Not to start the usual HN debate, but specifically in terms of the word 'catastrophe' being used. ... [Given current lack of storage] if there is lack of wind for two weeks and people are freezing in the UK, that could be a kind of high-severity catastrophe. A weather-system-related wind failure is a kind of common mode failure mechanism in that it can affect many nominally independent generators at once.
I agree regional damage from worst-case nuclear could be a different level of severity. Caveats about "well that's why long-distance transmission" granted.
>...the recent discovery of stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units. A dozen reactors have been shut down, and no one knows how long it will take to fix them. It may take years. Meanwhile, the heat wave and drought in Europe this summer have forced other units to go offline, since river water flow no longer suffices as an adequate coolant. Altogether, French nuclear capacity has been effectively cut in half.
Countries like here in Germany, where we have problems delivering coal to our coal plants due to low water levels caused by climate change caused by burning coal, poetic justice
Yes, the term of art "common mode failure" calls attention to failures (and latent contibutions to potential failure) in multiple deployments not being statistically independent.
Then maybe don't throw up a giant strawman? No one is advocating for an exclusively wind-based power grid, so why pretend they are? Real systems won't have the failure mode you posit.
In fact real grids (c.f. the Republic of Texas, or for that matter most of the developing world) are operating today with genuinely terrible reliability without the kind of "high-severity catastrophe" you are analogizing to a nuclear meltdown.
No one is advocating for any of our current status-quo systems, but that is what we have, for now.
That sounds to me like exactly the opposite point to the one your were making upthread? Yes, that's true. The possibility of generation shortfall due to weather in a wind or solar-dominated grid environment is, for sure, a problem to be solved.
Yet it is nonetheless at a "different level of severity" than a nuclear meltdown. Saying that is not "censoring" discussion of anything, it's literally engaging in the discussion.
First "Wind and Solar" doesn't have a single failure mode. You're now looking for failures of multiple days with minimal wind and high cloud cover if you want to invoke a "catastrophe" per the upthread phrasing. And that's much harder to do, statistically.
It also discounts that "majority of the grid" doesn't mean "without backup/storage solutions". Those gas plants aren't going away, they're just going to end up mothballed as (to be fair, very expensive) peaker plants. People are working hard on storage solutions like batteries and pumped hydro, wider grid connectivity for cross-continent buffering, etc...
It's totally a solvable problem (quite frankly it's significantly more solvable than "nuclear is an order of magnitude too expensive", which is the real thing holding reactors back). There will be no "catastrophes" in a renewable-driven grid, there just won't.
So please stop with the FUD, and stop reading sources that are feeding it to you. Nuclear has a place in the world, but it has to get its act together and compete in the market. You can't just argue that its competitors won't work, because it's wrong.
That happens all the time.
> People are working hard on storage solutions
Glad they are working hard, but that doesn't mean the technology is there yet, or will be anytime soon
> nuclear is an order of magnitude too expensive.
Because of all the ridiculous regulations in Western nations. South Korea and China have solved this problem.
My point being that a lot of debate on this issue assumes that nuclear reactor tech is frozen in time when it comes to safety.
It isn’t.
This simply isn’t true. A substantial amount of costs are that every single reactor must be approved as if it’s a brand new design. This is after fighting for 10 years or more for the rights to build it.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_pow...
Why not to build nuclear powerplants away from lands used for other purposes? Aren't we better with both designing safer plants and containing them in case of something bad - except maybe Russia going to war to Zaporizhzhia near the station - happens?
Um... no? I don't see where you're going here. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a real place that displaced real people. There's never been anything remotely similar in the history of aviation. In fact airplane accidents have never been a significant/measurable risk to urban populations, ever.
Is not a valid comparison to any commercially operating nuclear plant. The Chernobyl accident was the result of an insane government (the Soviet Union) building an insane reactor design (positive void coefficient of reactivity--no other reactor built by any other country has ever done this) and letting its poorly trained operators run uncontrolled experiments on it at high power levels. The obvious way to avoid such an event is not to do all those insane things. It is not valid to treat that insane event as any kind of benchmark of what is possible with commercial nuclear power as run by reasonably sane societies (i.e., every one on the planet except the former Soviet Union--even Communist China isn't stupid enough or ruthless enough to try something like this).
you may want to speak to the Canadians, as their reactor design also has a positive void coefficient
(admittedly a small one)
> Is not a valid comparison to any commercially operating nuclear plant.
We sort of want to plan for unexpected. To model that unexpected, Chernobyl could be a good approximation.
By this definition of "dangerous", other forms of power plants are much more dangerous. All other energy sources have killed or harmed many more people per unit of energy generated than nuclear has.
> To model that unexpected, Chernobyl could be a good approximation.
No, it isn't. That kind of comparison is like saying that, because bombs can explode, and explosives in bombs are chemically similar to gasoline, we shouldn't use gasoline in cars. It's simply not valid.
Dams are dangerous. To wit, they've killed many times more people than nuclear power plants ever have.
People can and do fall off windmills.
Gas can explode.
Hydrocarbons cause global warming.
PV cells are mostly made in tyrannical China with environmentally dubious sourcing and no independent oversight.
Pick your poison; nuclear is the least of them.
Because the longer the transmission lines the more power is lost - so plants are generally close to where they are delivering electricity.
It'll take a while to shake them out in practice, but they look very solid.
Why do you think that is?
(The answer, of course, is money. Nobody gets rich storing nuclear waste, but extracting mineral resources is a money printer - especially when you aren't saddled with the long-term consequences.)
The folks without mineral rights and with worthless homes with no clean water aren’t so happy either. The company is usually bankrupt so there’s nobody to sue either.
Finding sites to safely and permanently dispose of nuclear waste has been hard. Both because a lot of areas are poorly suited, and also nobody wants a permanent nuclear waste dump in their back yard.
Practically this means costs of nuclear power plants are very high, as you have to over-engineer them relative to other power sources. Natural gas and coal plant accidents are relatively common, for example; similarly oil refineries suffer fires on a regular basis. However, Texas City (site of a major BP disaster in 2005) is not currently a 100-year no-go-zone. Here's a 5-minute video on how that played out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JY3eT4cdM
Point being, there's no way to reduce nuclear power upfront costs without also introducing unacceptable risks, and that's a major reason why nuclear isn't going to replace fossil fuels on a global scale (along with the uranium ore to fuel rod to waste pile supply chain issues,decommissioning costs, etc.)
There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid, and that's one of several reasons why nuclear will remain little more than a niche provider.