While I agree that it would make a lot of sense, as another user commented, it's too much of a political football. More's the pity. Nuclear is an incredibly useful power generation method. With current tech, it would take much less time to stand up than it used to.
There are legitimate technical/logistical issues. Nuke plants require alot of water for cooling, have to be sited at a river or lake or something, and the ambient temperature of that water determines whether or not it is sufficient for cooling needs. Even when this is the case, the plant can often raise temperatures enough with its discharge to murder native species living in it downstream of discharge. Like with hydro, there's only so many places nukes can go. Even without nimbyism and politics, nukes may not scale. Depends on how power hungry the next few generations become.
There are definite environmental concerns. Just this morning there's an article about how rising sea levels in the Marshall Islands and melting ice on Greenland will expose nuclear waste. As for heating rivers, this is absolutely true, but with this said, if the plants are small then the discharge will be small, relatively speaking. Also, to the point about location, it is as much about the efficiency of the turbines as it is the temperature of the water. Combining nuclear power with solar updraft towers might be solution.
Wondering why the heat isn’t harvested for something useful like district heating? Too far from cities I assume, but just discharging hot water seems like a waste of energy.
Not to mention we still don't have a method for dealing with the waste they produce. Beyond the effects to the environment directly around it, then we have to find a deep hole to bury the spent fuel.
Nuclear advocates would do well to keep up to date with the Indian Point decommissioning in order to propose solutions to the knottiest problem for nuclear: the plants are owned by corporations who do bad things.
If you want nuclear to prosper, there needs to be solutions to issues like a company announcing it will discharge nuclear waste into the Hudson River with no regard as to how it might affect local economies or residents.
I think nuclear energy is quite a powerful tool in our quest to decarbonize, but I have very little trust in the stewardship of for profit companies who have very little regard for the lifetimes of the materials when they live and die by the quarter (relatedly see PFAs, micro plastics, &c.).
If the public doesn’t trust the organization that controls the nuclear waste, they will stand in the way of new nuclear plants.
Like I said, take a look at Indian Point. There was an uproar about releasing the nuclear waste into the river (on an accelerated timeline), an action which is now prohibited by law.
As a result, there are holding tanks full of radioactive water that no one knows what to do with and that pose a greater threat should they leak. There is public distrust for the company decommissioning the plant, and they are severely hamstrung (how _do_ they get that waste out of there when they can’t transport it anywhere?).
I should note, I’m not really looking to argue state vs non-state ownership. I’m saying that someone needs some real solutions to these types of problems before nuclear could be built at scale.
> Nuclear advocates would do well to keep up to date with the Indian Point decommissioning in order to propose solutions to the knottiest problem for nuclear: the plants are owned by corporations who do bad things.
I may be a libertarian of sorts, but I'd have no problem with nuke plants being nationalized for other reasons, and if that would assuage worries about corporate malfeasance, so much the better.
The Indian Point reactors 2 and 3 were decommissioned in 2020 and 2021 because of pure political reasons. For some reason Andrew Cuomo wanted them shut down.
> corporations who do bad things.
You know that governors can do bad things too, right?
Your link shows that China & Japan can build quickly now, and that the US and the UK could build quickly in the past.
Also keep in mind that the limited amount of data for US/UK plants are for long planned expansions. Vogtle was built to accomodate 4 reactors from the start. So Vogtle 3 & 4 should have taken considerably less time than average.
But let's be generous and say that a greenfield project takes less time to construct than Vogtle, or 10 years. Do you think planning & approvals can be done in less than 10 years?
Even the touted "small modular reactor" projects take over a decade. For example, the INL small reactor project started in 2013, kept getting delayed until it had a start date of 2030, and then was cancelled a few months ago.
And meeting demand with nuclear would require around ~200 full size reactors. 20 years to build 200 reactors sounds extremely optimistic to me.
If you are a capitalist looking for a return on investment, the best time to build a nuclear power plant is probably going to be "whenever we run out of places to put solar panels and wind farms".
mostly because people dont talk about nuclear as much in general. in aus at least, it seems like nobody cares, and the second you raise the idea you get a bunch of people crawling out of the woodwork going "i don't want to grow an extra set of eyes" despite the fact that nobody is proposing to put the plant in their backyard or the fact that just being near a plant isnt all that dangerous in the first place
>> ambitious plan to build 13 nuclear power plants to fulfill most of the (France) country's energy needs
Scaling the surface this means 200 nuclear power plants in the US. There already are 50 so another 150 to go. More chances for Fukushima / Chernobyl situations.
Don't build them on fault zones and tsunami-frequented coastlines, problem solved. There's sure to be 150 locations in the US where neither earthquakes nor tsunamis are frequent occurrences. Also, don't build graphite-core dual-purpose (power- and weapons-grade fissile material-producing) reactors without documenting the dual purpose and without telling the operating personnel about reactor behaviour under stress situations.
EVs provide flexible demand, they are parked 22 hours+ a day, can charge whenever power is negative (which happens 100s of millions of times/year) or power is zero. Right now, there is excess production from renewables, which is wasted. EVs can absorb all that.
We don't need quick chargers at home, unless you mean 240V chargers? Which is in some of the countries with 110V/120V.
We don't need more generation capacity. Utilities are keen on increasing costs, their profits are a percentage of cost, there is a nexus between generation, transmission and distribution companies to keep adding capacity. This was pointed out by many commenters, a recent out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39487714
The idea is to a) use V2G vehicles over a day / night cycle to "buffer out" gaps from renewables and b) incentivize high-demand consumers during low-production times to shut down by the power of the free market.
Point a) has already been explained by GP, but b) is the interesting one. Right now there's barely any incentive for large consumers such as aluminium smelters to shut down or limit consumption during the night (where there is no solar energy), the only incentive these kind of consumers get is a premium for short-term load shedding. We would, as a society, need far less of generation capacity buildout if we can get the large consumers to drastically reduce their consumption at night.
But don’t we want them running at night today vs during the day when more power is used. Scheduling those work shifts at the smelter is going to be annoying. “Sorry Bob, the power market is spiking now, you’ll need to come in 8 hours later to start your shift.”
We can solve this problem simply by closing all our plants and importing more aluminum from Japan.
Which is exactly why California has the highest growth in Air Conditioning usage. Most places were at 90%+ a decade ago; not much room to grow. OTOH SF has grown from 30% to 50%.
Electric cars will take ~30 years to transition (~10 years before almost all new cars are electric, and then another 20 years before the old cars are off the road). They will increase electrical demand by 20% over 30 years, or under 1% a year increase to demand.
The US increases its generating capacity by about 4% per year. (50GW added per year, 1.3TW total).
I don't think so, the adoption rate has done nothing accelerating since WWII. Once EV will be mainstream enough the switch will probably be quite brutal.
I don't think it is economically viable to maintain two sets of power distribution (electricity and petrol) at the same time so countries will probably "push out" traditionnal petrol stations once they think EV distribution is okay enough
The other day I was at a Target parking lot plugging in the EV at an island of about 6 superchargers. I looked over the rest of the parking lot at hundreds of ICE cars and it just struck me that getting the whole fleet electrified has got to be a substantial power demand increase, but maybe not. Which raises the question, what the heck is all the power being used for? :-)
The easy answer is bitcoin, AI & data centers. Those are noticeable because they're new. That's some of it, but AFAICT it is mostly air conditioning. Hotter days with more places being conditioned.
I have no take on whether or not this specific situation is priced in or not. However I’d challenge you on the second comment. I’ve found Taleb’s advice very actionable but it did take a lot of thinking about it to move from abstract thoughts into practice.
The same can be said about WATER and how little or clean drinking water is available.. If Nuke firms needs tons of water where is the water going to come from which already is scarce.. NOW! While I'm at it.. get rid of all mobile devices which literally suck energy.. kill off streaming and go back to landlines/cable TV. :-O See, the problems are too vast to say one solution is better than the other but yet here we are.. Go figure but I'm not.. For starters, I know how to cook without electricity and I dont depend on a mobile device.. Small things we'll need to know and learn when we don't have electricity anymore..
What is with the explosion of these manic sounding doomers? I appreciate conservation and am thoughtful of my use of resources but holy heck, these folks are pretty set on a lifestyle that we only read about in sci-fi books.
While nuclear generation plants do create waste, I was under the impression that most modern designs do a pretty decent job of recycling water that is contaminated or not having contaminated water to begin with so cooling water just gets ejected back out?
A source of the increasing demand are data-centres scaling up for AI (machine learning) workloads... and crypto mining is still happening I guess. They're also sucking up a lot of fresh water for these tasks. I'm curious how significant this portion of the demand is.
If it's big enough, maybe start making those companies pay for these externalities they're forcing on the rest of society.
Though for other industrial uses... does the U.S. have a plan for SMR research and policies for deploying them when the tech is ready? I'm a bit ignorant on that one. I know Canada has been making moves in that direction.
Externality of energy consumption? I'm pretty sure they are already paying for that. Or are you saying they should pay more per KWh than some other user for some reason? As for SMRs my guess is that local regulators will be the first hurdles to overcome. Cities and states will either embrace or reject the risk/reward there. I know the DOE approved one last year at the national level.
My small city of 50K is soon to be home to an $800M 700K sq ft Meta data center that will employ 100 people. I don't think the planners involved in these deals care much about risks, like the power company might have to petition the state regulator to increase rates for everyone so they can build a new power plant to satisfy demand. IMO they are only focused on the reward part.
> Or are you saying they should pay more per KWh than some other user for some reason?
I just checked, and residential electricity users pay more than commercial or industrial users:
"Residential Sector: The average price is approximately 17.08 cents per kWh. Commercial Sector: The average price is around 13.10 cents per kWh. Industrial Sector: The average price is about 9.47 cents per kWh."
I’m not even sure why we would need to ‘make’ them pay for this. As it says in the article:
> A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. ... Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers..
Sounds like these companies have capital investment available, and their demand is inducing increased supply of data centers.. which should also induce demand for electricity supply too.
If they really want to grow fast they are welcome to invest in generating capacity and grid infrastructure too.
> If they really want to grow fast they are welcome to invest in generating capacity and grid infrastructure too.
That's what I was getting at: if the grid is burdened by their demand, and the demand is outpacing other uses (preventing other productive use of that electricity like say... powering air conditioners in a heat wave) then maybe they should be contributing a portion of their capital to building more capacity.
Why does every one else, from residential users to small businesses, need to suffer rolling blackouts because a bunch of VPs need to, "win at AI?"
At this point it seems like the big tech companies are simply using up as much supply as they can get in order to grow and that there's only so much capacity to go around since funding for expansion comes from investments in projects that aren't being funded by the largest growing set of users creating that demand.
Another article that misrepresents the situation with hyperscale datacenters. They are concentrating loads into extremely efficient cloud facilities, which shifts a lot of energy from one column to another in EIA's reports. It used to be if you had a 100kW corporate datacenter with a PUE of 3.0 and a cost utilization of 1%, that was counted under "commercial buildings" or "office". With those workloads now running in PUE 1.1 datacenters where the cost utilization is 80%+, the true situation is much better, but the energy use is in another column.
This is an easily solvable problem. Make crypto-bros subsidize the electric generation they consume. Levy a tax on bitcoin mining and use that to build more power stations.
Bitcoin mining does subsidize electricity generation. It creates an extremely reliable floor price market for power, stabilizing demand and making power generation a more predictable business. There's a reason large renewable facilities are happy to contract with nearby bitcoin mines.
> Why not levy a tax on Bitcoin transactions in general
Do you have an idea of what this would entail at a legal, accounting, or technical level? This is sort of a bizarre suggestion from any of those perspectives
Just because it has "transaction" in the name doesn't mean it is applicable to bitcoin transactions.
Proposing a bitcoin transaction tax is more akin to imposing a tax on intrabank account transfers, which is facially absurd, because it's essentially a no-op from an accounting standpoint.
The same people who determine what actions are “crime”, who gets to be “married”, what’s “pollution”, and so on. (See? The scare quotes apply to literally everything in society.)
In a typical democracy, those people are legislators, courts, and government agencies tasked with oversight.
Time for America to do the same?