> which could be deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s and in Ontario by 2028.
Note the "could be".
Can the myth of cheap, safe and quick to deploy fission energy please die?
It's not cheap, for good reasons[1]:
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
> The authors also found that while changes in safety regulations could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of numerous factors contributing to the overages.
It's not safe:
> US nuclear regulators greatly underestimate potential for nuclear disaster, researchers say[2]
> Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, [snip] In 2009, President Barack Obama named me the agency’s chairman. [snip]
> Afterward, the falling cost of renewable power changed the calculus. Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, I now believe that nuclear power’s benefits are no longer enough to risk the welfare of people living near these plants. I became so convinced that, years after departing office, I’ve now made alternative energy development my new career, leaving nuclear power behind. The current and potential costs — in lives and dollars — are just too high. [3]
It's always slow to deploy[4]:
> Finland's long-delayed Olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor connected to the power grid for the first time on Saturday, the plant's operator said, 12 years after its planned launch. Located on Finland's west coast, Olkiluoto-3 is the country's first new nuclear plant in over four decades and Europe's first in almost 15 years.
1) Burning fossil fuels is why we are facing global warming right now.
2) Anti-nuclear sentiment is why we aren't living in a nuclear waste right now. Even nuclear advocate's argument that "nuclear plants are much safer now and the accidents that happened at 3 Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are impossible now" implies that anti-nuclear sentiment was correct in the 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000s at the very least!
You're absolutely correct when you say that less regulated nuclear would have caused more incidents. You may also be correct when you say the risks aren't properly calculated at present. The thing is, that doesn't matter unless they're off by three orders of magnitude. Coal kills so many people through pollution that the world could suffer a Three Mile Island once a year without killing anywhere near as many people as coal does.
It is now theoretically possible that solar, wind, and pumped hydro could provide a substantial chunk of global baseload power. We could have gotten there decades ago with nuclear. It's the fault of the green movement that we didn't.
Gen II 1970s era nuclear reactors are still among the safest forms of energy known to humanity. Anti-nuclear sentiment has only prolonged the reign of particulate and carbon emitting fossil and biofuel.
If Chernobyl itself was built today, without the post-accident modifications, and it ran 5 years and then exploded, it'd still be safer than a coal plant running normally.
Fossil/biofuel particulate emissions killing ~8 million people per year is no joke.
> Gen II 1970s era nuclear reactors are still among the safest forms of energy known to humanity. ... If Chernobyl itself was built today, without the post-accident modifications, and it ran 5 years and then exploded, it'd still be safer than a coal plant running normally.
This is only based on the official number of deaths (31 I think?). This is known to be false.
Better estimates are hard, but "the Ukrainian government pays benefits to more than 36,000 widows of men who have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster".[1]
There were also at least 200,000 people who had to be relocated.
I agree 100% we should get rid of coal ASAP! No dispute there at all.
> This is only based on the official number of deaths (31 I think?). This is known to be false.
Actually, it's based on the UNSCEAR number of 4000 deaths including latent cancers. Don't use the Ukraine political numbers. Use the UN panel of scientist numbers.
If they used your 4000 number then Nuclear becomes twice as unsafe as solar.
(But the point here isn't the number of deaths in the past - because that was moderated by the strong anti-nuclear movements. The risk is higher usage leads to dramatic increases, because deaths are dominated by accidents not constant one-off deaths like from pollution which are more predicable)
Woah I did not realize they used that figure. Everyone agrees that there were between 0 and 1 deaths from radiation due to Fukushima (vs between 31 and 4000 radiation deaths at Chernobyl). There were deaths caused by the prolonged evacuation at Fukushima, which must be where this figure comes from.
Debatable, since many of the dose rates many evacuated from are below the level that causes any measurable harm. Temporary short term evac is understandable while the event unfolded but they should have given people dose rates and health info (e.g that less than 300 mSv/yr doesnt cause measurable harm) and let people decide for themselves.
To your first point: Yes, but if Nuclear plants were more common less fossil fuels would be burnt. Hence anti-nuclear sentiment has led to more climate change.
To your second:
3 Mile Island was not an accident that caused significant environmental damage.
Chernobyl was a terrible design that should never have been built.
Fukushima is an example of the dangers. It was however hit by an earthquake 1 magnitude higher than it was designed for and a Tsunami. Given it's location it should have been designed to handle these possibilities.
I would argue that Fukushima was a pretty good example of how safe nuclear power is. The damage was very well contained, and the evacuation measures caused more harm than the primary danger.
I'm pretty pro-nuclear, but a couple hundred billion dollars of damages, a couple dozen direct deaths, some people getting maimed, and causing thousands of deaths by displacing a large population is a catastrophe by any stretch. Yes, fossil fuels may be worse per unit of energy generated, but they are never quite this spectacular in a single event.
There have been some pretty spectacular oil rig disasters with huge oil spills and >100 direct deaths. I would count those on the same scale. And those are in addition to the huge numbers of deaths every year and the contribution to global warming.
I wouldn't, though, because they don't have the impact on the population at large and don't cost nearly as much. Yes, maybe they impact other industries or recreation in an area for awhile.
A fossil fuel plant operating nominally without any incidents will impact the entire population as the fossil fuels are consumed and the byproducts of their combustion emitted. The number of QALYs / DALYs / deaths lost that are directly attributable to air pollution is absolutely staggering.
The magnitude of the risks we're contemplating when we're discussing nuclear are completely insignificant in relation to that.
> but they are never quite this spectacular in a single event.
Even things like oil spills? I know it's hard (or even impossible) to reduce to "overall damage" as the common unit, but I know oil spills are catastrophic.
The death tallies are statistical noise compared to normal cancer deaths, etc, and can't be differentiated.
All you can do is look at the dose and estimate the deaths. Pretty obvious the evacuation-related death toll is going to be one order of magnitude, and perhaps 2 orders of magnitude higher than Fukushima.
Even nuclear advocate's argument that "nuclear plants are much safer now and the accidents that happened at 3 Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are impossible now" implies that anti-nuclear sentiment was correct in the 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000s at the very least!
Every nuclear disaster so far has been unique, and this will remain the case going forward, because the nuclear sector is always defending against yesterday’s failure mode. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complicated machines mankind has ever built. In such a complex design there are too many permutations of failures that can arise to allow for designing away all risk. We need to fundamentally accept this risk and embrace it if we are going to adopt nuclear power on a grander scale. This is a big ask on a psychological level for humanity, and that’s one reason why I think a nuclear upscaling is not going to happen. (The other is high and rising cost of construction, which is the biggest problem facing the nuclear power sector that is on them to solve.)
When the last chapter of industrial civilization is written some time in the 2100s the number of people the Greens killed in the name of protecting the environment will make every war, genocide and mass murdering dictator look like amateur hour.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is unfortunate we have made Earth into hell though.
Hi, y’all I’ll take this one for the team. Sorry for generally reducing my resource usage and encouraging others to do so… I guess I’m excited to stop being compared to pol pot or whatever tho.
These things can all be true and yet it is still a good idea to include some nuclear in our energy portfolio for diversification. In particular, my understanding is that economic storage of renewable energy has not yet been solved, so it might be nice to get some nuclear going in case that endeavor doesn’t pan out as optimistically as hoped.
The problem is scale and availability of materials to make batteries.
Right now almost all the batteries are produced for and used in electric cars, however electric cars only make around 10% of all the cars consumed.
Now you wanna store enough solar-generated electricity for when the sun doesn't shine, worldwide? My napkin math says that either the price per kWh will go up, or that some poor country with enough lithium will be "politically destabilized" soon.
There's plenty of capacity for grid connected batteries.
For one thing they can use a bunch of tech that doesn't work well in cars (flow batteries for example).
And the price goes down because the primary constraint is production capacity. More demand means more factories mean cheaper prices. See eg the growth in manufacturing capacity in batteries and their price decreasing:
If you look at 2008, there was 6GWh of battery manufacturing in the world and 97% of it was in China.
In 2019, there was around 365GWh worldwide, split into: China (75%), US (9%), South Korea (7%) Europe (5%)
By 2023 we estimate there will be 1,230GWh worldwide: China (65%), Europe (10%), US (10%) and rest of the world (15%).
Iron redox flow batteries are made from abundant materials and cost less than lithium batteries. Sodium batteries have many of the upsides of lithium and don't require it (they require some other scarce materials). There are enough empty salt mines and similar to build weeks' worth of storage in CAES for less than the cost of either.
But none of these solve the issue of months long weather fluctuations and disasters entirely in regions where pumped hydro isn't viable. For that, grid flexibility (such as variable rate Al production and electrified steel smelting), gas or hybrid heating/cooling, generator backup for essential uses (minimal heating and medical facilities), and methane produced from electricity and biomass is the answer and the only reason it hasn't happened on its own is we don't price in the (absolutely massive) externalities of fossil fuels so they're marginally cheaper. We also need to cut the low hanging fruit that are responsible for most of the emissions either directly or indirectly (poorly insulated, overly large detached homes, cars, and cows).
Are detached homes really responsible for the majority of emissions, and how is that low-hanging fruit? That seems like one of the most expensive options per unit emissions reduced. I’m pretty sure industry and logistics are some of the most intensive, particularly if you don’t pretend that goods imported from China or other countries are emissions free simply because the emissions weren’t emitted domestically.
Detached homes are just one of the simpler low hanging fruit to fix -- subsidies on insulation and regulation rentals and on new homes -- rather than a huge part of the whole. It's an easy 5-10% depending on area (with side effects of helping the poor and reducing strain on infrastructure during extreme weather events) rather than a large part of the whole.
About half for heating and cooling in EU, https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-efficiency/heating... iirc 40% of that or around 20% of total was domestic -- it often looks small because it is broken dowm into two subsets of electricity and two subsets of methane use (and decreasingly kerosene) being for water and space heating. Detached homes use at least double compared to a row house (twice as many walls, but they also tend to be larger and have more windows) or far more than a similarly built apartment with one wall, and tend to be poorly insulated in places like the US.
Heating and cooling represents a lower proportion in the US for a variety of reasons (primarily driving/trucking and some differences in industry as well as a colossally wasteful military), but a huge amount is caused by cows, clearing land for cows, moving cows, cooling cow products, moving feed for cows, and producing fertilizer to grow feed for cows.
Unrelated, but detached home suburb design is also responsible for a lot of other emissions indirectly. Larger living space and fewer communal areas leads to more travel and more stuff. Things being spread out leads to low labour high emissions big box store stuff rather than local hand crafted and second hand markets and local in season produce. Transit and pedestrian hostile layout leads to more driving (and one car per person). Car dependent infrastructure leads to more trucking and less freight trains. Large centralised shopping centers like walmart leads to more uniform goods and just in time logistics which depemd on planes. Flight, trucking, driving and fossil fuel heating leads to more dependence on oil and gas. Oil and gas security is maintained by military activity which is responsible for a huge portion of emissions. None of this stops if you build a 5 over 1 and a train line or a medium density village instead of a suburb of course, but you make a small dent in every step.
> almost all the batteries are produced for and used in electric cars
I'm not convinced. I tried a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but there were a few too many variables, but I think the 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year edge out EVs (my main difficulty was comparing smartphone battery EV battery)
From a little Googling, it seems like an EV battery is four orders of magnitude larger than a smart phone battery, so about 150,000 EVs sold per year is the rough equilibrium point (that’s four orders of magnitude lower than your 1.5B figure), and it seems like we’re selling about a million EVs per month, at least as of the end of 2021.
I'd take that headline with a grain of salt. A lack of investment in power generation because of unclear policy goals by the previous conservative government is the real issue - combined with another odd policy where long term gas supply export contracts meant it was cheaper to turn off gas plants than run them!
Basically the previous government wanted someone to build a new coal fired power station(!) but no commercial company wanted to do it and no investors could be found (coal fired stations just cost too much now). The then Prime Minster is famous for bringing a lump of coal into parliament to show how much he loved coal[1].
It's worth noting that no blackouts occurred.
Ironically, the state of South Australia also had a conservative government at the time but had a very pro-renewables policy (this is where the first Tesla big battery was) which took power prices from the highest in mainland Australia in 2018 to the lowest wholesale prices[2]
The cost of storage must be factored into the cost of renewables, else it's not really a fair comparison. How much does it cost to build out 10 hours of storage @ 50% of day time generation wattage?
Ah yes ye olde 4 hours of storage quotes from the Li(a)zard People. Hope you don't run into one of those 3 week wind lulls or anything.
Lazard uses the worst possible nuclear builds and ignores the good ones. They ignore China, Korea, Japanese, and Russian builds. In 2006 Japan was churning out ultra-modern ABWR reactors in 36 months (not the old Fukushima kind). Unbelievably cheap and effective. Today, China's Hualong One builds are fully serialized. Yet Lazard keeps on looking at the worst 2 nuclear builds in history and ignoring e.g. the necessary cost of new transmission and overbuilding in order to actually decarbonize at scale with wind solar and gigatonnes of batteries.
Storage from day to night, not from summer to winter. The only solution for seasonal storage is hydrogen, and we are far, far from having any meaningful production of green hydrogen.
Why would you store from summer to winter? Wind works pretty well in both seasons (depending on geography but the solution there is better transmission!)
I love how nuclear is too expensive because it costs billions, but long range power lines, which also costs billions, are somehow a better waste of money.
Long range power cables only cost billions if they're >1000km long.
But this is besides the point. Energy companies spent money on long range power cables because they calculate they can make a profit on the transmitted energy. Nuclear power stations spend taxpayer billions because they can't possibly compete commercially. That's the key difference.
We're talking about the far north. I think it's reasonable to require a lot more storage than 10 hours (and account for overcast weather, which is common in winter).
Note the "could be".
Can the myth of cheap, safe and quick to deploy fission energy please die?
It's not cheap, for good reasons[1]:
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
> The authors also found that while changes in safety regulations could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of numerous factors contributing to the overages.
It's not safe:
> US nuclear regulators greatly underestimate potential for nuclear disaster, researchers say[2]
> Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, [snip] In 2009, President Barack Obama named me the agency’s chairman. [snip] > Afterward, the falling cost of renewable power changed the calculus. Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, I now believe that nuclear power’s benefits are no longer enough to risk the welfare of people living near these plants. I became so convinced that, years after departing office, I’ve now made alternative energy development my new career, leaving nuclear power behind. The current and potential costs — in lives and dollars — are just too high. [3]
It's always slow to deploy[4]:
> Finland's long-delayed Olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor connected to the power grid for the first time on Saturday, the plant's operator said, 12 years after its planned launch. Located on Finland's west coast, Olkiluoto-3 is the country's first new nuclear plant in over four decades and Europe's first in almost 15 years.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
[2] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-nuclear-greatly-underestimate-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nucl...
[4] https://www.dw.com/en/finlands-much-delayed-nuclear-plant-la...