It's basically a huge long-term liability that just doesn't exist with solar/wind/storage, hydropower, or geothermal.
Water essentially can not become radioactive, and the sewage is used to cool water, not (directly) nuclear material. As you probably know all heat engines need a hot side (the uranium) and a cold side (the sewage) - the cold side is also those huge cooling towers you see while driving near a power plant.
This environmental remediation cost is generally missing in comparisons with all other energy sources.
Solar panels may be tiny but they generate dozens of tons of waste material per panel.
There is a good reason all the large mining companies and several of the large oil companies market/lobby their contribution to 'green energy' so zealously. https://www.fcx.com/sustainability/environment#climate
(I used to work in this vertical)
'What What happens to all the old wind turbines?' (bbc.co.uk) [2020]
Wind turbine waste is almost nothing compared to that. Still worth fixing, but perspective is important.
1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-10/coal-ash-has-become-o...
I'm sure these turbine blades will likely continue to be iteratively re-designed to be increasingly recyclable or at least re-purposable as times goes on.
I was just answering the question about remediation costs for wind turbines, as this feature of the current popular implementations is often a surprise.
https://www.lmwindpower.com/en/stories-and-press/stories/new...
Just dumping fuel pellets into the deep ocean would be a pretty terrible idea though. All the fission products and impurities that build up as the fuel is burned lead to the pellets starting to crack apart. Any cesium or iodine would leach into the water quickly, it would not be a good day for Shamu.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-04-26/ddt-was...
Did I say thousands? Wow.
Don't ever trust anyone that says "We'll just safely dispose of that in the deep ocean.".
Could you elaborate on the why? I would asume, because of risk. A solar plant, you can more or less just put anywhere, but a nuclear power plant, even a small one, needs state permission, has to meet extensive regulation, etc.
It would need some convincing for me, too, that a nuclear reactor can be just a drop in replacement for coal. I would think unknown risks, hidden costs due to regulations, neverending building, etc.
And are we talking about a battle tested design, or is it new technology? That sounds extra risky.
Time for an HN Wind, water, solar, and nuclear company start-up.
Who’s in?
There exist green energy companies, and their biggest barrier to growth is government policy. For example, when Green Mountain energy wanted to sell to customers in AZ in 2021, SRP, one of the states largest utilities, pushed the state to repeal the competition laws it had on the books for 24 years. HB2101 was introduced in January to do this and it was signed by governor Doug Ducey in April. This gutted the states policy to have a competitive energy market and stopped the expansion of Green Mountain into the state.
You need friendly environments to operate in. Existing players like their monopolies, and they have the political connections to use the force of law to shut down your energy startup. You may have to plan to spend most of your investors money on Lobbyists and Lawyers.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/...
I would consider living in a division that has extra low-cost electricity. It couldn't be zero cost because nuclear could only provide base load power, unless one of these micro/modular reactor types is so innovative that it can provide base and peak load power, in which case such a division could have truly zero-cost power for a bunch of years.
I.e., promote the darned things, loss-lead if need be.
If the manufacturer won't take such risks, then might never break through.
I bet that after a few years you could get such good press out of it that other developers might sign on.
One word: Epcot
It's something Disney and Florida could probably agree on, would be a wholesome PR story about investing in Walt's futurism dreams, and would be easier to negotiate than with a less-planned development.
And finally, what better showcase than "If it's safe enough for Disney"?
Our Friend the Atom, indeed https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzl1wHc43I
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/disney-wo...
Perhaps we should also examine the requirements and costs associated with storing waste from coal-fired power plants. Oft overlooked in favor of the fuel rod boogeyman.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-...
If we treated such waste with the care and security it deserved, the cost equation may balance out differently.
first, the approval and regulatory process is deliberately cumbersome and in obvious need of reform. Treating every plant as a one-off design rather than standardizing has enormously inflated costs. And generally much higher scrutiny requirements for new designs have strangled the ability to roll out better/safer designs. It's very similar to what happens in the FAA with aircraft/engine designs, we can design much better engines/reactors than we could in 1960, but the new ones require an onerous approval process while the old ones got grandfathered approval. So we only build the old/worse ones!
If you don't want any more nuclear constructed, set policy to that effect, don't use the approval process to artificially inject costs to make it unfavorable. And the disposal situation just needs to happen, period. The waste has to go somewhere, we can't just have it sitting around forever. Even if we never ran another nuclear plant ever, the existing waste still has to go somewhere, and that process was dragged to a halt for political reasons too. The Yucca Mountain repository needs to be moved forward again.
Second, we need to stop letting coal externalize its costs. Tax carbon emissions heavily, require secure disposal of radioactive coal ash rather than letting it sit around in storage ponds that eventually spill and destroy miles and miles of land, etc.
Unfortunately, in both cases, the fossil fuel industry has its finger on the pulse of washington and isn't going to allow a trillion-dollar industry to be torn down without a massive fight. Existing stakeholders are just too entrenched for it to ever be successful and construction costs/disposal/externalities are just the place where that iceberg breaks the surface.
The "once you build the expertise, costs come down for the Nth plant" is also probably true, but there's also other things going on here with the process as a whole.
Decrease time-to-completion, and you decrease a whole host of costs. And the regulations driving that time explosion are within Congress's ability to modify.
(1) Grandfather any currently builing plan into regulations as of the year of project initiation, regardless of how they change after the fact
(2) Waive environmental impact studies for nuclear (or other no-carbon) plants. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
The real problem is that nuclear has no constituency. Environmentalists hate it because they can't do math and aren't pragmatic (let's be honest); wealthy folks hate it because they don't care how much power costs and NIMBY.
So who exists to fight for it?
The only political hope I see in the US would be a single-issue group comprised of practical environmentalists + industrialists. The former should like it because it saves the planet. The latter should like it because it allows decarbonization without inflating energy costs.
I certainly agree: the true costs of coal should be better believed!
How do they propose training for existing employees of a coal plant.
We think of Coal folks as "dirty stupid miners from kentucky" and we think of people that work at nuke sites as "white lab coat wearing scientists"
The only dirty stupid person from Kentucky is Mitch.
Operating the reactor is of course specialized. But once you have the steam, the rest of the power plant is conventional. Steam turbines, generators, and all the grid tie-in would be mostly the same as a coal plant.
I am not sure what you mean by Tooling but I am sure these retrofit reactors aren't going to be dropped off by UPS and someone on site has to figure out how to plug it in.
Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs?
"The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on producing radioactive waste"[0]
"Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants"[1]
Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter"[2], and we're still waiting...
[0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-next-generation-of-n... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/nuclear_reactors_wast... [2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf
Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven/unjust levels of harm). I think it's misleading to throw out individual objections like this without considering the systemic trade-offs that we need to make.
> the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter"
I think this kind of blame-throwing is unhelpful. I couldn't care less what marketing claims were made in the past. Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off now, or not? Specifically, compared to the other options we actually have available to us now. That is the conversation I think we should be having.
To address your object-level claim, as the OP describes in detail, one reason nuclear is more expensive now is the ever-increasing regulatory framework that has changed under the feet of in-progress projects. Maybe those regulations have resulted in a good ROI, but it's hard for me to buy that claim. Nuclear is now 10-100x safer than most other traditional/fossil forms of power generation[1], and it's excruciatingly expensive to buy that safety margin. These are tiny death rates caused by power generation.
The problem here is that it's political suicide to say "I think we should reduce safety regulations to make nuclear power 10x more dangerous, because that will avert far more deaths from climate change". In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on.
The most awesome thing you get from Solar is that it's going to move forward no matter what. It's just something you can do to lower your bill, or even disconnect from the grid altogether. Personally I am off grid with no propane. Almost unheard of in CA. Solar is now THAT cheap if you are willing to put the up-front investment instead of paying PGE $600 a month. And if you don't have the space - buy a solar panel on a business from that other company they are starting - it was on here a week or so ago.
The problem is that moving to solar solely by riding out the market-led transition won't happen fast enough. We would need to subsidize a lot more to avert the worst outcomes of climate change.
Batteries though, current batteries are a horrible solution.
It's funny that this threads main objection to nuclear is waste/mining/etc but the solar battery revolution generates some far worse environmental effects getting all those rare earth minerals. Compared to the tiny amounts of fuel needed for reactors, the sheer amount of metal needed for worldwide grid solar batteries is astronomical.
Is it?
I got the impression the discussion has moved to recognising that nuclear is too expensive, not flexible, and looking at the slow-motion-train-wreck that is the EPR project, new reactor projects are likely going to be very late[0][1][2] and hugely over budget.
[0] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Fresh-delay-to-F... [1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/finlands-olkiluoto-... [2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/CGN-takes-Taisha...
Getting the lithium and cobalt infrastructure up to scale takes time and has a lot of geopolitical considerations. It's not impossible but also far from trivial. It's not just a matter of throwing up more panels and turbines and calling it a day.
Unless we can solve storage at scale, generation at night will continue to be an issue, and nuclear is the least climatically damaging way to do that in the interim.
They are counting on lithium-ion batteries becoming dramatically cheaper at scale due to increasing demand for electric cars.
There's an entire agency/thinktank/R&D center working on this stuff, NREL: https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/storage-futures.html (or shorter summary: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81779.pdf). They do a lot of good work, but sadly no one really listens to them, either policymakers or the public :(
Nukes are not just unpopular, they are also way, way, way more expensive than favored methods.
That time will arrive after we have brought enough renewable generating capacity online that storage would not need to be charged by burning fossil fuel.
What we can be certain of is that Energy Vault (ERGV) investors who get out last will lose badly.
Small to medium investors and companies are trying to tackle it at the locality level (Tesla, small utility experiments, etc.), but there are no national or international movements to solve this issue wholesale. And until it is solved, adding more renewable production without storage to an already-capped grid doesn't really help the issue; in fact it worsens it by creating huge peaks and valleys in power production that are then compensated for by fossil fuel peaker plants (because nuclear can't ramp up and down that quickly). California is the example of this.
At the end of the day renewables vs nuclear is a false dilemma. The actual issue is future livability vs present-day profit, and the latter always wins in our political economy. We need vision and political will to get us there, way more investment in both renewables and nuclear, on the timescale of years, not decades, with nuclear providing a band-aid while R&D on storage increases several orders of magnitude.
It's the sort of problem that the private sector cannot easily solve; it would take mass national and international collaboration, or perhaps an arms race.
Given the progress (or lack of it) with the EPRs[0], I don't think "now" is something nuclear can claim to deliver on.
If we'd started planning dozens of reactors a decade ago, perhaps - but we didn't.
Nuclear simply isn't any kind of "quick fix", by a long stretch.
Arguing that we should adopt smr reactors because their proportionally larger amount of waste can be burned by a much larger/more expensive reactor that we'd _also_ have to fund/build? One that would likely cost >10b and take 20 years to construct? That doesn't seem like a good response to the waste issues with SMRs.
Doubt so, as after decades of often huge projects in many nations there is not a single industrial fast breeder reactor working satisfactorily. Can you name one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an...
Then why are you making so many arguments about how we must find ways to make it cheaper? That doesn't seem very committed to the idea of discussing the current cost benefit trade-off.
They don’t appear to be making those arguments at all. Just stating that Nuclear regulations sets safety standards substantially higher than safety stands for other power sources.
It quite reasonable to include a question about “how safe is safe enough” when talking about trade offs. It’s easy to change safety standards, and they’re constantly evolving in all industries, so it’s hardly disingenuous to consider as part of the current cost benefit trade-off.
However to insist that Nuclear energy can only be evaluated in strict unchanging state, or to suggest that GP was suggesting such an evaluation, is somewhat disingenuous, and substantially undermines the authenticity of your argument.
Ok, but this surely only is an argument that other sources should be regulated harsher (and fossil fuels absolutely should), not that we must make nuclear less safe.
With fossil fuels I'd say we need to worry about taxing emissions more than we worry about safety. But sure, let's make them safer.
Why do you think nuclear isn't too safe? Don't say it's impossible to be too safe. It's very possible. Imagine if speed limits were 15mph everywhere for an easy example.
We can build plants that are much safer than any previous ones; why is that not good enough? The regulations shouldn't be "make the whole thing out of the black box material, okay good luck".
> Why do you think nuclear isn't too safe? It's up to you to give me reasons to think that, because the default position is that a the regulation doesn't seek to require more than is necessary. This is explicitly listed in the legislation creating the NRC: it is tasked with running "A program to encourage widespread participation in the development and utilization of atomic energy for peaceful purposes to the maximum extent consistent with the common defense and security and with the health and safety of the public", meaning the current regulations are written to be just on the right sight of "safe enough" (my emphasis).
Yes, the opposite of that strawman is also a strawman. Neither one is correct.
By my view you're advocating for a strawman of near-infinite safety.
> meaning the current regulations are written to be just on the right sight of "safe enough"
As far as I'm aware, the way the regulation is handled in practice is that you have to be on the bleeding edge of safety innovations at all times. You can't just be much safer than your predecessors and adopt new methods as they become practical, you have to max out safety at tremendous cost.
Probably because there's decades and decades of pushing for safety, and it sounds really bad to say "no, the plant should not be safer than this, that's too expensive" even when it's true.
Errm, than renewables?
In this case it may be easier to change the regulatory environment than to come up with new dramatically-cheaper nuclear technology that complies with the restrictions of the current regulations (though that is happening too with modular reactors).
You're saying the safety standards regulation is not couple to the technology being used? Then what is it regulating if it's not the technology?
To be clear, I am explicitly advocating for a proper cost/benefit analysis that keeps all options on the table, rather than getting caught up on single factors ("we can't do micro-nuclear because it produces more nuclear waste"). As I mentioned later in the post, a major push to renewables is another option (I also don't see these as mutually exclusive).
I know that the most popular plan here is "push hard for renewables". I like that plan; I think a Green New Deal is an excellent idea. But empirically, how is that plan going? If that's your plan A, do you think it's going well enough to reject a plan B that you deem to be worse, but still dramatically better than climate change? I think the stakes are high enough that we should be hedging our bets.
It’s becoming clear that the climate alarmism isn't about solutions or even a tax, but forcing us to purchase “carbon credits” from Saudi Arabia and other sovereign wealth funds ranked high in the ESG index.
Only thing that could get us out there and would only make sense is going renewables everywhere in Manhatten-like projects, but that won't happen because people argueing like this got us into this situation where there is allegedly only a binary choice between failed and failed..
Isn’t the opposite true? Nuclear fuel has the highest energy density of any fuel source by a gigantic margin. The entire US stockpile of waste since the 50s is only 83,000 metric tonnes and could fit on a single football field stacked less than 10 yards deep. If we could all stop clutching our pearls about scary radiation and just agree to store the spent fuel deep underground there’d be absolutely no danger from it. Add to that the fact you can recycle the fuel and get even more energy out of it.
So building more nuclear would actually fix the nuclear waste problem.
Every half educated climate activist knows thay carbon credits are a fraud perpetuates by wallstreet types to pretend they are doing something when they are not.
This post is breathtakingly uninformed. I suggest calling it climate illiteracy
The problem with this statement is that the carbon credits ARE being rolled out AS the solution.
Is that the same ESG that Exxon is part of but Tesla isn't?
> The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single utility reactor in operation
They can add transmission lines, for cheaper importation.
As fuel synthesis -- ammonia and hydrogen -- comes online and undercuts NG, they can import that instead, at times when their transmission line power capacity or availability is exceeded.
Fuel synthesis from solar in the tropics undercutting NG extraction will be a big business. Synthesis using reliable wind, in other places, likewise.
In the meantime, as minority participants, their contribution to the ongoing climate catastrophe is relatively small.
I am not up to date with ammonia based processed.
Ammonia and hydrogen are attractive because you can sell extra production after your local tankage is full, keeping your synthesis equipment busy whenever you are not drawing down your storage.
There are countries that have been spectacularly failing to provide their own such facilities for decades.
If we propose to allow countries to outsource their nuclear waste disposal, wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper and safer to just skip nuclear entirely and outsource the power generation?
All those countries with apparently not enough access to sunlight or wind will save an awful lot of time and money messing about with nuclear and just buy in their renewable power.
If it works, could the Xlinks Morocco-UK power project could be a template for this kind of solution?[0]:
"A 10.5 gigawatt (GW) solar and wind farm will be built in Morocco’s Guelmim-Oued Noun region, and it will supply the UK with clean energy via subsea cables. The twin 1.8 GW high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cables will be the world’s longest."
[0] https://electrek.co/2022/04/21/the-worlds-longest-subsea-cab...
But there's definite risk in outsourcing the majority of your power production, risk that doesn't exist if you're outsourcing long-term storage. If something goes wrong with the storage ecosystem, you can keep it on-site for a few extra months.
I think trusting another country to look after your radioactive waste for a few thousand years might involve a fair amount of risk. It's hard enough trying to look after it yourself.
At the simplest level, what if the storage facility has a design fault or some geological event happens and suddenly loads more work and/or money is required?
Or, in the spirit of bad movie plots:
What happens if the other country changes its mind, perhaps after a major change of government or referendum? "We instruct you to take all your nuclear waste back. Right Now!"
What happens if the other country doesn't maintain the storage properly / fails to keep it safe? Who's to blame for any leak / accident / incident / attack?
It is not like oil stored in a tanker that might spill out because rust has made a hole.
It is a solid substance, vitriefied in a giant block of gas, sealed inside a copper container that never rusts. Then this container is placed hundreds of meters underground, into bedrock, and the tunnel is filled in. Noone walks around to check how it's doing today.
If something goes terribly wrong, these containers can be stored in an ordinary warehouse for years and nothing happens.
Then lets address the misattribution of incentives.
In all your scenarios the coutry housing nuclear waste is the one that's interested in making sure its stored properly. You can't use it for extortion, any kind of returning of nuclear waste by force would likely amount to an act of war.
On the other hand, if another nation is supplying you power, they can extort you by cutting power supply, and that is what Russia is doing to europe today. Europe is very fortunate that Russian leadership is completely retarded when it comes to running the economy, and Russia simply can't afford to cut the supply completely. However it does mean that Europe is sponsoring putin's war in Ukraine.
The primary concerns with nuclear power are those of economic viability, lead times, practicality.
The waste is not killing anyone, we can build containers thay last hundreds, even thousands of years and we have time to figure out this problem.
They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reactors that can basically be "dropped in" decommissioned coal-burning sites because the infrastructure to tie into the electric grid already exists.
It was expressed to me that selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle and uptake was very slow to nonexistent.
[0] https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx