The argument about north america having natural gas is flawed, on several fundamental levels. Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this.

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.

"Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices. The reserves being in north america has almost zero bearing on this."

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.

> 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.

"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.

> I don't think it's so simple.

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.

The other factor is that the price is necessarily much higher for exports than for domestic use, because converting NG to LNG and transporting it via ship is difficult and expensive. For domestic use, none of that is necessary. NG isn't like coal that you can just shovel onto a ship and haul across the ocean to burn somewhere else, it's a gas.

> Gas is traded internationally and north americans are generally not insulated from global prices.

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.

Gas is not a global market like oil. Gas is traded internationally only in two ways: one is if you have a direct pipeline, e.g. from Russia to Europe. That's a very localized market. The only real global market is liquified natural gas, transported by those ships with giant spherical tanks, requiring specialized terminals on both ends. That's way more expensive than pipelines. The US exports a fair amount of LNG, especially right now to Europe, but for its domestic gas it pays far lower prices than LNG, and significantly less than most countries with less abundant gas resources.

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.

It's not as clean as you describe - natural gas is certainly a global market, as demonstrated by the price correlations: futures in the united states are typically based on the henry hub price, as determined by the price at the henry hub located in Erath, Louisiana. If we compare this to rates found at, for example, the UK national balancing point, we will find that there is a definite correlation. The international trade in natural gas is definitely non-trivial. Grandparent post is making the claim that gas is traded internationally and north Americans are generally not insulated from global prices. This is demonstrably true.

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

Sure, I'm not saying they're completely separate. If demand for LNG increases a lot (as happened recently) then some US gas is going to go that way. But a country like Japan, subsisting on imported LNG, is still paying way more for its gas than domestic consumers in the US, and that's the point that matters if we're discussing nuclear's market challenges in Japan vs. the US.

Natural gas is attractive from a capital, operations, and expense perspective because we wave away most of the real cost as something we don't need to care about. Pesky externalities like carbon emissions are someone else's problem. If we accounted for them in the same way we account for the costs of storing spent nuclear fuel natural gas generation would be extraordinarily expensive. We basically let natural gas plants dispose of their waste product by venting it into our communities and then claim that natural gas is less expensive.

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

Natural gas emits half the CO2 than coal for the same amount of energy.

It evens out a little if you include GHG effects of methane leaked during extraction. Recent work suggests we might have been undercounting that.

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.

Natural gas is better than coal. That's a low bar.

It's better than any other carbon fuel that we could use, and not by a little but by a lot because emissions of mercury and other very bad things are much much lower with natural gas than with other carbon fuels. It's not just a bit better than coal.

I'm not sure why people are replying to this thread to talk about coal, other than GP post the entire discussion is about nuke and natural gas. Yes. Coal is very bad. Natural gas is less bad. Literally nobody is arguing against this point. Both are very bad.

50% less CO2 emissions is a big deal.

In terms of the plant yes, but of course coal is horrible so yeah.

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.

Well, gas leakage in coal mines isn't irrelevant either.

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.

> won't be making a contribution to the grid for a decade

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.

EBR II, FFTF and some Russian reactors have a very good record for reliability. Moju, Superphenix, not so much.

We do not know the reliability records for Russian reactors. We mostly know just what they tell us.

Somehow, the Russians got breeder reactors to work. They have two currently running and are planning a new 1200 GW one. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-Reactor

There is nothing to suggest these reactors technically can't be built, but that the upsides are heavily outweighed by the increased cost and reliability issues.

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.

The current plan is to have a BN-1200 built by 2035:

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 thought that the main problem with the breeder reactor design is the proliferation risk, because they also produce (and can burn) plutonium usable for building a bomb.

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).

No the problem was that 'proliferation risk' was used by the enemies of nuclear to oppose all these programs and get them canceled. Even when the main use of those reactors would have been to consume the nuclear waste from the existing PWR reactors demostically.

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.

Also nuclear plants are built by local heavy industries and constructors. It's better to pay for them instead of oil lands.

I think China has already deployed such a (Thorium cycle molten-salt) reactor in Gobi desert, with the plan to build commercial version of it in just a few years, and with the end goal of making it cheap and mass-produced.