Billionaire Venture Investors BG2 (Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley) have dug deep into nuclear fission energy. They had their most recent podcast at Diablo Canyon.
The California Diablo Canyon facility has two nuclear plants with a total 2.5 Gigawatts of clean baseload power.
The California Diablo Canyon facility was designed for six nuclear plants. If the US was building nuclear power plants then four more plants could be built at Diablo Canyon alone.
The nuclear plants can be continually maintained and upgraded indefinitely. There is no limit to the twenty year license extensions and operational extensions.
Build as much clean energy as you can. If there is abundance (way more than is needed and all growth needs easily handled) of clean energy then dirty energy like coal can be used less and less and eventually decommissioned. We are not in a situation of energy abundance.
All of the spent nuclear fuel every created could fit in one football field. If nuclear waste was reprocessed (like France, Japan and others have done and are doing) then the amount of waste fuel would be 90% less.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I recently read “Why Nuclear Power has been a Flop” by Jack Devanney.
A major part of his answer is that the Linear No Threshold model of radiation damage enormously exaggerates the harm from low level radiation, since it ignores the ability of living cells to repair such damage at low dose *rates*. Following LNT leads to *expensive* regulations that provide no benefit to the health and safety of workers or the general public.
In chapter 5 of the book he goes into detail on the evidence against LNT. I found this very convincing.
At this point as a proper skeptic I want to know what is the argument *for* LNT.
Can anyone point me to a source?
You read a book by the Thorcon guy; his stance is no surprise since he advocates for a reactor design that would increase dose rates by orders of magnitude. He can’t build his reactor if he can’t convince you to “suck it up” [more dose].
At some point (e.g. in proximity to irradiated fuel) radiation exposure does transition from irrational fear to lethal or at least sterilizing dose fields. Those lethal dose fields will occur in Jack Devanney’s plant, which will never be built. Almost been 10 years of listening to those Thorcon retirees. Maybe I should write a book too.
I’m mildly interested in reasons why someone might be biased in favor of a positions *AFTER* it has been pointed out that he gets his facts wrong here or his logic wrong there. Dismissing his argument before doing any such analysis because he is biased in an ‘ad hominem’.
Devanney isn’t the only person saying LNT is nonsense, cf Calabrese. I just mentioned Devanney’s book because I saw the most detailed argument against LNT written down there.
I don’t necessarily want a response to *his* argument, I want an argument *for* LNT that might have been written long before Devanney’s book.
Can you point me to any such argument in a book or a website?
Not this again. For the millionth time, this form of corporate welfare is dead. The same reasons everyone has been giving still apply.
I’m convinced that a big part of the fear of ‘nuclear’ is the fear of invisible, usually undetectable radiation.
Maybe we need to put up some kind of visual radiation indicators, that make radiation literally visible to people.
Like a 1 million pixel screen, where one pixel turns on for a while every time a detector detects ionizing radiation at a level equivalent to one millionth of a deadly dose if exposed to it continuously for a day.
People could see that even next to a nuclear power plant, the screen mostly stays black. In a disaster with release of radioactive gas, maybe a few pixels occasionally turn on.
Once a year there’d be a ceremony where a technician brings strong radiation sources to the ‘detector screen’, holding them up in turn on 8′ long poles while wearing a scarily heavy lead shielding suit, to demonstrate to witnesses that the screen really is working. Slowly the crowd edges back as first the pole is brought out with 1/1000th of a day’s lethal dose – and an almost invisibly thin row of pixels lights up. Then 1/100th – and a corner of the screen goes white.
The brave technician dithers, pulls off the leaded hood to wipe his sweaty brow, puts it back on – and finally pulls out the rod that with a full day’s exposure could give 1/10th of a lethal dose. For a few seconds he holds it up to the sensor, and the crowd sees a narrow solid bar through the middle of the screen, before their nerve breaks and they all turn and run. But after the technician is long gone, a few work up the nerve to come back, to stare at the black screen and the nuclear power plant looming a mile upwind of them.
Problem is that your demonstration would only be understood by maybe 50% of the population. You could not get my wife to understand this demonstration, but she is lovely company I assure you.
So much of energy around us is not delectable by normal human senses. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Our technology can help us detect frequencies from infrasound (what elephants hear/feel) to gamma rays. Trust me when I tell you, most people don’t want to be bombarded by “noise” they know little about, and can do nothing about. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the more information the better.
That said, you have to understand what people need to know, want to know, and what if you push it to hard, annoys people. Radiation that is hazardous people need to know. Most people would want to know. Then there’s always a percentage of people who prefer to hide under their beds. I don’t know what you propose would scare people, or make them want to be informed about radiation, what it is, how it may (or may not) affect them and what they can or should do about it. I would hope the later. Unfortunately, there is a percentage of people who “know everything”, who like hiding under their beds. Those who are intentionally clueless, think they’ll be safe. But this never ends well. Never.
I think your ideas are creative but I question their practical value. I view nuclear power, commercial airline flights, and our cars under the same broad Rubicon or mindset. We only notice them when they DON”T WORK. I question the value of this granular level of detail to the general public, but I LIKE it being available to people who monitor nuclear plants, commercial airline flights, those things that when they f*** up, WE ALL NOTICE. Some interesting ideas. Remember, overwhelm the general public even with “interesting” ideas, you’ll annoy them. But I will pass along your ideas to some people I know, who knows?
This is open press, you didn’t think this could happen?
If you want to see how bad global warming can get, “unlimited free energy” will get you there in a fraction of the time…. be careful what you wish for.
You can’t go back in time, and say “if we knew then, what we know know, we would have made better choices”. Pardon me, but this is the most OBVIOUS thing I ever heard in my life. Many years ago, I took part in a “wargame, an exercise”. It was utterly hypothetical. We were told we could go back in time, to a place we chose. We could take nothing with us, just the clothes we wore. No toys, gadgets, technology. Nothing to “Wow” the natives. In a “Star Trek universe”, the “prime directive” says, among other things, introduction of more advanced technology into a less technological society would be “disruptive”. It would be, but from these exercises, not how you’d think.
We found in my simulation (I went back to the American revolutionary war) with the goal of outlawing slavery from our nation’s beginning. We needed support from the “slave states” of the south to make the American revolution, happen. I knew, the American south, then mostly an agrarian society, would be transformed by agricultural technology. But that would have to be in place long before the revolution, Take the economics out of slavery, you think that would make it ridiculous? It would be a dominant factor (money ALWAYS talks, and walks) But it’s not (or ever) that simple.
So I show up in the American colonies say 1770. Remember, I show up only with what I know, and a future I hope to help create. That wouldn’t be enough time to introduce technology into the south that might impact it’s social structure. The date 1770 was picked for me, I had no choice (remember, this was only an exercise). But it’s social structure is based on one group of people thinking their better then another arbitrary group. No toys technology, even if they make their life much easier and unimaginably more profitable, will turn a bigot into a nice person. Oh how I thought it could. But I was young and stupid then.
Today, I’m old and still stupid. If I ever discover “wisdom”, I’ll be happy to share.
Figure out how to operate the plants without a figurative army of people filling out paperwork and a literal militia of people with automatic weapons and we’ll talk.
Until the regulations are changed to make this possible, no amount of technology can solve nuclear barriers in the US.
The failure to reprocess here in the US was a conscious strategy by opponents of nuclear power to choke the industry in its own wastes. It never had any rational basis.
Nuclear is the rare industry where regulatory capture was accomplished, not by the regulated industry, but by people who wanted it abolished.
The rational basis is that it is cheaper to fabricate clean new fuel than to 1) transport 2) chop up highly irradiated assemblies 3) dissolve the rubble in acid 4) use aqueous chemistry and solvent extractions to remove the actinides from the slop 5) dry the product and the slop, form pellets, etc., etc…
It should be intuitive that clean fuel is profoundly cheaper and safer to handle. Reloads for 1.2GWe reactors cost in excess of $100M/18-months.
Sure, new fuel can be cheaper than reprocessing: If you ignore the cost of waste disposal.
My perspective conflicts with your narrative.
Casks are an indefinite, passive, solution. They are licensed for 60 years, but they will last forever with infinite fatigue life. Perhaps the only failure mechanism involves stress corrosion cracking in salt air, and that should be identified before 60 years. The rain wets them and the sun dries them. Casks consist of a steel grid frame in a stainless thin walled vessel, placed in a painted steel overpack (shield), which is filled with hematite aggregate cement. If you want them to last double-forever, put them in a dry place. Your preferred CANDU makes about 8 times more high level waste mass/volume than a US LWR.
My best guess why France in Japan reprocess is to hedge against supply interruptions. These nations are aware of vulnerability in their supply chain.
It’s an interesting topic. Most of the spent lwr fuel is only about 1% fissile so it wouldn’t be one assembly comes in spent and one goes out new.
Anyway at this point it’s not a problem. We are not short of supply or running out of space. Fuel cycle is the most sexy topic but isn’t really important. Just build a bunch of ap1000s
Ralf Nader in 1994: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/nader.html
“Q: But that would be okay, even if it allowed the nuclear industry to continue, is my point.
A: No. The first step is to stop it from continuing. But then you deal with the garbage.
Q: You don’t want this problem solved until the industry–
A: No, because it’ll just try to prolong the industry, and expand the second generation of nuclear plants subsidized by the tax payer.”
In fact, it’s been an explicit strategy of the anti-nuclear movement since the mid 70’s to destroy the industry by “constipation”: Prevent the waste from being dealt with, and absolutely prevent it from being reprocessed. An *explicit* strategy, mind you: They openly talked about doing it.
The once-thru approach is vastly more cost effective than reprocessing, which requires tens of billions of dollars to build (as the French can verify).
As far as the cost of nuclear is concerned, the NRC is a perfect example of bureaucratic overregulation on steroids. The net result is a technology that is vastly and unnecessarily too costly with no chance of being remotely competitive.