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…
>If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years
Plus the ones we had were happy accidents thus far. We could have much worse, and they also involve terrorism and other such motives.
Plus disposing toxic byproducts that last almost forever (and which we regularly dump on the lowest bidder to take care off).
Lastly, to do nuclear properly costs too much. If it weren't for huge subsidies it wouldn't be viable...
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…
Not to mention the small nuclear waste issue. Managing waste for a period far, far, far longer than any state has historically lasted continuously (or even since the dawn of human civilization) seems really optimistic. Very few states have lasted continuously more than a few centuries without some kind of partial or total collapse (military defeat, revolution, bankruptcy of government, etc), ant these waste will need…
The consensus solution to nuclear waste is to put it in geologic repositories where it will be safely out of the biosphere until well after it decays to stability.
This issue of a toxic but carefully handled substance is very small compared to the looming threat of climate change.
As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person.
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 j…
Half the article was about the reasons costs are so much higher in the U.S. than South Korea, and how to fix it.
We've heard that sort of thing for decades. How many more times does Lucy have to pull the football away before you catch on?
FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…
“Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.” just that is all I need to know to prefer nuclear to coal.
You shouldn't just count deaths and conclude that a nuclear catastrophy isn't that bad. Far more people had to evacuate their home, having to leave most of their belongings behind. And most times with no or too little compensation. Sure, nuclear is prefferable to coal but that doesn't mean that both shouldn't be gotten rid of.
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…
The advantage of MSRs is not that they can't melt down (or that they could use thorium; that's vastly overhyped), it's that there's no volatile material in the containment building. The containment of a LWR has to be large because it fills with radioactive steam in an accident. It has to be able to contain this steam, which means at least a certain amount of structure to withstand its pressure. But MSRs don't use wat…
I'm pretty convinced that they're worth working on today because in 20 years when we have vast renewable deployment we'll either have solved the storage/intermittency problem with no unexpected environmental or economic costs, or we'll desperately need advanced nuclear. It's kind of a Pascal's Wager type of thing: worst case if you work on advanced reactors is that you learn new things about reactors and maybe they'll be useful in deep space (far from the sun). Worse case if you don't work on advanced reactors is you get screwed by climate change when running into logistical issues with renewable intermittency.
The US never had the ability to build affordable nuclear plants. That's a major reason the first nuclear construction boom fizzled out here.
> The US never had the ability to build affordable nuclear plants. Sure it has. They're just getting used by the Navy, not by civilians. There's no reason why the same methods that have been successfully used to control cost and schedule for those reactors couldn't be used for civilian reactors.
Navy reactors are extremely expensive. They are worth it because of logistics around oil.
Even when comparing to oil, Nuclear is still more expensive. “Specifically, total life-cycle costs would be 19 percent higher for a fleet of nuclear destroyers.” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/41454
seems like air travel, a crash in Siberia with 57 victims makes world news. 1200 car crashes and deaths at the same period don't. (made the numbers up but air travel is much safer)
It's exactly like air travel. We use that analogy in the industry all the time. The question for me is, OK so how did the airline industry make most people ok with it? And does that work for nuclear public education too? It's funny, people who live near nuclear plants are very significantly more supportive of nuclear plants. Anecdotally, I grew up 9 miles from an operating plant and love them.
Nuclear 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…
FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…
And as a result of the Chernobyl accident, southern Germany is sufficently contaminated, that food from the forests, like mushrooms and wild boar are still not completely safe to consume. Each killed animal has to be checked with a radiation detector, whether its radiation is low enough for it to be eaten, otherwise it has to be disposed as radioactive contaminated.
With Fukushima, it was increadible luck that e.g. Tokyo didn't get contaminated. The consequences if that had happened don't need to be described. So far, most of the contamination ended up in the ocean, the pacific ocean is really large, so the contamination got quite diluted. We don't know though, whether it doesn't come back to haunt us in some so far unexpected way.
“Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.” just that is all I need to know to prefer nuclear to coal.
You shouldn't just count deaths and conclude that a nuclear catastrophy isn't that bad. Far more people had to evacuate their home, having to leave most of their belongings behind. And most times with no or too little compensation. Sure, nuclear is prefferable to coal but that doesn't mean that both shouldn't be gotten rid of.
But that kind of reactor is never going to be built again - its design was very outdated and outright bad. Today we can build reactors where any failure that would result in an explosion of any kind is physically nearly impossible.
Nuclear power can save the world if we can prevent any more Fukushimas. It requires so much more responsibility than wind or solar seem to on the part of plant operators.