After reading years and years of discussions like this, it seems like the citizen opposition and (somewhat unfair) demonisation of nuclear power is endlessly repeated as the reason we don't have nukes anymore, despite them being a great source of clean(ish) energy.
However it seems the real reason, as in all things, is economics.
They're just too damn expensive to build and run, and the expected returns on investment take an extremely long time to materialise(20+ years) Noone wants to put up the enormous capital, with the very real risk that they'll never see returns as the alternative energy markets(gas, solar, etc) are evolving and dropping in price so quickly.
I know I'd be pretty hesitant taking a half billion dollar 30 year bet against technology.
At this point it seems like that would just mean nuclear losing to solar instead of natural gas. In both cases it's an extremely large investment and slow return, but solar PV juuuust seems to edge out nuclear. The numbers look like nuclear has a slight advantage, but that's skewed by underestimates of nuclear costs (or estimates that it'll come down in the future), as well as the rapid cost declines in solar power. Solar has a very wide price variation but the newest, cheapest stuff is better than nuclear.
I find myself in conflict with people a lot regarding nuclear online. I used to be one of those LFTR reactor guys but the facts are that nuclear reactors are always some newer, untested design that will require new untested innovations. On the other hand solar has an easily predicted, easily met roadmap to cheap power with existing tech. We know for a fact that solar can power the entire world's needs cheaply for many decades to come, but we are just guessing that the same can be done with nuclear. Why make that bet when we have a sure thing?
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
"According to the American Coal Ash Association's Coal Combustion Product Production & Use Survey Report, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in 2014."
No, anything that has residual radiation will be entombed in clay/rock/etc. The total amount of material and radiation from this will be trivial compared to coal waste.
"...Nearly every major river in the Southeast has one or more unlined, leaking pits on its banks filled with water and holding coal ash from power plants. Containing millions of tons of toxin-laden waste, these pits are unlined and have leaked arsenic, mercury, thallium, selenium, and other contaminants into the rivers and the underlying groundwater for decades. "
> No, anything that has residual radiation will be entombed in clay/rock/etc
Fine, it'll be an underground mountain :-)
> [...]compared to coal waste[...]Containing millions of tons of toxin-laden waste[...]
Holy shit, I had never even considered ash. It just never crossed my mind somehow. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
It doesn't make me any less opposed to nuclear energy, but you've given me one more reason to be against coal plants (as if there weren't enough already).
I am not an expert but many seem to consider the increased handling risk related to the toxicity and activity of plutonium and other products, especially considering terrorism, and also the risk for weaponizing the enriched plutonium.
I think you will agree there is no reason why we need to throw away 95+% of the fuel that is left in high level nuclear waste and bury it in the ground for thousands of years. There are better options.
>...I am not an expert but many seem to consider the increased handling risk related to the toxicity and activity of plutonium and other products,
I agree that nuclear waste needs to be handled carefully.
>...especially considering terrorism, and also the risk for weaponizing the enriched plutonium.
There is very little terrorism risk from nuclear waste. The weight, size and danger of high level waste means it would be beyond the capability of terrorist group to take advantage of it. Other sources of power have much, much more of a risk from terrorism.
>....also the risk for weaponizing the enriched plutonium.
None of the nuclear states got their start by using nuclear waste from a commercial reactor. This wasn't a coincidence - it is much easier to get nuclear fuel by using a special purpose reactor or enriching uranium.
This cost would be much easier to calculate if every country reprocessed spent nuclear fuel like France does instead of storing it. Reprocessed MOX fuel costs almost ten times as much as enriched uranium, but the left over waste products decay to levels similar to natural uranium in 300 years instead of 10,000. Molten Salt reactors would probably make reprocessing cheaper.
Yeah, Britain did that. The reprocessing plant has turned into another money pit full of leaking pipes and dubious practices, with a multi-billion pound decommissioning budget.
Plus, as you suggest, no-one wants to buy the MOX fuel product because it's more expensive than enriched uranium.
I'm not sure what you mean. We do establish the costs for carbon. In some countries you (or major users) must buy a permit to emit carbon. Some establish the maximum carbon the environment can handle, then auction permits, establishing a market price.
The U.S. effectively estimates zero cost (without looking into the details); that certainly is a bad estimate.
That's not the only cost of fossil fuel power plants. Coal plants kill huge numbers of people. The coal industry pumps huge quantities of uranium dust into the atmosphere alongside fly ash.
The biggest externality of coal in particular is not carbon emissions but the massive health costs and human suffering.
If fossil fuels were subjected to the same safety requirements as nuclear in terms of preventing public health effects, the cost would increase substantially.
> The biggest externality of coal in particular is not carbon emissions but the massive health costs and human suffering
The carbon emissions cause climate change, which causes human suffering at a scale, as I understand it, far beyond that of the pollution you describe (which is also substantial).
While that is true, coal is just one of the sources that play into that, and the point that you yourself made was that it can be offset.
While the dust and radioactivity released by coal plants kills hundreds of thousands of people now, and we can't meaningfully offset it by trading quotas - it's not like having more kids makes up for killing other people.
Well, it gives us cheap electricity, which helps us run our hospitals, for example. Thus helping kids live through the early years (where mortality is more likely).
But as we all know, replacing coal powered plants with safer things (nuclear, solar, wind, tidal) would cost nothing compared to healthcare costs.
This is a strawman - the discussion was not about investing more in alternatives, but about the effect shutting down nuclear has in prolonging the phase-out of coal.
Given that the shutdown of nuclear is extremely expensive, and that decommissioning before the planned lifespan also involves massive payouts to the owners and reduced time to amortise cleanup costs etc., the economics also vastly favour keeping them running.
It also ignores the vast healthcare costs involved in dealing with respiratory illnesses - including for children - as a result of coal. Few people fall over dead with no cost of care for respiratory illnesses.
So if your concern in healthcare spending, that's another reason to at a minimum not shut down nuclear plants until all of the coal plants are gone.
There is absolutely no reason to store anything for 100,000 years. If we were sane and reprocessed our fuel (like France), something like 400-500 years would put us below standard ambient radiation levels. Still a long time, but no we don't need to store anything for 100k years. Remember, almost all the long lived Transuranics are generally usable as further fission fuel. The other Transuranics and fission by products will typically decay rapidly to something stable or barely radioactive within a reasonable timeframe.
3) Nuclear power technology is running on technology half a century old.
This gives you a couple interesting points to consider:
- Once built, you have reliable baseload power for generations.
- Modernized power plants could be safer, more efficient, and smaller by orders of magnitude.
Demonization of nuclear power prevents improvements to nuclear power. The industry is stuck in the 60's. The real shame is that it's the only technology we have that is really future-friendly: Planetary colonization can't rely on wind, nor solar, and certainly not fossil fuels for power. Nuclear will really be the only option for reliable baseload power to extra-terrestrial colonies.
Absolutely, and even the new designs are multiple decades old. (But even those are a huge improvement over what we have from the 60s/70s).
Many of existing plants were at the time they were built considered to be important for national security (read: nuclear arsenal), which is much of why they're using the fuel they use and have the designs they have.
Civilian nuclear never really materialized in it's own right, which is certainly a shame.
A nuclear power plant disaster is pretty much going to bankrupt somebody, no matter who insures it. Even if the insurance is nationally subsidized, something like Fukushima is going to be a crushing burden on the whole country.
Their study looks at different forms of electricity generation from the perspective of 'costs avoided' (e.g. avoided carbon emissions), net cost of generation (e.g. nameplate vs. actual generation), and total system costs (e.g. grid balancing / stabilising costs). On 'costs avoided', their base-case assumption is a $50 per tonne price on co2 emissions.
The study concludes:
"Assuming that reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are valued at $50 per metric ton and the price of natural gas is not much greater than $16 per million Btu, the net benefits of new nuclear, hydro, and natural gas combined cycle plants far outweigh the net benefits of new wind or solar plants. Wind and solar power are very costly from a social perspective because of their very high capacity cost, their very low capacity factors, and their lack of reliability.
For example, adjusting U.S. solar and wind capacity factors to take account of lack of reliability, we estimate that it would take 7.30 MW of solar capacity, costing roughly four times as much per MW to produce the same electrical output with the same degree of reliability as a baseload gas combined cycle plant. It requires an investment of approximately $29 million in utility-scale solar capacity to produce the same output with the same reliability as a $1 million investment in gas combined cycle. Reductions in the price of solar photovoltaic panels have reduced costs for utility-scale solar plants, but photovoltaic panels account for only a fraction of the cost of a solar plant. Thus such price reductions are unlikely to make solar power competitive with other electricity technologies without government subsidies.
Wind plants are far more economical in reducing emissions than solar plants, but much less economical than hydro, nuclear and gas combined cycle plants. Wind plants can operate at a capacity factor of 30 percent or more and cost about twice as much per MW to build as a gas combined cycle plant. Taking account of the lack of wind reliability, it takes an investment of approximately $10 million in wind plants to produce the same amount of electricity with the same reliability as a $1 million investment in gas combined cycle plants."
While I don't disagree with your assessment of carbon-based energy, the same thing (externalising the cost of their downsides) happens with nuclear energy.
So if anything, they're equally terrible in that regard.
> the same thing (externalising the cost of their downsides) happens with nuclear energy. / So if anything, they're equally terrible in that regard.
That isn't true. There are externalities for both, but the externalities for carbon are far greater. The above statement is like saying: No houses are free to buy; therefore all houses are equally costly.
That's rather sweeping, don't you think? If anything, my statement might be an oversimplification. But untrue?
I wouldn't be surprised if they were of a similar order of magnitude. Like houses (Michael Jackson's mansion and similar outliers excluded).
> the externalities for carbon are far greater
Do you have numbers to back that up? (I don't).
But keep in mind that it's not yet clear how expensive it will be to de-construct reactors and store nuclear waste for millenia. Just that it's going to be very, very expensive. And probably footed by the taxpayer.
However it seems the real reason, as in all things, is economics.
Who's going to invest a billion dollars to build a new facility when they know that at any step along the way, some half-wit celebrity can decide that they want to buy property in the area and they don't want to live near a nuclear power plant, start protests and cause the project to be delayed or scrapped.
Continuing to run an old design is a very big part of how we ended up with the current situation with Fukushima.
Some evidence for the interpretation that construction and cost problems are the root is that even France has been having these problems with recent construction projects. France doesn't have the same NIMBY or regulatory problems as the U.S. with nuclear. It's a national priority, and the legal landscape is different, you can't sue to stop projects the way you can in the U.S., because direct authorizing laws are passed by Parliament, vs. it being up to a patchwork of agency decisions (which can be challenged in court), state regulations, etc. And yet their next-gen reactor project in Flamanville is going badly, with huge cost overruns and manufacturing problems, to the point where the contractor (Areva) is seeking some kind of bailout or state buy-out of its nuclear construction business.
This is also somewhat surprising because the previous-gen projects in France are usually seen as an example of a fairly well managed nuclear industry, with construction coming in reasonably close to budgeted cost, and a good safety record.
While your point is important, keep in mind that the value of nuclear safety (like so many other things the market puts a price on) is entirely determined by what people think. If they think the hazards are significant, because they hear alarming rhetoric, because the hazards actually are significant, or for any other reason, the value will reflect what they think. Regulations like the Price-Anderson Act[0] then formalize this value as insurance and construction and operational expenses, essentially defining many of the economics.
I don't disagree, the economic factors however go beyond scale. And I also agree that if we could agree on the 'externality costs' it would fare better in comparison but I have given up trying to have that conversation with people who can't or won't move past the emotional fear.
In many ways this wound on Westinghouse (and nuclear power) is self inflicted. As engineers moved out of senior management and politicians moved in in the late 70's, the company became less about moving technology forward and more about 'getting money for management'. It really lost its way.
I expect that the Chinese nuclear power industry will become nearly all of the civilian reactors by the end of this century.
To be fair, solar and wind are now approaching scale, whereas every nuclear power plant seems to be a bespoke special snowflake. The cost of nuclear would go down if R&D costs could be amortized over dozens or hundreds of reactors.
That was the hope with Westinghouse's AP1000. We shall see if this actually reduces costs. I'm skeptical it will though, as it appears that most of the cost is actually in construction, and not as much in the R&D. If there are specially constructed parts that benefit from producing a dozen at a time rather than one at a time, then perhaps there will be some savings there. At least in the US, large construction projects are expensive, and not getting cheaper. Battery-based storage and renewable energy is getting cheaper. Within 10 years I would expect that
solar/wind with 30-50% of the production stored in batteries will be cheaper than nuclear. It also deploys more quickly, in smaller amounts, and therefore poses less financial risk.
I would love to see a full breakdown of the budget on some nuclear power plants, but I have not yet seen anybody provide evidence that R&D or unnecessary regulations are significant enough of a cost burden that reducing them by a factor of 10 would make nuclear more cost competitive.
I am not a Nuclear Engineer...but here, again it seems like the operating factor is scale. If you were building many nuclear reactors, cost per reactor would perhaps go down. Not to mention: recent advances in technology and automation might help better monitor and operate the reactors, increasing safety and decreasing cost.
All of this is just armchair reasoning though. I have not the faintest idea what the most expensive parts of building a reactor are.
One of the reasons nuclear plants are so expensive to build is "citizen opposition and (somewhat unfair) demonisation of nuclear power". I'm all for making sure people who build and operate plants do so without cutting corners, but the US system makes it too easy to tie up a project for years with lawfare.
However it seems the real reason, as in all things, is economics. They're just too damn expensive to build and run, and the expected returns on investment take an extremely long time to materialise(20+ years) Noone wants to put up the enormous capital, with the very real risk that they'll never see returns as the alternative energy markets(gas, solar, etc) are evolving and dropping in price so quickly. I know I'd be pretty hesitant taking a half billion dollar 30 year bet against technology.