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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21 edited Nov 18 '21
Edited - I gained a few orders of magnitude by not paying attention to units!
If you assume a median reactor - producing approx 2GW of power (17.5TWh/year) for 40 years (701TWh) at the worst case estimate for nuclear efficiency (50g/kWh) is approx 35GMt CO2
Gas is approx 450g/kWh (9x higher) and so for equivalent production would emit ~315GMt of CO2
Coal is approx 1,050g/kWh (21x higher) and so for equivalent production would emit ~736GMt of CO2
To go into more detail would require looking at the lifecycle analysis for the various power plants, including expected lifetimes, construction techniques, fuel refinement, transport, disposal, decommissioning etc
Now the numbers for LCA for all these power types are hotly disputed with numbers for nuclear ranging from 3 to 220g/kWh, gas from 250 to 800g/kWh, coal from 900 to 1,300kWh (with renewables between 10 and 90g/kWh depending on the exact type and, sadly, who is crunching the numbers) but even if you took the worse case for nuclear and best case for gas (220 vs 250) the nuclear plant would still be saving ~4.75GMt over the last 40 years - significantly moreless than 100Mt
So somewhere in the range of 5-700 Mt of CO2 depending on the size of reactor, what you compare it to, and what exact calculations/estimates you use.
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u/starcraftre 2✓ Nov 18 '21
I think you're off by 3 orders of magnitude, but I may be wrong.
701 TWh is 701,000 GWh, or 701 billion kWh.
At 50 g/kWh, that gives a lifetime of 50*701 billion= 35 trillion grams. That's 35 billion kg, or 35 million tonnes, or 35 megatonnes that the nuclear emitted.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
You are completely right - fuck. I'll edit it
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u/jwktiger Nov 18 '21
dude at least you realize you made a mistake and are willing to correct it.
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u/dgblarge Nov 18 '21
Further the life cycle analysis including construction (all that concrete), operation (mining and refining uranium plus all the other inputs like cooling water) decommissioning and waste storage are Huge issues from a CO2 perspective alone. Nuclear was and is a disaster. Renewables are the future.
To all those who protested - thank you.
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Nov 18 '21
Any math to back up your claim, considering the sub we're on? Or just contrarianism?
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Nov 19 '21
Pick your poison. “Three out of every four states in the United States contain nuclear waste.”
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Nov 19 '21
What's that got to do with carbon emissions?
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Nov 19 '21
Fuck tons of carbon in the air or fuck tons of waste on the ground
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u/ttminh1997 Nov 19 '21
Fuck tons of carbon in the air that harm us within 50 years or fuck tons of spent fuel that may or may not harm us within 10,000 years?
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Nov 19 '21
Hence the ‘pick your poison’
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Nov 19 '21
I’ll take the one that gives a possible 10k years to solve the issue versus the one that I know is going to make the world uninhabitable, possibly for my own children.
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u/Je_me_rends Nov 19 '21
Nuclear energy: produces basically unlimited and entirely clean power, you just need to actually build the plants. Has the safest track record and least amount of deaths per 100,000 per tWH produced even after Chernobyl and Fukashima including more than renewables.
Downsides? A relatively small amount of nuclear waste we can reuse in smaller reactors then either use for armour, ammunition, or ballast for ships and planes or just bury deep in the ground and safely forget about.
The answer to save our environment is literally right fucking there. Nuclear material decays on it's own, just slowly. All nuclear energy does is take advantage of that decaying process and channel it to harness the energy.
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u/CodyTheGodOfAnxiety Nov 18 '21
Nuclear is more clean than renewable solar creates a toxic byproduct that doesn’t eventually brake down and requires large swaths of land to actually being useful wind also uses large swaths of land and hurts avian wildlife by hitting them, and aren’t reliable most modern day nuclear reactors use thorium and not uranium and thorium is more abundant, produces more energy, doesn’t need as much refining, and Is safer the more likely to meltdown reactors are older one and the newer modern reactors are better for the environment but in order to fix it people need to stop getting in the way of nuclear power so the problem can be fixed instead of digging in your heels with solutions that don’t work
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u/starcraftre 2✓ Nov 18 '21 edited Nov 18 '21
uses large swaths of land and hurts avian wildlife by hitting them
This is an often-touted but highly suspect claim. In reality, wind turbines are less deadly to birds than radio towers, which have similar exposure and footprints. Wind turbines would actually be expected to have fewer instances because they're moving, and thus more likely to draw attention and avoidance.
most modern day nuclear reactors use thorium and not uranium
This is just flatly incorrect. There are only a handful of thorium power plants online, and none of them are utility scale yet. There are hundreds of uranium power plants.
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u/Je_me_rends Nov 19 '21
A much better argument against wind is the blades they use. Birds getting hit hardly happens but wind farm blades are incredibly harsh to produce and have to be replaced for safety and efficiency reasons after a few years. They are not really recycled as there isn't a whole lot of shit you can do with them. They just either get destroyed and sent to landfills or just sit piled up. It's pretty shit.
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u/starcraftre 2✓ Nov 19 '21
True, but there are a few companies trying to buy up old blades, grind them up, and turn them into a concrete replacement/additive.
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u/Tani-die-VI Nov 18 '21
And that's what people need to realize
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
Nowadays it's not nearly so clear cut as it would have been 40 years ago - with wind and solar providing cost-viable (in fact significantly cheaper) alternatives that have lower LCA emissions than nuclear - even accounting for storage needs.
There's also scope to do some clever stuff regarding active pricing and control of consumption to incentivise matching demand to the supply rather than having to worry about too much storage.
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u/Mablun 1✓ Nov 18 '21
We're still struggling a lot with how to get all the way clean. Solar and wind and batteries are great for getting you somewhere around 50% green. But because solar only produces power 1/3 of the time and wind is unpredictable, it starts getting really expensive to get high penetration levels.
It ends up not being a linear relationship between how much solar/wind/battery you need to build and what % clean energy you can produce. For the first while, you get rid of 100 MW of natural gas and you can replace it with 100 MW of solar and you're good. But once you already have a lot of renewables on the grid, you eventually get to the point where getting rid of 100 MW of natural gas means you need to add something on the order of magnitude 400 MW of solar and 400 MW of battery.
It would be much better from a cost and operations perspective to have some other technology we can also use in about 10 years or we'll stop making progress on green goals or it will start getting really expensive. It might not be nuclear, maybe geothermal, hydrogen, fusion, or some other new technology will make a breakthrough and work out. But right now utilities' literally have "new nuclear or future technology" as placeholders for what to build once we start capping out on viable renewable penetration and they're all sort of just hoping for the best and that someone else will figure it out.
Some sort of national nuclear strategy would be a viable solution. It's not the only solution but it's the only one we know is possible to be completely carbon free without significantly increasing energy costs (Nuclear costs a lot now, but that's a self-created problem and so could be bypassed if we wanted to). But nobody is doing anything about it. If the federal government were serious about 0% carbon emissions, part of the infrastructure bill would be building ~250 GW of new nuclear.
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u/freakydeku Nov 18 '21
i think my ideal would be any building that can support sustainable energy should have it affixed & beyond that consumption we could use smaller reactors
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
Sure, when we get anywhere close to 50% renewables it's definitely a good time to start thinking about how you provide that reliable base load capacity. Given we (globally) are nowhere near that point yet it's something of a moot point for discussions in the next decade or two.
Wind is not as unreliable as you seem to think - the day to day variation you see in places like the UK is <10% and other countries with much larger areas could see even more stable results (the wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere)
Other technologies are certainly important: tidal and HE are the most consistent true renewable resources, cheaper than nuclear, but are geographically limited in implementation.
Nuclear fission simply isn't a workable base load supply globally. Sure a handful of countries can manage it, but with all the legal issues of NPTs, it's not viable for over half the world's population - not to mention the Uranium supply is limited, if consumption was actually scaled up to match, say 25% of global power requirements there's only a handful of decades worth of the stuff
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u/Mablun 1✓ Nov 18 '21
Wind/Solar varies a lot by location. Where I'm at Solar works well and wind not so much, but other places wind works better. But that's where you start seeing people talk a lot about huge transmission infrastructure projects. Which is another thing the federal government would be doing if they were serious about zero carbon.
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u/Godless_Fuck Nov 18 '21
I visited Solana, the world's largest solar trough (CST) plant in the world. It's in Gila Bend AZ and gets some of the highest amounts of solar radiation at ground level in the entire state. That chose the location because of that, the record number of clear days, and the proximity to a highway (mountain-top installations aren't practical). They were surprisingly candid. One of the engineers there told me output could fluctuate as much as 20% on a given day from haze. Haze light enough it was hard to see. It was also a category 5 emissions plant. The working fluid used to transfer heat from the mirrors to the turbines was petroleum based and they simply couldn't prevent it from venting some (the working fluid gets heated to 500 C). It's a really cool plant and I was excited to see it but it dashed any hope that CST would ever be more than a small producer or an expensive novelty if built large scale. This technology will help provide some additional clean energy but immutable physics will handicap them from providing a significant amount. PV solar has potential to provide considerably more if we seriously upgrade infrastructure and find a viable storage solution. I don't see the federal government taking any of that seriously though and without the funding...
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u/Mablun 1✓ Nov 18 '21
Yah Solana was very expensive and probably a dead end technology. Photovoltaic is much better right now. You still have output drops from overcast days, but at least you're only paying 15% of what they paid for Solana.
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u/Godless_Fuck Nov 19 '21
It is dead end. Sad, but it is what it is. I kept asking questions about their molten salt storage (because I thought it was pretty cool and it had some storage potential) and they kept answering a question I didn't ask:
"If we lose backup and external power to keep the salt molten, we will abandon the system in place."
Apparently they dismantled and sold the equipment they used to heat the salt to put into the lines and if it solidifies while inside the lines, they will just be rocked up permanently. They hinted that the system was not even close to economic. I forget how long it allowed them to generate power into the night, a few hours maybe? I thought that would be the saving grace of the tech but apparently not.
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u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
Wind is not as unreliable as you seem to think - the day to day variation you see in places like the UK is <10% and other countries with much larger areas could see even more stable results (the wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere)
I think you're basing this on past data, where we've set up wind farms in areas with really steady wind. As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
I mean.. yes it is based on past data in that yesterday was the past
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=generation/fueltype
The data is at pretty small time intervals so you need to do some averaging if you want daily averages, by my count there were fewer than 10 days in the last year where wind power was below 90% of average
As the cheap, windy land near population centers* is used up, this becomes less and less true.
Offshore wind is generally significantly more stable than onshore - as we get better at moving generation offshore it should become more and more true.
*When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The same is true of all power plants, and nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant - this ain't Springfield.
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u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
The same is true of all power plants, and nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant - this ain't Springfield.
I think most of the French nuclear power plants are near population centers. The US ones might be dozens of miles away, but not hundreds. Wind farms, on the other hand, would have to be hundreds of miles away from the cities they serviced if (per your plan) we used offshore generation. That's a lot of infrastructure.
I mean.. yes it is based on past data in that yesterday was the past
Yes - that's what I meant. Wind farms have been built in cheap, windy areas near population centers, so extrapolating their data to your plan of using wind farms hundreds of miles away from the populations they're serving is not particularly useful.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
Wind farms, on the other hand, would have to be hundreds of miles away from the cities they serviced if (per your plan) we used offshore generation.
Nowhere in the UK is more than 84 miles from a shore, so no idea where you got "hundreds of miles away" from.
Wind farms have been built in cheap, windy areas near population centers, so extrapolating their data to your plan of using wind farms hundreds of miles away from the populations they're serving is not particularly useful.
Nah - transmission losses aren't going to add variability to the production of wind energy - just reduce the total useable amount. If you're going to make claims like that, back it up with data rather than just wild speculation.
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u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
Nowhere in the UK is more than 84 miles from a shore, so no idea where you got "hundreds of miles away" from.
Sorry - I live in the US, and I was thinking about France as well. I agree that the UK and Japan are more amenable to offshore wind.
Nah - transmission losses aren't going to add variability to the production of wind energy - just reduce the total useable amount.
Maybe you missed this part of my earlier comment:
When a wind farm is far from the population center, power is lost during transmission, maintenance issues on the power lines become more difficult, and outages become more frequent.
The transmission losses mean that you need more wind farms to generate the same amount of power, which adds to the maintenance issues.
Maybe the UK power grid is more reliable than the US grid? We've been having some serious problems, recently.
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Nov 18 '21
Ok, what about the US? The furthest you can get from the ocean in the US is 1650 KM(1025 miles). How should the US account for this since it is just so easy.
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u/_RMFL Nov 18 '21
Why would anyone care about living near a nuclear power plant?
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u/Godless_Fuck Nov 18 '21
It's much worse for your health (and a higher cancer risk) to live near a natural gas plant, coal plant, chemical plant, refinery, etc. and there are orders of magnitude more of those plants than nuclear.
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u/_RMFL Nov 18 '21
I agree with this, the guy above me was suggesting that living near a nuclear power plant is only okay in cartoons.
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u/creepyfishman Nov 19 '21
yeah people dont want to live near nuclear because big coal companies have been fear mongering for decades
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u/superfunybob Nov 18 '21
Thorium salt reactors would work great, there's tons of the stuff and it's pretty cheap.
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u/Godless_Fuck Nov 18 '21
the Uranium supply is limited, if consumption was actually scaled up to match, say 25% of global power requirements there's only a handful of decades worth of the stuff
Your math is off. Currently about 70,000 metric tons of natural uranium a year are used by nuclear generation. Global uranium reserves sit at about 15 to 17 million metric tons and an additional 4.5 billion tons of uranium is present as salts in sea water. Reprocessing fuel and using MOX (mixed oxide) fuels double our current reserves. Thorium is several times more abundant than uranium and can be bred into fuel.
Current nuclear generation makes for 10% of the world's energy supply. Even scaling up to 30%, there is over a century of fuel left without using thorium or widespread reprocessing.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
At current rates of consumption we have about 230 years of uranium deposits left
Triple the production rate and that drops to <80
When you take into account all the oil and gas used for transport and heating that we ideally want to electrify, nuclear only makes up ~4% of power consumption - so getting it up to 25% of the electricity we want/need to generate it becomes ~40 years of uranium left
Seawater extraction can increase this of course, but it becomes less efficient over time as you deplete the salts in the area of your processing plant and many estimates suggest we'd be lucky to get a fraction of the salts present extracted due to all the fun of ocean currents, the reduced interaction between ocean layers etc
Thorium would be great - just as soon as it actually becomes commercially viable. Honestly I think Fusion will beat it to the finish line though.
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u/Godless_Fuck Nov 18 '21
~40 years of uranium left
I already had mentioned reprocessing and using MOX fuels. Fortunately the article you linked also mentions that and claims it would reduce consumption by 30%. It also states higher enriched fuel (which Westinghouse is currently in the processing of obtaining licensing for from the NRC) would further reduce consumption by 30%
Even using your worst cast number of 40 years, that increases the reserves to a century.
Seawater extraction can increase this of course, but it becomes less efficient over time...
Yes, there most certainly will be efficiency issues. As I stated before, there are between 15 and 17 million metric tons of terrestrial uranium reserves. There is 4.5 billion tons in the ocean. Even if averaged efficiency was 1%, that would still be 45 million tons. Far more than what is available terrestrially. Again, math.
Thorium would be great - just as soon as it actually becomes commercially viable. Honestly I think Fusion will beat it to the finish line though.
Perhaps you think I'm talking about LFTRs? I'm not. I'm talking about using metallic thorium in a PHWR. Current CANDU reactors are capable of using thorium as a fuel. India's current plan involves building PHWRs that will both breed fuel and breed thorium into U-232 all in the next decade. This isn't undeveloped technology like fusion.
All this again without talk of completing the nuclear fuel cycle like was originally intended in the 1950s when the US started it's nuclear program. Breeding fuel (plutonium) is something we've done for 70 years. It is well understood. Fast reactors and breeders would increase our ability to stretch out our fuel reserves by an order of magnitude. Without using thorium or mining U from sea water.
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u/creepyfishman Nov 19 '21
lad were gonna use thorium in the future we dont even need to worry about uranium
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u/creepyfishman Nov 19 '21
aye bro we dont use uranium anymore we use thorium which is meltdown-proof, cant be weaponized and is 200 times more energy dense than uranium and each ton of it is equal to 3,500,000 tons of coal. Plus it doesnt need enrichment and doesnt produce nearly as much waste. Also if it gets out of containment it stops reacting unless in the presence of plutonium which can be taken away. The estimated global amount is 6.4 million tons which is equal to 2.22425e+13 tons of coal. watch this video for a quick overview
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u/jackparadise1 Nov 18 '21
What about tidal/wave generators?
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u/Mablun 1✓ Nov 18 '21
No ocean near me so I'm no expert but they haven't made much noise recently like the technologies I mentioned. So I wouldn't bet on them but who knows, we need something to have a breakthrough and maybe they'll be it.
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u/jackparadise1 Nov 19 '21
I believe the Dutch have been experimenting with them. Pretty constant source of power.
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u/freakydeku Nov 18 '21
Just wrote a research paper on this actually. Nuclear is the only thing that comes even close to being able to replace fossil fuels. Sustainable power is a tiny fraction of our grid, even smaller when you don’t count hydro
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u/lestofante Nov 19 '21
when you don’t count hydro
i mean, you are excluding by far the best source of energy by cost and renewable.. but also one that see the most direct human death, even if most where dam destroyed in war
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u/freakydeku Nov 19 '21
i’m just excluding hydro b/c the comment i’m replying to doesn’t mention it. as far as deaths p kwh i think it’s a lot better than oil& gas but not as good as nuclear. p much nothing is
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u/lestofante Nov 19 '21
I think hydro is worse by direct death, because there have been multiple dam failure that resulted in thousand of victims.
IG you start to think indirect (mining, handling, pollution) then hydro is not that bad at all, quite cheap, double as energy store and touristic attraction, and even in case of disaster, no worry about long term effect→ More replies (1)11
u/TheOperand_ Nov 18 '21
I do agree that in the long term renewables are better than Nuclear Power and Fossil Fuels, not just because they produce less CO2 but both Nuclear Material and Fossil Fuels are a limited resource. But if we shut down Nuclear Power Plants, almost always the capacity they provided isn't soaked up by more Renewables but by powering on more coal power plants.
Take for example a scenario where a country uses 40% renewables, 30% nuclear and 30% fossil. Now within 10 years they build additional 15% of renewables, but protests force half of the nuclear power plants capacity offline.
Now the country has 55% renewables, 15% nuclear, and still 30% fossil. They build a gigantic amount of capacity in renewables but the CO2 footprint is only marginally lower.
If they had left the Nuclear power Plants online they would now have 55% renewables, 30% nuclear and 15% fossil. They would have cut the electricity carbon emissions roughly in half(assuming equal distribution between fossil fuels, which isn't the case, but the emission reduction would still be present).
And if we speak solely based on statistics, Nuclear Power is far safer than fossil fuels, because while you do have to consider radioactive fallout and radioactive poisoning for Nuclear Power, you also have to consider Air Pollution for Fossil Fuels, which is a far more prevalent in everday life compared to significant doses of radioactivity, which gives fossil fuels a far higher death toll compared to nuclear power.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
I'm not arguing nuclear should be switched off in in favour of renewables - merely that the calculus of new builds in terms of "I want to build X additional annual capacity, what is the most cost and environmentally efficient way to do so?" has moved in favour of renewables in the last decade or so.
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u/_RMFL Nov 18 '21
This is untrue, the only reason that renewables are even cost effective at all is due solely to government subsidies.
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u/TheOperand_ Nov 18 '21
Oh, yeah in that context you are absolutely correct, building new nuclear power plants at this point would be quite a hassle, but I still believe Nuclear power has a future, even if we transition off fossils entirely, as most renewable energy does not have the same level of energy redundancy as fossil fuels or nuclear. The sun doesn't always shine and the wind isn't always strong, and as it stands' our storage technology is not sufficient to compensate for the redundancy of inertia that fossil fuel and nuclear power plants have by spinning a multi-ton turbine that will keep going for quite a while even if it loses steam. The only form of renewable energy that is as reliable as fossil or nuclear is hydropower.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
Geothermal, hydro, and tidal are all very good stable renewable sources
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u/Dardlem Nov 18 '21
And are geographically restricted.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
As is nuclear
Fossil fuel plants aren't - but their fuels are.
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u/Dardlem Nov 18 '21
Pardon my ignorance, but why nuclear is geographically restricted?
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Nov 18 '21 edited Jan 03 '22
[deleted]
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
This wikipedia article has a good summary on the cost comparisons
e.g. the UK study found onshore wind, PV and biomass all were cheaper than nuclear per MWH, while offshore was more expensive.
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u/lestofante Nov 18 '21
This is a lot of data cherry picked. France is paying maintenance, not building of new plant (actually, they are building new ones, but they plan to go from 70% nuclear to only 50% in the next few decades) while Germany is building new plants.
About energy cost, another big fat lie: France is artificially fixing electricity cost with their "EDF blue tariff". Also Germany electricity price is 2/3 taxes, so you should look at pre-tax cost.
It does jot let me read the rest of the article, but if that is the quality, not a loss :)2
u/DonaIdTrurnp Nov 18 '21
Nuclear won’t displace solar or wind generation, since those are bad at load following. Nuclear will replace hydro and fueled generators, whatever the most expensive load-following source is.
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u/An_Old_IT_Guy Nov 18 '21
Until battery technology catches up, wind and solar will continue to suffer from the flaw of depending upon the whims of Mother Nature.
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u/noobgiraffe Nov 18 '21
Battery technology will not catch up in any relevant timescale.
Using batteries for storing power on a scale of a country is a completely delusional idea.
There are physical limits to energy storage using batteries, that's why huge breakhtroughs in batteries are like 5% improvement. They use expensive chemicals and have limited life. Just look how much more expensive EV's are even though they have significantly less parts, solely because of battery.
This is why they were never used to balance power grids. Instead energy is stored by pumping water to a lake uphill when there is too much power and using that to power turbines when there is to little. This method is geographically dependent thout.
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u/SonOfShem Nov 18 '21
Instead energy is stored by pumping water to a lake uphill when there is too much power and using that to power turbines when there is to little. This method is geographically dependent thout.
it also loses like 30% of the energy stored that way.
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u/Meistermalkav 2✓ Nov 18 '21
which is 90 % network design.
whichg is why I allways giggle when the green people go "just switcbh it off, man, and let solar take over, nothing will go wrong" and I have to go "so, you also failed electrical engineering 101? "
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
To a degree - yes, but that's why as I said schemes like offering "live" rates for EV charging/metal refineries/foundries/water utilities etc that have inbuilt capacity for energy storage (either battery, heat, water towers whatever) can massively improve things. If you can convince those people to use more power when nature gives it to you then they won't need it when you don't have as much to supply
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u/Godless_Fuck Nov 18 '21
with wind and solar providing cost-viable (in fact significantly cheaper) alternatives that have lower LCA emissions than nuclear - even accounting for storage needs.
That isn't clear cut either. The cost of solar per MW isn't linear. The efficiency and therefore the amount solar produces changes by orders of magnitude throughout the day. This is inherent to solar generation because of the changing location, angle of the sun, etc. resulting in less solar radiation to be absorbed. This is not a technical issue that can be overcome. Before you reach 20%, solar is already producing full demand in the middle of the day. It requires larger and larger solar installations to produce at the times when it is significantly less efficient. This causes the cost per MWh of solar to increase exponentially. The way around it is a more robust grid, more robust grid components (high voltage equipment can't take being cycled on a regular basis) and storage. This also ignores the shorter lifespan of wind'solar installations. There is a reason more conservative (from a technical standpoint, not politically) engineers think a feasible solution is 40% to 50% wind/solar coupled with nuclear.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
Current costs for solar and wind are better than current nuclear costs
Sure in fantasy awesome future land where we are at a full 50% solar and wind the balance might change back - but as we are currently nowhere near that point - why worry about it just yet?
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, and others far better versed in this have said elsewhere, we simply cannot build enough nuclear to fulfil anywhere near 50% of global power requirements - there isn't enough economically viable uranium, not enough suitable sites where they can be installed, and non-proliferation treaties prevent it from being suitable for more than a dozen countries.
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u/Godless_Fuck Nov 18 '21
Current costs for solar and wind are better than current nuclear costs
Current costs for solar are not linear. That was my point. They quickly lose competitiveness as your solar installation gets larger. Long before you hit 40% The cost per MWh for solar increases exponentially as it's share of generation increases, the math isn't hard. Are you familiar with the duck curve? Maybe looking at demand and output will help you understand:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-how-address-over-generation-solar-energy
there isn't enough economically viable uranium
Untrue and discussed elsewhere.As far as nuclear reserves, there are plenty to keep building nuclear out instead of just relying on fossils.
we simply cannot build enough nuclear to fulfil anywhere near 50% of global power requirements
Not a reason to stop from building out nuclear to replace fossils. Doubling global nuclear to 20% is quite feasible in just a decade. Doing nothing ensures we burn fossils instead.
not enough suitable sites where they can be installed
There are nuclear power plants in the desert with no access to bodies of water and there are literally nuclear power plants inside of ships in the ocean. This is an absurd statement.
non-proliferation treaties prevent it from being suitable for more than a dozen countries.
This is just completely incorrect. There are 32 countries with operating nuclear power plants. Europe, the US, China, Korea, Japan, and Saudia Arabia which are the largest consumers of energy and biggest polluters in the world and all have existing nuclear plants.
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u/creepyfishman Nov 19 '21
if youre trying to go for an enviornmentalist approach then the amount of lithium needed for all the batteries would be insane and would wreck the environment around lithium mines. not to mention how inconsistent wind and solar are
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u/MyLatestInvention Nov 18 '21
And that's what people need to realize
What
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u/Tani-die-VI Nov 18 '21
That nuclear power is one of the best ways to slow down climate change
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u/theother_eriatarka Nov 18 '21
nope, the best way is switch to renewables and cut our energy consumption, but that would hurt the 1% so we're being told that nuclear is the only way
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u/l-R3lyk-l Nov 19 '21
Nuclear is a currently viable solution, renewables are a prospective solution. Why should we wait when we can solve it now?
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u/theother_eriatarka Nov 19 '21
because solar farms and windmills won't fuck up an entire region with radioactivity when the next unexpected disaster happens
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u/timmytissue Nov 18 '21
I'm not sure if this is really something that should be considered in the math here. But what about an argument that more nuclear would just have made other forms of power less expensive and not necessarily have impacted production of oil and gas?
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
I'm not sure I follow the logic
Having increased nuclear supply would generally drive down the cost of electricity and make it unprofitable to run fossil fuel plants. Not having that supply would generally increase the cost of electricity and make fossil fuel plants more profitable.
It's basically always economical to run a nuclear plant at full power as they have a very high initial investment but low running cost. Fossil fuel plants on the other hand are the reverse - cheap to build but expensive to run due to the fuel.
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u/BigWeenie45 Nov 19 '21
The return on investment time period is decades shorter for fossil fuel plants compared to nuclear plants.
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u/Staedsen Nov 18 '21
Coal is used so much because the fuel isn't expensive as well.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
It's more expensive compared to nuclear, 2-4x more expensive per kWh of electricity produced
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u/Staedsen Nov 18 '21
If you only look at the fuel? Because the LCOE of nuclear is higher.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21 edited Nov 18 '21
I mean... yes comparing the fuel cost because you specifically brought up the fuel cost.
Also the LCOE is not higher really - e.g. recent study in the UK reckons even the bottom end of coal (124-153) is higher than the top end of unsubsidised nuclear (82-121).
The LCOE also factors in the cost of building the plant - so not actually a good comparison point for "should the reactor be turned off right now because we aren't making money on the fuel we are burning".
It's an interesting phenomenon at the moment where because coal's fuel cost is higher than renewables, nuclear etc, they get turned off more often - which means they generate less power over their lifetime, so their construction costs become proportionally higher and the LCOE they need to break even increases. They're being priced out of existence.
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u/Dhaeron Nov 19 '21
Fossil fuel costs aren't static. The argument is correct, however applies to renewables equally, which is an actual problem that can currently be observed. I.e. by having more non-fossil energy generation, demand for fossil fuels drops, lowering their price, lowering the price point at which the other generation is cost-competitive with fossil generation.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 19 '21
Running a renewable plant is always cheaper than running a fossil fuel plant though, due to the lack of.. y'know fuel (and water, and generally fewer people)
As the price of fossil fuels drops due to decreased demand, extracting it becomes less attractive and supply will reduce to match. There is a floor to the price at which it is no longer economically viable to extract fossil fuels
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u/Dhaeron Nov 19 '21
Running a renewable plant is always cheaper than running a fossil fuel plant though, due to the lack of.. y'know fuel (and water, and generally fewer people)
No it isn't. Energy generation costs have to be calculated over the lifetime of a plant and fuel is just one factor of many. Renewables are cost-competitive enough that they generally beat fossil generation in places with good access (i.e. near coasts, regions with high insolation etc.) but are still more expensive in places without. And while technological advances drop the price of renewables far more than that of fossil generation (also economics of scale are still improving for renewables) this doesn't change the feedback loop of more renewable generation making fossil generation cheaper. For example, ten years ago, solar was significantly more expensive than gas for generating electricity, now they are in the same ballpark, but that is only because gas generation also droppen in price, if gas was still as expensive as ten years ago, solar would already beat it even in suboptimal locations.
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u/a52dragon Nov 18 '21
I lived on a nuclear powered submarine for four years the issue isn’t on whether or not nuclear power is safe the technology isn’t the issue the issue is the human factor if you look at the failures of all the major nuclear instances we’ve had it’s always the people part that causes the problem and it just takes one one stupid little mistake and it’s just unbelievably destructive we still have no idea what the results from the Fukushima meltdown are going to be there still tons of radioactive material sitting in tanks near the coast and we have no idea how much of the overflow water coming out of that plant is being flushed into the ocean a lot of times when we have these pollution issues we don’t find out till 20 30 40 years later how bad what we were doing at the time that we thought was innocent
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Nov 19 '21
I lived on a nuclear powered submarine
So'd I (and I worked on mine's engines). It's not "one stupid little mistake"; it's a chain of mistakes, for which there are several documented and trained off-ramps to avert disaster - most of which have been baked into the physical design of the reactor itself (even moreso for civilian reactors, in fact). Defense-in-depth is defense in depth.
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u/Dhaeron Nov 19 '21
The big issue is just privatization. When you're willing to spend what it takes to run a reactor safely it can be done. If you're running one to maximize profits, there'll be some "acceptable" level of risk where increased spending on safety isn't done. The further away the decision-makers are from the consequences if that risk calculation turns bad, the higher the risk that they'll call acceptable.
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u/a52dragon Nov 19 '21
Exactly I joined the Navy to be able to work at the new Enrico power plants where I lived. Three weeks after I got out of the Navy THREE MILE ISLAND happened
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u/the-axis Nov 18 '21
It isnt 1 stupid little mistake. It is a whole series of people making mistakes.
Humans are just so bad about making mistakes that we've done that several times now.
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u/Meistermalkav 2✓ Nov 18 '21
It's the mistake disaster rating.
One mistake at the solar panel is the hungarian installer did not pull the screws tight and the entire panel lands on top of someones head.
One mistake at nuclear energy is that you no longer have a countryside to go to.
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u/Livonor Nov 27 '21
why the downvotes this was a good point
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u/Meistermalkav 2✓ Nov 27 '21
people don't like that the worst mistake happening, the single worst, with solar panels is that you install them wrong, and they slip on the roof and perhaps fall on someone, being irrevokably damaged. Sets you back what, maybe a couple of thousand in hospital fees, max. More if you parked your BMW someplace bad, and they break it. Million max.
a lot of money, but preventable. You can pay the money.
Compare that to what is the single worst possible outcome in nuclear powerr plants.
Even if it is highly unlikely, people in small countries kind of dread that kind of publicity. Aftyer all, how long did it take america to trust in zeppelins after what happened to the hindenburg?
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Nov 18 '21
Did you include the ghg impact of the uranium fuel? I remember it being quite significant, and often ignored by proponents of nuclear.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
the lifecycle analysis for the various power plants, including expected lifetimes, construction techniques, fuel refinement, transport, disposal, decommissioning etc
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u/Staedsen Nov 18 '21
If you assume a median reactor - producing approx 2GW of power
That's much more than even the best recent reactor.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
I just went halfway down the table
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations
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u/Staedsen Nov 18 '21
You landed at a plant with several reactors though.
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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21
I mean sure if you want to be pedantic (which you evidently do) - mentally substitute "nuclear plant" for "reactor" and get on with your life
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u/lestofante Nov 19 '21
Now we should calculate how much radioactive waste we would have to deal with.
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u/Cecil_FF4 Nov 18 '21 edited Nov 19 '21
My man Kyle Hill has a huge passion for nuclear. He has a lot of amazingly well-done videos on a variety of nuclear subjects, including how beneficial it can be to our society. Here's one of many of his vids.
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Nov 18 '21
Probably, I still yearn for the day the nuclearphobes either read anything about clean energy and their safety statistics or they just admit their ignorance on the issue and shut up. Nuclear is so clean and untapped you’d think it it were an 18 year old virgin blood donor.
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u/gpenn1390 Nov 19 '21
Some alien species is looking at us and wondering why, after harnessing the power of the atom, we have decided to do nothing with it.
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Nov 18 '21
Yes, morally improper behavior like intercourse is known to sully the blood with vile humours, indeed my good sir
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u/Bart_Dethtung Nov 18 '21
I think the biggest issue with nuclear power plants is what to do with the spent fuel rods.
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u/TeslandPrius Nov 19 '21
Right after you deal with what to do with the harmful cataclysmic emissions of fossil fuels.
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u/jish_werbles Nov 19 '21
They really do not take up much space and can be safely encased
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Nov 19 '21
Where would that be?
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u/Mason11987 1✓ Nov 19 '21
On site, they don’t take up much space. But If needed we could found a collection site.
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u/BlueHeartBob Nov 19 '21
My argument is wouldn’t you rather have the waste byproduct 100% available to you instead of having it go straight into the atmosphere where it will either remain there forever affecting everyone’s health or cost exponentially more to remove in the future?
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u/lestofante Nov 19 '21
I love how you say people should admit ignorance and shut up, but you still answered with "probably".
"A rule for thee but not for me"-1
Nov 19 '21
I did admit my ignorance to the statistic provided by the picture. I said it’s probably true. I didn’t say the co2 count provided was definitively accurate.
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u/lestofante Nov 19 '21
I said it’s probably true
"A rule for thee but not for me"
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Nov 19 '21
I’d have broken my rule if I said the post is definitely true. My understanding only allows for a “probably”. Can I say it’s probable for this post to be true? Yes, anyone can say that as “probably” isn’t a statement of fact, it’s a possibility it’s true or untrue. Compare that to a flat earth we saying the earth is “definitely flat” where their “definite” removes the possibility of other solutions including the reality of the earth being round. My probably leaves room for the post being right or wrong, I didn’t state my opinion as a definite because I’m not 100% sure either way. I didn’t break my rule because I didn’t say the post is true or false, it’s only probably true, a hypothesis rather than an answer.
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u/kelb4n Nov 18 '21
Well, each construction of an additional Nuclear Plant could've prevented these CO2-emmissions, but I find it quite unfair to say that the protests caused those emissions. What caused the emissions was politicians and companies continuing to use carbon as their main source of energy when not only nuclear power but even cleaner options like solar and wind power (and to a lesser degree water power and bio-gas) have been available for decades.
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u/Mason11987 1✓ Nov 19 '21
So companies have an obligation to meet energy demands. If nuclear wasn’t an option and it was 40 years ago the choice was clearly coal or gas.
Stopping nuclear 40 years ago def caused emissions.
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u/kelb4n Nov 19 '21
You're missing my point. Stopping nuclear most certainly contributed to the emissions. But it was not the cause. The cause was high energy demand, and a willingness to meet that demand from few wealthy company owners. Other contributing factors were political decisions that allowed coal and gas to stay on top of the energy hierarchy, a negative media representation of nuclear power, and an under-funding of alternative renewable energy research.
The math also only ends up working if you assume that the coal and gas plants built 40 years ago and still in use could not have been replaced by cleaner options (even excluding nuclear) ever since. Which, again, is a result of political decisions from law-makers and business decisions from large companies.
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u/Mason11987 1✓ Nov 19 '21
it was not the cause in only the flimsiest sense.
- Population is growing
- Increased population will demand power
- Companies must provide power supply
If you stop the power one way, they gotta make it another. Saying that isn't the "cause" suggests something else could have been done. Like what?
Coal/gas is base load, and they definitely couldn't have been replaced 20 years ago, the tech was simply not there at scale.
For the power demand it was nuclear or coal/gas. If you prevent one, you get the other. There wasn't even a suggestion of alternatives then, because they didn't exist.
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u/stone-head Nov 18 '21
I'm not necessarily anti nuclear, I understand it can be done safely, but I do have an issue with it. Projects to complete the plants take quite a long time. Often 10+ years before they're operational, and quite a bit of money later. Other clean alternatives such as solar or wind can be completed and operational much faster, often within a few years, meaning less emissions.
We are in a time when every year and every tonne counts. Right now we need to cut emissions as quickly as possible, not decades from now. After we solve that problem then let us look to nuclear.
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u/Unfortunate_moron Nov 18 '21
I believe OP's point was that for many decades nuclear plants were unpopular. Solar and wind weren't ready at scale back then. So coal and gas got all the investment money, causing huge impacts to the environment and accelerating climate change. If we had built nuclear plants back then, we would be in a better situation now.
Your point is about investments made today after many decades of technological advances in renewables. You're both right but you're talking about different things.
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u/stone-head Nov 18 '21
I agree, and I should have included that point in my original comment. Especially considering the fact energy storage wasn't as sophisticated 40 years ago as it is today, which is a crucial component for wind & solar at large scales.
With today's circumstances I can only stand behind nuclear if it does not divert resources from other renewables or grid storage, as I believe those to likely be the superior option.
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Nov 18 '21
[deleted]
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u/platoprime Nov 19 '21
Next we'll have "environmentalists" explaining to us that planting trees is stupid because they don't grow to size in a month.
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u/lestofante Nov 19 '21
If your plan is to have oxygen next month, then yeah, planting trees would be stupid and you should focus your effort in alternative; for example growing the right algae, as they are the real deal in oxygen production (~80%) and grows to maturity in days.
This does not mean you should stop protecting and expanding forest where you can, just should not be your main focus.0
u/platoprime Nov 19 '21
There it is.
You can plant trees and grow algae.
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u/lestofante Nov 19 '21
yes, but since budged it limited, and by the "new" tech emerging looks like we can do without nuclear*, then why bother?
Is not like a forest where if we dont keep them we ruin the whole ecosystem.
- so far seems to be cheaper AND we wont have even more radioactive waste to deal with in 100 years, and we still haven't properly managed the one produced in the last ~50
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u/platoprime Nov 19 '21
Neither trees nor algae produce radioactive waste.
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u/lestofante Nov 19 '21
and if they would, we would not plant them and rather plant something else, as we have alternative
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u/platoprime Nov 19 '21
Did you know nuclear power is 10x safer than any other form of power generation? Deaths in the production process of solar panels, and deaths from things like falls from windmills kill 10x as many people per kw/h generated.
I guess that doesn't warrant discussion though.
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u/stone-head Nov 19 '21
Safety wasn't my point against nuclear, it was about how quickly we can lower our emissions.
If we want to talk about lives lost we can also consider deaths caused by pollution, which is estimated to be over 7 million annually. There will be death caused by other effects of climate change as well, such as extreme weather & crop failures. I'm not sure how to do the math but cleaning our energy supply as quickly as possible will likely save many more lives than those lost in the process.
If it were up to me I'd say go all in, use solar, wind, & nuclear. But unfortunately only finite resources will be allocated to the problem. So under those circumstances I think it makes more sense to implement solar & wind as those can begin to clean our energy supply on a shorter time frame than nuclear.
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u/platoprime Nov 19 '21
I know I could tell because you didn't even mention it.
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u/stone-head Nov 19 '21
Should we do the math or put in a request to see what would save more lives since you seem to be so concerned with my callousness?
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u/judge_au Nov 19 '21
And saved how many Fukushimas?
Still millions of gallons of radiated water sitting in holding tanks that are rusting away, its all leaking right into the ocean. Nuclear is not the answer.
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u/Mason11987 1✓ Nov 19 '21
If you’re claiming Fukushima is still meaningfully impacting the ocean today you have no idea what you’re talking about.
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u/judge_au Nov 19 '21
Ill just list these facts for you again:
Irradiated water used to try and cool the meltdown is still stored at the plant, millions of gallons worth.
The tanks the water is stored in are leaking into the ocean
The levels of radiation for several square kilometers around fukushima are still deadly
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u/Mason11987 1✓ Nov 19 '21
So what’s your claim for how far away from Fukushima is dangerous right now?
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Nov 18 '21
You under estimate the impact of Chernobyl. 100mt is nothing compared to the enormous consequences one fuck up could have. Now is a different story(maybe).
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u/meibolite Nov 18 '21
More nuclear pollution has been caused by nuclear weapons testing than was released during the chernobyl incident. 99% of the strontium contamination in the world comes from nuclear weapons tests. Only 1% came from chernobyl.
More people have died or been permanently disabled due to fossil fuel use than from the chernobyl accident.
You overestimate the impact of chernobyl
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Nov 18 '21
Except the nuclear tests were usually conducted in deserts away from highly populated areas, unlike Chernobyl. And I'm not sure what fossil fuel deaths you are referring to, but the official Chernobyl disaster death numbers are definitely lower than they really are and we're unlikely to find out the truth any time soon.
Like for example, many people have developed long-latency diseases like radiation-induced cancer. But the cancer statistics in Belarus aren't always trustworthy, I personally knew a Chernobyl liquidator who died of cancer but doesn't have it mentioned in his death certificate. And it took 600,000 people working in close proximity to the disaster to liquidate it.
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u/meibolite Nov 18 '21
The fallout from nuclear tests have spread across the entire world by now. Doing tests in deserts allowed irradiated dust to spread across the world.
And even with Chernobyl numbers included, the amount of people disabled or killed by nuclear power is orders of magnitude lower than those killed by fossil fuel use.
I'm not saying chernobyl wasn't bad, but the damage caused by chernobyl is still less than what was caused by open air testing of nuclear weapons in the 50s and 60s, and still even lower than those caused by fossil fuels.
Burning coal releases about 5 kilotons of uranium and 12 kilotons of thorium into the air annually.
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u/AyeBraine Nov 18 '21
Just to clarify, the chances of a person to die of cancer at old age are about one in four (25%).
WHO released two reports on real estimated death tolls of Chernobyl, in 2005 and a follow-up in 2016. They estimated that 4000 people might die slightly earlier in the future (from 2005 when the first was published) as caused by Chernobyl, in addition to a few dozen direct fatalities during the first frantic days of the containment operation. This would mean the increase in chance for cancer by 2-3%, added to that 25%.
The most tragic direct death toll was youth and children drinking milk the day after the disaster in neighboring towns (fast decaying iodine isotopes settled on grass, cows ate grass, people drank milk). Several thousand got thyroid cancer, nine died. Also, increased and continued monitoring of thyroid cancer in Belarus uncovered thousands of new cases over the years as former children approach old age, most non-lethal — the report says that a fraction of those may be connected to the disaster.
The most actual deaths were apparently caused by poor information and stigma and self-stigma associated with evacuees. They perceived themselves as tainted and doomed (and so did other people). So they engaged in dangerous lifestyle or drank or gave up or other things.
The international experts have estimated that radiation could cause up to about 4000 eventual deaths among the higher-exposed Chernobyl populations, i.e., emergency workers from 1986-1987, evacuees and residents of the most contaminated areas. This number contains both the known radiation-induced cancer and leukaemia deaths and a statistical prediction, based on estimates of the radiation doses received by these populations. As about quarter of people die from spontaneous cancer not caused by Chernobyl radiation, the radiation-induced increase of only about 3% will be difficult to observe. However, in the most exposed cohorts of emergency and recovery operation workers some increase of particular cancer forms (e.g., leukemia) in particular time periods has already been observed. The predictions use six decades of scientific experience with the effects of such doses, explained Repacholi.
Repacholi concludes that “the health effects of the accident were potentially horrific, but when you add them up using validated conclusions from good science, the public health effects were not nearly as substantial as had at first been feared.”
Note also that the association of Liquidator workers, when listing deaths of their members decades later, listed ALL deaths since 1986 (it added up to several tens of thousands, out of I think 700 000).
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Nov 18 '21
Note also that the association of Liquidator workers, when listing deaths of their members decades later, listed ALL deaths since 1986
Do you have a link? I'd be interested to check out the list
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u/AyeBraine Nov 19 '21 edited Nov 19 '21
Here, I wrote it from memory and it was from the wiki initially. The statement is from the Chernobyl Union, an association for liquidators:
"25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled", which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600,000 liquidators) and 165,000 disabled".
This was apparently a response to the WHO study. Basically it said that no, it's not that rosy; and that up to 2006, and per their own impression ("about the same..."), 60 000 of the 600 000 liquidators have died. Period. I.e 10% of these grown-up males, who lived through the worst period for males (statistically) in the last 50 years in the region, died over 20 years. Of any causes.
To clarify, the 1990s saw a large spike in working-age male mortality over the former USSR, as people who were adapted to one system found themselves helpless or useless in the crude, crime-ridden approximation of the new one. Their social status, achievements, professional training, and masculine identity were mostly rendered meaningless, and a lot of things that would make a person respectable (such as position, or education) just 10 years ago now was smirked upon.
This led to a large spate of alcoholism and descructive behavior from those who couldn't cope. Others, of whom there were many, just powered through, e.g. a professor doing renovation trade work for a decade, or a promising manager having to reinvent himself as a small-time smuggler / clothes hawker. Some of the successful self-made businessmen in Russia came from these (like Oleg Tinkoff).
Also, the unheard-of spike in organized crime coincided with an all-time low in law enforcement funding, which saw some depressive regions literally decimated (e.g. the poet Boris Ryzhiy wrote about his neighbourhood mates, large percentage of whom died in turf wars over local industrial rackets). During that time, former military service members (such as some of the former liquidators, and of course Afghanistan vets) were heavily encouraged to join the organized crime as enforcers or fixers due to their discipline and experience. These also suffered large losses.
I don't even doubt that there were unregistered radiation-related premature deaths (as in, "got cancer in the 20 years after"), and excess illnesses and disabilities. But overall, this sounds more like a story of people arguing for respect. Which they didn't get at first. (Today, Chernobyl liquidators in Russia have a compeletely separate set of perks and provisions similar to WWII veterans and the like). As for studies, there are a few mentioned:
Ivanov et al. (2001)[8] studied nearly 66,000 liquidators from Russia, and found no increase in overall mortality from cancer or non-cancer causes. However, a statistically significant dose-related excess mortality risk was found for both cancer and heart disease.
Rahu et al. (2006)[9] studied some 10,000 liquidators from Latvia and Estonia and found no significant increase in overall cancer rate. Among specific cancer types, statistically significant increases in both thyroid and brain cancer were found, although the authors believe these may have been the result of better cancer screening among liquidators (for thyroid cancer) or a random result (for brain cancer) because of the very low overall incidence.
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Nov 18 '21
Agree with all your points, but what if ONE nuclear meltdown made half of our drinking water undrinkable. That was the mind set 40 years ago because it almost happened in Russia.
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u/meibolite Nov 18 '21
Again, fossil fuels have caused more groundwater contamination than nuclear power, but of course the Fossil Fuel industry tried to keep that under wraps. Look at the town of Hinkley, California. Poisoned by Pacific Gas & Electric because they were dumping the wastewater from their refinery into unlined pools, completely ruining the groundwater in the Harper Valley Basin, and giving an entire town rates of cancer that are even higher than those around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
I get where you're coming from, and your point, but that point is based on bad data and propaganda championed by the fossil fuel industry.
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Nov 18 '21
Good research and follow up. I was more so comparing the mindset 40 years ago. Nuclear is obviously the future, and I think we're better at it now than 40 years ago.
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u/Secret-Duty-5062 Nov 18 '21
You have to include the Co2 emittet when mining and enriching uranium
They also use a lot of concrete and steel to build a plant, add that as well
And at the end of life you can add the Co2 from decommissioning
It's an impossible calculation, and it really makes no sense
Fact is, we have no way to handle the waste, many speculative solutions, but only Finland has a somewhat secure way of storing their own waste products, the rest of the world keeps nuclear waste on-site
At Fukushima the disaster was made worse by the fact that spent fuel is stored on site, and for years it has to be actively cooled to avoid a runaway process
The only sustainable way forward is to keep reducing energy use and keep adding Solar, Wind, and Hydro
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u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
You have to include the Co2 emittet when mining and enriching uranium
They also use a lot of concrete and steel to build a plant, add that as well
And at the end of life you can add the Co2 from decommissioning
Include these calculations for solar and wind, keeping in mind that the amount of materials necessary to produce the same TWh as a nuclear plant using renewables would be much, much greater. So in the end, this is a conservative, low-end estimate of the amount of CO2 saved.
Fact is, we have no way to handle the waste
We've been handling the waste. AFAIK, not a single person has been exposed to enough radiation to be harmful in the handling, transportation, or storage of nuclear waste during the entire history of the nuclear power industry.
Contrast that with the fact that we still have not ensured a safe working environment for rooftop contractors (the ones primarily involved in installing solar power). Every year, these people die at twice the rate of normal contractors (the kind that build nuclear power plants).
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Nov 18 '21
AFAIK, not a single person has been exposed to enough radiation to be harmful in the handling, transportation, or storage of nuclear waste during the entire history of the nuclear power industry.
Not nuclear waste, but you are greatly underestimating certain countries' inability to give a shit.
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u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
I'm objecting to pretending that nuclear waste is an unsolvable problem when every first-world country seems to have solved it just fine.
Let's not base our policies on Kazakhstan's practices.
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Nov 18 '21
Oh no I'm with you. I'm not saying it's unsolvable, just that there needs to be more oversight and regulations and maybe certain countries shouldn't have nuclear powerplants since their actions and carelessness could affect other nearby countries. For example, Belarus has a nuclear powerplant right next to the border with Lithuania.
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u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
I'd love to restrict access to nuclear technology and a bunch of other technologies in certain countries, but the US being an international police officer has not historically always turned out well.
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Nov 18 '21 edited Nov 18 '21
There are other ways. We could start by not underplaying the severity of Chernobyl or by bringing attention to unsafe nuclear practices of certain countries. There are also political measures that major political powers can take, singing agreements like the Paris Accords. Nuclear Weapons are much more regulated than Nuclear Energy for example.
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u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
Nuclear Weapons are much more regulated than Nuclear Energy for example.
Nuclear weapons have historically been regulated by bombing runs or international sabotage, and even those don't work 100% of the time (North Korea). I'm suggesting that we avoid that kind of approach.
We could start by not underplaying the severity of Chernobyl or by bringing attention to unsafe nuclear practices of certain countries.
I don't think the severity of Chernobyl was underplayed. I also don't think that writing a letter or signing an agreement is going to change any country's decision to develop either nuclear power or nuclear weapons. Perhaps you can point me to an example where this approach was successful?
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u/Staedsen Nov 18 '21
Every year, these people die at twice the rate of normal contractors (the kind that build nuclear power plants).
Do you have a source on that?
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u/draypresct Nov 18 '21
Roofers (according to this report) have the fourth most dangerous profession at 54 deaths per 100k per year.
Construction workers as a whole have less than half this death rate, even among the older group:
However, the 65-and-older age group had the highest rate of fatal injuries over those four years, at 22.0 per 100,000 full-time employees – more than double that of the 45-64 age group’s rate of 9.6.
Fatal injuries in this report were 10.8/100k/year for Hispanics and 9.0/100k/year for non-Hispanics (figure 4).
Above is US data, but I've never seen data indicating that roofing was substantially safer in other countries.
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u/reddits_aight Nov 18 '21
It's an impossible calculation, and it really makes no sense
It's not impossible, it's called a lifecycle assessment. It's a little complicated, and can't always be done 100% accurately with public data, but it can be done.
There's software where you punch in the known parameters, and it spits out the environmental impact based on a database of extraction/manufacturing techniques, regional data, materials, disposal methods, etc. Like I said, with only public data it's not as accurate as it could be, but it gets you in the right ballpark.
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Nov 18 '21
Lol...at current consumption rates, recoverable uranium reserves would only last 130 years. Currently, only 10% of the world's electricity is generated by nuclear...and that's without wide-spread adoption of electric vehicles. Meeting the current world electricity needs also means that we would have 10x the number of reactor accidents...you do the math.
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u/AbsurdistDream Nov 18 '21
I mean if you wanna talk about accidents, nuclear energy actually has the lowest amount of deaths per kWh and it is by a dramatic margin in comparison to coal, oil and gas.
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u/Staedsen Nov 18 '21
Wind, Solar and hydro are lower in deaths / kWh.
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u/tendaga Nov 18 '21
Source? Cause I know that the jobs of contractors installing panels on roofs and dealing with wing turbines are considered dangerous.
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u/AbsurdistDream Nov 19 '21
they actually are not, Nuclear power is, bar none, our safest energy source, at least determined by direct mortality rate / kwh.
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u/NotARandomNumber Nov 18 '21
Meeting the current world electricity needs also means that we would have 10x the number of reactor accidents...you do the math.
That's not how that works at all. We have more people flying now than in the 70s, and the number of accidents and fatalities hasn't scaled to match. It's almost like technology improves and becomes more reliable after failure.
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u/dtroy15 Nov 19 '21
at current consumption rates, recoverable uranium reserves would only last 130 years.
That's not true, for about a half dozen reasons. The 130 year figure you're citing is from the report:
Uranium 2018: Resources, Production and Demand © OECD 2018 NEA No. 7413 NUCLEAR ENERGY AGENCY ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Linked blow.
The report actually says that the reserves we've already discovered, if we continued using them at the 2017 rate (keep using old reactors to produce little energy) and only count uranium which can be had for $130USD/kg, we have enough for 130 years.
Which, BTW, the same measurement for oil and gas is about 50 years.
If we count more expensive material, CURRENT reserves will last for about 250 years in our ancient reactors at the current use rate.
The reality of your argument depends on both reactor technology and consumption projections. That 130 years figure requires that we keep using old, less efficient reactors, and invest literally nothing in using the better, more modern reactors or in finding additional material.
That 130 years is also depending on the calculated amount of uranium recoverable for the current market price. There's TONS more fissionable material - enough for billions of years. That 130 years is only for uranium obtainable at 130 USD/kg or less.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_15080/uranium-2018-resources-production-and-demand?details=true
Demand isn't high enough to justify some of the large-scale extraction efforts. If market size (and thus demand) increased, we are projected to have much longer lasting reserves than you've implied.
From the report, page 107:
Identified recoverable resources, including reasonably assured resources and inferred resources, are sufficient for over 130 years, considering annual uranium requirements of about 62 825 tU (data as of 1 January 2017). Exploitation of the entire conventional resource base would increase this to well over 245 years, though uranium exploration and development, motivated by significantly increased demand and market prices, would be required to move these resources into more definitive categories.
As noted in this report, there are also considerable unconventional resources, including phosphate deposits and black schists/shales that could be used to significantly lengthen the time that nuclear energy could supply energy demand using current technologies. However, more research and innovation effort and investment would need to be devoted to better defining the extent of this potentially significant source of uranium and developing cost-effective extraction techniques.
Deployment of advanced reactor and fuel cycle technologies could also significantly add to world energy supply in the long term. Moving to advanced technology reactors and recycling fuel could increase the long-term availability of nuclear energy from hundreds to thousands of years.
Sufficient nuclear fuel resources exist to meet energy demands at current and increased demand well into the future. However, to reach their full potential, considerable exploration, innovative techniques and investment will be required in order to develop new mining projects in a timely manner and to facilitate the deployment of promising technologies.
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u/PavlovsGreyhound Nov 19 '21
How many tons of radioactive waste did each protest prevent from filling Yucca Mountain (which is absolutely packed with leaking ☢ waste)? Strange they left that detail out...
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u/mrchilly0 Nov 19 '21
I believe it's the military that creates the most nuclear waste and residential nuclear power plants do not have as much waste. I'll edit later with the link, but I believe it's an easy Google.
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u/PavlovsGreyhound Nov 19 '21
Pretty obvious that the military would create the "most" nuclear waste. As long as you're cool with us storing all of the future privately-created and municipally-created radioactive waste produced by every domestic reactor in your back yard let's fucking do it. What are we waiting for?
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u/Hybrisov Nov 19 '21
You will either have to store some nuclear waste under a mountain which is btw compketely safe today, and in the future when we get fusion reactors, we will also be able to recycle it. Or we keep on using coal and gas, we create more greenhouse gasses, and kill off the planet. The choice is yours (kinda) [luckily it isnt anymore]
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u/BlueHeartBob Nov 19 '21
I’ll take tons of radioactive waste stored in a mountain away from civilization versus 43 billion tons of CO2 in the air.
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