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Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

nytimes.com

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Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#41

Post by acidburnNSA »

quelsolaar wrote: post #31

Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion. A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that) Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you real…

Just a month before Chernobyl happened, the staff at the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II in Idaho successfully demonstrated something new and incredible: passive shutdown. They had the reactor at full power and killed the pumps. It shut down and started cooling itself with natural circulation (no external/backup power needed). No control rods were inserted. This state would last indefinitely. Then they did it again, this time cutting off the heat sink. Same result [1]. This was the ultimate energy source. But we all turned our backs on this team. Clinton cut funding in '94 and the reactor shut down.

Advanced low-pressure reactors can do this, and eliminating loss-of-decay-heat-removal accidents takes the probability of a large early release well into the 10^-7 or even 10^-8 range according to probabilistic risk assessments.

So even though nuclear is, by the actuarial tables, almost as safe as you can get in energy systems, you're right that the public opinion is a big hurdle and that Fukushimas are not acceptable. These low-pressure designs get us there, and it's been demonstrated.

Molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, and some gas cooled reactors all have this capability. It's basically the main event of what the nuclear industry called Gen IV reactors [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-II#Passive_safety

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#42

Post by hannob »

cm2187 wrote: post #30
hugi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima was an excellent demonstration of what can happen. You devastate huge areas of land and make them unlivable for generations. This is especially applicable to the United States that has proven entirely unable to handle it's own nuclear waste and just accumulates it at the sites where it's generated, waiting for disaster to happen.

I always thought that nuclear waste was a non problem. It is a minuscule amount of confined hazardous material. Even if you don't recycle it, the impact on the environment is negligible. But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors. More modern design do not present those risks [1]. Judging nuclear ener…

> But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors.

With "early generation reactors" you mean all the ones that exist. The whole "next generation reactor" / "generation 4 reactor" thing is at this point nothing more than vague plans for what could be.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#43

Post by Lammy »

quelsolaar wrote: post #31

Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion. A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that) Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you real…

> Even a country like Japan, who have high safety standards

Reading about TEPCO’s management of their facilities and people both before and after the Fukushima accident doesn’t really mesh with this claim.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#44

Post by DennisP »

pfdietz wrote: post #17
plasticchris wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A certain baseline power requirement must be met. It's also interesting to see the volatility of solar and wind be used as an argument against baseline generation, as this has traditionally been an argument against renewables.

It's an argument against renewables only when the renewables are expensive. When renewables are cheap, then nuclear is placed in an impossible situation, as nuclear either displaces the renewables when they ARE available (incurring a large marginal cost), or only runs when they aren't (forcing nuclear's large fixed costs to be amortized over much less output). It's likely that a cost optimized grid will have little o…

Unless you do solar and mostly skip wind, in which case you can build enough nuclear to run the nighttime load and solar for just the extra daytime load, then you can run the nukes 24/7. That minimizes both nuclear downtime and storage requirements.

But if we're going to build a lot of wind, that still doesn't necessarily doom nuclear, if we can lower the capital cost of nuclear. The article describes some fairly simple ways to go about that; a recent study at MIT had the same recommendations.

Down the road a decade or so, molten salt reactors will start to be available, and those look to have much lower capital costs and good load-balancing.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#45

Post by hannob »

OisinMoran wrote: post #25

If this interests you, I would highly recommend reading this article on molten salt reactors [0]. TL;DR: Molten salt reactors are safer (can't have a meltdown if it's already melted), smaller (could fit on the back of a truck), able to run on more abundant materials like Thorium (which in turn come from more politically stable regions), and to top it all off: not only do they leave much less nuclear waste, they can a…

Also Molten salt reactors don't exist yet appart from a few research reactors, which you forgot to mention.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#46

Post by hesk »

cm2187 wrote: post #10
fakwandi_priv wrote: post #5

>Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early. Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants? I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's. From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy b…

Pretty much because Merkel decided so in the days following Fukushima. Not exactly the result of long term strategy.

That's too simplistic. Retiring nuclear power plants has been the long term goal of the German anti-nuclear movement since the 70s. They were an important faction in the founding of the Green Party. When the Green party came into power in 1998 in a coalition government, they passed a law to retire all nuclear power plants by restricting the remaining energy output they could produce. BTW, this was done in consensus with the German nuclear industry. In 2009, a free-market/conservative coalition came into power again and they reversed course. Then Fukushima happened, a couple hundred thousand people demonstrated against nuclear power in Germany, a Green-led government won the elections in a historically conservative state, and Andrea Merkel changed her opinion.

Long story short, phasing out nuclear energy has been a long term goal and has broad support in Germany.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#47

Post by Krasnol »

cm2187 wrote: post #30
hugi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima was an excellent demonstration of what can happen. You devastate huge areas of land and make them unlivable for generations. This is especially applicable to the United States that has proven entirely unable to handle it's own nuclear waste and just accumulates it at the sites where it's generated, waiting for disaster to happen.

I always thought that nuclear waste was a non problem. It is a minuscule amount of confined hazardous material. Even if you don't recycle it, the impact on the environment is negligible. But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors. More modern design do not present those risks [1]. Judging nuclear ener…

Sure it is a non problem.

If your country is the size of the USA and nobody bothers if you let it disappear somewhere in the desert. Which is not the case in Germany and most of the countries. People just don't want to have a nuclear waste dump near by and Germany needs to spend a hell lot of money to clean up the last mine they used as a dump already.

The tech is dead and the lobby won't be able to ride that current artificial hype for ever...

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#48

Post by catdog »

fakwandi_priv wrote: post #5

>Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early. Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants? I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's. From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy b…

Also the beginning of this statement is not really true:

> Germany, which went all-in for renewables…

This might have been the case more than a decade ago with the green party being part of the government but the political climate changed. Angela Merkel talks a lot about saving the climate but actual policy is the opposite slowing down the switch to renewable energy as much as possible.

> From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy

Not really,

* It's expensive as hell, it just might seem cheap because a lot of the cost is offloaded to the tax payer in the long run

* Even western first world countries operate nuclear power plants which have known safety issues (look at e.g. France or Belgium) so even if we could technically do it safely, our societies are not politically mature enough to implement it.

* Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster so it's not even as clean as often advertised

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#49

Post by danso »

jseliger wrote: post #2

It is always interesting when the NYT and WSJ agree: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-needs-nuclear-power...

Both the OP and the WSJ article are op-eds, written by people who are not paid by the publications. Op-Eds get their name from the phrase, “opposing/opposite the editorial page”, so it’s not particularly accurate to think of this as the NYT and WSJ stating a position.
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