Fukushima was caused by shoddy planning. From a Carnegie Endowment report[1]:
"The original design-basis tsunami for Fukushima Daiichi of 3.1
meters was chosen because a 1960 earthquake off the coast of
Chile created a tsunami of that height on the Fukushima coast."
Assuming that future tsunamis would be no higher than a recent historical tsunami is already silly. But it's worse:
"one compilation of historical tsunamis in and around Japan lists
twelve events since 1498 having a maximum amplitude of more than
10 meters, six of which had a maximum amplitude of over 20 meters."
In 2002 they already knew the seawater pumps were located too low, but took no action:
"Fukushima Daiichi’s design basis tsunami was estimated to have
a maximum height of 3.1 meters above mean sea level. Given this,
TEPCO decided to locate the seawater intake buildings at 4 meters
above sea level and the main plant buildings at the top of a
slope 10 meters about sea level"
"In 2002, on the basis of a new methodology for assessing tsunami
safety developed by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, TEPCO
voluntarily reevaluated the tsunami hazard and adopted a
revised design-basis tsunami height of 5.7 meters. Yet, NISA
neither updated the licensing documents to reflect this change
nor reviewed TEPCO’s analysis. Given that the revised
design-basis tsunami was now 1.4 meters above the seawater pumps,
such a review should have been conducted."
This is one of those "Therefore, what?" points... (although you may not have intended anything more than sharing some very interesting and relevant information).
But I can see a "therefore, we should not dismiss nuclear power due to some shoddy planning". And, I can see a "therefore, we can expect some degree of shoddy planning in any engineering project, given that it happened even with a nuclear plant, where the risks were well-known ahead of time."
To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning.
Nuclear safety is a multifacted issue and only the news media would take one fact (Fukushima was avoidable) and reach a conclusion (proving that nuclear is completely safe / completely risky).
I'm personally an advocate for fission, because power storage has a long way to go before wind/solar can handle baseload. I especially like the newer designs such a Moltex (http://www.moltexenergy.com/). But that one fact about Fukushima isn't enough to support that position so I didn't bring that into the discussion.
> To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning.
Yes, and the next disaster "will never have happened if (insert other reason)". It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact.
Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.
> It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact.
Fukushima's obvious issue was known before it before it became a mistake. We aren't discussing unknowns.
> Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere.
Right; fortunately we have reactor designs now that are intrinsically failsafe (ie the failsafes rely on physical laws, and thus can't fail). Why don't we use them? Funding/politics. As you said, nothing is black and white.
> Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.
What other forms of energy? Chemical energy is limited and is just as hard to make safe (coal/oil is really bad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co...), which are arguably just as bad if not worse than nuclear power). Wind/solar is limited without storage; even with storage it's still limited.
My plan would be Gas and then replace it with Solar thermal energy. Im open to using nuclear in addition or instead of gas. However my (limited) research seems that Nuclear is actually quite expensive and probebly could not compete in a market against gas. Gas is fine because the burning is efficant, we seem to have quite a bit and its CO2 is accaptable.
We really need to be working on Solar thermal energy. It combines the renewable energy with the consistancy of gas/coal/nuclear plus its safer then either of those. I don't understand why its not used as much (Their are a number of theories).
There's no excuse for obvious mistakes. This wasn't something tricky. There are hundreds of years old stone markers in that area documenting the level which previous Tsunmis have reached - well above the level of the power plant.
The level of paternalism and corruption needed to pull off such an act of planning is actually pretty high - Japan's culture is particularly vulnerable to this. It's the sort of thing which would be very unlikely to happen in other parts of the world, where regulation and oversight is rigorously enforced.
Taking a single incident out of context and generalising about very different cultures and different plant designs is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusion.
Nobody was predicting a major nuclear accident in Japan before 2011. It makes me wonder how many other obvious mistakes are out there.
Contrary to your post, Japan has a strong reputation for safety and reliability in engineering. That kind of cultural explanations are very spurious anyway. I can come up with similar ones for many countries.
As someone living in Japan, I think this is a common misconception about this country. Just because Japanese excels in certain areas (manufacturing at scale, build quality and robustness to price ratio, earthquake safe building code) doesn't mean that it can be assumed safe in all aspects. There are a few known key areas where Japan has weaknesses. The most severe ones are IMO Software quality and lack of transparency and checks in government. The corruption induced by the latter is highly visible and failures like Fukushima aren't really too surprising knowing this. The good thing is that Japanese government is able to adapt relatively quickly when such failures become apparent - but something always has to happen first, because the chance of someone actually looking otherwise is next to zero.
And yes, this is very easily explained by culture. Specifically the culture of not questioning anyone with higher status in society. It's the downside of the importance of respect. The combination of this cultural aspect with the status of engineers being very low compared to western countries, leads to situations where management or regulatory decisions can become completely decoupled from what engineers communicate, if they even dare to communicate. If you want to solve this problem you need a rather different attack vector than the one you need in the US for example.
I find this cultural aspect fascinating. Can you please explain more about the interaction between engineering and their management? Why do you think engineering has a lower status in Japan compared to the US? Respectfully, AG
As to "what" happens: AFAIK, and that's second hand knowledge because I'm still in Academia: Engineers are the people you hire for their specific skillset in Japan. Advancement to management from these positions tends to be slow, if at all possible. This seems to be quite different from my (german speaking) home country where many CEO (and therefore also mid to lower management) positions are held by engineers. Japan has a very rigid "salary man" track system where it's pretty much predefined how old you must be and what university you must have visited in order to go on (a) a (salary man) management track for the big companies or (b) do a career in administration. Engineering is kind of separate of this whole system and generally comes with a lower overall status (and salary).
"why" is actually a hard question to answer. Might have to do with math skills being more abundant. Most certainly has to do with how the economy was modelled after WW2 (using American blueprints). Basically, imagine the way the job market in the US worked in the 50ies and then think of it as a top-down enforced policy rather than something that fell out of the need of the time. This worked very well (exceeding US growth) - until it didn't anymore, and Japan basically is still in a very slow process of adapting to the post-bubble reality. It seems like their economy was boosted so high that the bubble economy big corporations were able to survive until now and we're still in the process of getting rid of these encrusted structures. The government is certainly not helping by getting ever more in debt just to prop up dead industries. Low status of engineers, and even worse, entrepreneurs is probably one of the biggest detrimental factors to Japanese economic growth. And I really mean low, as in it is very hard to even find an apartment if you don't have a recognisable employer, even if you can show millions of revenue for your company and a high salary for yourself. Marriage market works much the same way.
I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the fact that when nuclear plants fail, they create highly dangerous and difficult to clean up messes. If an freak asteroid punctures a containment facility, it is nobody's fault, and no flaw of design, planning, etc. Yet, we still have radiation and waste to deal with.
Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable failures happen.
Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have no good method of ameliorating.
But do you care the same when a filter in your local coal plant fails? That happens way, way more often and actually releases way more hazardous substances that are even harder to remove. Moreover, any stop/start of the plant likely requires oil burner start which requires the filters to be disabled (or they'd be destroyed).
Specifically, mildly radioactive ash, large amounts of smoke, sulfur and nitrites. These leach into groundwater easily (unlike fallout) and are also biomagnified like fission products.
Only natural gas is comparatively clean and there are major problems with dependency and delivery infrastructure.
(Plus it is about just as environmentally friendly to mine as coal.)
Likewise it would be a mistake to assume that it's totally unsafe based on a single instance of poor planning. But it's true that reactors of this vintage are flawed and the risks probably are too high. Fortunately we have modern reactor designs to fix that.
I agree, but it should also be pointed out that the reactor was something like 60 years old. Newer reactors incorporate many improvements based on research and new risk modeling, etc. Keeping reactors past their planned service life means these improvements don't get put in. We need to be replacing oils reactors with newer, safer, more modular reactors.
> wind power energy generation has killed more people than nuclear power generation
Have you got a source for that claim? I'm genuinely interested to see how that stacks up, given that Chernobyl alone killed about 50 people directly, and a handwavy amount from increased cancer rates.
never seen those stats before. That's awesome. Interesting that Hydro is the safest apart from that one accident. I wonder if that's a long-term trend - that hydro accidents are very rare but very very bad. I guess we'll find out.
Has anyone done any research on how much 'energy' is stored in wind currents? How many wind turbines can we erect before we affect the climate by disrupting air currents?
Clearly you haven't done the back of the envelope calculation. Many people have looked at the problem and it's not a trivial one. First, to see how much wind could be harnessed see for ex. [0] or [1]. Assuming 100TW of power, it's ~10^7 turbines. If each one has 50*10^3 kg of steel, it's somewhere between 10^10 - 10^11 kg of steel. 100,000,000 tons if I'm not mistaking. It turns out that Japan produced as much steel on its own, just in 2014. If my estimate is off by a factor of 10, china produced 800 million tons of steel! Glassfibre could be challenging to scale, but it's hardly a scarce resource.
I can also see you have never worked or lived next to a wind turbine. I worked a few yards away from one for a year and the noise was imperceptible inside the building. (Mostly because, when it's moving fast, it's very windy, i.e. very noisy already due to the wind).
Finally, the migrant bird issue is an issue, but it's not hard to solve. Radar and Sonar systems exist to detect migrating flocks of birds and slow down the turbines [3]. But more importantly, buildings, skyscrapers and cars are the number one killer of birds (not turbines). Numbers would change, of course, if we truly tried to extract all accessible, high yield winds. But careful planning and technological solutions would mean that migrant birds would not be more affected than they are today by the human infrastructure.
> the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground
If it had been a heap of solar panels and wind turbines that got hit by a wave, at worst they'd lose some generating capacity and find the odd solar panel washing up in Hawaii.
Every accident "would have never happened if...". the point is to reduce the consequences when things do happen - we know damn well we can't stop every accident.
Honestly nuclear power had plenty of issues to solve before the Fukushima accident.
No, the point is to stop accidents from happening. Specially when they're this obviously preventable. I mean, we're talking about literally the most obvious precaution that one could possibly take when building in a Tsunai zone.
If it had been a factory producing solar panels, the whole production capability of solar panels would be set back by decades. Their production is this centralized.
Heck, it doesn't even take a tsunami to destroy quite fragile solar panels - just a bigger hailstorm.
Plus, I think you didn't even consider how harmful the resulting battery chemical spill would be if such an accident happened.
> If it had been a factory producing solar panels, the whole production capability of solar panels would be set back by decades
If it had been a factory creating coco-pops the whole pacific ocean would have become a chocolate milkshake. We can make random "if it was.." statements all day, but most of the other things it might have been wouldn't require it to be so close to such a large body of water for cooling purposes.
Ok, so I think we agree this was an "obvious" mistake. Given that "obvious" mistakes occur, should one consider using technologies with catastrophic failure modes?
Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes".
Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown, we can have our cake and eat it too. Now let's do that.
>Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes".
The difference being that even the most gnarly multi-car pile up doesn't directly involve more than a few dozen individuals. The worst macro-level effect is making everyone 30 minutes late when the interstate backup.
"Catastrophic" failures in cars are very localized when compared to the catastrophic failures we've seen in nuclear plants, which cause the permanent emergency evacuation of millions of residents overnight and quarantine zones that must be kept in place for decades.
Nuclear power is no joke. Look through the pictures of Fukushima or Pripyat if you don't believe me. Nuclear is way too dangerous to be trusted and doesn't have a place in civilian power generation, no matter how many times people swear "this time we've got it guys, I promise we didn't overlook anything obvious, I promise that we have a super-stable cool new design". These promises can't be trusted when such catastrophic failures are a realistic risk.
This doesn't really matter though since it's a meaningless safety measure to compare "worst accident per machine" between a single car and a power plant serving a million people. By this measure biking is much safer than train riding.
Here's some more useful stats and trivia about death tolls and power generation:
I don't think death toll is the catastrophic aspect of nuclear failures. Rather, it is rendering large swaths of productive land unusable. Chernobyl rendered an area about the size of Rhode Island, Samoa, or Luxembourg unusable.
The problem with nuclear power is not the danger, but the fear of the uneducated and the misinformation that is ironically spread by environmental advocacy groups.
I'm not sure that's such a clever analogy. First, because traffic deaths is an issue most places with cars, both due to drunk-driving (obvious failure mode), and other more complex/random failures. And while a drunk driver can (and do) kill a family of careful drivers/a pedestrian -- a nuclear plant failure is more akin to the terrible accidents we've seen with derailed trains carrying crude oil, see eg: http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-20...
What we do know, is that all current states able to build nuclear reactors, have suffered from incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors when it comes to large contracts. I've seen no evidence that this has changed.
So it would seem that effective disaster mitigation should account for our current reality: We can't store nuclear waste safely, we can't transport it safely, and we can't build nuclear reactors that are safe enough, given the high risk of disasters.
I don't think there are any obvious solutions to world energy supply; higher efficiency, less waste are a given (easy to say, hard to implement). Fundamentally, we need to move away from "thinking oil" -- I don't think highly concentrated liquid fuel traded on a (physical/geographic) global market is part of a sustainable future.
On the other hand, I don't think we'll replace air freight with Zeppelins - so clearly we'll need some kind of combustion. Maybe hydrocarbons created with electricity, or in combination with biofuels - some manner which is more carbon neutral. And in a way that doesn't destroy our food chain. Local transportation in the form of electric trains and cars, in preference to hydrocarbons. The US is a parody of efficient transportation, but I'm not very hopeful for reform. Even in little Norway, car-sharing hasn't been particularly successful -- poor city planning and habit means that people waste time sitting in long traffic jams, one person to a car. There are quite a few areas ripe to be made more effective with existing technology. But if we can't muster the will to kill the idea of one car per adult, I don't see much hope for other areas.
Nuclear power is plenty safe when compared to other sources of power. The 'incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors' apply to all large power projects. Dam failures displace and kill people, coil mines collapse and kill people.
Efficiency can help, and long term I'd love to find even safer sources of energy. However, we need to start building more nuclear power plants to reduce pollution and global warming so we can prevent even bigger catastrophes.
> The 'incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors' apply to all large power projects.
I'm not convinced "large power projects" are a good idea in general. I think many small power projects are a better idea. Depending on the geography, micro hydro-electric can be a great power source, with little ecological impact, and no disastrous failure mode.
Well. Here's the real question. When a natural disaster coupled with a human engineering disaster causes massive loss of life, destruction of property, and land rendered dangerous and uninhabitable, why is it that blame concentrates exclusively on nuclear power compared to other alternatives?
Coal power causes millions of deaths a year. It causes hazardous living conditions in some of the most populous cities in the world. The coal power industry depends on mining which endangers the lives of miners, with many deaths every year, and wrecks the environment. There are huge swaths of land that are barren and uninhabitable. There are giant piles of mine tailings and giant lakes of sludge scattered around the world. Nobody lives on that land, nobody can because it's contaminated and dangerous. There are places in the US where the risk of dying due to the effects of coal power are 4x higher than the national average murder rate. And there are places around the world where it's much, much worse.
The difference between nuclear power and other sources of power or other engineer works is mostly that the hazards of nuclear power are still seen as unusual and frightening, whereas we've simply grown comfortable with those of other forms of power.
Therefore, just about any technology can result in catastrophic failure if you adopt stupid designs. The answer is not to eschew nuclear power, but rather to avoid stupid designs.
Also, avoiding nuclear power will result in a much worse outcome in the long run, even in the face of stupid designs. A runaway greenhouse effect will be worse than dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Fukushimas.
The problem is that if there is a serious accident with a nuclear power plant, the damage is localized. If global warming gets to a point where sea level rises 2 or 3 feet, tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people are going to be affected, not to mention the tremendous death and misery that would be caused by the disruptions to agriculture. If things get to that point, there's no way humankind could undo the damage without tremendous cost, and that's assuming it would even be possible (currently the technology does not exist).
If solar and wind power could meet energy needs around the world better than nuclear then great. The fact is that they're not even close and no good alternatives will be ready in the foreseeable future.
>> If global warming gets to a point where sea level rises 2 or 3 feet.
You talk like this is going to happen overnight. It won't and this is not how it works. Even in the recent articles, sea level rises in MILLIMETERS, not FEET:
"Seas rose about 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) from 1900 to 2000, the new study suggests, for a rate of 1.4 millimeters per year. The current rate, according to NASA, is 3.4 millimeters per year, suggesting that sea level rise is still accelerating."
If you do the math, there's approximately 300mm in a foot. If you think its going to raise even conservatively another 2 feet, it would take close to 175 years for sea level to rise 2 feet. Not sure how old you are, but you, your kids, and your kids kids will never see the sea levels rise 2 feet. And in the event it does happen, I would hope that humanity had either solved climate change or found a suitable alternative on another planet by then.
"Though some would blame the islands’ sinking on shifting tectonic plates, Australia’s National Tide Facility has measured an annual rise of 8.2 mm in sea level on the islands in every year they’ve monitored—which, coupled with climate change’s propensity towards making weather patterns more sever, places climate change as at least a major contributor to the island’s submersion. "
If you count the harm done to the environment by fossil fuels while we've been waiting for wind and solar to actually become practical replacements in all cases, their effects are extremely devastating and long-lasting.
I think that's pretty much the reason people seem "opposed" to them. It's not that people hate wind or solar power per se, but that waiting for them to swoop in and save us means sticking with fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, which people don't like.
"Radioactive waste" (industry term is spent fuel). Is stored in a spent fuel pool and then moved to dry cask storage. (A concrete and lead reinforced shipping container).
No barrels involved.
(At least in the US).
In other countries they recycle the fuel in fast breeder reactors to make more fuel.
The real issue is what do to do with the steel from decommissioning reactors, as it is radioactive and can't be recycled into new fuel or non radioactive steel.
Tldr; nuclear plant operations are not like they are in cartoons.
The "radioactive waste" that lasts for 1000s of years is Plutonium. It's "waste" because existing reactors aren't designed to use it as fuel. New reactors could.
And we already have tons and tons of the stuff. All the existing reactors in operation produce it every day. The only way to actually get rid of it is to build new reactors that use it as fuel.
> In 2002 they already knew the seawater pumps were located too low, but took no action
A relatively-unasked question is, "How many nuclear power plants have analogous failings?"[0] Fukushima could be an outlier because it is more shoddy. This is an argument for nuclear power. Or every nuclear powerplant could have a different subset of shoddinesses.
I'd be interested in having the same attention paid to all nuclear powerplants that was paid to Fukushima. Then we'd be able to tell whether Fukushima was an outlier.[1]
[0] This may be publicly available information, say published by America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I as a layman haven't found it and doubt I could read it.
[1] You might say, "Why are we overanalyzing nuclear power relative to $SOMETHING_ELSE?" I agree with that criticism. My point as regards the parents is that the parent is implicitly making a statistical conclusion (other plants are safer than Fukushima) when we don't know as much about other plants as we do Fukushima.
Human error. Which human history demonstrates thoroughly is the norm rather than the exception.
With nuclear and similar technologies, human error has unprecedented scope of impact.
Until we "fix" the human error (and short-sightedness, and durability of institutions and civilizations), I remain convinced that large-scale deployment is a recipe for disaster -- sooner or later.
At a minimum, designs should be default power-down and containment until quite dead. If humans fail to keep the system running properly, its default behavior is shut-down and isolation until radiologically cold.
Necessary designs that can't accomplish this should be government level projects limited in scope and with very clear mandates including hard shut-down horizons and over-generously endowed orthogonal cost trust funds.
We can afford this. It's a question of whether we want to. Put the true costs up front -- not passed on to future generations. Decide then what parts are "worth it."
P.S. Additionally, the uranium mining aspect seldom gets addressed. Hardly "clean", itself. Just ask the Navajos, for just one example.
The Fukushima disaster was caused by TEPCO, which suffered from shoddy planning, and resulted from an extremely rare natural disaster. Recognizing that these mistakes were made and have happened does not instantly restore confidence in nuclear energy to opponents.
Even with properly located pumps and larger sea-walls, it's easy to imagine destruction from the greater Tohouku earthquake and tsunami still presenting huge operational hazards to the Fukushima TEPCO nuclear power plant.
In order to dispel myths around nuclear power, it's going to require everyone to have a lot more knowledge, including those arguing for and against and those who are designing these systems.
There aren't many people who understand all of the climate risks, engineering concerns, issues to social welfare, and risk of disaster (natural or man-made) at stake in this position, so it will require much better communication overall before we can solve this problem.
If I were to come up to you, and describe the perfectly running software I can build, and show you how there have been problems in the past, but they were door to poor planning, bad design, human error, etc... and show that perfect construction of software is quite possible... would you buy my argument that in the future, problems will not occur?
This is the same thing. Yes, it is possible to do it right and be perfectly safe. It is also possible for someone to not do it right. And if someone does so, the repercussions are severe.
Having worked in the energy industry, the goal is to minimize risk. Saying it is OK for nuclear to have some inherent risk because so does everyone else is true, but over-simplified. The consequence of a nuclear accident is much greater than the consequence of a wind power accident, so the reduction of risk in nuclear power needs to also be greatly reduced vs. other forms of power generation.
I would not describe myself as anti-nuclear, but I do not believe we need it. I believe solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc, can provide the power we need in this world. Why take on greater consequences to the risks of power generation unless it truly is needed?
Their point is that these risks are overblown. Nobody died from Fukushima. So if the major accident you're concerned about was, in fact, completely due to human error [and even still the number of deaths was relatively small], why are you still so skeptical?
Finally, when literal millions die per year because of air pollution, you are choosing something significantly more dangerous [and worse for the environment] because of many fewer memorable nuclear power-related deaths.
I'm not even sure that the number of people who died
or could die is really the most severe point but i rather believe it is the cost of a nuclear accident.
We as a society decide every day to let people die because it is too expensive. Think of healthcare, safety norms or human aid.
And having massive areas in high developed countries beeing uninhabitable is unbelieveble costly.
Think what 100 sqm in california would amount to.
Even more troubling.. There's a similar generation nuclear reactor about 40 miles from NYC. Just imagine the cost if Manhattan was in an exclusion zone.
There are areas over 100km away that are still in the closed zone. They found hotspots of >100 curies/sq km up to 300km from the reactors. It's not like there's a safe little 30km concentric circle.
If NYC were upwind from Indian Point, I woudln't be "fear-mongering" but an event like Chernobyl would very likely impact NYC.
Nobody died but a large region had to be evacuated. How much would it cost to insure against that? Is nuclear power still cost-effective if we include the cost of insuring against having to evacuate?
You can't tacitly accept the costs of our current means of power while criticizing the costs of nuclear. We need to make this decision explicitly, not implicitly.
When you ask about the costs of nuclear power are you also considering the costs of not using nuclear power? [delays timeline for 100% renewable energy which has climate costs, causes air pollution separate from that which is killing millions annually, etc]
Part of the reason it was evacuated was that overblown perception of risks. The evacuation itself did more harm to people that staying in place ever would.
The harm caused to people who evacuated was finding a new supermarket in the (nearby) town they moved to versus significantly higher risks of cancer if they had stayed. Think of a 10x increase in rates of Thyroid cancer. This might cause one or two deaths over a decade depending on the sparseness of population, but we are talking about people's lives.
In terms of insurance, the region was known for some rare produce, saké, and tourism, but I think well-being should be the primary concern.
Evacuation is never about "just" finding a new supermarket. For starters, it means total destruction of the economy of the evacuated area (= livelihood of its people), as well as a serious disruption to the area receiving evacuees. Then, the process of evacuation (and subsequent mess at the destination) increases chances of various accidents that can cause death or serious injury, and quite likely increases crime as well. Finally, at any given time in any area that's larger than a village there are people undergoing emergency medical care or who otherwise can't leave the hospital - massive evacuation will likely kill those (not to mention the strain on medical care resources the receiving area will experience).
Evacuations are serious business and are not clean and harmless.
It seems you are right about hospital evacuations. From 2012,
"A hospital [Futaba Hospital] near the disaster-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant made no mistakes during a hasty evacuation in March 2011 during which 40 patients and nursing home residents lost their lives, according to a report released on Sept. 30 by investigators commissioned by the hospital."
Unfortunately, that hospital is within 3km of the reactor and was evacuated between March 12th and March 16th. It's also worth noting that the radiation level on the day of the disaster, March 11, was 1,590 uSv/hr at a point 5km away (normal background radiation for a city is 0.25 uSv/hr). This is, per hour, more radiation than background exposure for a year in most cities.
Fukushima Prefecture is the third largest prefecture in Japan, and most of its largest cities emerged from the disaster with minor earthquake damage. Also, luckily, the area around the reactor is made up of small towns and villages, so I would like to believe the community's support has aided most of the refugees, but obviously it was a hardship.
Perhaps, but that means the cost of nuclear power is not purely technical. To keep the cost reasonable, you need to convince government authorities and the general public that they don't need to evacuate. It's a tough political challenge and can't be wished away.
True, but a) the chance of an event warranting evacuation (or even perceived as such) over lifetime of a nuclear reactor is negligible, and b) somehow this problem was solved for chemical plants, factories, coal plants, etc.
Yes, reversing the radiophobia will take a lot of work, political and otherwise, but realizing that it's the only real thing that blocks nations from building nuclear plants is a good start.
An insurance company that considered the risk of evacuation to be negligible would be negligent. It's important to estimate the likelihood of rare risks when they're very expensive and you have to pay for them.
Get Berkshire Hathaway to insure against this risk and I'll believe it's a reasonable one to take.
You make a good point, but I disagree. I'm a huge fan of solar and wind. I realize I'm over-simplifying, but the problem is that the sun does not shine (and the wind does not blow) all the time. Either a base load source is necessary, or we need to get fantastically better at storing energy.
In some areas hydro could work, but unless you're near a dam you are still going to need a coal or natural gas plant to provide baseload.
Tl;dr - Why take on greater consequences unless it truly is needed? It truly IS needed.
You don't need baseload. You need to always meet the demand.
Nuclear can't do that either because it's too damn expensive. You'd never build a nuclear plant to fill in at peaks.
What is needed in a future with lots of renewables is dispatchable sources, not nuclear plants with flat outputs.
There are several options. All of them are currently too expensive so apart from hydro you don't see them in production scale anywhere, but as the renewables sector grows, these things will start to show up.
This is not a joke - you can find people researching what it would take, and it's even within reach with today's tech - expensive of course, but not impossibly so.
Currently, most countries seem to be reinforcing the power lines, as the cheapest option.
> I believe solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc, can provide the power we need in this world.
Well, it hasn't. Countries like Germany and Japan which have moved away from nuclear are now sipping Russian gas and oil, all of which is controlled by a territory hungry autocrat who uses his pipelines for political control. This is better than running your own nuclear power and having energy autonomy? Polluting the air with burned hydrocarbons? Ask Ukraine how much it enjoys not having energy autonomy.
We keep coming to this argument, and no one seems to listen. Right now, the rational alternative to nuclear is hydrocarbons, not renewables. Renewables are many decades away from providing this as energy density, storage technology, and cost are not here yet.
This is probably the biggest issue hampering renewable energy. The investment just isn't there, and hasn't been there - across the board, for decades.
The ironic thing is when we do actually have investment, it's under the guise of cronyism and political favors. How many solar companies did the government give BILLIONS to, only to have them go out of business less than a year later, leaving the tax payers on the hook?
The other thing we need to consider is making renewable energy affordable. If you can get cheap energy, it would solve some really huge problems with global poverty.
As it sits right now, no renewable energy is affordable. I've been keeping an eye on solar for years. Last year when I checked on a small solar array for my house, the layout was around 30K and the ROI was ten years. No way does that work for low income families who could really use this type of renewable energy.
True, cost is a factor -- But that 30K number is if you purchase your own panels and equipment, and hire out all the labor. (FWIW, I spent about 18K on a 7kw system 18 months ago.) Also, that 10 year ROI assumes a linear progression of electric costs, which is speculative, and could go either way... but with the way trends are going, I wouldn't bet on coal coming back as a primary fuel source if fracking either gets banned, or in a couple years when the faster depletion of horizontal wells becomes more of a factor.
On the other hand, there are also multiple companies now offering lease programs that don't require a large initial payment. Pros/cons to that, as with everything.
But the other big problem is regulatory - if you want a grid tie-in (which almost all the leasing options require), cities often have a maximum amount of solar they will allow. And there are valid engineering reasons for this, but the real blocker to wide adoption of solar on single family residences, in the long term, will not be the cost, but the engineering of the grids, and the resulting regulations.
Don't forget about power storage facilities in the discussion of the grid design. The storage facilities to make use of any large quantity of solar power would have to be massive...
Wind power, yet more massive due to long term lulls in supply.
>While nuclear's power production decreased only slightly when comparing 2014 to 2013, electricity generated from brown coal, hard coal and gas-fired power plants significantly decreased by 3%, 9.5% and 13.8%, respectively.[1]
>Germany, the largest exporter of electricity with 10% of the overall exports, reinforced its position as a net exporter by 20% during the year 2010[4]
>The share of renewable electricity increased substituting the nuclear power.[3]
Germany doesnt use much coal at all, it burns mineral and natural gas:
While the whole of the EU imported 53.4 percent of its energy consumption in 2014, Germany’s dependency was even higher with an import share of 61.4 percent – only slightly below the previous year’s all-time high of 62.6 percent.
Germany needs to import nearly 90% of the gas it consumes.
Germany’s exit from nuclear power and low wholesale electricity prices have boosted the comparatively cheap generation of electricity from coal, leading to a marked increase in imports of hard coal.
> The consequence of a nuclear accident is much greater than the consequence of a wind power accident
Wind accident? Like, the propellor flying off and killing someone?
Seriously now, are you thinking of the average number of deaths / MW of power generated or just comparing one wind farm accident with one nuclear meltdown?
I was once at a panel at a scifi convention (Dragoncon, for the curious) where they had a few people working in various nuclear power related areas there to discuss and answer questions.
While they were clearly biased, I felt they did a good job addressing the issues directly. I too am biased (I tend to not trust anything that requires maintenance on a time scale so much larger than we can comprehend) and my walk-away conclusions were:
* There are a LOT of safety precautions, backups, and more backups - But I still don't trust those will survive human perversity [Edit: And that makes this point hard to settle - if I just don't trust any precautions would be enough, there's no effective way to add precautions that would change my opinion. ]
* Nuclear Power, with all the risks and detriments, has a very strong argument that the fossil-fuel alternatives we're using now are MORE damaging.
That last point was a huge deal to me. Instead of it being "Nuclear Power: Safe/Unsafe", it became "Nuclear Power vs Fossil Fuels (largely coal): Which is the bigger danger today".
I went from anti-nuclear power to "oh gee, I don't know, that's hard", which I generally take as a sign that I've become somewhat enlightened on a topic.
As another commenter has said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11483147), we now have nuclear reactor designs that have failsafes that cannot fail because they rely on physical laws. That should address your "survive human perversity" concern.
As one example, look at the Pebble bed reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor#Safety_feat...). The way it's designed, as the reactor temperature increases, the reactor power decreases, and this is a completely passive effect (meaning it happens without any human intervention), so in the event of an accident the reactor will end up automatically reducing to safe power levels all by itself.
I'm less worried about a reactor going critical than I am the safe storage and management of the waste. Anything from providing materials for a dirty bomb to general pollution to just generating a safe-but-expensive mess to manage for a really, really long time.
For your future advantage in these discussions, please know that going critical is a prerequisite for power generation; it is the steady state in which a fission-causing neutron is given off from each fission. A sub-critical reactor requires power input because it is not giving off enough energy to sustain the chain reaction; its population of fission-causing neutrons will exponentially decay, if left alone.
Waste management is certainly a problem. The pebble bed reactor produces waste that, while more voluminous than traditional reactors, contains the same radioactivity, but this does mean the waste is less hazardous and simpler to handle. It's also much more difficult to re-use pebble bed reactor waste for nuclear weapons as compared to other reactors. And there are other reactors that have a closed fuel cycle, meaning their waste can be reprocessed, though the reprocessing does itself end up with some amount of nuclear waste that has to be disposed of.
All that said, it's not like the waste from fossil fuel power plants is particularly safe either, it just has a different effect than nuclear waste, such as causing global warming.
The simplest argument is that we will only ever need more power, and nothing else can deliver. Burning shit is about as primitive as it gets, and that nets us a lot more power than wind or solar ever will. They're good supplemental power sources...but they will never meet our current needs, let alone what's right around the corner.
So...electric cars are growing now. You know how much power it takes to charge one of those suckers? The battery matrix in a Tesla can power the average household for a couple of days. These things are going to triple our power needs.
In the end: human potential is directly tied to our ability to harness energy and apply it. Fossil fuels enabled us to greatly reduce the need for human labor, but already we're limited by them. And clinging to them (or futilely pretending we can ever reduce our global energy needs) only hinders progress toward a better tomorrow.
Nuclear energy's "drawbacks" are incredibly overblown. Waste fuel is compact (weights sound impressive, but uranium and its isotopes are incredibly dense and take up very little space) and more importantly is wasted. Fuel shouldn't be wasted, it should be reprocessed with breeder reactors and reused. And if coal plants' waste was all contained in a convenient solid block instead of the atmosphere, we wouldn't even be discussing replacing it.
Anyway...if you want to see a good documentary on the subject, check out "Pandora's Promise." It's told from the perspective of several figures who were anti-nuclear activists before becoming "enlightened," so to speak and realizing they were mislead.
Electric cars: no, in fact it's the opposite. Electric cars are much more efficient compared to burning gasoline, so we can save a lot of the energy spent in the transportation sector once most cars are electric. Most people would never recharge their car batteries fully every day.
Waste fuel: I'm not an expert, but in Denmark work is currently underway to dismantle a small experimental reactor. The problem isn't really the fuel, the problem is the huge amount of contaminated reactor material (concrete etc.).
I think some of the videos out there make nuclear seem like a piece of cake. Don't believe that. It's complicated.
Teslas can be charged at home at night when wind is available, or at work during the day when solar is available, so they reduce the amount of energy storage needed in grids with a lot of intermittent sources.
I'm by no means anti-nuclear, though watching Fukushima unfold showed me a reality I hadn't fully thought out.
A few days after it all went bad, there was basically nothing we could do to stop it, which is terrifying. No humans could go in there, and there were no robots capable of doing the job.
So we as humans have the ability to build a machine of enormous power and (possibly) radiation, but when things inevitably go bad from time to time, our only course of action is to stand back and say "well, damn".
I agree. But watching BP's contractors repeatedly fail to plug the Deepwater Horizon gusher made me realize that these catastrophic possibilities are not limited to nuclear power.
With non-renewable energy production, the situation is literally "pick your poison."
> With non-renewable energy production, the situation is literally "pick your poison."
Isn't that true of renewable energy production at scale, too? Solar panels require some very nasty industrial processes to produce, wind more than decimates bird populations, tidal affects sealife and the seafloor, hydroelectric affects fish (and poorly-maintained dams can destroy cities and regions …).
I think it might actually be unavoidable: any process which generates the amount of energy required to sustain human life at scale will … be responsible for handling a huge amount of energy at scale.
edit: I'm unaware of issues with goethermal, but a) it's not possible most places; b) the fact that I'm unaware of them doesn't imply that they don't exist.
So while it is an issue, it's not remotely as much of an issue as other technologies that everybody takes for granted and nobody complains about.
I wonder if the same might be true for tidal: that existing sea traffic and fishing might have a far bigger impact on sea life than energy generation would have.
Similarly, coal-burning power plants put more radioactive materials into the atmosphere in a year than nuclear power plants have in their entire history, but nobody worries about that because coal power is old and we're all used to it.
Ironically, the people opposing the construction of new nuclear plants are implicitly encouraging the construction/refurbishment of coal plants, and thus increasing the amount of radiation in the atmosphere.
> I've never heard of anyone opposing nuclear plants while promoting coal plants
That's exactly what people are supporting when they oppose nuclear power. Rejecting nuclear doesn't provide power, so it's a de facto vote for staying with the status quo of coal.
Until solar/wind can operate fully without a natural gas backup, it's still vaporware for the base load. Maybe that will change in the future, and solar/wind should obviously fill some (non-base load) power generation needs, but until that happens we generate power with either nuclear or carbon. Pick one or other; not choosing leaves the choice to the market which is always going to choose whichever is cheaper, which is coal because they externalize the cost to human health and the environment.
Natural gas is not remotely as dirty as coal (though it still produces CO2, obviously). And I don't think we're going to get rid of gas anytime soon, particularly because it adapts more quickly to changes in demand than anything else.
I disagree that opposing nuclear means you cannot oppose coal. You can, and many do. I think the main point is that new investments should go primarily towards wind and solar, not towards nuclear, but I do agree that it's way too early to close existing nuclear plants as long as they work well. The German post-Fukushima plan to close their nuclear plants is folly; they should be closing their coal plants first.
But nuclear plants are expensive, and I think Uranium/Plutonium fission can be transitionary tech at best. The primary target for investments should be on cleaner tech, and on better networks and storage to deal with fluctuations in supply. That is absolutely an issue, but it's an issue that's being worked on.
By definition, the base load does not change quickly. Obviously nuclear (and other slow-to-change generation methods) need to be supplemented with more adaptable methods for the load-following[2] and peaking[3] loads.
> I think the main point is that new investments should go primarily towards wind and solar
The market doesn't care where you want investment allocated. Power demand is going up dramatically over the next 50 years - which is very good[4] for world stability - and basic economics (and historical experience) says that demand will usually be filled by the cheapest supply.
While they have high initial R&D cost, that can be nuclear if we allow for standardized mass production and existing modern designs to proceed (both of which are currently blocked by anti-nuclear fools). If we do nothing, coal (and other carbon-based sources) will remain the cheapest. Maybe in the future we can include solar/wind as cheaper, but for the main base load, they are currently subsided with natural gas (and other) backups. Solar/wind by itself is still vaporware.
> they should be closing their coal plants first.
Absolutely. If Germany had spent the money they've spent on coal replacement power generation on nuclear, they might have had completely zero carbon energy production several years ago. Instead, they are limping along one of the most hazardous generation methods because of idiotic radiophobia.
> Uranium/Plutonium fission
As usual, you are leaving out thorium, which is what we should have been using.
> investments
Given that my brother is working on new photovoltaic generation, I'd love to see a lot of investment for better renewables. The new epitaxy methods he invented for his PhD made InGaN heterojunctions that were 90% efficient in converting sunlight, which is outstanding if a mass production method can be created. Investment in basic research is always important.
However, what matters right now is what we can currently make. Vaporware doesn't matter until it becomes an actual shipping product. If we wait for hypothetical methods, we allow more coal power to be built.
If you're concerned about world stability, there's still one big problem with nuclear that you're ignoring: nuclear proliferation. Look at all the tension around Iran's nuclear energy program. It would be a lot better for world stability if we had give them energy tech that's not so easily weaponized.
> you are leaving out thorium
I'm leaving out Thorium for a couple of very good reasons:
* It's not as weaponizable as Plutonium and Uranium
* It's a lot safer, and as far as I understand, it doesn't produce the same levels of radioactive waste
* It seems to require more research before it's production ready (otherwise everybody would be using it already). It's not clear whether it will really be as practical as everybody says it is.
If Thorium turns out to be viable, and indeed a lot cleaner and safer than Uranium/Plutonium, it might well be suitable as a long term solution, whereas I consider Uranium/Plutonium only suitable for a short transition period to cleaner forms of energy. But for now, Thorium is still vaporware.
If you oppose nuclear power, you implicitly support the technologies nuclear plants compete with, specifically, oil and gas plants.
If you oppose nuclear, oil, and gas plants all at once, then you need to give a really good explanation of how we're going to generate base-load for our power grid. Because you can't do base-load with solar or wind, and I'd wager those people also oppose constructing new dams. (And in the US, all the good dam sites are already either dammed or in a National Forest.)
> hydroelectric affects fish (and poorly-maintained dams can destroy cities and regions …).
Moreso than that, things that affect fish, inevitably affect people. The flooding caused by dams increases mercury in the water which works its way up the food chain.
In British Columbia they are currently investigating whether or not they've poisoned an entire river system that people depend on for food.
Well, another big issue with (current?) solar panels is that they are highly problematic in case of fire (fire brigade with the waterhose closes the electric circuit with the grounded panel)
And geothermal has more than once been suspected to be responsible for more or less immidiate earth-quakes. Choose your risks on yourself...
Thankfully, we understand the physics a lot better now. The failure states for modern reactors are safe states. We've basically planned things so that if they do fail, they turn off.
In theory I might agree with you. In practice a lot of 'safe' designs for a wide range of things have failed.
For a single reactor in a single location the odds might be very good. But, build a few thousand and the odds get worse.
What happens if there is no power for months. What happens if an earthquake causes a reactor end up on it's side? What happens if there is a mistake while refueling? What about active sabotage? What if someone messes up in construction? How about a dam breaking causing massive wave?
There are risks associated with all kinds of power generation. Most of the things you list would apply to a lot of them. However, I'll attempt to address most of the ones you listed (and I'm assuming a boiling water reactor, there are alternatives that may be naturally more stable):
Modern reactors have passive cooling systems[1] which will only require an outside pool to be refilled every 72 hours (easy to automate or just drop a pipe from another location) so it could be left without power for a very long time.
Huge earthquakes which would shake a reactor apart would be strong enough to take down entire cities. A reactor going supercritical, while bad, is still less likely to kill. Furthermore, as long as the passive systems aren't completely destroyed they will still function.
Refueling is done by shutting down the reactor, so the risk is low.
Active sabotage would be difficult to accomplish because there are multiple layers of redundancy and control systems and people that would all have to be bypassed.
Construction mistakes could happen to anything, although again with multiple redundancies it doesn't matter quite as much.
Most of these issues are really boiling down to one-off incidents. Modern nuclear facilities have tons of redundancy and checks in place. Things can go south with any system, but modern nuclear facilities have a lot of layers to prevent catastrophic failure in all but the most extreme situations (situations which would cause plenty of death and destruction in general). I just think it's a little flippant to discount modern nuclear power generation because of the failings in the past when the field was still in its infancy.
The best metric is essentially "deaths per terawatt hour." From what I remember, nuclear has an extremely low 0.05 or so (and that's entirely workplace accidents like equipment falling on somebody...) Solar is more like 0.50, and Coal is something disgusting like ~200.
Everything has its risks, and nuclear is actually among the safest of all energy options. It's just like the irrational fear of flying: planes are concretely safer than driving long distances by all statistics...but the handful of rare crashes stick in the mind more than the everyday reality of automotive fatalities.
No power generation facility is passively safe for an extended period of time. Solar panels will leech harmful chemicals into the environment if they sit long enough. Coal plants will degrade and leech. Dams will degrade and fall apart. So it all depends on how long you think it is necessary to define as "passively safe". It is passively safe for 72 hours and then it will require an externally housed pool to be refilled. In the event of an incident something like that will be monitored very carefully, so it really doesn't have to be completely passive for very long.
72 hours is something of a best case assuming the pool is intact. Also, dam's can generally be left alone for months without issue many are on annual inspection schedules. Similarly solar can be left alone for years without problems.
3 days is far less time in the middle of a major disaster than you might think.
In order to cause enough damage to need this kind of backup system it would have to be huge. Something of that magnitude would also cause similar (if not more immediately catastrophic) problems for a dam or even wind turbines. Making the pool itself redundant in case of its failure is not all that difficult to do, although largely unnecessary. I'm only highlighting one of a myriad of systems that are designed to deal with worst-case of worst-case scenarios.
I realize you're attempting to pick out those kinds of things and highlight that something can go wrong. But for any system something can go wrong given incredible situations. Modern nuclear reactors account for a large number of incredibly unlikely scenarios and provide mitigations for them.
There is a fare amount of twisting of words going on. Modern approaches have vastly increased passive safety. Then again Chernobyl would have been fine if they did do several things that looking back where really dumb. Modern designs are still dangerous, expensive, beasts they are simply vastly less temperamental.
If we had no better options then sure they are workable. I would even say there great idea for power at a Mars base. But, we generally do have other options.
PS: I wonder what you think could happen at a wind farm to force a large scale evacuation for years?
Are you asking about a wind farm with the same power output as a nuclear plant? Because we could easily hypothesize about the damage done by a nuclear plant with the same power output as a wind farm, if you wish.
1 500mw reactor or 500 3mw wind turbines @ 30% utilization in the middle of farm land. Sure, they can fall down on some corn but that's hardly a major disaster.
> Active sabotage would be difficult to accomplish because there are multiple layers of redundancy and control systems and people that would all have to be bypassed.
Did I just imagine the news articles about two Belgian nuclear plant operators having been members of ISIS for some months, even participating in some attacks?
All of those and reactor designs for safe(r) generation of civil power are very different to reactor designs for breeding weapons grade material/based on similar designs.
We can build clean, efficient reactors that fail entirely safe.
Good designs can't fix faulty construction and poor maintenance. France has a long history of success with nuclear power, but using the exact same designs in Afghanistan would be begging for problems.
Further, we really don't have a good solution for nuclear waste.
PS: Most importantly they cost more than renewable power even including energy storage.
Possibly so I've not look recently but the cost of reactors is historically high because of the way they where built.
Newer cheaper safer reactors built in volume would be cheaper than old designs, when the french went on their reactor building spree the cost per reactor was massively less than what Hinkley is costing.
Tooling, scale, been able to lots of the same thing, experience etc all drive the cost down.
Construction, Mining/fuel processing, Operation, Decommissioning, Fuel Storage / reprocessing, Disaster Insurance. Sure, we can hand wave R&D as a sunk cost, but many of these costs only show up after the fact.
All of that stuff is debatable of course but given the massive environmental damage done mining Lithium I doubt there is much in it from the point of view of that one way or the other.
As for fuel storage/reprocessing with modern reactor designs the waste products are much smaller and we do have sensible sane ways to deal with them.
I'd absolutely love it if renewables dominated the percentage for generation but I think the future is more likely to be nuclear for baseload and renewables for the rest barring some huge breakthroughs in battery technology.
Pumped hydro is still the most efficient way of storing huge amounts of potential energy but it's simply not a possibility for most places (and is hardly kind to the environment either since it often requires damaging lakes and rivers).
Nuclear isn't perfect but it looks like the least worst option to me if implemented properly.
You can send electricity 1,000 miles with minimal losses. So there are some areas outside of reasonable pumped hydro but far fewer than you might think.
There is no terrorism-proof reactor design.
We may have new tech but we also have new problems.
Besides, we haven't solved the ultimate disposal place issue.
It's highly irresponsible to produce waste that is dangerous for thousands of years where noone has figured out how to handle it. Especially considering terrorism, corruption, states collapsing and natural disasters.
>> There is no terrorism-proof reactor design. We may have new tech but we also have new problems. Besides, we haven't solved the ultimate disposal place issue.
Those problems are closely related. We know what to do about the disposal problem: build a reactor that consumes that material as fuel. The problem is allegedly that such a reactor increases the risk of rogue weapons production. I'm starting to think all that spent fuel sitting around in pools of water (requiring active cooling) is a bigger danger than building a reactor that doesn't produce all that waste.
Thorium reactors are always being touted as safe (run away reactions shut down the reactor by design) and produces relatively little waste (with comparatively short half lives). And they don't produce anything remotely related to weapons capabilities.
I cannot verify that myself, but my friend who is a nuclear engineer is a fan, and it doesnt contradict what i've read about it.
Thorium produces Plutonium-238 which is NOT bomb-making material but used in space probes. Thorium advocates should make sure to not have the word "nuclear" or "reactor" in any press and emphasize that the waste is "space fuel".
I notice that not one of the American Navy's many nuclear reactors has ever been successfully targeted by terrorists. Which suggests that we have a well-understood design for terrorism-proof reactors: Build a reactor, and then cover it with fancy sensors, big guns, and a bunch of soldiers.
Actually there is a quite terrorism proof reactor design.
Thorcon's approach is to site the reactor itself 100 feet underground. Physical security for that type of setup is straightforward.
Waste from the next generation of nuclear reactors (LFRs) is only dangerous for a few hundreds of years. Much less than the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere...
Breeder reactors reduce what we now call "waste" by >95%. That makes storage a lot easier, especially since the isotopes with long half-times get used up.
There is no terrorism-proof anything. Whatever system a human devises, another can outsmart if they put their heart to it. You could use the same argument against building airplanes, airports, shopping malls, bus stops, power lines, schools... pretty much everything.
Also consider that blowing up a hydro plant can result in much more direct fatalities than blowing up a nuclear reactor. Not to mention that any attack on power transmission infrastructure will likely kill even more people.
>It's highly irresponsible to produce waste that is dangerous for thousands of years where noone has figured out how to handle it.
The best part about nuclear waste is rapidly it becomes harmless, unlike every other kind of waste we produce. Unfortunately most of our waste is not nuclear, and therefore will contaminate the biosphere, basically forever.
I think you may have that backwards. A lot of waste can be broken down, and will definitely be broken down on the timescale that some nuclear waste needs before it's harmless.
"So it was a disaster that killed roughly 180 people."
Just if somebody don't want to read all the glorification of nuclear power of this guy but want to know which numbers he used for his theory.
"Over it's lifetime Fukushima generated 877,692 Gigawatt-Hours of electricity .."
Subtracting the energy required to build, maintain, dismantle a nuclear reactor and store the waste for the next few thousand years would be nitpicking.
Since I wrote that the estimate of the number of deaths caused by the evacuation itself has gone way up and so the overall Fukushima disaster killed something like 5 times as many people as a coal power plant's normal operation.
I don't know where he got his reference from, but, renewable energy without the hot air, has something similar, it calculates the number of deaths per GWy, for different sources[0]. Coal is certainly near the top (second to oil)[0]. Although I believe it was published after fukushima, and people might be suffering illness not accounted for in the book, I imagine that fukushima won't have dented the stats very much.
The economic cost of dealing with the disaster and its cleanup, to Japan's present and future generations, is immense.
The loss of land in a crowded country where inhabitable land is at a premium is also a very heavy blow, which could have easily got much worse if the disaster had cascaded down to reactors closer to Tokyo, as the Prime Minister at the time very much feared as a real possibility.
Measuring the scale of disasters simply in loss of life is simplistic and also sometimes, as I think here, disingenuous.
I think you're drastically underestimating the environmental cost of coal power if you think the damage done by Fukushima is incompatibly larger.
Currently[1] the radiation in the evacuated area is as high as 3uSv/hr which works out to 26 mSv/yr. That's a lot compared to what most of us get but it's lower than the permitted dose for nuclear plant workers and it's much lower than the inhabitants of Ramsar, Iran, experience and they don't have a particularly higher cancer incidence than other populations. That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a lot of cleanup to do or that there aren't hotspots to stay away from but the area that's uninhabitable is very small.
There was a certain amount of luck involved in where the wind was blowing but on the other there was also a certain amount of bad luck in the plant being struck by such a
Believe me, I most certainly don't underestimate the environmental cost of coal power.
Coal or nuclear power is a false dichotomy but one that is continually trotted out by nuclear boosters such as the author of this piece.
> there was also a certain amount of bad luck
No, it wasn't bad luck. They built the reactor right next to a coastline that is famous for tsunami risk and where there are historical markers of previous tsunamis. They ignored safety concerns that were raised on a number of occasions [1]. That is not bad luck, that is bad and corrupt management. The nuclear industry, being necessarily a highly centralised, capital intensive industry has very close links to Japan's less than transparent government. It is a corporate model ripe for corruption and that is what the Fukushima disaster (and previous incidents in Japan) exposed. The Japanese people, sensibly, don't trust it and demonstrated in large numbers against it, something that is quite unusual in Japan. And yet numerous arm-chair nuclear boosters around the world tell the Japanese people that they should just suck it up and keep exposing themselves to this existential risk. [2]
As I said above, I'm not terribly concerned about the radiation risks and loss of life from this disaster. I'm more concerned by its economic impact, loss of valuable land and community impact. The costs of rehabilitation have been estimated at between $250 billion and $500 billion. [3] That huge amount of money would have bought a very sizeable amount of solar and wind power to Japan. Now it's wasted on the very non-productive clean-up of a disaster. The nuclear industry has continually proved itself to be a black hole for money that could have been spent on sustainable development. This is the guy you hired who sexually harassed the secretary, wrote false invoices to his benefit and burnt down the regional office. He says he's ‘learnt his lesson’ and deserves another go. He's obviously sick and disfunctional but what about the people who stand up for him?
A question to the downvoters: Whats your solution to this problem? It seems that you know a way which does exclude any risk of polluting the groundwater. I really would like to hear your ideas.
The solution? Stop labeling usable fuel as "waste". We only extract a few percent of the usable fission energy in current reactor designs. We've had plans for numerous other designs for years, but anti-nuclear hysteria and high-inertia bureaucracy have been very efficient at preventing new types of reactors from being built.
Maybe this might be true, but it is hard to believe that if those designs would really exists that there wouldn't be one state which would enable such a project. China, Russia, most countries in Asia not exactly full of "anti-nuclear hysteria and high-inertia bureaucracy". They just would build one of your magic nuclear reactors.
At the moment there are over 60 new reactors being constructed in 13 countries (eg. in China, South Korea, UAE and Russia). And they are all not of this magic type.
I think you are falling to some crude propaganda of the nuclear industry which would love to get more tax money.
But yeah, stop labeling deadly waste as waste is an easy way to avoid handling waste.
Can't speak of other countries, but anti-nuclear paranoia is alive and strong in South Korea. (After all, we're right next to Japan.)
Also bear in mind that it involves the same technology that could be used in preparing nuclear weapons. You don't just have to overcome your garden variety environmentalists. You also have to get the approval of Uncle Sam.
(Well, maybe not for China or Russia, but in their case, they have enough unused land and a forceful government, so they can just shove the "waste" somewhere deep in the desert and that will be last anybody hears about it.)
And what about Finland? They are building currently a new reactor. It is a Type 3 with an improved fuel technology, but still far away of one of those green, magic, waste free types which are supposed to solve the waste problems.
What is the reason the Finns do not build one of those supa dupa waste free reactors? Have they been forced by some environmentalists to ignore the wonderful new technology. Or do they plan to throw the waste, aeh sorry "fuel", into the baltic sea as this is cheaper?
Sigh. "We can develop the technology" does not equal "There is an available commercial prototype". Creating a new kind of commercial reactor requires $$$ and time, and good luck developing one (which can probably double as nuclear weapon factory) in the current political climate.
Anyway, nuclear waste can stay, safely, in underground facilities for a very long time, so it's not like anybody's in a hurry to use them before they rot away or something.
Please give me an example for one of those safe underground facilities which do not cost millions to maintain them safely. Are you talking about salt domes?
> I think you are falling to some crude propaganda of the nuclear industry
This rhetorical tactic is rather insulting, especially when you're repeating several well-known anti-nuclear talking points. Fuel reprocessing has existed in various forms for decades. There is still work to do, of course.
Why isn't it being used? Well, China is building several new reactor designs right now as part of their long-term power plans. This includes alternate fuel cycle reactors (thorium) that have far less waste in addition to reprocessing. Building reactors takes time, of course, so this is an ongoing project.
Also, you seem to think the nuclear industry supports reprocessing. After radiophobia, the existing nuclear industry is the biggest impediment to new reactor designs and reprocessing. Isotopic enrichment is expensive; why would e.g. Westinghouse make propaganda in support of technologies that disrupted their primary source of profit?
> stop labeling deadly waste as waste
That isn't what I said. You talk about falling for propaganda, but you're arguing with your own "straw man".
Ah, the Thorium dream. Would be great if this will work one day. But there are still lots of unsolved problems like the reprocessing, the energy required to start the process and preventing corrosion, to mention only the biggest ones. Those problems are far from being solved. Currently this is not more than a well known nuclear dream. What the chinese are building at the moment are prototypes which do not even count as proof of concept. They are far away from building real usable reactors.
And yes fuel reprocessing exists but to make the "waste" problem bearable they would need to reduce waste by far more than they do since decades.
The nuclear industry has much more players than only the fuel provider. The ones which build the reactors do not care too much for the fate of Westinghouse.
I believe the issue with Fukushima was that the early warning signs were ignored. If you ignore those warning signs with something that has the potential to be catastrophic, this is the result.
The seawall was shorter than it should have been, that is a planning and design failure, not just ignoring warning signs.
There also doesn't seem to have been any planning for a situation where the seawall failed (the inundation rendered the on site backup power inoperative). Adding a second layer of protection to such an important system would not be particularly aggressive.
>I'm by no means anti-nuclear, though watching Fukushima unfold showed me a reality I hadn't fully thought out.
The even worse reality is the government, contractors and everybody else involved repeatedly caught lying about it -- plus all the human errors in judgment and engineering involved leading to this.
And it's a huge industry which can employ a lot of researchers to lie with selective statistics, and sell the evergreen "newer models will be different this time, really".
I take issue with the account of Fukushima. Yes, a natural disaster kicked off the chain of events, but it was not completely unforeseeable and stronger safeguards and maintenance would have mitigated the disaster.
The big problem in my mind is not that nuclear power can't be safe but that I don't see anything to give me confidence that it can regulated to ensure that it actually is in practice.
The only appreciable release of radiation was a result of the Soviets playing fast and loose with shoddy infrastructure followed by higher ups attempting to rectify the situation by burying their heads in the sand is good enough for me.
Compared to oil spills ("oops, we grounded our tanker") and dam failures ("maintenance, lolwut?") a lot of different things needed to come together for the Chernobyl disaster to happen and the runners up, (3-mile, Fukushima) are downright benign by comparison.
As long as we don't get complacent and half-ass things I have no problem with nuclear power.
I'm a strong supporter of nuclear power, but calling Fukushima benign is counter productive. Thousands have lost their homes and there are dangerous amounts of radiation leaking into the ground. The site will remain a money sinkhole of ongoing mitigation measures for a long time. But besides these direct effects, the handling of disaster showed that the responsible parties were trying very hard to cover everything up and thus permanently destroyed any confidence you might have had in them, proving the "human factors make nuclear unsafe" crowd right.
Unfortunately the human factor is exactly the problem with these types of systems. I don't think humans can ever be considered to be safe stewards of anything where a seemingly remote cascade event can wipe out life on the planet.
Look at the disaster of Long-Term Capital Management from the financial industry as an example, where a presumed ten sigma event almost wiped out the whole western financial system.
These nuclear reactors are built with the same underlying principles and risk-management profiles. There's always the element of human error; you can't over-engineer something you did not foresee. In addition to that you have the enormous profit incentives from running nuclear power. These incentives can overwhelm the incentives for safety, or lead to disregard of warnings where profit potential would be compromised if warnings were attended to.
It's human, therefore it's hard to ever sleep completely sound knowing that these constructions are running on the planet.
Fukushima didn't just happen because one mistake was made either. It happened because a long string of mistakes and disregard of safety happened. Want to bet it doesn't happen again? It's hard to bet against human nature...
That is like saying that exploding all the ice cream factories would lead to continents being covered in continental ice sheets.
Yes, there are some risks - but they are very local, and do not last a long time. I would claim a lone oil tanker is an equivalent environmental risk to a nuclear plant. And look how much oil production we have operating in the oceans.
I think it's fair to say, we've accepted certain level of risk to get our power.
Please don't overstate risks. We are living on a planet whose oceans are dying, whose atmosphere is being clogged by CO2 ... nuclear power is mostly a benevolent technology. It creates very little waste, whose side-effects we can control. Unlike, say ,CO2. Or an oil spill.
Yes, there are sometimes mistakes - but please understand - no matter how the media spins it (because disaster new sell) they really are not that horrific when compared to other things that happen constantly.
No single plant failure can wipe out life on the planet. Not even if all plants fail simultaneously and dump their entire cores into the atmosphere you'd wipe out all life on the planet. So please don't overstate the risks.
Now, obviously no catastrophic event in a nuclear power plant (or any other system engineered for safety) happens because of a single mistake. If it did that would be a huge error in the systems design. For a catastrophe to happen, several layers of safety systems need to fail at the same time.
I think its possible to engineer systems that are safe enough even in the presence of human factors. Modern reactor designs for example are a lot safer than what we had in Fukushima. But convincing you of this would probably take a lot more text than fits in HN discussion, so let's just disagree on this point.
How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?
I remember seeing a recent article here on HN about a guy that lost a ton of (someone else's) money playing with oil contracts. He went on about how he diligently planned for "huge" failures, such as a drop of up to 30 percent in the price of oil.
I don't think it's fair to bring in finance. Natural disasters and nuclear reactors are far more well behaved and understood.
> How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?
They don't properly, and that is the problem. A lot of it had to do with creating models that do not reflect reality. They worked fine until extraordinary circumstances occur under which they break down. A well known mistake is assuming a normal distribution for financial returns. In reality this greatly underestimates the likelihood and magnitude of extreme moves that can cause catastrophic losses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan" discusses this in great detail. The bottom line is essentially that a move more extreme than what you anticipated is going to happen eventually.
LTCM made the mistake of neglecting the impact of changing correlations. The thought they had outsmarted the market by eliminating risk from their portfolio. But in times of financial turmoil, correlations of risky assets tend to increase. If your carefully constructed and hedged portfolio does not take this into account, you may be exposed to much more risk than you intended. This is precisely what happend to them. The fund was bailed out by a group of large banks, and their bets did eventually pay off, but the temporary losses were far beyond what their models had anticipated.
> direct deaths, which isn't the worst part of a nuclear catastrophe.
And the definitely largest impact in indirect deaths with Fukushima came from the emotion-based decision to shut down other nuclear reactors, even if there was nothing wrong with them. This lead to electricity shortage and lack of air conditioning, which killed dozens or hundreds (mostly elderly people in hospitals or similar care, who suffered heart attacks in the summer heat).
"The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has no confirmed casualties from radiation exposure, though six workers died due to various reasons, including cardiovascular disease, during the containment efforts or work to stabilize the Earthquake and Tsunami damage to the site.[15]"
Chernobyl was much, much worse than Fukishima. Chernobly rained down radiation on many hundreds of thousands of people. Parts of the surrounding area are intensely radioactive to this day. Fukishima is nothing like that.
Total deaths from Chernobly, including cancers is expected to be around 4000. That represents approximately a 3% increase in cancer risk to some 600,000 people.
As long as we don't get complacent and half-ass things I have no problem with nuclear power.
As if that will ever stop happening.
On a less snarky level: in a complex system (like basically any large-scale power generation scheme) we can't separate the underlying technology from the petty failings and foibles of the luckless human beings (quite often largely or entirely non-technical) saddled with the awful responsibility of having to manage it. And most especially not their time-tested propensity to sweep things under the rug and cover one's ass at the first sign of trouble (or even undue complication).
That's why we need to choose technologies which are resilient to human failure - not, implicitly, reliant and utterly dependent on human perfection to keep them from tipping over.
Have we ever trid asking a private insurance for a coverage? We often have the problem that the state tries to play the insurance role, whereas if every damage were to be paid for by an insurance, they'd "gide us" through respecting the procedures. Like we personally press charges and bankrupt you for life if you don't shut down the plant for every indicator that goes mildly not-green on this panel. Then we'd know the real cost of insuring for nuclear. Our problem is that the state is trying to make the nuclear investment itself.
I think the reason we don't have private insurance is the worst case risk is too significant for a single enterprise to absorb. Which is why the state is involved.
Your point remains valid, I just wish our governments were better at avoiding regulatory capture so we could trust them to do their job at this.
You and, going by Chernobyl's fallout distribution, everyone else within a radius of roughly 2000 km.
Looking on a map, for me this includes Chernobyl itself, the fallout of which is still measurable around here and contaminates dozens of forests to the point that mushrooms and game from there is considered inedible, and everything else between such stable, wealthy nations as Estonia, Tunisia and Syria.
No, I can't really say I'm confident in peoples' abilities to keep nuclear reactors out of harm's way.
> the fallout of which is still measurable around here
The radioactivity of granite mined decades ago and used to build buildings is still measurable using modern sensing devices. "Measurable" is a pretty bad threshold to use.
> contaminates dozens of forests to the point that mushrooms and game from there is considered inedible
"Considered" by whom? What are the actual levels? How do they compare to the radioactivity of other foods?
From what I can tell, the vast majority of the damage from nuclear accidents is not caused by the accident itself but the radiation-paranoid overreaction to it.
Allowable intake levels are different for different isotopes. Potassium has a biological half life of a few hours, Caesium (the isotope in question here), of several weeks.
The FDA apparently doesn't even bother with regulating allowable Potassium-40 levels due to this.
Which is why you shouldn't use Bq/kg and instead use Sieverts. It's not that bad, human body can get rid of caesium-131 etc. pretty well via kidneys. The main problem was radioiodide which accumulates in thyroid and parathyroid glands and super heavy isotopes which are chemically dangerous, e.g. plutionium and uranium - but these do not disperse far at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert - Recommended reading, has a handy table. Fukushima doesn't even register as dangerous in there, equivalent to about 3 full CT scans.
Data from Chernobyl is scarce, but I'd suspect 4x that value due to more retained isotopes.
The US FDA thinks 1000 Bq/kg for Cs-137 is just fine.[1] Browsing around, I have seen other sources that go higher. I am not knowledgeable enough to know if one or both of those limits is overly conservative. Considering my experience with other food safety limits, I would say they probably are.
The panic around every non-Chernobyl nuclear incident is insane. I've mentioned before that if Japan would legally allow it I'd immediately move next to the Fukushima reactor as a kind of publicity stunt. It's probably worth pursuing further.
It would be a great way to buy a house in a very private setting for a trivial sum. It's kind of like buying a house near high-tension power lines. Enough people with kooky beliefs will lower real estate prices.
Well if the japanese could not foresee it, i can imagine what would have happened in a less developed country. I fully agree that we should be switching to nuclear already, but everyone who agrees should be willign to sign a petition to build a nuclear plant 10km from their home. I suspect a large reason it's not being promoted is the fear of developing nuclear weapon tech.
Just go buy a bunch of solar panels. Even if you signed up for a Toshiba 4s, it won't be cost competitive with solar by the time its installed.
Wind is already cheaper than nuclear in the US, and our fleet will probably start being turned down over the next decade due to it [1] It's also evident in Europe [2].
Solar is not a reliable form of power. There need to be 24/7 power sources as well. Nuclear is the best candidate for this, and it is already one of the most cost-effective sources of energy. It could be much less expensive with more companies competing to produce better reactor designs.
There's quite a bit of activity in that area right now, with companies like TerraPower, Thorcon, Flibe Energy, Moltex, and Terrestrial Energy bringing new nuclear designs to the marketplace. Thorcon believes its reactors will produce power for as little as two cents per KWH.
All of these new designs will be meltdown proof, and they don't need to be sited near water.
Maybe these nuclear startups deliver, maybe they don't. Each year they're not operational is another year the price of wind and solar drops (wind is already below 2 cents/kwh in some markets).
Well, considering solar is only available during the day, and wind only when there is sufficient wind, you're making a flawed comparison. You would have to add storage for those sources to compete with nuclear. Now you've got a much lower bar to meet, since we don't really have mass energy storage yet, outside of limited areas where pumped water storage is possible. I expect the cost of using current battery tech to balance solar/wind day to day throughout a typical/ideal month would be huge, let alone however much you would need to cover the possibility of a stretch of overcast days and calm winds. Using nuclear to provide a baseline, and other renewable sources to provide peak power seems to be the way to go for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure how long it will be before we can get to a point where we can use purely non-nuclear renewable sources and storage to cover the baseline power draw, but I don't like the idea of sticking with carbon until then.
> I expect the cost of using current battery tech to balance solar/wind day to day throughout a typical/ideal month would be huge, let alone however much you would need to cover the possibility of a stretch of overcast days and calm winds.
14.5 cents/kwh is huge? And that's with existing battery costs, not taking into account Tesla's Gigafactory ramping up.
"The dispatchable solar plant has a 52 MWh battery system that will store energy generated during the day and allow it to feed up to 13 MW of electricity back onto the grid during the evening peak.
Under the 20-year power contract, KIUC will pay SolarCity 14.5 cents/kWh, less than the cost of conventional generation in Hawaii, and slightly more than the cost of power from the co-op's other exisiting solar farms."
> The goal of the new solar-plus-storage facility, KIUC said, is to "'shave' the amount of conventional power generation needed to meet the evening peak, which lasts from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m."
So, this is exactly what I said solar is good for, balancing out a bit of peak load, with no significant impact on the baseline. Not likely to impact Hawaii's around 88% carbon based energy production. It's one thing to install enough batteries to shift 13 MW of electricity by a few hours. It's another thing entirely to generate and store enough power to completely remove carbon sources. According to that source, Hawaii has a total capacity of 2.3GW. As far as I'm aware, nobody is even considering that as a near-term possibility for stored renewables. Also note that Hawaii is probably one of the better locations for solar, and things get grim the more northerly or overcast your area is. Also, those batteries store 52MWh, the Gigafactory will have an annual output of batteries with total capacity in the tens of GWhs, while Hawaii uses about 10TWh annually, which is over 27 GWh per day average. I can't find a source for how much of that would be used at various times of day, and unsure of the math for how much battery capacity would be needed to take variable sunlight throughout the day and make it last overnight to the next morning, but I expect you're at leas looking at two orders of magnitude larger than the project you linked. And that doesn't give you much of a buffer in case of a storm blocking out the solar power for even a day, which admittedly is less of a problem in Hawaii than elsewhere. You've still got to either provide enough battery power to hold out until generation exceeds consumption again, or you need enough solar panels that you can generate all the power you need even on cloudy days, and simply disable a large portion of them when it is sunny and the batteries are full.
Either way, you'd need every battery the Gigafactory produced for anywhere from a year to a decade, just to maintain reliable power in Hawaii alone. That would be an insane upfront cost without even factoring in solar panels. And those batteries need to be replaced as they lose capacity, so you have to divide that cost over a finite time.
The price of wind and solar (or anything else for that matter) at point of generation is irrelevant. It could be practically free and it still wouldn't matter [0]. The actual problem we need to solve is having reliable, dispatchable baseload supply that can be ramped up and down to meet demand. For every GW/h of intermittent generation added to the grid there must be another GW/h of on demand generation that can be spun up to compensate when the intermittent source is not available. Not storage, generation. Because otherwise when that once in a century weather event comes around and your intermittent generation falls over, once your batteries drain you're back to rubbing sticks together.
[0] Actually it might as the cheaper it gets, the more it drives out reliable baseload generation, which is bad.
Yep, but that's no different than the US government subsidizing liability insurance for nuclear generators, as well as allowing nuclear generators to store their waste onsite (with no permanent storage facility on the horizon).
The problem is that as long as nuclear is seen as the best solution, every country will want nuclear energy. See the whole mess around Iran why that is a problem. Nuclear energy is too tied to nuclear weaponry. We need something that's both safer and less easily weaponized.
That said, if nuclear can help us get rid of coal faster, I'm fine with it as a transitional technology. Because coal really needs to die. But I'd rather replace it with wind and solar. Or maybe Thorium, if that actually works (any progress there?).
But this is all not production ready. There could be very well unforeseen problems like the ones the german Thorium reactor had.
The engineers also didn't think their pebles would break and scatter.
A LFR ran at Oak Ridge for several years. The technology is well understood, the only reason it was never developed is it is not an efficient way to produce weaponizable material.
The Japanese knew about it. They just chose to ignore it. The area around Fukishima has stone markers from equally large Tsunamis hundreds of years ago which basically say "the water reached here".
In the US, we have thousands of Navy and ex-Navy personnel perfectly qualified to safely maintain nuclear reactors, and who (as a group) have an extremely impressive safety record.
But we're not utilizing this resource for civilian purposes. Not even slightly.
I used to work with former Navy nukes, almost all submariners. Nuke training qualified them for very good jobs in the semiconductor industry. I agree it's too bad they couldn't continue to work on civilian reactors.
Our country as a whole woefully underutilizes our military. It was the Army Corps of Engineers after all that built the roads and bridges which laid the foundation for America's breakneck growth in the 19th century.
We should reinstate the draft. Not everybody has to fight, but everyone should serve their country. And, for example, perhaps a few years doing cyber defense for the Air Force will be seen as a more efficient pipeline into tech jobs than college or coding boot camps.
Not even our own military wants to reinstate the draft. They prefer the quality of relatively few dedicated volunteers over a quantity of people who don't want to be there.
We should reinstate the draft. Not everybody has to fight, but everyone should serve their country.
We have a word for it: conscription. Along with that comes a bunch of people making a bunch of money, little of which goes into my pocket. I'm going to pass on that generous offer, thanks.
Yep. It makes it harder to convince the rubes to die for someone else's private gain when you enslave them outright. Works much better if they're desperate due to "austerity" measures, so they choose to sign up.
That's really the problem here, as well as in other industries: perhaps it can be safe in theory, but when exploited by profit-driven companies, corners will be cut.
This is not only true for nuclear power, but also for oil spills. The Deepwater Horizon disaster happened because BP cut corners. Fukushima happened because the company ignored warnings. Maybe we just can't leave these kind of things in the hands of big corporations.
Chernobyl happened because a government bureaucracy was lax and cocky. Love Canal happened because multiple government bureaucracies were lazy and didn't give a shit. Maybe we just can't leave these kind of things in the hands of big, disconnected bureaucracies at all.
True, but a well functioning company strives to maximize profits and reduce costs, whereas a well functioning government strives to maximize public benefit. A well functioning company might still decide to cut corners. Although I suppose that could be prevented with really tight regulation and harsh punishment for companies that still mess up.
But if there's really no organization capable of handling this responsibility, then maybe we shouldn't use these technologies on this scale at all.
Big corporations and big government bureaucracies are very similar to each other. In both cases you have tons of formalisms required by law, and lots of people jockeying for status and money.
"...the reality is that five years later, radiobiological consequences of Fukushima are practically negligible - no one has died from the event, and is it extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will do so in future."
Because if not, it doesn't seem like Fukushima is really a disaster you can point to and say, "This is why nuclear is bad."
It's rendered a rather wide section of Japan a ghost town and I'm not really convinced it is so "extraordinarily unlikely" or that the numbers aren't being fudged considering the scandals about lead in geiger meters of cleanup workers and so on.
I looked but couldn't find any sources backing up your claim about geiger counter scandals, so my only advice is to be skeptical of things you read on both sides.
Of course it's dumb to ignore warnings that nuclear power plants can cause massive amounts of damage, but there are also over 400 active nuclear reactors.
Among other accusations: " The workers’ dosimeter badges, meanwhile, used to measure an individual’s exposure to radiation, could be easily manipulated to give false readings. According to Suzuki, tricks like pinning a badge on backwards, or putting it in your sock, were commonplace. Regular workers were given dosimeters which would sound an alarm when radiation exceeded safe levels, but it made such a racket that, says Suzuki, “people just turned them off or over and kept working.”"
All kinds of potentially dangerous technology is safe and regulated in practice. Broad categories: aviation, medicine, automotive, electrical power, ...
Speaking of the latter, no matter how you generate electricity, the electricity itself is dangerous; if that isn't made safe and regulated, you have problems. Explosions, fires, electrocutions.
I had the interesting experience of working in a startup under a VP of Engineering who was a Nuclear Scientist and was part of the team the US sent to Chernobyl's sister site - exact same plans, basically - to ensure its' safety.
He told me that overwhelmingly what went wrong at Chernobyl is that the head of the plant consistently ignored all of the alarms and monitoring in place, because he was overconfident at what the results of his test would be. He apparently died in the control room.
Interestingly, one thing the Russians did notably different was to have a big guy, I want to think at the sister site his name was Sergei, basically live in a hut next to the cooling lake, which was uphill from the plant. In the event of a disaster, he had a humongous mallet he would use to slam open the valve, draining the lake.
... or maybe this was all made up, I couldn't tell you tbh, but it sounded legit to me. ;)
He told me that overwhelmingly what went wrong at Chernobyl is that the head of the plant consistently ignored all of the alarms
You may consider this an excuse of the kind "but that's not nuclear power's fault" and you'd be right-ish, but I simply don't care who exactly is at fault for whole regions to become uninhabitable in case of disaster.
That is connected to nuclear power in my risk assessment, even if you can make a rational argument that it shouldn't be. And I'm very risk-averse when the magnitude of consequences is that big.
Same with Fukushima: yes, everything was safe. Unconnected to the reactor per se they made huge planning errors, underestimating a tsunami. Again, I don't care.
It may be a bias or even a fallacy that Kahnemann has already described, but it's a useful and correct fallacy, I would argue.
That's not how this works. We're not dealing in absolutes because this is real life. We're dealing with probabilities and expected values. If nuclear power provides a net good, we should consider using it, not blindly reject it.
Saying you "don't care about probability-weighted outcomes" means you aren't willing to objectively value nuclear power. Why not? Why are you afraid of nuclear power?
The point this article makes is that nuclear power is an incredibly safe technology, and the concerns about it are exaggerated.
It would be good if these risks were objectively valued, for example by insuring the plant against meltdown costs.
Total economic loss estimates for the Fukushima meltdown are 250-500 bn USD[1]. And if the wind had been slightly different those numbers would be a lot higher, as Tokyo real estate would be affected.
And that insurance should also cover human error, terrorism, natural disasters. Won't be cheap is my guess.
Which brings us to the biggest myth of all, that nuclear power is cheap when you don't externalise so many costs.
Yeah, it'll make sense to do that when you start insuring other power plants for the environmental damage they cause.
We're not charging a carbon tax on coal plants. We're not charging drivers for the air pollution they cause in cities. If you believe the WHO when they say 7 million people die prematurely from air pollution, are you going to start making air-polluters pay for that? (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollut...)
Are you insuring dams against the floods they would cause if they break?
It'd be great to do those things, but it's unreasonable to unfairly punish nuclear when you're not willing to charge other power plant technology for their expected negative externalities.
If you're going to start enacting "reasonable taxes" on negative externalities, start by getting us off of dirty energy, not by preventing us from using reusable energy.
It would be great if externalities were insured by everybody, yes. But externalities are real, why would you ignore them "out of fairness"? The sane thing to do is to consider them for all kinds of power generation, and then make the best choice. Nuclear just has huge unconsidered negative externalities, we haven't even yet talked about cost of storing and guarding waste for centuries.
Thankfully there are only a few more years until wind & solar will have solved this once and for all by being cheaper, externalities considered or not.
You can't reject one form of power [as worse than existing power] because of externalities if you aren't considering the negative externalities of the existing power. It's not out of fairness, it's out of minimizing future damage.
If you aren't accurately considering the environmental damage of oil/coal/gas, then you can't say they're superior to nuclear just because you are considering its negatives.
I agree -- I look forward to a future of clean renewables, but even still wind and solar are inconsistent. Our storage systems aren't good enough to "just use batteries."[1]
We need a dependable, renewable form of energy that can bridge the gap for 80 years until our storage is good enough.
What exactly do you mean? It's too expensive? Legally impossible? No insurer would insure this?
It's a thought experiment to show what replacing wishful thinking with a tiny amount of objectivity would look like. OP was talking about expectation value of damages etc. Insurers are companies that deal with these sorts of things professionally.
The economic damages of Fukushima and Chernobyl are real and gigantic. It would be foolish to ignore them.
I'm fascinated by the idea of a "correct fallacy." How could such a thing ever make sense? Are you saying that you use this fallacy to reach a conclusion that you believe correct for other reasons? If so, why not state those other reasons and not use your fallacious reasoning? If not, how could your fallacy be correct?
I think that this fallacy is correct in the sense that averting extreme outcomes at the cost of a lower expected outcome is rational when it comes to survival.
I suspect you might be able to explain the existence of those "irrational" behaviours this way, although I haven't searched the literature.
Kind of the opposite of playing the lottery (which I also find rational, despite all the nerds decrying it): There you are giving up expected value, in order to gain variance.
Something is not rational simply because you think it is. A decision is rational if and only if the invested resources are proportional to the likelihood of success.
A fallacy is a fallacy because it violates this proportionality. Fallacious reasoning can never be rational.
If the risk/reward calculus of nuclear power is really favorable, then the industry should accept full liability for damages. Repeal Price-Anderson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...). Let them bear the market price of insuring against civil liability.
Fukushima had a meltdown because all reactors of the General Electric Mark I reactor design will melt down if they lose cooling pump power for 12-18 hours. They have an undersized containment vessel. This was known as early as 1972. Peach Bottom, in Pennsylvania, has the same reactor design, as do some other US reactors.
We also need to stop storing used fuel rods at reactor sites. Yucca Mountain may not be perfect, but it's so isolated that even if something goes badly wrong, there's nobody around to be affected. The area was previously used for outdoor nuclear weapons testing, after all.
Even if everybody evacuates after a disaster and it doesn't kill many people, you don't get your city back.
In nuclear, there are many myths like "decomissioning costs are covered" or "we know how to store the waste". And there are some blatant truths like "risks like that cannot be insured against". But that's usually just accepted as a given so I guess it's fine if the article doesn't mention that one.
I think the biggest myth in the article is the one where they assume that it will have to be either fission or coal burning, pick one.
oh yes, toxic waste production and safe storage facility. Those are definitely the main point of contend against civil nuclear. Not even France with its 75% energy generation hasn't found a way to recycle nuclear waste or at the very least reduce their lifespan significantly.
This seems to have ignored the 1600 people who died during Fukushima evacuation, and it didn't mention the possible thyroid cancer cases in children around Fukushima.
It also didn't mention link between spent nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons. Seems to me that's a good reason to avoid it. (Yes, it might be possible to separate these two, but it seems to me it's still a few years down the road.)
The 1600 people who died in the evacuation were being evacuated during a natural disaster that was far more devastating.
Not mentioning increased rates of thyroid cancer could be attributed to journalistic integrity. There is no evidence of higher incidences of any cancer in any group of residents and it's not expected that there will be. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1022.full
The plutonium in spent nuclear fuel is very difficult to purify to weapons grade. If you're not satisfied with inspections of purifying facilities then taking the waste off the hands of problem countries for free has been discussed. Unfortunately, Uranium isn't that rare or hard for countries to come by. If they really want nuclear weapons then a normal breeding program is the simplest way to do it.
That video you linked to was hilarious. Reprocessing is a great idea. There's no harm in waiting a hundred years for a method of getting rid of your spare plutonium when it means you get to reduce the total amount of radioactive waste anyway.
Also, while we may wail and gnash our teeth at having nowhere to store our nuclear waste the truth is that governments overwhelmingly deal with the very quite simple problem of storage in a competent manner. Certainly more competently managed than our storage of the products of coal power generation in our atmosphere has been.
I remember being about 14 (in 1991; 25 years ago) and learning about the effects of CO2 emissions on climate change in school. It seemed blatantly obvious - the only remotely feasible chance the planet had was to replace coal/oil with nuclear. The risk calculation was trivial. (Even after seeing the effects of Chernobyl in the years after 1986 in southern Sweden - we couldn't pick berries and mushroom in the forest for a while and moose meat was contaminated iirc.)
I'm so sad that we're still having this debate 25 years later and nothing has changed.
what bugs me is the possibility that one disaster, however unlikely, when it happens may render a wider area uninhabitable for a longer period of time. is this not the case?
and then, perhaps a bigger issue, waste management. just look at Germany [1], supposedly a role model country. please note that the New Scientist text is mostly about light waste, "just" 1000 years storage time. there's a committee trying to plan storage of highly radioactive waste - for 1 million years! we are a species of idiots. none of the plants generating that waste is going to give us a million years of power.
as others have mentioned, Fukushima could have been prevented. and Japan has also had accidents and cover-ups before [2]. all in all, it seems too risky.
and finally, what happened to Thorium plants? aren't they much much safer? or the breeder reactors, how are those coming along?
I'm a voting member of that Australian Greens (representing ~10% of voting public on a good day).
The green movement has yet to take responsibility for the disastrous effect our rabid anti-nuclear narrative has had on the health of this planet. For a movement that prides itself on conscientious reflection and progressive evidence based policy our track record on this matter is truly dismal.
Green Party policy on nuclear power is a massive failure.
I'm surprised to see this much advocacy of solar and wind here.
I do agree that we need way more of that, but what's the required size of a solar power plant that's feeding an aluminum plant?
Get a few (modern) nuclear reactors for baseline load, fill the rest with renewables. And shutdown the damned coal plants, those things spew radiation.
Sadly, the article doesn't do the problems - of both a nuclear future and a non-nuclear one - much justice. It relies on facts and figures, which even taken at face value, will not spur many people to action.
Part of the problem is that in general, and particularly with expensive / unattractive projects such as nuclear power plants, those who benefit the most (power company execs, building contractors) assume the least amount of risk - e.g. nearby residents and taxpayers. Same for jails and landfills - same game with a different name.
As other commenters have suggested, those who believe in nuclear should consider making a bold gesture. A petition drive might be interesting, but expect a lot of doors slammed into one's face. But to me it still sounds too conventional. Crowdfunding, anyone?
For anyone interested in this topic, I can really recommend "Radiation: What It Is, What You Need to Know" (by Robert Peter Gale and Eric Lax)[1] which includes some very thorough discussion on Chernobyl and Fukushima. An interesting point they raise about Chernobyl is the psychological fallout of people thinking they were exposed: there was a notable rise in abortions and quite a few plant workers drank themselves to death after the accident. It's all very fascinating.
Nuclear power is safe and clean in the abstract, where ideal safety procedures are always followed and mistakes are never made.
But in the real world, human error always causes problems. The problem with nuclear power is that the results of these problems are enormous and long lived. That's why I am against nuclear power.
We have much, much safer alternatives in wind, solar, geothermal and hydro electric. (Yes dam disasters have killed many, many people, I am not in favor of building any more dams where that kind of risk is a possibility.) In my mind there's no need for the risk that comes with nuclear power, we can build out our power infrastructure with safer, renewable sources of energy.
Even though disasters with dams are terrifying, it is still just nature reclaiming its' territory. There is no ecological fallout from a dam breaking. Water's gonna water.
I'm still with you on trying to avoid this risk, but don't feel it's at all comparable to the risk of a nuclear power plant.
Well, I am not sure but from my point of view, this article misses quite a few arguments against nuclear power. Some may be excusable but not mentioning waste storage (or even regeneration, though I want to see it before I believe it) at all. It does not tell about the destruction cost of nuclear plants (that will never be covered by waste regeneration). It does not talk about terrorist attacks on nuclear plants or just someone stealing radioactiv material to make a dirty bomb. I understand that some arguments against nuclear power are just nonsense but there are some quite tricky ones, picking some that you are able to refute is rediculous.
Edit: and a broken dam in a (at the time) third world country that kills >80% of 170.000 people later through famine and epidemics is nothing that translates to the first world. I agree that hydro-electric power has some big down-sides (like mentioned terrorist attacks) but still you should give things in context. Fukushima happening in Angola would have been a different story than in Japan.
This article is deliberately misleading. It's wearing its biases on its sleeve by admitting to only the direct deaths of Chernobyl (43) and saying that the WHO's projected tally of 4000 deaths merely "might suffer some ill effects". Death is certainly a pretty serious ill effect.
> The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.
Nuclear plants are being shut down often because of safety concerns. Planning a new nuke plant is a 30+ year prospect. Therefore while nuclear power has potential, one wonders if a 30-year lead time itself makes nuclear a risky bet.
You do know that most places don't have the geothermal energy close enough to the surface to make that happen? Also you'll need to provide a source to show that nuclear is "not economical" and "the worlds most expensive way to boil water". All the evidence indicates some of the renewables are it [1]. About 77% of France's energy is nuclear, so I'm not sure what you mean it doesn't work on a large scale...[2]
Fun fact a lot of aluminium is made in Iceland because of the cheap energy [3]
The Geothermal plants in Iceland are amazing to see. The tech is still quite new though. There are many improvements that will make them more efficient. Regardless, they are really really cheap to run.
I would imagine that drilling deeper will would allow for Geothermal plants in more places in the world.
Here is some background info on the poor economics of nuclear power:
> The Ice Link interconnector would link Iceland's cheap and carbon free electricity from hydro and geothermal to the UK. It could provide the equivalent power of a medium sized power plant through a copper cable laid under the sea between the two countries. Crucially the power would be reliable and available when other renewable sources such as wind and solar are not. However, as Tom Heap discovers when he visits the land of fire and ice, environmental campaigners like Bjork fear that this green solution for UK homes could create a need to develop into the pristine wilderness of Iceland's Highlands. Should we pursue our global climate goals even if it has the potential to affect untouched and fragile landscape elsewhere? Tough decisions for Iceland and for us all.
Producer: Helen Lennard.
Be careful when someone speaks about ideology if they were free of it.
"In the wake of Fukushima, Germany acquiesced to demands from lobby groups to shut down its nuclear sector, building heavily polluting fossil-fuel plants in their stead."
This is probably the worst part in this article, because coal is also decreasing in Germany. Not as fast as nuclear but nuclear was always the smaller than coal.
My main issue is, that again, someone believes that nuclear power is a way of solving the climate change crisis. It isn't for that nuclear power never had a big enough market share to begin with. Even the current plants which are being build won't change that.
Also nuclear power is extremely expensive. The ones currently being build in Finland and France are 3x over budget and are lagging behind years. Those two plants will supply 1600 Watts for the grid.
You can get that from renewable energies in less than a year.
And yesterday I read that Chinese researchers developed a solar panel which can even use also rain.
Why do people want a an energy source, which comes with so many unsolved issues and only promises to solve them later. In the last 50 years none of the issues could be solved. None! (I'm not talking about safety!)
If you can read German, here [1] is a study that says shutting off nuclear in Germany causes 63 million tons of additional CO2 emission per year. It's from BDI, an industry group, so take it with a grain of salt, but as the power we used to produce in nuclear plants has to come from somewhere, it makes sense that we produce a lot more CO2 to replace them. You can't just crank up wind and solar to account for the difference, you have to burn more fossil fuels.
Well, but we should also not forget that one of the reasons we have not left coal yet are the many jobs that depend on it. Just this weekend, there were massive protest again from the coal and steel workers union against european environment legislation.
I know German and I know the BDI, they are not really objective about it. Also the study is from 2011. We have 2016! The reality looks different. The amount of electricity from coal fired plants increased since 2011 but if you look from 2003 it decreased. This is true for stone coal and lignite. For the latter there is finally a phase out too.
> Be careful when someone speaks about ideology if they were free of it.
Indeed. It's a very disappointing article. I clicked on the writer's name and browsed his other articles published on The Guardian and they seemed good, so again, it's disappointing that he has such a blind spot on this issue and writes about it in an obviously one-sided and flawed way.
I agree (sort of) with the premise of this article but I'm not sure I believe all of its facts.
Specifically, the analysis of the negative effects of each respective meltdown, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I personally believe there's reason to distrust any study on Chernobyl because of the blatant cover-up mentioned and the interference of the Soviet government, so it doesn't really work well as a citation to convince skeptics of the safety of nuclear energy. Likewise, I don't know that we've seen the full effects of Fukushima yet.
"Some of the smallest children in Koriyama, a short drive from the ruined Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, barely know what it’s like to play outside — fear of radiation has kept them indoors for much of their short lives."
I lived at one point in time relatively near the Fukushima plant (100 km away) at about 2 months after the disaster and I did follow pretty closely at that time the pattern of fallout, but since returning to the USA it is not something I have followed as closely as I should.
For me, the hardest part is seeing the impact on people I met and their friends and families. But I also saw many people doing well even in the hardship.
I did live somewhere (a university campus) with continual radiation level monitoring, with levels somewhere below 0.12 uSv/hour or maybe twice the background radiation of Rome, and I also took Iodine pills in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. For that reason, maybe somewhat selfishly, and because of all of the obvious reasons, I do believe that nuclear energy is essential.
Side note: Fukushima Prefecture has the University of Aizu, which is the only public, graduate-level university in Japan dedicated to computer science and engineering.
Even if we completely ignore most of the risks and hidden costs, nuclear power is still unattractive in its centralized form - large, expensive power plants that require safety measures, usually a lot of water and huge overhead power lines and need to keep operating or millions will be without electricity. On top of that, the consumer is affected by (international) market price fluctuations all the time.
I much prefer being self-sufficient with solar panels on my roof and some far away plant as backup. Once nuclear power is safe, I'll happily put a small reactor in my basement as backup too.
The actual mortality rate from both Chernobyl and Fukushima are so low, I'm not even sure what are we talking about half the time. Fear? Fear of a fear? People store yellow cake at home just for fun, and it's perfectly legal and OK. Yet at other times, just mentioning the word nuclear gives half of the community brain cancer.
there are less than 500 nuclear reactors in the world. So less than 300 power plants for the 50 years. There have been 2 major catastrophes- i.e. 1 per 13000 reactor/year (or 1 per 8000 power plant/year). Compare that to drunk driving (which almost everybody agrees is unsafe) - 112 million alcohol-impaired driving episodes in US per year produce 13,365 deaths (http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...), ie. 1 death per 8000 drunk driving episodes.
Humans have had roughly 50 years' commercial generating experience with nuclear power. It took 25 years from first criticality to come up with passibly useful and safe reactors. Of the fewer than 500 commercial reactors which have been built, three have experienced significant core failures, and, despite design deficiencies in each, the core failings in all of these cases, as well as numerous other non-reactor or non-core failures, have been organisational.
Bad management. Bad design. Bad emergency response. A continuous underappreciation of the seriousness of what's at hand when you decide to start splitting atoms.
Fukushima was infiltrated by the Japanese mob. Future Gen IV and Gen V reactor designs, other than not being currently proven, raise risks of proliferation and novel chemistry experiments (600C highly radioactive florine salts -- what could possibly go wrong?) with a long-tail horizon of tens of thousands to millions of years.
We don't have any human institutions that are of comparable longevity. Our companies, governmentals structures, even major religions and languages are nowhere near that old. This is a mucking with things at scales we're nowhere near capable of handling. Hell, the smartest minds in Silicon Valley can't deliver cat gifs without stuffing browser exploits into the accompanying ads networks.
Human and organisational problems don't have technical solutions. The scale at which nuclear energy would need to be extended to replace existing fossil fueled systems is on the order of 15,000 reactors, worldwide. At present levels of energy consumption. Uranium itself won't deliver the energy we need (proven resources are good for about 8 decades at present levels of nuclear energy, six years if all present energy were nuclear sourced). At present rates of one core failure per roughly 100 reactor years, we'd see a meltdown per century. How much safer are future designs, organisations, and people going to be? 10x? 100x? 1000x? Is creating a new radioactive wasteland only once a century, until forever, acceptable?
Solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass have issues. Leaving glowing holes in the ground, or nondiscretionary slightly mutagenic wildlife preserves, isn't one of them.
The bigger lesson is that humans need to embrace limits. There are far too many of us, consuming far too much, and ignoring for far too long the warnings that we're exceeding any rational sustainable bounds.
Nuclear energy isn't going to address any of those issues. Facing reality might.
> Is creating a new radioactive wasteland only once a century, until forever, acceptable?
I think it's perhaps fine, depends on how radioactive the place is and what is the unsafe area radius. After all, radioactivity reduces with time. Wasteland seems like a misnomer, it's not like all the buildings have been destroyed by a nuclear bomb.
we should invest in fossil fuel backed intermittent renewables like wind and solar because hydroelectric is bad for environments, nuclear means there could be a mushroom cloud blowin' up my neighborhood, and coal pollutes. Or at least that's what my brochure from my local n̶a̶t̶u̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶g̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶l̶i̶e̶r̶ greenpeace tells me.
That's true in the abstract, but the big picture is that we're trying to avoid a much larger disaster with climate change. If wind+solar could fill the world's energy needs now, that is what we would be doing. But that is far, far off into the future, if it's possible at all.
Burning coal is causing damage to the environment now, killing people from air pollution now, and potentially driving us towards climate change that will kill and displace many millions of people. Nuclear has its downsides but it is not going to raise sea level by 2 or 3 feet in the next century nor cause widespread disruptions in crop growing, or cause devastating extreme weather.
A nuclear accident could result in an exclusion zone of a 2 or 3 dozen miles. Climate change could cause global consequences that would be irreversible with our current technology.
Maybe it's time to recognize investing in renewable energies is better than in the dying nuclear power.
Nuclear is a fossil fuel too (uranium has to be extracted and is limited), costs a tremendous amount of money in power-plant building and dismantling costs, and concentrate the production of energy in a few remote places (which makes transport costs higher).
Uranium being limited is a red herring. Breeder reactors and Thorium can provide us with power for hundreds of years.
Similarly, renewables are also fairly concentrated (optimal conditions for wind power or solar are not evenly distributed) and need excellent transmission networks because production is fluctuating.
While I agree that the long-term solution is absolutely to use renewable stuff (especially solar), I don't know that the renewable tech is completely ready to power 7 billion people.
Nuclear is messy, and far from ideal, but it doesn't spew chemicals into the air, with a high yield of power, and we already have decent(ish) nuclear tech.
I've been hearing just the opposite for the last few years, that nuclear power no longer makes economic sense in comparison to renewable energy. Renewables are just getting cheaper much, much faster than nuclear and don't require the enormous initial investment and construction time.
It's showing a range of estimates between $0.067-$0.30/kWh. In comparison, solar was around $0.25/kWh in 2008, $0.15/kWh in 2011, and continues to fall quickly.
That is sadly not counting in the cost of energy storage and is counting the huge regulatory overhead and major inefficiencies in building nuclear plants so far.
And the fact that you'd need massive areas of high quality solar panels - it's not like the solar panels will continue to get infinitely cheaper. And massive numbers of energy storage plants which do not exist.
(Even lithium-ion does not have enough energy density and it's very limited on lithium mining.)
Check the Lazard (2015) numbers. A comparable PV plant in a favorable location itself is only 25-30% more expensive than modern nuclear plant, but the batteries required put it an order of magnitude higher.
Plus nuclear plants scale better - they looked into medium-sized power plants.
The problem is how do megacorps and their privately owned properties such as media and government do their FIRE sector thing to profit off distributed solar panels...
Well, they could issue subprime loans and all kinds of weird financialization for people to buy panels. The factories are all all in china but some games can be played there. That's about it. Its not as profitable as building billion dollar class nuke plants...
They don't like being frozen out of a market, in this case the energy market, so we're all going to have to sit thru a lot of what boils down to sponsored content about how "we" need plants not panels (who is this "we" anyway?), and how panels are going to destroy the grid and motherhood and apple pie, etc.
> concentrate the production of energy in a few remote places (which makes transport costs higher).
Huh? I can drive from downtown Toronto to the nearest nuclear power plant in under 30 minutes. This is one of the largest plants in the world, mind you.
