Conservationists need to really make peace with the fact that the only way out of climate change involves building a very, very strong nuclear energy portfolio. This is difficult for people because it requires engaging in politics because these things are only as safe as they are well maintained. But actually, we do a surprisingly good job in America at keeping our nuclear plants running rather well, and we should be investing in many, many more.
Nuclear boosters need to start showing numbers proving this point instead of taking potshots on HN. Nuclear needs to be worthwhile on a balance sheet before anyone is going to take it seriously. Even now, it's cheaper to build out wind and solar. And the new technologies are rapidly getting cheaper.
I am a conservationist! I hang out in and around these communities and I am disheartened to see my comrades being anti-science and often straight up luddites.
Are you really trying to say that it will be cheaper by kwh to use solar / wind than nuclear? This is easily disprovable by simple googling.
Here's a giant study that shows that by 2050 you could cover 1/3rd the US total energy requirements using JUST nuclear in 169 square miles. The same with solar would require 1500-4250 square miles. Do you think this is reasonable? What about the environmental impact and labor costs of decentralized generation and maintenance of literally thousands of miles of solar panel.
The "numbers" on this, as you ask for, are really well covered. We need to have a diverse energy portfolio of renewables: no one worth listening to will contradict this but the simple fact is that by all accounts you can't generate the required amount of energy in the next 10-20 years without nuclear. Nor should we!
Wind and solar, no matter how cheap, are never going to be reliable sources of baseline power. They fluctuate, and something needs to keep producing power when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
The assumption that baseline power is necessary seem like an unwarranted assumption to me, an idea that is unquestioned because that's the way things are done now. Maybe adequate provisioning of sufficiently uncorrelated, variable power sources combined with some storage is enough to replace all baseline and peak power sources. Maybe this can be done with less expense than nuclear + peaker plants. I haven't seen any nuclear proponents defend the necessity of the baseline power concept with an actual analysis showing that alternatives can't work though.
We know that having a fairly constant source of baseline power works because that is what we are currently doing. The onus to prove that some combination of wind solar and batteries costs less and will deliver sufficient power across all use cases should be on the wind / solar advocates. We know nuclear plants work because they're currently in use all over the world.
Why demand numbers from others when you can't provide any yourself?
"Baseline power" isn't all that useful. What we need to complement renewables is a reliable source of dispatchable power that can be turned on and off, preferably quickly. Nuclear ain't it. While it's possible to somewhat increase or decrease the output of a nuclear power plant, it's slow, operationally complex, and increases the already formidable costs of nuclear power. It's also not terribly common in the US due to licensing restrictions.
Solar produces something like 90% of all the power it will generate in just 4 hours per day. Wind is intermittent and hard to predict. I live in one of the biggest per capita wind power states in the US, and on some days the nat-gas/coal plants are taking almost the entire load. If we relied only upon renewables, we'd either have people dying due to the brownouts or dying because they can't afford electricity.
Strawman. No one is talking about "relying only" on wind/solar. The point is that if you have $100M to spend on power and infrastructure, and have the choice of one medium scale reactor that will come online around 2027 or about 4x that capacity in coastal wind that can be operational next year (and yes, the price delta really is about that big), and you actually care about climate and not an argument on HN, you build out the cheaper option because at the end of the day that's going to make a bigger difference.
If at the end of the process we're trying to decomission the last 10% of legacy gas plants and need carbon-free options for peaking and buffering, sure, we can talk about building some expensive reactors.
And once more, that "and" is just an assertion on your part. It needs analysis to be true.
Compare: "For a balanced diet, you need grains, fruits, and beluga caviar." That's insane, because you're not looking at the whole space of solutions.
Again, find a balance sheet where someone tallies up cost per megawatt-hour of various technologies given existing tradeoffs. This stuff has been done. Nuclear doesn't even remotely come close, which is why the industry is trying to sneak around with legislation and steal government dollars that should be going to more effective solutions instead.
Look at the cost of energy in France where 75% of energy is produced from nuclear, it is 26% lower than the EU average.
Everyone agrees it is much safer to pursue zero carbon solutions in the long term. If carbon emission goals are going to ever be met nuclear will be a big part of it because it is the only replacement to coal/gas that can fill the same role without restructuring infrastructure. Solar/wind do not fill the same role, their lower price reflects the uncertainty of production and can only reduce demand for nuclear to some.
I absolutely guarantee you that number you're showing is the cost to operate the reactors, not to build them. We're talking about building new reactors, not shutting any down.
Oh I see. In that respect there is hope that mass produced small modular reactors would bring down mfg cost by increasing volume. I don't have numbers though.
There are really innumerable problems with using solar or wind (or even hydro, for these reasons) to serve a society that requires stable power generation. And we haven't even gotten to the environment impact of producing, and then throwing out!, battery tech at scale.
Nuclear fanboys (and I'm one) need to make peace with the fact that we've regulated them out of existence. Building a new nuclear plant takes more time, costs more per MWh, and involves more risk than current solar + batteries. I think nuclear had great potential, and if we'd been innovating on it for the last 70 years like we have in other fields it would be competitive. But we didn't and it's not, and it's probably late to change the momentum on that. Batteries are now advancing rapidly and I expect the future to be solar and wind with energy storage as the bulk of our energy production.
Can you link me to some support of the claim about batteries? I'm always depressed with what i perceive as total stagnation on that front. Last i checked the way they store power grid-scale electricity is literally to pump water up hill then let it back down when they need it. That's how bad our battery tech is.
This is what I'd describe as a 'narrowly rational view'. All other things being equal, x leads to y. In this case - political, economic and social conditions remaining in roughly the same range as they have since the post war period. This is quite frankly a wildly unsupported assumption - when compared to the span of human history, or even taking the 20th century into account (rather than merely the post war period). The idea that we should build devices which will become deadly (and indeed irreparable) under conditions of economic collapse, pandemic, conventional, let alone nuclear conflict, is utterly irrational. Over a long enough time line, all else is never equal. In the case of human culture and civilisation, that time line - i.e.: the duration of a stable society, let alone a stable post industrial society - isn't particularly long at all. And we have no good reason to assume that our current high volatile, tightly couple global economic system and political order will fare any better.
And lets say you believe that we are for whatever reason living in some kind of stable 'end of history' period; need I remind anyone that California is home to the San Andreas Fault, which is long overdue to produce the so called 'big one' >7.0 mega quake.
Nuclear power plants do not "become deadly (and indeed irreparable) under conditions of economic collapse etc" outside of comic books.
The power source that might apply to is hydro electric dams. Those dams won't stand forever without active maintenance, and the flood wave can sweep away entire cities.
Its failure in 1975 caused as many as 230,000 deaths.
The death toll of this disaster was considered a state secret until 2005 when it was declassified.[4] According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province[13] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people.
It's the example nuclear proponents always cite, but it's a terrible example. Banqiao Dam was a dual-purpose dam, for downstream flood control as well as power, and the immediate cause of its failure was that they didn't allow enough water out for fear of downstream flooding. Its flood control role was apparently so important that the government had to rebuild it despite the previous failure and its death toll. Also, I don't think it'd even be possible to build a nuclear power plant with the level of technology at which Banqaio Dam was constructed; it was an early-50s dam made of clay, back when the two nuclear powers were just starting their first experiments with nuclear generation. That's probably a good thing too, given the quality of engineering involved.
The idea we have some kind of choice between disasters like the Banqaio Dam one and nuclear power seems like a false one on every level.
> these things are only as safe as they are well maintained
If safety is the main concern that people have, we could also use a design like the Candu reactor that doesn't need enriched fuel sources.
Of course, the other environmental concern is storing spent fuel. But, that seems like an acceptable problem to manage considering the impact of climate change itself.
I mean, we're currently generating 37.1 billion tons per year of toxic waste[0] from our fossil fuel plants which is presently threatening life on Earth.
[0] It's linguistically odd that CO2 is both "toxic" and a "waste product" but not really considered "toxic waste".
We absolutely need nuclear energy.
1) Nuclear is the safest form of energy generation (measured in death/per mwatt)
2) Once operational it is always on and will substitute for solar/wind when those are unavailable
3) Energy conservation long term is not an option - quality of life correlates with amount of energy consumed
4) imagine, what if, energy were so cheap that desalination is profitable in CA.
Turns out, Chernobyl is pretty safe right now. Could be cleaned up with a Troop of Scouts with trash bags. Its the FUD surrounding 'nuclear' that keeps people out.
The ground being removed, the mass extermination of animals (although people have said its exaggerated in the show). Supposedly the cleanup was immensely expensive
We are currently having some parliamentary inquiries in Australia to start a nuclear program. I have always been against talk of nuclear on two main grounds [0,1] (but against decommissioning existing plants).
However a local economist has argued (and costed) for a way to make nuclear viable in this country. Tldr: a carbon price.
[0] Time/Cost (in aus, this means 30yrs+ & tens of billions). Though in CA, this may be considerably less, it is unlikely to be as cheap short term as renewables or gas.
[1] All the mines and dumping grounds in oz are in the middle of sensitive habitats or traditional owners lands.
> But actually, we do a surprisingly good job in America at keeping our nuclear plants running rather well, and we should be investing in many, many more.
No we don't.
The federal government didn't even mandate earthquake impacts for nuclear plants until 'after' the disasters in Japan.
Nevada is still used as a dumping site that is overfilled with leaking nuclear waste. The Republican senator put a hold on Trump nominees until the DOE promised to eventually ship out some nuclear waste a few years after they illegally shipped the waste in.
I found out the former after a PG&E outreach at my university that California was alone in most states over mandates on seismic fault planning for the nuclear industry. PG&E was trying to save the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. I felt that was a very pathetic overview of US regulatory framework. The latter was recently in the news (2 months ago?).
> Conservationists need to really make peace with the fact that the only way out of climate change involves building a very, very strong nuclear energy portfolio.
Disagree, your opinion is 10 years out of date from the facts.
Solar and wind prices have collapsed well below nuclear and coal.
Battery tech is advancing to be competitive towards baseload costs. Samsung plans to ship a graphene battery in cell phones. Makes me very curious towards how graphene can be used for battery plants.
Renewables are already competitive in Australia. Despite lots of sun and coal baseload costs in Australia are very high due to industry and government corruption.
I’ve really come around to nuclear power. I’d like to invite other HN readers to check out the comments of acid urnNSA[1] who describes himself as “Nuclear reactor physicist in Seattle”
> Recall that the beauty of nuclear energy is energy density: there is 2 million times more energy in a uranium nucleus than in any chemical's electron shell. An average american can get 100% of their total primary energy for an entire 88 year lifetime and only use 300 grams of nuclear fuel. At that kind of fuel/waste footprint, it's relatively easy to have a low carbon footprint. And the data is in. The number is 12 gCO2-eq/kWh.”
We need more support for nuclear, especially research for Thorium-based reactors. I am all for green energy, but until that can become a reality worldwide we need something that can generate a lot of electicity with as little waste as possible.
> “But we can’t make a serious dent in slowing the warming trend in the world without investment in nuclear power.”
That's... not really true. Cost to build out nuclear power capacity remains much (seriously, MUCH) higher than for solar or wind.
It's true that nuclear is carbon free, really quite safe, and very useful. You certainly don't want to be deliberately decomissioning reactors in a world where we're still trying to get legacy coal plants off the grid. But if you're going to spend $100M on new capacity, I want to see numbers that say this is actually better than buying a bunch of windmill blades.
It's a similar situation to hydro power. Dams are clean in a carbon sense but "bad" in lots of other ecological ways. No one is pushing for new dams, even if we all tolerate the ones that are already there.
Then show numbers for why we need nuclear for peaking capacity instead of just using existing gas and hydro while we wait for new technologies to arrive.
Again, the problem isn't that the alternatives are perfect or that nuclear doesn't work, it's that nuclear power is outrageously expensive. And no amount of internet argumentation or industry-driven legislation is going to change that fact.
Make it cheaper, then come back and evangelize. In the mean time, stop getting in the way of building out cheap green power, please.
It's difficult to provide concrete numbers here. A lot of independent research is needed on data. All one can point is examples.
For example, it is acknowledged by many that Germany made a mistake in shutting down their nuclear power plants since all they have done is simply increase their reliance on coal plants. Also, their renewables share of 36% quoted by several folks on HN also includes biomass!
> As for California’s climate and environmental record, it is not nearly as strong as it appears. Much of the state's emissions reductions owe to a switch from coal to natural gas in the electricity the state imports, and from keeping population low by blocking new home building, a problem which has worsened under the governor.
Well, this is the first time I've seen it suggested that blocking new home building is "keeping population low" (or, keeping population growth in check) in the Golden State.
Highly unlikely. US is no longer able to build nuclear plans on time or within budget. California has difficult geology and climate is highly favorable toward other renewable sources. Why do something that's more difficult and expensive?
Isn’t this 20 year to late? Even if you “just” want 50% of Californias electicity to come from nuclear you’d need 4 or 5 new plant built, ideally built yesterday. New plants will be at least 10 years away and that’s being really optimistic.
I get that nuclear is effective, but the worst case scenario for nuclear seems vastly worse than the worst case for any other method of generating energy. Fukushima plant has gathered 1 million tons of radioactive water they now plan on just dumping into the ocean, and has rendered a pretty sizable area uninhabitable. We still don't know the long term health effects of living in areas that had been evacuated. Coupling this with all the radioactive waste we may never know what to do with makes me personally feel that fission is a bandaid more than a permanent solution.
Diablo Canyon is in an area that's moderately seismically active.
It's easy to see the only lesson from Fukushima the meltdown of the Daichi reactors, but that was due to not being designed for the tsunami (or rather, the combination of earthquake and tsunami). The earthquake protections of other reactors (Fukushima Daini) worked as designed.
The full story of Fukushima has not really been comprehensively told, at least in English language media. I'm not really sure that new reactors would necessarily be safer than Fukushima Daichi unit 1, because that unit had an isolation condenser system. The IC is exactly the type of passive safety system that is touted with new designs -- it can keep the reactor cool for a couple of days just by turning a couple of valves, and it can operate indefinitely if its water supply is topped off by, for example, a firetruck. Supposedly the system automatically activated, but then was manually deactivated by reactor personnel before the tsunami arrived to avoid shock cooling the reactor. After the tsunami arrived, the system was not turned back on again apparently out of confusion, but exactly what happened is still mysterious to me.
All of that said I still think that nuclear is the safest and least environmentally damaging method of power generation we've yet invented. Like air travel, due to radiation's mysteriousness, it's held to a much higher standard of safety and environmental impact than other forms of power generation, and that has led to gross distortions in perception and regulation that lead us to have less safety and a worse environment.
Still, it took 2000 people some four days to get all four reactors at Fukushima Daini to cold shutdown.
In July 2019 a decision was made to decommission Fukushima Daini in response to local demands for a decision. It will take more than 40 years to decommission the plant.
> Diablo generates 9% of California’s electricity and 20% of its clean, carbon-free electricity.
It's remarkable that one nuclear plant generates 9% of the electricity for the entire state of California, and that they would have ever considered closing it (unless absolutely necessary).
Build a few more of those over time and California has no power concerns for the next 50-60 years combined with the expansion of other renewables. Even being conservative with their current budget they could safely put a few billion dollars per year into building new nuclear power plants.
Even better, build to surplus and begin exporting that green nuclear energy to other states.
1) A good size chunk of California is seismically active, which is generally a bad idea for nuclear power plant placement.
2) Nuclear power plants require large water sources nearby for cooling. Large chunks of California where power is actually needed are essentially deserts without lakes or reservoirs that can be easily used for this without environmental concerns. You could place them on the coast, but this brings its own set of environmental problems and potential dangers.
3) Nuclear power plants are not quick to build. We're talking 5+ years to get one up and running, even in the ridiculously optimistic estimates from industry proponents. So you need to make the case that in 5 years when one is running it will be better than if we had built more solar + wind + battery over the same period of time (a solar farm can be constructed in a few months, battery storage can be installed in weeks).
4) Nuclear waste is not a solved problem, no matter what proponents tell you. The solution right now is to just kind of keep it hanging around mostly secured locations and hope for the best. Long-term storage proposals have still not gone anywhere, so you're basically just hoping that nothing terrible happens until there's political and financial will to do something about it.
5) Power requirements per capita have been mostly flat or dropping for years in the US, and this is expected to accelerate as homeowners continue to install their own supplemental power systems. Building more gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants is a huge investment with a questionable ROI given this fact.
To me, nuclear power is a solution whose time has likely already passed. It just doesn't make much sense to install more baseload power via nuclear these days when we have non-coal alternatives available and dropping power requirements overall. Continued pushes for efficiency improvements, green buildings, residential solar+battery installs, and grid-scale renewable installs are cheaper, faster, and have less risks.
2. Power is already shipped across the state and to neighboring states. I'm not familiar with the capabilities to carry X amount of power between Y and Z regions, but, in the main, this is not a major issue, unless you're speaking of a specific limitation I'm not aware of.
5. Power requirements per capita in CA are dropping, full stop. I don't think homeowners installing their own supplemental power systems come into this (much). The power generated on my roof is still power I consume, and it's accounted for that way. Frankly, rooftop solar is a big arbitrage scheme rather than anything like self-sufficiency. Even most home solar+battery systems can't work in a grid disconnect scenario.
The article is referring to why CA might want to go nuclear, not why neighboring states might want to do so. My points reflect that specifically. Also, power transmission across 500+ miles to get it from a neighboring state with nuclear-suitable sites is not insignificant (typically in the range of 1-2% per 100mi).
What data are you basing your second point off of? All the stats I've ever seen are using electricity sales to estimate their per-capita numbers. For example, [1]. Rooftop solar would be accounted for only as a general dip in sales, not as a specific reduction in per-capita consumption if that makes sense (we might be saying the same thing). This quote from [1] is relevant here:
"Rapid growth in the adoption of small-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in states such as Hawaii and California has contributed to the recent decline in some states’ retail electricity sales. Small-scale solar PV systems, often installed on residential rooftops, offset the amount of electricity that consumers need to buy from the electric grid. In 2016, residential distributed PV generation was equivalent to 15% of electricity consumption in the residential sector in Hawaii, 6% in California, and 3% in Arizona."
That 6% number for CA has grown in the last 3 years as well and continues to do so. It's a bigger offset than most people think.
I'm not sure to what extent solar offsets this, but it's worth noting that it was in 2006, before solar was nearly as popular as it is now. Your source discusses power sales, where, I think you're right, rooftop generation would be netted out.
In realtime demand, I think the only cancellation would be the realtime net of production vs consumption. The all-time peak of around 2pm would be a time with lots of solar generation, to your point, so solar during peak times would cancel out some observed demand. Also it sounds like they did a lot of work to time-shift power usage, rather than outright decrease it.
Waste into space is a bad idea, mostly because it is much easier to dispose of here on Earth than it is to put it up into space.
(Personally, I find the arguments about how hard waste is to dispose of deeply unconvincing. It's treated as a stick to beat people with, rather than an engineering problem to be solved, and one that is, frankly, almost entirely solved already in a number of ways.)
There are a wide variety of ways to use nuclear power for propulsion, such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket NASA has recently been renewing investigations into this, as nuclear rockets have a much better story for getting into the rest of the solar system in some reasonably period of time.
You can ride on explosions, but, I mean, it's kinda brute force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... That said, if there was a "asteroid impact in three years that will wipe out humanity", this would be our best chance of lofting enough $STUFF into space to maybe survive as a species.
You could still decommission them for safety reasons and not just go on ignoring or hiding it. Maybe that would give back some of the lost faith in the technology.
Meanwhile humans doing stupid stuff are still a problem with nuclear. Recently we had this guy with his Bitcoin mining rig and whatever happened in Russia.
It's not like lifetime of those plants has been something that just came up recently. You have to plan for that and if you didn't, you need to buy power elsewhere and pay the price for your negligence. This would be the way to go if you care for safety. If you don't, you shouldn't build even more of those reactors because this technology is obviously nothing for you.
The tech is dangerous, humans are irresponsible greedy idiots who should not handle it and we have no space for the waste from production and from decommission.
So those new reactors that do not exist have no humans working there? Interesting theory...
You CAN decommission them. You just don't WANT. Germany managed it. France could too but they are not doing it because of greed aka human intervention.
In the end the same fact remains: humans = bad, bad shouldn't manage nuclear ergo no nuclear.
The really grim reality is that many environmentalists who correctly point the finger at unaccountable capitalists are themselves doing extreme harm by demonizing the only technology that can really help us in the next 10 years.
Really, the only technology? Not inshore wind turbines? Not hydrochlorofluorocarbon elimination?
"that can really help us in the next 10 years."
I doubt California could build a nuclear power plant in 10 years, and even if they did it would be crazy expensive and still take several years before it became operational. There are better ways to reduce and remove CO2 for the money.
Having said that, I (and probably many environmentalists) would still keep Diablo Canyon given the sunk costs and benefits. However it doesn't mean I think we should be spending money building more nuclear power plants.
