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.
> 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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning