[ducleonctor]

Nuclear power seems incredibly expensive and complicated, even more so than large coal power plants. The logistics alone are crazy.

Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases like powering infrastructure in space and implementing big red buttons for our presidents, supreme leaders and chairmen.

Nobody can rule out accidents or malicious things going on with the spent fuel anyways.

Wind and solar are very cheap and the sun won't turn off anytime soon. Can't we cover the planet's deserts with photovoltaics and wind turbines? Couldn't we ship the converted energy using high voltage DC lines or hydrogen/methane pipelines?

Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?

[acidburnNSA]

Sustainability: Nuclear fission fuel on earth can last about 4 billion years using breeder reactors [1].

Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.

Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.

Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.

Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

[2] https://thenextweb.com/science/2021/03/02/solar-panels-in-th...

[3] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

[_ph_]

Can you point me to some operating breeding reactors? Especially in western nations? What were the reasons the few operational ones were shut down and not replaced?

[acidburnNSA]

> Can you point me to some operating breeding reactors?

* India: FBTR (operating)and PFBR (under construction)

* China: CEFR (operating) and CDFR (under construction)

* Japan: Joyo (Monju is shut down)

* Russia: BN-600, BN-800

Shut down ones include:

* US: EBR-1, EBR-2, Fermi-1, FFTF

* France: Phénix, SuperPhénix

* UK: Dounreay, PFR

* Germany: KNK-2, SNR-300

The shut down ones mostly shut down because uranium minerals were found to be sufficient for the world nuclear demand for now. We really only need to go through the complexity of breeding when you have 1000 GW-scale nuclear plants or more. Today we have only about 400.

[ducleonctor]

> Sustainability: Nuclear fission fuel on earth can last about 4 billion years using breeder reactors [1].

Are there safe breeder reactor designs? How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?

> Safety: Fossil and biofuel waste kill 8 million per year, compared to "up to 4000" total, ever, from commercial nuclear power.

True. But irradiating large patches of land/streams of water just makes for bad publicity. Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site or similar sites, like the one near my home town Hanau (see comment below).

> Cost: Fossil and biofuel cause those health effects and climate change. Nuclear does not. If those were considered in markets, nuclear would be excellent. Furthermore, modern nuclear builds in Korea, China, and Russia are cost competitive without that advantage.

South Korea suffers from massive corruption and the country is practically run by a few ultra-rich families, even Chinese are complaining about that fact. ;)

As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few? It is no wonder that regulatory costs there are lower. A human life is apparently less valuable.

> Geoengineering: Turning the Earth's deserts black with solar PV causes serious impact on the environment [2]. It's arguably more environmentally friendly to not have that kind of geoengineering impact.

This is something to consider. Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert? Would wind turbines reduce peak windspeed and stop or revert desertification?

> Perfectly safe fuel rods: again, we're comparing a hypothetical danger that we have good solutions for [3] against a present killer of 8M people per year...

If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries" that would be awesome. Unfortunately shielding combined with the fact that it won't work as a closed system for long (need for "refreshing" spent fuel in a breeder periodically) makes that impractical due to hard physics. As far as I know.

How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled? Normal nuclear fuel transport cost lots of money and require high security. Are you going to put those perfectly safe rods in an Uber? Like that radioactive fracking brine on the back of a small truck without shielding? That model could work in Russia... or maybe the US.

[acidburnNSA]

> Are there safe breeder reactor designs?

Yup. As shown in data above, current nuclear is about as safe as you can get. On top of that most breeder reactors operate at low coolant pressure, enabling even more robust safety. For example the Experimental Breeder Reaction-2 did two famous demonstrations in 1986 where they turned off the coolant pump without inserting the control rods and the reactor both shut itself off anyway and removed the afterglow heat with passive natural convection.

> How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?

Same way we do today. Inspections and safeguards. You have to remember that it's wayyy easier to just buy natural uranium and enrich it than it is to steal radioactive plutonium from quasi-military guarded facilities. Furthermore, the latter can be done whether or not we have any commercial nuclear power so it's basically a moot point.

> bad publicity

Sure, but we can try to show people statistics to convince them that scary-looking things can sometimes be appropriate and good. Air travel would be a good example here.

> Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site

They absolutely do. Hanford impact is extremely well studied. These are WW2/Cold War era nuclear weapons sites, which are not necessarily comparable in mission to civilian power generation.

> As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few?

Do you say the same regarding current low solar manufacturing prices, driven almost entirely by the Chinese? If you want a more US-focused example, consider that the US Navy regularly constructs 300 MW nuclear power plants to power submarines and aircraft carriers in shipyard environments with excellent cost and schedule performance.

> Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert?

Surely there are, but most people like to take the precautionary principle about such dramatic and vast geoengineering efforts.

> If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries"

The "perfectly safe" standard you're applying to nuclear but not other energy tech is very perplexing to me. Why not 'anything 2 orders of magnitude safer than fossil and biofuel is safe enough'?

> How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled?

Like this [1] ;)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4

[tpmx]

Meanwhile, in the real world...

[ducleonctor]

...Germany gets its natural gas from mother Russia.

Which is more dirty, has a touch of corruption and allows mother Russia to tell the Germans how to behave. But it makes some politicians and companies in two countries happy and shows that large scale energy projects can work if there is a will.

So it's a start I guess.

[tpmx]

Ok, I'll bite:

> Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?

In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa. Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with a factor of 100-1000x.

Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...

[ducleonctor]

> In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa.

They are indeed unstable - for reasons that may not be discussed - but buying the required sites and securing them should be possible anyways. If local jobs are created in the process, even better. So much effort has been wasted on partially securing much more dangerous countries like Afghanistan and Irak with questionable lasting benefit and apparently low strategic gain.

> Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with 1000.

A very good point. One pipe obviously isn't enough and one shouldn't push too large objects through it without a capable plumber around.

> Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...

Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming and some mining for now? OK, they may also try to develop some industry, but how well Chinese business culture meshes with the African population's culture remains to be seen.

Also, just because a competitor is doing something one shouldn't do it? If everybody had always followed this rule, the USA would now maybe be called "North Mexico" because the Spanish sailed some ships there, first. I am not saying colonization is a good idea, much better arrangements could be made today.

[tpmx]

I think the you should spend your efforts on responding to other comments you got, at least two were quite strong, much stronger than mine.

I'll just reply to the China thing:

> Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming and some mining for now?

No. A large part of their investments are focused is on building and owning ports and roads. This is essential for owning trade, which is how you get to own the governments of Africa.

[ducleonctor]

> No. A large part of their investments are focused is on building and owning ports and roads. This is essential for owning trade, which is how you get to own the governments of Africa.

Good to know. I wasn't aware of that. What does that mean for our supply of blood diamonds, copper and similar? Maybe they are more needed in China, now that manufacturing has and is still being outsourced to that piece of two countries?

[p_l]

Buying up required sites is exactly how Suez Canal started - and ended with Suez Crisis.

Of course, there's always an option of not backing down from local population, or going full american and starting an insurgency doing terrorist strikes on all sorts of targets like primary schools - but I'd argue that we do not want that kind of blood energy, do we?

[deftnerd]

Nuclear power is expensive and complicated, but not inherently so. A lot of the causes of the problem is political decisions and bureaucratic processes.

There are many designs for nuclear reactors that are simpler, safer, and more suitable for smaller communities, but various government nuclear regulation agencies around the world have such a high bar for entry that those designs will never be put into practice.

In the US, if you want to operate a nuclear reactor, the design has to be vetted first. To vet the reactor, you have to convince the agency to let you build a full-scale test reactor and convince them that the design is likely safe before building the test reactor. If anything about the test reactor makes them uncomfortable, the design will be denied and the reactor won't be allowed to operate and cannot work as a template for future reactors.

This creates a very difficult and expensive bar for entry into the market. For a large reactor, a company would have to invest billions of dollars for a decade before they could even begin to hope to operate to pay back the loans, and even then there is no guarantee that they'll be allowed to operate the reactor to sell the electricity.

That is, unless they use one of the existing pre-approved reactor concepts that were designed in the 70's and have known flaws (albeit, with known ways to reduce the risks of those flaws)

Nuclear radiation might be damaging, but it's not really a big deal as long as the design prevents accidents and there are safeguards to prevent the uncontrolled release of radiation.

You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.

Solar is an excellent source of energy, with long life spans of the equipment but it's only functional for anywhere from 6 to 16 hours a day, depending on your latitude and the weather. The ideal places for solar farms are often far from the highest concentrations of consumers.

Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.

Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.

Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.

The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.

The problem is that it takes a lot of political will to build a nuclear power plant because everyone is afraid of that. Bigger plants are often desired because plant owners need to invest the decade and tens of millions of dollars getting not just approval from the NRC, but approval from the people and government within 20 miles of the plant.

Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.

[ducleonctor]

> You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.

This is interesting. I thought without breeder reactors and continued widespread nuclear use we would run out in ~50 years. Maybe you have more current sources.

> Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.

Yes and I additionally worry about the fiber material being slowly rubbed off and being spread downstream by the wind (google wind turbine leading edge erosion). Because wind turbines on land are often built on farming land. Thus I put a lot of hope in improved wind "turbine" designs like: https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/

> Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.

I thought the US grid is pretty old and some parts (Texas?) are on their own. Maybe investments in that area could help, in addition to storage (mechanical or hydrogen connected with solar).

> Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.

Combine this statement (risk of "real war") with this suggestion...

> The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.

...and you get great savings in making that hated opponents main population centers uninhabitable and the irradiated ruins a monument to remember. Even if only by unfortunate "accident". In WW2 cities were burned down using "firestorm" tactics here in Germany. I heard the anniversary bells ring an annoyingly long time a few days back in the rebuilt city of Würzburg... why would humanity change character and suddenly become more civil in the next conflict?

> Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.

I agree that this is probably due to the hard lessons learned from the risks in older experimental and larger commercial designs. But are we willing to learn the hard lessons of 10000s (or more) of handy, small reactors spread in everyones backyard?

Better put some solar panels on some roofs and hydrogen metal hydride storage in a few basements. Maybe not under a school or kindergarden or the likes.

A grid like this could be made incredibly resilient and hard to destroy by any opponent.

[relax88]

The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.

The currently identified reserves of Uranium could last us at least 200 years, even longer if you enrich it more or use newer reactor designs. If you extract it from seawater we've got about 60000 years worth

Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.

Wind and Solar are indeed cheap, but have higher materials throughput than nuclear, and they use orders of magnitude more land. This land use will almost certainly have a larger impact on the environment than Nuclear. There is also new research that is showing wind turbines are a major cause of insect decline as well.

The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.

Now lets say you've got solar and wind up the wazoo, and battery banks to load shift. Can you still power society 24/7? Nope. You still need either hydro, natural gas, or nuclear to run the grid in a stable and reliable manner. Batteries to provide base load overnight would require so much money and materials that I don't see this happening any time soon without major breakthroughs in battery tech.

What about pumped hydro? Well... turns out dams need to manage water levels for practical reasons and while some pumped hydro can be useful, the available capacity for this when you take into account electricity production and practical water management issues is minimal.

Why can't we cover the deserts in solar and wind and transmit it? Or move electricity from one area to another when the wind isn't blowing or its cloudy? Well transmission is expensive and incurs energy loss in a major way. transmission and sub-transmission lines today account for about a 30% energy loss. Now you're talking about tripling or quadrupling the transmission infrastructure at a minimum, and moving energy over great distances, which is VERY expensive compared to producing it near where it is consumed.

There is a good article here on the technical challenges: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...

Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.

At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.

[ducleonctor]

I grew up in Hanau and was born in that city one year before that happened (you may also refer to the sources if you don't trust the org publishing the English summary):

https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/493-494/ex...

Children found funny metal pill or drop-like objects in the forests around the plant and played with it. While there were reports of inspectors and interested civilians being blocked from taking measurements.

After this and Chernobyl nobody has a right to complain about me being a retarded monkey... or dying maybe 1-5 years earlier than normal due to earlier onset of cancer.

Humans can not be trusted (at scale) to keep such material secure and even in labs accidents can happen. Same is true for large scale use of dangerous chemicals, too.

> Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.

Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly reactive metals?

> The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.

Human operators can never be trusted. And machines built by humans will also fail, but at least risk could be more easily calculated. (Well, at least until machine learning came along and we started to introduce some "human factor" back into the algorithms for better or worse.) If we were able to avoid using most pesticides we would do so already. Unfortunately our way of producing food for the masses with low manual effort and low technology (large machines, monoculture) forces us to keep using them, for now. We will see what alternatives we can build (robotic farming, indoor farming and maybe a few organic farms) that can do with less or no pesticides. I don't think anyone questions the harm widespread pesticide use has done to our ecosystem. Pesticides are just like chemical weapons. What you really want is the bug not eating your plant, not multiplying in excess and staying mostly out of your bottom-line. Using pesticides is like waging a war against the bug species in question (with collateral damage) instead of finding ways to fix the root-causes. As someone who picked potatoe bugs from a field once, I can relate to the waging a war option, but that doesn't mean it's the right course of action.

> The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.

True. I also don't see how lithium based batteries have a long future in large scale energy storage. Too high environmental impact and political risk. (Everyone designs battery cars and China controls most needed rare earths. How is that not a dependency.) I have high hopes in direct hydrogen storage. Efficieny is important, but not the single most important factor. Total cost (over lifetime) and environmental impact - also in countries where the raw materials are mined - should be considered.

> There is a good article here on the technical challenges: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...

This one states that "Transmission Losses is approximate 17% while distribution losses is approximate 50%.". So these 50% loss in the distribution part are shared by any other power generation except distributed local (on your own roof or in your basement). The 17% in the transmission area do not sound so much and are lower than I expected. I do however take from that article that baseload power generation should be as distributed as possible to avoid unnecessary losses in distribution (smaller power lines/transformers of the villages/buildings).

> Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.

This one is unfortunately true. Every idea has its merrits and downsides. I'd rather err on the biome uninhabitable by us humans, though.

> At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.

Let us use this compact and efficient method for powering the ion engines to travel to some other planets, instead of using them here, with the risk of lowering our homeworld's value.

[acidburnNSA]

> Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly reactive metals?

There are vehicles that use highly reactive fluid called gasoline. Many people drive them safely because we are smart and designed them to be safe enough to be worth the benefit of travel. There are homes heated by explosive fuel (natural gas). People even cook with it. Sometimes people bring water to a hazardous boiling condition in order to cook or make tea.

The utilization of hazardous material in safe ways to benefit humanity is old hat, and wholly appropriate in many cases.

[ducleonctor]

> There are vehicles that use highly reactive fluid called gasoline. Many people drive them safely because we are smart and designed them to be safe enough to be worth the benefit of travel. There are homes heated by explosive fuel (natural gas). People even cook with it. Sometimes people bring water to a hazardous boiling condition in order to cook or make tea. > > The utilization of hazardous material in safe ways to benefit humanity is old hat, and wholly appropriate in many cases.

True, still people - including myself - keep burning their hands on the stove or with hot water occasionally. Humans also sometimes accidentally ignite some fuel and die a fiery death (electrostatic discharge at fuel station for example). But accidentally irradiating your and all your 1000 neighbors properties for centuries or until the next top soil replacement is a whole different matter. Before real accidents actually happened it was probably easier to convince people risk was tollerable. Now eating wild boar and some mushrooms in the forrest here is considered a health hazard, cause of high levels of cesium. Boar meat tastes great. It is a damn shame it can't be eaten in many cases. Same for the mushrooms:

https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w...

Quote: "Wer seine persönliche Belastung verringern möchte, sollte in den höher belasteten Gebieten Deutschlands auf den Genuss selbst erlegten Wildes und selbst gesammelter Pilze verzichten." -> "If you want to reduce your personal stress, you should refrain from enjoying game and mushrooms you have hunted yourself in the more polluted areas of Germany."

To summarize, I believe your argument is not unfounded but still doesn't properly account for the difference in scale (time, affected area and severity) of the worst possible effects if something should go wrong. And we know there always remains some risk.

People evaluate not only using analytic thinking, but also from observation and influenced by emotions. And the last two processes seem to disfavour use of nuclear power.

A reactor based on nuclear fission is going to be a hard sell in any region that has been affected by one or multiple accidents before. I hope we can get fusion to work and somehow find a way to shield it properly without causing too much waste. Or concentrate heavily on renewable energy storage (efficiency is a goal that has to be weighed against other factors and may be improved later).