Nuclear is an incredibly under utilized option which I believe is due to public fear from misinformation. Most people don't realize how much nuclear power we already have in the USA and how close they live to a nuclear power plant.
Indeed! Nukes provide about 60% of the low-carbon energy in the USA. They emit about 12 gCO2-eq/kWh (vs. 40 for solar PV, 11 for wind, 490 for gas, 820 for coal). They net save millions of lives simply by displacing air polluters. They contain and pay for all their waste (where other energy systems dump their waste right into our lungs where it kills hundreds of thousands per year). Accidents have hurt relatively few people (0 died or will die from Fukushima, while a gas explosion just happened and we already forgot about it).
The operating plants now are struggling because fracked gas pulled out the electricity revenue rug below their operating costs, and post-9/11 upgrades have been expensive for operation and maintenance.
But the capability of atomic energy is just so darn intriguing it's hard to just give up on fission now, even though it advanced fission has struggled through the years.
While accidents are rare, with their incredibly high cost (in this case: a city of 50,000 people that cannot be inhabited for a time longer than all of human history), they need to be even rarer.
First of all, the threat we're up against is global warming and air pollution which is currently killing hundreds of thousands of people, right now, per year.
Also, you're assuming a linear no-threshold radiation dose response, which is very hard to find support for at the low dose rates now present at Chernobyl. As someone else in this thread pointed out, that's like assuming hundreds of people would die per year from handshakes due to linear health response to Newton's laws.
Indeed, it appears that human presence was more detrimental to life than radiation [1].
The engineering cost of dealing with Fukushima and Chernobyl are aboslutely eye watering.
I would agree that the human reaction is sometimes irrational, but that needs to be accepted. Human life is not a lab controlled experiment where people will always behave rationally.
The cost of the status quo where we mostly burn dead dinosaurs for electricity costs a lot more and is not getting any less costly.
Given the choice of waiting for wind/solar to become more worthwhile as oil extraction slowly becomes more expensive and prices slowly rise (aka the status quo) or pulling the trigger on nuclear now it shouldn't even be a choice.
I am actually in favour of developing nuclear energy. And I think we should also invest in renewables. And one day I think that another nuclear station is going to fail and will need to be made safe. Those things are not inconsistent.
Ok, but would you agree that we should also expect to not overdo cleanup efforts by several orders of magnitude without reasonable evidence that low-dose radiation is dangerous after collecting multiple decades of data. I don't think infinite-duration irrationality in the face of data is necessary.
A focus of the engineering efforts at Chernobyl and Fukushima are to make sure that higher risk contamination is avoided. So the current radiation impact is not the issue. It is the potential impact that is addressed.
I hope that one day Chernobyl and Fukushima can be repopulated, and agree that may be safe. I don't think that makes any difference to the actual cost of the event. Nor, would it be wise to presume that a subsequent event could be safely handled without an evacuation. But that is one for politicians to decide.
Chernobyl was terrible design, and we’ve come a long way. Fukushima would be a better example of a modern design failing, and even then there are much more fault-tolerant designs.
We certainly aren’t going to be building any more Chernobyls for commercial power generation.
I wouldn't consider Fukishima modern either, it began construction in 1967, with the actual design plans being a bit older. That is like 25 years from the first nuclear reactors, we are now 50 years of research and technology beyond fukishima. Yeah it has had some upgrades, but you can only modify an already existent reactor design so much.
chernobyl had known reactor design flaws at the time of the accident. even then, there were designs for fail-safe reactors instead of fail-deadly reactors. those have only improved with time.
"habitable" is not the same as survivable. Generally the term habitable means safe for society, so while you may quibble over what exact standard to use the dangers around Chernobyl are MAGNITUDES higher than the dangers of smoking. More like guaranteeing cancer in <20 years.
Here's another data point: Even by your definition, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable today, less than 100 years after having been hit by nuclear bombs. Ground zero in those cities are thriving tourist zones. Yes, radiation is dangerous, but the dangers of nuclear power have been VASTLY exaggerated by left-wing propaganda.
If radiation sickness is your concern, then you're better off replacing coal (which spews radioactive material into the air all day every day) with nuclear (which does not normally, and even with the very few nuclear disasters in Earth's history doesn't do so at anywhere near the scale of coal).
20,000 years is way off. Here's a report by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) [1]. The main radio-isotopes after the Chernobyl disaster were (see p. 2):
"The total release of radioactive substances was about 14 EBq1 (as of 26 April 1986), which included 1.8 EBq of 131I, 0.085 EBq of 137Cs and other caesium radioisotopes, 0.01EBq of 90Sr and 0.003 EBq of plutonium radioisotopes. The noble gases contributed about 50% of the total release of radioactivity."
Iodine-131 has a half-life of only 8 days, and it cleared up long ago. The only going concern is Caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, and needs 300 years to go to 1/1000 of the initial levels and 600 years to all but disappear. The other radioisotopes were contained to the location of the reactor. The only one that will be there for millenia is a decay product of Pu-241, namely Am-241 with a half-life of 430 years. However, as stated before, that is localized to the nuclear reactor itself. It will reach a maximum about 100 years after the event (so about 70 years from now).
I believe that it is true that nobody has died from acute radiation exposure at a civilian US nuclear power facility. There are still fatal industrial accidents at nuclear facilities from more mundane causes, like accidentally falling equipment:
The reason I bring this up is because the "deaths per terawatt hour" comparisons often used by nuclear proponents omit non-radiation fatal accidents in the accounting for nuclear but include those accidents for renewables. See e.g.
It says that US nuclear has a mortality rate of 0.1 deaths per 1000 terawatt hours. Since US nuclear power generates about 800 TWh per year, that implies a fatality rate of about once every 12 years across the whole US fleet. But as shown above the Surry Nuclear Power Plant alone has had 6 workers die from accidents (though none involved radiation).
Nuclear power is very safe in any case; the real menace is combustion-based energy sources. It's just going too far to say that "not a single person died" from US nuclear power. Job site deaths from crushing, burns, falls from high places, etc. are still deaths. That modest number of accidental deaths would be a rounding error for coal, but it really matters at the low end with nuclear and renewables, precisely because the indirect pollution deaths are so much lower for non-combustion electricity sources.
We all know how enthusiastic governments are to admit fault, there are probably many more.
One I'm familiar with in the US:
"The Sodium Reactor Experiment-SRE was an experimental nuclear reactor that operated at the site from 1957 to 1964 and was the first commercial power plant in the world to experience a core meltdown.
There was a decades-long cover-up of the incident by the U.S. Department of Energy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#...
nickik's claim was that no one has died in the US from civilian nuclear. Your links are for the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a military experimental research facility.
If there have been any deaths from civilian nuclear, I would like that information to consider.
Building a new nuclear plant today costs an incredible amount of money and takes many years. The major reason we are not building more of them is that no one wants to sign up for that investment. Many nuclear plants that were built 20 years ago cannot operate profitably at this moment, so even if you could build a new plant for free, it's not a guarantee that it will be profitable. It's simply a better investment to build wind, solar, and natural gas.
Maybe next gen modular reactors will be cheaper. But, fear is not the main problem for nuclear. It's cost.
It seems more likely that no corporation is willing to spend tens of billions building anything with a lifetime of 50+ years without getting someone to guarantee a return on the investment - see Hinkley Point C:
"The plant, which has a projected lifetime of sixty years, has an estimated construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion. The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) [...] will be £50 billion" [1]
Locking in a pricing regime for decades which means consumers will pay £50bn above the market price for electricity? How far we've come in the last 64 years:
1954: "Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter..." [2]
2018: Here's your shiny new nuclear power plant, you'll be paying for it to the tune of £50bn more than the alternatives.
Hinkley Point C is an example of high cost because of many of these same reasons. It is legendary in the industry for high cost.
Mainly these cost are because of the complexity and scale of the project. The licencing and regulation make the complexity and scale larger.
To make mega projects like that efficient you need a trained workforce and that only happens if you build multiple plants.
South Korea for example is building these complex plants at very reasonable time and price. They can do this because they have an industry and trained workforce.
There has been a lot of study in nuclear economics and learning effects are hugely important.
However that means that if a state (France, South Korea) adopts nuclear as a matter of policy and deploys in mass, it can be very cheap.
However for other places I think new nuclear is the only hope. Advanced reactor companies are planning to be much smaller and should be build for 1 around billion.
So yes, people were overly optimistic in the 1954 but we also have to recognize that nuclear technology development was very much hindered by a large number of factors and that we are deploying the same type of reactors now as 40 years ago. This is a sad state of affairs that hopefully will change.
Isn't Hinkley Point C using the EPR design[1], which one might think was selected in an attempt to address the issue of economies of scale?
Having said that, EDF themselves don't appear to be particularly positive about the selected design:
"EDF has acknowledged severe difficulties in building the EPR design. In September 2015 EDF stated that the design of a "New Model" EPR was being worked on, which will be easier and cheaper to build"[2]
A lot of cost is driven by the need to build in a lot of redundant safety features because you are dealing with a fission reaction that can melt down and cause real problems. You also have to deal with and store waste on site. A nuclear plant is a lot more complex than a wind turbine or a photovoltaic plant. Hence it will cost more.
The fact that Illinois and New York had to recently bail out their nuclear plants shows that they are expensive to run (even after they are built!)...
Even assuming we build enough wind/solar to supplant existing coal/gas/oil generation, the unsolved problem is storing that energy for use at night, or on cloudy or windless days. Batteries are the only feasible thing in most places, and they are not available in the quantites needed for such an undertaking, and they are mostly made in Asia.
How much would we need to invest in batteries (mining/refining the raw materials, and actually building them, replacing them as they wear out, dealing with the recycling/waste, etc.) compared to the cost of a standardized modern reactor design.
Nuclear waste is just a political issue that anti-nuclear people use to come up with reasons.
Technically it is not a huge problem and consented policy could solve it.
So first of all, current nuclear waste should not be buried as it is fuel for future reactors. It should just stay where it is until somebody wants to use it.
Second, Yucca Mountain is a terrible place for nuclear waste. It was always a terrible idea and this goes back to the very first time this problem got studied. There are far better locations in the US for a repository, but insane political shenanigans prevent Yucca Mountain from going forward and prevent any smart solutions as well.
I strongly believe that Yucca Mountain will never actually be used, but it will probably take another 15-20 years of drama and pointless arguments with false facts to finally resolve it.
Before I go in there, can you elaborate on what the "Energy Impact Center" is? It's founding this page and the only info I could come up with is a google books result leading to a page that is not accessible. The result reads:
> Further actions were a $4 billion private sector commitment to scale up innovation in clean energy and the launching of a new Clean Energy Impact Center at the ...
The other guy is President, US Nuclear Industry Council...
Don't you have anything credible? I mean, I know it's about the transmutation of waste. There has to be something coming from credible sources out there or...not?
Saying that you can make nuclear waste disappear is an extremely ignorant (bordering on negligent) thing to say.
The hope that a dead project started 40 years ago might be brought back to life is hardly a "don't need to worry about it" sort of bullet point, especially when you're discussing something that needs to be managed and maintained for thousands of years.
Sure does coal also have accidents. A handful people die having it. Even solar plants burn down or a wind mill may fall over.
All of this is ridiculous compared to a nuclear fallout. But it says much that you chose coal. Another energy source that is on the way to be abolished.
PS. I may have taken too many deep breaths when the Tschernobyl cloud moved over me.
> Sure does coal also have accidents. A handful people die having it.
> All of this is ridiculous compared to a nuclear fallout.
Your response gives me the feeling that you're significantly underestimating the number of deaths caused by power generation using coal. It's not a "handful" of people–it's more like a million people, per year.
As I've said before, coal is already on the way to be abolished also. I also never stated that I support coal. Actually you'll probably find not many (if any at all) people who support coal over nuclear power (didn't you know that?). You've set up this straw man to point away from the actual issue and it's quite funny since it's what the industry does. I guess their advertising works ;)
> As I've said before, coal is already on the way to be abolished also.
Not anytime soon.
> I also never stated that I support coal. Actually you'll probably find not many (if any at all) people who support coal over nuclear power (didn't you know that?).
And yet, you're making comments about coal killing a "handful" of people, while nuclear fallout is "ridiculous". Also, I'd rather prefer if you didn't belittle me. I don't particularly care personally, but it's not adding anything to the argument so it's just extra stuff I need to read.
Many countries, notably India and China, are adding nuclear power to their electrical grids to supply base load. Also, nuclear accidents, while large, are very rare–especially with regards to how much power each plant generates. So per MWh you end up with a much, much lower casualty rate as compared to other power sources–coal, in particular, leads to many deaths in the process of mining it, breathing in its pollution (which many in this thread have mentioned is radioactive), etc.
I have no idea how this "many countries"-argument does make the waste or accident problem go away or is even related to it but actually China has not approved any new nuclear reactors between 2016 and 2017 and only 3 in 2017 which is a huge reduction. All this because of renewables. Solar is expected to become China's cheapest source of electricity, surpassing natural gas by 2020 and coal by 2030. China is ranked first in the world by installed capacity of hydropower, solar and wind. And India slashed plans for new nuclear reactors by two-thirds.
However...back to the actual topic:
> So per MWh you end up with a much, much lower casualty rate as compared to other power sources
I wonder how you get to this. How do you know how many Japanese citizens will die earlier of cancer because of Fukushima? How do you know, I won't die earlier because of Chernobyl? I mean, just comparing the accidents is ridiculous. An nuclear accident leads to dead land. You have to remove huge areas of soil and the impact through contaminated water is not even properly measurable. The costs of nuclear disasters are so far beyond every mine accident that it's not even worth mentioning. All this is a growing problem since we're faced with old nuclear reactors that are being kept alive for the sake of revenues. It's a huge issue for Germany for example being faced with old nuclear power plants leaking and breaking all the time just behind the border. This will happen more often and the poorer the country owning one is, the greater is the risk. We again didn't even touch the WASTE as you seem to avoid it at all costs. And as I've said several times over: I don't want to replace it nuclear with coal. Please stop dragging your straw man into this over and over. We are in the 21st century and there are alternatives.
The risk is much lower, but the worst case is much worse. In my personal view it is far better to use alternatives whose worse case scenario is nowhere near as bad, such as solar, wind, and geothermal.
Some of public fear is rational. It doesn't take a degree in statistics to figure out that nuclear disasters happen more often than official estimates of their probability imply.
It's apparent that the planet is warming and my fear is if we pass the tipping point, nuclear simply won't be an option. Both sea level rise and warming waters may make much of the nuclear power plants unusable.
However, the real danger is even more stark, which is if we pass the tipping point, I expect it will be very hard for humanity to have organized human life at the scale that we have now, and when nation states begin to fail, who will maintain existing power plants? Who will take the many decades to decommission them if they can't be maintained?
Pessimists have had this idea that humanity is on the tipping point of collapse for centuries. Progress has been uneven, but the track record is that we do manage to solve problems, advance, and improve our standard of living over the long term.
I'm not a pessimist, the tipping point from climate change is a real concern among scientists and prominent people in our field. Many believe we are only decades from it but there is uncertainty around it.
It's not that the tipping point isn't a real possibility, it's that there is uncertainty about the scale and speed of changes, and when such a tipping point can happen.
Are you aware of these arguments? And do you have anything better to counter them than saying "People have been spelling the doom of humanity for centuries!" ?
I think most people do realize that. And it scares them. This is certainly the case for me. Oh and before you call me ignorant, I am in fact quite knowledgeable on the subject.
