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.
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...
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.
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.
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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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
"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.
@@patreekotime4578 "I'm sure its leaking into the soil and water table". Why are you sure? Nuclear waste storage is carefully regulated and executed. Radioactivity is ridiculously easy to detect in comparison to almost any other pollution. I expect that it's done pretty well on the whole.
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 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!
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.
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.
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)
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?
"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?
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.
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'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 UA-cam channel.
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.
@@davesutherland1864 plus the accidents&deaths per mwh generated per year in use for nuclear makes it the safest form of power generation.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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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?
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@@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)
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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.
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?
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…
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.
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.
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.
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)
@@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…
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.
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.
@@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.
@@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.
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!
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.
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!
@@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?
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@@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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Nuclear Power has only few issues... - Power plants take a lot of time to be build... - It's location (you can't build them everywhere) - People are scared of it because they don't know how they work.. Nuclear waste isn't really an issue (it's mostly low-level). Majority of spend fuel is still stored at the Power plants location in pools or containers (when safe to do so)...
China are building reactors very quickly, the reason it takes so long to build one in the West is mostly due to a lack of political will and pressure from lobbying firms / "environmental activists" funded by big oil.
Those are not the main issues 1. It's cost more than anything else it's orders of magnitude more than the alternative 2. Cost overruns are just standard in nuclear 3. Time overruns are not just common they are really long like some are close decade. 4. It's niche, 158 new nuclear power plants by 2030 vs 7000 hydro plants 5. Almost all of the world cannot access it. Due to the conflict it would start with neighbours.
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.
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.
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
It would be foolish to think that buried capsules filled with waste are going to remain whole, complete and trouble free for thousands of years. What a legacy for future generations !😮
Can you guarantee the materials encapsulating the waste will not eventually deteriorate and cause leaks affecting the groundwater supply for instance ? There are potentially many far less damaging ways to create 24/7/365 energy. Putting the money into developing tidal energy for instance around Britain is just one source rather than billions put into an uncertain nuclear future, and it is uncertain ! Science often enjoys solving or overcoming huge obstacles, and ignoring simple solutions.
@@victorseal9047 I just did, you ignored the answer because it is not what you so desperately need to hear. Show your "many far less damaging ways to create 24/7/365 energy" since the world would love to see your amazing new discovery.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk I can see you are treating me and possibly everyone as closed minded, I don’t "desperately " need to hear anything, what I enjoy is discussions with people who don’t pigeon hole you. My best friend worked for 45 years in the nuclear sector, the last 5 in waste management, and was from him the information and opinion regarding the unknown longevity of waste disposal management came from. Just quoting someone who knows more than me.
@@victorseal9047 There is no "unknown longevity" with nuclear waste and we have many ways of dealing with it, most of which employ reuse/recycle. We are still waiting for you to show the better 24/7/365 option you invented.
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.
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......
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).
@@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 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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
I didn't hear any discussion about stationary battery storage working along with solar and wind. There are huge battery projects being installed right now all over the world.
Yeah that would not be such a positive video if you would need to compare your new NPP plans to the storage tech we will have when the NPP will go live in over 10years when even the current tech should be already competitive for the flexible use case, not running at 100 percent 24 7, where nuclear is even worse from the cost per MWh
Where do all the materials for global battery storage come from? Have you any idea how a simple battery even works and what it's made of? What about battery lifetime or how much storage is required to power a single large city for a few hours? Batteries, as they are now, are a complete pipedream as a "backup".
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.
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 !
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!
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.
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.
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?
Why was the IEA guy talking about dispatchable power in a short explainer on nuclear power? Nuclear is famously the least dispatchable means of generation.
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.
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!
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?
Nuclear and Renewables are the sustainable solution for Energy Security especially for developing countries. The only essential requirement is that the Nuclear power plants must be operated under international control and by qualified experts. Regular monitoring and maintenance be ensured by international authorities like IAEA etc. for safety.
The interviewee in the film said that the nuclear waste management is paid for by either the taxpayer or the consumer through the levy being placed on the generation form. Also, there is the commissioning costs which always receive massive taxpayer subsidy. And even with all that massive taxpayer subsidy the cost per kwh is still much higher than renewables. When I was on my environmental science degree I remember reading several detailed critiques of the Sellafield Nirex deep storage proposals and recently The Guardian published an article (23/09/22) on the soaring cost of waste management and decommissioning, quoting £260 billion. The recent article echoes my understanding of the complex nature of long term storage of nuclear waste because the waste is very problematic not just because of the radioactivity, but also because the waste matter can be corrosive, flammable, reactive, and hot. It produces expanding gases and liquids which add to the problematic nature of the storage. There was recently a fire at Sellafield due to a light fitting igniting a gas leak from the waste. Then there's the reasonable expectation that our modelling of the safety of the storage will be contradicted over time, and necessitate the hugely expensive removal and restoring of the waste in new more safe locations. I believe the problem really lies in the government choosing to spend massive amounts of our our taxes on supporting this very flawed generation form - instead of spending that money on methods that directly save the end consumer - they prefer to spend money on generation methods that deliver public money into the hands of private companies. Meanwhile there is insulation, domestic solar and air and ground source heat pumps, heat batteries, batteries, and new developing technology such as deep bore ground source aka geothermal to replace gas turbine stations. As usual, we are hamstrung not by technological limitations but political and economic ideology.
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.
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 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.
My understanding is that reactors built using Thorium instead of Uranium or Plutonium eliminate many of the risks associated with incredibly fine tolerances needed to run a traditional reactor. Surely this would reduce fear and foster support.
They also introduce other problems, mainly that molten thorium salt is extremely corrosive and the design relies on pumping it around. It is a promising idea, and lots of people are looking at it, but (a bit like fusion) we don't have a working design yet.
A major problem with thorium is that whilst the technology has been around since the 1960s, there has never been a single commercial thorium power plant ever built. So at the moment it's as much of a solution as fusion. There are some very popular UA-cam videos that have spread the myth of thorium, but in reality they just don't exist.
Yeah, and reactors based on fairy dust also sparkle and work forever. Breeders do not exist They've never worked Stop fantasizing about them
Рік тому+2
They come with an own set of risks, i.e. the molten salt used is highly corrosive and creates some major engineering challenges that have not been fully resolved yet.
It would take many years, before research on thorium reactors (and other, proposed, newer nuclear reactors, that reduce/eliminate the risks) gets developed enough, for anyone to realistically be able to start planing the construction of one …and then many year for the construction. Maybe about 30 years, in all?
This is very likely a simplistic view, but I have just one basic question: Cost.... The cost of building a new nuclear power facility is huge. REALLY huge. How much (industrial scale) wind, solar (and tidal?) power generation could be built for the cost of building one (or more) nuclear power station? To say nothing of the speed that wind and solar (and tidal?) can be built vs the speed of building a nuclear facility? And once built, the power that comes from wind, solar (and tidal?) generation is almost free (just on-going maintenance), whereas nuclear has a high cost - especially for disposal of the waste that means the end-customer pays more for the energy generated.
As long, as you don't have a solution, to securely store the nuclear waste for thousands of years and as long, as you can't assure the safety of nuclear power plants, nuclear isn't a viable alternative. You should instead invest time, effort and money to scale up existing power storage solutions and don't burn money for that kind of threat!
All 31 flavors of Nuclear Energy please!!! Micro reactors, nano reactors, reactors the size of a beer can please! Tiny generators in my backpack please. 100% pro Nuclear here.
One of the main problems with nuclear waste is that the waste could one day become useful fuel, so the owners are very reluctant to bury it. Would feel very silly if you encase millions of pounds worth of valuable material at the bottom of an inaccessible cave.
"nuclear waste" is 95% stuff like personal protective equipment, office furniture, walls, plumbing, cooling rods, ... anything that got irradiated or contaminated. this stuff is not fuel and can never be used as fuel. It gets buried in concrete or glass. The
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.......
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.
Not as anti-nuclear as I expected it to be, but not far off. Nuclear waste is NOT the big issue this programme makes it out to be. For instance, ALL the nuclear waste produced by the worlds fleet of nuclear reactors for the last 70 years is safely stored on-site or at a handful of specialised sites - this goes to show how LITTLE waste there actually is from nuclear power! Take a look at the worlds slag heaps from coal powered stations for comparision, not to mention the waste (and leaks) from oil and gas extraction. There have been very FEW accidents in the nuclear fleet, and only ONE (Chernobyl) that released significant radiation, and that was because it did not have a containment vessel, unlike ALL the reactors in the West. Cost is mentioned a Lot, and current generation PWRs are expensive mainly because of the Huge containment vessel and the very high pressure needed in the reactor to attain the temperatures required to generate the steam for the turbines. Using water as the moderator also results a positive reactivity coefficient and so complex (hence expensive) safety systems are needed to avoid meltdowns. I find it odd that you mention SMRs, which are still PWRs in design and so have most of the weaknesses and costs (and not designed or commercially available yet) AND YET you do Not mention other alternative designs like the Molten Salt Reactors that largely Eliminate Most of the weaknesses and cost of PWRs! Three companies come to mind (Thorcon Energy, Moltex Energy and Terrestrial Power - there are more) which are well advanced in their designs AND have signed contracts with commercial and governmental operators for supplying their first operational units within the next ten years! The new molten salt reactors in developement operate at Low pressure and so do not need the expensive containment vessel required by PWRs. Their fuel is already molten, so it can't melt. Because they use a molten fuel they have a negative reactivity coefficent and so are inherently SAFER and so require significantly less complex/costly safety mechanisms. Also being a molten fuel, significantly more of it is used up rather than the
Molten salt reactors need some cumbersome maintenance like chancing a pump or heat exchanger for liquid salt that is same time the fuel and the coolant. Now the robotics make things easy. In case of disaster, just drain the fuel to a tank and let remote controlled robots do the work. Lift the tank, melt it and restart the reactor.. that is also not very simple task, but compared to present reactors, safety is much better. Also, for example for changing a pump it is possible to heat the pipe line to spare pump first, and start spare pump, then stop and let the lines to first pump cool and solidify. Then the robots can change the pump, and the solid fuel salt can be recovered by melting. Molten salt reactor generates some radioactive gas, like tritium, but less than a coal plant exhausts. If the plant has waste refining, the final waste is partly useful isotopes, and the rest is less radioactive than the original fuel after about 200 yrs storing. The material problems seems to smell to my nose a lot as FUD.. the first molten salt reactor worked 60 yrs ago 5 yrs with no such problems, ans now we know more.
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.
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?
@@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.
@@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.
@@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.
@@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.
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?
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!
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.
"Hundreds of thousands pounds of nuclear waste." This is a standard misdirection for the argument. Let's be clear what she means by nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is NOT spent nuclear fuel. It is the low level radiation implements that has been exposed to radiation. The actual amount of high level radiation of the spent fuel is very very small.
I think an important point which isn't often talked about, certainly in the UK, is the need to get everyone onto smart meters to enable time of use tariffs to become the only option. Once you put a strong price incentive into the system people's behaviour will adapt, demand for products which allow you to move/manage usage will proliferate and we will reduce the big spikes in demand that drive the dirtiest, most expensive generation. This will not happen whilst everyone is paying a flat rate for consumption regardless of when they consume and the real time price on the wholesale market.
So, we'll schedule the big footie game for when the wind is blowing? and people can turn on their TVs & radios? Electricity and technology should serve humanity, not the other way around.
One point that I have not seen mentioned in the comments, and not addressed in the video is LOCATION. NPPs require a hell of a lot of cooling. For that reason most of them are situated either by the sea, or on a big river, where there is an unlimited supply of cold, clean water that can be used to cool the facilities. Part of "Climate Change" is the potential for sea levels rising. Add to that the increase in storms and high winds, plus a storm surge and you have a recipe for coastal flooding. Has any agency done research into how well nuclear facilities function when they are under several feet of water I wonder? Don't think you can move them terribly easily.
Fukushima showed us the outcome. It's unfortunate that as a "civilized" society we are incapable of pondering the larger questions: do we need the constant growth that requires nuclear energy in the first place?
@@jackolantern7342 It' not about growth - it's about decarbonisation. Once you convert all the transport and industry and heating to electricity, even with the major efficiency gains, you need quite a lot more electricity, without any growth at all. Fukushima mostly showed us that NPPs by the seaside are pretty stout. Everything else was washed away and utterly destroyed. The NPP suffered only minor damage, but the combination of some design choices and the fact that much of the rest of the grid was destroyed/offline meant that damage escaled over a few hours causing a serious incident (making the surrounding area about as radioactive as Cornwall is anyway).
NPPs are built near the sea, but several metres above sea level. That's enough to get us to about 2300 on current estimates. But you are right that it's an important consideration, and more so now that we know a load of SLR is coming. It's not particularly difficult to design for.
![АЛАУДИНОВ у Скабеевой: эти их ВСУ нас НЕ ДОГОНЯТ 😁 [Пародия]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/an0anqU4WGQ/mqdefault.jpg)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@patreekotime4578 "I'm sure its leaking into the soil and water table". Why are you sure? Nuclear waste storage is carefully regulated and executed. Radioactivity is ridiculously easy to detect in comparison to almost any other pollution. I expect that it's done pretty well on the whole.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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 UA-cam channel.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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?
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.
Always appreciate Helen’s pieces. Excellent for all the reasons others have already touched on.
Nuclear Power has only few issues...
- Power plants take a lot of time to be build...
- It's location (you can't build them everywhere)
- People are scared of it because they don't know how they work..
Nuclear waste isn't really an issue (it's mostly low-level). Majority of spend fuel is still stored at the Power plants location in pools or containers (when safe to do so)...
Don't forget it also costs 5 times as much as solar and onshore wind.
I thought I heard promising news regarding SMRs (small modular reactors) that might address some of those issues.
China are building reactors very quickly, the reason it takes so long to build one in the West is mostly due to a lack of political will and pressure from lobbying firms / "environmental activists" funded by big oil.
Those are not the main issues
1. It's cost more than anything else it's orders of magnitude more than the alternative
2. Cost overruns are just standard in nuclear
3. Time overruns are not just common they are really long like some are close decade.
4. It's niche, 158 new nuclear power plants by 2030 vs 7000 hydro plants
5. Almost all of the world cannot access it. Due to the conflict it would start with neighbours.
Cost is the biggest point I think. Long term cost advantage didn't matter if it could bankrupt you while it still not finish building.
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.
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.
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
It would be foolish to think that buried capsules filled with waste are going to remain whole, complete and trouble free for thousands of years. What a legacy for future generations !😮
And why is that? At the nuclear fission waste site at Oklo Gabon it wasn't encapsulated not buried and it did not spread after 2 billion years.
Can you guarantee the materials encapsulating the waste will not eventually deteriorate and cause leaks affecting the groundwater supply for instance ? There are potentially many far less damaging ways to create 24/7/365 energy. Putting the money into developing tidal energy for instance around Britain is just one source rather than billions put into an uncertain nuclear future, and it is uncertain ! Science often enjoys solving or overcoming huge obstacles, and ignoring simple solutions.
@@victorseal9047 I just did, you ignored the answer because it is not what you so desperately need to hear.
Show your "many far less damaging ways to create 24/7/365 energy" since the world would love to see your amazing new discovery.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk I can see you are treating me and possibly everyone as closed minded, I don’t "desperately " need to hear anything, what I enjoy is discussions with people who don’t pigeon hole you.
My best friend worked for 45 years in the nuclear sector, the last 5 in waste management, and was from him the information and opinion regarding the unknown longevity of waste disposal management came from. Just quoting someone who knows more than me.
@@victorseal9047 There is no "unknown longevity" with nuclear waste and we have many ways of dealing with it, most of which employ reuse/recycle.
We are still waiting for you to show the better 24/7/365 option you invented.
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?
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......
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 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!
The IEA has been horrifically wrong about predicting the energy mix for years and years. Why are they a source in this video?
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
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.
New Nuclear Plants are very expensive, why not take more advantage of Geo Thermal sources!?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
I didn't hear any discussion about stationary battery storage working along with solar and wind. There are huge battery projects being installed right now all over the world.
Yeah that would not be such a positive video if you would need to compare your new NPP plans to the storage tech we will have when the NPP will go live in over 10years when even the current tech should be already competitive for the flexible use case, not running at 100 percent 24 7, where nuclear is even worse from the cost per MWh
Batteries will not work unless there is an alternative to hydro storage. Atm there is nothing at hand.
Where do all the materials for global battery storage come from? Have you any idea how a simple battery even works and what it's made of? What about battery lifetime or how much storage is required to power a single large city for a few hours? Batteries, as they are now, are a complete pipedream as a "backup".
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
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 !
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!
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?
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.
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?
Why was the IEA guy talking about dispatchable power in a short explainer on nuclear power? Nuclear is famously the least dispatchable means of generation.
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!
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?
Nuclear and Renewables are the sustainable solution for Energy Security especially for developing countries. The only essential requirement is that the Nuclear power plants must be operated under international control and by qualified experts. Regular monitoring and maintenance be ensured by international authorities like IAEA etc. for safety.
The interviewee in the film said that the nuclear waste management is paid for by either the taxpayer or the consumer through the levy being placed on the generation form. Also, there is the commissioning costs which always receive massive taxpayer subsidy. And even with all that massive taxpayer subsidy the cost per kwh is still much higher than renewables. When I was on my environmental science degree I remember reading several detailed critiques of the Sellafield Nirex deep storage proposals and recently The Guardian published an article (23/09/22) on the soaring cost of waste management and decommissioning, quoting £260 billion. The recent article echoes my understanding of the complex nature of long term storage of nuclear waste because the waste is very problematic not just because of the radioactivity, but also because the waste matter can be corrosive, flammable, reactive, and hot. It produces expanding gases and liquids which add to the problematic nature of the storage. There was recently a fire at Sellafield due to a light fitting igniting a gas leak from the waste. Then there's the reasonable expectation that our modelling of the safety of the storage will be contradicted over time, and necessitate the hugely expensive removal and restoring of the waste in new more safe locations. I believe the problem really lies in the government choosing to spend massive amounts of our our taxes on supporting this very flawed generation form - instead of spending that money on methods that directly save the end consumer - they prefer to spend money on generation methods that deliver public money into the hands of private companies. Meanwhile there is insulation, domestic solar and air and ground source heat pumps, heat batteries, batteries, and new developing technology such as deep bore ground source aka geothermal to replace gas turbine stations. As usual, we are hamstrung not by technological limitations but political and economic ideology.
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.
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?
There is no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear power we have not yet learned how to use.
I could listen to Helen all day
Wonderful presenter !
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.
My understanding is that reactors built using Thorium instead of Uranium or Plutonium eliminate many of the risks associated with incredibly fine tolerances needed to run a traditional reactor. Surely this would reduce fear and foster support.
They also introduce other problems, mainly that molten thorium salt is extremely corrosive and the design relies on pumping it around. It is a promising idea, and lots of people are looking at it, but (a bit like fusion) we don't have a working design yet.
A major problem with thorium is that whilst the technology has been around since the 1960s, there has never been a single commercial thorium power plant ever built. So at the moment it's as much of a solution as fusion.
There are some very popular UA-cam videos that have spread the myth of thorium, but in reality they just don't exist.
Yeah, and reactors based on fairy dust also sparkle and work forever.
Breeders do not exist
They've never worked
Stop fantasizing about them
They come with an own set of risks, i.e. the molten salt used is highly corrosive and creates some major engineering challenges that have not been fully resolved yet.
It would take many years, before research on thorium reactors (and other, proposed, newer nuclear reactors, that reduce/eliminate the risks) gets developed enough, for anyone to realistically be able to start planing the construction of one …and then many year for the construction. Maybe about 30 years, in all?
This is very likely a simplistic view, but I have just one basic question: Cost.... The cost of building a new nuclear power facility is huge. REALLY huge. How much (industrial scale) wind, solar (and tidal?) power generation could be built for the cost of building one (or more) nuclear power station? To say nothing of the speed that wind and solar (and tidal?) can be built vs the speed of building a nuclear facility? And once built, the power that comes from wind, solar (and tidal?) generation is almost free (just on-going maintenance), whereas nuclear has a high cost - especially for disposal of the waste that means the end-customer pays more for the energy generated.
As long, as you don't have a solution, to securely store the nuclear waste for thousands of years and as long, as you can't assure the safety of nuclear power plants, nuclear isn't a viable alternative. You should instead invest time, effort and money to scale up existing power storage solutions and don't burn money for that kind of threat!
All 31 flavors of Nuclear Energy please!!! Micro reactors, nano reactors, reactors the size of a beer can please! Tiny generators in my backpack please. 100% pro Nuclear here.
One of the main problems with nuclear waste is that the waste could one day become useful fuel, so the owners are very reluctant to bury it. Would feel very silly if you encase millions of pounds worth of valuable material at the bottom of an inaccessible cave.
Yeah sure they'd totally bury it right now if only it wasn't so potentially valuable!!
"nuclear waste" is 95% stuff like personal protective equipment, office furniture, walls, plumbing, cooling rods, ... anything that got irradiated or contaminated.
this stuff is not fuel and can never be used as fuel. It gets buried in concrete or glass.
The
You can't seriously believe that.
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.
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.
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.
How do wind and solar "come out on top"? Without storage, both are a burden on the grid, not an asset.
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!
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.......
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.
Not as anti-nuclear as I expected it to be, but not far off.
Nuclear waste is NOT the big issue this programme makes it out to be. For instance, ALL the nuclear waste produced by the worlds fleet of nuclear reactors for the last 70 years is safely stored on-site or at a handful of specialised sites - this goes to show how LITTLE waste there actually is from nuclear power! Take a look at the worlds slag heaps from coal powered stations for comparision, not to mention the waste (and leaks) from oil and gas extraction.
There have been very FEW accidents in the nuclear fleet, and only ONE (Chernobyl) that released significant radiation, and that was because it did not have a containment vessel, unlike ALL the reactors in the West.
Cost is mentioned a Lot, and current generation PWRs are expensive mainly because of the Huge containment vessel and the very high pressure needed in the reactor to attain the temperatures required to generate the steam for the turbines. Using water as the moderator also results a positive reactivity coefficient and so complex (hence expensive) safety systems are needed to avoid meltdowns.
I find it odd that you mention SMRs, which are still PWRs in design and so have most of the weaknesses and costs (and not designed or commercially available yet) AND YET you do Not mention other alternative designs like the Molten Salt Reactors that largely Eliminate Most of the weaknesses and cost of PWRs! Three companies come to mind (Thorcon Energy, Moltex Energy and Terrestrial Power - there are more) which are well advanced in their designs AND have signed contracts with commercial and governmental operators for supplying their first operational units within the next ten years!
The new molten salt reactors in developement operate at Low pressure and so do not need the expensive containment vessel required by PWRs. Their fuel is already molten, so it can't melt. Because they use a molten fuel they have a negative reactivity coefficent and so are inherently SAFER and so require significantly less complex/costly safety mechanisms. Also being a molten fuel, significantly more of it is used up rather than the
Molten salt reactors need some cumbersome maintenance like chancing a pump or heat exchanger for liquid salt that is same time the fuel and the coolant. Now the robotics make things easy. In case of disaster, just drain the fuel to a tank and let remote controlled robots do the work. Lift the tank, melt it and restart the reactor.. that is also not very simple task, but compared to present reactors, safety is much better.
Also, for example for changing a pump it is possible to heat the pipe line to spare pump first, and start spare pump, then stop and let the lines to first pump cool and solidify. Then the robots can change the pump, and the solid fuel salt can be recovered by melting.
Molten salt reactor generates some radioactive gas, like tritium, but less than a coal plant exhausts.
If the plant has waste refining, the final waste is partly useful isotopes, and the rest is less radioactive than the original fuel after about 200 yrs storing.
The material problems seems to smell to my nose a lot as FUD.. the first molten salt reactor worked 60 yrs ago 5 yrs with no such problems, ans now we know more.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
"Hundreds of thousands pounds of nuclear waste." This is a standard misdirection for the argument. Let's be clear what she means by nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is NOT spent nuclear fuel. It is the low level radiation implements that has been exposed to radiation. The actual amount of high level radiation of the spent fuel is very very small.
@@seang2700 One of the first things she said was "hundreds of thousands pounds of nuclear waste." Can you read the quotation marks????
I think an important point which isn't often talked about, certainly in the UK, is the need to get everyone onto smart meters to enable time of use tariffs to become the only option. Once you put a strong price incentive into the system people's behaviour will adapt, demand for products which allow you to move/manage usage will proliferate and we will reduce the big spikes in demand that drive the dirtiest, most expensive generation. This will not happen whilst everyone is paying a flat rate for consumption regardless of when they consume and the real time price on the wholesale market.
So, we'll schedule the big footie game for when the wind is blowing? and people can turn on their TVs & radios?
Electricity and technology should serve humanity, not the other way around.
I recommend everyone the "Hinkley Point C" video from Fully Charged Show!
One point that I have not seen mentioned in the comments, and not addressed in the video is LOCATION.
NPPs require a hell of a lot of cooling. For that reason most of them are situated either by the sea, or on a big river, where there is an unlimited supply of cold, clean water that can be used to cool the facilities. Part of "Climate Change" is the potential for sea levels rising. Add to that the increase in storms and high winds, plus a storm surge and you have a recipe for coastal flooding. Has any agency done research into how well nuclear facilities function when they are under several feet of water I wonder?
Don't think you can move them terribly easily.
Fukushima showed us the outcome. It's unfortunate that as a "civilized" society we are incapable of pondering the larger questions: do we need the constant growth that requires nuclear energy in the first place?
@@jackolantern7342 I think that's probably the most naive point of view I'll read all week.
@@lukeh3020 Yeah, sure...
@@jackolantern7342 It' not about growth - it's about decarbonisation. Once you convert all the transport and industry and heating to electricity, even with the major efficiency gains, you need quite a lot more electricity, without any growth at all.
Fukushima mostly showed us that NPPs by the seaside are pretty stout. Everything else was washed away and utterly destroyed. The NPP suffered only minor damage, but the combination of some design choices and the fact that much of the rest of the grid was destroyed/offline meant that damage escaled over a few hours causing a serious incident (making the surrounding area about as radioactive as Cornwall is anyway).
NPPs are built near the sea, but several metres above sea level. That's enough to get us to about 2300 on current estimates. But you are right that it's an important consideration, and more so now that we know a load of SLR is coming. It's not particularly difficult to design for.