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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

#221

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 there has been this weird strain of FUD being spread around painting renewable advocates as some sort of crazed anti-nuclear zealots

It's certainly not true of all renewable advocates, but such anti-nuclear zealots do exist, and cause resistance to nuclear. Although I don't think environmentalists and renewables advocares are the only source of resistance, and cold war fear of all things nuclear/atomic/radioactive also shares some blame.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#222

Post by Sporktacular »

erentz wrote: post #199
Sporktacular wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not sustainable. But it can be more so, under some optimistic, unrealistic scenarios. This info is based on some projects for tech that hasn't yet proven to be economical at scale. In theory we could replace all reactors with breeders, develop a zero-carbon thorium fuel supply chain etc. but we haven't because it's expensive like hell, slow to commission and still not environmentally sustainable. What's easier…

Batteries and storage haven’t proven to be economical at scale. And also aren’t infinitely sustainable either (renewables and their storage don’t grow on trees, they use more resources and valuable minerals than nuclear). So by your measure we shouldn’t do that either.

Oh, so you concede that nuclear power actually isn't sustainable then? Okay.

So if you want to pivot to batteries... look at how much secondary batteries have evolved in the last 70 years. Genuinely novel nuclear power plant designs have barely left the drawing board over the same time. It's pretty hard to conclude batteries have proven uneconomical at scale when the term 'battery' is such a fast moving target.

No one claims infinite sustainability is a requirement, or even a possibility, but I see you dropped that in anyway. First, the paper in a paper battery, literally grows on trees. Unlike Uranium, which is relatively scarce and the cost of which, in $ and kg of carbon, after mining and enriching to 5% LEU is considerable. Enrichment techniques are unchanged after 70 years. About 100 times more common, and much much less valuable, is Lithium, the efficient sourcing of which (and its alternatives) is an area of active development. Lithium extraction is also damaging, but it is more deserving of research funding than a process for a fuel source that didn't advance for decades.

In 20 years this won't be a discussion because renewables research will have solved these simpler problems.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#223

Post by grecy »

dctoedt wrote: post #200
grecy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. I imagine there's tons of stuff you're not allowed to talk about, but have you ever written down any stories in a book or blog or anything like that? I would love to learn more about your career, what you learned, saw, etc. etc. Thanks!

> I imagine there's tons of stuff you're not allowed to talk about Yep. > but have you ever written down any stories in a book or blog or anything like that? Nope. But thanks for asking — I appreciate the interest!

haha, thanks.

Please do know that if you ever decide to write a book, or a blog, or a YT series, or honestly anything at all I'm very sure you'd have a huge audience!

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#224

Post by Gwypaas »

strawhatguy wrote: post #220
epistasis wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> B. Dealing With Variability and Stability

> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage [40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.

> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#225

Post by epistasis »

jwie wrote: post #190
epistasis wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Military reactors are different from civilian reactors in at least two ways: 1) military fuel would not be allowed in civilian hands, and 2) military reactors have essentially an infinite budget, and have few economic constraints. The challenges of using military reactors in other settings go far beyond questions of "political will"

The unlimited budget and the fuel comes from political will so I don’t understand your point.

The economic concerns and weapons concerns may have political aspects, but the bigger part are the material differences.

Usually when people say "political will" it's about making a choice without serious other constraints. There are incredible constraints on pricing and danger that go beyond politics when it comes to military style reactors.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#226

Post by kleene_op »

Sporktacular wrote: post #209
kleene_op wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but let me just drop this reality check here real quick: Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades. Everytime you listen to environmentalists talk you'd think we're already there, that countries are already covered with batteries…

"Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades." Its ability to supply France in the past is irrelevant to its ability to power global demand in future. The fuel is too limited and the technology too immature to turn this around. Nuclear is un…

> Nuclear has a limited future.

Nuclear power is such a dead end China plans to build a hundred of them https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli.... Russia, over 20 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil.... Japan, probably concerned about what's brewing over the Japanese sea, is going back at it as well https://www.ft.com/content/b380cb74-7b2e-493f-be99-281bd0dd4..., despite Fukushima's disaster.

> It was in transition and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict gas would be switched off overnight

Except maybe for the war in Dombas plaging us since 2014?

> No one credible called renewables the holy grail.

You are correct.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#227

Post by pdonis »

bluejekyll wrote: post #167
pdonis wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume people are still building those things If you mean older reactor designs without the passive safety features I mentioned, I don't think the US is building much of anything. > and I also bet they require some regular amount of maintenance. Nuclear reactors of course require regular maintenance, like any large industrial plant, but those costs alone are not a significant impact. To the extent there are incre…

>> I assume people are still building those things > If you mean older reactor designs without the passive safety features I mentioned, I don't think the US is building much of anything. No, I mean the new ones you mention, people will make mistakes building the new ones, including the failsafes, regardless of the physics. > Nuclear reactors of course require regular maintenance, like any large industrial plant, but…

> people will make mistakes building the new ones, including the failsafes

Mistakes during building can be caught and corrected by appropriate quality assurance procedures before the plant is put into operation. That is standard procedure on any construction job. That's very different from human error during the actual operation of the plant.

> People will be responsible for that maintenance, they will screw it up.

And such mistakes can also be caught and corrected by appropriate checking procedures before they cause a problem in actual operation. That is standard procedure for maintenance on any industrial plant.

> the idea that human error will be entirely removed

Nobody is claiming that human error can be entirely removed. But it is certainly possible to design systems so that the unavoidable human errors can be caught and corrected before they cause more serious problems.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#228

Post by RappingBoomer »

karaterobot wrote: post #4
silexia wrote: post #2

Who really killed nuclear power? I bet if you traced all the financial donations to all the environmental groups and people who have opposed nuclear power, you will find a lot of oil dictatorships and oil companies. Follow the money...

This is discussed in the article. >Instead of reexamining their energy vision, the greens have committed themselves to promoting energy poverty. In part, they’ve stayed the course because doing so has made them lots of money. The Environmental Defense Fund and the NRDC have a combined budget of nearly $384 million, for example... A recent study found that “tax-motivated investors in today’s renewable energy deals are…

no. I don't think that is what he is talking about...I was a young nuclear reactor operator for the navy back in the seventies, and I was there to witness the massive propaganda campaign that effectively killed off nuclear power...granted, that campaign used as ammo all those old nuclear scare movies from the fifties, back when the MIC scared the population regarding the Soviet 'menace' so as to manufacture consent for spending more money on the military, but even so, something new was definitely going on...there was some force behind the anti nuclear movement in the seventies, almost certainly fossil fuels industry...

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#229

Post by happymellon »

thayne wrote: post #218
qqqwerty wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nuclear has had many decades of research.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#230

Post by cyphar »

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…

> Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities.

By the same token, no energy production technology is "green". Solar panels use rare earth metals (and require clearing land in many cases), batteries use lithium, and wind farms have to have replacement fan blades every decade or so (which are not recyclable, so much so that the current state of the art is to burn them[1]) and kill larger birds of prey as well.

> The back end is a trivial cost because it Has Not Been Dealt With.

There are viable solutions for this[2] and given how natural deposits of uranium fare (even without containment they move very little on geological timescales), it seems deep geological storage really is an incredibly simple solution to this problem.

[1]: https://youtu.be/knX7NkJILhs [2]: https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k

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