Nuclear energy. I’m a dilettante (software engineer by background) but I find the topic absolutely fascinating and have educated myself on a diet of papers and books about the topic.
I find this topic particularly infuriating as the media feeds on and sells irrational fear on the topic, actively preventing a real solution we have to climate change TODAY, yet refuse to take.
I think they’re perfectly safe, but I don’t think we have a good way of storing the waste. Just leave some highly reactive stuff underground for a few hundred to thousand years? That sounds like a recipe for disaster at some point, that is a freakin long time
Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
Suppose you didn’t bury it and just stacked up heaps of those nuclear flask thingies and wrote on them “waste we didn’t know what to do with”.
Suppose this went on for several hundred years until a better solution was found, and by that time there was many thousands of those flasks.
I bet our descendents would be glad that we had left them with those rather than continuing to pump waste we didn’t know what to do with into the atmosphere.
I’m not sure about the situation in Germany, but the US built a large facility in a mountain to put all the waste in one spot and fear mongering meant it went unused.
Instead, waste is spread across the country in multiple redundant spots, wasting money and making it harder to secure.
I don’t have a problem with nuclear energy other than that it is expensive relative to other technologies such as solar or wind. Maybe some of the reason it is so expensive is precisely because of the FUD the media spreads on the topic. I think new technologies that gain widespread use are often the ones that are most profitable so in that sense solar beats out nuclear.
media feeds on and sells irrational fear on the topic
It is expensive relative to solar and wind. I agree!
You’ll notice, I hope, that in another comment in this thread I concluded that we need lots and lots of solar and wind. I’m ALL in on renewables; they’re great!!
But the (dirty) secret of renewables is that it’s got external cost associated with it. I can build a gas plant, or a nuclear plant, and I broadly get the advertised generation capacity out of it. I can steer this up or down (also with nuclear; one of many misunderstandings people hold on nuclear is that it’s not steerable)
When I build a wind turbine park, I can also in aggregate get an advertised rating out of it - in a windy area I multiply the capacity all the turbines by 45%-ish and that’s what I’ll get out of these turbines in a year. It’s remarkably precise.
The challenge is that a heat-based plant is steerable up and down (between 0 and its capacity), in the moment, on demand. Renewables are only steerable down (between 0 and whatever the wind wants to do right now).
And then many say “well we just need to build a LOT of turbines (and/or solar) and then we will always have enough”. Or they say “well, we will need some adjustable, backup capacity”.
And that’s valid - but…
We have a lot of wind today - enough that we can feel confident about estimating what “a lot of wind capacity would do”. And we would still have complete wind/sun-less days with zero output, even if we build massive over-capacity.
Ok, some say, then let’s invest in distribution - so I can source masses of renewable power from even further away. Yup, although all simulations show even with insane investments in distribution interconnectors, you end up with days of no power from anywhere AND you’ve now to spend on inter-connectors.
Let’s store it then! Well, sure, but now you’ve got to build an absolutely insane amount of batteries (heavy metal strip mining and very expensive, and probably more than we can actually conceive to make) or you’ve got to make very expensive pumped storage (we don’t have enough areas where pumped storage can be located).
If you want 50Hz (or whatever your local equivalent is) ALL THE TIME, there are external costs to renewables: Massive investment in distribution, massive investment in energy storage, massive over-building capacity etc.
So when you build renewable capacity, you are adding these external costs elsewhere. That’s why many grid-planners advocate for a different model: Guaranteed capacity.
Ie.: “I guarantee between 0 and 1000 GW, on demand; if I can’t meet the requested requirement, I pay a fine based on the size of the miss”. If you forced renewable capacity towards “guaranteed capacity”, these investments would have to be made in association with the build of the renewable capacity, either by leaker gas plants, storage, distribution networks etc.
So what’s happening right now is these externalised costs to renewable capacity are being absorbed elsewhere. When you add the cost of guaranteeing the capacity, nuclear no longer looks expensive.
Or you accept that hospitals will be burning diesel fuel and the rest of our world shuts down at random times. Travel to Johannesburg if you want a sense of what the world feels like when the power goes out in an entire neighbourhood to load-shed.
So I’m not arguing against renewables - if they could get us all the way there, at the sticker price, I’d not make an argument for nuclear.
But I do not believe you can - and as originally discussed, this is based on reading an unseasonable amount of papers and literature about grid planning, renewables and nuclear energy.
So for me, it comes down to: What do you want to do to guarantee that frequency is maintained 24/7? Gas peaker plants? Nuclear? Storage?
None of the options to go from “we have power 90% of the time” to “we have power 100% of the time” are that enticing. Nuclear power is the least bad. If 20-25% of our capacity came from nuclear, the price of guaranteeing 100% frequency-hold drops dramatically. Any other alternative seems worse.
Nuclear energy. I’m a dilettante (software engineer by background) but I find the topic absolutely fascinating and have educated myself on a diet of papers and books about the topic.
I find this topic particularly infuriating as the media feeds on and sells irrational fear on the topic, actively preventing a real solution we have to climate change TODAY, yet refuse to take.
I think they’re perfectly safe, but I don’t think we have a good way of storing the waste. Just leave some highly reactive stuff underground for a few hundred to thousand years? That sounds like a recipe for disaster at some point, that is a freakin long time
Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
We know how to solve it. We just don’t want to.
Suppose you didn’t bury it and just stacked up heaps of those nuclear flask thingies and wrote on them “waste we didn’t know what to do with”.
Suppose this went on for several hundred years until a better solution was found, and by that time there was many thousands of those flasks.
I bet our descendents would be glad that we had left them with those rather than continuing to pump waste we didn’t know what to do with into the atmosphere.
I’m not sure about the situation in Germany, but the US built a large facility in a mountain to put all the waste in one spot and fear mongering meant it went unused.
Instead, waste is spread across the country in multiple redundant spots, wasting money and making it harder to secure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository
I don’t have a problem with nuclear energy other than that it is expensive relative to other technologies such as solar or wind. Maybe some of the reason it is so expensive is precisely because of the FUD the media spreads on the topic. I think new technologies that gain widespread use are often the ones that are most profitable so in that sense solar beats out nuclear.
Fixed it for you. 😀
It is expensive relative to solar and wind. I agree!
You’ll notice, I hope, that in another comment in this thread I concluded that we need lots and lots of solar and wind. I’m ALL in on renewables; they’re great!!
But the (dirty) secret of renewables is that it’s got external cost associated with it. I can build a gas plant, or a nuclear plant, and I broadly get the advertised generation capacity out of it. I can steer this up or down (also with nuclear; one of many misunderstandings people hold on nuclear is that it’s not steerable)
When I build a wind turbine park, I can also in aggregate get an advertised rating out of it - in a windy area I multiply the capacity all the turbines by 45%-ish and that’s what I’ll get out of these turbines in a year. It’s remarkably precise.
The challenge is that a heat-based plant is steerable up and down (between 0 and its capacity), in the moment, on demand. Renewables are only steerable down (between 0 and whatever the wind wants to do right now).
And then many say “well we just need to build a LOT of turbines (and/or solar) and then we will always have enough”. Or they say “well, we will need some adjustable, backup capacity”.
And that’s valid - but… We have a lot of wind today - enough that we can feel confident about estimating what “a lot of wind capacity would do”. And we would still have complete wind/sun-less days with zero output, even if we build massive over-capacity.
Ok, some say, then let’s invest in distribution - so I can source masses of renewable power from even further away. Yup, although all simulations show even with insane investments in distribution interconnectors, you end up with days of no power from anywhere AND you’ve now to spend on inter-connectors.
Let’s store it then! Well, sure, but now you’ve got to build an absolutely insane amount of batteries (heavy metal strip mining and very expensive, and probably more than we can actually conceive to make) or you’ve got to make very expensive pumped storage (we don’t have enough areas where pumped storage can be located).
If you want 50Hz (or whatever your local equivalent is) ALL THE TIME, there are external costs to renewables: Massive investment in distribution, massive investment in energy storage, massive over-building capacity etc.
So when you build renewable capacity, you are adding these external costs elsewhere. That’s why many grid-planners advocate for a different model: Guaranteed capacity.
Ie.: “I guarantee between 0 and 1000 GW, on demand; if I can’t meet the requested requirement, I pay a fine based on the size of the miss”. If you forced renewable capacity towards “guaranteed capacity”, these investments would have to be made in association with the build of the renewable capacity, either by leaker gas plants, storage, distribution networks etc.
So what’s happening right now is these externalised costs to renewable capacity are being absorbed elsewhere. When you add the cost of guaranteeing the capacity, nuclear no longer looks expensive.
Or you accept that hospitals will be burning diesel fuel and the rest of our world shuts down at random times. Travel to Johannesburg if you want a sense of what the world feels like when the power goes out in an entire neighbourhood to load-shed.
So I’m not arguing against renewables - if they could get us all the way there, at the sticker price, I’d not make an argument for nuclear.
But I do not believe you can - and as originally discussed, this is based on reading an unseasonable amount of papers and literature about grid planning, renewables and nuclear energy.
So for me, it comes down to: What do you want to do to guarantee that frequency is maintained 24/7? Gas peaker plants? Nuclear? Storage?
None of the options to go from “we have power 90% of the time” to “we have power 100% of the time” are that enticing. Nuclear power is the least bad. If 20-25% of our capacity came from nuclear, the price of guaranteeing 100% frequency-hold drops dramatically. Any other alternative seems worse.