this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Are you arguing its a "good thing" for existing built plants or for propose plants yet to be built? I wasn't sure, but the result is the same for both. Nuclear is too expensive for what it provides in the face of better alternatives. I'm happy to back my statements with sources. Which position were you arguing?
There is one thing that new nuclear reactor designs can provide that there is no good alternative for, and that's consuming existing nuclear fuel. We can use breeder tractors to convert our existing waste into usable fuel for newer reactor types (I want to say Thorium but I'm not positive).
Our best outlook for the future is for us to build at least as much of these are necessary to clean up our nuclear waste.
Building reactors just to reprocess fuel would be a really bad way to solve that problem. If we are requiring reprocessing, there are other countries that run these that we could just ship our fuel to.
Breeder reactors bring some serious security problems
One of the really great things about civilian nuclear power in the USA is that the fuel or waste can never be built into a nuclear bomb. Our reactors run on Uranium-238. This is the most common isotope of uranium and its plenty fissile to reach criticality for power generation. Nuclear bombs use Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239.
The way a Breeder reactor can reprocess fuel is by turning "spent" Uranium-238 into, you guessed it, Plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 can be used to generate electricity in reactors too. So now you've got civilian power plants that are housing and handling weapons grade nuclear material. The security of the facility, supply chain, workers and everything suddenly has to go through the roof. All of those things increase the total costs to the resulting electricity. With nuclear already being more expensive than other cleaner and dirtier alternatives, running Breeder reactors makes that nuclear power yet more expensive again!
Those are certainly difficulties that we'll need to address. The plutonium especially. I think we could design ways however to keep it secure. It would certainly need to be carefully designed though.
We certainly could. We do it already today in the USA with our nuclear weapons (which use Plutonium). Its all possible, its just expensive. So much so that it makes an expensive power source (nuclear) even more expensive. Why would we do this when solar costs 5 times less than regular civilian nuclear power?
There's no magic bullet to our problems. Solar has issues with storage and varies day to day with the weather. I've got no issue making it a large supply of our energy, but we'll need generation sources for cloudy days. We can't presume the battery storage will be full every time we need it and it's cloudy out.
Who's suggesting there's a magic bullet? Certainly not me.
My argument is that nuclear isn't it.
Fair enough -- what do you propose we use instead?
Solar PV, wind, and hydro where we can. Geothermal in the very few places we can.
Combined cycle gas-turbine (CCGT) methane everywhere else.
My position is simply that it's a good sign if nuclear power is more expensive than other types. We should be suspicious of anything that claims to offer a better deal.
What an unusual stance. You eluded to the externalities of other sources as your concern. For coal I would agree. However, for wind and solar the studies have shown those to be substantially cheaper even with externalities factored in.
What do you base your reasoning on that wind and solar are not factoring in externalities?
My understanding is that wind and PV solar power are similar to most other industries besides nuclear power in that the management of the lifecycles of such deployments isn't well planned or funded. I myself have encountered a derelict wind farm and I have to wonder if that's just the way it's supposed to go after investors extract their short-term profits. As these renewable projects decline in performance (both in terms of actual electricity production and fictional financial viability), I guess the horizon will just keep collecting their skeletons.
This doesn't seem like a strong argument against wind that a wind farm planned for a 20 year life ran for 20 years, and was then dismantled.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I can only make some assumptions about where the gravity is for your point.
I'm interested in your viewpoint.
I am not arguing either of those points. My viewpoint is that we need big, expensive, state run power projects to really knock out fossil fuels rather than contriving financial products like renewable energy credits to attract private investment in PV solar and wind. I think nuclear power (and possibly concentrated solar and deep well geothermal power) is better suited to the task than PV solar and wind because they avoid the perpetual transition trap. We need hard, discrete, inalienable power facilities close by to where people live and work not just for cogeneration opportunities, but also so that the people come to see themselves as the true owners of this infrastructure. Wind farms tend to be remote, dispersed, and abstracted from the people consuming their output; therefore better suited to serve capital while never significantly threatening fossil fuel investments. It's a dead end, hence the skeletons on the horizon analogy. Perhaps it's more of an opportunity cost than an externality in the sense that we'd be leaving on the table real progress to zero-emissions by resisting nuclear power deployment in favor of plans that allow and require continued dependence on fossil fuels.
Maybe a case can be made for massive offshore wind farms for the sake of having a diverse energy mix or if there isn't a reliable supply of nuclear fuel. Otherwise, why spread out operations over thousands of square miles of ocean, accessible only by diesel powered ships, when you could have nuclear plants on shore occupying a few hundred acres, within easy reach of electrified public transit, supplying good heat and steam to homes and industry in addition to electricity? The answer would seem like some combination of nimbyism, defeatism, and subservience to fossil fuel interests.