You don’t have to tell me, I used to step out of my front door to a grand view of the towers at Sellafield.
So far as I am aware all current reprocessing still leaves significant amounts of waste that require medium to long term storage.
A problem we do not have a satisfactory solution to. Nor any prospect of solving.
As best I can tell current efforts are more focussed on persuading everyone that these are problems we can leave future generations to solve or attempts to persuade us not to worry about it.
This is very true. One of the big problems with solar and wind power is that there is an awful lot of variation in their output, by season, the time of day, and weather.
For a concrete example, the output of wind power here in Finland can swing from low tens of megawatt-hours per hour to about 2500 MWh/h, depending on the winds. You need either enormous amounts of storage, or highly reliable base-load power like nuclear, to account for that.
The conversation about nuclear power is so crushed by the weight of propaganda that it’s nearly impossible to have. And I’m no oracle on the subject, but I would throw out a couple of points to consider:
People who look into the subject seriously tend to end up decisively pro-nuclear. This includes a lot of STEM types, of course, but also old-school environmental advocates like George Monbiot and Patrick Moore.
A pound of uranium is certainly more hazardous than a pound of coal. But in terms of energy production, a pound of 235U isn’t equivalent to a pound of coal, or two pounds, or ten; it’s equivalent to 1,500 tons of coal. For each cubic inch of uranium that goes into a nuclear plant, you have 10 boxcars of coal rolling into a coal plant. Reactors run for years without being refuelled at all. A 5GW nuclear plant is equivalent to 39 square miles of solar panels during the day, and it runs 24/7. The sheer scale of it can’t just be waved away.
This is a more nuanced and factually accurate conversation about nuclear power than one usually finds on the internet, so well done, Mutants.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet- switching the grid to renewables is currently impossible because we have not solved the grid storage problem. We have a lot of interesting ideas (pushing concrete up hills, flywheels, compressing air…) and a few things that work in limited scenarios (pumped hydro and lithium-based battery banks) but we don’t have a scalable and practical solution to this yet.
Renewable fans (of which I am one, of course, because it’s the only ultimate future) by and large ignore the grid storage problem and how big a problem it is. We have not solved it and we are not close to solving it. Seriously.
Nuclear is far from perfect, but it is an essential component to decarbonizing. The planet is burning down and nuclear is the only life jacket we have to save us in time. If we wait for something perfect to come along, we’re all dead and everything is dead. When the house is on fire, you don’t complain that the fire hoses are soaking all your stuff. You stay alive now and deal with the less-than-ideal consequences later.
We need nuclear right now, and opposition to it in the face of climate change is irrational and denialist. I’m sorry, but it is.
IIRC, there’s some means to reduce the radioactivity of the waste to centuries and decades but I have no idea if it’s practical beyond the science news blurb I’ve seen on the topic.
Fuel reprocessing has been around for decades already. It’s not 50 years in the future, it’s 50 years in the past.
Various breeder reactor designs have been made that burn their own waste products, resulting 99% reduction in waste, and the waste that remains is much shorter half-life. Again, this has been done for decades. The US nuclear industry has been in deep freeze since the 1970s, as this video points out. I hope we will un-freeze it and get some very low waste designs into production eventually. It’s very old technology at this point.
What do you do with a planet that is uninhabitable because we cruised past 3°C of warming while fussing about with grid storage options?
I hate to be harsh but those are the choices: nuclear power to buy us time to solve grid storage or worst case-scenario climate change.
We can not afford to wait to solve grid storage
Furthermore, you are overstating the waste problem. Modern reactor designs can run entirely from the waste of older reactors while making minimal amounts of their own. We can bury it underground.
Is it perfect? No. Are there risks? Of course. Do we have any other choice? No we do not
Renewables do not work without massive massive grid storage which we have no viable solution to yet and no immediate prospects for a solution, even. We need time. Nuclear buys us time. It’s the only thing we have that can prevent catastrophic climate change scenarios, so no other concerns can take priority over that.
That’s basically a fictitious number. There’s no way we’re storing “waste” for thousands of years. All of it that we’re storing now is going to be dug up within the next few decades and burned as fuel. It isn’t waste. It’s just fuel that’s only been burned 1% of its potential.
Tell me what your alternative is, then. If there’s a solution that decarbonizes our energy supply in time to prevent catastrophic climate change besides nuclear, I’m all ears.
We are choosing between shitty problems. Burying nuclear waste deep underground is not a great option, but it beats total catastrophic climate change that will likely kill us all. Those really are the choices unless someone magically invents Super Grid Battery tomorrow.
Yeah, this. The cost per watt of solar is really great, but what about the cost per watt of solar… at night? I don’t have time to research the numbers on it, but intuitively, storing electricity probably more than doubles the cost of solar electricity. Probably a lot more than doubles. The storage solutions are batteries, which are still very expensive, and physical storage things (mainly storage as gravitational potential energy) which is also really expensive if you calculate it out. The same problems apply to wind, which doesn’t blow consistently. I know, clever grid connection of electric car batteries and so on can help but these are only partial solutions. You can’t run an industrial modern economy while starving for electricity. Nuclear is the solution we have and waste is mostly a fake problem created by a ban on reprocessing and breeder reactors.
The good news there is that battery prices have dropped significantly, and there are promising new technologies like the liquid metal batteries from Ambri that are made with more common, cheaper materials and don’t degrade over time in the same way that lithium batteries do. I’m definitely keeping my eye on that form of storage.
Honestly, we should be so lucky for it to be only a cost problem.
Batteries don’t scale well and aren’t very efficient. We can’t build enough of them nearly fast enough, and they are complex to maintain. Lithium battery technology does not have a lot of cycles and is very fussy, needing complex monitoring and charging infrastructure to keep from exploding. It’s not a viable tech to scale up to the entire grid.
Pumped hydro scales very well and is low maintenance, but only works in very specific geography which only exists in a few small places.
Every other grid storage idea is still in the “wacky idea that maybe we can prototype and see what happens” stage, like pushing concrete up hills or spinning up flywheels. Again though, none of it looks like it will scale very well.
People think we can just build a bunch of solar panels and wind farms and we’re done. Or they understand we need grid storage, but don’t understand the scale of that problem or that we literally don’t have the tech for it right now. It’s a moonshot and we can’t rely on a moonshot to save the planet.
Nuclear is here now and solves the problem. Not perfectly, but it does.
Gratuitous pumped hydro link, since I just think it’s cool:
We also shouldn’t think in terms of completely eliminate or 100% replace. The grid will always need a mix of generation. Not just for storage, but for lots of other reasons too. What we need to do is rebalance the current mix of generation. Reduce the fossil fuel, even if it’s not completely eliminated. Increase the other sources.
Incremental adjustments, but at a much faster rate than we’ve been adjusting in the past. Which for nuclear, “faster” than in recent past would just be moving at all, mostly.
For sure! Part of the challenge is that the grid now needs to become much more complex. We need more types and more sizes of power generation, from solar panels on someone’s house to a tidal generator in a bay to an old natural gas plant still kicking around, etc. Grid storage will no doubt vary depending on what works best in the area.
I tend to agree. I would like it if more people admitted that rather than pretending that storage is either solved or will soon be solved.
I do have doubts as to whether we have or can create storage capacity for sufficient nuclear waste to decarbonise the world economy.
There is of course a third alternative which you rightly didn’t mention because there is absolutely no prospect of achieving it - reduce our energy expenditure to a point where the planet can cope.
That is of course a very, very unpalatable alternative inevitably involving megadeaths.
I should probably go and reread some Peter Watts to cheer myself up.
Like you, I’m a huge renewables fan - it’s actually how I make my living. I see a few ways of finessing the storage problem: e.g. “over-build and distribute” is a surprisingly economical winning strategy to reduce (not eliminate) the need for firming. But there still needs an answer for that last chunk.
I’ll freely admit that my knowledge of the waste storage problem is based on old information, and is likely out-of-date. To be honest, I haven’t seriously adjusted my knowledge of it since I looked at the situation in the 90s and thought “madness” and moved on. Without trying to sealion, if you’ve got a few key words I can google to narrow the search to something practical, that would be most appreciated. If you don’t have time, that’s understandable. Heck, I should be back at my desk job right now.
And you’re right - we need time. We had time in the 90s and it’s gone. It wasn’t entirely wasted. I’m honestly not sure how solar could’ve moved faster; quietly and with little fanfare, solar grew at a mind-boggling rate. But googling “nyt exxon letters” for 2017 is enough to make me feel stabby. And makes me wonder about our capacity to run institutions that have planet-wide impact.
Thanks for a thoughtful discussion. You’ve fired up neurons that were long-dormant.
