> Uranium can be reused so that pretty much solves that.
No it can’t. Any given atom stops being uranium after it fissions. Some of the waste can be reprocessed because not all is fissioned, but even then there is a lot of literally untouchable waste left over — well, literally untouchable if you want to live: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
But I don’t get this untouchable concept. Lava is untouchable. Deep oceans are unreachable. Why is it a requirement that we have to be able to go and touch every single spot on earth? What is the problem with having one minuscule location on earth where you are not supposed to go and stock pile this material there? It is contained, we have full control over it, unlike the immense volumes of chemicals currently released in rivers or the atmosphere. And there are already countless locations where you are not supposed to go because it is private or military property, polluted with chemicals, or too cold or too warm for humans, or a protected natural reserve, etc.
I don’t think waste is a legitimate concern of nuclear energy, as long as they are stored and protected responsively. The risk of an uncontained explosion of a reactor is a more legitimate concern. But I understand many modern designs like molten salt reactors reduce this risk to pretty much zero.
I am somewhat sympathetic to your points, but was responding to a comment that seemed to claim it was a non-issue.
I’m only “somewhat” in agreement because humans are terrible at reading warning signs, especially from long-dead people. “Oh,” they say, “that was ages ago. It’s just a primitive superstition. Anyway, we’re special.”
Agree, but that being said you can walk around in Rome and read signs that were written 2000 years ago. Same characters, similar language than most european languages. English is the modern latin, and I would argue, with even more significance than latin given its global scope. I just can't think of a scenario where our descendants would not know what radiactivity is, and would have forgotten english.
As a collective culture, I agree with you (assuming we don’t turn the planet into a Dyson swarm in that timeframe, which is surprisingly plausible and I don’t know how to start making forecasts).
Absent scenarios which Isaac Arthur has already made YouTube videos about, I’m more worried about atomic analogs of antivaxxers or homeopaths. Or “Traditional Chinese Medicine”. Or… well, you get the idea.
> There is a debate over what should constitute an acceptable scientific and engineering foundation for proceeding with radioactive waste disposal strategies. There are those who have argued, on the basis of complex geochemical simulation models, that relinquishing control over radioactive materials to geohydrologic processes at repository closure is an acceptable risk. They maintain that so-called "natural analogues" inhibit subterranean movement of radionuclides, making disposal of radioactive wastes in stable geologic formations unnecessary. However, existing models of these processes are empirically underdetermined: due to the subterranean nature of such processes in solid geologic formations, the accuracy of computer simulation models has not been verified by empirical observation, certainly not over periods of time equivalent to the lethal half-lives of high-level radioactive waste. On the other hand, some insist deep geologic repositories in stable geologic formations are necessary. National management plans of various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.
So, various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.
That's all we have for now.
> I don’t think waste is a legitimate concern of nuclear energy, as long as they are stored and protected responsively.
Yeah, but so far we have no way of doing that, so it's a legitimate concern. I might as well say "we can just turn off all nuclear reactors now, we just need other means oto generate the energy and do the shutdown responsibly". Leave it allll up to the reader, or in this case, future generations, why not.
> At Hanford, a rough rule of thumb for planners is to look ahead 1,000 years. That’s like a Viking trying to conceive of an astronaut, then trying to pass a note to him.
> Experts inside and outside of DOE have pondered this communication conundrum. The agency has assembled panels of scientists, historians, artists, and others to tackle from all angles the question of how a 21st century sign should look to a 31st century person. From symbols to colors to materials to size, everything’s up for grabs — and nothing’s been decided.
We don't have solutions. Pretending we have solutions will not help us get solutions, either.
The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.
Furthermore, the price of uranium is so cheap that it's financially feasible right now. It will be over time but that should also show you just how abundant and available it is as a resource.
If we actually got politicians to sit down and go through the requirements with engineers and scientists they would realize how cheap and still safe it can be.
> The ability to reuse more and more will improve over time so yes it's perfectly feasible.
Well, if that "counts", then solar power will become totally free and have a net positive environmental impact, we'll just plant some nanobots that grow and repair solar panels inside a marked area, and can be scooped up should we need them elsewhere, hence "100% free once we perfected them". They'll smell like vanilla, and change color according to the moods of people using the energy.
Latter on we make nanobots and send them to the sun to hang out there for a few thousand years and grow a scaffolding from, uhh, space dust or something, and then we shoot nanobots at it that grow solar panels on it, and we have our Dyson sphere. Add some nanostuff that creates material from energy and flings that at Earth, then convert material back to energy.
This didn't even take me 5 minutes, so I really don't get what the problem is :P
Fuel cells are a high capital cost solution to the problem of turning hydrogen into electricity, at higher efficiency. That's not what solar or wind need -- they need low capital cost, mediocre efficiency backup sources.
On the contrary, current efficiency of even cheap-and-dumb electrolysis is 70% {1}, which means that cheap solar like the 2.155¢/kWh plant from 6 montgs ago {2} can easily provide baseline load.
This is pretty much entirely because PV keep getting cheaper faster than everyone expected — even as recently as five years ago, pessimism like yours wouldn’t have been unreasonable, and yet the problem is now essentially solved and all we need to do is build the stuff at the prices we can already afford.
Of course they can't and of course it doesn't get cheaper unless you decide to frame it in a way that not at all realistic.
Solar is less then 1% and that's with 300% increase it's not even close to being able to deliver baseline anything regardless of how cheap it gets. It's a dream that's not even close to be realistic and frankly highly naive.
Again 47w per m2 vs. 1000w per m2 and with solar panels needing continous repeairs and no grid or fuel cells in sight plus reliance on coal, nuclear and oil for when the sun doesn't shine.
Your first sentence is missing a word. Can’t what? I gave you links to show my working.
I have no idea what you’re referring to with “47w per m2”, can you elaborate?
Ditto “needing continuous replairs“. There’s a rover on Mars that’s been running for about 15 years continuously on solar with no human maintenance.
From an engineering point of view (though not political), you don’t even need to worry about night time, because the earth is round and even planet sized grids don’t lose enough power to raise my example of 2.155¢/kWh to even as high as coal. And that’s if you refuse to use the fuel cell tech that already exists.
They can, when teamed with dispatchable sources, destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources.
This is why you're not seeing new nuclear plants much in the west. The decision makers know they face huge risk from future cost declines of renewables which, combined with gas, would leave those reactors unable to amortize their construction, financing, and fixed operating costs.
There are other solutions for long term storage of renewable energy to make it dispatchable. For example, making hydrogen, then burn it in turbines. The efficiency of this is lousy, but the capital cost can be quite low.
I see plenty of self-inflicted damage. Inability to meet cost estimates for new nuclear plants, for example. If nuclear had been as great as the salesmen had told us, the opposition would have been much less, and would likely have been steamrolled. As it stands, utilities largely don't want to build new nuclear plants. They even shit talk it in public. They aren't doing this because they are secret radical ecoterrorists; they are doing it because they are hard nosed business people with no time for failures.
This is nothing new. As the Forbes cover story on Feb. 11, 1985 said: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale… only the blind or the biased can now think that the money has been well spent.”
In recent years, they gave nuclear another chance. And it failed again. You are unlikely to get a third chance anytime soon.
So by that argument if wind and solar where so great it wouldn't only be supplying around 1.5% of our energy and growing much more rapidly than it does.
You can't both have your cake and eat it.
The difference is that we KNOW that nuclear can deliver way more energy per m2 than wind and solar can. We know how to get it to work and we know that the primary cost of nuclear is political NOT technical completely opposite wind and solar which have technical issues to provide as much as nuclear or coal or oil can.
What? No, that argument is nothing like the claim you are trying to make in that first paragraph. Please stick to actual working logic.
Yes, nuclear can deliver more energy per m2. But this is irrelevant, since we have no shortage of m2. What we have limits on is $$$. On the metric of energy/$, nuclear fails. And no, we do not know that the problem with nuclear is political. You can keep repeating that, but it doesn't make you any less wrong.
Of course it is. You are claiming that the lack of success of nuclear shows that it doesn't work financially. The same can be said about the effectiveness of solar. If it was so effective and could support most of our energy needs why haven't it?
The reason nuclear is expensive is because of the regulations around it NOT because of the technical issues of building a nuclear power plant.
What condemns nuclear is the stubborn lack of improvement it has shown.
Solar and wind have shown impressive and sustained improvement along so-called "experience curves". The cost of each has declined as a power law in cumulative installed capacity. This decline has been sustained while they've declined in cost by orders of magnitude (PV has improved in cost by more than a factor of 200 since the 1970s.)
Nuclear, in contrast, has been largely free of such sustained improvement. If anything, costs have increased with experience -- negative learning. The complexity and scale of nuclear appears to be such that learning effects are cancelled out.
And no, regulations are NOT the reason. That's the increasingly lame excuse nuclear fans confabulate to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their precious technology not actually living up to their fantasies about it. And as I've said elsewhere, if your complaint is that government doesn't let reactors meltdown enough, you might as well hang it up and go home. You are not going to win that one.
Because even though only 5 of the last 20 years had less than 30% annual growth, even though the annual average compounded equivalent rate since records began has been 73% per yer (which I think places it second in growth between improvements to cost reductions in genetics (#1) and Moores law (#3)) it takes time to do that.
This year PV alone is forecast to reach half a terrawatt. I’m not sure if that’s peak or average but at 30% per year growth, it doesn’t really matter. World electric use is only 2.7 TW, after that point we want to start electrolysing hydrogen out of water even if only to replace jet fuel.
If it was easy to solve, it’d be solved already. It’s not easy and it’s not cheap, and for those reasons it’s likely it won’t be done.
It’s already cheaper to build new solar plants and wind farms than continue to run an existing coal plant (which itself is cheaper to run than nuclear).
No it wouldnt be solved already since the political environment is completely against nuclear, so simply false. Solar is a fraction of energysupply and will not even be close to being signifficant whare it really matters which is in transportation.
How is nuclear being expensive political? It is fundementally untenable as a commercial enterprise when compared to natural gas, solar, and wind.
90-95% of all new generation coming online each year are renewables in the US. Renewables cost continues to decline year over year, speeding its uptake. I cannot fathom how one would think nuclear can compete at all in such an environment.
“Nearly all nuclear plants now in use began operation between 1970 and 1990. These plants would require a subsequent license renewal before 2050 to operate beyond the 60-year period covered by their original 40-year operating license and the 20-year license extension that nearly 90% of plants currently operating have either already received or have applied for. The AEO2017 Reference case projections do not envision a large amount of new nuclear capacity additions. By 2050, only four reactors currently under construction and some uprates at existing plants are projected to come online.”
Super-expensive safety regulations are often based on the linear no-threshold model of biological dose response. There is more and more data showing that this is illogical at very low doses. Changing that is highly political.
The large 3-shift security staff at nuclear power plants is based on political concerns.
The contractor and financing models in play in the US to build nukes causes lots of misalignment, and contracts end up suing each other over trivialities rather than building the plant like the Koreans do or French did (in the 1970s). That's nearly political.
Anti-nuclear intervenors watch over plant plans and try to delay at all costs. Totally political.
If flyash disposal, mining, carbon emission, and fracking were equally regulated then these regulations create incentive to R+D nuclear technology, making it more affordable. The results of a rigged race don't prove anything.
That doesn’t address solar and wind being drastically cheaper than nuclear fission. It would be wasteful to continue to poor dollars into fission at this point, versus scaling up renewables and battery manufacturing further.
Whether the race is rigged is irrelevant; the race is over.
Solar and wind are environmentally dependent sources that aren't possible in all locations or times and are unlikely to work on their own. Even when they are generally available, they don't have the same utility for industry as a constant source like nuclear because of the uncertainty. Since coal and gas will certainly run out, nuclear still may have a future in small scale modular nuclear reactors produced offsite, at scale.
Again, they aren't cheaper when you compare to output.
Just to put things in perspective. Solar can do roughly 50W per m2 at best and I am being generous.
Nuclear does 1000W per m2.
Solar is not even close to being able to deliver stable energy so you would have to factor either coal, nuclear or oil into the mix too to provide stable delivery.
Renewable can't deliver the needed energy not even close. Less than 1% right now and not even close with anything like fuel cell technologies or distributed grid systems which would be very very very expensive.
Nuclear whether you like it or not is cleaner, more stable, cheaper and more scaleable.
Just to put things in perspective. Solar can do roughly 50W per m2 at best and I am being generous. Nuclear does 1000W per m2.
Apples and oranges. We have plenty of desert land and /or roof space for solar. Granted solar is not with its enviro issues but nuclear stands apart. Also costs. A Nuclear power plants costs $20+billion to be built. But then solar by definition is only during the day
But we have no fuelcell technology and no grid and no signs of anything even closely resembling a solution thats possible to pay for, nuclear provides energy for a very long time and doesent need to be fixed all the time like dolar and wind.
Solar and wind are currently very cheap on an LCOE basis, but LCOE is a poor proxy for the entire system cost. Due to their variable nature, the value of these resources shrink rapidly as their grid penetration increases. That being said, in most grids there's still plenty of space for wind and/or solar before these effects become a problem.
The end goal is a lowest cost deep decarbonized grid. We should design policies to give us that ASAP. In many cases, nuclear has a robust role to play in such grids.
You use it as baseload to replace coal. The problem with renewables is the variability, which would lead to overcapacity or other issues as it scales up.
When we say a source is "baseload", we're not saying something good about it. What that means is that source's business case depends on being able to sell its output most of the time. It's a word describing economic inflexibility.
There is no reason why a grid needs any baseload sources whatsoever.
It’s not good or bad, it’s just the nature of the beast.
The nature of a nuclear plant is that it is incredibly capital intensive, and needs to operate at capacity to work financially.
Solar is interesting because it’s peak output aligns with peak demand. Your solar farm isn’t going to do much for you st night, but that’s ok because you don’t need the power!
PV is also interesting because the levelized cost of power from it has become very good, especially in areas of high insolation, and because its costs continue to rapidly decline. Low cost gives all sorts of headroom for such things as overbuilding and low efficiency storage.
Its not too expensive its very cheap, its the regulation around that makes it expensive which can be solved too.