>And a lot of tangentials remain open. Like where to get and reprocess fuel rods? What about operational safety? And most of all, where to dump the radiactive waste?

All solved issues - nuclear energy is a matter of political will at this point.

I recently saw a documentary where someone was researching what the best way would be to label nuclear waste facilities such that future (far, far furture) generations would understand what's in there. You can't just slam an English text on there and hope in tens of thousands of years it will be understood by whatever creature visits it. Even only in light of just that, calling everything solved is a bit far fetched, no?

I can understand it's a stimulating problem for the brain.

In terms of priorities it doesn't make any sense at all to me though. It's hard to get the global population to care and act about what the GLOBAL state of the planet will be by the end of the century. So I really could not care less if by accident a few people dug a hole in tens of thousand of years at the wrong place and it created an issue. It's not like the whole human population would meet at this same spot and quickly dig a hole deep enough together so that they all get radiated...

It's not okay to poison people even if they are far away in space and/or time.

In my mind, continued storage of nuclear waste will always have to remain an active process. Dispose and forget like in a landfill isn’t an option if you care about the long-term risks.

That seems super unlikely to be a problem. For long term storage, I'd expect that we'll dig a deep shaft, or use an existing abandoned mine, and then seal it back up. Any group of humans who are willing and able to make a hole through several meters of concrete in order to get at the stuff will almost certainly also have the technological sophistication to know what radiation is, and that radioactive isotopes are dangerous.

Also, if you do decide to leave a message anyway, you'll just have to make it interpretable to a human, not to any possible "creature". 10 000 years is nothing on evolutionary time scales, so it will still just be us humans around, (or nobody at all, if we happen to go extinct first).

But in ten of thousands of years, all radioactive waste will be low activity, no? I mean, we do have prototype reactors that now use actanids as fuel, so the medium lasting high activity waste issue is now dealt with. Don't we only have to worry about the next 300 years for to radioactivity to go down to granitic cave levels?

If operational safety were a completely solved problem nuclear plants would be able to buy insurance without a liability cap of <0.5% of the cost of dealing with 1 fukushima.

As it is, even with that subsidy financing plants is basically impossible without more subsidies. Bill Gates' new reactor startup required taxpayers to fund 50% of it to even exist.

The reason why I believe operational safety is a solved problem: the US Navy has run reactors on board ships and submarines since the 50s, with 0 reactor accidents.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover

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

And the Russians have had accidents untold. Which is run more like commercial reactors?

No, they are not solved.

Nuclear can provide base load. Battery tech or other storage options are nowhere near developed/scalable enough to do that. Solar and wind always needs natural gas or similar as a backup.

The whole concept of "base load" is wrong. Electric networks need to provide exactly as much power as demmanded at any point in time to remain stable. "Base load" was just a statistical construct to determine which fraction of the total load is constant and can consequently served by slow power plants. Like nuclear and coal. To maintain a stable grid, you always needed quick power plants like gas and water.

Yes, solar and wind will need to be accompanied by lets call them "on-demand" power sources, like gas, water, in the future large-scale storage and of course power2gas for entirely renewal gas production.

By the way, the "base load" was artificially increased in the past to accommodate the mainly slow power plants. This is no longer a requirement, future loads will be more dynamic and more adjusted to the market offers.

This is a confusing statement. Are you saying that there is no reasonable minimum amount of electricity that needs to be available all of the time? That would make no sense given that we never have situations where there is zero usage of electricity.

In your scenario where we use renewables + gas, water, and storage which of these would be ensuring that we at least have enough to satisfy the loads on the grid that never turn off or vary? Everything on that list except gas is subject to forces we cannot directly control so I assume you would need a certain number of gas power plants to always be in production or idling to satisfy that demand.

Thirdly, why the preference for gas over nuclear?

Well, as statistics clearly show, there is a minimum demand 24/7. But that is just one characteristic number. That is the demand you always have to provide through the year. But at any time, more power is required, you have to provide that too. You cannot treat power demand over the "base load" any differently than the base load. Which type of energy production you might be using, you need to plan the ability to ramp up the production. So it isn't that you require special sources for the "base load", that can be provided by solar+wind, if they are available in the necessary amount. It is just that "base load" can also be provided by slow power plants.

The big problem with nuclear from the grid side is, that they are the slowest power plants available. Consequently, (and because of cost efficiency) they are run at high power output levels 24/7, the rest of the grid has to adjust by being throttled or fast plants which can be ramped up and down.

Gas is the fastest type of classical power plants (together with water, but that usually has limited amounts). And as the fuel always was on the expensive side, there is quite an incentive of not running gas power plants too much. They would be a good company to renewables, as they can switch between 0 and 100% and back very quickly. And in a grid dominated by renewables, you would only rarely run them at high loads for longer times. And while they emit more CO2 than nuclear plants, they do distinctively less than coal powered plans.

In the long run, you can run gas plants on e.g. hydrogen produced from solar - the recent plans for extending gas power plants in Germany all included the requirement to be usable with hydrogen too.

> The baseload[1] (also base load) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week. This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of low cost, availability and high reliability in any particular market.

> [...]

> According to National Grid plc chief executive officer Steve Holliday and others, baseload is "outdated".[7][6]

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

Burning gas emits a lot of CO2. Nuclear power emits zero CO2. Solar and wind power do not work at night (and in overcast conditions). Weather prediction horizon is 2 week tops. Grid-scale energy storage is way too expensive.

Conclusion: we need nuclear (and most certainly we don’t need gas).

Solar doesn't work at night of course, but wind power does. Actually, on average, it is stronger at night. Yes, we have to supply power in the times of low renewable production. Though there are renewables which are good for it like biomass and water. Nuclear is the worst to accompany renewables, because it is the slowest power source from a load switching perspective. Gas is the one which is fast switching, that is why the typical peaker plants run on gas. They could run on oil of course, but that would be much worse. In the future, the gas is to be produced renewable, and of course energy storate has to be extended.

It’s not about “producing renewable”, it is about CO2 emissions (and about not empowering certain gas-exporting countries).

Right, but the renewables are the one power source which is well suited going into the future. They don't use up any non-renewable source (hence the name), and they are the one energy production which is really available in most countries. All the others more or less depend on imports.

Nuclear can not follow load fluctuations, so nuclear needs gas (or hydro).

And before the inevitable comment follows, yes, that may change with future technology. Just like everything else.

It can follow the fluctuations during the day. That's what is done in France. It is not efficient at all since a NPP cost mostly the same regardless of its power generation, and is technically a bit more complex, but perfectly doable.

Do you have ever tried to visit your local thermal power plant?? They have backup generators which run on diesel to fulfill peak load demands.

>Electric networks need to provide exactly as much power as demmanded at any point in time to remain stable.

Great, so what do we do when the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing and the dams are empty? Just have a second grid worth of gas plants which we turn on once every two weeks for shits and giggles?

> a second grid worth of gas plants which we turn on once every two weeks

What if it just requires keeping the existing plants around, and turning them on for 6 hours every 8 weeks, for example?

Yes, that's not 100% renewable, but it gets electricity production to 99% renewable, and that other 1% you can mitigate by doing power-to-gas / direct-air-capture.

The same what I am doing when all the nuclear power plants are down.

In fact this isn't going to happen and there needs to be enough fungible capacity both internally and in the European grid. Right now, France is highly dependent on the grid, as 50% of the nuclear plants are down.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Time is just a statistical construct, but it's also a useful one. Similarly, base load is a concept to determine how power generation should be distributed between high reliability/consistent sources, vs less consistent sources.

The thing is, if the demand of the grid raises, you have to raise power production. Period. Of course, if e.g. it is dark, you cannot raise the power production of solar cells. That is bad. But if your nuclear plant is running at 100% already, you cannot rise the power production either. So it doesn't help you. "Base load" is only the statistical number of load you can expect 24/7 for your planning.

So you always have to have some means of power generation available for demand raises at any point and you have to be able to throttle down power generation in case of a demand drop, because otherwise the grid goes down equally as if you had not enough power capacity.

The good news is: renewables can be throttled down quickly, better than most other sources, the bad news is, you can only know about 3 days in advance what the maximum output of your renewables will be and there are days with very low total production. A future grid concept would have to come up with a solution for that. Gas would have been the easy way and probably will be the future when based on gas created via power2gas.

Pumped hydro and batteries solve this variability very well.

At grid scale?

yes. they don't do a good job of dealing with seasonal variability, but batteries are great at dealing with milliseconds to hours, and pumped hydro is great on scales from minutes to weeks

> Time is just a statistical construct

This is an incredible misunderstanding! Honestly, it's like saying that planet Earth is flat.

Did you meant something like "time zones are a social construct"? This true but quite a different claim that the one you made (which is not surprising since what you said is just nonsense).

Pumped water storage is 80/90% efficient, scalable & most studies looking at geographical options find 10x more geographical sites than we would need - distributed all over the world: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...

Australia is right now fairly close to finishing a 350GWh battery for about $6 billion.

By contrast, Hinkley Point C will take about 20 years to finish, and pump out 3.2GW at a cost of about $20 billion.

So you propose turning every mountain valley into an environmentally destructive storage battery? If we are willing to do that, why not just invest more in hydro power, since one of the big limits is the public's low tolerance for the environmental damage it causes? If we are just ignoring that damage or ignoring the public, why not build out basic hydro and not 'pumped storage'?

Hinkley Point C is being funded privately, based on a mechanism whereby the government guarantees EDF receive £92.50/MWh. This was thought of as expensive when the deal was being negotiated but the current wholesale price has been above that level for most of the past 12 months and is currently about £243/MWh. While EDF get the difference made up when the price is below the strike price, they pay back the difference if the wholesale price is higher.

That is very far from what "funded privately" means anywhere else.

No nuke anywhere was ever fully commercial. In every case they depend on heavy public subsidy.

Is not scalable at all. Not everyone lives in Austria or Switzerland.

Everyone (not on Antarctica) lives close enough to a place enough like Austria or Switzerland. Electric grids can be big.

And also a subject to state security and political leverage. I definitely would not like to be dependent on anti-nuke Austria fanatics who would be limiting storage capacity to me, just because I am using nuclear power plant.

It's only 1.4 GWh. https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/09/17/energyaustr...

I have a very hard time reading online forums. How come people do not see what I see? How can someone not see the constant stream of the same automatic thoughts again and again? Each major topic, including nuclear has comments from people like you and those comments are always the same old introductory talking points depite the author having seen them refuted countless time. How can someone not bore himself and be that mentally immutable? How many times again in their life will people say the same answer and stay imprisoned in the topic introductionnary level? It is remarkable.

Anyway let's address the comment:

> all currently available nuclear reactor models are way more expensive to build than renewables

Okay you use all, a universal quantifier which is epistemologically very weak. For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies. The interest rate is a self-fullifling prophethy and most of nuclear reactors have been created pre-bureaucratic era, are still in use and are actually much less deadly than C02 air pollution so let's admit the talking point is ad-hoc mediocrity. Secondly even if you take into account the economics of nuclear reactors from countries that have abandoned nuclear.. you have to realize how absurd the comparison is:

1) renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason

2) solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency, compare that with the lifepsan of 80-90 years that nuclear often attain and you see that the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.

3) Essentially it's time to try to avoid making absurd statements. Solar and wind economics are absurd, inexistant once you necessitate a storage grid (e.g. no light at night or with mild weather) and this which is barely doable (still no single real world deployment of a smart grid fully renewable (without cheats like hydro) exists) and has absurd economics (not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind). 3) just show how strong the level of virtue signaling/hypocrisy going on.

4) actually if your country hasn't become crazy you can have nuclear that are more economical even without considering 3), which is likely the case of China but most evidently is the case of Russia, which like it or not is the world leader by far, the new VVER-TOI are disruptive, both in economics and time to build (3.5 years), while simultaneously improving upon safety.

> where to get and reprocess fuel rods

this is not an issue

> What about operational safety

well if you're not retarded enough to build a plant in a major seismic/tsunami region the operational safety is much superior to all other classses of energies. Renewable induce more deaths than nuclear.

> where to dump the radiactive waste

You are talking about a fiction, in france nuclear generate a few kilos of waste per habitant, per year. The majority of nuclear wastes do not come from the nuclear industry and are a non issue since we have many depositories in place and the vast majority become negligibly radioactive after a few years. About the long term part while its very easy to isolate like many kinds of equally or more toxic industrial wastes, it can be reprocessed as MOX fuel however it is slighly less economical but only of a few percents.

In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot. If nuclear become the needed pilotable energy it makes renewable economics moot. Hence obviously renewable use will be very limited. Also I foresee that the russian nuclear export monopoly will massively grow although china might take a slice and so could Korea and France iff France new EPR pragmatic design is not a shitshow.

#3 is the big one for me. Solar and wind can't be simultaneously "the cheapest form of energy available" and yet also require grid-scale battery technology that doesn't exist--and even if it did exist, would not be economical--and require massive government subsidies (read: taxes stolen from people to fund boondoggles). Why is it the externalities are always ignored by proponents of wind/solar but then discussing other forms of power are nitpicked to death about said externalities? It's almost like wind/solar fanatics hold religious opinions.

> compare that with the lifepsan of 80-90 years that nuclear often attain and you see that the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.

One thing I am wary about is what the lifespan of any newly build plant would be that uses modern technology.

If you take a random 8bit home computer from 1983, all the non-mechanical parts on it likely still work today.

If you take a random computer from 1993, well most bits probably work.

If you take a random computer from 2003, if you are lucky some things work.

2013? Odds are it won't work.

The differences in manufacturing between everyday consumer electronics and high reliability electronics has grown larger and larger, for two reasons.

One is progress of Moore's law, smaller feature sizes have made electronics more susceptible to many different types of failure[1][2].

The second is RoHS[3], removing lead from solder has basically given all consumer electronics a 10 year life span.

Now of course you can get non-RoHS components, but they are not the norm, and to make things reliable you need to ensure everything is not RoHS.

Want a reliable storage medium? That is going to cost an insane multiple. Want a reliable computer? Another insane multiple, you are going to need to have something built on an ancient manufacturing process, and because you aren't getting the benefits of economies of scale you are paying more, and you are basically getting a bespoke machine so you now need to test it to heck and back to ensure reliability.

One problem with how we have chosen to advance our electronics industry is that the types of goods that are made en-masse have steadily separated from what types of goods need to be made for long term engineering projects.

An example of this in action: when Tesla first came out they realized existing automotive infotainment systems basically sucked and that they couldn't provide a good UX with anything available off the shelf at the time, so they instead plopped new consumer non-automotive gear. A touch screen that didn't suck! But it also melted. Everyone yelled at them "should have known better!" but their choices were "unreliable consumer" or "crappy behind the scenes".

Another example, RoHS doesn't have exclusions for home appliances. RoHS is also why the control board on washing machines gives out after ~10 years, necessitating purchasing a new washing machine even though the mechanics may have another decade left in them! (RoHS needs a crap ton more exclusions for long lived appliances...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_(semiconductor)#Fa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...

That's a lot of FUD about RoHS - especially for the consumer space. Don't you think that maybe everything built to be as cheap as possible to barely survive the warranty period is maybe a slightly larger effect than tin whiskers? Also old appliances typically contained less things that can break in the first place: What doesn't exist cannot break.

It's just a function of cost, do you want to engineer your device/machine to last or not, and are more features more important to you than reliability.

> Don't you think that maybe everything built to be as cheap as possible to barely survive the warranty period is maybe a slightly larger effect than tin whiskers?

YouTube recently recommended me some tear down videos of washing machines, for whatever reason. The video compared 1990s to modern machines.

The insides are remarkably similar, the main failure point is the electronics, flat out.

And in my experience (n=1), what fails on modern appliances is the electronics! Not the pumps or motors, sure sometimes those go out, but most often it is the control board.

Look at every car built since 2010. Sure you have some models with known manufacturing defects on a given part, but replace that one part and mechanically most cars are reliable. But how many cars have you come across that run just fine, but the check engine light is stuck on and the mechanic is like "well I could fix it but it will cost a lot"?

We have hundreds of years of knowledge about making reliable machines in massive quantities, and then cost reducing them (ok maybe 200 years tops), as a species we haven't even bothered trying to cost reduce reliable electronics! We just accept that they will fail.

I also had my fair share of repairing home appliances (trying to anyway) and in my N~5 sample size I was not only limited to failed control boards. But having seen those control boards I am honestly surprised that they even survive the warranty period. They are that cheaply and badly made. From the circuit board itself to the components used. And of course not designed to be repairable at all. They have more in common with a cheap calculator than something that controls kWs of power. But allowing the manufacturer to use leaded solder would have made zero difference in their reliability.

People absolutely can build reliable electronics these days, but it will be slightly more expensive than not quite so reliable electronics. Higher profit margin has a higher priority than making sure the product survives long after the warranty period has ended. Especially if the consumer only looks at the initial price without taking into consideration how long it will last. Which is also hard to do without reviewers tearing the machine to bits. Being expensive does not mean it is actually any good and will last a long time.

The changes that drive the reduction in lifespan of modern electronics is a very good topic, however it is an obvious issue that is taken into account in nuclear designs. The latest VVER-TOI has a life expectancy of 60 years, upgradeable to 100 years. It is possible that they have to change the CPUs every 10 years as routine maintenance though. I don't think they are full analog nowadays.

> How come people do not see what I see?

I guess that's because you are missing part of the picture.

> For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies.

Yes, everything says that it's possible to create safer nuclear reactors. But our current ones aren't. Safe reactors are on the same level of "nobody does this because of market and bureaucratic constraints" as cheap open-storage fuel cells. Except that the constraints are harder to change for the reactors.

We should be trying very hard to change both. But until we do, the reality will be that both nuclear reactors and batteries are expensive. And our current reactors are only safe because of the safeguards put on them, remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore.

> renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason

That's a pretty bad way to frame it. The problem here is that all non-dipatchable (on the economical sense, not the technical one) sources compete to get full utilization. That's not a problem when most of the power is dispatchable, but none of the options you are considering (renewables - except for buifuels - or nuclear) are. Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).

The only solution here is storage.

> solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency ... the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.

You noticed that you took the manufacturer guarantee and cited it as expected lifetime, right? AFAIK, we don't have a good number for how long our current tech of solar panels will last, because after just a few decades on the field, nobody catalogued enough failures to measure it. But we know it's way longer than that.

Anyway, doubling the cost of solar panels is both the wrong way to go (interest rates exist), and changes about nothing when comparing with the current costs of nuclear. (It would make them lose to coal, but then, both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs.)

> Solar and wind economics are absurd

Well, you clearly didn't dig into those. Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries). But it will of course always lose to natural gas generation.

Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap.

> not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind

I don't expect grid storage to use lithium at all, but the fact that you have gone over lithium¹ reserves and are ignoring uranium reserves shows a very biased research. TLDR, none will be a problem soon (or probably ever for lithium).

> In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot.

Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.

But anyway, renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way, so the only way they can push the prices higher is by reducing economies of scale, what is actually the goal.

1 - Of any element you could choose, you decided to go with lithium, one of the most available ones on the Earth's surface? But well, once in a while somebody pops up talking about iron or silicon shortages, so you could have done worse.

> Yes, everything says that it's possible to create safer nuclear reactors. But our current ones aren't.

1) extraordinary claim 2) completely miss the point that the 10000 bureaucratic safety rules could be trimed by half while actually improving security and reducing costs. 3) completely miss the point that current models from Russia and China are cost effective and comply with aforementioned unoptimized rules.

> remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore

most of the reactors from the 70s and 80s are still in use. they have much less safeguards and are still safe enough as in you'd better invest the saved money in saving lifes/medecine research than in those hypothethical safety gains that only drive marketing and hypocrisy.

> Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).

completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics. completely miss the point that nuclear plants can contrary to renewable decrease their output in a very fine grained way. Why is that interesting? The plant cost almost the same, but does not add a significant cost by overproducing electricity. When renewable overproduce electricity (which happens all the time given enough share) the excess electricity will break the electric grid and cause a nationwide shutdown. To prevent that, the Grid operator has to sell electricity at a loss (AKA pay people to consume the electricity). Given some level this startegy won't even work and will need a special costly infrastructure optimized for burning (throwing away) excess electricity.

> But we know it's way longer than that

who is we? Where is the evidence? Also newer reactors have a lifespan extendable to 100 years hence you need to triple or quadruple the price. And wind, which is generally much more prevalent than solar last in most cases 20 years. In 2016 they have started (in germany) installing twice as big turbines which are likely to have shorter lifespans.

> The only solution here is storage. > Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.

nuclear doesn't need energy storage.

> Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)

please source, enligthen me, I am unable to find reliable information supporting this.

> Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap

Please let's not be a joke, the discussion is about a long term fossil-free future. Not a thesis that only works until it doesn't.

> grid storage to use lithium at all

wtf, energy storage without batteries is niche. What are you refering to? Water, hydrogen? The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium. This should be obvious.

> renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way

Renewable needs pilotable energies. Solar in january and december is almost non existent. How much is an empirical and country dependent question but bewteen 20-30% average share of fossil energy needed seems probable. Meanwhile 100% nuclear is perfectly doable. 70% renewable 30% nuclear is also doable but would be economically inefficient.

> both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs

Wrong assumption, solar and wind in germany are extensively subsidized.

Anyway the most salient point about this discussion is the storage energy cost and feasability, of which you provide zero data.

regarding lithium availability: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/q78xv... Enough to build 8 billions cars and then zero cars for the next generation LOL. Now add that in addition of one car per habitant we need a similar or even bigger battery for his regular electricity uses, including house heating.

Doing policies that last for just the current generation and not the next centuries is madness. Yes we've all heard there are HUGE reserves in the oceans. Which pointless to say. There are a looot of gold in the oceans too. The density and extractability of it is the key question. The fact this is not currently used means it cost more than current methods. How much more? x10 ? x100? x10000? Who knows? Sharing technical evidence about this issues would improve the depth of the discussion but until then we are manipulating a huge existential risk.

about uranium reserves: right, the current estimate of reserves is of a 230 year supply at current consumption. The needed consumption for 100% would be at least a x10 so let's say we ran out of uranium in 23 years if massively adopted. 1) A major point is that contrary to lithium, the mining industry of uranium is much smaller and therefore if it received mass funding, the reserves might significantly increase. 2) like lithium there are huge oceanic reserves and like lithium, this is not a solution until proven otherwise. 3) reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption. Note that lithium can be recycled too but setting a global systematic recycling industry is yet to be done. 4) Indeed thorium reactors (not uranium) are the ideal solution since we have thorium for the next millenium. Thoriums reactors are not just a theoretical concepts, some have been made so it is feasable. It has not been developed because the energy efficiency/economics are inferior (how much ?) although since most of the cost is on the time to build the plant anyway, this should still be a viable solution although not necessarily as cost effective as renewable here (but with an expensive energy storage grid and pragmatic designs (like russian/chinese ones) and taking into account lifespan, and renewable need for fossil fuels/gaz, it very well could be) As for the ocean argument it seems easier to solve for uranium though which is needed in much less quantity (because of its ernergy density) and hence needs less regional density. Note however that water filtration methods for lithium are often similar to existing desalinisation plants. Which ironically are a great specialization for nuclear power plants.

> 1) extraordinary claim

So... The claim safeguards created after major accidents happened are necessary for safety is extraordinary?

They can probably be improved, but then, you keep comparing with Russia and China as if those two countries cared about the safety of their population.

(Anyway, there was a recent paper here on HN that looked into the issue and discovered the costs are more of a consequence of the small size of the industry than the safety constraints. That kind of problem is hard to fix, but if you want to try, it's a worthy cause.)

> completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics.

You seem willfully ignorant of how power generation economics work. Or are you talking about the opportunity costs of choosing the cheapest option?

>> But we know it's way longer than that

>who is we? Where is the evidence?

Hum... The first Google result I get seems to be using this data:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf

TLDR, the worst kind of panel they measured lost less than 2% of it's capacity per year, so about half of its capacity in 50 years. Some slightly more expensive ones lost less than 1% per year.

> > Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)

> please source

Oh, there's a comment on this thread about how hydro-storage can hold about 10 times the requirements for the world. There was one recently about how hydrogen is perfectly sufficiently, as flawed as it is. And of curse, there is always some weird design appearing once in a while, that nobody invests in, of course, because nobody has ever invested on energy storage.

> The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium.

What a lack of principled thinking, this equating batteries with lithium. Lithium isn't that great for stationary storage in any way other than the batteries factories already existing.

> Renewable needs pilotable energies.

Not more of them than we are using now. Anyway, no, 100% nuclear doesn't work well either, it would be incredibly expensive. None work without storage. (By the way, you seem to have an incorrect model of why renewables don't decrease their production when they overproduce. Most of them can do it perfectly well if the overproduction becomes too severe, it just brings costs.)

> regarding lithium availability

And then we go into the "what is the meaning of that "reserves" word" treadmill... You may want to look into it in detail, as both lithium and uranium have a problem with that word. None has a problem of availability.

Anyway, about sea extraction, people have done it economically for lithium, but for uranium it's many orders of magnitude harder.

Also, about this:

> reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption.

In theory, recycling can reduce consumption around 1000 times (varies with every detail on the lifecycle). Breeding can do much more (that's why thorium is interesting).

Except, thorium has been tried already. It costs more. Cost is already not nukes' strong suit.

Yep, thorium brings several engineering problems. Uranium breeding brings a lot of them too.

Overall, breeding reactors are currently way too expensive. They are interesting on the long term, once those solvable problems get solved. I do agree they have no place at all in a discussion about current energy crisis or global warming.

Cost is not static. Building more will create economies of scale. Most importantly, overhauling the excessive safety guidelines will give you an immediate savings

Wikipedia succinctly puts what happened last time "scale" was tried.

> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[46] [...] Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[50] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt.

> The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.[53]

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

The Forbes article cited there is criticizing the American model of building nuclear but praising the French model. The difference being standardization. One could also point to South Korea as a good model. By building new plants and tinkering with both the designs and regulation the US has maximized cost, albeit while pushing the tech forward. Basically the US built almost every reactor as an R&D project over that period. We could have and still could stamp out standard designs, and then the difficulty would be in construction management. That's by no means simple stuff but it's a reasonable path forward.

So you need to cheat on the safety side of things to be a good model? Their once grandiose plan of being a nuclear power house exporting reactors stopped at exactly the 4 reactors to UAE which was signed before the scandal. Of course to an authoritarian country.

> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[24] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[25] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[24][26]

> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[27] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[28] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[29]

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

No-- but there is a middle ground between institutional paralysis requiring safety-at-any-cost... and laissez-faire, safety-be-damned!

Ever since local NY authorities prevented a distant completed reactor from ever being operated by refusing to write a regulation-mandated evacuation plan, it's been mostly impossible to build nuclear in the US. Why put lots of capital at risk when rules might change and it can be decided "ehhhh, nevermind, you can't operate!" at the end of the process years later.

You’re arguing against a straw man. I’m not advocating sacrificing safety. Nuclear in the US is regulated to a level of safety far more stringent than any other industry and out of line with the actual danger. Moreover the regulations change frequently and safety reviews of new designs get rejected without comment or feedback. Many of these regulations were written and devised by people specifically trying to tank the industry. We could take an approach that is more neutral to nuclear and base regulations on probabilistic models of risk and it would be much cheaper and just as safe.

indeed, everyone misses the fact that, for any solution to be cost-effective you need an experienced team that have built thay before, that means:

1 - all powerplants should be identical, so you can work out problems on reactor 1 and have no probpems by the time you are building reactor 55. The US model of private companies building random shit doesnt fit well. Thats how wind and solar work - they build thousands of identical solar panels and wind turbines

2 - you cant start and stop construction - if you stopped building for 10 years, your engineers have left, retired or died. Now you build a new reactor, and you are goong to have inexperienced people making the same mistakes. you have to have an institution that is building non-stop for 20 years, like china does.

thats also why wind and solar works - the same teams of people were installing and servicing turbined for decades

3 - factory made - manufacturing of wind and solar is automated to a large degree. Automation in construction is ~0%. Whether you are building a house or a reactor, they are expensive manual labour. Some of this might be solved with prefab buildings, some might be solved with Small Moduper reactors, but approached require large investment and long-term commitment

I’m not sure they all have to be the same, but settling on a few standard designs would help a lot. SMRs might be good in some cases whereas in other situations a larger plant would make sense. I think privately constructed and run plants would be fine if the regulations were clear and didn’t change so frequently.

I beg your pardon? Excessive safety guidelines? Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe? How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?

> Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe?

Yes. My idea is that it would be much less harm (to human health and the environment) than is caused by burning brown coal in properly functioning coal-burning power plants.

And much less harm than results from using diesel as a transport fuel. That produces very high levels of carcinogens and other harmful products.

Yet, Europe does both.

Edit: note that these harms are caused every day by equipment working as designed. They are not due to extreme unforeseen circumstances but are accepted as normal.

Have you seen the amount of pointless paperwork that has nothing to do with actual safety/better outcomes that the nuclear industry generates? It’s mind boggling.

Fukushima is a good example of this, because the massive amount of paperwork made it hard to see that they could just spend 1/10th the amount of time, energy, and money and better protect their cooling generators and/or ask for help in time from the navy that was sitting just offshore and willing to help

> Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe?

Depends, what type of plant?

Plenty of nuclear plant designs that just drop the rods into a water bath and halt all activity.

Do you realize what types of health impacts gas leaks are having on densely populated regions right now?

Or how about fracking destroying drinking water? Higher cancer and birth defect rates for surrounding communities.

> How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?

The amount of fallout from Fukushima was obscenely minuscule. The worst case estimates, by the most pessimistic naysayers, 130 extra deaths will result from the accident. The most commonly agreed upon estimates, 0 additional deaths.

Meanwhile, 13k people dead minimum from coal in America each year. No one even tracks the impact from the literal thousands of natural gas leaks that are ongoing. [1] is a nice visualization of natural gas incidents from 2010 to 2017.

Fukushima was a worst case scenario with massive mismanagement on multiple levels, and the sum environmental impact was less than any of the multiple of oil tanker spills that happen, quite literally, multiple times a year. [2]

[1] https://public.tableau.com/views/NaturalGasTransmissionIncid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills

Yes, they are excessive. You can dump a lot of the expensive guidelines and nuclear would still be extremely safe.

I always love the nuclear arguments of "It's SAFE!" immediately followed by, "We just need to remove those pesky safety regulations to make it economical."

I can’t speak for European regulatory bodies, but in the USA the relevant authority is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was founded in 1974 and approved zero new reactor designs between 1974 and 2020. Conservative doesn’t even begin to describe the stance of regulatory agencies, despite newer designs being much safer from decades of design improvements, nobody wants to be the person responsible for signing off and issuing a safety certification.

The NRC was cheap at the price.

It is a shame it was unable to prevent green-lighting Vogtle and the other disaster next door.

Factoring in the nuclear waste storage cost over it's whole lifetime (instead of socializing it) will eat those savings easily.

Also: Germans love their safety regulations, this is never going to happen.

Probably not, if using casks and storing on site which costs nearly nothing?

Reactors don’t generate a lot of waste by volume, and it gets less of a problem over time by it’s very nature.

The required storage time for nuclear waste in Germany is 1 million years. Storing anything safely for one million years in one of the most densly populated continents is a huge challenge and certainly not as easy as "just dump it somewhere in the desert".

Also: uranium is a finite resource. After it will have run out, it humanity will have to maintain and check these storage sites for that amount of time. Who is expected to pay this? People who don't profit from the power anymore? In my eyes the only solution is either transmutation into less harmful wastes (very costly) or paying the future storage cost for that timeframe upfront (very, very costly).

Which points out the absurd safety requirements and paperwork. That regulation (if true, I haven’t seen it) is just trying to make it impossible to do anything, not actually protecting anyone in any real way.

1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home.

2) It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers. It’s ridiculous hubris to think anyone could predict or plan more than 100 years in advance with any certainty, let alone a million. And by setting a million year milestone, they’re saying ‘don’t even try to make something that could work now’

3) more people will die from the economic fallout of what the gov’t is doing (and the burning of Coal, wars, etc) than would die from any halfway likely outcome of a nuclear disaster here. They could have multiple Fukushima’s and still be better off.

4) as a species, anything recognizably human has been around AT MOST a single digit multiple of that number. Recorded history and civilization is a tiny fraction of that number. It’s a fun mental game, not a pragmatic limit or has any real meaning in this context.

Also, while Uranium is finite (as is everything else), we’ve got plenty to last the foreseeable future even without any fancy technology advancements. And there is plenty of avenues for that.

It’s the picture of ‘the now is unacceptable, the future is impossible.’

1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home.

heck even a time scale of 10.000 is beyoned the current civilized world, do you even realize that? how stupid to talk even about millions, if the modern world didn't even exists for a few HUNDRED of years.

and it's stupid to dump shit into the earth without knowing what will happen at point x.

If we never did anything until we fully understood all the ramifications forever, we’d literally have never existed. I’m not saying ‘don’t figure out what will happen next’. That’s dumb.

I’m saying ‘don’t set some impossible to achieve goal and fall into analysis paralysis while doing things with far worse known outcomes right now’. Because that is also dumb.

We know putting it in giant steel casks is pretty much foolproof, and will ensure no leaks for at least 40+ years. They’re literally bulletproof. It’s what every major reactor has been doing for 40+ years. Works surprisingly well.

> "It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers."

It is an absolute mystery why this does not inspire utmost confidence in the future of safe nuke waste storage...

Chernobyl went from glowing pile of smoldering glass to ‘just don’t dig it all up and play in it, idiots’. In half the time.

And yeah, Putin did send folks who did dig parts of it up - and play in it. They are idiots. They might die from it. However, conservatively, at least 10,000-100,000x the number of people already have, or will shortly be dead from more classical methods - artillery, gunfire, incendiaries, etc. Horrible ways to go, all. Near as I can tell, the idiots doing the digging are also likely to be the only ones seriously impacted by it, unlike the others.

Nuclear waste isn’t super healthy or anything, but it’s not even on the radar of ‘nasty shit a maniacal dictator will use to kill people’. Except maybe a bond-type spy ironically.

You know the last Hitler literally had his folks invent ICBMs and setup mass death camps, right?

Even if all the nuclear waste in the world right now went back in time and got spilled in the worst places possible, the mess and ensuing death would be way less than they made.

It is not about "using to kill people". It is about sane administration.

Which matters…. Mostly if not having it will kill people, no?

If it’s entombed in glass or in giant steel casks requiring no further work to keep safe, then the only real danger would be them pulling it out and using it for evil. Which, they’ll already have plenty of evil things at their disposal, and things far easier to use and more scalable for evil too. So not likely to be all that interesting.

How is the storage costing over time? I thought you'd dig an expensive dump and that was it.

You generally need monitoring at a minimum, and maintenance to shore up degradation of any unstable containment materials (i.e. those used to prevent water leeching, etc).

Plus security. You need to keep people out- there's always going to be some idiot who wants to get too close or use it for Evil.

That said, I imagine the costs are far less than the alternatives. Rebuilding the grid to satisfy continental-wide wind will produce a lot of CO2.