[jfaucett]

What many people is this thread don't realize is that nuclear is by far the cleanest form of energy for the environment. It has no intermittancy problems like Wind and Solar. The process of building nuclear is extremely clean compared to building wind turbines and solar panels which devastate the environment due to the rare metals needed and production process.

Its also vastly friendlier for humans and animals. The number of deaths due to meltdowns, and accidents in nuclear palls in comparison to all those occuring due to wind turbines and solar.

If you're an environmentalist it behooves you to honestly look at the research and data that has accumulated over the past 40 years on this topic.

[lucidguppy]

I find it hard to look at nuclear when much of what is limiting solar and wind is political.

So far every nuclear accident we've seen are going to be around for forever timescales.

The US could have been at the forefront of solar and wind power but it continually tries to push coal.

[jfaucett]

Please note though that the "forever" timescale becomes harmless for all intents and purposes relatively quickly. So IMHO and I don't really know the cause, this conception we have of nuclear is a really uninformed one. See: https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-nuclear-fallout-last

[amelius]

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500964

"Today, the liveliness of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki serves as a reminder not only of the human ability to regenerate, but also of the extent to which fear and misinformation can lead to incorrect expectations. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many thought that any city targeted by an atomic weapon would become a nuclear wasteland. While the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings was horrendous and nightmarish, with innumerable casualties, the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not allow their cities to become the sort of wasteland that some thought was inevitable. This experience of can serve as lesson in the present when much of the public and even some governments have reacted radically to the accident in Fukushima--in the midst of tragedy, there remains hope for the future."

[jiojfekjl]

Ok, but more than 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster, it's still not safe to live in Pripyat. Worker's are limited to spending no more than 5 consecutive hours on site.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/ukrai...

So yeah. Foreverish.

[yazan94]

Maybe it is uninformed, but the media certainly doesn't help in it's coverage of nuclear disasters. Speaking as someone with very little understanding of nuclear physics and energy, how it seems like nuclear power plants are amazing right up until they don't work (see Fukashima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl) or the fuel rods are spent. We still don't have long-term nuclear waste storage plans other than cordoning off certain areas and burying the spent fuel underground[1]. From the same article, nuclear plants have massive 'ponds' 7-12 meters deep that store highly radioactive spent fuel rods for a few years until they reduce their reactivity and heat to something more manageable before disposing of them. When decommissioning a nuclear station, what do we do with that water when in the meantime? Especially if it really is true that a nuclear plant's lifetime is on the order of 50 years[2].

Don't get me wrong, maybe nuclear is the optimal answer to Earth's energy needs. But also, maybe the tech is just not there yet, and certainly the media's fear-mongering needs to be more tempered and more informative to allow public acceptance of nuclear. Otherwise we will probably still keep getting NIMBY responses

[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

[2] https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...

[hackerman12345]

I'm not quite sure what your question is with the spent fuel pool. The water will just sit there and slowly evaporate probably or be cleaned and checked for contaminants before going elsewhere. It's really not that much water. I think you're making a problem where there isn't one.

The water keeps it from melting as the spent fuel becomes a little more inert each day (it transfers heat to the water, and as we know radioactive stuff has half lives). After a few years, we can move it to dry storage (incased by concrete and steel).

[adventured]

> but it continually tries to push coal

Let's clarify that China, Germany and Japan are consuming more coal per dollar of GDP than the US is. Those are the #2, #3, and #4 economies. Coal dominates both German and Chinese energy. The US coal industry has been contracting rapidly, falling back to 1985 levels, losing about 1/3 of output. China on the other hand, is still consuming as much coal as the rest of the world combined and four times that of the US.

Japan for its part, plans to open four dozen new coal plants in the next decade.

> The US could have been at the forefront of solar and wind power

The US invented modern solar and is at the forefront. As of early 2017, the US was still getting more of its energy from solar than China (not growing nearly as fast however). The US is adding dramatically more solar capacity than anybody else not named China. Capacity equivalent to four or five nuclear power plants, every year. In 2016 the US added 10 times as much solar capacity as what Germany did (an early leader), and nearly twice that of Japan.

The US is #2 in wind power globally and will remain there indefinitely. It's also at the forefront there. It's adding the equivalent of two or three nuclear power plants worth of wind energy capacity per year, while US energy consumption is flat.

The US has 30 times the installed wind energy generation capacity vs Japan for example.

Currently there are only three major players in wind energy. China, the US, Germany. Germany is starting to fall far behind the US just due to economic size variance.

[woodandsteel]

The problem going forward is that the Trump administration is busy reversing all the Obama policies that encouraged renewables,and is pushing fossil fuels as hard as it can. Renewables will expand nonetheless, just likely not as fast as if the Trump administration were not opposed. Were you really not aware of all this?

[twothamendment]

There are places where solar makes sense and places where it doesn't. When I lived in Utah, entire neighborhoods were covering their roofs with solar. Now I'm a lot farther North, almost Canada. Between the clouds and short daylight hours, solar doesn't make any sense at all for at least 6 months out of the year. I've been watching the percentage of sun received over the winter. Many days you can add all the hours of the day and not come up with as much energy as a single summer hour.

To see Canada look to nuclear isn't a surprise.

[walrus01]

I don't doubt that the technology works great. My concern is that the fully loaded lifecycle cost of spent nuclear fuel disposal/storage or reprocessing is not being taken into account when calculating dollars per megawatt-hour generated. This can be very costly and is frequently an economic externality of the cost to build and operate civilian nuclear power.

[jfaucett]

This is definitely being taken into account. For a quick summary see: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/how-mu...

[walrus01]

I really don't think north American nuclear waste costs can be estimated with any fixed ceiling to cost overruns, considering the expensive Fiascos that were WIPP and yucca mountain.

[hackerman12345]

Yucca's issues were political though, a byproduct of democracy.

[philipkglass]

The process of building nuclear is extremely clean compared to building wind turbines and solar panels which devastate the environment due to the rare metals needed and production process.

Photovoltaic cells can be made with thin film technologies based on rare elements such as gallium, indium, and tellurium. The vast majority are made with crystalline silicon wafers.

Wind turbines can be made with permanent magnet generators incorporating neodymium and dysprosium or terbium. The majority are made with electromagnets, which require no rare metals.

Nuclear, wind, and PV all have drastically lower full-lifecycle GHG emissions and deathprints per terawatt hour than any combustion-based electricity sources. It grieves me that so much "pro-nuclear" advocacy is just renewables-bashing -- and that so much "pro-renewable" advocacy is just nuclear-bashing. (Yes, I agree that nuclear really is safer and much cleaner than fossils.)

[lukeschlather]

I think you need to look at the research and data that have accumulated over the past 5 years. Nuclear seemed like a great investment 5 years ago, but there have been big changes.

Not only are solar/wind safer and cleaner, paired with modern battery storage they are now considerably cheaper and more effective at providing base load. And prices are still going down, while nuclear prices are if anything increasing.

[jfaucett]

Well,I think the picture is still much more in favor of nuclear than you seem to suggest although I'd agree renewables have gotten a lot better, though less so on their environmental impact (just having solar panels on land kills natural wildlife and destroys habitats). But I think we'd both agree people should look at the data and research this, b/c whatever you think nuclear still has tons of potential, it has already solved most of the problems wind/solar have, and the public has a false perception of it as a "boogie man" which has and will just lead to bad choices and misaligned public policy.

[wiz21c]

>>> the research and data that have accumulated over the past 5 years.

Any pointers ?

[franzmafka]

In an ideal world it no doubt can be done very well and safely. The thing is ours is a world of owners and the safety of the process is going to be at least partially determined by the people who make the decision on whether guidelines are being met or not. In turn those people are answerable to the owners, are chosen by them and replaceable by them. Now we are talking about micro nuclear? There is nothing about the nuclear power industry that makes me think it is better or different than any other industry. That is where it gets scary for me. Especially in a political era that loves deregulation.

[aquadrop]

Yes, it's ironic that greenpeace was created to battle nuclear, but if they didn't fight it, we'd probably have much more advanced nuclear tech with almost zero waste, and hence much cleaner world.

[_ph_]

Sorry, in the sum as you present it, it is wrong. It is correct that nuclear has the potential to produce a lot of energy without emitting CO2. And I am always happy to see new concepts for a more practical usage of nuclear energy. But the current way we are using nuclear energy has a lot of flaws, especially in the face of the ever cheaper reneweable energies. To address your points in more details:

- nuclear power plants might not occupy much space compared to other forms of energy production, but nuclear plants are extremely expensive. To the point where new building projects based on the conventional nuclear technologies are starting to fail because of cost basis. And there is nothing clean about mining and processing the needed uranium. Mining uranium is very bad for the environment and the workers as the uranium-rich soil radiates.

- it is also not true that the production of wind turbines and solar panes "devastate" the environment more than any other industrial production.

- it is not vastly friendlier for humans and animals. Beyond the issues with the mining of uranium and potential hazards whenever radioactive material is handled, operating a nuclear power plant has an environmental impact, even if it is only for the needed water cooling.

- as far as I am aware, no country has so far solved the issue with the long term storage of used fission material.

- and there are the meltdowns. While the exact number of people directly killed by the meltdowns are debatable, there are many more suffering long-term damage for the radiation exposure. They have rendered quite some large areas completely inhabitable for humans. And I am writing these lines from Bavaria, where there are still limits on eating mushrooms from the local forests, and where wild boar has to be checked for radiation before it is considered safe for human consumption. This is over 30 years after the Chernoby incident, and over 1000km away from the reactor. And it is expected to last for at least 20 more years.

So far the usage of nuclear energy has had quite a negative environmental impact already. Not to imagine a large incident in a more populated area. Japan got away lucky that the radiactive contamination was not blown towards the Tokyo region.

You write, that nuclear energy has no intermittancy problems - yes it mostly does not depend on the weather for the amount of energy produced. Except when it does, as power plants have to be shut down depending on the supply of cooling water, or when the water temperatures get to high, etc. Or when there are technical reasons which force a complete shutdown. Then the whole plant goes down removing a significant amount of energy production from the grid. In the last days, a lot of solar and wind power was transmitted from Germany to France due to extreme weather conditions

As said before, building new nuclear plants has become extremely expensive. Meanwhile the prices for wind and solar have gone down rapidly and below the price of new nuclear installations. There are also little risks to the population. If you are not standing below a failing wind generator or falling from your roof while installing solar, there are no risks. No contaminations, and the dismantling is a relatively cheap progress compared the dismantling of nuclear power plants - which is estimated to vastly exceed 1 billion per plant.