etc. If any of these are included in the costs the price changes quite a bit and I'd argue it is not in good faith to compare solar and wind to hydro, coal, nuclear, etc if you don't include battery storage/costs because intermittent energy isn't equal to continuous (unless you over allocate).
To continue along the line of the gp the worst case estimates of nuclear deaths (including future deaths) is still lower than 8 years of of coal in the US using the best case stats. If we use more reliable data (the consensus from the UN and other independent studies) even including future deaths are lower than a single year of coal's best case in the US. So how much do you value human life? Because we're talking about 81 people[1] (4k if we assume we don't get better at treating cancer over the next 20 years) vs 39k PER YEAR (low 7.5k high 42k per year US coal particulate related deaths). Let that sink in again: 31 people died immediately from Chernobyl, an additional 50 due to Chernobyl, 0 from 3 Mile Island, and 0 Fukushima. Those are the deaths of nuclear power.
> The order of magnitude of Fukushima ...
> Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
I'm often frustrated by Fukushima being brought up and people implying that it came down to human stupidity. Yes, that was a factor, but there was a much larger and significantly more important factor. The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest in recorded (by actual measurement) history (for Japan) and the 4th largest EVER recorded. The second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth. Based on this the likelihood of an earthquake and tsunami like that happening within the lifetime of the powerplant was incredibly low. Were the earthquake an 8.5 Fukushima wouldn't have happened. It is an absurd statement to chock this up to human fault. We're talking about an absurdly rare and freak event, and no one died.
As to the cost of the cleanup (which includes tsunami cleanup as well as radiation fwiw), well we could make it a lot cheaper if we reduced the acceptable levels of early death by radiation. The hard part is that there may or may not be small radioactive particulate on the ground and this could get introduced into water or food (getting inside the body). Letting people move back would still likely result in less deaths than coal does per year. I'm not advocating for this, I think that'd be insane, but why is this insane? Why is pumping out more coal not more insane? What's the difference? We're talking about human lives and livelihood here. When it is more humane to send people back to live in a radioactive zone than keeping coal plants online, maybe we should re-question our priors. What issue are we trying to solve? Because if it is saving human lives we're doing a pretty bang up job. If it is cost, ditto. If it is climate, ditto.
The arguments being made here are often absurd. There is no question that nuclear is clean and safe. The question is about cost, how much you value human life, how much you value carbon, and how much you value pollution. But if you think lives are cheap, climate change isn't real, and (not or) pollution isn't a big deal, then yeah, continue fighting against nuclear because it is costly.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
And deaths caused by fossil fuel emissions which is in the tens of thousands per year.
Fukushima and Chernobyl combined are a tiny fraction of FF emissions/deaths/costs.
Yes, they are, at least in California which has an aggressive storage policy: https://blog.ucsusa.org/guest-commentary/five-facts-about-en...
So how much is actually stored? 1.5GW for 10 minutes? 15 minutes? Watts isn't a unit of storage, watts per a unit of time is a unit of storage.
That's not actually the key figure of merit, the problem isn't how long stored sources can be used but peak output.
> 1.5GW for 10 minutes? 15 minutes?
All of it for longer than that (none of the various utility-scale sources have a discharge that quickly), which is why power and not energy is the thing that is targeted. But it varies (utility-scale battery systems have a different profile [and differing within that by specific battery tech] than thermal storage which has a different profile than pumped hydro, etc.)
> Watts isn't a unit of storage
No, it's a unit of power, and the main problem right now is being able to meet needed output levels when other sources are offline. The concern is the depth of the trough that storage can handle, you need breadth too, so a substantial level of that comes inherently with depth, and the main concern is short-term variation.
That is exactly the problem. Yes, output matter, too, but capacity is the main figure people are interested in. If storage system A can output 1.5 GW but only for 1 hour, and system B can output 1.5 GW but for 10 hours then these are very different systems.
> All of it for longer than that
And how long is it? Basically we're trying to find the area of rectangle. You're providing the height, but staying conspicuously mum about the width.
> The concern is the depth of the trough that storage can handle, you need breadth too, so a substantial level of that comes inherently with depth, and the main concern is short-term variation.
No, the concern is both depth and breadth. It's easy to build a battery system that puts out a lot of energy for a short period of time. It's hard to build a battery system that puts out a lot of energy for 12 hours.
We aren't anywhere close and won't be for many years which is why it's so absolutely ridiculous how green activists implicitly endorse using coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels which kill tens of thousands of people every year and are cooking the planet, when we have nuclear, which kills no one, and does not contribute substantively to climate change.
It's almost like the activists care more about posturing and magical thinking than they do "saving the planet"...
So that leaves...Nuclear.
So again, why are you fear-mongering about how "dangerous" nuclear is when it's a tiny tiny fraction of the real danger of fossil fuels?
I thought climate change was like an urgent crisis or something....?
We are being told on the one hand that climate change is an existential threat to tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Oh but actually we can just refuse to decarbonize our energy production because maybe someday 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now there's a true "green" renewable energy I guess.
There are good arguments for and against pivoting to nuclear right now. But there is an (I think) unquestionable position presented here that we shouldn't be pivoting away from nuclear and shutting down plants.
Nonsense. It's clear they can, although it's more than just using Li-ion batteries.
It'd probably be helpful to elaborate, rather than just insist that the above commenter is wrong and loosely suggest at other solutions.
Things like hydrogen storage, synthetic methane, and thermal storage remain in the prototyping phase. I think it's not correct to say that they can, seeing as there isn't even a commercial market for these technologies let alone one that we know will scale. By comparison countries have already powered >80% of their electricity with nuclear.
It's clear than nuclear power can completely replace fossil fuels. Renewables might be able to replace it, but that's a gamble based on assuming a new storage solution will work excellent. Not just better, but truly blows-everything-else-out-of-the-water phenomenal. When the stakes at play are stopping climate change, this is a very risky assumption to make.
These technologies exist today and are based on sound thermodynamic principles and existing industrial capability.
I'd say if we could provision 1 hour's worth of storage over the span of a decade, that'd amount to a demonstration of economic feasibility. But few of these upcoming technologies are making it out of the prototyping stage, let alone commerical success on this scale.
No one is presently making these because the policy of the grid was developed around power plants that dig stuff out of the ground and burn it - the markets are based on bidding with the assumption every power plant will have a marginal cost of generation relative to the cost of its fuel. This policy doesn't reflect the nature of renewables which besides their capital cost have very low to 0 marginal cost of production. This has disrupted the energy markets in many ways and policy is still being developed to incentivize storage capacity.
You can listen to the people who work in this industry and have studied it deeply or you can keep googling furiously for webpages that support your magical thinking.
In fact, I didn't see ANY links from you supporting your nonsense about renewables not working, despite them working in many places across the globe.
>literally none of these are currently capable of replacing baseload nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation.
Literally STORAGE will never replace GENERATION, they are two different concepts which most people understand but you apparently don't. STORAGE can supplement INTERMITTENT GENERATION to create DISPATCHABLE GENERATION for far cheaper than nuclear plants.
There is no way that renewable energy can replace baseload power generation of FF and natural gas given current technology.
All you have is magical thinking and science fiction.
I'll save you the time. No one has done it. And no, not because evil mustachio-twirling Koch brothers are pulling the strings. Because the technology does not exist at scale to do this.
Or do you want to continue with your speculative science fiction daydreams?
Your argument is "it hasn't happened yet, therefore it cannot happen". This argument proves entirely too much; it implies no technological change can ever occur. To make this argument, you have to demonstrate that the situations in which the change did not occur are the same in all important respects as the current situation. And you cannot do that. Here's what's different.
(1) The cost of renewables has crashed, especially in the last decade. In the case of PV, by nearly an order of magnitude. This is an extreme rate of change for an energy technology.
(2) The cost of storage has also fallen rapidly, and continues to fall.
(3) Market conditions are now beginning to favor installation of storage, as they didn't before (when there's enough dispatchable gas on the grid vs. renewables storage doesn't pay off.)
(4) The existing infrastructure was largely installed at times when renewables were not competitive. However, it won't be ripped out until it becomes uneconomical to operate it (which means ignoring its capital cost). So observing that the source are still being used doesn't imply renewables are not winning.
(5) Fossil fuels have not, and still large are not, being taxed at a level appropriate for the damage they are going to do. Renewables don't have to beat fossil fuels unburdened by CO2 taxes (although we may have waited long enough with CO2 taxes that they may increasingly do so, at least in some market conditions). CO2 taxes will rise to the level needed to push fossil fuels entirely out of the market, and then the question becomes "which is cheaper, nuclear or renewables (or, possibly, fossil fuels with CCS)"?
(6) Once fossil fuels are out of the way, it is crystal clear from the data that absent some technological breakthroughs, new nuclear power plants are grossly uncompetitive vs. renewables. This (and not ludicrous conspiracy theory) is why you're seeing massive installation of renewables around the world, and nuclear installs are gasping for breath.
However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed".
The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...
There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.
Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.