> This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. It killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh – comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind.
The Banqiao Dam failure had much more to do the 1970s Chinese Communist Party incompetence and the Cultural Revolution than anything specific to water power.
It appears to be second in death toll among renewables, after biomass.
> Solar: In an average year nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die.
It’s like saying Chernobyl only caused 32 deaths because the other ones were outside the plant.
What people don't understand is there has been literally decades of nuclear power generation over hundreds of reactors worldwide with zero issues.
I’d say the current state of American infrastructure, with our collapsing highways and constantly derailing trains that poison entire towns, would suggest otherwise.
From some admittedly quick research, there are apparently 600,000 road bridges in the US, and the continued maintenance of these bridges is dispersed between 50 different state governments. The US 140,000 miles of railroad track that transports 61 tons of goods per American per year. The scale of the size and use of road and rail systems in the United States are off the charts massive. This is not to excuse the issues you're referring to (they are real and they should definitely be fixed), but the context in which these issues are occurring is important when comparing to something like nuclear.
And it's not like it's all bad when it comes to massive infrastructure in the US: 1.7 million people fly in the US every day, and the last fatal crash on a commercial airlines occurred in 2009. Flying in the US right now is probably the safest mode of transport.. ever? Clearly the US is capable of regulating _some_ things well from a safety perspective.
So.. there are only 92 active nuclear reactors in the United States, all of which are regulated under a single independent agency of the US federal government (the NRC). It's obia much smaller, more tractable problem than general transportation infrastructure.
The worst accident occurred in 1979 and the total amount of deaths in the US caused by the industry are vanishingly small compared to so many other industries (even if you use the worst estimates from the TMI accident). The regulations and associated costs surrounding nuclear are such that we have fewer reactors now than we had in 1990. And the designs and technology of nuclear reactors continues to be improvements upon (what happened at Chernobyl specifically is basically not possible anywhere in the world besides the Russia).
I don't think it really makes sense to cast into doubt the entirety of the US government's ability to keep people safe at all (including from scary things like nuclear) just because we are seeing _some_ things go wrong at times (and I say this as someone who does in fact have very little faith in the efficacy for the US government generally speaking)
This is comparable to the North Sea flood [1] with 2,551 instant deaths.
The requirements are rarely for more than a few hours or a day or two of storage, which significantly reduces the required reservoir volume. And the only requirement is that it be at a higher elevation than the source body of water, so rather than disrupt an entire river and its migration patterns you can have it off to the side.
Because the sites are now a lot smaller and not limited to drops in elevation along rivers, you now have many possible sites; many pumped storage sites are either existing reservoirs or disused mines.
That’s one of the main issues right there. You can’t just plan for the typical case. You need to account for the slightly less frequent cases as well, like 11 days straight of <20% solar/wind generation [1]. And that’s not even an extreme outlier event.
[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...
Because a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is maybe 5% of the cost per watt of capacity of a nuclear power plant, we could cover the entire grid with CT backup and not come anywhere close to the cost of powering the grid with nuclear. And because these would be used so infrequently the fuel cost would be negligible.
This doesn’t sound accurate.
If you have a reservoir with zero head you can’t recover potential energy because there is not.
https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/
You can see from the image how small the reservoirs are. The initial charge is 5,500 acre-feet of water (and 600 acre-feet per year makeup water, I presume for evaporation). It stores 8 GWh of energy with a power capacity of 1 GW. The estimated economic lifespan is 75 years (conservative, since very few PHES systems worldwide have been retired.) Cost is $2.5B.
The Basin and Range province has an embarrassingly large potential for pumped hydro, due to the geography: all those intermixed linear mountain ranges and valleys. This province is also where UAMPS is trying to get utilities to buy into that cluster of six NuScale reactors. Utterly dumb, when they have practically unlimited storage at a shade over $300/kWh of capacity and could use renewables instead.
The pumped hydro projects do seem to have long build times; it would be interesting to know why that was. This one is not projected to come online until 2031. The company has 11 projects in the pipeline.
If we build one in Denmark, and it went wrong, then our entire country could end up uninhabitable. And I know the plants are very safe, but look at what’s going on in the Ukraine, or how Russia blew up the gas lines recently. Again something that is probably less of an issue within the USA.
So I think countries like the US should probably do a nuclear renaissance, while other countries should stick with renewables. I wouldn’t worry so much about the storage issue. We currently build and deploy batteries that are inside shipping containers, effectively solving our storage issues. It should be noted that “our” storage issues aren’t the same as the grids issues, ours is intended to be able to store excess power. Basically you cannot sell power when the grid is full, and currently that means solar plants dump it into nothing. The batteries allow us to store it for months. Of course we also use it to sell power at better prices, but I did say we were an investment bank.
Battery tech is only going to improve. It’s sort of ironic that Tesla was so early with some of the storage solutions that other companies actually build today, but sometimes it’s not a good idea to be a first mover I guess? The big push is largely funded by countries like Germany going for full renewables of course, and Tesla didn’t have that at the time.
Sorry but that conclusion is incorrect. Batteries, in their current lithium form, are absolutely not suitable for gridscale storage. They're far too expensive.
In Australia a $100 million battery, if it could discharge at an infinite rate, could only meet the demand of a city of 2 million people for about 48 seconds.
Lithium batteries are for grid stabilisation - the absorb short term spikes in demand and generation.
Funny that you quote the country with the worse energy policy in the world as a good example to follow.
Germany has some of the highest CO2 emissions per capita in the EU, has the highest kWh production price in the EU, imports tons of cheap clean nuclear energy from France to meet depend (exactly because they have renewables and there is no proper affordable storage technology that exists in the real world).
They have a chancelor who was/is openly in bed with Putin (Schroder if you want more info) who basically helped the Russians by making Germany dependent on their gas by making Germany switch to non-continuous energy sources (wind / solar, gas falls in for "the battery" that doesnt exist). All on purpose: got a nice "job" at Gazprom afterwards as a reward.
Now that the gas lines to Russia are gone Germany is importing natural gas in ships from the US. Very green! To fill in the other gaps they reopened their coal mines and started burning more coal once more. They closed their last nuclear power plant in the past year as well, so there will only be more of that.
And that's your good example to follow?
I would not invest at your investment bank needless to say.
Further, comparing electricity prices in Germany to France is a moot point, because France has a fixed consumer price and pays the rest using taxes.
More further, France is importing more electricity from Germany than Germany is from France. Ironically, because their nuclear reactors are failing. [2] So most of your points are probably false.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-....
Absolutely not. It happened only in 2022 for a very particular reason, maintenance for a defect now resolved. As of right now, France is exporting almost 3GW to Germany ;)
The comment you replied to didn’t make that argument.
My recommendation for German government: make electricity cheap and nobody will think twice installing heat pumps or buying electric vehicles. Current price 0.3-0.5€/kWh depending on location what is insane.
Powering the world with nuclear will require breeder reactors. A Chernobyl-like prompt criticality accident in a fast reactor could be an actual honest-to-god nuclear explosion, not a piddly pathetic steam explosion like at Chernobyl.
Nor is the entity who sold the land. So, if there ever was any opportunity cost involved, it is already factored in.
Take your pick. There are a ton of American cities where solar does not work like how you imagine
There are very few on most similar terrain in the Bay Area and there are no wind farms blocking development there. Why haven't houses been built?
However, there are places in the world (Japan) where a modern design nuclear power plant is built in 3.5 years. South Korea is very close behind. And it's not just a one off. Japan built 8 new nuclear power plants and South Korea built 13 in last 20 years. These plants are every bit as safe as plants built elsewhere, perhaps even safer as they're new designs.
This suggest it is not technology that's holding us(US and majority of EU) back, but bad project management practices. We too could have a new plant built in few years.
Add to this SMRs (small modular reactors) which are hopefully becoming available in next 2'years and anyone that can't see nuclear is the only hope for decarbonisation is misinformed.
Then take a country like Germany that has recently shut down perfectly working nuclear power plants and opened the first new brown coal burning plant in Europe in a very long time (also they activated many others that were doing very little before). I don't know if this is irony or what, but when "green" efforts make an industrialised country give up nuclear and switch to coal there is something seriously wrong.
Also few words on the type of coal they burn there. There are (broadly) two types of coal. There is coal proper (resembles black stone, mined in deep mines, high quality, little sulphur and oil/tar content) and there is lignite. A brown smelly thing that crumbles when you squeeze it leaving a tarry residue everywhere. It's "mined" from just below the surface by gargantuan machines that destroy thousands and thousands of hectares of land leaving a moonscape behind. Why is it used? Because when you build your power plant next to a source of lignite the electricity is really cheap. This kind of "coal" emits a lot more pollutants when burned. This can be mitigated somewhat by using modern tech, but still it should be our last power source choice. Not first.
If the people say no to nuclear they'll not get renewable for base load, but lignite burning plants. BTW, CO2 is not really the worst these plants emit. They emit tiny particulates that get in your lungs. Incidence of child asthma is a lot higher near such plants as well as many other diseases.
The US demolishes any and all of its state capacity anytime a company calls the congressman they bribe to complain that the government doing (insert project here) intrudes on their right to make money. That’s the difference. The Navy has been running nuclear power plants underwater for 50+ years at this point, but having a state organization that builds and maintains energy infrastructure would compete with all the existing energy sector interests, so it can’t be allowed to happen. Contrast this to China, where businesses do not have authority to override the state and this difference is obvious.
Blame where blame is due, please.
Germany's energy issues don't stem from green policies themselves, they track back to a single individual directing energy policy while in bed with Russian gas providers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der
Schröder was criticized for his policies towards Vladimir Putin's government, his work for Russian state-owned companies, and his lobbying on behalf of Russia. On 1 March 2022, Schröder's entire staff including long-time office manager Albrecht Funk resigned due to Schröder's alliances with Russia and Putin directly.
Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.
These are serious failures to be sure but failures of the kind that occur with any policy, be it green, military procurement, national parks, housing, etc.
And you know, do so my emitting it into the atmosphere.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
The chances of experiencing adverse health effects from radiation are slim for both nuclear and coal-fired power plants—they're just somewhat higher for the coal ones.
"You're talking about one chance in a billion for nuclear power plants," Christensen says. "And it's one in 10 million to one in a hundred million for coal plants."
McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly.
To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.
So, bugger all in both cases particularly when compared to normal background radiation exposure.
> digging up a whole lot of coal (particularly in Australia, which also has a whole lot of uranium)
Australia is kind of big (the same land area essentially as the contiguous United States of America) and I don't see the major uranium deposits in Australia being especially close to the massive coal beds.
For comparison, the USGS database on Coal quality states [2][3]
In the majority of samples, concentrations of uranium fall in the range from slightly below 1 to 4 parts per million (ppm). Similar uranium concentrations are found in a variety of common rocks and soils, as indicated in figure 2. Coals with more than 20 ppm uranium are rare in the United States. Thorium concentrations in coal fall within a similar 1–4 ppm range, compared to an average crustal abundance of approximately 10 ppm. Coals with more than 20 ppm thorium are extremely rare.
These figures for coal are all less than typical crustal concentrations.
The below link [5] is a throw in that doesn't address U-Th-K in Australian coal but does address the major properties of Australian thermal coals.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
[2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
[3] https://ncrdspublic.er.usgs.gov/coalqual/
[4] https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/download?pid=csiro:EP11424...
[5] https://minerals.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Best-in-C...
The claim of that title "Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste" is a baldfaced lie, btw.
14 years longer than promised, not expected. I don't know what drugs the salesmen were on, but they promised delivery 50% faster than any serial-built french plant for a model that was 1) more complex, 2) never built before and 3) with half of the experienced team missing.
Far more likely they’ll open new coal plants than nuclear, wind, or solar - nuclear and renewables are anathema at the polling booth, whereas the status quo is a safe bet.
40% of Americans do not believe in climate change, and the 60% that do include a good chunk who are not yet of voting age, and people who are otherwise unable to vote - and on a district by district basis, only about 35% of districts believe in climate change.
So, coal. It’ll be coal.
And regardless of what politians say, when something is a good investment, somebody does it. Hence the continious growth of solar, wind seems to run into way more hurdles, from regulation over NIMBY to technical issues.
That's not really true anymore:
But the chances of the US, or practically anywhere really, building substantial new nuclear facilities is close to zero.
Wind and solar are plentiful, cheap , quick to build, and offer immediate returns. If i have a few billion to invest I'd pick one of these over nuclear.
Basically wind and solar don't rely on foreign countries for fuel, are simple to run maintain, replace etc. In the case of wind land use is minimal. Solar can be deployed in already-urban environments. Environmental damage from catastrophic failure is basically zero.
Of course there is the storage problem, but there are various potential solutions to that. Pumped hydro, compressed air, hydrogen production, and others. I expect more innovation in this space.
Don't get me wrong, nuclear is safe, clean(ish), and provides a good base load. But regulation, planning, costs, and all the other layers make actual building of them very unattractive. I'm not confident they'll ever see the light of day.
[1] yeah, I know that's not how it works.