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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

#41

Post by tuatoru »

dctoedt wrote: post #23

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…

Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas.

Yet all these materials are cheap.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#42

Post by ska »

ant6n wrote: post #18
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #8

> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history; ... In North America, the mantle belongs to Ontario, whose nuclear plants replaced its coal fleet.1 I am dubious of this claim, but it probably depends on exactly how you define it. But switching from a country to a province immediately sends up red flags.

> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history I thought it was hydro in Quebec, or perhaps Norway.

Doesn't decarbonation imply replacing something? Lots of places with the right distributions of water use hydroelectric, because it was cheaper to build out. Ontario has craploads of water (hello, great lakes) but not much elevation, at least not in the right places.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#43

Post by epistasis »

dundercoder wrote: post #6

I worked in commercial nuclear power for a while, including a stint at three mile island. The regulatory compliance burden alone, from the NRC and DOE, is crippling financially.

That seems to conflict with the low operating expenses of nuclear reactors. Once they are built, what is the crippling aspect?

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#44

Post by jmyeet »

jdasdf wrote: post #17
jmyeet wrote: post #13

I'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~ We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years, and you would cause less environment damage, and human deaths than we did by operating fossil fuel plants in 2021. There is no argument against chernobyl because chernobil is quite frankly irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for, and arguably…

> ... irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for

In the US at least it's "accounted for" by shifting those costs onto the public [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#45

Post by lnsru »

tuatoru wrote: post #41
dctoedt wrote: post #23

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…

Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas. Yet all these materials are cheap.

Add semiconductor foundries. They have tons of nasty materials there. Enough to make inhabitants of the next bigger city not alive anymore.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#46

Post by pdonis »

dctoedt wrote: post #23

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…

Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer possible. (Whether those designs can support the requirements for military use, which are quite different from those for civilian power generation, is a different question.)

That said, civilian nuclear power, at least in the US, was never operated with the same attention to detail and the same intolerance for f[oul]ups as Navy nuclear power; the kinds of mistakes that operators made at TMI (don't even start about Chernobyl, that's a whole other level of insanity) would have gotten Navy nuclear trainees kicked out of the program long before they were allowed to do anything with an actual reactor. (When I was an Engineering Duty Officer working at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, I saw a reactor officer get fired for an administrative error that probably would not even have been on the radar in a civilian plant.) So that can't be a significant part of the explanation of why civilian nuclear power is so costly in the US.

The high cost of civilian nuclear power in the US has always been primarily due to politics: things like unreasonable waste storage requirements imposed by the government (you don't need to store waste for 10,000 years if you reprocess it, like every other nuclear energy using country does) and endless lawsuits delaying plant construction being allowed to proceed even though they were based on no valid technical data whatever.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#47

Post by [deleted] »

tuatoru wrote: post #41
dctoedt wrote: post #23

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…

Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas. Yet all these materials are cheap.

[deleted]

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#48

Post by mwattsun »

dctoedt wrote: post #36
mwattsun wrote: post #33

The 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.

Working in nuclear under normal operations is boring anyway and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators. At least on the submarine we'd scram the reactor and run drills. I'm sure civilian nuclear is less exciting than this. I had one buddy who did it for a career, but just one that I know of.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#49

Post by fallingknife »

jmyeet wrote: post #37
fallingknife wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Your source contains no number for the amount of radiation released into the ocean in absolute terms or relative to Chernobyl. It only says that a higher percentage made it to the ocean, which is meaningless because Chernobyl is inland. It also doesn't say what tangible effects the radiation release had on the ocean.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#50

Post by Georgelemental »

locallost wrote: post #27

The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs, and is partially the reason prices are going into the stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential risk for your analysis, well... The Frenc…

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.
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