Statements like “technology ‘x’ is potentially dangerous” are completely useless with specific data. Everything is potentially dangerous. Air pollution causes some 35,000 premature deaths from cardiopulmonary diseases in Europe every year, and in addition to that, burning coal releases more radiation than from a properly operating nuclear plant because it concentrates thorium and other radioactive minerals in the fly ash. Coal is deadly, dirty, dangerous stuff that needs to stay in the ground, even if it wasn’t a very large contributor to CO2 and other emissions.
Nuclear plants can be made safe. Chernobyl was nothing less than an accident waiting to happen, so poorly designed that its default operational mode was to accelerate the rate of reaction unless explicitly damped. Fukushima and TMI all had specific preventable problems, bad practices, and design issues. Risk is relative and has to be quantified and assessed rationally.
For me, the main objection is that we have not learned to deal with the nuclear waste. For current reactors, the waste has to be stored away from human habitation for hundreds of thousands years and we really have no idea what to do with it.
But there is an alternative. The learning curve would be steep, but once we were past that, it might be cheaper than current reactors. But the main thing is that it would render the nuclear waste situation manageable (although still a problem, to be sure). This is called a traveling wave reactor. Not only does it use a tenth as much uranium for a given amount of power, it could also use our current stock of nuclear waste as input. The waste it generates consists mainly of short-lived radioactives that need be sequestered for only some decades. It still has to be done of course. But the fact that it generates much less waste, that it can handle the current waste and that its waste is relatively short lived makes it something that should be developed.
But only a government can do this and our government is not interested, partly because of the learning curve I mentioned and partly because it won’t spend money on alternatives to fossil fuels. I have heard reports that China is seriously investigating it.
I’m pretty sure the Trump Administration will redefine current safety regulations, storage requirements, import and export of fuels, liability of owners, mandatory insurance, and such job-killing pettifoggery that hinders profits — including the legal meaning of radiation — in many ways that will satisfy the most ardent of nuclear enthusiasts.
The newer designs are way safer. Pebble bed and thorium reactor cores can’t melt down, so relative to 1950 designs that is a big change. But the main obstacle is the political head wind of NIMBY’s who equate nuclear energy with nuclear bombs.
Another very important point about Fukushima is that the real disaster wasn’t what happened at the nuclear plant; the real disaster was the magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent largest tsunami ever recorded. The purely natural disaster caused far more damage directly than the nuclear incident did, and almost nothing humans build can stand up to that unscathed. In fact, there was a lot of other infrastructure in Fukushima that failed, too, including fossil fuel infrastructure, which also caused more damage than the nuclear power plant. The lesson we really should be taking from Fukushima was that, even in the face of an unprecedented natural disaster, the nuclear plant still managed to say safe, and came very close even to staying functional.
Yes, I understood clearly that those accidents were preventable. That was precisely my point. You seem to think : “they were preventable, so it’s an abberation. Rationally, nuclear power is super safe”.
I say precisely that it’s not an abberation. It’s how things happen all the time. Human error, incompetence, greed… Those are things we must expect. Bridges and dams collapse, chemical plants catch fire, offshore platform fail…all because of “preventable problems, bad practices, design issues”. That’s the world we live in. In an ideal world, those things wouldn’t happen and nuclear plants would be perfectly safe (and all the rest too). In the real world, those things happen and nuclear plants aren’t perfectly safe.
And that’s something you must take into account when deciding to go the nuclear way. You can’t assume an ideal world. Hence my comment about the “spherical cow”. And the specific issue nuclear plants have is that a failure might have extraordinarily grievious consequences.
However the lesson is also: that, a nuclear reactor that comes very close to staying functional is capable of creating a contaminated area of land that displaces tens of thousands of people, and will bankrupt the owning company.
Life has lots of these in-computable risk situations. Where the outcome of a bad day is so bad that it becomes impossible to sensibly plan for or account for it. Yet we continue with the activity. Driving a car is the usual example. Everyday you take on a risk that kills well over 10,000 people a year in the US alone. But you still do it.
The problem for a nuclear power station is that that risk isn’t socialised in quite the same manner. Investors and governments are not keen on anything of the magnitude involved in a nuclear accident. The problems and their impacts don’t scale linearly. Nor are they predictable. The next bad day could involve a Chernobyl level of contamination. Unlike Fukushima - where the inhabitants are being invited to return home to land that is now only 20 times more radioactive than that recommended for permanent residence (20mSv is the maximum dose rate for workers in the nuclear industry, so the argument is that returning to the Fukushima area is OK, it is just like getting a job in the nuclear reactor and getting your maximum dose every year. Even if you are a young child.) Pripyat, with a population of 50,000, was evacuated in the days after the Chernobyl accident, and there is no current understanding of when the region will become safe to live in again. In the west, an accident of this scale would wipe out multinational companies and bring down governments. That is the problem. There are known extant examples of bad days. Engineering assurances that they won’t happen again, are countered by incidents where reactors are very close to staying functional but still bankrupt their owners and contaminate large populated areas.
Back to the OP - her asked why nuclear fission has not become the dominant power generation technology. This is the main reason.
One could ask if the government would be prepared to do a deal - I will magically stop all road fatalities in the US for a year, but my payment will be that a sinkhole will open up under a random city area and 5,000 people will be swallowed up, never to be seen again. Human nature being what it is, nobody would accept the deal.
To have a major impact on global warming in the available time frame would require a titanic, mind-boggling ramp up in reactor construction. At that scale, these could not be current Gen II or III reactors but would have to be new Gen IV reactors that are passively safe and of a type which either recycles fuel or uses a different fuel like Thorium. Generation IV reactor - Wikipedia
The Integral Fast Reactor theoretically could have almost eliminated nuclear waste, fuel supply issues and risk of plutonium proliferation. However it had it’s own problems: The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) - an Unfulfilled Promise
Optimistically, it seems technically possible to build reactors which produce very limited amounts of nuclear waste, are virtually immune to meltdown and misoperation, and stretch fuel supplies to thousands of years. However these are mostly new design concepts, not even prototypes, much less pilot plants.
The required developmental sequence is (1) Competing Gen IV designs must be studied and designs finalized (2) Prototype plants built and studied for several years. When that data is available: (3) Full-scale pilot plants built and tested for several years. When that data is available: (4) All changes incorporated into final production plants. Then (and only then) can widescale construction of those plants begin.
According to global warming calculations, the available timeframe is about 20-40 years before the entire earth must be on nearly 100% non-hydrocarbon energy: http://www.trillionthtonne.org/
How many final production new-generation fission plants would be needed? As of 2012, nuclear fission provided 10.9% of the world’s electricity. That year world total primary energy consumption (not just electrical) was 549 quadrillion BTU, or 160,896 terawatt hours. Final energy consumption is at least 32% less than primary, so that was about 109,000 terawatt hours: World energy supply and consumption - Wikipedia
World electrical consumption in 2012 was about 19,000 terawatt hrs, and nuclear fission provided about 2071 terawatt hrs. Compared to world total final energy consumption of 109,000 terawatt hrs, nuclear fission produced 2071/109000 = 1.9% of this.
Assuming the much larger non-electrical fraction of world energy consumption is magically fixed, and if the goal is limit average global temp increase to 3C, this would still require about 4,000 new fission plants by 2050, or 121 new plants per year – just for electricity. They would all have to be new plants using a new fuel cycle.
But if the goal is use predominately nuclear power for most or all energy (not just electrical) and within a timeframe to limit temp rise to 3C, this would require roughly 200,000 fission plants by 2052, or about 6,000 new plants per year.
So nuclear fission ironically has similar problems to solar power in that it cannot be developed and deployed on the required scale within the available time. This is also optimistically assuming world energy consumption will not increase over the deployment period and need only meet current demand, not future demand. However world energy consumption is keyed to economic output and has never decreased for any sustained period: What is our present energy consumption like? – Jean-Marc Jancovici
Since by definition global warming is a global problem, every industrial nation on earth would have to concurrently commit to this and achieve it within the available timeframe. A single non-compliant large industrial nation could still cause global warming all by itself. E.g, China emits more CO2 today than all nations on earth combined in 1965 – at which time global warming was supposedly well under way.
Timely news that Westinghouse, the biggest name in nuclear power in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy. The linked story brings up a lot of the points described by Francis Vaughan above. It’s worth a read.
[QUOTE=Washington Post]
Toshiba has written off more than $6 billion in losses connected to its U.S. nuclear business, citing accounting problems, delays and cost overruns.
…
Westinghouse ran into trouble on both sites. Although the AP1000 was supposed to be a standard design, changes were made in South Carolina. Moreover, Westinghouse plans included modules built in Lake Charles, La., that were supposed to fit together “like pieces of Lego.” But…the Lake Charles plant was shipping faulty modules, forcing Westinghouse to reweld them at the reactor sites. An entire extra building was erected to do the welding because there was so much of it.
…
Questions of liability in the event of an accident have blocked negotiations in India…In China, too, Westinghouse has struggled with alterations in its design, delays and cost overruns.
[/QUOTE]
[ul]
[li]Targets for terror attacks[/li][li]Natural disasters (like the Tsunami in Japan) can cause a nuclear leak[/li][li]Nuclear meltdowns due to human operator error[/li][li]Nuclear costs (far) more in initial capital than most other forms of energy[/li][/ul]
Other people have already addressed the issues though. Supposedly the newer generation reactors are cheaper and safer, but I’m not sure how much investment there is in China, Europe, etc for them.
As late as the early 60’s, we were assured that “Atomic” power would make electricity “too cheap to meter”.
Then the cost rose quite a bit.
By the Time Three Mile Island made the news, “nuclear” power was already viewed with suspicion - even by industry-loving Republicans.
Diablo Canyon in CA is on an active fault line, has improperly-installed reinforcement in the containment buildings and was opposed by thousands/millions of Californians.
It went live anyway.
The Westinghouse Electric meltdown was caused by attempting to build exactly TWO reactors.
That experience will probably do more to kill nuclear than all the NIMBY, “leftist propaganda”, tree-hugging could ever do - nobody likes to write off billions of dollars - I wonder how much profit they expected to make on those projects vs. what they lost.
Taking down Toshiba was, to the Japanese, as bad as the destruction of the Westinghouse name in the US.
Having both killed by the same two projects is a lesson not soon forgotten.
Nobody assured us that “Atomic” power would make electricity too cheap to meter – not in the 1960s nor any other time. This was a one-time speculative statement made in 1954 by the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in a talk.
1954 was before the Nautilus atomic submarine ever sailed, and before the first commercial nuclear plant was ever built. There was no baseline to make authoritative assurances, and the statement was the opinion of one person said during one talk. He was not setting policy, nor speaking for the industry or scientific community, nor making any kind of commitment or promise.
Even at the time the statement was made, the Atomic Energy Commission did not endorse that, nor did other nuclear physicists, nor did the fledgling atomic energy industry, nor did science writers of that era.
He actually did not even mention fission power as the source of the “too cheap to meter” statement. There is one line of reasoning he was rather speaking of the far future when possibly fusion might eventually produce this: Too cheap to meter - Wikipedia
Safety isn’t the real rational rate limiting step. Nuclear isn’t perfectly safe (nothing is), but it is reasonably so when compared with many of the alternatives.
The real rational problem remains cost. Specifically, the up-front cost of building the infrastructure.
These things are hugely expensive and the people ponying up the money have to do so in advance of generating a single dollar. Worse, at least from an investor’s perspective, the technology - both nuclear and non-nuclear - is improving all the time by leaps and bounds - so there is no guarantee that your multi-billion dollar investment, that takes a decade or more to build, isn’t going to be thoroughly obsolete the day it is commissioned. What if in the meantime someone invents an improved battery or solar panel?
This is a lot of financial risk. Quite aside from whatever political risk exists. Even if the public was 100% in favor of building a plant, it still is enormously risky.
If you go back over the thread, 100% safe isn’t the problem. The problem is making a reactor reliable enough that there isn’t a significant chance it will bankrupt the owner, the builder, or the hosting nation. Now safety is part of that calculation. But you are in a regime where there is essentially no useful engineering or statistical data to base sensible calculations on.
Nuclear may the carbon zero, but the technology doesn’t exist in a form that can make any useful dent in the global carbon output. There are lots of paper designs for new technology reactors. Realistically any of them will take at least a decade to become a proven viable design for new projects. So right now, all current construction is based upon technology that doesn’t really cut it.
As I wrote above, a totally dispassionate look at nuclear, only based upon the economic and financial forces, would have any sane person walk away, and invest their money elsewhere.
The only reason to go nuclear is for national energy security. Even then, the Japanese have decided the risk isn’t worth it. Britain and France have decided it is. Britain is lucky in that their bad day (Windscale) was a classified defence operation, so kept under wraps until well after it was secured, and that the wind was blowing the right direction. They may have had a very different feeling about the risk rewards nationally otherwise.