Japan has to import liquefied natural gas at great expense so the economics look different to them. The "plutonium economy" where fast reactors are used to breed fuel from the common ²³⁸U is particularly appealing to them because they have at least a century worth of fuel mined and above ground, some of which is labeled as "nuclear waste". Such a system uses uranium so efficiently it seems it could be made sustainable by extracting uranium from seawater.

The last round of interest in fast reactors was mainly about fuel economy and people believed then that fast reactors would have a higher capital cost, but the next generation of nuclear plants has to be economically competitive and that's not going to happen so long as the powerset is a steam turbine so the main appeal of alternative reactor types today is getting rid of the water so you can run at higher temperatures with a dramatically smaller and potentially cheaper gas turbine powerset.

Such "5ᵗʰ generation" reactors are still under development and won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade, but clean energy is a marathon and not a sprint.

Second, natural gas is a finite resource and the vast reserves are vast… for now.

What north america also has are vast tracts of land. The ideal place for nuclear reactors since large bodies of water are often close by. Same argument for wind turbines.

The difference when you have your own supply is that the price becomes a policy choice. The government can easily decide to prioritize the domestic market and limit exports.

They can, and have done this in the past, e.g. the US ban on export of crude oil.

But this does not change the point materially. Not exporting and consuming gas domestically at lower prices incurs an opportunity cost as the same gas could have been sold for more aboard. So net-net the people will pay for such a policy choice.

I don't think it's so simple. Cheap energy can make entire industrial sectors viable that otherwise wouldn't be. You could easily end up ahead by putting that energy into production of goods that are higher up on the value chain rather than exporting it directly.

There will be higher order effects, there always are. I don't think the second order you brought up above changes the argument either. If investing in a certain industrial sector is desirable, then why not sell gas at the international market price, and use the extra proceeds to do the investment at the level that makes sense. That way you can at least tune the investment to a level that makes sense, rather than having it depend on the delta between the local and global market price which will depend on a ton of other factors.

Note that I'm not saying that's always bad to protect a local market. The assertion was that North America has enough gas causing it to be isolated from the global market pricing, and I'm still very skeptical about that claim.

It is traded internationally, but oceanic shipping of natural gas is expensive, and capacity is limited (export ports, import ports, vessels), so the domestic market doesn't see the full effect of international pricing either.

I wish we would move from gas to nuclear since gas has a major climate impact, but low US gas prices do make that more difficult.

The US also happens to be especially well situated for solar and wind, making life even harder for nuclear. That comes with some bad news too, because we don't really have great storage solutions yet and we're terrible at building long-distance transmission.

https://www.theice.com/products/910/UK-NBP-Natural-Gas-Futur... https://ycharts.com/indicators/henry_hub_natural_gas_spot_pr...

Well, duh. Of course it's less expensive if you only have to care about the lifecycle of half of your process.

Gas still leads coal and is cleaner burning so less polluting in othet ways but its not quite the GHG slam dunk it is if you just compare CO2 from combustion.

Renewables and nuclear are way ahead of both.

However, leakage in both new and existing gas wells, plus leakage all across the gas distribution infrastructure make this worse.

However you are right, and its kind of funny. The US despite not signing the Kyoto protocol actually achieved those goals because of gas while most other nations failed. France of course was already green by the time the conference happened.

I don't think anybody knows which of the fossil fuels leaks more methane. They all leak lots of it, but the people with access to measure the leaks won't.

Or ever. Breeder reactors aren't a new idea. The concept has been around half a century, and they were put in commercial use 35 years ago. Thus far with enormous cost overruns and spectacularly bad uptime.

It's good that we research these things, but we shouldn't base our energy infrastructure on things which aren't commercially available for good reasons.

It's sad for everyone that energy infrastructure turned out to be a really, really hard problem, but wishful thinking doesn't make it go away.

We have several decades of empirical data to suggest this. A regime that has other basis of considerations can of course do what they want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor

In 2015, after several minor delays, problems at the recently completed BN-800 indicated a redesign was needed. Construction of the BN-1200 was put on "indefinite hold", and Rosenergoatom stated that no decision to continue would be made before 2019. In January 2022, Rosatom announced that a pilot BN-1200M would be built by 2035.

The BN-800 reactor connected to the grid in 2015. That's a gap of 20 years between building more BN-series reactors.

Meanwhile Russia has completed 6 conventional pressurized water reactors in the last 5 years:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

I think it's fair to say that breeders are still too expensive and complicated to compete with conventional reactors. The money saved on fuel is just not enough to justify the extra complications considering how inexpensive uranium remains.

I frankly think that these considerations are exaggerated in countries which already have nuclear bombs (like USA, Russia, China, France, UK, India, Pakistan, Israel,..). Japan does not have a nuclear arsenal, but, frankly, a normal nuclear power plant can also produce plutonium, maybe only somehow more visibly, so Japan might have built nuclear warheads on a year or so, had they decided to do so (and violate their Constitution).

But sure lets kill a great program to build next generation reactors and solve the 'nuclear waste' 'problem' by preventing that.

Just another one of the many ways the public opposition to nuclear has prevented all the progress.

...in fields governed by science and stricture, anyway, like nuclear power or aviation.

Time of last incident, average promotion time (over time reduces safety awareness again), calculating that, one can behave acyclic until the next accident.

When they were allowed to build the plant, emergency systems were not protected from tsunami damage/flooding. If the infrastructure around emergency cooling had been protected, then none of this would have happened.

When the tsunami happened, both the power company and government appeared to have no emergency action plans or preparedness for the obvious scenario of the emergency cooling system failing.

When they were caught with no plans and an unfolding catastrophe, instead of being open and seeking assistance from anyone they could, they clammed up and hid as much as possible.

It was a disaster predicated on incompetence and arrogance at every step by every organization involved, up to and including the most senior Japanese government officials who sat by and let the TEPCO bungle everything.

So yes, given such a systemic failure - much of it enabled by too-cozy relationships, incompetence, and (likely) corruption - I think it's quite wise to say "well, we're not qualified to do more of this."

Solar and wind don't have anywhere near the operating expenses, supply chain requirements, or dangers nuclear power has. They're highly distributed. And nuclear power is increasingly unreliable due to (cough cough) extreme weather events from climate change, though usually this is more inane stuff like cooling water sources drying up, or becoming too hot, or clogging up from invasive species that are able to survive where they weren't before.

Even if the technology advances, if the problem was the people last time, technology alone won't be enough.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/japanese-gover...

[1] https://archive.vn/UnavD

[2] https://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article/191735/Former-Fukus...

If you're going to build a plant that requires active backup cooling in a tsunami zone then you should protect your backup cooling system from tsunamis.

It's ok to build nuclear fission reactors in challenging locations. We have many that run underwater and a few dozen that run in outer space. We ran one under the ice sheet of Greenland and one in Antarctica. As you say, you just gotta build the necessary infrastructure.

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/us-a.htm

While none are operational right now, the highly radioactive reactors cores that didn't burn up over Canada by accident do remain a reasonably stable disposal orbit today. :-)

The film safe from Skylab that crashed in Australia made less.

Thankfully reactors in space have a lot of benefits compared to terrestrial use - ships and space stations can use the so called shadow-shield to protect the ship/station in its shadow and just let the radiation go into the void of space in all other direction. Makes docking a bit tricky as well as running multiple reactors (you need to take neutron cross-propagation into account), but should be still doable.

For surface or asteroid stations - there shouldby plenty of mass for any shielding and no biosphere to contaminate or possibly not even any hydrosphere or atmosphere to spread radioactive particles - on the other hand, this also makes cooling harder.

On Titan, all you need is a naked pile in a gore-tex sleeve with a wind turbine at the top, catching convection. Or maybe plunge it into a methane sea and drive a wind turbine from the boil-off. No need for cooling.

On orbit or on an airless body, a naked pile at the end of a long boom can be allowed to heat to a fierce glow. Photovoltaics ranged around it, at a distance, produce power directly. Again, no need for cooling.

BTW, there is a recently release grand-strategy game called Terra Invicta that gets it right - the same solar panel module that gives you 40 power units in LEO (or 260 at Mercury!) will produce just 3 power units at Ceres. So its all fission, followed by various fusion designs for any stations further from the sun than Earth/Luna & for basically all ships.

BTW, as for launching reactors into space - I think that at least the fuel elements will have to be launched for quite a while, the industrial base required for nuclear fuel refining and fuel assembly fabrication is just too massive for early deployment space-side. Lot of other stuff - dirt for shielding, coolant, possibly even some primitive radiators - could likely be made in space relatively quickly.

Still, nuclear fuel that has not yet been through a reactor is just a bunch of toxic heavy metal - not ideal if it burns s up, but possibly quite a bit better than plutonium from an RTG. Also being dense and quite small in volume, it could very well be shipped in a big ball of ablative shielding, just in case.

With changing weather patterns, wind turbines are exposed to more ice events - events during cold weather that cause the shutdown of hundreds of wind farms. And no, i am not referring to wind turbines being affected by the cold, this is specifically wind turbines being affected by temperatures around freezing where ice forms. And what of long periods where winds speeds are too low across half a continent - a la the UK and western europe very recently? Same with solar - the world’s largest power grids are mostly not tropical.

There will likely come a future where continents are powered by wind and solar, but that future is not tomorrow nor is it in ten years time. In the meantime, we continue to hurtle towards a climate disaster while quibbling about the problems of nuclear power - a technology that has the potential to get us to that sustainable future.

Just so we're clear though, the location itself isn't inherently a problem as far as I know. There was in fact a power plant closer to the epicenter of the disaster that survived just fine, which is pretty impressive given how cataclysmic of an event it was.

There is no possibility that any new construction would observe the same standards as that engineer. It might try, but management would overrule it.

I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages.

Also, it's being deployed commercially for resiliency and off-peak rate utilization. It's integrated into an increasing number of EV charge stations because one of the biggest barriers to DCFC system deployment is getting a beefy enough feed from the utility to handle peak usage.

Also, it's being deployed at the residential level, for many of the same reasons.

And Japan has a lot of such cascades - even just in Kurobe there are at least 4 major dams one after another.

And yet, the presumably intelligent people in charge of Japan's energy policy still think nuclear is the way to go. Do you know something they don't?

In these dimensions, resource availability becomes a limiting factor. Pumped hydro requires a lot of space and geography that many countries can't provide. It may be an option for Norway or Austria, but not for Germany. And even if Germany would buy the planned world production of lithium batteries for the next 10 years, we still wouldn't have enough. The math just doesn't work out for both. Hydrogen looks more realistic, but is not a mature technology at the required scale.

Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I personally am not offended or concerned by keeping natural gas generators around for decades, even, as insurance for catastrophic disasters, if in practice they're unused 99% of the time because storage infrastructure has reached 24 hour capacity. We reach diminishing returns on increased storage.

Pumped hydro storage does not, in fact, require "lot of space". Hydro power generation needs a watershed. Pumped hydro can reuse existing hydro infrastructure, but does not depend on it, and does not suffer its failings. Pumped hydro needs only a hill.

There will be no need to repeat the cited falsehoods.

Finally, a multitude of practical storage methods are being deployed. Batteries are the most expensive, so are only ever used for very short-term storage. NG backup for renewables works and will continue working; storage forestalls need to use it, decreasing opex.

Germany will spend like 40 years building this massively complex production system with massive overcapacity of solar and wind, quite a bit of storage, natural gas backup and lots and lots of distribution networks to move around power everywhere requiring a massively complex to operate country wide grid.

Man o man, France in 70/80s solve the same problem with 60 technology and it took them less then 20 years. The mostly build the nuclear plants on sits of existing oil plants and didn't even need to make their grid complex. And they didn't even want to produce green electricity, they did it by accident.

Really hard to see what the better plan is. Germany could have literally had 100% green energy by now if the 'Energiewende' had gone with nuclear, but instead they will spend the next 20 years shutting down their remaining nuclear, then shutting down all their remaining coal, and also building more gas plants.

Brilliant plan really.

Germany's only problems just now are that Russia turned out to be an unreliable supplier, and their renewables build-out is incomplete. Both are being dealt with.

They were used last time in Europe when there were an energy shortage. Almost all was decommissioned quite quickly afterward when they became economical unsustainable.

They are generally expensive. They are generally located in places where there already exist a lot of hydro power. They generally need a lot of land and connecting power infrastructure. They generally tend to compete with hydro power. They generally need a lot of subsidies.

With energy prices skyrocketing in eu there is some lukewarm interest to restart those old pumped hydro (those that still exist and with existing power infrastructure in place). They are however not a drop in replacement for existing nuclear power plants nor existing natural gas power plants. There is however a energy shortage and so any source might be economical viable if used correctly.

For the foreseeable future, electricity storage will stay expensive when you compare it with fast to cycle natural gas generators. This will only change with a carbon tax or after we consume most of the natural gas available on Earth (looks like it would take 2 or 3 decades on the shortest predictions).

That applies to any kind of electricity storage.

Compared to the alternatives, pumped hydro is currently a cheap highly efficient storage. It gets the best qualities of synthetic fuels (low cost) and batteries (efficiency). But it's not available everywhere. Things are changing fast, and I do expect pumped hydro to not be competitive when we fully deploy storage, but it's currently the best option you will see.

Lol no, it really isn’t.

> Pumped hydro has been in use for decades around the world,

Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands.

> battery systems are becoming commonplace as lithium ion battery prices have plunged

They are nowhere near the right scale. Bear in mind, in Europe they’d need to store energy over several weeks or months. The continent is prone to winter anti cyclonic conditions that go on for weeks, with no wind and no sun light. It’s quite different from, say, most of Australia.

> alternative battery technologies have matured

I’d like to know which one, because as far as I know none of the alternative are anywhere near maturity. Progress is being made, but you’re overselling it.

> Several Iron-flow chemistries are now commercially deployed.

These are no silver bullets and have several drawbacks, including the “flow” bit, which requires pumps and valves. Efficiency is also not that great. There are sulphides, lithium-air, and Na-ion designs that are more promising. But again, none of that is mature, or even really produced at scale.

> I don't understand why every time wind/solar are mentioned on HN, someone feels the need to say "tHe WiND doEsn'T alWAys BloW" while utilities are actively deploying storage, and not just for "when the sun isn't shining", but to help smooth peak usage to avoid transmission upgrades, provide resiliency from infrastructure failure during weather events, and increase flexibility for service/maintenance that doesn't require outages.

It’s the counterpoint of all these “lol renewables all the way” posts that crop up any time we discuss energy policy.

Most people would say that there are very good use cases for renewables. But they won’t be enough. If you read analyses at the grid level (some of that is in the IPCC reports), constant base production is very much required, otherwise you need to vastly overbuild and your grid has one huge point of failure (yes, freak meteorological events do happen).

> Pumped hydro works if you have mountains, valleys you can flood, and dams. It works great in the Alps; good luck doing that in the UK or in the Netherlands.

It works in Wales and Scotland -- but not in England where it is needed the most.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...

This falsehood has been corrected numerous times on HN. It need not be repeated.

Pumped hydro is in no wise dependent on any of those. All it needs is a hill. Even England has hills. Even Australia has hills. The Netherlands are in Europe, which has hills.

Another falsehood is that "you need to vastly overbuild". This has also been frequently corrected. We use, today, NG for backup. We will have no need to demolish any of that infrastructure, even after storage is built. Overbuilding renewables to charge storage makes compelling economic sense, just because it is so cheap, but the NG backup remains. Eventually, synthetic fuels will be cheaper, for such occasions.

So, renewables have no such "single point of failure". This falsehood need not be repeated.

Finally, pumped hydro and batteries are just two of numerous practical storage technologies being deployed. Their round-trip efficiency is of minimal importance when they are charged from free surplus. Storage with NG backup provides fully ample 100% service with exactly zero "constant base production" needed or wanted.

Like of course any water you push up a hill is gonna gain potential energy, but I think a reasonable reading of "works" in that post was "works efficiently enough that it's actually worth doing", not "is technically possible".

An earthen berm is a very cheap construction project. Classically those were achieved with hand labor worldwide, for millennia, eventually augmented with wheelbarrows starting in China, and oxcarts. They cost less today.

Nature providing one, two, three, or four walls (steepness optional) reduces construction cost, but the turbines and pumps are a substantial part of the total.

Opex is of course extremely low. Bonus points for solar farms floating on the reservoirs. Round-trip efficiency of pumped hydro is near the top of all alternatives, although efficiency is relatively unimportant when the power being stored was free.

Costs for many storage alternatives are falling fast, and it is unclear which choices will win. Adding pumps to existing dams has lately been cheapest, by far. Future people will choose according to local conditions without asking us.

The point is that whether a storage medium is practical in an area depends more on the landscape of choices than on the physical topography. Even Nebraska might have deep cavities that would serve in place of hills. But the extrema are extreme.

Other considerations drive choices, then, e.g. capex, transportability, usefulness for other processes.

No it actually isn't really.

> Build more, get more, sell the overproduction.

You will have to pay to get ride of it in many places. Chemical plants want reliable electricity to have reliable production.

When you produce chemicals yourself, you may operate on a schedule of your own choosing.

Why do people just assert things rather than spending five minutes actually looking up some numbers doing arithmetic?

Storage systems and theirs costs, discharge rates, cycle endurance, etc: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/07/f65/Stora...

What the wind power production rate over time looks like for a country: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Then you can look up country power consumption and wind cost per KWh and half life.

Then it's just some arithmetic.

You're not helpless consumers of data, you CAN look this up and figure it out.

To save you some trouble, the bottom line is that for countries like the UK pure renewables would triple electricity costs. Is that an acceptable price? Maybe.

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/09/21/rystad-energy-less-i...

It shouldn't be a deal breaker, but doing the same on oceanic water will have it's own challenges with significantly higher wind variance and more flotsam dangers

A region of:

- no freezing water, no icebergs

- few, low intensity storms

- shallow seas (often less than 100 m)

- surrounded by wealthy nations with large population centres

The argument does not hold and does not transfer well.

It's coming down. Though massive supply shortages and failure of a bunch of companies to hedge against commodity prices needed to fulfil budgets are going to be pretty rough for anyone who isn't China for a few years. Note how much more Japan's renewables cost than world median. The reasons aren't just policy -- Japan has ben dealt a uniquely terrible hand for renewables matched maybe by Slovak Republic (which at least has close allies to trade with).

Plus offshore wind isn't that cheap. It's still on the order of $5000/kW of net generation for shallow water, and Japan hasn't had a lot of success breaking $8000/kW as yet. Plus their utility solar market is also a bit borked.

There are countless reasons not to build a new nuclear plant, but the costs and risks of using old ones are less than not using them in this case. Especially given that they're also pulling the renewable encouraging levers pretty hard without much success.

How much does some renewable energy cost me at night when there is no wind, +infinity?

Just look at the average capacity factor of renewables, on average it is as if 60-70% of the time they produce nothing during the course of a year.

In contrast, a nuclear plant can easily reach 90+% capacity factor, which makes it very reliable as a power source.

I am not saying that renewables suck, but to say that they cost little and are the solution to all problems is simply false. Some countries may go 100% renewable, but to claim that everyone must adopt renewables is ideological propaganda.

P.S. It is useless to talk about batteries and storage systems, which do not exist on a large scale, except through dams, whose existence is highly dependent on the geology of the country. (By the way, these would be projects that would greatly increase the price of renewable energy, but they are always omitted for idology)

I can predict you, that the wind on the sea is way stronger and stable, than on land, so your base assumption might be wrong.

(Offshore windparks are still not the solution of course.)

You are maybe not aware, that for stationary batteries, there are way more options than lithium based. Natrium for example, is quite common, so you can make literal saltwater batteries.

We can wait for some scientific advances, but it is whishful thinking to hope that in a few decades they will invent the ultimate solution.

Hydroelectric plants are the only large-scale storage, but they are highly dependent on the geology of the country.

They are not a solution to seasonal storage.

For me it is useless to go on all these big trips, the solution is very simple: mix of nuclear for base load, and renewable for peak.

Pumped hydro is not, in fact, "highly dependent on the geology of the country". It needs a hill. Hills are very common.

A "solution to seasonal storage" is not, in fact, needed or useful. NG backup works and will continue working into the indefinite future.

Good day.

No one will deploy seasonal storage, so the point is moot. NG backup works today, and will continue working into the indefinite future.

Chemical batteries are the most expensive of many storage alternatives, with advantages for very short-term use. Lithium is a poor choice for utility requirements, so its supply is irrelevant.

There is no place for nukes, which cost radically more than all other alternatives, most especially for only intermittent use.

90% EAF for nuclear is a complete fiction, even in the US it only looks that way because the nameplate value isn't increased when expensive upgrades are made so you're averaging 120% output for 75% of the year with 30% or 0% in the rest. Before Fukushima, Japan's program was around 65%.

Cost for cost, a mixed renewable system will produce at least as much as a nuclear plant for at least as large a portion of the year.

Nuclear can be a good choice and probably is in this instance, but the only ideology here is the same set of slimy lies that the fake pro-nuclear crowd always uses to attack renewables.

Really, the North Sea is the ideal case for offshore wind. It is very windy but easily accessible and with a nice topology. Almost any other location is worse or much worse.

> Way, way cheaper than nuclear and can get online much faster.

It is not way, way cheaper. It is cheaper than nuclear if you consider only nameplate capacity. Once you account for the load factor it becomes worse. The capital cost for the wind turbines EDF is building in the UK is broadly comparable with the nuclear equivalent. And if you include the storage that will become more and more necessary as the share of renewables increases, it is much more expensive.

It can get online faster, true, and it does not have the same issues regarding waste. They are also more modular, because you can build only 5 of them, whereas you cannot build a half reactor.

That being said, it still has issues with waste because we cannot really do anything with the turbines once we decommission them. Also, whilst they are operating, each single turbine consumes several tonnes of aluminium each year.

They've long been regarded as a "technically non-nuclear... but only if on short notice" state, ready to join the Big Boy Club quickly if confidence in their position under America's nuclear umbrella wavers. I doubt they want to lose that, so they're going to want some amount of nuclear power as a plausibly-deniable way to keep up some of the equipment, material, and know-how they'll need to maintain that latent threat, even if it's not the most economical option.

Yet somehow in 2022, peak coal is now in front of us again, and even at these unprecedented production levels, people are buying it for over $400 per tonne. Despite the fact that solar and wind were alleged to have killed coal 10 years ago when it cost $50/tonne. Coal was completely uneconomical, they said. Coal is a stranded asset, they said. How did so many of the "experts" get it so wrong?

At this point it's clear that we can't keep waiting for renewables. You think nuclear takes way longer to get online, non-hydro renewables haven't even matched existing nuclear electricity production yet. They haven't even been able to halt the rise in demand for coal, let alone kill it, 10 years after it was supposed to be dead.

The best time to stop listening to anti nuclear / pro fossil fuel propaganda and save the climate was in the 70s. The second best time is now.

You're using a black swan event (russian invasion of ukraine) like it's a baseline of what to expect in the future, ignoring that the world has never invested more money into renewables than ever before

The world is definitely moving on from coal and gas and I reckon this coal crisis will be the last, I expect to see a lot more articles like this coming up around the world:

South Australia’s remarkable 100 per cent renewables run extends to over 10 days

https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...

No I'm not. Coal went to record highs almost a year before Ukraine was invaded and before any disruption to fossil fuel exports from the region, and many many years after renewables were said to have killed it. Do you really not remember? Stranded assets? Coal is not price competitive at $50/tonne?

> The world is definitely moving on from coal and gas and I reckon this coal crisis will be the last, I expect to see a lot more articles like this coming up around the world:

Not moving on, as record production and demand shows. Will one day in the future move on and won't move back, hopefully according to experts and random internet commentators who said it was definitely dead 10 years ago -- is not going to cut it for climate change though. We obviously need more baskets to put the eggs into.

> South Australia’s remarkable 100 per cent renewables run extends to over 10 days

One tiny state with almost unlimited solar and wind resources in one small country? That's great. Doesn't change the fact that we've run out of time waiting for wind and solar and they've still barely cracked 10% globally yet.

That's it's also hilariously weasel worded -- obviously that state is still burning a lot of gas to generate electricity. Strange why they don't feel they can be honest and up front with the public, why are they still trying to fool people about those things? Doesn't really lend a lot of credibility or confidence to what they're selling.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coal

Looks like a black swan to me, prices steady and trending downwards over the previous 20 years until Covid/Russian invasion which resulted in insane Euro demand

> Not moving on, as record production and demand shows.

https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all&interval=1M

We can see that renewables are soaking up a lot of the increase in demand, for example you can see South Australia go from coal and gas making up 100% of supply 10 years ago to just gas making up 16% and with the installation of new batteries and hydrolisers in the next few years to drop even further.

It just so happens that SA went hard on renewables because they had some of the most expensive power in the world. I'm sorry that it's not impressive to you. :(

You can also see my home state of Queensland: https://opennem.org.au/energy/qld1/?range=all&interval=1M

Increases in power demand are being met by renewables and it's now taking a bite out of fossil fuels with the largest ever investments by a long shot this year. I've never seen so much money thrown at an issue.

They are also all connected to an Australian grid which connects SA, VIC, NSW, QLD and TAS together, so when for example SA has excess cheap renewable power it can export it to another state reducing their power costs and thus their fossil fuel usage.

> obviously that state is still burning a lot of gas to generate electricity.

Yes but the point is that it has gone down significantly over the last 10 years and this is happening all over the world.

We'll also soon be helping power Singapore:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...

> is not going to cut it for climate change though.

At the end of the day if China/India/Vietnam and Indonesia seek to continue to build coal power plants then that's on them and I will continue to push against buying things made in those countries.

Is coal dead? no definitely not, will renewables have replaced significant amounts of coal in the next 20 years, I'd bet the house.

Betting on renewables + batteries in 2022 is like betting on the fast breeder reactor in 1955. There certainly is going to be development in batteries and other forms of storage in the next decade but we don't know where the minerals will come from, we'll have more grid scale batteries catch on fire, face more challenges siting solar farms because, as a major land use, they could affect endangered species, etc.

There will be progress there but remember that decarbonization is not just replacing the current electricity grid but it also involves replacing gas appliances with electric appliances, using electricity for heat in buildings (probably with heat pumps), electric cars (that people will want to charge at night and thus require more grid storage as well as competing for battery materials), replacing industrial uses of energy, synthesizing e-fuels for aviation and other special applications, etc.

Nuclear as we know it faces two problems: (1) the steam turbine and heat exchangers of the LWR are enormous such that an LWR would have a hard time competing even if the heat was free, (2) every country other than Russia has built LWRs sporadically and faced terrible project management problems; China is catching up with Russia with their Hualong One (4 completed in the past 2 years, 12 under construction now.) Long term the industry has to get rid of the water to get the temperature up so the powerset can be made more economical and you can use the heat for industrial applications such as thermochemical hydrogen, with the big plus that a reactor without a moderator can get roughly 50x the energy out of a pound of natural uranium than LWR.

Grid stability cost money and power companies do not want to carry that cost. It is a much better investment for them to let society carry those costs and simply produce as much energy when its most cost effective to do so.

There's also a related problem: once everyone is already paying the cost to purchase and operate backup power on a regular basis, they're not going to bother paying their power bills. They're just going to disconnect from the grid, because people aren't paying them for "power when its most profitable". They're paying for "power when they need it". Grid stability is the literal job of your power company, arguably moreso than power generation.

Which returns back to investments. If consumers will reward companies based on the cost of kw/h, and they will assume that governments take care of balancing the grid, then companies that invest in technology that produce the cheapest kw/h and ignore grid stability. The only way out would be for governments to subsidize less economical ventures but which consider grid stability.

It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.

The energy demand is not flat, it has peaks. If you don't flatten these peaks with storage, you need to build a production system that should be able to generate enough energy during the peak, but then, some of the generators will have to be turned off the rest of the time.

To illustrate the idea, let me invent some numbers: with storage, you have, let's say, 10 power plants to build that are running relatively all the time, producing an integrated total of electricity of, let's say, 100. So, if you paid X$ for building the 10 power plants, you will have X/100 per unit of electricity. Without storage, you may end up with, let's say, 15 power plants, but some are turned off 90% of the time. At the end, you also produce an integrated total of electricity of 100 (the integral is the same, the time of consumption is just shifted to create peaks). The cost of build is now 1.5X, and you will have to 1.5X/100 per unit of electricity.

On top of that, turning on and off a nuclear plant is less efficient than producing continuously, so the price of electricity increase even more.

So, even with nuclear, storage needs to be built. Once the storage is built, it means that the problem of intermittence of renewable is way less problematic.

What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.

Aluminum production, for one example.

Bauxite is so cheap and abundant that the cost of aluminum is almost entirely in the electricity required for smelting, which makes it effectively equivalent to energy exportation.

On my mind, the main problem of scaling down production for nuclear plant is that a nuclear plant is very expensive, and if it produces only at submaximal capacity, it means that the construction cost is spread on less electricity production.

Nuclear takes hours to days to respond to load change, so there has to be much more reactive power available. And nuclear plants need to be able to draw megawatts of power from the grid any time they're not generating power. You can't "cold boot" a nuclear power plant without a massive external power supply and it takes days to weeks to do so.

It's so bizarre hearing people advocating for nuclear talking about storage like it's some barely-understood, dangerous, hideously expensive sci-fi pipe dream. Grid-scale energy storage is almost 100 years old and battery based systems have been actively deployed for many years at all levels of the grid, right down to residential.

Days? Seriously? You know that is not true, don't you? The French nuclear power plants are an existence proof of that.

Nuclear does need to be supplemented with something else with low construction/fixed costs for handling the rare, extreme peaks. That will most often be some sort of gas-powered plants. This has nothing to do with nuclear powers "inability" to "respond to load change" and everything to do with the cost of building enough nuclear power capacity that will almost never be used.

On the other hand, we are still very, very far from being able to do really large-scale battery storage. We don't have the manufacturing capacity for the enormous number of battery cells needed and even if we did, the cost would be prohibitive. This will of course change for the better in the future but that is how things are for now.

I believe the French facilities have the capacity of doing load following, but are not doing it because it is less efficient (and therefore more expensive). So I would also not say "days", but it is also true that one cannot directly take a situation where nuclear has, so far, being used only for base load and pretend that load following will work exactly the same way.

I'm not sure why you say "rare, extreme peaks": the current demand is non-flat every day, with a difference between the trough and peak that is typically ~50% of the peak.

I agree that large scale battery storage is challenging. Maybe the solution would be to have some storage and some "wasted efficiency" by using nuclear plants in load following and turning them in stand-by every day during off-peak hours.

[0] https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ...

Just getting that to an hour means a three order of magnitude change in the amount of connected grid storage. Good luck finding that much pumped hydro! The easy spots are taken already!

An hour is not enough, of course. That might handle some small variations in wind only. Of course, one diurnal solar cycle means you need to store power for 8-12 hours. That is another order of magnitude. So in order to do this, we need to increase our battery capacity by four orders of magnitude. Multiple days? Weeks?

Now consider that the demand curve will become even more extreme, as climate change increases demand for electric heating and cooling. And consider that you will also need to account for electrifying the cars on the road (because building out storage like this is a multiple decades project), which will place additional capacity demands on the grid.

The thing with storage is not that it's difficult, it's that it's big. Like the scale is you need to nationalize your extraction industries and turn your economy into a wartime economy whose singular purpose is producing batteries big. It's not a Tesla or Google or even a DOE scale problem.

I also don't understand your argument about solar cycle: solar is producing close to peak hours, while nights are non-peak hours. So, in practice, it's not like you need to store the electricity locally for more than a couple of hours. I guess you are talking of a situation where the grid is 100% solar, but that's obviously a ridiculous scenario that no one has never pushed for.

I agree with the fact that the demand curve will become more extreme, and it is exactly the reason of my intervention here: this is a complicated situation, and it does not matter if the grid is mainly nuclear or mainly renewable, it is still problematic.

I agree that the storage problem is tricky and that the scale is a challenge. But this challenge still exist in full nuclear grid, unless we end up with a lot of idle nuclear plant running only few hours per day.

If you can turn a nuclear plant off (summer) and on (winter) once a year, the storage requirement for solar drops by a lot.

1) week storage and 3-6 months storage are extreme events, similar in probability as overlapping technical shutdowns in nuclear facilities. In practice, with interconnection, it is even arguable that such long term storage are even needed.

2) the technology built for short term storage is usually not that bad for medium term storage either. In any case, if you want a nuclear grid, you will need to invest in storage technology, and there is no reason the progress in those technology will only improve short term storage solutions.

But I 100% agree: a nuclear plant turned on during winter will help. I'm not against nuclear, I just want to react to the incorrect view that storage is just a renewable problem.

NG backup works fine, and will continue working fine indefinitely. Storage cuts the fraction of time the furnace needs to run.

Eventually, synthetic fuel will displace NG. It will be imported at need, same as NG today, but with no possibility of cartels.

And we could find more U-235 if demand really went up.

What would be needed are breeder reactors operating with a breeding ratio > 1. Otherwise, the vast majority of the 238U cannot be used.

Unless Germany is willing to admit that they wouldn't be able to reproduce what France did in the 70/80s.

Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. *One*.

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

Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change. Which likely numbers thousands if not tens of thousands of people per day.

> Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical.

My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future because of the two elephants in the room - China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. China might one day blockage Japan. Then again it might not. Ukraine might never have been invaded. Taiwan, might not get invaded.

The price in terms of deaths was low thankfully, but not because the released material was not dangerous, but because they have done an unprecedented cleaning project. 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. Hundreds of people died during the evacuation, but if they had not been evacuated that death toll of one would have been higher too. Also, cancer can show up years/decades later, and linking it to radiation exposure might not be easy. Basically the dying with vs from covid discussion :).

This entire cleanup project is estimated to cost in the high three digit range of USD billions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...

Nuclear is safe if done right, but the Fukushima accident was definitely a big catastrophy, even if the death toll wasn't large.

Because overly cautious governments told them so.

The fact that they were not safe is disputed. There are claim that there was some over-reaction and that the evacuation was actually counter-productive.

And a really gossip comment comes from JDM car lovers that have gone to Fukushima and show abandoned cars with again unsafe radiation levels.

It is not easy to react to a possible nuclear disaster after a heavy earthquake anyways.

This was the great trick the environmental movement bulled, they made so much panic about radiation that acceptable amounts were lowered to absurd levels. This was all based on suds-science. If this science were even remotely true, people in Denver would by dying of cancer at incredible rates.

There are also lots of places that have more radiation because sand beaches (historically associated with healing sands). People living in that region for 100s of years should also suffer from higher cancer rates and don't.

There are still people in Germany flipping out about the fact that some mushrooms have 'unsafe levels of radiation' and yet lots of people eat them and it has no effect what so ever.

that is quite logical, scientific and consistent with approaches taken in relation to other biological hazards.

Radiation has two types of dangers, chronic and acute. Our understanding of what levels of radiation cause acute damage is pretty limited and not very precise since we simply don't have that much data. However, I highly doubt that anything close to those levels of radiation were measured anywhere outside the reactor complex.

In terms of chronic danger, the official stance is that there is no safe amount of radiation exposure and the general principle in managing exposure is ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable). Lifetime cancer risk is cumulative so higher levels just add to that cumulative risk faster.

Thus there isn't really a clear "level of acceptable impact" but rather, we set arbitrary levels to to to limit that cumulative addition of cancer risk. Like with many things, that risk is a price you pay for other things that are important to you, like flying, living in denver, or getting xrays.

Spending a billion dollars to avoid a radiation caused cancer death is a very poor use of resources given you could save a hundred lives with other causes of death with that amount.

We learn and we improve for next time.

By comparison almost all superfund sites would have been dealt with for a tiny fraction of the cost and effort, assuming a similarly prompt response.

Not everything can be calculated so coldly! The gov absolutely has a responsibility to help people in an actual extreme situation like this versus the theoretical saving of people in future normal situations.

Even to this day, Fukushima-ken agricultural producers can't compete fairly on their quality, due to the lingering stigma with a half-life longer than any detectable isotope.

These lasting effects of hysteria are vastly worse for the health, prosperity, and wellbeing of the region than the actual becquerels released 11 years ago.

Out of 300k people 1,400 died over the span of 6 months [1]. Assume everyone lives to 100 and a uniform age distribution (both of these are actually generous: life expectancy is lower and age distribution skewed older in Japan), and 1500 people dying in 6 months is exactly on the mark for old age deaths. Even more telling, actually try and click on the link to the primary source in Mainichi Shimbun and it 404s.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fukushima-evacuation-has-...

That is nonsense. Most of that cleaning prevents nothing. Its mostly political posturing to show that they are doing something.

> Hundreds of people died during the evacuation

Evacuations that were mostly unnecessary.

With that said, I think even this old PWR design has actually proven itself to be extremely safe as it effectively prevented Chernobyl-style scenario during such rare and catastrophic event.

I mean, 3 reactors literally exploded, 3 cores melted and… pretty much nothing happened.

But it would be great to see new molten-salt fast reactor designs to gain traction, as they would be even safer, 95% more fuel efficient, not require water for cooling, and produce far less waste.

“According to MoltexFLEX, the cost of electricity generated by the FLEX reactor is comparable to that of wind, at just GBP40 (USD44) per MWh. This is achieved through a unique, patented system which uses two molten salts: one acting as a fuel, whilst the other circulates as a coolant. This allows the heat from the reactor to be extracted through natural convection, without the need for pumps.”

“Once online, the FLEX reactor can be operated with the same skills and equipment used in a fossil fuel plant. The reactor has no moving parts and is fuelled for 20 years at a time, meaning that there is very little operator input and very low ongoing costs.”

“MoltexFLEX estimates it would take just 24 months to build a 500 MW power plant. The company plans to have its first reactor operational by 2029.”

“The SSR-W is a molten salt reactor that uses nuclear waste as fuel. The company aims to deploy its first such reactor at the Point Lepreau site in New Brunswick by the early 2030s.”

However, when I said costs, I meant it more literally. Aside from the obvious cost of relocating all of those people, cleanup efforts, and so forth, it's also only fair to include the psychological toll as well. It certainly didn't help atop the massive tragedy that was already sweeping away lives and homes.

Sure :) I probably came across as a bit argumentative.

I also meant to add that this was caused by a natural disaster as well, unlike Chernobyl. So nuclear is arguably even safer.

Again, drawing a parallel with fossil fuels - when a hurricane strikes the Gulf of Mexico and causes some sort of oil slick and kills wildlife, it barely hits the news.

Also, whilst writing this, I wondered what the fossil fuel toll was for the Japanese tsunami, and the Boxing Day one, for that matter. It's not something that seems to have concerned people despite the sheer number of cars, bikes, lorries etc. that contained oil, and were destroyed. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind. Oil refineries on the Asian coasts must have been hit. What happened there?

I guess my rambling point is, we really need to compare nuclear to fossil fuels, like-for-like.

And "we", in particular the media, don't do that, because it's hard work to tally up a distributed fossil fuel infrastructure versus one big nuclear power station that was very visibly destroyed.

Fukushima was an ancient nuclear plant, WAY over its projected lifetime.

And still we only got one direct death.

Check out the radiation map of Japan: https://jciv.iidj.net/map/

Look up where the evacuation zone is and the pre evacuation population numbers.

Then plug those numbers into the linear no threshold model (which is thought to overestimate risk).

I'm away from my computer for the holidays, but when I did the numbers you're looking at QALY losses an order of magnitude lower than that caused by the loss of home.

In general people (govs included) drastically overreact to radiation deaths. It makes no sense to spend a billion dollars to avoid one nuclear accident death when you can spend a billion dollars to avoid 100 prostate cancer deaths. Its literally not worth doing the remaining cleanup by any metric.

It seems like while the official cleanup is done, actually repopulating fukushima and living there is a different matter.

It's pretty much impossible to get an exact pulse on how many people died indirectly as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster evacuation specifically who would've lived if it were not for that. Particularly because most of the deaths attributed to the disaster were elderly to begin with.

Not trying to downplay the cost of human life, it's really terrible when preventable scenarios or mistakes lead to any cost. With that having been said, there are sometimes going to be events where evacuations are necessary, and some of them we can't prevent. No doubt there were many thousands of deaths unrelated to Fukushima Daiichi due to the massive earthquake and tsunami.

I believe it is estimated that around 1,000-2,000 people died as part of the evacuation efforts, but I am not sure what a good source is, so take that with a grain of salt. If you want to go really deep, it'd be wise to consider the burden that it may have caused psychologically too, but that's even harder to exactly ascertain, especially since it is likely nothing compared to what happened as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.

If the point of this is to compare safety though, factoring this in still would place nuclear fission power plants very low in terms of how much cost of human life they cause overall.

And yet, despite that, it is in fact possible to make nuclear fission power plants survive this kind of disaster, and especially possible to prevent the meltdown that eventually occurred; Fukushima Daiichi is not the only fission plant in Japan, and not the closest to the epicenter of the disaster either. I think it's fair to say given the evidence that the problems that need to be solved with regards to Fukushima Daiichi are the systemic issues that led to the inadequate safety measures and the unfortunate decisions made leading up to the meltdown. Whether the issues be operational complacency, corruption, etc.

It'd be nice to have a way to simply be robust to those issues, but in the end it's always going to be dangerous to human life if the people in charge of decisions that could endanger human life are not adequately responsible. That would still be the case in absence of nuclear power, natural disasters, evacuations, etc.

I'd be getting my family the flying f outta there. Not logically deducing outcomes and risk factors on HN.

Hindsight is 20 20...

E.g. due to propaganda, people thought that Covid is 100x as deadly as it actually is (people estimated on average that infection fatality rate was 10%, when in reality it’s ~ 0.1%)

Applies both to Fukushima and Covid response.

The gas supply shortages in the eastern states of Australia arose precisely because of a lack of local supply mandate and price capping baked into the original licenses.

Western Australia has such things and had no shortages.

The inevitable result (in the West) was a transnational being limited in its ability to price gouge in a global supply crisis.

For example, were they granted a legal monopoly?

Err, by "they" do you mean Apache, BHP, BP, Chevron, KufPec, Mitsubishi Motors, Mitsui & Co, Quadrant Energy, Santos, Shell and Woodside Energy ?

(ie Australian LNG producers)

and by "legal monopoloy" do you mean "A market structure characterized by a single seller" ?

The Australian government is bringing in a price cap of $12 per gigajoule (well above historical gas prices, and well above long-term contract prices for Australian LNG in Japan) for domestic customers.

Whatever the merits of this action, it’s a very very very long way from “nationalising the sector”. The Western Australian gas industry (on the other side of the country on a completely separate grid) has long had a regulation mandating a minimum proportion of WA’s gas must be sold to domestic customers, meaning local gas prices there are unaffected by the global shifts in prices. Heck, that bastion of capitalism, the United States of America, completely banned the export of natural gas and oil until 2015.

https://www.upstreamonline.com/lng/shells-prelude-flng-facil...

Especially compared to the 19.700 deaths the tsunami took all in all.

But it is still not so simple. There are long term effects of radiation, many people likely will get cancer sooner and the whole mess is still not cleaned up.

And here where I live in germany, it is still advised against regulary eating mushrooms from the wood, because of one incident that took place 36 years ago.

But yes, the coal plants around here contributed worse, so I also believe it is wiser to not replace fission with coal.

Why do we allow smoking but are scared of low dose radiations?

Because smoking is not mandatory for everyone, but a individual choice and you can sue people, whose smoking effects other people.

Radiation effects everyone.

And no one is scared of low dose radiation, but it is a symptom of what can happen.

Chernobyl was just one incident. Going 100% nuclear and with people still being people, this would mean more accidents, more radiation, more cancer.

So do emissions and by-products of mining, coal burning, battery tech. To a much higher extent if I may add.

Where did you get this from?

One of the nice things about nuclear is that you can literally Google radiation maps from various time period, plug that in to demographic maps and plug those numbers into the radiation->excess death models.

Turns out, lightning is something you should be worrying about more than living 10 miles from Fukishima.

To be honest?

Not from deep research, but just from the known fact, that radiation increases cancer risk and that at Fukoshima was lots of radiation released.

"One of the nice things about nuclear is that you can literally Google radiation maps from various time period"

And there are different types of radiation. Some not so bad as background, or standing next to it, but very dangerous when eaten. I do not know when going in the forest and I do not want to walk around with a geiger counter. They still do not disclose how much wild boar meat has to be thrown away regulary in germany because of chernobyl.

And if the data in Japan does not show an increase, well then it is either all good (because most was washed into the sea) - or maybe not correct data. I don't know about the japanese government, but here in the east block after chernobyl, there was never a official problem in the first place. And the japanese government hopefully is better than the stalinists were, but bending the truth to save face, is a known motive there as well.

And the thing is, like I said, I am not anti nuclear. But solar panels and wind turbines simply do not have this problem ever.

Note that Fukushima isn't a "true" island, though some think it might come from a block of land isolated by rivers.

> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.

Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth

By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'

Rooftop solar needs to be installed on roofs and there are also fatalities.

Hydroelectric dams can fail and there can be thousands of fatalities.

Pretty much every method of energy generation needs mine-sourced minerals, where mining has fatalities.

Literally everything humans build need mining. And nuclear needs less mining then literally every other form of energy.

Uranium mining is mostly not open pit and has very little impact on people or society. Also the quantities need are vanishingly small.

In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough.

Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.

Also blaming all old people dying on the nuclear stuff is just nonsense.

The quantity of Uranium is also much larger than you're making out. A 1kw system backed by diurnal storage with lithium batteries would use about the same amount of lithium as the nuclear reactor uses in uranium. The mines are also lower impact per unit output.

Solar uses smaller quantities of everything else involved from chromium to copper to zirconium to cadmium to indium to steel or sand. The only holdout is silver, and the gap for that is getting narrower by the month.

Wind uses more concrete and more steel but less of everything else.

> In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough.

This is just a flat out lie. But I'm glad we agree. Let's just stop uranium mining overnight, and we can see your nuclear utopia emerge.

> Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.

Scientists who all objected to the report that took their research out of context.

Actually one of the newest trend in architecture are large scale buildings made from (fire-proof!) wood

> Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.

Yeah and 600,000 people worked as liquidators.

I think a lot of those arguments (in fact on both sides) are overly nitpicky and based on niche facts making reasonable discussions next to impossible.

Nuclear seems this simplistic choice where the risk is shifted to somewhere where nobody can see it. Nobody knows about missing Core catchers, failure modes or insurance.

That said, new Nuclear plants are actually more expensive (LCOE) than other Energy forms with the exception of on-demand Gas

Oh go join Greenpeace already.

I really get fatigued seeing people bash oil and gas as if it has zero value. The human population wouldn't have hit 8 billion but for natgas feedstock for nitrogen* fertilizer. People would still be heating their homes with dried animal feces and wood but for propane. We'd still be hunting whales but for kerosene. And damn sure, the ability to enjoy a high quality of life with a relatively modest cost would be all but impossible but for the myriad of uses for petroleum products in general.

But you didn't feel the need to point any of that out, and instead parroted the tired, cliched stance of a stereotypical progressive.

I'm only finding US statistics for the "extracting" part, and that looks like about 1000 dead in just the USA, just with regard to oil and gas extraction, in the last decade.

But, given your style and the newness of your account, I find it very hard to trust that you're really "just curious", rather than using the phrase to create rhetorical affect.

In fact we should consume even more, its totally fine, we just need to do it with nuclear breeder plants. Energy isn't practically limited.

In terms of total resource in vs energy out nuclear is fantastic. And if we actually made some series advances it would be insanely so.

If you see gas and oil as an improvement to w/p/w, why can't nuclear be an improvement on oil gas?

They compared fatalities between two energy sources. What do the relative benefits of those two sources have to do with their fatality rate?

Funny, because it's Greenpeace who is against nuclear power and thus pro-fossil fuels.

The economic cost, however, is huge.

> My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future

Why is this a cynical take? What's so bad about that about Japan wanting to secure their energy supply?

Also USD 82 billion and counting. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193#:~:text=Around%2....

From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards.

This is a natural thing for management to say -- they're sitting there in Tokyo not fully experiencing the severity of the problem.

The problem is that Japanese culture puts an emphasis on obeying your superiors, so it took a long time until people disregarded those orders and started cooling with sea water anyway. That sort of obedience culture is not really compatible with systems designed to suffer rare but potentially catastrophic failures.

I wonder if that had been the case if the wind had blown in another direction at the time, towards Tokyo, instead of mostly the open sea.

I also think it's difficult to come to conclusions in seeing this in an isolated way. Everything was in chaos and much destroyed because of the tsunami, surely that delayed communications, and assessment of the 'real' situation?

Sometimes when I read about the history of all that, and all the talking about, I get the feeling like the commentariat views this like a clean room laboratory exercise. Like in a model, this happened, what to do now?

Chaotic reality doesn't work like that.

But it would have caused panic and that wouldn't have been good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ronald_Reagan#2011_deploym...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(LHD-2)#2011

Some searching for 'Fukushima US-NAVY cancer' will bring up endless stuff from all sorts of sites.

The thing is, regardless of the sites reputations, there is a signal that those ships took a large dose, because some of their sailors claim their sudden leukemia was caused by that.

I don't know. Can one call that psychosomatic? Did they sniff too much JP-7 instead?

IMO that signal is too strong to be disregarded.

Well, not really. Some of the early damage might have been prevented by this (at the cost of destroying the reactors), but Fukushima really had no way to reliably cool their reactors without auxiliary power. Once that was gone, there was going to be serious trouble, and likely destruction of some of the reactors.

this is the whole thing about nuclear power. There's always plenty of data on how, from a technical standpoint, nuclear energy can be generated completely safely. There's always the hindsight observations how, none of this had to happen. But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off.

Case in point if you google for "Fukushima Was Preventable" you get a ton of hits that refer to well regarded studies, interviews, and journalism that refers to the ways in which TEPCO failed to plan and respond appropriately to the disaster.

But if you google for "Fukushima Was Not Preventable" then you get this: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fuk... just this year, Japan's legal system still claiming it was not preventable. It's easy to read between the lines on that, as the reason they decided this is because they are avoiding paying out damages to thousands of people harmed by this negligence. That is, they are lying.

From this, I draw the same conclusion I always have about nuclear power. Sure it can be done safely. But who is actually willing to do that enormous, massive effort, without cutting corners, covering up problems, acting negligently, and then ten years later just continuing to lie about it? Private companies? no way. Governments? we would hope, but wow, nuclear is really , really expensive and complicated to get right, and often not sufficient as practiced by mere human instutitions.

Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions.

Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946

Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up.

Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization.

The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades.

It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.

On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.

My general position is that even if many more people die installing rooftop solar and wind turbines, just falling off roofs and ladders, it's a better plan, politically, than nuclear. Not that nuclear can't be done safely, but that even done safely, the optics of single-point failures, which will happen, are so bad that nuclear becomes political loser. Just build more wind and solar and the distribution infrastructure to move it around.

Furthermore, the near-zero opex for renewables frees up more money to build out more renewables and eventually, when needed, storage.

The cost for that transformation was mostly on the books of the utility and were being paid down despite the low energy prices they were offering.

That a huge success, and any signification technical industrial nation could do the same. France was already going towards that path so if you would replicate it it would likely be 25 years but i that time you could like build 80 much more modern higher utilization reactors.

Germany had a Green transformation that with all the subsidies and everything will have cost 100s of million and they still have lots of coal (and their remaining nuclear) and will not have fully solved the problem for quite a while yet. In the time since French built nuclear the Germans mostly paid higher electricity prices and the most recent subsidy for energy prices will cost Germany 100s of billions. Not to mention the huge cost in terms of health and the environment to operate all the coal plants.

So had the Germany 'Energiewende' been to go from 30% to 100% nuclear, they could likely have done it in 20 years flat. Assuming a start date of 2000, that would be now. They could be 100% nuclear by now with reliable low cost energy prices, a 100% green grid. I don't think there is really any question if this would have been possible. Germany had all the knowlage and skills required. Even assuming some plants are delayed, they by now could easily finish 8 plants at the same time, they would be done within the next couple of years for sure.

This could have been financed easily as well. Assuming they build 50 new reactors (lets say 1.4GWe), assuming a conservative of 5 billion per reactor (prices way lower if you actually mass produce). 250 billion $, that's 6% of their GDP. Germany debt is 60%, and would go to 66%. German 30 year bond yields of 2%.

In return they would get assets that would produce green energy reliably at fixed price for literally the next 80-100 years. And that is assuming they do it with mostly the same tech that France did.

This would have clear been a superior path for Germany in almost any way you look at it. Their citizens would breath clean air now. They would have reliable low energy prices (as most of the French consumers of nuclear plants still enjoy). And they could tell Russia to go fuck themselves.

Likely the would also get contract from the Polish and all over Europe and continue to build them making it a profitable export.

France would then have to choose between mothballing their reactors and buying neighbors' power, or taxing their own citizens to keep the breeders operating at their radically higher cost. The latter would be an unpopular choice.

In summer, of course, the reactors would all need to be shut down in any case, because there is not enough water in the rivers to cool them. France would be buying neighbors' power, then. They could continue, in fall, or spend big bucks to fire up the reactors again.

French tolerance for folly has limits.

Overbuilding, storage and transmission for sure allows very close to 100% renewable generation. It will not be as _cheap_ as it is today though.

We could make a law today that forbids the construction of new fossil fueled plants. We could make a law that said that by 15 years the national grid will not allow the use of fossil fuels to stabilize the grid when demand exceed supply, and that by then people will either have to live with power outage or creating storage that match capacity with demand.

What we can observe in the world is an significant and continued increase in fossil fuel capacity, and energy politics being dependent on fossil fuel costs. Even in country with way over 100% wind capacity like Denmark, they still can only consume about 40% from wind. The remaining 60% comes from other sources like imports that are directly linked to fossil fuels. Getting those 60% to be generated from storage would be a major victory.

Magnitude 9.1, actually.

Earthquakes in different places can be compared only on a common scale.

And history shows that pretty much every nation that has tried it, including the Soviet Union did it with high safety.

Can you name a single nation that has tried to use nuclear power on the large scale and has failed with a large number of deaths?

So it really is like, if you just do it, its most likely the safest thing you can do.

And again, this is soviet union reactor technology that doesn't apply anyway.

Instead of moving those people investing even 10% that amount of money in new hospitals, trains and bike lanes (or name X other things) would have saved far more people.

So if you want to be really hard core you could say, right, we should never built that type of reactor again. But we have never done so in the West anyway so its really none issue in any rational discussion about energy policy.

Off-topic: Japan is small by country standards :-)

Only 377,975 sqkm. That's about the same size as Montana. Or about half of France + Belgium combined.

Nukes are not competing with carbon sources. Against renewables (+storage, eventually) nukes lose on every axis: safety, capex, opex, construction time, other environmental impact (e.g. U vs other mining).

There is no place where nukes come out ahead, so no place where building more is the right choice. Continuing to operate them where they are can be OK, for now.

Whatever renewables + storage they build reduces their operating cost.

There's nothing at all "cheap" about NG.

In the future, the fuel will be synthetic, and cheaper than NG.

And again, for the nth time I'm asking you here, where the fuck are you going to get it from? If it was so easily available, Europe wouldn't be screaming right now, and no one would care about Russia.

Mostly it's people falling off them when installing or maintaining them.

This is not that interesting an observation by itself. For example, they could have shut down and decommissioned the reactor.

What I believe you're trying to imply is that they were aware of problems and they could have fixed them in advance of the tsunami, and fixing them would not have been prohibitively expensive. But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.

The last bit is critical here; and it's why I disregard the narrative of Fukushima Daichi being "preventable". There are no current nuclear designs that are naturally fail-safe; all of them rely on active measures to ensure safety in the event of system failures. When the next disaster strikes, it will hopefully has as small an impact as Fukushima, but what I can guarantee is that afterwards we will have a laundry list of all the reasons why it was completely preventable based on the knowledge we had at the time.

That is fundamentally false. There are lots of designs and many tested reactors. Passive fail safety without any active effects are very much a common thing and mostly a standard feature in pretty much all modern designs.

Unless you have a different definition of 'active' then me. In the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment they literally hit the 'off' switch and went home for the weekend, shutting down the reactor was so basic. And the MSRE isn't the only reactor that has managed to do that.

There just not currently available commercially to buy of the rack.

If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years.

All the companies working on these designs have greatly limited, need to deal with very long wait times very limited facilities, need to overcome regulatory system not designed for those reactors.

If a nation picked a design, and really fast tracked development and deployment with all the needed work being done in parallel, a lot could be done.

To give you one example, the IMSR (Integrated Molten Salt Reactor) from Terrestrial Energy is in the very final stages of Phase 2 of pre-vendor design review. They are expected to finish Phase 2 within the next couple of months and that basically means the CNSC (Canada) has considered the design and there isn't any reason why appropriate construction license request wouldn't be approved.

> The objective of a review is to verify, at a high level, the acceptability of a nuclear power plant design with respect to Canadian nuclear regulatory requirements and expectations, as well as Canadian codes and standards. These reviews also identify fundamental barriers to licensing a new design in Canada and assures that a resolution path exists for any design issues identified in the review.

> A vendor who has completed a Phase 2 Pre-Licensing VDR, has committed to increased regulatory efficiencies at the time of licensing. The results of Phase 2 will be taken into account mainly for the Construction Licence Application and is likely to result in increased efficiencies of technical reviews.

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...

So if a nation like Germany did a 180 and said, we need new reactor and we need them fast, but we only accept reactors that are passively safe, but all German industrial resources are used and this is a high priority project. They could probably build such a reactor in 3-4 years.

There are others one could talk about but I do like the IMSR.

> But more important is the implication that the reactor was known to be particularly vulnerable in comparison to all the other nuclear power stations in Japan, and the cost of fixing all issues of comparable a priori severity was within the capacity of the funding of the system.

Actually it was known that the sea wall was a particular weakness and it wasn't done, but not because of cost reasons. It was not done because it would have given anti-nuclear people a reason to say 'see it wasn't safe'.

So really like Shuttle issue, its a flawed safety culture that was the real reason. The required expense wasn't that high. And that matters just as much as cost issues.

However I generally agree. Saying 'it was preventable' isn't a good defense.

I'm not a betting man, but I would wager a significant amount of money that by the time IMSR becomes widespread and approved it will require a large number of active failure measures to be considered "safe".

> If a nation seriously decided to invest in next generation nuclear, and were willing to put real money behind these designs, they could build them within a couple of years.

Sure -- they could do that with existing designs as well. But these things have a great deal of natural complexity, and once again, I would practically guarantee that whatever designs they choose will have active fail-safes, even if the concept does not require it in theory.

For example, if the diesel generators had simply been put up on a platform (so they weren't drowned when the seawall was topped), nothing further bad would have happened. If the hydrogen relief values vented outside rather than inside, the reactor buildings would not have blown up. Etc.

The same goes for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The designers of both should have consulted some airplane engineers. At Boeing a lot of effort was expended preventing cascading zipper effects.

Fixing faulty engineering processes has been demonstrated. Management, not so much. We have sound reasons to believe no systematic management improvements would be evident in future nuke projects.

Besides, my experience is that engineers do not think of these things until after the fact. Have you noticed them in any academic book on engineering? I've never noticed them in any, nor in any software engineering book.

What was rejected include an adequate seawall, and backup generators where a tsunami would not flood them. We know the ideas were rejected, because at a sister site only a few miles up the coast, rejections were overcome.

As a matter of fact, everything is preventable in hindsight. We are all very clever in hindsight.