Why haven't we switched to nuclear fission power?

Question inspired by this article I read on yahoo news this morning.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ripples-us-nuclear-plant-closings-131457228.html

Whenever the topic of global warming comes up it seems like the debate usually focuses on renewable energy like solar and wind vs. traditional coal fired power plants. Is nuclear pretty much a non-option at this point? I rarely see either side arguing in favor of nuclear. Are the objections mostly political, such as it’s too expensive or deciding where to store the waste? Is there practical considerations, such as there not being enough uranium to switch to nuclear on a large scale? What’s the straight dope on this? Apologies if this topic has been done previously.

A lot of pro-science, pro-environment people argue for fission. The issues are indeed mostly political. There might be issues with the availability of uranium, but how large an increase in fission do you want to use as basis for the analysis?

Fission power can also use Thorium or plutonium. It doesn’t have to be uranium.

It’s “political” in the sense that it’s unpopular with the public because of safety concerns, especially after Fukushima.

But apart from that, the reason we still rely on fossil fuels is because it’s cheap. Which is partly because there is not enough public support for making fossil fuel producers accountable for the pollution they produce.

Let’s say enough to replace all the coal plants in the US.

I think it is mostly a NIMBY issue, not a technology one.

(I was looking at nuclear power stations in relation to a different thread a couple of days ago and was struck by this map–I hadn’t realized how clumpy the distribution was. Living in Upstate South Carolina, I practically can’t throw a rock without hitting a nuclear power plant. When I was in school, I went on not one but two field trips to The World Of Energy, at a location with a scenic view of the cooling towers. )

The supply of uranium is not really an issue - at current rates of consumption, we have enough for over 200 years. If we used fast-breeder reactors, we have enough for about 60,000 years (cite).

As naita mentions, the objections are political and emotional rather than based on cost-benefit analysis. The word “nuclear” is scary, and people prefer technologies that kill a hundred people a year for a hundred years over technologies that kill a thousand people every hundred years.

Regards,
Shodan

Remove the quote marks and we’re in agreement, it’s political in the sense that basing ones safety concerns on the results of building nuclear reactors in earthquake and tsunami zones should not dominate debates on building them in geologically/meteorologically/hydrologically stable areas.

Nothing like an easy uncontentious question to start the week. :smiley:

Its complex. You got the high points pretty much right up. There are lots of competing questions and only some of them are technical.

Cost and time. Nuclear reactors take a huge amount of effort to build. The cost is very high, and the construction time is very long. The industry has never really got into its stride with known good debugged designs, and it seems almost every new reactor has some problem, involving delays and massive cost over-runs. If you are going nuclear you need long term planning and finance.

Worry about long term costs. Decommissioning reactors is a pretty much unexplored problem. So far they seem to cost about as much to take apart and redeem the land as it cost to build them in the first place. Even if that is 25 to 40 years in the future, that cost hangs over the head of the owners from day one. To the point that the capital value of a new reactor may be (in some senses) essentially zero.

Reliability issues and accidents. This is a big problem. As has been seen in Japan. Even a simple incident can cascade into a major disaster, with cleanup costs that defy the imagination. Fukushima is going to make the cleanup and compensation costs of the Deep Water Horizon look like a minor event. Nobody can realistically work out what the cost is going to be, and now the courts are sheeting home liability to the government as well. As a good estimate the cleanup costs will exceed the entire value of the Japanese nuclear industry. The costs of managing Chernobyl are similar. The new containment arch cost insane money, and needed an international effort to fund and build. And nobody knows how long it will take to sort the mess out. They are hoping that it can be done before the design life of the arch is up - which is 100 years. If you are financing a reactor the possibility that a accident can wipe the entire company out is going to keep you awake at night.

Waste. No matter what sort of reactor you have, you gets lots of very nasty hot waste. Reactors are full of neutrons, and everything becomes radioactive. Some of if is not too bad. Some of it is insanely bad. Nobody has a workable solution to the current spent fuel rods. They are simply stored on-site, initially in pools whilst the really hot stuff burns up, and then in free air to stay cool. There are a numberof projects around the word to build waste dumps. All have run into trouble, with technical problems, massive cost overruns, and inevitable NIMBY opposition. A waste dump anywhere near your home seems to be about as welcome as a half-way house for convicted sex offenders next-door.

There are significant logistical impediments to large scale commissioning of reactors. They require heroic engineering. The containment and pressure vessels are fabricated by only a handful of companies in the world that are able to handle the scale and technical challenges. The alloys needed are not cheap, and involve high cost and rare components. (Neutrons wreck everything, and making the metals strong and also resistant to embrittlement over the lifetime of the reactor is challenging.) You can’t even recycle the high cost alloys from an old reactor - they are too radioactive and contaminated.

There is continuing political opposition to nuclear. Much of this is the historical anti-nuke opposition that is rooted in the anti-nuclear weapons movement. Despite essentially no technical or logistical reason for it to be true, the anti-nuke groups consider the nuclear power industry to be an arm of the military with a clandestine purpose being the supply of nuclear materials for making weapons. Also there is much opposition on general environmental grounds - again an accident is almost always a very bad thing for just about any living creature anywhere close by.

Politically there is much traction behind ‘clean’ power, and the costs are now down to the point where solar, solar thermal, and wind are making big in-roads into the market. Add new technology for battery storage and these renewable power sources become just as reliable as traditional big inertia generation systems. They are not as cheap as a coal fired or gas fired power station, but given the current uncertainly about the long term cost of owning a nuclear power station, they don’t look too bad. The existence of government subsidies for renewables distorts the market enough that you would have to have rocks in your head to want to invest your own money in a nuclear power station.

However. Many nations have low levels of locally available power. Japan has about zero. Countries like Britain and France worry significantly about their energy security. They don’t like being beholden to imported gas or coal to run their power stations. Nuclear provides such countries with a strategically important core generation capability, one that insulates them from the problems that may result from international strife (which may be anything from politically inspired embargoes, runaway prices due to cartel action, right up to tanks roaming across the plains of Europe again.

If we’re talking about coal, it’s more like 13,000 every year, just in the US:

China’s coal-related death toll, both from mining and burning of coal, is much, much larger.

Chernobyl is expected to kill about 4,000 people before its lingering effects fade to noise, and Fukushima hasn’t killed anybody.

So if we’re keeping score over the last thirty years, it’s:

Coal: 390,000 dead in the US alone
Nuclear[sup]*[/sup]: 4,000 dead in the whole world
[sup]*Don’t go trying to lump Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the nuclear category; we’re talking about peaceful nuclear power in this thread.[/sup]

Politically raw numbers of deaths is an almost meaningless statistic. Cigarettes kill many more, cars twice as many as coal. It is deaths that you can sheet home to a specific incident that matter politically. It is also what matters when money is at stake. You can’t sue the coal industry for your black lung, but you sure as hell can sue the owner of a nuclear power reactor if there is an accident.

The OP asked why we had not yet moved over to nuclear fission power. Not why we should not in the future.

The bottom line IMHO is that there isn’t the money in it. Over the last couple of decades there has been increasing unease about the straightforward commercial sense in investing in nuclear. The reasons for going nuclear are mostly strategic energy security. That is the reason governments will support nuclear (both with direct and indirect subsidy.) But after that it gets thin. The argument for zero emissions is one that competes with climate change sceptics politically. Support for zero emissions comes from much the same side of politics as support for renewables. Opposition to any notion of the need for zero emissions comes from the same side that traditionally supported coal and nuclear. Historically, absent any pressing strategic imperative for energy security, nations went down the route of easy, fast built, and cheap power stations. Sadly this included coal, but modern combined cycle gas fuelled power stations are very efficient, and get about half the CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions as coal. The advent of wind and solar as affordable options pretty much left nuclear in the cold.

Here’s a priceless gem from The Master in “What’s the likeliest doomsday scenario?” – May 18th, 2012:

Emphasis mine

It’s too bad that a lot of the fear of nuclear power have come from the failure of either:

  1. a hilariously unsafe, unstable design which only the Soviets would put into use (Chernobyl,) or

  2. 60-year-old reactor designs being subjected to a situation way beyond their ability to survive (Fukushima.) This was of course made worse by some silly decisions made when building the plants.

Handford and Windscale both were graphite moderated reactor designs. Windscale of course didn’t go well either. But they were well before the Chernobyl reactors were built, and they were not intended for power generation. The Fukushima reactors are 60 year old designs - but this is like saying that a 747 is also a 50 year old technology. They are boiling water reactors, which although less popular than the (older) pressurised water reactors, between them account for most of the reactors extant. GE Hitachi still make boiling water reactors. Pressurised water reactors became the default design through, arguably, accidents of history. (Three Mile Island is a pressurised water reactor.)

What killed Fukushima could kill almost any of the extant reactors around the world today. What is often overlooked in the story is that Fukushima II - another almost identical reactor site - was also hit by the same tsunami, but it had been successfully hardened, and the electrical switchgear for the backup generators survived the enslaught, and reactors were fine. Had the upgrades to the Fukushima I switchgear been carried out in time, there would have been no failures, and no accident.

It wasn’t the age of the design that killed Fukushima. It was managerial complacency. Much the same as what killed Chernobyl. (At Chernobyl a young, relatively inexperienced team were on night shift and ordered to carry out an emergency drill test - a test which went rather badly wrong. The managers responsible, not those in the control room, got to spend a lot of time in stripes contemplating their sins.)

Again, IMHO, this is what worries people - these accidents were not technical in root cause. Complacency, arguably some level of petty corruption, and general human failures were responsible. If you look at the history of nuclear accidents, SL-1, Windscale, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, a pattern emerges. The systems are brittle, and human failings (not error directly) can lead to trivial problems that can cascade dramatically very quickly. And the aftermath is beyond any budget to cope with. All the good will in the world is not proof against such human failings. NASA simply failed to learn the lesson after Challenger, and almost exactly the same pattern of institutionalised complacency resulted in the loss of Columbia. The result of that was cancelling the programme. Similar thoughts will go through the minds of anyone responsible for the financial well-being of any large scale corporation in the power industry. It only takes one accident, but the company will be toast. It might not be this decade, but it could be next. BP survived Deep Water Horizon, but it is one of the largest corporations on the planet. A regional power supply company would be much less lucky.

Oh I get that. My point with the “60 year old design” quip is that while GE-Hitachi are still developing BWR tech, the latest designs are supposed to be “walk-away safe” and- like the Westinghouse AP1000- can keep themselves cooled for quite some time even in the case of a station blackout. In contrast to the BWRs at Fukushima; once they lost backup power to keep the circulation pumps running, they were doomed.

Of course, a good part of the answer is how you define “we”.

Ontario produces 60% of all its electricity from nuclear power in three major nuclear complexes. Nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar together produce more than 90% of all electricity.

The coal phase-out in Ontario included the shutdown of the largest coal-fired power plant in North America, the 3964 MW Nanticoke Generating Station which was shut down in stages in 2010, 2011, and 2013. The amount of electricity produced from coal has been zero since the last plant shutdown in 2014.

Even before Chernobyl or Fukushima, the Three Mile Island accidentin 1979 was a major factor in slowing / stopping the construction of new nuclear plants in the U.S.

But you can’t explain away these two disasters by saying that the disasters were caused by avoidable design or maintenance decisions. In real life, those bad decisions were actually made, and the disasters actually happened.

Reassuring people that your nuclear power plant can’t fail like Chernobyl or Fukushima because you’re not an idiot isn’t very reassuring, because the guys who ran Chernobyl and Fukushima would have said the exact same thing the day before the disasters.

Maybe you’re right, and your power plant is perfectly safe. Or maybe it isn’t. How is the general public supposed to tell the difference?

Of course coal power plants and coal mines have disasters all the time, and it would literally take all day to list all the various coal mining, coal transport, and coal power disasters. And that’s not even counting pollution caused by coal plants.

But the fact is that nuclear power was deliberately propagandized as cheap, safe, and clean for decades after WWII. Nuclear power was seen as a national security issue, the nuclear power industry was a siamese twin of the nuclear weapons industry. And we’ve found over the years that nuclear power is not nearly as cheap, safe, or clean as it was trumpeted as being.

The issues of nuclear power could be handled. There are technological solutions. We could bury the waste in Yucca Mountain. We could review plants for safety, we could estimate actual end to end costs and not forget externalities like, you know, decommissioning the plant. But the nuclear industry lost the trust of the people, and complaining that lack of trust is irrational doesn’t do a thing.

All WANO member plants were reviewed for safety after Fukushima.

Decommissioning costs are now included in the cost of building and operating a nuclear facility.

So, you’re saying that these catastrophes were caused by fuck ups? Yes, sure, like any other industrial catastrophe. What on Earth makes you think that we aren’t going to fuck up again? Humans fuck up. They will keep fucking up for the foreseeable future. Including when operating nuclear plants.

Engineers designing a nuclear plan can fuck up, make an egrerious mistake somewhere (think of the spaceship lost because someone mistook feet for meters). They can oversight something that will appear obvious in insight. Or planers will underestimate a known risk, like in Fukushima (there has been a nuclear plant built in France on a fault line. A minor one, where an earthquake is unlikely, but not impossible). You can’t assume that companies building or operating nuclear plants will be above cutting corners for higher profit, like they do for all kinds of projects. People operating nuclear plants too can make egrerious mistakes when facing unusual circumstances.

Massive failures will only happen if people do massive mistakes isn’t a valid argument, because people do massive mistakes. And that’s how we already had two major accidents. There will inevitably be others. That’s not even taking into account deliberate actions. Terrorism (a nuclear plant can’t withstand a 9/11 type attack, for instance. They aren’t designed for that), sabotage, crazy people…and plainly direct attacks in case of war (disabling the ennemy’s power production is definitely a thing that is done).

And the problem here, even if the risk is low, is that the stakes are very high. As Francis Vaughan pointed out, even if there are no, or few, direct victims, the monetary cost of a major nuclear accident is going to be absurdly high. If a single accident actually costs more than the value of the whole industry, you definitely need to take that into account when assessing risks and making a decision. And a new Chernobyl isn’t even a worst case scenario. For instance, if something equivalent happened in the Nogent nuclear plant in France, 1/5 of the french population would need to be evacuated, and the whole Paris area to be abandoned. It’s not anymore an absurdly high cost, it’s plainly impossible. Millions of people would have to keep living in a dangerously irradiated area, and the whole country would be economically crippled for the foreseeable future.

I’m not even talking about nuclear waste, because I don’t think that this is the main issue with nuclear power.
No, the current system of power production isn’t satisfying, especially given the issue of climate change, and the rising need for power (China, etc…). Coal plants aren’t any good. Renewable energy production isn’t going to be sufficient any time soon. And fusion power is permanently 30 years in the future. But it still doesn’t make the nuclear option a magical, risk-free solution that only uneducated idiots are going to be warry of. Denying that nuclear power comes with a risk is delusional, on a “consider a spherical cow” level.