The French government has approved a new nuclear fuel for existing nuclear reactors. Instead of using enriched uranium this fuel uses 90% unenriched uranium and 10% plutonium extracted from nuclear waste. The French government estimates this new fuel will eliminate 97% of high level nuclear waste.
I wouldn't get too excited about that. EDF, which is 80% owned by the French Government and runs the nuclear power stations in France, is not in their politicians' good books. It has a bad track record and France is very reliant on nuclear generation. The nuclear plant being built at Flamanville (3) is only 1.6 GigaWatts and was started in 2007. It is now at least 400% over budget and rising to what auditors think will be a six-fold increase over the original estimate.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Absolutely. The Phoenix one also ran for quite a while, but it was meant as a solely experimental design at iirc 500MWe, and was shut down for normal reasons, not political. The Superphoenix was the commercial version of the design, with 1.2GWe. At the beginning it was pretty jank, with multiple reliability issues, understandable being the biggest FBR ever built. But by the end it was working pretty well. For some reason the French government thought "hey this was expensive to get working, let's shut it down now that it's working". France has the ASTRID design, Superphenix's "daughter" in the drawer tho, so we may see a new FBR design coming in if there's interest. There's also the Natrium design from Terrapower which is basically a FBR as well. FBRs will have to be the future of Nuclear power. Ability to process SNF and DU into fuel and energy is great for the long-term sustainability of Nuclear power.
@@-whackd one, not a fan of the be nice message when going to reply. Not a fan of limiting speach. But those very same.people also think.they're being eco.friendly with EVs all while not realizing that something is burnt to.power it.
I've worked in the Nuclear Energy Industry for over a decade in North America. You won't find a more safety driven work force than the professionals in nuclear power.
I used to work in wind, They preach safety while at the office and look the other way when at the tower, its an industry of hypocrites. I would love to work in nuclear
I don't know if that's simply because Nuclear Engineers and executive have a long term view, or simply that the higher ups decided they had to avoid PR disasters at all costs to keep the industry alive. There was a real scare that the public would irreversibly turn against the Nuclear industry as a whole, not just con ed, after Chernobyl (and many anti-nuclear advocates pointed to earlier Three Mile Island disaster as a case of "see, this is dangerous it's not just the Russians who mess things up"). In contrast after Deepwater Horizon, there was no scare among the industry that the public would turn against them, even the worst case scenario insiders thought might be BP being forced out of the Gulf. The nuclear industry is one where executives nearly always listen to professionals and engineers when it comes to work safety. I'm not sure if its because the executives are better in the nuclear industry or if it is just that they know it is easier for them to lose trust than other companies.
I used to be anti nuclear, until I did a report on nuclear power in my physics class. My teacher encouraged me to consider the other perspective. I did, and found it agreeable .
Thanks Jim this encourages me as we now live in times where true scientific debate is often not allowed. The Nuclear bad rap is mix of old tech and a politics.
Thorium reactors are also looking good for greatly reducing waste. There is a device that is still being tested that turns the nuclear waste from the semi-liquid state into a solid state so it can be better recycled. Small Modular Reactors are also looking amazing. I'm recently in the nuclear field, having just started my degree on it, but it is amazing the sheer power of it. The rods are made of small pellets, each about the size of the top half of a person's thumb. That one pellet has more energy in it than 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, or more than a ton of coal, or more than 100 barrels of oil. Nuclear power is amazing. Just so many people have fear mongered it for so long.
Not to mention Thorium is an Alpha Emitter which is better than the gamma uranium or plutonium. And is way more abundant and ouput could rival U235 or Pu-239
There are many of us out there that support and give out testimonies about how great nuclear energy can be, but I feel as if the main things holding it back are the energy lobbies and gargantuan amount of propaganda ingrained into the education system and media. Granted that the issue of three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukishima incidents are very apparent and disastrous, the technology that is used today in Modern society and smart placement of said nuclear power plants can reduce the likely hood of another disaster. I'm glad there are still people that are passionate about the subject and will not go down without a fight. It's going to be a really hard nut to crack for the average citizen mindset into welcoming Nuclear energy, maybe the push for electric cars and less reliance on fossil fuels can energize not just the green energy sector(which really isn't green) but nuclear as well. The average person has been taught all of the darker sides of Nuclear energy but is absent on the breakthroughs in safety, recyclability and innovation that could ween us off fossil fuels and rid ourselves of high energy costs in cities. The incoming crisis that is fast approaching in the southwest can be alleviated if funds were used to build nuclear reactors that can sustain Los Angeles county, Phoenix and Las Vegas, all being built far away from places that are earthquake prone.
@@austinbeck2896 3 Mile was nowhere near the disaster that Chernobyl and Fukishima. The amount of radiation released at 3 Mile equals to standing outside in the sunshine for about 10 minutes.
Thorium reactors were tried, were subject to ongoing leaks and maintenance problems and were not economical. So-called thorium reactors convert non-fissile thorium-232 into fissile u-233, which can make a nice bomb (see Operation Teapot). Although thorium is not fissile, it presents a greater radioactive risk to workers than u-235. The process to convert thorium to u-233 and create fission is very polluting. Among other radioactive isotopes, it also produces u-232, which is really bad stuff. Reprocessing fission waste to reclaim fissile u-235 and pu-239 is expensive and the most polluting process in the nuclear business. It only reclaims a small fraction of the spent fuel and the reclaimed portion is harder to run in a reactor, and after one fuel cycle is again...nuclear waste. Small modular reactors were not economical 50 years ago and are less so now. Fast breeder reactors to supposedly "burn up" nuclear waste have a dismal track record and are very expensive. Ionizing radioactive isotopes cannot be burnt up, only transmuted into other radioactive isotopes. Do yourself a favor and study economics, instead or nuclear physics. Then you will understand why nuclear power is on the way out. Every reactor would already be shut down today, except for two reasons. They are: 1) nuclear proliferation. 2) Even if a reactor is operating at a loss, if it is shut down, it immediately goes from the asset side of the ledger, to the liability side. Costs for site maintenance, waste management, security and decommissioning remain, but no income. The utility and any investors would immediately go bankrupt. Nuclear will lumber along with the existing, patched-up, leaky, brittle reactors until maintenance gets so expensive and legislators get tired of utilities soaking taxpayers for more and more subsidies. Then they will shut down. Then it will be up to the public to try to clean up the mess. Nuclear warmongering nations may keep a few reactors around to "provide a deterrent," if they can get the public to pay for it. But Fauci and his Wuhan lab assistants have developed a cheaper and more effective weapon of mass destruction.
I will never agree of nuclear reactor in my country Because we life in ring of fire and we have corrupt goverment That combo will end up bigger disaster than fukushima or chernobyl
Nuclear waste isn’t an engineering problem it is a political problem. With reprocessing the long half life transuranics can be recycled as fuel. The remaining waste is mostly very short lived and is benign after a few hundred years. This waste can also be processed to make useful radioactive products like nuclear batteries. Can you imagine a BEV that you never need to charge?
I have read that something like 60% of all waste is safe to dispose of like normal trash in 20 years ( most waste isn't even fuel is PPE and lab equipment)
current fuel rods still contain 95% fissile material which could be recycled but USA forbids but France does - that one step would drastically reduce the waste stockpile
@@avroarchitect1793 I worked in Electronics and we used Beryllium paste on transistors etc - the empty tubes, the cleanup rags and or clothing were all deemed low level waste and sent for radioactive storage
I am very pro nuclear. I am an Electrical Engineer raised by a Mechanical Engineer, and one of my brothers-in-law works at a nuclear plant. After Brown's Ferry and Three Mile Island I turned anti nuclear until I realized that, even with very stupid designs and operation, both plants basically failed SAFE! This is the desired result for anything, particularly a nuclear reactor. Chernobyl and Japan - the USSR was stupid, didn't talk, and didn't care; Japan only had one problem, but it really bit them. Do we need a new style of reactor (not BWR or PWR or similar) - yes, but the learning curve will start over again. We appear to know how to manage a plant and to keep it safe. What more do people want? If the average person wasn't so ignorant they might listen to all the opinions and make up their own mind. IMHO.
TMI was a design and training issue. Chernobyl was the result of letting untrained management direct actions at a nuclear plant and Fukushima was an improper design-basis-accident evaluation. We are human and these are human designed and operated machines. Accidents happen. You can minimize them but they happen.
@@mtn1793 EVERY type of "NEW" nuclear technology has been tried by the U.S. over the last 70 years. Your idea of innovating is just a resurrection of something that had been tried in the past and decided to not be the best solution. These technologies all have specific advantages over the current PWR/BWR designs but they also have their drawbacks. The Natrium reactor being built by Terrapower is a sodium cooled reactor. What could go wrong using sodium, a highly reactive substance when in contact with water (one of the most common compounds on this earth)?
@@clarkkent9080 I really doubt there would be so many nuclear start ups if everything had been tried. But I think we agree that nuclear energy still has an important future for our world.
@@mtn1793 name one "NEW" reactor type and then google it to see how many have been built in the past. The U.S. actually tested a nuclear cruse missile, nuclear powered bomber and even nuked space. Yes we have built every type of research reactor
High level waste is even even more misunderstood than you say. We can recycle it in fast reactors to extract the remaining 90+ % of the energy content and cut the time needed to store it to about 300 years. Not only does this make storage much easier, but it also means we can address the sustainability of nuclear because at that level of fuel efficiency we have practically unlimited fuel on this planet.
@@vonnikon Fast reactors didn't turn out to be uneconomical, we just decided to stop building them in the west. In China and Russia they are building them and there are many designs such as Moltex and Terrapower that are going to be built here soon. The need for them may not be so urgent right now but they are very much the technology that will power human society going forward.
@@vonnikon You know lots of stuff doesn't work out the first few times they are tried. Billy Gates new reactor in Wyoming is going to be a fast reactor.
@@Spacedog79 They are kinda uneconomical simply because Uranium is still relatively cheap, and reprocessing SNF is even cheaper than enriching Uranium, in comparison to actually building one of these things over a PWR, not to mention the "bullshit factor" that FBRs face in contrast to PWRs, which makes the political part of it much harder. But with the increasing "issue" with HLW and future availability of Uranium, the interest in FBRs and other fast reactor designs is rekindling. Which is nice.
Fun fact: coal ash and fly ash, much of which is exhausted directly into the atmosphere, is radioactive AF...and much more voluminous than nuclear waste.
ive been to the local coal plant in my state. and the ash is NOT released into the atmosphere like you say. it is actually caught dropped into piles called gypsum. it is taken to the port and turned into drywall
@@Themrine2013 yes, that depend on the regulations where the coal plant is build. If regulations are stricter, less killer pollution is emitted. But if a coal plant is not allowed to emit either CO2 or particles, it's simply not economic any more. Coal economy rely on per mission to pollute.
@@Themrine2013 - Not all of it is caught and it is dumped in open pits that regularly get rained on heavily and overflow into rivers. Note West Virginia and others where there are fish kills and undrinkable water for miles downstream. There is a lot of Mercury, Lead and other heavy metals that have a 'half life' of infinity, i.e. they are dangerous FOREVER which doesn't seem to get near as much air time as nuclear waste elements.
I used to be a submariner, and literally slept a stones throw away from a nuclear reactor. They are incredibly safe and the best chance to not kill our planet. Unfortunately until we get better battery tech, clean and abundant energy is meaningless unless you can use it for powering transportation. Which is the largest contributor to carbon emissions.
The nuclear waste is radioactive because there is still fuel in it. If reprocessed, that useable fuel can be extracted and used. Nuclear power is also the best way to build a hydrogen fuel transportation infrastructure.
@@daniellarson3068 Use the hydrogen to stretch (dilute) the natural gas. The mix can be transported in the existing pipelines and used for heating the same way as pure methane.
@@tgkhfgkr9729 Running hydrogen enriched natural gas (which is predominantly methane) can have some drawbacks. Notably the hydrogen embrittlement of the pipes. If we're talking about a whole new pipe installation, then I'd have to ask why ANY natural gas is used. Burning pure H2 has surprisingly low CO2 emissions (LOL). That alone should help to keep the green-scene from bleating too loudly.
@@trevorvanbremen4718 I didn't know about the embrittlement problem of hydrogen in pipes. I read that hydrogen is difficult to contain and passes through metal. Possibly it depends on the type of metal or the wall thickness? Maybe it would be easier to just create synthetic methane or longer hydrocarbon chains and use the existing infrastructure.
nuclear power is like air travel, exponentially safer than carbon fuels or driving but has much bigger impacts when it goes bad. No one mentions the fact that coal pumps more radioactive material into the air or fracking creates radioactive waste water, but people fear nuclea
its always a good policy to spread your risks.. don't rely too heavily on one or two systems. The US currently has a pretty good mix. Also, the cause of so called climate change (once referred to as "global warming") is really not clear. Many factors contribute to climate (natural solar cycles being the biggest factor). Climate has always fluctuated, and will continue to do so regardless of human impacts.
You could say that. It is also comparable to hydropower, since China had some major accidents with dam breaks, killing a lot more people than Chernobyl.
@@colty7764 Fossile fuel kills. Last number I saw (most recent scientific paper) was 8 millions ANUALLY dead by air pollution from fossile fuels. Worldwide number but with significant numbers in North America and Europe. Fossile fuels should be outlawed, and every efford made to move to non-lethal energy sources as fast as possible.
The cost of building nuclear plants is also an artifact of the not-terribly-bright way we go about it. In the US, every plant is a one-off design, different from every other plant already in existence. France settled on a handful of designs and then just spammed identical copies of them across the country. The benefits from doing that, in terms of cost, reliability, and safety are staggering. That's why the small modular reactors being designed are so promising; they'd literally come off an assembly line and get shipped to where they are needed.
I heard a rumor that these small modular reactors could be installed on traditional energy plants. Is that true? Or are they only for specific energy plants?
There are a few paired nuclear plants that follow similar designs in the US, but not many. The SNUPPS (Standardized Nuclear Unit Power Plant System) has 2 plants in the US (Wolf Creek and Callaway) and one in the UK. Originally the plants were designed to be two-reactor power plants and 6 total plants to be built, but after the events of TMI, the second reactors we're decided against and only single reactor plants were built in a couple locations. Turns out that the biggest challenge to the standardized design is actually getting approval from the NRC and the inability for the NRC to determine if they wanted something to be one way or another in aspects like seismic restraints.
@@Quetzalcoatl_Feathered_Serpent A lot of them are made to do that. This is because nuclear plants, while everyone is in agreement that the PWR designs that require steam turbines are least efficient, it gave the early ones a double edged advantage that most could be retrofired where old coal plants were. A better more streamlined design could likely just be integrated into an already existing coal plant's generator and turbine system to reduce it even more. I am more of a fan of moving away from the PWR design, however honestly ANYTHING nuclear is good enough right now. Now the reason why it is a bad thing is because this is directly responsible for every single "nuclear pollutes the environment" study. Nuclear contains absolutely everything that has even a minuscule chance of being contaminated. To the point where you will receive LESS radiation being inside the containment building than being outside. Nothing gets out, even under severe events, and only the worst of the worst can get even a partial release to happen. And there is constant monitoring of the plant to verify that the lifetime emissions are basically non existent. Meanwhile coal spews contaminants left and right, including radioactive elements, with absolutely ZERO control or oversight. May it be from the massive ash piles to the billowing dirty smoke with dubious filters, coal will release a ton of really nasty elements into the environment, a lot of them settling in the local area. These contaminants remain here for decades if not more, which for activists groups is not even worth mentioning... until the coal plant is removed and a nuclear reactor is put there instead, because THEN they start to make the measurement, see that there is indeed traces of radioactive elements, and immediately use that as proof that nuclear is going to kill us all.
And these small modular reactors will then require the same security perimeter and containment structure as a GW size plant because they contain weapons grade fuel. It's not gonna happen, the utility companies said decades ago they would never buy such a system and the Nuclear industry knows it, the SMR is just a smokescreen put out by the industry to pretend it has a future.
I Hope we as a society, get past the fear of nuclear energy. It only exists from the mistakes of our past generations, but Nowadays Technology, safety, reactor designs, advanced knowledge, electronics, have advanced so much that things are night and day different. We had a very rough learning experience with the nuclear era and it timed up sadly with war but science and technology has advanced so so far in this realm just no one wants to commit to it because they have all these fears when really our fears come from this era that didn't take any safety measures, poorly engineered designs, poor technology, not respecting the dangers of working with the material which caused for so much unnecessary injuries. Now we have discovered so many new methods (Small form reactors, LFTRs, Thorium Reactors, liquid reactors, and many other improved methods, designs and possibilities) we can approach and apply this energy source in such a safer and controlled manner with layers of safety precautions set up that we really can overcome these fears and see that if we want to eliminate carbon emissions, but still have enough electricity, then we need to trust nuclear energy. We went through our rough learning experience. It was rough yes, but things have advanced so much. You don't ever get better at anything if you give up and it's only natural that you stumble and fail when you're very first learning. So I know it's sad that had to happen the way it all did but I strongly believe nuclear energy is our future. Just think how much computers, ROV's, robotics, understanding of safety, understanding of different ways to build reactors, to use different materials, with much safer methods of operations so the reactors just power down and shit off and some are designed to be unable to melt down like we saw in the ancient reactors of Chernobyl. We won't be having anything like that going forward, that was the past, the future of nuclear is much more advanced, thought out, tested, I know we can do it. I know we can grow past our past trauma's.
@@majorassault5074 Thorium-232 converted to U-233 and Uranium-238 converted to plutonium-239. Seems like a couple of dandy weapons grade materials to me. ig. What do you think? lol
@@jackfanning7952 fair enough, I’m doing my final on thorium so that is nice to know. My point on it being unweaponizable is that it thorium needs plutonium to kickstart the reaction (which it also makes it safer)
@@majorassault5074 Non-fissile thorium is bombarded with neutrons from fissile uranium or plutonium to convert it into fissile material. The result is that an element that is not bomb-making material is converted into bomb-making material. The processing needed to convert non-fissile thorium into fissile uranium is particularly dirty and dangerous for the workers, expensive and creates other radioactive isotopes that must be separated from the fissile fuel before it is used in the reactor. Other fission byproducts are produced in the process to make fissile U-233 from the thorium prior to the fission reaction, as well as in the reactor. These radioactive isotopes must be isolated from living beings for longer than mankind has been in existence. U-232 is co-produced which is 60 million times more radioactive than U-238. Thorium reactors have been tried and found to be less economical than existing reactors. In addition, they have other problems that are inherently more difficult to deal with and more expensive than conventional reactors (which are already more expensive than any other electrical energy source). This is true, even though nuclear energy has not begun to address its greatest economic liabilities - waste disposal for a million years or more and compensation, decommissioning and clean-up costs for the global contamination and disease it causes.
(2:35) The vast majority of nuclear waste is low-level waste, consisting of clothing, gloves, etc. and other materials that have had brief and/or tangential interaction with highly radioactive materials, and thus might have some low-level of radioactivity from that exposure but will go away in just a few years. The HIGH-LEVEL radioactive waste that people are so concerned about, 1) The VAST majority of that is ALSO relatively safe, as ~96% of that "high-level" waste is just unspent U-235 & U-238, which is only weakly radioactive. 2) 2% to 3% of the high-level waste is made up of fission products, what's left over after a uranium or plutonium atom is fissioned. That stuff is HIGHLY radioactive, but given radioactivity and half-life are inversely related, fission products go away relatively quickly. Almost 70% of fission products will be completely gone within a decade or so of being produced, and the only ones you really have to watch for longer than that are Cs-137 and Sr-90, both of which have half-lives of ~30 years (taking up to 300 years or so to almost completely decay away) and which combined only make up around 12% of fission products. 3) Only between 1% and 2% is made up of moderately radioactive transuranics like plutonium or americium or something else, which takes thousands of years to decay away (all of which can be fissioned in fast reactors and eliminated in just a few years rather than 1000's of years). As such, transruanics shouldn't be considered waste, but like with unspent U-238 and U-235, it represents unburnt fuel. As such, nuclear power reactors produce almost no long-lived waste, as un-fissioned uranium and transuranics represent unburnt fuel, and the vast majority of fission products are gone in less than a single human generation.
We should recycle everything we can. Depleted uranium has uses outside of being waste. It makes an excellent armor for the military, and though it's considered controversial it is great for projectiles as it's density is almost as high as tungsten but with greater ductility and is easier to work.
I attended a talk once that pointed out that high level waste could be categorized into 3 types: 1) stuff so hot that it's gone by the time you can even start processing it, 2) stuff that's no more radioactive (but possibly more concentrated) than what was pulled out of the ground and 3) stuff you can extract and sell at a profit for one use or another.
Funny thing is, I remember as a kid being taught that nuclear waste was a big issue because there would be lots and lots of it and it would be deadly for tens of thousands of years so we had to design big warnings that would be clear to decedents that completely forgot what was stored there without it becoming a tourist attraction. Of course, this was also at a time when AIDS was going to go airborne any day and wipe out humanity.........
video was poorly researched/made he says nuclear waste is difficult to manage, but how can it be when he explains how little there is. this is also the first source I have seen, to claim it is more dangerous then wind and solar.
@@spdrcr74 right it did. But it was nowhere near nuclear explosion power. The facility would be a huge hole I. The ground if it was a nuclear explosion. Plus it was ran by the soviets... which didn't really have a great reputation for safety with anything they did. The Fukushima meltdown was handled extremely well and with very little issues, because they had a plan for every contingency. Very highly trained employees and honestly I don't think k it could have gone better. There is always risk... but in my mind at least. We know for a fact that burning fuel is 100% killing us. Nuclear won't 100% kill us...
@@spdrcr74 you should research how many chemical plants that solar panels are made of explode. And they don’t even get talked about because their label is not scary enough. Oil refineries are constantly on fire. Let me say that again oil refineries are constantly on fire. Well that sounds like it’s only a fire but what’s burning in the air? Oh we don’t even have to talk about Coal remember the days when they actually use the word acid rain what happened that? They have multiple problems especially when you burn coal. How about windmills that become graves and that they still don’t know what to do with the waste of those after they’re done and they’re disposed of after so many years. So what’s my point every single type of energy production that is on this planet has something unsafe and a risk to it. Nuclear has it but it is not as bad as they keep telling you when there’s only like three of them as an example through the last 60 years. Do more research without going through these politicians that pad their pockets through green policies that Increase their stock investments. What’s even more funny is some of the old-timers are still in the oil and coal because they know that’s the only true energy source that’s available and And can generate the power of our needs. More Nuclear does not mean less solar or wind, it means less coal, oil and natural gas❗️
The drawbacks that you mentioned are rather overstated. Implying the "explodey risks you think about with nuclear power" is extremely inaccurate as it is physically impossible for a reactor to undergo a thermonuclear explosion like a bomb. The only situation that can cause an "explosion" is if numerous safety systems fail and a steam or hydrogen explosion occurs. Which could cause a rupture of the containment vessel, but all newer reactor designs have vastly reduced the already miniscule probability of catastrophic failure.
and that's what happened at Tcherlobyl. it's the primary water system that blew up. it'"s the one that hosts the water that's gets the closest to the nuclear rods and thereby highly radioactive.
In my view. Nuclear power is still far safer than traditional energy methods. If properly maintained (and not built with a budget) You could run nuclear power and give extraordinary amounts of power to homes and business. It could also help with the increase of electric vehicles and other sources. Yes there is a extreme danger with nuclear power, however humanity has reached the technological capacity to minimize nuclear waste due to more efficient means of extracting nuclear power. You'll still have it but in much less quantities. I believe some reactors are capable of still using some waste for energy use now. The issue with Nuclear power is that people has grown to fear it. Both due the inherit dangers, and thanks to nuclear weapons and disasters. Politics and culture runs on a knee-jerk reaction without trying to sit down and think things through. What the US should do is continue research and development of nuclear reactors especially with gen IIIs that literally are physically impossible to go into meltdown or run into dangerous risk. Especially as energy requirements for the nation only will increase over time. Yes green energy should and needs to be researched into, however nuclear plants should be also researched and improved more. You could literally have a near endless energy source
(2:55) "Nuclear power is still, well, nuclear, and that comes with all the explody risks that you can possibly imagine". The Chernobyl explosion was a STEAM explosions, NOT a nuclear explosion. You put water under incredibly high pressures and then ratchet up the temperature, you're going to get STEAM explosions like the one that tore the 2,000 ton lit off the Chernobyl reactor. On the other hand, if you have a reactor which operates at near-atmospheric pressures, you don't have that explosion risk anymore. The Fukushima explosion was a HYDROGEN explosion, NOT a nuclear explosion. Zirconium rods, when exposed to steam, will oxidize and stripe the oxygen off the hydrogen. Additionally, when water molecules are hit with neutrons, they tend to get broken apart, although you can add stuff to the water to prevent this from happening. During normal operations, nuclear plants have a re-combiner operating, which mixes together any hydrogen and oxygen that are produced, as they tend to separate otherwise. Since Fukushima's reactor water was allowed to boil and the recombiner wasn't working, there was a build-up of hydrogen, and all you need is a single spark at that time. Thus, NOT a nuclear explosion.
Thank you! This is such a common misconception with nuclear power is that it can explode like nuclear bomb. But it literally can't, it can't achieve the critical mass required to have a nuclear explosion. Also most modern reactor designs have Containment buildings in the event of such an event of steam or hydrogen explosions keeps the fission products contained to the containment building.
@@FangornAthran Concrete contaiments built like TMI definitely do the job. But the Fukushima reactors were housed in what looked like industrial steel buildings. That's worrisome.
The "all the explody risks" comment by the content creator is why I didn't give a thumbs up to this video. Why would anyone wanting to make a serious and informative video about nuclear power imply that a nuclear reactor could explode in a similar fashion to a nuclear bomb is baffling.
Personally I'm tired of hearing how complex and expensive nuclear is because I (or better yet scientists) can assure you climate change is going to be far more complex and expensive.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive. Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government. The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships. Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and ..... And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target. The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better.
Molten Salt Thorium Nuclear power reactors fix all the problems regarding waste as well as meltdowns. It's a self regulating system. Thorium is also far more abundant than Uranium.
@bhakta_joe actually, there’s over 4 billion years worth of nuclear fuels on earth. once you bring seawater uranium into the picture it becomes more renewable than solar.
In Illinois, surrounded by Nuke plants. Never lived in fear, even knowing that the nuclear waste is stored on sight. I feel as if knowledge is skewed and misinterpreted to people and that causes fear. I'm hopeful for nuclear fusion. But fission still seems like the route to go now.
The two nuclear plants in my state produced 26% of the state's electricity. Monticello is a 630ish MW plant and Prairie Island is a bit over 1000MW, so not even monstrously huge plants. I feel that nuclear power has become somewhat of a boogeyman.
Spot-on - worse, it is a profitable (if you are paid - either directly or indirectly by the PRC) bogeyman. My big disprover for the bogeyman is - rather oddly - an earthquake - specifically, the Mineral VA earthquake that shook the mid-Atlantic US. Mineral is also home to the Dominion Resources North Anna nuclear reactor - despite the earthquake next door, North Anna didn't even burp. (That is more than can be said for the National Cathedral (Washington DC) - how big was that repair bill?) Two OTHER reactors that were shook by the SAME quake that i know about - Calvert Cliffs - and the still-operating Three Mile Island reactors - ALSO failed to burp.
As someone who works in the nuclear industry, it would be very difficult to get beyond France’s 70% nuclear capacity, and if the remaining energy came from sources like wind/solar that are intermittent it would need to be probably closer to 30-40% maximum from nuclear. That is because nuclear operates best as a baseline generation source operating at 100% capacity all the time. You would still need to have some form of peaking capacity that can rapidly increase and decrease its power output in order to meet demand.
France uses Hydro a lot for those peaks, alongside fossil fuel. Hydro storage is also a great storage tool so you can keep Nuclear going 100%. And their Nuclear fleet does a lot of load following as well. Load following with conventional Nuclear is kind of a pain tho. Hopefully new designs can do it more efficiently and without Xenon issues than what the conventional PWRs and BWRs do. If everyone went the French way, an interconnected grid with some intermittent wind and solar could shuffle around enough power to make it so basically no fossil fuels were used, dams were kept at a nice full level, and kept Nuclear at full power, with relative ease.. But we had to go with a lot of Unreliables instead.
@@jplatour596 When I say 100% I say at high output, close to maximum. It has to shut down for refueling and programmed maintenance (although there are reactor designs that allow to refuel while still operating) but refueling and maintenance operations can be carried out when there's consistently less demand, like during the spring or early fall. It's not much of a problem.
@@jplatour596 do you have any evidence to support this? I work at a nuclear power plant and we have done studies on varying power 30% over the course of the day. We think it could be done, but it would definitely be harder on our equipment. Anything more than 30% would not be that feasible. Maybe if a plant was designed with load following from the beginning they could do a bit better, but would still argue 100% capacity base load is what nuclear (at least today’s plants) are very much best at
@@ajgross67 Nuclear operating best as a baseline generation source operating at 100% capacity all the time is FALSE. Your so-called 'working at a nuclear plant' is no evidence of anything.
I have been talking about this for a while but so many people just don't understand it's no more dangerous than any other form of energy production now. With the smaller reactors that are much more cost effective and efficient it is the only logical thing to do. But looking at the state of our society logic does not seem to be a consideration.
@@A.Martin absolutely! Why do our ignorant politicians not even mention this? I used to lean more left than right when it comes to politicians, then I moved right because the left had no answer. Now I have no F-ing place to go because they all ignore the obvious solutions! I hear a million excuses from the left and the right and absolutely non of them are valid! This country is going down the shitter because no one wants to do the right thing! Biden has some kind of 3!! Trillion dollar legislation that accomplishes nothing except piss away $ we don't have!!! 3 trillion dollars! I have researched it! 3 trillion dollars would build enough clean energy, safe and effective nuclear reactors for the entire country!!! With money to spare for desalination plants that can be run by nuclear plants! WTF!!!!!! Really non of the shit heads on either side of the isle have the sense of a snail!!!!! Dear God can we replace these morons with something that has a brain? Like a chimp?
it's considerably less dangerous than even half of the renewables funnily enough. and WAY better than the millions of people dying every year from fossil fuel pollution
@@l3d-3dmaker58 there is only two reasons that law makers are not discussing this as a viable option. One side loves fossil and the other side is heavily invested in China and wind and solar generators. Funny thing is China is working on perfecting the Thorium molten salt reactors which are a serious game changer. If China is able to get them on line and bring the cost of generating power down they will totally control manufacturing and the US will become a third world country overnight. That's no joke! As a person who loves this country for all it's faults we have to start by getting rid of everyone in Congress now and replacing them with people who legitimately want to build America back up. We are a meer shadow of the country we once we're and every American other than the few sitting at the top are suffering for their greed and lack of foresight!
Why didn't you mention fast reactors, which can burn the high-level and a good part of the mid-level wastes? Or the fact that Generation III reactors are walk-away safe and accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima are physically impossible?
Accidents are not physically impossible. Chernobyl was caused by the operators bypassing safety devices. Such a thing can still happen if operated by incompetent people. Fast reactors haven’t been proven as a reliable source of power. I believe they run off a molten salt, other operations that use this kind of fluid to transfer heat have run into major issues.
@@zinithin-8208 you’re missing the most important detail about Chernobyl. The operators did EVERYTHING wrong AND the reactor itself had a FLAWED DESIGN. In the USA and France and other modern countries our reactors even during that time period were FAR safer.
@@RicardoSanchez-es5wl You mean like the Fukashima reactor? A US design built to US safety standards during that time period? In spite of all the nuclear industry's ass covering, that accident was caused by the operator and the regulator ignoring numerous safety warnings, and persisting in the belief that that particular part of Japan would never be hit by a large tsunami. That kind of stupidity, corruption, and profit motivated thinking are easily possible in America and other western nations. Just look at how many fires and explosions and leaks the oil and gas suffers from. We've been handling that for how long? We shoudl be super good and super safe at it by now! But money. So we aren't. Same thing would happen with nuclear power, because the same people would be in charge. Remember the golden rule: If you haven't had an accident lately, you're obviously spending far too much money on safety and maintinance, and should cut back.
Another common misconception is that all nuclear reactors are built the same. Countless times I've heard people say that an event like Chernobyl could happen in the US, but they aren't aware that Soviet RBMK reactors didn't even have a reinforced containment structure.
Yes, nuclear can be effective, if given the chance. As for all the nay-sayers and green activists? Well, let me put it this way: Many years ago I was watching a program on the pyramids of Egypt. The host led a build team in constructing a small model - which could fit on the top of the Great Pyramid - to look at how they could have been realistically built, based on the methods speculated. The went with the standard ramp theory, but also with a levering theory, that the blocks were hoisted up the side slowly by using large logs to level them up. The archeologist who championed this method was on the show to supervise the team in using his method, and was very adamite that it would work. Well, it did work, but was rather ineffective and labour intensive. After they had used this guy's method, the host asked him if he thought that ramps would be more effective...and the guy replied "Well, ramps where needed, levering where needed." In short, he still clung to his theory, even though it was shown to not be a good one. That is what I'm seeing with many of these green activists. They are clinging to their notions that these methods will indeed work perfectly, without acknowledging that there are issues that need to be worked out.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive. Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government. The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships. Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and ..... And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target. The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better. 100,000 SMR to meet the worlds needs and stop CO2. NOBODY TALKS ABOUT these costs.
People's opinions aren't changed easily, sometimes they'll either have to be ignored or silenced for there to be progress. It might be a violation of freedom of speech but who cares. If it progresses humanity, sometimes freedom of speech needs to be sacrificed. Nuclear energy is good, the positives outweight the negatives, if people aren't willing to see that they should be kept from influencing anti-nuclear ideas.
70 years and nuclear is still only safe in highly trained nuclear industries. Let the idiots of the world have nuclear industries and sell them the raw materials we will building up the biggest defence military the world has ever seen.
Renewables are new technologies and falling in price rapidly. They do not need decades to turn on. Renewables can be built and run by 'monkeys'. 6.6 million EV car sold last year and much more coming now, today.
What’s funny is that nuclear energy doesn’t even produce the most nuclear waste, it’s still surpassed by coal. So switching to coal actually makes MORE nuclear waste.
I’ve worked on and around nuclear reactors on naval vessels,I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is the safest most highly regulated and controlled form of energy that’s in existence!
navy budget is 230 billion dollars. we wouldn't have many problems with anything that gets 230 billion dollars per year. to put that into perspective, all state, local, and federal education spending is 660 billion dollars a year. the federal government alone spends more on the military than the entire united states spends on schools. that's why the navy has safe nuclear reactors.
i'm showing electricity utility spending is about 60 billion dollars per year. capital investment is 40 billion dollars. the navy gets 6 years of what utilities spend on capital investment in a single year. we genuinely wouldn't have any problems if energy infrastructure got the amount of funding the navy gets every year.
You have forgotten the most important part of nuclear power mate, the molten salt breeder reactor, which by the way was a reactor developed by the USA way back, but it wasn't a good source of weapons grade material. Also these reactors can run with thorium too, which is much more abundant, and the high level waste from other reactors can be the required catalysts. And above all molten salt reactors run at atmospheric pressure, and has fail safe plugs that melt at the bottom of the reactor to ensure it can't melt down, thus making it the safest type of reactor, and at the same type a place for all high level waste to call home, until thy are dealt with. It is very sad how we have had the answer for more then 60 years, yet we fail to use it, letting other nations make more progress like India.
A couple of years back, SCE&G (I live in Cola SC) moffballed a half finished nuclear reactor being constructed in Jenkinsville. They claimed it to be too expensive to complete. Now, we pay among the highest electricity rates in the nation. We need these plants, and the US needs a 70's style building spree of GEN 3 reactors. The Chinese, of all people are building Thorium reactors, the safest yet proven. We can't be better then the Chicoms in this regard?
gen 3A now the standard but also gen 4 before 2030 if they can get some funding like wind and solar - even 10% would do the job rather than $10 million here or $20million for more research - big dollars to get the prototypes built and then the improvements will come from the first
@@jimlofts5433 If we would recognize the threat of CO2 pollution and the importance of energy to our economy the logical conclusion would be a Manhattan Project to build nuclear plants with at least 50% of the budget.
And I was part of “circle W” who was designing and helping implement those reactors. They got scared because of costs… and they won’t ever lower your energy bills they raised to pay for the construction.
@@mattlegge8538 if you think that's cool as we get more into nuclear research we should eventually unlock nuclear fusion reactors which are orders of magnitude more powerful
@@dozergames2395 Fusion is always x years away... TBH I don't have high hopes for fusion, but we should still try. But then there is still the matter of the superstitious masses who think anything nuclear is a bomb waiting to go off.
Imagine telling someone you have a power source that produces no greenhouse gasses and can run for decades on a small lump of fuel, only to have them screech at you and propose an alternative energy source that only works sometimes.
AKA environmentalists, vegans and animal rights activists. They all preach wind, solar and hydro but don't realize how unreliable they are. Actually they don't realize anything, because they have no brain cells. They just yap and scream.
The problems you mentioned with nuclear waste aren’t really problems. Chernobyl ONLY exploded because of intentional mismanagement. The guy in charge ordered a test when the reactor clearly wasn’t ready to handle it. And at Fukushima they KNEW a tsunami-earthquake combo could cause problems in that specific area and they STILL chose to build it there and didn’t install any safety measures that could have stopped this
Fukushima was poor civil design putt emergency generators in lower level so that water came in and shut them down after the earthquake caused the water surge flooding them.
Even discounting all of the advancements in nuclear technology in the last 40 years (thorium salt reactors, modular designs, walkaway safety, no need for fresh water, much less waste that’s dangerous for a much shorter time, etcetera), this video still makes a good case. Thanks Jeff.
China and Indonesia building or built MSR's using USA tech and data and all future patents will be owned by them rather than the usa which invented it funny haha in a stoopid way
Small correction, Nebraska does have a nuclear power plant, unlike your map. Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska each have just one plant with one generator at each.
This assumes today’s technology. All of the problems can be overcome by molten salt reactors and factory production. Todays waste can be ‘burned’ to near zero by MSRs. Thorium breeding also solves the cost of fuel and many other problems.
LFTR / MSR = yes…wondering why you got just 6 likes…are most oblivious? Let me mention Nixon: he killed the Oak Ridge Th reactor opting for the fissionable (bomb) byproducts and, economic impacts to his home state =CA..it comes down to know🧻
All good points. We literally have the solution to stop greenhouse gases right now entirely across the country. We simply choose not to due to cost and stigma.
By every measure, nuclear power is the greenest, safest and most productive form of energy generation. A major increase of the usage of nuclear power would create a music more affordable power grid, and using current methods of generation, is far safer than the burning of hydrocarbons.
You might want to add that the great cost of building a nuclear power plant is due to all the regulations and legal fights involved. Without them the cost would be half of what you quoted. Thank you environmentalists and lawyers.
Yep. Was part of a company for a decade that was building new AP1000’s in the US… and went over budget several times due to all of that stuff. Enough so that they canceled 2 of the reactors.
I did some calculation: around 70% of the costs are spent on useless safety sistems that will never be used, cause if somehow they were needed this would mean an asteroid just hit the earth so you probably have much bigger issues.
@@jmseipp "unsafe" You clearly don't know the meaning of the word "useless", so you probably should not be spending so much time on the internet but you should be focusing all your energy trying to pass your special ed class. P.S. You don't seem to care about the thousands of chemical plants around the world (never heard of incidents like Bhopal?), or about hydroelectric dams (never heard of Banqiao or Vajont?), or about fossil fuels killing 7 million people per year of pollution alone, not considering the frequent accidents in rafineries, pipelines, mines, oil tankers, etc.
If you started back in the 60s and kept building nuclear today, you would have breeder reactors, similar to EBR II. These reprocess the high level waste and use it to make more energy. The LWR design in the US was meant to be a PART of nuclear power, with breeders as the companion. When the us found lots of uranium in the ground, research into breeders and thorium and other designs was cancelled. Too bad since they can't melt down and TMI and Fukushima wouldn't have happened. If the Ukraine used the tech there would have been no Chernobyl either.
Every design mode has its strengths and weaknesses. FBRs with liquid Na or NaK coolant could prove 'problematic' in a flood or seismic zone MSRs have the issue of using an EXTREMELY corrosive salt LWRs and PWRs have THEIR associated weak points. Lithium batteries can have unexpected exothermic excursions Even fusion power has its drawbacks. Fusion powerplants seem to freeze time! (For the past 60 years, fusion power has only been 20 years away) I guess Elon will just have to start building a Dyson Sphere just beyond Mars orbit for energy?
Except that Fukushima was at first a victim of circumstances completely unrelated to the nuclear fuel itself. First off, everyone thought that the flood barriers would protect the plant from the incoming tsunami...except that no one realized that the earthquake had caused about 450 km of the Japanese coastline to settle by about one meter - so those barriers were actually about three feet lower then was thought, so everyone was surprised when the water came flooding over. Next, the plant design had the coolant water being fed by pumps powered by diesel engines - as opposed to the CANDU reactor, where it is gravity fed - and once sea water got into the fuel tanks, the pumps shut down. Of course, at this point the fuel DOES come into play, as someone thought it would be a good idea to pump sea water directly into the reactor to try and cool it down...which is what led to the explosions and radiation. Chernobyl, on the other hand, was the result of human mismanagement. To start with, the reactor was a graphite core design. The explosion resulted from a runaway reaction chain. What happened was that the operators were conducting an experiment to prove that the reactor could be shut down quickly in an emergency. (Personally, I think that the plant's director was told it was too risky but he ordered it anyway, possibly to gain prestige and rise up in the ranks of the communist party.)
Nuclear is incredibly expensive. Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government. The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships. Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and ..... And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target. The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better..
And as bad as the Chernobyl incident was, it did NOT affect ALL the on-site reactors any more than Three Mile Island or even Fukishima had all their reactors affected - some reactors at each are STILL operating - and in Chernobyl's case, taking artillery and missile bombardment! (Surprising source - CNN.)
@@PGHammer21A and every country should have it's own NUCLEAR INDUSTRIES, and every school pupil should have a gun in the classroom,and what else ? 75 years of nuclear non proliferation was stupid, nuclear winter was another lie. If only we had more geniuses like you 😔 It is always the bigger picture that is important.
It’s also very well noted that only a small amount of reactors have failed and only 2 were majorly damaging (tmi has only been involved with 0.7 cases of cancer a year compared to the 350k a year beforhand) and the last one to occur at this time was 11 years ago with a 99.7% fewer fatalities amount ever and if that isn’t enough the ways of storing nuclear power today are extremely strict and safe with most of it being glass or ceramic with some radioactive remnant and then theres thorium reactors i recommend watching videos on that but it’s 100x times smaller in waste production even safer and 1 ton of thorium is equal to about 200 tons of uranium and is 3 times more abundant
As a person who is very pro nuclear energy. I'm always glad to see content creators educating about this subject because all this anxiety about nuclear power in my oppinion is connected with lack of information rather the fact based precautions. Speaking of nuclear disaster all three major disasters were using technology of the same era that were 2nd generation of reactors, that required constant monitoring and input to keep it stable. But new reactors will be built with 3rd generation technology that are passively safe that frankly means meltdown won't happen even if every safety system fails just because of laws of physics. Currently developing 4th generation technology will help to greatly reduce nuclear waste and increase efficiency. So, bottom line is that past nuclear disasters demonstrate that we should increase investments in this industry and not decrease it, in order to make it more safe and efficient.
@@Dinoplank Agreed I'm already a subscriber to Kyle's channel however thank you so much for your recommendation he's got really good educational channel. As a counter recommendation haha, if you're interested in this subject you should watch Prof. David Ruzic's videos he's have academic insights in the subject of energy generation generally, he's highly informative and articulate
One of the biggest issues is that these plants were designed to help produce weapons grade uranium. There is a lot of improvement on safety just by switching the type of fessialble material. It will cost more to convert existing power plants to use materials like thorium, but it will increase the life of the plant. This doesn't even mention the viability of the small self contained reactors that can be replaced like a battery. But until fusion becomes available fission is the best choice for a cleaner environment.
The video keeps referring to statistics about the portion of energy production by various sources in the United States, as in stating facts like “in the US we receive 19% of our energy from nuclear power”. This is incorrect. In almost all instances what the narrator really means to refer to are the energy sources used for ELECTRICAL GENERATION in the United States, not energy in general. When talking about energy in general one has to also account energy used for transportation, heating, industrial processes, etc., in addition to electrical generation. In that context, nuclear energy provides 8% of the energy produced in the US. The largest source of energy in the US is petroleum, which accounts for 37% of the energy produced in the US.
With nuclear power you can produce synthetic jet fuel. The US Navy is testing this for their aircraft carriers. Split CO2, take the C, add H from H2O, produce hydrocarbon chains of desired length. This needs electricity, which is available on-premise thanks to the nuclear reactors on aircraft carriers. Small scale tests were successful, there's a video of an RC model jet flying with this synthetic jet fuel. The jet fuel generated this way is more expensive than if you buy it from an oil refinery. However if you add the cost to transport it around the world (through possibly hostile waters) to the carrier, it is getting interesting. Military jets need jet fuel, batteries have nowhere near enough energy density. You can do the same to get fuel for civil airplanes, trucks, cars etc. It's a matter of cost and enough electricity/heat. On land you can also use coal and add hydrogen (from water) to produce synthetic fuels, which is probably a bit easier and cheaper. China has lots of coal and Thorium, but little oil and Uranium. If they built enough Thorium reactors, they could produce their own oil. Obviously not tomorrow or cheaper than importing the oil, but maybe in the future. You can split water not only using electricity, but also using high temperatures (around 800°C). Molten salt reactors or gas cooled reactors would be handy for this because of their higher operating temperatures than PWRs.
@@jimlofts5433 Thanks. I searched for the video and found that I already watched it years ago :-) Still interesting to re-watch. BTW: MSR are also possible with U/PT cycle. Moltex is working on this in Canada and the design has some clever ideas. The advantage is that some of the technology is similar to PWRs, which makes development and licensing easier. Also the fuel can be spent PWR fuel, thus recycling the existing waste.
YES!!! this I actually a double whammy, you can make enough electricity with nuclear to match most demand peaks, and when demand is low you can use desalination or synthetic fuel plants to eat up the extra power while the reactors ramp down for the night, meaning you need little to no storage or peaker plants, and since you have so much installed capacity you have lots of cheap and available energy at night for intensive proceses like desalination and electrolysis!
What do you call the TRILLIONS that the U.S. spent over the last 70 years in researching and testing every reactor design possible and giving that technology to private industry? BTW, DOE is giving $4 billion of nuclear welfare to investor owned Terrapower (Bill Gates CEO) and NuScale to build demonstration reactors and DOE is giving $6 billion to investor owned utilities to keep old reactors operation longer. Just think where renewables would be if the U.S. spent all that nuclear welfare on developing better batteries, solar, and wind turbines
@@clarkkent9080 Better wind turbines? You are joking right? Our government is wasting too much on renewable energy. Wind is unpredictable, and kills thousands of birds every year. Solar power is a joke at this point. In order to power the same amount of homes as a nuclear plant you would basically need a whole city sized plot of land full of solar panels, and on top of that you have to store energy for use at night because they would not be receiving any sunlight. Renewable energy is a fucking joke and a scam. Its great for getting yourself elected because its sounds nice to your followers ears but on paper its worthless. Don't get me started on hydro. Blocking natural rivers and streams is nice for making small amounts of power but dams are devastating to water life. Solar is semi practical in space where you are getting sunlight far more than on earth and that's about it. If your phone was powered by a mini nuclear reactor or a radioisotope battery it would never have to be charged in your entire life. Imagine a world with that technology. You could pass your electronics down like family heirlooms.
@@nitroxylictv Last month wind turbines produced more energy in the U.S. than either coal or nuclear. In Hawaii and California, rooftop and farm solar provides 100% of their energy needs during daylight hours. That is no joke. The joke is that you really care about birds or fish. More and more homes with roof top solar and batteries are going off grid and supplying 100% of their own power. There are no new nuclear projects planned in the U.S. and if they decide to do so in the future it takes 15 years to build a standard PWR (see Vogtle). Terrapower and NuScale are 1/3 and 1/15 the size of a standard PWR and are only demo test reactors with 50% of the cost paid by the taxpayer and at least 10 years off. NO INVESTOR owned utility in the U.S. is even interested in nuclear while they do invest in solar and wind turbines. Putting a nuclear device in phones or homes, why you have to be a psycho to think that.....
When properly funded and staffed, nuclear power is, by far, the safest and cleanest form of power on Earth at the moment... If it wasn't demonized by Big Oil think of how far the species would have progressed over the last 70 or so years....
wind and solar aren't good options when applied on a large scale mainly due to how much space both take up to produce any usable amount of power for a city. that being said solar could be a good supplemental source of energy when installed on buildings and houses to help power those structures.
Technically speaking the land area needed for 100% solar is half that currently used by the oil industry. The real issues with wind, solar, run of river hydro, and nuclear is about production control. The first 3 are not under our control (weather dependent) and as such need grid scale storage to be practical. Nuclear has the problem of being slow, it takes time to adjust the set point of a reactor so normally they pick a setpoint and leave it to fulfill baseload demand. (Ramp time) Note, grid storage will benefit all technologies but some like hydro and gas are able to adjust output faster to match demand. (If demand and supply aren't perfectly matched the quality of electricity suffers and in the worst case results in a full collapse and a black start)
I'd rather have trees than solar roofs. And I'd rather have natural hills than wind-turbines. For aesthetic reasons, I'd rather have mass-manufactured compact nuclear boilers in place of coal-fired boilers. Better yet, mass-manufacturer the whole powertrain including the turbine and generator.
Just so we get this straight.... CO2 is basically Plant food, it's not a pollutant. Plants and Trees grow faster with CO2. Calling CO2 a pollutant is like calling Dihydrogen monoxide a pollutant. But if you think I'm wrong, and CO2 is bad for the environment, fine, please stop exhaling.
There is actually one here in Oregon, OSU uses it to power it’s campus. It’s a very small reactor used to train people, mostly those who would be maintaining reactors on ships, but it is here and does power things.
Chernobyl reactor was a stupid design. There are better reactor designs now than even what Russia and Japan use. All the nuclear waste fits inside a single football stadium and could be reduced by being reused in newer more efficient nuclear power plant designs. Without nuclear energy, your hopes of EV cars and no carbon emissions are a pipe dream. $9bil is less than we spend on SLS, military budget items like warships and stealth bombers, etc. Just spread it out over time. Newer designs are cheaper.
Ivanpah Solar in California cost $2.41 billion in 2020 dollars and its nameplate is 400+-MW and took 3 yrs to build. If 1GW nuclear is $7.5B the cost is the same but you would need 2x solar because solar probably isn't producing 1GW at night. The fastest built reactor only took 39 months to build and that's where most of the money goes- public opposition causes interest to build up which increases the cost of the project. That entire plant cost 83.5b yen ($642m) (in 2020 dollars). A cost not discussed is repairing the environment because of putting wind turbines (lightning rods) in mountain forests or cutting down forests for solar farms, etc. There won't be many nuclear accidents because that's expensive. People don't think about the impact solar & wind have on the environment (turbine blades erode leaving a layer of plastic on the planet).
@@namename9998 Capacity factor for solar plants SUCKS, LOL. Between 10% and 25%... that means the solar plant mentioned will, in practice, affect the grid as if it's somewhere between a 40 MW plant and a 100 MW plant... before factoring in all the other issues. Look up California solar energy curtailment... they literally threw away well over a TWh of solar electricity because they had no use for it. Out of that 400 MW nameplate capacity, I wouldn't be surprised if (over an entire year) its actual average output to consumers was LESS than 40 MW. Which makes nuclear look even better, since ITS average capacity factor from 2017-2019 was 91.20%... meaning your 999 MW nuclear plant outputs 911.1 MW on average. Direct side-by-side comparison: - Solar nameplate capacity: 990 MW; actual output: 99 MW - Nuclear nameplate capacity: 990 MW; actual output: 903 MW Sooooo... they spent $2,410,000,000 on a solar plant that, on average, might only put out 40 MW... By comparison - assuming your figures are accurate - while a nuclear plant might cost $7,500,000,000 to build, it'll be putting out 903 MW - 22.6X the energy for only about 3X the cost. That's 7.53X the value for money... as in watts per dollar. Investing in huge-scale nuclear development is the smartest thing we could possibly do right now. Capacity factor is important, and far too few people are paying attention to it. Electricity is basically worthless if it's not available when and where it's needed - and storage technology/infrastructure is NOT up to the task of load-shifting to make renewables even remotely viable in that context. I'd be rather surprised if it was fully up to the task by 2050... whereas nuclear is up to the task TODAY. Let's go nuclear! Renewables... well, maybe in the future, but they straight-up aren't ready yet. Not once you take into account capacity factor.
Yeah we need to go nuclear Here in Australia. Dam change of Government to left of centre, No hope of that. Idiotic leftwing Want to close our coal plants Down but there is no battery Technology for renewals.
Everything would be way better, electricity would be cheaper, the environment would be cleaner (nuclear waste while harmful is much easier to contain than gaseous waste), and we wouldn't be as dependent on foreign energy sources. It's a shame TMI ended US nuclear power
Increasing nuclear production is the only realistic way to switch from coal and oil. - Wind doesn't work very well when it isn't windy - Solar doesn't work very well when it isn't sunny (and the solar farms take up space) - Hydro power requires water nearby (normally affecting habitats) Nuclear can be used to produce any time, there's different types and sizes of reactors, they use water, but it (could?) be recouped, they produce very little waste and can produce less. There's some downsides to it, but the cost of building and maintaining them isn't that high when you compare the total energy cost over time, the waste over time, and the benefits over other 'clean' sources.
Both wind and solar work fine if you are able to store excess power generated during sunny and/or windy weather, and the technology for this is advancing rapidly. As for solar farms taking up space, solar power can be generated at any scale; it's possible for a rooftop array to power a single home or an apartment building.
i loved that you broke down and explained the different types of nuclear waste and it’s ramifications for the country, bravo. also, there is a large amount of waste heat that is rejected to maximize the amount of energy extracted from fission decay. if you passed a law saying this waste heat had to run carbon capture machines, or desalination plants, or vertical farms - etc; then these plants may even be carbon negative and possibly be of even greater benefit for mankind.
Some plants do Cogeneration using that waste heat for those kinds of things. Okiluoto in Finland is used for fish farms, and greenhouses, many plants in Russia are used for district heating, as well as in Switzerland. Diablo Canyon also desalinates water.
Nuclear power has been around for over 70 years now, and we have had a total of 3 nuclear plant disasters. Two of the three have resulted in Zero confirmed human fatalities. We have seen no statistically measurable increase in cancer rates among people who were near Three Mile Island (and it hasn't been for lack of looking for an increase), and we do not know of anyone killed by radiation in the Fukushima disaster (though I will admit that such fatalities might have been hard to find among the direct tsunami casualties). There are many more accidents and disasters with other forms of energy, usually not killing as many people at one time as the Chernobyl disaster did, but overall in many cases killing far more people per terawatt-hour produced than nuclear, as this video showed. So nuclear is as safe a form of energy as we have. What really frustrates me is when people who believe that carbon dioxide could make our world unlivable are the same people fear-mongering nuclear energy. I remain skeptical of the perceived carbon dioxide threats, but for someone who really believes that CO2 is an existential threat, how could nuclear power be more dangerous than that? Nuclear power is the only proven, cost-effective, base-load-capable, and scalable form of carbon-free energy we have.
What would have happened if Fukashima occured near New York or LA? How much would that have cost? How many lives would have been lost evacuating everyone in a 20 mile radius, or in the tent cities they'd have to live in for several months? The problem with "I've been in two car accidents and didn't get a scratch" thinking is that it ignores the possibility of worse outcomes.
@@anticarrrot I think that Fukushima was a very highly populated area. And it was devastated by the tsunami, which would have been devastating with or without the nuclear disaster. My point was that we don't know of anyone who was irradiated by the nuclear disaster, who wasn't already dead due to the tsunami. I think that the same would be true if the same events had happened in New York or Los Angeles. The explanation I heard at the time was that while every nuclear power plant is unique, each is a varient of one of three basic designs. All of them have backup diesel generators to keep the core cool in case the plant needs to abruptly shut down, as they do during an earthquake. Type 2 and type 3 power plants deliberately elevate these backup generators for the purpose of preventing them from being flooded by a tsunami, which could follow an earthquake, which is precisely what happened in Fukushima. The reason this failed in Fukushima is that this power plant was a type 1 plant, with the diesel generators low enough for the tsunami to reach them. The lesson learned from Fukushima was that all type 1 nuclear plants in tsunami-prone areas need to be shut down as soon as possible, and any replacement nuclear plants or other new nuclear plants in tsunami-prone areas must be type 2 or 3. That won't stop devastating tsunamis, but it would prevent them from also becoming nuclear disasters.
@@jeremykraenzlein5975 You ate playing No True Scotsman with the casualties. A death from a nuclear accident, including from vital responses to said accident, is a death from a nuclear accident. The Fukashima accident killed over 2000 people during the evacuation of 150k people. So extrapolating to New York we could expect north of 600k deaths.
@@anticarrrot I'm not familiar with the "2,000 killed" number you cited. How exactly did an evacuation kill people? Did the devastation to their transportation infrastructure caused directly by the tsunami play a role? If so, then they could also be counted as tsunami deaths. In any case, I have already proposed a solution to ensure that the Fukushima nuclear disaster never happens again. The point is that it is not necessary to shut down nuclear power entirely to prevent tsunamis from becoming nuclear disasters. Also, as the video demonstes, nuclear on the whole is still far safer than most other forms of energy, on a basis of lives lost per energy produced. Adding in 2000 more deaths from Fukushima, even if the video's numbers didn't already do so, won't change that bottom line.
Nuclear power plant builds are so heavily regulated that it takes a decade or more to permit and then to build. However had the US gone all nuclear, then the water shortage of the western states would be solved as large amounts of that power would be going to de-salting sea water, pumping into the western states to refill the Lake Mead's and other watercourses of the west. Water from the Great lakes could also be pumped over with out great concern of the energy expense. Meanwhile Canada and the Army Corp. of Engineers hold the Great Lakes 3 to 4 ft above the normal water levels to secretly look at the effects of higher water levels on coastal land forms to prepare for the increase of sea levels.
The Westinghouse AP1000 advanced PWR is fully approved by the NRC for construction and operation in the U.S.. VC Summer was building 2 but cancelled aftre spending $7 billion with no end in sight and Vogtle is building 2 at 100% over budget and schedule. Peole like to blame the regulations when they have no idea what the problem is. A nuclear plant is not a Walmart or Amazon distribution center. All Vogtle had to do is build the AP1000 acording to design but now they say it will take 2 years to correct construction errors.Is that the problem with regulations? Do you want them to ignore the safety design and just slap it together?
@@clarkkent9080 Yes, the current state of "safety" regulations are ridiculous and are regulatory lawfare by Greenpeace to make it virtually Illegal to build new nuclear power stations. Another problem is the lack of production lines and installation skill base because we don't build nuclear power stations in large numbers.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Anyone who doesn't know what they are talking about and has no facts can throw out smoke and mirrors and conspiracy theories but the FACT is that the AP1000 is FULLY approved. I must assume you mean that a utility should be able to do whatever they want and the NRC should bow down and accept it. ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS BUILD IT AS DESIGNED and the only regulatory oversight is making sure they do THAT. But that to you is over reach. Since when did Greenpeace control anything built in the U.S.????? I agree with the statement on lack of construction skills for nuclear but even at the most basic level, any home owner who has had work done on their home knows that there are very few skilled people left in America. So what is your solution to this issue. A problem without a solution is just bit#hing
Some ports won't allow nuclear powered ships to enter. Likely because the reactors are in the middle of the ocean where activist can't reach them to be a nuisance. In Europe a anti-nuke activist got himself a military rocket launcher and hit the containment building of a nuclear power plant that was in the process of being built. That scared the local politicians enough that the nuclear power plant stop being built. Disclosure: I support the construction of hundreds of desalinization plants which would require nuclear power plants.
You have made a few bad assumptions. As to the cost maybe you should use cost of building plants in South Korea. They are about 1/3 the cost of US reactors because they are building the same reactor over and over again. The other thing you did not consider is newer reactors running on and using up the past nuclear waste. These would be fast reactors. It's not likely that only light water reactors would be the only reactors built. Since nuclear waste is 99% unused fuel it's reasonable to assume that later built reactors would use nuclear waste as fuel source. These newer reactors would most likely get away from light water cooling so would be able to operate at much higher temperatures opening opportunities for higher efficiencies and wider industrial applications. Of course there would be no talking about global warming or industrial pollution. Yes the present we could have had.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive. Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government. The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships. Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and ..... And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target. The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better. 100,000 SMR to meet the worlds needs and stop CO2. NOBODY TALKS ABOUT these costs.
@@stephenbrickwood1602 I don't think nuclear power needs to be incredibly expensive. We went down this path of building giant nuclear steam engines because that was what the first small power systems were. Thinking was just make these things bigger and we will get economies of scale. Well in this case this was not true since the difficulty of going bigger with this design increased faster than the benefits of economy of scale. So there needs to be a rethink which there has been allot of. There are ideas of molten salt, liquid metal, Pebble bed, or factory built modules. The common denominator of all these ideas is they have to get over the development cost, often called first development cost. This is because the first developed of any of these systems are not going to be cheaper than current energy systems even if they have potential to be such. This is what was true with wind and solar too. The interesting thing with most of these nuclear designs is they are not envisioned to replace renewables but to be compatible with them. The nuclear, often with heat storage, serving to fill in for the weaknesses of renewables to make for a more practical and lower cost energy system. To achieve this the investment in development of these systems needs to be done.
@@stanleytolle416 Electric vehicles, EVs, will have 500 mile battery, huge, but the Daily drive is 40 miles 7kwh, and homes need 5kwh over night. So, with every home and business connected to the grid and 18 rooftop PV panels(33kwh) AND THE HUGE EV BATTERIES plugged in, the amount of cheap continuous power will be massive. Petroleum will be a strategic military reserve. A war winning reserve. That's what I mean about the importance of the EV battery, it makes all the difference. The EV means massive investment in nuclear and nuclear industries around the world is not necessary and 'a monkey' can install solar PV 😉
@@stanleytolle416 when you go to the individual cases then let's see what they are, the no wind or no sun places. In general the majority of the population is in warm latitudes and near coast lines.
Imagine: What if the rate at which nuclear plants were being built in the 60s had been sustained and no new coal-fired plants had been built? How much would that have reduced the USA's contribution to carbon emissions?
I appreciate the clear and realistic discussion of the nuclear waste problem. Too many videos I've seen still operate under the assumption that it's a huge issue.
Uranium is more common than aluminum, and produces nearly no Carbon Emissions. It is cleaner, coal plants release more radiation and destroys air quality. I never really got the whole push for solar and wind turbines, you need to put aside so much land and destroy so much land to power a city with this. They make sense in addition to, not as a total solution.
Once you do real research into nuclear energy you will realize nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, powerful and most reliable form of energy production in comparison to other forms of energy production. The Navy has submarines that have been running off of nuclear power for decades and have been used in emergency power supply for states that have undergone power loss. If you want to talk about renewable clean energy nuclear is the only logical way to go!!!
Don't forget that wind and solar are intermittent. You need either another power source that can react quickly or some form of energy storage. Fast reacting power plants are usually simple cycle natural gas power plants, but not combined cycle gas power plant (which are much more efficient, but react slowly to load changes). Pumped hydro is an option, but not available everywhere or in large capacities. Batteries would work, but are very expensive and resource intensive. Also wind/solar plus simple cycle gas power plants uses similar amounts of gas as combined cycle gas power plants without wind/solar. So you have to ask what's the point of wind/solar in this combination other than to make you feel less guilty. If you have a nuclear power plant with molten salt as coolant, it is quite easy and cheap to store heat in big tanks of molten salt. Some concentrated solar plants use this already. E.g. build the turbine part to triple the capacity of the nuclear reactor, add some (non radioactive) molten salt tanks, run the nuclear reactor at 100% all the time (most economic) and adjust the power delivered using the tanks.
Last stat I saw said storage was 6% of global capacity and up from 5% a decade ago. Also with those intermittents (wind, solar) are entirely dependent on cheap and abundant natural gas to make up the difference. take gas away and intermittents can't operate without frying the grid
@@jimlofts5433 Correct, but they would be more cost efficient if run at 100% capacity all the time. Therefore the idea of additional salt tanks for load balancing.
2.4-3.6 trillion: compare that to the cost of US wars and other unproductive spending and it is not that expensive anymore. Also technology for closed fuel loops exist for more than 30 years now (see EBR II for example), which would solve the waste, safety and sustainability problems. You also have to look at total energy consumption, not only electricity, which is only roughly a third.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive. Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government. The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships. Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and ..... And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target. The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better. 100,000 SMR to meet the worlds needs and stop CO2. NOBODY TALKS ABOUT these costs.
The Fukushima meltdown was caused by extremely poor design planning. By locating its emergency generators (needed to keep the reactors cool in the event of a power failure) in the basement, the tsunami filled the basement with water (DUH?), knocking out the generators, allowing the reactors to go into meltdown. Very poor planning. And as the number of EV's on the road increases, much more (dependable) energy will be needed to charge them. The United States needs to wise up, and go completely nuclear, like France. But instead, we follow countries like Germany, and Australia. They are in trouble, and we're right behind them.
One of my favorite solutions to the problem of both mid level and high level waste is drilling. You use the technology that oil drills use to drill a small bit deep hole. One well below where any water will ever penetrate and you place the waste in that and seal it up. Not a single gama ray will ever reach the surface of the earth and there is nothing that deep that will be negatively affected by radiation. Unlike fracking you're not removing anything either. You're replacing one solid with another. The low level waste can be stored until safe and then repurposed. By that point you have as constant a supply of waste going in as coming out. So relatively small facility, probably a repurposed salt mine, could be used to handle every single ounce of low level nuclear waste the US could ever produce with full scale nuclear coverage.
Problem is the military wants a system that allow them rapid access to the waste in order to extract plutonium should there be a need for more nuclear bombs. That is the problem with long term storage of high level waste. How do you make a vault that can store the waste safety.. for 30,000 years and yet can be opened at the moments notice if you need the material to extract plutonium. Attempts to fulfill both desires have lead to complicated, expensive and compromised designs which in the end... fail.
I recall just after 9-11-01, thinking that we should have - then - built one nuclear power plant in each state, as a way to reduce our reliance on foreign oil imports. Seems we could still do this, to reduce our collective carbon footprint.
US gets 19% of its electricity from nuclear , not total energy. Big difference. I'd like to see more reactors but the expense seems an issue. We are losing the existing plants as they retire. Nuclear not getting credit for being cleaner in terms of carbon or air emissions compared with natural gas is one problem. Second ,many of the energy subsidies are given by politicians to wind and solar which are intermittent sources which imbalance the electric market.
Nuclear is better for the environment. Why can't wind turbines be placed in the same area-because turbines in the back won't get any wind which means wind turbines change weather patterns (not the "air is warmer near the ground" argument but wind turbines stop wind otherwise the turbines in the back should work just as well as the ones in the front. There have been discussions about using them to stop hurricanes even though hurricanes are important to the planet). People are also putting wind turbines in mountain forests even though they act like lightning rods. And wind kills predator birds. Solar is just as bad because you need to destroy ecosystems to build solar farms. When Mao removed sparrows locust populations ballooned and 15-55million people died of famine. When wolves were removed from Yellowstone similar things happened. Building solar farms in deserts would limit minerals from being carried around the world on the wind and change albedos. And when trees are cut down there's less to absorb rain which means more flooding. When you think about the long term costs of repairing environmental mistakes nuclear turns out to be cheaper. And all you need is one design that can be used for all future plants. That would make everything cheaper because you become an expert at building that which means costs are lower.
Until someone invents a nuclear engine which can fit under the hood of a car, we're going to need to continue to use fossil fuels or draw electricity from some non-fossil source, nuclear or otherwise.
This whole video misses the mark. You are correct about nuclear waste, it just isn't a problem. You are correct about the emissions and deaths, they are both low. However, you neglect the most important issues impacting nuclear. Firstly, at CURRENT rate of nuclear consumption, we will deplete the earth's entire supply of viable uranium in about 80 years. Think about that for a moment. What you are speculating about here is a scenario where we are vastly increasing our uranium consumption. The correct answer to "what if the US was powered 100% by nuclear" is that we would run out of uranium in 15 or so years and then be totally fucked because we relied on a system where 100% of our energy comes from nonrenewable resources we exhausted. The other issue you don't mention, which is the driving force behind nuclear plants closing, is that they cost too much. You do mention this in your video, but you are really only talking about the initial construction costs. It is cheaper per unit of energy produced to generate electricity from wind and solar farms you build from scratch, than it is to generate electricity from a fully operational power plant. Basically, you have old news. Before 2011-2015ish, your assessments of the costs are about accurate, but since then, the price of wind and solar has plummeted far lower than economists and engineers predicted was possible. This is great news, but it means that nuclear, which is the kind of thing you invest billions in and break even at earliest 20 years after construction, has a bunch of nuclear plants that were expecting to pay off their huge investment by selling high priced power. Now that the power is selling for unexpectedly low prices, the break even point for nuclear is just fading off into the distance.
People have been saying the same thing about oil for hundreds of years. Just when we think we’re headed for disaster, about to deplete our wells, we find the largest untapped reserve in history. But obviously that’s not the main issue with coal and oil, it’s the environmental cost. I’m not going to rehash all the arguments because other commenters have done a great job of laying them out far batter than I could, but the combination of thorium salt reactors, reactors designed to run off existing high level waste fission byproducts, new highly efficient uranium reactor that can make use of less enriched fuel, etc mean nuclear has a much much much longer potential lifespan than you paint in your comment. Plus as it stands now, renewable energy is not profitable compared to existing means of energy production. Nuclear would have few downsides and would give the renewables industry precious time they need to innovate.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive. Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government. The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships. Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and ..... And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target. The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better. 100,000 SMR to meet the worlds needs and stop CO2. NOBODY TALKS ABOUT these costs.
excellent response above, the silence is deafening, to your response. nuclear would be a huge monopoly profit business, paying political donations, and so expensive that you could not turn it of until it had made its profits.
@@ayeeniko I wish you were correct Niko, that would be amazing. I would love it if you are correct, but alas you are not. We have more fossil fuel reserves RIGHT NOW than we have uranium reserves. That's just a fact. Don't fall into the same trap climate deniers do when they say global warming predictions have been false. They have not. Some journalist, politicians, people with facebook accounts, and other NON EXPERTS have made various claims in the past, but all of those are irrelevant. There simply hasn't been any issue with actual academics misunderstanding the abundance of either fossil fuels or uranium reserves. If you want to trust the facebook warriors and politicians over academics and other experts, be my guest, but I won't follow. Next, you talk about tech that is not yet developed, like thorium salt reactors, sodium fast reactors, modular reactors and a couple others. The issue with those, is that they won't hit the market until around 2040-2050. The issue is, grid scale storage is also in development with several implementations, and the expected time to hit market is similar. Since the cost of wind and solar is so incredibly low (about a 1/5 the cost of nuclear unsubsidized), and these new nuclear techs don't seem cheaper than grid scale storage, there's no financial rationality to go with nuclear over renewables and storage. Even yet further, and this is something I didn't mention in my top level comment, nuclear is base load, but it is not dispatchable. The huge issue of going 100% nuclear is that you can't match supply and demand quickly enough to match things like the duck curve, much less larger month to month imbalances in supply and demand. The correct comparison is not renewables + storage vs. nuclear, it is renewables + storage vs. nuclear + storage. Nuclear needs massive amounts of storage to go along with it if we went to 100% nuclear. France is 70% nuclear, and the job of that 30% is to be the dispatchable peaker generation they need to match supply to demand. If you try to do this with the nuclear plants themselves, you have to build double the nuclear plants you actually need, then turn most of them off and just have them sit idle until demand rises and they turn on. Financially, due to how nuclear pays off its construction, this is a nonstarter. Your final point about the profitability of renewables is also backwards. Solar and wind are so cheap and profitable for the operators that they have driven the cost of electricity down across the entire energy market. Nuclear plants are what is not profitable and can't compete anymore. I mean honestly, why do you think they are closing down fully operational nuclear power plants? What both you and Jeff both seem to believe here, is that these plants are closing down due to fears about safety and waste. That is just simply not the case. Jeff is totally correct here (as I said in the top comment) waste and safety are simply not issues for nuclear. The waste is negligible and so are the safety concerns. Policy makers and nuclear plant operators know this. They are not dummies. Fully operational nuclear plants are closing down because they cannot compete financially in the energy market where wind and solar have unexpectedly cut energy prices, even if they are currently in operation without any issues with the plant or supply lines. That's just the honest truth. I wish they were closing down because the public was generally misinformed about the severity of waste and safety issues, and politicians and plant operators were caving to political pressure, but again, that is not the reason here. Nuclear simply cannot compete in the modern energy market. Renewables are not just competing, they are dominating the market and pushing everyone else out.
@@jweezy101491 ok yeah you must be right, I’m sure this narrative about renewables being so massively profitable with no downsides that I’ve never heard from anyone ever before is correct. You see the market clearly! You should be president of electricity!!
Additional upsides to nuclear power; 1. It takes up less land than solar, wind, and hydro. 2. It produces energy at a regular interval unlike wind and solar. 3. We could become less reliant on hydro increasing water storage in the lakes to be used for other purposes than power. 4. Depending on the type of nuclear energy (example thorium), it can reduce the amount of nuclear waste currently in storage and help to clean up our waste problems. 5. New designs of nuclear reactors exist that would reduce how much water is currently used in the energy production process that are also much safer than the older systems.
Nuclear will make a comeback later this century after people realize the very expensive renewable approach will fall way short of supplying enough energy.
@Mark Stewger - solar wind about $1 bn per 1GW and not 24/7 365 day delivery your nuclear $1.16 BN per 1GW for 24/7 365 day reliability - solar 25% efficient per annum wind 30% - nuclear looks cheap also new Gen4 for load following, less and shorter lived waste stream at about same price and 3-5 cents per KWH They can use waste heat not electricity for desal / ammonia production / artificial diesel and other high temp chemical processes + produce medical isotopes to save lives
@@jp5000able @Mark Stewger - solar wind about $1 bn per 1GW and not 24/7 365 day delivery your nuclear $1.16 BN per 1GW for 24/7 365 day reliability - solar 25% efficient per annum wind 30% - nuclear looks cheap also new Gen4 for load following, less and shorter lived waste stream at about same price and 3-5 cents per KWH They can use waste heat not electricity for desal / ammonia production / artificial diesel and other high temp chemical processes + produce medical isotopes to save lives
I was ready to start crying cause I thought you’d talk about what if us was all nuclear since the 70s. So much less global warming, fewer oil wars, everything cheaper…
The saddest part of nuclear power's disasters is how preventable they were. 3 Mile Island resulted from a faulty sensor(something backups would've prevented) and wasn't even that bad. Fukushima was any one of a half dozen adjustments away from avoiding disaster entirely. Chernobyl is the end product of a Soviet experiment to try to get more power out of a plant than it was designed to put out and required disabling basically every safety feature the plant had.
@@ericlipps9459 Yeah, sure, hindsight and all that, but when it happens because they *did not follow the rules* there's no hindsight, only "what did you think was gonna happen?!"
I have worked for the last 30 years in nuclear cleanup and I can tell you that waste disposition is possible but expensive if done properly. Short lived isotopes are separated and solidified in cementitious grout, and will decay to safe levels within 300 years. Long lived isotopes ( that are not recovered for re-use) are mixed with borosilicate glass and melted into stainless steel cannisters. Even if the cans were cut open the radioactive material could not be extracted from the glass without the use of very strong acids. I know, I have done it. For decades now many of us have advocated for the deployment of Small Modular Reactors; factory built with identical design then shipped to location and "plugged in" avoiding the long lead time before power production begins. The largest operating expense for a gigawatt plant is the interest on the capital spent to build it.
Modern designs for Nuclear Power Plants are super safe and can run for 100 years before needing to replace the fuel. Things like 0 power fail-safe reactors, microreactors, and new ways to transfer heat to the steam turbine systems with no cross-contamination are just some of the latest technologies. We as citizens just need to demand that governments spend the money backing new nuclear rather than ineffective solar and wind projects.
Where do you get your information????? Internet I bet. I worked in nuclear for 40+ years and everything you say is BS from a know nothing. Utilities NOT the government are responsible for providing power and deciding where it comes from. I guess you want a communist country where the government decides.
@@clarkkent9080 You don't sound like you worked in the industry for that long. You would know how governments regulate every aspect of a nuclear power plant, and that makes the cost and complexity near impossible to build them even if a utility wanted to create one. Utility companies can't build 2 on 1 natural gas with heat recovery in a few years with lower costs because the government doesn't regulate those plants as much. The military has proved Fail-safe and microreactors in warships. I guess you're a case of the old needing to go before the new can replace them.
@@clarkkent9080 I, too, work in the power plant industry and am working with the modern designs. It may not be like how your old plant you work at is. You also seem to miss how governments regulate industries. For a person 60+ years old, you would think you got that by now. If governments helped utilities rather than prevent them from building nuclear plants, you would see utilities be more interested. But sure, call my knowledge BS and get all older man triggered.
Two Georgia reactors have cost over 30 billion and still aren't running at at full power. As a result, all nuclear power plants on the drawing board and one that was half built, were cancelled. We can't afford nuclear power.
@@clarkkent9080 The version of that quote I've heard most often is, "Fusion power is thirty years away and always will be." I don't agree, but I don't expect it anytime soon.
@@ericlipps9459 Once a demo test fusion reactor actually operates for an extended (months) length of time, the next step is to figure out how to convert that thermal energy into electrical energy. So far we have just been trying to initiate and contain fusion. My point being, once sustained fusion is achieved, it will take 15+ years to build a demo test fusion plant that actually produces electrical power and then that concept must be proven over time. It will take 30 more years once fusion is perfected before multiple plants can be built. So yes it is a long way off
From what I understand, modern designs can all but eliminate chances of meltdown. In addition, scalable modular designs can be built more safely, quicker, and more cheaply in factories and shipped to the site.
There is one issue you failed to mention. A nuclear plant can't be throttled. It takes days to get the plant up to full power and it takes days to bring it back down (safely). Sure you can SCRAM the reactor. But that is only done in emergencies. So once the plant gets up to full power, it stays at full power, day in and day out. Even at night when demand for power is low. So now you have to do something with that extra power. The solution to this is to pair the nuclear plant with a pumped hydro storage facility. But finding suitable sites for all the new pumped hydro can be challenging.
3 trillion? Considering it would take at least 10 years to build all of them, that's only 300 billion a year in spending. We can cover that easily if we stop giving it away to other countries and halve the military budget. "Sorry, [insert popular talking point country here], we're going dark for a decade to fix our own issues."
A 1,200Mw plant cost $15 billion and takes 15 years to construct...that is based on current FACTS. If 100 of these nuclear plants now provide 20% of the U.S. power, it will take 500 plants to supply 100% of the U.S. power needs. There are a limited number of construction personnel that can build these plants and recent construction projects show that no more than 4 reactor plants can be constructed at one time. You can do the rest of the math on how long that will take.
The paranoia around nuclear is so frustrating. Nuclear could literally save the climate right now! No need to place all our hopes in developing fusion. We can save the planet RIGHT NOW!!!
The French government has approved a new nuclear fuel for existing nuclear reactors. Instead of using enriched uranium this fuel uses 90% unenriched uranium and 10% plutonium extracted from nuclear waste. The French government estimates this new fuel will eliminate 97% of high level nuclear waste.
I wouldn't get too excited about that. EDF, which is 80% owned by the French Government and runs the nuclear power stations in France, is not in their politicians' good books. It has a bad track record and France is very reliant on nuclear generation. The nuclear plant being built at Flamanville (3) is only 1.6 GigaWatts and was started in 2007. It is now at least 400% over budget and rising to what auditors think will be a six-fold increase over the original estimate.
France has been using reprocessed fuel for decades already. They even built a FBR to produce some extra fuel. It was canned due to political reasons.
@@christopherfairs9095 Just saying it has gone over budget is misleading. Why don't you point the reason why it went over budget ?
@@AlldaylongRock The cancellation of SuperPhoenix and Monju was a disaster. It leaves only Russia with a viable fast breeder reactor, the BN-800.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Absolutely. The Phoenix one also ran for quite a while, but it was meant as a solely experimental design at iirc 500MWe, and was shut down for normal reasons, not political. The Superphoenix was the commercial version of the design, with 1.2GWe. At the beginning it was pretty jank, with multiple reliability issues, understandable being the biggest FBR ever built. But by the end it was working pretty well. For some reason the French government thought "hey this was expensive to get working, let's shut it down now that it's working". France has the ASTRID design, Superphenix's "daughter" in the drawer tho, so we may see a new FBR design coming in if there's interest. There's also the Natrium design from Terrapower which is basically a FBR as well. FBRs will have to be the future of Nuclear power. Ability to process SNF and DU into fuel and energy is great for the long-term sustainability of Nuclear power.
Why is everyone still afraid of going nuclear? Nuclear should be utilised WAY more frequently!
People who don't know anything about the subject. Same as the people who have opinions on global warming.
Our past two presidents could not formulate a sentence, and you think people have the mental capacity to understand this?
In 2019 congress passed some laws that would expand nuclear power. But Covid happened.
@@-whackd one, not a fan of the be nice message when going to reply. Not a fan of limiting speach.
But those very same.people also think.they're being eco.friendly with EVs all while not realizing that something is burnt to.power it.
Cause power companies and the NRC lied a lot after TMI so people don’t trust them anymore.
I've worked in the Nuclear Energy Industry for over a decade in North America. You won't find a more safety driven work force than the professionals in nuclear power.
I used to work in wind, They preach safety while at the office and look the other way when at the tower, its an industry of hypocrites. I would love to work in nuclear
Sure they do...right now...expand that workforce, fuel production and waste stream by an order of magnitude. See what happens.
@@BadOompaloompa79
So long as proper safety precautions are followed then nothing disastrous will happen like you insinuate.
@@Archangel657 Sure, as long as. Exactly my point.
I don't know if that's simply because Nuclear Engineers and executive have a long term view, or simply that the higher ups decided they had to avoid PR disasters at all costs to keep the industry alive. There was a real scare that the public would irreversibly turn against the Nuclear industry as a whole, not just con ed, after Chernobyl (and many anti-nuclear advocates pointed to earlier Three Mile Island disaster as a case of "see, this is dangerous it's not just the Russians who mess things up"). In contrast after Deepwater Horizon, there was no scare among the industry that the public would turn against them, even the worst case scenario insiders thought might be BP being forced out of the Gulf. The nuclear industry is one where executives nearly always listen to professionals and engineers when it comes to work safety. I'm not sure if its because the executives are better in the nuclear industry or if it is just that they know it is easier for them to lose trust than other companies.
I used to be anti nuclear, until I did a report on nuclear power in my physics class. My teacher encouraged me to consider the other perspective. I did, and found it agreeable .
as a pro-nuclear physics teacher, this encourages me
That's the true goal of education. To get us to throughly consider ALL ideas.
Well done.
Thanks Jim this encourages me as we now live in times where true scientific debate is often not allowed. The Nuclear bad rap is mix of old tech and a politics.
Anyone who is anti modern nuclear (small modular), is simply ignorant. People are scared of the type designed in the 50's, built in the 60's-70's
Thorium reactors are also looking good for greatly reducing waste. There is a device that is still being tested that turns the nuclear waste from the semi-liquid state into a solid state so it can be better recycled. Small Modular Reactors are also looking amazing. I'm recently in the nuclear field, having just started my degree on it, but it is amazing the sheer power of it.
The rods are made of small pellets, each about the size of the top half of a person's thumb. That one pellet has more energy in it than 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, or more than a ton of coal, or more than 100 barrels of oil. Nuclear power is amazing. Just so many people have fear mongered it for so long.
Not to mention Thorium is an Alpha Emitter which is better than the gamma uranium or plutonium. And is way more abundant and ouput could rival U235 or Pu-239
There are many of us out there that support and give out testimonies about how great nuclear energy can be, but I feel as if the main things holding it back are the energy lobbies and gargantuan amount of propaganda ingrained into the education system and media. Granted that the issue of three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukishima incidents are very apparent and disastrous, the technology that is used today in Modern society and smart placement of said nuclear power plants can reduce the likely hood of another disaster. I'm glad there are still people that are passionate about the subject and will not go down without a fight. It's going to be a really hard nut to crack for the average citizen mindset into welcoming Nuclear energy, maybe the push for electric cars and less reliance on fossil fuels can energize not just the green energy sector(which really isn't green) but nuclear as well. The average person has been taught all of the darker sides of Nuclear energy but is absent on the breakthroughs in safety, recyclability and innovation that could ween us off fossil fuels and rid ourselves of high energy costs in cities. The incoming crisis that is fast approaching in the southwest can be alleviated if funds were used to build nuclear reactors that can sustain Los Angeles county, Phoenix and Las Vegas, all being built far away from places that are earthquake prone.
@@austinbeck2896 3 Mile was nowhere near the disaster that Chernobyl and Fukishima. The amount of radiation released at 3 Mile equals to standing outside in the sunshine for about 10 minutes.
Thorium reactors were tried, were subject to ongoing leaks and maintenance problems and were not economical. So-called thorium reactors convert non-fissile thorium-232 into fissile u-233, which can make a nice bomb (see Operation Teapot). Although thorium is not fissile, it presents a greater radioactive risk to workers than u-235. The process to convert thorium to u-233 and create fission is very polluting. Among other radioactive isotopes, it also produces u-232, which is really bad stuff. Reprocessing fission waste to reclaim fissile u-235 and pu-239 is expensive and the most polluting process in the nuclear business. It only reclaims a small fraction of the spent fuel and the reclaimed portion is harder to run in a reactor, and after one fuel cycle is again...nuclear waste. Small modular reactors were not economical 50 years ago and are less so now. Fast breeder reactors to supposedly "burn up" nuclear waste have a dismal track record and are very expensive. Ionizing radioactive isotopes cannot be burnt up, only transmuted into other radioactive isotopes.
Do yourself a favor and study economics, instead or nuclear physics. Then you will understand why nuclear power is on the way out. Every reactor would already be shut down today, except for two reasons. They are: 1) nuclear proliferation. 2) Even if a reactor is operating at a loss, if it is shut down, it immediately goes from the asset side of the ledger, to the liability side. Costs for site maintenance, waste management, security and decommissioning remain, but no income. The utility and any investors would immediately go bankrupt. Nuclear will lumber along with the existing, patched-up, leaky, brittle reactors until maintenance gets so expensive and legislators get tired of utilities soaking taxpayers for more and more subsidies. Then they will shut down. Then it will be up to the public to try to clean up the mess.
Nuclear warmongering nations may keep a few reactors around to "provide a deterrent," if they can get the public to pay for it. But Fauci and his Wuhan lab assistants have developed a cheaper and more effective weapon of mass destruction.
I will never agree of nuclear reactor in my country
Because we life in ring of fire and we have corrupt goverment
That combo will end up bigger disaster than fukushima or chernobyl
Nuclear waste isn’t an engineering problem it is a political problem. With reprocessing the long half life transuranics can be recycled as fuel. The remaining waste is mostly very short lived and is benign after a few hundred years. This waste can also be processed to make useful radioactive products like nuclear batteries. Can you imagine a BEV that you never need to charge?
I have read that something like 60% of all waste is safe to dispose of like normal trash in 20 years ( most waste isn't even fuel is PPE and lab equipment)
current fuel rods still contain 95% fissile material which could be recycled but USA forbids but France does - that one step would drastically reduce the waste stockpile
@@avroarchitect1793 I worked in Electronics and we used Beryllium paste on transistors etc - the empty tubes, the cleanup rags and or clothing were all deemed low level waste and sent for radioactive storage
This is the Fallout future I can get behind.
A battery like that is capitalistically unrealistic. How is someone going to make money on something you only buy once and lasts 500 years?
I am very pro nuclear. I am an Electrical Engineer raised by a Mechanical Engineer, and one of my brothers-in-law works at a nuclear plant. After Brown's Ferry and Three Mile Island I turned anti nuclear until I realized that, even with very stupid designs and operation, both plants basically failed SAFE! This is the desired result for anything, particularly a nuclear reactor. Chernobyl and Japan - the USSR was stupid, didn't talk, and didn't care; Japan only had one problem, but it really bit them. Do we need a new style of reactor (not BWR or PWR or similar) - yes, but the learning curve will start over again. We appear to know how to manage a plant and to keep it safe. What more do people want? If the average person wasn't so ignorant they might listen to all the opinions and make up their own mind. IMHO.
TMI was a design and training issue. Chernobyl was the result of letting untrained management direct actions at a nuclear plant and Fukushima was an improper design-basis-accident evaluation. We are human and these are human designed and operated machines. Accidents happen. You can minimize them but they happen.
The failure to keep innovating nuclear technology is nothing short of tragic.
@@mtn1793 EVERY type of "NEW" nuclear technology has been tried by the U.S. over the last 70 years. Your idea of innovating is just a resurrection of something that had been tried in the past and decided to not be the best solution. These technologies all have specific advantages over the current PWR/BWR designs but they also have their drawbacks. The Natrium reactor being built by Terrapower is a sodium cooled reactor. What could go wrong using sodium, a highly reactive substance when in contact with water (one of the most common compounds on this earth)?
@@clarkkent9080 I really doubt there would be so many nuclear start ups if everything had been tried. But I think we agree that nuclear energy still has an important future for our world.
@@mtn1793 name one "NEW" reactor type and then google it to see how many have been built in the past. The U.S. actually tested a nuclear cruse missile, nuclear powered bomber and even nuked space. Yes we have built every type of research reactor
High level waste is even even more misunderstood than you say. We can recycle it in fast reactors to extract the remaining 90+ % of the energy content and cut the time needed to store it to about 300 years.
Not only does this make storage much easier, but it also means we can address the sustainability of nuclear because at that level of fuel efficiency we have practically unlimited fuel on this planet.
Fast reactors have not turned out to be economically viable.
@@vonnikon Fast reactors didn't turn out to be uneconomical, we just decided to stop building them in the west. In China and Russia they are building them and there are many designs such as Moltex and Terrapower that are going to be built here soon. The need for them may not be so urgent right now but they are very much the technology that will power human society going forward.
@@vonnikon You know lots of stuff doesn't work out the first few times they are tried. Billy Gates new reactor in Wyoming is going to be a fast reactor.
@@Spacedog79
There will be no more new nuclear power plants built in the western world. See my comment for why.
@@Spacedog79 They are kinda uneconomical simply because Uranium is still relatively cheap, and reprocessing SNF is even cheaper than enriching Uranium, in comparison to actually building one of these things over a PWR, not to mention the "bullshit factor" that FBRs face in contrast to PWRs, which makes the political part of it much harder. But with the increasing "issue" with HLW and future availability of Uranium, the interest in FBRs and other fast reactor designs is rekindling. Which is nice.
Fun fact: coal ash and fly ash, much of which is exhausted directly into the atmosphere, is radioactive AF...and much more voluminous than nuclear waste.
ive been to the local coal plant in my state. and the ash is NOT released into the atmosphere like you say. it is actually caught dropped into piles called gypsum. it is taken to the port and turned into drywall
@@Themrine2013 yes, that depend on the regulations where the coal plant is build. If regulations are stricter, less killer pollution is emitted.
But if a coal plant is not allowed to emit either CO2 or particles, it's simply not economic any more.
Coal economy rely on per mission to pollute.
nothing like cosmic rays melting your skin lol
@@Themrine2013 - Not all of it is caught and it is dumped in open pits that regularly get rained on heavily and overflow into rivers. Note West Virginia and others where there are fish kills and undrinkable water for miles downstream. There is a lot of Mercury, Lead and other heavy metals that have a 'half life' of infinity, i.e. they are dangerous FOREVER which doesn't seem to get near as much air time as nuclear waste elements.
Radioactive drywall? Coal ash is radioactive from the uranium and thorium in it. ?@@Themrine2013
I used to be a submariner, and literally slept a stones throw away from a nuclear reactor. They are incredibly safe and the best chance to not kill our planet. Unfortunately until we get better battery tech, clean and abundant energy is meaningless unless you can use it for powering transportation. Which is the largest contributor to carbon emissions.
The nuclear waste is radioactive because there is still fuel in it. If reprocessed, that useable fuel can be extracted and used.
Nuclear power is also the best way to build a hydrogen fuel transportation infrastructure.
I am not sure hydrogen is good for transportation, but I think it can be blended with natural gas to reduce emissions.
Reprocessing is needless, in the right kind of reactor
@@daniellarson3068 Use the hydrogen to stretch (dilute) the natural gas. The mix can be transported in the existing pipelines and used for heating the same way as pure methane.
@@tgkhfgkr9729 Running hydrogen enriched natural gas (which is predominantly methane) can have some drawbacks. Notably the hydrogen embrittlement of the pipes.
If we're talking about a whole new pipe installation, then I'd have to ask why ANY natural gas is used. Burning pure H2 has surprisingly low CO2 emissions (LOL). That alone should help to keep the green-scene from bleating too loudly.
@@trevorvanbremen4718 I didn't know about the embrittlement problem of hydrogen in pipes. I read that hydrogen is difficult to contain and passes through metal. Possibly it depends on the type of metal or the wall thickness?
Maybe it would be easier to just create synthetic methane or longer hydrocarbon chains and use the existing infrastructure.
nuclear power is like air travel, exponentially safer than carbon fuels or driving but has much bigger impacts when it goes bad. No one mentions the fact that coal pumps more radioactive material into the air or fracking creates radioactive waste water, but people fear nuclea
Exactly
its always a good policy to spread your risks.. don't rely too heavily on one or two systems. The US currently has a pretty good mix. Also, the cause of so called climate change (once referred to as "global warming") is really not clear. Many factors contribute to climate (natural solar cycles being the biggest factor). Climate has always fluctuated, and will continue to do so regardless of human impacts.
@@colty7764 A wild misinformation bot appears repeatedly easily debunked lied again
You could say that. It is also comparable to hydropower, since China had some major accidents with dam breaks, killing a lot more people than Chernobyl.
@@colty7764 Fossile fuel kills. Last number I saw (most recent scientific paper) was 8 millions ANUALLY dead by air pollution from fossile fuels. Worldwide number but with significant numbers in North America and Europe.
Fossile fuels should be outlawed, and every efford made to move to non-lethal energy sources as fast as possible.
The cost of building nuclear plants is also an artifact of the not-terribly-bright way we go about it. In the US, every plant is a one-off design, different from every other plant already in existence. France settled on a handful of designs and then just spammed identical copies of them across the country. The benefits from doing that, in terms of cost, reliability, and safety are staggering. That's why the small modular reactors being designed are so promising; they'd literally come off an assembly line and get shipped to where they are needed.
I heard a rumor that these small modular reactors could be installed on traditional energy plants. Is that true? Or are they only for specific energy plants?
@@Quetzalcoatl_Feathered_Serpent I think it makes sense. In theory the same steam turbines can be used
There are a few paired nuclear plants that follow similar designs in the US, but not many. The SNUPPS (Standardized Nuclear Unit Power Plant System) has 2 plants in the US (Wolf Creek and Callaway) and one in the UK.
Originally the plants were designed to be two-reactor power plants and 6 total plants to be built, but after the events of TMI, the second reactors we're decided against and only single reactor plants were built in a couple locations.
Turns out that the biggest challenge to the standardized design is actually getting approval from the NRC and the inability for the NRC to determine if they wanted something to be one way or another in aspects like seismic restraints.
@@Quetzalcoatl_Feathered_Serpent A lot of them are made to do that.
This is because nuclear plants, while everyone is in agreement that the PWR designs that require steam turbines are least efficient, it gave the early ones a double edged advantage that most could be retrofired where old coal plants were. A better more streamlined design could likely just be integrated into an already existing coal plant's generator and turbine system to reduce it even more. I am more of a fan of moving away from the PWR design, however honestly ANYTHING nuclear is good enough right now.
Now the reason why it is a bad thing is because this is directly responsible for every single "nuclear pollutes the environment" study.
Nuclear contains absolutely everything that has even a minuscule chance of being contaminated. To the point where you will receive LESS radiation being inside the containment building than being outside. Nothing gets out, even under severe events, and only the worst of the worst can get even a partial release to happen. And there is constant monitoring of the plant to verify that the lifetime emissions are basically non existent.
Meanwhile coal spews contaminants left and right, including radioactive elements, with absolutely ZERO control or oversight. May it be from the massive ash piles to the billowing dirty smoke with dubious filters, coal will release a ton of really nasty elements into the environment, a lot of them settling in the local area.
These contaminants remain here for decades if not more, which for activists groups is not even worth mentioning... until the coal plant is removed and a nuclear reactor is put there instead, because THEN they start to make the measurement, see that there is indeed traces of radioactive elements, and immediately use that as proof that nuclear is going to kill us all.
And these small modular reactors will then require the same security perimeter and containment structure as a GW size plant because they contain weapons grade fuel. It's not gonna happen, the utility companies said decades ago they would never buy such a system and the Nuclear industry knows it, the SMR is just a smokescreen put out by the industry to pretend it has a future.
The past like 10-20 years of nuclear system development is astonishing and I’m a major advocate for it.
Nuclear energy: less waste, more reliable power than wind and solar, also cheaper and more efficient.
I Hope we as a society, get past the fear of nuclear energy. It only exists from the mistakes of our past generations, but Nowadays Technology, safety, reactor designs, advanced knowledge, electronics, have advanced so much that things are night and day different. We had a very rough learning experience with the nuclear era and it timed up sadly with war but science and technology has advanced so so far in this realm just no one wants to commit to it because they have all these fears when really our fears come from this era that didn't take any safety measures, poorly engineered designs, poor technology, not respecting the dangers of working with the material which caused for so much unnecessary injuries. Now we have discovered so many new methods (Small form reactors, LFTRs, Thorium Reactors, liquid reactors, and many other improved methods, designs and possibilities) we can approach and apply this energy source in such a safer and controlled manner with layers of safety precautions set up that we really can overcome these fears and see that if we want to eliminate carbon emissions, but still have enough electricity, then we need to trust nuclear energy. We went through our rough learning experience. It was rough yes, but things have advanced so much. You don't ever get better at anything if you give up and it's only natural that you stumble and fail when you're very first learning. So I know it's sad that had to happen the way it all did but I strongly believe nuclear energy is our future. Just think how much computers, ROV's, robotics, understanding of safety, understanding of different ways to build reactors, to use different materials, with much safer methods of operations so the reactors just power down and shit off and some are designed to be unable to melt down like we saw in the ancient reactors of Chernobyl. We won't be having anything like that going forward, that was the past, the future of nuclear is much more advanced, thought out, tested, I know we can do it. I know we can grow past our past trauma's.
No worries, eh? You have it all figured out, eh? Then why don't we eliminate the Price Anderson Act and make nuclear liable for any damage they cause?
Lol why we didn’t use thorium I’ll never know. Cuz it can’t be weaponized ig lol
@@majorassault5074 Thorium-232 converted to U-233 and Uranium-238 converted to plutonium-239. Seems like a couple of dandy weapons grade materials to me. ig. What do you think? lol
@@jackfanning7952 fair enough, I’m doing my final on thorium so that is nice to know. My point on it being unweaponizable is that it thorium needs plutonium to kickstart the reaction (which it also makes it safer)
@@majorassault5074 Non-fissile thorium is bombarded with neutrons from fissile uranium or plutonium to convert it into fissile material. The result is that an element that is not bomb-making material is converted into bomb-making material. The processing needed to convert non-fissile thorium into fissile uranium is particularly dirty and dangerous for the workers, expensive and creates other radioactive isotopes that must be separated from the fissile fuel before it is used in the reactor. Other fission byproducts are produced in the process to make fissile U-233 from the thorium prior to the fission reaction, as well as in the reactor. These radioactive isotopes must be isolated from living beings for longer than mankind has been in existence. U-232 is co-produced which is 60 million times more radioactive than U-238. Thorium reactors have been tried and found to be less economical than existing reactors. In addition, they have other problems that are inherently more difficult to deal with and more expensive than conventional reactors (which are already more expensive than any other electrical energy source). This is true, even though nuclear energy has not begun to address its greatest economic liabilities - waste disposal for a million years or more and compensation, decommissioning and clean-up costs for the global contamination and disease it causes.
(2:35) The vast majority of nuclear waste is low-level waste, consisting of clothing, gloves, etc. and other materials that have had brief and/or tangential interaction with highly radioactive materials, and thus might have some low-level of radioactivity from that exposure but will go away in just a few years. The HIGH-LEVEL radioactive waste that people are so concerned about,
1) The VAST majority of that is ALSO relatively safe, as ~96% of that "high-level" waste is just unspent U-235 & U-238, which is only weakly radioactive.
2) 2% to 3% of the high-level waste is made up of fission products, what's left over after a uranium or plutonium atom is fissioned. That stuff is HIGHLY radioactive, but given radioactivity and half-life are inversely related, fission products go away relatively quickly. Almost 70% of fission products will be completely gone within a decade or so of being produced, and the only ones you really have to watch for longer than that are Cs-137 and Sr-90, both of which have half-lives of ~30 years (taking up to 300 years or so to almost completely decay away) and which combined only make up around 12% of fission products.
3) Only between 1% and 2% is made up of moderately radioactive transuranics like plutonium or americium or something else, which takes thousands of years to decay away (all of which can be fissioned in fast reactors and eliminated in just a few years rather than 1000's of years). As such, transruanics shouldn't be considered waste, but like with unspent U-238 and U-235, it represents unburnt fuel.
As such, nuclear power reactors produce almost no long-lived waste, as un-fissioned uranium and transuranics represent unburnt fuel, and the vast majority of fission products are gone in less than a single human generation.
This guy fucks! He knows his shit.
We should recycle everything we can. Depleted uranium has uses outside of being waste. It makes an excellent armor for the military, and though it's considered controversial it is great for projectiles as it's density is almost as high as tungsten but with greater ductility and is easier to work.
I attended a talk once that pointed out that high level waste could be categorized into 3 types: 1) stuff so hot that it's gone by the time you can even start processing it, 2) stuff that's no more radioactive (but possibly more concentrated) than what was pulled out of the ground and 3) stuff you can extract and sell at a profit for one use or another.
We need to weaponise Americium
Funny thing is, I remember as a kid being taught that nuclear waste was a big issue because there would be lots and lots of it and it would be deadly for tens of thousands of years so we had to design big warnings that would be clear to decedents that completely forgot what was stored there without it becoming a tourist attraction.
Of course, this was also at a time when AIDS was going to go airborne any day and wipe out humanity.........
Nuclear power does not go explody, Chernobl was a steam explosion not a nuclear explosion.
video was poorly researched/made he says nuclear waste is difficult to manage, but how can it be when he explains how little there is.
this is also the first source I have seen, to claim it is more dangerous then wind and solar.
It still exploded.
@@spdrcr74 right it did. But it was nowhere near nuclear explosion power. The facility would be a huge hole I. The ground if it was a nuclear explosion. Plus it was ran by the soviets... which didn't really have a great reputation for safety with anything they did.
The Fukushima meltdown was handled extremely well and with very little issues, because they had a plan for every contingency. Very highly trained employees and honestly I don't think k it could have gone better.
There is always risk... but in my mind at least. We know for a fact that burning fuel is 100% killing us. Nuclear won't 100% kill us...
@@spdrcr74 you should research how many chemical plants that solar panels are made of explode. And they don’t even get talked about because their label is not scary enough. Oil refineries are constantly on fire. Let me say that again oil refineries are constantly on fire. Well that sounds like it’s only a fire but what’s burning in the air? Oh we don’t even have to talk about Coal remember the days when they actually use the word acid rain what happened that? They have multiple problems especially when you burn coal. How about windmills that become graves and that they still don’t know what to do with the waste of those after they’re done and they’re disposed of after so many years. So what’s my point every single type of energy production that is on this planet has something unsafe and a risk to it. Nuclear has it but it is not as bad as they keep telling you when there’s only like three of them as an example through the last 60 years. Do more research without going through these politicians that pad their pockets through green policies that Increase their stock investments. What’s even more funny is some of the old-timers are still in the oil and coal because they know that’s the only true energy source that’s available and And can generate the power of our needs. More Nuclear does not mean less solar or wind, it means less coal, oil and natural gas❗️
Which of course means that it actually was an explosion. It didn't go off like a nuclear bomb, but it did scatter dangerous isotopes over a wide area.
The drawbacks that you mentioned are rather overstated. Implying the "explodey risks you think about with nuclear power" is extremely inaccurate as it is physically impossible for a reactor to undergo a thermonuclear explosion like a bomb. The only situation that can cause an "explosion" is if numerous safety systems fail and a steam or hydrogen explosion occurs. Which could cause a rupture of the containment vessel, but all newer reactor designs have vastly reduced the already miniscule probability of catastrophic failure.
and that's what happened at Tcherlobyl. it's the primary water system that blew up. it'"s the one that hosts the water that's gets the closest to the nuclear rods and thereby highly radioactive.
In my view. Nuclear power is still far safer than traditional energy methods. If properly maintained (and not built with a budget) You could run nuclear power and give extraordinary amounts of power to homes and business. It could also help with the increase of electric vehicles and other sources.
Yes there is a extreme danger with nuclear power, however humanity has reached the technological capacity to minimize nuclear waste due to more efficient means of extracting nuclear power. You'll still have it but in much less quantities. I believe some reactors are capable of still using some waste for energy use now.
The issue with Nuclear power is that people has grown to fear it. Both due the inherit dangers, and thanks to nuclear weapons and disasters. Politics and culture runs on a knee-jerk reaction without trying to sit down and think things through.
What the US should do is continue research and development of nuclear reactors especially with gen IIIs that literally are physically impossible to go into meltdown or run into dangerous risk. Especially as energy requirements for the nation only will increase over time.
Yes green energy should and needs to be researched into, however nuclear plants should be also researched and improved more. You could literally have a near endless energy source
(2:55) "Nuclear power is still, well, nuclear, and that comes with all the explody risks that you can possibly imagine".
The Chernobyl explosion was a STEAM explosions, NOT a nuclear explosion. You put water under incredibly high pressures and then ratchet up the temperature, you're going to get STEAM explosions like the one that tore the 2,000 ton lit off the Chernobyl reactor. On the other hand, if you have a reactor which operates at near-atmospheric pressures, you don't have that explosion risk anymore.
The Fukushima explosion was a HYDROGEN explosion, NOT a nuclear explosion. Zirconium rods, when exposed to steam, will oxidize and stripe the oxygen off the hydrogen. Additionally, when water molecules are hit with neutrons, they tend to get broken apart, although you can add stuff to the water to prevent this from happening. During normal operations, nuclear plants have a re-combiner operating, which mixes together any hydrogen and oxygen that are produced, as they tend to separate otherwise. Since Fukushima's reactor water was allowed to boil and the recombiner wasn't working, there was a build-up of hydrogen, and all you need is a single spark at that time. Thus, NOT a nuclear explosion.
Good explanation.
Thank you! This is such a common misconception with nuclear power is that it can explode like nuclear bomb. But it literally can't, it can't achieve the critical mass required to have a nuclear explosion. Also most modern reactor designs have Containment buildings in the event of such an event of steam or hydrogen explosions keeps the fission products contained to the containment building.
@@FangornAthran Concrete contaiments built like TMI definitely do the job. But the Fukushima reactors were housed in what looked like industrial steel buildings. That's worrisome.
@@rpbajb the reactors were housed in a containment building while the part that exploded was only a shell with some sheet metal walls
The "all the explody risks" comment by the content creator is why I didn't give a thumbs up to this video. Why would anyone wanting to make a serious and informative video about nuclear power imply that a nuclear reactor could explode in a similar fashion to a nuclear bomb is baffling.
Personally I'm tired of hearing how complex and expensive nuclear is because I (or better yet scientists) can assure you climate change is going to be far more complex and expensive.
new gen 4 reactors will be cheaper smaller modular and built on production line
Nuclear is incredibly expensive.
Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government.
The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships.
Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and .....
And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target.
The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better.
Molten Salt Thorium Nuclear power reactors fix all the problems regarding waste as well as meltdowns. It's a self regulating system. Thorium is also far more abundant than Uranium.
show me one example of an actually functioning thorium reactor.
Yeah the type of reactor and the fuel cycle matter.
@bhakta_joe actually, there’s over 4 billion years worth of nuclear fuels on earth. once you bring seawater uranium into the picture it becomes more renewable than solar.
@@seandepagnier there’s one in china and one will be opening at oak ridge in the next year
Liquid salt presents its own set of operating challenges. And Thorium reactors still produce radioactive waste.
In Illinois, surrounded by Nuke plants. Never lived in fear, even knowing that the nuclear waste is stored on sight. I feel as if knowledge is skewed and misinterpreted to people and that causes fear. I'm hopeful for nuclear fusion. But fission still seems like the route to go now.
Thorium molten salt reactors can't meltdown and can burn nuclear waste from our existing stockpiles.
The two nuclear plants in my state produced 26% of the state's electricity. Monticello is a 630ish MW plant and Prairie Island is a bit over 1000MW, so not even monstrously huge plants. I feel that nuclear power has become somewhat of a boogeyman.
Spot-on - worse, it is a profitable (if you are paid - either directly or indirectly by the PRC) bogeyman. My big disprover for the bogeyman is - rather oddly - an earthquake - specifically, the Mineral VA earthquake that shook the mid-Atlantic US. Mineral is also home to the Dominion Resources North Anna nuclear reactor - despite the earthquake next door, North Anna didn't even burp. (That is more than can be said for the National Cathedral (Washington DC) - how big was that repair bill?) Two OTHER reactors that were shook by the SAME quake that i know about - Calvert Cliffs - and the still-operating Three Mile Island reactors - ALSO failed to burp.
As someone who works in the nuclear industry, it would be very difficult to get beyond France’s 70% nuclear capacity, and if the remaining energy came from sources like wind/solar that are intermittent it would need to be probably closer to 30-40% maximum from nuclear. That is because nuclear operates best as a baseline generation source operating at 100% capacity all the time. You would still need to have some form of peaking capacity that can rapidly increase and decrease its power output in order to meet demand.
France uses Hydro a lot for those peaks, alongside fossil fuel. Hydro storage is also a great storage tool so you can keep Nuclear going 100%. And their Nuclear fleet does a lot of load following as well. Load following with conventional Nuclear is kind of a pain tho. Hopefully new designs can do it more efficiently and without Xenon issues than what the conventional PWRs and BWRs do. If everyone went the French way, an interconnected grid with some intermittent wind and solar could shuffle around enough power to make it so basically no fossil fuels were used, dams were kept at a nice full level, and kept Nuclear at full power, with relative ease.. But we had to go with a lot of Unreliables instead.
Nuclear operating best as a baseline generation source operating at 100% capacity all the time is FALSE.
@@jplatour596 When I say 100% I say at high output, close to maximum. It has to shut down for refueling and programmed maintenance (although there are reactor designs that allow to refuel while still operating) but refueling and maintenance operations can be carried out when there's consistently less demand, like during the spring or early fall. It's not much of a problem.
@@jplatour596 do you have any evidence to support this? I work at a nuclear power plant and we have done studies on varying power 30% over the course of the day. We think it could be done, but it would definitely be harder on our equipment. Anything more than 30% would not be that feasible. Maybe if a plant was designed with load following from the beginning they could do a bit better, but would still argue 100% capacity base load is what nuclear (at least today’s plants) are very much best at
@@ajgross67 Nuclear operating best as a baseline generation source operating at 100% capacity all the time is FALSE. Your so-called 'working at a nuclear plant' is no evidence of anything.
I have been talking about this for a while but so many people just don't understand it's no more dangerous than any other form of energy production now. With the smaller reactors that are much more cost effective and efficient it is the only logical thing to do. But looking at the state of our society logic does not seem to be a consideration.
and modern smaller ones are completely safe too, they will shutdown safely with a loss in power. No meltdown problems.
@@A.Martin absolutely! Why do our ignorant politicians not even mention this? I used to lean more left than right when it comes to politicians, then I moved right because the left had no answer. Now I have no F-ing place to go because they all ignore the obvious solutions!
I hear a million excuses from the left and the right and absolutely non of them are valid!
This country is going down the shitter because no one wants to do the right thing!
Biden has some kind of 3!! Trillion dollar legislation that accomplishes nothing except piss away $ we don't have!!! 3 trillion dollars! I have researched it! 3 trillion dollars would build enough clean energy, safe and effective nuclear reactors for the entire country!!! With money to spare for desalination plants that can be run by nuclear plants! WTF!!!!!! Really non of the shit heads on either side of the isle have the sense of a snail!!!!! Dear God can we replace these morons with something that has a brain? Like a chimp?
SMRs do look like a good idea
it's considerably less dangerous than even half of the renewables funnily enough. and WAY better than the millions of people dying every year from fossil fuel pollution
@@l3d-3dmaker58 there is only two reasons that law makers are not discussing this as a viable option. One side loves fossil and the other side is heavily invested in China and wind and solar generators. Funny thing is China is working on perfecting the Thorium molten salt reactors which are a serious game changer. If China is able to get them on line and bring the cost of generating power down they will totally control manufacturing and the US will become a third world country overnight. That's no joke! As a person who loves this country for all it's faults we have to start by getting rid of everyone in Congress now and replacing them with people who legitimately want to build America back up. We are a meer shadow of the country we once we're and every American other than the few sitting at the top are suffering for their greed and lack of foresight!
Why didn't you mention fast reactors, which can burn the high-level and a good part of the mid-level wastes? Or the fact that Generation III reactors are walk-away safe and accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima are physically impossible?
Accidents are not physically impossible. Chernobyl was caused by the operators bypassing safety devices. Such a thing can still happen if operated by incompetent people.
Fast reactors haven’t been proven as a reliable source of power. I believe they run off a molten salt, other operations that use this kind of fluid to transfer heat have run into major issues.
@@zinithin-8208 you’re missing the most important detail about Chernobyl. The operators did EVERYTHING wrong AND the reactor itself had a FLAWED DESIGN. In the USA and France and other modern countries our reactors even during that time period were FAR safer.
@@zinithin-8208 "Accidents are not physically impossible." In Gen3 reactors, they are! Chernobyl was Gen1.
@@RicardoSanchez-es5wl You mean like the Fukashima reactor? A US design built to US safety standards during that time period?
In spite of all the nuclear industry's ass covering, that accident was caused by the operator and the regulator ignoring numerous safety warnings, and persisting in the belief that that particular part of Japan would never be hit by a large tsunami. That kind of stupidity, corruption, and profit motivated thinking are easily possible in America and other western nations.
Just look at how many fires and explosions and leaks the oil and gas suffers from. We've been handling that for how long? We shoudl be super good and super safe at it by now! But money. So we aren't. Same thing would happen with nuclear power, because the same people would be in charge.
Remember the golden rule: If you haven't had an accident lately, you're obviously spending far too much money on safety and maintinance, and should cut back.
@@zinithin-8208 most modern reactors have so many fail safes you have to deliberately sabotage them to get a critical failure.
"pesky nuclear waste" Dude, we're talking a shoebox of spicy rocks that can be stored in a swimming pool. Easy there
Another common misconception is that all nuclear reactors are built the same. Countless times I've heard people say that an event like Chernobyl could happen in the US, but they aren't aware that Soviet RBMK reactors didn't even have a reinforced containment structure.
Nuclear power is so cool for school 😎 save the planet kids
Yes, nuclear can be effective, if given the chance.
As for all the nay-sayers and green activists? Well, let me put it this way:
Many years ago I was watching a program on the pyramids of Egypt. The host led a build team in constructing a small model - which could fit on the top of the Great Pyramid - to look at how they could have been realistically built, based on the methods speculated. The went with the standard ramp theory, but also with a levering theory, that the blocks were hoisted up the side slowly by using large logs to level them up.
The archeologist who championed this method was on the show to supervise the team in using his method, and was very adamite that it would work. Well, it did work, but was rather ineffective and labour intensive. After they had used this guy's method, the host asked him if he thought that ramps would be more effective...and the guy replied "Well, ramps where needed, levering where needed." In short, he still clung to his theory, even though it was shown to not be a good one.
That is what I'm seeing with many of these green activists. They are clinging to their notions that these methods will indeed work perfectly, without acknowledging that there are issues that need to be worked out.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive.
Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government.
The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships.
Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and .....
And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target.
The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better.
100,000 SMR to meet the worlds needs and stop CO2.
NOBODY TALKS ABOUT these costs.
People's opinions aren't changed easily, sometimes they'll either have to be ignored or silenced for there to be progress. It might be a violation of freedom of speech but who cares. If it progresses humanity, sometimes freedom of speech needs to be sacrificed. Nuclear energy is good, the positives outweight the negatives, if people aren't willing to see that they should be kept from influencing anti-nuclear ideas.
70 years and nuclear is still only safe in highly trained nuclear industries.
Let the idiots of the world have nuclear industries and sell them the raw materials we will building up the biggest defence military the world has ever seen.
Renewables are new technologies and falling in price rapidly.
They do not need decades to turn on.
Renewables can be built and run by 'monkeys'.
6.6 million EV car sold last year and much more coming now, today.
@@awddfg you mean put them up against the wall and shoot them when the revolution comes 😉?????
Now do a video about What If The World Was Powered Entirely By Nuclear Energy?
If the whole world was powered by nuclear energy then we would have to find another scapegoat for climate change.
What’s funny is that nuclear energy doesn’t even produce the most nuclear waste, it’s still surpassed by coal. So switching to coal actually makes MORE nuclear waste.
I’ve worked on and around nuclear reactors on naval vessels,I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is the safest most highly regulated and controlled form of energy that’s in existence!
navy budget is 230 billion dollars. we wouldn't have many problems with anything that gets 230 billion dollars per year.
to put that into perspective, all state, local, and federal education spending is 660 billion dollars a year. the federal government alone spends more on the military than the entire united states spends on schools. that's why the navy has safe nuclear reactors.
i'm showing electricity utility spending is about 60 billion dollars per year. capital investment is 40 billion dollars. the navy gets 6 years of what utilities spend on capital investment in a single year. we genuinely wouldn't have any problems if energy infrastructure got the amount of funding the navy gets every year.
You have forgotten the most important part of nuclear power mate, the molten salt breeder reactor, which by the way was a reactor developed by the USA way back, but it wasn't a good source of weapons grade material. Also these reactors can run with thorium too, which is much more abundant, and the high level waste from other reactors can be the required catalysts. And above all molten salt reactors run at atmospheric pressure, and has fail safe plugs that melt at the bottom of the reactor to ensure it can't melt down, thus making it the safest type of reactor, and at the same type a place for all high level waste to call home, until thy are dealt with. It is very sad how we have had the answer for more then 60 years, yet we fail to use it, letting other nations make more progress like India.
Here's a video explaining it a bit better: th-cam.com/video/FQEh7qLNVrU/w-d-xo.html
Bill Gates company Terra Power is a 4th generation nuclear power plant in Wyoming that is similar.
A couple of years back, SCE&G (I live in Cola SC) moffballed a half finished nuclear reactor being constructed in Jenkinsville. They claimed it to be too expensive to complete. Now, we pay among the highest electricity rates in the nation. We need these plants, and the US needs a 70's style building spree of GEN 3 reactors. The Chinese, of all people are building Thorium reactors, the safest yet proven. We can't be better then the Chicoms in this regard?
gen 3A now the standard but also gen 4 before 2030 if they can get some funding like wind and solar - even 10% would do the job rather than $10 million here or $20million for more research - big dollars to get the prototypes built and then the improvements will come from the first
@@jimlofts5433 If we would recognize the threat of CO2 pollution and the importance of energy to our economy the logical conclusion would be a Manhattan Project to build nuclear plants with at least 50% of the budget.
And I was part of “circle W” who was designing and helping implement those reactors. They got scared because of costs… and they won’t ever lower your energy bills they raised to pay for the construction.
@@mtn1793 co2 isnt a pollutant though.
@@Themrine2013 it is.
So you’re telling me that shifting the entire US energy sector to nuclear would still cost less than the ineffective Covid stimulus?
That was my first thought when he gave that number.
In NZ, if we built ONE nuclear reactor, we would be able to eliminate ALL sources of greenhouse gases. WTF.
@@mattlegge8538 if you think that's cool as we get more into nuclear research we should eventually unlock nuclear fusion reactors which are orders of magnitude more powerful
@@dozergames2395 Fusion is always x years away... TBH I don't have high hopes for fusion, but we should still try. But then there is still the matter of the superstitious masses who think anything nuclear is a bomb waiting to go off.
@@mattlegge8538
Basically the only reason nuclear energy is not a big chunk of energy production is simply this type of fear.
Imagine telling someone you have a power source that produces no greenhouse gasses and can run for decades on a small lump of fuel, only to have them screech at you and propose an alternative energy source that only works sometimes.
AKA environmentalists, vegans and animal rights activists. They all preach wind, solar and hydro but don't realize how unreliable they are. Actually they don't realize anything, because they have no brain cells. They just yap and scream.
The problems you mentioned with nuclear waste aren’t really problems.
Chernobyl ONLY exploded because of intentional mismanagement. The guy in charge ordered a test when the reactor clearly wasn’t ready to handle it. And at Fukushima they KNEW a tsunami-earthquake combo could cause problems in that specific area and they STILL chose to build it there and didn’t install any safety measures that could have stopped this
Fukushima was poor civil design putt emergency generators in lower level so that water came in and shut them down after the earthquake caused the water surge flooding them.
Even discounting all of the advancements in nuclear technology in the last 40 years (thorium salt reactors, modular designs, walkaway safety, no need for fresh water, much less waste that’s dangerous for a much shorter time, etcetera), this video still makes a good case. Thanks Jeff.
China and Indonesia building or built MSR's using USA tech and data and all future patents will be owned by them rather than the usa which invented it funny haha in a stoopid way
Small correction, Nebraska does have a nuclear power plant, unlike your map. Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska each have just one plant with one generator at each.
This assumes today’s technology. All of the problems can be overcome by molten salt reactors and factory production. Todays waste can be ‘burned’ to near zero by MSRs. Thorium breeding also solves the cost of fuel and many other problems.
LFTR / MSR = yes…wondering why you got just 6 likes…are most oblivious? Let me mention Nixon: he killed the Oak Ridge Th reactor opting for the fissionable (bomb) byproducts and, economic impacts to his home state =CA..it comes down to know🧻
All good points. We literally have the solution to stop greenhouse gases right now entirely across the country. We simply choose not to due to cost and stigma.
By every measure, nuclear power is the greenest, safest and most productive form of energy generation. A major increase of the usage of nuclear power would create a music more affordable power grid, and using current methods of generation, is far safer than the burning of hydrocarbons.
You might want to add that the great cost of building a nuclear power plant is due to all the regulations and legal fights involved. Without them the cost would be half of what you quoted. Thank you environmentalists and lawyers.
correct - see Thorcon Indonesia - less green tape but still safeguards and will be relevant to gen 4 reactors NOT gen 1
Yep. Was part of a company for a decade that was building new AP1000’s in the US… and went over budget several times due to all of that stuff. Enough so that they canceled 2 of the reactors.
I did some calculation: around 70% of the costs are spent on useless safety sistems that will never be used, cause if somehow they were needed this would mean an asteroid just hit the earth so you probably have much bigger issues.
@@thekyuwa Okay, lets build an unsafe, unregulated nuclear power plant next to your house!
@@jmseipp "unsafe"
You clearly don't know the meaning of the word "useless", so you probably should not be spending so much time on the internet but you should be focusing all your energy trying to pass your special ed class.
P.S. You don't seem to care about the thousands of chemical plants around the world (never heard of incidents like Bhopal?), or about hydroelectric dams (never heard of Banqiao or Vajont?), or about fossil fuels killing 7 million people per year of pollution alone, not considering the frequent accidents in rafineries, pipelines, mines, oil tankers, etc.
If you started back in the 60s and kept building nuclear today, you would have breeder reactors, similar to EBR II. These reprocess the high level waste and use it to make more energy. The LWR design in the US was meant to be a PART of nuclear power, with breeders as the companion. When the us found lots of uranium in the ground, research into breeders and thorium and other designs was cancelled. Too bad since they can't melt down and TMI and Fukushima wouldn't have happened. If the Ukraine used the tech there would have been no Chernobyl either.
Every design mode has its strengths and weaknesses.
FBRs with liquid Na or NaK coolant could prove 'problematic' in a flood or seismic zone
MSRs have the issue of using an EXTREMELY corrosive salt
LWRs and PWRs have THEIR associated weak points.
Lithium batteries can have unexpected exothermic excursions
Even fusion power has its drawbacks. Fusion powerplants seem to freeze time! (For the past 60 years, fusion power has only been 20 years away)
I guess Elon will just have to start building a Dyson Sphere just beyond Mars orbit for energy?
Except that Fukushima was at first a victim of circumstances completely unrelated to the nuclear fuel itself. First off, everyone thought that the flood barriers would protect the plant from the incoming tsunami...except that no one realized that the earthquake had caused about 450 km of the Japanese coastline to settle by about one meter - so those barriers were actually about three feet lower then was thought, so everyone was surprised when the water came flooding over.
Next, the plant design had the coolant water being fed by pumps powered by diesel engines - as opposed to the CANDU reactor, where it is gravity fed - and once sea water got into the fuel tanks, the pumps shut down. Of course, at this point the fuel DOES come into play, as someone thought it would be a good idea to pump sea water directly into the reactor to try and cool it down...which is what led to the explosions and radiation.
Chernobyl, on the other hand, was the result of human mismanagement. To start with, the reactor was a graphite core design. The explosion resulted from a runaway reaction chain. What happened was that the operators were conducting an experiment to prove that the reactor could be shut down quickly in an emergency. (Personally, I think that the plant's director was told it was too risky but he ordered it anyway, possibly to gain prestige and rise up in the ranks of the communist party.)
Nuclear is incredibly expensive.
Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government.
The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships.
Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and .....
And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target.
The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better..
And as bad as the Chernobyl incident was, it did NOT affect ALL the on-site reactors any more than Three Mile Island or even Fukishima had all their reactors affected - some reactors at each are STILL operating - and in Chernobyl's case, taking artillery and missile bombardment! (Surprising source - CNN.)
@@PGHammer21A and every country should have it's own NUCLEAR INDUSTRIES, and every school pupil should have a gun in the classroom,and what else ?
75 years of nuclear non proliferation was stupid, nuclear winter was another lie.
If only we had more geniuses like you 😔
It is always the bigger picture that is important.
It’s also very well noted that only a small amount of reactors have failed and only 2 were majorly damaging (tmi has only been involved with 0.7 cases of cancer a year compared to the 350k a year beforhand) and the last one to occur at this time was 11 years ago with a 99.7% fewer fatalities amount ever and if that isn’t enough the ways of storing nuclear power today are extremely strict and safe with most of it being glass or ceramic with some radioactive remnant and then theres thorium reactors i recommend watching videos on that but it’s 100x times smaller in waste production even safer and 1 ton of thorium is equal to about 200 tons of uranium and is 3 times more abundant
As a person who is very pro nuclear energy. I'm always glad to see content creators educating about this subject because all this anxiety about nuclear power in my oppinion is connected with lack of information rather the fact based precautions. Speaking of nuclear disaster all three major disasters were using technology of the same era that were 2nd generation of reactors, that required constant monitoring and input to keep it stable. But new reactors will be built with 3rd generation technology that are passively safe that frankly means meltdown won't happen even if every safety system fails just because of laws of physics. Currently developing 4th generation technology will help to greatly reduce nuclear waste and increase efficiency. So, bottom line is that past nuclear disasters demonstrate that we should increase investments in this industry and not decrease it, in order to make it more safe and efficient.
You should watch Kyle Hill"s videos on nuclear power , they are really good.
@@Dinoplank Agreed I'm already a subscriber to Kyle's channel however thank you so much for your recommendation he's got really good educational channel. As a counter recommendation haha, if you're interested in this subject you should watch Prof. David Ruzic's videos he's have academic insights in the subject of energy generation generally, he's highly informative and articulate
One of the biggest issues is that these plants were designed to help produce weapons grade uranium. There is a lot of improvement on safety just by switching the type of fessialble material. It will cost more to convert existing power plants to use materials like thorium, but it will increase the life of the plant. This doesn't even mention the viability of the small self contained reactors that can be replaced like a battery. But until fusion becomes available fission is the best choice for a cleaner environment.
would love to see more and more nuclear. More jobs, more energy.
The video keeps referring to statistics about the portion of energy production by various sources in the United States, as in stating facts like “in the US we receive 19% of our energy from nuclear power”. This is incorrect. In almost all instances what the narrator really means to refer to are the energy sources used for ELECTRICAL GENERATION in the United States, not energy in general. When talking about energy in general one has to also account energy used for transportation, heating, industrial processes, etc., in addition to electrical generation. In that context, nuclear energy provides 8% of the energy produced in the US. The largest source of energy in the US is petroleum, which accounts for 37% of the energy produced in the US.
Thanks , I see this particular error constantly even on mainstream media pieces on energy
With nuclear power you can produce synthetic jet fuel. The US Navy is testing this for their aircraft carriers. Split CO2, take the C, add H from H2O, produce hydrocarbon chains of desired length. This needs electricity, which is available on-premise thanks to the nuclear reactors on aircraft carriers. Small scale tests were successful, there's a video of an RC model jet flying with this synthetic jet fuel.
The jet fuel generated this way is more expensive than if you buy it from an oil refinery. However if you add the cost to transport it around the world (through possibly hostile waters) to the carrier, it is getting interesting. Military jets need jet fuel, batteries have nowhere near enough energy density.
You can do the same to get fuel for civil airplanes, trucks, cars etc. It's a matter of cost and enough electricity/heat.
On land you can also use coal and add hydrogen (from water) to produce synthetic fuels, which is probably a bit easier and cheaper. China has lots of coal and Thorium, but little oil and Uranium. If they built enough Thorium reactors, they could produce their own oil. Obviously not tomorrow or cheaper than importing the oil, but maybe in the future.
You can split water not only using electricity, but also using high temperatures (around 800°C). Molten salt reactors or gas cooled reactors would be handy for this because of their higher operating temperatures than PWRs.
see youtube by Dr Stephen Boyd on MSR's for high temp chemistry
@@jimlofts5433 Thanks. I searched for the video and found that I already watched it years ago :-)
Still interesting to re-watch.
BTW: MSR are also possible with U/PT cycle. Moltex is working on this in Canada and the design has some clever ideas. The advantage is that some of the technology is similar to PWRs, which makes development and licensing easier. Also the fuel can be spent PWR fuel, thus recycling the existing waste.
YES!!! this I actually a double whammy, you can make enough electricity with nuclear to match most demand peaks, and when demand is low you can use desalination or synthetic fuel plants to eat up the extra power while the reactors ramp down for the night, meaning you need little to no storage or peaker plants, and since you have so much installed capacity you have lots of cheap and available energy at night for intensive proceses like desalination and electrolysis!
Nuclear is 96% recyclable, this is France has NO nuclear waste problem!
Imagine if the US backed the nuclear energy sector instead of the ‘renewable’ energy sector. Would be nice.
What do you call the TRILLIONS that the U.S. spent over the last 70 years in researching and testing every reactor design possible and giving that technology to private industry? BTW, DOE is giving $4 billion of nuclear welfare to investor owned Terrapower (Bill Gates CEO) and NuScale to build demonstration reactors and DOE is giving $6 billion to investor owned utilities to keep old reactors operation longer.
Just think where renewables would be if the U.S. spent all that nuclear welfare on developing better batteries, solar, and wind turbines
@@clarkkent9080 Better wind turbines? You are joking right? Our government is wasting too much on renewable energy. Wind is unpredictable, and kills thousands of birds every year. Solar power is a joke at this point. In order to power the same amount of homes as a nuclear plant you would basically need a whole city sized plot of land full of solar panels, and on top of that you have to store energy for use at night because they would not be receiving any sunlight. Renewable energy is a fucking joke and a scam. Its great for getting yourself elected because its sounds nice to your followers ears but on paper its worthless. Don't get me started on hydro. Blocking natural rivers and streams is nice for making small amounts of power but dams are devastating to water life. Solar is semi practical in space where you are getting sunlight far more than on earth and that's about it. If your phone was powered by a mini nuclear reactor or a radioisotope battery it would never have to be charged in your entire life. Imagine a world with that technology. You could pass your electronics down like family heirlooms.
@@nitroxylictv Last month wind turbines produced more energy in the U.S. than either coal or nuclear. In Hawaii and California, rooftop and farm solar provides 100% of their energy needs during daylight hours. That is no joke. The joke is that you really care about birds or fish.
More and more homes with roof top solar and batteries are going off grid and supplying 100% of their own power.
There are no new nuclear projects planned in the U.S. and if they decide to do so in the future it takes 15 years to build a standard PWR (see Vogtle). Terrapower and NuScale are 1/3 and 1/15 the size of a standard PWR and are only demo test reactors with 50% of the cost paid by the taxpayer and at least 10 years off. NO INVESTOR owned utility in the U.S. is even interested in nuclear while they do invest in solar and wind turbines.
Putting a nuclear device in phones or homes, why you have to be a psycho to think that.....
When properly funded and staffed, nuclear power is, by far, the safest and cleanest form of power on Earth at the moment... If it wasn't demonized by Big Oil think of how far the species would have progressed over the last 70 or so years....
Thank you to all the nuclear engineers/workers out there!!
wind and solar aren't good options when applied on a large scale mainly due to how much space both take up to produce any usable amount of power for a city.
that being said solar could be a good supplemental source of energy when installed on buildings and houses to help power those structures.
Technically speaking the land area needed for 100% solar is half that currently used by the oil industry.
The real issues with wind, solar, run of river hydro, and nuclear is about production control. The first 3 are not under our control (weather dependent) and as such need grid scale storage to be practical. Nuclear has the problem of being slow, it takes time to adjust the set point of a reactor so normally they pick a setpoint and leave it to fulfill baseload demand. (Ramp time)
Note, grid storage will benefit all technologies but some like hydro and gas are able to adjust output faster to match demand. (If demand and supply aren't perfectly matched the quality of electricity suffers and in the worst case results in a full collapse and a black start)
I'd rather have trees than solar roofs. And I'd rather have natural hills than wind-turbines.
For aesthetic reasons, I'd rather have mass-manufactured compact nuclear boilers in place of coal-fired boilers. Better yet, mass-manufacturer the whole powertrain including the turbine and generator.
Just so we get this straight.... CO2 is basically Plant food, it's not a pollutant. Plants and Trees grow faster with CO2. Calling CO2 a pollutant is like calling Dihydrogen monoxide a pollutant. But if you think I'm wrong, and CO2 is bad for the environment, fine, please stop exhaling.
There is actually one here in Oregon, OSU uses it to power it’s campus. It’s a very small reactor used to train people, mostly those who would be maintaining reactors on ships, but it is here and does power things.
Chernobyl reactor was a stupid design.
There are better reactor designs now than even what Russia and Japan use.
All the nuclear waste fits inside a single football stadium and could be reduced by being reused in newer more efficient nuclear power plant designs.
Without nuclear energy, your hopes of EV cars and no carbon emissions are a pipe dream.
$9bil is less than we spend on SLS, military budget items like warships and stealth bombers, etc. Just spread it out over time. Newer designs are cheaper.
Ivanpah Solar in California cost $2.41 billion in 2020 dollars and its nameplate is 400+-MW and took 3 yrs to build. If 1GW nuclear is $7.5B the cost is the same but you would need 2x solar because solar probably isn't producing 1GW at night. The fastest built reactor only took 39 months to build and that's where most of the money goes- public opposition causes interest to build up which increases the cost of the project. That entire plant cost 83.5b yen ($642m) (in 2020 dollars).
A cost not discussed is repairing the environment because of putting wind turbines (lightning rods) in mountain forests or cutting down forests for solar farms, etc. There won't be many nuclear accidents because that's expensive. People don't think about the impact solar & wind have on the environment (turbine blades erode leaving a layer of plastic on the planet).
@@namename9998 Capacity factor for solar plants SUCKS, LOL. Between 10% and 25%... that means the solar plant mentioned will, in practice, affect the grid as if it's somewhere between a 40 MW plant and a 100 MW plant... before factoring in all the other issues.
Look up California solar energy curtailment... they literally threw away well over a TWh of solar electricity because they had no use for it.
Out of that 400 MW nameplate capacity, I wouldn't be surprised if (over an entire year) its actual average output to consumers was LESS than 40 MW.
Which makes nuclear look even better, since ITS average capacity factor from 2017-2019 was 91.20%... meaning your 999 MW nuclear plant outputs 911.1 MW on average.
Direct side-by-side comparison:
- Solar nameplate capacity: 990 MW; actual output: 99 MW
- Nuclear nameplate capacity: 990 MW; actual output: 903 MW
Sooooo... they spent $2,410,000,000 on a solar plant that, on average, might only put out 40 MW...
By comparison - assuming your figures are accurate - while a nuclear plant might cost $7,500,000,000 to build, it'll be putting out 903 MW - 22.6X the energy for only about 3X the cost.
That's 7.53X the value for money... as in watts per dollar. Investing in huge-scale nuclear development is the smartest thing we could possibly do right now.
Capacity factor is important, and far too few people are paying attention to it. Electricity is basically worthless if it's not available when and where it's needed - and storage technology/infrastructure is NOT up to the task of load-shifting to make renewables even remotely viable in that context. I'd be rather surprised if it was fully up to the task by 2050... whereas nuclear is up to the task TODAY.
Let's go nuclear! Renewables... well, maybe in the future, but they straight-up aren't ready yet. Not once you take into account capacity factor.
Yep, nuclear energy is the best energy. We need much more of it!
Yeah we need to go nuclear
Here in Australia. Dam change of
Government to left of centre,
No hope of that. Idiotic leftwing
Want to close our coal plants
Down but there is no battery
Technology for renewals.
Everything would be way better, electricity would be cheaper, the environment would be cleaner (nuclear waste while harmful is much easier to contain than gaseous waste), and we wouldn't be as dependent on foreign energy sources. It's a shame TMI ended US nuclear power
Don't USA have their own oil?
Increasing nuclear production is the only realistic way to switch from coal and oil.
- Wind doesn't work very well when it isn't windy
- Solar doesn't work very well when it isn't sunny (and the solar farms take up space)
- Hydro power requires water nearby (normally affecting habitats)
Nuclear can be used to produce any time, there's different types and sizes of reactors, they use water, but it (could?) be recouped, they produce very little waste and can produce less.
There's some downsides to it, but the cost of building and maintaining them isn't that high when you compare the total energy cost over time, the waste over time, and the benefits over other 'clean' sources.
Both wind and solar work fine if you are able to store excess power generated during sunny and/or windy weather, and the technology for this is advancing rapidly. As for solar farms taking up space, solar power can be generated at any scale; it's possible for a rooftop array to power a single home or an apartment building.
Short answer: The country as a whole would be a much better place to live in, and your electric bill would probably be a lot smaller.
i loved that you broke down and explained the different types of nuclear waste and it’s ramifications for the country, bravo.
also, there is a large amount of waste heat that is rejected to maximize the amount of energy extracted from fission decay. if you passed a law saying this waste heat had to run carbon capture machines, or desalination plants, or vertical farms - etc; then these plants may even be carbon negative and possibly be of even greater benefit for mankind.
waste heat for desal would be a big winner in California and Australia
Some plants do Cogeneration using that waste heat for those kinds of things. Okiluoto in Finland is used for fish farms, and greenhouses, many plants in Russia are used for district heating, as well as in Switzerland. Diablo Canyon also desalinates water.
Nuclear power has been around for over 70 years now, and we have had a total of 3 nuclear plant disasters. Two of the three have resulted in Zero confirmed human fatalities. We have seen no statistically measurable increase in cancer rates among people who were near Three Mile Island (and it hasn't been for lack of looking for an increase), and we do not know of anyone killed by radiation in the Fukushima disaster (though I will admit that such fatalities might have been hard to find among the direct tsunami casualties).
There are many more accidents and disasters with other forms of energy, usually not killing as many people at one time as the Chernobyl disaster did, but overall in many cases killing far more people per terawatt-hour produced than nuclear, as this video showed. So nuclear is as safe a form of energy as we have.
What really frustrates me is when people who believe that carbon dioxide could make our world unlivable are the same people fear-mongering nuclear energy. I remain skeptical of the perceived carbon dioxide threats, but for someone who really believes that CO2 is an existential threat, how could nuclear power be more dangerous than that? Nuclear power is the only proven, cost-effective, base-load-capable, and scalable form of carbon-free energy we have.
What would have happened if Fukashima occured near New York or LA? How much would that have cost? How many lives would have been lost evacuating everyone in a 20 mile radius, or in the tent cities they'd have to live in for several months?
The problem with "I've been in two car accidents and didn't get a scratch" thinking is that it ignores the possibility of worse outcomes.
@@anticarrrot I think that Fukushima was a very highly populated area. And it was devastated by the tsunami, which would have been devastating with or without the nuclear disaster. My point was that we don't know of anyone who was irradiated by the nuclear disaster, who wasn't already dead due to the tsunami. I think that the same would be true if the same events had happened in New York or Los Angeles.
The explanation I heard at the time was that while every nuclear power plant is unique, each is a varient of one of three basic designs. All of them have backup diesel generators to keep the core cool in case the plant needs to abruptly shut down, as they do during an earthquake. Type 2 and type 3 power plants deliberately elevate these backup generators for the purpose of preventing them from being flooded by a tsunami, which could follow an earthquake, which is precisely what happened in Fukushima. The reason this failed in Fukushima is that this power plant was a type 1 plant, with the diesel generators low enough for the tsunami to reach them.
The lesson learned from Fukushima was that all type 1 nuclear plants in tsunami-prone areas need to be shut down as soon as possible, and any replacement nuclear plants or other new nuclear plants in tsunami-prone areas must be type 2 or 3. That won't stop devastating tsunamis, but it would prevent them from also becoming nuclear disasters.
@@jeremykraenzlein5975 You ate playing No True Scotsman with the casualties. A death from a nuclear accident, including from vital responses to said accident, is a death from a nuclear accident. The Fukashima accident killed over 2000 people during the evacuation of 150k people. So extrapolating to New York we could expect north of 600k deaths.
@@anticarrrot I'm not familiar with the "2,000 killed" number you cited. How exactly did an evacuation kill people? Did the devastation to their transportation infrastructure caused directly by the tsunami play a role? If so, then they could also be counted as tsunami deaths.
In any case, I have already proposed a solution to ensure that the Fukushima nuclear disaster never happens again. The point is that it is not necessary to shut down nuclear power entirely to prevent tsunamis from becoming nuclear disasters. Also, as the video demonstes, nuclear on the whole is still far safer than most other forms of energy, on a basis of lives lost per energy produced. Adding in 2000 more deaths from Fukushima, even if the video's numbers didn't already do so, won't change that bottom line.
@@anticarrrot Wrong. Only one engineer has died since the incident.
Nuclear power plant builds are so heavily regulated that it takes a decade or more to permit and then to build. However had the US gone all nuclear, then the water shortage of the western states would be solved as large amounts of that power would be going to de-salting sea water, pumping into the western states to refill the Lake Mead's and other watercourses of the west.
Water from the Great lakes could also be pumped over with out great concern of the energy expense. Meanwhile Canada and the Army Corp. of Engineers hold the Great Lakes 3 to 4 ft above the normal water levels to secretly look at the effects of higher water levels on coastal land forms to prepare for the increase of sea levels.
The Westinghouse AP1000 advanced PWR is fully approved by the NRC for construction and operation in the U.S.. VC Summer was building 2 but cancelled aftre spending $7 billion with no end in sight and Vogtle is building 2 at 100% over budget and schedule. Peole like to blame the regulations when they have no idea what the problem is. A nuclear plant is not a Walmart or Amazon distribution center. All Vogtle had to do is build the AP1000 acording to design but now they say it will take 2 years to correct construction errors.Is that the problem with regulations? Do you want them to ignore the safety design and just slap it together?
@@clarkkent9080 Yes, the current state of "safety" regulations are ridiculous and are regulatory lawfare by Greenpeace to make it virtually Illegal to build new nuclear power stations. Another problem is the lack of production lines and installation skill base because we don't build nuclear power stations in large numbers.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Anyone who doesn't know what they are talking about and has no facts can throw out smoke and mirrors and conspiracy theories but the FACT is that the AP1000 is FULLY approved. I must assume you mean that a utility should be able to do whatever they want and the NRC should bow down and accept it. ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS BUILD IT AS DESIGNED and the only regulatory oversight is making sure they do THAT. But that to you is over reach.
Since when did Greenpeace control anything built in the U.S.?????
I agree with the statement on lack of construction skills for nuclear but even at the most basic level, any home owner who has had work done on their home knows that there are very few skilled people left in America. So what is your solution to this issue.
A problem without a solution is just bit#hing
Why is Nuclear energy okay for soldiers in the military soldiers in submarines and ships, but not good enough for regular Civilians?
Some ports won't allow nuclear powered ships to enter. Likely because the reactors are in the middle of the ocean where activist can't reach them to be a nuisance. In Europe a anti-nuke activist got himself a military rocket launcher and hit the containment building of a nuclear power plant that was in the process of being built. That scared the local politicians enough that the nuclear power plant stop being built.
Disclosure: I support the construction of hundreds of desalinization plants which would require nuclear power plants.
To be fair the US doesn’t have a great track record of maintaining its infrastructure so I see why nuclear energy is seen as a pariah.
Amazing video, as per usual.
Glad you enjoyed it!
You have made a few bad assumptions. As to the cost maybe you should use cost of building plants in South Korea. They are about 1/3 the cost of US reactors because they are building the same reactor over and over again. The other thing you did not consider is newer reactors running on and using up the past nuclear waste. These would be fast reactors. It's not likely that only light water reactors would be the only reactors built. Since nuclear waste is 99% unused fuel it's reasonable to assume that later built reactors would use nuclear waste as fuel source. These newer reactors would most likely get away from light water cooling so would be able to operate at much higher temperatures opening opportunities for higher efficiencies and wider industrial applications. Of course there would be no talking about global warming or industrial pollution. Yes the present we could have had.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive.
Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government.
The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships.
Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and .....
And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target.
The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better.
100,000 SMR to meet the worlds needs and stop CO2.
NOBODY TALKS ABOUT these costs.
@@stephenbrickwood1602 I don't think nuclear power needs to be incredibly expensive. We went down this path of building giant nuclear steam engines because that was what the first small power systems were. Thinking was just make these things bigger and we will get economies of scale. Well in this case this was not true since the difficulty of going bigger with this design increased faster than the benefits of economy of scale. So there needs to be a rethink which there has been allot of. There are ideas of molten salt, liquid metal, Pebble bed, or factory built modules. The common denominator of all these ideas is they have to get over the development cost, often called first development cost. This is because the first developed of any of these systems are not going to be cheaper than current energy systems even if they have potential to be such. This is what was true with wind and solar too. The interesting thing with most of these nuclear designs is they are not envisioned to replace renewables but to be compatible with them. The nuclear, often with heat storage, serving to fill in for the weaknesses of renewables to make for a more practical and lower cost energy system. To achieve this the investment in development of these systems needs to be done.
@@stanleytolle416 Electric vehicles, EVs, will have 500 mile battery, huge, but the Daily drive is 40 miles 7kwh, and homes need 5kwh over night.
So, with every home and business connected to the grid and 18 rooftop PV panels(33kwh) AND THE HUGE EV BATTERIES plugged in, the amount of cheap continuous power will be massive.
Petroleum will be a strategic military reserve. A war winning reserve.
That's what I mean about the importance of the EV battery, it makes all the difference.
The EV means massive investment in nuclear and nuclear industries around the world is not necessary and 'a monkey' can install solar PV 😉
@@stephenbrickwood1602 the problem comes with winter. How do you store enough power for the winter where there is not enough sun or wind?
@@stanleytolle416 when you go to the individual cases then let's see what they are, the no wind or no sun places.
In general the majority of the population is in warm latitudes and near coast lines.
Imagine: What if the rate at which nuclear plants were being built in the 60s had been sustained and no new coal-fired plants had been built? How much would that have reduced the USA's contribution to carbon emissions?
I appreciate the clear and realistic discussion of the nuclear waste problem. Too many videos I've seen still operate under the assumption that it's a huge issue.
Well it is an issue that is NOT solved and getting worst every year.
Uranium is more common than aluminum, and produces nearly no Carbon Emissions. It is cleaner, coal plants release more radiation and destroys air quality.
I never really got the whole push for solar and wind turbines, you need to put aside so much land and destroy so much land to power a city with this. They make sense in addition to, not as a total solution.
Once you do real research into nuclear energy you will realize nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, powerful and most reliable form of energy production in comparison to other forms of energy production. The Navy has submarines that have been running off of nuclear power for decades and have been used in emergency power supply for states that have undergone power loss.
If you want to talk about renewable clean energy nuclear is the only logical way to go!!!
Don't forget that wind and solar are intermittent. You need either another power source that can react quickly or some form of energy storage.
Fast reacting power plants are usually simple cycle natural gas power plants, but not combined cycle gas power plant (which are much more efficient, but react slowly to load changes). Pumped hydro is an option, but not available everywhere or in large capacities. Batteries would work, but are very expensive and resource intensive.
Also wind/solar plus simple cycle gas power plants uses similar amounts of gas as combined cycle gas power plants without wind/solar. So you have to ask what's the point of wind/solar in this combination other than to make you feel less guilty.
If you have a nuclear power plant with molten salt as coolant, it is quite easy and cheap to store heat in big tanks of molten salt. Some concentrated solar plants use this already. E.g. build the turbine part to triple the capacity of the nuclear reactor, add some (non radioactive) molten salt tanks, run the nuclear reactor at 100% all the time (most economic) and adjust the power delivered using the tanks.
Last stat I saw said storage was 6% of global capacity and up from 5% a decade ago. Also with those intermittents (wind, solar) are entirely dependent on cheap and abundant natural gas to make up the difference. take gas away and intermittents can't operate without frying the grid
@@chrisholdread174 6% of global capacity for how much time? Power generation is measured in Watts (power), storage capacity in Watts*Seconds (energy).
MSR's are automatic load following due to their negative temp coefficient - very good match with wind and solar
@@jimlofts5433 Correct, but they would be more cost efficient if run at 100% capacity all the time. Therefore the idea of additional salt tanks for load balancing.
@@tgkhfgkr9729 well done we need to remove the stigma from nuclear
2.4-3.6 trillion: compare that to the cost of US wars and other unproductive spending and it is not that expensive anymore.
Also technology for closed fuel loops exist for more than 30 years now (see EBR II for example), which would solve the waste, safety and sustainability problems.
You also have to look at total energy consumption, not only electricity, which is only roughly a third.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive.
Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government.
The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships.
Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and .....
And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target.
The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better.
100,000 SMR to meet the worlds needs and stop CO2.
NOBODY TALKS ABOUT these costs.
The Fukushima meltdown was caused by extremely poor design planning. By locating its emergency generators (needed to keep the reactors cool in the event of a power failure) in the basement, the tsunami filled the basement with water (DUH?), knocking out the generators, allowing the reactors to go into meltdown. Very poor planning. And as the number of EV's on the road increases, much more (dependable) energy will be needed to charge them. The United States needs to wise up, and go completely nuclear, like France. But instead, we follow countries like Germany, and Australia. They are in trouble, and we're right behind them.
One of my favorite solutions to the problem of both mid level and high level waste is drilling. You use the technology that oil drills use to drill a small bit deep hole. One well below where any water will ever penetrate and you place the waste in that and seal it up. Not a single gama ray will ever reach the surface of the earth and there is nothing that deep that will be negatively affected by radiation. Unlike fracking you're not removing anything either. You're replacing one solid with another.
The low level waste can be stored until safe and then repurposed. By that point you have as constant a supply of waste going in as coming out. So relatively small facility, probably a repurposed salt mine, could be used to handle every single ounce of low level nuclear waste the US could ever produce with full scale nuclear coverage.
Problem is the military wants a system that allow them rapid access to the waste in order to extract plutonium should there be a need for more nuclear bombs. That is the problem with long term storage of high level waste. How do you make a vault that can store the waste safety.. for 30,000 years and yet can be opened at the moments notice if you need the material to extract plutonium. Attempts to fulfill both desires have lead to complicated, expensive and compromised designs which in the end... fail.
@@nickl5658 I didn’t know this. Thanks.
I recall just after 9-11-01, thinking that we should have - then - built one nuclear power plant in each state, as a way to reduce our reliance on foreign oil imports.
Seems we could still do this, to reduce our collective carbon footprint.
US is now a nett oil exporter due to fracking. So interesting to reduce oil imports has faded away.
Captured Ukrainian troops in Donbas:
th-cam.com/video/eGg07FpmcKc/w-d-xo.html
US gets 19% of its electricity from nuclear , not total energy. Big difference. I'd like to see more reactors but the expense seems an issue. We are losing the existing plants as they retire. Nuclear not getting credit for being cleaner in terms of carbon or air emissions compared with natural gas is one problem. Second ,many of the energy subsidies are given by politicians to wind and solar which are intermittent sources which imbalance the electric market.
Nuclear is better for the environment. Why can't wind turbines be placed in the same area-because turbines in the back won't get any wind which means wind turbines change weather patterns (not the "air is warmer near the ground" argument but wind turbines stop wind otherwise the turbines in the back should work just as well as the ones in the front. There have been discussions about using them to stop hurricanes even though hurricanes are important to the planet). People are also putting wind turbines in mountain forests even though they act like lightning rods. And wind kills predator birds. Solar is just as bad because you need to destroy ecosystems to build solar farms. When Mao removed sparrows locust populations ballooned and 15-55million people died of famine. When wolves were removed from Yellowstone similar things happened. Building solar farms in deserts would limit minerals from being carried around the world on the wind and change albedos. And when trees are cut down there's less to absorb rain which means more flooding.
When you think about the long term costs of repairing environmental mistakes nuclear turns out to be cheaper. And all you need is one design that can be used for all future plants. That would make everything cheaper because you become an expert at building that which means costs are lower.
@@namename9998 good points
Until someone invents a nuclear engine which can fit under the hood of a car, we're going to need to continue to use fossil fuels or draw electricity from some non-fossil source, nuclear or otherwise.
This whole video misses the mark. You are correct about nuclear waste, it just isn't a problem. You are correct about the emissions and deaths, they are both low. However, you neglect the most important issues impacting nuclear. Firstly, at CURRENT rate of nuclear consumption, we will deplete the earth's entire supply of viable uranium in about 80 years. Think about that for a moment. What you are speculating about here is a scenario where we are vastly increasing our uranium consumption. The correct answer to "what if the US was powered 100% by nuclear" is that we would run out of uranium in 15 or so years and then be totally fucked because we relied on a system where 100% of our energy comes from nonrenewable resources we exhausted. The other issue you don't mention, which is the driving force behind nuclear plants closing, is that they cost too much. You do mention this in your video, but you are really only talking about the initial construction costs. It is cheaper per unit of energy produced to generate electricity from wind and solar farms you build from scratch, than it is to generate electricity from a fully operational power plant. Basically, you have old news. Before 2011-2015ish, your assessments of the costs are about accurate, but since then, the price of wind and solar has plummeted far lower than economists and engineers predicted was possible. This is great news, but it means that nuclear, which is the kind of thing you invest billions in and break even at earliest 20 years after construction, has a bunch of nuclear plants that were expecting to pay off their huge investment by selling high priced power. Now that the power is selling for unexpectedly low prices, the break even point for nuclear is just fading off into the distance.
People have been saying the same thing about oil for hundreds of years. Just when we think we’re headed for disaster, about to deplete our wells, we find the largest untapped reserve in history. But obviously that’s not the main issue with coal and oil, it’s the environmental cost. I’m not going to rehash all the arguments because other commenters have done a great job of laying them out far batter than I could, but the combination of thorium salt reactors, reactors designed to run off existing high level waste fission byproducts, new highly efficient uranium reactor that can make use of less enriched fuel, etc mean nuclear has a much much much longer potential lifespan than you paint in your comment. Plus as it stands now, renewable energy is not profitable compared to existing means of energy production. Nuclear would have few downsides and would give the renewables industry precious time they need to innovate.
Nuclear is incredibly expensive.
Hello, hello 90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, an ancient war fighting government.
The only reason the USA spends so much on its military budget is because of the dictatorships.
Little rocket man in Nth Korea, the religious leaders in Iran and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and .....
And so, if CO2 reduction then every dictatorship will have their nuclear industries and USA is a big target.
The real costs are huge, renewables are cheap, cheap, cheap. And getting better.
100,000 SMR to meet the worlds needs and stop CO2.
NOBODY TALKS ABOUT these costs.
excellent response above,
the silence is deafening, to your response.
nuclear would be a huge monopoly profit business, paying political donations, and so expensive that you could not turn it of until it had made its profits.
@@ayeeniko I wish you were correct Niko, that would be amazing. I would love it if you are correct, but alas you are not. We have more fossil fuel reserves RIGHT NOW than we have uranium reserves. That's just a fact. Don't fall into the same trap climate deniers do when they say global warming predictions have been false. They have not. Some journalist, politicians, people with facebook accounts, and other NON EXPERTS have made various claims in the past, but all of those are irrelevant. There simply hasn't been any issue with actual academics misunderstanding the abundance of either fossil fuels or uranium reserves. If you want to trust the facebook warriors and politicians over academics and other experts, be my guest, but I won't follow.
Next, you talk about tech that is not yet developed, like thorium salt reactors, sodium fast reactors, modular reactors and a couple others. The issue with those, is that they won't hit the market until around 2040-2050. The issue is, grid scale storage is also in development with several implementations, and the expected time to hit market is similar. Since the cost of wind and solar is so incredibly low (about a 1/5 the cost of nuclear unsubsidized), and these new nuclear techs don't seem cheaper than grid scale storage, there's no financial rationality to go with nuclear over renewables and storage. Even yet further, and this is something I didn't mention in my top level comment, nuclear is base load, but it is not dispatchable. The huge issue of going 100% nuclear is that you can't match supply and demand quickly enough to match things like the duck curve, much less larger month to month imbalances in supply and demand. The correct comparison is not renewables + storage vs. nuclear, it is renewables + storage vs. nuclear + storage. Nuclear needs massive amounts of storage to go along with it if we went to 100% nuclear. France is 70% nuclear, and the job of that 30% is to be the dispatchable peaker generation they need to match supply to demand. If you try to do this with the nuclear plants themselves, you have to build double the nuclear plants you actually need, then turn most of them off and just have them sit idle until demand rises and they turn on. Financially, due to how nuclear pays off its construction, this is a nonstarter.
Your final point about the profitability of renewables is also backwards. Solar and wind are so cheap and profitable for the operators that they have driven the cost of electricity down across the entire energy market. Nuclear plants are what is not profitable and can't compete anymore. I mean honestly, why do you think they are closing down fully operational nuclear power plants? What both you and Jeff both seem to believe here, is that these plants are closing down due to fears about safety and waste. That is just simply not the case. Jeff is totally correct here (as I said in the top comment) waste and safety are simply not issues for nuclear. The waste is negligible and so are the safety concerns. Policy makers and nuclear plant operators know this. They are not dummies. Fully operational nuclear plants are closing down because they cannot compete financially in the energy market where wind and solar have unexpectedly cut energy prices, even if they are currently in operation without any issues with the plant or supply lines. That's just the honest truth. I wish they were closing down because the public was generally misinformed about the severity of waste and safety issues, and politicians and plant operators were caving to political pressure, but again, that is not the reason here. Nuclear simply cannot compete in the modern energy market. Renewables are not just competing, they are dominating the market and pushing everyone else out.
@@jweezy101491 ok yeah you must be right, I’m sure this narrative about renewables being so massively profitable with no downsides that I’ve never heard from anyone ever before is correct. You see the market clearly! You should be president of electricity!!
Additional upsides to nuclear power; 1. It takes up less land than solar, wind, and hydro. 2. It produces energy at a regular interval unlike wind and solar. 3. We could become less reliant on hydro increasing water storage in the lakes to be used for other purposes than power. 4. Depending on the type of nuclear energy (example thorium), it can reduce the amount of nuclear waste currently in storage and help to clean up our waste problems. 5. New designs of nuclear reactors exist that would reduce how much water is currently used in the energy production process that are also much safer than the older systems.
When Nuclear reactors explode it’s actually the steam that is “exploding” the nuclear rods don’t explode.
Nuclear will make a comeback later this century after people realize the very expensive renewable approach will fall way short of supplying enough energy.
@Mark Stewger No its not. Figure in all the hidden costs and damage to the environment. It's extremely expensive.
By that time we will have developed other power sources and nuclear cannot compete on a cost per Mw basis.
@Mark Stewger - solar wind about $1 bn per 1GW and not 24/7 365 day delivery your nuclear $1.16 BN per 1GW for 24/7 365 day reliability - solar 25% efficient per annum wind 30% - nuclear looks cheap also new Gen4 for load following, less and shorter lived waste stream at about same price and 3-5 cents per KWH They can use waste heat not electricity for desal / ammonia production / artificial diesel and other high temp chemical processes + produce medical isotopes to save lives
@@jp5000able @Mark Stewger - solar wind about $1 bn per 1GW and not 24/7 365 day delivery your nuclear $1.16 BN per 1GW for 24/7 365 day reliability - solar 25% efficient per annum wind 30% - nuclear looks cheap also new Gen4 for load following, less and shorter lived waste stream at about same price and 3-5 cents per KWH They can use waste heat not electricity for desal / ammonia production / artificial diesel and other high temp chemical processes + produce medical isotopes to save lives
I was ready to start crying cause I thought you’d talk about what if us was all nuclear since the 70s. So much less global warming, fewer oil wars, everything cheaper…
The saddest part of nuclear power's disasters is how preventable they were. 3 Mile Island resulted from a faulty sensor(something backups would've prevented) and wasn't even that bad. Fukushima was any one of a half dozen adjustments away from avoiding disaster entirely. Chernobyl is the end product of a Soviet experiment to try to get more power out of a plant than it was designed to put out and required disabling basically every safety feature the plant had.
Nuclear accidents always seem to be preventable . . . after they happen.
@@ericlipps9459 Yeah, sure, hindsight and all that, but when it happens because they *did not follow the rules* there's no hindsight, only "what did you think was gonna happen?!"
I have worked for the last 30 years in nuclear cleanup and I can tell you that waste disposition is possible but expensive if done properly. Short lived isotopes are separated and solidified in cementitious grout, and will decay to safe levels within 300 years. Long lived isotopes ( that are not recovered for re-use) are mixed with borosilicate glass and melted into stainless steel cannisters. Even if the cans were cut open the radioactive material could not be extracted from the glass without the use of very strong acids. I know, I have done it. For decades now many of us have advocated for the deployment of Small Modular Reactors; factory built with identical design then shipped to location and "plugged in" avoiding the long lead time before power production begins. The largest operating expense for a gigawatt plant is the interest on the capital spent to build it.
Modern designs for Nuclear Power Plants are super safe and can run for 100 years before needing to replace the fuel. Things like 0 power fail-safe reactors, microreactors, and new ways to transfer heat to the steam turbine systems with no cross-contamination are just some of the latest technologies. We as citizens just need to demand that governments spend the money backing new nuclear rather than ineffective solar and wind projects.
Where do you get your information????? Internet I bet.
I worked in nuclear for 40+ years and everything you say is BS from a know nothing.
Utilities NOT the government are responsible for providing power and deciding where it comes from. I guess you want a communist country where the government decides.
@@clarkkent9080 You don't sound like you worked in the industry for that long. You would know how governments regulate every aspect of a nuclear power plant, and that makes the cost and complexity near impossible to build them even if a utility wanted to create one. Utility companies can't build 2 on 1 natural gas with heat recovery in a few years with lower costs because the government doesn't regulate those plants as much. The military has proved Fail-safe and microreactors in warships. I guess you're a case of the old needing to go before the new can replace them.
@@clarkkent9080 I, too, work in the power plant industry and am working with the modern designs. It may not be like how your old plant you work at is. You also seem to miss how governments regulate industries. For a person 60+ years old, you would think you got that by now. If governments helped utilities rather than prevent them from building nuclear plants, you would see utilities be more interested. But sure, call my knowledge BS and get all older man triggered.
Two Georgia reactors have cost over 30 billion and still aren't running at at full power. As a result, all nuclear power plants on the drawing board and one that was half built, were cancelled. We can't afford nuclear power.
They should let it run at full power
We can just nationalize it let our tax dollars pay the bill.
Can't wait until fusion becomes a thing as well.
your gonna have to wait. It has been 5 years away for the last 30 years
@@clarkkent9080 Yeah but now we actually have reactor designs that show promise.
@@clarkkent9080 The version of that quote I've heard most often is, "Fusion power is thirty years away and always will be." I don't agree, but I don't expect it anytime soon.
@@ericlipps9459 Once a demo test fusion reactor actually operates for an extended (months) length of time, the next step is to figure out how to convert that thermal energy into electrical energy. So far we have just been trying to initiate and contain fusion. My point being, once sustained fusion is achieved, it will take 15+ years to build a demo test fusion plant that actually produces electrical power and then that concept must be proven over time. It will take 30 more years once fusion is perfected before multiple plants can be built. So yes it is a long way off
You should look at thorium molten salt reactors like LFTR. They are the answer to our energy needs.
From what I understand, modern designs can all but eliminate chances of meltdown. In addition, scalable modular designs can be built more safely, quicker, and more cheaply in factories and shipped to the site.
Very informative and well documented! Thanks for doing!
There is one issue you failed to mention. A nuclear plant can't be throttled. It takes days to get the plant up to full power and it takes days to bring it back down (safely). Sure you can SCRAM the reactor. But that is only done in emergencies. So once the plant gets up to full power, it stays at full power, day in and day out. Even at night when demand for power is low. So now you have to do something with that extra power. The solution to this is to pair the nuclear plant with a pumped hydro storage facility. But finding suitable sites for all the new pumped hydro can be challenging.
3 trillion? Considering it would take at least 10 years to build all of them, that's only 300 billion a year in spending. We can cover that easily if we stop giving it away to other countries and halve the military budget. "Sorry, [insert popular talking point country here], we're going dark for a decade to fix our own issues."
A 1,200Mw plant cost $15 billion and takes 15 years to construct...that is based on current FACTS. If 100 of these nuclear plants now provide 20% of the U.S. power, it will take 500 plants to supply 100% of the U.S. power needs. There are a limited number of construction personnel that can build these plants and recent construction projects show that no more than 4 reactor plants can be constructed at one time. You can do the rest of the math on how long that will take.
Don't hold your breath waiting for the military budget to be cut in half.
The main thing that makes nuclear plants expensive is the cost of regulations that are set up to prevent new plants from being built.
No matter what you may think, regulations on nuclear power aren't put in place "to prevent new plants from being built."
@@ericlipps9459 The intent of the regulations doesn't change the effect.
The paranoia around nuclear is so frustrating. Nuclear could literally save the climate right now! No need to place all our hopes in developing fusion. We can save the planet RIGHT NOW!!!
Thank you for making this video