I am interested in hearing your opinions about nuclear power, what you know, if you have any fears, or ideas? Do you know if your country has any nuclear power generation?
My only complaint to add to the debate is that too much of the waste discussion assumed it’s burnt fuel and not just irradiated junk shoved in barrels. At least that is what a former nuclear engineer complained to me about.
The second I guess in the US is the weird public private deals that permiate the industry. Like who’s the inspector? Oh that’s a private company? Whos responsible for the waste? The government? Where is it stored? Oh your not sure? It was SUPPOSED to here but some of its there and some of it supposed to recycled but some supposedly can’t be. Who funded this? Who’s profiting?
I got some very confusing answers asking people in the industry about it, and they seemed to agree it was confusing.
It would have been a good transition source of power away from fossil fuels 15 years ago with further development while we build out a renewable infrastructure. Now, best I can see it as backup for some areas of the country.
I am extremely pro. Hear me out. For instance in Scandinavia, we have some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. Yet we import most of our fissile material from Australia. By boat.
The Scandes (mountain range) happens to be one of the best places to store spent fissile material on the planet.
We also have a highly educated workforce, and some of the best universities and colleges in the world.
We also have regional depopulation in the areas where this would be relevant, and suffer from brain drain, because there is more money to be made abroad for the whole range of academic disciplines, so the smartest people, and a fair chunk of the lesser smart people, move abroad. Because lack of opportunities and money.
Furthermore we are addicted to not only fossil fuels like carbon and gas, we (Europe) import most of our energy from Russia (famously). And we are making a lot of geopolitical concessions for the privilege (Nordstream springs to mind).
My proposition is that we expand nuclear power in the nordics, massively. We mine our own uranium deposits, store the spent fuel in our own mountains (think Moria, Nords would make for great LOTR dwarves), create a massive surplus of energy, then sell it off to the rest of Europe, creating basically an energy export hegemony. The energy basket of Europe.
We’d be fucking kings.
Then we’d create a Nordic Union, and get nukes, but that’s a different story.
(Just as a fun fact, Sweden had one of the worlds most advanced nuke programs after WW2. They got talked out of it bc USA)
Reprocessing spent fuel is also a massive opportunity. But yea I am 100% in agreement with you.
I’d rather solar at this point.
It’s good and has few downsides, but I feel like we kind of missed the boat and solar is the move now.
There is still massive energy demand, “missed the boat” is kind of nonsensical.
It’s not a well-reasoned feeling, I’m sure if I saw the numbers on the energy production vs cost etc., I could form a better opinion on it. As-is I will support both nuclear and solar, since they’re both clearly better than fossil fuels.
I live in Taiwan and we are actively shutting down our nuclear facilities. Now the majority of our electricity is from fossil fuels.
I much rather work towards clean energy but at the same time only use nuclear power.
They aren’t nearly as unsafe as people think they are and I think they are completely fine.
BUT it still doesn’t make sense to build them, because renewables (especially solar) is so much cheaper, so we should focus all our energy on expanding that instead of nuclear.
Nuclear is good for many reasons except it’s not good for anyone when there still is geopolitical and military instability. I don’t know much other than what can be read on Wikipedia and other popular information sources.
I like the idea of nuclear power, but I think the cost is not justified as it is currently implemented.
Now, the cost for nuclear power can come down. The Trump admin already reduced the cost for setting up nuclear power plants in the US, but that cost reduction comes with increased risk. The reason why I would be fine living near a nuclear power plant, is because the whole thing is designed and run with safety as the first priority. If you haven’t yet, check out the Smarter Everyday video Destin filmed inside a nuclear power plant. You can tell from watching the video that safety at that plant is a constantly improving process, and it comes at a cost. Extra concrete to protect the building, extra environmental studies to look for contamination, round the clock armed security… All these things make nuclear power safer, and they are all things that every investor and board member would love to cut to make some extra margin on their billion dollar power project. TBF, I don’t think the profit/rent seeking line-go-up management and political culture in the US today is condusive to running safe and reliable nuclear power, and I would much rather see our power come from lower-consequence renewables.
That’s exactly my fear, that some money-obsessed person may decide safety costs too much.
Powerful, but also nonsensical in a world where nuclear reactors have to be stopped because the water used to cool them isn’t cold enough. Several reactors in France are powered down or nerfed during heatwaves, for instance. Also, when nuclear goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong, with consequences for generations. It doesn’t sound reasonable.
I personally feel safer with wind, solar, water, etc, but pragmatism will probably ask of us to use a mix of both renewable and nuclear, especially if AI data-centers hog enough power for us all to live in the tech-surveillance world desired by our genocidal, children-r*ping Epstein classes.
Hm. I guess some technazis ought to get luigied. For ecological reasons, of course, nothing personal. We could also upcycle them to compost.
I used to think it was the way to go for base load generation, but now I’m more excited about sodium batteries because they seem safer and cheaper.
I think we are making big mistakes ditching it.
Renewables have two problems that need to be complemented by other type of energy source.
1.- they take a lot of land. As energy demand increases the amount of land taken is going to reach a limit. Then what?
2.- Most renewables have low momentum. Mostly only hydro have great momentum. This is critical for net safety. My country recently falled into a total blackout among other things because our energy composition (high on renewables) had low momentum and couldn’t handle some inestabilities.
For a complementary energy source we have 2 options, burning coal/gas or nuclear. Out of two options I prefer nuclear Sadly every country that ditched nuclear because “renewables are the future” ended upping up their gas/coal consumption for energy production. Most famous example being Germany.
I do think a mix of renewables and nuclear is the future we need to achieve.
Sadly most western societies only look on the short term. And a good national nuclear plant is a long term investment, most governments won’t look so far after the next election, so here we are.
pros:
- High ouput
cons:
- overall extremely expensive (you’ll pay the govt. subsidies too, also the cleaning up after 50+ years)
- strategic target
- risk for population with “oversights” (big-money attracts corruption) *
- “fuel”:
- geopolitical dependencies (mainly russia)
- even getting it is a ecological disaster (and its fans then call it “clean energy”)
- radioactive + toxic waste problem still not solved
All in all, it is a great excuse to have the expensive infrastructure for nukes and submarines (see France).
* the stories i know only from the rather thorough & proper countries Switzerland, Germany, France… it’s crazy.
I’m nuclear industry adjacent, and I work in public safety. My thoughts, which are only my own:
- Renewables are the future. Nuclear power is expensive and takes a long time to build, mostly because people don’t like the idea of a reactor near them. While that’s also true of things like wind farms, the lawsuits on those don’t take as long, I guess.
- Small modular reactors may have a place in our future energy landscape, but the specifics remain to be seen. SMRs are (obviously) smaller, so they have less fuel in them, generate less waste, and would be easier to build (like modular homes, they’d be all made basically the same in a factory and shipped to their site). They are in a race against good enough battery technology to carry the base load. Who will win? Well, nuclear is getting a lot of extra support currently, but still, who knows?
- Nuclear power is so much safer than people assume. Nuclear reactors have reactor buildings which are big thick concrete monstrosities (part of the reason they’re so dang expensive to build). It’s quite hard for them to leak, so releases will end up being little amounts out of limited area. Yes, even Fukushima, which while very bad and very expensive to clean up, wasn’t the thing killing people. One person officially died, years later from lung cancer. Cancer he might have gotten anyway; we can’t know. In the US at least, a lot of money goes into emergency preparation at nuclear power plants, trying to mitigate the impacts of any kind of event, but the concern is cancer, not radiation poisoning. 3.5 interestingly, SMRs will probably not get big thick concrete structures around them, or at least not as big or as thick. It’s because the risk is lower in those designs but also because there’s just not as much material that could be flung around. This may have changed though (this is not my specific area, just something I hear a lot about). Maybe it will be more akin to naval reactors or something. Those are very small, and very very safe.
- Nuclear waste storage is a political problem. The nuclear industry has been paying for a long-term storage solution for decades and recently sued the US government over it. We absolutely built a house without a toilet, but we could change that with enough political will. Until then, the waste sits at the plant under guard. It’s not great but none of the plants are going to run out of room or anything.
- The US government is going away from certain standards that are generally recognized as being the safest approach to radiological exposure. This, quite frankly, may be disastrous, but likely not immediately. Eventually I could see it leading to eroded safety culture and that could be a problem long term. But I’m a notorious pessimist, so…
- Renewables are the future. Anyone telling you anything different is selling something. Probably stock in an SMR company.
The eroded safety culture is a big worry of mine. COVID did some wiiild shit to the healthcare industry.
As an industry adjacent person, I’m curious to know your thoughts on the potential for nuclear fuel reprocessing. Is it at all feasible to start up again or is it a pipe dream?
It’s great and we should have more of it.
Unjustified fears of it blowing up and destroying the world are ridiculous and overblown, especially given modern advances in reactor design and safety. Nuclear waste isn’t really an issue, so much as it is an issue of bad policy based on fear mongering about waste being stolen and turned into nuclear weapons/dirty bombs. Which has never happened… it’s utterly stupid that due to these stupid fears we don’t re-process fuel, which would reduce it’s volume by 80%.
There are 431 reactors, and 360 of them are based on 1960s technology, designed and built mostly in the 1970s. They are 50+ years old. Thanks to Chernobyl, reactors are basically stuck in time. Esp when you realize that non-nuclear plants only last about 30 years before they are replaced
There are only 4 Gen 3 reactors in service, and 2 gen 4. Why we don’t have 200+ gen 3/4 reactors is… insane. We just keep re-fueling the less safe Gen 2 reactors.
But this is generally just a problem with all our infrastructure in the developed world in general… we don’t renew or upgrade it… we just keep patching it and then we wonder why everything is so shitty and inefficient… because we refuse to actually upgrade things in a real way
There is no point in using a technology that is only as profitable as it is due to subsidies and that generates tons of dangerous waste that we have no proper storage strategy for, when we could just use regenerative energy sources with basically no side effects and build a much more resilient power grid in the process.
How is the waste not an issue? I have never heard the argument of it being stolen to be honest. Here in germany the problem with the waste is, that there is no good place to put it (though this is partly a political problem)
in the USA they won’t re-process fuel because of fears it will be stolen and turned into weapons. so we have 5x the waste volume than other countries where fuel is re-processed.
also we won’t use breeder reactors because of this, which are more efficient and produce way less waste than normal reactors.
yes, it’s all political problems. people are ignorant and angry and fearful and won’t let nuclear power problems be resolved because they don’t understand solutions exist and if you try to educate them they refuse to learn because they want to cling to their fears and emotions about it. a lot of political problems are like this. we have active solutions for many social problems, but people refuse to allow them to be implemented because of fear and delusional belief.
Only ~3% of nuclear waste is really dangerous, that’s the spent fuel rods. The majority of “nuclear waste” is stuff that was in proximity and contains intermediate to low levels of radioactivity. It’s obviously not great to injest or spend all your time around, but it can be safely stored almost anywhere as it’s mostly only emitting alpha and beta particles.
So what about the dangerous stuff like fuel rods? Well, if you took all the dangerous waste nuclear power ever created and piled it in one place, it would cover a football field and be stacked 3 meters high. That sounds like a lot, but remember, that’s is ALL the dangerous waste nuclear power has EVER produced. Compare that to literally any other form of energy production, including solar and wind, and the footprint from nuclear is laughably, almost unimaginably, small.
I think you have no clue how dangerous that waste is. There is literally no way to store it in a volume like you described because of all the heat it generates. If it gets distributed for some reason, it could contaminate the entire planet.
Also, other nuclear waste is not not dangerous. You have to store it in a way that it doesn’t pollute water, for example. That is a much harder problem than you might think. Here is an interesting read for you:
Because the amount of waste we’ve created is really quite small. Per the US DoE:
U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards (or meters).
There are ways we can repurpose or reuse spent nuclear fuel. I don’t know a lot about this so I won’t get into it, but even if we chose to do nothing with it and just bury it, we know enough about geology that we could stick it into some bedrock that will be stable for the next 500 million years.
But long term storage also isn’t easy. Maybe it’s less of a problem in the US (you’ve got a lot more free space where no one lives) but it has to be made sure that it does not contaminate the surroundings, even in thousands of years and more. Another (as of yet unsolved) problem is far more human. How do we mark those places, if at all. See this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
Just hollow out a mountain, like the US did with Yucca mountain, plenty of storage (if you’re politicians let it be used for its purpose) that is pretty easy to secure for centuries (and after that probably pretty easy as well). Assuming you close it up well when full, even future historians probably will have an idea that it’s dangerous by the level of difficulty to just get into it.
Not trying to discount the issue, just point out that there generally are solutions to the issues around nuclear waste, just that politicians have mucked it up quite a bit in the past (especially in the US).
The idea in germany are old mines, we already have some “temporary” solution (an old saltmine) but there are some problems with it. Understandably there is a lot of nimbyism around the permanent storage, which makes finding a good spot a lot harder
Just hollow out a mountain, like the US did with Yucca mountain
Until Harry Reid does everything in his power to shut it down like an asshole
eh, i’m 50% talking out of my ass here, but the waste is actually not a problem. if we wanted to, we could use it again to extract even more energy out of it … problem is that that’s currently not economical.
“using it again” would require special reactor designs that can stimulate the material to do extra-decay. which causes the extra cost.
That is more like 99% out of your ass.
It takes 10 years minimum from design to build out for a nuclear project, so that lines up pretty well with the end of the cold war once the US didn’t need more nuclear material.
Which has never happened
which, as we all know, implies that it will never happen …
actually, after reading through your whole comment, it has a few issues:
Unjustified fears of it blowing up and destroying the world are ridiculous and overblown, especially given modern advances in reactor design and safety.
Yes, you’re right, nuclear power plants are safe as long as nobody in engineering royally fucks up. But, as we all know, engineers never fuck up and forget an important detail … (/s)
But this is generally just a problem with all our infrastructure in the developed world in general… we don’t renew or upgrade it… we just keep patching it and then we wonder why everything is so shitty and inefficient… because we refuse to actually upgrade things in a real way
This sounds like a popular thing to me … people think that replacing old things will make them better / more efficient. When that is simply not true. Banks, for example, still use programming language from the 1960s. Why? because actually it turns out that that stuff just works. Meanwhile newer languages each introduce their own new kind of problem. The same phenomenon happens in many cases. I was told that airplanes do the same, using flight control software from 20th century … for the same reasons. “newer” does not imply better.
The nuclear everyone is afraid of was from an era where priorities 1-9 were making plutonium for nukes or justifying massive uranium centrifuge farms for making weapons grade material.
Priority #10 was making safe electricity. It honestly was more of a waste product from making nukes instead of the point of the plant… It’s not a coincidence that nuclear build out matches the cold war era perfectly. Once the cold war ended the US and allies didn’t need more nukes to make weapons with… The priority became stabilizing the Petro dollar, which nuclear helps undermine by decoupling nations from being dependant on USD and US treasuries.
Fast reactors and LFTRs are god awful for nuclear weapons (why they weren’t made beyond pilot plants or a few examples that exist purely to complicate my point) but are some of the safest designs for new gen IV reactors.
Fast reactors literally burn nuclear waste from Gen 2 plants…
Liquid core reactors can be built in two halves—the heat retaining high reactivity core, and the heat dissipating passively safe container you drain into in an emergency through a freeze plug. That plug works as long as gravity doesn’t go away.
Fast reactor waste is safe in 300-500 years, and they can actually be designed to run on existing nuclear waste as fuel. Even the stuff we can’t burn currently that has half lives in the hundreds of thousands of millions of years.
Thorium breeder reactors are the future for long term base load stability I think. Its not the only solution to our energy needs though but it’s a very attractive option.
I agree to this.
And I will add a strategic note. Power on demand is very important as an asset. You can in fact blot out the sun, a volcano eruption of significant magnitude would do that naturally and no amount of storage would be enough. Wind isn’t always available. Strategically and experimentally we need to be able to go “okay now 10x it!” .
It’s too bad we don’t have great ways to get power from waves yet. I am all for spreading out our dependence over multiple sources, but to not have the means when they fail is to rely on diplomacy and even more infrastructure.
I’m curious how far along Rolls Royce is, are any of those smr’s running yet?
Yeah I agree. It is a shame about wave energy too but I think we’ll eventually figure it out. The downside is to get meaningful energy without beating the crap out of your equipment (using giant waves) you end up needing to cover huge areas with wave generators.
Ironically hydro power and nuclear are natural partners when combined with other renewables.
Nuclear covers the base load generation, and hydro trims up the remaining power production to perfectly meet demand and condition power on the grid. When renewables begin over producing the dam can ramp down to its minimum flow to meet its water license, allowing the reservoir to fill.
I think it’s going to be a constellation of solutions to replace our current energy sources. One of the most important I’ve been watching is soapstone thermal batteries. You can massively over build solar and wind if you know there’s a bunch of soapstone thermal batteries to act as demand for it.
During overproduction you turn resistive heaters inside those soapstone batteries on progressively until the grid stabilizes. Germany actually had (has? I’m not sure if they still do it) something like this for water heaters using frequency sensitive relays to help stabilize grid production. If the grid frequency started to climb relay after relay would activate adding more and more heating load to soak up demand to stabilize the grid.
If we did the same for industrial users who currently burn natural gas, or even a thermal battery to provide district heating for towns and cities using cheap overproduced renewables, you can replace a huge amount of natural gas for nuclear, hydro, and renewable peak shaving.
