Here's another "rando" that also happens to have a doctorate degree in how the environment works. Dr. Patrick Moore. He was a founding member of Greenpeace but left after they lost their sight on the science behind their motives. https://www.msn.com/en-us/food... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Greenpeace hates chlorine, because chlorine was used as a weapon in World War One. Well, it's chlorine that keeps municipal water systems safe for drinking. Chlorine is the basis of many medicines. Just like we use nuclear technology to fight cancer, diagnose diseases, explore the universe, and provide safe and plentiful energy. But, because we also used nuclear technology to make weapons, we have groups like Greenpeace opposing nuclear power. Dr. Moore likes nuclear power and he's convinced me to like nuclear power.
I'll take the words of two people with doctorates on the merits of nuclear power over a bunch of "randos" on the internet. Maybe if people stopped to look at the science instead of the hysteria from Greempeace then we'd have a much better world to live in.
But what do I know, I'm just some "rando" typing on a computer in his basement. Don't listen to me, listen to Dr. Malhotra and Dr. Moore.
But you have to build windmills to maintain the industry.
You mean like how we have to keep building nuclear power to maintain the industry?
We were building nuclear power around the world like mad 40 or 50 years ago and then... we stopped. People have become fearful of nuclear power because it's a mystery to them. We have accidents like at Fukushima because the people that know how they work retired, have gone senile, or died. When we need experts to fix what's broken we are finding that the best people for the job are over 80 years old or under a headstone.
I keep hearing on how decommissioning costs for nuclear power keep rising. Well, that's what happens when there is a lack of expertise and infrastructure. Then there's the complaints on having no place to put the waste. That's what happens when funding for facilities to process and dispose of this waste gets held up in congressional "debate" for THIRTY YEARS! This isn't a problem that just appeared, our grandparents were talking about this. A quick Wikipedia search will show that the US federal government has been looking at Yucca Mountain as a potential disposal site since 1957, and approved it as a site in 1987. The government should have been able to start packing this hole in the ground with waste in 1998.
Nuclear power is expensive now because we killed the industry 40 years ago. We can make it cheaper if we only spend the money to build the infrastructure, just like we did with wind and solar. The longer we wait the more expertise in this field is lost. Claiming that we will never need this expertise again is simply false. All those nuclear power plants in operation now will have to be shut down and torn apart at some point, because nothing lasts forever. We'll need a place to dispose of the waste. People will have to become experts in this. We can train these people now or we can have them learn on the job, where mistakes can cost lives.
Because we stopped maintaining this nuclear power industry there's a shortage of medical isotopes for treatment and diagnostics. NASA is running short of their supply of reliable radiothermal generators for exploration. Missions failed because they tried to rely on solar power instead. If they had some strontium or plutonium to keep the electronics warm and powered up then we'd know more about the solar system now.
Nope, we can't have "nu-ku-lar" because... reasons. Since we lost all we learned from previous mistakes we will just have to repeat those same mistakes.
Then we should subsidize it until it's cheaper. If that works for other low CO2 energy sources then it should apply to nuclear as well.
Nuclear power also works at night, in high winds, in no winds, when it's raining, cold, hot... okay maybe it has to reduce power when it gets really hot. That's why we need a mix. Pick energy that's cheap, low CO2, and safe. The top three on that is onshore wind, hydro, and nuclear, not necessarily in that order. Then comes things like (also not in any particular order) geothermal, biomass fuels, off shore wind, and concentrated thermal solar. (Cite on CO2 emissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Solar PV is just a bad idea all around. Anyone that thinks that PV is cheap is only looking at the subsidized cost, the real cost is very high except when laid out flat on a field. Putting PV on rooftops might mean not losing any area of value but it can multiply the cost by five times. (cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) Solar power isn't all that safe either, considering how many industrial accidents there are per real energy produced. Solar PV is also very resource intensive. (cite: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... )
If people believe that solar and wind can get cheaper if we will it so and throw enough money at the problem then we can do the same to make nuclear cheaper.
If nuclear power costs too much then lower the price. It's that simple.
The UK already has had problems with too much wind power and has been paying wind farms to sit idle. https://www.express.co.uk/news...
That's assuming the wind farms weren't producing power anyway, or forced to shutdown because of high winds. https://stopthesethings.com/20...
HIGH WINDS!?!?!?!? They had to turn off the devices to collect power from the wind because the wind was too powerful.
Do you really believe that the people that do these calculations don't consider the CO2 from the uranium mining? Nuclear and wind produce 1/2 the greenhouse gases of concentrated solar power and 1/4 of that from solar PV. Solar is just a bad idea. Wind is only a good idea if there is some storage to go with it. For that I like hydro, it's not as good as wind and nuclear on GHG emissions but both wind and nuclear need storage and so it would be wise to use the means of storage with the best record on cost and GHG emitted.
Seriously? You argument pro Pu-239 is that it can be used as a weapon? I hope you are trolling, because if that's not the case you are either insane or a complete idiot.
If I had not mentioned its use as a weapon then I'd be accused of lying by omission, do you want me to lie?
The emphasis should be on the use as a fuel, especially for the use in molten salt breeder reactors like LFTR-49. https://articles.thmsr.nl/the-...
LFTR-49 will burn plutonium as fuel and in the process produce U-233, a fuel worthless for making weapons. This makes plutonium far more valuable as a fuel than as a weapon. LFTR style reactors don't produce plutonium like current solid fuel reactors do. Depending on how the LFTR manages the transuranic elements it will produce no plutonium or produce plutonium so contaminated with lighter and heavier isotopes that it would be nearly worthless for weapon production.
The only way to destroy this plutonium is in a reactor. What some politicians would like to see is "downblend and dispose". This means taking the weapon grade and reactor grade plutonium we have and mixing it with a bunch of spent fuel and other stuff to make it hard to process back out, and then drop it in a hole. A hole by the way Democrats have been denying funds to dig.
So, what do you propose we do with all this plutonium that's been piling up? And the weapons with plutonium in them?
I suggest we use it as fuel. This can mean downblending as part of turning it into fuel to discourage it being diverted into weapons. Downblending alone does not prevent this from being turned into weapons in the future, as it only makes refining more expensive, not impossible. The only way to destroy it is consume it in a reactor. While we do that we may as well produce electricity, more fuel, valuable medical isotopes, and isotopes valuable for space exploration.
So why don't we have a highly advanced program that handles nuclear waste instead of it piling up at reactor sites around the world?
Because Democrats.
The Democrats prevented the processing of old weapon cores into fuel for nuclear reactors meaning the USA did not hold up it's end of the deal with Russia to reduce stockpiles of plutonium. USA had a deal with Japan on dealing with their stockpiles of plutonium and so now Japan has waste piling up. The Democrats held up the Yucca Mountain disposal site since 1987, so our waste is piling up at home. Democrats in the USA are why we have waste piling up at reactor sites all over the world.
The Republicans are in power, they aren't building nuclear power plants or even considering it.
The NRC has been dominated by Democrat appointed commissioners for at least 8 years, and Trump's appointments didn't get on the commission immediately after he got into office. Just how quickly do you think that they can issue licenses and ramp up on construction after 40 years of sitting on their thumbs? Give it time.
Maybe you should stop reading what they claim and start reading what they do. It is possible to lie with words, but not with actions. That is why it has been irresponsible to vote Republican for the last 50 years.
Well, the Republicans have been in power for nearly 2 year now and we are seeing some of the lowest unemployment, huge growth in the economy, and reductions in taxes. That's just a few off the top of my head. If that's what "irresponsible" looks like then I want more.
A nuke plant might operate for 60 years. All the waste must be safely stored. Storage is not free, and security is expensive.
A hydroelectric dam will last that long too, as will a coal fired power plant. These sites must also be kept secure. Storing the spent fuel on the same site as the nuclear power plant is common practice, meaning the storage may not be "free" but it is minimal and included in the cost of constructing and maintaining the site. If the Democrats hadn't been holding up nuclear material disposal sites like Yucca Mountain for 30 years we'd have had this problem solved. There is no storage problem but what the Democrats created.
Some of the waste becomes safe in 30 years,
Actually 30 years is the half life of some of the more dangerous isotopes. A "rule of thumb" on when this becomes safe is ten half lives, so more like 300 years.
but Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.
First of all Pu-239 is a very valuable material for nuclear fuel and weapons, storing this as "waste" is idiotic. Second, the radiation flux is an inverse of the half life. The longer the half life the less radiation it emits in a given time period. With a half life this long it is effectively inert. It's still a heavy metal and so should be handled with care, much like one would treat lead. it's also something that is not known to blow away, dissolve in water, or otherwise move from where it's put. There's far more dangerous isotopes to deal with than Pu-239.
That sort of kills any idea of "cheap in the long run." In the long run, the short run, any way you slice it, nuclear power is the most expensive way to generate electricity ever conceived, and will remain so.
Really? Perhaps you could provide a source for that. Oh, and include the storage costs for that wind and solar, because that's going to be necessary to match load to supply.
That said, we still need nuclear power and will need it for probably 100-250 years, and we should be building more plants. But eventually, sooner than later, the entire nuclear industry must be decommissioned and mothballed, because we have safer, cleaner, greener, less complicated and less expensive ways to generate electricity.
100 years? Well, that's convenient. That's something no one reading this could ever confirm on their own. In that time we'd probably find a way to deal with all the radioactive waste we produce now and nuclear power will be powering colonies on Pluto or something.
You'll see that nuclear provides nearly 20% of our electricity. Wind less than 6%. Solar is producing so little energy that it doesn't even get broken out separately, and is just "other". Biomass produced more electricity than solar, and that's mostly just coal plants "greenwashing" their operation by mixing in some sawdust and wood chips in with the coal so they can claim to be "green".
Whatever little is spent on solar makes a large difference on the subsidies per kWh since the output from solar is so small. If you scroll down that Wikipedia page some more you will find that solar makes up about 2% of installed capacity and nuclear makes up about 10% of installed capacity. Again, nuclear produces 20% of the electricity but solar is less than 1%. To replace a single 1 GW nuclear power reactor we would need to have 4 GW of solar power capacity.
The US federal government has been subsidizing solar power for decades with very little to show for it. You think nuclear power is getting corporate welfare? Look at solar. There wouldn't be a solar power industry if the federal government hadn't been propping it up all this time.
You know all this already and are just pushing your false reality again.
Yep, just "fake news" from us nuclear power advocates. If solar power made such great business sense then why demand the subsidies? I'll find that solar power advocates rarely lie about anything, just as what you posted appears to be true. What happens with great regularity is the lie by omission. By telling only half the story, giving all the "pros" and none of the "cons", solar power looks pretty good. It's easy to reveal the half truths though.
I used to tear into wind too for their subsidies but it looks like we are actually seeing some return on that investment. I'd like to see the wind subsidies go away, as I would for all energy subsidies, but it's solar that is not giving much for even the little it gets in "corporate welfare".
It's been getting real hard to portray nuclear power as unsafe in recent years. Calling it "dirty" is getting real hard as well. Now it seems that people rely on half truths of the costs of nuclear power. How long will it take for the truth on that to become clear? Then what argument can be made to not build more nuclear power?
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has a reputation as a capable regulator with many decades of experience in safe nuclear plant design review and operations oversight. It also has a process that is amenable to technologies that use nontraditional fuels and coolants.
Sweden, the original home of LeadCold, has similar remote areas and a capable regulator, but it is currently lead by a government that doesn't support nuclear energy development.
As Senator Murkowski made clear during Governor Perry's confirmation hearing to become the new Secretary of Energy, Alaska has communities with similar power needs. Unfortunately, the U.S. NRC has not yet implemented an acceptable process for reviewing nuclear reactor designs that use coolants other than water.
If people in the USA want to see more nuclear power then vote, and vote for people and political parties that support nuclear power. I've read the party platform documents from both the Democratic and Republican national committees. In the Democrat platform I recall seeing the word "nuclear" only once, and that was in reference to nuclear weapons. The Republican platform nuclear power was mentioned as one of many ways to achieve cleaner air and energy independence. I also remember a debate between McCain and Obama when they were running for POTUS. Obama made some happy mouth noises about research but McCain said we need to start building nuclear power. It's quite clear where the support lies among politicians, vote accordingly. Perhaps the two parties have had their stance on nuclear power evolve since I last looked but recent events tell me it's unlikely there's been a big change. This isn't the "far left" opposing nuclear power, this opposition is far more widespread than that.
We can throw a bunch of money at nuclear power research but nothing can provide funding and experience like private industry actually building real and actual reactors. The argument for wind and solar subsidies was made on the same premise, that nothing drives development of a technology like shipping product.
I'd like to see fourth generation nuclear reactors being built too. Seeing more third generation nuclear would please me greatly though. We aren't going to see fifth generation nuclear power, almost by definition, until fourth generation reactors have reached some kind of maturity. Again, nothing can mature a technology like shipping product. I believe that there is a lot of life in third generation nuclear yet, as it is quite safe and offers means to slow the production of nuclear waste and perhaps even consume some of the waste we already have.
Indeed. Objecting to nukes because of safety is silly.
Objecting to nukes because of economics makes much more sense. They are far too expensive, and the cost is going up while the cost of solar, wind, and storage is falling.
On the second page of the PDF there's a chart showing that solar is indeed quite inexpensive compared to nuclear. There is also a warning at the top of the graph that costs addressing the intermittent nature of solar and wind were not taken into account. Solar power with storage is not cheap, and neither is putting solar on rooftops. Solar power is only cheap when there is no storage (meaning reliance on things like hydro, natural gas, and internal combustion diesel engines) and when placed in large open fields close to the ground. Wind is cheap, and will likely still see some gains in getting cheaper yet, but it has problem with being intermittent as well. Wind is not considered safe enough to put near inhabited areas and, while it does not displace cropland and grazing areas like solar would, it's not something people will put on their rooftops either.
That Lazard study and articles like the following explaining the safety and resource needs of solar tells me that there is not much future in solar power. http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Solar is complicated, expensive, and when compared to other energy sources available to us it's really not that great on safety and CO2 output. What really kills solar, by my estimation, is the resources needed. We'd be far better off with wind, hydro, and nuclear.
If you want to make an economic case against nuclear then I'd like to see the costs from storage. If you say that the storage costs will come down in a decade to be affordable then I'm fine with waiting. The question then is, what do we do until then? Keep burning coal? I say we build nuclear power plants. The claim has been that solar and wind prices will come down with economy of scale. Would that not also be true for nuclear? Japan, South Korea, and France, all saw costs go down by standardizing their nuclear power. In the USA we kept building a bunch of reactors by the ones and threes and so costs stayed high. Stop doing that and costs go down.
Here's a couple experts in the field that did a study on the costs of storage and it's not a pretty picture they paint. The storage alone for wind and solar would cost much more than an equivalent supply of energy from nuclear power. http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
The "Roadmap To Nowhere" authors make it clear that an all nuclear power grid is not ideal or perhaps even possible, they just use that as an intellectual exercise. I recognized this as well, we'll need something other than nuclear, and to me wind and hydro are far better options in nearly every case than solar. As it is now, today, solar is a bad idea. Until that changes we'll need something that's cheap, reliable, safe, low in CO2, and something we can deploy in quantity today. Solar scores poorly on all metrics.
Prove to me that solar and storage can compete and I'll change my mind.
The first two were found in the basement turbine room a few days after the accident. But if "out of Fukushima" implies "out of" as opposed to "in", sure.
Those deaths were not due to radiation. Best guess is that they sheltered there from the tsunami but the wave flooded the room and they drowned, and the radiation came later. A possible radiation link to their death would be they drowned in radioactive water, meaning that if they died from acute radiation poisoning then it only killed them sooner and would have drowned anyway. In either case it was the tsunami that killed them and any possible link to radiation in the cause of their death is ambiguous at best.
The article in on the first confirmed death from radiation that came from the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The other two deaths were not confirmed to be related to the radiation as a more likely cause is the turbine hall being flooded and they drowned.
What I find rather disturbing in all of this is that they knew of a risk of a tsunami flooding the plant but dug out several meters of dirt and rock to lower the plant closer to sea level. Some of that might have been necessary since the bed rock was eroded and unstable but they still dug deeper than many deemed necessary to make it easier to bring in building materials from ships, and to make the cooling pipes to the sea shorter (and therefore cheaper).
When issues were discovered TEPCO dragged their feet to make changes to address threats of flooding. The possibility of the diesel backup generators getting flooded was known. They still had power available from the grid to drive cooling pumps, and batteries. The triple redundant safety systems failed because no one could fathom something so large that it could take out the grid, render the generators unusable, and do so with such damage that it could not be repaired before the batteries ran dead.
This one in a million occurrence of events happened and we still saw only one confirmed death from radiation. Is nuclear power dangerous? Of course. Nuclear power is also the safest energy source we know of. Japan doesn't have a lot of options on getting electricity where they are. They don't have a lot of land for putting up solar collectors and windmills, or much for hydro power. They shipped in a lot of coal while they checked out all their reactors and this impacted air quality. Had they kept doing that then they'd see far more deaths from air pollution.
Nuclear power doesn't live in a vacuum, if it's not nuclear power then it's something far more deadly.
Those were nuclear power plants built in the 1960s and 1970s. You know what was also built at that time? A lot of things, I know that. What comes to mind are the De Haviland Comet and Ford Pinto. The Comet was known to fall from the sky without explanation, and the Ford Pinto of the time was known to burst into flames with minor accidents. Does this mean we should stop flying jets and driving cars?
We don't build nuclear reactors today like we used to in the 1970s, just like the planes and cars we build today aren't like what we used to build in the 1970s. There's a lot of old nuclear reactors from the 1970s operating today, and it would be nice to see them replaced with something more efficient and safer. It would be so much easier to do so if we didn't have idiots that thought nothing has changed in nuclear power since Bee Gees released "Stayin' Alive".
Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have. Safer than even wind and solar. That doesn't mean we should rely on nuclear as our only energy source, but it does mean we should make it part of our energy solution.
I'm guessing the people that have to choose between coal power and no power.
I'll defend coal because it is cheap, reliable, plentiful, very low tech, and therefore the only choice for many people all over the world. If you don't want people to burn coal you'll have to do better than hand out solar panels and batteries. These people will also have to be able to maintain these on their own or they will simply be abandoned in no time.
Much of the world today has technology much like the USA and Europe had somewhere in between 1850 and 1950. That means coal, hydro, wind, but not much for solar power. The USA didn't see solar power as anything practical until at least the 1970s, and that's being generous. We saw practical nuclear power before we saw practical solar power.
If we want to lift people out of poverty, and do so without coal, then it's not going to be with solar power. Hydro will only work if there is enough water flowing to build a dam. Wind is pretty good at a lot of things but without cheap storage, like perhaps a water reservoir to pump water to a higher potential energy, this energy is not reliable. You can't have a modern society without reliable energy supplies.
If it's not coal then it's going to have to be nuclear. Whatever you have to say against nuclear means nothing if the alternatives are not reliable, inexpensive, and cannot be maintained with hammer and wrench technology. It would be nice we we could just drop in a silicon PV fabrication plant, gobs of high tech chemical production plants to make batteries, and all the electronics needed to run them, but that's not going to happen overnight. Nuclear power won't happen overnight either but if you have a society that can manage coal power and hydroelectric dams then you got people and infrastructure real close to building nuclear power. That's really really close to having nuclear power.
Then clue me in. I asked a very honest question with sincere curiosity. Germany has stated an intent to reduce its CO2 output by closing coal fired power plants. I see that is happening. What is also happening is the construction of new coal fired power plants. What is the capacity of these old plants compared to the new? Is this just closing down two coal plants only to build a new one that's twice their size, and therefore changing nothing in how much coal is burned?
I cannot take a nation's commitment to reduce CO2 output when that same nation has a commitment to abandon nuclear power. While it may be possible to do both it will be quite difficult as shown on this web page: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
I see plenty of people on Slashdot talking about how solar power is inexpensive today, but no one seems to actually say how much it costs. Let's see some numbers. But first I'd like to see the numbers on coal power, because that's the biggest producer of CO2. Replace coal with most anything else and CO2 output is reduced. I'm not seeing Germany even doing that, and if someone could help me find some numbers then I'd appreciate that. Numbers of plants closed and opening is meaningless without knowing the size of the plants. Put it numbers my 11 year old nephew can understand, he wants to be an engineer some day.
2. Renewable energy can't provide a significant proportion of the energy we need. Clearly it can, especially in areas of high growth like India and China and Africa.
For me to take this seriously I'll need to hear how you define renewable energy. Here's the definition of renewable energy I found in my dictionary app:
energy from a source that is not depleted when used
Taken strictly nothing meets this definition since even solar energy is being depleted when used, as is it's derivative forms in wind and water, since the sun is expected to run out in a few billion years. If we mean "renewable" to mean energy that is so plentiful that we could not expect to run out in millions of years then that means wind, sun, water, and nuclear.
Yes, I include nuclear power as a renewable energy source.
Just in the seawater alone there are billions of tons of uranium, and meeting all the energy needs of the planet today would mean several thousand tons of uranium per year. There's far better places to get uranium than from the sea but for any nation with access to the sea means access to an effectively unlimited supply of energy in uranium. Any nation that can mine coal can also mine uranium and thorium for nuclear power. In fact in many cases just mining coal ash for uranium and thorium would mean getting far more energy than was obtained from burning the coal.
From there I can see that nuclear power has the lowest CO2 output of any other energy source available. Nuclear power takes far less resources than any other energy source. Also, from those charts, you can see that nuclear power causes far fewer fatalities per energy produced. From there I can also see that solar power is a very bad idea.
I like wind and hydro because at least those are relatively inexpensive compared to solar. When talking about developing nations, where they lack much in the ability to produce and maintain the electronics needed for photovoltaic systems, they can at least build wind and hydro in spite of the extra resources needed over nuclear. Wind and hydro are very low tech energy sources, with low CO2, relatively reliable, and far safer than coal or oil. Solar power compared to any other energy source is very complex, resource intensive, expensive, and unreliable. Hydro power is also has by it's very nature the means to store energy inexpensively. Wind power doesn't have to turn a generator to produce useful work, it can pump water to a reservoir behind a dam for drinking water and/or electricity, and do so with centuries old technology.
When considering a country that is just now learning how to harness energy from coal, oil, and hydro, it seems to me that nuclear is far easier of an energy source to harness than solar. If a nation can build massive concrete dams to hold back a river, build boilers for coal, harness steam and running water to turn a turbine, then they have most everything they need technologically and in infrastructure to harness nuclear power.
Solar power is near worthless for a developing country. With solar power we'd be handing them a bunch of batteries and PV panels like fish, from which they can eat for a day. Hand them wind, hydro, and nuclear, and they can get their own fish and eat forever.
Except in Germany they built two new ones and closed six old ones, so there were 4 fewer than before... And the new new ones were more efficient too boot.
That means nothing. I'll give an example from my growing up on a dairy farm. Dad had four corn wagons but sold three of the wagons to buy two to replace them. How much more or less corn can he move at a time? You don't know because I gave no indication on the size of the wagons. If I now add that the wagons sold could carry 8 tons, and the new ones can carry 16 tons, and the one he kept could carry 12 tons, you now have a much clearer picture on how he's increased his ability to move corn.
How big were the six plants that were closed? How big are the two new ones that were opened? If the old ones were 250 MW and the new ones 1500 MW then how does that help in their CO2 production? Maybe they burn more efficiently, and produce less soot, and provide for district heating, and all kinds of other benefits, but that doesn't necessarily mean less CO2 will be produced. I'm sure Germany will see cleaner air and less expensive electricity with shiny new coal plants, but that's not the issue here. At least not the only issue.
Germany talks big about their CO2 reduction plans but it's easy to see that their CO2 reductions in recent years have been minimal to nothing. Also, they've created an energy plan that makes them increasingly dependent on foreign trade (in electricity itself, or in coal, natural gas, oil, and other fuels). Germany is not some model to follow, because if everyone followed their model of relying on their ability to buy and sell electricity with neighboring nations to manage the intermittent power they get from wind and solar then everyone would see their electrical grid collapse.
So, again, tell me how big these coal plants are and maybe I'll believe you that Germany is serious about reducing their reliance on coal for electricity.
Oh, and I know the USA isn't exactly a model on CO2 reduction either. In fact no one is really taking CO2 reduction seriously. If they were then they'd be building nuclear power plants to replace coal. There are nations building nuclear power and most of these nations are exporters of coal and oil, and by building nuclear power to replace the coal and oil they burn domestically for electricity the more coal and oil they can export. Of course they will claim it's all about "going green", but it's really about making more money. I don't much care why they build more nuclear power, only that they do so because that means cleaner air and stronger economies in the long run.
Small reactors have all the same problems as large reactors without any economy of scale. Consequence, they cost more per Wh and therefore will never proliferate.
Then put multiple small modular reactors on a single site. You do that and you spread out the engineering costs that used to be for 1 or 2 reactors and now have it spread over 6 or 8. With multiple reactors on one site you'll then also share overhead like engineering, maintenance, administration, security, and so on. Do that and watch nuclear power "proliferate".
Nuclear power is barely profitable as it is,
Do you know why that is? Because EVERYTHING is "barely profitable".
If nuclear power demanded too much in profit then they'd go out of business, just like anything else. Profit margins on a lot of the products we buy are very low, but they make it up in volume. This goes for nuclear power, the profit margin on every kWh produced is very small but when a single reactor produces 1.21 GW for 8000 hours in a year that adds up to a lot of money.
and like coal it's already only profitable if you get to ignore externalities like the environmental impact of uranium mining, and of waste disposal.
Go look at how much mining has to be done for wind and solar compared to nuclear power. You think that doesn't have an impact? One thing we found out is that as we mine for the materials needed for wind and solar we get a lot of radioactive material in the tailing piles. That's because common dirt is mildly radioactive and if you take out the not radioactive stuff for making concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, and so forth, that concentrates the radioactive stuff in what's left over. What do you propose we do with that? Australia figured this out, they sell the radioactive leftovers to other nations for them to refine as fuel. It would be nice to see Australia build their own nuclear power instead of selling this uranium to China and Japan but at least they aren't making piles of radioactive dirt.
Then look at the fatalities caused by each energy source. Notice anything? That tiny little bar on the graph next to "nuclear"? That's right, nuclear is safer than any energy source we have. They even included some disputed deaths from past nuclear accidents to get the number that high.
And decommissioning has fixed costs as well as scaled costs, and already consistently costs more than estimated (and budgets) at construction time. Now multiply the number of reactors, and see how costs expand...
If costs keep going up, and even higher estimates don't account for that, then what happens if they estimate the cost to be negative? I've wondered about that.
The reason costs keep rising is this concept of ALARA. That's "as low as reasonably achievable". This means they take a reading on how radioactive something is and make note of that. The next time this is done they ask, "can you get lower radiation than you did before?" Which of course the answer is always yes, because it's always possible to get lower radiation, it just costs more. So with every iteration the costs go up, the radiation goes down, and now we have "radioactive sites" with lower radiation than Grand Central Terminal. The granite blocks that they used to build a train station is more radioactive than the "radioactive areas" at some of these sites.
There's another concept in radiation safety, NORM. That's "naturally occurring radioactive material", which is regulated differently than other radioactive material. I guess because "natural" radiation is safer than "artificial" radiation. This is bullshit of course, a gamma is a gamma and an alpha is an alpha. Because the people that mine coal and the rare
Let's say I concede the point, that the DOE got the materials needed for solar power off by an order of magnitude you still have on a per megawatt-hour basis....
Solar power requires 3 to 10 times the materials compared to nuclear, depending on how you want to do your math. (And it would be more like 30 times if I don't concede this point.) Solar power causes 4 to 4000 times as many fatalities. (Here's another source for that: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... ) Solar power has the same to 10 times the CO2 output as nuclear, depending on who you ask. (This shows solar has about 3 times CO2 output over nuclear: https://energy.utexas.edu/news... This shows solar and nuclear at near parity: https://www.carbonbrief.org/so... )
As for cost... I can't seem to find a straight answer. I'll search and keep finding sources from nuclear power advocacy places where they show nuclear is cheaper than solar. When I look for data from places that advocate for wind, solar, and hydro, they don't mention nuclear power at all. That in itself is quite telling. There's those studies from a place called Lazard that give wildly varied numbers on solar power based on the specific type and they include a warning not to compare intermittent energy, like wind and solar, to dispatchable energy, like nuclear and natural gas.
This warning from Lazard to compare solar power costs to nuclear become apparent when looking at the paper from Conley and Maloney where they compute that just the backup power in natural gas, or storage from pumped hydro, would cost double to 5 times the generation capacity from nuclear. Again, that's the cost to match the solar supply to the load, before the costs of the actual solar power generation is added. Again I'll give the link: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
To defend your point on material needs you gave a pamphlet on a do-it-herself solar power kit that looks like something someone would prop up at a campsite, not a permanent install done by professionals.
So, if I concede the point on materials needed, and agree the DOE was off by as much as an order of magnitude, then it still doesn't look that great for solar. Would you like to go into the other points against solar now?
Your first link is ridiculous. Those figures are absolutely not right, at least for solar power. They seem to overestimate the material requirements for solar by a factor of about three, maybe somewhat more for rooftop installations. Somebody screwed up structural numbers there.
First, that chart is from the United States Department of Energy. I'm not aware of them being a bunch of cheerleaders for nuclear power.
Second, assuming what you say is true that still leaves quite the margin on material savings for nuclear. It's pretty safe to assume that materials like concrete and steel cost the same whether that be for solar or nuclear, so that leaves a lot of savings on material costs to cover things like labor, engineering, and licensing costs. Costs that can be reduced with economy of scale. Rooftop installations may reduce the cost of materials for not needing as much additional structure to anchor the panels but it will increase labor costs for having to do more moving about from rooftop to rooftop, and time in lifting the panels onto those rooftops. Solar economy of scale only kicks in when it's a bunch of panels on a large and flat piece of land.
Third, you gave nothing as a reference to back up your claim. It's a very weak claim at that given my first and second points.
I think we need to understand that nuclear power failed in the United States because of the market.
Correct, natural gas drove most everything else out of the market. That won't last forever. We are already seeing the price of new nuclear go down as old plants go offline and new ones come online.
It proved itself expensive and unreliable.
If that's what you believe then you didn't read anything I linked to.
And that was without considering the permanent waste storage problem that we still haven't solved.
The storage problem has been solved. All we needed was a POTUS and Secretary of Energy that wanted the problem to be solved. The problems are all political. We'll just need new politicians to smooth over the problems further. I give that about 6 months.
There are lots of tortured arguments from proponents for why nuclear power is better than wind or solar.
Then you read nothing I linked to. Give your own links refuting these "tortured" arguments.
But both those technologies continue to be cheaper to build and more reliable in operation.
I have no doubt they will get cheaper but as of right now nuclear is already cheaper than both, require far less labor and material, and we simply cannot wait for wind and solar to catch up.
Until that changes, it doesn't matter whether it floats or not, nuclear power is going to remain at the bottom of the list for new investment.
Then you haven't been paying attention. There's plenty of new nuclear construction all over the world and plenty more planned for the near future.
As for the "material" used by nuclear power, have you ever been to an open pit mine? Yes, it probably requires digging up less material than a coal mine for similar output. But why would we care?
You should care because wind and solar take easily 100 times as much material for the same energy as nuclear. We can likely see improvements in wind and solar technology but nuclear power is just as likely to improve as well.
Maybe wind and solar is our future, our distant future. As of right now nuclear power is the only viable option we have to provide electricity that is both inexpensive and low in CO2 emissions.
The STORAGE needed for a wind and solar solution would cost at least double the PRODUCTION of the nuclear solution. With wind and solar the production would cost at least what the storage costs. That's four times what nuclear costs with just storage and production. Then there are issues of needing a "smart grid" to move all this energy around to where it is needed, and the land it would take to put these windmills and solar collectors.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quoting the sibling post because it's got some good information that's being ignored out of a lack of moderation points for ACs.
That "rando" is Dr. Ripu Malhotra. I put his name in Google and found his author bio on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Ripudam...
His "Cubic Mile of Oil" blog is his means to updates to the book he co-authored of the same name.
https://www.amazon.com/Cubic-M...
I believe this is an authoritative source.
Here's another "rando" that also happens to have a doctorate degree in how the environment works. Dr. Patrick Moore. He was a founding member of Greenpeace but left after they lost their sight on the science behind their motives.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/food...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Greenpeace hates chlorine, because chlorine was used as a weapon in World War One. Well, it's chlorine that keeps municipal water systems safe for drinking. Chlorine is the basis of many medicines. Just like we use nuclear technology to fight cancer, diagnose diseases, explore the universe, and provide safe and plentiful energy. But, because we also used nuclear technology to make weapons, we have groups like Greenpeace opposing nuclear power. Dr. Moore likes nuclear power and he's convinced me to like nuclear power.
I'll take the words of two people with doctorates on the merits of nuclear power over a bunch of "randos" on the internet. Maybe if people stopped to look at the science instead of the hysteria from Greempeace then we'd have a much better world to live in.
But what do I know, I'm just some "rando" typing on a computer in his basement. Don't listen to me, listen to Dr. Malhotra and Dr. Moore.
But you have to build windmills to maintain the industry.
You mean like how we have to keep building nuclear power to maintain the industry?
We were building nuclear power around the world like mad 40 or 50 years ago and then... we stopped. People have become fearful of nuclear power because it's a mystery to them. We have accidents like at Fukushima because the people that know how they work retired, have gone senile, or died. When we need experts to fix what's broken we are finding that the best people for the job are over 80 years old or under a headstone.
I keep hearing on how decommissioning costs for nuclear power keep rising. Well, that's what happens when there is a lack of expertise and infrastructure. Then there's the complaints on having no place to put the waste. That's what happens when funding for facilities to process and dispose of this waste gets held up in congressional "debate" for THIRTY YEARS ! This isn't a problem that just appeared, our grandparents were talking about this. A quick Wikipedia search will show that the US federal government has been looking at Yucca Mountain as a potential disposal site since 1957, and approved it as a site in 1987. The government should have been able to start packing this hole in the ground with waste in 1998.
Nuclear power is expensive now because we killed the industry 40 years ago. We can make it cheaper if we only spend the money to build the infrastructure, just like we did with wind and solar. The longer we wait the more expertise in this field is lost. Claiming that we will never need this expertise again is simply false. All those nuclear power plants in operation now will have to be shut down and torn apart at some point, because nothing lasts forever. We'll need a place to dispose of the waste. People will have to become experts in this. We can train these people now or we can have them learn on the job, where mistakes can cost lives.
Because we stopped maintaining this nuclear power industry there's a shortage of medical isotopes for treatment and diagnostics. NASA is running short of their supply of reliable radiothermal generators for exploration. Missions failed because they tried to rely on solar power instead. If they had some strontium or plutonium to keep the electronics warm and powered up then we'd know more about the solar system now.
Nope, we can't have "nu-ku-lar" because... reasons. Since we lost all we learned from previous mistakes we will just have to repeat those same mistakes.
Yeah, numbers bigger than 8 confuse me too!
Oh my god! What happened to your thumbs?
Right, let's get this straightened out. Just like we did with planet "Urectum".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Nuclear is more expensive. It's that simple.
Then we should subsidize it until it's cheaper. If that works for other low CO2 energy sources then it should apply to nuclear as well.
Nuclear power also works at night, in high winds, in no winds, when it's raining, cold, hot... okay maybe it has to reduce power when it gets really hot. That's why we need a mix. Pick energy that's cheap, low CO2, and safe. The top three on that is onshore wind, hydro, and nuclear, not necessarily in that order. Then comes things like (also not in any particular order) geothermal, biomass fuels, off shore wind, and concentrated thermal solar. (Cite on CO2 emissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Solar PV is just a bad idea all around. Anyone that thinks that PV is cheap is only looking at the subsidized cost, the real cost is very high except when laid out flat on a field. Putting PV on rooftops might mean not losing any area of value but it can multiply the cost by five times. (cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) Solar power isn't all that safe either, considering how many industrial accidents there are per real energy produced. Solar PV is also very resource intensive. (cite: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... )
If people believe that solar and wind can get cheaper if we will it so and throw enough money at the problem then we can do the same to make nuclear cheaper.
If nuclear power costs too much then lower the price. It's that simple.
France exports its CO2 production to the uranium mines.
Just like how the UK exports its CO2 production from wind to the mines for the copper, steel, aluminum, and rare earth metals?
Looks like off shore wind and nuclear are at a tie on greenhouse gas emissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The UK already has had problems with too much wind power and has been paying wind farms to sit idle.
https://www.express.co.uk/news...
That's assuming the wind farms weren't producing power anyway, or forced to shutdown because of high winds.
https://stopthesethings.com/20...
HIGH WINDS!?!?!?!? They had to turn off the devices to collect power from the wind because the wind was too powerful.
Do you really believe that the people that do these calculations don't consider the CO2 from the uranium mining? Nuclear and wind produce 1/2 the greenhouse gases of concentrated solar power and 1/4 of that from solar PV. Solar is just a bad idea. Wind is only a good idea if there is some storage to go with it. For that I like hydro, it's not as good as wind and nuclear on GHG emissions but both wind and nuclear need storage and so it would be wise to use the means of storage with the best record on cost and GHG emitted.
Where have I lied? How about instead of attacking the messenger you debate the message.
Here's just one of many places showing nuclear power to be safe. Go see figure 3.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Seriously? You argument pro Pu-239 is that it can be used as a weapon? I hope you are trolling, because if that's not the case you are either insane or a complete idiot.
If I had not mentioned its use as a weapon then I'd be accused of lying by omission, do you want me to lie?
The emphasis should be on the use as a fuel, especially for the use in molten salt breeder reactors like LFTR-49.
https://articles.thmsr.nl/the-...
LFTR-49 will burn plutonium as fuel and in the process produce U-233, a fuel worthless for making weapons. This makes plutonium far more valuable as a fuel than as a weapon. LFTR style reactors don't produce plutonium like current solid fuel reactors do. Depending on how the LFTR manages the transuranic elements it will produce no plutonium or produce plutonium so contaminated with lighter and heavier isotopes that it would be nearly worthless for weapon production.
The only way to destroy this plutonium is in a reactor. What some politicians would like to see is "downblend and dispose". This means taking the weapon grade and reactor grade plutonium we have and mixing it with a bunch of spent fuel and other stuff to make it hard to process back out, and then drop it in a hole. A hole by the way Democrats have been denying funds to dig.
So, what do you propose we do with all this plutonium that's been piling up? And the weapons with plutonium in them?
I suggest we use it as fuel. This can mean downblending as part of turning it into fuel to discourage it being diverted into weapons. Downblending alone does not prevent this from being turned into weapons in the future, as it only makes refining more expensive, not impossible. The only way to destroy it is consume it in a reactor. While we do that we may as well produce electricity, more fuel, valuable medical isotopes, and isotopes valuable for space exploration.
So why don't we have a highly advanced program that handles nuclear waste instead of it piling up at reactor sites around the world?
Because Democrats.
The Democrats prevented the processing of old weapon cores into fuel for nuclear reactors meaning the USA did not hold up it's end of the deal with Russia to reduce stockpiles of plutonium. USA had a deal with Japan on dealing with their stockpiles of plutonium and so now Japan has waste piling up. The Democrats held up the Yucca Mountain disposal site since 1987, so our waste is piling up at home. Democrats in the USA are why we have waste piling up at reactor sites all over the world.
The Republicans are in power, they aren't building nuclear power plants or even considering it.
The NRC has been dominated by Democrat appointed commissioners for at least 8 years, and Trump's appointments didn't get on the commission immediately after he got into office. Just how quickly do you think that they can issue licenses and ramp up on construction after 40 years of sitting on their thumbs? Give it time.
Maybe you should stop reading what they claim and start reading what they do.
It is possible to lie with words, but not with actions.
That is why it has been irresponsible to vote Republican for the last 50 years.
Well, the Republicans have been in power for nearly 2 year now and we are seeing some of the lowest unemployment, huge growth in the economy, and reductions in taxes. That's just a few off the top of my head. If that's what "irresponsible" looks like then I want more.
A nuke plant might operate for 60 years. All the waste must be safely stored. Storage is not free, and security is expensive.
A hydroelectric dam will last that long too, as will a coal fired power plant. These sites must also be kept secure. Storing the spent fuel on the same site as the nuclear power plant is common practice, meaning the storage may not be "free" but it is minimal and included in the cost of constructing and maintaining the site. If the Democrats hadn't been holding up nuclear material disposal sites like Yucca Mountain for 30 years we'd have had this problem solved. There is no storage problem but what the Democrats created.
Some of the waste becomes safe in 30 years,
Actually 30 years is the half life of some of the more dangerous isotopes. A "rule of thumb" on when this becomes safe is ten half lives, so more like 300 years.
but Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.
First of all Pu-239 is a very valuable material for nuclear fuel and weapons, storing this as "waste" is idiotic. Second, the radiation flux is an inverse of the half life. The longer the half life the less radiation it emits in a given time period. With a half life this long it is effectively inert. It's still a heavy metal and so should be handled with care, much like one would treat lead. it's also something that is not known to blow away, dissolve in water, or otherwise move from where it's put. There's far more dangerous isotopes to deal with than Pu-239.
That sort of kills any idea of "cheap in the long run." In the long run, the short run, any way you slice it, nuclear power is the most expensive way to generate electricity ever conceived, and will remain so.
Really? Perhaps you could provide a source for that. Oh, and include the storage costs for that wind and solar, because that's going to be necessary to match load to supply.
That said, we still need nuclear power and will need it for probably 100-250 years, and we should be building more plants. But eventually, sooner than later, the entire nuclear industry must be decommissioned and mothballed, because we have safer, cleaner, greener, less complicated and less expensive ways to generate electricity.
100 years? Well, that's convenient. That's something no one reading this could ever confirm on their own. In that time we'd probably find a way to deal with all the radioactive waste we produce now and nuclear power will be powering colonies on Pluto or something.
On a per kWh produced basis the subsidies for solar power is far greater.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
Look at the pie chart here on where the USA gets it's electricity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You'll see that nuclear provides nearly 20% of our electricity. Wind less than 6%. Solar is producing so little energy that it doesn't even get broken out separately, and is just "other". Biomass produced more electricity than solar, and that's mostly just coal plants "greenwashing" their operation by mixing in some sawdust and wood chips in with the coal so they can claim to be "green".
Whatever little is spent on solar makes a large difference on the subsidies per kWh since the output from solar is so small. If you scroll down that Wikipedia page some more you will find that solar makes up about 2% of installed capacity and nuclear makes up about 10% of installed capacity. Again, nuclear produces 20% of the electricity but solar is less than 1%. To replace a single 1 GW nuclear power reactor we would need to have 4 GW of solar power capacity.
The US federal government has been subsidizing solar power for decades with very little to show for it. You think nuclear power is getting corporate welfare? Look at solar. There wouldn't be a solar power industry if the federal government hadn't been propping it up all this time.
You know all this already and are just pushing your false reality again.
Yep, just "fake news" from us nuclear power advocates. If solar power made such great business sense then why demand the subsidies? I'll find that solar power advocates rarely lie about anything, just as what you posted appears to be true. What happens with great regularity is the lie by omission. By telling only half the story, giving all the "pros" and none of the "cons", solar power looks pretty good. It's easy to reveal the half truths though.
I used to tear into wind too for their subsidies but it looks like we are actually seeing some return on that investment. I'd like to see the wind subsidies go away, as I would for all energy subsidies, but it's solar that is not giving much for even the little it gets in "corporate welfare".
It's been getting real hard to portray nuclear power as unsafe in recent years. Calling it "dirty" is getting real hard as well. Now it seems that people rely on half truths of the costs of nuclear power. How long will it take for the truth on that to become clear? Then what argument can be made to not build more nuclear power?
There is R&D happening on nuclear power, just not so much in the USA.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has a reputation as a capable regulator with many decades of experience in safe nuclear plant design review and operations oversight. It also has a process that is amenable to technologies that use nontraditional fuels and coolants.
Sweden, the original home of LeadCold, has similar remote areas and a capable regulator, but it is currently lead by a government that doesn't support nuclear energy development.
As Senator Murkowski made clear during Governor Perry's confirmation hearing to become the new Secretary of Energy, Alaska has communities with similar power needs. Unfortunately, the U.S. NRC has not yet implemented an acceptable process for reviewing nuclear reactor designs that use coolants other than water.
If people in the USA want to see more nuclear power then vote, and vote for people and political parties that support nuclear power. I've read the party platform documents from both the Democratic and Republican national committees. In the Democrat platform I recall seeing the word "nuclear" only once, and that was in reference to nuclear weapons. The Republican platform nuclear power was mentioned as one of many ways to achieve cleaner air and energy independence. I also remember a debate between McCain and Obama when they were running for POTUS. Obama made some happy mouth noises about research but McCain said we need to start building nuclear power. It's quite clear where the support lies among politicians, vote accordingly. Perhaps the two parties have had their stance on nuclear power evolve since I last looked but recent events tell me it's unlikely there's been a big change. This isn't the "far left" opposing nuclear power, this opposition is far more widespread than that.
We can throw a bunch of money at nuclear power research but nothing can provide funding and experience like private industry actually building real and actual reactors. The argument for wind and solar subsidies was made on the same premise, that nothing drives development of a technology like shipping product.
I'd like to see fourth generation nuclear reactors being built too. Seeing more third generation nuclear would please me greatly though. We aren't going to see fifth generation nuclear power, almost by definition, until fourth generation reactors have reached some kind of maturity. Again, nothing can mature a technology like shipping product. I believe that there is a lot of life in third generation nuclear yet, as it is quite safe and offers means to slow the production of nuclear waste and perhaps even consume some of the waste we already have.
Indeed. Objecting to nukes because of safety is silly.
Objecting to nukes because of economics makes much more sense. They are far too expensive, and the cost is going up while the cost of solar, wind, and storage is falling.
I've seen the economics and here's a report that seems to get cited often:
https://www.lazard.com/media/4...
On the second page of the PDF there's a chart showing that solar is indeed quite inexpensive compared to nuclear. There is also a warning at the top of the graph that costs addressing the intermittent nature of solar and wind were not taken into account. Solar power with storage is not cheap, and neither is putting solar on rooftops. Solar power is only cheap when there is no storage (meaning reliance on things like hydro, natural gas, and internal combustion diesel engines) and when placed in large open fields close to the ground. Wind is cheap, and will likely still see some gains in getting cheaper yet, but it has problem with being intermittent as well. Wind is not considered safe enough to put near inhabited areas and, while it does not displace cropland and grazing areas like solar would, it's not something people will put on their rooftops either.
That Lazard study and articles like the following explaining the safety and resource needs of solar tells me that there is not much future in solar power.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Solar is complicated, expensive, and when compared to other energy sources available to us it's really not that great on safety and CO2 output. What really kills solar, by my estimation, is the resources needed. We'd be far better off with wind, hydro, and nuclear.
If you want to make an economic case against nuclear then I'd like to see the costs from storage. If you say that the storage costs will come down in a decade to be affordable then I'm fine with waiting. The question then is, what do we do until then? Keep burning coal? I say we build nuclear power plants. The claim has been that solar and wind prices will come down with economy of scale. Would that not also be true for nuclear? Japan, South Korea, and France, all saw costs go down by standardizing their nuclear power. In the USA we kept building a bunch of reactors by the ones and threes and so costs stayed high. Stop doing that and costs go down.
Here's a couple experts in the field that did a study on the costs of storage and it's not a pretty picture they paint. The storage alone for wind and solar would cost much more than an equivalent supply of energy from nuclear power.
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
The "Roadmap To Nowhere" authors make it clear that an all nuclear power grid is not ideal or perhaps even possible, they just use that as an intellectual exercise. I recognized this as well, we'll need something other than nuclear, and to me wind and hydro are far better options in nearly every case than solar. As it is now, today, solar is a bad idea. Until that changes we'll need something that's cheap, reliable, safe, low in CO2, and something we can deploy in quantity today. Solar scores poorly on all metrics.
Prove to me that solar and storage can compete and I'll change my mind.
The first two were found in the basement turbine room a few days after the accident. But if "out of Fukushima" implies "out of" as opposed to "in", sure.
Those deaths were not due to radiation. Best guess is that they sheltered there from the tsunami but the wave flooded the room and they drowned, and the radiation came later. A possible radiation link to their death would be they drowned in radioactive water, meaning that if they died from acute radiation poisoning then it only killed them sooner and would have drowned anyway. In either case it was the tsunami that killed them and any possible link to radiation in the cause of their death is ambiguous at best.
The article in on the first confirmed death from radiation that came from the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The other two deaths were not confirmed to be related to the radiation as a more likely cause is the turbine hall being flooded and they drowned.
What I find rather disturbing in all of this is that they knew of a risk of a tsunami flooding the plant but dug out several meters of dirt and rock to lower the plant closer to sea level. Some of that might have been necessary since the bed rock was eroded and unstable but they still dug deeper than many deemed necessary to make it easier to bring in building materials from ships, and to make the cooling pipes to the sea shorter (and therefore cheaper).
When issues were discovered TEPCO dragged their feet to make changes to address threats of flooding. The possibility of the diesel backup generators getting flooded was known. They still had power available from the grid to drive cooling pumps, and batteries. The triple redundant safety systems failed because no one could fathom something so large that it could take out the grid, render the generators unusable, and do so with such damage that it could not be repaired before the batteries ran dead.
This one in a million occurrence of events happened and we still saw only one confirmed death from radiation. Is nuclear power dangerous? Of course. Nuclear power is also the safest energy source we know of. Japan doesn't have a lot of options on getting electricity where they are. They don't have a lot of land for putting up solar collectors and windmills, or much for hydro power. They shipped in a lot of coal while they checked out all their reactors and this impacted air quality. Had they kept doing that then they'd see far more deaths from air pollution.
Nuclear power doesn't live in a vacuum, if it's not nuclear power then it's something far more deadly.
Fukushima and Chernobyl both exploded.
Those were nuclear power plants built in the 1960s and 1970s. You know what was also built at that time? A lot of things, I know that. What comes to mind are the De Haviland Comet and Ford Pinto. The Comet was known to fall from the sky without explanation, and the Ford Pinto of the time was known to burst into flames with minor accidents. Does this mean we should stop flying jets and driving cars?
We don't build nuclear reactors today like we used to in the 1970s, just like the planes and cars we build today aren't like what we used to build in the 1970s. There's a lot of old nuclear reactors from the 1970s operating today, and it would be nice to see them replaced with something more efficient and safer. It would be so much easier to do so if we didn't have idiots that thought nothing has changed in nuclear power since Bee Gees released "Stayin' Alive".
Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have. Safer than even wind and solar. That doesn't mean we should rely on nuclear as our only energy source, but it does mean we should make it part of our energy solution.
Why I like nuclear power:
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Who is defending coal plants?
I'm guessing the people that have to choose between coal power and no power.
I'll defend coal because it is cheap, reliable, plentiful, very low tech, and therefore the only choice for many people all over the world. If you don't want people to burn coal you'll have to do better than hand out solar panels and batteries. These people will also have to be able to maintain these on their own or they will simply be abandoned in no time.
Much of the world today has technology much like the USA and Europe had somewhere in between 1850 and 1950. That means coal, hydro, wind, but not much for solar power. The USA didn't see solar power as anything practical until at least the 1970s, and that's being generous. We saw practical nuclear power before we saw practical solar power.
If we want to lift people out of poverty, and do so without coal, then it's not going to be with solar power. Hydro will only work if there is enough water flowing to build a dam. Wind is pretty good at a lot of things but without cheap storage, like perhaps a water reservoir to pump water to a higher potential energy, this energy is not reliable. You can't have a modern society without reliable energy supplies.
If it's not coal then it's going to have to be nuclear. Whatever you have to say against nuclear means nothing if the alternatives are not reliable, inexpensive, and cannot be maintained with hammer and wrench technology. It would be nice we we could just drop in a silicon PV fabrication plant, gobs of high tech chemical production plants to make batteries, and all the electronics needed to run them, but that's not going to happen overnight. Nuclear power won't happen overnight either but if you have a society that can manage coal power and hydroelectric dams then you got people and infrastructure real close to building nuclear power. That's really really close to having nuclear power.
Get a damn clue.
Then clue me in. I asked a very honest question with sincere curiosity. Germany has stated an intent to reduce its CO2 output by closing coal fired power plants. I see that is happening. What is also happening is the construction of new coal fired power plants. What is the capacity of these old plants compared to the new? Is this just closing down two coal plants only to build a new one that's twice their size, and therefore changing nothing in how much coal is burned?
I cannot take a nation's commitment to reduce CO2 output when that same nation has a commitment to abandon nuclear power. While it may be possible to do both it will be quite difficult as shown on this web page:
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
And this website:
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
And this website:
https://www.withouthotair.com/
And here:
https://www.brightnewworld.org...
I see plenty of people on Slashdot talking about how solar power is inexpensive today, but no one seems to actually say how much it costs. Let's see some numbers. But first I'd like to see the numbers on coal power, because that's the biggest producer of CO2. Replace coal with most anything else and CO2 output is reduced. I'm not seeing Germany even doing that, and if someone could help me find some numbers then I'd appreciate that. Numbers of plants closed and opening is meaningless without knowing the size of the plants. Put it numbers my 11 year old nephew can understand, he wants to be an engineer some day.
2. Renewable energy can't provide a significant proportion of the energy we need. Clearly it can, especially in areas of high growth like India and China and Africa.
For me to take this seriously I'll need to hear how you define renewable energy. Here's the definition of renewable energy I found in my dictionary app:
energy from a source that is not depleted when used
Taken strictly nothing meets this definition since even solar energy is being depleted when used, as is it's derivative forms in wind and water, since the sun is expected to run out in a few billion years. If we mean "renewable" to mean energy that is so plentiful that we could not expect to run out in millions of years then that means wind, sun, water, and nuclear.
Yes, I include nuclear power as a renewable energy source.
Just in the seawater alone there are billions of tons of uranium, and meeting all the energy needs of the planet today would mean several thousand tons of uranium per year. There's far better places to get uranium than from the sea but for any nation with access to the sea means access to an effectively unlimited supply of energy in uranium. Any nation that can mine coal can also mine uranium and thorium for nuclear power. In fact in many cases just mining coal ash for uranium and thorium would mean getting far more energy than was obtained from burning the coal.
Take a look at the charts on this web page:
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
From there I can see that nuclear power has the lowest CO2 output of any other energy source available. Nuclear power takes far less resources than any other energy source. Also, from those charts, you can see that nuclear power causes far fewer fatalities per energy produced. From there I can also see that solar power is a very bad idea.
I like wind and hydro because at least those are relatively inexpensive compared to solar. When talking about developing nations, where they lack much in the ability to produce and maintain the electronics needed for photovoltaic systems, they can at least build wind and hydro in spite of the extra resources needed over nuclear. Wind and hydro are very low tech energy sources, with low CO2, relatively reliable, and far safer than coal or oil. Solar power compared to any other energy source is very complex, resource intensive, expensive, and unreliable. Hydro power is also has by it's very nature the means to store energy inexpensively. Wind power doesn't have to turn a generator to produce useful work, it can pump water to a reservoir behind a dam for drinking water and/or electricity, and do so with centuries old technology.
When considering a country that is just now learning how to harness energy from coal, oil, and hydro, it seems to me that nuclear is far easier of an energy source to harness than solar. If a nation can build massive concrete dams to hold back a river, build boilers for coal, harness steam and running water to turn a turbine, then they have most everything they need technologically and in infrastructure to harness nuclear power.
Solar power is near worthless for a developing country. With solar power we'd be handing them a bunch of batteries and PV panels like fish, from which they can eat for a day. Hand them wind, hydro, and nuclear, and they can get their own fish and eat forever.
Except in Germany they built two new ones and closed six old ones, so there were 4 fewer than before... And the new new ones were more efficient too boot.
That means nothing. I'll give an example from my growing up on a dairy farm. Dad had four corn wagons but sold three of the wagons to buy two to replace them. How much more or less corn can he move at a time? You don't know because I gave no indication on the size of the wagons. If I now add that the wagons sold could carry 8 tons, and the new ones can carry 16 tons, and the one he kept could carry 12 tons, you now have a much clearer picture on how he's increased his ability to move corn.
How big were the six plants that were closed? How big are the two new ones that were opened? If the old ones were 250 MW and the new ones 1500 MW then how does that help in their CO2 production? Maybe they burn more efficiently, and produce less soot, and provide for district heating, and all kinds of other benefits, but that doesn't necessarily mean less CO2 will be produced. I'm sure Germany will see cleaner air and less expensive electricity with shiny new coal plants, but that's not the issue here. At least not the only issue.
Germany talks big about their CO2 reduction plans but it's easy to see that their CO2 reductions in recent years have been minimal to nothing. Also, they've created an energy plan that makes them increasingly dependent on foreign trade (in electricity itself, or in coal, natural gas, oil, and other fuels). Germany is not some model to follow, because if everyone followed their model of relying on their ability to buy and sell electricity with neighboring nations to manage the intermittent power they get from wind and solar then everyone would see their electrical grid collapse.
So, again, tell me how big these coal plants are and maybe I'll believe you that Germany is serious about reducing their reliance on coal for electricity.
Oh, and I know the USA isn't exactly a model on CO2 reduction either. In fact no one is really taking CO2 reduction seriously. If they were then they'd be building nuclear power plants to replace coal. There are nations building nuclear power and most of these nations are exporters of coal and oil, and by building nuclear power to replace the coal and oil they burn domestically for electricity the more coal and oil they can export. Of course they will claim it's all about "going green", but it's really about making more money. I don't much care why they build more nuclear power, only that they do so because that means cleaner air and stronger economies in the long run.
Small reactors have all the same problems as large reactors without any economy of scale. Consequence, they cost more per Wh and therefore will never proliferate.
Then put multiple small modular reactors on a single site. You do that and you spread out the engineering costs that used to be for 1 or 2 reactors and now have it spread over 6 or 8. With multiple reactors on one site you'll then also share overhead like engineering, maintenance, administration, security, and so on. Do that and watch nuclear power "proliferate".
Nuclear power is barely profitable as it is,
Do you know why that is? Because EVERYTHING is "barely profitable".
If nuclear power demanded too much in profit then they'd go out of business, just like anything else. Profit margins on a lot of the products we buy are very low, but they make it up in volume. This goes for nuclear power, the profit margin on every kWh produced is very small but when a single reactor produces 1.21 GW for 8000 hours in a year that adds up to a lot of money.
and like coal it's already only profitable if you get to ignore externalities like the environmental impact of uranium mining, and of waste disposal.
What's the externalities on wind and solar? Here's a web page that gives some idea on that.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Go look at how much mining has to be done for wind and solar compared to nuclear power. You think that doesn't have an impact? One thing we found out is that as we mine for the materials needed for wind and solar we get a lot of radioactive material in the tailing piles. That's because common dirt is mildly radioactive and if you take out the not radioactive stuff for making concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, and so forth, that concentrates the radioactive stuff in what's left over. What do you propose we do with that? Australia figured this out, they sell the radioactive leftovers to other nations for them to refine as fuel. It would be nice to see Australia build their own nuclear power instead of selling this uranium to China and Japan but at least they aren't making piles of radioactive dirt.
Then look at the fatalities caused by each energy source. Notice anything? That tiny little bar on the graph next to "nuclear"? That's right, nuclear is safer than any energy source we have. They even included some disputed deaths from past nuclear accidents to get the number that high.
And decommissioning has fixed costs as well as scaled costs, and already consistently costs more than estimated (and budgets) at construction time. Now multiply the number of reactors, and see how costs expand...
If costs keep going up, and even higher estimates don't account for that, then what happens if they estimate the cost to be negative? I've wondered about that.
The reason costs keep rising is this concept of ALARA. That's "as low as reasonably achievable". This means they take a reading on how radioactive something is and make note of that. The next time this is done they ask, "can you get lower radiation than you did before?" Which of course the answer is always yes, because it's always possible to get lower radiation, it just costs more. So with every iteration the costs go up, the radiation goes down, and now we have "radioactive sites" with lower radiation than Grand Central Terminal. The granite blocks that they used to build a train station is more radioactive than the "radioactive areas" at some of these sites.
There's another concept in radiation safety, NORM. That's "naturally occurring radioactive material", which is regulated differently than other radioactive material. I guess because "natural" radiation is safer than "artificial" radiation. This is bullshit of course, a gamma is a gamma and an alpha is an alpha. Because the people that mine coal and the rare
Let's say I concede the point, that the DOE got the materials needed for solar power off by an order of magnitude you still have on a per megawatt-hour basis....
Solar power requires 3 to 10 times the materials compared to nuclear, depending on how you want to do your math. (And it would be more like 30 times if I don't concede this point.)
Solar power causes 4 to 4000 times as many fatalities. (Here's another source for that: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... )
Solar power has the same to 10 times the CO2 output as nuclear, depending on who you ask.
(This shows solar has about 3 times CO2 output over nuclear: https://energy.utexas.edu/news...
This shows solar and nuclear at near parity: https://www.carbonbrief.org/so... )
As for cost... I can't seem to find a straight answer. I'll search and keep finding sources from nuclear power advocacy places where they show nuclear is cheaper than solar. When I look for data from places that advocate for wind, solar, and hydro, they don't mention nuclear power at all. That in itself is quite telling. There's those studies from a place called Lazard that give wildly varied numbers on solar power based on the specific type and they include a warning not to compare intermittent energy, like wind and solar, to dispatchable energy, like nuclear and natural gas.
This warning from Lazard to compare solar power costs to nuclear become apparent when looking at the paper from Conley and Maloney where they compute that just the backup power in natural gas, or storage from pumped hydro, would cost double to 5 times the generation capacity from nuclear. Again, that's the cost to match the solar supply to the load, before the costs of the actual solar power generation is added. Again I'll give the link: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
To defend your point on material needs you gave a pamphlet on a do-it-herself solar power kit that looks like something someone would prop up at a campsite, not a permanent install done by professionals.
So, if I concede the point on materials needed, and agree the DOE was off by as much as an order of magnitude, then it still doesn't look that great for solar. Would you like to go into the other points against solar now?
Your first link is ridiculous. Those figures are absolutely not right, at least for solar power. They seem to overestimate the material requirements for solar by a factor of about three, maybe somewhat more for rooftop installations. Somebody screwed up structural numbers there.
First, that chart is from the United States Department of Energy. I'm not aware of them being a bunch of cheerleaders for nuclear power.
Second, assuming what you say is true that still leaves quite the margin on material savings for nuclear. It's pretty safe to assume that materials like concrete and steel cost the same whether that be for solar or nuclear, so that leaves a lot of savings on material costs to cover things like labor, engineering, and licensing costs. Costs that can be reduced with economy of scale. Rooftop installations may reduce the cost of materials for not needing as much additional structure to anchor the panels but it will increase labor costs for having to do more moving about from rooftop to rooftop, and time in lifting the panels onto those rooftops. Solar economy of scale only kicks in when it's a bunch of panels on a large and flat piece of land.
Third, you gave nothing as a reference to back up your claim. It's a very weak claim at that given my first and second points.
I think we need to understand that nuclear power failed in the United States because of the market.
Correct, natural gas drove most everything else out of the market. That won't last forever. We are already seeing the price of new nuclear go down as old plants go offline and new ones come online.
It proved itself expensive and unreliable.
If that's what you believe then you didn't read anything I linked to.
And that was without considering the permanent waste storage problem that we still haven't solved.
The storage problem has been solved. All we needed was a POTUS and Secretary of Energy that wanted the problem to be solved. The problems are all political. We'll just need new politicians to smooth over the problems further. I give that about 6 months.
There are lots of tortured arguments from proponents for why nuclear power is better than wind or solar.
Then you read nothing I linked to. Give your own links refuting these "tortured" arguments.
But both those technologies continue to be cheaper to build and more reliable in operation.
I have no doubt they will get cheaper but as of right now nuclear is already cheaper than both, require far less labor and material, and we simply cannot wait for wind and solar to catch up.
Until that changes, it doesn't matter whether it floats or not, nuclear power is going to remain at the bottom of the list for new investment.
Then you haven't been paying attention. There's plenty of new nuclear construction all over the world and plenty more planned for the near future.
As for the "material" used by nuclear power, have you ever been to an open pit mine? Yes, it probably requires digging up less material than a coal mine for similar output. But why would we care?
You should care because wind and solar take easily 100 times as much material for the same energy as nuclear. We can likely see improvements in wind and solar technology but nuclear power is just as likely to improve as well.
Maybe wind and solar is our future, our distant future. As of right now nuclear power is the only viable option we have to provide electricity that is both inexpensive and low in CO2 emissions.
IOW, less than what 1/10 of what your system will cost.
No, read the study. Here's the link again:
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
The STORAGE needed for a wind and solar solution would cost at least double the PRODUCTION of the nuclear solution. With wind and solar the production would cost at least what the storage costs. That's four times what nuclear costs with just storage and production. Then there are issues of needing a "smart grid" to move all this energy around to where it is needed, and the land it would take to put these windmills and solar collectors.
I'll also bring this back again, nuclear power has a lower CO2 output than wind and solar.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Why is anyone so opposed to nuclear power? It's safe, clean, inexpensive, reliable, and domestically sourced.