My dad who passed away some years ago on my 50th birthday, worked on the design for the AGR for many, many years. Fond memories of him picking me up from school and excitedly telling me the interesting problems he had to solve that day on the walk home. A lovely way to start my day - thank you for sharing.
He worked on the steam turbine portion of the plant and the stories I remember involved clever ways of routing the incredible amount of pipework containing steam, coolant and who knows what else, to the right place and dealing with the extreme pressures.
I also remember him gleefully describing how robust the containment shell was and just like the piece in the article, being able to easily withstand a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into it. My young mind couldn't comprehend why anyone might do that and how utterly unlikely it was that someone might use an aircraft as a weapon.
I bet the Fukushima backup power system would have fit this explanation perfectly:
> in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working.
Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns?
The most likely (and I think underestimated) risk for Nuclear plants is a systemic change due to a large (climate?) crisis and/or war. Think of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that definitely increased risk and reduced maintenance budget for a few Nuclear plants. Any significant sea level rise, drought or flood could very well trigger such events (even if the reactor is not affected directly, the society around it will be). That is why I think nuclear is a risky option to reach net-zero; every plant you build is a bet on the future stability of society for at least 75 years (time until the plant will be safely decommissioned by future generations). I would feel much safer in a world covered in solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines (and highly variable spot pricing) than in one with nuclear plants that require constant care by experts and that even in the best case incur a huge cost on society to safely decommission.
> In 2016 the European Commission assessed that European Union's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded by about 118 billion euros, with only 150 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 268 billion euros of expected decommissioning costs covering both dismantling of nuclear plants and storage of radioactive parts and waste. France had the largest shortfall with only 23 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 74 billion euros of expected costs [1]
Interestingly hunterston - a nuclear power station on the west coast of Scotland - had a failure of its backup diesel generators. Wikipedia describes it as:
> In December 1998, an INES Level 2 incident occurred after severe winds and sea spray disabled all four power lines to the site during the Boxing Day Storm of 1998. After multiple grid failures in a short period of time, emergency diesel generators failed to start. Normally, in the absence of power for the reactor cooling pumps, the reactor would be passively cooled. However, the emergency control system which would have initiated passive cooling failed to act, as it had not been reset. Reactor cooling was reinstated after four hours.
It seems the safety margin was twenty hours of no reactor cooling.
Well, "passive cooling" means that it requires no external power to cool. Doesn't necessarily mean it's normally plumbed into the circuit. Most probably it would not normally be, as the passive cooling would definitely decrease the power output (it is, after all, what it is designed to do).
So there was probably one or more valves that did not get switched, as the system somehow didn't think they needed to, due to something not being configured as they should.
I agree with your risk assessment, but I have to say that given the choice between a climate apocalypse and a nuclear power buildout, I would choose the latter.
If only it was a conscious choice... I fear significant climate has happened already, and even if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow will continue for a long time to come. Putting up a few km2 of solar in e.g. the Sahara now is surely less effort than decommissioning dozens of nuclear plants in 50 years.
Why not do both? Solar power works really well in the Sahara, but not so well in Northern Alberta. While the Sahara's emptiness is penetrated with limitless sunlight, Northern Alberta features vast, rolling plains where waste heat from nuclear plants could be used to heat homes for people escaping the burning wastes of California and BC, while generating carbon-free energy for the North American grid. Waste heat can also facilitate the chemical processes needed to extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere. You can also use nuclear waste heat to replace natural gas heating when extracting bitumen from oil sands -- arguably an activity that we ought not to be pursuing anymore, but tell that to the companies and people making their livelihood from it.
The problem with high latitude places like the northern half of Alberta is that hardly anyone lives there. The population is not high enough to justify something as large as a nuclear power plant.
A similar thing happens in Alaska. The largest grid there, the Railbelt grid, has an average power flow of just 600 MW.
It's a massive logistics challenge and it would require an unprecedented level of cooperation between Saharan nations and given how unstable the region is as of current... I'm afraid it's not happening for another 30-50 years, when climate change will probably corner these countries or their rich neighbors living further north. That being said, Australia is a better candidate to this due to it being a single country and a very stable one at that...
Once Australia proves the concept, Africans can follow suit, and we'll build solar arrays over the oceans, and then we'll become a type 1 civilization.
Or we could just overthrow all their governments and make them vassal states. Sounds crazy? Well just take another good look at Saudi Arabia, crazier things happened in name of energy stability. If the choice is between unlimited renewable energy for Europe and sovereignty of the Sahara I know where I stand
You really think it'd be that easy? Europeans, especially France and the UK backed off from that part of Africa mostly because they don't want massive uncontrolled immigration.
For over 50 years now France has been corrupting those countries' elites at the expense of more than 90% of the population. For 50 years those countries' cooperation level with each other have been hindered and their industries dilapidated to keep them poor and dependent from Europe or outside aid. Dictators have already been put in place (like how can anyone even stay in power for 25 years with nobody batting an eye despite the country lagging behind in everything?) to pillage the regions economic resources and pollute their soil, especially uranium and other metals.
Do you really think it'd be internationally acceptable to commit a massive genocidal war after what Nazi Germany had done to Jewish Europeans eight decades prior?
Overthrowing the established governments is only going to make matters worse. Just see how much of a mess Libya is right now, 10 years after Gaddafi died. French civil aircrafts still won't even fly over it.
Easy? No. Also highly unlikely and against every treaty etc. But bigger wars have been fought over energy security, so not entirely impossible. And with Russia, China and USA fighting injust wars left and right, it seems Europe is the only major power that still cares a bit about internationally acceptable.
This is my issue with the debate between Nuclear proponents and Renewable proponents (most of whom seem to be nuclear detractors): They usually compare what is possible in a future state with renewables to what is currently possible with Nuclear technology from decades ago.
I want people to start imagining what innovation in Nuclear can look like again. If you want to compare current state to current state, then neither are going to move the needle enough. But let's imagine what can be possible, especially if we poured in the same tax dollars and incentives to Nuclear as we are with renewables. We don't have to imagine that we will be decommissioning the same honking reactors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Let's imagine what's possible with next-gen plants.
> ”if we poured in the same tax dollars and incentives to Nuclear as we are with renewables.”
We do. Modern nuclear plants (for example, Hinkley Point C in the UK) receive enormous subsidies. Far more than renewables projects (eg: offshore wind farms) get on a per-MWh-generated basis.
Or to put it another way, each $/£/€ invested in renewables generates a lot more clean energy more quickly than if that some money goes into nuclear.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be funding nuclear research and trying new things, but for now it’s hard to justify building new nuclear plants when better alternatives with better economics/ROI are available.
The problem with your argument that while there is currently more funding for renewables historically much more funding has gone to nuclear [0], and that is not even counting the significant military funding. In fact renewables got to the current state with much less funding, so why should we pour much more money into nuclear when the return on (research) investment is much better for renewables?
Not to mention operational losses of many nuclear plants already out there. Quite a few of them could not compete in the current market if not for massive subsidies.
I think your assessment of what is currently possible with nuclear technology is somewhat skewed. The time from start to plan to put in production of an old technology nuclear plant is seven years on average (which honestly sounds optimistic). Whereas utility scale solar can be deployed in half the time (which will likely be reduced because most of that time is permits and other legal requirements.)
All this is current tech for both. And honestly, solar panel and energy storage technology improvements are already coming down the pipeline whereas the next-gen nuclear has been "almost ready" for decades.
Precisely. There are numerous non-political, but rather purely technical and operational reasons, why any appreciable new nuclear builds are probably a decade plus away, even if significant resources are devoted to start right away.
The picture for most renewables as a fossil energy replacement is much rosier, even considering the generation profile problems that some renewables present.
I'd be happy for there to be some amount of investment in new nuclear builds, just to maybe prove me wrong, but right now it seems like a good thing nuclear is not much of a focus.
It’s funny to me that you’re getting a totally different interpretation from the same facts. When I hear that nuclear needs with the same massive investment, subsidies and decades-long R&D that were required to get renewables to the point were they are today, it’s completely clear to me that nuclear power is on its way out.
Renewables are already moving the needle quite rapidly. Take China for example, from 17.74% in 2009 to 29.09% in 2020. Meanwhile coal dropped from 79% in 2009, to 62% in 2019.
Nuclear is going to stick around, but at best we can start building today’s designs and have them finished in a few years. It’s simply to late for any significant R&D effort to pay off, we needed better designs a decade ago for them to be proven reliable today and then ramp up production for 3-5 years from now. It’s not even just building nuclear stuff that’s slow, the Navy has a solid track record and trains people quickly but even that takes time.
I don't think putting up km2 of solar in the Sahara will solve the problem. You just can't ship electricity that far. We're at the point where we need to build any and all green power supplies as much and as quickly as possible if we want to get past this.
While it certainly possible to ship electricity over such distances (there are connections from e.g. Norway to the UK or Europe) I agree that that should not be the priority. There is huge potential for renewables within Europe first. Most places in southern Europe still have very little solar (AFAIK Germany has by quite a margin the most Solar installations in Europe and it definitely is not the best geographically). Sweden has huge potential for wind but hardly any installationsjust two name two things.
Another aspect that should not be ignored are the efficiency gains of producing electricity close to where it is used by e.g. roof top solar
Except you lose a lot of that power through attenuation. You can't really send electricity from the sahara to europe efficiently. Even over relatively short distances (a few dozen miles), you're losing up to 10-15% of your overall energy. A thousand miles or more...and I can't even find numbers on that because nobody does it.
Your 10 to 15% figure is total transmission and distribution loss from producer to consumer. If you scale up the transmission distance only, the total shouldn't change much. There are several studies referenced in this course http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/. Looks like 2 to 3% loss over 1000km.
"Coal is the second-largest source of electricity in Germany. As of 2020, around 24% of the electricity in the country is generated from coal. This was down from 2013, when coal made up about 45% of Germany's electricity production (19% from hard coal and 26% from lignite)." - Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#:~:text=Coal...). )
But sadly it went slightly up from 24% to 24,5% in 2020 (don't have the source at hand right now for this second statistic).
While these are real risks, it's worth pointing out two things:
- This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away.
- The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that.
The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we should definitely make sure it doesn't happen again - but we should also not ignore that more modern plants don't have the same design flaws, and that events with enough destructive force to shift the entire planet on its axis by 10-25cm are not common (and if they become so, we have additional problems).
> The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that.
That's the point, though, isn't it? One of the richest and most developed nations failed to decommission the plant in a timely manner, even under excellent conditions, in order to save costs. It's not the technology that's the problem.
There's a circular problem here, though: anti-nuclear activists block development and deployment of new technologies and plants, then complain that everything's old and outdated. The cost of nuclear has to include all the decommissioning costs while Coal and Hydro get to externalise their major environmental costs.
I understand that single incidents are more visible than long-term low-level harm. But as a civilisation we really aren't paying enough attention to the overall cost of everything that's not nuclear.
Or, anti-nuclear activism would be as ineffective as most other activism if nuclear actually made economic sense. Nuclear's economic fragility renders it vulnerable to external negative influences.
I don't think a lot of people realize just how old the power plant actually was; it went online a year before Chernobyl even started construction, and it's own construction started when the Soviets we're still winning the space race.
And we're putting in wind and solar at record rates, but that still doesn't cover us at night or when there's no wind. Batteries or other energy storage cannot meet the demand yet. Nuclear is still the best option for continuous weather-independent power among all the low-polluting options.
It can't, source, gas prices in Europe now. Which we are paying. To a dictator who's overtly planning to invade the East. Because the sun isn't shining and batteries are three orders of magnitude too expensive.
Renewables get exactly as much credit for what might happen in future as Communists or NFT sellers get for how awesome their plans are. Nuclear already delivered, in some places still does, winter heat. Its detractors are responsible for gas reliance.
This is patently untrue. If you had followed some links there you would have seen that there are renewable plants today that are cheaper than fossil alternatives. The current gas crisis is, if anything, due to bad choices of electricity companies that tried to do financial games with gas prices. You can't win that game against a crooked political operator. Renewables can and do deliver winter heat too. Nuclear did and could have been something, but now it's not. We should build the best option for the future. And right now that's not nuclear for technological, political and technical reasons.
But neither can nuclear reactors that do not exist yet. Sure, there are a couple that got shut down, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to total consumption. If you want to get an alternative to gas in 15 years or so then maybe nuclear would work. But a better bet is to get people to install heatpumps and drive those with solar and wind in a few years time. Far more effective use of resources, and far quicker from start to finish.
That's one (powerful) argument against this intermittency myth on one of the sources I link to here. The grid already is powered by intermittent sources, no power plant is on 365x24.
whatever did happen to pebble bed and all the other emerging nuclear technologies from 20 years ago that were supposed to move the bar into passive fail-safe territory and eliminate the waste problem through spent fuel reprocessing?
It's because safety wasn't the obstacle to nuclear energy, cost was.
Also, I don't think passive safety of CANDU is what's meant by passive safety of HTGRs. The latter can survive losing cooling and everyone just walking away (in theory); I suspect the CANDU melts down in that situation, even if the chain reaction does stop.
Dealing with nuclear waste is still a thing, even with safe reactors. Here in the US, we can't seem to find a permanent place to bury waste.
Don't forget, either: Nuclear waste isn't just spent fuel. The reactor core remains radioactive after the plant is decommissioned.
That's one of the things that nuclear fusion proponents seem to forget. Even without the spent fuel problem, fusion reactors still produce nuclear waste.
That is very expensive. Given that they came online in the 70s and early 80s we can assume the initial capital investment is paid off by now and that cost is only the marginal running cost. (OPEX)
Now, currently we are building solar farms in desert areas for ~1.5 cent per kWh. Including both CAPEX and OPEX. On-shore wind is built at ~3 cents per kWh and ~6 cents per kWh for off-shore.
This is where the explosion of renewables is coming from, they currently undercut the marginal cost of traditional power sources.
> Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns?
That was sadly not an unknown at all. TEPCO was definitely aware of the possibility given that flooding in the generator rooms had happened before, and they deliberately ignored studies finding they were not prepared for a tsunami.
French power grid agency RTE made a report[0] forecasting 2050 France energy mix, and because of loss of knowledge and increased security measures, even with strong political will, France won't be able to maintain its 70% nuclear power electricity share.
Most nuclear-intensive scenario in this report is max 50% nuclear energy.
its a bit of an over used trope in fiction to me that if you kill the one person inventing a thing you stop it. think t2 and the chip. most major discoveries i have heard of in important areas had multiple people running neck amd neck.
when it comes to rebuilding a thing, i think whats important to wonder is would you even build it the same way? I remember seeing an article on ars about the engines for the Saturn 5. They took over a thousand hours of weld time at a level of skill and quantity that was built up during that time period. And they got them working via experimentation. Building the now was done differently. They 3d scanned the parts and used modern additive and cnc machining and used way less welds (one can argue additive metal is just cnc welding but I digress). And then simulated it in the computer. I remember a discussion about the baffles in the nozzle to stop pulsing in the combustion, that was figured out in destructive trials of this incredibly difficult machine. You'd do that in simulation now.
I likely got details wrong.
But it's to say that part of "they don't build em like they used to" also means "they learned". Look at bridges, they don't look like Brooklyn or Eads anymore. They used to build them with waaay too much steel.
That said roman concrete is a thing they've been chasing for a while
> That said roman concrete is a thing they've been chasing for a while
Roman concrete isn't some magical substance that we're hoping to replicate - we already know how it works - it just would really suck for the type of building projects we have now.
Unfortunately a lot of the discussion online regarding Roman concrete veers uncomfortably into a rather, shall we say, "supremacist" angle. For a level discussion about Roman concrete, I found this to a nice place to start.
In my (probably flawed) understanding, I think the drawbacks of Roman concrete in a modern setting is that it takes a really long time to cure (like a year or so) and it uses salt water, which would not interact well with regular steel rebar.
If you ever watch the documentary "Connections" by James Burke, you get the impression basically all inventions are caused by the circumstances where two realms of science meet up in a new way to solve a problem, and that the people involved are a detail of passing importance.
> It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards.
> Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point!
And also wildly over-optimistic (as is typical for SF). In the books, I think it took something like 10,000 years to loose the technical knowledge. I bet we could do it in 100.
A complicated technology like present aircraft, nuclear energy, petrochemical refining, pharmaceuticals, etc. is resting on the shoulders of a few thousand 40-something-year-olds that have the book learning of the 25-year-olds coupled with the experience and judgement that makes the technology practical, and particularly the knowledge of how to go from zero to one multiplied across many many sub-problems.
If something puts a particular technology out of practice for 20 years, many of those now-60-somethings, while still alive, will have forgotten much of what they knew, and not be suitable to put the hard hats back on and get in the field.
And this is not accounting for the effects of whatever catastrophe put the technology out of practice to begin with.
There are two forms of loss, loss of the theory, and loss of the practice. We will lose the practice - all the tribal knowledge that comes from doing it quickly. However so long as we can still read the physics, engineering and math text books we can recreate something similar. It will take a few years and we will make mistakes, but take a bunch of "smart people" and give them time and they could re-create anything from first principals.
It only took a few years for the Manhattan project to create nuclear bombs once physics advanced to the point where we realized such a bomb wouldn't need to be the size of an aircraft carrier. Only a few years after that (and a much smaller budget) to make a non-exploding power reactor. There is no reason society couldn't duplicate that if we wanted.
Now the tribal knowledge does help a lot, it you still have it you can take a lot of time off. However it isn't needed.
We probably still have all the papers and journals and schematics and whatnot. What we don't have, however, is people with the appropriate training to make sense of those things. Without those people - without actual working knowledge of the technology - all that data is useless.
You can figure out what it does rather easily. Figuring out why it was done that way requires a lesson from the school of hard knocks in a lot of cases.
In the case of the nuclear industry those knocks can be rather significant.
Thanks for posting that link; I had not seen that lecture before and found it highly enjoyable. For others that might gloss over a random link to youtube, this is a lecture from 2019 delivered by Jonathan Blow titled "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization." In this talk, he discusses the problem of generational transfer of knowledge within the historical context of civilizations who failed to do so successfully. At about the halfway point, he transitions to the related topic of declining software quality, which I suspect will resonate strongly with many programmers on this forum.
Even if you didn't have loss of knowledge or increased security measures, unless future French nuclear power can lower its costs, it will inevitably have a lower share in the French energy mix.
The long term vision is for those gas plants to be hydrogen-powered, with the hydrogen generated by the surplus of wind and solar during peak times. Pumped hydro for power storage is also something that will become viable. You lose a lot in conversion, but excess wind power is very cheap.
Honest question, but do people actually believe that? It sounds like a tactic by oil companies to sucker in gullible people in order to punt a problem down the road. It also acts as a great excuse by politicians to avoid having to deal with a problem.
IMO, the reality is that these plants will never convert to anything other than natural gas and will eventually be shut down, still running on natural gas.
Hydrogen is not a fuel, it's an energy storage mechanism, and not a very good one at that. If you're going to store energy there's much more efficient and/or cheaper ways of doing it.
Natural gas is still a good fuel but I don't think anyone in the US at least is under any illusion that these will ever run on anything other than natural gas.
Well, any plan for green energy has major holes in it. If it was easy someone would have already done it. The EU is taking this very seriously however as part of their climate plans.
The big problem with the hydrogen economy is not the conversion of the gas plants, it is having enough wind to generate the hydrogen in the first place. You need excess wind capacity to make hydrogen, and no private venture will invest into wind turbines that aren’t needed. Without a strong government hand shaping this market it will not happen.
In Des Moines more than 80% of all power comes from renewable sources. Despite that my power costs are good. Iowa has a lot of land relative to people, but still there are a lot of power that other states are throwing away. (Texas as someone else mentioned is also doing well)
Having their own grid has some serious downsides as they found out last February but the upside is that they get to run things so that their installed base of renewable power is larger than the backlog of projects waiting for approval which is the case most of the country is in.
Moving quickly to renewable energy with only a few downsides sounds like a great tradeoff. Especially if they're downsides that consumers can work around.
I seem to remember that you can’t even pump hydrogen through existing natural gas infrastructure because the smaller hydrogen molecules are more prone to leaking. I would imagine the equipment at a plant has a similar problem and combine that with lower efficiency from burning a fuel that the plant wasn’t designed for, and the abysmal efficiency from converting electric energy to hydrogen and it seems like pure snake oil.
Not to mention ignited hydrogen leaks being invisible in daylight!
You can walk right into one if you are not careful - which is why you might see people walking with brooms in front of them around hydrogen equipment. :)
Coal gas contained significant amounts of molecular hydrogen (~50% or so) and it had been used for decades. What magic did those people know back then?
Pumped hydro has been viable for energy storage for decades and decades, running 70-80% efficiency. It's more efficient than most alternatives, to include compressed air, but it can't be dispatched quite as quickly.
The real problem is the fact that environmentalists tend to hate dams, especially large hydro projects, so there's a major political battle on top of finding funding for these kinds of capital-intensive projects.
Even if we could build dams with no worry about the environment, it wouldn't help. There are not many places left to build them, and a lot more would be needed. Sure use them where we have them, but they are not a something we can grow.
In unrelated news, lowering nuclear to 50% of electricity is set as a political goal.
In other unrelated news, safely maintaining the current nuclear electric power would have required a massive buildup starting 10 years ago (to replace the reactors that are currently arriving at the end of their life).
Though that sarcasm of mine is slightly outdated, a new promise (exploiting the recent high energy prices) is indeed to build some new reactors, postponing the previous promise of reaching 50% (from the current 75%) from 2025 to 2035 :
That's 28 years away. People not yet born will be trained nuclear engineers by then. On what basis does RTE regard the loss of knowledge as already locked-in?
Areva has a lot of trouble hiring new engineers. Nuclear power is not as popular in France as it once was. Also, you don't only need engineers: you need lots of industrial workers (such as welders), which, because of deindustrialization, are not that common in France anymore.
It's not only the loss of knowledge, it's also the higher security standards. The last reactor being built, Flamanville 3, was supposed to be ready by 2012, is still being built and not estimated ready before the end of 2022.
That would contradict "even if she wanted to, France couldn't". If she wanted to, France could make nuclear engineering a highly-paid profession with strong job security. It would just cost more money.
It's impossible to make binding long-term promises in a democracy. Voters are allowed to change their minds, and the risk that they do that and completely destroy nuclear engineering as a career option is always present.
Something like software engineering is a much safer career option, because the risk that your country will categorically ban it is pretty low. And because it doesn't tie you to a small number of possible employers or force you to live in a specific location.
And thus we arrive at today's world, where the best and brightest of our generation are working on optimizing ad clicks instead of solving grand challenges. le sigh
Austria comes to mind - they built the fully functional nuclear power plant, and never had it started - because the public referendum was narrowly (50.47%) against it. Billions of dollars down the drain, hundreds of careers derailed.
> It's impossible to make binding long-term promises in a democracy. Voters are allowed to change their minds, and the risk that they do that and completely destroy nuclear engineering as a career option is always present.
That's true of any political system, the problem with democracy is more that it's invariably fickle. A dictator may also be fickle, but there's a least a chance he has a long term vision with a late payoff that he pursues for a his lifetime.
> It's impossible to make binding long-term promises in a democracy.
We can make binding financial promises at least. It's entirely possible to grant nuclear workers each a personal 60 year annuity managed by a consortium of foreign banks, and requiring the worker to pick between working as an engineer, returning the annuity, or sitting in prison.
It's difficult to ascribe a single will to a nation. It's more of a split-brain issue.
And making certain professions high-paying isn't as viable a strategy as you might think. Multiple factors go into that. Nuclear engineering isn't a popular thing, just like animal testing.
I went on a tour round Torness a couple of years ago and it's a fantastic engineering marvel to mosey around.
A few things stand out, like the old-tech ring binders and Windows 95 screensavers on CRTs. The safety focus was clear. Nothing was done without a risk assessment, and the young apprentice who was helping with our tour was given a telling off by the tour staff as he wasn't holding the handrails - as had clearly been drummed into them.
What really struck me was how many people were involved in running the plant. I don't know how it compares to similarly sized gas plants, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people employed - mostly in project management/safety roles. I wonder how it compares to how many folk are employed in renewables, we have a lot of wind power here now.
It's a shame that cracks have started to form in the reactors so the plants will be shutdown earlier than planned. It looks like tours are suspended for Covid, but go round if they open up again before shutdown!
The central cylindrical space in what was the Scottish Nuclear headquarters was designed to be the same size as an AGR reactor (each AGR plant having two reactors) - which I thought was rather cool.
Always a treat to read something by Charles Stross. Seems like Accelerando was required reading for the previous generation, is it still? I was not familiar with the UK advanced gas cooled reactors, which use CO2 to cool the core and transfer heat to the steam. From the name it seems to be gas and not supercritical CO2 although I may have that wrong.
Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal clear imo. Energy goes into steam, steam does work, lowering the steam temperature and pressure, heating and cooling at different point can increase efficiency. It’s a topic I wish I’d have learned about sooner!
My old man was a Navy nuke turned instrument tech at Three Mile Island... he can go on and on about steam tables.
I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building (that Unit 2), staring at the humongous, partially-disassembled turbine (they may have replaced it that year), spotlighting deer at the end of the island. I also remember a very strange feeling while listening to radiation monitors go crazy when the spent fuel was being removed... if you walked a few dozen feet past the warning tape you were probably dead.
I'm getting flashbacks of the engineering problems I had to solve at school with all this talk of steam look up tables. Not sure if its enjoyable or suppression nostalgia :)
I fell asleep in Thermo 1 on the day the professor taught us to read steam tables. I never did get many of those problems right, even though I did my engineering co-ops at power plants.
Hey, maybe you can share something about the Three Mile Island accident.
I read somewhere that during the accident some insects were irradiated. One of the irradiated spiders later bit a man and that man mutated to be able to walk on walls, like a spider.
I was very disappointed when I finally learned how a nuclear power plant worked because I assumed there was some really cool way to turn nuclear energy into electricity (apparently this is still challenging to do at power plant scale).
RTGs are even more hilariously stupid simple. They are literally just lump of radioactive material that is slowly decaying by itself and heating a thermocouple, producing electricity. No moving parts, no complicated reactor chambers and systems, no nothing.
Yeah, I was ameliorated when I learned about RTGs, since they're solid state but it's still heat based. I assumed if you knew how to split that atom that somehow magically meant you could also convert it to electron current.
Accelerando is my all-time-favorite Sci Fi book. I read it twice now and will again in the near future. I'm 36 year old. I hope more people read this book.
It is really not my own favourite of the books I've written, though. (If you want to understand why, you might enjoy The Rapture of the Nerds -- my two-fer with Cory Doctorow, revisiting the same themes a decade later from a rather more tongue-in-cheek, not to say skeptical, direction.)
The coolant in these reactors would not normally be considered supercritical as its pressure (2.66 MPa max) is well below its critical pressure (7.38 MPa.)
I read "The Fountainhead" at age 18 and was marvelled by it. I even quoted bits of Howard Roark's speeches on second-handers. I re-read it at age 25 and, uh, it's a really bad novel built around a couple of awesome "yas queen" kind of put-down rants.
I feel the same about Accelerando. At one point I was in a clubbing phase and always took my paperback in my jacket pockets. Then, I never fully read it a second time because I can't get through Annette Benning, and I remember the flock of birds stuff at the end.
The linked text is pretty good, but Stross thinks too highly of himself re: his knowledge of science, and he presents his politics in a way that mildly annoys people who don't agree with his politics. Also, Accelerando ages as badly as Ayn Rand.
I think of Accelerando sort of the same way I think of Snowcrash. They're both just avalanches of mind candy barely contained by enough thin narrative to pretend they're novels.
They're both incredibly fun reads, but awful fiction. Both authors got significantly better at the craft with practice, although one of them still seems to have an ideological aversion to endings.
My opinion? I began writing the stories that turned into Accelerando in 1998, largely to keep myself from having a work-induced nervous breakdown during the dot-com bubble. I finished it in 2003/04. It's journeyman work, and I like to think I'm both a better writer and a deeper/broader thinker than I was back then: it's no masterpiece, and I'm a little embarrassed by its staying power among the folks here.
Indeed on Stross lacking humility. His recent post where he talked about COVID was pretty rife with inaccuracies and assumptions, which is fine, but he presented them with this unbridled level of certainty that simply isn't available in the data.
I've grown to tire over the "certain" people trying to analyze the science in this pandemic, on both "sides". (If you force it into a binary framing, it's the "holy shit this is bad" side and the "holy shit you guys are overreacting" side, both of whom have loud nutbags who are too confident in their assumptions.)
ITER / DEMO / PROTO plants planned to eclipse everything previous in scale. And with nuclear fission now classified as green tech by the EU, maybe the political will is finally here ;)
ITER will generate no power. No liquid-metal neutron-absorber "blanket", no steam piping, no turbines.
DEMO / PROTO will, if not cancelled, be absolutely monstrous, but generate no more power than a wee fission plant. Until they destroy themselves with their own neutron flux. (They should build them underground, so they will already be buried when it is time to abandon them.)
It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all. Cost would radically exceed the same-capacity fission plant, and fission plants are already not competitive. All the while before ground is even broken to start building any, power generation cost is in free fall, with no bottom in sight.
> It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all
In and of itself that may be correct, but they could provide valuable stepping stones to future systems that are much cheaper, simpler, and more efficient, which could not exist without first creating these large expensive projects.
The value isn't in the project itself, but in the legacy it creates in terms of future iterations.
Prime example of sunk-cost rationalization. When has such a gargantuan expenditure of time and resources ever produced the promised second-order benefits that outweigh the lack of first-order benefits?
Neutron fission was discovered in 1938, ten years later we'd flattened two cities with it, and ten years after that we had working, profitable power stations. Theory to useful first-order application to useful second-order application in two decades.
Meanwhile, ITER started planning in the late 80s, began construction in 2007, and won't be fully operational until 2035, assuming no delays (hah). Even then, it won't do anything directly useful. That'll be figured out by grad students who haven't even been born yet, possibly.
This just isn't how healthy scientific and technological research looks like. If nobody expects anything of actual tangible value for 20 years, and there are billions of dollars of funding being thrown around, obviously you're going to get people riding the gravy train instead of getting real jobs. ITER is welfare for physicists.
> When has such a gargantuan expenditure of time and resources ever produced the promised second-order benefits that outweigh the lack of first-order benefits?
Pretty much all space programmes prior to the commercialisation of space. We're only at the start of that, too: today imaging satellites and internet connections, tomorrow potentially heavy industry, solar power generation and mineral extraction. Who knows what else.
If we count the commencement date of that investment from 1960 or so, and assume the start of real returns on that investment hasn't arrived yet, the main second order benefits of space research and the associated feats of engineering will have taken 60+ years to appear. By the time any of the applications I mentioned above are realised, we might be at 80 or even 100 years.
Some things just take a really long time. I haven't studied ITER or any other fusion tech, but long timelines don't mean things aren't worth it. They can deliver things iterative processes might be unable to do.
Lastly, if you're concerned about the money going to the wrong place, it might be better to start with fossil fuel subsidies - diverting these to clean energy production and research would speed the transition immensely.
>Pretty much all space programmes prior to the commercialisation of space. We're only at the start of that, too: today imaging satellites and internet connections, tomorrow potentially heavy industry, solar power generation and mineral extraction. Who knows what else.
Those had *direct* benefits at the time, immediately: satellites of all kinds, classified military stuff, and the dickwaving pleasure of putting a man on the moon before the Soviets.
The comparison to space would make sense if we spent billions of dollars building a single large rocket starting in 1950, finally launched it in 1975, with a payload of nothing but styrofoam. Then tried to justify it by saying that by 1990 we'll have something useful.
Even then, the space programme was a decadent swamp of pork-barrel spending and vanity project scams like the Space Shuttle and the SLS. I severely doubt that the benefit to humanity outweighed the money spent and lives lost on that crap.
The problem with saying "the benefits just take a really long time to come about" is that it's completely unfalsifiable, at least within the lifetimes of the people who profit from the funding today. They can just dangle that "second-order benefits" carrot in front of the rest of us suckers until they retire.
An interesting article, but rather undercut by the fact that he highlights quantum computers as the same situation. Twelve years later, they exist. They work. They have APIs! Yet the development process displayed all the negative symptoms he highlights. How can we be confident fusion is different?
It is welfare for the otherwise mostly military contractors who get contracts for construction. It would be overwhelmingly cheaper to just pay the physicists, even if we supported tem times as many.
Correction: But not low-magnetic field Tokamak. High magnetic field Tokamak are a lot smaller and could fit on a large spacecraft. They're room sized, not skyscraper sized.
ARC has a mass of 7,190 tonnes (not including generators or radiators). This is about the mass of three US WW2 destroyers. It's not room sized; the thing is something like 20m tall (once you include the support structure).
A 190MW(e) fission reactor would be considerably smaller. There is really no use case for DT fusion in space, especially if they have to make their own tritium.
Pretty much all space-faring SciFi, including "hard scifi", is basically garbage that you can toss out the window as far as expectations go. Think things are hard to cool on earth? Space leaves you with radiative cooling only. The least efficient (space x time x cost x performance) type of cooling in the known universe. Internally-powered propulsion in spacecraft is never going to happen with thermodynamics around.
The fact fission is classified as green /might/ impact fusion's future classification, but who knows. I was listening to a podcast and a disillusioned engineer said "environmentalists favorite nuclear power plant is always one that doesn't exist, as soon as it's ready to be built it's ready to be protested".
Probably an instance of many groups under one label acting disparately, but I get the sentiment :/
Nuclear reactors are just bigger pains than even the coal plants they might replace.
Especially to replace enough fossil fuel one would have to scale up the problems with mining, waste disposal, and risks of accidents or malicious interference. I know this isn't a popular idea here, but there also lots of physicists who don't believe in nuclear fission as a mid-term or near-long-term solution.
France begs to differ. We basically replace fossil fuel with nuclear here (we only have small peaker gas plants, our baseload is all nuclear and some of our variable load is hydro) and there is no particular scale problem, no accidents (incidents yes, but they don't become accidents, the system works), a few pools of waste but whatever, no trouble to procure the fuel...
Even France is having serious issues both currently and in the future. There is considerable national pride involved, so the picture being painted is often more rosy than it is. Nuclear power in France and elsewhere had a leg up in terms of brain share and political will due to the importance of nuclear weapons, it was patriotic to be for nuclear things but that factor has vanished since the end of the cold war. This is also a factor France has a leg up on Germany who was not allowed to have nuclear weapons due to WWII. Without nuclear weapons programs, nuclear power would probably not have had the same importance.
Even when trying to come to a conclusion if nuclear power is worthwhile, one has to realize how much more complex even the equation is. It takes so much more qualified engineers, a much more specialized and expensive supply chain, and then there are huge uncertainty factors with unintentional accidents and malicious interference. Waste storage is a recurring headache and not globally solved. All of this MIGHT be manageable for a first-world democratic country like France, but I really don't like to see China scaling up their nuclear industry, nor would I want to see much of the rest of the world to replace their fossil fuels by those headaches.
The fuel is an interesting point - I gather it comes from former French colonies, mostly. Do you know if this is true? And if so, what are the conditions of the workers and the impact on the economies of countries where the extraction happens?
I'm not one of those physicists, mind you. I think keeping all the problems substantively in liquid or solid phase gives us a better chance than automatically pumping them in gas form into the atmosphere. not to mention the transport efforts go from a daily coal train per powerplant to a single semi every 18 months. All the logistics up stream similarly impacted. I'll grant it's not as straight forward as disassembling and then burning a mountain in west virginia every few years, but the over all footprints way smaller.
The radioactive problems as they are, they're still better than the chemical ones from coal plants, if we'd decided to change history in the 40's and replace all the nuclear plants with coal ones we'd have killed millions[0] more people more subtly.
That's still not accounting for all the trouble you might run into when scaling up nuclear power. It would also not be enough to do this in highly stable western-style democracies. It's not accounting for all the cost that goes into developing the nuclear industry and dealing with all the consequences. All those cost calculations are either very optimistic or fraught with uncertainties.
It doesn't matter if it's hard, it's the steady state power option that doesn't have any marginal carbon output and is essentially site agnostic. We've been deficit spending our power budget for a century and now we're surprised things are going to get a bit harder?
With the slight difference that the "gas form", meaning CO2 can eventually be reabsorbed by plants... the radioactive waste not so much. It has to be kept separate from animal and Human life for millenia ...
This is also true for solar panels too though - they require rare earth materials. And large scale wind farms can have accidents and fires and harm wildlife.
Do they require neodynium permanent magnets? AFAIK, there are generators (including big generators at hydroelectric power plants) which use electromagnets instead. The same applies to electric motors; there are some which use permanent magnets, and some (induction motors) which don't.
They don't either, it's just that PMG turbines are somewhat more preferred if you can build them. If you can't, nothing prevents you from building turbines with induction generators.
I don't see why - assuming that we actually manage to make power-positive fusion, there's no question that it would be much "greener" than nuclear fission, without the need to deal with spent fuel and without the accident contamination risks.
DT fusion releases the majority of it's energy (14 out of 17 MeV) as neutron's, there will be radioactive waste to deal with, and it will rapidly be considered an unacceptable risk compared to coal and natural gas, because reasons that will seem perfectly rational to people at the time.
The Ferranti mainframes mentioned in the article are probably Argus 700 machines developed in 1968/9 [1] Amazing that such tech was still running important infrastructure only a decade ago.
They absolutely are Argus 700's, and a lot of the design of the systems is in the public domain.
> The computer system consists of a network of computer nodes, based on the Ferranti Argus 700 range of computers, assigned to each reactor unit, except where common station facilities are required. For each reactor unit, the computer system provides both data processing and automatic control functions. For essential data capture, control and display to the CCR operators, the processor hardware is duplicated. These are termed Level 1 systems and are shown in Figures 1 and 2. Single
processor systems which collect data not considered essential for continued unit operation are termed Level 2 systems. Figure 3 illustrates the Level 2 computer system for both units. Torness NFS probably has the most complex computer configuration of any operating nuclear power station. The auto control "supersystem" consists of, per reactor, ten input multiplexing computers ("muxes"), eleven control computers (CCOI, CCO2 to CCI 1) and a dual online/ standby supervisory computer ("CS"). Each of these computers is a node in the hierarchical control supersystem shown schematically in Figure 2.
The training simulators used custom hardware from Marconi Simulation as well - a long long time ago I didn't get to job to work on them at Torness.
Mind you I did end up on an academic project that included modelling of Hunterston, so I got the "behind the scenes" tour there that Charlie got for Torness.
The Project Manager from Scottish Nuclear had worked on the construction of Torness and he lots of interesting stories.
On safety - one of the places I had the opportunity to visit had a car park where you were only allowed to reverse in. I'm not sure if it was a holdover from a previous establishment, but I think they kept something on site that was volatile enough (like a lot of gas) that if a swift evacuation was required, they didn't want people futzing around getting out of spaces.
I spent some time at an active petroleum refinery a few years ago and one of the safety things that surprised me a little was that every vehicle inside the complex must have the keys in the ignition at all times. Not turned on, but in the event of an evacuation they didn't want anyone to have to futz around looking for keys.
I think part of what's wild about that for me is just imagining the risk analysis that would lead to that kind of thing. Like, obviously not an explosion that's over in seconds, but everyone would be dead anyway. And not a normal fire because then you'd just evacuate as usual and carpool if you can't find your keys.
But there's a class of refinery-specific disasters where I guess you have tens of seconds to get out, where looking for your missing keys could well mean the difference between escaping or now.
A refinery can leak explosive gasses that form a plume in or around the refinery that rises off the ground. Once detected, there's a fairly high chance that one small spark will set it off but it could be many seconds or minutes until it's ignited and it could take multiple smaller explosions to mix in enough oxygen to cause the big one. This gives the staff "plenty" of time to evacuate but it's still an emergency situation where arguing about carpools or knocking things down frantically looking for keys (causing that spark) will eventually get people killed for no benefit.
Yup, or even if just one of the vehicles is in the way and the person with the keys is nowhere to be found it could cause a huge problem during an evacuation.
You've touched on something else that I found extraordinarily impressive there: how amazingly thorough their risk analysis process is and how well thought out their mitigation plans are. When they had the problem I came to help work through (not immediately safety critical, but a big deal, intentionally being vague here), step one was to reach up to the shelf and grab the binder labelled "Business Continuity Plan: Problem $X" and start executing the plan from page 1. It wasn't a plan to fix the problem so much as a plan for how to continue operations until the issue was fixed. Very very impressive.
I learned a lot on that gig, and it's really helped influence the way I think about business "disaster planning", whether caused by floods, or data centres burning down, or a rogue sysadmin deleting backups, or whatever. That industry is 100% the opposite of "cowboy".
My wife visited Torness (the plant in the article) for a meeting with one of the managers. She went through reception, got her badge, and was on her way up the stairs to the meeting room when the receptionist shouted at her. "Maam! MAAAM!... please hold the handrail".
They're nuts about safety - and a good thing too, speaking as someone who lives relatively close-by.
This was also the case at this location. Alongside discipline around showing passes, scramble pads on doors and so on. It was even the case in the office building (we were nowhere near anything obviously dangerous). Super strong safety and security culture.
This excellent article reminds me of the time in the early 80's when I got to visit the Dounreay nuclear reactor complex[0]. Now we didn't quite get to see all the guts of the power station as Charlie did, but nonetheless even as a young teenager I was impressed by the scale and complexity of the engineering. The thing that really made the hairs on the back of my neck activate was standing right above the reactor itself. We also got a tour of the labs where radioactive components and other "hot" things were manipulated by remote control arms and grippers behind very thick glass. We even got to have a go, though obviously not with anything too dangerous :)
I know that it's a good thing it's being decommissioned and cleaned up, but there's a certain fondness I have of the site because we spent many a holiday camping and B&Bing in the area when I was a youngster. That and the sound of the Scrabster(?) fog horn.
One thing I've always wondered is, who cleans this things? Is normal, run of the mill cleaning personnel expected to be careful enough to not accidentally toss something out alignment, or is there some kind of Nuclear Plant Grade Cleaning industry I never heard about?
There are dedicated staff for cleaning, and they do an amazing job, not a speck of dust or grime anywhere people routinely go (for good reason). Where I worked they even had special titles: NPSA, nuclear plant service attendant.
The only real difference is that there's also a decommissioning aspect. Typically any consumables that get used in a nuclear environment get collected, put in a barrel and then sent off to a warehouse for later disposal (generally unspecified...). A lot of "nuclear waste" is lightly contaminated PPE.
Just to point out that Stross's blog is running off an elderly PC in his office, so no surprise that when it makes the front page on HN (twice in two days now) it gets slashdotted.
> ...although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. "Energy too cheap to meter" it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat.
"some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the past"
echoes of the Raspberry Pi camera flash reboot story, 13 years apart :)
Being apparently able to erase old style glass top EPROMs with a camera flash is perhaps a bit less surprising than random power components messing up. UV light exposure is how you erase them normally, although you normally use lower light levels for longer, not a short bright camera flash.
I do think they need to buy higher grade sticky labels to cover the window with though. :-)
Seeing a massive 500 megawatt turbine in the generator hall of a nuclear powerplant is an incredible experience, dwarfed only by the knowledge that there are 3 more at the facility.
The last paragraph was truncated for me. I had to look at the page source to read it! Reproduced here for those on mobile browsers:
"It's a weird experience, crawling over the guts of one of the marvels of the atomic age, smelling
the thing (mostly machine oil and steam, and a hint of ozone near the transformers), all the while knowing that although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. 'Energy too cheap to meter' it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat."
One can hope that the complexity, size, potential hazards, and expense of getting power from nuclear reactions can be greatly reduced in the future. Like Charles Babbage's difference engines [1] that were replaced by a whole new way of doing calculations with electronics, I don't think there is any first principle reason small and safe nuclear powers sources couldn't exist. The big problem in discovering/inventing them is the regulations and public fear around radioactive materials. Radioactivity is dangerous but so are a lot of technologies when they first were discovered. Steam power, chemical explosives, oil refining, etc. No one can really tinker around nuclear materials, try new things, and iterate quickly. The US could really help jump start new nuclear tech if they would designate an isolated location where the rules and regulations around handling radioactive material was greatly relaxed. The former test site in Nevada might be a good place.
Fully informed consent for the people working there with each lab spaced out to confine any unexpected high exposures to the people working on their own experiments. A certain portion of the population desires doing dangerous and risky things. Look at all the extreme sports these days. It would be great to create a way to allow them to take dangerous risks that are deeply meaningful, intellectually challenging, potentially financially lucrative, and productive for society at large.
This plant is exceptional. It is a vintage Ferrari among power plants. If hundreds of these were built, and then operated by the typical management competency of a large natural monopoly, would you bet they would all be as safe as this plant?
That's the context of nuclear safety. Big, bureaucratic, lowest-bidder contractors, bosses that are most competent at career management, lax oversight, privatized profit cushioned by socialized risk, ineffective whistleblower protection.
In my first job in the late 1980s I had a colleague who tailgated someone through the security gates at Torness and had real difficulties getting out again as he hadn't officially entered... He had been through security and issued a pass so there probably wasn't a security risk.
"the anti-truck-bomb obstacles (on the entrance only -- no self-respecting truck bomber would ever think of driving in through the exit, would they?)"
This is the sort of thing that never stops to amaze me, usually when visiting some installation or other there is a detail like this that jumps out. The best example that I have of this was a perfectly sealed isolation ward in a hospital that merged both intake and exhaust of the isolation ward with the general wards because they ran out of budget for another air system so they plumbed it into what was already there. It totally floored me that this was done consciously as a cost saving measure, I'll leave the failure modes as a homework exercise ;)
AGRs also perfectly demonstrate some of the more perverse elements of the nuclear economy.
They can be (at least were designed to be) refuelled online. An operator's dream - 100% uptime! And for the same reason, a security nightmare. So no exports.
Demo and pilot plants tend to be small because they are intended to prove the technology to be feasible and economic. The next step would be a commercial scale plant.
Wouldn't more small reactors be better for management of power production? If one of 20 needs maintenance, you still have the other 19 to supply consumers with electricity.
While if you need to power down a huge reactor for maintenance, its backup must be of the same huge capacity.
"(Which isn't likely; in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working.)"
I do not understand the argument for nuclear. The risk never seems worth the reward. Clean now? Yes. Cheap now? Yes. Potentially catastrophic? Yes. This feels like an unnecessary risk to take on. The lessons of three mile island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima seem to be forgotten too quickly.
I'm sure you understand the argument for commercial flight being safer per mile than most other forms of travel despite the potential catastrophe of a plane crash. The argument for nuclear is identical.
The combustion of fossil fuels regularly kills 4.2 million people per year, year after year and counting. The combustion of renewable biofuel kills 3.8 million/year (WHO numbers [1]).
Chernobyl directly killed between 60-80 with acute radiation syndrome and caused up to 4000 cancer deaths [2]. Fukushima radiation killed between zero and one person, depending who you ask [3]. TMI killed zero.
So, running the numbers, you see that fossil + biofuel kill the entire death footprint of the entire commercial nuclear industry very 7.5 hours and counting. Thus, from a safety perspective, nuclear is a no-brainer, despite the fact that it seems overly hazardous due to the way the stories come out.
I am not sure this is a good argument, if only because the upper bound potential for damage is so much higher.
> the combustion of fossil fuels regularly kills 4.2 million people per year, year after year and counting. The combustion of renewable biofuel kills 3.8 million/year (WHO numbers [1]).
Your link is on air pollution, NOT fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are gross, dirty, and far-too-lobbied. However, even in your own link, there is reference to cook fires, and I would be willing to bet that a lot of that pollution is from industrial processing and lack of regulation as opposed to just fossil fuel.
> Chernobyl directly killed between 60-80 with acute radiation syndrome and caused up to 4000 cancer deaths [2]. Fukushima radiation killed between zero and one person, depending who you ask [3]. TMI killed zero.
The numbers you site are not in your link. It says 6,000 children with thyroid cancer, and I would be willing to bet the actual damage is way, way higher than reported. Esp due to the nature of the soviet union and the fallout and radiation spread across Eastern Europe cannot have a counterfactual for cancer rates.
The real issue is that the potential of Nuclear is to make whole swaths of the planet uninhabitable. This is also where your flight analogy falls apart. The upper bound of death for a single plane crash is ~300 people on the flight + (a few thousand, god forbid) if it hits something critical as it falls. The upper bound for nuclear is... unimaginable?
Edit/afterthought. In your profile, I saw that you are a nuclear scientist. I think you should disclose that career bias when you argue for this.
DISCLAIMER: I am a nuclear expert who got into nuclear to help fight climate change.
> if only because the upper bound potential for damage is so much higher.
Chernobyl was a nuclear excursion that blew the roof wide open and shot fuel out into the air. Air rushed in and ignited a nearly inextinguishable graphite fire that propelled the nuclear fuel high into the atmosphere. There was no containment structure around the core. And yet this killed 60+ people, caused up to 4000 early cancer deaths, and (yes) did cause a bunch of thyroid cancers. (Fortunately, thyroid cancers are usually treatable. Not saying they're ok, but not fatal like fossil + biofuel air pollution).
I would claim that Chernobyl is a reasonable example of a nearly-worst-case nuclear reactor accident. With modern reactors having containments, it's hard to postulate radiation releases of that magnitude. Case in point, Fukushima was 3 meltdowns and had much less radiation release and therefore health impact. I don't think saying nuclear reactor accidents are nearly unbounded wildly beyond Chernobyl is reasonable.
And again, fossil + biofuel kill a Chernobyl's worth of people every 7.5 hours...! The WHO numbers linked are due to the fossil fuel + biofuel. I'll link more detailed meta-analyses below.
Also, the area around Chernobyl is not really uninhabitable at all [1]
As for thinking the UNSCEAR values on deaths are a sham, yeah I mean Greenpeace has been saying against all scientific consensus that the impacts are way higher for years. But the science does not support that. UNSCEAR is basically like the IPCC for nuclear.
I highly recommend listening e.g. to Gerry Thomas on this topic for details. [2]
> I am a nuclear expert who got into nuclear to help fight climate change.
I think that is very noble. I am thinking of eventually moving my career to solar or wind for the same motivations.
Chernobyl was partially contained, it could have gone far, far worse. IIRC only 1 of 4 reactors exploded? I suppose hypotheticals are not extremely useful, but what is the hypothetical upper bound on the most catastrophic nuclear scenario?
The hypothetical upper bound of a reactor accident is that 1 radioactive atom gets inhaled by each creature on Earth and the decay of that atom causes a fatal cancer and every living thing dies.
There are ~equally unlikely life-ending upper bounds of all energy sources. For example, you could have world-ending wars and famines from solar and wind if a superlarge volcano largely blocks out the sun for a few years. Or they could lead to world-ending land wars over sunny and windy areas.
Today, in reality, we have clear and present and known dangers like fossil and biofuel that are currently killing millions and also causing climate change. These things make 84% of our primary energy as a world today. Shifting away from these things to the things low on the ourworldindata graphic above (low carbon, low risk) is a net benefit. Worrying about exceedingly unlikely worst cases is not necessarily productive or useful. Considering them is well and good, sure. But IMHO one must dismiss them quickly based on 60 years of operational experience.
In other words, if someone is currently attacking you and you can pepper spray them, it's probably better to do so than to worry about whether or not the pepper will cause the house to combust.
I'm wondering whether the point you're making can be made even stronger.
I would phrase your argument as simple as: you estimate the world is much more likely to become uninhabitable if we don't use nuclear.
What's the worst case of not using nuclear? It's the same as the best case of using it. Best case, nuclear would enable us to entirely phase out fossil fuel energy production, reducing the world's CO2 production by 25%, reducing green house emissions to the point that large parts of the planet no longer become uninhabitable.
I do not understand the argument for hydroelectric. The risk never seems worth the reward. Clean now? Yes. Cheap now? Yes. Potentially catastrophic? Yes. This feels like an unnecessary risk to take on. The lessons of Banqiao Dam, Vajont Dam, and Sempor Dam seem to be forgotten too quickly.
Despite that I think that both nuclearpower and hydropower are good and safe sources of electricity.
> (Not that there's ever been a spontaneous failure of that kind at an AGR, but current disaster planning tends to emphasize scenarios such as a fully-fuelled 747 flying straight into the plant at full speed -- can't think why.)
You get a nice view of the buildings from the train on the East Coast Main Line. The plant is still controlled by Ferrani Argus 1980s-era computers running CORAL.
> Just to point out that Stross's blog is running off an elderly PC in his office, so no surprise that when it makes the front page on HN (twice in two days now) it gets slashdotted.
> (Note: there are no photographs; nor did I take a notepad, so I'm writing this from memory. Cameras were verboten -- not because of security, but as an operational precaution. For starters, some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the past, triggering a generator trip; for seconds, we had to wear protective clothing -- try explaining to a visitor that their expensive Nikon has been contaminated and needs to be left behind!)
