Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor. (Neither Three Mi…
Yeah, I don't know how to convince myself that it will ever be truly safe.
It isn't if it fails, it is when it fails.
Seems highly risky compared to simpler alternatives.
Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit: 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels 2. nuclear plants for base load power and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces. Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...
It's literally natural market forces that are "killing" nuclear energy. It's simply too expensive compared to modern, emission-free alternatives.
Have you solved the problem of intermittent power production by solar and wind energy and included the costs of it to the calculation? It seems to me that the solar and wind energy are causing problem in the energy market with their unreliable production and not paying the cost of solving this problem.
France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.
Political incompetency should really be baked in any discussion about pushing more nuclear. You can have miracle new reactor designs, but do you have a society that matches it and will properly manage the technology for the next 50 years ?
You could have stopped after the word "discussion".
It's not a question of enough cooling water. It's a problem of how much the plant is allowed to heat the river. Because apparently keeping a stretch of river below 28*C is more important than climate change.
Not killing all the fish in a river is also generally something that should be aimed for, since that can have knock on effects on ecosystems. We’d rather not find out what happens and accidentally instigate some kind of environmental disaster that might lead to farm failures or something unexpected.
The limit on the temperature is as low as 26C or 79F. It's not like the river is boiling. Furthermore this heat dissipates downstream, it's not affecting the entire waterway. This heat has the potential to harm fish in a segment of a few rivers. By comparison, throttling carbon-free energy production has the certain impact of producing more greenhouse gases, which will contribute to global climate change. I seriously don't see how someone makes this kind of tradeoff - it's like the same mentality that held up a solar farm to relocate tortoises.
Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit: 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels 2. nuclear plants for base load power and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces. Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...
It's literally natural market forces that are "killing" nuclear energy. It's simply too expensive compared to modern, emission-free alternatives.
Market forces heavily influenced by politics, so not "literally".
From the article you quoted: > In order to replace the two nuclear plants while the sun is down, the batteries would need to replicate two 1.117 GW power sources for 16 hours. The total energy storage capacity would be 39.3 GWh, after we add an extra 10% for safe measure. Sorry, but no. This is a brittle system proposed. A 16 hour battery backup doesn't account for bad weather events like hurricanes, let alone more s…
A major cause of Texas's power outage was nuclear tripping off. Meanwhile, massive amounts of batteries are far less brittle than the single point of failure like a nuclear reactor. Same with solar. It's the difference between building one massive mainframe and having a data center. In the data center you plan for failure, plan for individual nodes to go down, and the whole system becomes incredibly reliable because…
I request a citation that it was a major cause of Texas' power outage, because looking at this graph, there is a step-down in nuclear generation on Feb 15th from 5 to 4 gw, but that's smaller than the step-downs in natural gas (-15 gw), coal (-5 gw) and wind (-5 gw).
Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.
Nuclear energy stays a bad fit when you factor in that it needs to combine: - sustained political will and capital - high morale (contractors and controllers need to not collude to hide flaws/cut corners/inflate prices) - excelent design and on par execution - excelent risk assesment and long term vision - stable geopolitical situation No country currently has a combination of all the above, all the nuclear plants we…
The US has all of those things for nuclear submarines.
That seems to conflict with the low operating expenses of nuclear reactors. Once they are built, what is the crippling aspect?
low operating expenses over the whole lifetime of the plant including deconstruction or just the fun part?
Typically decommissioning costs are collected throughout the lifetime of operation, and to my knowledge these costs do not significantly raise the operating expenses. But I'm not familiar in detail with many examples, so if I'm wrong on the general trend, I would like to know!
"today’s so-called environmentalists" The nuclear industry had decades to fix its economic, safety and environmental issues but sat on its hands instead. If half of the subsidies they received over that time when into research we would have fixed the renewable storage problem a decade ago. There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. Fission wa…
Got a citation for your claim about the U supply? And there are reactor designs that burn much more of the U in the fuel...
There should be a meme for not very serious articles about nuclear issues. “We need fewer, clearer, and more sensible regulations.” And not a single example of which regulations to drop. How about redlining the appropriate docs and posting those? If they’re all so bad it should be a trivial excercise.
One regulation mentioned is “ linear no-threshold standard (LNT) for measuring doses of radiation.”
That’s not a regulation per se, but likely the source of many unnecessary regulations.
