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.
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.
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.
Solar panels may be cheap to produce, but they are terrible for the environment because of the complex manufacturing process. Parabolic reflectors can be melted down and reformed without huge additional environmental costs. If you're interested in the environment, this is the real benefit.
Cutting-edge solar panels have about 23% theoretical efficiency. Stirling dish systems have about a 30% theoretical efficiency and about a 25% real-world efficiency.
Solar plus battery near the equator can be sized for 24/7 power with relative ease.
But no one would do that, because we don't need power at the same rate all the time. Near the equator, where most people on the planet live, our need for energy is correlated with when the sun is shining and air con is running and people are awake.
This is why solar is better even at the mythical "baseload" than nuclear is.
Also, the base load most of us are talking about isn't created by people for the most part... it's created by industry, without which life on the equator or anywhere else would be rather primitive.
In any case, the equator is going to become unlivable in the next few decades to the point where populations in equatorial areas will drop drastically.
Do you have any data on power consumption near the equator, or where does this assertion come from?
Anecdotally, it doesn't ring true to me from my time in Thailand and Malaysia, where inefficient air con would be left on in poorly insulated houses overnight to help people sleep. I couldn't find any graphs like you can trivially find for power grids in the west.
But I did find this article[1] which indicates the record power consumption occurred at 9:35pm, beating the previous record which occurred at 10:28pm a few years prior, and both of these are times where it's all going to be coming from batteries.
But this isn't necessarily representative. Even if your reference is a book I'd be happy to purchase it, I find solar penetration in developing countries particularly interesting.
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.
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.
Exactly, when people mention losses saved by superconductors they don't mean to improve the current grid. It's to route power from the always sunny side of the planet.
The 5% is quoted further in the article for overall grid waste. The per mile basis is purely there to compare why higher voltages for the Samer power lead to less waste.
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.
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.
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.
Assuming there are that many panels, it is in fact quite easy for any industrialized country to design a weapon that can destroy a square mile of panels or more with a single warhead. They're thin sheets of silicon covered in glass.
A square mile is 2.6 square km. You are replying to someone who said it would be hard to destroy thousands of square km of panels. It would seem that your reply, that "it is…easy…to…destroy a square mile of panels or more with a single warhead", is not to the point.
However, by coincidence, your position is right, for two reasons:
1. Single nuclear warheads routinely have blast radii of tens of km rather than, as you suggest, hundreds of meters. So in fact a single warhead can indeed destroy thousands of square km.
2. 1000km² of solar panels would be 1000 GWp; at a low-cost module price of €0.19/W (the average for 2019) that's €190 billion. Currently solar plants are not built that large, nor nearly so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every thread in HN is filled with pessimistic people pointing out how things can't work. It's tiring to read.
Solar and wind absolutely can produce all the energy the world currently needs, using only a tiny fraction of available land area. You could power the whole of the US by 100 square miles of solar panels in the southwest, backed with one square mile of batteries [1]. Clearly it's a hard problem and there are many obstacles to overcome, but just as clearly it's not fundamentally unsolvable.
Long-distance electrical transmission is actually pretty efficient nowadays, so that's not a showstopper either.
Bottom line, optimists are responsible for progress and while many people on HN are content to write comments about how it can't be done, somewhere there's an entrepreneur working hard to make it happen - and the smart money is on them, collectively, over the long-term - and thank goodness for that!
You can absolutely power the whole of the US by 100 square miles of solar panels in the southwest. The cost would be to build the solar panels, the square mile of batteries, replace all the power lines in the US with cables that can handle very high voltage (twice or more than what current power transmission cables can handle) needed for long-distance, and replace all the power stations connected to those so that can take that high voltage.
It not impossible at all, we have the technology, it just money. Replacing 200,000 miles of cables, with a price tag of a few millions per mile is a project the US could undertake. Replacing all the power station to handle the very high voltage is similarly possible.
When choosing between the many alternatives it is something which should be calculated next to the cost of building nuclear plants in a distrusted pattern, and the long term cost of nuclear waste that such plan would entail. If entrepreneurs could invent power transmission cables and power stations that can manage millions of volts and cost a fraction of existing methods to install would make a centralized place for power generation a much more attractive option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Countries which currently are replacing nuclear power do so with a combination of renewables and fossil fuels
Which countries? Germany for example isn't - yet. We're still in a place where we can reduce usage of both fossil fuels and nuclear, though that won't last unless we figure out effective means of energy storage.
As an example, Sweden. People will use fossil fueled energy when the choice is between people freezing in their home or burning fossil fuels. Sweden rely on a mix between hydro and nuclear, but it is not feasible to extend hydro beyond current capacity. The nuclear plants however is getting older, and politically people want to shut them down. Something has to produce the energy, and during the winter it is imported fossil fuels energy when the wind is not blowing.
Germany as an example illustrate the issue quite nice, as can be seen live at electricitymap.org. When the wind is blowing the country goes green with around 70% of energy being produced by wind. Very sunny days you get around 20% solar. Days like today that is a bit rainy and not very windy, and you have 60% fossil fuels. The constant is nuclear around 10%, so remove that and the above numbers will go up depending on weather conditions.
Germany absolutely is relying on coal and (Russian) gas to afford its ideological decision to prematurely sunset nuclear plants, at the worst possible time in history : just as climate change becomes an emergency.
The cold hard truth is that it's impossible to operate a grid with solar & wind energy alone, unless and until a hypothetical battery storage breakthrough lands in the next decades.
I've just checked the realtime figures and as I write this, German electricity is 5 times more carbon intensive than in France (72% nuclear) : https://www.electricitymap.org/
> "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.
It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?
Also, if Rolls-Royce projects 2029 it doesn't mean it's done by 2029 and most certainly not wide scale deployed/operable. So what kind of renewable infrastructure and tech will be deployed 15-20 years from now?
> "It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?"
It's not a question of nuclear or renewables - we absolutely need renewables, and right now renewables are much cheaper, and can be delivered faster, than nuclear.
But there are regions of the world that may struggle to decarbonise completely without nuclear in the mix. Especially if you consider additional demands in the future from electrification of transport, building heat, etc.
> Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?
If the electricity storage problem doesn't get solved (which is a pretty small "if", since it requires a very uncertain breakthrough in physics) : nowhere.
In 10 years the climate emergency will be even more salient, but one of coal/gas/nuclear/hydro will still be required in the mix.
Countries that can't have hydro for geography reasons, and have shut down nuclear early for political reasons will be a liability to the rest of the world.
Most likely in that time frame we'll be trying to get by on a mix of renewables and non carbon neutral generation from coal or similar, and we'll also have implemented limits on carbon generation that will effectively be crippling various industries and increasing the cost of various necessities worldwide.
We won't have a choice... it'll be down to either everyone accepting reduced quality of life or nuclear... at which point nuclear starts to look very good.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
Good. For the foreseeable future, the limit of energy available from solar will be the total surface area of the Earth divided by two.
And that includes hydro from evaporation-rainfall cycling, photosynthesis, and wind. Which basically leaves as alternate energy sources tidal, from the sun and moon dragging the oceans around, energy stored from long periods of solar absorption in ages past, residual geothermal, and nuclear.
A little neutron-activated waste is indeed a small price to pay.
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".
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.
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.
> 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?).
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.
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.
> 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.
You're comparing magnitudes there ... but I've a feeling there's a base-rate somewhere, relating to how dangerous just a relatively small amount of nuclear waste can be if it gets into groundwater or something.
The real problem with nuclear is that it's a one way only system. The effects of other forms of fuel can in theory be sequestered eventually. Sequestration of nuclear waste is exactly something that yout don't want to happen.
As you say, it's a matter of scale. A limited amount of nuclear power is probably fine, and safe. But it can never be the "solution" to our energy problems until the various problems are solved satisfactorily.
We could grind nuclear waste from current nuclear plants into fine powder and intentionally blow it into the atmosphere and still cause fewer deaths than coal, as well as cause the release of less radioactive material, as the coal industry causes huge amounts of uranium dust to be released in the air.
So as it stands, if we look at the real world instead of some hypothetical future, we continue to depend on types of power that causes not just the release of more harmful material, but the release of more radioactive material than nuclear.
If we get to a point where we have fully supplanted fossil fuels, and we need to consider whether to continue building nuclear or replace it with alternatives, then the situation may look different, but at the moment anything that slows the replacement of things like coal causes massive amounts of harm, both environmentally and in killing people.
We could have a Chernobyl a year, and it'd still cause us less harm than the continued dependence on coal.
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.
>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.
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.
By human emotional calculus, it is better for a million people to experience on average 0.001 of a mortality event than for 1000 people to be killed outright.
When we measure such things in terms of "increased cancer risk" and "possible thyroid dysfunction", it is far easier to discount, particularly as young people are not tremendously concerned when people above a certain age die of diseases that are already typical in the aged.
So even if we knew it exactly, people would still care less. It might be more relevant if, instead of death toll, it could be given a money value derived from additional healthcare expenses for exposed individuals, because young people implicitly know that they are the ones who pay when old people get sick.
Same thing for the death toll from coal burning plants. All that ash, deaths from that radioactivity and lung disease, deaths caused by global warming, etc.
If you look at a long enough time scale, anything can seem like a giant problem.
> 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:
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:
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:
There were no known deaths from accute radiation syndrome[0]. There were deaths from things like the tsunami, the evacuation, and stress, which was essentially the point I was trying to make. The nuclear part of the equation caused a lot of fear, but it was all of the other things (and maybe the fear itself) that caused the deaths. That said, you're not wrong about the long-tail effects being hard to quantify and measure.
> 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.
For what it's worth, I've lived near nuclear power plants for over 30 years, and have no problem living near them until I die-- which will almost certainly not be from radiation unless we have a nuclear war. I had more radiation exposure from the coal fired power plant in my childhood town than from any of the nuclear plants I've been around.
> 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.
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.
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.
Global-politically, there shouldn't be any problem for the US, UK, France, Russia, and China to have fast-breeder reactors, but it still may be a concern in local politics due to environmental or terrorism concerns.
Nuclear waste has to be shipped to the facility. All the shipping routes from all the nearest waste-producing reactors converge there. That's naturally a concern to all those who live nearby.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.