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Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

32 points by gangorgasm 2y ago

onetokeoverthe 2y ago
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ZeroGravitas 2y ago
> There is a great conflict between two of the most pressing problems of our time: poverty and climate change. This wasn't true in 2021 and has been getting less true over time. Not one mention of Solar or Wind in the whole article.
- uniqueuid 2y ago
  I agree that it's stupid not to take the game-changer of solar and wind (and batteries) into account. Even though I believe that nuclear no longer has a role in energy (fuel sources, disposal, concentration of risk into few small units), the statement is still correct and it has another dimension: There is a conflict between poverty, climate change, gravity of climate change harms and the speed at which we can reduce climate change impacts. The problem is that there is a shrinking window to limit harm, and the harms will disproportionally affect poor nations which at the same time lack resources to mitigate. I'd definitely call that a gordian knot.
  - wcrossbow 2y ago
    A guardian or a gordian knot [0]? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
    - uniqueuid 2y ago
      Haha thanks fixed.
    - bborud 2y ago
      The story of the gordian knot wasn't really about the problem. It was about the solution. So alluding to it when you talk about nuclear is apt, but not for the reasons people seem to think.
  - TheRoque 2y ago
    Is it really a game changer though ? AFAIK countries that made the shift to solar and wind can't still store they energy and have to rely on fossil still to power they country (e.g. Germany). On top of that, if the whole world made the shift to solar, wind and batteries, I assume the scarcity of some materials will become an issue. According to this [1] Lithium for example is expected to have a shortage by 2025. There are also challenges like usable surface, and making all the intermittent, non-controllable energy work together. I mean, I am open to the idea of solar/wind, but "game changer"... Doesn't seem so easy [1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-world-enough-lithium-resources/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Watching what China does is always instructive. Despite platitudes to the contrary, climate change is a tertiary concern of theirs. What they care most about is (1) energy independence and (2) cost. So 10-15 years ago they started building a lot of nuclear, solar and coal. As the cost of solar plummeted and nuclear went up they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions. For the last 5 years they've built several TW's of solar capacity and a similar amount of coal peaker plants to run when the sun isn't shining. Now in 2024 they're starting to scale back coal and they're building massive batteries instead. IOW, batteries are now cheaper than coal to offset the intermittency of solar. Also, the lithium shortage has come and gone already: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
      - defrost 2y ago
        > they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions. Currently (June 2024) they're all the way down to: China intends to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035, with 27 currently under construction and the average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years, far faster than for most other nations. China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology. China is leading in the development and launch of cost-competitive small modular reactors (SMRs). From 2008 to 2023, China’s share of all nuclear patents increased from 1.3 percent to 13.4 percent, and the country leads in the number of nuclear fusion patent applications. ~ https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-china-in-nuclear-power/ https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c... Which is quite the wind down from . . . ?
  - emptyfile 2y ago
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- Festro 2y ago
  ? Those are very much two of the world's most pressing problems, both accelerating currently. Though I'd phrase the 'poverty' one as 'wealth inequality' instead as whilst people are getting poorer their access to resources has been scaling well enough to keep them above the poverty line. That may not remain true for much longer though. And the article is about nuclear energy and the premise of it being a flop and why that might be, based on a book about the topic. I don't think it has to mention solar and wind. Though I can see, as competing energy sources, why it would be useful to look at their impact on political momentum for nuclear, or how they reduce economic demand for the extra energy nuclear can supply.
  - wyager 2y ago
    > whilst people are getting poorer their access to resources has been scaling well enough to keep them above the poverty line Defining poverty as "wealth relative to the richest person on earth" or whatever you're doing here is unproductive crab-bucket envy, not a useful definition. If you're talking about wealth, all that matters is if the baseline is going up. If you're talking about status, be honest and say that explicitly instead of dressing it up as a wealth issue.
    - anonymous_sorry 2y ago
      Wealth distribution is important, because very rich people disproportionately buy up limited-supply assets in order to earn passive income on them. In densely populated places, that includes assets like homes, which pushes up housing costs. Housing costs often aren't included in popular measures of inflation. If you do use an inflation measure that includes housing and all other everyday expenditure, then I think it's a reasonable to argue the baseline going up is good enough.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        Unless someone buys up so many properties they can start unilaterally increasing prices, the problem with housing going up isn't rich people buying them and renting them at a market rate. It's the amount of demand vs supply that does it. And you're right - this is possibly the single biggest issue that's a downgrade for people vs their parents/grandparents, and it's a huge one. But the problem needs to be attributed correctly.
waciki 2y ago
too expensive and never built on time, only countries where it's cheap are dictatorships where you can hide problems
- unglaublich 2y ago
  The fossil industry is doing a fantastic job hiding problems in "free societies" and dictatorships alike.
- dwighttk 2y ago
  France?
  - oezi 2y ago
    They were able to build them in the past. It is unclear if they can still do it. It seems even for France the issues are piling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
- maelito 2y ago
  That's wrong. France's electricity is 70 % nuclear, on plants that were never built during a dictatorship phase.
audunw 2y ago
The conclusions of the article is very good. I mostly agree with them. But there are two major flaws in the article: 1. “we need more like 25 TW”. That seems too high to me. Is that based on a direct conversion of the primary energy consumption today? The alternatives solutions needed for decarbonisation is generally much more energy efficient than the fossil fuel based solutions we use today. In addition, the energy used per capita to live a European lifestyle is decreasing year over year. And finally, the energy use will drop dramatically as we shift from primarily making stuff out of mined virgin materials to using recycled materials. For instance, commercial EV battery recycling is ramping up rapidly already today. Making virgin concrete is energy and CO2 intensive but that might not be a viable option for the long term anyway, as it requires sand that we’re also running out of. There’s already huge pressure to reduce the use of concrete. It should also be said that 25TW or more of nuclear thermal power will contribute to thermal forcing of the planet that we probably can’t afford when the planet is already on the precipice of dangerous climate tipping points. The global warming effect of the thermal power plants we have today is already on the same order of magnitude as greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes. 2. I miss a discussion about the labour costs when it comes to nuclear. I think one of the reasons it was cheap to build in the past was access to cheap labour in the countries building the nuclear power plants. Changing demographics is an irreversible trend that will keep these labour costs high. Solar lets you outsource much of the labour costs of the production of the panels, and that production will probably end up being fully automated and then on-shored in the end anyway.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  Have you got some sources for that? Thermal forcing from existing plants (and thermal sink from their energy output) seems like it'd be tiny compared to solar thermal forcing. I realise GHG from their waste gases is a huge problem, but direct thermal forcing?
  - XorNot 2y ago
    I don't know how this constantly comes up on HN but I have seen it mentioned across every type of energy thread. And people could trivially disprove the notion in mere seconds by Googling the solar irradiance of the sun over the Earth, but for some reason they never do before posting.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
I don't really think he understands why the safety paradigm is the way it is. The problem is fear. Fear generated by individual incidents that have terrible local harmful effects. And the (perhaps inaccurate) perception that plants may still have issues. Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem. Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe. When will we know that the new nuclear power plants are safe enough? Not for a decade or more. Pretending that the industry isn't taking a rationale line based on the same tired stats about radiation is pointless. Humans are bad at judging risk, but your job as a power plant operator is to deal with the risk people perceive as well as the risk that actually exists. (And the fact he links to LessWrong which is a site that overemphasises rational thinking to the extent it ignores the human condition says a lot to me).
- krisoft 2y ago
  > Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem. Is it more or less solved than the waste storage problem of fossil fuel generation?
- jeltz 2y ago
  What terrible local harmful effects? Only Chernobyl had any and they were very modest. Compare that to the hydroelectric plants. There we can talk real incidents with harmful local effects. If people actually feared incidents they would campaign against hydroelectric power. And the last such incident was last year in Ukraine. Also just building a hydro plant can ruin the local ecosystem even if there is no incident. Fro the record I am pro-hydroelectric, pro-nuclear and pro-wind (I am a bit more skeptical towards solar but that is probably just me being from Sweden where solar isn't really an option). None of these are perfect but nuclear is by far the safest. The issues with nuclear do not relate to safety.
  - kalaksi 2y ago
    Are you saying Fukushima had none or less than modest harmful effects? I don't know what the parent meant, but the whole Fukushima disaster management and clean up will take decades and people had to leave their homes. To add, I agree about your point about hydro in general. It's a complicated comparison, though.
mumong05 2y ago
......
maelito 2y ago
> Or they were—costs are so high now that we don‘t even build plants anymore. That's factually wrong. France has a program of nuclear building. We don't build a lot of plants in Europe, but we do.
- medstrom 2y ago
  Does the US not legislate that a NPP should be built with certain minimum amount of concrete that is far higher than needed? I read somewhere that lobbies inflate the cost so they will not be built, IDK if that's true.
- TomK32 2y ago
  The French nuclear program was started without public or parliamentary discussion, read up on the Messmer plan, it was a spontaneous reaction to the oil crisis of 1973 and new deployments haven't happened in the 25 years. France has a plan to extend it's nuclear plants by another 10 years, but really it would have to replace them sooner or later. Even in France the trend visible in other European countries will happen: Wind, solar combined with large-scale batteries or pumped storage hydropower. Those are more simple to construct with less resistance from today's public.
- DoctorOetker 2y ago
  And this has absolutely nothing to do with having to maintain a nuclear stockpile, because France unlike other nations in the European Union doesn't have nuclear weapons. /s
  - pepa65 2y ago
    Come on man, everybody knows France has their own nuclear weapons, have had for many decades.
    - DoctorOetker 2y ago
      /s stands for sarcasm
- 2y ago
cedws 2y ago
Something I haven’t seen discussed in the nuclear debate is that NPPs become a high risk target in times of war. Look at what’s happened in Ukraine regarding the Zaporizhzhia power plant. The IAEA has been crapping itself the entire time while both Ukraine and Russia have haphazardly been shooting and bombing around it. If Russia were forced out of their position, they could adopt a scorched earth policy and destroy it, potentially irradiating the area. Whether Russia would actually do that doesn't even matter - just being a possibility allows them to take the area hostage much more easily. I am well aware that it would not detonate like a nuclear bomb or like Chernobyl. It doesn’t have to, it could still contaminate a huge area and harm a lot of people.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- littlecranky67 2y ago
  Fully agreed. When the Ukraine war broke out, in Germany we had discussions how we could no longer rely on cheap russian gas and there we politicians actively demanding NPP to be reactivated. At the same time our government decided to spent 100 bilion € for the military and defense. This is surreal, when experts explain how "safe" NPPS are, the safety assumptions never asume a war going on around that NPP. If you factor this in all NPP would immetiately fall into the very unsafe category and all other energy sources would gain precedence.
  - cedws 2y ago
    Much easier to target one NPP than thousands of windmills and solar panels distributed throughout the country too.
    - rasz 2y ago
      Weird thing to say considering russians didnt bomb any NPPs yet, but did actually brick Viasat disabling "remote monitoring access to over 5,800 wind turbines" .. in Germany of all places https://cyberconflicts.cyberpeaceinstitute.org/law-and-policy/cases/viasat https://cyberconflicts.cyberpeaceinstitute.org/law-and-polic...
nottorp 2y ago
Has it been a flop? They should ask France. About the trains too...
ianis-h 2y ago
Nuclear Power is a complex thing, as any complex thing it require attention and commitment. Therefore it is more prone to destablization by a small number of individuals. Russia have been quietly lobbying against nuclear in the EU for a long time (looking at you german Green Party).
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > Russia have been quietly lobbying against nuclear in the EU for a long time And, given this, they might even have a perverse incentive to destroy nuclear facilities, if only as yet another form of pro-oil, pro-gas propaganda.-
bborud 2y ago
A lot of what is said about nuclear power fails to drill down to the bare essentials: how do you de-risk building nuclear power and how do you get the cost down. A lot of smug mumbo-jumbo written by industry insiders who have their heads too far up their own behinds tends to take attention away from the fact that, so far, we've gone about it in ways that don't make sense. You don't actually need to know anything about nuclear power to understand why the approach of building large nuclear power plants doesn't work. Some basic knowledge of financing and the statistical chances of "black swan events" when you stretch out projects in time suffices. Or in short: if you don't understand the goals you must navigate towards, it doesn't matter how much of the technical implementation you know. "How Big Things Get Done" by Flyvbjerg and Gardner zooms out a bit (well, a lot) and draws a relatively clear picture of what approximate shape the solution space has for nuclear. Yes, the book gives a high level perspective. And yes, transforming the industry so it can fit within the constraints outlined in the book will be expensive and time-consuming. But it is worthy of serious consideration. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-get-done https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-... I tend to point out that the country where I live is uniquely suited to design and build reactors precisely because we don't have a nuclear industry. (We had a research reactor, but that's an entirely different matter and you would NOT want to involve the cowboys who ran that)
jaimex2 2y ago
Simple, people found out the reactors get retired after 50 years and its an absolute shit show. Totally not worth it. Then there's the unforgiving accidents.
deleted 2y ago
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michaelt 2y ago
Here in the UK it would be super convenient if cost-effective nuclear power plants could be built. After all, to decarbonise the economy we need to replace petrol cars with EVs, and gas-fired central heating with heat pumps - which will mean a big increase in demand for electricity. A lot of that heat demand will be in winter, when solar output is at its lowest. And a lot of our existing power plants are past the end of their designed life. The problem is we're trying to build one nuclear power plant, and it's going pretty badly. It's an extra reactor on an existing site - that should make things easy, right? And it's being built by the French who operate loads of nuclear power plants - should be experienced specialists building a cookie-cutter replica of a proven design, right? And it's using private-sector finance with the government just guaranteeing an electricity purchase price - should remove the incentive for delays and cost over-runs that plague cost-plus contracts used in things like defence procurement, right? But it turns out none of these tricks was able to overcome the curse of large infrastructure projects, and it's going to be delayed and expensive. And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling. I can understand the argument for building fewer and larger nuclear power plants - you only have to get one set of locals to support you, do all the impact assessment paperwork once and so on - but I can't help but wonder what would have happened if we'd instead set out to build ten nuclear power plants, each one tenth the size, so there weren't so many things being done for the first time in a generation.
- cogman10 2y ago
  > And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling. This is the #1 reason why I'm a bit more pessimistic on nuclear than I used to be. I still think it has a place in a modern power grid and probably increasingly so as available sites for renewables go down. However, we simply aren't there yet. Both renewables and batteries have seen precipitous drops in pricing which ultimately means they make more sense as they are both cheaper and faster to deploy.
whoitwas 2y ago
Because of the existential threat they pose. They require a military to defend.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  More specifically, everything requires a military to defend, but some targets (nuclear power plants) are much harder to defend.
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    I don't think so. These plants are super volatile and can meltdown forever.
Yeul 2y ago
The 1970s: When you have cheap coal and gas it would be financially stupid to invest in nuclear. Which is why most countries never did. Today: when a single nuclear powerplant is estimated at 20 billion you calculate how many windmills you can build for that money. Ironically wind power is now the proven technology.
- pepa65 2y ago
  Windpower is shit, and it's on the way out. It's also polluting in all kinds of ways (visually and materially).
ponorin 2y ago
The article is too US-centric to a fault. Basically all project's costs after 1970s balloon to an extent. Japan's cost has risen. French, while only slightly, has risen. Same for India. Only S. Korea have seen construction prices fall, but notice the price bottoming out after the 1990s. It's only maintaining the price, not getting lower. Regardless, these other countries didn't contribute that much to increase global nuclear power capacity. In both India and China nuclear doesn't even count as the majority in their low-carbon energy mix, which is still dwarfed by the massive deployment of coal. S. Korea is slacking on low-carbon sources in general. Japan has lost trust (rightfully) on nuclear and decided to reset their entire nuclear generation capacity. No country has expanded their energy grid with nuclear. Except France, who only did it because of the oil crisis.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  > Japan (rightfully) has lost trust on nuclear and decided to reset their entire nuclear generation capacity. bullshit. Japan is in the process of restarting all of their nuclear plants. Price of energy had doubled after the grid went off nuclear.
  - ponorin 2y ago
    I have clarified my original comment. Regarding your comment: > Japan is in the process of restarting all of their nuclear plants. They are still "in the process" after 12 years, and their capacity is still less than half of pre-Fukushima level. Japan has had more solar generation than nuclear since 2014.
    - ekianjo 2y ago
      if solar was the answer then ask yourself why they even bother restarting the nuclear plants
hoseja 2y ago
Because nuclear competency is a strategic asset that the long march has been very successful in degrading.
486sx33 2y ago
Ok, this is crazy. I stopped reading when the author says evacuating the people from Fukushima was unnecessary. Of course it is necessary. What good is a world where everyone is irradiated and dying of cancer ? We have enough already. This guy is either on Westinghouse’s payroll or some kind of pharmaceutical company about to release a new injectable therapy. Fukushima proved that the nuclear industry in fact isn’t designing reactors safe ENOUGH and that Mother Nature is very difficult to predict. Everything needs redundancies and even higher levels of safety as a nuclear “incident” large enough could destroy humanity.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  > I stopped reading when the author says evacuating the people from Fukushima was unnecessary. I disagree strongly on this. I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that I would be willing to trade of <some> risk of mortality in exchange for keeping and staying at my home (especially older people!). If you displace over 100000 people you need a good justification-- if you lack observable excess mortality from radiation in the non-evacuated population, you clearly, objectively overevacuated in my view. I do agree with the article that current regulation tends to focus too much on mitigating irrelevant/marginal risks (driving up costs too much), but I think this can still be true even though the resulting cumulative risk is too high: "Overregulation" is NOT a one-dimensional quantity.
amai 2y ago
This article is missing the biggest elephant in the room: The unsolved problem of safe nuclear waste disposal. Everyone is in favor of nuclear power until the state decides to dispose the nuclear waste near your house: for a hundred thousand years.

32 points by gangorgasm 2y ago

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> There is a great conflict between two of the most pressing problems of our time: poverty and climate change. This wasn't true in 2021 and has been getting less true over time. Not one mention of Solar or Wind in the whole article.

uniqueuid 2y ago
I agree that it's stupid not to take the game-changer of solar and wind (and batteries) into account. Even though I believe that nuclear no longer has a role in energy (fuel sources, disposal, concentration of risk into few small units), the statement is still correct and it has another dimension: There is a conflict between poverty, climate change, gravity of climate change harms and the speed at which we can reduce climate change impacts. The problem is that there is a shrinking window to limit harm, and the harms will disproportionally affect poor nations which at the same time lack resources to mitigate. I'd definitely call that a gordian knot.
- wcrossbow 2y ago
  A guardian or a gordian knot [0]? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
  - uniqueuid 2y ago
    Haha thanks fixed.
  - bborud 2y ago
    The story of the gordian knot wasn't really about the problem. It was about the solution. So alluding to it when you talk about nuclear is apt, but not for the reasons people seem to think.
- TheRoque 2y ago
  Is it really a game changer though ? AFAIK countries that made the shift to solar and wind can't still store they energy and have to rely on fossil still to power they country (e.g. Germany). On top of that, if the whole world made the shift to solar, wind and batteries, I assume the scarcity of some materials will become an issue. According to this [1] Lithium for example is expected to have a shortage by 2025. There are also challenges like usable surface, and making all the intermittent, non-controllable energy work together. I mean, I am open to the idea of solar/wind, but "game changer"... Doesn't seem so easy [1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-world-enough-lithium-resources/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Watching what China does is always instructive. Despite platitudes to the contrary, climate change is a tertiary concern of theirs. What they care most about is (1) energy independence and (2) cost. So 10-15 years ago they started building a lot of nuclear, solar and coal. As the cost of solar plummeted and nuclear went up they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions. For the last 5 years they've built several TW's of solar capacity and a similar amount of coal peaker plants to run when the sun isn't shining. Now in 2024 they're starting to scale back coal and they're building massive batteries instead. IOW, batteries are now cheaper than coal to offset the intermittency of solar. Also, the lithium shortage has come and gone already: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
    - defrost 2y ago
      > they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions. Currently (June 2024) they're all the way down to: China intends to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035, with 27 currently under construction and the average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years, far faster than for most other nations. China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology. China is leading in the development and launch of cost-competitive small modular reactors (SMRs). From 2008 to 2023, China’s share of all nuclear patents increased from 1.3 percent to 13.4 percent, and the country leads in the number of nuclear fusion patent applications. ~ https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-china-in-nuclear-power/ https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c... Which is quite the wind down from . . . ?
- emptyfile 2y ago
  [dead]
Festro 2y ago
? Those are very much two of the world's most pressing problems, both accelerating currently. Though I'd phrase the 'poverty' one as 'wealth inequality' instead as whilst people are getting poorer their access to resources has been scaling well enough to keep them above the poverty line. That may not remain true for much longer though. And the article is about nuclear energy and the premise of it being a flop and why that might be, based on a book about the topic. I don't think it has to mention solar and wind. Though I can see, as competing energy sources, why it would be useful to look at their impact on political momentum for nuclear, or how they reduce economic demand for the extra energy nuclear can supply.
- wyager 2y ago
  > whilst people are getting poorer their access to resources has been scaling well enough to keep them above the poverty line Defining poverty as "wealth relative to the richest person on earth" or whatever you're doing here is unproductive crab-bucket envy, not a useful definition. If you're talking about wealth, all that matters is if the baseline is going up. If you're talking about status, be honest and say that explicitly instead of dressing it up as a wealth issue.
  - anonymous_sorry 2y ago
    Wealth distribution is important, because very rich people disproportionately buy up limited-supply assets in order to earn passive income on them. In densely populated places, that includes assets like homes, which pushes up housing costs. Housing costs often aren't included in popular measures of inflation. If you do use an inflation measure that includes housing and all other everyday expenditure, then I think it's a reasonable to argue the baseline going up is good enough.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      Unless someone buys up so many properties they can start unilaterally increasing prices, the problem with housing going up isn't rich people buying them and renting them at a market rate. It's the amount of demand vs supply that does it. And you're right - this is possibly the single biggest issue that's a downgrade for people vs their parents/grandparents, and it's a huge one. But the problem needs to be attributed correctly.

waciki 2y ago

too expensive and never built on time, only countries where it's cheap are dictatorships where you can hide problems

unglaublich 2y ago
The fossil industry is doing a fantastic job hiding problems in "free societies" and dictatorships alike.
dwighttk 2y ago
France?
- oezi 2y ago
  They were able to build them in the past. It is unclear if they can still do it. It seems even for France the issues are piling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
maelito 2y ago
That's wrong. France's electricity is 70 % nuclear, on plants that were never built during a dictatorship phase.

audunw 2y ago

The conclusions of the article is very good. I mostly agree with them. But there are two major flaws in the article: 1. “we need more like 25 TW”. That seems too high to me. Is that based on a direct conversion of the primary energy consumption today? The alternatives solutions needed for decarbonisation is generally much more energy efficient than the fossil fuel based solutions we use today. In addition, the energy used per capita to live a European lifestyle is decreasing year over year. And finally, the energy use will drop dramatically as we shift from primarily making stuff out of mined virgin materials to using recycled materials. For instance, commercial EV battery recycling is ramping up rapidly already today. Making virgin concrete is energy and CO2 intensive but that might not be a viable option for the long term anyway, as it requires sand that we’re also running out of. There’s already huge pressure to reduce the use of concrete. It should also be said that 25TW or more of nuclear thermal power will contribute to thermal forcing of the planet that we probably can’t afford when the planet is already on the precipice of dangerous climate tipping points. The global warming effect of the thermal power plants we have today is already on the same order of magnitude as greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes. 2. I miss a discussion about the labour costs when it comes to nuclear. I think one of the reasons it was cheap to build in the past was access to cheap labour in the countries building the nuclear power plants. Changing demographics is an irreversible trend that will keep these labour costs high. Solar lets you outsource much of the labour costs of the production of the panels, and that production will probably end up being fully automated and then on-shored in the end anyway.

Earw0rm 2y ago
Have you got some sources for that? Thermal forcing from existing plants (and thermal sink from their energy output) seems like it'd be tiny compared to solar thermal forcing. I realise GHG from their waste gases is a huge problem, but direct thermal forcing?
- XorNot 2y ago
  I don't know how this constantly comes up on HN but I have seen it mentioned across every type of energy thread. And people could trivially disprove the notion in mere seconds by Googling the solar irradiance of the sun over the Earth, but for some reason they never do before posting.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

I don't really think he understands why the safety paradigm is the way it is. The problem is fear. Fear generated by individual incidents that have terrible local harmful effects. And the (perhaps inaccurate) perception that plants may still have issues. Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem. Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe. When will we know that the new nuclear power plants are safe enough? Not for a decade or more. Pretending that the industry isn't taking a rationale line based on the same tired stats about radiation is pointless. Humans are bad at judging risk, but your job as a power plant operator is to deal with the risk people perceive as well as the risk that actually exists. (And the fact he links to LessWrong which is a site that overemphasises rational thinking to the extent it ignores the human condition says a lot to me).

krisoft 2y ago
> Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem. Is it more or less solved than the waste storage problem of fossil fuel generation?
jeltz 2y ago
What terrible local harmful effects? Only Chernobyl had any and they were very modest. Compare that to the hydroelectric plants. There we can talk real incidents with harmful local effects. If people actually feared incidents they would campaign against hydroelectric power. And the last such incident was last year in Ukraine. Also just building a hydro plant can ruin the local ecosystem even if there is no incident. Fro the record I am pro-hydroelectric, pro-nuclear and pro-wind (I am a bit more skeptical towards solar but that is probably just me being from Sweden where solar isn't really an option). None of these are perfect but nuclear is by far the safest. The issues with nuclear do not relate to safety.
- kalaksi 2y ago
  Are you saying Fukushima had none or less than modest harmful effects? I don't know what the parent meant, but the whole Fukushima disaster management and clean up will take decades and people had to leave their homes. To add, I agree about your point about hydro in general. It's a complicated comparison, though.

mumong05 2y ago

......

maelito 2y ago

> Or they were—costs are so high now that we don‘t even build plants anymore. That's factually wrong. France has a program of nuclear building. We don't build a lot of plants in Europe, but we do.

medstrom 2y ago
Does the US not legislate that a NPP should be built with certain minimum amount of concrete that is far higher than needed? I read somewhere that lobbies inflate the cost so they will not be built, IDK if that's true.
TomK32 2y ago
The French nuclear program was started without public or parliamentary discussion, read up on the Messmer plan, it was a spontaneous reaction to the oil crisis of 1973 and new deployments haven't happened in the 25 years. France has a plan to extend it's nuclear plants by another 10 years, but really it would have to replace them sooner or later. Even in France the trend visible in other European countries will happen: Wind, solar combined with large-scale batteries or pumped storage hydropower. Those are more simple to construct with less resistance from today's public.
DoctorOetker 2y ago
And this has absolutely nothing to do with having to maintain a nuclear stockpile, because France unlike other nations in the European Union doesn't have nuclear weapons. /s
- pepa65 2y ago
  Come on man, everybody knows France has their own nuclear weapons, have had for many decades.
  - DoctorOetker 2y ago
    /s stands for sarcasm
2y ago

cedws 2y ago

Something I haven’t seen discussed in the nuclear debate is that NPPs become a high risk target in times of war. Look at what’s happened in Ukraine regarding the Zaporizhzhia power plant. The IAEA has been crapping itself the entire time while both Ukraine and Russia have haphazardly been shooting and bombing around it. If Russia were forced out of their position, they could adopt a scorched earth policy and destroy it, potentially irradiating the area. Whether Russia would actually do that doesn't even matter - just being a possibility allows them to take the area hostage much more easily. I am well aware that it would not detonate like a nuclear bomb or like Chernobyl. It doesn’t have to, it could still contaminate a huge area and harm a lot of people.

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littlecranky67 2y ago
Fully agreed. When the Ukraine war broke out, in Germany we had discussions how we could no longer rely on cheap russian gas and there we politicians actively demanding NPP to be reactivated. At the same time our government decided to spent 100 bilion € for the military and defense. This is surreal, when experts explain how "safe" NPPS are, the safety assumptions never asume a war going on around that NPP. If you factor this in all NPP would immetiately fall into the very unsafe category and all other energy sources would gain precedence.
- cedws 2y ago
  Much easier to target one NPP than thousands of windmills and solar panels distributed throughout the country too.
  - rasz 2y ago
    Weird thing to say considering russians didnt bomb any NPPs yet, but did actually brick Viasat disabling "remote monitoring access to over 5,800 wind turbines" .. in Germany of all places https://cyberconflicts.cyberpeaceinstitute.org/law-and-policy/cases/viasat https://cyberconflicts.cyberpeaceinstitute.org/law-and-polic...

nottorp 2y ago

Has it been a flop? They should ask France. About the trains too...

ianis-h 2y ago

Nuclear Power is a complex thing, as any complex thing it require attention and commitment. Therefore it is more prone to destablization by a small number of individuals. Russia have been quietly lobbying against nuclear in the EU for a long time (looking at you german Green Party).

Bluestein 2y ago
> Russia have been quietly lobbying against nuclear in the EU for a long time And, given this, they might even have a perverse incentive to destroy nuclear facilities, if only as yet another form of pro-oil, pro-gas propaganda.-

bborud 2y ago

A lot of what is said about nuclear power fails to drill down to the bare essentials: how do you de-risk building nuclear power and how do you get the cost down. A lot of smug mumbo-jumbo written by industry insiders who have their heads too far up their own behinds tends to take attention away from the fact that, so far, we've gone about it in ways that don't make sense. You don't actually need to know anything about nuclear power to understand why the approach of building large nuclear power plants doesn't work. Some basic knowledge of financing and the statistical chances of "black swan events" when you stretch out projects in time suffices. Or in short: if you don't understand the goals you must navigate towards, it doesn't matter how much of the technical implementation you know. "How Big Things Get Done" by Flyvbjerg and Gardner zooms out a bit (well, a lot) and draws a relatively clear picture of what approximate shape the solution space has for nuclear. Yes, the book gives a high level perspective. And yes, transforming the industry so it can fit within the constraints outlined in the book will be expensive and time-consuming. But it is worthy of serious consideration. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-get-done https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-... I tend to point out that the country where I live is uniquely suited to design and build reactors precisely because we don't have a nuclear industry. (We had a research reactor, but that's an entirely different matter and you would NOT want to involve the cowboys who ran that)

jaimex2 2y ago

Simple, people found out the reactors get retired after 50 years and its an absolute shit show. Totally not worth it. Then there's the unforgiving accidents.

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michaelt 2y ago

Here in the UK it would be super convenient if cost-effective nuclear power plants could be built. After all, to decarbonise the economy we need to replace petrol cars with EVs, and gas-fired central heating with heat pumps - which will mean a big increase in demand for electricity. A lot of that heat demand will be in winter, when solar output is at its lowest. And a lot of our existing power plants are past the end of their designed life. The problem is we're trying to build one nuclear power plant, and it's going pretty badly. It's an extra reactor on an existing site - that should make things easy, right? And it's being built by the French who operate loads of nuclear power plants - should be experienced specialists building a cookie-cutter replica of a proven design, right? And it's using private-sector finance with the government just guaranteeing an electricity purchase price - should remove the incentive for delays and cost over-runs that plague cost-plus contracts used in things like defence procurement, right? But it turns out none of these tricks was able to overcome the curse of large infrastructure projects, and it's going to be delayed and expensive. And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling. I can understand the argument for building fewer and larger nuclear power plants - you only have to get one set of locals to support you, do all the impact assessment paperwork once and so on - but I can't help but wonder what would have happened if we'd instead set out to build ten nuclear power plants, each one tenth the size, so there weren't so many things being done for the first time in a generation.

cogman10 2y ago
> And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling. This is the #1 reason why I'm a bit more pessimistic on nuclear than I used to be. I still think it has a place in a modern power grid and probably increasingly so as available sites for renewables go down. However, we simply aren't there yet. Both renewables and batteries have seen precipitous drops in pricing which ultimately means they make more sense as they are both cheaper and faster to deploy.

whoitwas 2y ago

Because of the existential threat they pose. They require a military to defend.

actionfromafar 2y ago
More specifically, everything requires a military to defend, but some targets (nuclear power plants) are much harder to defend.
- whoitwas 2y ago
  I don't think so. These plants are super volatile and can meltdown forever.

Yeul 2y ago

The 1970s: When you have cheap coal and gas it would be financially stupid to invest in nuclear. Which is why most countries never did. Today: when a single nuclear powerplant is estimated at 20 billion you calculate how many windmills you can build for that money. Ironically wind power is now the proven technology.

pepa65 2y ago
Windpower is shit, and it's on the way out. It's also polluting in all kinds of ways (visually and materially).

ponorin 2y ago

The article is too US-centric to a fault. Basically all project's costs after 1970s balloon to an extent. Japan's cost has risen. French, while only slightly, has risen. Same for India. Only S. Korea have seen construction prices fall, but notice the price bottoming out after the 1990s. It's only maintaining the price, not getting lower. Regardless, these other countries didn't contribute that much to increase global nuclear power capacity. In both India and China nuclear doesn't even count as the majority in their low-carbon energy mix, which is still dwarfed by the massive deployment of coal. S. Korea is slacking on low-carbon sources in general. Japan has lost trust (rightfully) on nuclear and decided to reset their entire nuclear generation capacity. No country has expanded their energy grid with nuclear. Except France, who only did it because of the oil crisis.

ekianjo 2y ago
> Japan (rightfully) has lost trust on nuclear and decided to reset their entire nuclear generation capacity. bullshit. Japan is in the process of restarting all of their nuclear plants. Price of energy had doubled after the grid went off nuclear.
- ponorin 2y ago
  I have clarified my original comment. Regarding your comment: > Japan is in the process of restarting all of their nuclear plants. They are still "in the process" after 12 years, and their capacity is still less than half of pre-Fukushima level. Japan has had more solar generation than nuclear since 2014.
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    if solar was the answer then ask yourself why they even bother restarting the nuclear plants

hoseja 2y ago

Because nuclear competency is a strategic asset that the long march has been very successful in degrading.

486sx33 2y ago

Ok, this is crazy. I stopped reading when the author says evacuating the people from Fukushima was unnecessary. Of course it is necessary. What good is a world where everyone is irradiated and dying of cancer ? We have enough already. This guy is either on Westinghouse’s payroll or some kind of pharmaceutical company about to release a new injectable therapy. Fukushima proved that the nuclear industry in fact isn’t designing reactors safe ENOUGH and that Mother Nature is very difficult to predict. Everything needs redundancies and even higher levels of safety as a nuclear “incident” large enough could destroy humanity.

myrmidon 2y ago
> I stopped reading when the author says evacuating the people from Fukushima was unnecessary. I disagree strongly on this. I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that I would be willing to trade of <some> risk of mortality in exchange for keeping and staying at my home (especially older people!). If you displace over 100000 people you need a good justification-- if you lack observable excess mortality from radiation in the non-evacuated population, you clearly, objectively overevacuated in my view. I do agree with the article that current regulation tends to focus too much on mitigating irrelevant/marginal risks (driving up costs too much), but I think this can still be true even though the resulting cumulative risk is too high: "Overregulation" is NOT a one-dimensional quantity.

amai 2y ago

This article is missing the biggest elephant in the room: The unsolved problem of safe nuclear waste disposal. Everyone is in favor of nuclear power until the state decides to dispose the nuclear waste near your house: for a hundred thousand years.