It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple.
Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight...
> essentially limitless
oh well
So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..
Their average prices are only a little below the EU average.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
How does that have anything to do with the discussion about energy conversion types methods and their pros / cons?
https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/sondage-... ]
You can then think what you want of the French people and why they could be dead wrong for not thinking like you, but it's another debate: they'll still want to get out of it if given the time/choice.
I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?
But I think molten salt thorium plants can offer superior safety
You're correct that nobody builds rbmk reactors any more, but others of the design continued to operate safely for many years.
[1]https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
There may well be tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. No, we can't state that these deaths absolutely occurred/will occur -- they are spread throughout large populations, mixed into the vast number of naturally occurring cancers -- but technology regulation is not like criminal prosecution where things must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty.
That depends entirely on the technology, and who is paying who. Fossil fuels have been proven guilty of numerous sins time and again and are still relentlessly defended as innocent. Leaded fuel in particular enjoyed an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Food additives are another category of chemical with very permissive regulation, provided they don't cause lab rats to immediately keel over.
Technology regulation is unprincipled at best and outright corrupt at worst, and even with the most pessimistic estimates nuclear power has the best safety record per watt of any power generation technology (and it's not close).
Fossil fuels being bad is an argument for getting off fossil fuels, not an argument for nuclear in particular.
"2 workers died in the blast.
28 workers and firemen died in the weeks that followed from acute radiation syndrome (ARS).
19 ARS survivors had died later, by 2006; most from causes not related to radiation, but it’s not possible to rule all of them out (especially five that were cancer-related).
15 people died from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination. These deaths were among children who were exposed to 131I from milk and food in the days after the disaster. This could increase to between 96 and 384 deaths, however, this figure is highly uncertain.
There is currently no evidence of adverse health impacts in the general population across affected countries, or wider Europe."What you are doing here is demanding that the cancers actually be demonstrated, requiring that radiation be treated as innocuous until it can be conclusively shown it isn't. This is the mindset behind those ranting against the linear no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis.
But regulation doesn't work this way. Nuclear isn't something that must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
...
>And I live in California,
This made me laugh out loud. (Worked with utilities all my life, including in CA.)
While other countries have stable and reliable power in the face of hurricanes and ice storms, our power is routinely knocked out by cars, trees, and basically any act of nature.
I love how expensive everything is for how behind we are from the entire rest of the world. Too bad the expenses keep me trapped and poor, unable to do anything about it—even just move to any other country.
• Long-term debt used to buy off the slave owners in 1837 and not getting fully paid down until 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837
• Napoleonic war debt was also still being serviced until 2015: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...
(PG&E is basically nationalized already, they don't make their own decisions here.)
Solar and wind are extremely expensive when all costs are taken into account. One study found that the "true cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh": [pdf]https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
Mind you, this could change if we get an economical way to generate hydrocarbon fuels from renewable electricity, so I'm certainly not pessimistic about solar/wind's long term prospects.
Wind and solar were 30% of Great Britain's electricity last year. The National Grid is a private company, so their costs are clear, 3% of the average bill.
That's a bit of an odd one, as the amount of electricity you consume has little direct effect on maintenance costs. Now, it might be in some sense "fair" to charge heavier consumers more, and there's a second order effect whereby if total demand exceeds some threshold, the grid must be upgraded to cope, but if that "delivery fee" scales with your consumption then you're definitely looking at some "creative" accounting.
Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials.
Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. While that is not a concern in our lifetimes, some progress on thorium plants and so forth must be made for nuclear to be a long term solution.
Nothing is zero carbon either. Batteries have a very long supply chain that involves a lot of carbon heavy steps, and their disposal also creates pollution. The same goes for solar panels, but people conveniently choose to ignore that.
> we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades
We dont need uranium to run on nuclear power. There are several alternatives already.
There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long-lasting nuclear waste, i.e. those with a half life of millions/billions of years.
With known supplies of uranium and thorium on Earth, nuclear fission can provide 100% of humanity's current energy needs for something like 2 billion years. For reference, the sun's rising luminosity is expected to boil Earth's oceans away in 900 million years. We could 1000X current energy consumption with nuclear, and have enough fuel on Earth for over a million years. Long before the fuel runs out, we will be able to exploit resources beyond Earth.
Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality (that is, an actual nuclear explosion) in a serious accident if enough of the core melts and moves around.
In any case, costs can be brought down significantly with 1. more reasonable regulations and 2. economies of scale, which just requires building more plants.
So if - due to massive expansion of nuclear power - we get to the point that uranium supplies are dwindling and causing the price of uranium ore to rise, we may still see breeder reactors with lower construction and operating costs than current generation reactors.
I suspect modularity in reactors, that enables a genuine global market to emerge in reactor manufacturing, would be instrumental in bringing down reactor construction costs.
>>Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality
I'm quite the layman in this subject, but my understanding is that there are fourth generation fast reactor models, with passive safety features, that effectively eliminate that possibility.
For regulations: how does one identify "reasonable" regulations? How is this to be determined? The usual way this is done in other industries is by allowing accidents to happen, then add regulations that would have prevented them. I doubt that would be acceptable for nuclear: unlike (say) aviation accidents, the cost of an individual accident can be extremely large.
As for economies of scale, the evidence for that in nuclear is slight. Maybe S. Korea? But elsewhere costs seem to have increased with experience rather than decreasing. Nuclear involves large units that take a long time to build; there's not much room for anyone to gain much experience over their career. If anything, experience decay (as organizations and individuals age) seems to overwhelm experience growth.
> fast reactors
Fast reactors inherently have this problem, since a fast chain reaction occurs without a moderator. In a LWR, concentration of the fuel in an accident reduces reactivity, as the moderator is reduced. In a fast chain reaction, concentration of the fuel will increase reactivity. Putatively safe 4th generation reactors merely assert that such rearrangement cannot happen. If the analysis that led to that conclusion is found to be in error then anyone who has built such a reactor will be in deep trouble. Perhaps molten salt fast reactors will have sufficiently credible analysis, but those have their own issues (such as need for large amounts of isotopically separated chlorine in molten chloride reactors and exposure of the walls of the reactor to unshielded/unmoderated fast neutrons.)
Nuclear should either be operated all the time, or it shouldn't be used at all.
However it's no deficiency of planning.
It's down to public opinion and misguided regulation.
Not sure if that would fly.
No heroics from any project manager would eg let 1980s Ford stop selling internal combustion engines and go all-in-one electric cars. So any deadlines would be missed.
Zwentendorf was such a disaster.
My wholly intuition-based guess would be that the net effect of these higher construction/safety standards is massively more lives lost.
But if that is the case, the lives lost from higher construction standards are a result of second order effects and populist government-interventionist political ideologies are generally quite poor at factoring in second order effects, as we saw with COVID lockdown policies, which resulted in far more lives lost from the second order effects of the lockdowns than lives saved from the lockdowns mitigating the spread of COVID.
Specific construction expertise for nuclear very likely has degraded (the US can no longer forge the large reactor vessels for PWRs, for example.)
Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support. Bespoke turbines from smaller makers will be more expensive.
Nuclear plant construction has the potential to become much less labor intensive if it moves to smaller, standardized nuclear reactors that can be manufactured in factories, using mass-production techniques.
>>Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support.
True. However this is a surmountable problem. It's just a matter of using subsidies to achieve economies of scale in nuclear plant construction.
The problem with the subsidy argument is there's no good experience to show that subsidies would do more here than just burn money. Nuclear has not had good experience effects. This is in sharp contrast to renewables and storage.
Nuclear is weighed down by the boat anchor of its historically poor performance.
They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.
We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.