this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Nuclear technologies missed their window. The use cases where they are the best technical solution now are extremely limited, and that means you can get the investment going to improve them.
It’s a curiosity now.
There’s an alternative timeline where Chernobyl doesn’t happen and we decarbonize by leaning on nuclear in the nineties, then transition to renewables about now. But that’s not our timeline. And if it were, it would be in the past now.
From where I stand you couldn't be further from the reality of the situation.
Nuclear has a number of advantages from low carbon output per kilowatt over lifetime as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.
But the real advantage being overlooked is the small foot print and land use compared to other forms power generation. A nuclear reactor is ideal for high density population areas, adding no pollution like fossil fuels and using a fraction of the land that renewables require. And there is room for overlap between renewables and nuclear as well, meaning days where wind or solar would produce more power than usual, its easy to scale back solar production to take advantage of cheaper power, and vice versa for times when renewables aren't going to generate enough to meet demand nuclear can increase their output relatively quickly and effectively.
The future of nuclear is however one of the most important. We are eventually going to be spending humans to other planets, and having mature, efficient and compact forms of power generation with long lifetimes and minimal start up power from idle states is going to be important, solar gets less effective the further from the sun we get, you can't stick a wind turbine on a space craft and expect good results, and you're out of your mind if you want to burn fossil fuels in an oxygen limited environment.
Treating nuclear as more than a curiosity but rather as the genuine lifeline and corner stone of our futures and future generations is significantly more important than fossil fuel profits today and all their propaganda.
The space based nukes paragraph is irrelevant. While I agree with the point thtat it may not only be useful for long term space habitation, it may be required, I don’t see what that has to do with earth based commercial power generation. They’re very different beasts with little overlap. That’s like saying you support corn based subsidies, because we’ll have to grow crops off world: true but not relevant.
Extremely cheap per kilowatt? Every statistic out there that I've seen and that includes government funding, as well as construction and deconstruction costs, paints a different picture. Nuclear is only competitive with coal or the relatively underdeveloped solar thermal.
Emphasis mine, source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power
If you scroll down literally like. A paragraph past that you will see a very nice table showing the spread of nuclear costs. Some (including in the US, which is used for the EIA figures) are quite expensive, but others (notably South Korea) are very much cost-competitive or better than renewables. Also worth noting, the renewable estimates have spread themselves, and do not include overinstallation/storage required to behave as firm power.
Which is to say:
A - there certainly are quite a few places that nuclear doesn't make sense, at least currently. Including the US
B - equally, there are a lot of places around the world where nuclear is competitive
C - we should perhaps look at why the US is so expensive relative to other countries; it's not some law of nature, we can change it. And it's probably not just because other countries under-regulate them (I'd buy that for some of the countries listed)
I specifically picked the statistic that claimed to have included the full cost of installing something new. Most other statistics only include prolonging the life of existing plants, thus ignoring the installation costs completely. You can just quote the paragraphs that prove your point the same way I have and then we can discuss further. Maybe I made a mistake, who knows.
What? How? Far as i know it's the most expensive, with a lot of hidden costs.
When costs are level per kilowatt over lifetime Nuclear is cheaper thanks to economies of scale, it's only more expensive when plants are restricted by local authorities in how much they can produce in a given cycle so that other power generators in the energy sector can fill their contracts. When these artificial caps are removed and the plant is allowed to operate as intended and no kneecapped to allow coal and oil plants to operate at their peak effeciency rates, nuclear drops below .10USD. And thats using outdated equipment and maintaining the absurdly high safety standards saddled upon them despite being the safest form of power production bar none.
Wholesale or retail cost? Either way, that's not especially cheap compared to renewables.
Nuclear may be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space at this point. Granted, that's back of the envelope costs for a hypothetical space based solar system compared to nuclear plants that already exist. But the fact that they're close is not a good sign for nuclear.
Plants will take 10 years to build, at least. If every permit was signed today, there wouldn't be a single GW of this new nuclear going on the grid until 2034. We're aiming for major reduction in CO2 by 2030. Oh, and the huge amount of concrete needed would create a massive spike in CO2 by itself. Timeline issues alone kill nuclear before it starts.
Edit: fixing autocorrect's corrections
Ha, no.
I disagree, a bit.
Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That's basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.
We have four choices:
We can do all of them concurrently, provided there's money for it, but we only give money to the last one.
So how much would it cost to do geothermal to power a city? It must be wildly infeasible if I’ve never even heard it mentioned. Can significant electric generation be had from that?
It's limited in the geography where it could be useful, such as near techtonic plate boundaries. Iceland gets about a quarter of its electricity that way. Some advancements in drilling techniques have made it more viable in more locations.
https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2023/05/is-geothermal-energy-making-a-comeback
Exactly. I live in Utah, which is perfect for nuclear:
So why don't we do it? FUD. We should have a nuclear base with solar and wind helping out, but instead we have a coal base and are transitioning to natural gas. That's dumb. And it's hilarious because we sell electricity to California when their backbone isn't sufficient.
It's probably not the best option everywhere, but it's a really good option in many areas.
A consortium of Utah's utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale's modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn't compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.
I wouldn't sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.
Yeah, I just saw that news, which apparently happened end of last year. The public wants nuclear (or at least a non-coal base power), but projects keep getting delayed or scrapped due to local lawsuits or local governments pulling financial support.
Geothermal is cool, and apparently there's an active project. It should produce 400MW, which is pretty significant, but still a pretty small fraction of total capacity (~9.5GW).
If the Blue Castle project ever finishes, it'll supply ~1.5GW power. That, with geothermal, could take up ~1/4 of the total energy generation, which would be a really good start. I'd also like to see hydrogen production as a "battery" source (produce from solar, burn at night). Looks like that's under development as well.
Lots of interesting things are happening now, I just wish they started 10+ years ago...
Scrapping the NuScale project had nothing to do with lawsuits. Governments pulled their financial support because projected costs were exceeding what was contractually promised, mostly due to pandemic-related supply chain and inflation issues.
This is typical of nuclear. The industry wants to believe its problem is regulation. It's not, at least not if you want to have better safety guarantees than the Soviet Union did. Its problem is that to be safe, nuclear is expensive, and there doesn't appear to be a way out of that.
So, essentially, nuclear power is like airships, except with worse disasters?
More people died in airship incidents than in civil nuclear power.
E: typo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Yeah, read it. Also the article with the discussion on the death toll. 31 immediate deaths 60 attributable in the following two decades
The official WHO estimate with 4000 more cancer deaths until 2050 is based on the disputed LNT model. Even UNSCEAR itself says:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/let-s-separate-the-urban-myths-from-chernobyl-s-scientific-facts-20190705-p524f7.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world
The two airship accidents with the most casualties count together 120 dead (USS Akron and Dixmude).
Mmmm. Looking at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
Roughly I'd say it's at most 200-300 people. Airships just didn't carry many at once.
If you look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_fatalities_by_country
You easily go past the airships estimate. One that surprised me was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
"Estimated 100 to 240 cancer fatalities in the long term"
You can beat airships deaths will just one of big accidents.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
I explicitly wrote "civil nuclear power". I know there were big incidents, especially in early military nuclear sites. Windscale and Kyshtym are two of those.
So we agree, airships and nukes are both outmoded, old tech.
also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties
I never agreed that its outmoded or old tech.
At Fukushima Daichii died one worker of radiation poisoning and one in a crane incident. The evacuation killed 51 more. Scientific consense is, that the loss of life and cumulative lifetime would have been lower if there was no evacuation.
"No evacuation." Have you ever actually talked to people?
You know that nuclear power plant up the road? They just had a big accident, we don't know exactly what's going on, and at least one person is already dead from radiation. But it's fine, and you shouldn't worry or leave the area.
There was a massive tsunami in the area killing almost 20k people, the power plant was not their first concern.
The guy died 4 years after the accident from lung cancer, not very common in nuclear power.