It kind of depends on what you consider a fact.

I support nuclear scientifically. I don’t think it has a chance politically.

Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem.

Politically, expect to spend billions upon billions and then have things like Yucca Mountain canned after lots of construction.

Both are true and which ones you consider lead to very different conclusions.

Flying is scientifically a well understood and safe thing. Still its the FAA that makes the rules, and engineering that needs to produce robust and reliable systems, and still planes fall out of the sky sometimes..

Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot...

So what does "scientifically...much solavable problem" in practice really mean? Worlds apart..

> Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot...

There is no evidence that fusion is a solution to any energy problems. The central problem of fusion power is that reactions consume more energy than they produce.

That's currently a problem, but I don't think it's the central problem. The central problem for DT is some combination of inherent complexity and very low volumetric power density.

Translating the numbers:

Billions upon billions per capita is three-dollar bills upon three-dollar bills.

It would be one thing if billions and billions lead to success, but we are nowhere near a politically acceptable solution for nuclear waste.

Who is “we” in this context? It looks like the Finns figured it out.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

> Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem.

No it is not.

There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically stable for the time periods required We have no way of knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with those people bout the danger of what we left behind?

Greed. Hubris.

Tectonic plates don't move nearly quick enough to be a concern in the span of 100k years. A spot square in the middle of a plate is going to be safe from earthquakes for millions of years.

And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig deep boreholes.

You’re incorrect about the middle of tectonic plates being safe from earthquakes by definition. Locating naively built skyscrapers in New Madrid, MO, for example, would be a bad idea. [1]

On a geological timescale, tectonic plates occasionally rift down the middle, both successfully (East Africa) and unsuccessfully (a failed plate rift produced the Great Lakes).

With that said, identifying strata that are going to remain seismically stable for a looooong time is a solved problem, and earthquakes generally damage only those things not attached to the (moving) earth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraplate_earthquake

Yet, all the attempts to store nuclear fuel underground in Germany proved so catastrophic that they had to scrap all of them and restart the selection process.

And this was because of earthquakes? Germany foolishly stored it in an abandoned mine, rather than impermeable bedrock.

If we continue on the current path there will be no society at all. This argument is seriously f'ed up for so many reasons

There are water around mines that will be toxic to human life until the sun collapse and the earth burns up. People will have to be aware of those dangers for as long human exist, unless humans mutate enough to tolerate lead and sulfur in their fresh water.

How should we communicate to those people of those dangers?

In the very long run we don’t.

We simply trust that people in the future check their water for safety, or avoid drinking from water sources that correlate with illness.

We do this now, and humans have done it for millennia.

We need a banner that says "Don't drink the water full of dead deer"

(Hum, I hope that they will not have tiktok)

Lead and sulfur are relatively easy to remove from water. Wildlife, however, will be affected by that. We have bigger issues.

We can filter it out, but unless people know that the water is toxic then they might still be harmed. How do we inform the people of the future of the dangers that contaminated fresh water has, and how do we do that for billions of years into the future?

Nuclear waste disposal has already been solved at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

The flora and fauna in the Chernobyl exclusion zone appear to be thriving.

In some cases, yes, in other it seems that they are sink areas that are simply constantly being nurtured with migrant animals from the surroundings (Some birds for example). Is complex.

And we need to remember that some people was poisoned just a few months ago for digging trenches in Chernobyl in the middle of a war. The danger is still there forty years later.

Poisoned is a relative term. The rates of cancers and deaths from the Chernobyl disaster varies by an incredible amount depending on what source you look at.

Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality, nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower than solar, higher than wind) [2] and with seawater extraction has the potential of being renewable.

Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.

So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...

[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...

Besides this being studies for which other studiest exist the same, we also learned in the pandemic that "deaths" cannot be the sole metric (however you want to interpret that).

And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal - both would equally not scale to needs with current technology, so what?

Why wouldn't seawater extraction scale? There's 4 billion tons of uranium in the sea (a 60,000 year supply at current usage levels), and 100 trillion tons of uranium below that from which it's replenished as it is extracted.

[1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514

Supplying a single 1 GW(e) burner reactor with seawater uranium would require a 170 square kilometer absorber field on the continental shelf. That's much worse power/area than solar, and just slightly higher than the power/area of an offshore wind field.

Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.

Sir. There's a practically unlimited quantity of uranium available to meet our energy needs now and for as long as humans wander this rock. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best. A huge reason breeder reactors aren't used right now is that there's plenty of land-based uranium already and fuel is not a concern. So much so that stretching it with breeders doesn't really matter, and as a percentage of the cost of generated electricity the uranium input barely registers. By the time we need to dip into the renewable water-based sources, we'll long since have been carbon-free. It'll scale just fine. Stop worrying about problems that won't matter for 10-100,000 years. We've gotta clear the century first.

There is a pratically unlimited quantity if cost is no object. But for cost to be no object, breeder reactors are needed. For burner reactors, fuel cost will begin to be seriously affected rather quickly if we try to supply a 100% nuclear world economy with only terrestrial U sources. That economy would go through in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year to supply the current world average primary energy demand of 18 TW (about 6000 3 MW(th) reactors.) This could exhaust known terrestrial uranium resources (not proven reserves) in less than a decade.

Breeders, as I said, would greatly extend the terrestrial U resource, both by getting 100x as much energy per unit of natural uranium, and by allowing resources 100x as dilute to be economically exploited.

The safety of nuclear assumes no nuclear accidents.

Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.

The safety of any power source projects past performance onto future performance. This is a tautology, and not really relevant as we have 80 years of experience and nuclear provides 20% of US power. It provides almost 40% of Canada's electricity. 10% of the world's electricity. We have plenty of samples necessary to make an informed projection.

The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low. Just ask Ontario. [1] There is a large cap ex cost at the start, but you can amortize it over 80 years - whereas solar and wind has to be replaced every 20-30.

Nuclear prices in all externalities in its cost assessments due to the onslaught of attacks whereas other energy prices in almost nothing. Coal kills about 100 people per TWh, and at the same $9M NRC cost, coal should cost about $1/kWh.

[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

> The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low.

Only if you ignore the amortization of the cost of financing and building the nuclear power plant. That's fine if the plant is provided by the Nuclear Fairy; not so fine in the real world if we're talking about building new nuclear plants that have to be paid for.

Some things are expensive - more expensive - but we should do them anyways because they're the right thing to do. Generally I refer to the 'nuclear fairy' as the government, whose job it is in my opinion, to make sure we do the right thing even when the market isn't interested.

You are engaging in the egregious fallacy of "if the government pays for it, it's free". That's true at the individual level. It's not true at the level of the whole society. And it's that latter level that matters when asking if nuclear power makes sense.

It's hard to see how wasting resources and, all else being equal, doing something the much more expensive way would be "the right thing to do". If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.

> You are engaging in the egregious fallacy of "if the government pays for it, it's free".

No, I'm not.

A role of government in my opinion is to facilitate providing services and creating infrastructure in the public interest which might not make market economic sense at the time we need it - if it is a better outcome for the citizenry. You're welcome to disagree but there's no fallacy there. I never said it was free, I said it was more expensive - but the government should do it anyways because it will make us better off. Like the post office and the EPA.

There's a reason in going to the moon, JFK never said that “we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not just because they are easy, but because they are the cheapest thing we can possibly do, and if it starts to look like it's cheaper or easier to be sitting on the couch then too bad so sad, to the couch we shall return!"

He said it was "because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

> If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.

Right no. I don't believe in that. Again, nuclear is renewable, this much is basically indisputable. I believe that a better solution can be government funded in line with the charter of any world government, be it a western democracy or the PRC. I do not believe market viability is the be all and end all in this here world. I believe that attitude would have left us living as hunter-gatherers. I do not believe the cheapest solution is the only solution we should advocate for or pursue, period.

We deserve better and should demand better than your position.

Renewables literally can't beat nuclear at power generation until long term grid storage is a proven thing. We're not there yet.

They can beat nuclear right now -- you get more CO2 reduction per $ from adding renewables than you do from adding nuclear. And you get it sooner. Little or no storage is required. By the time storage becomes necessary, the economic environment (price as a function of time) on the grid will be so hostile to new nuclear that there will be no sense even trying to pretend nuclear makes sense.

You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important.

When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out.

If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.

You can make all the theoretical arguments you like, but the empirical data (California, Germany, and more) disagrees with your conclusion. Perhaps you should consider a more serious argument that actually agrees with the current evidence.

What? Experience in Germany and California is completely consistent with what I was saying. Of course natural gas without sufficient CO2 charges will continue to cover intermittency, especially when there's a great deal of already installed gas capacity whose capital cost is sunk.

Why is Germany reopening it's coal plants if not to make up for the intermittency problems of renewables?

If intermittency issues caused storage to be quite attractive, why hasn't storage already been rolled out across Germany and California?

Neither if these claims agrees with what happened in these two cases. Any electrical engineer could have told you storage is needed before decommissioning nuclear in favour of renewables.

> environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas.

Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont

> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.

The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (radioactivity). Who says anything about putting them back in the original mines? Why would the original mines happen to be suitable for nuclear waste storage?

The cost to store nuclear waste is $600 / kg

When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg

IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.

I agree with more nuclear but blasting waste (at least highly radioactive) to space is a problem as there's always a risk the rocket explodes and spreads the radiation on earth. At least I've always understood that's the objection and seems to me reasonable. Yucca mountain type solutions seem more palatable.

You encapsulate the waste so it survives any accident. This adds some weight, but not an enormous amount of weight.

If you can encapsulate the pellets to the point that they can survive getting blown out of orbit, catching fire and raining down over the human population without causing any harm - you can encapsulate them and throw them into Yucca Mountain and save the whole exiting earth step.

Except no, those are not the same thing. Stuff in the repository, for example, is exposed to a much higher cumulative radiation dose, which causes huge and unacceptable changes in many materials.

I'm not sure that's relevant to the broader argument I am making. Don't blast waste into space. It carries with it dramatically higher costs - and drastically higher risks. It's completely untenable according to every study and paper on the matter.

Again, selecting a geographic area away from humans and providing sufficient demarcation is dramatically safer than putting it into a rocket and flying it up into orbit over humans. If you disagree, cite a source on its feasibility - and one on the lack of feasibility of deep geological sequestration. Let's not shoot from the hip on this one. I know I haven't found any.

It's untenable with current launch vehicles. Do you think current launch vehicles are the sine qua non of launcher technology, for centuries into the future? We don't have to shoot stuff into space right this moment.

Thanks. Where does that number come from?

Despite his Twitter account, Musk is not the savior for everything. However, maybe he would like to be blasted into space on the first journey to Proxima Centuri? If anyone can do it, he can!

Still nuclear is finished everywhere (or on the way out except in China) and won't come back from the grave. It is like asking for cars from the 70ties to return.

Isn't that exactly what Tesla just did? The electric car was of course the 'car of the 70s' until it was the car of the 2020's.

Defeatism never solved everything, and China building hundreds of reactors might just be the shot in the arm to get things back on track. The big loss will be that it's these Chinese designs the world will use instead of Western designs.

No, the nuclear from the 70s won't come back. Modern ones will.

You fell into the same trap. You linked 2 studies. Other side could link 2 studies with very different conclusion. We should understand it is fundamentally a political issue, and both side shouldn't hide behind 2 links to support them.

I didn't fall into the trap. Objective reality isn't political. The total number of people killed in nuclear accidents divided by TWh generated is pretty objective.

Unfortunately despite the track record nuclear won't make a revival. The planning cycles for new plants are just too long. Renewables will yet again half in price by the time you could just build another nuclear plant. That's why really nobody is trying anymore.

Is that still true for mass produced SMRs ('small' modular reactors)? That don't rely on special forges, of which we don't have much? Isn't that the promise of all those startups from the sector? Regardless of exact model and technology? True production lines like in shipyards, maybe more airplane-/carfactory like? Instead of almost 'artisanal' 'one-offs', like it is now, even though they have common design elements?

Not when deaths caused by nuclear energy are incredibly hard to quantify.

Are they though? Do you have some quantification of that difficulty? Any studies? Any citations to back up your thesis?

When someone is exposed to radiation and dies of cancer many years later it’s impossible to know whether he’s a victim of radiation or just unlucky. As simple as that.

> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.

In the Australian outback those are places people used to live. How are you going to stop people returning for 200,000 years?

Greed. Hubris.

Do you think those aren't solved problems? First, fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. [1] And even to answer your original question directly, there's a whole area of study that's fascinating on how to provide long-term warnings. [3]

Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site which is already some of the most radioactive land on earth).

What greed exactly are you talking about? I've no financial interest in the success of nuclear power. I recognize it's more expensive than some competing options but it's a better solution.

As for hubris, again, you're not exactly coming to the table with data on the risks, especially since we've got 80 years of experience with nuclear power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

Exactly right. The goal with nuclear waste is basically to get it back down to levels similar the original ore. At that point, it isn't especially dangerous.

Many radioactive products are either very short lived, and will decay down to minimal levels within a few hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low radioactivity.

The problem are the elements that are in between which is mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within only hundreds of years.

The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs to continue running.

Fast reactors are also in principle subject to Chernobyl-like criticality accidents (only worse) in case of meltdowns.

I mean, any bad design is subject to failure. Aircraft are subject to catastrophic failure too, so we iterate and improve until they're super safe.

Fast reactor inherently have more fissionable material in a smaller volume, and don't have a moderator that can either keep things separated or remove itself in an accident to kill the chain reaction. If a supercriticality on prompt neutrons alone occurs in a fast reactor the neutron population will increase orders of magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, because the neutrons are moving so much faster.

Edward Teller in 1967 famously expressed his skepticism about fast reactors because of this safety issue.

That's not the argument I was making. I said anything of sufficient scale carries significant risk, and we can in time reduce that risk to acceptable levels via engineering practices and principles. As with airplanes, which are metal tubes full of humans we load up with kerosene and send into the atmosphere. A bad plane will crash, a bad reactor will melt down. We can overcome the risks to reap the rewards. That's like our whole thing, as humans.

Chernobyl happened for a very specific reason - you know, the late-night tests and the positive void coefficient. Do you think we haven't learned? Please cite sources. The thing is, we have learned. That's why reactors are so expensive. You're double-dipping by citing the risks and the costs. It's really one or the other if you're not being disingenuous.

It's not the argument you were making, but it's a point your argument is compelled to address. Yes, any system of sufficient scale carries risks. In the case of breeder reactors, one of those risks is the possibility of something approaching an actual nuclear explosion, with fast neutron physics similar to what happens in actual fission bombs, not pitiful low yield moderated explosions as happened in Chernobyl.

> fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years.

Hundreds of years is not acceptable. Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. Look at the Zaporizhia atomic energy site for an extreme example of what I mean.

The problem is not just the time scale either. There are other areas humanity fails at time and again.

P.S. Thank you nevertheless for pointing out several advantages of fast breeder reactors.

> Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time.

There's plenty of buildings that took centuries to make, this projects are comparatively simple/require less coordination once started.