U.S. reenters the nuclear fuel game

A quiet night will take out both solar and wind. And that happens multiple times a year.

As I write it right now Denmark is producing 0 solar, and only 12.5% of its wind production. Because its cloudy and there's little wind.

So they have to import almost 40% of electricity from Norway and Sweden where electricity generation is propped up by nuclear

But is it low enough?

Solar drops to zero every night.

For hydro, there's already seasonal variation with rain/snow melt. Beyond that, it looks like the majority of hydro in the US is on the west coast, which has been experiencing a drought for years and is projected to get worse. The west coast is big on removing dams for habitat restoration, too.

Wind: Admittedly I have no idea what sort of consistency wind has. But it does seem reasonable to assume the overall reliability of wind power will decrease as installed capacity increases, assuming we started with the most productive geographies first and then move to increasingly marginal areas.

In the same way that storm fronts travel through an area and bring high speed winds perhaps there is the opposite, where relatively sudden, large-scale lulls form?

To minimize the likelihood of blackouts we'd need to either:

1) Build sufficient excess capacity of wind/solar/hydro to overcome variance in output. This may not be feasible, if even possible, considering the points above.

2) Maintain fossil fuel peaker plants.

3) More nuclear for base load.

Having written these thoughts out I now realize your statement presumes we can ever (and always) meet 100% of electricity demand with wind/solar/hydro in the first place.

Not nearly as low as is believed and promulgated by advocates, who apparently naively believe these to be uncorrelated both in time and space.

They are not.

Didn't France very recently have to shut down or limit a bunch of reactors due to <checks notes> the river water being too warm.

Because of environmental limits to protect the river ecosystems, not because of any safety or operational constraints. Many of these limits were set years ago, when the water temperature in rivers was lower, and haven't been increased since - leading to very tight margins. When the grid is stretched, the plant operators usually get a temporary authorization to exceed the environmental limits.

Every year this is big news for some reason, even though it amounts to a roughly 0.3% reduction of yearly electricity generation. It only impacts river cooled plants, and only those that don't also have a cooling tower.

Didn't France very recently have to shut down or limit a bunch of reactors due to <checks notes> the river water being too warm.

No, no they didn't. Most reactors that were shut down that summer were shut down for maintenance after a decade or more of neglect.

That's a nice way of saying that nuclear power is much too expensive to not run plants at maximum capacity all the time.

Nope. It means that the variable costs are low. The fuel costs for a nuclear plant are so low that it’s essentially free.

Which is also the primary reason we throw away 95% of the fuel unused: given the low cost of fuel, recycling just isn’t viable. And again, not because recycling is so expensive, but because new fuel is so cheap.

How often can they repeatedly ramp without getting into trouble with reactor poisoning?

Every day, several times a day. That is literally the requirement for modern reactors (where modern means any reactor in the past 30 years, or more, and most retrofitted reactors from previous years)

Graph and text on page 8:https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

Slight amendment: China is installing more wind and solar PV generation capacitythis yearthan the entire generation capacity of the UK. The increment, not the total.

Edit: Nuclear power generation in China has, IIRC, tripled in the 21st century.

But demand has gone up much more than twentyfold though, and this year we are the crossover point where wind an PV manufacturing and install rates, and transmission line build rates, exceed the growth of demand, so fossil plants can start to be retired there.

If nuclear can't be built fast in China, where can it?

But not easily storable.

I'd want a separate house, too, if my neighbors are Americans.

China is a special case because it has to import all its oil which makes it a huge strategic weakness. Wind and Solar is still a tiny part of its electricity production. You can't rely on either for cold dark winters. Its emissions are already higher than Europeans per capita and still growing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_Ch...

You can post it three more times and it won’t make it any less true that renewables are plagued with shortcomings regarding 24/7 uptime and massive safety issues with installation and eventual end-of-life environmental costs.

440 people die for every 1000TW of solar, compared to 90 for nuclear:https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...

Solar panel disposal impact:https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power

Renewables have a place in our energy future. Fanaticism about them does not.

Mostly red tape. It's much tighter regulated, and takes longer to get any project off the ground.

Solar was never “unfairly sidelined” because it was never regulated to death. That’s why it’s gotten cheaper while nuclear has stagnated.

France also suffered from the same anti-nuclear sentiment as the rest of the world. To the point that they a couple of years ago they were forced to shutdown their plants for maintenance after a decade or more of neglect.

France went "Negative learning by doing" [1] in their initial build out and Flamanville 3 [2] is looking like a complete boondoggle.

[1]:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

[2]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...

I've heard it said that in France there are 3 types of nuclear reactor and 100 types of cheese. In America it's the other way around.

There is a magical end that we can optimize where it is just about making nuclear fission energy more efficient.

Put another way, nobody cares if I have solar panels on my roof. But if I have a tiny modular reactor in the garden the neighbours will (not surprisingly) object.

Yes, though your neighbours will probably also object to you putting up one of those big wind turbines in your backyard. Or a coal fired power plant.

Anti-pollution activists share a lot with anti-nuclear activists.

In China and Russia they don't have as much clout, so they use lots of coal, if it's cheaper.

China and Russia regularly deliver nuclear plants (VVERs, Hualong One) roughly on time and budget.

The blog post simply links to a scanned 1991 document from the major anti-nuclear players laying out their strategy. It includes folks like Ralph Nader.

ICYMI:https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/Antinuclear-st...

Given the absolutely massive popularity of the antinuclear movement, the fringe belief is actually to think the legal intervenors that came out of it had negligible impact.

Germany for example had a 100% complete fast breeder reactor called SNR-300, designed to provide sustainable low carbon 24/7 energy for decades. Before it could turn on for the first time, protestors rioted. They never turned it on. Today it's an amusement park. Now that is impact.

If you think about it, what is the argument for why nuclear is to plan? Nuclear is impossible to plan because ... pixies steal the computers the planners are using? Note that whatever factors you identify, the people estimating the plant build process are aware of that.

The planners know exactly how long it takes to build a nuclear plant, and they learn just as quickly as everyone watching from the sidelines. Their assumptions are being thrown by something - almost certainly anti-nuclear campaigners in government or regulatory forces warping incentives. Those are the only things that can consistently diver overruns. Otherwise it is hard for overruns of a nuclear plant to be different from any other project.

Outside the US, Finland's Onkalo repository is on track to be the first operational commercial repository [1]. We have some operating military ones, like WIPP already.

[1]https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html

As for transportation, this has been a big concern for some time but has pretty rock-solid technical solutions [2]. We regularly ship high-level nuclear waste around (e.g. from nuclear submarines to Hanford) and haven't really had any incidents. I'd claim that the issue is basically solved with these robust containers.

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?vW=hlextDSoVkQ

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

Do you know how much empty unproductive space there is in the world? It’s an awful lot more than you think.

Putting them on peoples roofs is actually a terrible option from a GW/$ equation due to install costs, and lack of operational scale.

Any dedicated wind farm is going to have a ton of empty space.

You seem to have a funny definition of "empty space" when the post you're replying to explicitly called out the uses for land in between wind turbines or leveraging wind turbines in areas where much of the land isn't usable for much else. If your argument requires completely ignoring points made by someone else, you probably don't have very strong of an argument.

I was talking about massive wind farm power generation operations.

Which are almost universally placed in said farm fields, unproductive hillsides, and open ocean. No one's clearing city blocks to place a wind turbine. These "massive wind farm power generation operations"already existin the middle of Indiana's cornfields. Drive from Chicago to Cincinnati and you'll quickly see howlittleland they can eat up.

Concrete example:https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B035'55.2%22N+87%C2%...

Same logic applies to just laying massive amounts of solar panels over a wide area.

Same response; they only make financial sense to place on low-value land. A solar farm will be very happy on shitty land that's not particularly suitable for farming, grazing, or habitation. They can even benefit farmland in some climates;https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/03/made-shade-growing-....

I doubt we will see federal subsidization for nuclear in the near term with the GOP poised to take over the Senate and House still up for grabs. It’ll be “drill-baby-drill.”

They have other problems too:https://www.barrons.com/articles/nuscale-power-corp-investig...

Energy subsidizes in Europe looks different. Wind/Solar are the single biggest recipient of subsidies and receive about as much as the combined total of all other subsidies in the energy sector. They get far more per watt produced than anything else, mostly going to grid connections, building, deconstruction, and price guaranties. (The yearly report is produced and published by the European commission at ec.europa.eu)

Nuclear get subsidies in term of research, building, deconstruction, waste storage and price guaranties. Around 70% goes to the single fusion research project called ITER (international research, non-military).

Hydro receives an increasing amount of subsidies for repair and modernization. Dam repair and flooding protection is expensive and with climate change there is even bigger need for fixing Europe old hydro power dams. They are also in general non-compliant with the European environmental regulations (several species are going extinct), but that is not a subsidies issues directly. Fixing the dams so they allow for fish to pass is however a subsidies issue, but as far the budget to fix that has yet to be allocated and the costs are estimated to be exceedingly high.

And last we have fossil fuel subsidies. A large portion of the "reserve energy" plan in eu in order to address increased gird variability is based on keeping a large number of fossil fuel plants on stand-by, paid through subsidies. Then there is subsidies on extracting the fuel itself, subsidies on trading fuel, and subsidies on storage of the fuel, and transportation of the fuel. This is not accounting for the environmental cost from burning fossil fuels, which some see as a form of subsidies.

Subsidies-like part not included are insurance against nuclear accidents, insurance against floods from dam failures, and insurance against forest fires. It is also not accounting for land usage nor damage to wildlife.

Ok, so the argument is that we know we went nuts regulating it to oblivion, and this is a fault in the technology and not ourselves - then you go to admit that it is a massive tactical and technological advantage we need?

Ok, strange flex but this about what I have come to expect from this “debate”.

seems that wind isn't profitable without massive subsidies either

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/14/wind-farm-or...

Well, nuclear power is literally the reason why in this map:https://app.electricitymaps.com/mapFrance is almost constantly green, while Germany, Poland, and most of the US, are just different shades of brown...

Keeping existing plants running is the sensible approach in my mind. We can't build new nuclear power to reduce CO2 emission, it's much to late for that. We want drastic reductions in 5 - 6 years, the first nuclear power plant won't be ready for another 10, 15, 20 years. If we wanted to go nuclear we should have started in 2000. Right now we start reducing consumption, build wind turbines like crazy and close the coal and oil fired power plants first, then gas and nuclear last.

nuclear is the "One True Solution" to clean energy

Not to be that guy but it sort of is. Comparing nuclear power to renewables is a lot like comparing a truck to an electric scooter. Sure, both can transport you to your destination and both work equally well in many scenarios, maybe the scooter even has advantages in some places but when it comes to handling the entirety of possible scenarios the truck is the clear choice. That doesn't mean you can't have a truck and a scooter and use each where appropriate, it's just that you'll probably use the truck a lot more.

This might become a discussion about the definition of pragmatism, but I find the most pragmatic solution is to simply ban the use of fossil fuel in the energy grid. Remove the easy, cheap and extremely harmful substance, and people will be forced to find a working solution. If that happen to be nuclear then that is that. If that happen to be renewables + some yet to be developed technology to address grid variability, then lets do that. I have no horse in that race except that hydropower need to get their very old infrastructure fixed so that we don't make eels and other species extinct, and water constructions on the ocean need to be a bit careful around nature reserves and places like the baltic ocean. Ocean based wind farms like to build on shallows for economical reasons, and those places have a tendency to be nurseries for fish and other animals.

What I really can't stand is the use of fossil fuels in the grid when there is known and effective alternatives, and it gives a bad taste in the mouth that tax money intended for grid stability is used on fossil fuels.

In the case of GW scale solar farms that's essentially true.

Polycrystalline panels last 20 years,sometimeslonger (the sales pitch is "up to 25 years") but the 20% fall off in deliverable power after 10 years is real.

Monocrystalline last longer, they also gradually fall off and they cost more.

Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs, where's the optimal sweet spot for buying new and rotating out on a schedule | reacting to failure.

I'm not opposed to solar, I'm in Australia in one of the states with large amounts of residential solar and heavy mining industries that dwarf anything in the US currently going electric - we're costing out massive farms to run solar power to asia via HVDC cable.

The supply side of all that is sourcing the copper, the lithium, the aluminium framing, the long list of other raw material inputs, the processing to get from concentrate ores to usable elements, etc.

Monocrystalline is the most expensive one to produce, the process of manufacturing monocrystalline solar cells is very energy-intensive and produces a big amount of silicon waste.

They're not especially robust in cold weather and while they do last longer, they do also degrade in output over time just as the poly versions do.

Tomaintaina 1 GW farm requires ongoing upkeep, etc.

Again, there are no magic problem free resources, just like low volume uranium mining, large volume mining and production processing to sustain solar power has toxic side effects and impacts people.

How much energy does all of humanity use compared to the rest of the biosphere? Genuine question not intended to be leading, it's a very interesting point.

I agree, but we also need a storage system that can move around, and the aggregate scale of that is inherently more than enough for grid storage. This is why I'm not going to rule out hydrogen despite it having not worked out even back during the 1973 OPEC fuel crisis when alternatives were desperately needed and nuclear power (which is useful for among other things electrolysis) was The Future.

(Also, on paper one doesn't need any grid storage, if only we could get governments to cope rates on a planetary grid. Texas doing it's own thing and Japan having two frequency zones shows how hard this would be in practice, but in principle it can work just fine).

Those are breeder reactors. In breeders, less fissile materials are transformed into more fissile ones. That's interesting technology and very nice on paper, but there are practical challenges.

Reprocessing is another thing entirely. It relies on the fact that used nuclear fuel is mainly not reusable due to accumulation of neutron poisons. In reprocessing, these poisons are removed so that the rest of the fuel can be reused. This too has many practical challenges as you end up with liquid radioactive materials and a lot of it is waste. So far it has proven more practical than breeders, though. Perhaps that is because the same processes can be used to extract materials for nuclear weapons.

- 20.000 died because of the Tsunami. - 2.000 died in the evacuation attempt. - ONE person died because of actual radiation.

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

Mortality rate in deaths per thousand terawatt hour[1]:

  - Brown coal:  32.72
  - Coal:        24.62
  - Oil:         18.43
  - Biomass:      4.63
  - Natural gas:  2.82
  - Hydro:        1.30
  - Wind:         0.04
  - Nuclear:      0.03
  - Solar:        0.02

1:https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

But the millions killed each year by pollution created burning gas, oil and coal would stronglydisagree- if they were still alive.

>But there's still no solution for safely storing or disposing of nuclear waste, so all those power plants currently have a stockpile of spent fuel rods,

There is, we know what it is, but no one wants to pay for it - it's called deep borehole storage. You basically put your fuel in cylinders, dig boreholes few miles deep, put all the waste at the bottom, done. It's not coming back ever, it doesn't pose any danger to anything or anyone on anything other than geological timescales(and if the geology starts pushing stuff buried 5 miles deep to the surface you have other bigger problems to worry about).

It's estimated that "just" 800 boreholes would be enough to store all nuclear waste ever produced.

But yeah, cost is one thing, but the other is that this material then becomes truly and irreversibly irretrievable - which actually might not be desirable since we know that even spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed to make more fuel or weapons, which is not something that countries like US would want to dismiss as a possibility.

And also - storage of spent nuclear fuel is actually a lot safer and less scary than most people think. In Netherlands they literally made a museum out of their spent fuel storage facility, you can walk in between the casks that hold material radioactive enough to kill you in minutes, it's that safe.

Most of the waste can be recycled in a breeder reactor for more energy than the original reactor got out of it.

"Backyard" in this case is the entire transit route to get the spent fuel to a storage location, not just the final destination.

Of course there is a technical solution already and there has been one for decades. You Yanks could have a deep geological repository by now, but NIMBYs in Nevada blocked it.

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

That is what happened, but I can't pass by without highlighting how irrational the response was.

I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy.

And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish.

Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.

It was a partial meltdown in a pressurized water reactor, it cannot be compared to Chernobyl, it's a completely different technology. PWRs can't explode like what happened in Chernobyl.

It's a pretty high bar. Three mile island has a lifetime production of ~250 TWh, coal kills ~25 people per TWh.

So if it had killed ~6000 people it would be within the accepted norms of the energy industry for anything that isn't nuclear.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Compared with the constant deaths from coal, yeah, it's a much better bet. Thankfully moot these days, but the overreaction to these problems set us back generations at solving climate change.

That's usually the point when capitalism evagelists start ignoring capitalism and economics, isn't it?

Jack himself said he should be judged by where the company was 10 years after he left. That comment did not age well.

I'm saying he had a larger agenda at the time that comment was made, one that had him divesting not just from nuclear but many other of GE's historic heavy industry and power related business lines.

That with full recycling, including partitioning and transmutation. In a once-through cycle it takes more like 10,000 years.

https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...

Edit: I'm a nuclear engineer.

Exactly. We have the money and technology to build and operate repositories that responsibly handle all our nuclear waste. We just need the willpower to go out and do it.

Yet we don't actually have an industry that is capable of doing this at the scale that's needed. I am not deeply knowledgeable of this industry enough to understand why but it looks like it's not as easy a solution as presented otherwise we would actually do it.

That is an oversimplification, it disregards a few things: the concentration of radioisotopes (which is extremely high in spent fuel) and type of decay products (which each have their own half lives, in many cases the radioactivity goes up for some time after the initial decay while decay products break down and eventually reach a stable isotope) and the type of emissions.

Also containers that don't break down under centuries of ionising radiation bombardment haven't been invented yet.

Is China a profit driven society or do they have a command economy? Do you even understand the basics of politics and what it takes to enact certain things in different countries with different political systems and motivations? China also added more solar capacity last year than the entire US solar capacity. Why is it your support for China policies only extends to your fondness for 1950's science fiction? China's Covid crackdowns were effective in slowing the spread of the disease through their populations and saves potentially millions of lives because of it. Should we be welding people into their apartment buildings or are you willing to admit that different governments tackle problems differently and one solution can't be applied universally?

By the way, even accounting for China's recent investment in nuclear they are only projecting to have 10% of their power generated by nuclear by 2050. The US is already close to 20%, or twice as much as China as a percentage of power generated. But sure, let's just keep pretending these situations are the same.

True, but we already have quite a lot of them, and we’re not going to remove them all immediately.

Power production via uranium (or other related heavy element) fission is simply unlike any other process. It's basically a proximity effect, as if you place the fuel rods close enough to one another with water in between them, you initiate the process. The U-235 fuel is continually decaying, releasing neutrons. In the context of enriched fuel rods in the proper orientation in a watery environment, this means other U-235 nuclei will absorb such neutrons, becoming unstable and splitting into two smaller nuclei, known as fission fragments - of a remarkably wide variety, many of them unstable and generating further nuclear reactions. Along with the fragments, several fast neutrons and a significant amount of energy are released. The water in the reactor acts as a moderator, slowing down the fast neutrons released in the fission process. Slower neutrons are more likely to cause subsequent fissions in other uranium-235 nuclei, sustaining the chain reaction.

Now, the fission fragments are highly radioactive and unstable isotopes of lighter elements. These fragments undergo beta and gamma decay, emitting high-energy particles and photons, transforming into stable isotopes over time. Furthermore, some neutrons, instead of inducing fission in uranium-235, are absorbed by uranium-238 nuclei, typically actinides, like plutonium and neptunium.

So this ridiculously toxic brew of rather random radioactive heavy elements is what we call a 'spent fuel rod'. If you were to pack a few kilos of high explosive around one of these 'spent' fuel rods and detonate it in a city center, it would probably cost at least a billion dollars to clean up, if that.

It sounds kind of ridiculous when you can build 1 GW of reliable 24/7 wind/solar/storage power generation for the same cost as a 1 GW nuclear power plant, and then you never have to buy fuel or deal with the waste stream ever, doesn't it?