The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/business/energy-environment/nuclear-power-westinghouse-toshiba.html
39 comments
Running it is cheap, but the large costs of construction and decommissioning that bookend a plant's lifespan mean you need a really, really long and mostly trouble-free operating life for the overall amortized costs to look good. At least with conventional large-scale plants. There are alternatives [e.g., 1] that might change that aspect of the economics, if they turn out to be feasible (politically and otherwise).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
It's also not "clean" -- just ask the Navajos, for example.
As for my experience, figuring out what to buy and what not, in Munich in the months after Chernobyl. Apples from Tirol were found to contain significantly higher levels of fallout -- one thing that happens to stick in my mind, because I was eating them until I learned this.
And wild mushrooms, particularly from Eastern Europe? Forgetaboutit -- fungii were concentrating fallout up to 400 times (not percent, but 400-fold).
A good friend cooked a meal containing wild mushrooms from her family back in Poland. I felt I had to pass on it.
Granted, coal-based energy spreads heavy metals around, and forests were taking it on the chin from acid rain before scrubbers and switching to coal supplies containing lower levels of sulfur -- primarily, as I recall, in the U.S. being "hard coal" from deposits/mines in western states. Global warming was a concern back then, but it hadn't entered the knowledge of the larger general public.
Everything has trade-offs. That includes nuclear, and we shouldn't be calling it "clean".
Like the heavy metals from coal burning, a significant concern is the very long-term nature of the pollution that does result, and that, with current and immediately foreseeable technology, said pollution is "irreducible".
CO2 warms things, but it doesn't directly poison them nor leave the ground infertile or unusable. Organic toxins can, largely, with enough will and investment literally be burned away -- at least, until you spread them out over the soil. If you have a vat of e.g. dioxin, you can -- carefully -- burn it away. Just make sure you burn ALL of it; one erstwhile proposal for such disposal was to inject the waste into a molten metal mass in a disposal "reactor" with careful monitoring and filtering of the exit gases.
We haven't yet achieved significant alchemaic control. Heavy metals stay heavy metals, and radio-nucleotides keep their own schedules of decay. Once spread around the environment, we are left quarantining that environment -- either wholesale, or where possible by scraping off the contaminated bits/layer and quarantining that.
A more immediate-term solution may be better concentrating and/or filtering mechanisms, for separation of such contamination from the environment it's dispersed through. (As one example, natural or engineered biological concentration and harvesting.)
Maybe nuclear is better than the wholesale smog that kills millions each year, and that used to kill many more in the U.S. but still takes probably hundreds of thousands a year.
But I'm not willing to call it "clean".
And given some of the potential, catastrophic risks, I'm not prepared to call it "better".
P.S. Another, primary concern I have with nuclear, is that no human society has demonstrated continuity and consistent reliability on the kind of timeframes required to manage current nuclear technology and its waste.
Even if a properly handled device is perfectly safe, do we have any guarantees -- or even real, high-likelihood hopes -- that humans will properly handle it (and its waste) until it is effectively retired or neutralized?
As for my experience, figuring out what to buy and what not, in Munich in the months after Chernobyl. Apples from Tirol were found to contain significantly higher levels of fallout -- one thing that happens to stick in my mind, because I was eating them until I learned this.
And wild mushrooms, particularly from Eastern Europe? Forgetaboutit -- fungii were concentrating fallout up to 400 times (not percent, but 400-fold).
A good friend cooked a meal containing wild mushrooms from her family back in Poland. I felt I had to pass on it.
Granted, coal-based energy spreads heavy metals around, and forests were taking it on the chin from acid rain before scrubbers and switching to coal supplies containing lower levels of sulfur -- primarily, as I recall, in the U.S. being "hard coal" from deposits/mines in western states. Global warming was a concern back then, but it hadn't entered the knowledge of the larger general public.
Everything has trade-offs. That includes nuclear, and we shouldn't be calling it "clean".
Like the heavy metals from coal burning, a significant concern is the very long-term nature of the pollution that does result, and that, with current and immediately foreseeable technology, said pollution is "irreducible".
CO2 warms things, but it doesn't directly poison them nor leave the ground infertile or unusable. Organic toxins can, largely, with enough will and investment literally be burned away -- at least, until you spread them out over the soil. If you have a vat of e.g. dioxin, you can -- carefully -- burn it away. Just make sure you burn ALL of it; one erstwhile proposal for such disposal was to inject the waste into a molten metal mass in a disposal "reactor" with careful monitoring and filtering of the exit gases.
We haven't yet achieved significant alchemaic control. Heavy metals stay heavy metals, and radio-nucleotides keep their own schedules of decay. Once spread around the environment, we are left quarantining that environment -- either wholesale, or where possible by scraping off the contaminated bits/layer and quarantining that.
A more immediate-term solution may be better concentrating and/or filtering mechanisms, for separation of such contamination from the environment it's dispersed through. (As one example, natural or engineered biological concentration and harvesting.)
Maybe nuclear is better than the wholesale smog that kills millions each year, and that used to kill many more in the U.S. but still takes probably hundreds of thousands a year.
But I'm not willing to call it "clean".
And given some of the potential, catastrophic risks, I'm not prepared to call it "better".
P.S. Another, primary concern I have with nuclear, is that no human society has demonstrated continuity and consistent reliability on the kind of timeframes required to manage current nuclear technology and its waste.
Even if a properly handled device is perfectly safe, do we have any guarantees -- or even real, high-likelihood hopes -- that humans will properly handle it (and its waste) until it is effectively retired or neutralized?
You raise some decent points and I'm not going to reply to them all, however, consider that there is also medical radioactive waste. Should we abandoned all of our imaging equipment and radio-medical treatments because we can't handle the waste?
CO2 is a poison, in a way. Excessive CO2 has lead to increasing acidification in the oceans, which has resulted in death of coral and fish. There have been other costs but I am not up to snuff on climate change as some. I do know it is a negative-feedback processes, as these events occur the rate only increases. It will increase even more once methane has been released from the frozen ground and from beneath ice sheets.
I don't think we'll solve it any time soon. I see us driving straight into that brick wall. It's the way the majority of us operate, there's not enough people wanting to change our outcome.
CO2 is a poison, in a way. Excessive CO2 has lead to increasing acidification in the oceans, which has resulted in death of coral and fish. There have been other costs but I am not up to snuff on climate change as some. I do know it is a negative-feedback processes, as these events occur the rate only increases. It will increase even more once methane has been released from the frozen ground and from beneath ice sheets.
I don't think we'll solve it any time soon. I see us driving straight into that brick wall. It's the way the majority of us operate, there's not enough people wanting to change our outcome.
I'm not arguing we get rid of all use. I do think we should stop calling it "clean" -- at least and especially in this simplistic political and marketing sense.
Even solar and wind are not entirely "clean".
There are initial capitalization and resource consumption to construct them. There are noise and other disturbances that cause some near wind farms considerable stress and ill health. Wind farms disturb the lower level atmosphere and there are questions about what effects this creates. There are open questions about how "clean" necessary storage technologies will be.
These should be known and discussed.
One frustration after Chernobyl, was that the (Western European, not to mention Eastern and Soviet) public became concerned whether they were being told the truth by their own governments. In some cases, governments were apparently at least hedging in public communications -- afraid of panic as well as backlash against their own energy programs.
Anyway, I don't entirely know why I originally commented. I didn't bring up a particularly novel counter-argument nor set of facts.
But that "clean" moniker that gets attached to (extant) nuclear (fission) power. It gets under my skin. Because even before you talk about accidents or attacks, there's a lot about it that's not clean. From the mining to the processing (they still don't know how they are going to manager the Hanford complexes in Washington State; to the best of my recollection, the now "cleaned" Rocky Flats in Colorado still poses considerable challenges; etc.) to the whole issue of waste...
I also have another argument. The actual supplies of accessible and extractable ores are limited (though less so for thorium, another possible source). If and as we have alternative energy sources for everyday life and economy, perhaps we should be husbanding those limited and extraordinary resources for potential future use. What if they do become the one viable route / power source for larger scale space travel? Maybe we will need them -- at least until and to jump-start off-planet mining to obtain other sources.
And, nascent large-scale solar and wind production are and can be made more decentralized. This even has security implications; I keep running across arguments in favor of a distributed, decentralized, hard-to-knock-out energy/power network. (Something that can also pertain to self-servicing/autonomous smaller scale local nuclear reactors, once they are in place and running.)
And yeah, I did skip going into what CO2 becomes, once it starts reacting with the environment. Fair point.
I think we are going to keep some nuclear fission power production, but that economics are already pushing us away from large expansion of it.
I hope that will also reduce incentives and the effectiveness of efforts to "cleanse" its image and externalize significant aspects/costs of its use.
Even solar and wind are not entirely "clean".
There are initial capitalization and resource consumption to construct them. There are noise and other disturbances that cause some near wind farms considerable stress and ill health. Wind farms disturb the lower level atmosphere and there are questions about what effects this creates. There are open questions about how "clean" necessary storage technologies will be.
These should be known and discussed.
One frustration after Chernobyl, was that the (Western European, not to mention Eastern and Soviet) public became concerned whether they were being told the truth by their own governments. In some cases, governments were apparently at least hedging in public communications -- afraid of panic as well as backlash against their own energy programs.
Anyway, I don't entirely know why I originally commented. I didn't bring up a particularly novel counter-argument nor set of facts.
But that "clean" moniker that gets attached to (extant) nuclear (fission) power. It gets under my skin. Because even before you talk about accidents or attacks, there's a lot about it that's not clean. From the mining to the processing (they still don't know how they are going to manager the Hanford complexes in Washington State; to the best of my recollection, the now "cleaned" Rocky Flats in Colorado still poses considerable challenges; etc.) to the whole issue of waste...
I also have another argument. The actual supplies of accessible and extractable ores are limited (though less so for thorium, another possible source). If and as we have alternative energy sources for everyday life and economy, perhaps we should be husbanding those limited and extraordinary resources for potential future use. What if they do become the one viable route / power source for larger scale space travel? Maybe we will need them -- at least until and to jump-start off-planet mining to obtain other sources.
And, nascent large-scale solar and wind production are and can be made more decentralized. This even has security implications; I keep running across arguments in favor of a distributed, decentralized, hard-to-knock-out energy/power network. (Something that can also pertain to self-servicing/autonomous smaller scale local nuclear reactors, once they are in place and running.)
And yeah, I did skip going into what CO2 becomes, once it starts reacting with the environment. Fair point.
I think we are going to keep some nuclear fission power production, but that economics are already pushing us away from large expansion of it.
I hope that will also reduce incentives and the effectiveness of efforts to "cleanse" its image and externalize significant aspects/costs of its use.
At the moment, there is nothing cleaner than solar or nuclear. I don't know what you think clean is but it's not the same as everyone else.
De-centalizing the grid brings it own set of issues. One will be cost of actual infrastructure. Two, management of the power flow. Three, energy storage during non-production hours. It can be done but at what cost? Everything has trade-offs.
De-centalizing the grid brings it own set of issues. One will be cost of actual infrastructure. Two, management of the power flow. Three, energy storage during non-production hours. It can be done but at what cost? Everything has trade-offs.
If you were to track radioactivity released by human activity to the actual environment, a coal plant releases more than a nuclear plant.
It's actually a pretty fun argument: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-pla...
It's actually a pretty fun argument: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-pla...
> But, if a war breaks out and someone bombs a nuclear reactor, it will be messy to clean up the mess.
Still will be environmentally cleaner than a coal plant with no war breaking out and nobody bombing it.
...Even when we add the war itself to the nuke side.
(...Well, unless we do have a nuclear war. Then all bets are off.)
Edit: What, do I look flippant? Here are statistics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
> A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000, mostly from an estimated 3% increase in cancers which are already common causes of death in the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
> Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
Compare this with:
http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e...
> Air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the U.S. (...) Emissions from road transportation are the most significant contributor, causing 53,000 premature deaths, followed closely by power generation, with 52,000.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/asia/china-coal-hea...
> Burning coal has the worst health impact of any source of air pollution in China and caused 366,000 premature deaths in 2013, Chinese and American researchers said on Thursday.
In short, (a year of operating coal plants, without accidents) > (worst nuclear disaster mankind has witnessed), by an order of magnitude (or two).
Still will be environmentally cleaner than a coal plant with no war breaking out and nobody bombing it.
...Even when we add the war itself to the nuke side.
(...Well, unless we do have a nuclear war. Then all bets are off.)
Edit: What, do I look flippant? Here are statistics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
> A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000, mostly from an estimated 3% increase in cancers which are already common causes of death in the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
> Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
Compare this with:
http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e...
> Air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the U.S. (...) Emissions from road transportation are the most significant contributor, causing 53,000 premature deaths, followed closely by power generation, with 52,000.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/asia/china-coal-hea...
> Burning coal has the worst health impact of any source of air pollution in China and caused 366,000 premature deaths in 2013, Chinese and American researchers said on Thursday.
In short, (a year of operating coal plants, without accidents) > (worst nuclear disaster mankind has witnessed), by an order of magnitude (or two).
I initially downvoted, undid it, then wrote this reply.
A fleet of many coal plants operating normally kills more people than one nuclear plant accident. A nuclear reactor that is bombed during war (or otherwise suffers catastrophic loss of containment) is not environmentally cleaner than one coal plant of comparable capacity operating normally. Nuclear power is safe by the numbers, but you have to use the right numbers.
If reactor containment failed more often then reactors wouldn't be any better for human health than fossil power plants. It's because they are designed and run with such care that they have such a good environmental and safety record, on average. I was reacting partially to something that you haven't said that I've heard all too often in discussions like these: reactors are so safe, we should get rid of these burdensome regulations so they can be affordable too. It's the "burdensome" attention to detail that makes nuclear so safe. If the nuclear industry had the same cavalier cowboy attitude to safety as the coal mining industry, it would be an environmental disaster.
But you didn't actually call for deregulation, and just making a poorly worded numerical comparison isn't enough for a downvote. I apologize for that.
A fleet of many coal plants operating normally kills more people than one nuclear plant accident. A nuclear reactor that is bombed during war (or otherwise suffers catastrophic loss of containment) is not environmentally cleaner than one coal plant of comparable capacity operating normally. Nuclear power is safe by the numbers, but you have to use the right numbers.
If reactor containment failed more often then reactors wouldn't be any better for human health than fossil power plants. It's because they are designed and run with such care that they have such a good environmental and safety record, on average. I was reacting partially to something that you haven't said that I've heard all too often in discussions like these: reactors are so safe, we should get rid of these burdensome regulations so they can be affordable too. It's the "burdensome" attention to detail that makes nuclear so safe. If the nuclear industry had the same cavalier cowboy attitude to safety as the coal mining industry, it would be an environmental disaster.
But you didn't actually call for deregulation, and just making a poorly worded numerical comparison isn't enough for a downvote. I apologize for that.
We had a massive uncontrolled release of radioactivity at Fukushima and before then Three Mile Island and Windscale and Chalk River and no one died.
They don't even need exclusion zones as big as they have if you think we should let people live in Denver.
They don't even need exclusion zones as big as they have if you think we should let people live in Denver.
Your argument is a strawman.
The alternative is generally natural gas, not coal. With some exceptions, coal is generally a legacy technology.
The alternative is generally natural gas, not coal. With some exceptions, coal is generally a legacy technology.
Not at all. Operations are relatively cheap, but when you amortize the capital costs that get dumped on ratepayers, it's not cheap at all.
That's not even including the costs associated with decommissioning that eventually get dumped on the taxpayer indefinitely.
That's not even including the costs associated with decommissioning that eventually get dumped on the taxpayer indefinitely.
Do you mean cheap (to some extent) to build, or cheap to operate?
I like to assess energy sources by the numbers, and by the numbers nuclear power is safe enough (far safer than continuing to burn fossils). By the numbers, new reactor builds are also slow and expensive, with the one notable exception of South Korea's KEPCO. (China and Russia sometimes also get cited as examples of countries that can still do nuclear power "right," but neither is particularly transparent with domestic projects nor particularly inexpensive/quick with projects they offer to build abroad.) Ten years ago Japan and France looked like they did nuclear right also. Then Fukushima tanked the Japanese nuclear industry and the ongoing disaster of EPR construction took France off the list.
France's fame as a country that did nuclear right is also a bit tainted by recent revelations of problems with component quality and forged quality control reports: http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla...
I should probably also mention falsified nuclear documentation in South Korea that surfaced a few years ago, in fairness to France: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Indictments_for_South_K...
Maybe small modular reactors will make nuclear power attractive again. Or maybe even big, expensive, slow reactors will seem relatively attractive some decades from now after national grids are already saturated with as much renewable electricity as they can reasonably use. (Though even that is subject to receding horizons if bulk electricity storage gets cheaper over time.) It's really hard to see anything that will make nuclear power more competitive over the next 10 years in Japan, the Americas, Oceania, or Europe. (South Korea, China, and the Middle East and North Africa -- I expect to see continued if not particularly fast nuclear growth in these regions.)
I had thought that the AP1000 looked like a pretty incrmental, conservative, easy-to-build choice for new reactors. Builds are well behind schedule in both the US and China, and the costs are escalating too. My personal guess is that the 4 reactors now under construction in the US will not make the 2020 deadline to qualify for the new-reactor tax credits that have been available since 2005. My guess is also that all the institutions that got burned building these 4 will dissuade new US orders, so any lessons painfully learned on this first wave will not ease the construction of another wave of reactors; the lesson learned will just be "don't try to build reactors."
China's leadership can plan for the long term because there are no electoral politics nor elections. The same goes for Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt where I also expect to see nuclear growth. In the heyday of France's nuclear build-out, there was something similar offering stability: EDF was a state owned electricity monopoly for all of France, and didn't have to worry about competition or the short term. Since the monopoly ended in 1999 France has only started building one new reactor, the disastrously late and over-budget Flamanville-3. With a monopoly I could imagine this being a painful lesson that nonetheless eases construction of more EPRs. Without a monopoly I think that this expensive education will be wasted, like the skills relearned from the current AP1000 projects will be wasted in the US.
Just add these nuclear industry woes to the very long list of reasons that the world is not on track to stabilize the climate with emissions cuts alone, and will need active carbon dioxide removal measures later this century or sometime in the 22nd, assuming that industrial civilization remains intact.
France's fame as a country that did nuclear right is also a bit tainted by recent revelations of problems with component quality and forged quality control reports: http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla...
I should probably also mention falsified nuclear documentation in South Korea that surfaced a few years ago, in fairness to France: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Indictments_for_South_K...
Maybe small modular reactors will make nuclear power attractive again. Or maybe even big, expensive, slow reactors will seem relatively attractive some decades from now after national grids are already saturated with as much renewable electricity as they can reasonably use. (Though even that is subject to receding horizons if bulk electricity storage gets cheaper over time.) It's really hard to see anything that will make nuclear power more competitive over the next 10 years in Japan, the Americas, Oceania, or Europe. (South Korea, China, and the Middle East and North Africa -- I expect to see continued if not particularly fast nuclear growth in these regions.)
I had thought that the AP1000 looked like a pretty incrmental, conservative, easy-to-build choice for new reactors. Builds are well behind schedule in both the US and China, and the costs are escalating too. My personal guess is that the 4 reactors now under construction in the US will not make the 2020 deadline to qualify for the new-reactor tax credits that have been available since 2005. My guess is also that all the institutions that got burned building these 4 will dissuade new US orders, so any lessons painfully learned on this first wave will not ease the construction of another wave of reactors; the lesson learned will just be "don't try to build reactors."
China's leadership can plan for the long term because there are no electoral politics nor elections. The same goes for Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt where I also expect to see nuclear growth. In the heyday of France's nuclear build-out, there was something similar offering stability: EDF was a state owned electricity monopoly for all of France, and didn't have to worry about competition or the short term. Since the monopoly ended in 1999 France has only started building one new reactor, the disastrously late and over-budget Flamanville-3. With a monopoly I could imagine this being a painful lesson that nonetheless eases construction of more EPRs. Without a monopoly I think that this expensive education will be wasted, like the skills relearned from the current AP1000 projects will be wasted in the US.
Just add these nuclear industry woes to the very long list of reasons that the world is not on track to stabilize the climate with emissions cuts alone, and will need active carbon dioxide removal measures later this century or sometime in the 22nd, assuming that industrial civilization remains intact.
Thank you for your well-written comment.
I just want to that I think it's unlikely new big reactors will have a place in a grid with plenty of renewables. You're going to have a hard time making the ends meet up if you can't sell all the power the reactor produces, and that won't happen as it can't beat the marginal costs of wind turbines or solar panels.
Burning biomass, biogas or some sort of mass storage will be much cheaper.
Regarding the latter, in Denmark the former CTO of Siemens Wind Power has devised a plan for heated stone storage. So you heat the stone with electricity to around 600 degrees C and can thus use the heat to drive a turbine later. Last I heard another company in Denmark recently got EU funding to build a demonstration plant. (Not saying this will be the future, just putting it out there for people who think the only alternatives are hydro and chemical batteries.)
I just want to that I think it's unlikely new big reactors will have a place in a grid with plenty of renewables. You're going to have a hard time making the ends meet up if you can't sell all the power the reactor produces, and that won't happen as it can't beat the marginal costs of wind turbines or solar panels.
Burning biomass, biogas or some sort of mass storage will be much cheaper.
Regarding the latter, in Denmark the former CTO of Siemens Wind Power has devised a plan for heated stone storage. So you heat the stone with electricity to around 600 degrees C and can thus use the heat to drive a turbine later. Last I heard another company in Denmark recently got EU funding to build a demonstration plant. (Not saying this will be the future, just putting it out there for people who think the only alternatives are hydro and chemical batteries.)
My personal guess is that you are right and that large reactors will not find any more popularity after renewable penetration reaches high levels. But I want to keep alternative scenarios in mind even if I consider them unlikely. Ten years ago I also thought that fluid hydrocarbon prices (both oil and gas) were going to stay high, if they didn't just keep climbing, but the shale revolution upended that expectation. If any of the miraculous-on-paper new reactor designs being pitched by evangelists ever perform up to expectations in real life that could make nuclear power a low-cost electricity source again.
I know that public opinion and environmental activism are often cited as reasons for nuclear power's failure to thrive in the developed world, and there's some truth to that. But I also think that if new reactor designs ever live up to the hype of producing the cheapest electricity around, they will become widespread despite opposition from activists. For a parallel, again look at the shale revolution. Fracking is vocally opposed by environmentalists and celebrities (many ordinary members of the public too), but it still grew rapidly because it actually delivered lower cost energy to buyers. The fact that nuclear keeps failing to deliver low costs/predictable construction schedules is a bigger factor in its weak market prospects than opposition by Greenpeace. Greenpeace opposes many things and usually fails to stop them.
I know that public opinion and environmental activism are often cited as reasons for nuclear power's failure to thrive in the developed world, and there's some truth to that. But I also think that if new reactor designs ever live up to the hype of producing the cheapest electricity around, they will become widespread despite opposition from activists. For a parallel, again look at the shale revolution. Fracking is vocally opposed by environmentalists and celebrities (many ordinary members of the public too), but it still grew rapidly because it actually delivered lower cost energy to buyers. The fact that nuclear keeps failing to deliver low costs/predictable construction schedules is a bigger factor in its weak market prospects than opposition by Greenpeace. Greenpeace opposes many things and usually fails to stop them.
[deleted]
I'm not against nuclear power, but the U.S. was a pioneer in this tech and it still required massive support from the weapons industry to even get as much implementation as it has. I don't believe this is solely on either the tech or the anti-nuke power movement, but rather has to do with how large and distributed the U.S. is geographically, which makes each plant being a custom build job in many places with not enough nearby consumers to give any savings from scale.
Add to that, the fact that you have so many levels of government approval before you can break ground, and the high initial cost to build a plant, and you're basically left with a system that can only gain traction with some organisation like the military pushing it through.
Add to that, the fact that you have so many levels of government approval before you can break ground, and the high initial cost to build a plant, and you're basically left with a system that can only gain traction with some organisation like the military pushing it through.
Too bad this article mentions nothing about the future of LFTR reactors (Thorium).
Thorium reactors have too much going on inside the reactor, and a radioactive chemical plant outside it. The history of nuclear reactors indicates that plants with anything complex going on inside run into problems. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Helium reactors leak. Pebble bed reactors jam. Boring old water reactors are about all that can be made to work for decades.
Running a radioactive chemical plant usually results in a toxic waste site. All three US reprocessing plants are now major toxic waste sites.
Running a radioactive chemical plant usually results in a toxic waste site. All three US reprocessing plants are now major toxic waste sites.
Boring old water reactors are about all that can be made to work for decades.
After being shut down by the Clinton administration in 1994 (as was its follow-on IFR program), disassembly showed no meaningful wear or damage to its hardware.
"In controlled testing in 1986, with the EBR-II reactor running at full power and the emergency shutdown systems disabled, the reactor's supply of electricity was intentionally turned off, causing the coolant pumps to stop. This is a worse scenario than what happened in the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. (At Fukushima, which began operation in 1971, the emergency shutdown system turned off the reactor as soon as it detected the earthquake. However the tsunami destroyed the electric generators powering the coolant pumps, which needed to continue running after the reactor shutdown. Subsequently, the core overheated and meltdown occurred.) EBR-II, in contrast, handled the event without creating a dangerous situation. EBR-II had a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity that shut down the reactor when the temperature increased due to loss of the coolant pumps; the time required to heat the large pool of sodium surrounding the reactor provided a sufficient time buffer for the passive decay heat removal system to prevent the EBR-II reactor from melting down. The safe shutdown of the EBR-II relied only on the laws of physics and did not require operator or control system intervention."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...
This reactor was 1/50th the scale of a typical power reactor. The radiation, thermal-hydraulic, and chemical environment of a full-scale reactor is different. Different stress corrosion interactions, severe oscillating stresses due to thermal-hydraulic fluctuations at assembly outlets... The operational record of such reactors hardly supports them as foolproof or economical versus the best modern water reactors.
Researching thorium all the way to production will cost a lot of money. For the same money, we could do a lot of research into new storage ideas and solar thermal, which thus far has been disappointing in production, but does make storage easier.
I'll bet that no new nuclear plants will be built in my lifetime nor in my children's lifetimes.
So strange you're downvoted when you're correct. Why spend billions on a nuclear plant that'll take a decade to build when you can deploy solar, wind, and battery storage at a lower cost and a tenth the time?
The economics simply do not work for nuclear, and I'd expect all nuclear generators in the US decommissioned by 2030.
The economics simply do not work for nuclear, and I'd expect all nuclear generators in the US decommissioned by 2030.
It's not strange to see downvotes, IMO. Industry spends a tremendous amount of money and resources attacking our more sustainable energy future with rampant FUD. They want to milk their current infrastructure for as long as it's profitable for them.
Sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about alternative, more sustainable energy sources (and storage) has gone on for decades and has had a very pervasive, toxic effect on general discourse of the matters.
Sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about alternative, more sustainable energy sources (and storage) has gone on for decades and has had a very pervasive, toxic effect on general discourse of the matters.
Nuclear is still the future, just maybe not the immediate future... Unless we have a massive breakthrough in transmission and storage. I see it as gap between solar and wind to meet emergencies and peak loads.
It is the future in a parallel universe where solar panels don't cost $0.40 per watt and aren't falling at 30% per year.
That suggests they will be $0.20/watt in two years. That will make them too cheap to ignore for almost everything.
Given how expensive nuclear is, running it for emergencies and peak loads is not a good economic plan. Given that concrete generates a lot of carbon, you're better off using natural gas peaker plants.
... except for that pesky CO2 emission problem.
... all that concrete in the nuclear reactor emits a lot of CO2 when the reactor is built. If you don't use the nuclear reactor for anything but peaking, you're not going to amortize that CO2 emission over a large number of kWH.
You'd never use the nuke as a peaker because it'd cost too much money, but, it's not a good idea in this other way, too.
You'd never use the nuke as a peaker because it'd cost too much money, but, it's not a good idea in this other way, too.
It's far better used for primary generation than as a "peaker" plant.
The optimal energy infrastructure, IMHO, is to use nuclear for baseline needs, then in times of low electrical demand use it for splitting out hydrogen for fuel cell vehicle use and industry.
The optimal energy infrastructure, IMHO, is to use nuclear for baseline needs, then in times of low electrical demand use it for splitting out hydrogen for fuel cell vehicle use and industry.
But, if a war breaks out and someone bombs a nuclear reactor, it will be messy to clean up the mess.