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Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#211

Post by epistasis »

alerighi wrote: post #205
Gwypaas wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is not fossil fuels, that's arguing a strawman, it is renewables.

Good. Are you willing to renounce to your current lifestyle? Because renewable energy alone can't, even considering the most optimistic prediction, and even ignoring costs and production scale problem, substitute fossil fuels. That means that we need to reduce the amount of energy that we use, if we don't want to substitute fossil fuel with nuclear, so are you willing to do so? I think that nuclear is the best compro…

A future of renewables means a future of energy abundance, of electricity far far cheaper than it is today.

A future with nuclear means extremely pricy electricity. Now, as California shows, high electricity prices don't spell doom for the economy, it means that people simply use electricity far more effectively. So if we had the logistical capability to build expensive nuclear, it wouldn't spell the end of our lifestyles, but it would be a bit harder and require that we shift around a bit how we do it.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#212

Post by bobthepanda »

pyuser583 wrote: post #187
makeitdouble wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That model works because there is no question of scale or mass production, no external client, not enough civilians involved to put a strong political aspect on it, so virtually no external pressure to do anything about it. Basically we’d need volunteer based self-sustained communities living in the middle of nowhere to replicate that in a non military setting.

The US nuclear naval fleet isn’t a set of islands. The fuel must be mined and delivered. The nuclear reactor have to be maintained and kept in dry dock, sometimes for years on end. Nobody is afraid of aircraft carriers, even though they are powered by nuclear reactors.

There aren’t that many naval submarine bases, and they’re not particularly close to most of the population.

Unfortunately, nuclear reactors need transmission lines to population centers, and we can’t just concentrate reactors into less than a dozen massive stations for the entire country.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#213

Post by pfdietz »

kristopolous wrote: post #203
pfdietz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. That had jack shit to do with the failure of nuclear in the US. The back end of the fuel cycle is a trivial cost that had nothing to do with the financial failure of nuclear here. And it's the financial failure that stopped it.

So many things! The country that had generated the most nuclear power IS the United States and it's also the one with the highest capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country The depiction of it as a "failure" is the industry whining like the defense industry whines about not having 50,000 more airplanes Despite being at scale and having 70 years to bring down costs, it's still prohibitively expe…

The point is that lack of a very long term solution to nuclear waste in the US has not been an obstacle that has impeded adoption of nuclear. It's a talking point, but if nuclear had otherwise made sense it would not have prevented it from going forward.

If anything, the causation is in the other direction: we don't have Yucca Mountain because there are no stakeholders who really wanted it. The utilities don't need it. Dry casks work just fine for them, and are pretty darn cheap. The real problem with nuclear has been its overall poor economics, and a geological repository would not help with that.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#214

Post by pfdietz »

alerighi wrote: post #194
pfdietz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out this is not the case. Many nuclear reactors in the US have been shut down because they couldn't even make an operating profit. The remaining reactor at Three Mile Island was cash flow negative for the last six years it was in operation.

As I see (but I'm not from the US) you also have energy shortage problems. Granted, not as we have in Europe, but the problem still is starting to appear. How much does it cost a company that doesn't produce because it has no energy or the energy is too expensive to be economical? Also the main alternative to nuclear are fossil fuels, that have order of magnitude of cost higher than nuclear, only that it's not payed…

Electricity demand in the US has been flat for the last decade. There's no shortage. We are seeing increases in the price of natural gas though. The solution to that is add more renewables.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#215

Post by jwie »

makeitdouble wrote: post #135
jwie wrote: post #39

Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other. Most people just don’t know how safe nuclear power is. I worked on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear medicine procedures create. The other source is entre…

> Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other. Is it fearmongering when incidents actually happened and right now we have a country that could potentially have a reactor get destroyed by act of war ? You seem to focus purely on the technical part, and swiping away the margin for human error, unpredicted issues, political incompetence, and straig…

Nuclear power is not without risk. Those risks are far more attractive compared to the risks of not using it.

Nuclear power is far simpler than people would intuitively believe. The nuclear reactor boils water at scale, the steam spins an electric generator via a steam turbine. The steam plant side of things is well understood technology, almost 170 years old at this point, nuclear power itself is about 70 years old. As technologies go, it's incredibly simple, and thus far less prone to error.

It is fearmongering to suggest or imply that there's catastrophe right around the corner of every nuclear reactor. This is just not so. It's not possible to have the kinds of nuclear disasters people are afraid of. Fatalities from nuclear power measure around 100 per thousand terawatt hours, far lower than any other power production source by orders of magnitude.

There is simply no evidence that nuclear power is dangerous, and a lot of evidence to suggest it is the safest, most effective power source we have created.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#216

Post by Blammar »

Sporktacular wrote: post #189
Blammar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152... Or Sabine Hossenfelder's explanation https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365 Current reactors use U235 which is less than 1% of all Uranium on the planet. Don't know about reactors that use other uranium isotopes, but if after 70 years they are still at the design stage, it kind of makes my point. It's just too late to turn that around. The article just overl…

Thanks for the links!

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#217

Post by thayne »

epistasis wrote: post #40

While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear. Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of cult…

I think blaming it on a single cause is naive. The culture war is probably one of several contributing factors. And it synergized with other problems. For example resistance to nuclear results in stricter regulation, which results in higher costs.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#218

Post by thayne »

qqqwerty wrote: post #108
alerighi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't about nuclear vs coal. It is about nuclear vs renewables. And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build. For every nuclear plant you build, we can build the exact same generation capabilities for about half the cost and it can be built in a quarter of the time[1]. That means that the renewable solution will have already mostly paid for itself before th…

But part of the point of the article is that nuclear is unnecessarily expensive. And I would guess if we had put as many resources into R&D for nuclear fission as we had into wind and solar, nuclear would be a lot more economical today.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#219

Post by WalterBright »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #170
WalterBright wrote: post #11

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-...

Just do the first one. No need to force the issue. If nuclear is amazing as claimed it will be adopted. If the claims are the same empty ones we've heard for 70 years then we'll get some electrolyzers and gas turbines running green ammonia

Building nuclear plants requires that the government remove legal and regulatory hurdles that stifle them, like endless lawsuits.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#220

Post by strawhatguy »

epistasis wrote: post #211
alerighi wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. Are you willing to renounce to your current lifestyle? Because renewable energy alone can't, even considering the most optimistic prediction, and even ignoring costs and production scale problem, substitute fossil fuels. That means that we need to reduce the amount of energy that we use, if we don't want to substitute fossil fuel with nuclear, so are you willing to do so? I think that nuclear is the best compro…

A future of renewables means a future of energy abundance, of electricity far far cheaper than it is today. A future with nuclear means extremely pricy electricity. Now, as California shows, high electricity prices don't spell doom for the economy, it means that people simply use electricity far more effectively. So if we had the logistical capability to build expensive nuclear, it wouldn't spell the end of our lifes…

Something has to cover renewable’s shortfalls when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

In Texas and Germany now, it has shown that over reliance on them have led to more instability in the grid, leading to higher fossil fuels use.

Basically you can’t really have renewables without nuclear to back it. They’re a package deal. I don’t know where this renewable purity comes from, but it’s not helpful.

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