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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

#91

Post by philipkglass »

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.

The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 milligrams/kg: http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tabl...

The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895

Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19680020487), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gram, strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as arsenic, or 3 times as deadly as the chemical warfare agent sarin. A commercial power reactor of 1000 MWe output can have an inventory of tens of kilograms of strontium 90 in the core [1] along with even more acutely dangerous shorter-lived fission products.

Nuclear reactors are safe because of careful defense-in-depth in their engineering and operation. They need deeper, more stringent safety systems than steel plants or ammonia plants because they contain substances much more toxic than those found in steel plants or ammonia plants. You also see extreme safety practices in facilities that handle non-radioactive poisons, if the poisons are potent enough:

"Inside Fort Botox"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-fo...

[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6822946 See table 2.2 "Fission product inventories"

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#92

Post by Schroedingersat »

musha68k wrote: post #15
fundatus wrote: post #5

Who 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.

Yes, it’s interesting to watch consensus switch over to pro-nuclear again. I’m not only referring to power generation by the way. In terms of global warming I’m still conflicted myself. It’s a complex topic. Going nuclear probably would be a pragmatic last minute band-aid if it had been applied 20 years ago. Now I’m not so sure anymore. Future plants will also likely meet more wars and other shocks to the system. You…

It's not so much consensus as what will keep the fossil fuel players in business as long as possible. Both in delaying renewables and finding a new monopoly to fuck everyone with.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#93

Post by nullc »

alerighi wrote: post #83
epistasis wrote: post #40

While 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 cult…

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

We need to stop looking at coal/gas, etc. as fuel. They're not. They are part of an atmosphere/carbon-sink battery.

When we get energy from carbon emitting sources we're discharging the atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. Eventually we're going to have to charge it again, and to do so it will take substantially more energy than we got from discharging it.

Beyond CO2, coal in particular produces a large amount of radioactive and particulate atmospheric pollution. We expect nuclear to capture most of its externalities but we ignore those of most other ways we obtain energy.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#94

Post by Gwypaas »

alerighi wrote: post #83
epistasis wrote: post #40

While 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 cult…

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

The alternative is not fossil fuels, that's arguing a strawman, it is renewables.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#95

Post by nullc »

rglover wrote: post #72
arez wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tell that to france and their inability to generate power with many reactors because either the rivers are dry or too hot. How is that a sustainable solution

Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is: > After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers. And also... > Since 2000, p…

... as if the alternative energy solutions don't harm wildlife (including solar and wind). Is this again an example of expecting nuclear to mitigate its externalities while ignoring them for everything else?

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#96

Post by Krasnol »

alerighi wrote: post #83
epistasis wrote: post #40

While 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 cult…

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

Yes we don't factor the long term effects because we don't know what might happen in a thousand years when some madman digs out our nuclear waste to do some madman stuff for example.

This is not about nuclear vs. fossil. Both are from the past. It is nuclear vs. fast improving and cheap technologies around renewable energy sources. It loses that battle and will keep on losing it because everything around renewables is getting better and cheaper while everything around nuclear is getting more and more expensive and takes much longer than expected.

It's time to face the future.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#97

Post by SECProto »

epistasis wrote: post #40

While 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 cult…

> 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?

Nuclear plants are massive, complex, tightly regulated capital projects. These require strong project management capacity. Most Western democracies have spent decades systematically outsourcing project management to various consultants (who are great for reducing cost on small projects with short timelines, but not good for major projects with a lot of schedule and budget uncertainty). Couple that with the fact that the US and France haven't built a nuclear plant in decades (France started two in the 1984-2007 gap), causing the loss of most institutional knowledge. I think these are the root cause of price and schedule escalations.

Same problems have caused cost and schedule escalations in the Site C dam and the Lower Churchill hydro project in Canada. High speed rail in California has similar issues. Similar causes have affected the Berlin airport, and the Stuttgart railway station reconstruction.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#98

Post by epistasis »

alerighi wrote: post #83
epistasis wrote: post #40

While 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 cult…

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point in comparing to them at all.

Sure, nuclear is CapEx heavy, with low OpEx. But storage and wind and solar have lower CapEx and OpEx. And they also scale much better, and are falling in cost, so when they need to be replaced, they will be replaced at even lower costs than their initial builds. And investing in the technology now only drives down future costs even more.

We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites.

None of the advocates for nuclear seem to ever run the numbers on what it would take to actually build nuclear. They don't model the needs of the grid, they don't look at where nuclear has failed during construction and do a root cause analysis, they don't try to change specific regulations, they don't try to figure out what could actually make nuclear work in the US. Instead we get vague wishes and hand waving, and we are missing any of the hustle that would be required to actually make positive change in the world.

And I have a feeling that the reason for this lack of practical attention to detail, and this lack of this entrepreneurial hustle, if because when you start paying attention to details and the maze of action needed to get nuclear built, nuclear is not compelling compared to the alternatives.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#99

Post by conviencefee999 »

Krasnol wrote: post #96
alerighi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

Yes we don't factor the long term effects because we don't know what might happen in a thousand years when some madman digs out our nuclear waste to do some madman stuff for example. This is not about nuclear vs. fossil. Both are from the past. It is nuclear vs. fast improving and cheap technologies around renewable energy sources. It loses that battle and will keep on losing it because everything around renewables i…

You know that we can launch nuclear waste into space right? The thing that's infinitely large. As for renewables the issue is scale and renewables have limitations that investments in fusion and existing fission do not.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#100

Post by pfdietz »

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.

In all those cases if something goes wrong workers can be sent in afterwards to rebuild things. If something goes seriously wrong in a nuclear power plant the owner is out one nuclear power plant.
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