As the title says, I’m interested in this community’s perceptions on nuclear energy.
True sustainable > Nuclear > Fossil fuels
Transitioning out of fossil fuels is #1 priority. Whatever it takes. Even shortening the transition by one year would be worth 40 more years of nuclear wastes, which are much much more easily manageable problem (unlike CO2 you can literally store nuclear waste in a hole for thousands of years without it messing up the environment)
My long term preferred solution is renewables or fusion, but we are not yet at the point where we can deal with the intermittence (but closing that gap fast)
I am really angry at the anti-nuclear movement. If we had gone all-in in that direction in the 90s we would be out of the fossil fuel economy by now.
Seconding this. I’m very much against letting perfect be the enemy of good. Nuclear power is a useful capability and if it helps avert or slow climate change, we can work on dealing with the waste after that.
I hear and understand this perspective. For me, the overwhelming focus on carbon emissions misses the point that the planet and our relationship to it is sick. We have to consider the overall health of the planet and future generations when we make our decisions.
I’m by no means advocating for increasing the utilization of coal, oil, and gas, but just wanting to challenge my own feelings around nuclear energy.
Some how I feel like the fact that nuclear is also reliant on extraction gets lost in the focus on decarbonization.
you can literally store nuclear waste in a hole for thousands of years without it messing up the environment
No you can not, we still don’t have the technology to store it safety. And we definitely still don’t do it. If you do just a bit of research you will notice that nuclear waste is being stored in big water pools close to nuclear plants. I would not call that “safe, long term solution”.
I am really angry at the anti-nuclear movement.
Current nuclear technology was developed for nuclear weapons, it is a no go. We need to impove reserch into molten salt thorium reactors and fision, but uranium is not an option.
Notwithstanding the fact that “big water pools” would not be an extremely high tech solution and could be a long term solution, you should look into geological storage. Enclosure in glass and concrete, storage deep enough to be below aquifers, do look like they can last millions of years (which, personally I think is a waste: a radioactive material is something that radiates energy. I am sure that within a century or two we will dig up these “wastes” to generate energy, I hope we make their enclosure easily openable)
Current nuclear technology was developed for nuclear weapons
True, and internet was developed by the DARPA. That’s largely irrelevant. The effort to make weapon-grade uranium (90%) is an order of magnitude above the effort to make power plants-grade uranium (20%)
I agree that, in future, we will probably have ways to store and use energy from radioactive waste and I geological storage might probably be solution.
But… we are still not close to it, “we will solve it in the future” is what got us here.
Additionally, I just think there is no need to take such risks when there are other, safer options.
What technologies are missing in your opinion to do geological storage?
Many sites are currently operational across the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Nuclear_repository_sites
If you take a look at “Status” column, only four of them are in use. After 60 years of nuclear energy and 440 nuclear power plants in 32 countries.
I call that a big fail, and exact problem I am talking about.
We don’t even need to go into question wether thise will be safe for thousands of years, which is doubtful.
If I show you definite proof of extraterrestrial visits on Earth, it will not matter that 99.9999% of UFO sightings were fake.
I call that a big fail, and exact problem I am talking about.
No, you never specified the hypothetical blocking problems you are talking about. Existence of even one site in operation proves that no blocking problems exist.
We don’t even need to go into question whether these will be safe for thousands of years, which is doubtful.
My good man, these are designed for millions of years. Based on the observation of billions years old natural occurring isotopes. From the WP article:
Despite a long-standing agreement among many experts that geological disposal can be safe, technologically feasible and environmentally sound, a large part of the general public in many countries remains skeptical as result of anti-nuclear campaigns.
Well I am sceptical. Maybe I can believe that US and other rich nations can make it work, I have huge doubts in most of the couries being careful enough.
Personally, as it currently stands, no. But it could potentially be, given better waste treatment practices and far better regulation and consistently enforced safety requirements.
It’s far greener than fossil fuels, when run carefully at least. But between the persistent issues with waste reclamation and harmful leakage, and the massive amount of damage that can be done when mistakes are made or safety is overlooked, I don’t think it qualifies as “green”.
So from a practical standpoint, I still think new resources are better spent developing infrastructure for solar, wind, geothermal, etc. But as we are phasing out other power sources, pretty much everything else should go before we start to decommission nuclear.
In addition to this, uranium mining and processing is done in places with low environmental regulation even if the countries that ultimately use it have their own deposits and processing facilities.
Has anywhere actually solved the issue of waste handling?
Uranium can and does get recycled from one facility to the next, however there comes a point when it can’t be reused anymore to gain any meaningful amount of energy and it still has radioactivity and ultimately buried somewhere. Though arguably still better than fossil fuels, that’s an obvious and major drawback to nuclear.
I think nuclear also benefits a centralized grid structure more than community-based energy production and use.
All power generation benefits a centralized grid structure most by definition. There are scaling laws involved and humans tend not to use power at 100% all of the time, so by centralizing production and storage reductions in cost and efficiency increases in production become possible.
Isn’t the main beneficiary of centralized power generation industry and not the average citizen?
Well that depends on factors outside of the technology.
For example if a centralized power production facility was controlled by a community and used its excess capacity to produce Ammonia which was then used to provide fertilizer to increase crop yields to provide more free food to the community. Would that benefit the industry or the citizens more?
Scaling laws are real but we can collectively use them for our collective benefit or we can continue to allow a set of self-selecting few to continue to use them for their own personal gain.
Agree with you here. Fossil fuel energy sources need to be phased out before nuclear energy.
When compared to something like a coal fired power station, they too can cause similar levels of unthinkable damage when things go wrong but with the added damage whilst they operate. Nothing feels ideal at this stage and not to say it classes them as green or clean, but the bar is pretty low for improvement as it stands.
There is no such thing as clean energy; it is ultimately a question of what waste products we want to deal with and how long we expect them to last.
Ironically coal was originally sold as a green alternative to cutting down trees and making charcoal.
But if we repeal the ban on nuclear recycling, 95.3% of supposed nuclear waste becomes fuel we can put right back into reactors (as it is just unused fuel). The only actual waste products are the transuranics.
I appreciate the comment on what waste we’re willing to deal with. It’s also important to look at the embedded energy of the process, the energy return on investment, and the overall ecological footprint.
Completely fair.
An EROI of about 7 is considered break-even economically for developed countries and the US average EROI across all generating technologies is about 40 (and going down as the EROI of coal and oil is going down due to increasing energy requirements). The current estimated EROI for current generation nuclear reactors (that have huge rooms for improvement thanks to nuclear recycling being currently banned) is 80 for their operational lifetime (Which is actually a fraction of its estimated safe lifetime which further reduces the net EROI artificially to increase safety margins).
Why is there a ban on recycling if that much is reusable? I thought it was an issue with reactor design?
It was created to subsidize the production of nuclear weapons during the cold war and ensure a massive stockpile for future use in the event of nuclear war.
There are readily available chemical processes for separating out the waste from the pure fuel (we use them for processing the mined ore already)
Cool.
I’m very favorable to nuclear energy.
The main reason is that today the only countries with a low CO2 per kWh ratio are country with either a lot of hydro, a lot of nuclear or both.
You can check my claim here and look at yearly production. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
So today, if a country has maxed out their hydroelectricity production the only proved way to reduce significantly the CO2 emissions is to add nuclear in their mix.
Wind and solar is great for individual or communal use if we accept to live with the intermittency.
But right now we don’t know how to compensate the intermittency without a lot of fossil fuel: gas, coal or oil. We can also use biomass but biomass also have a whole lot of issues and is not really free of carbon emissions either
The problem is that you can’t extrapolate from countries that already have nuclear power plants to those that would need to start building them now.
If you start planning one now, it will be maybe done in 15 years and billions over budget. And in the mean-time nothing changes and business continues as usual.
If you take the same money and start building wind, solar, geothermal and battery storage you get an immediate effect and the result is more sustainable as well.
I also have such an issue with just looking at carbon footprinting.
There are a lot of countries in the data you have posted, that show you are wrong. Spain for example went from 275g/kWh in 2018 to 205g/kWh in 2022. Portugal and Greece did reduce even more in the same time. None have built more nuclear, but they added a lot of renewables. Just as some example and you can find even more. Here is a longer but annual map of carbon intensity were you can see my point a bit better. The issue is that wind and solar have dropped in price a lot in the last decades. In the last one they have become cheaper then fossil fuels in many places, but they cost a lot to install. So grids with a lot of none hydro renewables are rarer. Really important to say is that their are ways of dealing with intermittency. The two main ones are larger grids and electricity storage. In terms of grid size hvdc is falling in costs in recent years, this allows for intercontinental electricity connections with 3.5% power loss over 1000km. So you can built continent wide grids with relative ease and is always windy or sunny somewhere. Electricity storage is pretty obvious, but battery prices are falling fast and hydro power plants can be used for this as well.
My biggest issue with nuclear is that as an industry it is lobby-promoting, politically-toxic, corruption promoting and thus anti-democratic in a fundamental way.
Just because of that we should not pursue nuclear.
Name an industry that isn’t.
I don’t agree. Even the industrial military complex is more prone to diversity in terms of incentives, centralisation and consequences.
The nuclear energy industry is:
Very dependent on investment costs. More than everyday costs. So public funding is frequently demanded, with contracting being a politically toxic environment. The taxpayer pays today without knowing with clarity what he will have to pay on the future.
The risk management brings about a lot of low probability X high consequence cases. So, for safety keeping we need regulations and oversight, lots of it.
Everyday costs thus are heavily dependent on regulations. With a massive difference in operating costs between 99.999 Vs 99.9999% safety levels. Thus lobbying politicians, regulator/overseer capture, and plain old corruption have big relevance to everyday costs
Security issues also demand that inicial clearance as to who can enter the industry, and does not allow having so many players that the probability of losing track of them becomes higher. Thus a massive big incentive for centralisation, on top of the ‘every-other-industry wants it’s own monopoly’ incentive.
Thus, for me, the slippery slope is so slanted that the risks outweigh the benefits, even for a very good democracy.
EDIT: beyond the issues I was talking about, nuclear energy production, as we can build now, has lot of practicality issues. And a lot of people don’t have/take time to explore those issues. Like, the power output is not flexible, as required by consumption — because of that it has only been useful to have nuclear for baseline consumption, and that only represents about 6% of total electricity needs, 94% of the electricity has to come from other sources.
My objectionsn to nuclear are also similarly moral. I just have such a huge issue with an energy source that creates a waste that will be around for generations.
Uranium mining has also created so many environmental disasters and is a risk to human health on that end.
That being said, I also understand that batteries and solar require rare earth minerals which causes more mining and human rights violations.
Yes.
Even when taking waste and sourcing as not a big issue, if we take then out of the discussion, nuclear is not that great option.
Fusion: yes, when eventually feasible.
Fission: maybe. It has high energy density. But uranium ore is very thin and needs to be refined a lot. Storage of spent fuel is problematic. Generally, it costs a whole lot. Even if I consider it green, I don’t see it solving the most pressing problems - setting up nuclear energy is slow.
If fusion were ever to be feasible, would it also need to used mined uranium, or are there other fuel sources?
Current fusion (thermonuclear bombs) require a fission bomb trigger to start fusion in a lithium deuteride body, but reactors - absolutely not.
Fusion reactors do one of the following:
- use magnetic fields and electrical current to contain + heat a ring tritium (hydrogen isotope) plasma to extreme temperatures
- use a laser pulse to compress + heat a capsule of tritium to extreme temperatures
- use a magnetic field and electrical current to collide two rings of helion (helium isotope) plasma at extreme velocities
Short version: fusion needs fission only in warfare.
I love nuclear energy. Well maybe to strong of a word. I am extremely favorable towards it.
But we needed to go majority nuclear 10-20 years ago…
There are so many nuclear safety regulations and red tape (for good reason) that it makes new reactors being started now not financially profitable. Renewables are mugh much better until the current highly excessible lithium deposits dry up (tons of lithium in the world, but a tiny fraction of it is minable without decimating the environment)
But that brings me to my main point: energy providers are constantly for profit just like leacherous landlords. Basic necessities should be run publically in many cases. If you can get electric prices so low that it is almost free provided a large governmental investment (a mere tiny fraction of the military industrial complex budget) then you could literally turn the world around in 10 years. But that is a pipe dream that will never happen.
Oil companies control all of the energy decisions around the world and will sooner invest in renewables than nuclear.
I see nuclear as a transitory source of energy. It doesn’t emit any greenhouse gases and FAR better than fossil fuels. We could easily transition to it faster and more cheaply than solar, wind, etc currently. Deaths associated with fossil fuel energy greatly exceed those associate with nuclear energy.
Burning fossil fuels needs to stop and we need to bring down carbon levels to what they were 20+ years ago. Ideally, transitioning to nuclear would be cheap/fast while we build out solar and wind infrastructure, and research how to make these sources of energy more effective.
However, I’m not a policy nor energy expert by any means. I’m just some random person on the internet.
Practical experience shows that nuclear is neither cheap or fast, with ongoing constructions being massively delayed and way over budget.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago, but now we have way better alternatives and nuclear is too slow to make a difference.
NIMBY is also another factor that delays new nuclear plants. That said, safety is another big concern here. Although not at an nuclear energy facility, there was that incident recently at Los Alamos National Laboratory researching nuclear weapons where they placed 8 rods of plutonium next to each other that could have triggered a disaster. Very high safety standards are required, and humans are known for making stupid decisions.
Well there is a very good reason why modern nuclear reactors have a negative void coefficient (you just turn off the neutron source and the reactor naturally turns itself off
Or if really paranoid have a supply of Xenon-135 handy and that reactor will be shutdown in microseconds (which by the way is naturally produced by the reactor itself and why early prototype rectors kept turning themself off after running for a bit)
It’s interesting to me that the conversation has shifted so far from ecological footprinting to carbon footprinting. I don’t think the Navajo Nation would agree that nuclear energy creates less emissions that coal. The mining and end life of nuclear energy is just too toxic for me to ever consider it clean or green.
Of course, I also have an issue with hydropower, so 🤷🏻
The question was whether or not nuclear is clean or green. To which my answer is “no”, but “better than fossil fuels”. If we were to shut down all the nuclear power plants in the world today, much of the world would switch to burning more fossil fuels because in much of the world it’s still the most cheapest form of energy. Someone else in this thread already mentioned it, but fossil fuel energy facilities/sources should be decommissioned first before nuclear.
I have an unpopular opinion.
TLDR: While current nucler has it’s place, it most definitely is not the solution.
Please, do remember - we need solution for the whole planet, not only EU+US.
While nuclear (fision) can be relatively clean (molten salt thorium reactors), cutrent technology is not there yet, and other comments explain why: availability of uranium, processing of it, and storage of nuclear waste, which contrary to popular opinion is not yet solved. Just search around and those idea we were sold during 80s never materialized, we still don’t know how to safely put nuclear waste into the ground.
Even if we do it right, it is extremely expensive and probably is generating more emissions we think.
Current technology was created for making nuclear weapons, promoting use of it is just promoting nuclear weapons.
Do you really want random countries around the world to have acces to processed uranuim?
Would you trust some random dictators that their plants will be safe?
That their nuclear waste will be safely stored?
Current nuclear is not the solution, Thorium and even better fusion is, so we need to push research, not uranium.
And we need to remember that there is no one solution to rule them all, hydro is working nicely for some countries, geothermal for others, wind for some locations, solar definitely has it’s place. Nuclear too, at least to fill the gaps in others.
Other big part of solution, which every nuclear supporter is ignoring: we need to reduce energy consumption.
We need better insulation, more efficient cars, machines, computers. Less traveling, less commuting, more public transportation.
unfortunately we will run into Jevon’s paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It isn’t the making of more efficient things (which we should do)
It is the changing of human attitudes towards consumption that we need to solve.
Interesting read about Jevons paradox, thanks for the link.
I know that we don’t want to reduce our comfort, but there are ways to keep it and reduce energy demand, or reduce comfort just a little but (ex. using small cars).
well if we encourage proper mass transit, then people wouldn’t need to spend money on liabilities (cars) and we could have substantial improvements in reducing our total energy demand while providing greater mobility and transportation access to those most desperately in need.
