Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance. EVs would be a no brainer Natural gas would be obsolete. Nuclear desalination would completely solve the water crisis in the US West. I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age. Really the possibilities are incredible. It would be the equivalent of humanity going from horse and buggy to using fossil fuels, but another order of magnitude.
In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables.
EDIT: I feel like people are focusing on the wrong point here. I was apparently—and unintentionally—disingenuous by touting Germany’s success in replacing coal power with renewables, as compared to France. However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
> In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
Rarely have I seen reality mistreated so blatantly.
France has barely used coal in the last 4 decades, and so it seems to be enough to claim that, by slowly reducing their coal use, Germany does much better.
That reminds me of the popular definition of chutzpah: the person that asks for mercy after murdering his parents, since, afterall, he's now an orphan.
> However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
Your main point is wrong. [1] shows that each model has experienced faster build time as new units were built. What is true is that new, more advanced designs can take more time to build than older, less advanced designs.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%...
That sounds a less impressive when you rephrase it as saying they went from 15x more coal use than france to 9x as much. Percentage wise the decrease seems similar in the last few years.
source: https://www.iea.org/countries/france https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and had instead merely key up the pace, our grid wouldn't be 20% nuclear like it is today, it would be 100% nuclear.
Instead, we made the choice to pump 20 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere while we waited for solar and wind to become viable. I'm glad they finally are -- they just broke into double digits, in a few years they will pass the nuclear buildout we stopped in the 80s -- but that was one helluva waiting cost.
Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger.
On the other hand, the costs grew because the standards for risk grew to tremendous levels that are way, way above those applied for the coal and gas industries, or wind and solar for that matter.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
The wiki article you linked says the plant was unfinished. This would indicate the attack was a protest against the construction of the plant, not an attempt to induce a nuclear meltdown. You are perhaps unintentionally twisting the facts.
Absolutely true. It proved expensive even at large scale and with full support of the state. I don't trust promises or hypotheticals of cheap nuclear power, at all.
But here's the thing: France succeeded with decarbonizing their electricity production. It's a pretty notable success. Yes, it was (and remains) expensive and yes those plants are now failing often, remaining expensive ober their whole lifetime. But it worked and France could afford it.
I'd argue many other countries could afford it as well. The German electricity mix is a lot dirtier by comparison.
failing plants due to their age and maintenance resulting in less nuclear power in the long run say otherwise
France uses 20x less coal than Germany to begin with (https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...) so I'm not sure about the comparison of reducing consumption
Also, during the recent conflict with Russia, Germany is turning coal plants back online and France is not.
Domestic coal consumption figures are meaningless.
Germany is like 40% coal, and France is maybe 5%. It's easier to reduce at a faster rate when your use is still massive.
Historically the countries that invested in nuclear and hydro have been most successful in lowering the carbon intensity of their energy sector. Looking at the data, Germany does not appear to be nearly as successful as France. In 2021 France's electricity averaged 68 gCO2/kWh, and Germany averaged 364 gCO2/kWh.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?t...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Economies of scale were applied from the inception of commercial nuclear power, yet the promise of electricity too cheap to meter has never materialized. Quite the opposite. In fact, nuclear has always been the most expensive method of generating electricity, and the anti-nukes don't enter into it. Even if every individual on the planet was pro-nuke, it would still be too expensive. If it was otherwise, nothing whatsoever could prevent investors from coming out of the woodwork to fulfill your dream of nuclear power plants everywhere. Make nuclear energy economical and you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, as well as being absurdly wealthy. But when you fail, try to avoid blaming anything other than nuclear energy itself.
The short version is, you need to have enough generations of reactor building to allow later projects to benefit from previous learnings. Because of various outside effects (this is a euphemism for the anti-nuke lobby) that type of iterative improvement and workforce skilling didn’t happen in other countries.
The same will be true of fusion. Set a target level of service and make electric generation a government service. The government is better at capital projects anyway and if energy were a taxpayer funded service it would transform society in many ways.
Just wonder if we're pricing in those externalities from coal, like hundreds of thousands of deaths per year due to air pollution and the fact that it is completely fucking up the atmosphere, leading to a global catastrophe. Because...we're not.
Some of the costs/risks with nuclear are a bit black swannish though which complicates matters.
Energy efficiency, pollution controls and carbon taxes are the real magical tech we've not exploited.
Because cheaper in the long run means more expensive right now, which is a vulnerable political soft spot that psycopaths can easily exploit.
Even in France, which has a very supportive population, and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they build more of the same reactor model.
Construction productivity doesn't increase like manufacturing productivity does. Nuclear's failures are, as far as I can tell, entirely the responsibility of those tasked with building it. And it's quite possible that nuclear only makes sense at a certain level of economic development, with the right level of technology, but not too much technological development such that manufacturing has completely eclipsed construction.
Go to any investor that would build nuclear, and they won't cite public opposition as the reason not to build, they will cite the construction risk.
And that's why this SMR design is being tried rather than large reactors.
https://energypost.eu/how-profitable-is-an-investment-in-nuc...
And France, with many Nuclear plants, has recently had issues keeping the plants up. Many of the most problematic plants are newer ones.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-3939/frances-energy-woes-wo...
The reality is economies of scale have kicked in for solar and wind energy in a way they never can for nuclear. We are at the point where it makes sense, at times, to overprovision renewals to ensure enough supply.
The issue with renewables is storage, of course. But that problem looks to be more solvable than cost effective nuclear, a problem which we have not solved in over 50 years. One can say if we were only smarter we could make nuclear more cost effective, which is probably true. But we built a nuclear power plant where a tsunami occurred in the past, only to find it occurred again, so we aren't that smart. The issue with nuclear is everything has to be right for it to be cost effective and safe, and nuclear is too complex for humans to consistently do this.
Safe nuclear power that is also cost effective is not a problem we have solved.
It’s really hard to invest billions of capital dollars that won’t produce any return for a decade while you can realize immediate return on solar with costs that drop every year.
Accountants are the worst enemy of nuclear, not activists.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower-waste-id...
'Former President Jimmy Carter halted reprocessing in 1977, citing proliferation concerns.'
Truly glad we prevented a few assholes corporations from making a mess of things. I get grossed out just thinking about the clean air and normal climate.
it doesn't matter they were USSR. might as well have been PG&E. soviet people and usa people were both just people and still are.
1 https://www.perkinelmer.com/au/product/cesium-137-calibratio...
I'm absolutely certain of it. In regards to nuclear rocketry, it wasn't even the anti-nuclear crowd that killed one of the most promising technologies but they certainly guaranteed it would die in the dustbins of JPL's archive.
NASA and the United Aircraft Corporation came up with a reactor design called the nuclear lightbulb [1] that used tens of kilograms of uranium instead of thousands by heating uranium hexaflouride [^1] to a plasma and using an irrotational vortex [^2] of neon gas to compress it until it became a self sustaining [^3] black body radiator [^4]. They were just about to test the reactor with real fuel when it was canceled (during Nixon's administration as part of the Mars program) but they managed to experimentally identify the remaining production challenges like the computational power needed to keep the core stable and the material science necessary to separate the vortex from the fluid economically. There has been so much progress in fields that address those challenges that many of the problems are considered solved and the remainder are surmountable engineering problems.
I really hope with this renewed interest in nuclear someone eventually revives the design and tries to bring it to its conclusion. Just based off of the declassified publications from the 60s and early 70s [2][3][4][5] it is obvious how much potential this design had: it's safe [^5], useful for rocketry and terrestrial power generation, and self breeding by nature of its design [^6]. Who knows where we could be in space exploration and the battle against climate change had the design been fully explored.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018850
[3] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018851
[4] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710010820
[5] and many more in the JPL archives! Search for "gas core reactor"
[^1] UF6 is the most common intermediate in the enrichment process and depleted UF6 is how most of our nuclear waste is stored... and this reactor is a perfect breeding reactor for the waste (see [^5]). All of the infrastructure for dealing with the materials have existed since the Manhattan project.
[^2] the opposite of a rotational vortex like a tornado, which have calm centers. In an irrotational vortex the particles in the center have the highest velocity and in the reactor it acts like a centrifuge, forcing the uraninum to the center and compressing it to tens or hundreds of atmospheres. This part was tested experimentally.
[^3] the energy of the plasma and compression from the vortex increase the neutron cross section to the point where the nuclear reaction becomes self heating with only 20kg of fuel. They stopped just short of testing the full cycle but this is the same concept behind nuclear weapons, which use precise explosives to compress nuclear fuel until it reaches criticality, except the vortex can't generate the kind of pressures necessary for a nuclear explosion.
[^4] the NASA/UAC design heats the UF6 till it radiates most of its energy away as UV. Classical steam turbines or hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles (in the case of a rocket engine) allow the system to extract power.
[^5] since it's an active design, tons of power is required to pump the vortex and keep the core in a fissile regime. If any part of the system fails, the core loses pressure and becomes a really expensive gas canister until the chamber is cleaned up and the core restarted. With a plasma window separating the core from a vacuum, the entire system can be designed to depressurize safetly.
[^6] anything injected into the core gets bombarded by neutrons and the vortex system constantly wicks away small amounts of the core. The system forms a closed loop that recycles unused fuel via centrifuge and it can also separate out transmuted waste [*]. The NASA/UAC team tested this with a neutron gun to simulate fission in the core.
[*] we could have had honest-to-god alchemy!
