No to Nuclear Power

Even if the article is right about the cost of nuclear energy (for which it provides zero evidence), it is ignoring some major points:<p>- peak oil: eventually (probably not in a distant future) oil is going to become too expensive. What then?<p>- coal causes horrible pollution<p>- natural gas is non-renewable, just like oil<p>- nuclear power technology hasn't stagnated in the 70's<p>On a more empirical note, I live in France and energy here is much cheaper than anywhere else I lived (and this includes public transportation, which runs mostly on nuclear power in Paris). My home country, Portugal, has destroyed its industry with a government-subsidized windmill scheme. 70% of your energy bill there is tax.

As an engineer working on expensive and safety-sensitive systems, I really have to disagree with everyone claiming (without evidence) that the high cost of nuclear power stems largely from over-regulation.<p>My experience has been that good engineers genuinely care about building things safely. And we burn through a lot of money doing so.<p>Every mark on every blueprint gets checked and rechecked by multiple, well-paid engineers. We go through elaborate and time-consuming testing procedures. Multiple layers of redundancy are built in.<p>All of this costs. And the greater the danger, the more of this kind of stuff we have to do. Nuclear accidents are black swan events. Though unlikely, their impact can be huge. So for nuclear power, the engineering requirements are extreme. This is as it should be.<p>If nuclear power were deregulated, the industry would still have to spend boatloads to provide adequate safety. And if the industry instead cut corners, they'd eventually get bit by another disaster, and the business would once again stagnate.<p>This, by the way, is coming from a guy who doesn't work in the nuclear power industry. I'm just extrapolating from my experience with safety-sensitive engineering.

&#62; The main reason no new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States in 30 years is that they have proven to be poor investments<p>Uh... no. The main reason no new nuclear power plants have been built in the US is because 3 mile island and chernobyl scared the shit out of people.<p>Both of those incidents were caused by people going outside the safety protocols. Nuclear power, just like anything else, is VERY dangerous if you ignore safety.

Potential conflict of interest here. The author is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a think tank affiliated with the Koch family, who make their money in oil and gas (among other things).<p>Not reason enough to throw it away, but perhaps to suspect the absence of any evidence to back the cost claims.

What is missing in the original article and what some "I'll just leave it here (bar of consumption vs. bar of green production)" comments omit is the grid.<p>The electricity is not some component part which you order in China, stock it up in thousands in your warehouse and wait until you need it.<p>The total electricity production and consumption must be absolutely equal in ANY. GIVEN. MOMENT. If you are not generating enough, the generators would be overloaded, start slowing down and bad things would happen (frequency would lower, your own generators and/or power lines between countries will go out of phase and bang, you have a nice large several-country-wide blackout). Similar things happen when you generate too much.<p>Therefore, mentioning the current AVERAGE green production per day and consumption per day is totally out of reality, as the "base" energy is still provided by the dreaded nuclear, peak oil and very dirty coal power plants. In order to cover the consumption with the "holy" green energy, the capacity of such power plants would have to be several times the current consumption in order to generate the energy for times when there is no wind, no sunlight (night!), etc. AND many storage plants (e.g. pumped storage) have to be built. And one pumped storage plant alone (without the power plants providing the electricity into the storage!) cost the same as adding the same net power capacity in nuclear, which goes by the projections until the next scheduled shut down, no wind onsets, etc.<p>Also, please do not be fooled with the "Austrian model" - ban nuclear energy in the constitution and import (nuclear!) energy from surrounding countries. Or with the "German model" - promise to stop nuclear power plants and: a) use "green" government subsidies to start COAL power plants instead (yes, environmental funds are being used to build new power plants of the most dirty kind!), b) overload surrounding grids (Polish, Czech) to dissolve peak effects of current, very unstable, "green" sources, c) start inventing crazy things like using home water heaters running on fossil fuels (!) controlled by computers to generate electricity into the grid when the green sources are not enough...<p>Whenever anybody is speaking about noes to nuclear power or green sources, these issues should be foremost addressed. Otherwise it is the same beating around the bush, as when biofuels are governmentally subsided and made mandatory by law to be mixed into ordinary fossil fuels, but it is kept secret that the agricultural vehicles running on the fossil fuels, spreading pesticides and fertilizers made from fossil fuels, use more energy than is finally made in the "biofuel". However, this happens in some other country across the globe, so it is none of our business and it is very "green" in our "bio"fueled country...<p>Source: electrical engineer controlling the power grid of a European country.

Since I live near DC and work in the energy field, I occasionally get the pleasure to attend seminars on nuclear power. I'll preface by saying that I know practically nothing about nuclear power. That said, people seem to be very pumped up about Generation IV reactors.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor</a>

No mention of thorium fission reactors, that would be far cleaner and would consume 232Th which is far cheaper and more abundant than 235U.

The strongest source in the article appears to be Moniz and Kazimi 2009. Not sure if I've tracked down the one they're referring to, but the MIT Nuclear Power Update, on which they are coauthors (<a href="http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/nuclear-update.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/nuclear-update.sht...</a>) states:<p><i>The 2003 report found that “In deregulated markets, nuclear power is not now cost competitive with coal and natural gas. However, plausible reductions by industry in capital cost, operation and maintenance costs and construction time could reduce the gap. Carbon emission credits, if enacted by government, can give nuclear power a cost advantage.” The situation remains the same today.</i><p>... citing increased construction costs across the board, increases in interest rates during construction of recent plants, and a decline in the cost of oil and gas costs after a spike in the mid-2000s. Their base case suggested nuclear at 6.7 cents/kWh, and coal/gas at 4.3/4.1. With carbon corrections, coal/gas rises to 6.4/5.1. With capital corrections equivalent to coal plants, nuclear falls to 5.5 cents/kWh.<p>Keep in mind that US data on nuclear efficiency is limited <i>because we haven't built any new reactors</i> in the last 30 years. We're running plants a generation (and a half) behind current technology, and they're <i>still</i> this efficient. Meanwhile, extracting gas and coal is becoming more difficult, and not likely to get any easier. Just take a look at the economic feasibility studies of Alberta's tar sands.<p>MIT's opinion?<p><i>In sum, compared to 2003, the motivation to make more use of nuclear power is greater, and more rapid progress is needed in enabling the option of nuclear power expansion to play a role in meeting the global warming challenge. The sober warning is that if more is not done, nuclear power will diminish as a practical and timely option for deployment at a scale that would constitute a material contribution to climate change risk mitigation.</i><p>Honestly, the phrase "clean coal" should have have been clue enough to stop reading. :-/

Coal plants pump out TONS of radiation into the air, far more than living near a nuke plant causes not to mention megatons of CO2 (coal is the range of a ton of CO2 per megawatt, if not a little north of that)<p>They put out regulations in March that basically made fossil fuel plants require a redesign before constructing more of them (Gas currently has a small enough CO2 footprint)

The costs are regulatory. Just cut out the NNSA oversight and nukes will be cheap.<p><i>edit</i><p>ok, unsubstantiated assertions are bad. Here's just one example of regulatory overhead that other types of power don't have to deal with,<p>"Since it may cost $300 million or more to shut down and decommission a plant, the NRC requires plant owners to set aside money when the plant is still operating to pay for the future shutdown costs." straight from the nrc <a href="http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/decommissioning.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/decommissio...</a>

Say no to moronic articles like this. There are ways to make nuclear power better, just because some governments fail doesn't mean it's impossible.<p>Fossil fuel kills more people than nuclear power, the reason people seem to ignore it, is because nuclear disasters kill a lot of people in short time.<p>This article should not be taken seriously because it fails to examine the possibilites of nuclear power, and by that it fails to backup its claim that nuclear power should be totally rulled out.

Several omissions in this article, for example compared to oil, uranium is available from more stable trading partners with huge reserves (Australia).

this article is garbage at best. clear bias from the very first sentence and only argues from a current cost structure perspective.

tl;dr argument: currently existing nuclear power plants produce electricity that costs more than using coal<p>my comment on this argument would be that I find it less persuasive than the article seems to want it to be.

I think it's irresponsible to just say no to nuclear power wholesale. The holy grail of nuclear energy is cold fusion, of course. But in the meantime, we can get safer nuclear energy by using thorium in our reactors instead of uranium. The reason why uranium is used over thorium is because uranium has applications not only in energy generation, but also in nuclear weapons. Uranium was more lucrative to mine than thorium because governments around the world bought so many of it to create so many bombs.<p>Here is an article explaining some of the advantages and drawbacks of using thorium as a nuclear power source:<p><a href="http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1141/" rel="nofollow">http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1141/</a><p>Cold fusion is the ultimate clean energy, but until that is accomplished (if it can even be accomplished), we shouldn't bury our heads in the sand with regards to nuclear energy. Thorium isn't very clean energy, it still produces radioactive waste like uranium reactors, but thorium reactors have the potential of meeting our energy requirements while being safer than uranium reactors, so there's less of a chance of a Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima happening.

The idea behind nuclear power isn't "cost-effectiveness", you fucking idiot. It's about staying away from energy resources that fuck up our planet and our atmosphere. This world's thirst for energy has gone far beyond the capabilities of oil, gas and coal to provide without seriously damaging our planets infrastructure. Nuclear accidents can be prevented with proper care and maintenence, whereas "the moment we stop being able to produce oil" (whatever you want to call it) is GOING TO HAPPEN at some point, and we've seen the horrible effects of coal and gas on our ozone already.<p>Regardless of your views on nuclear power this article is a load of BULLSHIT and I wish I could vote things down on HN.

Because the energy grows on trees and it will be enough to sustain our civilization after it runs out of coal and oil to burn.