Batteries are expensive, low-capacity, and absolutely horrendous from an environmental perspective.
"Nuclear lost. Its never coming back."
There are currently 55 new power reactors under construction and scheduled to be in operation by 2020.
China alone has 20 in active construction, with many more planned.
Nuclear is a mess. You either are left with a waste problem that doesn't go away or a proliferation risk. The US government or successors will be subsidizing 20th century waste for hundreds of years.
Energy storage is a problem, but a transient problem that can be addressed with a variety of storage techniques and backed up by natural gas.
Not all reactors result in long term storage of waste, I believe some designs can use existing spent fuel even.
I would really like to see investment in other types of reactors such as pebblebed, molten salt etc. If we don't build the stations to create nuclear missiles, we can make them much more 'friendly'.
The spent fuel ones produce plutonium as a byproduct -- not good.
I'm all for new technology, but the lobbying/PR effort that produced this article is 100% based on existing technology that makes big engineering firms/government contractors billions of dollars.
I'd hope that these obstacles could be battled with research and funding. All countries require affordable and carbon-free power, if we jointly took on research I strongly feel we could engineer out or around some of the issues.
Perhaps It's just an idealistic layman's perspective, either way I think more research in the nuclear power provision would be sensible.
>Batteries are expensive, low-capacity, and absolutely horrendous from an environmental perspective.
not even close. To store energy melt potassium oxide using that energy - low melting temperature allows for low losses. To produce the energy back "burn" that potassium in a very simple metal-air fuel cell (organic electrolyte, carbon electrodes - nothing "horrendous from an environmental perspective"). Storage by melting isn't suitable for a car or a phone battery, yet there is no issues with it when we talking scale of even a small power plant.
> Batteries are expensive, low-capacity, and absolutely horrendous from an environmental perspective.
Compared to nuclear? That very few nations recycle or reprocesses? And where all the waste ends up in cooling pools forever? Don't be disingenuous.
> There are currently 55 new power reactors under construction and scheduled to be in operation by 2020. China alone has 20 in active construction, with many more planned.
I wish those generators luck. Even if wind and solar doesn't have the capacity factor, it being under 1 cent/kwh when generating will drive nuclear right of business (which is why Exelon is closing two generators this year in Illinois; the wind, its too damn cheap!)
EDIT:
> No country keeps waste "in cooling pools forever".
"But radioactive waste doesn’t disappear if you ignore it. The US has 75,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste—spent reactor fuel and the byproducts of processing it—that now sit in pools or dry casks at nuclear power plants, facilities never intended for long-term storage. The risk of leaks is high. Because the stuff stays radioactive for millennia, the safest course of action is supposed to be entomb ingit in rock like at Yucca Mountain, where it can remain inaccessible to future humans."
"Now, Yucca Mountain plans have dragged on so long that all the high-level radioactive waste in the country exceeds its storage capacity. The Department of Energy hasn’t even built the repository yet, and the country already needs a second."
"Nobody wants radioactive waste to be their problem, and it ends up being, well, everyone’s problem. The federal government has paid $4.5 billion to keep high-level waste at nuclear power plants, and it’s on track to spend another $22.6 billion. At the same time, the plans for Yucca Mountain are all drawn up and and even its initial tunnels have been drilled. “The technical solutions are ready to be implemented when the political will reasserts itself,” says Lanthrum."
Sure sure, let's keep building nuclear reactors instead of renewables and batteries /s
There are plants of various ages beacause it was an area of active research in late 1900s, and a handful of industrial scale plants that are operating. But it's not generally happening or growing. For most used fuel there is no plan, or going to be buried underground.
It hasn't been in high demand because virgin uranium is still cheap. That won't be the case forever, and the used fuel pellets will be waiting when that occurs.
The UK reprocessing plants at least are environmental disasters with a history of large-scale radioactive discharges into the surrounding environment. (Russia's were even worse, apparently.) They also lost their foreign customers for falsifying data on fuel shipments. They're due to shut down altogether in the next few years as their existing contracts come to an end. Unfortunately, the Sellafield site is probably impossible to decommission safely due to massive contamination and poorly-designed containments with no documentation of the contents.
Also, most of the big reprocessing plants out there were originally constructed as part of nuclear weapons programs, including the UK, US, French and Russian ones. They're just not economically viable otherwise.
The list has 6 active ones with > 100t/year capacity, more are being decommissioned than built.
Uranium is going to stay sufficiently cheap to our best current knowledge (we'll probably keep find new deposits, or it can be extracted from seawater for much cheaper than reprocessing spent fuel)
"The technical solutions are ready to be implemented when the political will reasserts itself"
There is no technical reason not to move forward, the issues are all ignorant political stances based on FUD much like the stuff you are espousing here.
Where did I ever say the problem was technical? It might as well be; the political climate will not change. Nuclear will die a slow death while renewables and battery storage continue to have their tax credits for another five years.
Batteries are expensive, low-capacity, and absolutely horrendous from an environmental perspective.
"Nuclear lost. Its never coming back."
There are currently 55 new power reactors under construction and scheduled to be in operation by 2020. China alone has 20 in active construction, with many more planned.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...