Nuclear doesn’t just have one problem. It has seven. Here are the seven major problems with nuclear energy and why it is not a solution to the climate crisis.
Oh boy. The breakdown is:
Takes too long to build
Expensive
Weapons proliferation
Meltdown
Lung cancer risk to miners
Construction/Operation emits carbon
Nuclear wasteThis is… really not great reporting. There are concerns with nuclear power but these aren’t them. I mean, national weapons proliferation? That’s really not a concern with modern reactor tech, and they should know that. The article ignores the last 50 years of advancement in reactor design to present their arguments, and that really undermines their credibility.
I mean, national weapons proliferation?
Also with the current state of NATO this might soon turn into a pro argument.
I mean, national weapons proliferation? That’s really not a concern with modern reactor tech, and they should know that. The article ignores the last 50 years of advancement in reactor design to present their arguments, and that really undermines their credibility.
The problem is: In real life, most nations want weapons potential as an added bonus to their expensive civil nuclear programs. This connects to the “Takes too long to build” and “Expensive” points.
Nuclear waste is also something, that even though ideas exist in spades, no one seems to have been able to solve. So I wonder: What are the real world hurdles, that have prevented all the talk of “we just need breeder reactors” or something similar, that I have been hearing for many years now, to manifest? Is the tech maybe not as easily implemented as thought? Is the cost/reward ratio too bad, so it would again connect to the expensive point?
Thing is: I am not fundamentally against Nuclear as part of a power mix, with climate change being the most pressing reality. But I think it’s often presented as better as it is in the real world by people that are highly intelligent and knowledgeable in the basic physics and theoretical engineering parts - but then usually don’t have answers for why, then, even states that don’t have large anti-nuclear movements don’t use it often, in real world circumstances.
At the risk of retreating to easy retorts, I think most of the answers here can be boiled down to “the extensive efforts of petrochemical companies to suppress every competing technology”. It’s the same reason we’ve had PV or molten salt solar plants for years, but have never extensively pursued them* as a country.
The thing that bugs me about “weapons potential” is the fact that a lack of nuclear plants has done fuck all to stop countries from building warheads.
Could plants help their efforts? Maybe, and that’s a weak maybe on the side of “no.” As it stands, anyone who can build a plant can or is building nuclear arms already. If the sticking point is not wanting nuclear weapons, they’re barking up the wrong tree; the problem is the people in charge.
The article ignores the last 50 years of advancement in reactor design
So does Canada.
According to the World Health Organization, about 7.1 million people die from air pollution each year, with more than 90 percent of these deaths from energy-related combustion. So switching out our energy system to nuclear would result in about 93 million people dying, as we wait for all the new nuclear plants to be built in the all-nuclear scenario.
No one is proposing we stop building renewables while we build more nuclear. This is a bad faith argument and just dumb. Stop building oil and gas plants build renewables and nuclear. The best thing to do is build nuclear on top of existing coal or gas thermal plants.
- Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation This is a fair criticism but it’s fundamentally misunderstanding the reasons it takes to long to build. Construction takes to long and costs to much because every plant is custom and we don’t have people with experience building them. It’s we start building new ones we will gain that experience and improved modularity.
- Cost Cost is a factor but the LCOE of renewables depends on batteries which they don’t factor in or existing fossil fuel plants to provide peaker and base load.
The clean up costs are exaggerated by first generation designs. I’m currently eating dinner in Fukushima prefecture and I have no fear or concern over contaminated food. The reactor designs the have melted down did so because they did not have passive safety systems which all modern designs include.
Storage of waste is also overblown. All the high level waste the United States had created would fit in a modern NFL stadium. And only 5% of that is actually waste. 95% is firtile fuel and could be recycled and put into a breeder reactor. We only generate this much waste because we never invested in breeding or recycling.
Lastly with waste it does not need to be long lived isotopes like cesium or plutonium. Recycling and breeding can turn these actinides into fissile fule reduces the half-life down to hundreds of years not thousands or millions.
- Weapons Proliferation Risk
This is true, historically governments wanted weapons with their power so the designs we invested in were only ever dual use. Modern designs are much harder to turn into weapons. This was a deliberate choice and we don’t have to make it again.
- Meltdown Risk
Chernobyl was not a meltdown but something worse as it went prompt critical and created a super critical steam explosion. Had it not flashed both is moderating and coolant instantly it would not have melted down. That design was a cost savings choice without concern for the outcomes.
TMI was a meltdown. And it was due to a lack of passive safety systems and lots of procedural issues that were resolved. There have been no meltdown in the United States since TMI because of those changes. Most running reactor could suffer the same type of failure but don’t because we changed the procedures to prevent it.
Fukushima is perhaps the most valid criticism of “modern” as they decided not to build the sea wall high enough and put the backup pumps and generator on a lower level. It could have been avoided and should have been but humans are not great at evaluating risk.
- Mining Lung Cancer Risk
This is true of all mining and the best argument for recycling our waste.
- Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution
I think they said things but the arguments seem to be renewables create less CO2 which ignores storage and reliance on existing fossil plants. Again no one is suggesting that we don’t keep building renewables only that we stop building fossil plants.
- Waste Risk
Waste is currently a choice not an inevitability. We could choose to recycle, we could choose to breed, and we could choose to use the thorium cycle but we don’t because dumping is cheaper. same with coal ash and gas emissions, we didn’t actually calculate the cost of being responsible. If we did I would expect nuclear to end up costing far less than fossil fuels.
I will address some of the points you make.
After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, there has been an increasing preference for passive safety features in the nuclear power industry. To my understanding, it’s not that all modern designs include this feature. Not only that, there are many ways to implement it, with different evaluations on their effectiveness.
For the US nuclear waste I could suggest the following article:
Nuclear Waste Is Piling Up. Does the U.S. Have a Plan? | Scientific American | March 2023
The U.S., which led the way on managing nuclear waste in the 1980s and 1990s, has now fallen to the back of the pack. About 88,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors remain stranded at reactor sites, and this number is increasing by some 2,000 metric tons each year. These 77 sites are in 35 states and threaten to become de facto permanent disposal facilities.
Finally I believe that
While nuclear champions claim that nuclear energy can work hand-in-hand with renewables, it is becoming increasingly clear that nuclear power acts as a significant hurdle to energy efficiency investments, the roll-out of renewables and fossil fuel phase-out in three spheres: the EU political debate, energy system planning, and decentralisation.
More on this, in the source
The good news is that there is already a clear strategy for managing and disposing of this highly radioactive material. The bad news is that the U.S. government has yet to seriously follow that plan.
The very second paragraph covers my point about waste. It’s been a solved problem we just won’t do it because leaving the waste on site is cheaper, and mining new fuel is cheaper. If we adjusted regulation to match actual cost this with l would change.
To my understanding, it’s not that all modern designs include this feature. Not only that, there are many ways to implement it, with different evaluations on their effectiveness.
Fair but lame I should have said most not all. Guess you got me and all my arguments are negated.
Hi, I’m a nuclear engineer. I’m not looking to specifically argue against you, or counter your points. Just to provide some information, some of the things you have said I will confirm, some I will not
Not all modern designs have these safety features.
It’s not clear to me which passive safety features, specifically, you’re referring to. Safety is a very serious concern, and there are many different ways to make a safe reactor. If you are specifically referring to powered off passive cooling via carefully designed convection, then there are reactors in development with this particular safety system, but they tend to be SMRs, such as NuScale. However, not all reactor designs need this. For instance, a molten fluoride salt dissolved fuel reactor doesn’t need circulation to prevent damage to the reactor in the event of an unpowered SCRAM, because if the salt gets too hot it will simply melt a plug in the salt that is actively being kept frozen, and allow the salt to drain into a series of tubes which have enough surface area to be passively cooled by the air in the containment building.
However, if by modern reactor you are referring to the current generation (Gen 3/3+) of reactors, they are characterized, in part, by the incorporation of these sorts of passive safety systems. The existence of these systems are one of the things that makes a Gen 3 reactor a Gen 3 reactor. However, because the nuclear industry in the United States essentially stopped in 1996 as the first Gen 3 reactors were coming online, the only Gen 3 or better reactors you will find in the US are the reactors 3 and 4 at Vogtle, Westinghouse AP1000. (The recent plant that came online at Watts Bar in 2016, was originally built in the 70s and just turned on for the first time recently, so it’s Generation 2.)
The US certainly does not currently have a good plan to handle nuclear waste that is currently politically possible to implement. However, there many options, and the problem is not actually urgent. All of the transuranic waste produced by the entire 80 year history of US civilian nuclear power fits safely in dry casks on about 3 football fields. Nuclear power just doesn’t make a lot of waste in an absolute sense because it is so much more energy dense than fossil fuels. This is a problem that we can take our time on to do right. The solution will probably involve some form of reprocessing, which will reduce the amount of waste by over 90%, and reduce the amount of time it takes for the waste to decay to background levels from over 10,000 years to just 300.
That being said, other than the plans to put it in Yucca Mountain, which has been deeply unpopular with Nevadans, there are also studies about freezing and immobilizing it in a salt mine, which is being done by Sandia National Lab, and Savannah River National Lab is investigating encasing waste in glass and other relatively chemically inert substances for disposition. Probably other projects as well, these are just the ones I’ve come across in my this far short career. I’m personally not a super fan of disposing of transuranic waste without reprocessing, due to the 10,000 year thing, but that is the method currently favored by the government due to security concerns regarding the potential of proliferation during reprocessing.
Opinion section:
It is true that there is only so much investment and so much manpower to go around. And perhaps a future in renewables only is possible. But I’m not confident in that at the moment due to the requirements of energy storage, but I will readily admit to not keeping up with this area of study. Perhaps large advances in energy storage are possible, but as far as I am aware the technology isn’t there quite yet, and nuclear is possible with the technology we have now (provided we can muster the political will to get them built, but historically, frankly, that has been difficult).
Overall, I look at this largely the same way I look at solutions to “fixing traffic.” The solution is trains, not a million whiz bang things that try to be new and cool and exciting. Not individualized self driving pods, that can dynamically connect and disconnect. Not a fleet of robo-taxis. Not a hyper loop. Just trains. Trains are the solution and they are unpopular, because they are boring, proven technology, there’s nothing to sell, no value to add, no capitalist is going to want to do this because it’s a big investment and shareholder value blah blah blah. They are an AM* solution not an FM** promise.
We have a functioning solution to energy that is politically difficult in nuclear reactors. And we have a half-solution that is easy to spin up in he private sector, but difficult to get us all of the way to carbon free in renewables. We are still waiting on the other half of the solution, and until then we’re simply stuck on carbon power to meet the difference. At least, that’s how I see it. But I only know what I know.
Thanks for the taking the time to read this.
* Actual Machines
** Fucking Magic
Thank you very much for taking the time to wright all the above. A lot has been clarified and you gave me input to further my quest. Btw do you have any recent book/documentary/etc to suggest on the topic for a non-scientist reader?
I don’t know much about lay person explanations of nuclear engineering that are accurate and accessible. I can perhaps recommend the textbooks I used in my major? Nuclear engineering is a cousin to mechanical engineering, so if you have a background in differential equations then you have all of the tools necessary to start learning the material. The physics of nuclear interactions are mostly abstracted away into tables and data, (such as the Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) which you can browse online here) so you don’t need to learn Nuclear Physics beyond the complete basics.
The introductory course at my old university, which kind of discusses general things rather than specifics, uses “Nuclear Engineering Fundamentals” by Masterson. From here if you’re specifically interested in nuclear reactors, you can study Radiation Physics (Turner’s “Atoms, Radiation, and Radiation Profection”), and then Reactor Physics (Lamarsh’s “Introduction to Nuclear Engineering” and Lewis’s “Fundamental of Nuclear Reactor Physics” and Duderstadt’s “Nuclear Reactor Analysis”). From there, if you have a background in Heat Transfer and Thermodynamics (very important) you can learn how practical (rather than abstract) reactors work using Todreas’s Nuclear Systems I. This covers mostly PWRs and BWRs. Undergrad doesn’t talk much in curriculum about other reactor types (Fluoride, Lead Eutectic, Breeders, etc) that’s mostly Graduate material.
Please note this isn’t a complete major, there’s a lot of material about radiation protection and shielding and health effects and so on.
Have you noticed that your arguments in opposition to nuclear power appear to be entirely rooted in bureaucratic failure?
And these are just pet peeves, but why are we measuring nuclear waste — something famous for being made of the heaviest materials possible — in tonnes? Wouldn’t a much better metric for difficulty-of-storage be the volume? I know the reason is that it would be devastating to the argument against nuclear power when compared to the size of, say, a football/soccer pitch, but it’s still deeply irritating. Also, there are grades of nuclear waste. There is much less TRU/HLW waste than there is Class A, which is predictably never ever mentioned in poorly researched anti-nuclear propaganda articles like this.
(I almost forgot to mention this one, but the majority of nuclear waste is produced by the Nuclear Stewardship Program not commercial nuclear power plants. I think we can all agree that nuclear weapons are awful, and if we want to stop the production of nuclear waste we’d have to get rid of them as well, an unlikely condition but one I’d be very happy to see realized)
