Nuclear is just cleaner when it's done right. Look at the top producing plants in the US (https://findenergy.com/power-plants/). All fossil fuels, mostly around 1,000 KGs of CO2/MWh produced. Nuclear is around 15 KGs/MWh. Just for reference, the #1 polluting plant in the US produces more CO2 than all of the passenger vehicles in the US combined.
I don't think your last statement is correct. According to the linked page, the James H. Miller Jr. plant produces around 19 million metric tons of CO2 per year, while passenger cars produce around 760 million metric tons per year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235091/us-passenger-car...
Yes you are correct, my bad I was misremembering. It's the sum of the top 100 most polluting plants (656 million metric tons in 2020) which is close to the total emission of all passenger vehicles. It was closer in 2019, because 2020 saw a 10% drop in emissions due to COVID.
Actually the notion of cleaner should be taken with pinch of salt.
I was very pro nuclear until it came out of my mind.
Given its construction, the nuclear plan can have an intensive use of the sulfur hexafluoride ( SF6 Gas)
Which according to Wikipedia
"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF
6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO
2 when compared over a 100-year period"
This puzzled me as pro- nuclear tend not to mention it.
Unless new technology come up addressing this issue, I would not judge nuclear as clean for the time being.
It's hard to say Fukushima was a case of "doing it wrong." You can only protect against a certain level of natural disasters. Even if you get totally paranoid and put the plant deep under earth you can never be sure an earthquake doesn't damage it. We just can't be 100% sure.
On the other hand, can we afford not doing it? We don't yet have clean and efficient energy storage technologies that would allow us to switch to renewables completely. So if the alternative is to burn coal and worsen our already bad situation, the nuclear risk seems much smaller.
Not directly related to the article, but I wonder if the renewables industry being so hostile to nuclear is actually because renewables don't make sense with nuclear.
We started off with 100% of power generation being either fossil fuels or nuclear (+hydro etc. but these are minor for most places). As part-time renewables enter the stage, they take priority over the fossil fuel plants when they do produce, and simply go quiet when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine. We accept that, because we're fundamentally still in a fossil fuel energy mindset.
So what does the post-fossil fuel world look like, with a nuclear+renewables mix? Well, we have as much renewables as we'd like, but really (and here's the kicker) we also need enough nuclear for windless nights (or winter days which in e.g. Northern Europe barely count as daytime). So really, we need to be able to power nearly 100% of the economy through nuclear alone in those cases.
But then, that begs the question, do we still need the renewables at all? Right now it probably makes sense, because it lets you throttle back the fossil fuel burning, so is a net win. But if your baseload generation is carbon-free (at the margin anyway), it doesn't matter. You just don't need the renewables.
This is somewhat oversimplified, perhaps. E.g. the times when you are less likely to have wind and solar are at night, when energy use is lower (though will that remain the case when everyone's electric car is then charging?). Also, winters drive heating demand. Perhaps some small amount of storage makes a big difference; e.g. if we could store a week's worth of power, that takes us through all but the biggest troughs in power generation, and you need less nuclear (though again, not sure how that works with winters).
I'm not nuclear-crazy, if we could do solar+wind+batteries, why not. But I find the renewables lobby just says "yeah prices will fall, we will solve energy storage, just go all in on renewables, perish nuclear", which just seems like crazy wishful thinking. Whereas nuclear is always described based on 1970s technology and with the most exaggerated (un)safety numbers.
There’s nothing wrong with more energy. People seem to assume that we need X amount of energy and if we can provide X amount of energy with one source or the other, we don’t need any more energy. That’s ridiculous. Energy is a commodity like anything else, and when you have more of it, you can do more stuff.
There's only two viable paths to a zero emissions society. One is nuclear and the other is hydrogen. We have to pick one or the other (or both) as all other ideas have fallen far short of the goal.
Well, I don't know. Are batteries + renewables a prior impossible? I can't see why, especially if we're talking about utility-scale batteries, which could be heavy and bulky.
My point is we don't have them at a competitive price, and yet the renewables people insist we definitely well. We might, we might not.
I still havent heard of a solution to nuclear waste. In my opinion nuclear could be the transition technology though. Also nuclear is not cheap at all from what ive read..
I remember reading that nuclear costs about the same as fossil fuel + carbon capture, and, at current prices, much less than renewables + enough storage to make them continuous. This to me is the fair comparison. Further, I'd rather live near a nuclear plant than a coal plant sitting on tons of compressed CO2, ready to pop and asphyxiate everyone in the vicinity.
I agree storage is a problem, maybe not as big as it is generally made out, but even then, would I rather struggle with nuclear waste, or millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? The latter will lead to a planetary-scale disaster, the former at worst to minor regional ones.
The solution to nuclear waste is "status quo". As far as I know, no person has ever been harmed much less killed by waste from a nuclear power plant.
Also, the dangerous isotopes are also the ones which decay most quickly. Let the waste sit for 300 years and it will be no more radioactive than the uranium ore it was originally mined from. At that point you can dump it back into the uranium mine, or else keep it anywhere else you think would be safer than an abandoned uranium mine, the risks are miniscule either way.
China have an experimental molten-salt Thorium reactor going live very soon. It's only small, but if it's successful there are plans to build a much bigger one by 2030. That's really interesting tech, notably because the supply of Uranium is very limited and there isn't enough in nature for every nation to go all in on nuclear power. Using Thorium and turning it in to U-233 for power generation is a good idea. Plus, there's loads of Thorium on the moon, so if we get good reactors on Earth the tech will apply to our extra-terrestrial expansion plans.
Actually some companies that got hundreds of millions of funding are pitching commercial viability this decade. That's the reason these investments are happening. The breakthrough is basically that funding is now happening because the technology has progressed enough for investors to be willing to start taking that risk. They wouldn't do that on a 30 year plan.
The fallacy is believing that because it has historically been so far away that is still that far away.
E.g. Helion, a y combinator backed company (our beloved HN overlords), just raised half a billion from investors for a series E round that include Peter Thiel and a few others with well earned reputations for making lucrative investments. I think there's a good chance that we'll have operational fusion plants next decade already. It's not money in the bank yet but clearly enough of a chance for the likes of Peter Thiel to commit some serious money to this.
Helion is pitching 1 cent per khw. That completely kills the business case for new nuclear plants. The payoff on those investments is going to be insanely good if this works as advertised.
In Finland 18% of all energy is produced with Nuclear, which almost the double of the global average (~10%). We don't have earthquakes or other very strong weather phenomena (apart from freezing temperatures up to -40C/-40F), which makes Nuclear a very feasible option.
Not to forget stable geology suitable for long term storage of our own waste. Solar isn't great for most of the year. Wind is some parts, but long periods of downtime. Hydro can't really be extended. Geothermal would require very deep wells. Outside biomass nuclear is only sane option.
That is blowing the risks out of proportion. Normal houses won't be earthquake proof, and people will actually be living in them and get squished if there is a bad earthquake. There will be death and destruction.
Whether or not the nuclear plant survives intact is a bit of a minor issue. It just has to fail without being orders of magnitude worse than the earthquake.
Citing Fukushima - Fukushima was bad. Bud the mounds of corpses caused by the natural disaster that also caused Fukushima are a far more important thing to spend resources preventing than Fukushima itself was.
Nuclear energy is clean, until it is not. When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.
Such 180 degree swings in public opinion seems dangerous. In 2018 Macron talks about reducing France' reliance on nuclear energy [1], now he declares its a tool to achieve energy independence [2].
Building, maintaining, upgrading and dealing with issues caused by nuclear reactors is a very engineering and science heavy.
I am curios if there is enough talent to be able to do it? Will this rhetoric be attended with enough investment in education to make sure that we have talent to service this need for generations? Nuclear energy skill is akin to space exploration, just because the nation had Apollo program and could put a man on the moon 50 year ago, does not mean it can do it now. If it were not for Elon and SpaceX US would not have an ability to bring astronauts to ISS without a third nation. Financial investment alone won't solve it, as you need time to establish pool of qualified people.
"We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country and continue to develop renewable energies," – so people who launched it in the past have long retired? The newes reactor in the US was launched in 2016, the newest plant is 1996, so 20+ years ago.
And there are still problems to be solved with nuclear energy. The most obvious one – nuclear waste. No one wants to have in their backyard. Once it is stored, it is essentially a permanent commitment to keep it safe there until a better option emerges. A better option will emerge if there is a constant effort to find it. But what if something goes wrong, how will the public and politicians react? Are they going to reverse 180 again? Fukushima scared politicians, that were afraid of saying "nuclear energy" in public for 10 years.
When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.
Coal-fired power stations release significantly more radioactive material into the atmosphere than any nuclear accident[1]. If your concern is about radioactive material then worry about coal ash first.
> When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.
I encourage you to look at the numbers for yourself. The equivalent baseload power technologies are all WAY more dangerous.
Go and tally up the human casualties from nuclear over its entire history. Use the most damning numbers you can possibly find. Go ahead and include the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you like. Include any count of potential cancer cases too. Even using the most biased, openly political casualty counts you can find, it is challenging to get to 1.5 million over the entire history of the power source. If you stick to relatively credible sources you'll certainly be below half a million.
Now look at the human casualties from coal when it's working properly. No accidents, just regular power production. The first duckduckgo result for me estimates about 8.7 million deaths per year, not including accidents, bombs, or non fatal casualties.
The casualty rate from nuclear's entire history doesn't even approach the death rate from coal, oil, or gas in a single year.
> nuclear waste
One person lifetime of electricity creates about 350ml (about a coke can) of solid nuclear waste. We know where that waste is, and what it is doing. We can monitor and control access and keep people away from it.
In contrast, one person lifetime of coal power produces hundreds of thousands of TONS of waste, much of which is also radioactive, but lets not forget about the toxic heavy metals and carbon. Most of that waste goes into the atmosphere, where it cannot be tracked or controlled at all, and where it causes millions of deaths per year. To be fair a lot of it goes into the water and ground, too.
The fact that there are options AT ALL for nuclear waste puts it miles ahead of the competition.
Nuclear is by far the lowest carbon, safest, lowest waste universally available baseload power source ever invented. Casualties from nuclear aren't even a rounding error compared to the alternatives on the table.
You are absolutely right however, that it is highly volatile politically.
In the US, nuclear goes wrong before construction even begins. Typically, many billions of dollars, sometimes tens of, are spent, rolling into a broad selection of pockets for years before the project is, finally, ignominiously cancelled. Often a great deal of concrete has been poured. No one is indicted. The money is just "gone".
Are you referring to 2 new units at Vogtle? What scares me there is that there were already few acquisitions and reactor manufactured filed for bankruptcy. Seems like entities that started it aren't the same, that are finishing it.
With per megawatt waste for nuclear per 20 years being exponentially smaller in volume.
And where the alternative is coal /natural gas (rather than wind or solar) where these produce more volume of waste in a month/year than nuclear does in a decade. (And in the case of coal, we store worse waste in ways it often enters our fresh water supplies.
Readit News
I was very pro nuclear until it came out of my mind.
Given its construction, the nuclear plan can have an intensive use of the sulfur hexafluoride ( SF6 Gas) Which according to Wikipedia
"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF 6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO 2 when compared over a 100-year period"
This puzzled me as pro- nuclear tend not to mention it.
Unless new technology come up addressing this issue, I would not judge nuclear as clean for the time being.
Page Wiki for additional information:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride
The question is whether “doing it wrong” (Fukushima) outweighs the benefits of “doing it right”.
As of 2021, nuclear powerplant accidents killed less than 2 people per year since 1970s. As of 2018, nuclear powerplants produced 10% of energy.
WHO estimates that climate change causes 150000 deaths per year.
On the other hand, can we afford not doing it? We don't yet have clean and efficient energy storage technologies that would allow us to switch to renewables completely. So if the alternative is to burn coal and worsen our already bad situation, the nuclear risk seems much smaller.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
I actually had this in mind for storage.
We started off with 100% of power generation being either fossil fuels or nuclear (+hydro etc. but these are minor for most places). As part-time renewables enter the stage, they take priority over the fossil fuel plants when they do produce, and simply go quiet when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine. We accept that, because we're fundamentally still in a fossil fuel energy mindset.
So what does the post-fossil fuel world look like, with a nuclear+renewables mix? Well, we have as much renewables as we'd like, but really (and here's the kicker) we also need enough nuclear for windless nights (or winter days which in e.g. Northern Europe barely count as daytime). So really, we need to be able to power nearly 100% of the economy through nuclear alone in those cases.
But then, that begs the question, do we still need the renewables at all? Right now it probably makes sense, because it lets you throttle back the fossil fuel burning, so is a net win. But if your baseload generation is carbon-free (at the margin anyway), it doesn't matter. You just don't need the renewables.
This is somewhat oversimplified, perhaps. E.g. the times when you are less likely to have wind and solar are at night, when energy use is lower (though will that remain the case when everyone's electric car is then charging?). Also, winters drive heating demand. Perhaps some small amount of storage makes a big difference; e.g. if we could store a week's worth of power, that takes us through all but the biggest troughs in power generation, and you need less nuclear (though again, not sure how that works with winters).
I'm not nuclear-crazy, if we could do solar+wind+batteries, why not. But I find the renewables lobby just says "yeah prices will fall, we will solve energy storage, just go all in on renewables, perish nuclear", which just seems like crazy wishful thinking. Whereas nuclear is always described based on 1970s technology and with the most exaggerated (un)safety numbers.
For whatever reason, energy production seems to be about meeting demand, rather than finding use for surpluses.
My point is we don't have them at a competitive price, and yet the renewables people insist we definitely well. We might, we might not.
I agree storage is a problem, maybe not as big as it is generally made out, but even then, would I rather struggle with nuclear waste, or millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? The latter will lead to a planetary-scale disaster, the former at worst to minor regional ones.
Also, the dangerous isotopes are also the ones which decay most quickly. Let the waste sit for 300 years and it will be no more radioactive than the uranium ore it was originally mined from. At that point you can dump it back into the uranium mine, or else keep it anywhere else you think would be safer than an abandoned uranium mine, the risks are miniscule either way.
The fallacy is believing that because it has historically been so far away that is still that far away.
E.g. Helion, a y combinator backed company (our beloved HN overlords), just raised half a billion from investors for a series E round that include Peter Thiel and a few others with well earned reputations for making lucrative investments. I think there's a good chance that we'll have operational fusion plants next decade already. It's not money in the bank yet but clearly enough of a chance for the likes of Peter Thiel to commit some serious money to this.
Helion is pitching 1 cent per khw. That completely kills the business case for new nuclear plants. The payoff on those investments is going to be insanely good if this works as advertised.
Change will happen where regulatory capture isn’t strong.
Nevertheless one should never take this as guaranteed. Nuclear power plants should be carefully designed everything-proof wherever they are built.
Whether or not the nuclear plant survives intact is a bit of a minor issue. It just has to fail without being orders of magnitude worse than the earthquake.
Citing Fukushima - Fukushima was bad. Bud the mounds of corpses caused by the natural disaster that also caused Fukushima are a far more important thing to spend resources preventing than Fukushima itself was.
Such 180 degree swings in public opinion seems dangerous. In 2018 Macron talks about reducing France' reliance on nuclear energy [1], now he declares its a tool to achieve energy independence [2].
Building, maintaining, upgrading and dealing with issues caused by nuclear reactors is a very engineering and science heavy. I am curios if there is enough talent to be able to do it? Will this rhetoric be attended with enough investment in education to make sure that we have talent to service this need for generations? Nuclear energy skill is akin to space exploration, just because the nation had Apollo program and could put a man on the moon 50 year ago, does not mean it can do it now. If it were not for Elon and SpaceX US would not have an ability to bring astronauts to ISS without a third nation. Financial investment alone won't solve it, as you need time to establish pool of qualified people.
"We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country and continue to develop renewable energies," – so people who launched it in the past have long retired? The newes reactor in the US was launched in 2016, the newest plant is 1996, so 20+ years ago.
And there are still problems to be solved with nuclear energy. The most obvious one – nuclear waste. No one wants to have in their backyard. Once it is stored, it is essentially a permanent commitment to keep it safe there until a better option emerges. A better option will emerge if there is a constant effort to find it. But what if something goes wrong, how will the public and politicians react? Are they going to reverse 180 again? Fukushima scared politicians, that were afraid of saying "nuclear energy" in public for 10 years.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/macron-says-france-w...
Coal-fired power stations release significantly more radioactive material into the atmosphere than any nuclear accident[1]. If your concern is about radioactive material then worry about coal ash first.
[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
I encourage you to look at the numbers for yourself. The equivalent baseload power technologies are all WAY more dangerous.
Go and tally up the human casualties from nuclear over its entire history. Use the most damning numbers you can possibly find. Go ahead and include the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you like. Include any count of potential cancer cases too. Even using the most biased, openly political casualty counts you can find, it is challenging to get to 1.5 million over the entire history of the power source. If you stick to relatively credible sources you'll certainly be below half a million.
Now look at the human casualties from coal when it's working properly. No accidents, just regular power production. The first duckduckgo result for me estimates about 8.7 million deaths per year, not including accidents, bombs, or non fatal casualties.
The casualty rate from nuclear's entire history doesn't even approach the death rate from coal, oil, or gas in a single year.
> nuclear waste
One person lifetime of electricity creates about 350ml (about a coke can) of solid nuclear waste. We know where that waste is, and what it is doing. We can monitor and control access and keep people away from it.
In contrast, one person lifetime of coal power produces hundreds of thousands of TONS of waste, much of which is also radioactive, but lets not forget about the toxic heavy metals and carbon. Most of that waste goes into the atmosphere, where it cannot be tracked or controlled at all, and where it causes millions of deaths per year. To be fair a lot of it goes into the water and ground, too.
The fact that there are options AT ALL for nuclear waste puts it miles ahead of the competition.
Nuclear is by far the lowest carbon, safest, lowest waste universally available baseload power source ever invented. Casualties from nuclear aren't even a rounding error compared to the alternatives on the table.
You are absolutely right however, that it is highly volatile politically.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... is a nice reference for easy comparison, but really, duckduckgo it yourself.
Why not go Thorium?
With per megawatt waste for nuclear per 20 years being exponentially smaller in volume.
And where the alternative is coal /natural gas (rather than wind or solar) where these produce more volume of waste in a month/year than nuclear does in a decade. (And in the case of coal, we store worse waste in ways it often enters our fresh water supplies.
Coal: 100000
Oil: 36000
Nuclear: 90
Solar: 440 (rooftop)
Wind: 150
Nuclear is the clear winner, closely followed by wind and solar.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...