As a Brit until 1987, I remember the Dounreay Fast Reactor in Scotland. Sadly shut down in 1977. We are so many decades behind where we should be with nuclear power!
As an irrelevant and self-indulgent comment: A couple of years after Dounreay was shut down, I was in huge CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) march in London. I felt a bit alien because I was the ONLY person I talked to who was anti-nuclear weapons AND pro-nuclear power. Why would you be against both? They are radically different things.
A couple of years later, anti-nuclear (all kinds) activist Helen Caldicott gave a talk at my school. She showed a dramatic presentation that revealed the effects of dropping a nuclear bomb on a nuclear reactor. She wasn't at all open to my inquiry as to whether the nuclear power plant had much to do with the outcome.
I fully support the idea of recycling nuclear waste, but I must pour some water in your enthusiasm: Germany, as shown in your map of already recycling countries, is definitely NOT doing so. Instead we shut down our remaining working reactors in a sad dogmatic fulfilment of Green ideology. They just couldn't retract on their decade long vilification of everything nuclear ... :-(
Fantastic post, zionlights. Wonderful information and explanation that I've not seen elsewhere, even though I've been researching nuclear power every chance I get. This is a great addition to your post "Everything I believed about nuclear waste was wrong". Hopefully the Supreme court decision against the Chevron Deference will turn the tide toward a more sensible approach to nuclear power in the US. Solar panel toxic waste is worse, greater in extent, more difficult to recycle, and therefore much less manageable than nuclear waste.
Perhaps, if you have not seen all the good stuff there is out there, watch Canadian energy engineer Doug LIghtfoot's video which covers the whole thing from soup to nuts . Doug was presenting globally on this in 2008, it's not we don't know, it's those in power that don't want us to have it, and the bands of activist "useful idiot" morons they fund to oppose it. Thoroughly recommended as an accessible and wholly facts and science based master class in the subject of nuclear power and energy supply and use in general. BRian RL Catt CEng, CPhys, MBA
For those interetsd in reality, the published works of Prof Wade Allison may be of interest, Radiation and Reason and others, including a detailed analysis of Fukushime event. Such realistic analysis is widely avaiable and I have given talks on the reality, but the truth is not something people want to here, or allow to be heard, because nuclear is the obvious cure for the claimed problem of fossil fuel use to generate enrgy.. But that will grow the comies of countries and make the people rich and free and questioning of their estabishments and they REALLY don't want that. They need excuses to impose restrictions on the freedoms of most people and massive taxes enacted in its name, and they really don't want you to know there is better, safer, cheaper, more sustainable, less environmentally damaging solution than the feudal energy sources of renewables which can never scale to demand or be affordable, because of low energy density hence the resource use, the lack of scability and fundamental limits of intern mittency to which storage is not a solution either economic lor in overall energy supply on demand terms.
When choosing between reason and profit, the US always ignores the former for a bit more of the latter. What I can't understand is why the NRC has been allowed to use the LNT model to set such absurdly low limits on radiation that nuclear reactors can't compete with fossil fuels.
Your criticism about the US is unfair. Reason and profit work together. I can tell you one thing for sure, LNT and ALARA are unreasonable and unprofitable.
Reason and profit can indeed work together, but only when the former is in service to the latter. Google's motto used to be "Don't Be Evil", but that was before Alphabet rewrote the rules. Once there is money to be made, reason becomes the slave of profit.
Here in Canada, we watch the USA carefully for a few years after every major development, and when we're certain that it was a disastrous mistake, we repeat it.
The saddest thing of all is that most Americans are decent, honest, hard-working and kind. Those folks are horrified at how their country is turning out.
This is a tired anti-capitalist narrative. The US has big problems. As does every country in the world. I’m not ready to sign up for your socialist sing along.
That's odd, I'm not tired of repeating it. Are you implying that narratives have to be abandoned just because they are old and tired? How about old, tired people? Want to get rid of us too?
Nuclear power does compete successfully with fossil fuels. Every time the relative costs of nuclear vs. everything else was assessed in Ontario, nuclear was always the lowest cost since the early 1980s. The reason is very simple: Ontario has no coal, and coal is enormously expensive to transport.
The heavy expense to transport coal is precisely the reason that France started its large nuclear generation program in the 1960s. The Franco-Belgian coalfield was nearly exhausted, and transportation systems would be inadequate to ship cheap coal to France from North Africa. The same system is at work in the United States. Nuclear power plants exist where coal is either unavailable or prohibitively expensive to transport.
This is also the case in China. Most of China's coal is located in Manchuria. But most of the industrial development and economic growth occured south of Shanghai. Hence, the need for nuclear in southern China.
An identical pattern exists in India with coal reserves located only in the northeastern parts of the country. Hence nuclear is located mostly in the south around Madras.
As for LNT, that is a very large topic that has a relatively limited effect on the cost of electricity produced by NPPs.
I beg to differ. The regulatory limits on radiation doses are roughly 500 times lower than the lowest dose ever shown reliably to produce any adverse health effects, and lower than the levels shown to have hormetic effects, all thanks to the debunked LNT model that the NRC refuses to reevaluate critically. If NPPs begin to compete again, thanks to the development of 4th generation and SMR reactors, watch for the limits to be lowered still further, so that ALARA can make reactors still more difficult and expensive to build. Follow the money to understand why this happens. It has nothing to do with "safety" -- which we routinely ignore every time we get behind the wheel of a car or ride a bicycle or even walk down concrete steps without a railing. It is fueled entirely by irrational "radiation paranoia" intentionally created by disinformation brokers.
"What about Fukushima?" Radiation releases from the Fukushima meltdowns killed exactly ZERO people, as opposed to the hundreds killed in the panicked evacuation of elderly folks and hospital patients due to that same irrational terror. There are many such examples. Lies kill. Radiation can kill too, but only in doses much higher than anyone has received accidentally since Chernobyl, which cannot happen again.
All good except for "follow the money". This problem is a result of regulatory agencies -- and pressure groups. It has made nuclear so expensive that it has not been able to compete profitably. The problem is not money but the tight control on ways that people can make money by providing better energy sources (nuclear)!
Nuclear power does compete profitably in dozens of countries around the world. In these places, nuclear power is the lowest cost option of those available. Nuclear power is even viable and desired as a preferred electricity source in at least one nation that is one of the world's largest suppliers of LNG - United Arab Emirates. It wil likely be joined by another oil and gas state - Saudi Arabia.
And if you have ever attended a public hearing of a nuclear power regulator, public pressure groups play remarkably little role in the outcome of decisions. Nuclear regulatory agencies make decisions on their merits, not public pressure tactics by ENGOs. Except in cases where Greg Jaczko or Allison Macfarlane were put in control of the US NRC. Fortunately, those are rare. Most sensible governments want their civilian nuclear power to succeed.
All exactly right. And the IEA makes nuclear cheapest ona an avergae basis around the World. The reason you build nuclear if you don't have coal youcontrol is to have a sovereign fuel supply that you control the price of. Such a ot of opinionated twoddle. BTW I was around in the UK RPS and NPL when the LNT principle was being discussed by the likes of Lindop, and our senior physicists in the RPS, nobody thought it was anything other than a decision made entirely in ignorance of the real biological hazards at doses 10^7 down on those in Japan. It is now a craft run by ignorant bureaucrtas with rules and no science, bog budgets and power over people and NO interst in questioning the flawed guesswork that gave them their undeserved power and budgets. The US Health Physics brigade are very much against the continuation of LNT, vigorously opposed by the corrupt bureaucracy of the NCRP et al, who are interested only in preserving their power and budgets at pubic expense. How very unusual. The other problem is that ignorant problem prefer to believe what they're told and fit in with others in their ignorance. Yes exactly right as regards LNT as anybody who knows the figures from Ruapari, Ramsar or Kerala knows. It might be an idea to refer to the UNSCEAR report, which covers most of these issues in an unexpectedly rational and reasonable way for the UN. Well stated anyway. The work of Benard Cohen and Luck onelevated low does radiation are also of use to those capableof understanding them. My degree is in radiation physics and my early scientific experience was 16 years in Health Physics and Radiation protection. CEng, CPhys, MBA.
You can't distinguish reason from profit. Profit means that someone is providing a valuable service. (So long as coercion isn't involved.) Ignoring price signals in a functional market is not rational. It is ignoring the reality of revealed preferences.
Your comments on LNT and its cost and stupidity -- I agree completely!
Glad you agree about LNT, but ... the very definition of "profit" is getting more back than you put in. I.e. violation of the First Law, never mind the Second! The quest for profit frequently has salutary consequences such as new technology or higher efficiency or "improvement" of natural resources [that one is tricky!] but such "spin-off" benefits are incidental to the goal of getting more back than you put in. Sure, there are exceptions; but the main nexus of capitalism is the stock market, and it is ruled absolutely by the crassest version of "profit". I'm retired, so all my income is from investments -- so I am a prime example of the guilty parties. I could just sell it all and die in poverty a few years from now; what other options do you perceive?
Half way through listening to a podcast about Oklo on this. The focus was it seemed on small modular fast reactors and how they can be used for high demand, extreme reliability demand usages like data centres.
As a Brit until 1987, I remember the Dounreay Fast Reactor in Scotland. Sadly shut down in 1977. We are so many decades behind where we should be with nuclear power!
As an irrelevant and self-indulgent comment: A couple of years after Dounreay was shut down, I was in huge CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) march in London. I felt a bit alien because I was the ONLY person I talked to who was anti-nuclear weapons AND pro-nuclear power. Why would you be against both? They are radically different things.
A couple of years later, anti-nuclear (all kinds) activist Helen Caldicott gave a talk at my school. She showed a dramatic presentation that revealed the effects of dropping a nuclear bomb on a nuclear reactor. She wasn't at all open to my inquiry as to whether the nuclear power plant had much to do with the outcome.
I fully support the idea of recycling nuclear waste, but I must pour some water in your enthusiasm: Germany, as shown in your map of already recycling countries, is definitely NOT doing so. Instead we shut down our remaining working reactors in a sad dogmatic fulfilment of Green ideology. They just couldn't retract on their decade long vilification of everything nuclear ... :-(
Fantastic post, zionlights. Wonderful information and explanation that I've not seen elsewhere, even though I've been researching nuclear power every chance I get. This is a great addition to your post "Everything I believed about nuclear waste was wrong". Hopefully the Supreme court decision against the Chevron Deference will turn the tide toward a more sensible approach to nuclear power in the US. Solar panel toxic waste is worse, greater in extent, more difficult to recycle, and therefore much less manageable than nuclear waste.
Perhaps, if you have not seen all the good stuff there is out there, watch Canadian energy engineer Doug LIghtfoot's video which covers the whole thing from soup to nuts . Doug was presenting globally on this in 2008, it's not we don't know, it's those in power that don't want us to have it, and the bands of activist "useful idiot" morons they fund to oppose it. Thoroughly recommended as an accessible and wholly facts and science based master class in the subject of nuclear power and energy supply and use in general. BRian RL Catt CEng, CPhys, MBA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOeoXvRQPiI
For those interetsd in reality, the published works of Prof Wade Allison may be of interest, Radiation and Reason and others, including a detailed analysis of Fukushime event. Such realistic analysis is widely avaiable and I have given talks on the reality, but the truth is not something people want to here, or allow to be heard, because nuclear is the obvious cure for the claimed problem of fossil fuel use to generate enrgy.. But that will grow the comies of countries and make the people rich and free and questioning of their estabishments and they REALLY don't want that. They need excuses to impose restrictions on the freedoms of most people and massive taxes enacted in its name, and they really don't want you to know there is better, safer, cheaper, more sustainable, less environmentally damaging solution than the feudal energy sources of renewables which can never scale to demand or be affordable, because of low energy density hence the resource use, the lack of scability and fundamental limits of intern mittency to which storage is not a solution either economic lor in overall energy supply on demand terms.
When choosing between reason and profit, the US always ignores the former for a bit more of the latter. What I can't understand is why the NRC has been allowed to use the LNT model to set such absurdly low limits on radiation that nuclear reactors can't compete with fossil fuels.
Your criticism about the US is unfair. Reason and profit work together. I can tell you one thing for sure, LNT and ALARA are unreasonable and unprofitable.
Reason and profit can indeed work together, but only when the former is in service to the latter. Google's motto used to be "Don't Be Evil", but that was before Alphabet rewrote the rules. Once there is money to be made, reason becomes the slave of profit.
Here in Canada, we watch the USA carefully for a few years after every major development, and when we're certain that it was a disastrous mistake, we repeat it.
The saddest thing of all is that most Americans are decent, honest, hard-working and kind. Those folks are horrified at how their country is turning out.
This is a tired anti-capitalist narrative. The US has big problems. As does every country in the world. I’m not ready to sign up for your socialist sing along.
That's odd, I'm not tired of repeating it. Are you implying that narratives have to be abandoned just because they are old and tired? How about old, tired people? Want to get rid of us too?
Ha! I might be older than you. We ( in the US) let our Government get too big and unaccountable. That’s our biggest mistake.
Bigger than embracing fact-independent fascism? What sort of government is less accountable than a dictatorship? Talk about tired old tropes!
Nuclear power does compete successfully with fossil fuels. Every time the relative costs of nuclear vs. everything else was assessed in Ontario, nuclear was always the lowest cost since the early 1980s. The reason is very simple: Ontario has no coal, and coal is enormously expensive to transport.
The heavy expense to transport coal is precisely the reason that France started its large nuclear generation program in the 1960s. The Franco-Belgian coalfield was nearly exhausted, and transportation systems would be inadequate to ship cheap coal to France from North Africa. The same system is at work in the United States. Nuclear power plants exist where coal is either unavailable or prohibitively expensive to transport.
This is also the case in China. Most of China's coal is located in Manchuria. But most of the industrial development and economic growth occured south of Shanghai. Hence, the need for nuclear in southern China.
An identical pattern exists in India with coal reserves located only in the northeastern parts of the country. Hence nuclear is located mostly in the south around Madras.
As for LNT, that is a very large topic that has a relatively limited effect on the cost of electricity produced by NPPs.
I beg to differ. The regulatory limits on radiation doses are roughly 500 times lower than the lowest dose ever shown reliably to produce any adverse health effects, and lower than the levels shown to have hormetic effects, all thanks to the debunked LNT model that the NRC refuses to reevaluate critically. If NPPs begin to compete again, thanks to the development of 4th generation and SMR reactors, watch for the limits to be lowered still further, so that ALARA can make reactors still more difficult and expensive to build. Follow the money to understand why this happens. It has nothing to do with "safety" -- which we routinely ignore every time we get behind the wheel of a car or ride a bicycle or even walk down concrete steps without a railing. It is fueled entirely by irrational "radiation paranoia" intentionally created by disinformation brokers.
"What about Fukushima?" Radiation releases from the Fukushima meltdowns killed exactly ZERO people, as opposed to the hundreds killed in the panicked evacuation of elderly folks and hospital patients due to that same irrational terror. There are many such examples. Lies kill. Radiation can kill too, but only in doses much higher than anyone has received accidentally since Chernobyl, which cannot happen again.
All good except for "follow the money". This problem is a result of regulatory agencies -- and pressure groups. It has made nuclear so expensive that it has not been able to compete profitably. The problem is not money but the tight control on ways that people can make money by providing better energy sources (nuclear)!
Nuclear power does compete profitably in dozens of countries around the world. In these places, nuclear power is the lowest cost option of those available. Nuclear power is even viable and desired as a preferred electricity source in at least one nation that is one of the world's largest suppliers of LNG - United Arab Emirates. It wil likely be joined by another oil and gas state - Saudi Arabia.
And if you have ever attended a public hearing of a nuclear power regulator, public pressure groups play remarkably little role in the outcome of decisions. Nuclear regulatory agencies make decisions on their merits, not public pressure tactics by ENGOs. Except in cases where Greg Jaczko or Allison Macfarlane were put in control of the US NRC. Fortunately, those are rare. Most sensible governments want their civilian nuclear power to succeed.
Agreed. But... how do those pressure groups get financed? Follow the money!
All exactly right. And the IEA makes nuclear cheapest ona an avergae basis around the World. The reason you build nuclear if you don't have coal youcontrol is to have a sovereign fuel supply that you control the price of. Such a ot of opinionated twoddle. BTW I was around in the UK RPS and NPL when the LNT principle was being discussed by the likes of Lindop, and our senior physicists in the RPS, nobody thought it was anything other than a decision made entirely in ignorance of the real biological hazards at doses 10^7 down on those in Japan. It is now a craft run by ignorant bureaucrtas with rules and no science, bog budgets and power over people and NO interst in questioning the flawed guesswork that gave them their undeserved power and budgets. The US Health Physics brigade are very much against the continuation of LNT, vigorously opposed by the corrupt bureaucracy of the NCRP et al, who are interested only in preserving their power and budgets at pubic expense. How very unusual. The other problem is that ignorant problem prefer to believe what they're told and fit in with others in their ignorance. Yes exactly right as regards LNT as anybody who knows the figures from Ruapari, Ramsar or Kerala knows. It might be an idea to refer to the UNSCEAR report, which covers most of these issues in an unexpectedly rational and reasonable way for the UN. Well stated anyway. The work of Benard Cohen and Luck onelevated low does radiation are also of use to those capableof understanding them. My degree is in radiation physics and my early scientific experience was 16 years in Health Physics and Radiation protection. CEng, CPhys, MBA.
Costs Here: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12/egc-2020_2020-12-09_18-26-46_781.pdf
You can't distinguish reason from profit. Profit means that someone is providing a valuable service. (So long as coercion isn't involved.) Ignoring price signals in a functional market is not rational. It is ignoring the reality of revealed preferences.
Your comments on LNT and its cost and stupidity -- I agree completely!
Glad you agree about LNT, but ... the very definition of "profit" is getting more back than you put in. I.e. violation of the First Law, never mind the Second! The quest for profit frequently has salutary consequences such as new technology or higher efficiency or "improvement" of natural resources [that one is tricky!] but such "spin-off" benefits are incidental to the goal of getting more back than you put in. Sure, there are exceptions; but the main nexus of capitalism is the stock market, and it is ruled absolutely by the crassest version of "profit". I'm retired, so all my income is from investments -- so I am a prime example of the guilty parties. I could just sell it all and die in poverty a few years from now; what other options do you perceive?
Half way through listening to a podcast about Oklo on this. The focus was it seemed on small modular fast reactors and how they can be used for high demand, extreme reliability demand usages like data centres.