Fossil fuels produce terrible waste we store in the air that we breathe.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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I don't think even one of those fast fission reactors is still in operation. Wonder why that is.
They're politically unpopular, more expensive than fossil fuels, and most of them are prototypes.
India and China each have one. Russia has 3.
Because, it does not destroy all waste, despite a cartoon claiming as such and gullible people falling for it? Even "short-term" waste needs to be stored somewhere for about 500 years. Sure, it ain't like the others in terms of length of time but anyone who thinks that is a cheap fact or trivial is an idealogue. Since they can exist at both extremes.
So the issue of the water table or general environmental contamination is not addressed the way OP claims. There are also higher costs and higher grade fuel is required. Not to say that there are not some advantages but the cartoon is just plain incorrect and taking a toodler's view on some serious concerns. The Wikipedia article has a list of disavantages for anyone to look into.
I blame Nixon for why nuclear power in the US sucks. He axed research on any reactor types that didn't produce plutonium for weapons, including thorium reactors. Hope he's rotting in hell.
According to the future-documentary Futurama, his head is in a jar somewhere, waiting to assume the presidency once again with the headless body of Spiro Agnew.
Nah, they also depict Henry Kissinger that way, but we all know he's dragging what's left of his body across a minefield in hell.
According to Wikipedia there are a few, with more planned. But not nearly enough. IMO, we should switch over to Fast Reactors as standard.
Canada has CANDU breeder reactors, still in use. They also produce the majority of medical isotopes.
CANDU reactors are pressurized heavy-water reactors not Fast-neutron reactors.
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Since there are economic, ecological, conceptual and engineering problems, only five Fast-neutron reactors are operational at the moment. Three in Russia, one in India and one in China. Not surprisingly these are countries that also have an interest in producing weapons grade Plutonium, which FNRs are capable of.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2968/066003007
https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-breeder-reactor
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs15glaser.pdf
https://energypost.eu/slow-death-fast-reactors/
https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/report/
And while nuclear energy production peaked 1996 at 17% and was nowhere near overtaking fossil energy production in it's 70(!) year long existence, Renewables will overtake fossil fuel power production in 2025, with only minute risks for the biosphere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-power-set-to-surpass-coal-globally-by-2025/
https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/REI_NuclearReport_201902_EN.pdf
So why cling to an outdated technology when there are viable solutions at hand, which are nowhere as complicated and dangerous as nuclear fission? It's the monetary interest of a dying nuclear industry and its lobbyists.
It's not really needed. Waste is a boogeyman, but not really a problem. It takes an incredibly small volume to store the waste, and it can be reduced with reprocessing to run in the exact same reactors.
At some point in the future when there actually is a huge amount of waste causing issues, then it might make sense to build a reactor to use it.
when there actually is a huge amount of waste
Over 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored across Europe (excluding Russia and Slovakia), most of which in France (Table 1). Within the EU, France accounts for 25 percent of the current spent nuclear fuel, followed by Germany (15 percent) and the United Kingdom (14 percent). Spent nuclear fuel is considered high-level waste. Though present in comparably small volumes, it makes up the vast bulk of radioactivity.
~ 2019 https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
Last "brilliant" plan I heard was dumping it in a hole deep enough we'd never need, nor be able to recover it.
A quick question . Other than a suprisingly lot of complexity involved in diggin the hole of sufficient size and depth why wouldnt it work ( or is that the reason )?
It would work. Much like every other sweeping of something under the rug, hiding it elsewhere for it to be a problem later always works for the person throwing it away.
After all, why would we ever wish to extract the remaining U~238~ from the spent fuel? We utilised a full 4%, let's call that square and throw the rest down a hole. Perish the thought we'll ever need to dig near this massive radioactive hole. Or that an undiscovered cycle of nature causes it to come back to bite us. Just throw it down there with the rest of the resources we never want to safely explore, and who cares if there's something valuable within it's sphere of radioactivity.
Apologies for the sarcasm. I consider the idea both wasteful and foolish.
I'm a fan of both Thorium and Molten-Salt Reactors.
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Have a look at the size of the Finnish waste repository.
"They'll hold a total of 5,500 tonnes of waste," says Joutsen. "So Onkalo will take all the high-level nuclear waste produced by Finland's five nuclear power plants in their entire life cycles."
The Finnish repository is designed with a life of 100,000 years. Homo sapiens (i.e us) have existed for about 300,000 years.
Article about the problems warnings that will comprehensible in 10,000 years https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
So nuclear plants of the future won't be run by companies who cut important corners on safety to maximize shareholder profits while offloading the consequences to the government and public?
I mean that's how things work in China with state owned companies. I don't see why everybody shouldn't be doing that.
Good news: America already does it too!
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Or just bury it miles underground in the desert, but for some fucking reason a state is as likely to store it upstream in a concrete shack as they are to ship it to the mojave where the pit is literally already dug out and designated.
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If nuclear stops getting outstripped by renewables on cost I might be more interested in it.
Just remember that Low level Radioactive Waste is a thing, unless there’s a fast reactor that runs on smocks and used syringes
Nuclear power is still the most expensive way to produce electricity by a large margin.
It is not.
And there is no large margin.
Referencing several sources that consider a vast array of power generation technologies, from offshore wind to biomass, terrestrial wind, solar, gas, coal and nuclear, and nuclear energy has high start up costs and it's also not the cheapest per megawatt of power. It's basically middle of the road on most of the stats I've seen.
Solar, by comparison, has had a much higher LCOE as recently as 5-10 years ago. Most power construction projects take longer than that to plan and build, then operate for decades. Until the last few years, solar hasn't even be a competitor compared to other options.
Beyond direct cost nuclear has been one of very few green energy sources, the nuclear materials are contained and safely disposed of. Unless there's a serious disaster, it's one of the most ecologically friendly forms of energy. The only sources better are hydroelectric, and geothermal. The only "waste" from nuclear is literal steam, and some limited nuclear waste product. A miniscule amount compared to the energy produced.
Last time I checked, all of the nuclear waste that's ever been produced can fit in an area the size of a football field, with room to spare. For all the energy produced, it's very small.
Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.
I live in Ontario, Canada, our entire power infrastructure is hydroelectric and nuclear. I'm proud of that.
Nuclear isn't the demon that people believe it is.
LCOE of solar is lower than nuclear for eleven years now. Wind has had lower LCOE than nuclear for 14 years now. See figure 52.
Building a new nuclear power plant takes 9-12 years on average. Hinkley Point C in southeast England was announced in 2008 (16 years ago) and is projected to be finished in 2028, with costs now being estimated around $40 billion. These long realisation times are not a european issue alone, as Korea's Shin-Hanul-1-2 faces similar problems.
Safely storing nuclear waste is expensive, too.
Maybe I shouldn't step in this but here it goes. My personal opinion is that nuclear isn't good or bad, it's an option that's available. I have never heard a nuclear activist say that nuclear energy is superior to renewables. It's not black and white, it's all a complex mix of demands and limitations that dictate if renewables are better for an area or nuclear. It's a whole lot of gray, but nuclear energy isn't as dangerous as some make it out to be.
Your comment is valid, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
I wouldn't say that nuclear is the best option, nor cleanest, nor safest. Like anything, it's all circumstantial. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes other options are simply better.
From what I've seen, nuclear is the best for base load on a grid scale. Basically: the load that the grid continually has, is well served by nuclear. To my understanding, most nuclear generation is fairly slow to ramp up and down, compared to other technologies, so keeping it at a relatively steady level, with minor adjustments and changes through the day as required, is the best use case for it. It's stable and consistent, which is to say it doesn't vary based on external factors, like the weather, where solar/wind are heavily influenced by external factors.
It's entirely on a case by case basis.
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No. And pretending it is longer for solar is false too. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
Thanks, that LCOE reference shows that nuclear is on par with several other technologies.
It thoroughly disproves the point that it is more expensive "by a large margin". At most it's a bit more costly than some things, but it's also not far off from some other options, so it's definitely not expensive... At least not by a large margin.
Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.
Is that a bad reason really? When nuclear goes bad it goes really bad and it can go bad due to human error which is something that will always be present. When a solar panel catastrophically fails it doesn't render the surrounding environment uninhabitable for decades.
The thing is, nuclear problems are big and scary events, but they're rare.
Think like plane crash vs other transportation accidents: they make bigger news, but they're actually safer than most other solutions.
Here's the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
It does seem that your solar example is the one thing that's safer than nuclear sccording to this chart though, so maybe you knew!
I'm not just talking about deaths though. If a bad nuclear accident happens it makes a large part of the surrounding area uninhabitable and the fallout in the air can cause long term very nasty health problems for a lot of people. If that happened near a big city the results would be devastating. Considering that the other clean energy options are comparable in terms of danger per output during general operation it just doesn't seem worth it. Obviously I'm not a nuclear engineer and maybe I need to read up on it more but that's my current thoughts on the matter.
As for the rarity, they may be but we are operating on an indefinite time scale. Sooner or later something is going to happen again with how complex those things are. Especially with corporations involved that are more concerned with making their stocks go up than keeping people safe. Here's a better explanation of what I'm talking about - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_accident
Those are very good points.
This specific source doesn't highlight it and I don't have the opportunity to find something else at the moment, but when I first heard about it ( in a ted talk that I can't remember the name of... ) they had highlighted that health complications followed similar curves. The worsts of course being burning stuff due to dumping it in the air, but that most renewables had their lot of injuries too, that their just less publicized.
Here's my full take of nuclear/renewables
My understanding is that most power grid depending on renewables need an alternate energy source for when power demands ramp up: they need some energy sources that they can tune depending of needs, at the drop of a hat.
Hydro does that, you can let more or less water through. (I happen to live aomewhere where most of our energy is Hydro) Things like wind or solar are more complicated.
As an energy appoint source, I think nuclear is a good fit for some use cases.
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This comic is pretty bad. It oversimplifies both positions to the point of complete triviality, then uses it to mock a group of people. The comic is not insightful, or funny, or representative or any real people in any sense. It's basically just a jab at some people that the author doesn't like.
then why aren't we already doing that? Probably it's not as cost-effective? nuclear power is already crazy expensive.
That being said a very small amount of nuclear I'm fine with, just to make up for renewable fluctuation until we figure out power storage
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