The case for nuclear power

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not a Great Debater, so I put this in IMHO.

I was born in the Space Age, grew up during the Cold War, and read and watched a lot of science fiction. So I was exposed to the concept of nuclear power being the energy of the Future, and I was aware of nuclear annihilation. The thing of it is… I’ve always known the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Forty years ago, I got the impression that anti-nuclear protesters thought that nuclear power plants were just bombs waiting to explode. They’re not. The U.S. Navy has 83 nuclear-powered vessels, and none of them have blown up. In the 60 years the U.S. Navy has been operating nuclear vessels (I know you want to pronounce it like Chekov), none of the retired ship have blown up. Nuclear power seems fairly safe to me. From the linked article, ‘In terms of deaths from accidents or pollution, nuclear is far safer than coal or natural gas - the largest sources of electricity in the U.S.’

I have two concerns with nuclear power: The waste needs to be stored somewhere; and nuclear waste could be used to construct dirty bombs. Considering all of the security around nuclear energy, I’m not overly-concerned about terrorists stealing the waste. It seems to me that it would be easier to obtain low-level radioactive materials from other sources such as hospitals and industries. A terrorist isn’t going to make a nuclear bomb. Low-level radioactive materials such as I mentioned are enough to induce panic. So as I said, I’m not paranoid about it.

The storage issue though, is a tough one. I believe it’s currently being stored on-site. Not ideal, but it doesn’t seem to have cause many (if any) problems. (Before you bring up Hanford, the contamination is from a different time and mindset, the waste is from weapons production, and they’re trying to clean up 70-year-old technology and practices.) There’s Yucca Mountain, which I’m not 100% on board with because I have environmental concerns that I haven’t read about for around 20 years. [NB: I’ve just read that the NRC and DOE determined that Yucca Mountain would be safe for one million years.) If that’s true, then my main concern seems to have been removed.

In the late-'70s, I heard that we might be about to enter a new Ice Age. I heard a lot about Nuclear Winter. Now we have global climate change. (Should the thermohaline circulation shut down due to melting ice caps, we may yet get the new Ice Age. But I digress…) We really need to reduce our carbon emissions. It takes a lot of carbon to build a nuclear power plant (or pretty much any other large-scale project). But once running, they don’t emit carbon. Nuclear power plants are not reliant on sun, wind, weather, etc. [NB: I want solar and wind energy too.] More, non-polluting, power generation would be a green way to charge more, better, electric vehicles; not to mention industries that use electrical power. It seems to me that more nuclear energy would do a lot, once they’re built, to reduce carbon emissions.

Finally, we have a lot of natural gas in the U.S.; but it’s a fossil fuel, and it will run out eventually. Clean nuclear energy can make it last longer, and also reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil that may be disrupted out of caprice (1973 and 1979 oil crises, 2007 price increases) or wars (Russian invasion of Ukraine).

Building and certifying nuclear power plants takes years and years. We really should have started building newer plants at least a couple of decades ago.

2

Someone will come in with science reasons why it’s great and why it’s terrible. That’s not me. I think that safe nuclear power is a necessity to avoid the worst of climate change, if that’s even still possible.

However, the costs and issues must be higher and worse than proponents claim. I say this because there are countries that have major energy needs and don’t have any sort of green movement or protesters, and no NIMBY issues: China and Russia.

Both have nuclear power plants, so both know how to build them. Neither has to worry about protestors or popular pushback. China definitely doesn’t have to worry about NIMBY issues – if they had a good spot for a plant, they would just tell their folks to move.

Given that, why aren’t Russia and China already predominantly nuclear powered? Why is China building lots of new coal plants?

3

I attended a conference about nuclear waste management about thirteen years ago, and part of that included a tour of the Yucca Mountain site. My take-away was that the people in charge had a really good handle on all the scientific and technical issues, but had no clue about how to deal with people.

Physically, Yucca Mountain would work*, but I don’t think they’ll get approval to use it any time soon.

*They went into great detail about the geology of not just Yucca Mt, but all the surrounding mountains. They’re essentially all different, even though they look very similar, and they chose Yucca because it’s unique geology was just about perfect for a long-term, geologically stable storage facility.

4

Nuclear power plants have a reasonable $$ per year per megawatt-hour cost, but nobody said they are not currently very expensive to build (capital costs) and take the better part of a decade to construct and bring on-line.

If you want to recycle nuclear waste, that’s another expensive plant.

5

Did you watch the HBO series Chernobyl? They address that, a bit. Nuclear does cost more to build than coal or oil power plants. To build it safe is even more expensive. And if you don’t care about adding things like scrubbers to your coal plant, the cost difference becomes even greater. Ultimately, China and Russia care a lot more about money than they do the environment, so they go for the cheapest option they can.

6

China is the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world.

They’re a lot cheaper than a runaway greenhouse climate.

7

To me, this is a case for a carbon tax or cap and trade. If we fully priced in the cost of carbon, then nuclear power may seem cheaper (or maybe not), solar and wind will likely be cheaper (but less reliable), etc.

If we could get China on board for a carbon cap-and-trade system (after getting our own polluters on board first), then the market will figure things out. As it is, nuclear energy can’t compete in the market place because we all get to dump our carbon dioxide for free.

8

OMG SOCIALISM!!!1one BENGHAZI! BUTTERY MALES! HUNTER’S LAPTOP!

That’s the problem as I see it. We can’t tax carbon because the corporations that rely on carbon will rile up the base. They’ll scare them about Big Government taxing the Little Guy (which wouldn’t actually be happening), and tell them that this socialism will turn us into North Korea.

I’m from a different time. I remember as a child, Iron Eyes Cody made me guilty for having tossed a Jack In The Box bag out the car window. The ‘Make America Beautiful’ campaign guilted a lot of people into changing their ways. Then there were the ‘atomic energy’ campaigns of the 1950s. I didn’t exist then, so I didn’t experience the Zeitgeist, but I’ve seen the occasional newsreel or vintage commercial that was intended to make this new Miracle Power popular.

I think one reason we started shutting down nuclear power plants (aside from their not making electricity as cheaply as advertised) is because of shifts in public opinion, from earlier ‘back to nature’ types to those who were frightened after Three Mile Island. Public opinion is powerful. So I think a greater number of pro-nuclear ads (I’ve seen a couple not un-recently), as well as ‘Take your foreign oil and shove it! We don’t need you!’ rah-rah ads, and other… well, let’s face it; emotional manipulations would make the carbon taes not seem quite so bad.

9

We have discussed this before. Nuclear Energy is not Zero Carbon emissions. In fact Nuclear energy carbon emissions are around 1/2 to indeterminate of that of coal.

We have to look at the Carbon emissions from well to wheel of petroleum products, and the same applies for Nuclear Power too. Since, nuclear mining is closely guarded, there is no way of knowing how much water pollution and Carbon emissions results from mining and concentrating Nuclear fuels.

The cite below calculated CO2 emissions from Nuclear Power to be half of Natural gas. The cite did not consider water pollution from nuclear fuel mining which is severe in many parts of the world.

Nuclear is a great fuel option, but it is just one of the things to fight climate change and it comes with other tradeoffs.

10

Cheaper in the long run, not the short, and cheap people more often than not think short-term.

11

Cody was was born Espera Oscar de Corti from two Italian parents. He was an actor onscreen and lived a giant lie offscreen.

I would say that most of the public discussion of nuclear power has also been a giant lie, from all sides. The dangers are less than the antis say they are and the problems are harder to solve than the pros think they are. I’ve swung between those poles over my lifetime. Right now I’ve of the opinion that nuclear power would be helpful in reducing carbon emissions but the public prejudice against them - largely driven by the media - makes them impossible in most countries. Cost and the time to build makes them unpalatable elsewhere.

There was a media frenzy making these claims then. It was based, basically, on one book, albeit by a top climate scientist, Stephen Schneider. His model was not accurate and neither he nor others could reliably recreate his predictions and he long ago discarded them and became a staunch believer in global warming and a voice of despair about popular science writing.

Popular media almost always oversimplify the complexities of science and almost always overstate the extreme findings of studies, especially when they’re reporting on single studies rather than the broad consensus among the vast majority of scientists.

Scientists need to change virtually everything about the way they communicate science. The present system has been failing for the entirety of its existence, which I would put as coinciding with the entirety of the atomic age.

12

It’s not possible. The defect in the system is not with scientists, or even journalists, but with the very concept of news. News thrives on newness, which is completely incompatible with scientific discourse. There are scientific news outlets which do a fine job, but the public is not interested in them. And it is not possible to make the public interested in them without destroying the very thing that makes them useful.

Breathless, fact-light reporting will always win the public’s attention. The best thing that scientists can do is ensure that useful information is easily accessible so that the small portion of people that are interested can find it.

13

As far as nuclear power goes:
The best bang-for-the-buck thing we can do regarding nuclear power is to not close existing, functional plants.

I am extremely skeptical about the cost effectiveness of new nuclear vs. solar+storage (which is already cheap, and goes down in cost year after year). However, that is largely to do with the high capital cost of plants, and our decreasing ability as a society to build them on schedule.

However, none of this applies to working plants, like Diablo Canyon in California. Even the plants that are at the end of their current license can likely be renewed. It is utterly stupid to shut down plants that are producing close to zero marginal CO2 emissions. The embedded emissions are already paid for; in fact we’d incur greater emissions to shut them down due to the decommissioning cost.

So step 1 should be to stop doing the dumb thing. And let’s not confuse not shutting down functional plants with building new plants. They aren’t remotely the same thing.

14

I agree with @Dr.Strangelove. Building new nuke plants is horribly carbon intensive. Besides the emissions from all the diesel construction equipment, there’s tons and tons of concrete in them. Concrete is probably the worst material around in terms of CO2 emissions. I haven’t looked for any figures, but I bet it takes many years before you get a net gain in terms of reduction of CO2 from a nuke plant, especially if you’re comparing it with a natural gas combined cycle plant.

Which is why you want to run the ones you have as much as you can. You got that sunk cost of the concrete and you can only get it back by running the plant as long as you can.

15

Good news about Diablo Canyon:

I’d prefer 10 years to 5, but given the rate at which renewables+storage are being installed, it should be enough time to build suitable replacement capacity.

16

I agree with this, too, as an interim measure and for the reasons stated by @Dr.Strangelove and @dtilque.

But no more new nuke plants. Why?

Let me know when a wind or solar farm can be taken hostage and used as an world-threatening weapon of war.

17

Ehh… I’d suggest perhaps no new nuke plants if you happen to border a pathocracy. Countries with secure borders don’t really face the same problems.

Still, even for secure countries, there is value in the decentralized nature of renewables. They’re inherently resilient not just against terrorism/war, but natural disasters, mechanical failures, and even ordinary maintenance downtime. If one wind turbine or one section of a solar plant goes down, it’s no big deal. A nuclear plant going offline is a big deal.

18

The arguments against expansion of nuclear power make is sound like it hasn’t been done, but France gets about 3/4 of it’s power from nuclear. Other countries are also up there in terms of % of their power from nuclear. Granted, many of the top nuclear power countries are an order of magnitude smaller than the US, but they are comparable to US states, so it’s not like virgin forest here.

I, too, have gone back and forth on the question, but today I am leaning more to the “let’s talk about it and see what the current technology can do” camp. AIUI, there are projects afloat that seek to create smaller, more nimble nuclear power generation, which makes the investment and timelines a lot more attractive compared to the massive power plants of the prior generation. I think one the the threads around here someone shared info on a company looking to build portable power plants that could be driven to a location in the back of a box truck, dropped-off, installed, and plugged into the existing power grid. When it reaches end-of-life, the unit is replaced with another and the old one is disposed-of properly. Kind of like the propane tank exchange. I am interesting in this type of creativity when it comes to nuclear power.

19

The US is already the #1 nuclear power producing country (by total capacity, not percentage). The issues:

  • Time has shown that it’s not really a cheap source of power. The capital costs are immense, and were only ever reasonable because we didn’t fully understand or account for some of the secondary costs.
  • It’s just a very slow moving industry. There are obvious safety reasons for this. We need to move faster on clean energy than the nuclear industry is capable of.
  • It is not without environmental issues. There’s the aforementioned dependence on large amounts of concrete for construction. And the reactors typically depend on water, which may be in short supply. It also heats the water it depends on, possibly killing off local ecosystems.

I’m not opposed to continued research on nuclear power, particularly the smaller plants that you mention. It may be that these can eventually be mass produced in factories, decreasing some of the high capital costs. But I’m almost certain that new nuclear will not play a significant part in AGW harm reduction. Next-gen designs are decades off.

20

Agree. We should definitely have an eye on the risks as well as the potential rewards. I was just mentioning its good to keep an open mind about it rather than the visceral anti-nuke response of old (which was me).