[jvm_]

It was my understanding that fission and fusion both use the same Nuclear Power Plant sized facility.

Fusion just replaces the radioactive bit, you still need steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling... it's not like a suitcase you can plug wires into, you still need a massive 'factory' to make electricity, just the one bit is a safer.

[RealityVoid]

I am really not buying the fact that nuclear is expensive because it's nuclear. I think the fears around it, the overregulation and opposition to it make it costly. Obviously, there have been plenty of plants that were profitable.

Also, nuclear fusion is possibly the cleanest energy source we could get. If we touch this, we might have a real path forward.

[Maursault]

That just isn't the case. Nuclear (fission) has always been the single most expensive way to generate electricity, and the expense has only increased. Uranium is crazy expensive. Security is very expensive. Spent fuel storage effectively never stops costing, and it isn't ever cheap. If nuclear was simply expensive because of regulations, investors would find a way, and you could not beat them away from building nuclear power plants. But that just isn't where the expense lies. Today it costs $20B to build a nuclear power plant, and that does not include the cost of spent fuel storage or decommissioning. Investors are actually pretty shrewd to stay away from that kind of an investment that always loses. The idea of "electricity too cheap to meter" simply never materialized. Today, electricity generated from solar power is cheaper than electricity generated from nuclear power. The main reason the 110 or so commercial nuclear plants were ever built is that the US military vastly overestimated its need for fuel for bombs.

[ClumsyPilot]

Thats not accurate at all, Uranium itself is much cheaper than coal / any fuel per unit energy. Some contries have permanent, final storage for nuclear waste, it does not cost any more once created.

Furthermore, not only was solar power borderline non existent when those reactors were built, it is also still intermittent. You are just glossing over the biggest challenge of energy - balancing the powe grid. No-one needs energy if it's only avaliable at the wrong time. Energy storage multiplies cost of renewable electriciry several times over, and no country-scale grid has ever operated on wind and solar.

Lastly, energy is actually cheap - you can see that because we can afford transporting a pair of jeans 4 times across the world in the process of manufacture. We could have had zero-carbon grid since the 70s with nuclear - and France did. Even though France has cheapest energy in EU, suppose energy would be 30% more expensive. So what? We would be so much better off in terms of climate change.

[Retric]

Nuclear has the opposite problem as solar in that it needs high uptime 24/7 to stay reasonably economical. You can easily design a grid following reactor as seen with nuclear subs etc, it just doesn’t save you any money.

24/7 365 grid scale battery backed and thus load following solar runs about 8c/kWh* which is cheaper than nuclear at high utilization. Sure, France’s model of importing and exporting significant chunks of electricity allowed them to ramp up nuclear, but they where exporting power at a loss and utilization still fell into the 80% range.

*Excluding the most northern and southern areas.

[MagnumOpus]

Excluding the most northern areas is a pretty big issue. Most of Europe is north of 45 degrees north... Yes, Hawai'i and California can be supplied with solar panels cheaply; the UK can't.

[Retric]

Can’t is really just a cost question. 8.2 percent of Germany‘a gross-electricity generation comes from PV solar and their southernmost point is 47°17'N. IMO, that was an over investment, but that’s their choice. Most people in Canada live south of that so we are not talking about that many people.

We are really talking about a handful of countries. The Nordic countries have cheap alternatives in hydroelectric, wind and geothermal energy. Nuclear may have a few niche applications for northern islands etc, but that’s not really significant globally.

PS: 4% of the UK’s electricity comes from solar and their southern tip is a actually quite decent for solar.

[Maursault]

I'll respond to your straw man. It isn't about the energy within the thing, the exorbitant cost of Uranium is in mining and refining. No one said anything about coal, but it doesn't need refined, and is cheaply mined... but you've also made a false equivalency, because coal isn't the only competition to nuclear. The sun just shines, wind just blows, water just flows, and the geothermals just produce heat, without any investment or refinement.

If just 10% of the resources poured into nuclear development, which is a cost no one that is pro nuclear wants to tally into the bill, were instead invested into solar energy, nuclear power would not have been able to compete with solar power by 1980.

Nuclear power isn't cheap, unless you ignore the insane R&D that was paid for by tax payers by government mandate and never paid back, unless you ignore the massive cost of construction long before one watt of power is produced, and unless you ignore the massive cost of decommissioning, and unless you ignore the never ending cost of spent fuel storage. It is entirely absurd that you believe once a spent fuel storage facility is built, the costs just disappear. The costs never go away. Maintenance. Security. Testing. It isn't free and it isn't cheap.

[ClumsyPilot]

Two questions:

You keep repeating this idea thay uranium is expensive, by what metric? Where do you get the idea that its expensive?

If nuclear is so expencive, why does France have cheapest elecrticity in EU? And Denmark /Germany have invested in renewables have expensive electricity.

[Maursault]

Looks like I was simplifying. Uranium prices peaked around 2010 for $135/lb., and today is only $35/lb. The break even point for mining uranium is about $50/lb. So the problem in 2010 was that uranium was crazy expensive, but the problem today is it is so cheap, it can't be mined for profit.

But you raise a decent point about what metric we should choose... I meant the cost of the stuff, but there are other metrics, such as clean up costs, because mining uranium is not clean. There is also a human health cost to populations within the proximity of the uranium mine.

French electricity is likely cheap because the French tax payers already picked up the cost of constructing spent fuel storage facilities and power plant construction, and they will ultimately shoulder the burden of the cost of decommissioning. This is just an educated guess, because that is usually how nuclear economics work. Otherwise, the investors that run the plants and sell the electricity would not be interested.

[cromwellian]

4 words: Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (LIFTR)

[justatdotin]

> Uranium itself is much cheaper than coal / any fuel per unit energy.

well, that's silly: sunlight is cheaper than uranium.

[Retric]

Uranium and even enriched uranium is still reasonably cheap. Fuel rods get expensive, and more critically only using up ~5% of a fuel rod before you need to replace it gets even more expensive. Other reactor designs can use a higher percentage of uranium without reprocessing, but they have other issues. In the end fuel including waste disposal represents about 10% of nuclear reactors operating costs or ~1c/kWh. It’s a significant but hardly gamebreaking cost.

[xyzzyz]

You don't need as much containment as you do for fission, because you don't deal similarly large amounts of highly radioactive isotopes. Consequently, the safety standards required are closer to fossil plants than to nuclear plants, and these safety standards are really what drives the cost of nuclear fission. The steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling" are also present in fossil plants, and these are significantly cheaper than fission plants.

[Retric]

It’s not that simple.

Fission’s primary form of shielding is generally large pools of water or other coolant which don’t directly become radioactive. Fusion on the other hand needs to maintain a near vacuum so your pressure vessel is under heavy neutron bombardment. However, small amounts of radioactive materials get dissolved in the fission’s water which the goes on to contaminate the primary coolant loop which increased decommissioning costs. Fusion reactors primarily containment vessels becomes extremely radioactive and all the remote handling equipment also needs decontamination, but it’s unclear if the primary coolant loop will need similar types of decontamination.

And by small amounts, divers occasionally go in the same pools storing years of spent fuel rods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool

Running the numbers the real difference is fission reactors need more protection from the outside world and containment for a potential meltdown. Thus thick though still fairly cheap walls, which generally don’t become radioactive. They last for 50 years and don’t actually cost that much to construct. Fusion however is a vastly more complex device which will also increase construction and decommissioning costs.

[cromwellian]

In ARC the containment is not under vacuum, the reactor chamber is surrounded by molten salt of fluoride and lithium, and so the neutrons produced travel into molten salt where they collide and produce tritium.

It would help to actually watch the presentations. They’ve solved a lot engineering problems from Routine maintenance to blanket Renewal.

[Retric]

ARC reactors due use high temperature plasma in a near vacuum. “The confinement time for a particle in plasma varies with the square of the linear size, and power density varies with the fourth power of the magnetic field,[2] so doubling the magnetic field offers the performance of a machine 4 times larger.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor

[m0zg]

Just the little bit responsible for Chernobyl and Fukushima is not a part of the design at all. No big deal. :-)

[ClumsyPilot]

I am really tired of this line - the taunami killed 18,500 people. The reactor incident killed no-one through radiation and 32 people through physical injuries.

One failure of Banqiao Dam killed an estimated 240,000 people. That's more than all people who have ever died from anything to do with nuclear, reactors and bombs combined.

Air pollution kills about 2,000 people every single day.

Reactor incidents are like plane crashes - they get attention. Fissil fuels are like car crashes - they kill more people every day and noone gives a shit.

[Retric]

Killing people is hardly the only issue. Rendering large tracts of land uninhabitable is extremely expensive. All told 4 nuclear reactors have had major issues, 2 subs and 1 power plant run by the USSR, and then another one very recently by Japan. Plus several near misses.

That’s a significant percentage of total reactors ever built including what was considered a safe design. We could go 1000 years without another incident, but from an insurance standpoint what would you charge a new power plant next to NYC? That means you need them in an a less expensive area, but everyone feels their area is valuable. That causes vast NIMBY issues and heavy regulation.

In theory modern Nuclear should cost less and be both clean and safe, but people gonna people both inside and outside the industry.

[MagnumOpus]

> Rendering large tracts of land uninhabitable is extremely expensive

Have you ever been near a coal ash pond? You probably haven't because it is an extreme health hazard to get anywhere near it, as it is full of mercury, arsenic, heavy metals and occasionally radioactive slurry.

There about a thousand of these ponds in the US alone totaling maybe 100,000 acres. Meanwhile all the nuclear power plant waste ever produced could fit into a single large hangar...

[Retric]

Every nuclear accident was completely avoidable, but it’s not clear if future plant operators can avoid making similar mistakes.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is 1,000 square miles. Fukushima had a much smaller exclusion zone but Estimates of radioactivity released ranged from 10–40%[163][164][165][166] of that of Chernobyl. The significantly contaminated area was 10[163]-12%[164] of that of Chernobyl.[163][167][168]

On 12 October 2012, TEPCO admitted for the first time that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants. That’s the core issue not physics.* ... A 2008 in-house study identified an immediate need to better protect the facility from flooding by seawater. This study mentioned the possibility of tsunami-waves up to 10.2 meters (33 ft). Headquarters officials insisted that such a risk was unrealistic and did not take the prediction seriously. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warned of a risk of losing emergency power in 1991 (NUREG-1150) and NISA referred to that report in 2004, but took no action to mitigate the risk.[149] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

France and the US have a solid nuclear track record, but so did Japan.

[m0zg]

I'm really tired of this line as well. Had they failed to contain Chernobyl, much of Eastern Europe would be contaminated for thousands of years.

It is true that today's reactor designs are much safer than RBMK, but I will prefer the reactor can can't go supercritical to one that can any day, especially if it's nearby.

[outworlder]

> but I will prefer the reactor can can't go supercritical to one that can any day, especially if it's nearby.

Newer design's can't go supercritical.

[drran]

Tsunami and earthquakes are not man generated events, so we can dismiss them. Yes, they killed a lot of people, but cancer kills even more: about 10 millions per year. In part, cancer is caused by contamination of food by radionuclides from reactor leaks (Chornobyl) and nuclear bomb testing.

[outworlder]

> In part, cancer is caused by contamination of food by radionuclides from reactor leaks (Chornobyl)

Sorry, this is just misinformation. Residual radiation worldwide from nuclear testing or Chernobyl is minuscule. We wouldn't even be able to detect anything if we didn't have incredibly sensitive instruments.

The sun is a much larger daily source of radiation. Or a banana.

[drran]

Radiation from Chornobyl affected large area, but not whole world. People die from radiation induced cancer in affected areas only, of course.

[FriskyAlter]

Yes, cancer did not exist before nuclear. We can blame cancer on nuclear plants and bombs. That's quality commentary.

[drran]

Radionuclides are major contribution to growth of cancer rate.

Quote: Radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests probably caused 17,000 cancer deaths in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1849471.stm

[FriskyAlter]

"probably" 17000 in 70 years against 700 000 000 total cancer death. Pack it up, boys.

And if anything, that shows how bad nuclear weapons are, not the power plants.

[joncrane]

I believe that coal releases more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear energy.

[drran]

Quote:

McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

[dougabug]

But the tsunami didn’t render large areas of land uninhabitable, as in the case of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

[bserge]

The nuclear incidents didn't, either. Decontamination of Okuma has been successful and residents are already returning.

Pripyat is an animal and vegetation haven. Really shows how dangerous our species is to the planet.

Point is, nuclear power plants, even the old ones, are nowhere near as dangerous as the media portrays them.

[dougabug]

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is 30km in radius. It’s not at all clear that serious effects do not extend beyond that, for instance to agricultural lands in Belarus.