Nuclear power can be done safely as long as the extremely robust safety regulations, along the lines of the very strict oversight Naval Reactors performs, are maintained. Due to the extreme risks, IMO it pretty much requires massive government involvement. But with such oversight, IMO it’s the most powerful weapon against climate change in terms of energy.
The piece doesn’t mention things like thorium based reactors which would be much, much safer than current uranium based systems.
Sometimes, what I or anybody else “think” doesn’t matter because there is data to refer to. Factual matters are separate from matters of faith- believe what you must, but the numbers won’t change, and so the numbers are what ultimately matter. We can acknowledge weaknesses in data collection and the margin of error in things and apply human judgement to form a picture of a situation, but still it is best to keep things impersonal and rooted in the data we all share. So let’s take a look at Shodan’s cite, mmmkay?
So, 2129-1368=761. 761 deaths in the area in question were from “that other evacuation”. Not really what I “think”, but what the (human-collected) data tells us.
Dude, you can stop with the strawmanning right now. I am aware that there was a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan. That is, yanno, why there was a nuclear disaster in Fukushima in the first place. I think just about everybody knows this.
Yeah, you could say (part of) my argument is that “very few people died from radiation”, depending on your sense of “very few” lives. The thrust of my comments was that Shodan was minimizing the damage, both in terms of lives lost and economic/cleanup/environmental damage. Thing about radiation pollution though is that it can take decades for it to kill people. So, if someone gets zapped in their twenties, and dies of an ultra-rare cancer in their forties, and this happens at a highly statistically unlikely rate, wouldn’t you say, another decade from now, that those people also died from radiation? Or would you prefer to narrow the discussion to the number of people killed by the concrete blown off the roof in the explosion, since that much is obvious and it helps the discussion lead to your desired result? Because I just want to be real about things.
Now, estimates for the full cost of the Fukushima cleanup run to a trillion dollars. In the end maybe it will “only” be $500 billion? Who knows? Did the entire tsunami disaster cost that much? I really don’t know. All I am saying is that Fukushima presents us with a real-world example of the downside risks presented by nuclear power. Why would we want to exclude such a thing from the discussion? Me, I am all for including the risks of coal, oil, gas, wind, solar, geothermal, wave power and so on, the advantages and drawbacks of them all, so that we can make an informed decision on how to proceed. I mean, look at my handle. If we aren’t making an informed decision, what kind of decision are we making?
Maybe a veteran of these discussions like you becomes weary of seeing the same points raised again and again, and they start to seem like bs. If p then q. So, if the same old same old, then bs. Got it. Argument from pathos- your “feelings” are that you are “tired” because of the repetition, and this sort of dyspeptic reaction colors your judgement such that the conclusions reached are “bs”. I found the article in the OP to be far more persuasive than your ham-handed, dismissive summary FWIW.
What level of horseshit are you talking about? You’re mostly ranting and angry at the discussion. Sorry you’re having a bad day?
So the evacuation period might have been too long. So what? It was a freaking nuclear accident. Know why they evacuated 100,000 people in the first place? Because they were going to get hurt or killed, because of the nuclear accident. Can’t we let this be part of the discussion, neither minimizing nor exaggerating it?
It happened exactly one time since 1966? A trillion dollar, 30-year disaster? Should every nation in the world accept one of these in that kind of timeframe? Maybe three or four for the US and China since they are so much bigger? Trillions in downside for everybody, and potentially orders of magnitude more deaths due to radiation if the kind of cloud that flew out to sea and poisoned the poor kids on the Ronald Reagan were to fly over, say, Beijing or Los Angeles? One Fukushima in every European country, every African country, Australia, maybe the Philippines and Venezuela, and so on, all over the world, just one teensy little nuclear accident per country per 75 years or so is what you are willing to accept?
Dude, I get it that the discussion takes place against the backdrop of climate change, and in the context of competing forms of power generation. Instead of just throwing all these things on the table in a sort of a fit, could you maybe pull it together into a coherent argument please?
Cite? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this all looks like bar napkin calculation to me. Look at what the nuclear expert in the OP’s article says about Japan:
Why should I trust your raving over the verifiable statements of the OP’s nuclear expert?
Propping up your conclusion like this makes you seem childish. Anti-vaxxers are completely unrelated to the discussion, and I am not just like them. You certainly haven’t shown that, or much else about your views on nuclear. Would you please make your point in a more convincing way?
I have heard of those, and some other, newer designs as well, but don’t know much about them. What makes the thorium reactors so much safer? How are they on cost?
Um…no. I don’t think we shall. For one, his cite wasn’t anything special or definitive, so I’m unsure why we’d simply use that and not, oh, say google it ourselves. A quick Google search turns up…well, a lot of nothing. I did find this Time article interesting (it’s dated 2018):
Now, true, the Japanese government could be hiding the additional 760 (761-1, using your figures :p) deaths, or perhaps they are denying them compensation, or maybe they have taken them all out and secretly shot them or something, but this seems to indicate that your math is just a bit off. We are talking about direct radiation deaths here, and, frankly, there weren’t very many (or any). Now, you might be talking about potential future deaths, of which there will certainly be a few due to increased chances of cancer. This could, indeed, be 700 or so down the road, though it’s all probability as they haven’t died as yet. But, perhaps we should do another Google search (instead of relying on the one Shodan provided) to see if, maybe, there are any similar deaths due to coal in Japan? That seems reasonable. Here is an article discussing it:
This is, of course, an ANNUAL (estimated) death toll. So, let’s do the math here, shall we? If we assume you are right, and the Japanese government has, indeed, covered up over 700 deaths, and if we assume that this has happened every year since Fukushima (the Japanese government is notorious for such large scale coverups), then it looks to me as if nuclear energy has, at a minimum, killed over 400 less people per year. Of course, this is ridiculous…because, the fact is, it hasn’t killed those 700 even one time, let alone each year, while coal in Japan has. And this is the NORMAL operating condition for coal…not a fluke once in a millennium situation such as Fukushima, which was a golden BB wrt an improbable chain of events.
As a poster up thread stated, no one should be criticizing nuclear as long as one coal power plant continues. And, the thing is, Japan has few actual options EXCEPT coal as an alternative to nuclear. If they could have switched to wind and solar (which they have tried) they would have, since they get a lot of shit about them moving back towards coal…and rightfully so. I’ve actually heard, though I can’t be bothered to look it up, that they are starting to rethink their move away from nuclear…quietly, of course. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it’s something I heard but isn’t backed up by facts. But since we are talking about facts, your extrapolation of deaths from a Wiki article is…well, wrong. And, seriously man, it’s trivially easy to have looked this up for yourself. You can, of course, find articles that support some huge death toll from nuclear radiation for Fukushima…in the same way you could find articles supporting an anti-vaxx stance, or some other CT on the internet.
Perhaps if you read it closer it wouldnt’ have been raving? I wasn’t talking about Japan, but the US. In the US, we have 20% of our power production done by nuclear. So, replacing that means…well, 20% more power from somewhere needed. I can sort of do this calculation in my head, but if you want me to go through it I can. I’m positing there that in the next few decades, with the current trajectory, we won’t have any nuclear plants left. Again, this seems fairly simple…we aren’t making new ones, ones currently being used are aging and will eventually go to end of life and be shut down…something has to replace them. I’m saying I HOPE that this would be wind and solar, but it can’t possibly replace all of it because, again, wind and solar don’t produce energy consistently as we need it too. Perhaps in that time frame large scale batteries or some other magic tech will come along, but today it can’t. Now, if you need cites for this…well, no, I don’t think I’m going to do the prove water is wet thingy here. What you cited from the expert doesn’t do anything at all to address what my actual point was, and if you don’t want to trust a ranter on the internet, that’s fine. 
No, I wasn’t having a bad day, and yeah, I’m kind of tired of this. It gets old seeing the same things brought up over and over. There are real, solid arguments against nuclear. Cost is the best one. But using the cost of cleanup for a one-off disaster? Or trying to conflate the deaths to some ridiculous level that STILL doesn’t come close to the regular operating costs in terms of death to the alternative that is actually in use and will be for the foreseeable future? Basically, not even sure why you bother with those silly arguments…or really any. Your side won! Rejoice in your victory! Your side has saved us all from the evils and massive danger of nuclear energy! Go team!
I’ve made this argument a few times. It’s usually been ignored as “futuristic thinking” even though the reality on the ground is it’s happening.
Look beyond the past just a little bit. Stop arguing over exactly how many people were killed, or what the risks of nuclear power actually are or might be.
It’s actually not relevant.
As an engineering optimization problem, renewables are outright winners.
Why is this? The reason is that without the risk of a catastrophic release of fission products, you need a fraction of the safety inspections or paperwork or component by component analysis and justification. Solar panels and their associated electrical systems do need some level of engineering to them, but they can be mass manufactured by automated systems and built as self-contained modular units that require minimal skill or labor to install. It’s possible to optimize every single penny out of the production and installation pipeline because if you save a penny and later something goes wrong, the primary risk is just early failure of the device. No release of fission products, no huge fire, just the solar panel or inverter or battery bricks itself. Or, at worst, catches fire, but you enclose the fireprone components in metal boxes (this is why Tesla battery installations are separate metal cabinets - it limits fires to one box destroyed) and greatly limit the damage.
There’s also other tricks - wind turbines don’t seem to be cost optimized to shave every penny, instead, modern turbines are just much, much bigger, so that all the expensive equipment they use generates more energy for the capital cost.
As a side note, this also applies to comparing renewables to fossil fuels. With renewables, once a site is selected and bought and prepared, costs remain very consistent forever. Components need to be replaced as they fail, and there are warranties, but that’s it. No difficult effort involving geologists and special equipment for fracking the next well site as you slowly burn all the easy to access fossil fuels and have to keep drilling in ever more difficult and technically complex areas. Also, with renewables the primary hazard is just electrical fires and falls, things that are far easier to prevent than the dangers involved with storage/handling of massive amounts of flammable liquids and gasses.
A wind farm or solar park will continue to produce as long as the failed modules are periodically replaced. Also, the maintenance tasks are very much automatable.
So, renewables are going to keep getting cheaper over time. There are additional levels of automation that haven’t been done yet - fully automated delivery, installation, manufacturing, and mining isn’t here yet but it will be. I think there is at least another 10x worth of cost reduction in renewables that is feasible with the latest advances in machine learning/robotics. (once these advances are pushed to production software systems and mass deployed, automating most of the global mining/manufacturing/transport/warehousing/installation/maintenence). Oil and gas and nuclear do not benefit as much from these advances in automation because each well site is unique and because robotic systems won’t be perfectly reliable and thus trustworthy enough to maintain and run a nuclear reactor.
Except you haven’t solved the key issue, that being that both wind and solar are variable while our requirements are for steady power 24/7/365. So, you are still going to need something to do that and to fill in the gaps and maintain the load. Which, if you are discounting nuclear, means fossil fuels. As long as you and everyone accepts that this is the reality, then sure…we should be building wind and solar. I think you are handwaving away some of the costs, as there is maintenance on both systems that will be ongoing, and with solar there is degradation of the panels over time and with wind there is degradation of the turbines, both systems will need constant maintenance and down cycles, and solar is pretty land intensive whether we are talking a distributive system or a central one. But none of that is insurmountable…it’s just more than you are portraying it to be in your apples to orangutans comparison between wind/solar and nuclear. There really is no comparison at this time because of what I said in the first sentence…so, that’s where you need to put your mad engineering skills, not to the back end. Until and unless that changes, nuclear can only be compared to the fossil fuel power generation systems, because only they can meet the requirement. Maybe down the line Tesla or someone else will be able to provide city scale battery systems that can keep an entire city running 24/7/365 with stored energy from wind and solar, but that doesn’t exist today and isn’t likely to do so for decades if not longer wrt scaling it to every city and town and community even in the US, let alone world wide. When you see LA, say, or New York or London with such a system then you can say we might be 10 years or so away from such a system.
Hopefully we’ll have that sort of time to give into this irrational fear of nuclear and play along hoping for technical solutions to make wind and solar meet our critical needs. We shall see. And with that, I think I’m out of here unless something new or interesting pops up. Ado.
Nuclear…also has this problem. When you say “base load” what you don’t realize is that with enough wind, geographically spread out, the probability that all wind everywhere is 0 is also 0. There will be some base supply of power. The flaw with renewables and nuclear is that neither is dispatch-able.
The reason is that with nuclear, the economics require that each operating reactor be running at as close to 100% power as possible all of the time. In fact, there are some technical limitations that prevent the turbines from running below 50% power or so - this is the reason why most nuclear plants can’t generate their own backup power with reactor heated steam.
So, practical nuclear installations will have no dispatch-able power to offer. Whenever the power grid has a large increase in demand, something else has to make up the difference.
Obviously, as you note, batteries are so expensive that they can really only be sized to meet “short tail” requirements - battery pack facilities need to be sized to where they are discharging a significant amount of their capacity to the grid at a premium price basically every day.
What is the long term solution? Well, fossil fuels are a great way to store very large quantities of energy in high density, liquid forms. One option would be to use excess solar + wind energy to convert atmospheric C02 back to methane or methanol. The trouble with this is the first part, concentrating the CO2, is very energy intensive.
Another is demand shaping. The so-called “smart grid”.
Every time there is a sudden demand for electricity, in reality the cost to most users is low if they don’t get all the energy they demand at that instant. Most residential and commercial demand is for air conditioning, which can be slowed or paused. Factories that are robotic can pause many operations until more power is available. Aluminum electrolysis plants can in principle reduce power (they need to keep the metal molten but they don’t have to electrolyze at full speed). Electric cars can pause recharging.
These days, large farms of computer chips being used for machine learning runs can also be paused or downclocked, they are presumably going to be an increasing part of the energy grid.
Anyways, with a smart grid where pricing is variable and users have equipment able to reduce energy consumption when the pricing is high, it would be possible to use mostly renewables. Obviously, data centers handling economically valuable real time transactions (real time stores, stock trading) and hospitals would all need backup generators.
So much for giving the victory to others… 
In any case, I’m not discounting nuclear, but there are very good reasons and evidence to report that even with current technology we can use both solar and wind to deal with the issue.
Important to notice here is that I have seen many times criticism that claims that researchers are not seeing the limitations (sun does not shine all the time, wind does not blow all the time, etc) when in reality they do.
So, the point I made many times before stands, we can do it easily with nuclear on the mix* but doing so with other sources is less easy but not impossible at all.
(Hence why I do support standardization and government deployment of nuclear as free enterprise is dropping the ball, just like vaccines* are seen now many times as a loss by the pharmaceutical industry now.)
** And really, pharmaceutical companies are doing such dick moves because of economics, but it would be an even bigger dick move if they claimed that they are dropping vaccines because of what antivaxxeers are doing. And as an aside, it has been very insulting from you to equate anti-vaxxers with the ones opposing nuclear power, they are loopy of course; but they have very plausible reasons for their opposition and not completely and absolutely insane ones like the anti-vaxxers do.
Gigo, how many years do you think we are from mass deployment of robotic systems able to do any repetitive task with a reliably measurable short-term goal*?
With such systems, mass deployment to 100% capacity would just be a matter of time.
*I can define this pretty exactly if you need
Remember, robotic workers do not make nuclear cheap or easy - they don’t remove the need for government inspections or vast piles of paperwork or planning. Or very complex engineering work to design reactors.
While solar installations and battery installations in particular can be made very cost effective with robotics. The very linear rows of panels or battery packs make it easy for a robotic system to roll up and down the rows. The modular nature of each panel, inverter pack, or battery box means that modular maintenance is possible. Government inspections are much cheaper - for a given site, if the government approves N panels using a particular solution, N+1 is just a rubber stamp. (the automated system doesn’t diagnose like a human technician does - each node is self-diagnosing and also able to diagnose faults in neighboring nodes. For example, a breaker box node can tell a connected inverter node is faulty because no current is flowing from it. Once a fault is identified, a robot just goes and yanks the entire faulty module for recycling/refurbishment by other robots in a facility elsewhere)
One other point on grid responsiveness is that hydroelectric is very responsive, very cheap, and green. There’s a maximum amount of energy you can get out of any given facility over the course of a year or so, but that amount of energy can be distributed during the year in many different ways. If smart metering can get the variation in demand below the total averaged output of hydro plants, then the hydro plants can take it the rest of the way.
The biggest catch is that, due to global warming, there are a lot of places where we don’t really know what that maximum yearly amount of energy is. We used to know, based on past history, but now rainfall patterns are different from what they used to be.
Hydro also doesn’t scale with population or industrial growth. The closest tech equivalent is I think flow batteries, where tanks of somewhat toxic chemicals are serving the same purpose, just using a different mechanism and with higher density. Obviously, flow batteries can be built anywhere in any quantity, so long as the materials used to make the liquid reagents are available at a economical prices.
While leaks of toxic chemicals aren’t great, in principle, flow batteries can be recycled forever, especially since they are kept in central locations.
Pumped hydro can be built in places where normal hydro would not. There are still limits, but the water needs are lower than most dams.
Personally, I think the argument is over: renewables have won already. We aren’t getting more coal plants, and we aren’t getting more nuclear plants. Natural gas will survive for a while but it’ll lose the cost war against renewables.
For my money, the reason isn’t just cost, but capital cost. And specifically, the vast cost overruns that we see in $B+ projects.
When a nuclear project fails, you get nothing. You get less than nothing, actually–you get an abandoned structure that now has to be dismantled. A solar or wind farm project (already less likely to have an overrun) doesn’t have the same problem. You might get fewer panels or turbines out of it, but it still works.
Instead of nuclear, we should be building out the grid, with massive transcontinental DC links. As you note elsewhere, it’s always blowing somewhere. And while the sun does sometimes set on the US empire, having the entire latitude of the US available broadens the times of day in which solar is producing, as well as compensating for cloud cover.
So, I thought I’d post this video about reasons for nuclear, by Michael Shellenberger. I don’t agree with everything he’s saying here, but basically this is a good video showing most of my own thoughts on this subject for anyone who is interested.
I’m not GigoBuster, but it sounds like you are suggesting mass robotic manufacturing of solar panels from construction to transportation to in situ mounting and hookup and all the rest. Is that correct?
If so, the approximate answer is ‘never’, in the sense that if we ever get to the point where we could do something like that, the world will be so different that the arguments we are having here will be moot. For one thing, such automated manufacturing would apply to everything from nuclear plants to CO2 scrubbers.
Even inside factories we haven’t figured out how to automate 100% of the activities. Even auto plants which have been automated heavily still require many workers to do the stuff the machines just aren’t capable of doing. I have visited a lot of automated plants, since I used to work in factory automation. All of them are teeming with humans. Remember when Elon Musk announced that he was going to be building ‘lights out’ automated factories with no people in them? That didn’t happen. He grossly overestimated our ability to automate things.
And the factory floor is the *easiest place to automate. Today there is little to no on-site automation of installations, because there isn’t enough site-to-site consistency to automate a process. Installing a solar panel on a roof always results in problems that it takes human judgement to solve, just as installing plumbing or wiring does. You don’t see a lot of robots on job sites, and you won’t for a long time unless they are doing menial tasks (like a robotic mixture stirrer, or a robotic nail gun or something).
The day may eventually come when you can order an installation of some sort and have robots deliver it and install it, but if that day comes it won’t be for decades, and it will bring with it so many changes to the world that all the numbers we’re using today are moot.
Now, you could see technologies like 3D printing bring down costs, and those are available now and could be scaled up to 3D print buildings or large concrete or steel support structures and the like. But then, those technologies could also be used to build other types of energy installations.
Seriously, what do you base this on?? We ARE getting more coal plants…China is building gobs of the things, and so are many other countries. Natural gas will ‘survive’?? It’s expanding and nothing is looking to be able to replace it. Renewables have ‘won’?? Based on what? I just don’t know where some of you guys get this stuff from. Renewables have certainly expanded their deployment footprint, and percentage of the overall production, but not by enough to say they have ‘won’ anything. And they won’t, either, until the fundamental issue of the intermittent nature is solved. And it’s not going to be as simple as ‘well, we’ll just build them all across the country and ship power wherever we want’, because it doesn’t work that way.
Here’s the other thing: If time is really of the essence and we have to transition within 12 years, doe anyone here seriously believe that this can be done with primarily wind and solar? If hou do, you are living in a fantasy land. The scale of engineering that is required to change over the Earth’s power grids to intermittant wind and solar power is immense. If we engaged in the most rapid shift to those power sources as is politically feasible, say at the speed of Germany, we might be able to add another 10-20% of total renewable capacity by that time. Unfortantely, we will also have increased our global energy requirements by 10-20% in that time, so we’ll still be burning approximately as much fossil fuel as we are now.
Nuclear power buildout could be accelerated dramatically simply by cutting the most expensive regulations and putting moratoriums on lawsuits demanding environmental reviews and such once a license to construct a plant has been given. China can build nuclear plants in four or five years for about $5 billion dollars. They haven’t had a major accident with one yet. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear power and has some of the lowest electricity prices in Europe. Sweden gets 40% of its electricity from nuclear. So we know it can be done. It’s not pie-in-the-sky. We just have to be levelheaded about risks.
It’s time to try something different than "tax fossil fuels, and subsidize renewables’. It’s not working. For one thing, the taxes are being rejected decisively by voters everywhere they have been implemented. Ontario voted in a carbon tax, and that government was kicked out. Alberta voted in a carbon tax, and that government was voted out. Our Prime Minister implemted a carbon tax, and he’s now polling well below the opposition. Australia just defied the polls and put the Liberals in power in a majority on an election that was seen as primarily a referendum on climate policy.
Furthermore, the carbon taxes currently being implemented are too low to make much of a difference. Energy consumption is very inelastic and doesn’t respond quickly to price signals. Higher gasoline prices don’t translate into lower consumption until people buy new cars, which on average takes about a decade. And if people are rejecting these taxes at this low level, imagine what they’d do if the tax REALLY hurt, as it would have to if you want to change short-term consumption patterns.
A winning, lower carbon policy that has a chance of actually succeeding is ‘all of the above’, with nuclear taking the lead and being the largest percentage of new construction. Where solar makes sense and the people want it, by all means build solar. If your town is situated near a mountain pass with sustained high winds, by all means build a wind plant. Wind is cost-competitive in the most suitable regions, but there aren’t enough of those regions left undeveloped for wind to be more than maybe 20-30% of power. Solar can make up another 10-20% perhaps, and perhaps we can keep the grid stable with that much intermittent power by adopting smart metering and such. That’s doubtful, though. Today, places like Germany and South Australia are having grid stability problems at about 25% of total power coming from intermittant renewables.
What’s feasible in the medium term (a couple of decades) would be a transition to a grid that contained maybe 50% nuclear, 25% Wind and 10% solar, with 15% natural gas for load-following and in distant locations where the population doesn’t warrant larger plants. Many northern communities for example.
If the environmental movement is going to continue to insist on 100% renewables, be prepared for CO2 emissions to at best remain about where they are for the next 50 years. And if they insist on imposing carbon taxes on people without a solid plan for fixing the problem, be prepared for the election of a lot more conservative governments.
In the context of my post, “we” is the United States. I’ll eat my hat if another coal plant is ever built in the US.
You can see planned US electrical capacity expansions on this summary page. 64% is wind+solar. 34% is natural gas. And that’s under a Republican administration that’s as friendly as can be toward CO2 emissions. Renewables are already dominating, but they would be even more dominant if natural gas plants paid for their emissions.
The page also lists planned retirements. Coal and natural gas make strong showings. Unfortunately, nuclear plants are being decommissioned as well. Notably absent from the retirement chart are wind+solar.
You’re the one living in a fantasy land if you think any of this can be done in the US. Realistically, it’s just not going to happen. Also, you forgot to add: massively subsidize nuclear plants by having the government act as an insurer of last resort.
We aren’t going to enter a low-carbon future without disruption. It’s too late for that. Fortunately, in a few decades, renewables will dominate generation whether or not they get subsidized. We can speed it up by stopping CO2 subsidies, and reduce disruption by building out the grid, but it won’t make a difference in the long term.