It is always interesting when the NYT and WSJ agree: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-needs-nuclear-power...
Bipartisan legislation incoming
Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
51–60 of 731 posts
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#52Nuclear 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…
That assumes the technology won't get much better. But there are a ton of potential ways to improve nuclear, like LFTR.
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#53>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.
You are aware that the "long-term strategy" had been to phase out nuclear, with laws and contracts laying out a gradual shutdown in place, and Merkels government slowed that process down against majority opinion in the population before Fukushima? The shallow "Merkel did it after Fukushima" meme is a mockery of what has been a long democratic process that Merkels government tried to renege on, with nuclear power having been a contested topic for decades.
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#54Nuclear 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…
In the US, public opinion has nearly nothing to do with the lack of new construction. The problem is far simpler here: nobody can build a reactor reliably without going vastly over budget, or off schedule. Going off schedule also means going off budget because costs are front loaded over the 40-60 year lifespan and therefore every year of delay costs massive amounts of interest.
There are plenty of viable sites for nuclear in the US where the local population is eager and willing, usually where there's already a nuclear power plant and it forms a strong economic force for the area. The NRC can't wait to approve more reactors and is doing its best to come up with new ways to certify safety.
So why wasn't nuclear built? Project management failures in the 1970s, combined with utility management far overestimating demand, led to a glut of reactors that were gigantic losses for those trying to build them. This was happening before TMI and Chernobyl turned more public opinion against nuclear. There's a great historical article about this management failure from the 1980 in Forbes that is escaping my web searches at the moment, but the massive financial losses taught the money guys to stay the hell away from nuclear.
Fast forward to the 2000s, there's a renewed push to build more reactors, especially as the current fleet ages and will need to be retired. Nobody wants to do it, because of massive financial risk for little gain. Finally, regulatory capture of the Georgia and North Carolina state legislatures enables bills so that the utitlties socialize all risks of construction failure into their ratepayers, while keeping the profits privatized. Only in that remarkable situation would any utility be willing to take on the insane risk of trying to build a reactor. Four were attempted, two have been abandoned, and North Carolina electricity customers pay something like an average of $20/month on their bill for reactors that will never get completed. Georgia is behind schedule, 2x-3x over budget at the moment, with no end in sight of the cost overruns.
So it's not public opinion that kills nuclear, it's nuclear construction that kills nuclear, at least in the US. We do not build massive projects well, and it blows out any sort of competitive nature for nuclear.
Even if nuclear costs 5x renewables stored in energy, there may still be a financial case for it being a part of a grid, just as peaker plants right now cost much more than, say, combined cycle gas turbines. But it seems unlikely that the massive GW+ reactors of yore will be attempted again any time soon. "Small" modular reactors in the 50MW range will be attempted next, even though in the past these were disregarded as too small to be cost effective. We shall see what their costs end up being, but the best I've been able to glean from news articles is that it's about the cost of Vogtle's new construction in Georgia, I.e. not going to be price competitive with batters and renewables in 10-15 years.
Building nuclear right now is a massively expensive bet on a technology that gets more expensive the more experience we have with it. Meanwhile it's competitors are getting cheaper every day. There may be a spot for it in the future grid, but only if it's boosters focus on nuclear's true problems rather than wasting effort on excuses that are not truly blocking the tech.
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#55Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…
Can you give more information on why this is? Any recommended reading to better understand where and why the costs increase?
Here's a recent report about what makes nuclear expensive and how to fix it [1].
[1] https://www.eti.co.uk/library/the-eti-nuclear-cost-drivers-p...
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much because Merkel decided so in the days following Fukushima. Not exactly the result of long term strategy.
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.
Afaik, the main problem with Fukushima disaster was awful handling by Japanese management, mostly finger pointing, instead of fixing the problem.
In particular Fukushima case, the evacuation caused more harm than fallout would do, so, in retrospective, it would be better to not evacuate.
There is no "huge areas devastated and unlivable for generations".
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#57Nuclear 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…
No, nuclear is sadly not a viable solution, due to cost. If nuclear were affordable it would be pushed through regardless of opposition. But it has just not worked out.
The people with the money saw what happened at Vogtle and Summer (and also at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point). Those efforts to make nuclear affordable failed spectacularly, even with public and government support. Westinghouse and Areva were just unable to execute.
This failure should not have been a surprise, as it mirrored what happened in the last big nuclear construction boom. That didn't stop because of accidents; it stopped because the nuclear plants in that boom experienced substantial cost overruns (i.e., the nuclear vendors were not honest about what the technology would actually cost.)
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#58Generation III+ reactors are orders of magnitude safer than everything else that was built before the turn of the century. China is actually leading the charge right now, with AP1000 reactors under construction. One of the plants just went live last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station
The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#59If 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…
A quibble: The point about meltdowns is cute, but probably wrong; the insurance against meltdown is a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity, if I understand correctly. In other words, the thermal expansion drives the fuel out into the piping as the reaction heats up, away from the compact reacting core, and also reduces the density in the core, allowing more neutrons to escape.
All reactors have negative temperature coefficients of reactivity, including LWRs (the water moderator boils away), SFRs (the core thermally expands), and MSRs (the fuel density decreases). The key to avoiding radiation leakage out of any nuclear plant is decay heat removal [1]. If you can passively remove decay heat, your reactor is very safe. MSRs do this easily, as do other reactors with low-pressure coolants (like sodium metal-cooled reactors).
Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you need twice as much electricity in the winter as in the summer? You're either going to need double the renewable capacity (4 x if you're solar-based) or some kind of super battery. Which doesn't exist yet. The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity…
Solar is headed toward as little as $0.01/kWh, an order of magnitude cheaper than high capacity factor nuclear. At that price, you cover seasonal shifts by some combination of overbuilding and curtailment in the summer, plus production of hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen in the winter in relatively cheap gas turbines (simply cycle turbines + generators are around $400/kW). This would be much cheaper than seasonal low…
Some non-trivial nuclear capacity is expected to make high-renewable deep-decarbonization scenarios significantly cheaper [1]. That hydrogen and battery storage stuff quickly adds numbers to the system cost. Solar alone with no storage doesn't work even a little (because of night time).
[1] http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-...