Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant

> While it is still an emerging technology being used only on a modest scale as yet, it does have an advantage over some other renewable energies in that it is available around the clock.

I notice the 'some' here, and the absence of the word 'nuclear' from the article, which of course is also available around the clock. Most readers will know something about Japan's troubled relationship with nuclear power and can fill in that context themselves, but to my eyes, it's a startling omission.

Some other *renewable* energies. Nuclear isn't generally considered renewable.

I love nuclear power and know a lot about operating them, however:

1) It's expensive. Very very expensive.

2) It's dangerous when not operated properly, and I don't trust commercial interests operating hundreds of these due to this reason.

3) It's bad for the environment, both the mining to get the uranium and all of the processes to turn it into fuel.

4) There is no answer for spent fuel.

Whereas with solar or wind you can basically remove #1, #2, and #4, however you still have to mine and process the materials.

Anyways, nuclear will be great for some niche uses, I am sure, but it isn't the answer to our green energy prayers.

1) It's actually not that expensive, but the regulations made it so. I remember something from titans of nuclear or some Jordan Peterson podcast. I'll try to write the gist of it here:

There was some rule, that the cost of safety (like how thick concrete should be in some places), could be so high, that the usually cheaper fission energy would be equal in cost with the other sources (like burning oil). Then came the oil crisis of the 70's in USA. The safety margins got boosted to crazy levels, without any realistic gains. Moving from 99.999% to 99.9999% safety (just an example).

When the oil prices dropped, safety standards stayed and now fission energy is expensive. At least in USA and EU. Not in France or South Korea, which streamlined the regulations.

2) not with the modern technology, it isn't. And there are even safer alternatives like marble balls reactors that can't meltdown even if cooling is shut down.

3) not using it is bad for the environment. Fuel requirements are minimal compared to other plants. Even some types of renewables pollute more per W of energy produced. Like wind turbines that will fill up landfills at some point.

4) Thorium reactors. If we just give the fission energy some research & development, we can burn all the spent fuel up in thorium reactors.

But it's inexhaustible. Sun will die at some point and moon will fall down to earth. Then we'll have no solar and no waves.

Nuclear is quite exhaustible. If we use it to power everything, we have about 100 years worth. It's just another kind of fossil fuel, storing energy that was captured long ago.

I love that you can post whatever you want on the internet. “Nuclear is quite exhaustible”, “The earth is flat”, “Ernest Borgnine killed JFK” you can just put words together and put them online. Such a thrill

> 4) There is no answer for spent fuel.

We store it. There are radioactive waste storage sites in 39 US states, for example.

https://curie.pnnl.gov/system/files/SNF%20and%20Rep%20Waste%...

Do you believe that underground elves are continuously manufacturing more uranium, or what do you believe is the case?

According to some quick googling and rough math, there's about 5.5 billion years worth of U-235 present in the Earth's crust on the top 15km. If we consider that we can maybe reach 0.5km down, (deepest gold mine is 4km), and assuming it's evenly distributed, then that's only 180 million years!! (2024 global electricity usage)

Think we can figure out breeder reactors in 180 million years? If we're going all nuclear, I'd expect them in under 1,000 years, but I'm not an expert.

I’m just having fun posting online as an expert on nuclear energy that’s never heard of fusion, breeder reactors or thorium it is a blast because you can just write numbers. 100 100,000 100,000,000 are all the same to me

No but technology improves. Breeder reactors can take the current fissile material (assuming estimates of the total fissile material are accurate, which isn’t necessarily accurate) and extend it by about 60x, meaning thousands of years or even closer to tens of thousands of years. And we don’t need it to last forever. Just long enough to get to fusion.

My rebuttal is this: where’s the nuclear plants then?

It’s not economically viable. No amount of (ugh) Jordan Peterson whining will change that.

The question is whether current nuclear power can be considered renewable. The answer is that it is not.

Renewable, to my mind, means energy that will be there in a million years. Solar. Wind. Waves. That kind of thing.

Exactly. Nuclear power is not eternal because uranium is finite whereas solar will last forever because the aluminium, cadmium, copper, gallium, indium, lead, molybdenum, nickel, silicon, silver, selenium, tellurium, tin and zinc to make the panels exist in infinite quantities

If we can extract minerals from the Earth then we can extract them from PV panels to refurbish/build new PV panels.

If you don't like that, then there's also concentrated solar. We're not going to run out of mirrors.

Fissile isotopes on the other hand, once they're gone, they're gone. You can build new reactors that run on different fuel but that's not the same thing as you were doing before, so you can't call the original process renewable.

Humans haven’t stored anything for twenty thousand years yet.

How do you know that?

And if humanity can’t do anything that it hasn’t done before, why should we care about power generation or any problem that wasn’t completely solved before today? (Like today. The day that you are reading this.)

Same reason why Germany closed it's nuclear plants ahead of time or switched to burning gas in "green" propane gas-burning powerplants. Regulations.

You add tariffs and you make steel production profitable in US. China subsidizes it's electric cars industry and they can sell EVs in Europe for half the price of European cars, literally killing the market.

You subsidize renewables heavily and you get windfarms that are unprofitable once subsidizing ends.

I'm sure that in a free market situation, your comment would make lot of sense. But this is not the case and you should read up a little.

I believe that one should aim to, in spite of their political views, try to see the big picture. Like why there's so little nuclear vs sun or wind.

Idk why this is downvoted. People should look it up before you thinking someone isn't contributing to the conversation

> The European Commission said in 2001 that at the current level of uranium consumption, known uranium resources would last 42 years. When added to military and secondary sources, the resources could be stretched to 72 years. Yet this rate of usage assumes that nuclear power continues to provide only a fraction of the world's energy supply.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining

Or depends also on what we're willing to pay for the power but critics already call it too expensive compared to be viable given renewables' price and price history

The estimate is outdated but I didn't quickly find newer info and it's just generally not a weird notion to say it's exhaustible

Imo we should make use of what we have and not wait for everyone to put solar on their roofs to supply like 10% of what we need and then wonder how else we're going to reach net zero (especially in local winter), but that's another discussion

Germany had a badly designed prototype reactor with 80 incidents in 4 years of operation and one particular incident on the 4th of May 1986 - a week after Chernobyl accident, where reactor operator was lying about it. No wonder they have those regulations and general public distrust in anything nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

Fusion will be the permanent end of all known life in the universe, as we compete with each other to boil the most ocean to make more bitcoins, leading to a planet with a helium atmosphere and no water.

Bro what the fuck are you talking about. This comment is incomprehensible.

I think those numbers unfairly assume many things, including:

- breeder reactors will not exist in time

- we will not find more uranium on Earth than we have already

- we will not be able to economically extract uranium from seawater, phosphate minerals, coal fly ash or other sources

- other materials besides uranium will not be used in the future

- synthetic production will not become viable

To say that nothing will change in the next 40-70 years and we will simply run out of material and stop using nuclear altogether, just seems quite far-fetched in my opinion.

"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."

So what you’re saying is that there is more than enough nuclear fuel to power humanity through its entire existence

Humans haven't had agriculture for twenty thousand years yet.

Also, this line of inquiry is still just tilting at windmills; "somehow, future Fred Flintstone manages to get a hold of equipment capable of digging out a mile of concrete and yet somehow not know what radiation is" is not a productive line of thinking at best and a bad-faith argument at worst.

Humanity's mechanical capacity to dig that deep actually post-dates its discovery of radioactivity, too. If they have the technology for it for them digging it up to become an issue, they'll be able to identify, trivially, that it is an issue.

They're all in France, whose construction began under a military dictatorship to ensure energy security whenever the US starts a war in a place supplying it with energy.

This strategy was proven decisively correct in 2022, and also applies to solar and wind when the US (and by proxy, the whole West) inevitably gets into it with China and suddenly your degrading solar panels and growing need for energy become major problems (and thus forces you to build out nuclear anyway).

Cost isn't the only factor here, and it would be short-sighted to take the cheaper short-term option by buying Chinese rather than paying our own people to regain and retain that engineering and construction experience we foolishly squandered 30 years ago.

Which specific regulations are halting nuclear construction?

Let me know, specifically, which of the safety measures you think we can skip, with your extensive knowledge.

Yes, cost was only 1 of 4 factors I noted.

I've never seen a tomato that could kill a man just from holding it in his hand.

I know because storage of spent nuclear fuel is a pretty big deal, and right now the USA is simply sequestering it on-site with no plans beyond 50-100 years because there is NO solution for long-term (20k years) storage.

Did you read what he wrote? They’ve been made uneconomical due to excessive regulation and that’s why nobody bothers building them.

Requirement 73 of the IAEA's Safety of Nuclear Power Plants would be a start. That rule is so stringent that it requires bag in/bag out procedures for changing HEPA filters at nuclear power plants.

Bag in/bag out was developed for labs handling infectious micro-organisms. It involves a complicated bagging system, which, if done properly, isolates a contaminated filter from the environment during filter change outs.

But for nuclear the bag only protects from alpha particles and electrons. It has zero impact on photon dose. If workers are wearing bunny suits and respirators they are already protected from alphas and electrons. The extra change out time required by Bag In/Bag Out increased the worker photon dose.

This regulation actually increases workers’ exposure to radiation.

We could reprocess it but choose not to. This is what France does. It’s not a novel process. Instead we stupidly let it sit there and pay to secure it.

Why are you so irrationally anti-nuclear?

Nobody asked you about what’s a big deal or not. You answered a question that nobody asked you. I asked you how do you know that humanity has never stored anything for 20,000 years. You would need a list of every thing that was ever buried by a human and then proof that everything on that list has been dug up.

“Nuclear waste makes me nervous” is not proof that we have dug up everything that has ever been buried.

Given the (possibly intentional?) inability to parse language here, to make sure that you’re not a bot, is it possible for you to answer the question? If yes say yes and then answer it, if no just write something vaguely anti-nuclear

I don't think humans propogate these using agriculture.

I'm not anti-nuclear, I'm realistic and I understand the technology and it's pitfalls. I was trained to operate nuclear power plants, I understand how they work and I'm not scared of the tech. I'm scared of letting American corporations who have zero accountability construct and operate them.

I am quite rational, thanks. See my other comment.

Also, France has a state-owned company operating the plants. I would not be averse to an American version of that, or perhaps just expand and enhance the training they already do for the naval nuclear power program and send navy nukes to operate them. I don't trust American corporations to operate them properly.

"Excessive regulation" is always the excuse but I have literally never seen someone show how that is the case. They'll show you one or two low-hanging fruits and then extrapolate that into saving billions of dollars on construction or something. It's ludicrous that anyone even repeats this argument without even knowing what they are talking about.

OK so how does that reduce the cost of nuclear effectively? That has to be a savings of a few tens or maybe a hundred grand over a year, it's peanuts. I'm asking for big examples, ones that would convince someone that regulations truly are stifling nuclear.

There are ~65 Trillion tons of uranium in Earth's crust. This dissolves into sea water to maintain an equilibrium concentration.

It takes 18.6 tons of natural uranium to produce 1 TWh of electricity with light water reactors.

The world consumes ~30,000 TWh each year.

65 Trillion / (18.6 * 30,000) = 1x10^8 years worth of uranium with present day technology, no elves required.

State owned nuclear worked out great for Chernobyl. I don't trust the state to run them, especially given the string of failures by our government to do anything competently over the past 20 years.