I think it might be fine that fusion power may be more expensive in some ways than fission, as long as its reputation is kept clean (figuratively and literally). Market fusion power as the savior of humanity, and get enough people to believe it, and it'll be fine.
I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Fukushima made headline news around the world, leaked large amounts of caesium-137 into the ocean, caused a 20km evacuation radius, is projected to take a total of 30-40 years to clean up, and people think of it as not that bad of a nuclear incident.
In comparison burning fossil fuels is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Way less sensational. You can do math and say nuclear has a safer track record than coal/oil. You can point to design, engineering or management faults with historical failures. It doesn't change the fact that nuclear had a very fair chance at being the future and shown itself to not be trustworthy. If humanity was a little more perfect maybe we could have pulled it off
Yes, something like 150k people were evacuated because of worries about radiation. What you don't mention is that the total number of people evacuated was 470k. Most of the people who had to leave their homes had to leave not because of anything nuclear but because the enormous tsunami destroyed their homes.
So the Fukushima story is: massive natural disaster that caused enormous destruction and tens of thousands of deaths; a nuclear power plant was in a badly affected area; the damage was expensive to deal with but the total number of resulting deaths was, er, maybe about 1.
1. People tried to ring alarm bells about the building codes (and the reactor specifically) not being able to handle earthquakes of a size Fukushima was likely to experience. They were on deaf ears.
2. Japanese government admitted guilt for poor oversight and regulation.
3. Three executives were put on trail for negligence. There were found not guilty, but that's not the same as innocent.
If the question were, say, "how much should we trust the Japanese government?" then Fukushima is not very encouraging. But if it's "how worried should we be about nuclear power?" it seems pretty encouraging to me. Lots of errors and negligence, huge natural disaster, and even so scarcely any lives lost and most of the harm done would have been the same without the nuclear power plant.
Airliners have the same problem, yet their spin doctors are much more successful. Everybody keeps believing they're the safest form of travel.
> caused a 20km
Questionable if that is actually necessary or just over-reaction.
But ultimately it's such an expensive and society-tier level of investment that it's at the whims and pressures more than almost any other technology that has benefited society in resent history. So likewise it's also most at risk of the downside of populist politics (short term thinking, highly reactive to noisy local issues, driven by emotional outrage, etc).
I wonder if it's prospects are even worse off now that's to social media.
Oh yes indeed. Nuclear energy is not legal in Italy, so I did some research:
We had nuclear reactors in the 80s, until we held a referendum on nuclear energy, 3 months after Chernobyl. The result: overwhelmingly against, so we dismantled our reactors. Decades later, the Government pushed for a new referendum. When did they choose to do it? 6 months after the Fukushima disaster... you can guess what did the Italian population voted for.
Is this true?
I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. The number's I've crunched say fission isn't the economic choice, but that varies depends on how much value is placed on 'base load'.
1. Cold war era vanity tech. Nuclear weapons were used to end World War 2, and now they are just another infrastructure project for us.
2. Code shifted weapons research. Countries blame each other for this all the time in the nuclear non-proliferation era.
3. Strategic choice to avoid traditional energy imports (France, Japan).
After 1990 specially 2000 lots of governments around the world started to massively subsidize solar and wind. While often at the same time having policies punishing nuclear in various ways.
The uneconomical solar and wind became economic because of massive government orders and investment. Even the US often simply set targets for solar and wind that utility providers had to reach. Even nuclear nations like France did so.
So why did wind and solar turn economical, massive investment around the world in making it so. Had Germany, France and the rest of the EU simply gone all in on even a Gen3+ reactor design, and had order 200 of them since 1990, it would also be very economical. History of nuclear shows that if you build the same plant in large numbers, they can be built and finished far faster and cheaper.
And that is even before we consider the huge reduction in capital cost if you go from a PWR design to a GenIV design. Just in terms of the scale of the project, there is a huge difference. Sadly by the time that technology was getting ready for serious commercialization, nuclear was basically seen as legacy and almost all government stopped most research and stop investing in it.
Imagine if nuclear in the 80s had the support wind/solar did in the last decade. If every utility in the US simply sad 'you need X% nuclear by Y date'. And in Europe at the same time as France was building its reactors, Germany, Nordics, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain had also built reactors at the same time.
During the Kyoto protocol talks, France already had a mostly green grid because of nuclear. But somehow essentially nobody copied this success story because it simply wasn't politically viable in most places. It took decade plus after Kyoto before wind/solar were commercially viable but really only if you don't consider intermittency a problem and the market doesn't give you a penalty for it (it usually didn't because before wind/solar that just wasn't an issue). Yet despite solar and wind not being economical, massive investment in it happened and eventually it was made economical thanks to economics of scale.
I would claim if all the investment that was made in wind/solar since 1992 had been made in nuclear, we would produce more green energy now and the cost curve would be driven even lower, and baseload power would be solved as intermittency is simply not a thing. We would not need to redesign grids because nuclear plants would map nicely onto the current grid, if you just replace coal with nuclear.
So, its all about economics of scale, that makes it energy production cheap. Putting up huge wind mills is cheap because there are lots of trained people to do it, the factories can produce large volumes. The largest wind mills now are by themselves large then a whole GenIV plant would be. And produce like 95% less energy and not even consistently.
> I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic.
You missed that it is green and no CO2. That was not a reason anybody cared about before 2000 but since then it was part of the rational in some countries.
I would like to hear why you think fission can't be economic in principle. Maybe you can make the argument that Gen3 reactors can't be economical but based on first principles, fission itself can be economical if you had economics of scale seems a stretch.
Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Are you referring to the need for electricity now at the Ukraine plants? Newer technologies such as NuScale require no external electricity for their cooling. The reaction only occurs if there is water and when all the water evaporates then the reaction stops.
> Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Gas turbines in aviation also blew up way more often in the past than they do now. Who says the blowing up of plants is a constant? There have been many improvements in safety. Also, apart from the Three Mile Island accident, there haven't been major nuclear problems in the US in the last 50 or so years. Furthermore, the thing that lead to the Chernobyl disaster is not possible, by law, in modern reactors. Furthermore, newer reactors require an extra casing of concrete which would also have contained the Chernobyl disaster. You can even fly an airplane in those newer housing buildings and nothing would happen (with the building at least).
I have yet to see such a world.
If you built nuclear at scale, then these problems solve themselves. Just as France solved them in 15 years in the 70/80s.
Just as these problems were solved for solar/wind by economics of scale.
Solar/wind was not economical, it was basically forced into being economical by creating economics of scale.
That said, well, they stopped building new reactors, most of their reactors were built in 15 years in the 70/80s. Since then they have not done as much as they should have and all those reactors are starting to need more maintenance now.
Because they have not built much new things, they don't have as many people with knowledge as they used to.
But they are managing most of these issues pretty well overall.
I would say France did pretty well having 40 years of green energy.
After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewable sources, flexible grids and storage systems to balance everything out.
Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.
Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFSCOE) does include storage and suddenly nuclear fission gets a lot more competitive:
"All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.
Economic challenges of quickly building grid-scale battery storage , battery production for the entire globe, NIMBY's etc.
> Modern batteries don't burst into flame
they literally do
> the overwhelming bulk of storage is not batteries
Well overwhelming bulk is a high bar and storage is geography dependent. Germany f.e. can't build as much pumped storage as Australia and Australia built a large amount of battery storage vs PSH.
Modern batteries do not burn. Teslas do.
That's not sufficient for pumped storage at scale, but Germany is mostly focusing on hydrogen for now.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/recycling-firm-fined...
Lithium is anyway not favored for use in utility-scale storage, where its light weight offers no compelling value. Up-and-coming chemistries include iron-air (no explosions), calcium-antimony (no explosions), and bromine-zinc (no explosions). Hundreds of other chemistries are available.
Fissions reactors that don't have incredibly strict and expensive regulation are already pretty unreliable, and they're operating within the bounds of known materials rather than an order of magnitude outside of them.
Even the mythical 100% uptime nuclear reactor still needs just as much storage for abritrage because it is so much more expensive.
When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life, you generally want to be really sure you aren't going to have an oopsie.
"The fly ash emitted from burning coal for electricity by a power plant carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."
I think Chernobyl was the only really big nuclear plant disaster right? And even then, what we've really learned in the long term is that human habitation is more dangerous to wildlife than nuclear radiation (the area around the plant is now a thriving wildlife preserve).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
A nuclear reactor that had the same radiation as a coal plant would not be legal? How does this make any sense at all?
The Safety standards were actually put at to high a level to early, specially given how instantly save nuclear was.
Consider this, how safe were coal plants? Would nuclear instead of coal have saved 100000s of lives since then? Yes of course nuclear would have, even if you had an accident once in a while.
The problem is that there was 0 tolerance for nuclear accident, because of populist nonsense, but if coal plant and supply chain killed 5 people here 10 people and 1000s of people get sick, nobody cares.
So the reality is, that nuclear went uneconomical because nuclear and existing power production (mostly coal, later gas) were no treated the same in terms of their safety requirements.
> When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life
That's not actually what happens. 3 Mile Island or Fukushima didn't even remotely come close to what you describe. And even for Chernobyl this is questionable statement. And Chernobyl was a type of reactor not built in the West, so in the West something that bad simply can't happen with PWRs.
At the contrary in renewables the learning cycle is in months so costs fall exponentially.
That's the real reason of high costs in fission, not red tape or public sentiment.
Probably the fact that it's literally the same thing that killed 140 thousands people in an instant and imposed the spectre of a nuclear winter upon us all, had its importance.
In theory much of that is excessive but there is a long history of very expensive mistakes with massive cleanup efforts. The US talks about three mile island as the largest nuclear accident ignoring the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One that killed 3 people. All that complexity and expense comes from trying to avoid real mistakes that actually happened.
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years.
your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive accidents, but the chance of a modern gen3+ plant that we'd build today causing any accidents like that in a western country is so very close to 0 that it's not even worth discussing.
The rate and cost of failures directly relate to insurance costs. A 1 in 100,000 chance per year to cause a 500 billion dollar accident represents a ~5 million per year insurance cost to offset that risk before considering the risk premium associated with insurance. And that’s on top of the normal risks for large complexes that have little to do with nuclear just high voltage equipment etc. Unsubsidized insurance costs are something like 0.2c/kWh which is quite significant for these projects.
In the end you see a lot of people talking nonsense around nuclear costs using wildly optimistic numbers, but there hasn’t been a power plant built and operated in the last 20 years that come even close to these numbers. Let alone when you start to compare predictions for decommissioning costs with actual decommissioning costs.
Yes, and that one is society. It what we do with any risk that is so great that if any company would have to carry it then the company would fold and society would still have to carry it.
Hydro power is one prime example. If a dam would break the damage downstream would be too high for any power company to pay. Individuals living downstream might have insurance, but no insurance company can handle the cost of a major flood. The only entity able to do so would be the government.
An other example is forest fires caused by poor maintenance of power lines. Such things happens from time to time and it not the power company or their insurance that will cover if half a country is up in literal flames and a few towns are lost. There might be a bit of bad press, a few millions/billions in damages, but the true cost won't land anywhere near the power company.
Fully eliminate the risk of floods and fire from the power grid would be very difficult, and putting the power company on the hook for the full cost would be impractical and counter productive. Society need electricity. The best they can do is impose regulations, and in exchange society will pick up some of the risk.
Those companies can and should be held responsible for the damages they cause. You can't just privatize all the profits and leave all the losses to the government! If you want to do something so dangerous nobody is willing or even able to insure you, you should not be allowed to do it.
[0]: https://damsafety.org/sites/default/files/files/Legal%20Liab...
When a company files for bankruptcy the result is a legal process where the company seeks relief from debt. PG&E caused California second biggest wild fire named "Camp Fire" which destroyed 1,329 structures, and burned 963,309 acres, with an estimated cost of $16bn. The next year they caused a second wild fire, and yes they did get sued for that. They are estimated to have caused over 40 wild fires.
In the bankruptcy filing that got accepted by the judge they might be paying $13.5 billion for all of the wildfires, with half of that being paid as "stocks" in the company (for how much that is worth). All the remaining costs of the wildfires will be carried by the victims. Since September 30 this year the total amount PG&E has actually paid is $5.08 billions.
If one of Californias nulcear power plant would explode tomorrow with the effect of 40 wild fires then the result would be identical to PG&E. They would be sued, they would file for bankruptcy, and then a portion of the true costs will be paid out. That is reality regardless of what you thought it was.
[0]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article165448747.html
As a California government agency it’s self insured by the state government, which is a very different situation than a private company building a power plant exclusively to generate power.
As to bankruptcy, insurance is normally required. Wildfires are an odd case because unlike nuclear the people who suffer damage are partially responsible for failing to mitigate risks as eventually fires will happen.
Who is the primary owners in a power company matter very little. In many countries, especially in EU, the government tend to be the majority owners in power companies operating nuclear power plants. It doesn't change the risk factors.
Also I would never blame victims of flooding or wildfires. People who choose to live downstream of a hydro power dam, or chooses to live in areas with high risk of wild fires, has just as much power as people who choose to live next to a nuclear power station. If operators of dangerous and critical infrastructure do a bad job then the blame tree start with the owners and trickles down to each leaf.
People have been making dams for quite literally thousands of years before we discovered AC electricity. They are useful structures to ensure water security and reduce damage and deaths from regular flooding. So yes the Marib Dam for example produces electricity and it’s failure would pose a risk, but it’s on the same location people a dam failed all the way back in 575 and there is evidence of earlier dams in that location going back to 1750 BC.
For power generation, humans just need electricity. This requires large networks of high voltage lines crisscrossing the country. Those lines will start wildfires at some rate X. A utility cannot survive being liable for all damages by that wildfire.
So what you do - is everyone buys insurance and the government sets "best practice" regulations designed to reduce X to a number considered reasonable. Investigations that result in litigation are usually what happens when the company has clearly violated best practice.
The problem with all things nuclear is that our vision of acceptable number and severity of nuclear incidents is that it needs to be negative.
Poland just decided to build our nuclear to the tune of 40bn eur and their first contract is with westinghouse and their ap1000 reactor but also signed a letter of intent with KHNP to also built out further. I'm sure they cost Westinghouse for strategic reasons though and not because of price.
heck.. even Finland with their massively delayed and over budget Olkiluoto 3 also plans to built out even more nuclear. it's almost like some countries are now realizing that putting your faith in the weather gods for supply safety is not a good idea and that solar and wind are simply not viable for baseload or the grid in general.
i still think wind and solar has a place for creating synthetic fuels, but let's stop pretending it's been comparable to nuclear for the grid.
edit:
also.. are your saying IEA has wrong data? and if so, would you mind bringing since sources into your argument about people being way too optimistic
United Arab Emirates has had massive issues. Unit 1 began construction in 2012 and was “completed” in 2018, but didn’t enter commercial operation until 2021 due to literally hundreds of issues. “In December 2018, it was reported that voids were found in the concrete containment buildings for units 2 & 3. Grease was found to have leaked through the unit 3 containment, which may have been due to a crack in the concrete.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
South Korea also ran into multiple delays, “Shin Kori-3 was initially scheduled to commence operation by the end of 2013, but the schedules for both Units 3 & 4 were delayed by approximately one year to replace safety-related control cabling, which had failed some tests.”
Poland isn’t a failure at this point, but they don’t have a power plant yet and their cost projections before delays aren’t very rosy.
Objectivity it’s reasonable to blame bad management for issues within a single project or even country, but when several different projects in different countries run into issues that suggest more fundamental problems.
If Britain decided to build 10 APR-1400 in the next 10 years with each one they would improve.
France built like 50 reactors in 15 years with 60s technology. Yes they had issue early on but after a while they were completing reactors within 4-5 years and very few issues.
The reality is from 2000 to 2020 every country in Europe could have 100% green energy if they had just started building multiple reactors every year.
Germany could have easily have a green grid by now. A nation like Germany could very much have gone and do that, just as France did in 1980s.
European nuclear initiatives are mostly about strategic concerns to get out of Russian gas. Economically, even the cheapest nuclear power on Earth can't compete with gas, if it is pipelined. (It can compete if it is liquified.) Or you need to penalize gas to unreasonable degrees for carbon emission.
Meanwhile the largest known deposits of Uranium can be found in Australia and Canada, making them much safer sources for western countries.
If EU countries allow fracking domestically, this will change, of course. Though the same "green" movement that opposes nuclear is likly to try to block this. Maybe we should look at how much funding these people get from Russia?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/putins-green-fifth-co...
Just to pick a few random google results.
As far as I can tell, it's in Russia's interest to encourage any energy source that synergizes with NG (ie wind and solar) and to work against energy sources that are full alternatives (nuclear, coal and large scale storage), while at the same time ignore the downsides of NG.
It would make sense to fund groups aligned with these interests, even those that are generally negative to Russia politically. Such funding would not need to be done directly, but could be done through subsidiaries.
Must be a conspiracy theorist.
Storage does not need any "breakthroughs". It will be built out when there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, NG plants fill shortfalls.
Globally 16% of electricity is produced by traditional hydro annually that can cover the majority of the projected need for storage in a pure wind/solar grid.
Also, by the time we need significant batteries the costs will have fallen even further. If you want to eventually cover 10% of the grids daily demand from batteries using projected costs from 2030 to 2040+ it doesn’t look unreasonable.
Renewables with straight gas backup and no other storage are already lower carbon than any other option, and batteries and off river PHES have only just started getting cheap.
The breakthroughs we need to cover the final gap have already been made if you're paying any attention at all.
Stop concern trolling
It is also perfectly capable of meeting dispatchable loads like heating, chemical production, and EV charging, and adding them to the grid will bring the ability to meet electricity even higher. Considering the storage and dispatchable low carbon energy that already exists, the remaining part would produce less carbon than would be released by expanding Uranium mining.
There is not enough uranium to meet 50% of world electricity demand using current technology for long enough to wear out a single generation of wind turbines or solar panels.
Your imaginary all nuclear future is both impossoble and worse than the trajectory we are currently on.
If we are being honest, that also has a lot to do with why nuclear is so expensive.
Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW.
For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW capacity. So even under the assumptions that
- you have to replace the wind turbines 3x to reach 100 years life span and
- you always have to build more renewables since they don't run at 100% their capacity throughout their lifespan
wind make more sense economically nowadays.
it's cute that you are mentioning onshore wind but that will just never happen, takes up way too much space and most places have a capacity factor of below 20% making your 34500 Mw 6900Mw as well as giving you erratic output. so for wind to work you either need fossil fuels, power 2x or some new magical battery that will make the cost of such a solution insane because you'd have to completely overhaul your infrastructure.
offshore wind is more realistic, but costs way more than nuclear.
wind makes sense of you want to built something fast, but it won't bring down your carbon footprint. og at least it haven't in Germany or Denmark. the only reduction we've seen is because we burn trash and biomass which fair some messed up reason is considered green and renewable.
Then also look at the $20 billion dollar 'service' contract for the Saudi one that doesn't include any labour or running costs. It suddenly costs about the same as Hinkley C even before overruns.
Once you look at the total in rather than comparing overnight costs to renewable all in costs, they're the same $8-10 per net watt as nuclear always is anywhere except china - and China's renewables are cheaper by close to the same ratio.
The penetration rates at a given cost favour renewables right up until your peaker gas plants are causing less emissions than the Uranium mine.
could you please provide some evidence that the capacity factor and supply safety is remotely comparable between APR1400 and offshore wind?
What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy.
where do you get your numbers? you sure make many claims without a shred of evidence. and are you seriously suggesting that we continue using natural gas?
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsEnergyAva...
Cheap reactors are unreliable reactors.
> What do you think service costs are for offshore/onshore wind and hinkley point? having maintenance and an industry is actually a good thing for the economy.
Stop with the broken window fallacy. If subsidizing jobs is important, open a battery or PV plant with the tax money instead.
> and are you seriously suggesting that we continue using natural gas?
Using gas 2-20% of the time with a mean of around 8% produces fewer emissions than opening new uranium mines and only needs to happen whilst the storage industry matures. Your plan entails burning more gas whilst the reactors, mines, and enrichment are built out over decades, then it also entails burning more gas at the end for outages unless you overprovision and build seasonal storage and long distance transmission.
The mock outrage is tiresome and transparent.
As do I, I personally have never heard someone refer to a nuclear fission power plant as a nuke, but I guess I don't hang around with the same people as you...
Everyone in the area simply calls it "the nuke plant".
It is a directional landmark : "yeah, so once you get to the nuke plant turn left...."
"Once you see the nuke plant you know you are getting close"..
Its full name is a mouth full : Pickering Nuclear Generating Station.
Citing wikipedia sometimes backfires.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/nuke
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuke
Your mock ignorance is tiresome and transparent
No one is even slightly confused by the usage.
The same people moving form project to project, on-boarding new people. Just as France did in 1980s.
This would result in very cheap competently green grid for the next 100 years.
Wind turbines have to be replaced 3x in that time and you don't have to deal with intermittency at all.
Just as with everything else, without economics of scale it doesn't work.
You certainty don't have anything close to the intermittency of wind and solar. And this is clearly evident in the production graphs.
In most regions you can get a lower forced downtime rate for a lower cost with renewables, and then you also get the curtailed energy to feed dispatchable loads. You need the electrolysers anyway for chemical feed, and you need storage to meet variable loads so it's just a matter of which can be deployed faster.
Additionally you get a very long forced downtime when you burn through your Uranium reserves in under a decade by trying to provide current final energy.
Offshore wind pays into the public purse now via the leases and still costs about half what subsidised nuclear does. It's still a very young industry.
Offshore has a rather fast construction time, it turns out. For example, the United Kingdom's Hornsea Wind Farm Project 2 was given planning permission in 2016, and it reached its full capacity of 1.4GW less than six years later. Project 1 at the same wind farm reached 1.2GW in less than five years.
And when it comes to cost, Hornsea Project 3 is to start construction next year - with commercial operation scheduled in 2025 - at $12bn for 2.4GW. Not bad when you compare it to Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant unit 3 costing an estimated $11bn for 1.6GW - which took 22 years from first license application to design output power.
That is insane. They're building a FOAK project for less than NOAK nuclear reactors like Hinkley C in less time and it will be generating at higher capacity from day one than new nukes manage for their first decade or so of operation. Nice pro wind factoid.
More power, sooner, with low enough O&M that you could build another one with the money you saved just during the time it would take for another EPR to be built and come to full power? Sign me up.
For example, in France nuclear power reactors were stopped because unexpected cracks appeared in pipes after just 25 years of operations requiring expensive maintenance, https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/France-Cl... That put reactors off-line for over a year.
Then Sweeden closed one of its reactors because it bacame unprofitable due to raising maintainance costs, https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-sweden-europe...
Currently a lot of reactors are hitting the 30-40 year mark, and they are running into significant issues with the aging equipment. We are seeing an increasing number of minor incidents, often caused due to manufacturing defects finally rearing its head, or just plain fatigue.
Meanwhile, solar has a 25-year economic lifespan. At that point you can make more money by replacing them with more efficient panels. However, manufacturers have already started offering 40-year warranties for consumer panels, at which point they have a guaranteed 88% power output. Wind indeed has a lifespan of 25 years, which seems pretty average when compared to literally any other power plant with moving parts.
When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.
A warrantee of that length is only valuable if the manufacturer is a stable business with multiple income streams (say GE) or the warrantee is backed by stable insurance (say Lloyds). Liabilities are supposed to be on the balance sheet, so they are not free to mint.
If there were a long term issue where consumers needed to claim on the warrantee, I would guess most manufacturers would just get liquidated, but the executives and owners will have already cashed out. The same business model gets used for lots of other businesses with long term warrantees - limited liability is very handy.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-data-animation-nuc...
solar is fine for those who can afford it, but workout subsidies and the ability to sell electricity back to the grid it's a crazy long term investment in many places of the world especially northern Europe where I'm from (for hopefully obvious reasons). so different milage may apply elsewhere. i guess we'll have to see if those 40 years are for real and if the companies offering it are even around in 20 years.
wind needs constant maintenance to have a 20 year lifespan, but beyond the 25 years you'd have to replace the whole thing. so while a nuclear powerplant also requires constant maintenance you don't have to treat down the whole plant after 40 years. even the German ones that are closing now could easily have their lifetime extended https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...
>When it comes to accidents, they are indeed extremely unlikely. However, the figure to look at is the potential damages multiplied by the likelyhood of the accident. When we look at those two together, they are definitely worth discussing.
i guess what I'm trying to say is that we as a civilization engage in activities that are way more risky and dangerous than the miniscule risk of a serious accident in a modern gen 3+ nuclear power plant. of course we should have strict regulation here, but it's just not that dangerous or risky
The ~fifty year lifespan is in part based on physical corrosion of pipes running through concrete there really isn’t a way to economically replace them all that costs less than simply building a new power plant. But even here not everything fails on the same day so there is some wiggle room.
Let it run? You mean, presumably, the huge amount of testing and preventative and planned maintenance that is scheduled in as part of a reactors expected lifetime, plus anything new discovered along the way. That doesn't come for free.
> In theory maintain a nuclear power plant to last for 100s of years
Sure, given enough effort you can fix anything. But extending a fission plant's lifetime can require massive overhauls, replacing reactor components, replacing materials that have experienced radiation embrittling and activation, etc. Keeping a plant running indefinitely is so complicated and expensive that we haven't managed it so far.
Extension is something we should absolutely consider but it's not a magic fix all. Sometimes it's not worth it to keep an old thing running.
But that's precisely why nuclear power plants are so expensive to construct. If the generation technology was inherently less risky, it stands to reason the facilities would be cheaper to build
>. Fission is still by far the most expensive power source even with massive subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base load power backed up with peaking power plants.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/748580/electricity-cost-...
Seems Solar is the most expensive, and by a large margin?
It looks like nuclear is cheaper vs almost all "renewables"?
There is a nuclear power plant ~10KM from me that set world records:
- On October 7, 1994, Pickering Unit 7 set the world record for continuous runtime at 894 days, a record that stood for 22 years.
Can you provide the number of days that "WIND" or "Solar" have provided continuous power for?
That complexity and expense is because you are building machines which can run for 894 days NON-STOP. (CANDU plants can be refuelled while operating)
Diesel locomotives are expensive, a lot of this is attributed to the engine designed to run at high-output for an extended amount of time.
A fusion reactor will also require wall thick enough to stop aircraft. Security will likey be the same to. And there is no fundamental reason why fusion should require any less for any of these.
In fact the actual cost of nuclear is CAPX and comes from the large civil engineering project with high specification, the steam turbine and water towers.
There are lots of fission based reactor designs that have non of these things. So nothing you describe has really much to do with 'fission' itself. Fission plants can also be made so that airborn radiation is practically impossible.
We simply stopped fundamentally advancing fission reactors in the early 70s and instead of solving problems fundamentally, we added lots of regulation.
Seems like power generation still counts on externalities being external.
I might be in the opposite camp as you but this is very much a "where were you when—" moment for me. I'm sure someone will pop in to disappoint me but I think the point is it's no longer a hypothetical exercise.
Of laser energy into a tiny control volume that doesn't consider how much energy went into the laser systems. If you draw the control volume around the building and see that the lasers require vastly more energy than what came out, I think you'll be less excited, right?
We've been getting lots of energy out of fusion since the early 1950s with thermonuclear bombs. We know we can get energy out of a control volume. But is it a practical energy source is still the question imho.
Is it that in a specific volume they got X EM energy coming in from the laser and Y thermal energy coming out, with Y>X BUT the electricity consumption of the lasers is Z>Y>X?
If so that's sort of misleading, like the plethora of claims from ITER. I hoped this was different.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
> The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.
They probably upgraded the rig since the Wikipedia article was written, so most likely the 2.1 MJ refers to the UV light numbers.
Add to that the fact that improvements in laser efficiency is a hot research area (as lasers are used commercially in a lot of places, and cost-cutting is always a concern), and this is starting to feel a little more attainable.
Even if the lasers are 1% efficient does it matter if 100 GJ of electrical power results in 100 TJ of fusion heat? I'm not saying this is at all how it scales, but it is the logic behind pursuing an ICF power plant. The fuel gets ignited and heats itself.
Also, for fun, 100 TJ is 24 kT TNT equivalent: slightly more than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trying to capture this energy released instantaneously would be a fun engineering challenge.
But personally, I don't know whether that's actually important. Power plants usually consume a nontrivial fraction of their own produced power to power themselves, and in fact consume more than 100% of produced power when starting from a full stop — meaning that in initial few-shot conditions, even when feeding back their own produced power into themselves, they still need (huge amounts of) external power input to get going, like a car engine needing a battery + starter motor. Only a rare few kinds of power plant can be used to "black start" a power grid. Most types of generator need to overcome initial higher resistances, e.g. inertia (and thereby back-EMF resistance at the transformer) in getting heavy turbines spinning from a stop.
It wouldn't be at all strange if a practical fusion power plant turned out to be energy-negative over a few-shot run (i.e. required "bootstrapping"), but then became energy positive over a theoretical 24/7 run at whatever its optimal duty cycle is. And a single-shot run becoming net-positive would be a good point to start to consider those more practical calculations, since they'd have been useless to consider until then—a power plant can't possibly be net-positive over any kind of runtime + duty cycle, if its core reaction can't be net-energy-positive when considered in isolation.
Which is, to me, why it probably does make sense for ITER to be excited. They've reached the point where they can stop using a lab-bench model of power efficiency, and start trying to come up with another, more full-scale model of power efficiency to replace it with.
Still, this is an important step in the development of fusion energy reactors.
Tabletop rigs can be as efficient as 50%, however high power such as we see here tends to come with drastically reduced efficiency.
Edit: I was wrong, fusion is always 30 years away: https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...
Someone has to keep the bloviated PR campaigns checked with reality. Otherwise, some crazy fools might actually start believing that fusion is real and gets duped out of their money. If you can't stand a bit of real criticism, then maybe you should sell your scam somewhere else. Otherwise, take it on the chin, retool your message, and come at it honestly.
Personally, I just don't see fusion being a viable solution for anything in any of our lifetimes. I will gladly admit how wrong I was if/when someone solves it. I just have a much stronger doubt in sci-fi vs reality, and don't get swooned by the hype machines surrounding fusion.
What is tiring to me is calling the skeptics tiring. But to each their own
And it's unreasonable and annoying to expect everyone to say "This is amazing, but..." rather than just "This is amazing". Yes, we know, fusion power isn't ready, and we have no idea when (or if) it will be.
I haven't been "holding my breath". I've been watching from afar, checking in occasionally (like when this sort of news comes out), and I genuinely think this particular breakthrough is exciting. I don't need the tiresome -- yes, incredibly, frustratingly tiresome -- legion of naysayers coming in and stating the obvious every single time.
Maybe it's not the result you think it should be ("with all they hype over decades, we should have fusion power by now"), but... too bad. It is what it is, and this particular announcement is indeed impressive.
Happy to be proven wrong and told that it is more of a breakthrough than I think it is..
So there is at the moment no working design for a generator as a plant that produces more electricity than it takes in.
It's always the same…
There are always these articles: net energy gain finally! and then: no not really.
It being hard and it requiring continual progress does not mean that progress does not occur.
I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at the moment, like the US/Japanese ABWR or Korean's APR-1400 designs. I wish there was more hype around them rather than SMRs and advanced reactors.
My favorite idea in nuclear to rapidly deeply decarbonize is to use a shipyard to mass-product large floating reactors. This gives you economies of scale and economies of mass production. Amazingly, this was seriously attempted in the 1970 and 80s in Jacksonville, Fl on Blount Island, where Offshore Power Systems installed the world's largest gantry crane and got an honest-to-goodness manufacturing license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 8 of these. [1]
Sadly, my concern above with SMRs happened to OPS and they couldn't break through. Such a good idea though.
They are taking an active approach:
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
Reactors like ISMR from Terrestrial Energy and SSR from Moltex that will operate at 500MW (rather then true 'small' reactors) are for more reasonable for scale.
They look like 'small' reactors but they pack quite a punch in comparison to PWR designs.
Any nation that just seriously commits to a single reactor design like this and plans to build 50 of them will do really well.
But I agree the same could be done with APR-1400 or AP1000.
Because some countries consider even 500MW reactors SMR if they are GenIV.
SMR has become kind of widely used for lots of different things.
Yeah and with a breeder fission reactor we could reduce this to below 1% probably. With a thorium breeder the fuel cost might be essentially 0%. In the vision of Alvin Weinberg you literally just drop some thorium into the fuel salt every once in a while.
But the real issue for nuclear energy is currently capital cost and time not fuel cost. And capital cost can go down massively with GenIV reactors as well.
So I don't see how fusion will be cheaper.
> In fusion it could be lower
But eventually you have to start breeding tritium, so wouldn't that make it more expensive.
> Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.
Awesome, we desperately need GenIV reactors (even if I dislike that term).
I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water, right?
There are other ideas too, but it's hard to beat a Rankine cycle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy
https://web.archive.org/web/20150404075829/https://hifweb.lb...
If we use a reaction that primarily produces beta radiation or other high energy charged particle, sending it through a coil of wire would induce a voltage that we could extract as electric energy.
For that matter, appropriately located coils could be used to extract thermal energy from the plasma directly. The trick there is that we can't get much with the current tokamak and stellarator designs -- the thermal energy is too disordered to use a large coil and the plasma flow is not sufficiently confined to use small coils. There are almost certainly better configurations, but the electrohydrodynamics simulations are tricky. If we keep at it I'm sure we can find a stable configuration with fewer degrees of freedom.
We do have radio-photo-voltaic devices, but they're so inefficient it's laughable. And we have RTG generators, which are only practical in limited situations, and again have a very low efficiency.
So hot water it is!!
Fusion is a much safer alternative both in incidents and fallout
I definitely wouldn't want to make any broad sweeping statements about something that hasn't been built yet.
In a case of an accident I would also imagine an explosion from a Fusion Reactor, but the fallout of it would not even close as dramatic as a Fission Reactor leak or explosion
At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that will not be any means mean the overall system will be cheaper.
We'll have to see the cost tradeoffs: fusion makes much less radioactive material per kWh than fission (but it still makes some) vs. simplicity. Fission is relatively trivial: just put special rocks in a grid and pump water over them as they pour out their star energy.
Progress is good and exciting, but I don't see any reason to think this will have major implications for energy systems anytime soon. Would be happy to be wrong though.
Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.