How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.
The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.
The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers).
In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000!
I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.
> The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.
What would your definition of a "major incident" be for photovoltaics?
> I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants.
If we only tolerated the same long term risk level for food, you wouldn't be be eating anything but organic vegetables. The fact that we put a sarcophagus to prevent material from leaking is just the reflection of the accepted limits. Flint water crisis was much more dangerous than leaving Chernobyl without the latest sarcophagus but nobody cared for a decade.
> The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion
The stories of acute radiation poisoning have been debunked repeatedly, there simply isn't enough radioactive material left there to cause such symptoms (it's still a very bad idea to eat mushrooms or the meat of wild animals living there, you'd risk long term cancer, but nothing close to acute radiation poisoning, it's simply not possible from a physics standpoint).
And again, we're talking about an accident that happened in Soviet Union on a reactor absolutely not designed with safety in mind and with a Soviet party member who threatened the engineers into bypassing safety mechanism in order to operate outside of the design domain of the plant. And the resulting accident was nowhere near close to the Bhopal catastrophe.
Chemical site have deadly accidents every other years and nobody seems to care but they'll obsess about nuclear ones even when they barely kill anyone. And chemical plants accident do leave long lasting pollution with durable health effect, but we don't permanently evacuate the places because we tolerate the risk.
Your "large area" is actually tiny, and the solution is to... not go there. Yeah, all you have to do is not go to a very specific tiny area in Ukraine. I think that's quite easily manageable.
As usual, when such things are mentioned, you lack any and all sense of scale and statistics. Just pure fearmongering.
Look at the number of all nuclear plants over their entire lifetime and divide their benefits by the cost of what, the two or three major incidents you can think of? This simple calculation alone makes your arguments utterly ridiculous. We accept 1000x the risk and cost of that on a daily basis, in e.g. driving, gas and coal plants.
Go ahead and evacuate to get away from the negative effects of soot, tire dust, CO2, and all the other fun pollution that's spread out over the entire atmosphere. Good luck living on Mars.
It's even worse than this, you'd don't even need to compare to other industries, nuclear-induced death over the past 40 years are negligible even when you compare to stuff like professional diseases of maids or electricians (and I'm purposely not picking hazardous professions…).
Are you rhetorically or actually asking? I'd guess significantly lower than coal and gas, and in the ballpark of (but still higher than) solar and wind combined (in the expected value, i.e. probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster times the death toll of that).
No member of the public has died from civilian nuclear power in the US. Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse.
I don't doubt that that resulting number is still very low, or there (being intentionally optimistic about politics and society here) wouldn't be any nuclear plants.
Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up.
> Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms). But that's besides the larger point of low probability and historical risk.
> That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse.
The data is sparse because the rate is very low. If the world used twice as much nuclear power as it does now, we don't have enough statistical data to predict with high accuracy if something as bad as Chernobyl would happen two more times or zero more times but the existing data allows us to be pretty confident it wouldn't be 100 more times. Meanwhile coal kills more people than 100 Chernobyls every year in just the US.
There is also reason to suspect Chernobyl was an outlier because the USSR was such an authoritarian nightmare. They not only screwed up the design of the reactor (positive void coefficient, no containment building) but then also its operation and the response. The majority of the confirmed deaths were plant workers and emergency responders who got radiation exposure after being sent in without training or relevant equipment. It took the USSR more than three days to admit that it had even happened so that people living next to the plant would know to leave the immediate area. Screwing it up that bad required more than an honest mistake.
> Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up.
The "thousands of years" thing is essentially fake. Radiological half-life is the inverse of intensity. Things with a half-life of five minutes are super radioactive. Things with a half-life of thousands of years aren't much above background.
For example, there is an isotope of uranium that has a half-life of four billion years. It's also a pain because its decay chain contains radon gas. ZOMG what are we going to do with it for that long? Well, that's the one that represents 99.3% of natural uranium straight out of the ground, which is why homes in areas with natural granite need radon reduction systems, so it turns out the answer to what we do with it is we can put it in a reactor and use it to generate electricity and that will turn it into something with a shorter half life that goes away sooner. And the major ones that are "thousands of years" can also be used to generate electricity if we would actually separate them and use them for that to get rid of them instead of wringing our hands about where we're supposed to keep them.
> In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms).
It's also lower because nuclear plants are pretty obsessive about safety vs. random solar installation company whose job application test is to see if you can make it onto a third story roof with a two story ladder.
Nobody has died from nuclear accidents. If we’re including workers falling off of roofs then we should include nuclear power plant workers dying from mundane industrial accidents which has happened in the US.
Tiring with arbitrary limitations to exclude major accidents of a fleet in the hundreds.
The difference between renewables and nuclear power is who gets harmed.
When dealing with nuclear accidents entire populations are forced into life changing evacuations, if all goes well.
For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry. And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
And the worst power-production disaster in history so far was neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl, but the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And it's not even close.
Which of them resulted in "entire populations [] forced into life changing evacuations"? Which ones were the implied something worse than that and what happened then?
> For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry.
Solar panels are essentially semiconductors. "Silicon valley" is called that because they used to actually make such things there. You can tell from the number of superfund sites.
"The newer ones are safer" has a certain symmetry to it, right?
> And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
Those things are actually the dangerous things though? There were no fatalities from Three Mile Island but a plant worker at a nuclear power plant in Arkansas was killed and several others injured when a crane collapsed and a generator fell on them. Power company line workers have a worse-than-average fatality rate from getting electrocuted.
MIT actually measured this, and the conclusion might surprise you:
> Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators “required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material.” Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects.
> But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.
> By contrast, R&D-related expenses, which included both regulatory changes and things like the identification of better materials or designs, accounted for the other third of the increases. Often, a single change met several R&D goals, so assigning the full third to regulatory changes is probably an over-estimate.
> So, while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima.
France is all-in on nuclear. Their reactors are still pretty expensive. Worth it, but expensive. Each reactor is a huge piece of infrastructure where small mistakes compound. No matter how little regulation you have reworking these giant buildings takes a lot of work, if only from the physics of it all.
If there's magic that makes em massively cheaper someone should tell France.
Actually France knows how to build them cheaper and quicker.
Their whole nuclear industry (reactors and all) cost just €228 billion. And they built 50+ reactors in just 15 years.
They know how this works, and so do we: standardize a design, build lots of them, in overlapping lots so experience accumulates and knowledge gained from earlier builds can be passed on and applied to newer builds. This also worked for Germany with the Konvois, even though only 3 got built and the same technique is now working for the Chinese, who copied it from us.
With Flamanville 3, the French did none of these things. Why not?
They weren't allowed to do so. Politically. France actually was on a long-term nuclear exit trajectory. The Mitterand government put a law in place that not just demanded reduction of the nuclear share to 50% of total electricity production, it also capped the total permitted capacity to what was installed at the time: exactly 63.2 GW.
So they could not build any additional nuclear power plants, meaning they could only build new plants (to retain the know-how of how to build them) if they turned equivalent existing capacity off.
Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.
But in order to retain their industrial capacity, they did just that idiotic thing, knowing that it would be idiotic. The 2 reactors at Fessenheim were turned off to allow exactly 1 new EPR to be built at Flamanville.
Not a standardized design, a brand new design. And a design that was also troubled, see:
And not a lot of them, just a single one. And with a single one, obviously also no overlaps.
So that went about as well as one might expect: not at all.
Now the law has been removed, they have 14 EPR2 reactors of a new simplified design planned, with a first batch of 6 in lots of 2 each at 3 sites coming up.
I was a bit confused about the Mitterand gov't claim, that seems to be a Hollande gov't thing from 2014. In particular after 2011 (with Fukushima on the minds of Europeans... not to debate how much those concerns made sense), and part of policy alignments with the socialist party and the greens
Found this 2023 article with Hollande not feeling the need to apologize for this policy[0]. I would like to point out that here Hollande at least points out the following:
- at the time polling showed 65-80% of people wanting an off-ramp
- this was kinda premised on the idea of leaning into renewables, which feels fine. If you can build a wind farm or solar in some spots might as well! There's not much morally wrong with the tech
There's definitely an argument to saying that its the responsibility of politicians and gov'ts to convince people to make the right decisions, but if 80% of people are like "we want to move our electricity grid to rely more on renewables" it's hard to argue to _not_ do it. And 50% is still 50%!
> Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.
This is the thing I'm not quite sure about. Like Fessenheim (which, IIRC, was the oldest) ended up working for 40+ years. Now... I'm not sure but if this plant was the oldest, then France was decomissioning older plants right? So either all of these politicians are being too "scared" to run the plant for 80 years.... or the lifetime of these plants really are less than 50 years.
I don't know how much of the reduction of nuclear share played a role in everything. We're talking about Hollande, a one-term president, establishing this in the wake of Fukushima. It wasn't the state of things in 2010, right?
I do get the argument of "don't lose the muscle memory" for cost control cases alone. I don't think that "build some renewables because wind is also quite nice when you can use it" is an unreasonable ask either (don't need water to cool wind turbines!).
I do appreciate the color on EPR though. I knew EPR was a bit of a mess but I get what you're saying about building 14 of the same thing vs just one of em.
And yes, of course they wanted to replace nuclear with renewables, what else were they going to replace it with?
But that doesn't work. See Germany. Which is why that plan has now been laid to rest.
Without shutting off Fessenheim, Flamanville 3 would have been illegal under the Hollande law:
"On 9 April 2017, the plant was ordered to close after the Flamanville 3 unit comes online, expected to begin operation in late 2018, later reported to 2019, keeping the French nuclear generation capacity below the legal limit of 63.2 GWe." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant...
And there was also strong political opposition to Fessenheim. The Fessenheim closure was not technical.
The French reactors are based on Westinghouse designs, and those reactors are currently being extended to 80 year lifespan in the US. So I don't see why they shouldn't be capable of the same lifetime in France, though the French do drive them a bit harder.
It's not the regulations, it's the financing scheme: if it's not state backed with a long investment horizon, it's very expensive because private investors expect 10% yields in the middle of a ZIRP to cover from the possible political reversal.
The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.
It's not just political reversal risk; there's the risk of technological obsolescence. It's very much a stretch to assume a nuclear plant will remain operationally viable (in the sense of being competitive) for 40 years, never mind the 60 or 80 years sometimes mentioned, because the competition isn't standing still.
The only credible competition against a state funded nuclear plant is hypothetical next gen geothermal power though.
Nuclear won't save the planet, as few countries can develop a nuclear industry. But for countries that have one, it should be a no brainer if not for irrational nuclear bomb fears.
> The only credible competition against a state funded nuclear plant is hypothetical next gen geothermal power though.
If we extend renewables and batteries on historical experience curves they could become incredibly cheap, with solar well below $0.01/kWh. Nuclear couldn't even make an operating profit in an environment with solar that cheap.
Price is irrelevant when you need most of your electricity in a season when there's barely any sun.
Most of the European population leave on places that are more northern then Montreal, we have less than 8 hours of daylight per day, and a significant fraction of it is cloudy.
There's no storage solution that can store the excess summer solar exposure (when we get more than 16hours on sun per day) to reinject it into the grid in winter. That's literally science fiction tech, and that's what you'd need to make solar + storage a reliable source in Europe.
Solar in California, India or the middle east? Sure. Solar in Europe, Canada and even Japan, good luck (and yes, these countries constitute most of nuclear power plants operators).
looking at the current Geopolitical Climate this does not seem like an Irrational Fear. And I do not mean the fear of a reactor meltdown. But if you refine Uranium for a Powerplant you can also Refine it for a bomb.
Any country that can make a nuclear bomb could decide to make one whether or not they chose to have a civil nuclear industry (Israel being the prime example).
And in the current geopolitical climate, expect more countries to build a bomb.
If risk and disposal is factored into coal, gas, solar power, what would be cheaper? Nuclear has recyclable fuel processes and fail safe systems available.
> That cost doesn’t even factor in disposal because no one knows the true cost yet
There's still some cost factored in, unlike any other industry where the government is expected to clean up after the fact.
> Not sure what risk you think come from renewables
The grid collapse risk (See what happened in Spain last year, which caused 8 deaths, more than every nuclear power plant accidents in the Western world combined…). Grid operators are currently investing a trillion Euro in the EU alone in order to adapt the grid to the new challenges caused by intermittent and distributed energy sources, and this will never be accounted for in renewable electricity prices… (hence the paradox: the more “cheap energy” is being deployed in Europe, the more expensive the electricity prices become).
> and storage
"Storage" doesn't exist yet as a most people imagine it. Batteries can help ease a few hours of peak load/low supply but that's pretty much it, pumped storage is very situational with limited deployment capabilities. So the risk is that the technology simply never materialize.
It's €1.6tn up to 2040. And it's not being built to fix problems "caused by intermittent sources" so much as a complete overhaul of a grid for 27 countries, some of which are relatively backward, with standardised digital control, plus significant new interconnectors.
The finished grid will be far more robust, better able to handle local outages and issues, and generally more adaptive and open to development in various directions.
As for "cheap energy" raising prices - prices rose a little after Covid, but there's been no constant march upwards. The main driver of higher prices is gas, and eliminating gas dependence, for both for financial and strategic reasons, is a key goal.
The current situation in Iran is likely to increase that motivation.
A key point about renewables is that power doesn't rely on imports from war zones.
In my part of the world the authorities can demand a clean up bond as part of giving permission to build the project. That is done to ensure that you can’t skimp on your responsibilities.
Then I just see misinformation on the Iberian blackout. Please go ahead and tell me how thermal planes not delivering the expected reactive power was caused by renewables.
Please tell me how renewables can’t deliver reactive power when the US and all other sane grids have required them to do it for close to a decade.
And with that we’re solving high 90s% of the grid. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough when we still need to solve agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping, industry and so on.
All ignoring that storage on larger scales already exists.