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Peter Thiel: We Need a New Atomic Age
HughPickens.com writes: Peter Thiel writes in the NYT that what's especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. "But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie "The China Syndrome," about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled," says Thiel. "If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago. Instead, we went in reverse."
According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power. However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today's regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones. "Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy," concludes Thiel. "supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon's going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it."
According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power. However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today's regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones. "Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy," concludes Thiel. "supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon's going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it."
[citation needed]
It's the waste! They store it underground and tell themselfes that those bunkers will survive at least 200.000 years, wich is utter, utter, utter bullshit. So first we need an actual workable sollution for the waste.
Nuclear energy's effective demise was not of its own making.
Incessant Alamist and hyperbolic activism by extremeist turn public opinion, spurred frivolous lawsuits, and prompted overzealous regulations.
The irony is that Nuclear is the best hope to fight their new boogieman, Climate Change.
Environmentalists are looking for a foot doctor to take care of the hole the shot into it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This guy is an idiot. Renewables haven't failed, they are rapidly improving and winning against everything else on economic grounds. Nuclear isn't failing because of fear, it's because it isn't economically viable.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Google "curve of binding energy", and you will become enlightened.
The problem isn't the stuff that lasts 200,000 years. That is pretty low level. Its also not the highly radioactive stuff since it decays quickly. It's the stuff that lasts hundreds of years that is trouble. Luckily we are getting better at nuclear chemistry and our ability to separate the bad from the not bad, or even useful stuff is improving. If we hadn't had such a short sighted policy we would have moved even further.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
And who should pay for its safe depositing.
Nuclear energy is cheap and clean. As long as those reactors are running. I just doubt that the companies that reap the fruits of cheap energy are also willing to deal with the costly time after when there is zero revenue and horrible costs. I.e. what is now being brushed off to the government.
It's the usual "privatize revenue, socialize cost" spiel. Sorry, but no game. Here's the offer: You have to show that you know where to put the waste and you have to lock down enough money to take care of it for at least a century, then you can build that reactor.
Deal?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
in the face of falling profits. The trouble with nuclear is that sooner or later somebody is going to start cutting corners on safety to maximize profit. Look at Fukushima. Completely avoidable, everybody knew about it, still a disaster. And the CEOs responsible have so far got off scott free (can't spill the blood of kings, ya know). Yeah, I know there are more oil & coal deaths per watt, but the damage from nukes lingers in a way that oil/coal doesn't.
Until it's cheaper to run the plants safely than not, and I mean cheaper in the short run not just the long run, I won't trust nuclear. Until then we're one MBA away from 100 years of elevated cancer risk.
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anymore. I'll leave the details to the rest of the commentators, but it's a problem long since solved. You'll get way worse waste from a coal factory, just as folks back east who've had Ash Slurry in their water.
The trouble is long term safety. As plants age they need very, very expensive maintenance and then eventually need to be shut down and rebuilt. It happens in about 20-30 years. Whoever is running the plant at that time is going to want to bury this fact so they can keep bringing money in from the factory. We saw this in Fukushima, and we saw how little gov't oversight worked to prevent it. We also saw a complete lack of accountability for the disaster. Until we solve this problem nuclear is a nonstarter.
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You can guarantee they will do it wrong thinking it will save them 50 cents this quarter even if it causes a meltdown next quarter. That's next quarters problem.
Exactly. The problem is not those wacky environmentalists or all those crybabies who don't want nuclear waste buried in their neighborhood. The problem is 50 years of massive cost over-runs, complete lack of proper maintenance, and general greed, corruption and incompetence. Nuclear power is a great idea, but not if it is run by the existing power companies.
Just require that every atomic plant owner makes an insurance, for which you require that they have proper securities. This then levels the cost for an incident over the whole nuclear industry. The insurance company will then take care of the security of the plant, because it will be inside their economic interest to avoid nuclear incidents. Right now its in the economic interest of the energy industry to spare on security, so that they have less costs. Munich re can cope with tens of billions of dollars, without any discussion about their solvency.
How do you internalize the cost of a rare catastrophe (which would probably bankrupt any insurance company)?
Why don't we start by internalizing the external costs of fossil fuels? That will drive us to alternatives REALLY quick.
I don't usually flatly agree w/ something Thiel says (he never has grown out of his Ayn Rand phase), but this time I do.
Wind, solar, all the others...they are awesome and let's keep dumping cash into R&D for those...all of it.
But also do nuclear.
We have a long, long way to go before we can power our cities with renewables 100%. Nuclear has been retarded by 4 decades of fear-mongering...nuclear is safe when done correctly. The 3 Mile Island disaster killed no one and displaced only a small ammount of people...it wasn't anything like Chyrnoble.
It's 40 years later and we can make reactors that are safer by orders of magnitude than the 100s we've been using for decades that have been working perfectly.
Thank you Dave Raggett
With reprocessing, breeder reactors can theoretically generate no waste at all. In practice they do tend to produce small amounts, but the half-life is on the order of 30-40 years, instead of the 25,000 years stuff we produce now.
Many of th environmentalists who initially spread the fear about nuclear waste decades ago are now coming out in support of nuclear, trying to undo their fud.
They took two facts about two -different- things and implied they were both true of the -same- thing.
Consider a candle, and some gun powder. The gun powder is dangerous precisely because it releases its energy quickly. The candle releases its energy slowly, meaning that it lasts a long time and is safe.
Nuclear radiation is a lot like heat radiation- some materials release it quickly and a lot of energy released quickly is dangerous. Other materials release it very slowly, and are therefore very safe. The ones that release quickly are dangerous- for a short time.
"But after years of cost overruns"
Stop there. This is the #1 reason for the failure of nuclear. The *average* cost overrun was over 2x. Once you factored that in, the cost benefits promised simply disappeared.
When this happened with the first generation reactors, they said those designs sucked, we know how to fix them, and that will be generation 2. When the exact same thing happened with with the gen 2 reactors, they said those designs sucked, and designed generation 3 reactors. And then we started to build those designs...
"According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost."
Yeah, except we're building a couple of these, and they immediately went over budget and continue to do so:
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuclear-industry-darkened-by-delays-cost-overruns-at-vogtle-summer-facil/404418/
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/09/03/edf-nuclear-flamanville-idUKL5N1182LY20150903
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/nn-olkiluoto-3-start-up-pushed-back-to-2018-0109147.html
When faced with problems like these, the "new generation" said those designs sucked, we know how to fix them, and that will be "new nuclear". And those designs exist only on paper, and offer no reasonable explanation while they will break the 50 year cycle of suck.
The basic problem isn't nuclear, it's big. Big projects go over just as often as little projects, but when they do the magnitude is larger and people notice. A million $1000 cost overruns isn't news, but one $1 billion overrun is, as the articles above note. And, sadly, nuclear needs to be big. Don't believe the hype from the small modular people, the concept is inherently flawed and thats why all the big companies dumped their design efforts and the only people still supporting them are two people and a dog shops.
Fine; you've loaded the cost onto the ratepayers, which is just about everyone, so that's not unreasonable, but you have also made some low-life parasitic scum in an insurance company rich as lords, which there is no need or excuse to do.
Let the society as a whole "insure" the plant owners against catastrophes, as they largely do now. Then it's still the same "everyone" paying the cost, but you've eliminated the parasites.
But I would complete the rationalization. I would make society as a whole the builders and operators of the plants. Then you've eliminated more parasites, and profit motives would never intrude into the operation and create lackadaisical, corner-cutting practices.
Tell me this hasn't worked wonders for France.
Berlin already gets 40% of its energy from renewables, like the rest of germany.
Or do you mean a Berlin in the states?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Fine; you've loaded the cost onto the ratepayers, which is just about everyone
No, if the nuclear plant owners insure their plants, only they have to pay the rates. This makes the cost for nuclear power more expensive, and if its still competitive, nuclear plants will be built, if its not, none will be built. This way the market determines which technology is really the cheapest.
you have also made some low-life parasitic scum in an insurance company rich as lords, which there is no need or excuse to do.
Their job is to collect investors to get securities, and to assess risk in order to determine a price. There is a free market for their service, and if you want to get rich yourself, feel free to do it, or, as insured, chose a cheaper competition. They aren't more parasitic than investors. They make money with your work. This is what an economy is about: let specialists do the job, don't do it yourself.
Let the society as a whole "insure" the plant owners against catastrophes, as they largely do now. Then it's still the same "everyone" paying the cost, but you've eliminated the parasites.
If the government does the job of controlling the plants great, its all good. But still the costs need to be internalized somehow, otherwise this is subsidies for nuclear plants. So a good way would be over a tax for nuclear plants. Will the government really use the income from that tax to save for an incident? Or will it use it to pay for something the politicians promised to their voters? And when the incident happens, will the government take loans? Even after the paris attacks, which is a fairly small incident economy wise compared to a nuclear catastrophy, the french government announced they will take more loans now.
And I think the analysts working for an insurer are much better than the government people, after all, their paycheck is much larger, so the best of the best won't go the government career way. So one can chose between the good people or the bad people doing the job.
I would make society as a whole the builders and operators of the plants.
This could work, yes, but many people don't like the socialist approach. I can live with it if things are properly run, but don't get your country into an international trade deal, as often one of the clauses is access to your market for foreign companies. So you would have to create and maintain a state monopoly, quite a task.
It also has to pay other countries to take its excess power.