"The Mark I containment was undersized in the original design; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Harold Denton estimated a 90% probability of explosive failure if the pressure containment system were ever needed in a severe accident.[18] This design flaw may have been the reason that the tsunami in 2011 led to explosions and fire in Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.[19]" (Wikipedia)

It's likely that many old power plants are just not safe and too costly to operate reliably.

> DAEC's operation helps avoid the emission of nearly 4 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, which is the equivalent of taking almost 800,000 cars off the road

Understanding, improving, testing, and certification of a plan to protect against the huge risks involved is expensive and often in practice timelines and budgets often go significantly over.

There's numerous MUCH newer designs that: are much smaller, much easier to scale, absolutely identical, well understood, robust in the face of failure, and don't even need operators. Additionally since they are identical they get economies of scale and only need a finite number of experts on hand, not a group of them per site. You literally need a flat site, water, and electrical hookups. If you don't provide enough water for cooling they shut down. After their useful service life you put them back on a train car and ask for a replacement.

Some of these projects are ready to deliver, but the early customers have been cancelling. Bill Gates funded a project, and there's several around.

https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/business/duane-arnol...

It should be quite clear that neither solution are even close to enough power to bridge the gap and require additional energy in the form of fossil fuels. It will be less fossil fuels than if the nuclear plant was exclusively replaced with fossil fuels, but it will be more fossil fuels than before and it will be adding to global warming in a time where the planet can't take more.

While I support expanding nuclear power capabilities in general, a straightforward rule like “don’t decommission old plants as long as fossil fuels are still being used” seems dangerous and irresponsible.

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...

Availability has nothing to do with what you are talking about (it’s much higher for photovoltaics anyway). Out of the 49.5% non-renewables only gas which makes up 12.5 percent of electricity can really be used to follow demand. Coal and nuclear are too slow for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_factor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/presse-und-medien/news/2020...

Modern nuclear plants can do load following and they do so in France and in Germany. So why is "nuclear too slow"?

Intermittency is mostly relevant for 100% zero carbon energy which is a goal that is incredibly far away. At least another 10 years before we even think about it and then another 10 years to do it.

I suspect Germany does the same thing, but it would be interesting to hear if my guess is correct.

Sweden is also currently investing heavily in connecting power lines with nearby countries in order to increase the capacity to buy energy with countries that produce energy through fossil fuels when needed.

What do you define as 'a total disaster'? Coal fuel consumption is down enormously, supplanted by renewables and a tiny bit of gas generation growth.

Germany's CO2 intensity of electricity isn't actually very good. It's worse than the UK, and 7 times more than France.

Likewise, CO2 reductions aren't very large, and is still above average for EU member states: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...

I’m all for developing renewables, but we cannot abandon the one good technology we have for generating massive amounts of energy our base loads demand without polluting our air.

The fact of the matter is, that we can dump all our waste on a couple of football fields worth of space. Or even better: store it in a cave somewhere deep and dark and away from rivers.

My old man worked at TMI. We moved to a new house and one day he set off the radiation monitors going into work. Turns out we had a radon problem. This part of PA isn't exactly coal country, but close enough.

My bro was an auxiliary operator at TMI until a few months ago... shut down.

It's the pinnacle of "perfect is the enemy of good."

Well, not just Earth but from almost everywhere in the solar system (assuming being on an almost circular orbit).

Just imagining the solar system as a bowling ball at the center of a trampoline surrounded by fast moving billiard balls. The problem is probably the speed the earth is moving at, plus the speed we had to get the rocket up to, to get it off earth.

Yes, which is around 30 km/s of delta-v, as compared with only 12 km/s delta-v to boost an object from Earth's orbit (assuming you launch it in the same direction that Earth is traveling) to escape velocity from the solar system.

throw the waste in a bucket strong enough to survive hitting earth at terminal velocitty. place bucket in spacex falcon9 rocket. launch rocket into orbit with escape velocity. watch nuclear waste vanish into vacuum of space forever. if crash, collect bucket and restart with new rocket.

financially costly? yes. solves the 'what about in 5000 years when someone opens it or it leaks?' questions, yes.

1. Reprocessing is a better technological solution.

2. That waste is much safer in it's current location in a dry cask in the back lot behind a power plant than it would be on even the safest rocket.

3. Even if we punt waste disposal or reprocessing to future generations, we are still better off stacking waste in dry casks in the back lot behind power plants than burning coal.

Truth though: I think Gundam 00 showed a shockingly plausible future (sans mechas, most likely) for our planet if we do not get over our reliance on fossil fuels. Global conflict on a scale that makes WW2 look like child’s play is an inevitability if we cannot mitigate the environmental impact and eventual depletion of fossil fuels, and that includes support to help less developed nations move away from them.

For a lot of plants, an anonymous cyberattack could probably do it. That'd be way worse than an attack to geostationary, which very few actors could manage, and probably nobody could pull off anonymously.

Space junk seems a more serious problem:

https://physicsworld.com/a/space-debris-threat-to-geosynchro...

I've seen various proposals to clean it up but it'd take some work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit

Except, as the parent noted, very briefly during the equinoxes.

For economic reasons you pretty much have to use phased array transmitters, with a reference signal from the ground to make it coherent, so if the beam gets repointed it gets a lot more diffuse than that.

But as others have pointed out, why would you bother with building space based nuclear plants and then converting that energy to light when you could just use the sun?

Earth is huge. At the rate reactors create waste, the amount of land consumed by storing it is staggeringly low (the higher risks are transportation, which unfortunately the rocket idea doesn't solve unless we build a dedicated rocket site next to each reactor). Low enough to justify the risk-over-time of securely sequestering it instead of throwing it away.

The fuel itself is just a small part of it.

But I think the real problem is emotional. People are afraid of mushroom clouds and mutants.

They don't say that because that's not how we're wired. We come up with better sounding arguments to believe. But what need to be solved is the emotional problem.

There's no free lunch.

I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to say "nuclear > renewables" or even "renewables > nuclear" (this is a dumb comparison imo), but rather that every time we have these conversations in HN and most places we aren't even attempting to make a one-to-one fair comparison. I just wish that, especially on a technical form, that the conversations would focus on technology and science rather than the politics. Though I understand that not every (anyone) is really qualified to talk technically so we talk politically because we still want to engage.

1. They're ignorant and follow a fallacious "appeal to nature" mentality. They seriously think that some sort of return to nature will result in a utopia instead of disease and famine.

2. They're Malthus apologists who want to cause an energy crisis and cause people (who aren't them) to die.

It also overlaps with the anti-GMO types.

In Ohio, the subsidies we so large they led to bribery payments of $60 million by FirstEnergy (former owner of the nuclear plants) to the Ohio Speaker of the House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

Low gas prices have accelerated the decision to close down existing nuclear power plants as gas prices look to be low for the foreseeable future thus keeping power prices low.

As for new nuclear, I do not think there will be anymore after the Vogtle 3/4 plants are online. The certified construction and capital costs were estimated at $14 billion in 2017. In 2018 the costs were estimated upward to $25 billion. Analysts are now estimating an additional $1-2 billion due to COVID. With the estimated completion dates of Nov 21 and Nov 22 likely being pushed back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

A sister set of plants (Westinghouse AP1000) design were begun in South Carolina (Summer 2/3). In 2008, costs were estimated at $9.8 billion. Project was cancelled in July of 2017 after $9 billion spent and total cost to complete was estimated at $25 billion.

We do not know how to build new nuclear power plants even remotely cost effectively. The French have tried and it bankrupted their lead nuclear developer, Areva, in 2016. China has built some new nuclear power plants, but has not started a new one in a number of years.

One last side note, another item damaging nuclear power plants, particularly in the Midwest is the structure of the subsidy for wind power. Wind power tax credits are a Production Tax Credit (PTC). To earn the tax credit, the wind turbine must generate power into the grid. As a consequence, wind turbines have a tax incentive to produce power in negative price environments (e.g. overnight). Nuclear power plants cannot turn on and off easily so they end up paying to produce power at these negative price time. Not helpful for profitability.