> “With the goal of completing the decommissioning in 30 to 40 years [...]"
Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning towards success:
- ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less safely sitting in steel enclosures
- we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may only (ahem) take a couple generations
- OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to the environment...?
The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.
The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere.
The "Great East Japan Earthquake" and its tsunami killed 19,759 people. The earthquake was a terrible tragedy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
Meanwhile, the precious fuel remained safely entombed within the concrete and steel vessel that was designed to contain it. Without cooling, the fuel got hot ("decay heat") and melted, always safely enclosed within the vessel.
Unfortunately, during attempts to cool the fuel in the aftermath of the earthquake, some radioactive fission products were released into the environment: caesium, iodine, xenon, etc. These fission products have been diluted and are harmless. See the section "Radionuclide release" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
How much harm did the radioactive fuel cause? Quoting Wikipedia:
No adverse health effects among non-worker Fukushima
residents have been documented that are directly
attributable to radiation exposure from the accident,
according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on
the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
Insurance compensation was paid for one death from lung
cancer (4 years later), but this does not prove a causal
relationship between radiation and the cancer.
Six other persons have been reported as having developed
cancer or leukemia. Two workers were hospitalized because
of radiation burns, and several other people sustained
physical injuries as a consequence of the accident.
The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.
This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").
Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.
It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.
To add to your point. Disposal of nuclear waste at sea was common up until 1993. There is still a couple hundred thousand tons of such waste sitting in the ocean right now. In addition, about 214 times as much radioactive material was generated by nuclear testing than the Chernobyl breach. Fukushima wouldn't even come close to the waste that has already been released prior to the 1994 ban on Oceanic dumping.
> - OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to the environment...?
The reactor itself is high enough to be safe from tsunamis.
If you were a Japanese tax payer, would it be a success ?
The total cleanup costs were estimated to be between 50.5 and 71 trillion yen ($470 to $660 billion). For the cleanup, only 184.3 billion yen was reserved in the September supplementary budget of prefecture Fukushima, and some funds in the central government's third supplementary budget of 2011.
They don't have to pay for it all this year
Very naive comment. It’s still a lot of money.
Are you aware about the current economic and demographic situation in Japan ?
It’s not good here. That money could’ve went to a lot more useful things. Also remember this was a man made disaster. The plant was not upgraded (as recommended) to meet new safety guidelines, because, as if a mega tsunami would actually happen, right ? Then right after the event the operator was downplaying the extent of meltdown for too long. The PM had to step in and get a proper response team organised.
> The plant was not upgraded (as recommended) to meet new safety guidelines, because, as if a mega tsunami would actually happen, right ?
And others on this same thread are trying to use the same disaster to paint nuclear as expensive.
And who do you think they will be paying it to?
Subsidizing Japanese companies to develop technologies that may be exported elsewhere isn't that bad of a deal actually.
Sound more like a success for the anti-nuclear movement.
The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they’re reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal, trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.
Oh, sure they are reaping.
61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely.
The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation in nuclear and saving the environment 2024 means acting fast. Nothing about nuclear is fast.
[2] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/ausbau-erne...
PS. because it automatically comes up: no, Germany could not phase out coal before nuclear because there are much more jobs connected to coal and no politician would survive such a fast exit. How important it is, can be seen from the name of the commission tasked with the coal phase out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
> 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources
Now. For years they switched to coal. Even today, Germany falls to the siren songs of the gas lobby, who promise a €1.5tn investment into gas infrastructure will be happily written off for the sake of the planet.
Nuclear was replaced by renewables, not by coal: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschla... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_generati...
A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now.
For gas use electricity production is just a minor use. Most gas is consumed by industry and for heating purposes. Not enough happened in Germany in the last years electrifying them.
> coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now
Right. Coal stayed online where it would have otherwise gone away. That was true for close to a decade.
> gas use electricity production is just a minor
And growing. Look at your own chart. The change in natural gas electrical generation is about as large as solar’s entire controbution.
Well then it sounds like they are progressing in the right direction. If in the future you get to a point where 80% of all energy is renewable and 20% are peaker plants that’s a pretty good place to be in. I’m all for nuclear but a 1 in a 1000 year event causing a nuclear spill, say by the Danube, that makes multiple countries unlivable is a pretty scary proposition. That being said, I have no idea what the state of the art is when it comes to nuclear power plants so maybe plants are very, very safe now.
FYI: In Germany the same companies who have nuclear reactors, have coal, gas and renewables. They do not lobby against themselves. Therefore, your "lobby" phrases do not work for Germany. You should stop repeating that. It only shows that you have not sufficient knowledge to participate in this discussion.
ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be ramped up and overused in Germany, Nuclear is safe and effective and until we actually solve the battery problem most of the world should switch to nuclear if we want to survive, Yale has tried to fit the numbers on many occasions but not even them can disagree that nuclear is required
> ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be ramped up and overused in Germany
This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been declining consistently in Germany and especially since the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.
And here we can see how their electricity generation has fallen
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
And in France:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR...
Note that France has lost more nuclear generation than Germany over this period.
Where are all those rolling blackouts we've been promised by the fearmongering of the nuclear-astroturf? Weird eh?
Maybe it's not always clever to use US-logic on the rest of the world.
Germany is not Texas.
Texas, where new nuclear has been dead in the water for years.
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(passage from Dec. 2018 Physics Today; Texas natural gas is even cheaper than that now)
61.5% sounds like a lot, but how much electricity is needed to replace everything that fossil fuel is now used for? I think it needs to increase to 400% or so to do that.
We don't need to replace primary energy with electric energy in a 1:1 ratio.
An ICE car is 20-30% efficient, an EV is 90% efficient. Generally we are looking at a grid expansion, but it is not massive.
See this amazing chart on rejected vs. useful energy:
> 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely.
472g of C02 per kW/h as we speak[1]. 20 times more than France and its nuclear.
A resounding success…
The Fukushima #1 meltdown was man-made, namely the absolute ineptitude of the Japanese government at the time. As disasterous as the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami were, those were not what ultimately caused the meltdown.
The government was no more or less inept than any other organisation - government or private - anywhere in the world.
When faced with pressure to save money but still deliver, weighed up against a very low risk of catastrophe in their time, they did the mental math and cut corners, found ways around the safeguarding policies previously put in place and kicked infrastructure spending down the line.
The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it’s guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years.
You literally do not know what transpired.
When the tsunami hit and Fukushima #1 lost power and was at risk of meltdown, TEPCO was ready to scuttle the reactors by dumping seawater in them. It would have rendered the reactors unusable, but meltdown would be prevented.
The Japanese government at the time, coming from the Prime Minister (Naoto Kan) himself, denied TEPCO from scuttling them because the government wanted the reactors usable. TEPCO was begging for authorization but it was not meant to be.
So what happened was the meltdown happened and the reactors became unusable anyway.
The blame was then scapegoated on TEPCO, because elite politicians surely can't and shouldn't be prosecuted for their ineptitude.
What happened at Fukushima #1 was a human failure that did not have to happen.
Bittersweet revenge was that the incumbent party at that time, the Democrat Party of Japan, lost the subsequent general election and the party subsequently fell apart.
Are the costs of this 13 years and counting expense tab added to the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in any way?
Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.
Japan has (within reason) concerns other than the total cost of electricity: having to haul in coal, oil and LNG over an ocean contested by an increasingly hostile neighbor must be very worrying to them.
Money is numbers in computers, joules and watts are real things.
Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.
On the other hand, the existence of coal power proves that releasing small amounts of radiation is fine, really. So we should be able to build a lot more nuclear power plants; it would take a lot of accidents like these to match the releases from coal.
The explosion of Chernobyl released a few thousand PBq of activity. Coal contains a few tens to a few hundreds of Bq/kg. You would have to burn something like 50 times the world coal reserves (and make sure not to use any exhaust filters) in order to match the radiation release of Chernobyl.
Chernobyl with its totally mad graphite design is not representative of safe designs like Fukushima, or French plants, or even Chinese plants...
Yet we've had Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Sellafield and many others (military ones too). Unforeseen accidents happen. Wars too, which tend to destroy safety equipment.
Artillery was fired around Zaporizhzhia when the reactors were still online, Ukraine is currently invading Russia near Kursk where two of the mad-graphite RBMK reactors are still operational today. I hope they try to avoid those when blowing stuff up. Because they don't have containment vessels.
And then see how difficult it is to clean up an accident like Fukushima where the containment mostly held. It feels like playing with fire.
> we've had Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Sellafield
You’re comparing rubber ducks and battleships
> It feels like playing with fire
Much safer to burn the rest of the planet instead.
Fukushima also released more radiation than all the coal that has ever been burned (a few hundred PBq, ignoring the thousands of PBq of Xe-133). The amount of radiation created by a nuclear power reactor is on an entirely different scale than any natural source of radiation.
Are there safer plants still, that focus on eliminating the daughter nuclei?
I understood that one benefit of molten salt reactors is that the fission products were easier to process or burn.
Edit: "MSRs enable cheaper closed nuclear fuel cycles, because they can operate with slow neutrons. Closed fuel cycles can reduce environmental impacts: chemical separation turns long-lived actinides into reactor fuel. Discharged wastes are mostly fission products with shorter half-lives. This can reduce the needed containment to 300 years versus the tens of thousands of years needed by light-water reactor spent fuel."
While I like nuclear on the paper and its theoretical env impact, this one is hard to ignore. Add costs of current projects which became ridiculous in reality. Plus as we see with various wars nuclear powerplants would be a prime target for terrorists or even state actors, they are certainly not considered as excluded from wars, in contrary.
If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.
Do pray tell calculate a world's energy system looping back while running purely on renewables, with electric powered mining, transport of ores, refining, panels production... You will find that you cannot, cheap (for now) fossil fuels are subsidising solar panels and wind farms massively.
The difference is the cost coming from handling it. The latest figure on the cost to handle Fukushima is $190B from 2016.
The great thing today is that we don't need to accept radioactive releases from either nuclear power or coal. Simply build the cheap scalable option instead: renewables.
while cheaper in some contexts and somewhat scalable, renewables are nowhere near being as scalable or effective as nuclear, specially as tensions with China rise
Renewables are vastly more scalable and effective than nuclear.
Nuclear power which currently has zero new commercial reactors under construction in the US while backsliding as an energy source due to cost and construction timelines now apparently is "effective" and "scalable".
Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do. This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.
Negative industrial byproducts creating costs for future generations is an unique challenge? Have you heard of climate change?
> ...centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what...
OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say) lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother trying that, either.
Barrels don't last when filled with nuclear material. The radiation embrittles the materials over time, they wouldn't last 100 years. And then all that crap will be released into the ocean and swerve all over the world.
People keep proposing that nonsense from 70's but can be cured studying some really basic biology and oceanography. In 2024 is at a level similar than saying that smoking is good for your children. Is not even funny as a joke.
> Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up
Read about the concept of vertical migration
What are these putative externalities of wind and solar?
These is a constant whataboutist argument from nuclear apologists, but it falls apart when examined closely, as all pro-nuclear power arguments do.
The fact that their system cost is prohibitive in the real world? The fact that we don’t fucking have the slightest idea of how to deal with recycling that stuff on their EOL? Or would be the fact that mining cobalt and lithium in the required quantities to indulge on the fantasy of a solar/wind based grid would poison an inordinate portion of our environment? Or would it be the fact that every single fucking country that went all in on the siren’s song of the renewable industry scammer is now plagued with absurdly high energy costs and are slipping into becoming impoverished third world de-industrialized economies like the UK and Germany?
You provide excellent examples of the bogosity of the arguments. Let me demolish them in turn.
1) System cost
Sure, it's high. That's because we spend huge amounts of money on energy. ANY system to replace fossil fuels will be expensive, in the trillions of dollars.
But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables.
2) Recycling
At worst, we can bury the stuff. Recycling it is not necessary. After all, the amount of material is small compared to everything else we do in society, and it's not some special kind of waste (like high level nuclear waste) that requires some particularly unique handling.
3) Lithium and cobalt
Lithium is abundant. If you hadn't been paying attention, the price has been crashing, as it pretty much always does after a price spike of a mineral resource, when the price spike encourages investment to increase the amount available. As for cobalt: probably the same is true, but why do you think cobalt is needed?
4) poison the environment
This is just emotional bullshit. No, renewables would not "poison the environment". You beclown yourself with this nonsense.
5) absurdly high energy cost
As opposed to those still burning fossil fuels where they are foisting off the cost of the externalities on others? Ignoring those external costs doesn't make them go away.
In any case, the place that's normally pointed to is Germany, where they made a large investment in renewables from 2009-2012. Solar was much more expensive then, and they are still paying that down. But the costs of renewables crash with time, so pointing to past expenditures is grossly misleading. Going forward renewables will be much cheaper. That's why we're seeing so much investment in them now globally.
One can tell the intellectual barrenness of the pro-nuclear position when you have to resort to this sort of deplorable nonsense.
1) it's not the money, it's the EROEI 2) at scale, panels recycling does become a very real issue 3) It's not the abundance, it's the mine-able ore at high enough concentration that matters 4) solar panels, read the docs please 5) again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind scrap a 3, early oil was in the hundreds, nuclear is at around 50
After having gotten 0/5 in terms of correctness on actual facts, maybe tone down the sneer?
Indeed you have to look at the figures, no amount of wordage without computation will get you a true answer, still calling someone or something deplorable is, I am sorry, a dog-whistle.
So to clear the air I propose you look at this substantive set of answers:
https://youtu.be/Z4teA8ciuRU?si=9L-_bHawmM8MI5UA (cc to english should work ok)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I strongly wish we had more comments like the one you're responding to. I find most comments here to be obnoxiously polite and I wish more ignorant opinions were publicly demolished as they should be, rather than continue to spread misinformation because it's the polite thing to do.
Not all opinions are created equal.
I agree.
At least in the US such costs are factored in. First of all, after Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) performed a huge "Lessons learned" exercise, and asked all the power plants to do various upgrades. Here are some links [1], [2]. The ask was not "pretty please, can you do this if it's not much of a trouble for you", it was "you have to do this by this date if you want to continue to operate".
Second, it's the nuclear insurance. The scheme is codified in the Price-Anderson Act [3]. Basically, all the nuclear power plants need to purchase insurance for $0.5 BN per reactor. If anything happens, and the cleanup costs exceed this number, then the rest of the industry has to chime in, and the total is up to $16 BN per reactor. So, if 3 reactors were to have a core meltdown, the industry would have to pay close to $50 BN. The total estimate of the Fukushima cleanup stands currently at about twice that, so one can say that $50 BN is too little, but it certainly is not nothing.
Edit: the efficacy of the Price-Anderson Act was tested at the Three-Mile Island. Virtually no taxpayer money was used in the cleanup [4]. Of course, there were other costs incurred, such as in collecting data, doing investigations, upgrading regulations and enforcing them, but that's how Government should work.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2132/ML21322A288.pdf
[2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/fukush...
If you think Hollywood accounting is opaque and full of shenanigans, look into electric utilities. Nuclear power is not conventionally insurable. The NRC has the most understandable explainer I have found here: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
The current fad of buying old nukes to power data centers is going to be a learning experience for the tech industry about taking on the liabilities entailed.
japan has limited land, no oil&gas resources, so the nuclear is the perfect source of electricity for them, plus they have the expertise.
Japan has 34 000km (21 126 miles) of coastline.
They import about 90% of its energy requirements. This includes nuclear fuel. So this is far away from "perfect" if you can get wind and sun without having to import it.
nuclear fuel: nuclear rods can last about 3-7 years, lets say 5 on avg. 150 rods per 1 GW reactor. so its like one or two rail cars of fuel - extremely compact footprint.
how calculate yourself how much fossil fuel you need to power 1 GW power plant for half a decade, and how much CO2 emissions will you generate?
How many rail cars of coal Germany will need to generate 1 GW 24/7/365 for 5 years reliably ?
it is just unfair comparison, nuclear is several orders magnitude better in all aspects compared to fossil fuel and renewable - just due to physics of the process. Nuclear is capturing strong and weak forces, while combustion is capturing electromagnetic force with piss poor thermal efficiency and losses abound.
The only reason countries fumble nuclear energy is because they dont invest enough into new designs and constructions and still employ old design plants.
If there was as much investment into new nuclear plants as it was in renewable tech - we would have solved many of our energy needs long long time ago.
So for nuclear power to be successful you just have to change human nature and politics to secure long term investment. And do so in countries that cannot even figure out how to properly fund education.
the fact that we allowed non-technical people with liberal arts education, who have no concept of physics and energy, to make nuclear a political issue is a big failure.
Plus oil rich countries lobbying LNG as a greener alternative for nuclear is another fail
Technically, solar is also nuclear.
photovoltaic elements inside solar panel rely on photoelectric effect, which is electromagnetic force. It cannot be weak/strong force
> This includes nuclear fuel.
Nuclear fuel is both relatively plentiful, and can be sourced from a multitude of countries, both Eastern, Western, and, most importantly, unaligned. A lot of countries have economically viable (for power generation) uranium reserves, but do not exploit them because global prices for it are so low.
It differs significantly from oil in this respect.
I would be curious to know which industry would survive such drastic standards.
As the generational costs for the waste management should be.
The odds of some weird future generation digging this stuff up for bad reasons already adds enough incalculable costs.
> TEPCO speculates that radiation passing through camera semiconductor elements caused electrical charge to build up, and that the charge will drain if the cameras are left on in a relatively low-dose environment. It was the latest setback in a very long project.
I found this interesting. I wonder how many of the ICs onboard the robot are radiation hardened, and how many are just COTS with the hope they'll last for the brief mission.
As I understand it, part of the problem is that the vast majority of components simply don't exist in rad-hardened versions. The cost of having a hardened part manufactured and qualified is high, and demand is low; only a few manufacturers bother.
There's a company selling a radiation-tolerant TV camera for use inside nuclear reactors.[1] It uses a vacuum tube imager (a vidicon?). But it may be too big to put on the pointy end of the long, thin Fukushima manipulator.
[1] https://diakont.com/nuclear-services/radiation-tolerant-cctv...
Can you cut the fuel into small pieces and keep them away from each other so that they don't reach such a high temperature?
We have about 800 tons of the fuel and now we were barely able to pick up a few grains.
