The same procedures are involved when building coal mines, coal ports, coal railroads, and coal power stations here in Australia, yet they proliferate everywhere regardless.
I hear from friends that are still in consulting about how annoying it is to be knee-deep in a project when they find that a Koala lives around the proposed site, or that they spend ages trying to find a suitable site for a development that doesn’t involve clearing pristine forest housing endangered species, and yet too much forest is cleared nonetheless and the Koala is on track for extinction by 2050 (in the state of New South Wales where I live).
I can see Timex’s side to the argument too, what’s the point of the cultural heritage of a farmstead when future humans will be too busy scraping together a subsistence trying to farm the coming hellscape to appreciate it? Solar/Wind with batteries might be able to take a small enough footprint to not have to involve any large sacrifices (e.g. rooftop solar, offshore solar/wind).
Tim is right - this “stuff you don’t NEED to do” isn’t specific to nuclear power, and other energy installations find ways to handle it. What matters is where nuclear is different than other forms of energy production, and that is in the risk mitigation.
As I said above, nuclear power fail states are at best extremely dangerous and at worst massive disasters. Mitigating that risk is where the high cost comes from, both at the front end when designing and building the plant, and during the life of the plant as safety processes are maintained and updated.
It’s also interesting to note that the normal operation (not fail states) of coal and natural gas plants is far more hazardous than nuclear ones — by which I mean pollution and greenhouse gas emissions — but the operators of those plants are basically permitted to transfer the cost of that hazard to everyone else.
Plus there are many different types of risk. Waste (still no solution despite 70 years of best efforts), security, fuel supply, and expertise that goes hand-in-hand with nuclear weapons.
Yeah, i guess climate change isn’t really THAT big a deal then.
Nah dude, it really ain’t. Some bones or pottery, buried in the dirt, aren’t really that big a deal, in the grand scheme of things. They don’t actually matter.
See, that’s the thing here… You can’t simultaneously say that climate change is the greatest danger in the history of the human species… And then simultaneously say that this other shit matters so much as to limit our options for dealing with climelate change.
See, this is what I mean. The waste from coal and gas plants is also hazardous, and there is a lot more of it, and there is basically no solution despite hundreds of years of efforts. So it’s not clear to me that the waste argument is the one that rules out nuclear.
It’s also worth realizing that the waste from nuclear power plants is effectively infintesimal. All, all the waste from every nuclear power plant, that has ever existed, anywhere on earth, fits into an area 10 feet high, going from the endzone to the 10 yard line of a football field.
Like, even if you did literally nothing with it besides bury it in the ground and just allowed it to contaminate the ground water… the impact would be super localized, because there just isn’t that much of it. It wouldn’t destroy the fucking planet.
The reality is this:
When it comes to actually just building the nuclear power plant, as a raw engineering task, it is not prohibitively expensive. It’s NOT THAT COMPLEX. It’s a super well understood problem. And modern reactors are even simpler than the old ones we built 70 years ago.
The additional costs are stuff that we, as a society, are CHOOSING to impose. We can choose not to, if we think it’s an important thing to do.
Ah, the engineer’s perspective. Politics and economics say that someone is gonna try to make money and gather power through the process, eroding those “simple” engineering principles. Leading to both higher costs and less safety. This happens with every type of power, the difference here is just that the stakes are higher.
We’re arguing different sides of the same issues which we agree on. I’m saying there’s a regulation framework that can’t be bypassed and is unlikely to be surmountable, and you’re saying it needs to be bypassed and surmounted. Ok.
Thing is I’m pretty sure the fact that we live in a democracy with laws and individual / property rights just won’t be able to change that framework in time to construct nuclear power to avert climate change. The scientists who looked at it holistically from a public, private, cost, feasibility, and even new research and technology (modular reactors) also agree with me.
This is a huge concern! If you’re not willing to throw in the towel yet, good, I guess.
On a side note, the ability to appeal a development for lack of adequate consultation / compensation / environmental studies (such as cultural heritage) is really the heart of a democracy in my opinion. Forget congress voting to declare war, that has nothing to do with you and me on a day to day basis. It’s the day-to-day processes, the farmer writing a letter to a guy at a desk in Washington saying that his farm is worth saving. For better or worse if we do demolish that farm we do it with open eyes and consensus and studies and compensation. We don’t just send a bulldozer. I also point out this disconnect here @Timex in that you’re supposedly a small government, personal-responsibility type, yet you want the government to literally bypass the laws about consultation and compensation to build an industrial-scale power plant? Basically what you need and want then is then communism?
Nuclear waste is also not a ‘technical issue that can be easily solved’. It’s a terrible legacy. I looked it up for my local power plant and their answer? “We are currently storing waste on site, and constructing new buildings when they get full. This is currently a new building every five to seven years”. It’s radioactive for thousands of years. Those buildings won’t last thousands of years. Yes, the quantities are small, but even if transported by truck or train to Yucca mountain, some of those trucks and trains will crash. Some of the containers will leak. I understand, that radiation exposure to small-town Alabama is a small price to pay for clean power. I’m on your side. But we live in a system where the small town gets to say no. Again, communism?
Natural gas WITH CARBON CAPTURE might be cheaper than nuclear. Solar and wind are cheaper. Not cheaper with subisidies, cheaper. We should and are building as much of it as we can. Base load is a major issue, but we haven’t tried everything else yet either. Low-head micro-turbine hydro, battery storage, thermal storage, and true market pricing. Power should be much more expensive on a still night when there is no solar and wind, and we should adapt our systems to have our electric car feed the grid and give us cash back on those nights. These ideas ARE compatible with our current framework.
Yeah, this is really the heart of the issue. Solar/Wind are cheaper, faster to install, require far less initial capital investment, and have almost no security issues or long lasting environmental impacts. Until we’ve replaced a large chunk of our carbon based power sources with Solar/Wind, it doesn’t make sense to spend money on new nuclear power plants. Twenty or thirty years ago, nuclear would have been a great investment. Ten or thirty years from now, newer forms of nuclear might be a good way to handle the base load problem. But at the moment it doesn’t really have a place.
To support my views, I include this highly scientific graph:
But why can’t a regulation framework be bypassed?
It’s not some force of nature. It’s a self imposed limitation. You can change those laws. You can change how you enforce those regulations.
Yeah, you buy that land. I mean, you seem to be confusing different issues here.
On one hand, you have things like eminent domain. Stuff like forcing someone to sell their land to you.
But beyond that, if you buy the land? Then it’s yours. You can do what you want with it. Now, you may get to a point where you don’t like the fact that some land NEAR you now has a nuclear power plant? But that’s kind of too bad. You don’t own land that you don’t own.
Well, two points here.
As I just said, buying land from people and then building a nuclear plant is not communism. Hell, unless you use eminent domain, it’s not even a government matter. It’s just buying land and using that land.
But beyond that, if what we’re talking about is doing some massive government program to try and tackle what is being described as some existential threat to mankind, then this kind of thing becomes moot. I mean, if you are already going to go down that road, you can’t then say, “Oh, but we can’t have the government intrude into our lives!” You can’t say, “We need more government intrusion… but not for nuclear power!”
It’s a TRIVIAL amount of waste. OH man, they have whole BUILDINGS with it! Oh man, that’s, what… thousands of square FEET! That’s like, 0.000000000000001% of the earth!
It’s a trivial fucking problem, dude. Oh man, it’s radioactive waste! Oh noes! Dude, you get more radiation out of existing coal plants than any nuclear plant… it just happens to float away into the atmosphere, so no one cares.
No matter how bad radioactive waste is, it’s super localized. That means you can just fucking not go where you put it, ever. You can just say, “That section of the earth is dead to us, forever”, and… it doesn’t matter, because it’s a trivial amount of space.
The problem with AGW caused by CO2 is that it affects the entire earth. It’s not localized at all. You can’t hide from it.
If you are trading the utter destruction of one tiny area of the earth, in order to preserve the rest of the earth? That’s a good trade. You should take that trade.
Solar and wind cannot provide the baseline power generation you need. Full stop.
Yeah, guess what? “Trying everything” takes time.
Nuclear is a solution to the problem, TODAY. It doesn’t bank on hoping that you invent some new, viable solution. It’s already solved.
Just FYI it’s super frustrating and stupid people are still arguing over nuclear power. It’s literally the primary solution for energy production that isn’t carbon based, and only realistic solution, and people want solar panels.
Solar and wind can not work without massive batteries, at best.
Well, there is a big assumption underlying this as well: that we all won’t be forced to abandon our “use all the power we want any time we want” mindset. If solar energy storage doesn’t grow up, and baseline starts to fail or becomes too expensive, everyone will need to treat daylight more like we did a century ago, and if you aren’t on a life support machine you are rationed to 200Wh/night after sunset.
You can’t ration energy but you could severely price tier it, like many cities do with water now. So price tier 1, base tier, is basically free, but each usage tier above that gets significantly more expensive, 2-10x more expensive per tier, with very significant costs at the high end.
Energy is literally everything. Like, seriously, everything in the entire world that you deal with every day is ultimately related to some amount of energy.
Having the government institute some kind of tax on energy is ultimately a tax on everything you consume, ever. And as a result, it will have a virtually guaranteed depressive effect on the economy and productivity.
Humanity’s consumption of energy is going to go up, probably forever. Even if you include things like increased efficiency, you’re not gonna beat the fact that the population keeps growing, and the fact that most of the world still lives like primitive humans, and their energy consumption is going to skyrocket as they come into the modern age.
Yeah, efficiency ain’t gonna help there. That curve is way too steep.
The solution isn’t going to be for folks to use less energy. We’re not going to go back to being primitive humans, unless we destroy our civilization… at which point, hey, none of this shit matters anyway!
You need to produce carbon free power. That’s the problem that needs to be solved, and it needs to be solved yesterday. Either focus your efforts on that problem, or you’re just fucking around.
You say that as if rolling brownouts aren’t a thing already. Government and Business have the $ to get their power, but it could price residential users out of off-peak energy markets. If you don’t have that Tesla wall of your own, you don’t get to use that 1800watt microwave after dark.
I don’t think people are claiming that Solar and Wind will be the full solution. Rather, we’re saying that there is a giant chunk of electricity generation (~80%) that can be replaced by Solar and Wind before baseline load becomes an issue. So let’s replace that 80%. Once we’ve replaced 80% of our power generation, then nuclear might have a place at the table. Up until that point though, it’s just an all around worse solution.
We spend a huge amount of time talking about this topic here around the lunch table — a lot of calories are spent on it. So I’ll tell you what I’d say is the informal general consensus about ultra-high-penetration renewables scenarios.
The consensus is emerging that we can probably do 80 percent [renewables] with some combination of spatial diversity and short-duration storage.
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Edit: Oh, and I agree with 98% of the other stuff you’re saying Timex. This is really my only quibble.
The problem is that you don’t have time.
The reason we don’t have enough nuclear power now, is because people have been fucking around for ages. Because people got this messed up idea in their heads, largely based on movies, that nuclear power plants were gonna blow up and create giant mutant monsters… so we stopped building nuclear power plants. We haven’t built a new one since the 90’s, and that one took forever due to problems we have already talked about here.
Our first nuclear power plant, Oyster creek? We built that for $488 million dollars. In 5 years, starting in 1964. And it ran until this year.
And for years now, folks have said, “We can’t build new nuclear power plants, they take too long!” But we could have already built enough to provide all of our baseline power. We just didn’t. And we never will, as long as we keep pretending like it’s impossible.
