Is Nuclear Power the Answer to Solving the Climate Crisis?
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- Опубликовано: 13 июл 2024
- Since its inception, Nuclear Power has split opinion and so we thought it was time to explore why, and ask if Nuclear has a place in a net zero future. Whilst renewable power such as wind and solar will always come up on top, their intermittency might leave space for this zero carbon often controversial power source, to make up at least a fraction of the grid. Rising energy prices, managing nuclear waste and a plight for energy security and it looks like we may well have to ask ourselves some serious questions about Nuclear. Join Dr Helen Czerski as she finds out more.
0:00 Introduction
0:50 A brief history
3:15 When renewables won't do
5:20 What is radioactivity?
6:15 What about nuclear waste?
8:56 Who pays for nuclear waste?
11:25 Do we even need it?!
12:20 How much do we need?
15:10 Trade offs to get to net zero
16:25 Double the Electricity!
17:03 Join the discussion
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The important fact: coal plants not only emit carbon dioxide, they also emit significant amounts of other pollution, INCLUDING radioactive particles. Coal is slightly radioactive and when you burn it some of the particles in the chimney are radioactive.
Ashpiles are at much higher levels then any the workers in the nuclear industry are allowed to be exposed to.
Nuclear has the highest standards, yet there is still a nimby feeling.
The constant FUD around nuclear from anti-groups has caused that.
One other thing with coal it expels a lot of heavy metals next to the ghg and dust.
So are bananas!
I can never understand why geothermal is not considered as an alternative to nuclear. If we are happy to go to all this effort and expense to dig holes in the ground to bury nuclear waste. It can’t be beyond us to drill down to harness the heat of the earth to generate power. And, we have a load of technology and skilled labour from the fossil fuel industry that have the experience and expertise to help get it done as well. 🤷♂️
Well said. Eavor announced funding for five new projects today, and have one underway in Germany. No hot water required. Underground heat is everywhere.
Because the nuclear lobbyists are much more powerful than the geothermal ones.
We have some test sites for larger scale geothermal energy her ein Germany, there were some occasions of smaller earthquakes that were seemingly caused by change sin the water pressure underground. It seems we need to be pretty careful with picking sites for these plants, especially since most areas that are good for efficient plants are also geologically active and risky. I don't know about the UK, but in Germany we have only a few places where these kinds of plants could be built cost efficient. Smaller scale geothermic for house heating in combination with a heat pump are a common option, it doesn't help with our industrial electrical power needs though.
sadly some of the obvious ways of using geothermal in non "active" areas (think island) have the same downsides of fracking. so earthquakes, disturbed groundwater and the like. and also the right geological conditions are not easy to find, especially places you can actually build the plants
@@Mikael.Andersen Not so. You can't equate Geothermal with Fracking. Seismic monitoring of existing Geothermal (Cornwall) has not shown any "earthquakes". No toxic chemicals are pumped down, the sides of the well are lined and the water tables remain unaffected. See previous video (about 1 year old). Directional drilling enables choice of site, etc. etc.
What is needed is an audit on the price of oil/gas subsidies and the full price we pay for the construction maintenance and decommissioning of these nuclear power plants and the storage of the nuclear waste from them. I think it will be in the hundreds of billions! I feel the British public do not have any idea of the total cost of these subsidies and charges. Some party/ organisation should publish these figures in the media.
Lots of (highly paid) people will spend their whole careers (40 years or so) involved in the decommissioning of Sellafield...that's how cheap nuclear is...as time goes on, increasingly stringent safety requirements escalate in price ( for obvious reasons), probably exponentially...that said, it probably is possible to use fission economically, using the right approach - but can we achieve it ? (Politicians work on a 5 year timetable, so no use asking them...) But let me get this right - the public are paying for the present nuclear waste - and in the future the government will pay. That's fine then. Oh wait, where does the government get every single penny from? Yeah, the public.Yet again, energy producing companies (fossil fuel, coal, nuclear ) get the gravy and the public has to clear up the sh** they produce...
Yes, that’s the imperative of companies:
privatise profits, democratise costs.
French authorities have budgeted all the lifecycle and it's by far cheaper than solar+batteries (yes solar is cheap, but not at all per on demand MWh)
Considering that the world's governments are subsidising oil and gas to the tune of $11M every minute, I'm sure we can afford the cost of nuclear waste storage. The main issue will be the length of time it takes to implement a nuclear power station.
@@claudebbg err no they have not. Everything about Nuclier power in France is a state secret and anyone saying anything other than the state line on this power source risks being "vanished" yes they are that strict!
I used to work at Windscale as it was known then. They told me that they knew how much radiation they were pumping into the North Sea.. and it was far less than was there. Strangly however there is always a frence freighter sitting just over the Windscale (now Seascale) pipeline exit. The ship was swapped every few days by another one.. anyone know where the French dispose of their reprocessing waste??? No? Well I can give you a guess if you like.
There have to have been "insidences" with French power plants.. however nothing has ever been publicly anounced. So in the 60+ years they have never had the slightest issue?? Yeh right belive a word they say and you will be made a fool.
Born 1952 in Pittsburgh. 1958 first commercial reactor came online just down river from Pittsburgh. Toured the plant as a Catholic schoolboy in 1965. Built by Pittsburgh based Westinghouse using a design from nuclear submarine. Two large foundational mistakes made. One was military insisted reactor design could make bomb grade material. Two high pressure water reactor had many single points of failure. Similar designs were replicated without better understanding of downsides. Our library had books claiming we could use nuclear bombs for tunnel building, for military aircraft. Westinghouse eventually collapsed and sold to Toshiba. Toshiba bankruptcy put it in hands of private investors. Three mile island catastrophe also in Pennsylvania. Coincidentally Pittsburgh's heritage was coal, coal, coal. First commercial oil well Drakes well just north of Pittsburgh was drilled with a wooden bit! Oil was readily available. Today Western PA's heritage is countless abandoned methane spewing wells. Areas riddled with hundreds of miles of empty coal mines. Mine subsidence strikes even today as property's collapse. Water fills the mines, leaches millions of tons of toxic metals, dissolved iron which pollute streams on large scale. The used coal slag heaps are legendary! From opening of Carnegie's steel mills in 1800's till late 1970's the railroads that hauled the slag had the greatest tonnage of freight (although poisonous) in the world. Great swaths of groundwater polluted. River's waters undrinkable till very recently. From my birth to 1962 air pollution so bad you had to drive with headlights on at noon on the sunniest days. Grandma swept her porches soot off multiple times per day. IMO nuclear at least should not be curtailed assuming the plant passes safety standards. Waste fuel in US has been used as a political punching bag instead of having discussions on how best to store. We've already built two burial sites one of which is near the testing grounds of nuclear weapons, land that's useless anyway yet politicians block their usage. We're burning through over 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent fossil fuels annually globally. Adding 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases pollution to our shared atmosphere annually. In addition fossil fuels are critical to civilization today to make nearly every product imaginable. Burning them for transportation and electricity genocidal. Lastly there's no OIL FAIRY REFILLING THE HOLES! Will add if the rest of US adopted California's conservation regulations we could buy time to do what can, must, will be done! Thanks to Fully Charged and it's team of presenters for tackling this mess.
Didn't you forget the "Too cheap to meter" part?
"military insisted reactor design could make bomb grade material"
This is the entire objective of nuclear electricity generation. This is why it exists. This is why we must say no.
My understanding of the storage problem here is that no states wanted to agree for radioactive waste to be transported by rail through their states. Largely a reaction to a series of widely publicized rail accidents around the same time. So it wasnt even about national politics so much as a state by state problem. Interesting to me that that hasnt been a huge barrier to oil and gas pipelines. Maybe the nuclear industry just didnt pay off enough local politicians?
So now we are stuck storing this mess in rotting old plants. Im sure its leaking into the soil and water table. Someones problem in the future i suppose is the attitude.
Good thing our only choices aren't just nuclear fission and coal.
@@4203105 Thank you for injecting a little rationality into a "solution" based on a false equivalence fallacy. There are other options, none of which were presented here.
Can you take a look at the radiation released by coal, the deaths caused by coal or as a side effect of its use in terms of deaths.
The fear against nuclear power has been exploited by the fossil fuel companies.
History / statistics show nuclear to be very safe. Even incline the disasters
@@markthomasson5077 yep, I think your right.
I remember your video from 6 years ago. What has changed since then? From 'most expensive electricity', to 'we definitely need a base load'. I remember; 'storing energy is much cheaper than nuclear'. Yeah, a lot has changed since then!
They talk out of their behinds. Just quoted Greta Thunberg in the video too.
My thoughts exactly. A green energy channel which I used to respect now pushing nuclear. By the time these expensive nuclear solutions are ready to go, we could have decentralized the energy grid and put energy generation in the hands of people. That is true resilience. Not hand millions to a few companies, which will leave a dangerous legacy to future generations. I truly thought Fully Charged was fighting the good fight.
They realised they were wrong
Slightly less snarkily, they got a physicist, who thinks with their mind, rather than an actor that thinks with their heart
Not really. If you have an operating nuclear power plant, keep it running as long as possible. New nuclear is less clear cut. Yes it is good baseload but unless we find a cheap way to make the nuclear power stations and a cheap effective way to store the waste then it is a dead end. New nuclear is currently too expensive and too slow to build oit to bother.
I'm glad Helen presented this, and it was a better video than about nuclear power than I have come to expect from Fully Charged Show. I hope future episodes will be more detailed and more even handed.
In this episode renewables were presented as the best solution, with no attempt to let viewers know that nuclear has lower or comparable lifecycle CO2eq emissions, which is a pretty big omission. Here are the figures for two prominent major studies:
UNECE Carbon Neutrality in the UNECE Region (2022): Integrated Life-cycle Assessment of Electricity Sources, lifecycle emissions (in gCO2eq/kWh):
Hydropower 6-147g
Nuclear (fission) 5.1-6.4g
Solar (CSP) 27-122g
Solar (PV) 8-83g
Wind (offshore) 12-23g
Wind (onshore) 7.8-16g
IPCC WG3 AR5 Annexe iii (2014), median lifecycle emissions (in gCO2eq/kWh, including albedo effect):
Biomass (dedicated) 230g
Geothermal 38g
Hydropower 24g
Nuclear 12g
Solar (CSP) 27g
Solar (PV rooftop) 41g
Solar (PV utility) 48g
Wind (offshore) 12g
Wind (onshore) 11g
Of course to fairly compare nuclear to wind and solar on a level playing field, you have to add additional emissions to wind and solar for storage or backup generation. The UNECE report mentions in the electricity storage section that adding 4 hours of 60-MW storage to a conventional 100-MW PV system would increase its greenhouse gas emissions 4-28g gCO2eq/kWh depending on battery chemistry and solar irradiation, which is quite significant.
If you would like more factual information about nuclear power and waste, then I suggest checking out Sabine Hossenfelder's RUclips channel.
I thought FC would do a deeper dive into the topic instead of just skimming the surface. As one example, China is currently running a test reactor using molten salt and thorium. It doesn’t require water to run and the fission products are have shorter half life’s. Can you please at lease send one of your crew to do a video report on this new reactor?
I would love to know the aggregated kilowatt hour cost including the lifetime total of commissioning and decommissioning and storage of waste
The current charge is something like 0.1-0.2p/kWh. So it's a pretty small fraction (1-2%) of the electricity cost. Whether that proves to be sufficient by the time we've actually picked a site and built the facility and packed all the waste in remains to be seen. The (CFD) cost of the power overall (for Hinckley) is 9.3p/kWh (2017ish price). That was looking quite expensive (as renewable prices fell to ~4p/kWh and even firm power was ~6p), but now that gas prices have gone crazy and we're averaging about 30p/kWh on the wholesale market it's looking very cheap.
Great introductory video! I would also like to see you cover some of the key benefits of nuclear energy compared to renewables in a bit more detail: high energy density, small land footprint, low material intensity, highest EROEI of any power source, extremely low carbon intensity and of course dispatchability (keeping the lights on when wind and solar do not deliver)
I don't think we need to do a versus, just on its own merrits against fossil.
The material intensity is not that much different for nuclear and wind. Wind uses more steel (and fibreglass), nuclear more concrete.
have you counted the disaster clearing efforts in your EROEI "calculations?" Like Chernobyl, Fuku, or how did you calculate the final costs for the waste disposal, as zero final solution exists yet?
@@sandormedzi9839 Finland has a final solution. So there is 1 now actually built, and other designed and costed.
@@xxwookey no nuclear has a much lower material usage.
It's just more in one place.
The compare should be on TWh's and lifetime.
"We don't want to rely on foreign countries for our fuel." Really? Where are the uranium mines in the UK to feed the nuclear plants? How much of the uranium used in the UK is actually Russian?
Good point
@@nicolascontentin4611 Thanks. I always wonder why people get to say stuff like this unquestioned.
So much outright lying in this video
Russia bought up most of the uranium market in recent years. So the answer is: most of that uranium is actually russian.
The U.K. can extract uranium from sea water.
As an opener, I was always told that if you really want to know the bias of any system, follow the money. When looking at how nuclear power is funded and sold, we can get a clearer picture as to it's actual efficacy as a power source. It is only second to the oil and coal industry for direct taxpayer subsidies. In inflation adjusted dollars, the US nuclear electric power industry has received on average 3.5 billion dollars a year since 1947 of direct taxpayer subsidies. Compare this to renewables that has received 0.38 billion dollars a year since 1994 in direct taxpayer subsidies. Yes, you heard it right, 0.38 billion, or 380 million per year for 40 years, compared to 3,500 million per year for 76 years.
This does not include a lot of hidden costs to taxpayers, but that is another whole subject. Depending on the amount and type of subsidies received, owner/operators then have to sell the power to customers and try to recoup their unsubsidized costs. Depending on how the utility is structured, and its relationship to the owner/operator, the utility will be allowed to pass on varying levels of power plant construction, power production, decommissioning, and ultimately, waste disposal costs to customers. This leads to utility customers bearing and subsidizing the higher costs of nuclear power, often through opaque system of billing. At this point, not a single nuclear plant produces power that could be sold for a profit on the open market without the subsidies received, since it cannot compete with even unsubsidized utility scale wind and solar, or combined cycle gas, or even some coal.
Some nuclear plant operators, trying to make themselves profitable, have been fined for trying to operate as lagging source power (peaker plants) instead of leading source power (baseload plants) as they were designed and operationally permitted for. Operating a nuke plant as a peaker plant greatly increases operational risks that they are not designed for. It is like asking a 747 passenger plane to be used as jet fighter: they are just not designed to maneuver that quickly.
Then there is Insurance. Early on in the nuclear industry, insurance risk assessors looked at nuclear power plants, and gave their opinion of the risk costs, and applied that to insurance premiums. It took the already incredibly high cost of nuclear power, and made it stratospheric. So then was born the Price Anderson Act to subsidize the cost of insurance to nuclear power. It only required each commercial reactor/s owner to carry a small amount of liability insurance (now 450 million) for each reactor owned. Then this first tier of liability insurance is supplemented by an industry self insurance program, where all of the owners of all 92+/- currently operating reactors are supposed to chip in up to 131 million for each of their reactors for any accidents, hopefully without going bankrupt.
All told, the total theoretical accident liability insurance available would be a total of about 15 billion dollars for an accident similar to Fukushima with 4 involved reactors. As Fukushima is expected to exceed 1 trillion dollars in cleanup costs, that would leave about 985 billion dollars to be covered by US taxpayers. This Taxpayer Self Insurance is a hidden subsidy to the nuclear industry. The average site premium is around 1.3 million per year for the 450 million in coverage. If we extrapolate that out to 1 trillion in coverage per site, that is an equivalent to 2.888 billion dollars in insurance premiums for each reactor site in the US, EACH AND EVERY YEAR! Yes it is assuming that they would not be under insuring themselves, but even if the premiums were halved, and then halved again, they would be astronomically high. Far higher than the value of any power produced.
Even building nuclear power plants puts companies at extreme financial risk. The most recent nuclear power projects in the US bankrupted the builder, Westinghouse Electric, and caused it's parent company Toshiba financial ruin trying to build two projects using "fast modular design" reactors.
As a teenager in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I was reading about the carbon foot print of nuclear energy. At the time we had decades of information and studies that had been done on the overall infrastructure needed to build and fuel nuclear power. As an electrician who has worked on nuclear power plants, I can attest to the incredible amount of material needed to build nuclear compared to conventional power plants. From redundancy to safety systems, the reactors and isolation system, fuel storage and pumping systems, nuclear power requires millions of tons of material more than conventional power, most of it very carbon intensive.
To mine fissile materials is becoming increasingly carbon intensive, as all of the easily mined fissile materials have been already mined. What is left is deeper underground, so either we can drill deeper mines, or move more overburden. There is also the types of ore. Soft rock and hard rock ores, are just that. Soft rock is easy to break up to allow the extraction chemicals to work, while hard rock ores require much more energy to break apart. I am sure you can figure out which one has been already mined first.
In the late 1970's, some non-nuclear industry funded studies put nuclear power CO2 production to be slightly better than that of natural gas, but that was without factoring in decommissioning and waste disposal. Now that we have plants that have been decommissioned, and decades of short term waste storage, some of those same independent studies put the CO2 production of nuclear up there with coal.
Then there is the waste. In the 1950's and 1960's, when most nuclear power plants were being designed and built, people did not truly understand the dangers of nuclear waste, and they just assumed that we would come up with disposal solutions as time went on. This has turned out to be much more technically challenging than people imagined. Nuclear waste continues to produce heat and decay particles that eventually destroy all of the containers they are put into, causing it to leak out into the surrounding environment.
A lot of people try and downplay the effects of radiation, often likening exposure by comparing it to the amounts we are exposed to while flying in an airplane. This is a very misleading false equivalency, since radioactive particles released into our environment continue to produce dangerous radiation for up to millions of years, and will be either inhaled into lungs through the air from dust, or ingested into plants and animals that will then become parts of our bodies. Flying in a plane is like standing to close to the camp fire and having ones skin get uncomfortably hot, versus the internal damage caused by swallowing some red hot coals that stay hot for years causing continuous internal damage.
At this point, there are very few places on earth that are now considered possibly viable for long term waste storage, and fewer yet now storing waste. Areas around them then have to decide if they want the added risks of thousands of tonnes of radioactive materials being shipped through their communities.
Temporary dry cask storage containers for high level waste are 100 to 150 tonne behemoths of steel and concrete with 1 to 5 tonnes of high level waste sealed in with helium gas. It is hoped that they will last for 50 to 100 years, but 25 years has been the norm for now, with some failing within 5 years. This means that the waste must be put into new 100 to 150 tonne containers of steel and concrete every 25 to 50 years. While we are all hoping to decarbonize steel and concrete production, we have not yet done so, so the carbon footprint of nuclear waste storage is astronomical. The handling and transport of these materials adds lots of risks and costs, and is a highly technical process. We cannot just drop it in a hole and cover it in concrete, and then assume it will stay in place. the concrete will start to crumble and crack from the heat and radiation, and then release the radioactive materials into surrounding materials. Our earth is a very dynamic place underground, with lots of water moving around in aquifers, with a lot of that being pumped out for use by humans now. We cannot just politely ask the waste to stay put, and expect it to do so.
In my opinion as an IBEW electrician, the nuclear industry gets incredible support for two reasons: One is that it is an engineers wet dream about the mythological sexy atom. The other is because of the incredible trough filled with taxpayer and industry money that politicians and industries can feed from. A normal combined cycle gas power plant might have 200 to 300 electricians working at the peak of employment during construction, while a nuke plant can have 2 to 3 thousand electricians at peak. That is a lot of union workers getting top dollar, and making lots of overtime.
I don't mind my tax dollars going to roads, schools, social programs, and infrastructure, but I hate seeing it wasted to line industry pockets just for the easy money, when so many people who need real help get nothing.
I can’t bothered reading all this. Do you know what a Exec Summary is ?
@@MichaelSmith-px1ev I read it -- very interesting!
@@MichaelSmith-px1ev Actually, it really [is] worth taking the time to read it all. A cogent and coherent set of points.
A fulsome cogent and coherent argument. 👍
@@pinkelephants1421 Not really, it was mostly FUD. Like calling a place 1000 meter deep in a stable rock formation "a very dynamic place". I have rocks at my house left by the receding ice from the last ice age 10 000 years ago. Just imagine all the stress they have received from being exposed to wind, rain and snow for all this time. And still they stand proud.
What I am missing in this is an answer to the question of where does the fuel come from? How much carbon emissions created during the mining and refining? And how much carbon is produced in the construction of a nuclear power plant.
...compared with a coal powered station?
Also, it is important to consider the outlook in up-coming nuclear designs. IINM, there's not much to be done with (eg) the emissions in coal mining, etc, but nuclear is somewhat like battery technologies used for EVs...lots of promising techs on the horizon.
Compared to the power that nuclear power plants produce, the emissions are almost negligible on a per kWh basis.
@@davesutherland1864 plus the accidents&deaths per mwh generated per year in use for nuclear makes it the safest form of power generation.
Actually a bigger topic than one might expect, a large percentage of known nuclear fuel deposits are owned by authoritarian regimes, we can try to only source from democratic countries, but the worlds needs will lead to a dependency on such states as Kazakhstan, South Africa, Russia, China or Tanzania. Also a not widely accounted for fact is that the known deposits aren't that large over all and many are not economic to mine. If we were to increase nuclear power by a large factor we might run into an actual shortage of fuel, or at least a huge cost increase rather soon.
@ What you're missing is the (very realistic) possibilities of nuclear reprocessing, which unfortunately has been prohibited in some countries. There's a considerable gain to be had in using the fuel again, not least that the waste you end up with will be way less radioactive.
Geo-thermal is the third option! Why spend billions (as we are at Sizewell C) on nuclear, when geo-thermal is quicker to bring on-stream. Using the same technology as oil drilling (rigs at sea..) would leverage existing infrastructure and skills.
Continually renewed (by the Moon), and ceaselessly producing output.
I am still surprised at how nuclear sells itself as 'clean' low carbon energy (as if nuclear plants appear by magic!) when in fact there are a great many emissions from fuel production, construction, waste processing to de-commisioning at end of life.
We actually need nuclear fusion for space travel. Developing nuclear fission will help us gain a broader understanding of harnessing elements for limitless power.
We don't have practical and economic access to the high temperature geothermal resources we would need. Iceland has a very unique geography.
Solar and wind, and also any storage solution, also have CO2e emissions in construction and operation. They don't just appear from nowhere.
I work for a company involved in the nuclear industry, and there are so many misconceptions about nuclear even within the industry itself. The number one problem with nuclear is TIME. The number of years it takes to bring new reactors online simply isn't compatible with the time we have to reduce energy related emissions, whereas wind and solar can be massively scaled within just a few years. Nuclear is part of the solution (as shown in the IEA scenario in this video) but nowhere near as much as some people believe it should be. If we lived in a world where capital funding was readily available for everything then sure put it into nuclear, but where finance is constrained it is better (for climate change) when invested in renewables right now. Willing to be challenged on this view.
I could listen to Helen all day
Wonderful presenter !
Nicely balanced, no hysteria. Life is full of choices. This is just a really big one that affects us all.
Nuclear energy is a very bad idea. In generations to come, the concrete casing of the waste material could be breached under geological activity, and the waste can get into underground water. So, there is a need to continue to resist nuclear. It must be stopped. Hundreds of thousands of waste - who will want it? Terrorists can use it to make dirty bombs.
I'm afraid I did not find it balanced enough. For example, nothing was mentioned about renewable backup storage for those times renewable is not generating enough.
@@barryh9653 Hi Barry, I see your point. I think this was concentrating on Nuclear Power, rather than looking across the entire mix.
I'd love to see an excess of renewables built, so we could put energy into some form of medium/long term storage (I'm deliberately not getting into what form that could take). But the maths on how much renewables we would need is scary. If we want to decarbonise iron/steel (coke) and other major industries that uses gas, stop making grey hydrogen from natural gas for fertiliser and electrify all ground transport and home heating.... we are going to need an enormous increase in electricity production in the next 20 years. I just don't see how we can build enough renewables to power all of this AND have excess to put into storage for peak usage and to cover intermittency.
Honestly.... I hope I am wrong! I'd prefer not to use nuclear fission, but it just seems to be almost inevitable which isn't ideal.
Glad I'm not making the decisions - but I would like to see the UK Political Parties at least laying out their policies in their manifestos before the next election so we can judge what they will plan to do.
@@geralddavison I suspect that much of this can be made up from becoming significantly more efficient in what we already currently use. I.e. a significantly higher priority in making homes much more self sufficient and as close to passive as possible. If this was achieved above all other concerns then the amount of energy increase people imagine just does not need to happen. Education from a young age on being efficient is a must I feel. Further, a stable balanced population needs to be established. We simply cannot have an ever increasing population count. That's totally unsustainable.
Less than 4 minutes in "we know wind and solar are the best". FFS, how is that balanced?
Really enjoyed this video. Very informative and very relaxing to watch. More like this please.
I assume relaxing to watch is an ironic criticism?
Excellent analysis Helen - thank you! I'm off to see a screening of Oliver Stone's 'Nuclear Now' in London tomorrow. Looking forward to comparing and contrasting that with your work!
Makes the case for investing in home insulation/solar/battery and hopefully some of the new small turbines - distribute the power where its possible to reduce the size of the grid requirements
The new nuclear designs are so much safer than what is out there currently. The problem, at least in the US, it almost impossible to get them built, litigation blocking it delays and makes them too costly. Recycling the waste shrink it to small amounts, a soda can worth per person for their lifetime. Localized plants with sealed systems can run for decades on their original fuel.
New designs? You do realise that it will take many years, until they have been developed enough, that you could realistically start talking about planing the construction of one. (and then it takes many years, for it to be completed, of course)
@@ZarlanTheGreen New means about 25 years old and they have been tested.
@@jasonfournier Ah. So you're talking about the sightly newer designs, that are only _slightly_ safer? In that case: They are hardly any better. Very risky, extremely expensive, take ages to build, depend on materials that have to be imported from problematic/dangerous countries (where they are also mined, in ways that are deeply problematic), involve risk of countries developing nuclear weapons…
Loved how careful and fair this complex issue was discussed. Usually it always deteriorates to either a bashing of the german nuclear exit or a one liner calculation showing how bad nuclear does on the price sticker.
Personally I think that well maintained nuclear reactors should be kept running for their designed lifespan. Meaning not shutting them down to have them produce "only" 98% of the expected waste in their timeline. We already have a big issue with the radioactive waste that already needs solving. There is no dodging it even if we shoot all reactors at the moon. That is the foul compromise we probably have to make to save millions of tonnes of CO2 without making the nuclear waste problem noticeably worse.
But installing new reactors now? That is a really odd idea, unless a country has some freakish boundary conditions to contend with. With the price development of renevables it is cheaper to build up an overcapacity of wind, then toss a lot of that energy into electrolysis, make hydrogen, e-methane or amonia from it and use that in fuel cells, gas turbines and what have you. Yes, it will be twice as expensive as using the renewable power directly but that is:
a) still cheaper than nuclear power
b) necessary since long term power storage needs a beyond battery solution because of the gargantuan energy amounts involved in that issue and because batteries are crucial for mobile applications and rare as it is.
Totally agree - stored hydrogen provides "instant on" power. Another point is that once we have millions of EVs plugged in with V2G there will a massive amount of storage available. School buses in the US are a great example of this.
And if we need to build out a couple of hundred km3 of desert with solar panels to do run the electrolysis facilities that seems a much better investment than new nuclear plants. Faster to construct as well.
Lots of comments start with "what no one ever mentions" and then mentions something discussed *endlessly*.
What no one *actually* never mentions is that nuclear needs storage just as much as solar.
Unless you build enough to cover the peak, and waste the rest, nuclear needs storage. The nuclear lobby (which is really the fossil fuel lobby in a clown mask) only ever talks about average demand, or meeting those times of low renewables, so you don't need storage or long distance power lines (they do it in this video). The reality is that nuclear can't be a standby for renewables, or anything else. Its far too expensive and finicky to be running it for a few hours every couple of months. They need to be brought to temperature very slowly, run at a fixed level as long as possible and cooled slowly when you need to shut them down. Just like coal, or any other gigantic heat engine.
In general I agree, but the overcapacity gets more and more expensive as you get to the last few percent of supply. I'm not sure it's yet clear that "it will be twice as expensive as using the renewable power directly but that is still cheaper than nuclear power". Nuclear power is currently about twice as expensive as slightly-firmed renewables (and one third the current price of gas generation). So actually I think it may still work out to be a reasonable deal. It's certainly not obviously a bad plan, and diversity is a good thing in itself - it makes for a more resilient system. 25% for the UK seems like too high a target, but the two big plants currently planned seems like a sensible level of provision. Exactly what the right mix is is quite a nuanced debate IMHO.
You are looking at RE with a overestimate of how great it will be.
And of what is needed.
@@xxwookey I think your stand point is very sound even if it diverges from my own. One thing I would like to add however is that as soon as H2 gets into play, renevable overcapacity will not be "expensive" it will just be a factor that will then regulate the prices for concrete and steel. Those processes use coal right now but can be replaced with hydrogen (one example why green future without hydrogen is a pipe dream). So, when there is tons and tons of overcapacity, that hydrogen becomes very cheap, making steel and concrete cheap in the process.
Enjoyable video with a rational vibe. Some aspects however are lacking a bit of depth in my humble opinion.
it’s mentioned that the problems are: complexity, cost and overruns. This tech is indeed complex and needs attention on a national level. The cost of new nuclear builds is extremely high in two parts of the world, the US and Europe. Reasons for this are very simple. In the past decades there have almost no new builds in Europe which makes it expensive. The US has an even larger timespan. Vogtle 3 & 4 are the first new reactors in 30 years. When a product isn’t build, the industry that was able to build them will disappear. Europe has been able in the 70s and 80s to build affordable to even cheap reactors. In the rest of the world where they build reactors on a constant basis, they are affordable and withing reasonable timescales.
The waste that is mentioned could have been explained by type. Not everyone is aware of these differences. The biggest thing that I miss in this video is the nuclear fuel cycle. If you’d dive into this topic it will become quite clear that the high level waste coming from spent fuel isn’t actually waste. It’s fuel for fast reactors that breed new fuel from U-238. Examples for these kind of reactors are: Phénix, Super Phénix, EBR I & II, BN-600 & 800, etc. fun fact: the Finnish geological repository is the first in the world for commercial reactor waste and called Onkalo. It’s situated under the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant and is 520m deep.
As a finishing statement saying that we as a civilization need to use less energy is not just unrealistic it’s also the opposite if you want a world that keeps advancing. Sure energy efficiency is important and we should pursue and advance this field. But the more energy a civilization can use, the higher the quality of life will become ex: fertilizer = more efficient crop yield, heating, advancement in tech, less child mortality, fewer diseases, etc…
For an hard topic like this, i do agree this had to be addressed in de video
High level waste is the fission products and it is just that - waste.
U238 isn’t really radioactive at all and can be used in the manufacture of such things as racing yacht keels and bullets due to its very high density.
All reactor types produce fission products in pretty much equal amounts. It doesn’t matter if they’re uranium or thorium based, fast breeders, whatever, if you have fission, you get fission products, ie high level rad waste as a waste product.
Sorry, but your finishing statement ignores several things, not least of which is that we live on a finite planet and that we use more energy than ever yet still have rampant poverty.
As a counter-example: you said fertiliser = more efficient crop yield... no, no it doesn't. And energy generation has only a very minor part to play in crop nutrition (even then, there are alternatives). Now, I assume you didn't mean "efficient" but instead "increased" which is more accurate, if grossly simplistic. But here's the thing, ~1 billion people are starving and 9 million will die of hunger this year, despite us producing more food, using more fertiliser, and having better crops and agronomy. So that increased energy use hasn't been effective at bringing a higher quality of life.
I highly recommend reading The Divide by Jason Hickle.
@@oakfieldfarm4131 no, the amount of energy extracted from the fuel does differ, so the volume produced per TWh's is different.
And we should use the heat for much more in industries, water and hydrogen.
@@tim290280 @Tyson Adams @Tyson Adams Our resources are indeed finite so recycling which is energy intensive should be mandatory to be sustainable. The povery gap between nations is something that has to be fixed. Isn't this a perfect example of energy use and quality of living? If not, what is the solution to lift these people out of poverty?
Yes efficiency was a poor choice of words on my part. What i meant was indeed what you described. Correct me if i'm wrong but doesn't fertiliser get made from natural gas these days to turn it into amonia? I'd think it would be possible to make this with green energy by splitting water into hydrogen and adding nitrogen from the atmosphere.
So, at present taxpayers are paying to dispose of old waste and in the future customers will be paying. Why isn't the cost of disposal coming from the profits of producers?
In the past governments had a huge interest in making nuclear work, not in the least to gain access to fission material for bombs. Risks were ignored and costs for the producers were capped. A nice example is that insurance for nuclear plants is basically impossible to get. All current insurances are capped and governments (taxpayers) guarantee for all excess costs that might come form nuclear desaster.
What I miss in this, otherwise very good video: creating the fuel rods take energy and also has wast in the mining and refining etc.
Creating the fuel rods takes a negligible amount of energy. You are right that there is always waste from mining and refining (of everything). Care needs to be taken in Uranium mining not to make too much of a mess (like they did in the 50s in the US). Yes it wasn't mentioned, but as she said - they were not going to cover all the little wrinkles in a 17min video. She didn't talk much about grid storage either, which is an important system consideration, nor a whole load of other things, like reprocessing, but they are all relatively minor considerations, like the details of fuel manufacture.
You have to know how energy rich uranium is to understand that mining etc is a non issue on ROE.
Three things. One: most of the nuclear fuel waste isn't waste, it's fuel with 95% energy left in it waiting to be used again. Two: it is hard to recoup the cost of maintenance if you only can run the reactors at full capacity a fraction of the time. Less wind and solar means more revenue for nuclear making it more economic. Three: we want wind and solar, but we need nuclear. Need wins over want. If we need nuclear to keep us alive in the cold and dark of winter, why would we want anything else in the energy system making things more complicated and more expensive?
Forget wind and solar, go 100% nuclear, it's the logical decision. Nuclear energy gets cheaper the more you use it. Adding wind and solar just make the energy system more complicated and expensive. The waste isn't a problem, partly because it isn't just waste, it can be recycled in advanced reactors, and partly because it isn't that much of it considering how much energy it brings. After a second run the fuel needs storage for a blink of an eye (500 years).
You also forget that nuclear reactors become a target for terrorist. No system is full proof so if a terrorist decided they wanted to blow up the power plant and succeed you now have a Chernobyl.
@@PandaKnight52 Sigh. Tjernobyl. Tjernobyl isn't useful for comparisons with anything. Tjernobyl was a mistake from day one, built without reinforced containment, a nuclear reactor in a barn. There are not one reactor in this world that are anywhere close to as bad as that failed Tjernobyl reactor.
When we build new reactors they have several layers of extra protection that Tjernobyl did'nt have. If a terrorist manage to set an explosion within a nuclear plant, we would see an event like Tree mile island, a confined meltdown without external implications. Nothing like Tjernobyl. More over, if we choose to build unpressurized salt reactors instead of pressurized water reactors, then you can drop a bomb on it and it will have no other effect than the salt freezing incapsulating the isotopes within the salt.
Thank you!
Wow - I have just been enthralled by the comments and it is clearly a live debate. That got me thinking what do I want to know more about.
1. The actual risks of fall out… we worry about nuclear facilities in our country, but these are the ones we can control, what about the ones down wind?
2. How small could an SMR be and what is the value?
3. What makes up nuclear waste… I think a lot of people this is is the fuel rods, but I think it is much more.
4. Can we reuse the waste to generate more energy?
5. Can we use lower yield fuel sources, which reduce the risk?
6. If a nuclear power station is a standard design… why does it take so long to build?
7. Base load sounds great…. But if the idea is to use nuclear power when the wind does not blow. This is no-longer base load it is dynamic…. Can nuclear plants run like this?
Using nuclear "for the last 5-10%" as a load-following plant is madness . Nuclear reactors work way worse when used modulating the power output, they degrade faster and the cost/kwh skyrockets, they are not built for that. Nuclear would be best used for the base load (energy even in the middle of the night is required for lights/industries/fridges ecc). A nuclear reactor can work easily 93-99% of the year and needs to be shut down only to change the bars or for periodical maintenance.
12:26 the issue with what this person said for a UK audience is we already have a baseload that is going to hydroelectric from Norway and places in the UK. Tidal could also be a constant Baseload as well if it was just given some investment.
Tidal is still transient, much like other renewables...
@@lolroflpmsl which other renewables Hydro is the oldest, solar, wind, geothermal are well established. Wave and tidal are the only ones not ready but just require investment.
yes, tidal is very reliable unlike wind and solar.
@@lolroflpmsl Tidal is so predictable, the grid will manage fine even if it came on stream today. That doesn't matter in the 21st Century. The 21st century grid balancing and frequency regulation will be via "Demand Side Management" (smart fridges and smart car charges and the like) rather than the "Supply Side" of the 20th century (turning massive power stations up and down). Tidal, geothermal and interconnectors will replace the baseload, together with pumped hydro and a massive virtual battery made up from 2nd life car batteries in people's garages. Renewables will be fine, just as long as we have a diverse supply.
If the war in Ukraine hasn't retaught the UK we need to be self sufficient in Energy... the country needs to have a word with itself. We used to import electricity from France and they had issues and we lost 3GWh of imports which forced the coal fired power stations to open. We need renewables and Nukes but we also need a plan for hydrogen generation of excess Wind power to supply powerstations in lean times of no wind
'nuclear reactor' is a blank description of a VERY wide array of reactor types, some of which don't even use the same energy source! It would be very helpful to go over the different types, especially as thorium ones have far less nuclear waste (shorter halflife).
There's also the ability to dispose of the waste in space, too, which with something like the new centrifugal launcher that only requires electricity, no heavily polluting rocket fuel needed.
I would love to see big investment in tidal power. Projects like cardiff bay or the river Severn tidal barrage are, to me, 'no brainers'. There is so much potential around our coastline that would merit Nuclear redundant, yet there is strong lobbying for Nuclear and little for Tidal - financial interests and all that!
I read the other day that there is one planned for the Mersey as well.
Or across the North Channel to Ireland….Boris had it right!
Always appreciate Helen’s pieces. Excellent for all the reasons others have already touched on.
Nuclear energy costs more per Kwh than almost all other energy solutions. Those costs are passed onto governments and citizens to cover for potentially hundreds of years. It doesn't make sense to me. Invest that same amount of money into Wind & Solar with better energy storage solutions.
Wind and Solar in the EU match energy prices of other energy generation methods due to Merit-Order and some such systems. We'll never see "cheap" prices (if we see them at all, because the companies won't just stop wanting more of that sweet sweet "renewable" cash) until renewables are at 100% or more production. When's that gonna be? 2080?
To fight the climate crisis effectively and in time (at the current rate there are under 7 years left until the worldwide CO2 budget is used up) we need to choose the fastest solution with the most impact per unit of currency . That's wind, solar and water together with a rapid expansion and flexibilization of the grid (connections to other regions, prediction of weather, load management, small amounts of strategically placed storage, decentralisation of electricty production to increase security and reduce cost). Nuclear can only be a very small part of a future grid (existing reactors and veeeery few new ones) simply because there is no money to built it out to a scale for it to have an impact on traditional power grids in time.
I like the cars and stuff, I love the episodes with Helen.
Why is it that when people talk about nuclear, it's like a solved technology with no possible improvements, but solar is given the benefit of the doubt of advancement. Why can't both get better?
Solar and wind have shorter release cycles and so you can see the improvements when comparing the price per MWh over the years. If i remember right Nuclaer got even more expencive over the years per MWh. NPP take around 10Years to build and new designs need to be tested first. It is like hoping that one of the fancy new Battery design will finally deliver or you can look at the rate where the Battery's that are on the market did improve year over year.
@@toggleton6365 the comparison unfortunately gets sideswiped by its own premise; people just assume nuclear is slow so it doesn't get much investment to improve it. There's a huge number of alternative reactor designs that only need some validation but various regulatory agencies are basically and old boys club: if it ain't a pressurized water reactor it ain't nothin' according to them.
Basically, with some breathing room and funding, a lot of these newer reactors could get off the floor really fast
Thank you.
Hi - I’d like to expand on two points that I raised in my interview with Helen on this video:
1. Dispatchability - I refer to nuclear as dispatchable because the fuel input is available at all times, including periods of peak demand, or alternatively stated, it is not weather-dependent. This service, sometimes also called adequacy, will be needed in future power systems in periods when net demand (overall demand minus wind and solar) is high, particularly for sustained periods of time. We tend to think of flexibility as a separate resource, which is the ability to respond to changes in net demand on a timescale of minutes to hours. While it is technically possible for nuclear to provide this service, as it does today in France and Canada, which have high shares of nuclear power in their energy mix, the reduction in output raises the overall cost of energy because nuclear plants have high fixed and low operating costs. We do expect that batteries will provide a substantial portion of the need for both flexibility and adequacy in future low-carbon power systems, while hydropower, fossil fuels with CCUS and hydrogen-based fuels are also candidates to provide these services. But these sources are either not yet commercially viable or are limited by geography.
2. Reducing dependence on foreign sources of fuel - while not all countries have deposits of uranium that are suitable for enrichment for nuclear power plants, in this case, I wanted to convey that fuel is a low share of the overall cost - about 10%. This compares to coal at around 20% and natural gas at around 50%. These costs can be highly variable and have recently increased dramatically, particularly in Europe, but also in other markets that compete for liquified natural gas. Nuclear fuel can also be purchased in advance and stored on-site before use, adding further protection against volatile spot markets.
Thanks very much to Helen and Fully Charged for the invitation and to all of you for your interest in the topic! If you’d like to know more about how nuclear might play a role in future power systems, you can read our recent report on the topic on the IEA’s website
You didn't really address the geopolitical implications of the global market for uranium fuel.
Kazakhstan is by far the largest producer of uranium for nuclear fuel. Which, of course, is of huge tactical importance for Russia and its projection of world power in the way that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is for their oil and natural gas strategy. And we have also seen how problematic warfare is in the vicinity of centralized nuclear facilities in Ukraine.
It doesn't seem responsible to me to put our long term energy strategy into centralized nuclear generation and with such vulnerable supply chains of fuel. Why should we replicate the geopolitical market dynamics and economic warfare that petroleum has wrought just with uranium instead? There _will_ be other wars, and we don't want nuclear facilities, or the supply of nuclear fuel, to become the targets in those wars.
Spot on. No such problems with closed loop geothermal - which unfortunately has no lobby.
we need to keep the Nuclear we have now online but I don't think we should be building more Nuclear going forward. Run what we have now till we have something to replace it with like wind and battery which is a lot cheaper and safer.
But it's not (yet) clear that it _is_ much cheaper or safer. Existing stats show nuclear is much safer than early wind in deaths per TWh (they have probably improved their practices since then but there was a lot of ground to make up). And for a whole system with enough storage/capacity to get the reliability guarantees we want, doing it with just wind+batteries would be much more expensive than doing it with nuclear+lakes. It's a not a binary choice - the question is what is the best mix of technologies for reliability, security, environmental considerations at a reasonable cost and speed. Hydrogen + gas plant storage is one way to fill the gaps. Demand management and everyone's cars is another. Firm supply is worth a lot, which is why some nuclear in the system probably remains a good idea. You _could_ do it without, but it's not necessarily cheaper.
The good ting is that this conversation has got a great deal more nuanced over the last 15 years, and the most significant thing I've had to learn is that we can't tell when we start where the endpoint will be - there are too many variables and things are changing too fast. We just have to set off in the right direction, making sensible choices for the time as we go. A complete system optimisation is not possible.
@@xxwookey you can't compare the early days of wind and solar with nuclear now especially with nucleus dodgy past. Wind and solar is cheaper period and will of paid for itself before any nuclear plant has been build and put online.
@@adus123 Wind and solar are much cheaper (bit less than half the price) in simple LCOE terms, but firm power is worth more than non-firm, so the right balance all comes down to system firming costs and demand management capability.
And it does depend where you are in the world. Solar is not much use in cold high-latitude areas during peak demand in winter. Being able to build generation for less than half the cost in 1/4 of the time doesn't help if it won't actually supply enough energy when needed. I don't see places like Siberia shifting away from nuclear any time soon. (Maybe geothermal can fill that space?) But most places further south probably will. We shall see. I really don't care _how_ people decarbonise so long as they do, and pretty quickly.
Instead of burying the waste we could 'burn' it in a waste burner molten salt reactor of a type now being built in Canada, but designed in the UK the Moltex SSR-W
Hello from Montreal, great video. Are you aware of the wood pellet biomass industry? There’s a power plant in Britain that’s using the pellets to generate electricity. The premise was to use the waste from logging but unfortunately large areas of British Columbia forests are being clear cut for this use and sold off to the Uk. Governments have turned a blind eye on this and see this as a win win situation. The CBC’s “ The Fifth Estate” has done a documentary on this. You may have seen it. All the best from across the pond.
New Nuclear Plants are very expensive, why not take more advantage of Geo Thermal sources!?
The most important questions weren't ask: Where is the uranium coming from? Last year, half of the production worldwide was coming from Russia and Kazakhstan. Second question, levelised cost of electricity generation or LCOE? The IEA projected $75 to even above $100/MWh. Also rising capital costs aren't making it more easy to finance these projects...
As she said - this video was not going to cover all the details. The things you mention are not 'the most important questions'. $100 is fine for firm power (we are paying over $300 wholesale in the UK at the moment so just about anything that isn't gas is looking like excellent value).
@@xxwookey if the uranium is coming from Russia is not one of the most important questions? Have you been living under a rock?
Uranium is everywhere.
Lcoe is only good for solar and wind projects.
Not to others energy sources.
It gets abused for framing it with other sources.
@@4203105 FWIW: Sources and percentage shares of total U.S. purchases of uranium in 2021 were:
Kazakhstan 35% Canada 15% Australia 14% Russia 14% Namibia 7% United States 5%
Five countries combined (W) 10%
@@seang2700 just ask yourself, why uranium isn't on any US/EU/UK sanction list... Just look to Hungary, their nuclear plants use 100% uranium from Russia and now even let Russia invest in a new plant. I mean that's pretty Stockholm.
I would like to point out several glaring omissions in this report, but I don't blame you, it is rampant throughout the discussion of nuclear energy.
European energy executives find nuclear fuel under their Christmas Tree all gift wrapped and they say it's carbon neutral. When I discussed with a Swiss energy Exec and told him about the diesel used in the mining, crushing, milling and processing, he responded "That is the problem of the producing country". Bastard. He knows the true costs and is willing to continue to lie to you.
We have to replace our present electrical and energy system? Why? It is based on our WW2 like effort of 2005 to rapidly transform our system to fracking and tar sands. We broke the bank, and I refer to the work of Simon Michaux. He had an excellent presentation based on a false premise, that we needed to replace every vehicle in existence today to renewable. He played dumb at the almost 6 fold increase of electricity, energy and all metals needed for those techniques. By stopping them, we can reduce our energy needs by at least 2/3, if not more. There I'm basing my calculations on both information from grid operators that say that 43% of all electricity in our nation goes to a refinery, 24h/24h.
So those projections of ever increasing needs are based on false premises.
I thought there would be more discussion about this. Is this being shadow banned?
The IEA has been horrifically wrong about predicting the energy mix for years and years. Why are they a source in this video?
Ireland is not part of the UK (11:42). Why does this need to be pointed out again and again and again? It's the height of disrespect and calls into question the validity of your entire presentation.
On the subject of trust, it would be a lot easier to trust if the waste issue up til now wasn't being fixed at the TAXPAYER'S expense. You want to be a Nuclear provider, put your money up and fix the problem before you create any possible new ones.
Absolutely.
That's already there, didn't you listen it's in the kwh price.
The historical 50/60s.were government projects, hense tax-money.
And it was not done with a repository in mind!
Non-electricity energy use is not "factories running on generators". It is mainly heating, transportation and industrial processes, like smelting metals and making fertilizer. Otherwise, great job!
Excellent
Nuclear is definitely needed, especially for the base load mentioned, a lot of which comes from industry who often need power 24/7 for manufacturing. Also some reactor designs are sort of renewable with waste being recycled back into fuel so it breaks down into shorter lived waste that is much easier to dispose of, or is useful for medical imaging like x-rays. We'll probably always need some form of nuclear power, we just have to treat it with respect 🙂
@@garysmith5025 In most reactors yes. Hence my saying some designs which are built to create reusable spent fuel. But your also right about the other stuff with long half-lifes. Some of that will need storage. And we have several solutions for that mentioned in the video 🙂
Yes, we need more people to understand the world energy system.
There are no wonderland easy fantastical solutions, it's going to be hard work from today on to keep people out of poverty with sustainable energy.
No
@@johnmightymole2284 Unfortunately Nobellium is not a useful fuel. We've never made much and mostly for research. But thanks for your suggestion 🙂
Nuclear is not needed at all. check out Eavor loop 2.0 and Quaise drilling technology
Some of the issues about nuclear are costs and the time to build more plants. At this point a new plant takes around 15-20 years from planning to operation. On top of that many countrys are reluctant to allow nuclear at all. And with the rapid improvements and price decrease of solar and wind in recent years I believe that nuclear is up for a tough fight winning the citizens confidence.
There are small reactors coming from many manufacturers. I think local, small and low risk facilities are important in providing heating in the winter. Electricity is much harder to produce but heating is relatively simple.
@@patterisepi A NuScale SMR Project did recently in Utah change the cost per MWh from the planned 55Dollar to 90 till 100Dollar and they did not even start building it. And with all such big projects the construction time will likely be longer than planned. We will see if they reach 2029 as planed. SMR have other downsides and upsides that the big brothers but a perfect solution are they clearly not.
FUD
4 reactors in 12 years in the UAE disprove all your nonsense.
11:58 have watched all the video but I wish they would have gone into detail as to what the waste was. Is it low level, medium level, or high level waste they are putting into the ground?
I'm glad of how this was done. Though I would have liked a bit more emphasis on the cost and time to build new nuclear, and why that makes keeping the nuclwar we have so important. Perhaps a bit more on the potential of SMRs. But the conclusion of the value of the carbon clean energy mix was good to see.
I worked in the nuclear industry for 23 years as an engineer. It's very corrupt. I worked on a project logging childhood cancers which was hastily abandoned when it came up with unacceptable answers on 3 old sites. UKAEA argued about the effects on employment in West Cumbria if Sellafield and Thorp were to close. Frightening.
From "too cheap to meter" to hundreds of years and billions of pounds to decommission really did not take very long...
Who did you work for and in what capacity?
I worked for Magnox for 28 years and would say it’s the exact opposite of what you say. It was the most un-corrupt organisation I could imagine.
@@oakfieldfarm4131 I worked for BNFL at Springfields near Preston then on the Thorp site at Sellafield. During my time at Sellafield I noticed there were many cases of childhood cancers in children. I then reviewed the statistics for the area round Springfields and found the same clusters. I reported this to the AEA and they denied my research not knowing I had had the work reviewed by medical statisticians. I contacted the local MP called Cunningham and he rang me to say Sellafield was the main employer in the area and my report would cause severe problems for the plant. I did as he asked and dropped it. Later I worked as a sub contractor installing SAP for Anderson Consulting in BNFL and without doing anything too clever found there was a problem throughout the UK in the immediate areas of older nuclear plants.
A hybrid solution is required -- traditional renewables combined with some sort of backup reserve power-production.
OK, and what form of back up do you recommend?
It all comes down to cost. We can design the system in a million different ways, but if it makes electricity cost $10/kWh - what's the point?
Great video! I'm glad you're moving into more controversial topics but keeping a rational view of both negatives and positives. The reality is the is an important question of a 0 carbon future so its important that it's covered by you!
Keep it coming!
Dounreay is currently being decommissioned. A nuclear energy plant used to test 3 fast reactor systems. It is on the very northern edge of Scotland. As far from London as possible on the mainland of the British Isles. Why is it there and not near Brighton ? You work it out !
I can't wait to watch the rest of the series and see how several key aspects of nuclear power are handled. Very good first chapter.
It's decent except for a bit of bias here and there.
Excellent summary. I would like to know more about grid scale storage. Could this not compensate for nuclear provided baseload?
This is one of the big problems. Despite the hyperbole, there is no technology available as yet that can provide the levels of grid storage needed if we were to rely totally on solar and wind. The issues of the materials and the access to them used in the batteries we have now mean they're currently a no go at a global scale. Although here are many alternative battery technologies being researched, none are close enough to commercial scale production as yet. The most efficient method, pumped hydro, is only viable in a small number of geographical locations. I think nuclear will have to play a part for a while, while all the many alternatives are developed. And of course, there is always the hope that at some point fusion will become an actual thing, which would be an excellent. I can't see any one tech. providing all the answers at the moment, and it'll have to be a pick and mix that includes nukes for a generation or two to come. Most importantly though it needs the political will to do what needs to be done, which seems to be somewhat lacking.
Depends on the kind of storage and the kind of supply lull it's trying to treat. Li-ion and Na-ion batteries only really have the capacity, power and self-discharge characteristics for a few hours of storage. Pumped hydro can handle longer storage, but is geography-dependent, limiting capacity. Compressed air is similar, less geography-dependent, but is still immature, expensive and risky to build up. Exotic solutions like flow batteries, iron-air batteries and gravity energy storage are still young and unproven (to varying degrees).
If we're talking days or weeks of supply shortfall, then we need to look at interseasonal energy storage. The only viable options (that I know of) are hydrogen and thermal storage: fill a cavern with electrolysed hydrogen, then burn it in a gas turbine; heat rocks or phase-change materials (e.g. melting aluminium), then use the heat to boil steam for a turbine. Both options are extremely inefficient, losing >50% of the initial energy. For these kinds of storage, the electricity being sold in the lull would have to be ~4× the price of the electricity used to 'charge' it. This leads to big questions about revenue, demand/supply forecasting, upfront cost, running cost and investment: build dispatchable generation (e.g. nuclear, geothermal) or build interseasonal storage. Which is cheaper? Which is more reliable? *Extremely* difficult questions to answer.
I've always thought tidal power has been underdeveloped. Perhaps a higher price price per Mwh of this technology should be allowed for as it is good green baseload. Nuclear: not so green.
@@TheTonycima My feeling is that the lack of investment in tidal indicates there are major inherent problems with it. A quick Google hints this is the case. People are prepared to put money into alternative battery designs, physical energy storage, solar, wind, nuclear (both fission and fusion) etc, but not tidal. That says a lot to me. And although I agree it'd be nice to do without it, nuclear isn't quite as un-green (especially when compared to the currently available alternatives) as some would have us think. And that's the point. We need action now, we can't afford to wait for the magic bullet.
Thanks all for very insightful comments.
We can always decommission a nuclear reactor when we have a better alternative,but as we are already finding out dealing with global warming once it’s here is very difficult.
In colder countries it's the heating demand that's hard to satisfy with renewable electricity, there's no way solar and wind will never achieve this in the UK unless there are some serious improvements efficiency. Gas isn't going anywhere for a long time.
Nuclear is great for heating. One of the promising areas for molten salt reactors is for industrial heat. Even now nuclear would be fine for district heating using steam.
Nuclear is the most expensive electricity you can produce. Hinkley Point C £92.50/ MWh rising with inflation v Wind less than £40/MWh with costs falling all the the time!
Levelized cost of energy is a way of comparing the cost of different energy sources. How can the cost of storage of nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years be calculated? So how can we determine the true cost of nuclear?
Decommissioning costs - paid for consumers/taxpayers
Fukushima’s Final cleanup Costs Will Approach A Trillion Dollars. With only about 400 nuclear plants around the world the chance of an expensive cleanup should be included in the cost comparison: 2 in 400 chance of a 1 trillion $ cleanup who wants to insure against that and what would the premium be?
Why no mention of battery storage to be used to smooth out the power curve? I still think that nuclear is needed but maybe not as much as others think if there is battery storage to help.
Yes, nuclear will always be there but just a small portion. Wind+solar already surpassed nuclear last year with both at 10% of global electricity generation. While nuclear has been flat for +20 years and will continues being flat for at least another 10 years. Wind+solar is being installed at an exponential rate hitting 20% in 2025 and 40% in 2030 of global electricity generation. With batteries and smart grids the power will be smooth in the future coming from wind and solar.
Because we need 1000s of GWh of battery storage for renewables to displace thermal and nuclear generation. And at the moment we have projects that are at their biggest 1GWh.
@@EP-bb1rm Yup, but why no mention at all? Battery storage is obviously going to be part of the solution.
@@EP-bb1rm UK is using an average electricity of 35 GW towards 2050 it is going to double to 70 GW. Batteries are most likely to end with a 6 to 10 hours of storage capacity leaving the rest of the backup job for other technologies. Thus, in 2050 UK will need between 420 to 700 GWh of batteries. It is a lot but you also have 25 years to fulfill it.
For reference Tesla has deployed about 100 GWh of batteries in 2022 in their products.
@@sambira If you define the term 'battery' to include any and all energy storage technologies, not just chemical batteries of one kind or another, then I think that is certainly a strong argument. Among the stats for the current balance between renewable and other forms of generation, it would be good to see an estimate of how much additional renewable energy could be produced from existing wind turbines etc. if a lack of demand was never a constraint.
Good video, but there's one area of omission. Before too long, the UK will often have an excess of renewable electricity production, but still some times when we have too little. Storage of the excess in significant quantities is the key.
One point not mentioned, nuclear needs energy storage too. The pumped storage facility that I've visited was built to pair with a nuclear power plant upstream, so that power produced in the wee hours of the morning when there's little demand, could be stored until demand exceeds the nuclear plant's supply in early evening (by pumping water up from a river to a mountain top, then letting it down through turbines when that energy is needed). Not everywhere has suitable sites for this, and there are limited sites in total.
With renewables, spatial variability can be substantially addressed by a grid, taking power from where the wind is blowing to where power is needed, rather than only storage to address temporal variability. A study showed that a thousand mile radius grid could make wind as reliable as a coal fired electric plant. And power lines that bring electricity a thousand miles with only 10-20% losses have been in large scale commercial operation for decades.
I agree that the optimal solution will likely be a balance.
(On the subject of waste, I've never understood why people are so freaked out by waste that decays eventually, but not by heavy metals and other toxins emitted by coal fired electric plants into the air. Having done work in the latter, they're awful for pollution. And they can even emit some radioactive ash, because coal deposits can be associated with uranium. Vile. But, going away, thankfully, only 22% of American electric generation currently, and ever dropping.)
By 2030 in the world we hope to build but realisticly will not 158 Nuclear power plants vs well over 7,000 Hydroelectric powerplants, nuclear power is fine it's just a tiny part of global power and the focus on it as a panacea is disproved by this alone.
Let's just conveniently ignore the power generation numbers of nuclear vs hydro to suit your argument, I guess?
Nice video. As someone active in the nuclear industry, I think it is important to add certain points
1) Cost. Yes, that is the main barrier of nuclear. However, I think that the argument is used on apples vs oranges scenario. Firstly: it is costly in EU and USA, the western world, which practically halted the production of new nuclear since Chernobyl, and got worst after Fukushima. However, if one sees the nuclear costs in Asian countries (Russia, Japan, South Korea, China), we have a history of projects being built at 50% less cost, and at HALF the time. This is because these countries never stopped investing in the industry itself - with the exception of Japan after fukushima (but not after Chernobyl). All these countries follow under the safe umbrella of the IAEA. This is a complete showcase of how, when you stop investing in an industry and lose expertise of it, you obviously will need more time and money to build them better.
Also, it is often compared with renewables, but it is such an apples vs oranges comparison, as solar/wind are finacially cheap, but come with high costs in the whole system (need for backup natural gas / storage). It does not take into account that we can extend the life of nuclear power plants at minimal cost, nor that we are dependent on external countries to get our renewable energy minerals/equipment.
2) Nuclear Waste. I believe the arguments around it are completely overblown. We live in a world with an history of irresponsibility of waste: There's plastic in our ocean, toxic e-waste in developing countries, Green House Gases in the air. All of these, actively hurting our environment and health today, for the past decades. However, nuclear waste does not fit into these. We have been dealing with it for over 70 years, never hurting a single human nor affecting the environment. We have good solutions for it, which have mostly been halted for diverse reasons: GDF in USA was completely halted for only political reasons (Thankfully, Finland and UK are going strong on this). Even in the UK, the Sellafield site had a nuclear waste recycling facility, which got suspended. Reason? - Not ENOUGH nuclear waste to keep it economical. The ammounts are just so small, and keep getting smaller by using better techniques and diversion tactics. And yet, there are so many discussions around it, where other industries are not half as responsible as nuclear is. This includes renewables, as wind turbine blades and PVs are very hard/costly to recycle, with wind tower also abandon their foundations in the land when decommissioned, neglecting any plant life to grow there, and a lot of PVs get discared together with other e-waste.
Overall, nuclear projects will always take more time than renewables to be safe, and require expertise to be done correctly, but they do pay-off. Playing politics about "Oh but do we need it?", when we are still very much dependent on coal, and are increasing our natural gas usage every year, is such a waste of time, in a situation where we need to do as much as we can to decarbonize our economies. And - like the video mentioned - this is just the Electricity sector! There's so much to do, we can't afford to play favourites, and just forsake technologies that are proven to work.
2:58 anyone else notice the coaster calamity 🤣
What I would like to see a nuclear waste storage engineer answer is, what happens to that waste in 150 years when, say, Great Britain is a collapsed nation ruled by 15 warlords fighting for domination, and all memory of what is stored in those facilities is lost to history? It’s simply ridiculous to project _any_ state level construction endeavour so far into a future that is so uncertain. We have, today, got troops firing at each other at the sites of live nuclear facilities, digging trenches in contaminated soil, murdering the staff! This is in Europe, right now, with full knowledge of what could go wrong! How is it defensible to play at being able to plan anything at timescales that exceed that of most nations?
It was quite appropriate that this video was hosted by your resident physicist; fantastic video. (Dr. Czerski made an excellent documentary about the physics of bubbles - definitely worth a watch.) Even though I am a proponent of nuclear fission power, and more so for nuclear fusion, you make an important point by stating that energy production should be viewed as a system comprised of many parts (sources). Fission energy can be done safely with technologies such as molten salt reactors, and thorium reactors promise the reduction of nuclear waste stockpiles by re-using that waste as new fuel. With a very deliberate choice of the most beneficial forms of fission energy, nuclear power can play a significant role in diversifying our low carbon power production needs.
In the future I believe the stored radioactive waste will become a resource. So I predict it's not going to be on the negative side of the balance sheet. -- I'm against large, expensive, time consuming large nuclear power plants. Small localized modular reactors make a lot more sense and can be brought on line in the near future, helping to speed decarbonization.
Very true. There are already reactors producing power from waste, most notably the CanDU Canadian reactor design.
Molten salt reactors (although still largely theoretical - but India and China are building them) can also be configured to burn old waste.
The great thing about molten salt reactors (whether thorium or uranium based) is that there is no pressurisation needed - so unlike all PWRs there's no need for a building they are in to be an explosion resistant pressure vessel.
The good thing about small modular reactors is that they can be factory built then shipped to site, which could make them faster and cheaper to build. The bad thing about small modular reactors is that they typically have a lower thermal output temperature, making them less efficient, meaning they produce more radioactive waste per kWh than larger reactors.
However, there is much less of a ticking clock for cleaning up nuclear waste than there is for stopping runaway climate change. You can safely store nuclear waste now and clean it up later with waste consuming reactors or particle accelerators.
No mention of the cooling water problem? If you have a 3.5 gigawatt power station running at around 60% efficiency then you have to dump around a gigawatt of power into the surrounding environment. France had big problems getting enough cooling water during the drought this year. Sites that are on the coast use seawater but this is a serious threat to any wildlife that gets near the intakes. And sea level rise is a threat to the future of the plant.
I am with Greta on this. Keep the existing nuclear plants running as long as possible whilst building out new wind/solar/storage as fast as possible.
I also think that energy storage needs to be nationalised. You can find figures that say that if we go 100% wind + solar then we "only" need 5 days usage worth of storage. If I have a project that stores energy for 8 hours then (at the moment) then I can make a good case to to a bank and they will lend me the money to build it. However, if I want to make a case for storing energy for 4.75 days I am going to tell the bank that it might used every 3 or 4 years when we have a string of cloudy/windless days, so my business case is that I can only service the loan every 3 or 4 years. I have great difficulty seeing a commercial case for long term energy storage, I can only see a social case.
Finally, I have great difficulty with this Tory government handing out taxpayers money for storing nuclear waste. Any contracts are likely to be awarded to the landlord of their local pub who will offer to wrap it in unusable Covid PPE and keep it in his cellar for a few hundred million quid and also supply free drinks to the party conference once a year. After all, his pub has been there for 2 or 3 hundred years and should stand until at least after the next election......
I am not nuclear scientist (physician), but I am a nuclear supporter. I have a question. Both the main commentator (sorry I didn't catch her name) and another guest speaker both either said directly or implied that nuclear was needed to "fill in the gaps" left by renewables. The guest speaker went on to say that nuclear needs to ramp up when renewables are low and vice versa ramp down when renewables are peaking. Again, I am not a nuclear scientist, but isn't true that nuclear reactors are not good at "ramping up" and "ramping down" with a short time constant? I thought I remembered something about nuclear reactors generating Xenon gas when ramping down that takes days to clear before they can be ramped up and that the Xenon gas keeps the moderating control rods from controlling the rate of nuclear fission. My understanding was that a ramp down followed by a ramp up was the root cause of the Chernobyl disaster. Perhaps you could shed some light on how nuclear reactors can moderate the highs and lows in the grid created by renewables. Perhaps it might require a follow-on video. Thank you and Fully Charged for everything you do to save the environment.
It would be really interesting to know what the amount of nuclear waste is being produced in weight compared to gas/oil/coal generation ( most of which is going into the free sewer we call fresh air)!
If future nuclear power has the waste priced in what is the cost of other energy with waste priced included?
Well the EU has a co2 price that got more strong in the last years. It was not good before and the co2 prices should rise with every year. The idea to price in the damage is already there and should accelerate the shutdown of the most dirty productions step by step
@@toggleton6365 no the price isn't the strong point, it helps.
The overall capacity is limited so that you can't buy shares outside the yearly allowance.
Each year it shrinks.
It's not comparable.
You have to look at TWh's. And volume.
And the save amount of GHG emissions.
Tonnage is meaningless.
Very disapointed about this advertorial for the nuclear industry.
The same old arguments with questionable validity being used while not adressing what the real concequences will be of chosing dependence on nuclear power today. Or more acuratly a decade or more from now.
I would have at least expected a more realistic portrayal of the future of the energy landscape a decade from now, the current state of affairs doesn't matter if it will take 20 years before any significant amount of nuclear will be online.
Chosing nuclear now will be an economic noose the uk will carry for multiple generations and will only hold it back going forward. And it will only make the uk even less competitive and less efficient compared to it's competition on the global stage.
Technological development is going so quickly and so mjch is being invested in renewable technology, commiting now to nuclear will make these new more efficient and most importantly orders of magnitude cheaper developments a threat to the enormous investment made into very expensive nuclear and thus will inherently pushed out to protect these investments.
Nuclear will be further regression for generations for the uk economy. It's like stubornly buying huge amounts of steam engines when better, cheaper and more efficient new technology is already taking over the industry in comperative countries.......
I keep hearing about disposing nuclear waste, but there's a lot of energy still in 'spent' fuel.
What about reactors built to extract all that remaining energy?
Can you use the 'spent' fuel in RTGs?
Excellent, calm and balanced video thank you. Please do more on this - there are so many facets to explore and I find it hard to see a solution ever being reached in this manner - it will most likely be lobby driven/knee-jerk political expediency either way.
A related thing tying up to the conservation element touched on at the tail end. I listened to a very good segment on you and yours (R4) this lunchtime covering the Worcester Uni based building experimental facility. Belway and Barratt housebuilders building full sized new builds in environmental chambers able to accurately test efficiency of the fabric and heating technologies ie heat pumps/batteries. All good stuff but the depressing thing was that both companies said they had to use brick on the frame because that was all British consumers would accept. It seems like a huge lost opportunity to investigate options for deploying houses built in alternative materials (wood etc) at scale. I would love a passive house and care not a jot about bricks but I would have to pay bespoke prices because they are rare and would be built by a (probably) German team coming here. I honestly think if you offered a choice of bricks or good looking wood with recurring annual running costs 50% of the bricks then "the public" may change their stated preferences.
Keep it coming please!
Watching this the day after Switzerland says it might restrict the use of EVs to save energy. Nuclear isn't perfect but it's a lot safer than fossil fuels.
The funny thing is that the production of gas and diesel does cost electricity as well. Roughly 11kwh are needed to produce 7l of gas. One wonders if they shut down refineries as well ;)
@ do you remember where you read those data about 11kwh for 7L?
@@chemicalbuz The US department of Energy determined in 2009 that a refinery needs 1.585kwh of electricity to produce a liter of gas (6kwh/gallon)
These numbers are not hard, quite a few calculations vary greatly in both directions, especially since electricity is only a smaller part of the over all energy needed in the refinement process.
Nuclear is a lot more expensive than renewables and takes decades to build. If you are taking about letting old plants continue to run, as long as they are safe, fine. But building new ones, when you could use the money and man power to build more renewables in a shorter amount of time, is just madness.
Cost of nuclear is to high fact. It is quicker and cheaper to build battery storage grid scale, home and EV V2G and V2H. If every EV sold had V2G and V2H and this storage could be manages by utilities to balance the Grid further if every property had solar or wind capacity grater then there consumption the Grid would be able to shift the excess to were it could be stored or used there would be on need for nuclear.
It would interesting to see Full Charged doing more detailed follow-up episodes on the new 4th gen power plants where the first versions have come online over the last year or so (thinking of High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor - Pebble-bed Module (HTR-PM) but there are other designs being constructed), and the modular designs being proposed by Rolls Royce and others.
Sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow but tides are as regular as clockwork and are everywhere. The several estuary would make a great location for tidal harnessing.
Tidal power has proved to be the most difficult to harness so far. It breaks everything that they try and use. They will crack it one day but who knows when?
The metro-mayor of Liverpool yesterday announced a cooperation with the Koreans to build a tidal dam on the River Mersey's estuary. Liverpool has amongst the highest tidal ranges in the world. The Koreans have the largest tidal power station going through many problems in operation. So they are invaluable.
They just needs HMG money to build it. They can do and drop this ridiculous money pit called HS2.
The 'expert' claimed that nuclear is 'dispatchable'. While that's technically true, in reality, it's not very dispatchable. Nuclear power is total shit at filling in between renewables- it becomes completely uneconomic because of how stupidly expensive nuclear power plants are to build. The only use I've ever found for it in my modelling is to run flat out underneath wind and solar. Doing that reduces the amount of storage you need for wind and solar variability. Because when wind goes away for a week or two, if you're producing nuclear power the whole time, the amount of storage you need is (say) halved or better. But for that to work, you only need a relatively small amount of nuclear power, maybe twice what the UK already has. But the main problem with doing even that is that it takes such a long while to build out, and then operating nuclear power plants with their catastrophic failure modes in the extremely population dense areas that the UK has, and so close to the continent which is downwind of any fallout.
I'm disappointed you didn't mention the relevance of nuclear plants for countries with nuclear weapons. This is the key reason why so many new plants are being built.
Because its not fully relevant, when you make Nuclear fuel you generally have to make the choice to enrich it to make fuel or a warhead, the early ones were interchangable, but the newer ones have a much harder time to be used as weapons. There are reasons why certain ones arent allowed because they dont make weapons grade stuff, so that would be the point in your case which would make sense.
The relevance isn't there.
Only the start after WWII.
Great episode, thanks for covering this topic so phenomenally & sharing it freely with all here on RUclips
I hadn’t really considered the almost binary decision of more CO2 that definitely effects the whole world, or more nuclear waste that is very localised but has a risk of effecting that area. A simplified outlook but it’s pushed me nearer to accepting nuclear fission based energy has a future! Always be open to having your mind changed!
I recommend everyone the "Hinkley Point C" video from Fully Charged Show!
I was under the impression that enough money had been put aside to deal with the nuclear waste and decommissioning of the first nuclear power stations. If I am right where did that go then?
As with everything to do with nuclear everything has huge cost overruns in the billions and time overruns in the decades
@@Alex-cw3rz 100% because of politics, lobbying and activists, not due to nuclear itself.
Look at China to see how it's done.
@@kristoffer3000 China has cost overruns and time overruns as well, it is an issue with nuclear, due to it having a lot of different supply chains, the need for higher safety and the lack of experts in the field.
@@Alex-cw3rz Average build time of 2 years in China.
@@kristoffer3000 maybe I'm out of date but I was thought it was 5 years and 2 billion was the average for a Chinese nuclear powerplant. However planning etc. Is not included in this
I am all for more wind power and think we should be putting onshore wind wherever viable, but if you consider, the UK's energy usage is about 1w per sqm of land area. A windfarm produces about 2w per sqm of area. Hence for wind to provide all energy it would need an area half the size of the UK. So realistically we are going to need wind, solar and something else.
I would question your 2w per sqm figure as it depends very much on size, height placement of turbine. We have a huge area available offshore.
@@eclecticcyclist 2w is the average across a range of wind farms, not all will be the same as you note correctly. Offshore is a great option but it is time consuming and expensive. Possible yes, but a lot more costly. But in terms of what we could do fast, right now, then sticking up loads of onshore wind would be a very good start. As would a mass insulation program and solar panels on every south facing roof. All could be done relatively quickly.
@@jamie-ck6js A start would be mandatory solar. Panels on the toof of every new build unless it can be proven that they would be shaded.
@@eclecticcyclist Yes, I just don't understand why more is not being done. Put to oneside global climate change and if you only focus on energy cost, security and local pollution it is so worthwhile.
Good intro to the complicated decisions facing energy policy makers.
The main argument against Nuclear always seems to be the waste. However what is this waste that society is so terrified of? How many people have been killed or injured by it or will be in the future? The reality is most of the waste is unused fuel waiting to be reused. There are or could be many useful applications for the materials within "Nuclear waste" for instance most people dont realise that Americium used in Smoke detectors is extracted from spent Nuclear fuel. So how many lives has Nuclear waste saved?
Compelling all new houses to be built with solar panels and house batteries would hugely reduce demand on the grid. Ditto the French scheme to install solar on supermarket car parks.
Exactly. The solutions are right there. We just have to bloody use them!
And would only cause all housing to increase in price by 20-40k, and since we all know housing is amazingly affordable already that's no problem at all!
@@Snerdles Solar and battery for an average house is less than £1k.........Anyone can post unsupported nonsense.
@@SuffolkJason Anyone can go look up a 5kW solar system with a 10kWh battery backup kit online and see the price, and that system is incredibly tiny. Why do you have to spread misinformation?
@@Snerdles If private house building would be recognized and subsidized as the contributor to our energy needs that it can be the costs would be reduced a lot. Also if the owner of the house uses at least a part of the created power to charge their own cars the costs for commutes etc. would reduce drastically. This can easily be made to work imo.
I do love these episodes where you discuss areas in energy generation or choices that have to be made :) I used to be very wary of nuclear energy, but having seen convincing analyses from various sources - I think it's the lesser of two evils. Sabine Hossenfelder had a couple interesting videos about this lately, as did Kurzgesagt.
One big issue with the perception of Nuclear is the accidents have a large impact, but are few in number. By comparison coal (as an example) causes thousands of premature individual deaths per year (30,000 just in USA per year iirc). Also I understand (have not personally confirmed) that coal gives off a lot of radiation - no one piece of coal is highly radioactive, but with the quantity consumed per year it may exceed all the Nuclear leaks to date. And yet people are scared of Nuclear.
Then we move to the winter problem with renewables where wind and solar are much reduced just when we need our heating the most. A long term solution is storage, so excess renewables generated in the summer months can be stored and used in the winter months. Problem here is the few existing storage systems are small (relatively speaking, tiny) and expensive and the new technologies required for country scale storage will be expensive when they exist (Uk's largest pumped hydro storage at Dinorwic in North Wales can power London for a whole 8 hours, but is offline for a few years for life extending work). Large scale energy storage requires finding a way to safely store energy equivalent to a few large nuclear explosions for a number of months and then release it in a safe and controlled manner on demand - so not an easy task.
Personally I am comfortable with a new generation of Nuclear being built to support mid term requirements, in the hope that long term we will be able to move to either renewables with large scale storage or fission (or something else as yet unknown).
The guest here is pro nuclear, and is just plain flat out lying.
Why is there even a debate ? Building Renewables plus storage is 1/3 the cost of building nuclear power. Debating this is pointless.
13:44 So there is a uranium mine in GB? Interesting, where can I visit that?
Cost? The biggest problem of nuclear power is really the cost of a kWh. Nuclear waste is one thing, but if nuclear was cheap enough we would live with that. Given that nuclear power is 3-5 times more expensive than wind or solar per kWh most places on the globe, nuclear is just not an option.
All we ever hear about is how we need more energy and virtually nothing about conserving or making products more efficient yet we also hear nothing from the governments when a simple product like LED lightings wide use and low energy requirements have undoubtedly contributed to lower energy need, we only see greedy power utilities looking for any way they can to fatten their bottom lines!
Well it is both. Switching to more energy efficient can have a impact but we are talking about electrifying the energy need. So heating goes from Fossil fuel to heat pumps, oil based fuel for cars goes to electric cars and the industry like steel, chemical, cement production will take a lot of Power when switched from fossil fuel sources. So the efficiency improvements will have an impact but this will eat it up. So the power needs rise.
Changing our consumption changes the baseline of what we need to produce, but it doe snot change the fact that we need to switch over from fossile. Also many of the currently gas or oil based industrial process are not very efficient when switched over to electricity. Fertilizer production for example would require us to first produce H2, then ammonia, a very costly and lossy process.
We need more electricity because we are moving from using fossil energy in many processes, like cars, trucks, busses, steel plants etc. Not having electricity for these conversions means we cannot reduce CO2 output from them.
@ On the other hand many things are way _more_ efficient when switched over (heating, transport, typically by a factor of 3). So yes it very much depends on the details of each process what effect the transition has one the overall demand.
Quite the legacy. Good luck future people
Humans have been making nuclear waste for over 70 years. The Finnish facility is the first long term storage that I know of. It has to keep the waste safe for 100,000 years. Mankind has been working metal for only 6,000 years or so.
Need to look at the cost comparison - LCOE with storage. Include waste storage costs, decommissioning costs, etc.
Also the opportunity cost is very high, it will take a decade before new reactors come online and we need renewable energy now!