why we don’t rely on nuclear power plants more, especially these days
In: 441
It’s hard to get approval to build one, people are against it because of the few bad accidents you hear about.
More people have died at coal mines, building dams, drilling for oil etc but it doesn’t make the news like Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Politicians do what the constituents want, so the make policy that makes it tough.
Nuclear power has the lowest overall impact on the environment and is comparably mu h safer than anything else.
Several very good reasons:
First, expense. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build and expensive to operate. They require a tremendous amount of up-front investment which can take years to pay off
Second, safety. Even if everything goes according to plan, nuclear power produces waste which has to be managed for *millennia*, and plenty of the rest of the facility is turned into low-level radioactive waste which must be carefully managed and disposed of. In the entire history of nuclear power, 700 reactors have been shut down, but only 25 have been returned to “greenfield” status, which means they’re usable for other purposes. And for the long-lived fission products, they’re so vexing, the industry can’t deliver the political will to authorize a long-term store, and it’s all a giant game of ‘radioactive potato’.
And then there’s the chance of disaster. To be sure, the overall safety record of nuclear power is far better than fossil fuel energy, but no oil or gas disaster has the power to functionally wipe places off the map for decades, if not centuries. Fukushima’s exclusion zone will be around long after the plant operators are dead and buried, and Chernobyl will be unsafe for human habitation for several generations.
Third, lack of scale. Even if you could snap your fingers tomorrow and make the first two sets of problems vanish, it still wouldn’t get around the big one: There just isn’t enough fissionable material available to scale up nuclear power, according to the NEA’s estimates of supplies of economically accessible uranium. We go through about 70,000 metric tons of raw uranium per year, we have about 5.5 million metric tons of identified uranium sources, and they estimate another 10.5 million metric tons as yet discovered, which will give us enough uranium to last for about 230 years at current scale.
And before someone mentions seawater extraction, I’d just like to point out that we don’t yet find extracting *water* from seawater economically viable in chronically drought-stricken areas. Uranium occurs in seawater at 3.3 parts per billion. I trust I don’t need to explain that math to you.
Believe me, the energy industry isn’t stupid. If they could make money building nuclear power plants, they would be doing it. They’re not. They’re sucking up subsidies and grant money to research technologies, and have been steadily doing so with no economically viable results for over 50 years.
Several very good reasons:
First, expense. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build and expensive to operate. They require a tremendous amount of up-front investment which can take years to pay off
Second, safety. Even if everything goes according to plan, nuclear power produces waste which has to be managed for *millennia*, and plenty of the rest of the facility is turned into low-level radioactive waste which must be carefully managed and disposed of. In the entire history of nuclear power, 700 reactors have been shut down, but only 25 have been returned to “greenfield” status, which means they’re usable for other purposes. And for the long-lived fission products, they’re so vexing, the industry can’t deliver the political will to authorize a long-term store, and it’s all a giant game of ‘radioactive potato’.
And then there’s the chance of disaster. To be sure, the overall safety record of nuclear power is far better than fossil fuel energy, but no oil or gas disaster has the power to functionally wipe places off the map for decades, if not centuries. Fukushima’s exclusion zone will be around long after the plant operators are dead and buried, and Chernobyl will be unsafe for human habitation for several generations.
Third, lack of scale. Even if you could snap your fingers tomorrow and make the first two sets of problems vanish, it still wouldn’t get around the big one: There just isn’t enough fissionable material available to scale up nuclear power, according to the NEA’s estimates of supplies of economically accessible uranium. We go through about 70,000 metric tons of raw uranium per year, we have about 5.5 million metric tons of identified uranium sources, and they estimate another 10.5 million metric tons as yet discovered, which will give us enough uranium to last for about 230 years at current scale.
And before someone mentions seawater extraction, I’d just like to point out that we don’t yet find extracting *water* from seawater economically viable in chronically drought-stricken areas. Uranium occurs in seawater at 3.3 parts per billion. I trust I don’t need to explain that math to you.
Believe me, the energy industry isn’t stupid. If they could make money building nuclear power plants, they would be doing it. They’re not. They’re sucking up subsidies and grant money to research technologies, and have been steadily doing so with no economically viable results for over 50 years.
The fossil fuel industries heavily promoted the fears and drawbacks of something that could easily replace them without contributing to climate change.
Several very good reasons:
First, expense. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build and expensive to operate. They require a tremendous amount of up-front investment which can take years to pay off
Second, safety. Even if everything goes according to plan, nuclear power produces waste which has to be managed for *millennia*, and plenty of the rest of the facility is turned into low-level radioactive waste which must be carefully managed and disposed of. In the entire history of nuclear power, 700 reactors have been shut down, but only 25 have been returned to “greenfield” status, which means they’re usable for other purposes. And for the long-lived fission products, they’re so vexing, the industry can’t deliver the political will to authorize a long-term store, and it’s all a giant game of ‘radioactive potato’.
And then there’s the chance of disaster. To be sure, the overall safety record of nuclear power is far better than fossil fuel energy, but no oil or gas disaster has the power to functionally wipe places off the map for decades, if not centuries. Fukushima’s exclusion zone will be around long after the plant operators are dead and buried, and Chernobyl will be unsafe for human habitation for several generations.
Third, lack of scale. Even if you could snap your fingers tomorrow and make the first two sets of problems vanish, it still wouldn’t get around the big one: There just isn’t enough fissionable material available to scale up nuclear power, according to the NEA’s estimates of supplies of economically accessible uranium. We go through about 70,000 metric tons of raw uranium per year, we have about 5.5 million metric tons of identified uranium sources, and they estimate another 10.5 million metric tons as yet discovered, which will give us enough uranium to last for about 230 years at current scale.
And before someone mentions seawater extraction, I’d just like to point out that we don’t yet find extracting *water* from seawater economically viable in chronically drought-stricken areas. Uranium occurs in seawater at 3.3 parts per billion. I trust I don’t need to explain that math to you.
Believe me, the energy industry isn’t stupid. If they could make money building nuclear power plants, they would be doing it. They’re not. They’re sucking up subsidies and grant money to research technologies, and have been steadily doing so with no economically viable results for over 50 years.
The fossil fuel industries heavily promoted the fears and drawbacks of something that could easily replace them without contributing to climate change.
The fossil fuel industries heavily promoted the fears and drawbacks of something that could easily replace them without contributing to climate change.
There are multiple practical concerns and one big, big emotional one.
First, constructing any new energy plants is time-consuming. It takes tons of legal red tape, environmental studies, land acquisition, and regulatory hoops to jump through. Nuclear power has exponentially more challenges than others, including obligations to groups like the DoE, international nuclear energy regulators, and every gladhand and grandstander in the state and local governments.
Second, nuclear power is not completely clean. While the big white clouds are just that for the most part, and the water pumped out of a properly functioning system is safe enough to drink, there are waste and byproducts. Fuel rods can’t just be used until they’re no longer radioactive – they have to be radioactive to a certain point or else the system can’t work efficiently. So used rods are still dangerously radioactive, but have no use in that reactor type, and have to go somewhere else. The same is true of many other byproducts, especially anything use in cleaning up an incident. With radioactive materials, the time until its safe to be around can be minutes to longer than the age of the universe. They gotta go somewhere, and nobody wants ’em. (There are reuses on the horizon, like fusion or breeder reactors, but they’re not commercially viable yet).
And then there’s the BIG one.
The two biggest media complexes for serious matters are those of the USA and Russia. Japan listens to the USA, China to Russia, etc. Both had major, major nuclear incidents during the Cold War. Russia had Chernobyl and Khysthm. The western world had Three Mile Island, Windscale, Fukushima, etc. Each took lives and left patches of land either uninhabitable or scary to survivors. Nobody wants that kind of fear in their lives, even if it is irrational. Nuclear accidents are rarer than fossil fuel accidents but the spectre of Nuclear Power (bombs?) haunts the psyche and makes nuclear power plants very unpopular.
Even nations that haven’t had major nuclear accidents like Germany are slowly turning off their existing plants. New plants in the post-industrial world (UK, USA, France) are almost unheard of. Last I checked, only the state of Georgia is constructing a new plant in the USA. Meanwhile, developing nations like India and China are willing to “roll the dice” on that possibility as they try to create electricity for their growing industrial and luxury needs.
There are multiple practical concerns and one big, big emotional one.
First, constructing any new energy plants is time-consuming. It takes tons of legal red tape, environmental studies, land acquisition, and regulatory hoops to jump through. Nuclear power has exponentially more challenges than others, including obligations to groups like the DoE, international nuclear energy regulators, and every gladhand and grandstander in the state and local governments.
Second, nuclear power is not completely clean. While the big white clouds are just that for the most part, and the water pumped out of a properly functioning system is safe enough to drink, there are waste and byproducts. Fuel rods can’t just be used until they’re no longer radioactive – they have to be radioactive to a certain point or else the system can’t work efficiently. So used rods are still dangerously radioactive, but have no use in that reactor type, and have to go somewhere else. The same is true of many other byproducts, especially anything use in cleaning up an incident. With radioactive materials, the time until its safe to be around can be minutes to longer than the age of the universe. They gotta go somewhere, and nobody wants ’em. (There are reuses on the horizon, like fusion or breeder reactors, but they’re not commercially viable yet).
And then there’s the BIG one.
The two biggest media complexes for serious matters are those of the USA and Russia. Japan listens to the USA, China to Russia, etc. Both had major, major nuclear incidents during the Cold War. Russia had Chernobyl and Khysthm. The western world had Three Mile Island, Windscale, Fukushima, etc. Each took lives and left patches of land either uninhabitable or scary to survivors. Nobody wants that kind of fear in their lives, even if it is irrational. Nuclear accidents are rarer than fossil fuel accidents but the spectre of Nuclear Power (bombs?) haunts the psyche and makes nuclear power plants very unpopular.
Even nations that haven’t had major nuclear accidents like Germany are slowly turning off their existing plants. New plants in the post-industrial world (UK, USA, France) are almost unheard of. Last I checked, only the state of Georgia is constructing a new plant in the USA. Meanwhile, developing nations like India and China are willing to “roll the dice” on that possibility as they try to create electricity for their growing industrial and luxury needs.
[removed]
Latest Answers