Is nuclear energy all that bad?

Great Debates
1

With all the attention for sustainable energy on wind and solar, thisNewsweek article got me thinking if nuclear energy deserves the bad reputation it has. Similar studies have shown the same conclusion: Wildlife loves disasters, even nuclear ones.

Nuclear energy is a “simple” and fast solution to supply lots and lots of electricty, and it is…at least in my opinion…pretty safe.
In the roughly half a century we’ve been using nuclear plants, there have been two notable incidents: Czernobyl and Fukushima. Combined death count: Around one or two dozen, I guess. Less people than have died installing windmills.
Czernobyl was a first generation plant, uncomparible with modern facilities. Fukushima was clearly an act of God and ironically possibly the result of global warming by fossil fuels.

Also, again in my opinion, it is pretty clean. Sure, the cores stay radio active for pretty much ever, but do people realize how little waste we are talking about here compared to all the polution that even the manufacturing of solar panels and wind turbines produce?

I think its time that we give nuclear a second chance if we want to make a fast and significant reduction of fossil fuel dependancy.

2

Nuclear is expensive due to all the safety and regulations that need to be baked in, some of which are certainly part of why it is so safe. But yes, I’d definitely rather have a nuclear power plant, even in my general vicinity, than a coal plant.

Unless batteries get a lot cheaper, nuclear power may be useful for baseline low-carbon energy in places like the Florida peninsula that aren’t near elevation changes high enough to use hydro and/or or pumped storage.

3

Nuclear is fine, and there’s even safe waste disposal methods. (Safe, but requires a specialized landfill, so there will still be environmental damage.)

Unfortunately, it provokes outrage. People are scared of radiation while they’re not scared of coal or water dams. This is probably why the green movement attacks it so hard, when it makes more sense to focus on attacking coal… they’re just personally outraged.

4

Interesting question

Nuclear has a huge cost in terms of nuclear waste reprocessing. There are very facilities in the world that handle waste, it gets shipped across the world to plants like Sellafield in the UK, which is sitting on tons of highly radioactive waste that is going to dangerous for many thousands of years. These ‘safe specialised landfill’ facilities cost top dollar.

Nuclear power plants are also hugely expensive to build on a large scale. They would not be viable without government guarantees to pay an agreed amount for the power for the lifetime of the plant. They also take years to build. Renewable power and Gas power stations are much faster to build and cheaper to operate. Decommissioning nuclear power plants is also hugely expensive having to handle lots of highly contaminated hardware stored on ponds of radio active water.

Their performance characteristics are admittedly very attractive. They generate a lot of power 24/7. Great for base load power generation for a national electricity grid and they don’t pump CO2 into the atmosphere as much as fossil fuels.

Many of the costs associated with nuclear power were magnified by government involvement because it was seen a technology that was key to national energy security AND the potential to develop a nuclear weapon capability which is a sabre many countries like to rattle. You don’t get those unfortunate complications with other power sources.

Nuclear power was desperately oversold by governments when it was developed in the 1950s. ‘Power too cheap to meter’ was the phrase.

Sixty years later, that all rings rather hollow. What we have today is not what was promised! An awful lot of government money was poured into unique reactor designs.

The nuclear power industry would have developed rather differently without all the government interference. Nuclear power plants are still highly political decisions. I would compare it somewhat to the development of the space launch business which has been dominated by strategic political and military concerns rather for decades and is only now becoming free to develop according to market demand.

5

I think you’re right. Clean-up is an issue but there are answers. (For starters, you get the company to post a bond to cover clean-up costs so they can’t get out of it by going bankrupt.)

6

I’d count Three Mile Island in the same category.

You guess?

Chernobyl-related deaths could be 4000 (dismissing the more alarming/alarmist numbers put forth by Greenpeace and UCS, whose estimates range from tens to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths). Over 1300 deaths have been attributed to the Fukushima meltdown (primarily due to the evacuation).

Then, of course, are the hundreds of billions of dollars the accidents cost in cleanup alone. Not considering costs of relocation and lost productivity.

I’m adamantly pro-nuke, but let’s be realistic about the numbers involved. Don’t just guess.

7

That looks really contradictory.

8

Let’s look at the cost issue for a moment.

Why does nuclear cost more than similar coal or natural gas production? Because nuclear actually has to account for its waste, whereas the others do not. Nuclear has to store every bit of its waste products and store them for thousands of years. As it should, that’s fine.

Coal and natural gas plants do not. They simply dump their poisonous waste into the air. They just dump trillions of tons of CO2 into our air. Coal plants dump millions of tons of coal ash, coal slag, and other extremely toxic, and somewhat radioactive waste products into our water supply every year.

And then people say “nuclear is expensive!” and then by default, because you need base load energy generation, shift the market over to coal and natural gas.

So who pays for the waste that coal and NG put out? We all do. Millions of people per year have lives that are shortened, quality of life worsened, or were killed by coal generation in particular. Coal generation kills many orders of magnitude more people than nuclear does. And that’s understating the cost, since it only deals with fatalities - how many people are living with a lower quality of life due to having consumed coal waste products (which are radioactive) in our air and in our water? We could have a chernobyl every month and nuclear would still be better for the environment than coal. That’s how insanely damaging coal energy is, and no one cares.

And that doesn’t even touch global warming, where nuclear releases no co2 as part of its operation whereas coal and NG basically turn their products into co2. How many trillions of dollars (and lives and land) is global warming going to cost us? Do you think if we baked those costs into coal and natural gas generation instead of society as a whole, that they’d still be cheaper than nuclear?

Using this same logic - if nuclear plants simply burned their waste and/or dumped it into a river, it’d be a whole lot cheaper to run a nuclear plant, right? The costs would be more competitive. But people would be horrified at the thought of this, it would be absolutely unacceptable, whereas when coal and natural gas do this, no one even bats an eye. It’s completely considered the norm.

Nuclear energy is cheaper, when the lifecycle cost of generating it, including construction, uranium mining, and waste costs are accounted for. Significantly cheaper. It’s just that with coal and natural gas, the public is paying for the operating costs with worse health and global warming, rather than paying in cash to sequester the waste products like nuclear does.

Anti-nuclear attitudes in the US are just as bit as ignorant as anti-vaccine attitudes. They’re just as propagated by fearmongering and lack of ability to understand the data. But while anti-vax attitudes are more or less self-correcting (once we actually start to see things like measles outbreaks, all of those super special mommies to super special snowflakes get scared and start getting vaccinated), we’ve been plunging the Earth headlong into disaster for 70 years by not embracing nuclear.

And the worst irony of all, is that the people who call themselves environmentalists, who probably do sincerely care about the Earth and the health of people, are leading the charge against nuclear power, which is the best thing we could’ve done over the last 70 years to improve our environment. All based on irrational fears and ignorance.

Renewables are great. I hope that we go balls out on renewables and hit something like 60% energy generation from renewables by 2040. But baseload power will have a place in our energy generation scheme for decades to come. Until there’s a revolution in energy storage technology, it’s simply better to augment baseload power with renewables as best we can, but it is implausible to replace that baseload generation. So the question becomes - is that baseload generation going to be nuclear, or coal/ng?

The actual costs of nuclear, in terms of waste and potential danger, have also been mitigated to a large degree by technological and scientific development. Modern reactor designs can create much less waste, and even re-process existing stocks of nuclear waste, using it for energy, and spitting out a less toxic product. Modern reactor designs are also passively safe, where a meltdown becomes impossible because of the reactor design. But these reactor designs cannot get approval in the US due, among other sorts of red tape, nuissance lawsuits from environmentalists which are stopping us from replacing older, less efficient reactor designs with modern ones.

If we really wanted to save the world, we’d be decommissioning as many fossil fuel power plants as possible. We’d subsidize renewables, encourage research into them, and build nuclear power plants as fast as we could.

9

“If.” Bless your heart, “if.”

We don’t. We want the world saved, preferably by magic. But we don’t want to save it. That requires effort, and thought, and–most terribly–foresight.

10

I don’t know that I would. At least Chernobyl and Fukushima actually released noticeable amounts of radiation into the environment. TMI was just an expensive industrial accident.

I think he was talking about direct deaths. That there is a slightly higher incidence of cancer and other deformities in the areas that may have been affected is something to take into account, but only if we take that into account for all forms of energy production, not just nuclear.

As far as Fukushima, it was anti-nuke hysteria that caused those deaths, not nukes themselves. There were no dangerous levels of radiation in the evacuated zones.

We can be careful and have even fewer accidents going forward. I am not concerned about a repeat of any of the three “big” accidents. they were all caused by things that are very well taken care of now.

Here’s the thing, we want to save the world, but we do not want to do so by reducing our population or standard of living. Even if I thought we should, even if I was willing to do so myself, I’d have to convince everyone else to not have kids and reduce their consumption, and that’s not likely to happen.

If we want to save the world, we have to do it realistically, and that involves taking into account that we will be increasing our population, and that population will want to consume more. Any approach that begins with “reduce” is not going to work, and is not a realistic proposal.

Nuclear must be part, and a large part, of our energy production going forward. Keep in mind, we are not just replacing the electricity we consume now, we are also working on transitioning out transportation fleet over to using electricity rather than fossil fuels, which means we will be needing even more.

We have a number of exciting new designs on the drawing board, and some which have at least been tested off of paper as well. These have the potential to be much safer, “walk away safe” even, and also may be able to burn up transuranics to help solve the waste problem.

11

Nuclear is just another form of energy with its share of benefits and pitfalls. Following are the pitfalls

  1. Nuclear energy has zero carbon footprint : Nit so fast!!! Mineral processing for making nuclear fuel is very energy intensive and is fossil fueled. Same goes for nuclear waste processing. The total lifetime carbon footprint needs to be considered.

  2. NIMBY : I have climate scientist friends who are huge proponents of Climate change research and yet buy everything organic when it comes to food despite food science showing limited or no benefits . If scientists choose to ignore other scientists then why blame the general public for Not In My Back Yard. So to put up a new nuclear plant, you will need to go to a remote place : clear the trees, build long roads or transportation infrastructure and

  3. Nuclear power plants are big : Although there are newer technologies for making smaller plants, the typical plants are 1000 Mws or multiples due to a lot of factors. This then requires huge infrastructure, grids, etc etc and are not suitable for distributed power generation.

  4. Nuclear power plants use a lot of water : A 1000MW plant puts about 2000MW in the environment; a lot of that heat goes into the water and has severe environmental impact.

12

How does that compare with coal and natural gas?

13

What exactly is the carbon footprint of nuclear power, and how does it compare to coal, NG, solar and wind?

14

Cite : Accurate Quantification of Nuclear Power's Carbon Footprint

”There is no industry standard for reporting the GHG emissions of a nuclear reactor. [6] Thus, it is easy for a nuclear power company to devise its own methodology for CO2 emissions that reports they are emitting few GHGs when in reality they aren’t accounting for all the CO2 that is emitted.”

” Sovacool et. al. in 2008 performed a survey of 103 different articles that quantified the GHG emission of nuclear power. They found that these studies ranged from 1.4 g CO2/kWh to 288 g CO2/kWh. “

The median numbers for Coal are 820 and natural gas combined cycle are 490 per the 2014 IPCC.

15

I’m a little confused by that. What part of the nuclear power cycle emits CO2? Now you can make a case that manufacturing the steel used to build the plant, mining the uranium, driving waste by truck or train generates CO2, but my understanding is that the actual process of running a plant only emits water vapor and heat.

16

Good luck. Changing decades of anti-nuclear propaganda is going to be tough. Also, there is a huge up front capital cost you need to deal with. One reason plants aren’t being built in the US is because of risk. Since your capitalization is front loaded, you can’t actually make any money until down the line when you cross your ROI line…and since nuclear power plants inherently cost a lot more than other types of plants that line is 7-10 years in the future. Only after that will you start making money back…in theory. Of course, if the plant runs for it’s full life cycle, that could be decades (part of the operating costs goes to the supposed end of life stuff, but that’s a problem too). However, what happens if you get delays? What if your project is delayed a year? 2? 4? What if there are additional costs not originally planned for? Legal costs, zoning costs, new safety measures costs? What if the project is canceled or shelved for a decade? Who wants to tie up capital that long with those sorts of potential risks? Answer…almost no one. Especially since a lot of those delays are going to happen due to public fear and anti-nuclear agitation.

So, the reality is we aren’t going to be saving the planet with nuclear…not until it gets so bad that folks realize that the cost of not doing it is unacceptable. And by then it will probably be too late. Or we’ll have fusion and flying cars I guess.

17

No one said zero, but much, much less than current, yes.

And processing if fossil fueled, only because fossils fuel everything. With a nuclear economy, it would be nuclear powered, and given the enormous amount of energy trapped in the atom, will still come out well ahead.

And, that is assuming that we keep doing like we are doing, and do not improve designs to be more efficient or to use other types and methods of fuel.

Like you said, they are climate scientist, not food scientists. Scientists are even more susceptible to dunning kruger, as they think that their knowledge the field that they are knowledgeable about translates to anything outside of it.

But, you are correct that there is quite a bit of ignorance out there to be fought.

We can either fight it, or give in to it and join it. I choose the former.

they are generally that size because that is the efficient size for co-locating power. Most coal plants are in the 1000 MW range as well.

Keep in mind that all that infrastructure is to turn that steam into power, and will be needed whatever heat source you need. the reactor is actually smaller than the coal burners in a coal plant, but their turbine halls are pretty much exactly the same.

There are designs for smaller, more compact and modular reactors that wold only be a couple hundred MW each, and would essentially be plug and play into the fixed steam generators.

Coal is a bit less efficient, it just puts its waste heat into the air along with the other pollution.

The biggest problem with nuclear is that we don’t do enough of it. Everything we do is a prototype, a one off. We don’t have mass manufacturing of components and the economies of scale that go along with that. And we will not have any way of bringing the costs down until we actually start building them.

Building modular reactors that can be made in a factory or shipyard, and then shipped to the location that only needs to provide the turbine hall, will decrease the cost and complexity by orders of magnitude.

18

Well, yeah, especially when it continues to be spouted

For instance

Or until people stop spouting off anti-nuclear propaganda.

19

Is this just your guess, or do you have data to back this up? It’s not impossible - and there are certainly scientists who attempt to speak authoritatively outside of their area of expertise - but so much of learning about science is learning how to be skeptical and how human mental failings trap us into believing false things, so I personally would guess that scientists as a whole were more careful and self-reflective about the nature of their knowledge and beliefs and would not be more susceptible to dunning-krueger.

20

If you are trying to say I’m spouting anti-nuclear propaganda, well…that’s ironic. Not sure what in my post you think is anti-nuclear propaganda, but feel free to flesh out an actual rebuttal. Or not.