And dangerous battery fires, which are growing in occurrence w growing grid storage. “Between 2017 and 2019, 23 energy storage fires were linked to flaws in the batteries. “ “MOSS LANDING, Calif. - Residents say they feel unsafe in their neighborhood after a Tesla battery caught on fire early Tuesday morning at PG&E's newest power plant. The fire caused a day-long *shelter-in-place* advisory for the entire Moss Landing community.” “Crash investigators in the United Arab Emirates traced the fire that destroyed a UPS plane in 2010 to the cargo of lithium batteries, … That country's General Civil Aviation Authority found that heat from the fire disabled the crew's oxygen system and that toxic smoke filled the cockpit within three minutes of the first alarm, obscuring the view of controls and terrain. Both crewmembers were killed when the 747-44AF crashed Sept. 3, 2010, near Dubai.”
@@adbogo There is no “high” radioactive waste for 100,000 years. That’s the point. The highly radioactive is gone in days, lesser gone in few hundred years. Quartz pebbles in your backyard will be radioactive many million years, no guarantee required.
@@adbogothere are available plant design that can re-use used nuclear fuel. Doing so leaves "waste" that is safe with a few years. Japan uses such plants
@@davidgeary490 It's actually correct. Even with disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear is one of the safest energy providers, right on par with solar. Wind is more dangerous than nuclear. And we already have the technology to deal with the high-level waste. There are reactors (CANDU, EBR-II, BN-800) that can run on it and burn most of it in their cores. The remaining waste is very little and will only stay radioactive for a couple of hundreds of years, instead of thousands. Solar/wind alone will never be able to sustain a base-load grid. We need nuclear whether we like it or not.
Regardless, the meme that it's a matter of coal versus nuclear, is decades out of date. I did work in coal fired utility plants; decades ago they produced the majority of America's electricity. Now that's down to 20%, and continuing to fall. The major source for America's electricity is natural gas, hence that's the more relevant comparison. As well as to other energy sources that are rising in use, perhaps.
How about going into the "bad" of other power generating systems? Everything has bad and good. Hint, radiation is also a problem with coal fired plants!
Any self-respecting reactor would hide in utter shame if it would emit the same amount of radiation that a coal-fired plant does on a daily(!) basis. But somehow the nuclear reactor is the bad guy here. No one seems to bat an eye over the literal millions that died due to the pollution the fossile fuel plants put out all these decades.
Yeah, I remember the radioactivity warnings I'd see sometimes in coal plants, which my scientist colleagues indicated was due to uranium deposits often being co-located with coal deposits, if I recall correctly. Coal, nasty stuff. However, honest analyses should start with the energy sources actually being used; coal is down to 20% of electricity production in America, and falling decade by decade. Natural gas is the biggie currently. (Germany, which went from nuclear to lignite coal and Russian gas, may be a different case, and some other places.)
@@bearcubdaycare That doesn't negate the the disparate handling of the two waste products. Both are radioactive, only one has regulations up the wazoo on storage and handling. So much irrational public policies.
Glad to see the comments are all on the same side. Nuclear can be improved but that doesn’t mean it should be dropped completely and should be an integral part of our energy resources for reliable, low-carbon energy while renewables catch up and even once we can get enough renewable, they can help manage loads during fluctuations E.g at night during or after a few cloudy, windless days when renewables will not be able to handle the load.
Honestly to me it seems that it would be most beneficial to make a nuclear society then when renewable catch up each individual house hold can have its own power and the nuclear grid can power the municipal system so we also solve the problem of grid strain by separating these two and obviously recreational power use is by far the largest section
@@cameronvandygriff7048Actually, a grid may be the best way to address the variability of renewables. (The weather systems that cause temporal variability in production at any one location, exist over a scale of say a thousand miles.). A study decades ago showed that connecting commercial wind power over a thousand mile radius of Iowa (I recall) would yield power as reliable as a coal plant. Take a look at a weather map of the lower 48 to see why. Nuclear can be good to provide base power, but it's expensive, and long to implement (decade or so). So, it may be better to let nuclear catch up on cost and on small modular, perhaps even reprocessing, and let the grid and storage catch up to renewables (though they seem further along), while using natural gas in the meantime.
Renewables can always handle the load, both day and night. Right now 50% of all people contract some form of cancer in their lifetime, do you want to make it a hundred percent?
@2:11 “If the plant was previously producing GWs of power, then even 1% of that is still MWs” Agreed. Two points: 1. decay heat problem might might be the biggest advantage of smaller reactors. If the decay heat is instead in the tens of KW range, ie the heat of a small truck engine, then the decay heat can find a path through a shorter path to outside air or water and have no chance to destroy metal. 2. Decay heat did destroy three reactors at Fukushima, in which every backup system failed in a tsunami, and the result was .. nobody in the public died. Compared to the explosions and fires and pollution harming people every day from fossil use, the facts objectively show decay heat is not a severe risk to life, even if the loss economics are large (and then again see small reactors) despite all the media hype at the time claiming otherwise.
Natural gas (the main fossil fuel used for electricity in America at least) does have its own risks, as do renewables, but there's still a large no go zone as a result of Fukushima. (Technically, people can go in escorted for short periods.). Chernobyl has a no go zone too. The accumulation of no go zones around the world with the occasional accident, is a consequence, especially if nuclear power were to be scaled tenfold, as would be needed to meet current needs plus a significant bit of transport and heating going electric. Comparing that to the risks of natural gas, nuclear is less of a slam dunk, at thrice the cost. And compared to wind or solar, it's probably a similar price when storage and grid are included for renewables, but the costs of turbines, panels and storage are declining, while nuclear is getting more expensive. If its proponents want nuclear to succeed, they need to candidly address these, rather than just falling back to self satisfied notions. I get your points, but I think that nuclear needs to get past "I have a solution drawn on a napkin; it's all sorted" to actually demonstrating affordable power, with the problems addressed, for an extended time.
@@bearcubdaycare There is no “accumulation” of no go zones. From chemical spills called superfund perhaps. Fukushima residential exclusion all cancelled. I mean good grief Hiroshima has a million people there, was thriving a dozen years after the war. You’re hand waiving away all the fatal accidents from natural gas, year after year, and the billion tons of crap thrown in the air, in comparison to Fukushima where *nobody* died from radiation, and call nuclear advocacy “self satisfied”? The rest goes on like that with nonsense straw men and errors. “Drawn on a napkin”? Several grids have been majority nuclear for decades like France. They work. There is no majority wind-solar grid for a year, not anywhere in the world, and those that push it have dramatically higher electricity prices from trying to firm up part time power. Yes somebody is making plans on a napkin, and self satisfied.
That is a blatant lie. At least one person died in the aftermath of the nuclear accident and many died of the after-effects. Thousands of lives were destroyed because of it and many more will contract cancers because of it.
Anyone who is against new nuclear energy answer this question. What is worse ? A nuclear accident, that on a global scale is relatively small, has a very very low chance of happening and can be contained and managed in the vast the vast majority of cases. Vs The climate crisis running out of control, us smashing through 1.5°c warming heading on to 5°c, which triggers all the tipping points on the way, causing a feedback loop and making an extinction level event happen before the end of the century... 🤔 To all the people who say yeah but what about the "nuclear waste" So called "nuclear weaste" is actually spent nuclear fuel that has valuable materials that can be utilize to generate energy and provide benefits to society. By using new nuclear technologies like the Molten Chloride Fast Reactors (MCFR) you can destroy everything you don't want like transuranics actinides, spent nuclear fuel and plutonium. But at the same time make new valuable materials like u233. By having the (MCFR) wrapped in a thorium blanket as we destroy the "nuclear weaste". We can use the U233 produced to start new Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) that will run on only thorium, produce almost no "nuclear weaste" and never run out of power. The only argument against [nuclear energy] is a political one, that people won’t accept it, or people won’t want it. I don’t think there are any engineering or physics challenges that can’t be fairly easily addressed, and that includes the cost, if the will is there to do so. With time running out fast we must have a pragmatic way of thinking regarding nuclear, not an ideological one. It would take 51.4 billion 350W solar panels to power the world! Put another way, this is the equivalent of a solar power plant that covers 115,625 square miles. For wind It would take 1.49 million wind turbines to supply the world's energy needs, if we only used extremely efficient turbines (i.e. ones that create 4 MW of power at 40% capacity). This would require 5.85 million square kilometers. All this is not including how much power it would require to power the worlds transport needs... Add in to that the intermittency of solar and wind and it's just not gonna come close. So you see, New nuclear is the clear answer!
Lmao nuclear accident small on the global scale. Sure… the fallout is spread for miles and let’s not forgot the land surround the hypothetical plant would be unusable for a generation or more. Nuclear power has proven time and again humanity are children without a clue. I’d rather coal any day over the dangers of nuclear power.
@@odach2034 The question was what are the better options than nuclear not what are other options. As for tidal and other options if you dont mind damaging the environment so you can use more energy then sure theyre good options. "Tidal barrages have the potential to cause significant ecological impacts particularly on bird feeding areas when they are constructed at coastal estuaries or bays. Offshore tidal stream energy and wave energy collectors offer the scope for developments at varying scales. They also have the potential to alter habitats." "A number of environmental issues have been taken with tidal barrage plants such as sedimentation changes, impacts to the benthic habitat, noise pollution, reduced area of intertidal habitats, a rise in water level, and negative effects to water quality"
Many falsehoods starting with the statement that “most of the energy is used up in spent fuel” while the truth is that 95% of the potential energy is unused. The fuel can be recycled to use the rest.
He also pretended that only two countries have come up with a 'solution' to the nuclear waste 'problem' when in fact many countries already reprocess spent fuel.
Proliferation issues are a real hurdle to taking full advantage of nuclear energy. As a matter of fact, reprocessing of spent fuel is a major red line. However, nuclear technologies per se are not to blame. Rather, it's our enduring collective inability to live in peace with each other.
Proliferation really isn’t an issue. The USA and Russia dismantled hundreds of nuclear warheads. The weapons grade uranium and plutonium was shipped to the Savannah River Site in SC. All the uranium has been down blended and burned in commercial reactors years ago. The only way to dispose of the plutonium is through nuclear fission. The plan was to down blended it and mix it with uranium to also be used in commercial power plants and mixed oxide. The MOX plant in SC was cancelled, so tons of weapons grade plutonium sits in storage at SRS. So, proliferation of weapons grade plutonium from spent fuel isn’t really an issue when tons of weapons grade are available. Besides, you can’t just steal spent fuel rods and turn them into weapons. The casks weight tons.
An average (1000 megawatt) nuclear reactor has approximately 16 billion curies in it's reactor core. 1 gr of Radium =1 curie/sec = 37 000 000 000 becquerels/sec
Violent conflict between groups of humans has been a thing since before we were human. Management of any new technology must take that into consideration.
Anyone at any given time can just say screw it, I'm not part of this agreement anymore (as North Korea did), then start extracting all the stockpiled plutonium out of their spent fuel caches. The whole agreement is incredibly flawed.
I don't mean to sound like I think you are being deceptive, but on two points at least, we have some additional facts; At Fukushima, there was and undersea earthquake causing and tidal wave- the same fault and same result as some 500 years ago at the came place- the tidal wave knocked all the power grid down, which would have been OK- except the emergency generators were in the basements of the affected reactor buildings- where flood waters had immersed them. FWIW, all of Japan sits in a highly likely region to experience earthquakes. PM Abe was so furious with TEPCO executives who had lied to him about readiness just weeks before this happened. My second point of info is that Rosatom, Russia's "captive giant" nuclear energy co. is building 40% of all new nuclear reactors, most in third world nations and financed by Russia- and they are demonstrating many of those great good qualities you talked about. But where they go, the IEAE and the NEA do not have any sway. Details, I know, but details make the world go round.
You significantly underestimate the danger of chemical reactions. When the Farmington coal mine exploded, the explosion was felt 12 miles away. Under the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania burns an anthracite fire which has been burning for about 60 years. All attempts to extinguish the fire failed. Toxic emissions, subsidence, and sinkholes caused by the fire forced the town to be evacuated.
Small modular reactors are far from novel. They've been used to power submarines and aircraft carriers for many decades. Australia has committed to purchasing and operating six nuclear powered submarines. The proliferation problem is over emphasised. Any country with enough energy can produce devastating conventional weapons that don't have the huge maintenance cost of nuclear weapons. It's been argued that Russia probably has no functional nukes. One third of the USA's military budget goes into maintaining its nuclear arsenal. The waste problem as hinted at exists simply because its cheaper to dispose of it than make use of the remaining energy. It's really a huge waste of a resource. As for accidents. Very very little escaped from THMI. Almost all the loss of life from Fukushima happened due to mismanagement of the evacuation. Even so there's been a number of serious incidents in the USSR that have received little coverage not all of which relate to reactors. Chernobyl is a fairly unique event caused primarily by arrogance and ignorance. It also exposes one issue with reactors not mentioned. Once shutdown they must not be restarted for at least 3 days.
It's always interesting to see just how much people do not want to acknowledge the drawbacks of nuclear. People who acknowledge (or suspect) that renewables have major drawbacks, and are not to the task of powering a global civilization, put their hopes on nuclear and want to gloss over nuclear's drawbacks. What none of us want to acknowledge, though, is that we all just need to use less energy.
True the cost of solar construction is declining, but that is only 1/2 the story. The other half is energy to the grid that the consumer can use. No energy on the grid, nothing works in your house. If you install equal amounts of generation of solar, fossil or nuclear, fossil and nuclear can 100% of their rated capacity to the grid all day and all night, it 100% capacity factor. Solar cannot do that since it cannot generate in low light or no light conditions, and can provide power for roughly 25% of the time, 25% capacity factor. To meet the 24 hour capacity of nuclear or fossil, 4 times the amount of solar needs to be installed, with 75% going to storage. The storage is what breaks the back of solar being less expensive. Using LCOE from wiki, solar cost per kw is $830/kw and battery storage is $1380/kw. $830/kw x 4 = $3,320/kw of solar. That’s puts 60 kw to the grid and 18 kw to storage. $1,380/kw x 18 kw = $24,840. Solar with storage comes to $28,840/kw to provide 100% capacity factor that nuclear foes for $6,000/kw or solar with battery storage is 4.5 times more expensive than nuclear. Considering longevity, nuclear plants have a 60 year design life, and some US plants are considering licensing to 100 years, where as solar design life is 30 years.
@@namename9998 The thing about landfills, no one wants one near them, but it’s ok to ship to someone else’s area. Then when a landfill reaches capacity, no one wants to build another for their trash.
@@LSuschena Landfills dont have to exist if people cared about the environment like they claimed but recycling isnt cheap so landfills will continue to exist and peoples health will suffer because of stuff like ewaste. Its predicted that by 2050 there will be 78 million tons of waste from solar panels. It would take Japan 19 yrs to reprocess 10k tons of it. Over 50 years from around the world theres only 250k tons of spent fuel/nuclear waste. All of the 250k tons of nuclear stuff could fit in 1-2 football fields. "By the end of this decade, about 8 million tons of solar modules could arrive in landfills globally, according to an NREL study published in 2020. By 2050, panels could make up 10 percent of all electronic waste, according to the lab." "“With mounting volumes of production and disposal, the world faces what one recent international forum described as a mounting “tsunami of e-waste”, putting lives and health at risk.” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. "In the same way the world has rallied to protect the seas and their ecosystems from plastic and microplastic pollution, we need to rally to protect our most valuable resource -the health of our children - from the growing threat of e-waste.” As many as 12.9 million women are working in the informal waste sector, which potentially exposes them to toxic e-waste and puts them and their unborn children at risk. Meanwhile more than 18 million children and adolescents, some as young as 5 years of age, are actively engaged in the informal industrial sector, of which waste processing is a sub-sector. Children are often engaged by parents or caregivers in e-waste recycling because their small hands are more dexterous than those of adults. Other children live, go to school and play near e-waste recycling centres where high levels of toxic chemicals, mostly lead and mercury, can damage their intellectual abilities Children exposed to e-waste are particularly vulnerable to the toxic chemicals they contain due to their smaller size, less developed organs and rapid rate of growth and development. They absorb more pollutants relative to their size and are less able to metabolize or eradicate toxic substances from their bodies."
It gets worse for solar than even 1/4 of the actual output. In winter it goes down as low as 1/30 of actual rated output of the panels that the Greenies love to use.
The waste situation is somewhat less rosy than is presented here. While spent fuel *could* be moved to dry cask storage after five years in the cooling pool, the majority has not. The IAEA status report of 2022 clearly shows that over 80,000 tonnes of spent fuel remains in pools, whereas only about 50,000 tonnes has been placed in dry casks. There are no permanent disposal sites in the US for the existing stockpile of over 130,000 tonnes of spent fuel, and there are no facilities to repackage existing spent fuel either for transport or final disposal. To summarise, the very first and smallest step to medium term waste hazard reduction is not even half done, and preparation for final disposal has not commenced in any way. Reprocessing spent fuel for re-use sounds good, but winds up causing a bigger problem. The re-use of plutonium in MOX fuel produces wastes that are less tractable than spent uranium fuel. The MOX fission products are derived from a greater range of isotopes, and are themselves more diverse chemically and radiologically. The actinide or transuranic bombardment products are far less simple than for uranium, many more are neutron poisons, and some, particularly U232 involve awkward half lives and strong gamma emitters. Spent MOX fuel requires longer cooling periods, longer interim storage, more expensive reprocessing, and ultimately less-compact and more-expensive disposal. To summarise: No existing commercial reactors or systems can use recycled fuel without creating a larger waste problem than the original single-pass open cycle. Reprocessing for re-use using existing reactor concepts is probably a dead-end, and I have little faith that "future reactors" will be a panacea.
Fair enough, yet hard to put a label on that, call it “less rosy” when commercial spent fuel never killed anybody, vs just the accidents from oil gas coal which blowup, crush, burn, poison, kill people all the time. And then there is the billion tons of junk thrown in the air..
Factual, concise and well reasoned counterpoint to your complimentary and equally factual, concise and well reasoned video "5 Simple Reasons Nuclear is a Great Idea". I am a strong and active advocate of Nuclear energy. With advancements in scalable reactor designs, Nuclear is our single best tool for minimizing the scale and scope of our world's expanding climate catastrophes, but I hugely appreciate this video for illuminating and addressing the challenges that humanity faces in making expanded Nuclear solutions politically, technically and economically desirable. GREAT INFORMATION. EXCEPTIONAL DELIVERY!
Land Use: New solar farm in Virginia consumed 6300 acres of farmland and woodland. Local nuclear plant occupies about 100 acres and produces 125% more power than the solar farm. Power: The nuclear plant provides reliable power 24/7, 365; solar plant is useless at night and cloudy days. Adding two reactors to the plant would eliminate the need for coal power in the entire DELMARVA peninsula and West Virginia. Waste: Yucca Mountain could safely store the waste, but politicians choose to store it all over hells half acre.
“Local nuclear plant … produces 125% more power than the solar farm” North Anna is the nearest nuclear plant. At 1900 MW, it produces 3X more power than than 625 MW Spotsylvania solar farm at its peak, 15x more during a full average day, 25x more than a winter day. Also, this solar farm will need need to be demolished and replaced at least two times in the the already existing life years (43) of North Anna, and likely a third time in the remaining NA lifetime. Last, and this surprised me, the solar farm will use several million gallons per year of pumped ground water to regularly clean the million panels. North Anna by contrast, is a closed loop cooling cycle, pumps water out the lake, pumps it back in.
@@cx24venezuela "Solar plant footprint also means less forest that reduce" flooding. Trees absorb water and no trees means poorer soil which means more flooding which could lead to crops being destroyed (which means more co2 because the crops still exist but theyre not edible. And crops being destroyed contributes to poverty and deaths). Rivers would be protected because trees absorb water (etc) which prevents ground pollutants (fuel, pesticides, etc) from being washed into rivers. Nuclear waste is fine being stored on site but it could be recycled and used as fuel. By 2050 theres expected to be 78 million tons of waste from solar panels compared to over 50 yrs from around the world theres only 250k tons of nuclear waste (most hasnt been recycled). It would take Japan 19 yrs to reprocess 10k tons of solar panels.
One very important factor to consider that this video failed to observe, is when comparing the price of ruinables to nuclear is that the Greenies purposely use RATED output values, not actual production service numbers. The actual number of solar or wind hardware needed actually increases 4X in both price and land use than what they tell us, and as many as 30X less power output in winter. Plus the fact that ruinables cannot operate on the grid without energy storage or fossil fuel peaker plants which they also never mention.
This is a very good explanation of why boiling water plants are not desireable. Operating plants at very high pressures drives cost through the roof and requires very careful safety measures to safeguard them. There are designs that run plants at near atmospheric pressures by moving away from using water as the main coolant. These new designs have to be prototyped and the vetted designs have to be built posthaste. If we wait for fusion it will be to late to do any good, 4th and 5th generation plants can solve a lot of the problems we have with the early 1950's design we cling to.
We don't need them any safer. 1970s era nuclear plants are already the single safest energy conversion technology, period. Any regulations to make them "even safer" serve only to raise the cost and retard the adoption of existing nuclear technology, increasing net harm and excess deaths.
@@clarkkent9080The Bhopal gas accident in India killed 2,900 people and exposed 500,000 people to toxic gas. To put that in context, that's more than every nuclear accident that's ever occurred combined. However, there are no calls for that industry to be closed down.
@@lokai7914 Your original comment was about accidents not deaths. There have been many nuclear accidents in the U.S. over the 70 years and yes there have been deaths. The TMI accident trashed a 3 month old multi billion dollar power plant, cost $1 billion to just clean up the melted fuel and the containment is not scheduled to be cleaned up until 2040, 60 years after the accident. Released radiation rarely kills instantly but do so over time and the cancers caused make those people wish they were killed quickly in a toxic release. Every country is different and you cannot compare a backward country where industry specifically locates there because there are little to no regulations and countries like the U.S. that has stringent regulations.
@@clarkkent9080 Learn a little about the nuclear power industry. It is the ONLY one that I'm aware of where EVERY incident is investigated and the Internation Energy Agency puts in place measures to prevent it from happening again. As for your allegation about deaths due to nuclear radiation in the years after the accident, the UN put out a paper on Chernobyl that expected 5,000,000 deaths over the decades after it. However, that paper was WITHDRAWN as it was found to be scientifically inaccurate and overestimate the casualties by an order of magnitude or more. The Bhopal Gas incident in India killed more people than EVERY nuclear incident combined at 2,900 people in a single day, plus over 500,000 exposed to toxic materials. Nuclear is one of the SAFEST industries out there according to every metric. Try dealing in facts, not speculation.
@@lokai7914 Given that I worked in the nuclear industry for 40+ years at 5 different facilities in the U.S. , I do know a lot about it. In the U.S. the " Internation Energy Agency" has No authority and has never visited any facility that I have worked with. Here we have the NRC. And every transportation accident is investigated by the Traffic Safety Board, Federal Aviation Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Mine Safety and Health Administration, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency , and many more. There have been many nuclear accidents and deaths during the development of Nuclear power in the U.S. and in many other countries. And I am not talking about Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island. Just for one, google SL-1. And there are many many more that just never made national news. Don't believe everything you think. It is a big world
Thorium reactors would solve a lot of problems but it would still require updating the reactors with decent backups . Japan had a problem with their reactors getting hit by a storm! They would have needed better back up safety systems
@@markiplieristhebestpizzato2743 For one, an LTFR is not economically viable. There are lots of technical hurdles to be taken. So far there have only been test reactors with lots of problems. Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 - 'so these are really U-233 reactors. This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste. Even if thorium technology does progress to the point where it might be commercially viable, it will face the same problems as conventional nuclear: it is not renewable or sustainable and cannot effectively connect to smart grids. The technology is not tried and tested, and none of the main players is interested. Thorium reactors are no more than a distraction.
@@markiplieristhebestpizzato2743 Compared with naturally occurring uranium 235, uranium 233 has a lower critical mass, which means that less material can be used to build a weapon. And compared with weapons-grade plutonium 239, uranium 233 has a much lower spontaneous fission rate, enabling simpler weapons that are more easily constructed.
Yeah, that's something the Greeines hide from us since they know revealing that no one has died from stored nuclear waste would destroy their narrative.
Yes it is. Don’t melt already molten fuel, but same exact decay heat, couple MW. If in first few days you don’t get cooling to reactor vessel it’ll melt the vessel, and same problem with melt plug and drain tank. That drain tank is a fail safe to stop fission, and it will. Nothing but time stops decay heat. Temp will keep rising until even molten fuel vaporizes. Only out is small reactor for ambient cooling, or some kind of backup up cooling, passive cooling.
Well commercial nuclear has been around for 70 years and in the last 20 years the U.S. completed 2 new nuclear units but cancelled plans for many more. So what does that say?
@@bigblue2216 Well VC Summer unit 2 &3 were canceled after spending billions in 2017 and Vogtle unit 3 & 4 are currently at $35 billion and unit 4 is still not operating. These are South Carolina nd Georgia where there is 100% political and public support and they are failed projects. So it is just not the repercussions of an accident but the massive expense to build nuclear
Perhaps, but other energy sources have their regulations. It'd be more enlightening to list a specific set of regulations that would be enough to ensure public safety, while reducing burden, if advocates of nuclear power want this addressed.
@bearcubdaycare That is an entirely too long of conversation for this thread. However, it has been estimated that over 15% of the cost of reactor construction is just compliance costs in terms of required personnel, paperwork, etc. It is actually cheaper to just rip out something that has insufficient documentation as verses proving that it will meet the standard. The NRC is terrible when it comes to documentation requirements. And every significant or critical component has to be certified by the builder, a second builder, a quality control inspector, and a contractor assurance inspector. After the fact, it will be reviewed by NRC, DNFSB, and every other interested group. If any of them find a question or defect, regardless of how minor, the builder will just likely remove and rework the item instead of fighting it. This triples the cost of the component.
@@boeubanks7507 The NRC regulations for building a new nuclear power plant have not changed since the TMI accident in 1979 unless you want to build on on the coast. And yes you actually have to document through proof that safety systems were built as designed. At Vogtle they had a delay costing $1 billion because they did not x-ray critical safety system welds or perform performance tests even though that was clearly spelled out and YES the NRC caught the mistake. BTW, The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is an independent organization within the executive branch of the United States Government, chartered with the responsibility of providing recommendations and advice to the President and the Secretary of Energy regarding public health and safety issues at Department of Energy defense nuclear facilities. It has no say so or review over commercial power plants
7:37 false.. I tried to watch the whole video before commenting how wrong everything you are saying is but that is flat out false.. LWR use 3~5% of the uranium and the rest can easily be used in a molten salt burner or breeder if you want to use all the U238. you compare subsidised solar and wind with old reactor designs (standard anti nuc tactic). is it ignorance or malice???
@@Nill757 the hardest part is the chemistry, the physics is simple.. there are plenty of people who know chemistry you can hire.. what's the issue? (Aside from regulators)
@@samuelforsyth6374 physics is easy? Maybe if you know fast neutron diffusion. Control with out negative reactivity coefficient moderator is hard. Near Weapons grade fuel startup plugs. Control over microseconds instead of milli. Then, when those solutions are available, the design has to enable repeated builds that never go out of tolerance or is tolerant of those that do. Same applies to operation and operators. There is no substitute for experience in these last two.
@@Nill757 reactivity is controlled by temp but yes interesting point. You clearly have first hand experience where as I live in a luddite country that banned everything nuclear so I respect your knowledge but still the advantages in costs, safety and applications seems obvious.
Every single one of these so called "bad idea" memes come straight from the Greenies anti-nuke propaganda playbook and are easily counteracted with actual facts you avoided.
I think there will be a time and certain places that New nuclear power will be feasible. Modern small modular fast breeder type reactors with built-in no human auto safeties. They will not leave waste that is dangerous for thousands of years but little more than one hundred years. We have left it far too long for Solar, Wind or any other green energy to work in time. This leaves nuclear to make it big and fast!
Also decay heat is not an issue. It's the design on how to best utilise that decay heat. Also, shut-down should only be used in emergency . The system design is not robust due to poor regulation. Your Also avoiding the terrible waste products caused by using 30 year old process that uses only 5% of fuel. Tgis is outrageous and if a reactor was designed correctly you would not need to shut it down , and it would be able to be run continuously and use 99% of it fuel..
I don't even need to watch the video to know this is moronic. Unless fusion can be made commercially viable and that's still pretty iffy, we need to seriously double down on nuclear.
There were no fatalities for TMI and one for cancer on Fukushima. The fatalities for Chernobyl is the firefighters. The Soviet reactor is very different from western reactors and the gen5 reactors cannot meltdown like TMI/Fukushima did.
The national grid expansion to 5 times existing capacity in a 100% electric world is stupendously stupid amount of money. Stupendously stupid amount of construction time frame.
@@LSuschena copy what I have said and talk to anyone who will listen. The nuclear promoters just want to get their 'nose into the public trough' before we are aware of the bigger problem. Government disaster insurance and Government cash, your taxes will subsidise them for 60years to 100years. Their solution is so expensive and the massive grid costs on top. Nuclear promoters fill everyone with their talking points.
@@stephenbrickwood1602 Well who doesn’t want to feed at the taxpayer trough, but if you really look, the ones getting the money are renewables, billions every year, plus power purchase mandates from state and local governments, essentially they push nuclear out of the market in some states. It’s only the US that is killing off nuclear. In the last decade of so, the number of operating nuclear plants around the world has risen from 410 or so to 437 as of today, while the US shutdown half a dozen.
@@LSuschena I have seen that the fossil fuel industry has been receiving government money and tax breaks for decades aswell. Nuclear has had 75years to proliferate and it is only the climate destabilisation that has seen an interest in this as it is a centralised money 'machine' and a last chance to get past it's greatest problem it's greatest danger. So, climate destabilisation or peace destabilisation?
@@stephenbrickwood1602 The actual estimate is a 30% larger grid capacity, not 5 times more. But you are correct with the 'stupid' amounts of money needed since the Greenies think they can do this with 100% ruinables. That would exceed the GDP of every country on the planet.
Wow, how much conjecture and suggestive projection can you fit into one video. This content creator's material should be viewed very critically because he likes to inject innuendo in between partial facts that do not relate to reality. The one supposition that is right in my opinion is that nuclear energy is way too expensive because the world, politically and socially, has been fed a lot of crap by all sort of possibly well intentioned but, almost entirely ill informed sources. That includes the fossil fuel industries. This, like many other videos on the subject, pass directly over the fact that nuclear energy is far and away, the safest, least polluting, grid scale electric production process in use. And that, despite the inefficient, overly complex, technologies that have been employed by the established industry. New far better technologies ARE in swift development and will, if not sabotaged, be our best answer to benefitting mankind and saving the planet from the greed of a portion of mankind. And don't get me started on nuclear waste disposal. One ten hour video could not provide an adequate explanation of the history and current facts about nuclear "waste" disposal, which is a misnomer in itself. Bad, incomplete info is more misleading than no info.
Being expensive is subjective. If youre talking US prices only then sure but if youre talking about Asian prices then reactors are cheap (and safe). And if youre only comparing costs but not impact then thats complicated. There are articles that talk about using wind turbines to stop/slow hurricanes. That seems like wind turbines change weather patterns. Lets say this is true that wind turbines change weather patterns. You would then need more wind to compensate for the changing winds which makes wind more expensive. If a solar farm is responsible for crops being destroyed because of flooding (removing nearby trees that would have prevented flooding) then the cost of solar increases. Solar and wind arent being recycled which means lower costs. Besides opposition the main reason nuclear is expensive is because some countries are relying on prototype plants rather than mass manufactured.
@@namename9998 No, even in the US solar is more expensive than big nuclear. The video producer failed to mention all the flaws in the Greenie numbers he repeated.
@@cx24venezuela And less when you arent dealing with cheap bureaucrats (Onagawa vs Fukushima). And are nuclear accidents worse than solar or wind? If a solar farm is responsible for destroying a seasons worth of crops (because trees had to be cut down which meant nothing to absorb rain) isnt that worse than a small increase in survivable cancers 10 yrs from now? Not only is that less food to eat and more money needing to be spent (assuming the money is there) to keep people fed but the waste of crops means more co2 from food waste.
I find it disingenuous that you skip over a new generation of plants that are safer. That run on a thorium fuel cycle. That have been built and tested in the late 60 early 70. They do not produce the waist of the current crop. In fact they can be used to reduce the current stock pile of waist with 0 proliferation. They have a 100% pasive safety system and operate at varry low pressure. The cost per megawatt will literally be cents. They as you said are already being operated in China.
Thorium plants certainly do offer a great alternative that have a lot of benefits compared to the current generation like you mentioned. India is also a leader in developing these, but time will tell if we see any big adoption.
@@atomicblender Thorium reactors are not Thorium reactors...they are Thorium-232 decay chain that must be hit with a neutron first to then form eventually Uranium-233 which is then fissle...reactors. It still creates radioactive waste, it still has to be cooled with water which Neutron captures into H3O or molten fluoride salts that cause Tellurium embrittlement of the Hasteloy-n alloy which means they either must use a special alloy and a additive to keep corrosion down for longer than 5 years or replace the core every 4-7 years which is not cost effective.
@@paulmobleyscience Those crazy Chinese went ahead and Finished Alvin Weinberg work and build prototypes of the Thorium reactors in the gobi Desert. If they get the reactor working the way they want there will be a big Financial reward and influencing other countries as well, by selling other countries a reactor with Reduce proliferation concern and a dramatic increase in safety.
You had me until the end when you hocked your video on why nuclear is good. I was planning on promoting this video all over, but I'm against fission nuclear energy because of all the reasons you gave plus many more. I'm working on an argument that talks about the 10 most egregious reasons for not using nuclear. My focus is mainly on the nature of accidents and the levels of risk associated with exposure to accidents, much the way insurance companies come up with actuarials when deciding to provide insurance for something. Can you do this gain only leave out the promotion of your nuclear rah rah video? If you do I'll promote it.
You, like the video producer have failed to fully examine the issue, because there wouldn't even be an antiunclear energy movement in the world today if everyone was educated. "All the reasons he gave" to be against nuclear energy were Greenie talking points with incorrect or misleading assertions.
The main reason newer technology nuclear has not been developed is legacy nuclear interests has squashed it using DOE and NRC revolving door regulation. The price of getting a new design approved prevents ANY change. This is by design.
Overall a lovely useful video. But, knowing someone who worked on it, Yucca failed for technical reasons, not political. The glib notion, usually from non geologists, that there's some magic formation miraculously unaffected by stresses for zillions of years, doesn't seem to hold up to the reality of myriad fractures, and even underground rivers. Everywhere has earthquakes, and those indicate geologic stresses, which are pretty merciless over geologic time. A video describing how this has been addressed in Finland would be useful.
Please look at the newer designs. The newer designs take the Spent Nuclear Fuel and burn it up. Classic pressurized water reactors use up about 1% of the available energy from the fuel. Which is why the partially burnt fuel must be stored for thousands of years. With high burnup, the used / spent fuel returns to safe levels of radiation in a few hundred years. And newer designs are MUCH safer. We the USA did build a reactor that could not explode or melt down. The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment ran for over 60,000 hours. Was intended and showed that it could be built and was safe enough to walk away from -- without any possibility of explosion and it's molten salt fuel flow precluded the possibility of meltdown. And please consider every alternative besides nuclear -- Coal Oil Gas -- all adding to the carbon load -- no thanks Hydro -- check what is the level of Lakes Mead, Powell and Shasta -- bad news there Solar, Wind -- not steady enough Going back to huddling in a cave -- would not fly.
@@hopliterati61 That's by design, just like the purposeful inaction on disposing of the waste in the US. It's a concerted effort to pretend there is some "big problem" with nuclear energy.
Ok first point. Wrong. And misleading. Relate accidents to power output across all industries. Also high pressure water was leading cause to all accidents. We all agree we need to get rid of older high pressure containment.. we have many solutions to mitigate high pressure containment these days. So 1st point is mute and misleading at best
The current safety standards are set by people that don't truly understand the risk. They set unreasonably strict regulations that have show not to work and cause issues. I.e high pressure containment. It's is the only cause and no one in industry wants that regulation.
See the couple dozen reactors built in the U.S. starting late 1960s. Illustrative examples are Oyster Creek in NJ, or the Point Beach plant in Wisconsin. They were built in 3-5 years, capital cost under $1000/KW, todays $. Ran for over 50 years, or still running. Great safety records. It seems unsupportable to make blanket statements about nuclear power technology as always and everywhere “expensive” with this evidence in plain sight. Observe both these early US reactors, along with the build time and cost of modern Asian reactors (SK, China, Russia), then the evidence for the cause of expensive reactors points towards a non technical reason, the modern US NRC. Note that when Vogtle 3-4 completes, it will be the first US plant authorized by the NRC from initial proposal to power. The others all began design proposals with the US AEC.
@3:30 “Severe accidents can cause these particles to break through” What might qualify as a “severe” accident? How many fatalities from radiation? As far as I can tell, from the commercial reactors and not the military, no deaths at TMI, none at Fukushima per the UNSCEAR and WHO reports. Chernobyl killed perhaps a hundred through radiation poisoning, and more later from cancer. Yet Chernobyl was a graphite reactor w a positive feedback that enabled a runaway explosion while operating at power That can’t happen with negative feedback light water reactors. The above should be seen in contrast to the recent Harvard study finding PM2.5 pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for 1/5 of all global early deaths per year. Surely this calamity deserves the label “severe”, and not some accident that, while expensive, killed nobody from radiation. What other choice is there? Solar and wind despite a half trillion Euro spending in the like of Germany cleaned up the grid a bit at the margin, leaving the coal fleet in tact, expanding the gas fleet by half. By contrast, when the French 75% nuclear fleet was built, the large oil fired fleet was completely abolished, no half measures.
Solar is probably going to be worse if we talk just about the panels and not the environmental impact (cutting down trees, etc). And alcoholism and poverty was responsible for the Chernobyl birth defects not radiation otherwise why are birth defects higher in countries with more poverty. And if you never counted the people you work with but started today does that mean the number of people you work with increased overnight or could there be another reason why the number appeared to increase. And what about energy poverty? "Poverty kills: this isn’t hyperbole, but fact. Some 10% of the total deaths, significantly more than 3,000, are directly linked to fuel poverty itself." The Guardian 2020 "By the end of this decade, about 8 million tons of solar modules could arrive in landfills globally, according to an NREL study published in 2020. By 2050, panels could make up 10 percent of all electronic waste, according to the lab." Environment & Energy Publishing "“With mounting volumes of production and disposal, the world faces what one recent international forum described as a mounting “tsunami of e-waste”, putting lives and health at risk.” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. "In the same way the world has rallied to protect the seas and their ecosystems from plastic and microplastic pollution, we need to rally to protect our most valuable resource -the health of our children - from the growing threat of e-waste.” As many as 12.9 million women are working in the informal waste sector, which potentially exposes them to toxic e-waste and puts them and their unborn children at risk. Meanwhile more than 18 million children and adolescents, some as young as 5 years of age, are actively engaged in the informal industrial sector, of which waste processing is a sub-sector. Children are often engaged by parents or caregivers in e-waste recycling because their small hands are more dexterous than those of adults. Other children live, go to school and play near e-waste recycling centres where high levels of toxic chemicals, mostly lead and mercury, can damage their intellectual abilities Children exposed to e-waste are particularly vulnerable to the toxic chemicals they contain due to their smaller size, less developed organs and rapid rate of growth and development. They absorb more pollutants relative to their size and are less able to metabolize or eradicate toxic substances from their bodies." WHO
You also can't use Thorium to make power. Thorium is not fissile and does not fission. You can use URANIUM to make neutrons so Thorium can transmute into URANIUM.
@@clarkkent9080 Thorium is fertile, not fissile. That's true. It's use a naturraly occured isotope of uranium, the U - 233 to start the fission reaction. The thorium cycle is actually a thorium-uranium cycle.
@@umfuturopossivel2137 First U233 is NOT naturally occurring. Second , Uranium 238 like Thorium 232 is fertile and can be transmuted into Pu239 just as Th232 can transmute into U233. We have so much U238, that it is used as ship ballast and bullets. And some U238 is transmuted into Pu239 in every PWR and BWRE in the world so why is there any interest in Thorium ??
When a nuclear plant goes wrong ..U really carnt get up n close n personal to fix the thing..in the guts of the machine it will kill you ..+ it takes time to get really ready to go fix the machine in the guts of that machine..safety stuff to put on and so forth..sometimes a human can't enter at all..so time in a dangerous situation when seconds count..is a disaster waiting to happen..unlike gas n petrol n coal stations you can get to the source of the problem way more quickly..ya goofy m8te from Australia
Agreed, when nuclear goes wrong it can go wrong quickly and be difficult or impossible to physically get in there. Thankfully those cases are rare, but not impossible.
@ForbiddTV burie them you say..OK.. I nominate you to go in there pull em out n burie them...coz noway em I going near that impossible situation...lol..ya goofy m8te from Australia 😆
@@ACE-gk5gi Burial of the site wouldn't even have to go in there at all, don't you get it? Oklo Gabon proves we wouldn't even have to bury it in the first place.
