It doesn't just have to be designed right, it has to be built right. Like Fukishima where the design engineer resigned during construction over how low the sea wall was built. The sister plant which was closer to the epicenter had the proper sea wall and as such it was totally fine despite the higher waves.
The problem with nuclear is we can't have it until we have eliminated corruption. In that industry it can lead to a literal nuclear meltdown.
You have to make the construction process transparent and verifiable enough and then these issues can be removed. It's not a given, but it certainly is doable.
You can't wipe a continent out with the worst case coal plant failure. A reactor going critical and exploding, however "impossible" would do just that. Look at the Saudi plant going up. It is jokingly referred to as "a car with no seatbelts".
You’d be surprised how many people die every year from coal power exhaust.
People naturally overweight low frequency high impact events like a nuclear meltdown but drastically undervalue high frequency low impact events. Someone dying early because they lived too close to a coal plant doesn’t make the news, but in terms of actual human impact it trounces nuclear’s impact by multiple orders of magnitude.
You can't even wipe out a continent with a fusion bomb, how would a nuclear power plant even have enough material to be that damaging? Yeah, it might spread a bit of radiation if the entertainments cracked open like an egg, but that would be very obvious if terrorists, say, were trying that.
It is but it happens all the time. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the rest all have been caught doing it on a large scale. Most of them even agreed not to hire from each others employee pool.
So glad Canada plans to litter our country with these soon. They want SMR's in every logging camp, remote community, mine, and so on. Sure they are more dangerous per GW and more costly per GW but they are MUCH cheaper initially so small unqualified companies can get involved. Let the good times roll.
The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds.
These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so.
I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.
History of nuclear has taught us that nuclear is very safe until an accident happens. You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen.
here in Quebec, we decided to close a nuclear reactor after Fukushima at a cost of $2 billion
> You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen
I don't accept this characterisation. I see Fukushima as an example of being curiously diligent in one area, and negligent in another, perhaps because rather than have a "culture" of safety it was simply legislation driven, such that standards dropped as soon as there was a gap/oversight in the legislation. To clarify - as safe as the plant was, it was not in a safe chosen location. Concerns were raised, and ignored. legislation covered the building and operation of the plant, not diligence in planning its location.
security is somewhat weakest-link - it doesn't matter if your doors are metal with strong locks if there are large windows without bars. Fukushima was always unsafe, just conditional on a relatively rare event - by the same measure the unstable warehouse cargo that exploded in Beirut was always unsafe, even if it existed for nearly 7 years.
«According to estimates by the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s coal-fired power stations currently generate waste containing around 5,000 tonnes of uranium and 15,000 tonnes of thorium. Collectively, that’s over 100 times more radiation dumped into the environment than that released by nuclear power stations.»
About 1% of it is leaked into air, so about 500 tonnes of uranium and 1500 tonnes of thorium are leaked into air every year.
However, uranium and thorium are much less dangerous than radioactive iodine, strontium, and cesium.
For Chornobyl, I found estimate at Wikipedia:
«An early estimate for total nuclear fuel material released to the environment was 3±1.5%; this was later revised to 3.5±0.5%. This corresponds to the atmospheric emission of 6 tonnes (5.9 long tons; 6.6 short tons) of fragmented fuel.[127]»
But is this an apt comparison. The soviet union was pretty independent from the rest of the west. I's sooner qualify that western/European nuclear is safe, so the average isn't dragged down by despotic/unstable nations.
Nuclear proliferation is a worldwide concern, but a new power plant in your backyard is as safe as relative to the national record.
Don't discount nuclear waste as well. I'm not trying to promote coal here, but nuclear energy has problems too and shouldn't be touted as something it's not: a safe and clean solution.
Don't overblow nuclear waste. Normal responsible operation produces very little waste per electric MWh produced. And we know how to handle it. No energy production solution is perfect but compared to coal/gas pollution it can eliminate it is a nonbrainer.
I do not agree with this overall. It holds true only for some timescales and for some assumptions of risk factors.
Not specifically about waste, but still relevant. Fukushima and other plants in Japan were designed to withstand a 100 year tsunami. Bad luck that 3/11/11 was greater than that.
Every analysis is based on some assumptions and all predictions hold true only for limited timescales. Yes natural disasters happen and we can't prevent all of them. Yes we will have "nuclear disasters". The world is under constant threat of semiglobal nuclear war.
But Chernobyl and Fukushima (and others, let's not kid ourselves) are disasters with minuscule cost in lives and environment harm. Every year 60 million people die and out of that 12 million die due to unhealthy environment. Risks of (non-weapon) nuclear energy to life, while they exist, are a complete non-issue. Apart from political changes, we need cheap reliable energy to fix the atmosphere and to fix that unhealthy environment.
Here in Canada we use the CANDU system which is far safer than the systems like what you found in Three Mile Island - and no-one is as foolish as to do the Russian tests again.
Concorde was the safest form of commercial air-travel, until one day in Paris it wasn't.
Nuclear currently has around 3% share of power generation globally. More share than Concorde had, certainly. But not enough to say definitively that nuclear's comparative safety is not just because of its comparative scarcity. It's been a low-hanging fruit.
Scale up to 30% share and be necessarily exposed to new risks which were not exposed at current levels of deployment.
Many of these additional risks would be from economic factors: we'd probably never achieve 30% share without a less rigorous and much less costly safety regime.
30% is a completely arbitrary level that you’ve picked with no justification. I’d suggest you cite some sources to provide depth to the argument that 30% of world power is materially different.
Arbitrary yes. Pick another number that is substantially larger than current share.
I am not going to be able to give statistics, but to me it's obvious. After all these decades, what's been holding nuclear down to its present market share is its economics of safety. Cost overruns all but bankrupted Toshiba, just to give one recent example.
If you want an order of magnitude more installations, you will have to relax those constraints.
So we cannot use today's safety record as proof of tomorrow's safety if we also expect massive increase in deployment.
Which day in Paris? Single accident did not increase overall air travel safety significantly, regardless of what impression you could get from the press.
Do you want a bit of perspective from someone who's been living under a very thick pall of coal-produced smog for many years? 100-500 µg/m³ of PM2.5 at day time (depends on wind speed mostly, right now it's 550 µg), twice or thrice that at night. I don't think my body can tolerate this much longer. If we were to switch the coal power plants to nuclear energy, I'd jump up and down like a little girl. A small risk of second Chernobyl seems just fine in comparison to this. I'd be fine with a risk of nuclear explosion with no chance to escape, honestly.
Sorry for that, but may I ask where you live? Because if the pollution is coming from a coal power plant, there are filters for that. And I shudder to think what the people (mis)managing that coal power plant could do if it was nuclear instead...
It's not actually true that batteries and solar are a perfect clean solution - and neither is wind. Better than coal to be sure, but it's not what you're making it out to be.
Rare earth metals have to be mined in remote portions of China in dystopian hellscapes. Lithium and other minerals also have to be mined, and leave toxic tailing ponds. Solar panels frequently have cadmium and tellurium, which are also hazardous, and need to be managed. Plastics and composites in wind turbines also cannot be recycled.
There are no perfect solutions, and the future will almost certainly require a mixture of kinds of energy.
Nothing is risk free. The nice thing about nuclear power is that radiation is really easy to detect, with you know, a Geiger counter.
On the other hand, particulate matter emitted by oil and coal plants causes millions of deaths per year, right now. And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.
What's the systemic risk of solar panels and wind power, for example? A terrorist attack destroying 100 millions solar panels?
> On the other hand
The usual false dichotomy between nuclear and oil/coal/gas.
> And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.
...not to mention the direct release of heat into the atmosphere due to poorly isolated house heating, industrial production and electric generation plants themselves. None of which is mitigated by nuclear. Rather, it's made even worse by any source of cheap electricity.
Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand attacks from crazies. Terrorist attacks done so far have had minimal impact on infrastructure. It is a very minor and manageable threat.
Release of heat due to chemical and nuclear sources does heat the planet, but the contribution to heating compared to effect of increasing CO2 concentration is negligible in the range of 1%, this is well known.
As a Canuck I'm enthused about an increased adoption of nuclear energy. It's far safer than coal or oil, and is able to generate energy on-demand. It's a great pairing to solar, wind, and hydro.
Last time i studied this topic one of the main drawback of nuclear energy was precisely that it required accurate forecasts of future demand, so not suitable for "on demand" production, because of how long it takes to cool down.
Had anything improved in this area?
More modern designs can ramp faster, but still not fast. The main issue is that the largest cost of a nuclear power plant is the capital investment to build it and staff to run it, which is fixed. In comparison fuel costs seem to hover at about 25%.
Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear on price many hours of the day this becomes an even harder calculation.
Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation of storage can make the same, and still undercut you.
This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.
No it's not - to compensate for times when there is not enough energy from renewable sources, you need power plants that can be shut down and brought back online quickly, and nuclear plants are certainly not that.
Nuclear power plants can vary power output quickly if planned during the design. As France has an installed capacity of more than 60 GW of nuclear power production, their power plants can quickly adapt their production. That's needed to keep the network balanced.
France has 80% nuclear. It works there not because French reactors can respond meaningfully to short-term meteorology, but because:
1) France is connected to a continent-sized grid and
2) All of France's neighbours are nowhere near 80% nuclear, so will buy this baseload power.
If Germany, NL, Denmark, Spain, UK et al. had 80% nuclear France's nuclear power would become uneconomic.
It's the grid and unique political considerations, not those plants' responsiveness that makes it work for France.
The French do vary the power of the reactors to follow the load [1] [2]. They don't purely rely on their neighbors, far from it. As a consequence, the usage factor of the plants is lower than nuclear plants in countries where they they purely use them for base load.
Incorrect, we don't need all power plants to ramp up/down in seconds. Energy demand of a provider during the day follows roughly the same curve for the specific time of year. Thus ramping up/down of baseload can be and is planned in advance. The random variations from that prediction can be handled by smaller number of responsive plants.
I think SMRs are very different from RTG. SMR is an essentially a small and fairly complex reactor design, like a molten salt reactor. It heats water or other liquid, turns it into steam, steam spins a turbine, just like a regular power plant.
An RTG is just a hot piece of radioactive material surrounded by thermocouples that directly convert the heat into electricity.
The problem with nuclear is we can't have it until we have eliminated corruption. In that industry it can lead to a literal nuclear meltdown.