[grabbalacious]

>Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 all technologies are needed.

Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inherently evil provided we learn how to do it safely, which is an ongoing process.

[arcticbull]

> ... with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive

Expensive, probably. Dangerous? Not according to the data. Lowest deaths per terawatt-hour of any energy source including solar. Yes, even if you count Chernobyl, Fukushima (where 6 folks died) and Three Mile Island (nobody died) [1]

[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

[uurrnn]

You have to understand that "Lowest deaths per terawatt-hour" is not the sole stat to look at to determine something's danger.

I think the flat amount of direct and indirect death, as well as considering the amount of people who's quality of life has diminished, but not enough to kill them.

Other energy industries have these problems too, so I have no idea how they actually compare.

[abstractbarista]

Energy sources like coal undoubtedly reduce the quality of life of individuals near the energy source more than nuclear.

[manicdee]

“X is better than coal” is damning with faint praise.

“At least I am not a mass murderer.”

[bassman9000]

I think the flat amount of direct and indirect death, as well as considering the amount of people who's quality of life has diminished, but not enough to kill them.

How do you measure that? Why do you think is higher for nuclear than for other technologies?

[1MoreThing]

Death is not the only measurement of danger.

[hajile]

I've actually wondered if we could find enough suicidal idiots maintain the growing number of wind farms.

Finding climbers for static towers is already hard enough. Death rates of cell tower climbers are 10x that of normal construction workers (cell tower climbers have the highest death of all construction jobs). Of all those deaths investigated by OSHA, almost 40% involved no rules violations -- speaking of that, only 3 of those found in violation were fined more than about $25,000 with most being fined less than 10k and some only being fined a few hundred dollars).

Unlike static cell towers towers, you have lots of moving parts you can't really stop and high-voltage power sources you can't completely shut down. There's additional risks of fires and even disintegrations.

Unlike cell towers, I can't find any overall statistics. The closest I can find is [this organization](http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm). It's crazy to realize that at least one windmill suffers structural failure every month. Two catch fire and (since there's currently no way to put out a fire hundreds of feet in the air) burns down. Two more will suffer blade failures whipping sections of blade out at up to 325km/hr (200mph). There will even be someone who is injured due to ice being flung by the blades and hitting someone over 150 meters away. This is all before counting the couple people killed every month. And to top it all off, they don't even have complete statistics.

Underwriters Lab (the official unofficial US government lab) in 2015 claimed a 0.54% blade failure rate worldwide, but with almost 500K units, that's still thousands of units every year (I'd note that they don't actually have reliable data on the 42% of all wind turbines that happen to be located in China). [source](https://www.enr.com/articles/42352-are-four-wind-turbine-fai...)

To quote another [article](https://www.power-technology.com/features/golden-hour-parame...)

> There were 737 reported incidents on UK offshore windfarms in 2016; blades falling off, turbines tipping over, falls from height, vessels sinking in ice-cold water, groundings, onboard fires, helicopter crashes make up just some of the reports. The most common accounts were of hand injuries, while fingers cut off, arms crushed, broken bones, fractures, lifting injuries and teeth knocked out also occur. Non-accidental medical emergencies include strokes, heart and asthma attacks, and anaphylactic shock.

> Of all the incidents at UK offshore windfarms, the majority happened on operational sites: only two were recorded during windfarm development in 2016. Around 44% of offshore medical emergencies occurred in the turbine region, while just over one quarter were on vessels. The number of fall-related injuries was 110 or 15%, of which 95 (13%) were during heavy lifting operations.

Then there's the issue that wind turbines seem to have a realistic lifespan of only 12-15 years instead of the 20-25 years claimed and lose half of their total power output over that 15 years. [source](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/9770...).

Solar panels have a relatively low direct body count, but mining then melting down entire mountains for their rare earth elements has a severe environmental impact (not to mention the environmental toxins and toxic waste produced during the actual manufacturing process).

In the entire existence of US nuclear power, there have only been around 60 incidents which resulted in death or damages over $50,000 (and only 13 deaths overall) and unlike wind power, every little thing about nuclear plants is logged thoroughly. Even the "waste" is safer to store on average than the caustic waste from manufacturing and will be refined and reused once cheap mining sources dry up.

Rather than scaring everyone with nuclear FUD, we need to embrace it as the most promising and safest green energy technology we have.

EDIT: I'd also give a shoutout to concentrated solar which could be a great green daytime alternative with some caveats (variable power output, still needs nuclear power at night, much more geographically limited, etc).

[vinniejames]

How about building drones to do some of this work, or even to carry people up to do the job in a safer way?

[WhompingWindows]

It's not "probably" expensive; it's undeniably very expensive, which is why it's a non-starter in most of the world. Look at South Carolina's fiasco with nuclear...the only country doing nuclear is China, which is known for massive infrastructure spending.

[big_chungus]

Horror story from a friend who worked in China as a consultant on the power grid back in the mid-aughts. Basically the guy who was leading construction on the plants was working with another who was to supply the concrete for the walls. Problem was, the concrete guy was behind on his "five year plan", so plant guy didn't have enough concrete. Plant guy still has to meet _his_ targets, so he just builds the plants with thinner walls.

Sure it's an anecdote, but the point is China has very loose safety standards and cuts a lot of corners. She's much more okay with losing a few people here and there.

[chantelles]

Horror story from my stepfather at Bruce Nuclear Power Plant in Ontario Canada: At least twice a year there was a "secret leak" where he had to come home early but no media was alerted and they had to hire racialized folks from the city to go in and make repairs. He also stole reactor sealer to seal our basement from spring leaks and our basement leaked. And on and on. Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts lots of corners.

[arcticbull]

> At least twice a year there was a "secret leak" where he had to come home early but no media was alerted...

Uh, [citation needed].

> ... they had to hire racialized folks from the city to go in and make repairs...

Racialized... folks?

> He also stole reactor sealer to seal our basement from spring leaks and our basement leaked.

That might be because, and I'm speculating here, your basement isn't a reactor. I've heard that a sealant for a specific kind of material may not work on literally any other kind of material.

> Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts lots of corners.

That's just pretty objectively false.

[asymptotically2]

>> Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts lots of corners.

> That's just pretty objectively false.

Don't they still mine asbestos in Canada?

[friendlybus]

France? 70% nuclear power and growing.

[kakwa_]

No,France has not built any new nuclear power plant in decades, the only one being built (flammanville 3) is a mess, and there are goals to reduce the share of nuclear to 50%.

[jhayward]

No. France is retiring plants and has a nominal plan to retire 30% of their nuclear generating capacity in the next decade.

There is one plant being built at Flammanville. It is 11 years over schedule and 400% over budget, and still not certain that those will be the final numbers.

[m0zg]

That's because the international elites that are really running France have decided that it'd be easier to just shift pollution to China and make their money there. There's no sane argument against nuclear today, particularly if you believe in climate change. And yes, you can make anything cost 400% as much, just pile on more regulation and NIMBY-ism, and you'll get there eventually, that's not news.

[kakwa_]

Well, no.

The Flamanville 3 EPR nuclear reactor is a mess (and I've seen it first hand, working on one of its subsystem a few years ago). The regulations bodies, aka the ASN (Agence de Surete Nucleaire) played its role, and uncovered various issues, most worrying, defects in the reactor vessel itself (and also there was some attempt by the manufacturer to hide these defects). And it's only one of a long chain, the were others like concrete being poured without/insufficient rebar or improper composition, various welding issues on pipes or machinery. And each time, it was not some minor mishaps requiring a quick fix but a major mistake requiring undoing what was done, redoing it properly and causing months of delays.

Basically, this is an Engineering and Project Management failure. On this kind of giant projects, logistic, coordination and management is key, the design is also key (system of systems, interfaces between systems etc) and it failed spectacularly here.

From the political side, despite some calls to just stop the construction from minor parties, the commitment from the politicians to see it built has remained strong all along. And there was also a deep commitment from the French state to the Nuclear industry, with the government bailing out Areva just a few years ago.

The Finish one is not better off, with the same kind of delays. The Chinese ones are in production (after significant delays) but 1) They learn from the mistakes of the first twos 2) They have probably better experience in large projects given the past construction boom in China 3) Some issues were probably put under the carpet as the Chinese government is not exactly renowned for its openness.

[ZeroGravitas]

Your lowest death stats seem to be missing grid scale solar and rooftop solar that isn't a refit.

Which is extra significant if it's also the cheapest.

[cameldrv]

The point is that it's an extremely safe method of power generation, and what is cited as a key downside is in fact empirically a huge upside to nuclear. No one is demanding retrofit rooftop solar, wind, or gas turbines be shut down on safety grounds, even though they are considerably less safe.

[luspr]

Agree completely. It's a fallacy to believe we will require less energy in the long run. We need much more, if we want to advance as a species.

[dmos62]

> we want to advance as a species

I'm somewhat weary of people talking of civilization progress as if its definition is obvious and universal.

[the8472]

As far as humans are concerned overall progress has been linked to climbing up fractions of the kardashev scale since fire was invented.

And even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased. You can't run a hummingbird or mammalian brains on photosynthesis directly, it's just not energy-dense enough.

[dmos62]

> overall progress

This thread is becoming recursive. Is organism complexity progress? Everyone might agree with you, or not. That's because progress is whatever we say it is. It's subjective, in that everyone can have a different view of it, and it's non-constant, in that you can change your mind whenever. Progress is such a loaded word today. I'm hardpressed to find more than a few words with so much cultural baggage. Even someone who agrees that good and evil are in the eyes of the observer, can often say that the definition of Progress is self-evident.

[wolfram74]

Most quality of life improvements do take energy, and yes, quality of life is subjective, it is conceivable to imagine a mind that takes joy in their child dieing of a preventable disease, some vertebrates eat their young, but overwhelmingly, humans like to see their child get old enough to play and talk as well as laugh and cry.

Things like reliable and easy access to clean water, refrigeration for medicine and food, shelter against the weather, clothing, cleaning mechanisms for the above, all of these are non-equilibrium phenomena and so take energy.

So we either need more sources of power or fewer people. I'm glad that birth rates are falling, but lots of people don't have those basic technological tools, so energy technology will need to be rolled out or our definition of empathy will need to change to allow for lots of people to suffer.

[labawi]

While one would agree with your list of desirable non-equilibrium phenomena, the need for more power or less people is non con-sequitur, as you fail to show how the listed things require more energy than our current world consumption.

AFAIK, more than enough food and clothing for all people is currently produced, shelter and cleaning probably isn't far, refrigeration for medicine and required food wouldn't take much of industrial output and problems with access to clean water is often caused by "progress" and could be solved with more strategy rather than energy.

Either way, I think most of current energy consumption is for things like heating / cooling inefficient homes, manufacturing things people don't really need, inefficient transportation, brain-dead things like making oil from tar sands etc.

[the8472]

I am saying that for many or perhaps even almost all measures of progress we want to apply, i.e. the specific definition doesn't matter, that progress was either enabled by or directly required more energy being available.

[xtian]

Certainly individual conceptions of "progress" will vary, but only the most deranged practitioners of self-loathing would make the argument that gaining the freedom to exit a destiny of brute survival does not constitute advancement.

[stjohnswarts]

Progess is a human invention, without us it has no meaning. Complexity is a first order axiom; if you don't adhere to that philosophy then it is not. You are free to move to a remote area and live off the land.

[Symmetry]

even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased

Heck, look at how the complexity of life increased as soon as mitochondria were invented, going from genomes measured in millions of base pairs for bacteria to billions for amoebas once cells were no longer caught in the square/cube trap of respirating over the cell wall.

[scotchmi_st]

Right but I'm also weary of the kind of second-guessing about the future and the nature of 'progress' that leads to a kind of epistemological paralysis. Taking an approach of 'it's all very complicated, who knows what the future holds, let's not try to plan for it' is also wrong.

[RankingMember]

Couldn't agree more. "Advancement as a species" seems to imply a sort of consensus that doesn't really exist.

[fao_]

Exactly. Hegel developed a theory that historical progress goes always forward, or towards better things. Capitalist-based theory says that Capitalism is the inevitable outgrowth from Feudalism, which is false (Meiksins-wood showed that Capitalism is an idea that was enacted through force, not an inevitable outgrowth of the previous systems). Communist theory says that Capitalism inevitably fails and tends towards Socialism, which eventually develops into Communism, which has yet to be shown. People tend to think that Evolution results in better and better organisms, rather than those that convey the best advantages for it's environment. For some reason lot of people tend to think that a society's values will get better over time, and that modern societies are qualitatively better than those from thousands of years ago, rather than just different.

Hell, even here a lot of people believe that technological progress is a linear path towards the future, even when there's evidence contrary to that assumption. Without even reaching for evidence from other fields, it's trivial to find examples of entire theories that have been forgotten and rediscovered. Think of Low-Density Parity-check codes, that were developed in the 1960s and essentially forgotten for 20 or so years. A lot of technology has been found and then lost.

[claudeganon]

> Hegel developed a theory that historical progress goes always forward, or towards better things.

This is a popular supposition, but is mostly a misunderstanding of Hegel, promulgated by Left Hegelians like Marx. Hegel’s argument was that thought moves toward a greater state of contradiction, not progress, but that this evolved sustainment of the contradiction represents a more rational form.

Todd McGowan at the University of Vermont wrote a whole book on this subject:

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/emancipation-after-hegel/97802...

[lukifer]

On the one hand, limitless growth is an unsustainable anti-pattern (when it manifests in the biological realm, we call it cancer).

On the other hand, it's hard to see how civilization could continue to function without the prospect of "growing the pie". If/when we reach a steady state of finite resources, it seems highly likely that the best strategy (individually and tribally) is acquire resources at the expense of one's neighbors (before they acquire your resources first). This has been the default state of nature for nearly all biological history, with occasional exceptions of growth and plenty.

I don't have an answer here, long-term; and where the rubber meets the road, I do think our corporate model of "your business is failing if it's not growing" results in more negative than positive externalities (at least, beyond a certain equilibrium), and should be eyed critically. But the growth model is as much about social mindset as it is real-world wealth generation; and luckily we have lots more progress we can make (both on and off Terra Firma) before we're at risk of fully diminished returns on the growth of sentient well-being. The question is one of intelligent growth (cue Bucky Fuller [0]), rather than a locust-like runaway replicator pattern, which is clearly net-negative even if it looks like growth when zoomed in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship...

[ameister14]

Or even if it's actually happening - it's a problem that the Hegelian concept of progression has rooted itself so deeply in the west that we think it's universally held, where other countries find a cyclical nature to humanity and history

[yohannparis]

Easier to say that when you have anything.

Advancing as a species can merely making sure that everyone got a safe environment, freedoms, access to education and health, etc.

There are still billions of people who barely have the quality of life that most of Hacker News reader does.

[stjohnswarts]

If we want the species to get off this mudball, we need newer and better technology, also we need it to head off the climate and pollution crises and raise the quality of health and living for everyone on the planet.

[Firadeoclus]

As we expand to space. On Earth there is an effective upper limit to the amount of heat we can release into the atmosphere before we'd cause catastrophic warming even without greenhouse effect.

[pjkundert]

That upper limit is probably orders of magnitude higher than we’re currently dissipating. We could blanket every city and town with permanently heated streets, and - as long as we stopped pumping water vapour into the dry upper troposphere - we wouldn’t even notice an increase in temperature.

The big problems are 1) gigatons of soot coming over the north poles, permanently lowering the albedo of the planet and 2) pumping water into the dry upper atmosphere via jet exhaust, creating permanent cloud layers where they didn’t exist.

Solve those two issues, and we’d have a much more interesting debate...

[mercutio2]

Sea ice radiative forcing and overall albedo effects are on the order of 10% of well mixed greenhouse gas radiative forcing.

Short term cloud layer albedo effects are even smaller.

If we switched all our greenhouse gas emissions to nuclear, I agree there’s huge room for localized waste heat. But reducing albedo effects isn’t going to help if we keep emitting greenhouse gases.

[fao_]

You missed out the ecosystem collapsing because marine life has died off, and the oceans and waters becoming acidic (which will affect trade, drinkable water, rain, etc.)

[quindecagon]

That upper limit is in the trillions of people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA&feature=youtu.be...

[reallydontask]

> It's a fallacy to believe we will require less energy in the long run

It's hard to say without knowing your definition of long run so would you care to explain why you believe that less energy is required in your long run?

I see it as exactly the opposite, in the short/medium term we will use more energy but it will eventually go into reverse.

Maybe Jevons Paradox will intervene and you are correct, I don't know

For the record, my long run is 150+ years, if only to make sure that we are all dead.

[scotradamus]

Energy production really isn't the issue. Energy storage is.

We produce way more energy than we use. We currently do not have an easy way to store it. So why generate more than we need? Well, we need to have power available to prevent brown outs, especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak). Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up.

[cesarb]

> We produce way more energy than we use. [...] So why generate more than we need? Well, we need to have power available to prevent brown outs

That's not how it works. If you generate more than you need, you will have the opposite of a brown out (overvoltage and/or overfrequency). Generation and consumption of power have to always be precisely matched.

> especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak).

When everyone gets home and flips their light switch, the extra demand slightly reduces the system voltage and frequency; feedback loops on the power plants then increase their generation to match the extra demand.

> Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up.

Keeping the generators running at their maximum means you have no margin for extra demand or sudden loss of generation (for instance, another power plant or a transmission line having an issue and shutting down). It's better to keep the generators running below the maximum to have a reserve for when these things happen.

[manfredo]

Excess energy is an easy problem to solve: use it to desalinate water, produce hydrogen fuel to power ships, or any of several other uses.

[wayoutthere]

It's also a fallacy to think that humans will be able to escape the gravity well in large numbers. And once we do, the ones in space will quickly become a new species as they adapt to a different environment -- assuming they survive at all.

Science fiction is fun and all, but even an ecologically ruined Earth is going to be a much more welcoming environment to live in than anything else the solar system has to offer. Meaningful exploration of the solar system will be restricted to unmanned probes and complex missions that require 100 Earthbound support staff for each human we send into space.

Continuing to live on Earth will require a big reduction in the amount of energy we use per capita. We're already above what the Earth can realistically handle, and the global population is still growing.

[chrisco255]

Yep, and nuclear is the only near-infinite source of energy.

[hannob]

I'm always baffled by such statements.

Can you explain in which way solar is not a "near-infinite source of energy"? I mean... there are without doubt technical challenges and all that (but arguably less technical challenges than to do the same with nuclear), but there really is no relevant limit to the deployment of solar cells if you include things like large-scale installations in the desert.

[chrisco255]

Solar depends on weather, location and battery storage. Solar cells also require massive amounts of physical area to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant. And you can't compare a "2 gigawatt" solar installation to an equivalent nuclear installation because nuclear will produce power 24/7 at peak capacity, rain or shine. A solar plant sees a huge amount of variability and only hits peak efficiency for a brief part of the day on clear days.

[aplummer]

Solar power in the desert produces power 24/7 by keeping the molten sand hot overnight. It’s also always sunny

[Accujack]

That technology is far more expensive than photovoltaic panels.... for example, the solar thermal Ivanpah project is now obsolete for that exact reason.

Additionally, The storage density of molten salt is far lower than the generation capacity of a reactor.

[chrisco255]

I hate to break it to you but night time hits the desert as well. They don't magically escape earth's rotational spin in the desert.

[threeseed]

Especially if there are advancements in power distribution e.g. high temperature superconductors.

This would be a game changer for the major continents like Europe, US, Africa where you could have power coming from hydro, thermal, solar, wind etc and being shipped to where it is needed.

[posix_me_less]

Loss of power during distribution is not a problem that needs solving, power losses due to transmission in conventional grid are mere 5%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...

Considering how costly and inflexible all superconductors are, I don't see why they would help.

[chrisco255]

Those losses are on a per 100 mile basis. 2-5% per 100 miles of line (not as the crow flies mind you). Superconductors would make a huge difference if they could build a room temperature superconductor.

[The_Double]

Not every country has access to a desert to deploy large scale solar. Most of the EU, Russia for instance, and those places do not want to be dependent on other countries.

[Accujack]

It's probably also worth noting that photovoltaics have to be exposed to the sun to work... which means that they can't be protected by armor or bunkers, which means that they're terrifically vulnerable to terrorist or other attack.

[lhopki01]

The terrorist attack that is going to take out 1000s of square kilometres of solar panels? Surely they'd just attack a city if they had that amount of firepower? Or in the more likely case that they don't it's easier to attack power transmission than generation.

[friendlybus]

Most militaries rely on oil and dirty fuel to run campaigns. There's mandatory fuel stockpiling. The event of a power station going down would be seen as an act of war and suddenly there's much bigger problems for everyone involved to worry about.

[bra4you]

Me too. But lets not forget, we are dealing with 16 years old kiddies here.

But for you: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

[belorn]

What I have heard, you do loose energy in transmitting power over large distances. There exist low loss transmission cables, but I don't know how effective that is over very great distance. There is also the question of how to redesign a distributed power grid into a centralized version where all the power comes from a single sources in desert areas.

On top of that there are political challenges. I have a hard time imagine Europe in current climate being happy to rely exclusively on power from the Sahara.

[hannob]

The Sahara thing is ultimately just to illustrate that there's no real limit to solar energy (because the upper commenter claimed that nuclear is the only energy that is practically limitless). But of course in practice you'd do the easy things first - that is, build solar on every rooftop. No country is anywhere close to that.

I guess in the future we'll use imported solar for hard to solve problems, e.g. turn it into hydrogen or synthetic fuels (which also makes the transmission loss problem much smaller), while our electricity needs will be served mostly by local wind and solar.

[chrisco255]

There's no solar energy in the Sahara at night. And then as people mentioned, there is energy lost in transmission through resistance in power lines. There's also the fact that not too many of the world's 8 billion people live within serviceable range of the Sahara, assuming you can get past the geopolitical instability in that region to construct and maintain such things. The solar cells would need constant cleaning from dust storms to keep them running at high efficiency.

No, running solar on rooftops isn't the most practical use either. Depending on latitude, weather, cost of solar installation and battery installation, orientation and layout of roof to the sun, the problems with snow, rain, and hail, the lack of solar at night, the fact that none of this generates enough power for those times when you need it most like in the middle of winter in northern climates, etc. Solar and wind will never meet the growing needs of modern economy. Period. It's a pipe dream.

They are great supplemental sources of electricity. They cannot power a first world economy.

[roenxi]

The solar panels do have to be fabricated. That probably doesn't have the same scaling potential as nuclear given how much power/m2 nuclear can reach.

Also, at a guess the energy in solar panels drop with the square of distance to the sun. It is unlikely to be a good choice for interstellar travel if 'advance[ing] as a species' heads in the more fantastic directions.

[epistasis]

If we are getting to the point where W/m2 is an important win for nuclear, we are going to start to have serious problems with the rejected heat.

A fundamental limitation of thermal steam engines is that they can only ever be 50% efficient, and you have to dump that waste heat in order to maintain power.

Already, heat mitigation systems for some existing nuclear plants are starting to fail during heat waves as the climate warms. And these are expensive systems: at Diablo Canyon in California, it's cheaper to replace an entire, functioning reactor with renewables than it is to simply build a new cooling system.

Which is all to say that nuclear won't scale tremendously well unless we 1) figure out fusion, and 2) figure out direct conversion of energy to electricity rather than using steam turbines to mechanically drive a generator.

For the ultimate goal that many people have for nuclear, as a power source when not on earth, these sorts of advancements are also likely also necessary. Cooling in space is not a trivial matter.

[erulabs]

Solar power is simply indirect nuclear power anyhow. If we can do what’s happening in the sun in a bottle - then no need to produce panels. If there is material in stars to produce solar power, then there is more potential nuclear power. I’m for both, and solar seems distributed in a way that makes me think it’s better for human society, but since stars are made of fissable materials - by definition there is more “potential energy” in fission than solar, since solar is simply a subset of fission at a distance.

[neuronic]

Solar is fusion and not fission [1]. If you can't even get that right, why should anyone take these weird pro-fission arguments seriously in 2020?

The solution is to keep using existing nuclear power and develop renewables for replacement. Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins. And that leaves out years of planning and dealing with contracts.

It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fission-and-fusion-what-d...

[belorn]

Renewables are not a replacement for existing nuclear power unless you either add fossil fuels or batteries to the mix. Countries which currently are replacing nuclear power do so with a combination of renewables and fossil fuels, with fossil fuels burning when renewables are not producing.

Batteries, usually reverse hydro power, is an interesting future technology. Some argue it is significant more developed than fusion. The bigger question is if its economically competitive compared to fission. There is costs and energy loss in every single step of producing electricity from renewables, transmitting it to the battery, converting it into potential, recreate the electricity, and finnally transmitting it to the end users. With fission you go directly from the power plant to the end user. Reverse hydro power plants also take a long time to build and either use a lot of land or coast. If you build it on land it also release a lot of methane as top layer of the land decompose.

[Reason077]

> "Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins."

Yes, but that's what the small modular reactors being proposed by Rolls-Royce, and others, intend to solve. If successful, they would greatly reduce the construction time, risk, and cost of nuclear projects.

[Accujack]

>Solar is fusion and not fission [1]. If you can't even get that right, why should anyone take these weird pro-fission arguments seriously in 2020?

To nitpick a bit, he didn't say the sun was powered by fusion, he said fissionable elements are present in the sun. Which is entirely true.

[aguyfromnb]

>It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month.

Why are you comparing the state of nuclear energy today with the potential scientific breakthroughs of renewable energy in the future?

If you compare nuclear of today with renewables of today, then the winner is clear. If you compare the two accounting for potential scientific breakthroughs..who knows?

[lorenzhs]

Stars are fusion reactors, not fission. They're mostly made of hydrogen and helium, which account for 98% of its mass: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/suncomp.ht.... You're going to have a hard time building a fission reactor running on hydrogen and helium.

[logfromblammo]

Stellar fusion like that which occurs in our sun is effectively aneutronic, but is also relatively slow, because the limiting step is the combination of two protons into a proton-neutron pair.

You need to keep a lot of hydrogen at plasma-hot temperatures and very high pressures for a long time. So you can't really do it with masses smaller than Jupiter, because smaller bodies can radiate the energy away faster, and produce fewer events from the lesser mass.

So the only technologically effective way to leverage solar is to deconstruct larger stars into red dwarfs between 0.08 and 0.35 solar mass, perhaps with a ferro-platosmiridium core to increase the overall density and make the reactions viable at lower overall mass. Then surround the whole thing with a Dyson shell and Shkadov/Caplan thruster.

It's a bit beyond our means right now.

[cuspycode]

Aneutronic reactors are good of course, but the Sun still puts out lots of other dangerous radiation. In particular, ultraviolet electromagnetic radiation from the Sun causes tens of thousands of cancer deaths every year. I have no problem accepting a few percent of that mortality from man-made radiation sources if that helps solving the CO2 emission crisis.

[erulabs]

Edit: subset of nuclear at a distance. Yes the sun is powered by fusion, not fission, but the point still stands.

[rusk]

Forgive me if this is a worn trope, but I've read somewhere that the upper bound on what we can do with nuclear energy is not how much we can produce, but what we can do with the leftovers ... as more and more people use nuclear power we're going to produce more and more nuclear waste, and there isn't really any answer as to what we can do with that. There are plenty of fantastic "ideas" as to what can be done, but it doesn't seem to me that we've fully solved that side of the equation, and I'd be thinking we really should have a good bit more work done before we consider something with such dangerous side effects "a solution".

[belorn]

Nuclear waste is significant less harmful than fossil fuel waste which currently is produced in massive amounts.

For my perspective, we should ban the worst waste first and then iterate. If we can build an energy grid without burning fossil fuels we should do so, preferable yesterday. If we can then build one that also is without nuclear waste then lets do that too, but my first priority is going to be to get rid of the fossil fuels.

What I do not want is replacing nuclear waste with fossil fuel waste. While we have an unsolved problem with nuclear waste, it is dwarfed by what can be done once run away climate change happens. A world where 100% of energy comes from nuclear is preferable over one where 100%, 80%, 50%, maybe even as low as 20% comes from fossil fuels.

[roenxi]

If literally all the electricity ever produced by the human waste had been produced by current generation nuclear technologies, there would be a small hill of high-level nuclear waste somewhere. It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored.

To believe that is a problem is to not have grappled with just how big the world is and how much of it is uninhabitable to humans already. The human population is concentrated in an absurdly small footprint in major cities and fertile belts compared to the size of the planet. The area the waste would sterilise would be a non-issue.

I dunno. What do you want to be solved? If we call it poisonous instead of radioactive would you be happy? There are literally poisonous lakes out there and nobody cares much. One more doesn't matter. The only interesting thing about nuclear waste is we use a different word to describe the same outcomes. The outcomes don't seem that dangerous in the big picture.

[e12e]

> If literally all the electricity ever produced by the human waste had been produced by current generation nuclear technologies, there would be a small hill of high-level nuclear waste somewhere.

I'm not sure what kind of "modern nuclear technology" you're referring to. Are you saying that our legacy power plants are bad, and should be replaced? At what cost?

> It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored.

So, a single nuclear power plant for the world?

Transporting nuclear waste is also a problem. Even in the US, where it doesn't need to cross oceans (ignoring Hawaii, Puerto Rico and maybe some other territories).

I'm also uncertain if we'll be likely to encourage modern nuclear reactors in Iran, North Korea and in various failed states. They may be safe wrt weapons grade nuclear weapons initially - but could the be modified? (honest question, I'm not sure how easy it would be to enrich material for a traditional bomb, or indeed a "dirty bomb". But small amount of high grade waste kind of sounds like it's usable for a dirty bomb?).

[Accujack]

Most of the nuclear waste that exists is from weapons production. Nuclear generating plants produce only a very small amount.

Right now, small enough amounts of waste are produced that reactors generating power actually store the stuff on site.

>but could the be modified?

Modern reactor types are specifically designed not to be proliferation risks. The only reason the older reactor types are risks is because the governments who originally built them wanted to produce weapons, so they chose the technology that allowed them to do so.

Waste could be used for a "dirty bomb" in some sense, but it wouldn't be terribly effective. "High level" is relative, and the isotopes that would make a dirty bomb truly scary aren't available except in fuel rods shortly after their removal from a reactor... at which point no one does anything to extract those isotopes anyway, they just stick the fuel in cooling ponds to decay down to lower levels of radiation.

[rusk]

Yeah man, I dunno either ... I think "poisonous" is understating it somewhat. We're talking about substances that will remain toxic for thousands of years, and are quite happy to go everywhere they can if there is some issue with containment.

I appreciate that you have a conviction that this is a problem, but you're coming across a bit hand-wavy in your arguments. I'd prefer to see concrete solutions (and I don't mean nuclear waste encased in concrete) than rhetoric as a means to address my concerns.

[roenxi]

> you're coming across a bit hand-wavy in your arguments. I'd prefer to see concrete solutions

It is an order-of-magnitude argument; a bit like arguing whether $1 billion or $1 million is more dollars. The difference between the two figures is almost exactly a billion dollars because there really is no comparison between orders of magnitude. Uranium is something like 6 orders of magnitude more energy dense than fossil fuels (so more of a trillion to a million) - the waste is a lot worse too, but it is nowhere near 6 orders of magnitude more dangerous, because that would suggest it is killing more people than the population of the earth already. Which it is not ^.

You can say you want something solved, but the problem you want solved is several orders of magnitude smaller than the problems everyone currently shrugs off as totally normal. The orders of magnitude are so different they do not need to be solved and can be handwaved. The nuclear waste problem is incomparably small compared to the fossil fuel problem which has proven to be tolerable despite 20+ years of resistance by Green groups.

It is also probably going to turn out to be smaller than the waste problem fabricating renewable will have by the same order of magnitude issue.

^ The evidence suggests it is actually not that much worse because it is so easy to isolate. It is practically achievable for nuclear waste to do less actual harm unit-to-unit than coal.

[p_l]

Fast reactors as well as other specialized designs can burn down fuel that is currently stored as "waste", and just don't produce such long-lived isotopes.

For examples, the half-life of output products from uranium-fueled SVBR-100 is ~550 years, and that can be reduced further by several technologies that are now available.

[dsfyu404ed]

>We're talking about substances that will remain toxic for thousands of years

Most substances are toxic forever. If you bury mercury or lead in a hole a dig it up in a few million years it will be just as toxic. Radioactive substances are an anomaly in that they become less toxic over time.

[Already__Taken]

> and are quite happy to go everywhere they can if there is some issue with containment.

It's turned into glass as far as I know (which isn't much). It's not like some ooze to leak out.

[christophilus]

Nuclear energy has a PR problem that is very hard to solve. It doesn’t help that movies dramatize it. From what I remember, the only people who died due to Fukushima were those that died of fear. The reality is that nuclear is remarkably safe, clean, etc.

[rusk]

I'd imagine the death toll from Fukushima will probably not be fully estimable for a few years yet.

[Melting_Harps]

> From what I remember, the only people who died due to Fukushima were those that died of fear. The reality is that nuclear is remarkably safe, clean, etc.

Then you have a faulty memory, and a selective one at that because the crisis is still on-going; there were an estimated 2000 from evacuation alone:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/03/01/editorials/f...

You think this is safe or healthy? 100k+ displaced people living in abject squalor in the 3rd richest nation on Earth? Often seen as less-thans by their fellow citizens due to the Meltdown:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpxtMBOiD6A

What's even more conflicting is that this year's Olympics are scheduled to take place in Tokyo, all the while the food is contaminated, as is the water (and the air if they're still doing regular debris burns that spreads it around the World).

The cancer rates, thyroid maladies and heart disease are all correlated to the radiation exposure, but they don't have an interest in monitoring this accurately and reporting it to the Public due to typical Japanese 'cultural norms.' So, in it a very defying sense of abnormal behaviour, Japanese house wives have taken to measure their neighborhoods, as well as the food and the vacuumed debris.

This is quite honestly a bigger part of why Humanity has to solve its energy crisis, Greta makes a good case for what their generation is left to live with, but being in between the two generations as a millennial and having been around for both Chernobyl and Fukushima, its hardly comprehensive of the true costs. That last video even delves into the Children of Chernobyl, they are reporting large frequencies of cancer and various immunological diseases. This is more the norm that I ever thought in surrounding areas, when I lived in Croatia it was also the same. When I lived in Germany their were patches of Earth that looked scorched that had been hit particularly hard due to the Fallout of Chernobyl. Many farming families in that area went Bankrupt due to it.

I honestly think people like you should only be able to have this opinion if you live near Nuclear Plants, for a decade at a minimum. You'll see first hand how perilous it could be, the infrastructure around coastal areas is another bottle neck that most don't consider an issue for things like evacuation until its too late; they often only have 1 way in-1 way out layouts.

Nuclear regulation is a joke, and is as entrenched and as corrupt as Big Oil. The legal system, in both Japan and the US, is equally as complicit as the Nuclear lobby and refuse to take preventive action, as was the case with why Fukushima was left exposed on the coastal area after TEPCO was warned, repeatedly by several studies, that is was prone Meltdown should something like that Tsunami happen. The Nuclear village/TEPCO/Japanese Government did nothing:

https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventabl...

[posix_me_less]

> we're going to produce more and more nuclear waste, and there isn't really any answer as to what we can do with that.

There are several answers to the question "what we can do with it", such as 1) reprocess it and use it again; 2) keep it in the power plant pools or similar storage facilities; 3) dump it to some deserted place where it isn't a big problem (high depth, stable earth crust). In the past, UK just dumped nuclear waste in barrels into the sea, which seems kind of convenient and irresponsible, but if done right (better isolation from sea creatures), this could work too.

It is true that there is no single universally agreed upon answer. But that is the same as with all other waste. Most of waste gets either burned or dumped at some place. The same will happen to nuclear "waste", until people start reprocessing it.

[rusk]

I didn't think nuclear waste could be "burned" ... I was given to believing that containment was the only option right now.

I'm familiar with your (1) (2) (3) items, but again, from what I've read these aren't fully satisfactory. (1) is probably ideal but hasn't really been cracked, (2) and (3) are just different facets of containment, but (3) is admittedly the most plausible right now.

We can tolerate a limited amount of this for sure, while we work on other solutions, but unless this question gets resolved it will hamper the widepsread adoption of nuclear.

The UK approach is interesting because yes, they just dumped it in the Irish sea. There's a deep underwater ravine between Scotland and Northern Ireland where it's all dumped, along with various other bits of old military hardware and other bits that are inconvenient.

Think about that the next time you here Bojo talking about building a bridge to Northern Ireland.

[p_l]

Fast reactors can burn waste pretty well, as few other designs. However, it's politically problematic because it involves using plutonium burning (not as fuel, but produced in the reactor while burning down uranium).

This is not liked by certain governments, even if theoretically NPT gives a framework to do it safely, and large scale commercial reprocessing essentially died after India used Canada-built CANDU reactors to kickstart their nuclear weapons program.

[dsfyu404ed]

A quick google search says if we only used nuclear we'd get 40g of waste per person per year assuming western energy consumption standards[1].

Multiply by 8*10^9 people (a little more than the current world population) and you get 320,000 metric tons which is about 3/5th the capacity of the largest oil tankers.

Finding a place for that much waste per year is a political problem, not a technical problem. There's plenty of geologically "safe enough to outlast the radioactivity" places we could dig a deep hole (thanks to the fossil fuel industry that is a solved problem) to dump that much waste into.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf (no idea on source bias here, I didn't read the whole thing)

[inertiatic]

Isn't the fact that failure of the transport system would have catastrophic consequences an issue you're concerned with?

[tomatotomato37]

Considering the already realized catastrophic disasters due to failures of our fossil fuel transport system (Exxon Valdez comes to mind) it would still be a net improvement.

[quindecagon]

Interestingly, this post on an application for Nuclear waste was on the front page[1]. This talk on nuclear waste may also be of interest to you[2].

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

[kwhitefoot]

Not really. The supply of economically extractable fissile material is limited in just the same way as any other mineral.

If energy prices rise then it will become worthwhile to extract, if they fall then it will be less so. Of course if the number of consumers rises this will also improve the viability of mining. According to this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia, it is currently uneconomic to proceed with several mining projects.

Regardless of economic considerations fissile material is a finite resource although it could be that we will never reach the limit.

[Accujack]

Technically, yes.

In practical terms, however, switching nuclear reactors to use the Thorium fuel cycle would allow us to use a supply of fuel that would probably outlast human civilization.

[threeseed]

But that hopefully would be nuclear fusion not fission.

Fission however (a) is politically unpopular and (b) has a waste problem that no country wants to own.

[zahrc]

But where does all the nuclear waste go? We already struggle with plastics and tech waste.

[goalieca]

Id he happy if we just focused on social issues and happiness. But might is right and every nation state and company and human being needs all the technological might we can muster in order to “win” (win what!?)

[koheripbal]

There's also some false equivalency in the quote above. "Environmentalists" is a vague term.

If we asked Environmental Energy SCIENTISTS, they overwhelmingly support nuclear power.

[mgoetzke]

Scientists are not always thinking through consequences in the real world though. Just the theoretical aspects of something.

Theoretically I find nuclear fission impressive and amazing.

Practically I see no desirable outcome without bad effects especially when coordinated by the private sector with their habit of saving money and squeezing out more profits every year.

[hanniabu]

> private sector with their habit of saving money and squeezing out more profits every year

Bingo. I have no issues with nuclear power. I have an issue with the human component. Safety regulations have been continuously changed and been made more relaxed to keep up with the crumbling nuclear plants that are way past their design life and coming up on another extension.

Have a crack in the concrete? Increase the allowable crack tolerance. Have leaking radioactive water? Change the way the test is performed so it allows you to still pass.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/17/insanely-bad-mo...

[JulianMorrison]

Dyson swarm.

The nuclear reactor comes pre-installed.

[eeZah7Ux]

> solve all kinds of existential problems

...very few existential problems have anything to do with technology.

[the8472]

Long-term existential problems (was there ever any meaning to life if it just dies on earth?) most likely require technological solutions.

[Accujack]

If you're human, every existential problem has to do with technology. That's who we are.

[AtlasLion]

baby steps I'd say. Let's first fix all the mess we are making here on earth before thinking of space exploration.

[socialdemocrat]

No that is an absolutely terrible way of thinking about ANYTHING. That is what the townspeople said to the aristocrat funding development of the microscope. They demanded he care for the sick before engaging in this glass grinding business which had no obvious benefit

Yet the microscope proved to be the biggest advance in medicine. Nobody could have predicted that being able to look at really small things would have an impact on how we understand disease.

Likewise nobody could have predict the profound impact satellites have had on our economy and on science.

Space exploration brings technological progress. If you are concerned about waste of money then first start to worry about industries we spend far more money on 1) Gambling 2) Cosmetics 3) Weapons, bombs etc 4) Disposable fashion

Not to mention most of the worlds problems are of political nature. They are not problems a scientists can solve. Insisting that a physicist should apply his skills to create say world peace is a waste of skills and effort.

[jwm20]

The microscope story a sibling comment mentioned is part of a 1970 letter from a then-NASA Director to a nun serving in Africa who asked the same question. I believe the full text is worth a read: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

[papreclip]

I think space colonization is an even bigger fantasy than relying on "future tech" that will magically terraform the earth and reverse climate change. We can have a tiny structure housing 10 or 20 people somewhere in our solar system for the price of millions of pounds of fuel and billions of dollars.

Inter-system travel will never happen. Forums like this tend to have a healthy population of the sci-fi minded, so it won't be a popular opinion here, but the laws of physics simply rule it out. And the "men once thought they couldn't fly" argument doesn't carry water with me. We know a lot more about what we don't know now than we did then

[htfu]

Nevermind the hocus pocus, and I agree as far as "travel", but all that's really needed for (fairly dystopian attempts at) space colonization is surely artificial wombs?

Which aren't far off.

We don't need to break the laws of physics, or have cryonics or singularity shit work out to eventually consume the universe. All the nodes will just be real isolated.

[ryacko]

Space colonization is only viable for a small handful of people who produce at least a million dollars in revenue per year.

Programmers and CEOs.

[pauljurczak]

There will always be some mess on Earth and anywhere else human kind visits in the future. We are flawed. Let's dream about perfect, but settle for good enough.

[alpaca128]

That's like saying "let's first neatly reorganize all the files on these 700 harddrives before thinking about backups" when you can just do both.

Spending for space exploration is currently at a laughably low level, if countless people didn't manage to solve all our problems in the course of decades then adding a few billions of dollars won't do anything except make a few people even richer.

[throw0101a]

> ... before thinking of space exploration.

Without space exploration we may not have had CMOS image sensors, in addition to a whole bunch of other things:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

[nolok]

You're missing the point. Going to space puts us in very restrictive environments and situations that forces us to solve issues that we "can" just shrug away here on earth (meaning we move it to one or two generations down the line so it's not our problem anymore).

[C14L]

No.