Increasing the usage of nuclear power

In My Humble Opinion
1

We’ve had occasional discussions about the advantages of nuclear power. I’ve wished that there were an easy way of getting nuke plants built. I came up with a potential way of encouraging that–a way which I’m sure will never be put into practice, but it would be interesting, I think.

Pass a law dividing all types of power plants into two lists.
List A:
coal
nuclear

List B:
gas
all renewables
anything not specifically named

The law further states that every time a utility company or a municipal utility wants to build a power plant from List B, they must first build a plant from List A.

It seems that not very many people want coal anymore. I suspect that, forced to make a choice, a lot of people would suddenly realize that nuclear isn’t so bad after.

I assume that there would be unintended consequences, but I think that this would make a genuinely interesting experiment.

2

Why on god’s green earth would you ever mandate coal and nuclear ahead of gas and renewables?

Look the drop in coal use isn’t only because of pollution and the difficulty in disposing of the waste. It is because, due to fracking, gas is abundant and cheap. So if you’re looking at immediate costs, gas beats coal every time.

Renewables (wind, solar, hydro, geo) are all immensely preferable to fossil fuels. The wind isn’t going to stop blowing, the sun won’t stop shining.

Oh, and for coal? That pollution? Almost every lake in Minnesota has fish consumption advisories for Mercury. Where did most of that mercury come from? It rained out of the sky, the product of burning coal. The more coal we continue to burn, the higher the mercury levels rise. And not just in those lakes, but everywhere. Farm fields, your backyard, everywhere.

And as far as nuclear goes; What nuclear energy is, is just getting the radioactive fuel rods in close enough proximity that they get really hot from it. That heat is used to boil water, which turns a generator. It isn’t magic, it isn’t something different, it is the same as burning anything else to boil water to turn a wheel. Only the waste, including the entire power plant at the end of it’s lifecycle, is radioactive. Which means you can’t just tear it down, or dump the waste in your local landfill.

3

Nuclear is expensive. Unless they can build them cheaply I dont’ see them catching on.

4

I don’t get why this scheme is needed. If you want to compel power companies to build nuclear plants, just compel them to built nuclear power plants. There’s no need for a game that purports to give power companies the illusion of a choice.

5

I am for nuclear power, but this proposal seems problematic in many respects.

The biggest is that the two lists are not the same.

Nuclear and coal power tend to co-locate enough generation capability to be around a gigawatt. That seems to be a happy industry average. This is because the plants are expensive to locate and build, they need access to infrastructure for equipment and fuel, and they need to have enough electricity users nearby to justify their existence.

Gas powered and renewables are typically much smaller scale utilities, a few MW each.

Maybe if you said that for every GW of power produced by B, you have to produce a GW of power by A, that would at least make some sort of sense, but it would still be a terrible idea.

And, given that coal plants are far cheaper to build than nuclear plants, you would not see any new nukes being built, just lots and lots of coal plants.
I’m right there with you on wishing to increase our nuclear capacity, and especially (as something not addressed in your post) using much newer designs than the ones that are based on 1950’s technology, but this proposal would not get us there.

6

A good way to advance nuclear power would be for all other forms of power generation to face the same rigorous accountability to their environmental and health impacts as nuclear power.
Perhaps then it would become plainly evident that nuclear power has one of the best environmental and safety records of any form of large scale power generation.

7

You do realize, on average, unless things go very pear shaped, your average coal plant emits more radiation than a nuke?

8

According to some politicians, that’s a good thing, and solar is baaaad.

9

I’ve heard solar called expensive but ive never heard anyone say that it is inherently bad except fringe environmentalists who object to the massive footprint required for the panels and the effect that’ll have particularly on desert environments.

10

Actually the wind does stop blowing, at least hard enough to be useful. Also, there are things like “clouds” and “nighttime”.

It’s the same, except it doesn’t emit greenhouse gasses. And the problem of radioactive waste is manageable, especially if we recycle the spent nuclear fuel.

If we want more nuclear power, and we should, because there is no alternative energy source that will scale up, we need simply to [list=A][li]Stop subsiding the less efficient, more dangerous alternatives like solar, and [*]Stop the lawsuits from Luddites who are more committed to ideology than cost-benefit analysis.[/list][/li]Regards,
Shodan

11

It’s baaaad because it displaces power sources based on coal. Remember, to some, Koal is King.

12

I’m in favor of more nuclear power – it’s a proven technology, it’s very safe with proper oversight (and the US Navy and DoE have proven to be capable of this), its environmental impact is far preferable to coal and comparable to solar and wind (nuclear waste can be stored safely if the political/NIMBY barriers can be overcome), and its a far more compact and energy-dense technology than solar and wind (i.e. a nuclear power plant will occupy far, far less land than a comparable solar or wind plant).

I also favor more solar and wind – these aren’t either/or choices. Solar and wind make sense in lots of places, but not all. Nuclear makes sense in some places. Coal should be phased out, IMO.

I’d strongly oppose the plan in the OP, which looks counterproductive and extremely inefficient.

13

What things would potentially become pear-shaped, and how would that affect the relative radiation output of coal and nuclear plants? :confused:

14

I’m pro-nuke as well, but the high cost of nuclear has to be dealt with. Most of the radioactive waste issues could handled with fast breeder reactors and recycled fuel rods and/or the adoption of thorium over uranium as a fuel source. But before any of that can take place, there needs to be some legal protection against NIMBYs as legal challenges to nukes raises the costs by more than double. Perhaps small scale, self contained reactors, insured by the government is a required first step to greater adoption.

15

I will add that the argument “we should just overcome the objections to nuclear that are based on NIMBYism” is totally missing the entire point. It’s like saying, “if we can just overcome the concern about tens of thousands of homicides, the left can come to love gun rights,” or “if we can just overcome the concern about socialism, the right can come to love single payer health care.” If one simply dismisses the major controversy about an issue, anything can become reasonable.

I’m not saying this as an objection to nuclear power. I’m saying this as an objection to the arguments made for nuclear power.

16

How much money would Nevada be compensated for nuclear waste disposal? If the price were right, perhaps Texas, California, Washington or Idaho might be willing to underbid Nevada. Let the free market help determine what nuclear plants must pay for waste disposal. Bad idea?

17

Nuclear and renewables inherently conflict with each other.

The reason is pretty simple. Advances in wind turbine design and manufacturing have made them dramatically cheaper per watt produced when the wind is blowing. Similar advances in solar have brought it’s cost per watt down immensely, to the point that it’s the cheapest form of power in some biomes when it is producing.

So it puts you in a situation where when the sun’s out when the wind is blowing, you actually may be slightly over 100% of grid load just from renewables. Other times, it may be a dark and cold and calm night and you have a huge demand for power.

Nuclear can’t really respond to these load changes. If you ever get a nuclear plant running, you want it to run at full rated reactor power 24/7, and you want customers to be forced to pay per kWh full freight (10 cents or more) for every kWh the reactor produces, all day all the time. Otherwise you just can’t really pay the bills on one of these.

So it just doesn’t work. You don’t want to be installing nuclear reactors if 30%+ of the time, renewables are producing all the power you need.

Instead what you want are cheaper generators, ones that can burn fuel when needed but don’t cost much to idle. So you want a mix of co-gen natural gas plants, which you want to kick on first when the grid needs it. Gas turbine based. And then you want piston engine natural gas generators, because they are the cheapest per watt of generating capacity but less efficient, to kick on during that rare 5-10% when you need it.

And batteries, though batteries are very expensive, so you use them more like a grid-scale UPS, where they only supply power in brief spurts for a few minutes.

You want to make coal illegal because of the air pollution. If you do need to use coal, there are ways to turn it into natural gas without releasing any coal smoke to the atmosphere.

And before anyone comments me on breathless futurism, this is what is happening right now. In Texas, where we have an unregulated grid, there is rapid shift to wind + natural gas by free market forces.

18

I agree, limitations on nuclear power due to public concern about safety are inherent to a society and system of govt like we have in the US. It would be one thing for Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks to discuss how much attention they should pay to local opposition to nuclear plants, but it’s just meaningless for nobody internet posters (I include myself in that category:) ) to breezily wave off the issue in the US, or other rich democracies where it’s been a major limitation.

Plus ‘NIMBY’ is not nearly the only issue. Look at the fiasco of the (only) two recent nuclear plant projects in the US, in Georgia and South Carolina. One cancelled with billions down a rathole, one to be salvaged (as of now) in a decidedly Pyrrhic victory from a local rate payer’s POV, and after the bankruptcy of the only US based (though foreign owned) commercial reactor provider. ‘Expensive’ for nuclear assumes the cost estimates given when the projects are proposed. It doesn’t cover the massive cost overruns these projects have always been subject to. And both those projects were to build new plants on existing nuclear sites so didn’t have major ‘NIMBY’ issues.

If the ‘limits to growth’ type predictions of running out of fossil fuels had panned out that would be one thing. But now nat gas is much more plentiful in the US than when this debate was had in past years. Some big new plants are being built in eg. PA in areas where the gas is partly ‘stranded’ otherwise and sells below benchmark prices. I’m not ignoring renewables, but it’s a somewhat separate debate because they are (by and large) intermittent sources so making them a large % of power production involves big issues not reflected in standard wiki links quoting lower costs now for solar/wind than gas for unstored power. Although, any new source is added at the margin, so a little solar/wind is also much cheaper than a little more nuclear and another economic headwind to nuclear.

Projects for new coal fired plants in the US have practically evaporated in recent years. The only real issue with coal is whether utilities should be forced to shut down coal plants which have still have economic life remaining. Again in the US, plenty of new coal plants in China, India etc. But in the US from now after the latest round of financial disasters nobody is going to consider nuclear without some implausible level of govt subsidy/gtee. Realistically new baseload plants will be gas fueled. Renewables can be competitive but only when measuring the cost of non-stored power with a fairly low limit to what % of the whole grid they can be. Pending breakthroughs in storage costs which may or may not happen.

But discussion of expanding renewables to a large % of power is often like nuclear, based on ‘here’s what I’d like’ qualitative statements not what stuff really costs (as of now) and what people are wiling to pay for electricity (as if that was somehow irrelevant).

19

Read above. Renewables, especially wind, get along quite well with natural gas. This is because the capital cost of natural gas plants is pretty low per watt, and when the plant is idle you’re saving on both fuel and per runtime hour maintenance costs.

So deploying the correct percentage of wind pairs well the natural gas and you have a solution that is good enough for now.

The long term solution, albeit stupid political tribalism may prevent it from being implemented, is to slowly ratchet up a carbon emissions tax (or cap) on the fossil fuel plants. Do this at a smooth and steady rate so the utility companies can switchover smoothly and so that electric rates smoothly stay the same or increase appropriately. (consumers can respond by increasing efficiency, you can trivially make most American homes and apartments consume about half the power they do today by retrofitting replacement climate control and replacing the appliances and lighting)

20

It works when renewables are a fairly small %, as of now.

The second paragraph reference to ‘stupid political tribalism’ I think proves my point about the similarity of many pro-nuclear and pro-(large % of grid) renewable arguments. It’s unrealistically dismissively waving off opposition to one’s preferred plans in a society and system of govt where the ‘stupid’ people have as much say as smart ones.

There’s paranoid fear of nuclear power, and also legitimate concern. There’s bull headed denial of any risk to green house gas emissions, and there’s the reality of what it would really cost to greatly reduce them and what people are really willing to pay for power.

Gross cost I mean. The argument would of course be that whatever that gross cost increase might be, it’s offset by the avoided cost of serious/catastrophic climate change or risk thereof. But in fact that cost/risk is not at all clear quantitatively. And it’s almost certainly lower in temperate zone rich countries than the world as a whole. The Obama admin’s Clean Power Plan was based on an estimate of the world cost, same studies give a much lower US cost, IOW estimate of the cost of climate change on the US. It’s valid to adopt the political opinion that US consumers should bear the world cost of GHG emissions. But it’s not necessarily ‘stupid’ or ‘tribal’ to disagree. Also considering all such estimates are rough, in reality. Or even if it is ‘stupid’, the reality is that much higher power costs will meet resistance, if that’s the result of a policy.

OTOH if as you imply in your previous post this is all happening due to free market forces, there’s no need to worry. But a largely renewables grid is not going to happen via market forces without a big change in technology. If that comes about, great, IMO.