Very good news to hear. With recent energy problems being exposed via the war in Ukraine, nuclear power is increasingly our best option for cheap, abundant energy. Despite decades of misdirected "Green" propaganda, nuclear is the safest, most viable route to a carbon-free future, while renewables are just not ready to scale yet (let alone their massive footprint compared to nuclear). Just hope we can get these in the ground fast enough to make a difference.
Very cool. Japan doesn't have much of their own in terms of energy resources, so I applaud both the commitment to help our ally and the R&D in terms of new and especially SMR nuclear.
Japan is the perfect use-case for nuclear. Even when disaster strikes, they're extremely safe. Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it.
> Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima.
While I tend to agree with your point, there's also the couple hundred square miles and 165k people worth of exclusion zone as a side-effect. That's not small, but it's potentially something you can mitigate by picking sites carefully.
If the U.S. shared similar concern for environmental health a good portion of urban areas would be in exclusion zones from other sources of industrial contamination too. Instead we tolerate these people having elevated rates of diseases such as cancer or asthma and generally shortened lifespans, and let companies responsible go bankrupt with their executives absolved of all responsibilities while we spend time today scratching our head figuring out what to do.
Nobody bothered to clean up Chernobyl because the whole town's existence was to support the plant and plant workers. With no plant, the city had no value and thus no incentive to spend money on remediation. By comparison, Japan showed us what occurs when places with value are contaminated: effort is made to clean them up. Half of the exclusion zone was reopened within 5 years, and the most intensely irradiated locations were cleaned up in just over a decade.
This doesn’t fully track, the Chernobyl popwerplant was in operation for many years after the catastrophe. I think the sinister truth is that the soviet union just cared a lot less than the Japanese government, not to mention the slightly bigger scale of damage.
More specifically: Pripyat and the original exclusion zone evacuated. Slavutych [1] was subsequently constructed to support the nuclear power plant after the disaster. Because again, Pripyat had no harbors, and no real economic value other than supporting the power plant. So it was simpler to just construct a new city.
It's been a while since I looked, but I think the claim here is that the evacuation of elderly and infirm people from the parts of the exclusion area that were otherwise not seriously affected by the tsunami resulted in a large loss of disability-adjusted life years.
I'll have what he is having, in fact, Ill have a double.
"Because of the plant’s location along the coast, much of the water washed into the Pacific, resulting in the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history. Additional airborne radioactive material from the explosions and fires at the plant fell onto the sea surface, where it too mixed into the water, as did subsequent leaks from tanks on the site holding treated water."
This is from Woods Hole, you probably do not know or recognize their expertise.
"the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history."
And it is is just a drop in the ocean when you consider the natural radioactivity from ⁴⁰K.
It may be a local, time-bounded problem in the first few years after the accident in that certain isotopes may bio-concentrate and affect fishing and agriculture in that region.
So far as the ocean as a whole goes I'd be more concerned about chunks of styrofoam.
For some perspective: I don't have a full breakdown of the release materials on hand, but according to Wikipedia of the 45 PBq you quoted something like 20 PBq of that was Iodine-131 and 5 PBq of Cs-137. That's about 4.3 grams of I-131 and 1.6 kg of Cs-137. In radiological terms that's a LOT if they were concentrated in a small area, not so much when diluted into the entire ocean. Note that estimated releases to the atmosphere were about 10x that IIRC (but don't quote me on exact numbers).
Not to downplay the risks or consequences, people need to decide that for themselves and the dynamics of how this material ends up dispersed in the environment are complicated, but talking in terms of mass helps put things into perspective.
This takes decades. The plume was largely concentrated over a few dozen km and couple hundred m deep when it hit california five years later. And actually significant spill would be orders of magnitude worse.
This is also why mass expansion of reprocessing facilities is completely untenable.
Which is why any next-gen nuclear should be doing near-complete fuel consumption. Solid fuel rods aren't going to cut it.
Liquid / molten salts can be reprocessed "online" and the fission products extracted (yeah, handwaves a LOT of chemistry), so you don't get these partially transmuted solid rods.
Even if you have solid rods or solid pebbles doing the primary power, maybe you can have a secondary on-site molten processor to take care of the waste without it shipping.
One of the annoying aspects of arguing with pro-nuclear people is their blind spot for reprocessing/waste. It just gets shrugged/handwaved away, but to the voting public, having a reactor that produces no waste in the traditional solid fuel sense would be a political boon.
The real issue is that nuclear simply isn't price competitive, it barely beats coal. I would like it to be otherwise.
This is presumably being downvoted for the unnecessary “gotcha” phrasing, but it is an interesting point of distinction. I have an intuitive guess as to the principles at work, but I don’t really know the actual physics.
I don’t think that explains it at all. So garbage floats (more or less), so can be modeled as a 2D plane. But why do patches form? Why isn’t the garbage distributed uniformly across the plane? And why doesn’t that same mechanism apply in 3D?
These comparisons—except for Chernobyl—are disingenuous. Nuclear weapons testing has been outlawed and has mostly stopped, natural Uranium and—even more so—Potassium don’t release radiation in nearly the same concentration as Fukushima (or Hanford to that extent). Radiation is dangerous when it concentrates.
Radiation deaths? Lol guys, I get it, but please don't try to make a bigger fool out ouf you by ridiculing about a point noone ever made.. it is like someone would tell you that our lethargic sitting life styles makes us sick and you stand up and shout: "But noone died from sitting, while tons of people die from sports a lot!!!"
Its simply because both Japan and the U.S. are far behind Korea, who has been shipping reactors all over the world after Fukushima, and they are the only country to increase installations since.
Korea is not the only country to add nuclear power installations since Fukushima. Look at date of first grid connection in the following data sets for years after 2011:
Small modular reactors for the win. Hope to see this move forward with cookie cutter approaches that can be easily reproduced with a high degree of safety.
From the announcement one can guess that the Japanese side will contribute with the Mitsubishi SRZ-1200 reactor [1], while the US with several SMR designs, of which NuScale will clearly be one [2].
But other than that, how exactly will they cooperate? Will the US build any large reactors using the SRZ-1200 design? Will Japan build any small reactors with the NuScale design? Or this is just some meaningless expression of common interest in the same stuff but not much else?
Nuclear engineer here. Thorium is not actually that preferable over Uranium. The point most people miss is that you can make breeder reactors with uranium or thorium. Most pop internet thorium takes compare uranium in non-breeders vs. thorium breeders. Comparing uranium vs. thorium breeder reactors is a wash.
In your professional nuclear engineer opinion, what is the future of nuclear in the energy mix? Not in the political sense, but I keep hearing these claims that solar/wind will just destroy nuclear due to lower costs. Does that make sense to you, or do you think nuclear has something to offer?
The solar/wind cost argument you refer to relies entirely on an accountant's metric called Levelized Cost of Electricity, which explains what the cheapest power sources are on the margin, given today's fossil-backed grid. Wind and solar and fracked gas do great in this metric.
But when you start looking at costs of the entire future decarbonized electricity system, including all the stuff needed to level out the weather-dependence of wind and solar, and you start comparing e.g. a 100% wind + solar + batteries grid vs. a wind + solar + hydro + nuclear grid, you start seeing dramatic differences. There's a metric being developed called Levelized Full system Cost of Electricity to handle this.
Anyway it turns out that having a 24/7 zero-carbon miniscule-footprint energy source like nuclear fission in the mix is a huge help to the overall system.
Also, nuclear can use its 'waste' heat as district heat and pump warm water up to 100 km to fully decarbonize local building heat without going through an electrical conversion.
Also nuclear works great in deep space.
So yeah, I see a great future for nuclear in the near, medium, and extremely distance future.
Thanks, very interesting. I have heard that exact reasoning ("It's all about LCoE!") from various Very Smart People Good At Math. Physics PhDs, VCs (Chamath talks about how this means we "already have practically free, abundant energy from solar").
Seems to me like a case of wishful myopia, where they hone in on that one metric that gives them the illusion that This Is Working.
That's my perspective. LCOE says what people want it to say, and so it's self-reinforcing. Meanwhile, electricity costs are skyrocketing, and the grid is getting more fragile.
I always wonder about this balance of policy and engineering ... I mean, engineering efforts need policy support, but too much can drown it. Anybody have a sense of the negotiators involved?
Meanwhile in France, we're trying to convince people that nuclear energy doesn't emit CO2 and isn't more dangerous that the others.
Well, 4g/kWh.
Although the government has planned to construct 6 reactors, the historical "ecological" movement still makes fighting nuclear electricity their 1st priority.
Not sure if you meant it like this but "even higher" sounds like you think that's high. Your source also gives the following numbers:
On-shore wind: 11 g/kWh
Hydropower: 24 g/kWh
Utility solar PV: 48 g/kWh
Biomass: 230 g/kWh
Natural gas: 490 g/kWh
Of course this is from the World Nuclear Association but they link a source at the IPCC, and after doing a little googling it looks like other sources agree.
Electricitymaps uses ipcc2014 which was a retrospective at the time and not about new generation and refers to technology over a decade old.
Please cite one of those 'credible sources' that verifiably refers to something current like a 160 micron bifacial PERC cell based panel at median capacity factor of 18% (or a realistic near future value like 16%) using up to date processes for polysilicon processes and an up to date energy mix from the place of production (even xinjiang or lower mongolia is significantly lower than it was in 2014) and concludes that emissions are higher than a nuclear reactor based on new mining (rather than a combination of ranger and cigar lake).
There is probably a good chance a new ISL mine with solar powered pumps, leeching solution, and electric vehicles followed by centrifuge enrichment then burnt in an APR could come in under wind, but no chance it will come in under new solar -- especially if that solar is produced in new facilities outside of north-western China.
It also doesn't matter because the magnitude is so much lower than delaying decarbonization by 6 months and they all close the loop via electrification.
I love that the Guardian article in that thread cites the head of NATO's statements as proof of Russian involvement. This is even lazier than Russiagate.
And? There's nothing here denouncing nuclear. Also, Nord Stream AG? You mean the Swiss holding company of which Gazprom is a partner? So the millions of dollars that Exxon, Chevron, etc. have spent on misinformation to undermine climate change concerns over the decades implicates the US government as well?
BUND specifically states that they never opposed to construction of the Nord Stream pipeline, because they viewed natural gas as a good alternative to nuclear:
Wow, well as someone who straddles the US and EU, he sure as heck seemed to be extremely pro-Putin at the very least, and Putin was very clearly very pro-Trump. Whether Putin has kompromat/direct control of Trump is unknown, what is clearly known is that Putin and Russian nationalists much preferred Trump in charge. I cannot find a single thing that Trump said which is negative about Putin, and Putin is a man who considers the USA his greatest enemy.
I honestly did not think it was debatable at this point that Putin's and Trump's interests were very vocally aligned. It's like you and I live in different multi-verses yet are somehow communicating. How truly bizarre.
There were a couple actions Trump did during his presidency that directly hurt Putin, namely the sanctions on Nord Stream 2 that caused Allseas to drop out of the project and delaying the completion of the pipeline for some time. The EU was quite upset by this.
He also criticised Europeans for not meeting NATO defence obligations, although whether he would have been fine with them just increasing their expenditures or if this was just a rhetorical point to find support for leaving NATO is perhaps only known to him.
On these points I agree with you! The idea that Trump was a Russian asset is laughable given his own actions in office, not to mention many of his appointments. He certainly admired Putin, but that's due to his own psychology rather than any supposed dirt they had on him.
It's a consortium. Majority owned by Gazprom. Still doesn't support the notion that the Kremlin was coordinating or even funding some elaborate misinformation campaign against nuclear. Private companies always lobby in their own interests-- worst of all in the US where this sort of corruption is legalized and highly lucrative.
NICE. So two of those are just opinion pieces quoting Western cut-outs/think tank hacks, and the Guardian piece is relying entirely on the statements of NATO's chief. Funny how low the barrier of proof is when you're "the good guys."
"He declined to give details of those operations, saying: “That is my interpretation.”" LMAO
Firstly, it's incredibly difficult to track funding for entities like these, so when someone like the NATO chief isn't citing sources, it's probably because the sources aren't for the public to know.
Second, this is something that Russia has done dozens of times. It should be shocking to you if they aren't funding this sort of narrative in the countries they want to be dependent on them.
The entire conflict is created by the environmental NGOs though.
Many countries & people fund those NGOs, either thinking they are helping the environment, or they have ulterior motives (promoting their investments).
The NGOs are tricking people, they want to reduce nuclear to further solar/wind because they have investments in it.
Russia is playing into the NGOs because they have the same end goal, wanting to reduce nuclear, but for their nat. gas. investments.
Russia, and before them the Soviet Union, has been backing domestic groups in Western societies fir ourpose of destablization, disrupting economic progress, etc., and weakening military stance for a long time. The anti-everything-nuclear movement ticked all those boxes in different ways.
(And, yes, this kind of geopolitically-motivated propaganda works in all directions.)
Why would Russia promote anti-nuclear disinformation? The Russian state-owned entity Rosatom is a major exporter of nuclear technology, so doing that would be against Russia's interests.
Those revenues have specifically gone up as a result of climate change measures. NS2 had a projected cost of 9.5 billion euros, and that's not even including any gas; you don't spend that kind of money without the expectation of making it back and more.
1. Guaranteed windfall profit now is better than speculative profit later; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
2. Russia has long planned on a 'pivot to Asia' in the event Europe does ween itself off of natural gas. Not that that has panned out very well so far; the Power of Siberia pipeline has reportedly been quite unprofitable, allegedly because of the nepotism on the project regarding the contractors. Which brings me on to the next point...
3. It is a mistake to assume that leaders of countries are competent or their interests are inherently linked to 'national interests' or 'geopolitical strategy' (principal-agent problem).
3a. Even if Russia is out of money in 50 or 100 years because of some green energy revolution, nobody running the show today will be alive enough to care about it.
3b. Natural resources are easier and more profitable to exploit than human resources. If you want to build a technology-intensive industry, you need to keep the talent happy (or otherwise prevent them from leaving as the Soviets did) and keep up on innovation against competitors. E.g., Roscosmos has been coasting for decades off of the reliability of Soyuz, but have they designed anything good lately? SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and several other startups present a real risk to their business.
If you have something in the ground you can dig up, you don't have to keep anybody happy, you might have competition, but changes in the market won't come as any surprise. You don't even have to have local expertise in resource extraction - just hire Exxon to do it for you, like they did in Sakhalin. Whereas if you want to extract money from people, you're going to have to tax them, and if you do that too much, they'll get upset or leave.
If you're running a country and want to personally enrich yourself, the best way to do so is to prioritise resource extraction and exploitation.
I think our analyses of the Russian state are based on such fundamentally different premises that we will never come to any meaningful agreement, and further discussion is pointless.
I'm actually saying that I don't think having a debate about the nature of the Russian government on the internet would be a productive use of my time.
Yes, but doing that by undermining nuclear is a poor strategic move. It would leave Russia with no fallback strategy in the case that Europe did cease fossil fuels imports, and would undermine export of nuclear technology to other regions.
Russian's main export is oil/gas/coal/etc. It's roughly half of all their exports and over a $100 billion worth every year. Yes, squashing new nuclear plants profits them tremendously, and protecting their oil/gas/etc export business is likely one of their top priorities.
You would think it would be a lot more straightforward and effective to just directly bribe policymakers than to crank out propaganda and hope 1% of it sticks.
>Why this and not some other objective? Why can't they sway the global opinion on Ukraine? Surely they are trying.
The Overton window is a thing, right? "Nuclear power might be really unsafe" is a much easier sell in the public discourse than "it's OK to invade your peaceful neighbors".
That is exactly what I mean. There is virtually no public support for invading your peaceful neighbor, and no amount of misinformation is going to fundamentally change that. Support for building nuclear power plants is a contentious issue. Of course Russia wants to nudge the outcome in their favor, but saying Russian misinformation is mostly responsible for the anti-nuclear sentiment is crazy.
> There is virtually no public support for invading your peaceful neighbor, and no amount of misinformation is going to fundamentally change that.
I mean, there is a sizeable minority who have been convinced by Russian propaganda on this; typically they refer to Euromaidan as a coup, blame the invasion on Ukraine for not implementing Minsk, claim Ukraine is banning the Russian language, and so forth.
If propaganda can bump this from zero to twenty percent, why not from 40 to 60?
These points are literally made on fox news many nights. How much does it cost to get fox news to broadcast your propaganda to 60 million americans versus bribing enough american politicians that have enough sway to actually disrupt things.
Russia buying a politician would hopefully be a huge story. Russia buying advertising in the US to push for dis-unity or their abhorrent propaganda about Ukraine being full of nazis or that 1 billion dollars is a lot to pay (in old, out of date, expensive to decommission hardware) to absolutely defang the largest rival we had last century is derogatorily labeled as "Russiagate" and "conspiracy theory" and "liberal brainworms".
> Out of all objectives that further Russian power, you have decided on the squashing new nuclear plants.
it's not like it's a team of five guys slogging away in the propaganda mines with pick axes. they can pursue a number of goals simultaneously, limited mostly by budget and probably other geopolitical concerns, rather than video game-esque restrictions on the total number of things they can propagandize about simultaneously.
> Why this and not some other objective? Why can't they sway the global opinion on Ukraine? Surely they are trying.
they've had a lot longer to work on nuclear than the current invasion.
they've also had plenty of success in the past with ukraine-related misinformation, see walter duranty.
You may want to read something like "Common misconceptions about Germany's energy transition"[0] for a fuller picture of the situation there. In particular, it points out that between 2002 and 2021:
"both hard and lignite [coal usage] decreased from 251.9 TWh to 146.5 TWh for a reduction of 109.4 TWh. So Germany reduced both coal and nuclear at the same time, coal did not grow, and the coal reduction was actually larger than the nuclear reduction."
> 29.2 TWh of reduction of Russian coal imports, vs 12.2 TWh increase of Russian gas imports.
> The Energiewende made Germany less dependent on Russia than if it had never taken place!
This is moronic, a total apples to oranges comparison. First, coal is much cheaper than gas, so whatever they were paying for Russian coal doesn't necessarily cancel out the gas increase. Second, coal is way easier to transport than gas. The latter needs a pipeline or liquefaction, both of which require extensive capital outlays that make it much more difficult to switch from one supplier to another. Third, coal and nuclear are both base load, while natural gas is used as peakers. The entire argument for nuclear over renewables was that renewables would require more peakers (i.e., gas).
Keep in mind, most of the reactors we are used to are basically 1960s designs. Part of the appeal of building new reactors is that they are so much more efficient that they can actually burn up more of the spent fuel than they themselves create.
> Part of the appeal of building new reactors is that they are so much more efficient that they can actually burn up more of the spent fuel than they themselves create.
This is an outright lie with regard to Gen III+ reactors. MOX is filthy.
It's just turning almost-inert U238 and relatively low activity Pu239 into Pu240, Pu241 and Cs-137. This is after a reprocessing step that vastly increases the volumne of contaminated material and leaks a bunch of it into the environment.
The volume of inert material in the spent fuel is a red herring.
Oh, really? Care to explain? Seems pretty toxic from everything I have seen.
I also don't find paying (currently) over half a billion dollars a year in storage costs efficient. Usually not even factored into the costs of this "clean" energy.
We don't have a totally nontoxic power source. We do have ones which offer better options for containment. Coal ash is radioactive and toxic [1]. Solar panels are also toxic [2]. But we don't grind them into a fine powder before sprinkling them over communities. On this scale, nuclear is toxic, but in small, contained and manageable masses.
> paying (currently) over half a billion dollars a year in storage costs
Your link fingers "the United States' failure to implement a permanent solution for nuclear waste storage" as the cause for the "half-a-billion dollars a year [paid] to the utilities for their simply keeping the fuel" [3]. The current solution passably inefficient. The efficient solutions are blocked by activists.
Seal it in metal and concrete -> done. You can now store it in any old warehouse. If you're really paranoid, put a sign "Warning: Dangerous Alligator!" on the door.
Half a billion per year is nothing compared to the damage we're preventing with climate change, is it?
They tend to bury the waste extremely far underground, and even than that isn't very expensive. It's a hell of a lot cheaper the the real world impacts we're seeing from carbon emissions today (over a million deaths a year).
There is literally zero risk of this for the sites that are chosen for storage, and the method of storage, even if it was directly below your home, is also at zero risk of causing this to happen. It isn't stored in leaking metal drums with green ooze falling down the side, and Jimbo doesn't occasionally knock one over when he sits on one for a lunch break.
The small next-generation nuclear reactors are all breeder reactors, IIRC.
You do not want them in the hands of religious or political fanatics.
And small reactors are more dirty than big reactors.
And nuclear power is most of the time more expensiv than some renewables.
Simply put, the radiation was detectable over more than 1/2 of the entire surface of the earth. A lot of people do not think it is a problem, unless you immediately die of radiation.
A 747 when flying straight at you, is only a tiny tiny spec, until the very last second, and then it gets really really big, and then you are dead.
I heard Randy Shilts say this "Give me a number. How may people have to die?"
Fukushima and Chernobyl are the good outcome. They released well under 1% of the bad stuff before it was contained.
It only takes Areva or Rosatom having an oops with one reactor load of fuel because they bribed the geologist for the waste dump and it turns out it was actually unstable and linked to the aquifer or papers were forged on the parts for the transport cask or they buried it in a shallow dump in nigeria where it corrodes open in 2150 and you turn a country into the red forest for the next millenium.
This is 100% guaranteed to happen the second there's too much of it for mass protests to cover every fucked up thing the industry tries.
