Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.
Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
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Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#32Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.
Wind and solar aren't baseload
They can be made so for similar cost to nuclear in at least two distinct ways.
An aluminium rod with a cross section of a few square metres is enough for global power needs, PV is cheap enough that the resistance loses don't alter that equation even antipodally. Take a while to mine that much aluminium, but it also takes a while to make even one reactor.
The batteries we need to build anyway for the electric cars (or the hydrogen production, storage, and fuel cells if we decide to go back to those) are the same scale we need for grid storage, and it makes sense to repurpose car batteries as grid batteries before full refurbishment. Last I checked the cost for batteries was close to, IIRC slightly better than, equivalent nuclear.
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#33The accident at Three Mile Island and the film "China Syndrome" turned the public against it in America. The prejudice still lingers. I was working as a reactor tech on a nuclear submarine shortly after and decide before I got out that there was no future in nuclear. I became a computer programmer instead. Alvin Toffler's book "The Third Wave" convinced me to do this.
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#34I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example: > The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement. and > Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eug…
I don't have a real opinion on this subject, but wanted to point out that 1,000 square miles is not really as big as it sounds: a square 31.6 miles on each side. About the size of Rhode Island's land area.
That depends on where the 1,000 suqare miles is. If it's in the Nevada desert, I might agree (although the fallout from Chernobyl did fall over Europe so the initial impact is well beyond the long-term 1,000 square miles) but that's not where you need to build nuclear power plants [1]:
> To obtain the best value from nuclear power stations, they should be built close to the cities
[1]: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#35Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.
Shhh, don't disturb the pro-nuke narrative with 'facts'. Elsewhere in this thread they try to blame regulations. US regulations don't apply in China and Russia, but they can't make it economic either.
China is planning to build 150 reactors by 2035, and has not then doubled the nuclear share in a decade, so economic or not, there's evidently some appeal there.
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#36The accident at Three Mile Island and the film "China Syndrome" turned the public against it in America. The prejudice still lingers. I was working as a reactor tech on a nuclear submarine shortly after and decide before I got out that there was no future in nuclear. I became a computer programmer instead. Alvin Toffler's book "The Third Wave" convinced me to do this.
Another ex-nuke here — when I got out and went to law school, coincidentally right after Three Mile Island, my dad (neither a lawyer nor an engineer) tried to convince me that I should specialize in nuclear-energy law because I'd have a built-in advantage. I politely explained why I thought that would be a dead end, and that turned out to be correct.
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#37I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example: > The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement. and > Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eug…
> The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl > Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off So let's not ignore Chernobyl. Let's say hypothetically that we build our entire power grid out of nuclear power plants that use the exact same design as the reactors at Chernobyl. Still better than using fossil fuels. And it's a stupid compa…
> Fukushima, I absolutely do write off
The only thing that prevented Fukushima from having a Chernobyl like impact was that the radiation leakage was into the ocean [1]. The ocean ironically is being treated as a dumping ground that can be ignored by the pro-nuclear lobby just as they claim the pro-fossial fuel lobby os treating the atmosphere.
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/fukushima-radiation-con...
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#38I am curious, was there ever a time were insurance companies did offer risk insurance for nuclear power plants? If not, then nuclear has been killed by it's risk profile.
Nuclear plants tend to be underinsured; the bulk of the financial burden of a cleanup after a potential accident will be carried by tax payers. I am not sure if that is true everywhere, but at least in the US (the federal government takes over after the first $15 bn) and parts of Europe. Japan technically not, but practically yes. [0][1][2]
It gets even trickier with plants bordering other countries.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... [1]: https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51672335&itype=CMS... [2]: https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-there... | https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/08/national/fukush...
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#39Anti 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 entrenched players in the power industry hate nuclear power because it works, and can credibly produce post scarcity levels of power production.
It is unfortunate that the green energy movement has been lied to and co-opted against this genuinely fantastic energy source.
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#40While 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 culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?
By focusing on culture war, we miss a bigger story: perhaps nuclear construction is not compatible with modern economies? And perhaps it never was a great fit, according to this quote from the article?
> At first, nuclear energy was too expensive and so less attractive to utilities. But once General Electric and Westinghouse spurred the industry onward by becoming loss leaders (they collectively lost around $1 billion building plants) the race was on.18 A herd mentality soon developed as utilities lined up to take advantage of government benefits to build new reactors. So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”19