Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standard, White House says

I'm a convert. I was anti-nuclear power, now I am pro with a boatload of caveats.

As a person who changed their mind, let me offer this advice to the people commenting here. Don't pretend there aren't legitimate concerns with nuclear power. Accidents did in fact happen and, given enough time and more reactors, will absolutely happen again. That's not a reason not to build more nuclear power, but let's not play make-believe about it. Don't pretend that just because we are better at handling nuclear waste it is a solved problem. It isn't. A hundred-fold increase in nuclear power generation would be a roughly hundred-fold increase in nuclear waste that must be stored away from all life for several hundred years (until we develop technology to resolve the issue, likely long after we're all dead). And maybe most importantly, acknowledge that nuclear energy is far more expensive than other green energy options and, even if we could drive down the cost, it will not solve all our problems. It is, at best, a big part of the solution, not "the" solution.

>...Accidents did in fact happen and, given enough time and more reactors, will absolutely happen again.

Well it is a straw man to claim that anyone says there won't be nuclear accidents. What people have said is that historically nuclear power has been much safer than all the alternatives that have been available:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable misperception that it is more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could have let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would the media have covered that if 200 thousand had been evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?

>...Don't pretend that just because we are better at handling nuclear waste it is a solved problem. It isn't. A hundred-fold increase in nuclear power generation would be a roughly hundred-fold increase in nuclear waste that must be stored away from all life for several hundred years (until we develop technology to resolve the issue, likely long after we're all dead).

In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "

>...IFR development began in 1984 and the U.S. Department of Energy built a prototype, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II. On April 3, 1986, two tests demonstrated the inherent safety of the IFR concept. These tests simulated accidents involving loss of coolant flow. Even with its normal shutdown devices disabled, the reactor shut itself down safely without overheating anywhere in the system. The IFR project was canceled by the US Congress in 1994, three years before completion.

Unfortunately, the IFR work was cancelled by the incoming administration because "it's a symbol":

>...Despite support for the reactor by then-Rep. Richard Durbin (D-IL) and U.S. Senators Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL) and Paul Simon (D-IL), funding for the reactor was slashed, and it was ultimately canceled in 1994, at greater cost than finishing it. When this was brought to President Clinton's attention, he said "I know; it's a symbol."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

>...And maybe most importantly, acknowledge that nuclear energy is far more expensive than other green energy options

Cost should always be a consideration, but when you see people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid and it isn't clear what they are really trying to accomplish.

The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing it. The potential costs for renewables + storage is about the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.)

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously at least a direct cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap, simple or easy to protect against terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas super station hasn’t been completed yet. The potential costs here don't seem to matter to some advocates.

Some advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants where necessary to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term. (There are lots of atmospheric losses in the capture and distribution of natural gas.) No one concerned about climate change seriously thinks that burning natural gas is a long term answer.

>...It is, at best, a big part of the solution, not "the" solution.

I agree.

A very expensive part of a solution. Being so expensive, it becomes part of the problem, instead, as money spent on it is diverted from actually cost-effective methods.

Nukes' main attraction, institutionally, is as a long-term conduit for public money into selected private hands. The Biden administration has as much need as any for plums to hand out. Nuke plant construction projects have served in that role reliably before. The skids are well-greased.

The outline is always the same: the $2B/3y project balloons to $12B/12y, blamed on "regulations, change orders, mismanagement". But a multi-$billion project can certainly afford sound management, if that were desired, and accounting for regulations and change orders would be part of that. But it is not desired. Coming in on time and within budget is the worst imaginable outcome for the project's backers.

Well as I said, cost should always be a consideration, but deliberately ignoring costs of some choices is not helpful. The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing it. Why is that? Do you also consider rooftop solar a very expensive part of a solution, or do those costs not matter?

The prices for utility solar and wind have come down dramatically which is great news. Unfortunately these sources have low capacity factors and can only achieve so much market penetration before some combination of very expensive energy storage or transmission or overbuilding would become necessary. Do these costs not matter and there is no need to consider them? Right now, no effort is made to collect the CO2 from burning natural gas nor the atmospheric losses from collecting/distributing natural gas - if people were required to prevent those external costs the price for natural gas would dramatically increase. Do those costs not matter?

>...Coming in on time and within budget is the worst imaginable outcome for the project's backers.

Conspiracy theories here are not helpful.

By definition, it is not a conspiracy if it is legal. Nobody is being indicted for nuke plant construction cost overruns, any more than for F-35 hemorrhage. That doesn't mean anybody meant for it not to happen.

And the only big open question about storage is which will prove cheapest for each case. Underground compressed air? Mineshaft gravitational? Tower gravitational? None of those depend on any new tech. Ammonia (more expensive, but also more useful, in excess)? Hydrogen (likewise)? Batteries are expensive just now, but those prices are also in free-fall.

The only reason you don't see much of that yet is that it hasn't been needed, and dollars are much better-spent right now building out generating capacity.

Then there is geothermal, which can now be done anywhere, and doesn't need storage. It uses the same tech, equipment, and staff as are used for drilling fracking wells.