The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a large part of the remains will need to be stored safely for millenia as well. This is the opposite of sustainability and fairness towards future generations. Worldwide there still exists only a single final storage solution for nuclear waste - in Finland for the finish waste. In densly populated Germany the search for a storage site has been going on since the late 1950s, so far without success. All this on top of the risk of a system failure that would devastate huge territories. In a country where, as we've recently seen, simple emergency warning systems are basically non-existent and fax is still the main communication tool for the authorities...
The Germans have switched from nuclear to coal. Can you cut this "future generations are going to have to carry the cost" when the alternative is literally helping destroy the whole planet's ecosystems? Not to mention they spew up significantly more radioactivity in the air than nuclear powerplants.
A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young generations. Is cancer caused by coal particulates really something you wish on people around you?
In Germany renewables are at over 42% in 2021, despite a 'conservative' government that for decades has blocked the development of windfarms and solar for the benefit of the coal and nuclear lobby. That kind of lobby-work is the actual problem here. The way forward is renewable energy. The huge difference is that the source of renewable energy is free and basically limitless.
Waste is just partially burned fuel. There is only ONE reason why it exists.
We made a political choice that storing partially burned fuel instead of reprocessing is safer than allow people have technology that can also create nuclear weapons.
I agree it would have been better to phase out coal before nuclear, but it's not correct to say that there was a switch from nuclear to coal.
The switch was from nuclear to renewables. Coal was stable for a long time, and is now decreasing. Coal is currently scheduled to be phased out by 2038.
Source: Quick Google image search for the power sources over time plots.
A typical large nuclear plant will produce 3 cubic meters of solid waste in a year. That's a little bigger than a refrigerator.
A lot of solid waste can be reprocessed, though doing so requires regulatory and logistical challenges to be solved that apparently only France has figured out.
Nuclear waste, comparatively, is not the problem. The risk of accidents, proliferation, and the generally higher cost of engineering are. Every energy technology produces waste, too. As others have mentioned, coal-fired plants produce literally thousands of times the radiation of a nuclear plant, blasting that right into the atmosphere in the form of radioactive fly ash, as well as huge amounts of CO2 and particulates. The production of solar panels is not waste free. Nothing is waste free.
The nuclear waste argument is a distraction. Nuclear power, of all the options, all things considered, leaves the smallest scar on the planet of all the options available to us. Solar panels, wind, hydro, they all require land use changes that are a big impact on the planet. Uranium mining is comparatively small in terms of its impact. So IMHO nuclear is the best option.
Nuclear energy kills about zero person per annum. Coal itself kills at least 50000 Europeans every year. Even taking into account the worst case scenarios such as Chernobyl, coal (and fossil fuels generally) is several orders of magnitudes more dangerous than nuclear.
I just don't get this mindset. People prefer killing literaly millions of persons right now while there's a safer alternative. That's incredible, really.
There is a safer alternative in the short term. The two are comparable in the long term for safety. Also "Coal itself kills at least 50000 Europeans every year." is far from a truth. Coal may have increased the chance of death by some amount for at least 50000 Europeans every year is more correct.
The costs of the status quo are also beared upon by us and future generations. Instead of the waste product being contained in a controlled environment, it is dispersed into the atmosphere and breathed in by millions of Germans, where it will continue to warm the world for future generations to attempt to right our wrongs before its too late. Even if emissions stopped globally today, temperatures would continue to rise due to greenhouse effect just from what is already present in the atmosphere. I fear for a world where climate change advances faster than our ability to adapt our foodstocks to it, that world is not as far away as you might think, especially with the left's resistance toward species saving technologies such as nuclear power and genetically modified organisms.
This is a like a preposterous version of the trolley problem ... "The trolley can continue down the nuclear track and maybe, perhaps, kill people far into the future or you can switch to the coal track and continue to kill thousands now and maybe destroy the planet"
> In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries".
I’m sorry but no. The future costs of nuclear are comparatively irrelevant if you consider the immediate doom our climate and thousands and thousands of species are facing because of burning fossil. If a 100 nuclear disasters happen in the next 5 years it will still do less damage than coal.
There is simply no more time, the only option is to stop burning at any and all costs.
The marginal cost of storing a few years worth of spent nuclear fuel doesn't seem that high, as you have to find a place to store the waste already generated anyway. I for one would accept other countries spent fuel to be stored in Finnish bedrock. Might be hard politically, though.
The background issue is that Germans, with their harmful surpluses, all this talk about costs, seem to completely misunderstand economics.
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I get that the Cold War hurt a lot in Germany. I've met my distant relatives stuck on both sides of the iron curtain, for example. That would have made issues of proliferation and whatnot extra salient.
But the fact of the matter is that the environmental problems we face now completely dwarf whatever environmental problems were being chased after then.
You have to realized that when you thought you were fighting the end-game boss, but you were actually fighting the mid-game boss which is the minion and now the big boss has shown up, everything changes.
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Please connect those necessary readjustments to thinking more critically about economics and whole-system things in general, to connect my two points, and we'll all be very happy.
The "hundred thousand years" argument is one I hear a lot, but why do we all assume 1. our civilization will last more than 1,000 years. 2. there will be no new tech to address the issue in the future? The estimated time until catastrophic climate change are MUCH sooner than that.
Oil and gas plants are far worse. They kill tens of thousands TODAY and produce long lasting poisonous waste that affects everyone now.
Nuclear waste is easy to store and not voluminous compared to oil and gas waste. The US for example designated a waste mountain in Nevada that could store all of our waste but is not using it yet due to politics.
Nuclear is FAR safer than oil and gas and even the worst tragedies like Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island did a tiny fraction of the damage oil and gas to every year.
> A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price
People always mention that as an argument. I'm pretty sure that we could figure out a solution if we actually worked on it. Given how far we've come over the last 100 years, I don't see this as a problem that we couldn't solve over the next 100 years.
The only advantage is the reduced CO2 emission, economically nuclear energy isn't viable. Sure, safety regulations play a huge part here, but they aren't optional.
Every form of energy production has disadvantages, but I cannot really say that ending nuclear was a mistake if it isn't just exchanged for coal and I don't believe this is the case. Maybe we could have opted to let remaining plants run for longer, but Germany actually never had that many of them anyway.
Uranium isn't available anywhere and some say it may deplete at some point. I think this problem is not in focus because nuclear is still a small part of overall energy production. But it could very well be a problem, especially if countries increase nuclear.
edit: A bit disappointed in Theo Sommer here. I think he got swept up by wrong information about costs and benefits here. Otherwise a great writer.
edit 2: They just argue to keep plants running, that might be a sensible decision, depends on the numbers.
So, 100 thousand years is not long enough to find a use of disposing nuclear waste but it is enough to try to terraform earth to undo the changes enacted from NOT using nuclear?
There are so many solutions for the safe storage problem and very little research. I believe if we think out of the box, the problem will be solved relatively easily and effectively.
Storing nuclear waste for millennia? How long ago was the first nuclear reactor activated? Do you really think in one thousand (!) years we will be using 2020's technology? In a thousand years nothing we see today will be even vaguely familiar.
The view is based on some false assumptions. Nuclear reactor fuel can be efficiently recycled. Besides, the reason why storage of nuclear fuel is expencive is because nuclear industry actualy takes care of biproducts of operation, unlike other industries that produce equally or more dangerous chemical waste. It is also not true that a system failure would "devastate huge territores". No PWR accident had major consequences on human health, even in Fukushima there were no fatalities from radiation. Statistically nuclear power is the safest form of electricity. The largest storage battery (Australia) can replace a NPP for about 10 seconds. In winter you might have no sun and wind for weeks. This is why you are, and will continue burning fossil fuels in Germany.
Nuclear is problematic, but it should not be phased out as long as there's fossil fuel used in energy generation. All efforts should go into replacing fossil fuels for now.
If you’re referring to Thorium and pebble bed, they’re both not proliferation safe and have their issues with ecological confinement of highly active waste.
So unfortunately they never managed to overcome the initial “should we even seriously try it” cost/benefit analysis
How is something so entirely wrong the top comment on this? Waste storage is not even close to a problem for nuclear and even having the option to store the extremely minimal waste is basically a miracle compared to the disaster that is coal, which stores the waste literally everywhere, including the air we breathe
It's worth noting that nuclear is really expensive when factoring in insurance and disposable, a lot more so than wind and solar.
>The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189.
> Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income … Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. … We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life? …
Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. …
Little did John know the future would bring such wonders as HS2, lockdowns, the Ethiopian spice girls, NHS, a fake property market, ... a very different world.
The electricity that is produced at night is sold cheaper in Germany, as it's mostly not used anyway - mostly because storage is difficult. But since the world is currently being filled with an abundance of large batteries like in electric cars, this energy loss will decrease over time. These batteries could also compensate peaks in demand.
The UK is suffering the most from the drop in wind power output, caused by mild weather. The country, which prides itself on its wind capacity and whose Prime Minister last year said wind farms could power every home by 2030, produced less than 1 GW of wind power on several days. This compares with a generation capacity of 24 GW, according to ICIS senior energy economist Stefan Konstantinov.
Cheap isn't as important as reliable. It's not like these countries have no money.
There is this cycle where this is blamed on a combination of Brexit and global warming, so they want to shift to even more wind/solar, causing even more outages, and it's a positive feedback loop.
One would think that if you seriously believed that the climate is going to rapidly change, then you would seek out climate-independent sources of energy. It's like predicting the world will be in drought but then advocating for more hydro power. But perhaps I don't understand the full nuances of European politics.
I'm reminded of the Tom Scott video mentioning how parts of the grid is simply not up to the task yet to get wind energy from high-wind areas into the mainland.
Solar + 4 hours of storage clocking in at $40/MWh in ideal conditions. Substitute for windpower and some worse conditions and nuclear energy still look awful from a cost perspective.
Nuclear is massive-grid-scale base load only in a world that does not need more base load nor massive grid-scale generation. Everything about nuclear is slow, difficult, expensive, dangerous. They are increasingly not handling climate change well. They are decade-scale projects that take a long, long time to become carbon neutral; we cannot wait that long.
* Solar and wind are here to stay and they mean we need fast-reacting spare capacity and storage. Nuclear power plants are very slow to react and because they are so monumentally expensive they have to run at as high capacity as possible, as much as possible. They are strictly base load.
* Siting a nuclear power plant is very difficult just in terms of geology. Siting a nuclear power plant is very difficult grid-wise as well, because they are only cost-effective at massive scale. Super-high-voltage DC transmission systems can help, but they only tack on more to the project cost. You can't just inject gigawatts of power anywhere you want. And it isn't just injection that is the problem. Nuclear power plants that are not producing power need massive amounts of electricity to get things like cooling pumps running or keep them running until everything is up to temperature and you can get the turbines up to temperature and speed. Then there's the matter of needing sufficient cooling - usually done via river, ocean, or lake. Except climate change and other factors are making those sources of cooling increasingly unreliable (for example: invasive species like zebra mussels have made life hell for a lot of power plants)
* Nuclear power plants require lots of highly trained people to design, operate, and maintain. More power plants means more of them. Training them up isn't a short term affair. Solar and wind require far less of all of this. And frankly, I have serious doubts about societal stability in 20-30 years, and nuclear power plants are not even remotely friendly to any sort of societal instability. Not just in terms of security, but upkeep. They have very complex, deep supply chain needs.
* Building nuclear power plants from the start of planning to grid synchronization takes a decade or two, and it then takes another decade or so for the plant to become carbon-neutral in part due to the massive amount of concrete they require. Right now, we need to be reducing carbon footprint as much as possible, as fast as possible. Not causing huge increases in carbon footprint that will only balance out well past catastrophic climate conditions.
* Nuclear reactor containment vessels can only be constructed by a small handful of facilities and their capacity is very limited, and by and large already spoken for. We can't just wave a wand and start building more reactors tomorrow. Or even in the next several years.
* Nuclear waste may be a "solved" problem tech-wise as nuclear power proponents are fond of saying, but reality is that nuclear waste is a huge problem. Even short-term storage is a problem, as demonstrated, again, by Fukashima where fuel cooling ponds caught on fire.
Time and time again we demonstrate that we are not responsible enough to handle nuclear power; we've had numerous military nuclear power disasters; the commercial ones haven't stopped, either. A "1st world" country, arguably one of the most technologically advanced ones around, repeatedly bumbled every aspect of Fukashima, starting with the plant's design, its maintenance and procedures, and the response to the incident. What was Japan's excuse?
How many Mulligans does nuclear power need?
You know what happens when a solar or wind power plant is incompetently designed or run? A bunch of people lose lots of money. You don't end up with thousands of square miles of land uninhabitable. You don't need people with years of training supervising a bunch of solar panels. Maintenance on a wind turbine is a standard-industrial-equipment sort of job, no bunny suits required.
You know what happens when a country with solar or wind power has a government that is full of incompetent suit-stuffing chair-warming morons, or gets taken over by a despot dictator, or has an economic collapse? Nothing.
If you want to look to the future in power grids, look at the iron chemistry liquid batteries that are non-toxic and almost trivial to deploy at electrical substations. They can provide spare capacity at the neighborhood/regional level while helping balance distribution loads and allow those neighborhoods to continue to function in isolation in the event of transmission grid problems.
For instance, wind requires mining huge quantities of rare earth metals in open-air hellscapes in Mongolia, referred to as "the worst place on earth." [1] The two hundred meter tall towers and their giant blades are also built of fiberglass (an epoxy/glass mix) which cannot be recycled and are instead buried. [2]
Similarly solar panels are often made with cadmium and tellurium, and various other toxic chemicals which leech out of the panels when placed into landfills. The US for instance has no solar panel recycling mandate except in Washington State. The world already has a massive e-waste problem.
By 2050, there will be 78 million metric tons of solar panels to dispose of. [3]
Solar panels then have to be supplemented with vast quantities of lithium for temporary storage.
Solar and wind aren't "green" they're "less black."
Nuclear produces 2000 metric tons of waste per year in the US while amounting to 20% of the entire grid, 0.85TWh per year.
How much does Germany spend on the military? Cancel it, and spend the money on nuclear power. Otherwise Germany has a significant strategic weakness (gas imports) to Russia, its only realistic enemy.
I don't think canceling an already tight military budget in favor of a power source that could be devastating when hit by an airstrike is a good strategy
Time component can’t be disregarded, though. You can build, operate and decommission a wind farm or a solar plant in the time it takes to sell the first watt from a nuclear plant.
Why is nuclear considered in contrast to solar and wind? Nuclear energy will allow humanity to move off of petrochemical energy sources much more quickly and given the looming ecological catastrophe the costs of nuclear energy are very reasonable.
One generally underappreciated aspect to nuclear energy opposition is the intrinsic link to nuclear weapons. Some of it is scientifically illiterate nonsense (a lot of people seem to think power reactors can have a nuclear explosion). And some of it is just historical association. But some of it is a lot harder to dismiss.
A world without nuclear reactors or enrichment facilities is a world without nuclear weapons. Any medium or large industrialized country with power reactors could build nukes very quickly. It's bad enough half a dozen already have. This notion keeps some people up at night, I think. If you consider nuclear weapons to be an existential threat to the species -- perhaps worse than climate change -- then building infrastructure that would allow their more easy construction might seem like madness.
The trend has been to more specific weapons that can pick off the bad guys while missing the civilians. Drones and the like. Hopefully not Slaughterbots.
Would a world where we took initiative to reduce civilian air travel in preference of trains and boats also lead to the military no longer producing fighter jets?
It would do a lot, yeah. Boeing services military and commercial contracts. If instead of commercial airlines taking off (lol) they just.. didn't, then even with an interested military you would have fewer engineers, smaller & poorer companies, just generally less advancement and less production.
Your question is good but it doesn't have the answer you seem to think it does! These things feed into each other, so while it might be unreasonable to say "no commercial airlines means no military air vehicles" (I hesitate to say fighter jet because I do think that would be a casualty), it would also be unreasonable to say that "no commercial airlines means no impact on military air technology".
You might think, hey, the military has got some strong advancements the rest of us don't even know about, whos to say that wouldn't be the case? Well, the people working on that tech went to college and got educations in a field that had employment opportunities, and likely would not have if those opportunities didn't exist. Just think about all the supporting industries that are very specific. The aluminum alloys, the manufacturing methods for these high tolerance parts, the electrical systems, the fuel systems etc. You just aren't going to get very far without a civilian populace implicitly backing the effort.
Nuclear Enrichment is kind of hard actually. Nobody's going to get away with it without others knowing.
The risk if Nuclear Energy proliferation is the waste being used in a dirty bomb.
Nuclear waste spread out in Manhtatten might not kill people, but it could make the city, or parts of it unlivable for a long time. At minimum a big disaster.
So in order for the Nuclear future to work, we'd need to set standards that have teeth.
The issue is not Canada or Germany, it's Venezuela or Colombia where there is corruption, political instability, lack of oversight, and then a local antagonist can sneak in and grab materials. Cover ups, finger pointing, refusing to allow inspectors in lest they assess the level of corruption, it all falls down while the baddies take their stolen gear to other, more ideological bad actors.
There are long term storage issues but I think those can be worked out.
Nuclear Energy is basically free Energy to any group of people civil enough to manage it.
I am calling out my ignorance here, but are there not reactor types that don't require enriched uranium? Sodium-cooled, Molten Salt, etc. I'm curious about the current state of reactor technology and if it addresses your concern.
They all need some enrichment, but then apparently it’s still very hard to go from a civilian reactor to weapons-grade uranium. Just, I guess, much easier than from a heap of coal.
I understand that with adequate supervision from the IEA proliferation is generally a non-issue.
Also, I would expect more positive feelings about existing fission to increase R&D into thorium, fusion, etc., which do not have proliferation concerns.
Then we will continue wringing our hands about the would be nuclear apocalypse while species continue to die, crops fail, seas rise, temperatures warm, and billions of humans starve to death in the mean time. There is justified fear and irrational fear, and this is irrational. It should probably be noted that the firebombing of Tokyo with conventional weapons was more deadly than the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.
It may be pragmatic - but politically tough - to keep the nuclear plants open longer, if that can be done safely, and invest heavily in renewables + storage to take all that awful lignite/coal power generation offline. And phase out the nuclear plants once enough (storage) capacity has been built.
I wonder if people have modeled for how fast that could be done, and how expensive it would be. We have the technology (cf. grid scale storage, there is a fascination array of options, several of which are tried and tested), it's "just" a matter of scaling it up.
Good luck with the Greens now as the #3 party. The authors of the letter are right, Germany will miss its 65% emissions target and politicians will try to fix this with carbon credits and other policy BS which of course doesn't quite work in practice, since clean electricity doesn't come out of thin air.
The discussion and debate about nuclear energy needs to be a constant war of attrition against the long held and stubborn inertia of anti-nuclear sentiment.
This letter signed by 25 "intellectuals" (oddly vague name for writers and journalists) is part of the puzzle insofar as it gets the discussion into the news. But unless there is a sustained conversation which carries the attention of the public and really drives and beats back the misinformation back to the shadows, nothing will change.
The same tired anti-nuclear talking points need to be systemically deconstructed and refuted over and over again until it is pushed into being a fringe belief.
Unfortunately humans are really not set up to have these conversations about "boring" things like global warming and nuclear energy. Unless there is a crisis front and center (like the pandemic) it is hard to reverberate change throughout society.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but watching all this play out is like witnessing a devastating car crash happen in slow motion, and being helpless to do anything to prevent it.
The Cold War takes a lot of the blame: everything from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, to the subsequent ugly arms race, to bomb testing and its environmental effects. Plus events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Generation X kids were born into an era which felt the threat of global nuclear war, and those people are decision makers today.
Frankly, non-nuclear is austerity in disguise. "Too cheap to meter" electricity is like full employment, objectively better but a huge target politically. It's not a coincidence that US gave up on both at the same time.
https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf does justice to the full employment situation, and the same arguments apply. In the econ case it's kind of incredible we filled our minds with nonsense to convince ourselves the thing we had been doing is no longer possible. I suppose the nuclear hysteria served the same roll.
To be clear, I am not trying to argue some sort of conspiracy here. I think it all happened organically, which is frankly even more fascinating. Shows that "truth is endogenous" and the post-modernists had a point long before people whined about Trump.
Why invest into something that will only last 100 years in fuel, take 30k years to deconstruct and may blow into your face at every point in time. Sounds insane.
One of the blocks was really old so I'm glad to see it go. I'm in favor of building new, safer reactors. Bill Gates is an investor in a startup that developed such a design, but it will probably be hard to get it tested.
Readit News
A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young generations. Is cancer caused by coal particulates really something you wish on people around you?
No, they did not. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
Waste is just partially burned fuel. There is only ONE reason why it exists.
We made a political choice that storing partially burned fuel instead of reprocessing is safer than allow people have technology that can also create nuclear weapons.
The switch was from nuclear to renewables. Coal was stable for a long time, and is now decreasing. Coal is currently scheduled to be phased out by 2038.
Source: Quick Google image search for the power sources over time plots.
The future is neither coal, nor nuclear.
A lot of solid waste can be reprocessed, though doing so requires regulatory and logistical challenges to be solved that apparently only France has figured out.
Nuclear waste, comparatively, is not the problem. The risk of accidents, proliferation, and the generally higher cost of engineering are. Every energy technology produces waste, too. As others have mentioned, coal-fired plants produce literally thousands of times the radiation of a nuclear plant, blasting that right into the atmosphere in the form of radioactive fly ash, as well as huge amounts of CO2 and particulates. The production of solar panels is not waste free. Nothing is waste free.
The nuclear waste argument is a distraction. Nuclear power, of all the options, all things considered, leaves the smallest scar on the planet of all the options available to us. Solar panels, wind, hydro, they all require land use changes that are a big impact on the planet. Uranium mining is comparatively small in terms of its impact. So IMHO nuclear is the best option.
I just don't get this mindset. People prefer killing literaly millions of persons right now while there's a safer alternative. That's incredible, really.
And people are choosing to switch.
It's completely unnecessary to do that. So many people have this misconception.
If you combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor you burn up everything, leaving very little waste.
> In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries".
There is simply no more time, the only option is to stop burning at any and all costs.
"Der Graslutscher" has written 6 parts about "Energy transition in 10 years". Sorry it is in german but it is worth reading.
https://graslutscher.de/how-to-energiewende-in-10-jahren-tei...
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I get that the Cold War hurt a lot in Germany. I've met my distant relatives stuck on both sides of the iron curtain, for example. That would have made issues of proliferation and whatnot extra salient.
But the fact of the matter is that the environmental problems we face now completely dwarf whatever environmental problems were being chased after then.
You have to realized that when you thought you were fighting the end-game boss, but you were actually fighting the mid-game boss which is the minion and now the big boss has shown up, everything changes.
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Please connect those necessary readjustments to thinking more critically about economics and whole-system things in general, to connect my two points, and we'll all be very happy.
Nuclear waste is easy to store and not voluminous compared to oil and gas waste. The US for example designated a waste mountain in Nevada that could store all of our waste but is not using it yet due to politics.
Nuclear is FAR safer than oil and gas and even the worst tragedies like Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island did a tiny fraction of the damage oil and gas to every year.
People always mention that as an argument. I'm pretty sure that we could figure out a solution if we actually worked on it. Given how far we've come over the last 100 years, I don't see this as a problem that we couldn't solve over the next 100 years.
Every form of energy production has disadvantages, but I cannot really say that ending nuclear was a mistake if it isn't just exchanged for coal and I don't believe this is the case. Maybe we could have opted to let remaining plants run for longer, but Germany actually never had that many of them anyway.
Uranium isn't available anywhere and some say it may deplete at some point. I think this problem is not in focus because nuclear is still a small part of overall energy production. But it could very well be a problem, especially if countries increase nuclear.
edit: A bit disappointed in Theo Sommer here. I think he got swept up by wrong information about costs and benefits here. Otherwise a great writer.
edit 2: They just argue to keep plants running, that might be a sensible decision, depends on the numbers.
Just bury them to hell: https://www.deepisolation.com/
Deleted Comment
So unfortunately they never managed to overcome the initial “should we even seriously try it” cost/benefit analysis
>The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
-- John Maynard Keynes
Cheap wind and solar electricity is absolutely useless if it cannot be produced on demand.
Nuclear produces electricity 24/7, independent of weather with no backup required.
The kWh costs 30 cents in Germany, but 15 cents in France.
Actually, no. Heatwaves can and did disable thermal plants in the past:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
This is an problem that will only be intensified by climate change.
When the plant is not offline…
Not true.
> The kWh costs 30 cents in Germany, but 15 cents in France.
International comparisons are useless without comparison of pricing structure. That includes for example the tax regime, fees mandated, etc.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Europes-E...
Cheap isn't as important as reliable. It's not like these countries have no money.One would think that if you seriously believed that the climate is going to rapidly change, then you would seek out climate-independent sources of energy. It's like predicting the world will be in drought but then advocating for more hydro power. But perhaps I don't understand the full nuances of European politics.
'The islands with too much power' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UmsfXWzvEA
:)
https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
* Solar and wind are here to stay and they mean we need fast-reacting spare capacity and storage. Nuclear power plants are very slow to react and because they are so monumentally expensive they have to run at as high capacity as possible, as much as possible. They are strictly base load.
* Siting a nuclear power plant is very difficult just in terms of geology. Siting a nuclear power plant is very difficult grid-wise as well, because they are only cost-effective at massive scale. Super-high-voltage DC transmission systems can help, but they only tack on more to the project cost. You can't just inject gigawatts of power anywhere you want. And it isn't just injection that is the problem. Nuclear power plants that are not producing power need massive amounts of electricity to get things like cooling pumps running or keep them running until everything is up to temperature and you can get the turbines up to temperature and speed. Then there's the matter of needing sufficient cooling - usually done via river, ocean, or lake. Except climate change and other factors are making those sources of cooling increasingly unreliable (for example: invasive species like zebra mussels have made life hell for a lot of power plants)
* Nuclear power plants require lots of highly trained people to design, operate, and maintain. More power plants means more of them. Training them up isn't a short term affair. Solar and wind require far less of all of this. And frankly, I have serious doubts about societal stability in 20-30 years, and nuclear power plants are not even remotely friendly to any sort of societal instability. Not just in terms of security, but upkeep. They have very complex, deep supply chain needs.
* Building nuclear power plants from the start of planning to grid synchronization takes a decade or two, and it then takes another decade or so for the plant to become carbon-neutral in part due to the massive amount of concrete they require. Right now, we need to be reducing carbon footprint as much as possible, as fast as possible. Not causing huge increases in carbon footprint that will only balance out well past catastrophic climate conditions.
* Nuclear reactor containment vessels can only be constructed by a small handful of facilities and their capacity is very limited, and by and large already spoken for. We can't just wave a wand and start building more reactors tomorrow. Or even in the next several years.
* Nuclear waste may be a "solved" problem tech-wise as nuclear power proponents are fond of saying, but reality is that nuclear waste is a huge problem. Even short-term storage is a problem, as demonstrated, again, by Fukashima where fuel cooling ponds caught on fire.
Time and time again we demonstrate that we are not responsible enough to handle nuclear power; we've had numerous military nuclear power disasters; the commercial ones haven't stopped, either. A "1st world" country, arguably one of the most technologically advanced ones around, repeatedly bumbled every aspect of Fukashima, starting with the plant's design, its maintenance and procedures, and the response to the incident. What was Japan's excuse?
How many Mulligans does nuclear power need?
You know what happens when a solar or wind power plant is incompetently designed or run? A bunch of people lose lots of money. You don't end up with thousands of square miles of land uninhabitable. You don't need people with years of training supervising a bunch of solar panels. Maintenance on a wind turbine is a standard-industrial-equipment sort of job, no bunny suits required.
You know what happens when a country with solar or wind power has a government that is full of incompetent suit-stuffing chair-warming morons, or gets taken over by a despot dictator, or has an economic collapse? Nothing.
If you want to look to the future in power grids, look at the iron chemistry liquid batteries that are non-toxic and almost trivial to deploy at electrical substations. They can provide spare capacity at the neighborhood/regional level while helping balance distribution loads and allow those neighborhoods to continue to function in isolation in the event of transmission grid problems.
For instance, wind requires mining huge quantities of rare earth metals in open-air hellscapes in Mongolia, referred to as "the worst place on earth." [1] The two hundred meter tall towers and their giant blades are also built of fiberglass (an epoxy/glass mix) which cannot be recycled and are instead buried. [2]
Similarly solar panels are often made with cadmium and tellurium, and various other toxic chemicals which leech out of the panels when placed into landfills. The US for instance has no solar panel recycling mandate except in Washington State. The world already has a massive e-waste problem.
By 2050, there will be 78 million metric tons of solar panels to dispose of. [3]
Solar panels then have to be supplemented with vast quantities of lithium for temporary storage.
Solar and wind aren't "green" they're "less black."
Nuclear produces 2000 metric tons of waste per year in the US while amounting to 20% of the entire grid, 0.85TWh per year.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...
https://www.energylive.cloud/
How much does Germany spend on the military? Cancel it, and spend the money on nuclear power. Otherwise Germany has a significant strategic weakness (gas imports) to Russia, its only realistic enemy.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
The cost to keep a reactor that's already been built going is low.
The need to keep nuclear in the short term is based solely on the urgency of the climate crisis.
Cost is irrelevant in the face of extinction.
We have a couple centuries to figure out wind and solar economics if we convert all coal and gas to nuclear immediately.
Because at the moment, wind isn't doing so well, there being a wind-drought for the last few months and all.
Out here in the real world, people are paying $200/MWh and hedge funds are making billions.
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A world without nuclear reactors or enrichment facilities is a world without nuclear weapons. Any medium or large industrialized country with power reactors could build nukes very quickly. It's bad enough half a dozen already have. This notion keeps some people up at night, I think. If you consider nuclear weapons to be an existential threat to the species -- perhaps worse than climate change -- then building infrastructure that would allow their more easy construction might seem like madness.
It’s an interesting though actually, that coming up with new, presumably more deadly weapons, can lead to a less horrendous world.
Your question is good but it doesn't have the answer you seem to think it does! These things feed into each other, so while it might be unreasonable to say "no commercial airlines means no military air vehicles" (I hesitate to say fighter jet because I do think that would be a casualty), it would also be unreasonable to say that "no commercial airlines means no impact on military air technology".
You might think, hey, the military has got some strong advancements the rest of us don't even know about, whos to say that wouldn't be the case? Well, the people working on that tech went to college and got educations in a field that had employment opportunities, and likely would not have if those opportunities didn't exist. Just think about all the supporting industries that are very specific. The aluminum alloys, the manufacturing methods for these high tolerance parts, the electrical systems, the fuel systems etc. You just aren't going to get very far without a civilian populace implicitly backing the effort.
The risk if Nuclear Energy proliferation is the waste being used in a dirty bomb.
Nuclear waste spread out in Manhtatten might not kill people, but it could make the city, or parts of it unlivable for a long time. At minimum a big disaster.
So in order for the Nuclear future to work, we'd need to set standards that have teeth.
The issue is not Canada or Germany, it's Venezuela or Colombia where there is corruption, political instability, lack of oversight, and then a local antagonist can sneak in and grab materials. Cover ups, finger pointing, refusing to allow inspectors in lest they assess the level of corruption, it all falls down while the baddies take their stolen gear to other, more ideological bad actors.
There are long term storage issues but I think those can be worked out.
Nuclear Energy is basically free Energy to any group of people civil enough to manage it.
I understand that with adequate supervision from the IEA proliferation is generally a non-issue.
I wonder if people have modeled for how fast that could be done, and how expensive it would be. We have the technology (cf. grid scale storage, there is a fascination array of options, several of which are tried and tested), it's "just" a matter of scaling it up.
The current plan only phases out coal by 2038 which seems... way way way too late. Cf. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/spelling-out-coal...
Nevermind the hugely powerful car industry.
This letter signed by 25 "intellectuals" (oddly vague name for writers and journalists) is part of the puzzle insofar as it gets the discussion into the news. But unless there is a sustained conversation which carries the attention of the public and really drives and beats back the misinformation back to the shadows, nothing will change.
The same tired anti-nuclear talking points need to be systemically deconstructed and refuted over and over again until it is pushed into being a fringe belief.
Unfortunately humans are really not set up to have these conversations about "boring" things like global warming and nuclear energy. Unless there is a crisis front and center (like the pandemic) it is hard to reverberate change throughout society.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but watching all this play out is like witnessing a devastating car crash happen in slow motion, and being helpless to do anything to prevent it.
https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf does justice to the full employment situation, and the same arguments apply. In the econ case it's kind of incredible we filled our minds with nonsense to convince ourselves the thing we had been doing is no longer possible. I suppose the nuclear hysteria served the same roll.
To be clear, I am not trying to argue some sort of conspiracy here. I think it all happened organically, which is frankly even more fascinating. Shows that "truth is endogenous" and the post-modernists had a point long before people whined about Trump.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zsSswlxThqo
One of the blocks was really old so I'm glad to see it go. I'm in favor of building new, safer reactors. Bill Gates is an investor in a startup that developed such a design, but it will probably be hard to get it tested.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower
China apparently also has made advances.