Blaming things on neglect or politics just isn't useful. We need power sources that have some resilience to those things.

Exactly. Humans are part of the system, so human factors matter to reliability.

> We need power sources that have some resilience to those things.

None of the power sources have resilience to politics.

No but some are more resilient than others. It is much easier politically to shut a nuclear power station down than remove dirty wood burners from people's houses.

Can you give an example of a power source that is resilient to politics? I struggle to imagine what that would even look like.

Coal power plants, wind turbines and mostly anything else. They can end up catastrophic in a sense, but not to the same degree nuclear fission plants can end up.

Coal has killed tens of millions from air pollution alone. Civilian nuclear power has probably killed on the order of a few thousand, at most. The studies that say millions have died as a result from Chernobyl is propaganda funded by Greenpeace and friends.

> Coal has killed tens of millions from air pollution alone.

That stat is effectively impossible to nail down after the fact. Air pollution is one metric of am extremely complex system, and coal or any other energy source is one of countless inputs impacting the environment simultaneously. At best we can design and run models to help get clues on what impact any one input has, but those models will always be rough hints at correlation with results that are heavily influenced by the assumptions used when designing the model.

You are correct that any studies claiming to put a number on how many deaths should be attributed to Chernobyl is propaganda. That holds true for the rest as well though, including any claims of exactly how many have died due to coal or cow farts for example.

> That stat is effectively impossible to nail down after the fact

Sure, but given how long we've been burning coal and how dirty it is I'm positive that tens of millions is a gross undercount. It's not about getting an exact number. We're looking for orders of magnitudes here.

Orders of magnitude really don't gloss over huge confidence intervals though, that's just attempting to game the stats.

I get what you're going for and anecdotally that number doesn't even seem crazy if you're going back through our entire history of coal. At the end of the day that number simply didn't exist though, and any time someone uses a start like that to bank up an argument it's just propaganda. Having a bunch that number should be accurate is very different from being able to use it as part of a larger discussion of what the biggest problems are and how to improve it.

None of those are resilient to politics.

See for solar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35661918

Same for everything else. Green Party in Britain is campaigning against literally everything including offshore wind: https://twitter.com/stuarthammond14/status/16486453145621217...

Solar + battery doesn’t bother anyone. Wind turbines have mild resistance from people who think they are an eyesore or people worried about migratory birds.

I wish it were true that solar and battery projects didn't bother anyone. Some recent examples of opposition to solar and battery projects:

"Jacumba residents sue to stop 600-acre solar project"

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2021-09-...

"Proposed battery storage site in Eden Valley prompts local worries"

https://thecoastnews.com/proposed-battery-storage-site-in-ed...

"The Energy Transition Runs Into a Ditch in Rural Ohio"

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29072022/williamsport-ohi...

"An activist group is stopping rural US solar farms with lies"

https://electrek.co/2023/02/20/an-activist-group-is-stopping...

"Marin battery storage project sparks early opposition"

https://www.marinij.com/2023/03/13/marin-battery-storage-pro...

Solar on roof has no resistance, but solar plants takes a lot of space and it starts being a source of conflict in some places of France. It's important to take everyone opinion into account to avoid doing stupid things like putting wind turbines way too close to people houses or farms.

Name a thing that is resilient to both neglect and human politics. We'll wait.

Some things are more resilient to those things than others.

No power source is resilient to politics unfortunately.

Politics can fuck up everything.

Nuclear proponents when trying to sell nuclear love to shout about how successful France is.

Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great...and now France's nuclear program is terrible and the result of 20-30 years of neglect and politics? Also, which part of "nuclear plants are sensitive to environmental changes" didn't you get? If there's no cooling water, or the water is too hot, the plant can't run.

How many times do people need to be told that with all the renewables coming onto the grid, we don't need more base load? We need storage. Also, wind keeps working just fine when the sun goes down.

Do any of you geniuses realize that it's a lot more difficult for the grid to accommodate the injection of tens of gigawatts of power, than it is to handle tens of gigawatts of highly distributed generation and storage across a large region?Guess where utility companies are spending their money? Hint: not on nuclear.

Nuclear is the most expensive form of electrical generation while wind and solar are the cheapest.

Nuclear capacity takes a minimum of ten years, more like 20, to come online and then takes decades longer to go carbon-neutral.

Solar and wind take months to deploy and are carbon neutral within a few years.

Nuclear plants require a continuous, expensive, complicated supply chain and hundreds of people supervising and maintaining it.

Solar farms require maintenance that just about any asshole with an electrician's license can handle, the panels last for decades, and can be recycled. Wind turbines require more maintenance but it's standard industrial electrical/mechanical stuff, just on a tall stick.

Yes, intermittent (sun/wind) only could work with enough storage. Do you know if/when we could get enough safe storage ? My understanding is batteries is not possible at the scale we would need. Pumping water where it is possible would be nice, but not sure if it would be enough. Do we know the storage capacity than US for instance would need, if only using solar and wind ?

Note that the cooling argument would be the same for coal or gas power plant. They work the same way. So, until enough storage is in place, we might need some base production, and it would require access to cold source (river or ocean). France had to reduce the activity of some nuclear power plants last summer because they have rules when it comes to river temperature. The next 8 reactors that France is planning to build would likely be build on the ocean's shore for that reason.

The cost of nuclear electricity is mostly impacted by the cost of money. That is why the cost of electricity from a UK nuclear power plant is more expensive than from France nuclear power plant. The UK used private capital (higher interest) when France use gov funds (lower interest). It is correct that it takes time to build a plant, and it requires expertise. But it is also true that a power plant can run for decades (US and France pushing to 80 years) as anything in a plant can be upgraded over time (except the pool).

Until there is an efficient storage technology that can be deployed at large scale, we might need to run some nuclear power plants. No idea for how long ?

Wonder if this could help:

Iron-Air Batteries Are Here. They May Alter the Future of Energy.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42532492/ir...

Maybe - but remember that lithium ion batteries were first developed in the 1970s. It wasn't until the 2010s that they became so widespread and cheap.

A counterintuitive alternative is to invest a fraction of the costs of nuclear in cleaning up emissions from coal plants. We seem to have swung too far by shutting down a reliable source of energy when mitigating technologies to filter emissions [1] and next generation cleaner extraction technologies [2] are coming online to massively improve coal driven electric power generation. These technologies are DoE funded and patented the former has been deployed in production at a 100 Mw plant the latter is at a pilot stage in a 30Mw research generator at a university.

In any case coal is not going away and there is no single “answer” to the planet’s energy needs. A resilient grid requires a portfolio of energy sources including nuclear but it’s by no means the single answer as the title of the post suggests.

Uranium is “carbon free” but “radioactive waste full” and creates multigenerational environmental debt in the form of waste - nuke proponents usually hand wave and talk in generalities when it comes to this topic. Note the comment that “90% of materials in a nuclear reactor can be recycled” deftly sidestepping the 10% that will live on in deadly form for thousands of years with no solution in sight.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3568623/

Google “Biswas Washington University Enhanced Electrostatic Precipitation” for more

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3817794

Google “Axelbaum Washington University staged pressurized oxy combustion” for more

The radioactive waste is fairly small. US is the country in the world with the most nuclear power plants. US produces yearly: " The amount is roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool" source: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

"More than 90% of its potential energy still remains in the fuel, even after five years of operation in a reactor.

The United States does not currently recycle spent nuclear fuel but foreign countries, such as France, do."

But even if like US does (i.e. does not re-use the waste), less than half of olympic pool is pretty small given the amount of energy produced. Ideally US would re-use the waste, and vitrified the final waste, and then producing even less volume of waste.

Then store it. Properly packed it is not "in deadly form for thousands of years with no solution in sight". Most countries store it deep for 50 years, and then it is safe to dispose on near-surface disposal at ground level, or in caverns below ground level.

Radioactivity is everywhere e.g. with radon (https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-12/documents/ra...) at 4 pCi/L 7 our 1000 people will develop lung cancer. Flight attendants get their fair share too. Our body is prepared to fix itself when attacked by radiation. https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

One alternative is that you overbuild and connect very widely. China has 3000+km power connections. If you do that you can connect to remote wind, which is never not blowing somewhere within 3000km of you. During the day, solar nearer the equator could power areas further away. That’s not the full answer but definitely a useful addition to storage.

There are also battery tech like liquid metal that is being more widely tested and suits grid storage. That scales like crazy if it works.

Sure, France has it's own issues but they are not really related to the tech itself.

Point me any other energy company which could have survived basically 20 years without proper investments and forced to sell back electricity to their competitors.

I would even say that the tech is what made the grid still standing against all odds.

> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great

Yet is amazing that even with the poor management of the French government, it is still a beacon of hope the rest of the world looks to for our energy future.

> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great...

That person is really just spreading FUD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35659262

> How many times do people need to be told that with all the renewables coming onto the grid, we don't need more base load?

Of course we do

> We need storage.

Yes. And it's non-existent. There are literally no grid-scale strage solutions in existence.

> Do any of you geniuses realize that it's a lot more difficult for the grid to accommodate the injection of tens of gigawatts of power, than it is to handle tens of gigawatts of highly distributed generation and storage across a large region?

Neither are particularly true statements. Also, what do you think grid-scale storage would do if not inject gigawatts of power into a grid when needed?

> Nuclear capacity takes a minimum of ten years, more like 20,

Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant in China: 6.1 GW nameplate capacity. Built over 14 years at 1 reactor per 6 years. Operational.

Meanwhile the very distributed Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project was founded in 2018, and is promised to start powering Britain in 2030.

--- start quote ---

Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budget.

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-projec... --- end quote ---

So we know how that will go.

> Nuclear plants require a continuous, expensive, complicated supply chain and hundreds of people supervising and maintaining it.

> The panels last for decades, and can be recycled. Wind turbines require more maintenance but it's standard industrial electrical/mechanical stuff, just on a tall stick.

Of course it's not just a tal stick. It's a rather complicated machine that you can't even safely get to since it's so tall. And that's before we start talking about offshore wind farms like Hornsea 2. Yo need a lot of specialist equipment to maintain those.

There are 500 to 800 people working on a nuclear power plant.

--- start quote ---

Each windfarm tends to have between 7 and 11 employees per 100 MW

https://graham.umich.edu/media/pubs/Wind-Turbine-Economic-Im...

--- end quote ---

So while fewer than per a nuclear plant, you still have to keep in mind that you need to massively overbuild renewables because their generation fluctuates.

Wonder if this could make a difference?

Iron-Air Batteries Are Here. They May Alter the Future of Energy.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42532492/ir...

I'll believe it when I see it. It's a lot of could should would. A lot of tech "revolutions" sizzled away into nothingness after initial round of celebratory press.

Not the parent. But grid scale battery storage does exist. The UK has around 30GW in the pipeline and deployed around 1GW last year.

Projects like xlinks are not directly comparable to other mega projects as they are far less monolithic. They can scale out rather than having to scale up.

In terms of staffing a nuclear station needs many different professions who are relatively expensive, specialised, and need to be heavily monitored for safety. Renewables requires talent obviously but probably less so.

> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great.

Relative to...what? Is there any major country that has a great power grid, objectively better than France? Certainly we have plenty of problems here in the US.

I'm a big nuclear power advocate but of course NP has problems, like any human project. It has dangers, like any scalable power supply. I support NP because it is better than all the rest.

I do agree with that and some replies in favour of nuclear energy were totally sensical. The initial article is not and should be balanced with issues and yes, sometimes irrational fears, we do face as a country relying mostly on this energy source. The risk of electricity cut was a big deal this winter, might be next winter too.

> Nuclear is the most expensive form of electrical generation while wind and solar are the cheapest.

Except if you add the cost of 12 hours of batteries to solar it's massively more expensive. You can't just compare an intermittent source and a non-intermittent source, without factoring in the cost of storage.

>Except if you add the cost of 12 hours of batteries to solar it's massively more expensive.

Nobody knows what nuclear costs, because nobody knows what it will cost to handle the waste 10 years from now, let alone 100 or 1000 years from now. The solution to this for most nuclear operators has been to pay a symbolic fee and let the taxpayers cover the rest "in blanco".

When accidents happen, costs also arrive very suddenly. Nuclear power in Japan is quite expensive already, for example.

We know exactly how to store nuclear waste: bury it underground in impermeable bedrock. We already have several of these [1]. Furthermore, the figures for the costs of nuclear power already include waste disposal [2].

Also, since most countries don't reprocess nuclear waste, it's actually good to hold onto it since it's a future source of fissile material.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

2. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

> We know exactly how to store nuclear waste

Sure but we don't know how much it will cost. Yucca mountain has been debated for decades already, all those experts, contractors, scientists, politicians have already cost millions. The nuclear industry doesn't pay for that, of course.

> Furthermore, the figures for the costs of nuclear power already include waste disposal

They really don't. They only include a token sum that is nowhere near the actual costs of dealing with the waste. In France they didn't even pay enough to handle actual operations, so the government had to bail them out.

Your source explicitly explains that the cost of a plant is only calculated from the lifetime of the plant, which means it ignores the long tail of costs appearing after the plant has closed.

It also makes the argument that fossil fuel plants should bear part of the cost of global warming (despite transportation actually being a bigger culprit than fossil power plants), yet it doesn't even mention the several hundreds of billions of dollars and counting that the world has paid and is paying only for Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Why does the site not suggest that nuclear operators should pay secondary costs for nuclear, such as Fukushima and Chernobyl, when they do argue that fossil fuel operators should pay the costs for global warming? That seems dishonest.

The source is explicitly the "international organization that represents the global nuclear industry" which does of course explain it. The nuclear industry never mentions costs that are contractually assigned to governments, since such costs never appear in their own books.

But that doesn't mean such costs don't exist.

> Nobody knows what nuclear costs, because nobody knows what it will cost to handle the waste 10 years from now, let alone 100 or 1000 years from now. The solution to this for most nuclear operators has been to pay a symbolic fee and let the taxpayers cover the rest "in blanco".

We have a fairly good idea, Finland built a nuclear waste storage facility deep in bedrock for €818M:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

> The estimated cost of this project is about €818 million, which includes construction, encapsulation, and operating costs.

No, it's still massively cheaper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108

Cheaper how? From your source:

> Last month, the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimated the cost to decarbonize the U.S. grid alone would be $4.5 trillion, about half of which would go to installing 900 billion watts, or 900 gigawatts (GW), of batteries and other energy storage technologies. (Today, the world's battery storage capacity is just 5.5 GW.) But as other cities follow the example of Los Angeles, that figure is sure to fall.

The US was able to build nuclear at plants at ~$1B per GW of capacity when nuclear was built at scale during the 60s and 70s [1]. $4.5 Trillion is considerably more expensive even if we assume that serial production would still be 5x more expensive than historical trends.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

$1 billion per GW is fantasy. Right now it's more like 8 or 9.

$6 billion can buy a 6GW "pumped storage" battery in Australia. It's not fantasy it's happening right now.

Furthermore, 1960s reactors were not safe.

Nuclear power can reduce costs by reducing safety and may well do so to compete. At the moment this cost is hidden, as plant owners' liability is capped at a very low level.

> Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really not that great...

If there is one immutable truth about the French psyche, it’s that things are always “really not that great”.

Source: I am French, and left France because of that state of mind.

Sorry I don't believe in the existence of country-wide psyches. Also not claiming things are great when we think they aren't is how we bring progress. I am sharing an opinion, which I didn't claim to be a fact either, but is based on my understanding the local and national news of the last decade.

> Also, which part of "nuclear plants are sensitive to environmental changes" didn't you get? If there's no cooling water, or the water is too hot, the plant can't run.

That is completely false. Most Gen4 reactors are passively cooled. And even older ones, not all require 'once through' water cooling. there are other options: https://world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/techn...

You grossly misunderstand what passive cooling means. It doesn't mean they don't need water for cooling in normal operation. Air cooled thermal cycles are inherently more costly and less efficient

Someone on the internet is saying they are French, making claims that aren't backed up with sources or data.

"The phasing out of the three large, baseload nuclear power plants will increase Germany's need to import electricity from its neighbors. At the same time, all available scenarios show that as a result of the (almost) simultaneous phasing out of the coal units, Germany will transform itself from an exporter to a net importer of energy as early as the mid-2020s. Adding spice to the matter is the fact that the country is particularly dependent on importing energy from France, which obtains three-quarters of its energy from nuclear power plants. Without the widespread availability of electricity from France, Germany's Atomausstieg would not be possible."[0]

Europe needs stable, centralized and long-term source of energy. Neither solar nor wind power fulfills these requirements. The main goal should be to abandon coal and gas power plants as quickly as possible, and Germany showed that it is very hard / impossible without nuclear power.

[0] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/node/31458 (in polish, sorry, there is no english version of the article)

> It's just as easy to find confirmation that all the problems you listed are the result of neglect and politics of the past 20-30 years.

This is always my objection to Nuclear. Nuclear's biggest drawback is that it requires proper maintenance and a stable regulatory environment to be safe.

Our world is too political and tumultuous. You have to manage too many externalities. This is only going to get worse as our climate continues to change.

I just don't see decades long nuclear projects helping us in the short term, and the disruptions on the horizon make long term governance of them problematic.