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Notes -
This is the reason why France has the nuclear system it does- it was de Gaulle's baby precisely because the US doesn't have French (or European) interests at heart. France was under [his] military dictatorship at the time, which helped get things moving.
He was right, of course; both in 1973 with the US-caused oil shortage and then in 2022 with the US-caused LNG shortage.
It's not so much that as it is completely obviating the need to resupply with fuel. And, especially relevant for submarines, nuclear power functions even with a complete lack of oxygen, so doing that is a no-brainer.
It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night. Lighting a fire is the classic method to get energy at that time, but "magic hot rock" is fine too.
I once heard stated that the reason it's difficult to get good output from nuclear is because they simply can't run the reaction hot enough- hence the emphasis on exotic coolants (molten salt, etc.)- whereas with LNG the exhaust heat is sufficiently hot that you can heat the steam driving a secondary turbine to the point where it's very, very efficient. Of course, because we want to reserve the right to quench the reactor if it gets too hot for... certain reasons, we'd like a coolant that doesn't make the problem worse if we do that. At least with LNG you can turn the gas off and the reaction will stop.
I suspect that China’s interest in nuclear power and renewable energy (and coal) are similar to De Gaul’s. China wants a diversified energy portfolio so that they don’t have a single critical failure point built into their economy.
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"Work" is the key sticking point here - does it provide enough energy to pay for itself? To pay for the extraction of the raw material from the ground, refinement into usable fuel pellets, transportation to the plant, the construction of the plant, the lives of the people who run it and then on top of that provide usable power for the rest of the society that sustains it? The answer is, at present, "No."
That's the entire basis of my objection - even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment, nuclear just can't pay for itself. Every single existing nuclear program I'm aware of is made viable on the basis of government subsidies or exploitation (i.e. the hilarious prices France paid for Nigerian uranium). Every single proposed nuclear program that doesn't have these problems (fusion, molten salt, thorium, etc) is 20 years in the future, and has been 20 years in the future for the past 60 years.
The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.
I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
I'm not accusing you of any personal ideological hypocrisy of not being against mining pollution enough. It's just that the theoretical possibility of some post-civilizational-collapse humans being poisoned two hundred years from now, because the concrete box, that we store spent fuel in, eroded away is a laughably insignificant concern. Where are the policy initiatives for deep geological storage of solar panels and solar panel production waste that guarantees no environmental damage for the next X thousand years? Why is nuclear power singled out as the one human activity where we have to spend billions to make sure that no living being in any possible future timeline thousands of years in the future is harmed by some byproduct? Why do we not simply accept that in every country there is one warehouse that requires some minimal continued maintenance effort to remain safe to people in the immediate surroundings? Remember, numerous other such buildings exist right now. Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
The environmental damage from the creation of solar panels comes from the mining of the components used to create them as well as their manufacture. They are mostly made out of glass and aluminum which doesn't actually cause any serious environmental damage, though there are some trace amounts of nasty chemicals. If every single solar panel in use today was abandoned after humanity got wiped out in a second, the environmental damage would be minimal. The two problems just aren't really that comparable.
Because nuclear waste remains dangerous for that long. But moreover, it isn't - if we were actually being rational, global warming and the flooding of the atmosphere with the byproducts of fossil fuels would demand even more attention. But we're not going to care until it is too late, because the consequences of global warming will come after the people currently making decisions are long dead - you, me and our descendants will have to deal with those problems but the people in power right now won't.
Let's go with these numbers: https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-of-toxic-materials-like-cadmium-and-lead/
this says 4400 tons of lead are contained in 92GW of solar panels. So that is roughly 4400 tons of lead for 30*years*92GW of energy. I assume this is peak capacity, so at a capacity factor of around 20% we get 4400 tons of lead for 0.6TWy.
Wikipedia says:
Which gives 15000-18000 tons of HLW for 0.6TWy or about 4x the amount. The numbers are very much comparable, and I think I was pretty fair to either technology. Presumably, PV has more production waste due to the much larger volume of stuff and I don't care enough to research things like the impact of mining waste for things like the copper content in PV modules vs. Uranium mining. If we also, say, limit the analysis to Germany where the PV capacity factor is 10% or bias our valuation of baseload energy production more highly, or we include battery waste it's not too hard to get numbers where Nuclear comes out on top.
I feel like you're refusing to engage with the argument. Lead and spent nuclear fuel have pretty much identical environmental risk profiles after a few decades. It's just that the other energy technologies are much better at diluting their waste throughout the environment.
Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.
Lead is actually substantially easier to safely re-use than spent nuclear fuel - to the best of my knowledge, solar panels don't actually do anything to the lead which renders it irreversibly unusable. If you have evidence that you can't actually reuse the components or materials placed into solar panels I'd love to see it.
Except nuclear waste is more dangerous for far longer and less re-usable, which makes the comparison pointless.
What argument? I'm unfamiliar with any scientific literature that makes the case spent solar panels are as environmentally damaging as nuclear waste. Nuclear waste continues to irradiate anything around it for an incredibly long time, while lead...well, I wouldn't want to drink it or use it in my pipes, but lead is actually a useful metal that can be repurposed safely.
Collapse doesn't actually take place overnight - the US and Europe are collapsing right now, and the collapse of the Roman empire took hundreds of years to play out fully. But this question doesn't mean terribly much because you wouldn't be safe anywhere if civilisation collapsed overnight. If you want to talk specifically about the dangers of chemical storage, then it depends on exactly what's stored there and how. I personally wouldn't want to start growing crops on a chemical storage facility, but I think the bigger danger from a chemical storage area at a port would be that it gets into the ocean after sea levels rise... but that's going to be significantly delayed if civilisation collapses and we stop burning fossil fuels anyway.
This is meaningless without quantities though. Everything is irradiated at all times from ordinary nuclear decay, cosmic rays, and solar radiation. It is a manageable hazard. After a long time, the quantity of radiation emitted is going to flatten out to a hazard lower than the chemical toxicity you dismiss.
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If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em. Presumably they're going through some horrible Max Max/Dark Ages thing to have regressed so far, and a bunch of radiation deep underground in the desert is the least of their problems. This is just papier-mache moral grandstanding, hence your need to resort to snark - it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question) to your actual immediate descendants than to prioritize some hypothetical 3035 descendant who finds themselves building a hut in whatever godforsaken place we put a waste dump in.
I'd feel ashamed if I ever said that about my descendants. I think this might be a case of differing moral frameworks - I really can't relate to this perspective.
What snark?
"Bracketing the cost question" lmao. If you don't care about the cost of the power produced then there's no point even talking about the viability of different energy sources at all. Assuming I misunderstood what you meant here... If nuclear power actually did provide clean, cheap power that was too cheap to meter then there would actually be a real discussion to have here but it doesn't! It has failed to do so for decades, and I see no signs that this will change in the near future. What we actually get is power that is more expensive than fossil fuels or renewables and creates a huge waste problem on top of that. My government's chief scientific body recently produced a report on the relative cost of different energy sources, and nuclear ended up being roughly twice as expensive as solar/wind (https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2025/July/2024-25-GenCost-Final-Report).
My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025. Yeah, I care somewhat about these hypothetical people, but not so much that I would sacrifice real gains for my children and grandchildren because someday, in a scenario of civilizational collapse where they're all fucked anyway, one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it. The reality is, either we keep going along the trajectory of technological progress, or life for our descendants will be so much worse that nuclear waste will be the least of their troubles, and I'm happy to judge them for failing the project of human civilization.
You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants. Come on, man, you knew exactly what you were saying when you wrote that sentence.
I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters - even if I disagree with your position, seeing you argue that will be productive and we can learn new things. I'm saying that the long-term waste storage argument is an irrelevant distraction from the cost argument.
I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.
Except that nuclear waste runoff won't be limited to that stream. What bodies of water will that stream feed into? What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future. That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain. Nature will adapt, for sure, but humans don't evolve nearly as quickly as wolves or bacteria - and the evolution of radiation resistance via natural selection would involve incredible amounts of human suffering and pain.
I don't think that qualifies as snark - not caring about the fate of the Earth is a fairly common position among a lot of rationalist circles, especially ones who believe we will colonise space or discover AGI in short order.
Sure, here's the debate: Barring a dramatic increase in EROEI, nuclear power is uncompetitive with solar and other renewables. While it is the appropriate solution for some limited circumstances (nuclear submarines, having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium, etc), it is no way an actual answer to the energy crisis rapidly approaching the world.
Far from being an irrelevant distraction from the argument, nuclear waste and the proper safekeeping/disposal of it is one of the bigger contributors to the EROEI problems of nuclear power. When the final accounting is done, the costs of that storage could leave nuclear power with a negative EROEI - we would have been better off simply not doing it at all save for the generation of certain medically and scientifically useful isotopes.
I get that. But, as a modern man, I would have no similarity to descendants a thousand years in the future who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste. Maybe they've regressed to feudal peasantry, maybe they're killing each other over the last hydrocarbons - it doesn't matter. They might as well be animals. To share values with us as modern men is to move forward and overcome problems, not to stagnate and regress. I would have nothing but contempt for my descendants if they're mindlessly drinking the runoff from a nuclear waste dump, dressed in furs and oxhide; let the dying sun swallow them.
Please, tell me what dreadfully important ecosystems draw on the western Nevada desert for water? It's a desert for a reason. We have an awful lot of waste land going, and we could easily find the most useless parts of it and drill deep holes, if it wasn't for the eternal whining of the native bitter-enders still living out there. We can also just bury it in the Canadian Shield in some area where the watershed drains north, I'd assume the post-apocalyptic Inuit would be happy to hunt walruses that glow in the dark.
At this point I'm starting to take you less seriously. Do you actually believe that the storage of depleted nuclear waste deep underground, leaching through the groundwater to aquifers over the centuries, and then to the ocean, diluted in billions of gallons of water, is going to turn into radioactive rain?
Raw Uranium is currently $75/lb after China's big buildout has been priced in. Double or triple that to get it in the reactor, and it's still not a major cost in nuclear's economics. It's all capital costs for building and decommissioning, running costs are a rounding error. I'm very open to the argument that the cost of building nuclear power isn't due to excessive regulation, but due to the inherent difficulty of containing a nuclear reaction in a safe vessel. But if your argument for why France's program is cheaper is because the least economically important input is slightly cheaper than getting it from Australia, I think you need better arguments.
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At that level of dilution, the radioactivity would not be detectable above background, let alone acutely hazardous.
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China actually started up a molten salt 'thorium' (eg, starting with uranium, then moving to thorium) reactor last year, with the first full thorium cycle this November. I'm not optimistic about its effectiveness, but that's more because it's a lot more complicated than it needs to be, rather than net energy or net cost problems.
A lot of the various cost problems with nuclear plants reflect political willpower, rather than actual material costs. That's most serious in the United States where we've intentionally made them several times harder to produce at the same time that the control and construction technology has gotten much much better, but most western governments have done something similar. (or just had politicians launch rockets directly at the construction sites.)
There's a revealed preferences sense where, if you can't solve those political problems, you can't produce power at price, and it's not entirely wrong. But it's misleading to treat it as a physics problem.
I actually mentioned this in an earlier post. If they can safely generate power with a good EROEI, great!
You're right that there's definitely a political aspect holding nuclear power back - the fact that you can't find enough subsaharan africans with degrees in advanced nuclear physics to meet diversity requirements most definitely imposes an additional cost on American/European nuclear power efforts. But some of those policy restrictions are actually extremely sensible and following them imposes lower costs on society as a whole. Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation. Building nuclear reactors on earthquake fault lines is in fact a bad idea, as is building them in floodplains or directly next to the sea. Your nuclear reactor should also be built to rigorous construction standards rather than relying on cheap contractors who half-arse everything and replace a bunch of structural cement with styrofoam to reduce construction costs.
Do all of those regulations impose additional costs? Absolutely. But at the same time, they prevent much larger and more expensive consequences from showing up later. I'm not going to deny that some of those regulations are bad - mandating that half of your construction workers are women of colour imposes additional costs for negative benefit. But I don't think many people can accurately determine which regulations fall into the former category and which fall into the latter.
Nobody reasonable wants to throw nuclear waste into the river. What reasonable people want is to vitrify it and then keep it in containers in a parking lot-sized storage yard in the middle of nowhere and enventually maybe reprocess it.
The unreasonable people want to spend ridiculous amounts of money to bury it all underground or something because nuclear waste remains radioactive for millions of years and let's ignore the fact that the longer half-life something has, the less dangerous it is.
The unreasonable people don’t even want to do that, they want to try to bribe really poor communities to have storage facilities near them, then decide better of it and just hold onto it.
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At the risk of embarrassing myself, I feel like I could pretty easily sort them into 'yes' (most of the stuff you mentioned), 'no', and 'demands further enquiry' if I didn't have political considerations to worry about.
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Then nothing is cost-effective except for fossil fuels and hydroelectricity, ultimately.
But we already knew that; that's why banning their use is such a powerful socioeconomic weapon. Nuclear just happens to be both the closest you get to viability (since the plants from the '70s and '80s seem to be doing just fine; that was back when construction and labor were way cheaper though) and something that's arguably worth funneling research dollars into from a materials science perspective.
This line always frustrates me because this is an isolated demand for rigor. Mine drainage (and it is a rather interesting flex that a modern mining company saw fit to name itself after the most expansive environmental mining disaster zone in human history- that being the Rio Tinto, which is what that's a picture of) will kill future Fred Flintstone far more quickly than anything else will. Fortunately, we discovered radioactivity before we invented the backhoe.
And I get that you have to convince John Q. Public of that, who will never come around in their lifetimes thanks, ironically enough, to radiation exposure (they sat too close to the TV while watching Simpsons reruns). Which is why you basically can't do this until you have a military that will deal with that.
Correct! Hell, forget about cost - there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels.
Nature is already going to do that for us - not only are the fossil fuels going to eventually run out, rational human beings prioritised the easiest-to-access and most efficient stores of fossil fuels. The energy return on energy invested of conventional fossil fuels is going down, and the EROEI of shale and fracking is even worse.
No, not at all. I believe mining should be heavily regulated, especially when it comes to disposal of hazardous and toxic wastes. Allowing people to pollute and destroy the biosphere imposes immense costs on the rest of society - it is a form of abusing the commons, and is ultimately substantially more expensive than properly disposing of the waste. It's just that the cost is paid by the rest of society as opposed to the mining companies.
How long are you going to be waiting? We've already hit peak conventional oil, and tight oil is significantly less competitive on an EROEI basis (which is the only basis that actually matters). Nuclear power, barring some great new discovery or innovation(which, to their credit, the Chinese may have actually achieved), will remain on the shelves in most cases because it is just not capable of functioning as a viable replacement for fossil fuels due to the poor EROEI.
Isn’t there quite a bit of easy to access fossil fuels that are off limits for political reasons, eg Venezuela’s dictator not trusting anybody capable of drilling?
Venezuela's oil is notably low quality and requires extensive processing before it is usable - and they actually are drilling for oil anyway for export to China. The last time I ran the numbers, Venezuela's oil reserves, if totally extracted, would be able to power the current global economy for less than a decade assuming zero economic growth. While there's likely to be significant demand destruction due to the US economy imploding to the degree that the administration won't even publish the numbers anymore, Venezuela's oil just isn't worth the squeeze - and even if it was, it won't last for long.
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