Phys.org summary main bullet points:
Land and location: One nuclear reactor plant requires about 20.5 km2 (7.9 mi2) of land to accommodate the nuclear power station itself, its exclusion zone, its enrichment plant, ore processing, and supporting infrastructure. Secondly, nuclear reactors need to be located near a massive body of coolant water, but away from dense population zones and natural disaster zones. Simply finding 15,000 locations on Earth that fulfill these requirements is extremely challenging.
Lifetime: Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after 40-60 years of operation due to neutron embrittlement - cracks that develop on the metal surfaces due to radiation. If nuclear stations need to be replaced every 50 years on average, then with 15,000 nuclear power stations, one station would need to be built and another decommissioned somewhere in the world every day. Currently, it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement unrealistic.
Nuclear waste: Although nuclear technology has been around for 60 years, there is still no universally agreed mode of disposal. It’s uncertain whether burying the spent fuel and the spent reactor vessels (which are also highly radioactive) may cause radioactive leakage into groundwater or the environment via geological movement.
Accident rate: To date, there have been 11 nuclear accidents at the level of a full or partial core-melt. These accidents are not the minor accidents that can be avoided with improved safety technology; they are rare events that are not even possible to model in a system as complex as a nuclear station, and arise from unforeseen pathways and unpredictable circumstances (such as the Fukushima accident). Considering that these 11 accidents occurred during a cumulated total of 14,000 reactor-years of nuclear operations, scaling up to 15,000 reactors would mean we would have a major accident somewhere in the world every month.
Proliferation: The more nuclear power stations, the greater the likelihood that materials and expertise for making nuclear weapons may proliferate. Although reactors have proliferation resistance measures, maintaining accountability for 15,000 reactor sites worldwide would be nearly impossible.
Uranium abundance: At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years. (Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.)
Uranium extraction from seawater: Uranium is most often mined from the Earth’s crust, but it can also be extracted from seawater, which contains large quantities of uranium (3.3 ppb, or 4.6 trillion kg). Theoretically, that amount would last for 5,700 years using conventional reactors to supply 15 TW of power. (In fast breeder reactors, which extend the use of uranium by a factor of 60, the uranium could last for 300,000 years. However, Abbott argues that these reactors’ complexity and cost makes them uncompetitive.) Moreover, as uranium is extracted, the uranium concentration of seawater decreases, so that greater and greater quantities of water are needed to be processed in order to extract the same amount of uranium. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would need to be processed would become economically impractical in much less than 30 years.
Exotic metals: The nuclear containment vessel is made of a variety of exotic rare metals that control and contain the nuclear reaction: hafnium as a neutron absorber, beryllium as a neutron reflector, zirconium for cladding, and niobium to alloy steel and make it last 40-60 years against neutron embrittlement. Extracting these metals raises issues involving cost, sustainability, and environmental impact. In addition, these metals have many competing industrial uses; for example, hafnium is used in microchips and beryllium by the semiconductor industry. If a nuclear reactor is built every day, the global supply of these exotic metals needed to build nuclear containment vessels would quickly run down and create a mineral resource crisis. This is a new argument that Abbott puts on the table, which places resource limits on all future-generation nuclear reactors, whether they are fueled by thorium or uranium.
land and location is complete bunkum. gotta be working from some schema that outright excludes anywhere that could possibly have a flood or earthquake no matter how unlikely/mitigatable that risk is
lifetime makes it sound like no other forms of energy generation require maintenance and replacement parts :data-laughing: find me the solar panels going 60 years in perfect condition
waste is pretty contentious but the scale is vastly different from the perception. regular landfill waste is thousands of times as numerous and quite often comparably dangerous
oh man i sure hope we dont have major fossil fuel accidents every month. can you imagine?
proliferation doesn't matter if the 2 countries with all the bombs refuse to disarm anyway
the last bits about materials : not economical to mine, but somehow the demands of 15,000 plants wouldn't tip the scale into them being 'economical'? we're going to extrapolate accident numbers from current industry size to 15,000 but the price of uranium and beryllium are written in the stars
As he states, it's not just maintenance exists, it's that replacement of the whole core is a massive undertaking that introduces a lot of uneconomical downtime into the system compared to most forms of maintenance.
If anything, I'd argue waste is vastly greater than perception. Low-level waste is dangerous for millenia and produced in large quantities, vastly more than renewables.
As always, nobody's arguing for staying with fossil fuels, but that nuclear is a silly option while renewables can just fix the issue.
And no, Uranium doesn't become magically easier to find once you built thousands more power plants. If anything, the proliferation of cheap renewables is making nuclear energy even less and less economical, if you massively scaled up demand for radioactive ore and made for high energy supply, it'd be substantially less economical than it is now.
'as he states', there is no cost comparison to other forms of energy' downtimes due to maintenance. nuclear is centralized generation, taking it off to replace is a bigger deal than a single panel on a farm but the comparison has to be of all those decentralized repairs vis-a-vis the reactor on the same time scale. the case for photovoltaics is actually on his side because a 'lifespan' of the technology is not known or expected. however wind turbines are expected replaced on 1/3 of a nuclear plant's schedule.
260,000 tons is literally all of the waste. the US alone has put > 380 times this underground yearly since the 60s. i'd put it in some fancy warehouse and employ a whole nearby town in its maintenance but actual mediation philosophy has always been "we should put it underground and forget about it" vs. "that design will probably degrade in that timeframe" because neither side wants a thousand do-nothing jobs of watching nuclear material decay and checking for leaks. a functional society should just be willing to apply labor toward the issue.
the accidents paragraph is pure sophistry : riposting the undeniable fact that nuclear accidents' risk has been mitigated with improvements by claiming it cannot actually be modeled so Bro Trust Me the back of the envelope extrapolation is the only number we need 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴
As always, nobody’s arguing for staying with fossil fuels
"In the short term, this problem can be addressed via dual use of solar thermal with natural gas." oops oh fuck someone spilled their fossil fuels in my anti-nuclear advocacy again! how does this always happen?
economic viability of extracting minerals is literally pegged to the price of the mineral. if uranium increases in price, at all, the amount of 'reserves' underground increases, but the author simply uses the current reserves at current prices for all figures regarding the 'extinction' of mineral supplies
all this talk of what is 'economical' does nothing to reveal what is possible, but everything about what looks good for the balance sheets of capital at the moment. and what do you know, the fossil fuel guys who run the west have it set up so they're still more 'economical' than nuclear, because nuclear capital is forced to pay costs privately that fossil capital has long since shouldered us with.
Germany replaced nuclear with coal. So yes, people are arguing for more fossil fuel.
It's kind of a silly premise to replace fossil fuel with nuclear 1:1. No one, especially not nuclear advocates suggest we build 15000 reactors and no other forms of power generation. Most serious energy people believe a diversified low/no-carbon emitting supply stack is the way to go, and most serious climate people acknowledge that nuclear is an essential bridge to that low/no-carbon future
is an essential bridge
It isn't though. Would I use it? Yes. But mostly cause it happens and we didn't start the transition 20 years ago. Nuclear fission could be replaced with other energy / electricity sources. Essential it isn't, just useful.
Sorry, maybe I should've added 'existing' in front of nuclear. Existing nuclear plants shouldn't be shuttered because they aren't profitable. They should also be seeking license renewal for extended operation, if possible. That's why I meant by bridge. Agreed we missed the boat on any new nuclear by 20 years
They should also be seeking license renewal for extended operation, if possible
The problem for many reactors in Germany is that they would have to be repaired, maintained and certified again, which is pricey. Investing the money into storage solutions might be a better way now.
Especially in Europe (in part with the Finish and Swedish reactors) I am not happy with real LCOE for nuclear fission reactors.
In regards to the other big problem, which is that it takes a while to construct plants, I am agreeing with you quite a bit. We need change now and before a significant number of European plant would go online.
Sure, they would require additional investment in order to operate for an extended 20 year life, and you can stack the cost/mwh against other investments like renewables, but much of those are subsidized while nuclear is not (at least in much of the us, not sure about Germany).
Even if extending existing nuclear isn't as cheap as solar or wind, there are other considerations. That's where the diversity of the supply stack is most important. A stack comprised or various sources is more resilient to various weather and market conditions
I can believe it's not possible under capitalism.
And with uranium fuel accidents.
Godspeed on the Gobi molten salt reactors :rat-salute: :xi-vote:
:rat-salute:
sounds like thorium at least partially addresses some of the guy's main concerns
expected to be safer than traditional reactors because the molten salt cools and solidifies quickly when exposed to the air, insulating the thorium, so that any potential leak would spill much less radiation into the surrounding environment compared with leaks from traditional reactors.
:nicholson-yes:
As this type of reactor doesn't require water, it will be able to operate in desert regions.
:nicholson-yes:
Thorium — a silvery, radioactive metal named after the Norse god of thunder — is much cheaper and more abundant than uranium, and cannot easily be used to create nuclear weapons.
:nicholson-yes:
Sitting just two positions to the left of uranium on the periodic table of chemical elements, nearly all mined thorium is thorium-232, the isotope used in nuclear reactions. In contrast, only 0.72% of total mined uranium is the fissile uranium-235 used in traditional nuclear reactors. This makes thorium a much more abundant source of energy.
:nicholson-yes:
Thorium’s advantages don’t stop there. The waste products of uranium-235 nuclear reactions remain highly radioactive for up to 10,000 years and include plutonium-239, the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. Traditional nuclear waste has to be housed in lead containers, isolated in secure facilities, and subject to rigorous checks to ensure that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. In contrast, the main byproducts of a thorium nuclear reaction are uranium-233, which can be recycled in other reactions, and a number of other byproducts with an average “half-life” (the time it takes for half of a substance’s radioactive atoms to decay to a non-radioactive state) of just 500 years.
:nicholson-yes:
might not address the reactor lifetime issue or the need for exotic metals though
Thorium reactors tend to be smaller. Also ai construction methods are making it cheaper to build nuclear facilities in China, which is more important than anywhere else considering they manufacture everything
for the record, thats an old article, the pilot thorium reactor was deemed a success and they are now considering commercial applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1
already discussions of including it in the belt and road
I've heard of the uranium problem before, but it's pretty :yea: that almost all of the reasons involve capitalism in some way. The only mass adoptions of nuclear were State-run initiatives during postwar rebuilding periods, circumstances not likely to occur again without an apocalyptic catastrophe.
imo the big question is how much energy and labor goes in for each unit of energy that comes out
china it's on you guys for thorium and a viable generating fusion reactor because the age of easy energy can't bridge with the potential age of renewable/advanced energy production
and it's thanks to capitalism and that might close off modern civilization completely if the gap can't be surmounted
Probably true, but most of the people making this claim seem like they want modern civilization to end forever anyways so I guess they’ll be happy
A serious study would look at the pros and cons of replacing fossil fuels with nuclear at a range of rates like 5-20%, compared to the status quo and even compared to converting existing nuclear to coal. This is not a serious study. It's just regurgitating the same talking points as usual, in the context of a totally unrealistic strawman.
There are already built, fully functional nuclear plants, capable of providing cheap energy for decades without greenhouse gas emmisions, that are currently lying dormant because they got shut down in favor of fossil fuels. Obviously, that shouldn't be happening.
Climate change is an existential threat, and we have to look at reductions in emissions wherever we can find them. There's not going to be one magic bullet solution that fixes everything, we need a multi-faceted approach, and that includes some degree of nuclear. It's not a perfect solution, but neither is a tourniquet.
There are already built, fully functional nuclear plants, capable of providing cheap energy for decades without greenhouse gas emmisions, that are currently lying dormant because they got shut down in favor of fossil fuels.
Which ones?
Many of the German ones that got shut down were still fully functional and now Germany is burning coal instead.
Germany is burning coal primarily for political reasons that are related to the CDU and the right flank of the SPD with the reunification worries in terms of labour in the East (lignite mining) and some other effects.
However that most reactors were fully functional is not correct.
Didn't say most, I said many.
Even if Germany is only burning coal as some kind of political stunt, they're also using oil which is still worse than nuclear.
Lifetime: Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after 40-60 years of operation due to neutron embrittlement
The current estimates are that a lot of plants are going to be safe to run for 80+ years.
Here's the author' areas of research, as listed on his faculty directory listing:
- Biomedical and bioinspired engineering
- Optical/Infrared/mm-Wave/T-ray vision systems and sensors
- Novel analog VLSI circuits
- Game theory and information theory
- Complex systems and quantum systems
- Stochastic phenomena
- Computational neuroscience
- Forensic engineering
- Forensic genealogy
Not that I really care one way or another but I wonder if this is just another one of those oil-funded analyses. He's at some University in Australia. Doesn't seem like he would be though.
I wonder if this is just another one of those oil-funded analyses. He’s at some University in Australia.
Hell, if anything this probably strengthens the legitimacy of the study because we aren't at the absolute mercy of the oil companies - we're completely controlled by the mining companies.
Miners have basically been frothing to dig up uranium from directly under indigenous communities in the Northern Territory for decades and place every single bit of anti-renewables, pro-nuclear bleating directly into our media outletshm, starting to think that unchecked resource extraction is bad in itself, and inextricable from capitalism
Sounds quite reasonable - I'll have to give this a look in the morning. Seems like it's all based on how nuclear currently operates which makes sense - things would definitely have to change. One issue I take is I was pretty sure that despite that nasty Chernobyl disaster (Fukushima wasn't too bad don't @ me), nuclear is really safe compared to other sources per unit of electricity generated, and uses low amounts of land even accounting for Chernobyl exclusion zones.
Fukushima wasn’t too bad
Three nuclear meltdowns, three hydrogen explosions, 1000 sq. km. of exclusion zone, >100,000 displaced residents, unprecedented amounts of radioactive material dumped into the Pacific, at least 30 more years of cleanup required. All caused by what were deemed 'foreseeable' causes in a country that supposedly takes these sorts of things super seriously. Yeah, directly attributable deaths/unit of energy are fractionally lower for nuclear, but don't argue these things ain't bad.
You're right it's not just deaths that matter. It ruined a lot of people's lives
It's so goofy to make a study that essentially says "making 15,000 nuclear reactors would be hard." Like, yeah?
Uranium abundance: At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years. (Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.)
vs
Lifetime: Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after 40-60 years of operation due to neutron embrittlement - cracks that develop on the metal surfaces due to radiation. If nuclear stations need to be replaced every 50 years on average, then with 15,000 nuclear power stations, one station would need to be built and another decommissioned somewhere in the world every day. Currently, it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement unrealistic.
These cancel each other out. It doesn't matter about the lifetime of the power plants if the Uranium would run out, we won't replace them we'll be forced to move to something else. Getting 50 years of time to consider alternative options is pretty good all things considered.
All those other types of plants also need to be replaced on that kind of timescale. Wind turbines only last 20 years.
These cancel each other out. It doesn’t matter about the lifetime of the power plants if the Uranium would run out, we won’t replace them we’ll be forced to move to something else. Getting 50 years of time to consider alternative options is pretty good all things considered.
It is a bit more complex, the more uranium we need and extract the harder it is to get. There are virtually no economies of scale that are estimated to happen, but there are costs that raise as the demand will be higher. Nuclear fission power even with the best theoretical reactors (those that are sometimes by factors better in LCOE than real existing ones of the newest generations) would increase the need for uranium and reduce the time we have with resources and reserves.
In addition the places in which we can realistically extract uranium that we need are few, this means that those supply chains are reasonably easy to disrupt and political influences can matter a ton. So geologists and physicists I know wouldn't agree with that it cancels each other out.
I just don't like the idea of nuclear reactors everywhere. Something terrible will happen if there are 15,000 of them. It is inevitable.
Yeah, honestly there's literally no downside to just going all in on renewable energy once fossil fuels are phased out.
Wishing infinite energy a la fusion power is cool and all, but... what for?
It's usually technoutopian bazinga brained ideas to get Star Trek technology. We haven't fixed the issues with the destruction of the ecosystem, and we're not close in any way to doing that. I think Fully Automated Luxury can wait.
As icky as it sounds the occasional disaster is less bad for the environment than the constant disaster that is fossil fuels. I mean. We could just cover Kansas in windmills and call it a day. Capitalism won't let us, so we are looking at seccond order solutions anyway.
I am fully convinced that humanity being what it is, we will end up in a situation where we are unable to maintain the majority of those 15,000 nuclear power stations, and the planet will become an irradiated hellhole. And yeah, fossil fuels are a constant disaster, but I am not advocating those either.
pretty sure 15000 fukushimas wouldn't be nearly enough to turn the earth into an irradiated hellhole. They aren't nuclear weapons, though obviously in the worst cases they can still do significant damage
I'm thinking of a global event meaning that reactors melt down en mass because there just isn't the ability to safely shut them down.
A war for example. Or societal collapse. Or a fuck off solar event.
So a global thermonuclear war that wipes out all the people capable of shutting down reactors, yet somehow leave enough stuff standing to care what happens afterward?
It should also be noted that reactors have failsafes in place, accidents can still happen obviously but generally requires a lot of things to go wrong at once.
Let's just agree to disagree. I've had this exact argument a million times and it never goes anywhere.
that seems like an exceedingly unrealistic and vague scenario and I still don't think it would "turn the earth into an irradiated hellhole"
Again if you look at fukushima or chernobyl, the affected area is not that huge. 15000 chernobyls (and to be clear this article is saying building 15000 reactors is impossible, and even advocates aren't asking for that I don't think) would barely be enough to make a thin ring of irradiated wasteland around the equator a few times, and while that's horrifying, again, it's not the whole earth and its not going to happen without astonishing incompetence of everyone involved (every country). shutting off a reactor isn't a herculean undertaking, and their default state if left unattended isn't meltdown
and the planet will become an irradiated hellhole
chernobyl is a paradise for animals
also 15000 chernobyls is still not a life-ending surface area, not even the size of europe
The part about uranium mining is probably the biggest thing here. Turning most of Canada and Australia into open pit uranium mines to supply the world with electricity is a non starter.
