I want to write some points, why nuclear probably will not play any significant role going forward:
- In 1000 tonnes of uranium ore, there is 1 tonne of uranium. This contains about 0,7% U-235 used as fuel in most civilian applications. U-235 is used in the fuel in concentrations of about 3-5%. In the end, from a tonne of uranium, you can make about 100 kg of fuel used by a nuclear reactor. This is all used up in about a day in a largish installation. So you have to dig and process 1000 tonnes of ore each day to keep a 1 GW electrical output reactor running. The recycling of the fuel isn't economical unless you have a nuclear military program or want to do some research with various isotopes. That doesn't seem like a huge improvement compared to coal, gas and oil. Nuclear just isn't very clean in this respect either.
- The technology and mentality of how we build actual nuclear reactors is stuck at best in the 1980s. This might change, but there isn't any conceptually new reactor running in production anywhere. Compared to wind and solar, where replacement with better technology is the norm, this is just nuts. Also, wind and solar starts to be competitive to fossil fuels when producing electricity in some cases.
- Solar and wind don't have to produce stable output if the output is very cheap. In such a case, it will be economical to build better transmission lines, motivate consumers to adjust use based on production capacity and finally invest in clever energy storage projects. Good transmission lines (which we will need anyway, because of EVs and other electricity consumers) will spread out the production and load in such a way that the Central Limit Theorem will guarantee something similar to the traditional "base load" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem Cheap batteries acting basically as grid capacitors will smooth out most of the peaks in production or demand, which will make the whole thing more economical still. (As we can already see in several places.)
- For winters, long term energy storage from the summer or very good inter-continental transmission lines are needed. This is not a solved problem but we still have plenty of time to think about solutions, but we really should think about them. Just building something conceptually stuck in the 1980s that is more expensive just to ensure we have electricity and perhaps heat in the winter without having to think about perhaps more efficient solutions doesn't seem like a situation we want to be in. We can decommission existing power plants over the next 10-20 years, while we think about storing the energy/ producing energy intensive stuff mostly in the summer or something like that. There is e.g. the possibility to produce ammonia, sodium metal or something else with excess energy that we can transform into electricity in the winter. There is also HVDC lines that might actually connect continents, which would solve some of this as well. There really is plenty of energy in wind, solar, tides/ waves, etc. that we can use. If it is produced at a low enough price, we might be able to throw some even rather substantial portion of useful energy away to transport it to the consumers be it on a different continent and still end up with cheaper power.
It might be more economical to buy storage to have enough for the winter or to transport some form of fuel. I think, the reality will be a mix of all approaches.
- We might do a better job of insulating our homes and more stuff like that to reduce some obviously inefficient use of electricity (e.g. for "just" heating, cooling, drying). Actually making infrastructure better is a good long term investment as it enables new approaches to solving problems and makes the quality of living better for everybody but especially for the less affluent.
- Nuclear is regulated as hell, where wind and solar isn't really all that much. Wind and solar is very flexible, as can be seen in poor bu sunny countries, where solar is a way to have electricity most of the time without having to worry about diesel (or uranium for that matter). Some people have a much better quality of living thanks to the dropping price of solar electricity in their circumstances and they don't have to ask anybody for permission to use solar. They just throw it on the roof of a hut and have enough electricity to power a phone and a battery so they have light at night. They can now communicate e.g. about the price of their produce and educate themselves. These people will not see nuclear or fossil fuels as a solution when they progress into the middle class, where they actually can affect some things e.g. by engineering infrastructure solutions.
- Nuclear always has the risk of a nuclear meltdown, which just isn't an option in large population centres. We humans are just too error prone to be able to reliably design and handle this. Because we are quite risk averse and have all the preventive measures (that have failed multiple times already) the cost of producing nuclear power just skyrockets.
- Finally, if there were no nuclear reactors, it would be even more uneconomical to keep a large stockpile of nuclear weapons or to power attack submarines and other stuff that is made only for the purpose to solve problems by force. Perhaps there is some advantage to the fear of guaranteed destruction but in reality, we just wage wars using ransomware and proxy countries - nuclear weapons aren't useful there at all.
The other uses of nuclear science e.g. in scientific instruments, medicine etc. can be done without nuclear being used to produce electrical power. We will have the current reactors for perhaps at least two more decades, so we have time to think about this even without building any new nuclear power generating capacity.
Once your consider the x-axis of time, I think it's clear that nuclear will not help us decarbonise, or at best will be a bit player. If nuclear becomes useful, it will likely be after we have already solved carbon-free energy systems, and come into play only because it has somehow become cheaper than other terrestrial methods of electricity generation, storage, and distribution.
I'm excited about nuclear, but it seems like we will eventually run out of uranium fuel unless we switch to breeder reactors. Am I off on this? This is assuming that nuclear usage grows to become a larger portion of our total energy use. I see nuclear as potentially solving a lot of our problems, but it seems to have some difficulties as well.
I'm more skeptical that we can support such a large population. Right now we make heavy use of fertilizer, which is produced from natural gas and by mining phosphates. Probably we could avoid using natural gas, but this would require using more energy, so I'm not sure how sustainable this is long-term.
What's always missing in these kinds of propaganda articles is the resource issue with fissile material. If you look at the data given by the International Atomic Energy Agency you'll see that there are roughly 6 million tons available at the moment, with the price for uranium doubling over the last 20 years and cost for exploration quadrupling in the same time. Now, we get around 10% of all energy worldwide from fission, using 60k tons of uranium per year. So, at the current rate, we can do this for maybe 100-150 years. Increase the power output, reduce this time accordingly. And don't mention non-existing or experimental reactors like fusion of thorium, that have been just 10 years away from working for the last 50 years. We cannot solve climate change with current nuclear energy technology. There's just not enough fissile material.
Mining and transport of uranium ore, processed fuel and nuclear waste. I don’t know how significant those are.
My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.
There are some very practical problems with nuclear that people are hand-waving away. One of the most significant is simply longterm cost, because you have to consider what nuclear, at large scale, would entail. Because of the specifics here costs would likely go much higher, not decline - and it's already one of, and by some metrics, the most expensive methods of energy production. Right now nuclear accounts for 10-15% of the world's energy production, yet even at that level we only have known uranium reserves to run these for about 200 years. [1] Bump that up to where nuclear is a major player in energy production and we're suddenly running out imminently. This means we're going to need to turn to things like saltwater extraction and breeder reactors. But these technologies are going to send costs skyrocketing. And as well as scarcity becomes an issue, we can also expect to see the cost of uranium itself start to skyrocket.
And this is before getting into the other issues of nuclear at scale. Decommissioning is a lengthy, expensive, and complex process. Nuclear accidents are rare, but nowhere near as rare as they should be, on paper. There are currently about 450 plants operating worldwide. That's a disconcertingly low number given the number of accidents throughout the years. And breeder reactors would be absolutely required for longterm uranium perspectives, yet that technology not only greatly increases costs but also complexity and volatility. And another issue that becomes even more critical at scale is disposal. We already have some 90,000 tons [2] of nuclear waste (in the USA alone) the requires disposal. And this waste needs to be stored for thousands of years before it becomes remotely safe. And that also means we need to consider the waste that will pile up over centuries of nuclear usage.
And as the article mentions, we're likely to see major increases in global energy usage over the years to come which further exasperates these problems. These are very real practical problems that seem to have no clear solution. In my opinion solar is the most logical option for the future. The one and only downside there is the lack of production during the night, yet this can be resolved in a countless number of basic technical ways ranging from batteries to even just mundane things such as shifting objects (or liquids or whatever) to create potential energy that can be harvested during off times. If we take a utopic view of the future, it's even possible to envision worldwide high energy direct current lines transiting power worldwide. All of these things involve losses of energy of course, but as far as our needs are concerned solar can provide a practically infinite amount of energy and so optimal efficiency is not so relevant.
I also think that the decentralization of energy is also desirable. Even something as benign as rooftop solar will end up providing an immense amount of energy. Centralization of energy, let alone when it relies on a scarce resource is something I think we've learned a lot about for the past century. A bit of hindsight would be valuable here.
It's good to know that there are other people who are great promoters of nuclear power (I am a huge fan), but you're not reading your sources very well (the last article you linked to put the cost of uranium as nuclear fuel at 0.5c/kWh at a spot price of $53/kg), your math is full or errors and you clearly haven't researched exactly what goes into taking uranium from the ground and using it to produce power, or the related fields, such as energy production and consumption in general, mineral exploration and mining, or waste management. You fail to take into account production levels (which are currently only about 65% of consumption), an increase in uranium demand (based on new and proposed build will double by 2020), increased costs of actual mining and transportation of the resource just to name a few, or the effect of mining and extracting ever bit of uranium from the planet. There are limits to fuel efficiencies increases and as well to the economic viability of nuclear power. This is why it's a good idea to invest in new technologies now, such as fusion (the whole reason this discussion began). Sure we can take every last particle of uranium out of the Earth's crust and ocean's but I think we can spend our time, energy and effort doing something more productive. Uranium and thorium are finite resources and no amount of water extraction will make them not so. We once believed oil would last us forever and we have come to realize that this is not so. Let's not make the same mistake by promoting unsubstantiated and irrational ideas that nuclear (fission) will last us for half a trillion years when very educated and informed people who are actual experts put the number at 1000 years. As a nuclear enthusiast, I'm fine with the 1000 years because I hope that by then we have something better that nuclear (fission) to get our power from.
No, it isn't. Building up the needed capacity will take decades and cost an enormous amount of money that is better spend elsewhere. Fuel supply is limited, with cost for exploration quadrupled over the last 15 years, and a doubling cost for uranium fuel over the same period. Commercially viable known uranium reserves are used up by roughly 1/3 since 1950, depleting ever faster with more reactors. Even if we had the reactors already, even if we wouldn't need to spend trillions, the fuel simply isn't there for cost effective usage until the end of the century. Alternative reactors, thorium or fusion are experimental at best. So no, nuclear won't change anything soon.
That's a good point. It's pretty easy to construct and maintain fission reactors without fossil fuels. I bet enriching uranium was a snap in the 18th century, too. It will be even easier even getting to the enrichment phase in the future, with accessible ores about 30% as rich as they were when the nuclear age began.
Looking forward to the fleet of electric concrete trucks carrying electrically-manufactured concrete loaded with batteries that were produced with lithium carbonate dug out of the ground by electric excavation rigs.
All of this construction work will also not be disrupted by any social unrest resulting from 3 billion people starving to death because the Haber process no longer has enough cheap feedstock to sustain modern agricultural processes.
2017 known supply is enough for 130 years at current usage (supplying about 10% of global energy). Each doubling of production halves the peak timeline. Basically no one expects discovery to outpace usage.
So, at best, nuclear is a stop gap and part of a different long term solution. Which could be fine! But the extremely low LCOE and fast build time for modern renewables suggests that nuclear is simply losing the race for relevance.
There is less fissile material than fossil fuels. And the reactors are huge and heavy. Thousands of year maybe at current consumption levels, not if all energy consumption was replaced with nuclear.
One thing I found out recently found out about nuclear that really shuts down home "great" it is as a fix for climate change is how limited fuel is for it.
Some numbers
Nuclear currently uses about 60,000 tonnes per year of uranium [1]
Nuclear is about 10% of electricity, 4% of energy as a whole [2]
There is about 8,000,000 tonnes of uranium reserves world wide [3]
For a 100% of current electricity demand by nuclear that's 13 years of fuel,
For 100% of energy (e.g. gas heaters replaced by electric powered by nuclear) that's 5 years of fuel.
Oh sorry I misunderstood that you're talking about fuel production.
But this highlights what I think is the main problem with the large scale nuclear energy vision, it would replace oil with Uranium as the root of geopolitical resource control wars.
The abstract of the reference given says "With nuclear heat, the fossil fuel--re-formed to a suitable reductant--is confined to the chemical role and not used as a source of heat."
So, still using coal.
In contrast to more modern methods that avoid coal altogether, by using hydrogen as the reducer, or by direct electrolysis of molten ore.
I think nuclear is still really important and has a lot of room for improvement. It's hard to beat its output stability and energy density while emitting no carbon.
“Build the hell out of nuclear plants” isn’t going to have any impact, and having this attitude means you aren’t informed about the state of the world. There are two types of energy technology right now: those that can be constructed in a factory and deployed on an exponential curve (so far that’s solar and wind, and maybe battery storage in the future) and those that aren’t on this trajectory. Unless someone figures out modular reactors, and gets them deployed by the thousands quickly, nuclear isn’t going to matter.
We have enough uranium to satisfy our power needs for a few hundred thousand years. It's just that nuclear plants are expensive to build (and run) and electric cars aren't common yet.
Off topic: Nuclear power isn't renewable energy. If we keep it up and cannot find methods to extract it more efficiently, the current rate of consumption would consume conventional uranium reserves by 2080. Some say we can add 100 years for potentially undiscovered ones, but it is certainly limited. Especially if we increase usage further, currently NP just serves around 12% of energy worldwide.
I know that NP is hip right now, but it really has its own problems at scale.
How many terawatt-years of electricity can the entirety of accessible uranium reserves produce?
How many terawatt years of non-low-grade-heat energy do we need between now and 2030?
Now that we know that PWRs are irrelevant, can we move on from the constant gaslighting about how 'the next one will he cheaper we swear' or 'it's totally safe if everything goes perfectly always, just ignore the mines'. Or are you just trying to distract from the only thing that can replace the majority of (or even a tiny minority of) fossil fuels?
- In 1000 tonnes of uranium ore, there is 1 tonne of uranium. This contains about 0,7% U-235 used as fuel in most civilian applications. U-235 is used in the fuel in concentrations of about 3-5%. In the end, from a tonne of uranium, you can make about 100 kg of fuel used by a nuclear reactor. This is all used up in about a day in a largish installation. So you have to dig and process 1000 tonnes of ore each day to keep a 1 GW electrical output reactor running. The recycling of the fuel isn't economical unless you have a nuclear military program or want to do some research with various isotopes. That doesn't seem like a huge improvement compared to coal, gas and oil. Nuclear just isn't very clean in this respect either.
- The technology and mentality of how we build actual nuclear reactors is stuck at best in the 1980s. This might change, but there isn't any conceptually new reactor running in production anywhere. Compared to wind and solar, where replacement with better technology is the norm, this is just nuts. Also, wind and solar starts to be competitive to fossil fuels when producing electricity in some cases.
- Solar and wind don't have to produce stable output if the output is very cheap. In such a case, it will be economical to build better transmission lines, motivate consumers to adjust use based on production capacity and finally invest in clever energy storage projects. Good transmission lines (which we will need anyway, because of EVs and other electricity consumers) will spread out the production and load in such a way that the Central Limit Theorem will guarantee something similar to the traditional "base load" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem Cheap batteries acting basically as grid capacitors will smooth out most of the peaks in production or demand, which will make the whole thing more economical still. (As we can already see in several places.)
- For winters, long term energy storage from the summer or very good inter-continental transmission lines are needed. This is not a solved problem but we still have plenty of time to think about solutions, but we really should think about them. Just building something conceptually stuck in the 1980s that is more expensive just to ensure we have electricity and perhaps heat in the winter without having to think about perhaps more efficient solutions doesn't seem like a situation we want to be in. We can decommission existing power plants over the next 10-20 years, while we think about storing the energy/ producing energy intensive stuff mostly in the summer or something like that. There is e.g. the possibility to produce ammonia, sodium metal or something else with excess energy that we can transform into electricity in the winter. There is also HVDC lines that might actually connect continents, which would solve some of this as well. There really is plenty of energy in wind, solar, tides/ waves, etc. that we can use. If it is produced at a low enough price, we might be able to throw some even rather substantial portion of useful energy away to transport it to the consumers be it on a different continent and still end up with cheaper power. It might be more economical to buy storage to have enough for the winter or to transport some form of fuel. I think, the reality will be a mix of all approaches.
- We might do a better job of insulating our homes and more stuff like that to reduce some obviously inefficient use of electricity (e.g. for "just" heating, cooling, drying). Actually making infrastructure better is a good long term investment as it enables new approaches to solving problems and makes the quality of living better for everybody but especially for the less affluent.
- Nuclear is regulated as hell, where wind and solar isn't really all that much. Wind and solar is very flexible, as can be seen in poor bu sunny countries, where solar is a way to have electricity most of the time without having to worry about diesel (or uranium for that matter). Some people have a much better quality of living thanks to the dropping price of solar electricity in their circumstances and they don't have to ask anybody for permission to use solar. They just throw it on the roof of a hut and have enough electricity to power a phone and a battery so they have light at night. They can now communicate e.g. about the price of their produce and educate themselves. These people will not see nuclear or fossil fuels as a solution when they progress into the middle class, where they actually can affect some things e.g. by engineering infrastructure solutions.
- Nuclear always has the risk of a nuclear meltdown, which just isn't an option in large population centres. We humans are just too error prone to be able to reliably design and handle this. Because we are quite risk averse and have all the preventive measures (that have failed multiple times already) the cost of producing nuclear power just skyrockets.
- Finally, if there were no nuclear reactors, it would be even more uneconomical to keep a large stockpile of nuclear weapons or to power attack submarines and other stuff that is made only for the purpose to solve problems by force. Perhaps there is some advantage to the fear of guaranteed destruction but in reality, we just wage wars using ransomware and proxy countries - nuclear weapons aren't useful there at all.
The other uses of nuclear science e.g. in scientific instruments, medicine etc. can be done without nuclear being used to produce electrical power. We will have the current reactors for perhaps at least two more decades, so we have time to think about this even without building any new nuclear power generating capacity.
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