Is nuclear power really that slow and expensive as they say?
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Out of the many bad arguments against nuclear power, there are two good arguments: It's too expensive and the power plants take too long to build. But are they true? And if so, why is it that nuclear power is so slow and so costly? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
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00:00 Intro
00:39 Bad Arguments Against Nuclear Power
03:51 Construction Time
10:24 Cost
25:28 Summary
26:07 Walk the walk with Planet Wild
#science #nuclear
This video comes with a quiz which you can take here: quizwithit.com/start_thequiz/1703709451798x425667829179799040
You tell about how phycist are constantly wrong predictions yet you think Climate scientists are still credible 😊l
It's finally completed: kzhead.info/sun/nsmTntJsZHeZZok/bejne.html
Danke Frau Hossenfelder, ich habe nun gelernt das ich mir in ca.7 Jahren mit nötigen Kleingeld und Geduld, den nötigen Vorschrift und der richtigen Versicherung (Check 24), ein eigenes Kraftwerk in den Hinterhof bauen könnte. 👍😃
Global warming is necessary to get us out of the ice ages and back to normal.
*3 major accidents... #3mileisland
Great video. I worked in nuclear power for over 40 years. The biggest challenge was educating the public. We failed to address it early on. Catch-up is nearly impossible, especially with population growth, lack of education, and fear of science.
Its wierd, even as a kid I knew that a lot of the fears ppl had were mostly made up, or intentionally exaggerated. Currently we have mining companies buying up old uranium mines because they believe there's no way ppl can keep ignoring it's benefits.
It's finally completed: kzhead.info/sun/eNafpLp-j4WIpqc/bejne.html
So did I, and the biggest challenge IN THE US is working AROUND THE PIE IN THE SKY PROMISES OF THE NUCLEAR VENDORS WHO LIE, CHEAT, AND STEAL LIKE DRUG PUSHERS.
"Fear of science" That's a scary thought. Most people are barely different from most animals.
Don't forget active spread of disinformation by certain politicians and the media.
I would prefer to live near a nuclear waste storage site than a coal fired power plant, oil refinery, chemical works, waste to heat plant, etc. They are all likely going to do more harm to my health than a nuclear waste site.
As a chemist, I second this lmfao. I'd rather live next to a nuclear power plant too
FYI there is wind/solar/hydro at a third of the price.
@@JuanCEOs725 distribution and storage is difficult. nuclear is highly predictable and dependable. There is no reason not to do both. Batteries are the antithesis of renewable and the level of interconnectivity required to connect regions with different weather conditions to the extent that power can be ensured at all times would drastically increase that price.
Funnily enough, a coal power plant emits a measurable amount of radiation.
1) there is nothing unusual happening with the climate. 2) there is nothing wrong with burning fossil fuels. Its problems in high-density areas are trivial to fix and already have been fixed. CO2 is not a pollutant. 3) Climate alarmism is a big-lie superstition supported by tax-bribed liars. (See Climate Discussion Nexus for 100s of videos on climate quackery, deception, and realism.) 4) decarbonization is 21st century pyramid building and human sacrifice. 5) there is NO excuse for expensive electricity. Electricity generation is boring. Just burn coal and scrub the smoke in densely populated areas. 6) the only challenge is manufacturing market quantities of cheap gasoline. South Africa has already done this for decades (Sasol), using coal
1 thing Sabine failed to mention about the Fukuashima accident is that the backup generators that run the cooling pumps were on the basement floor of the plants. So when the tsunami struck it flooded the basement rendering the generators inoperative. In an area with frequent severe earthquakes you would have thought the designers would have foreseen that.
Something that the engineers had warned about even during construction but they were ignored by upper management. For anyone wondering why, the plans for Fukushima were based on a GE design meant for California, where tsunamis are not a concern.
Hey, but at least Japan holds the record for the fastest built nuclear power plant. /s This reminds me of a hyperbole that handymen like to tell: "I can do it cheap, fast, or good. Pick two."
The plant was designed and built according to american engineers, which had placed no thoughts to the idea that the generator room could be flooded, because they thought the tsunami wall would remove any form of danger to the plant what they forgot however is that their little tsunami wall was not really designed for the kind of tsunami that eventually did end up hitting Fukushima, even in Soviet Union the nuclear plants had several generator backups in case of WW3, there were several in bunkers, some on taller floors capable of all running the pumps in emergency, but in ol' Japan there no such thing as WW3 so its all peachy! Whats ironic is Chernobyl was designed to survive Earthquake up to 7 on the richer scale as required by all Soviet buildings in case of nuclear attack.
@@SMGJohn That's the dilemma of nuclear power plants: you eventually can't think of every possible future scenario to make the technology failsafe. But even the risks that you do know about, that you can and must minimize will make planning and building costly and time consuming.
@@docNeptun Well, placing backup generators in a basement is not very well thought out regardless, thankfully the Japanese government has made some changes so that wont happen again.
In the UK the main problem with any infrastructure development is not regulation, but the fact that anything that takes more than a couple of years falls at victim to winds changing in electoral cycles. So things get sent back to committees, extra studies, etc all of which delay starts or introduce extra hold points and mid project delays. This has happened with projects such as HS2, Hinkley Point, etc.
cmon, the UK worship the Tories as gods. The only time Labour has won in the past 45 years is when you had a Tory pose as a Labour leader. The UK is basically a 1 party state.
Really? That’s why it’s going to take 12-14 years to build Hinckley Point C, from the point at which construction began, not even counting design, planning, and the rest. Old style Nuclear is a dinosaur technology that is only useful in China and other 3rd world countries where getting it built is the only priority.
The point is it’s Government inflating time tables and expenses!!!
@MultiTacs ish, it's mostly the process for lobbying and consultation over inflates the influence of a small group to say no to anything
And HS2 wasn't even worth doing
If I had the choice between living next to a chemical factory or living next to a nuclear power plant or nuclear waste repository, then I would always choose the nuclear power plant or nuclear waste repository.
I'd choose the power plant because you might as well get cheap power out of the deal, kinda like putting a data center right next to a hydroelectric dam.
@@jasonk125 I still remember the Ukrainian solar farm disaster of 1986. The plant covered Europe with an intense wave of extreme sunlight.
@@jasonk125 A solar farm is only comparable if you combine it with a Tesla Megapack. Would you also like to live next to a Tesla Megapack?
@@robertmuller1523 Mass solar is especially viable if it's a thermal plant (molten salt) connected by ultra high voltage lines with massive storage like pumped hydro. That's what China is doing. China is investing very heavily into pumped hydro energy storage and ultra high voltage connection, both of which are extremely efficient. It allows China to build HUGE solar farms in the desert, transfer the energy to factories on the coast, banking any excess in lakes.
Don't choose either, dummy. Live next to a solar or wind farm. They are going to be everywhere.
My father helped build three nuclear power plants in the 70s. According to him the first one took 7 years to build, the second took 5 years. During the second they started work on the third and it was on schedule for three years mostly as an effect of logistics and lessons learned. He switched jobs after a negative referendum on nuclear power so he never saw the completion of the third reactor and is not sure if they kept the schedule.
It's finally completed: kzhead.info/sun/eNafpLp-j4WIpqc/bejne.html
I helped build 3 in the 70s that were YEARS behind and hundreds of millions over budget and situated in an area with a mushrooming population. Oh, and two were on a river that had flow decreases in the summer so they had to cut power ..., all because the project save tens of millions not having to build a new transmission line for them. Guess who has to pick up the $$$$ for the power they have to 'import' because of that screwup? Oh, oh, and because the utility on two of them ignored their OTHER units, those units got shut down by the NRC for general incompetence and arrogance to regulators. How much more money do you think that utility incompetence cost the rate payers? We'll not discuss their horrendous waste handling practices and the like. All of this was in a era where a huge talent pool of nuclear construction was present, and YET they couldn't get my 3 plants finished near time and budget NOR could the 2 Georgia Power plants get finished on time or budget, but needed an emergency flare to the industry to dig them out of their hole. NOW, guess which utility considered itself qualified to build the nuke vendor's LATEST, GREATEST, FASTEST, SHINIEST PLANTS, yet they STILL went $Billiond and many year OVER?! If you don't have the experience, the industry and the people who got their golden retirements from it will snow you every time with lies, promises, and marketing.
I can't find any reference to a referendum on nuclear power in the UK. Was this Germany or Italy perhaps?
@@alanwhiplington5504 probably Italy
Could be Sweden... That was a "vote all alternatives to sooner or latter close them down" And latter opinion shifted back to more "sound looks on it". After that the "GreenMafia" and the Socialist created a tax thing that made the commercial part non existing for the smaller and the oldest reactors to be scrapped.... AND TODAY WE SUFFER ENORMUS COST FOR ENERGY DUE TO EU EXPORT "FORCING" RULLES... @@alanwhiplington5504
Great video as usual! I am a retired engineer from a large US utility company. About 20 years ago, I pushed, as best I could, the modular nuclear plant idea. My thought at the time was suggesting using pre-approved (Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)), shop-fabricated and inspected (as physically possible, given size to ship), 200-300 MW (thermal) size nuclear modules. These would be based on, or exactly the same as, the proven (since the 1950s) Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) that the US Navy uses in over 150 nuclear powered vessels. The thought was to reduce siting, permitting, warship reactors are "hardened" for war, and can withstand many G's (earthquakes), and construction times, via maximized shop-fabrication of nuclear and other components. As far as I can tell, from public information, these reactors have a perfect safety and reliability record. For electrical generation, the reactor steam (thermal) output could be headered together to drive a single large turbine generator or several smaller turbine generators. I could go on, but enough said for now. Keep up the great work...!!
The problems with modular nuclear reactors are that nobody has a real concept how to produce them at a reasonable cost. The projects so far have all exploded in costs. Test projects have failed. We won't see any serious designs until the 2030s now. There are also all sorts of other problems with using these at a singnificant scale. They generally either produce an obscene amount of waste or rely on completely unproven technologies. Small modular reactors sure look like vaporware at this point. They continue to get more expensive due to issues like rising steel prices and higher personell requirements. They then to make up for their problems by proposing increasingly exotic fuel cycles, making them less and less feasible. Whereas renewables and battery storage continue to become cheaper at a massive rate. And as the share of renewables continues to increase, nuclear plants become even less attractive since they are even less efficient if they get pushed into the role of load-following plants. Nuclear is already looking bad and only falls further behind.
@@T33K3SS3LCH3N I’m not educated l Have there been any advancements in battery storage in the last decade? Costs can go down all they like, but batteries are inefficient, so I don’t think they will solve anything until there’s new technology
Well, the world has moved on…now solar and wind are much cheaper. And that is not even mentioning hydro.
@@JuanCEOs725 Wind and Solar are NOT suited to BASE LOAD (24/7) operation. And, many hydro sites are also NOT suited to base load operation due to environmental issues like fish habitat and other water uses. Nuclear plants run best at base load (24/7). Wind and solar are neither dispatchable, nor is their capacity committable. That is, their capacity and energy cannot be committed the day or week before to serve load and/or schedule other generation sources to load follow. In addition, their energy output cannot dispatched (controlled at will or automatically) during the daily load cycle. To make up for these wind and solar shortcomings, a system operator must either, commit (schedule) other generating units to have on-line spinning reserve capacity (much more than would be necessary without wind and solar on the system) and dispatch it to follow load, or have some type of energy storage device(s) (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro) on the system to allow load following during passing clouds, wind shifts, darkness, etc. Without some type of storage, generation capacity (power output, Megawatts) must match electrical load (power demand, Megawatts) in REAL TIME, second by second. Today's wind and solar, operating on a large scale system, is not as cheap as it may seem due to these (and other) accommodations required to integrate them into a reliable large scale electrical system. I could go on, but enough said for now......
I mean, if you spend 5 years trying to get all necessary approvals for every technological process and then it goes nowhere because local government prioritizes politicing over getting shit done, of course it'll be slow. Yes, it does sound sort of specific because it is.
it is not a mistake when people confuse "mean and median" People just choose the one that best supports their arguements
Just like Sabine did in this video. Why only pick construction time and only from last century and a bit later until 2010? Open the data, let us see for ourselves.
@@MattCasters well there were few reactors built before the 20th century, and mid 20th century you cant compare the safety standards with modern ones..
@georgelionon9050 exactly. Something is swept under the rug. Sabine has been on a continuous anti renewables and pro nuclear streak in her videos and it feels like the actual data is less important that her "nuclear is going to save us all' story. Oh, only a few times more expensive is no big deal? Tell that to the poorest people on the planet.
Yes, your comment makes you both a cynic and a realist - do you mind if I borrow it for later use? It's bound to come in handy.
@@andrewharrison8436 I'm absolutely no cynic. Eco-modernist seems to be the term these days.
More radioactivity is emitted into the environment from burning coal than from nuclear power. The ample waste from the use of coal is also radioactive.
Right, very few people know that.
Why did then increase the radioactivity after the Chernobyl incident by a factor of 100, in some animals by a factor of almost one million at a distance of more than 1000 miles? I don't remember that as of a sudden 100-times more coal power plants were turned on.
@@geraldeichstaedt Chernobyl was a special case, they used burnable graphite as moderator there, that burned and caused the terrible fall out. Nobody would build such a design again, there's better technology today. And the first commenter here is right, I live beneath the biggest coal mine of Europe, you can measure the increase of radiation there, it's because of the tremendous amount of material they take from the depth, where automatically the radiation is higher.
@@Thomas-gk42 I remember the time before the Chernobyl event. The reactor type was considered inherently safe. The admittedly significant radioactive load due to burning coal is nothing compared to the release of radioactive material from Chernobyl. That's why the radioactivity went through the roof after the accident. Up to a millionfold compared to the "natural" radiation due to further enrichment processes. Our nuclear power plants had to switch off their alert system due to the radiation from outside. That had nothing to do with burning coal.
@@geraldeichstaedt Hi Gerald, you are right, Chernobyl was in the SU, and always everything was save before an accident happens. In the west, the nuclear lobby made the same mistake in the seventies in claiming, these plants would be absolutely save. Every technology has it's risks of course, but in case of nuclear power they are widely overestimated. When Chernobyl happened, my young wife was pregnant and we were very worried about the health of our unborn son. But if you look at the death zone there today, it's a nature paradise. And technology goes on and gets saver. The tremendous danger, humanity has to face is the global warming caused by CO2 emissions, that have to stop immediately, and renewables alone cannot do that. So we should be open in all directions. Sabine is a bit on one side here, I don't see a sense in reckoning deaths from one to another topic. But anyhow she did a great job in provocing and starting a fruitfull debate. Coal mining causes low radioactvity if course, but over a gigantic region, while nuclear waste is ridiculous small, Sabine is right at that point. But it's not the major issue as you can see here in western NRW. Its the incredible land use, the destroying of whole landscapes and forests, the massive expulsion of the population - and we're not in China, toxic dust and an incredible amount of CO2 emission. Now Germany buys nuclear power from France and Belgium and imports fracking LNG, that's even worse than the own brown coal.
It seems to me the biggest issue moving forward on nuclear is that the politicians are afraid of even talking about this because of attacks from special interest groups or the irrational and uninformed segment of the public. In Canada our political system is embroiled in appeasing special interests rather than building a rational energy strategy. I would also like to see the life cycle costs for nuclear which could be relatively low compared to alternatives. I have also heard there are nuclear power plans that can use the existing spent fuel. Thanks for the video.
Absolutely the best episode. You nailed so many nuances of the nuclear power topic that so many just don't understand well enough to discuss dispassionately. As one who grew up in the heart of TVA and had the great fortune of knowing so many well informed people in ORNL, TVA, and government, your insights are SO appt on. Regulations became a cash cow for the government for TVA as one example as you so rightly called out. I fully admit that I support nuclear power yet your approach to this topic and the facts that you presented really paint an accurate picture and I'm grateful
Do you think it is a coincidence that the country (Japan) which has the fastest build times and lowest cost since it outsurced the regulations and safety checks to the companies that build and operate the plants is also the only western country that had a major accident? One that was easily avoidable with better safety checks and regulations? I think not. Before answering keep in mind that there were other reactors nearer to the Fukushima earthquake that experienced higher tsunami waves. But for those Tepco bothered to build a higher Tsunami protection wall - something critics told them before 2011 they should do on all powerplants but they deemed to expensive.
I was tangentially involved in the construction of Kashiwazaki Kariwa unit 6 in Japan - that was the first ABWR to come online and it took 3 years from site breaking to first criticality. Full grid connection was about a year later. This was in the mid '90s, so even back nearly 30 years ago it was certainly possible to get even a novel plant plant design running fairly quickly.
How much time planning and getting permits? THIS is the problem, especially in USA. And her example from TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) They revoked permit and had to revise design to get new permits. That's why it had a 22 year pause in construction. You can't even depend on being able to build it after you got the permits. They permits can be recinded and make you tear it down to start over.
That's a good question, and I don't actually know the answer to it. The previous construction start on unit 4 had been a couple of years earlier (unit 5 was already built) - but I don't know how long the whole approval process was. I think the pacing item was the approval of the actual reactor design, since it was a variance from the original plan to use a BWR-6@@fhuber7507
@@fhuber7507 This. Most studies regarding construction times don't take this into account. The iaea study quotes France as one of the quickest builders and they had such an insane increase in building time that prices are exploding too (have we reached the 20 billion mark yet?). The study also simply compared number of regulations and not the difficulty to obtain them. In Japan, everything is streamlined. Most other countries are a clusterf* compared to them. Not even going to go into the China issue :D France is also bound to set more regulations now to make sure that nuclear power plants don't suck their adjacent rivers dry - one of the bigger reasons why so many reactors went offline in 2022 beside extension of lifespan checks for a fifth of their reactors (the other fifth was supposed to be done in 2024 I think?! Let's see if they're going to be out again :D )
That is an enormous facility. I visited Kashiwazaki over a decade ago. Very impressive. I think they may be trying to restart the plants this year or next?
Tell us about the 2007 Kashiwazaki Kariwa seismic event (and warning) and consequences on reactors.
Thank you for this video, but you missed one important point: It is wise to analyze not only the LCOE, but the VALCOE (Value-adjusted levelized cost of electricity) for each type of energy in different energy mix scenarios. In that case you really see the benefits of including nuclear energy in the power production systems of a country. You have to consider the cost of the storage and distribution systems.
Also the numbers Is totaly Bull. No the source don't agree wirh each other. Its just lika lazard spam out like 3 reports per year pretty much swamping it with false report making it look like most report agree, when it's really a very small subset that spam faulty numbers.
This gets overlooked all the time and it drives me nuts. Renewables aren't a viable standalone solution to power generation without storage, new grid infrastructure, and a comprehensive recycling program. The monetary and carbon costs for those add-ons make them at least as expensive as new nuclear. The catch is that you can sell solar panels and wind turbines without addressing these issues and just kick the can. Can you imagine if a nuclear plant stalled intermittently throughout the day? Only connected to a rural community 100 miles away from where it was needed? Or if there was no plan in place to deal with radioactive waste?
LCOE is also just using Vogtle's build costs for its basis which paints a really misleading picture on costs as you're using a huge outlier, not the global average. This is due to the fact Lazard is more US centric as they've admitted to. Also, their Solar/Wind estimates do not include firming requirements, and the moment they did include it, it was only 4 hours MAX which is insufficient if you want a stable grid. Yet even with 4 hours of firming requirements, the costs actually balloon quite a bit nearing even their Nuclear costs. This is because nameplate capacity =/= generation capacity when factoring capacity factors which is around 25% for solar, and 40% for wind vs 92% for Nuclear. You'd need to overbuild more than 1GW nameplate capacity for Solar/Wind to even get near 1GW nameplate capacity for a Nuclear plant.
@@ryoukokonpaku1575 you are only getting 25% of solar with a movable disc in a dry climate. With a fix panel you can expect no more than 15% and that is ina dry climate.
@@matsv201 Oh forgot to actually incorporate that, this actually applies to Wind as well. Renewables in general are too variable imo, that volatile nature is a cost often not computed by these models and they actually end up being more expensive in practice when you actually start banning fossil fuel use like gas which hides the true costs of such buildouts.
I worked on the flood risk assessment for a nuclear power station currently being constructed in the south of England during 2009, during which time I recall seeing design documents predating 2000. The latest estimated completion date I read is 2026! In other words 17 years from the planning stage and arguably more than quarter of a century(!!) from contract commencement. All for
Getting one built on the UK is a nightmare of red tape and planning issues, all because of laws and regulations lobbied foe by the oil industry.
It's almost as if the less you do something the harder it is to do it. A bit like training for a race after you haven't moved from your couch for 2 years. Weird!
This is great video! Thank you! As a child, I watched a film about Chernobyl. It was the 90s, and I was very afraid of nuclear power. But, as an adult, I understand that this is our future. I hope other people can understand this
Unless fusion takes off, it's likely not our future either. There's little money in it. Fear isn't the problem, it's just not profitable.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn it will be when the oil runs dry.
Why? The plant was located in the far reaches, so meltdown didn’t matter so much, just fence off the area and keep people away, for whatever decades it takes to cool the fuel down. Once the fuel is activated, and control over power is lost, the temp rises to infinity minus one and can’t be stopped. The saying goes burns a hole to the other side of the world, the idea is to transfer the heat generated from fission/fusion or whatever, until active fuel is used up. Look up Fukushima Power Plant. Go wind and solar and hydro and natural gas and never look back. Even burn garbage. Conserving energy means cutting power needs. Peace from NYC, USA.
Hopefully people understand that Soviet Union would not have the best safety standards.
@@brucestewart3170 I've seen other people in these comments saying 'but what about Chernobyl?' It's really disappointing, because - as you said - that was an example of the Soviet Union putting on it's 'best' work... so the design was inherently flawed, the reactors were managed poorly, and everything about them was heavily coated in secrecy. Chernobyl is an example of a few individuals performing stress tests on an inherently flawed reactor design which had been known to be flawed from 1983 (when the same design had a much smaller incident in a Lithuanian power plant), and everything going wrong as a result. In the time since, nuclear physicists and reactor engineers have naturally improved many things and made the designs ACTUALLY perfectly safe, not Russian 'safe'. In a modern nuclear reactor there should be no possible combination of inputs over any period of time that can cause it to go critical or supercritical. They are designed so that it literally isn't ever a physical possibility, even in the worst possible case.
Fukushima happened because of old Generation I plants. Onagawa was closer to the epicenter and hit with a bigger tidal wave, but all of their GenII reactors were fine. At Fukushima, there were 6 reactors, 4 GenI reactors that eventually melted down (I think the last one lasted something like 4 years), and 2 GenII reactors that, although they were shut down, they never melted down or had any other problems.
No! Fukushima happened because TEPCO failed to build the seawall to the height recommended by the experts. Period. full stop.
Fukushima Daichi had a lower seawall of 5 and 10 meters, and Onagawa had a 14 meters seawall.
@@MsPedross That was just a matter of protecting the backup generators. The tidal wave took out Fukushima's backup generators, and the disaster meant they couldn't get more in. It didn't directly affect the reactors.
The argument is that the nuclear plants are so complex that there are always some serious faults that will break sooner or later. A well known rule of life for all software engineers.
@@shanedk Location of said backup was the main issue and most obvious way to have avoided meltdowns - not placing the backup generators in the basement.
In France, decommissioning of Brennilis Nuclear Power Plant, a fairly small 70 MW power plant, already cost €480 million (20x the estimate costs) and is still pending after 20 years. Despite the huge investments in securing the dismantlement, radioactive elements such as plutonium, caesium-137 and cobalt-60 leaked out into the surrounding lake.
And how many atoms of plutonium was that exactly, probably so little that nobody would have noticed
What happened to the lake?
actually, the last estimated budget is ~ 850M€. The contamination of the water table with tritium was mainly caused by an accident in 1988, the nuclear plant was stopped in 1985. That contamination is said to be under the standard threshold. But it is not an easy task to know what information can be trusted, as in France there has been quite a lot of fake news from anti-nuke activists, and same amount lies and lack of transparency from our governments.
@@trent800you're talking about the French. So they say the water is within UN health limits for drinking. It just took 14 hours to admit it to people locally that the release had occurred, when the authorities had no idea of the consequences. This is why many people distrust nuclear power.
Ever wondered that maybe those delays might not be technical but political or financial? And that any leak becomes more likely the more time passes with an open unfinished building site that contains fuel rods waiting to be put at good use?
I could say this under a more adequate video, but I really have to say it. You're an incredible scientist and you always work with lucidity and critical thinking, which make you and your work good and reliable. Thanks to you I now see how modern science is and how it could improve and you motivate me to become a physicist and solve problems of modern day physics.
She is spouting nonsense. That's not work, that's bullshit.
@@hans-joachimbierwirth4727 your biases and group-think misconceptions that make you say this. When a clear-headed researcher says these things with no care for your group-think, you react violently with cognitive dissonance just like that.
Yeah, lol, my "biases and group-think misconceptions" being a former chief consultant of the largest producer of nuclear facilities in Europe. You might wand to open your window and try some fresh air. It helps avoiding early onset of cognitive decline!@@jesan733
But for nuclear energy she thinks as a physisist. But if nuclear power plants are cheap and fast to build, why does nobody build them large scale? Because the are of high risk, from an investment point of view. If something like Fukushima happens again your investment is gone. More or less everywhere in the world.
@@danchris7179 high risk? Two major incidents occurred in many years of work, and there are many nuclear plants that work to this day and nothing happens there. Both Fukushima and Chernobyl were the rare exceptions
Very interesting video, as usual. One thing to note is that the planning stage was not part of this discussion, but it puts a hindrance on things. Lots of people don't even to have a Wind Mill or heck, some even don't want Solar Cells near their place. Regulations and laws allow the "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) problem to bring lots of projects to stop (at least for some time), even less impactful than a nuclear power plant. Planning more in the more densely populated countries will prove a challenge. Of course, how much political will can mean and could change: In Germany, entire villages have been demolished to get more coal. That's more than just a "Not In my Backyard" problem, that's: "We don't just want your backyard, we take your entire home and everything around it to do continue to do somethig harmful for the environment, and that's it". And Japan is also pretty densely populated, and they managed it to. I am still just not sure it's worth the effort and risks, if solar power and wind are as efficient as they are.
The issue with solar and wind is mainly the fact that they can’t provide a base load power i.e. they can’t provide the constant minimum reliable power we need for every day. If it’s not sunny or not windy, then you get no power. This needs to be filled by something like nuclear which can provide power all the time. And if not by nuclear, then it will continue to be fossil fuels.
I like green energy to, but wind & solar do come at great cost & are susceptible to storm damage, take up a lot of area sometimes native protected species, koala’s, birds, etc, and don’t supply a base load of power 24/7. I think it is time for us Aussies to get with nuclear power, China’s new Thorium Molten Salt Reactor only took 5 years to build, has been going for a year now & has many benefits & safeguards due to its build type. Unfortunately our politicians are all woke idiots and are probably the most dangerous & expensive part of any such projects in Australia.
@@joshuasenior4370wind and solar have a great synergy. In the netherlands we already have a lot of negative energy prices even in winter. We dont need a baseload. Wind and solar is enough for 95% of the time. We are not going to spend gizzillions for that last 5%. We need something fast that can jump in when there is not enough wind and solar. Nuclear is definitely not the answer because you cant turn it on and off really fast. Gas is alot better i think, and a lot of countries already have a lot of gas plants.
@@Ardano62 in the netherlands wind and solar combined account for only 31% of electricity production. With Coal, natural gas and biofuels combining for 61%. These sources all produce CO2 and need replacing. You simply cannot use wind and solar as a base load power regardless of what you say. Even in the netherlands where wind is more efficient than most places. I’m not saying renewables can’t make up a substantial mix in some countries. But you still have to account for over 60% of your electricity coming from burning stuff and putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Nuclear provides the best alternative.
@@joshuasenior4370 thats definitely outdated. In 2023 cbs (they do nationwide statistics) reported 48% of electricity was renewable. And its increasing like crazy for the last two years.
This channel I discovered last year became an enrichment for my life. Informative, controversal, entertaining and provocing. Sabine´s books are an enlightening. The best for the next year.
Thank you from the entire team, and a happy new year to you too!
youtu.be/ErfFXSRso
it's finally completed: kzhead.info/sun/nsmTntJsZHeZZg/bejne.html
Yes, this channel and her knowledge is fantastic, thank you for sharing your knowledge. Frohes Neues Jahr
@@urielromero5069 🎉☺️
Your discussion of labor productivity was quite interesting! We measure success by positive outcomes, not counting risks mitigated. In the software industry, a young company is able to ignore risks to generate a little new revenue. The job changes by imperceptible degrees until it is all non-productive compliance, maintenance, and customer retention work. This is a fact I wish I'd recognized sooner in my career. Same for most startup founders.
Interesting as in: good to know who is taking his (or her) info mostly from US fringe publications.
That is a very good example of how human inventions of new industries evolve. There are steep learning curves and a whole new set of problems to overcome. But we did, we are, and will continue to do so. It's quite a natural process. Luckily, there are so many people in the world population today that we have a never-ending pool of skills to pull from, to teach, to use for future endeavours. It will be the same in the nuclear power industry and in the Climate Change industry as a whole. It is rather exciting to know that we have so much more to come that will change the world.
@@hans-joachimbierwirth4727 this is not some fringe fiction, it happens to all corporations gradually as they get older and bigger. I consult as an engineer for both small and big companies. The difficulty and pushback in changing a bad design gets proportionally bigger with the company size.
@@mrfrenzy. That's because, if you have no income, breaking a few eggs to make it is no big deal. If you are already raking in millions, making a change that could put that at risk to make a little more is inherently risky.
i am a fan of solar and wind energy. but the argument, that they are so much cheaper than nuclear power has a big flaw. without batteries, solar and wind are very unreliable. and reliability is way more important than costs. if you add costs of batteries or backup-gas-powerplants to the renewables, the perspective changes. here in europe the most valid argument against nuclear plants is the fuel because we need to import it from russia.
Totally agree. As a former nuclear oponent I think today, we need both, renewables and nuclear power. One possibility to get rid of the uranium gap would be the use of the fast breed technology, that increases the amount of energy, you can get out of the stuff dramatically, while decreasing the amount of nuclear waste.
I was employed in the nuclear power industry from 1974 through 1988, and worked on design for Watts Bar unit 1, Sequoyah unit 1, McGuire Unit 2, and Catawba Unit 2, and lastly was employed for 4 years at Rancho Seco, which was operational by the time I arrived there. These were all pressurized LWR's, but I've come to wonder if the Canadian CANDU is a superior design. It has 1 overwhelming advantage over all of the American reactor designs: it doesn't have to be shut down every couple of years for up to 4 months at a time for refueling. The fuel channels in a CANDU reactor can be accessed with the reactor running at full power. The reactor is built on it's side rather than vertically, and at each end of the reactor, there's a big machine that seals itself to the fuel channels, and a new fuel bundle is pushed in at one end, while a spent fuel bundle, which has spent about 18 months traveling from one end of the reactor to the other, is extracted. CANDU reactors do occasionally have to be shut down for repairs and upgrades, but over many years, average "availability" of the reactor is around 90%, compared to 60% for a PWR. The CANDU has a high initial cost to produce the deuterium oxide (heavy water) needed for the moderator, but another advantage that offsets this cost is that the CANDU's fuel is natural uranium, so the U-235 enrichmnent costs of a typical American LWR are eliminated. The walls of the Calandria of a CANDU reactor don't have to be as thick as those of typical American PWR, so it's less expensive, and easier to transport from the fabrication plant to the reactor site. It may be possible to design the reactor and fuel geometry of a CANDU to burn Thorium-232 (a fertile isotope that can be bred into fissile U-233), or MOX, which is recycled LWR spent fuel that contains some Plutonium-239 in addition to U-235 and U-238. Any power plant is only paying off it's construction and operating costs when it's actually running, and there are very few other reactor designs that can match the availability factor of a CANDU. I wonder, if you did a detailed comparative analysis of all 4th generation reactor designs on the drawing board, if the newest proposals for the Advanced CANDU would come out a clear winner because of that high availability factor?
Love the discussion about construction time. One word of warning though, we might exclude the time to build some of the earliest plants because their construction was much simpler. With improved safety standards, some of those plants would not be allowed today. As the industry matured and post TMI, requirements have changed and thus plant designs. A small criticism, but I think we should be careful of this. Another factor that has changed besides overall plant design is the (in the US) shift from separate construction/ operating licenses to a combined one. Some plants in the early 70's were built under one permit, but then sat unusable until a separate operating permit (with long reviews, public hearings all over again, and other beauruacratic delays) was granted. I guess the point is, that historic construction times must be looked at warily.
You're probably right. While we're on the subject of reactor construction time, I wanted to bring up that the US Navy builds reactors fairly quickly without a single accident in it's entire history operating them. The time it takes is mostly red tape.
Id argue that the time differences probably dont matter. Sure they had less red tape but the tech was new and being desinged while being built slowing down construction. Where now we have more red tape but safer facilities that are much easier to get parts for and build than the first ones being designed. Overall these factors probably cancel eachother out. China and japan being able to do them faster tells me its more about labour slowing down a build. As their countries view labour differently than the west.
@@jeffbenton6183you should read about the SL1 accident it was an army project but a navy guy was there too. Accidents have happened. Thats how we develop safety procedures unfortunately.
@@jeffbenton6183Being a former 'navy nuc', I do appreciate the Navy's safety record. But a key issue there is they have a much different budget. Navy subs don't have to 'make a profit.'
@@jeffbenton6183the scale is completely different, small pressure vessels are easy to construct.
Fairly well said. One thing I should point out is that the "freeze plug" passive safety for Molten Salt Reactors has gone out of fashion now. There's a better way whcih I've heard referred to as "bucket" safety. Instead of a plug that has to melt in the event that the salt gets too hot or the power to the plug cooling goes out, the core is ALWAYS draining into the safe storage tank at all times and there's a pump which brings it back from the storage tank and into the active reactor. This version still ensures that in the event of a power loss (or if high temperature is detected) the pump stops and the core safely drains away and cools down but because it operates continuously you can be absolutely certain that it works and it works at the speed it's supposed to work at.
That's actually brilliant. How much power is lost by running the pump continuously?
@@SapereAude1490 something like that might take a hundred watts, a small continuous leak of heavy fluids, might need to pump a few grams at a time.
The freeze plug is almost passive. My impression is that the continuous thing will mean continuous pumping. Is that extra Balance of Plant (BOP) energy expenditure which must be maintained and paid for during the life of the plant? I like free stuff.
Nah, dump molten salt and use liquid metal cooling. Leftover fission of scrubbed reactor will never cause pool of lead or tin to boil.
@@daniellarson3068 Not really. Freeze plugs require continuous cooling usually with Helium gas. So you have to cool that helium down (with some basic air conditioning mechanism) and you generally want to control the contamination of the Helium with any other gasses. Either method is negligible in terms of cost to run it though.
The quoted prices for solar and wind are a joke. The only way to compete with nuclear is to compare prices for 24x7x360 day production every year. Add the batteries, curtailment and more storage and gas emergency backup and one is at 2x the price of nuclear and 10x the emissions.
Source: trust me bro
apply same logic to nuclear: add batteries, add curtailment, add mining, add risk mitigation and hassle with waste management, potential for development of nuclear weapons etc. if for Sabine Fukushima is "very little happened" then we don't want to truly experience a nuclear catastrophe that she would be impressed with.
I saw you lecture at the Royal Institute and found you fascinating, now through these videos I have a great respect for your humor and teaching ability, thank you
Seems to me that costs and build time could be greatly reduced by choosing a design that worked and producing it in large numbers. A bit like producing Liberty ships in World War 2. Instead most reactors in the west are unique or one of a small number making them effectively prototypes which create issues on building and require snagging before they can get to full productivity. The endless changes in regulation don't help.
Bingo.
That is what it has been supposed holds cost for nuclear plants down is South Korea. And in the same way cherry picking can raise costs, if we average in south Korean cost but then never have society, workforce culture or economic commitment they do to it, then that will not be indicative of our results when doing something different, but only similar in that we both build nukes.
Doesn’t France do this? It has 56 nuclear reactor in operation and might build as many as 14 more by 2050. They’re not all the same design, of course, but they fall into just a few classes of design-and the designs are updated. (And other countries, such as South Korea and Japan, might be models for deploying uniform designs as well.)
Yes, this is how nuclear power could compete with fossil the past 4 decades. You pick one simple design. You mass produce at least 10 to 30 plants that are very large, at least 0.5 to 1 GW. And you fund it all with tax payer money. That was the only way you could actually do nuclear in the past. But today we live in the age of cheap energy through solar and wind. Solar is beating dirty coal on price. No one is going to build a dozen of nuclear reactors. It is insanity. The market wants to pay for solar and wind and you want the US and Canada, or the entire EU to put 100 to 200 billion tax payer money into a new nuclear project? It just can't happen.
Keeping a fixed blueprint definitely helps cost saving, however size matters, too. In the big reactor businness, the building site will need a lot of unique features and infrastructures built from scratch that will preclude any benefit from economy of scale, ask the French with their PWR. Massive nuclear cores need to be welded on the spot, for instance. People like the Thorcon guys inverted the design phase by starting from questions as "how big today's existing shipyard facilities can off-site mass produce a steel core", then by sizing down the reactor to fit into those existing infrastructure capacities. Only then one can actually send the blueprints to those shipyards and ask "please, 1000 more of this". This should keep the time and cost (per kWh) lower than coal plants.
This video should be mandatory for every person who does data analysis. I have seen so many people who are hungry for finding any sort of insight in their data that they end up concluding bad correlations (willingly or unwillingly). Good insights are always there you just have to give it some more time & get the analysis methodology audited from people who have directly worked on the projects.
There is a lot of questionable data in this video, like projecting numbers from the sixties into today and ignore the huge price drops in solar, wind and batteries. and at the other hand how much more expensive Nuclear has become and only will get worse, here a video that clearly explains building Nuclear powerplants is the dumbest thing to do: kzhead.info/sun/lpSfYbBoj4d_hHA/bejne.htmlsi=Y2oLlYa7HXlgJy2e What striked me is how inherently unsafe nuclear powerplants are, that we see a major accident happen about every 20 years with only about 500 powerplants in operation worldwide is in fact a terrible statistic. If that would happen with coal or gas fired powerplants, we would see a powerplant blow up about every week!
@@MarcoNierop I'll start from the end of your comment: 1- I do agree that is a terrible statistics, because that is NOT how you make statistics. You need to look at the death toll per TWh of energy produced. And nuclear is even safer the wind and solar. 2- That video you mentioned is a total mess of cherry-picked misleading if not at worst completerly false information. (like France's nuclear fleet water consumption and weapon proliferation) 3- Comparing the costs (LCOE) of energy sources is a very misleading and blind comparisons. If you read the last assessment of LAZARD on the LCOE, you notice that if you inlcude the firming intermittency you get a higher cost value than the energy produced by the most expensive nuclear plant in the world (Vogtle, Georgia) Anyway, in general, that is true that the cost of VREN is lower that nuclear but a WHOLE system with only VREN, compared with a system which include Nuclear and VREN, is actually higher because you are NOT taking into account the system cost. System cost are NOT the VREN's costs but rather they are the cost to stabilize the solar and wind intermittency and to bring renewable energy where you actually need it. Because i cannot place for example wind turbines whenever i want, but i need to place them where wind is avalaible. For example, off-shore wind turbines in UK sells their electricity for around 30£ per MWh which is really cheap. But in order to connect those wind turbines the UK government also allocated around 54 billions pounds to connects wind turbines to the grid. Those 54 billions are NOT counted in the LCOE costs of VREN. They are actually "hidden" system cost. The aforementioned is just the tip of the iceberg, there are also, backup system (batteries), backstop system, grid guarding system, energy flow management system, curtailment, capacity market, dispatch priority, duck shape curve and so on... The energy cost is just a single variable. Electricity cost are of interest for the investors. Lower electricity cost doesn't mean lower electricity bill. the "costs" are not the "prices". The price of electricity is determined by the system marginal price, therefore by the demand and offer mechanisms in the energy market where production costs is just meaningless because all the suppliers are then paid by the same amount of money. Lower cost means a higher net income for the supplier and the investors. The consumers should care about the merit curve. Nuclear have the advantage of decreasing the merit curve which means it actually reduces the energy price, because its not important to substitute the lower part of the merit curve, but rather you need to displace the higher part of the curve which are the fossils fuels and thats what makes the final prices. If you look at the report by the european commissions on the actual energy prices, you can see that France electricity is one of the cheapest of the whole Europe.
@@beppelatorre2.077 "You need to look at" This is exactly how you skew statistics when looking for your confirmation bias :D 2) I just went into the first 2,3 minutes and he said pretty much what was said in this video. It is more expensive and no company is willing to take that risk so hardly anyone is building nuclear (Japan being the exception and it should be pretty obvious why that is the case). The only case that could be made is that batteries are still fairly expensive and would drive the lcoe to a level that's... still under nuclear power :D (though I have only seen one study on that and that would be pretty much useless by now as battery price prediction is a little meh) 3) phew, "backup system (batteries), backstop system, grid guarding system, energy flow management system, curtailment, capacity market, dispatch priority, duck shape curve" you really tried to fill your bingo card here aye? The 54Bn are not just to connect offshore wind farms to the grid. they are, for the most part, to renew the national grid which has been neglected since it was privatized around the time the sovjet union fell apart. Now the tax payers have to pay up for that so the board of the national grid can continue paying themselves their bonuses woop woop (y) LCOE is not the final price the consumer pays that much is true. It is still heavily correlated - some might say causation is a thing here. Britain is still taking part in the EEX so energy producers can take part in the "oh the merit order makes your electricity so expensive because russia" and then take all the profits from having cheap wind and solar.. (ok, solar and britain... :D )
It's an example of very bad statistics. Useless bullshit it is. No one would ever consider the construction of long gone technology, and she completely ignores the involved feedback from older constructions aswell as the missing infrastructure that is completely gone in some countries like for example Germany. She is an idiot.
Well, it would have been good if she bothered to check if the construction times presented were for SMRs or LNPPs but she didn’t. They are very different. Plus she doubles down on making conclusions on clearly incomparable data. Definite case of what not to do.
Thank you!!! This edition made me tear up this morning. I think you're amazing. I recently ran for (LA) city council, and found the complete idiocy of people completely frustrating. Human emotions keep us small minded. With your/your team's deconstruction of research, calling people out for lying, and "de-dramatizing" Fukushima incident I have additional information with which to talk to california's Greens. 🤜🏽🤛🏽
Thanks for the longer talk. I've been missing these
Thanks to you and your staff for putting this together. You folks are what reporters in tech should be aspiring to be. Thank you again and happy holidays!
What staff? She's just talking out of her arse.
Sabine, thank you for turning us on to Planet Wild! Such an incredible organization doing so much good for our planet. I watched the video you recommended and I was hooked and became a supporter of Planet Wild immediately! I hope all you viewers take the moment to watch the video to learn how each of us can easily join Planet Wild and help fix many of the environmental messes man has caused. Our planet’s and our live’s depend on it. Thanks again for Planer Wild and also for how you help us learn so much on other topics covered in your videos.
I agree, became a member by Sabine´s ad on the greenwashing vid, Happy to support thes people a tiny little bit.
Thanks for your explanation of power and energy! I've always known the difference, but found the unit of Wh very difficult, because in other units you tend to divide by time instead of multiplying. I've always learnt how to calculate energy when you know the power, because that's what you tend to do in real life. But turning it around is so obvious I never thought of it! Power is energy/time, thanks!
Thanks for a good video! To add: In the 70s you typically had nuclear power programs in western countries. In the 2000s you build them one at a time which is extremely expensive. In Asia in the 2000s they have programs building several reactors of similar type after each other. If you do that in Europe and the US you will likely get similar costs for the plants. That is more important than SMR:s (which is likely a little bit too small to be cost effective).
SMR, small modular reactor. The trick is the "modular" part, Nuclear Power Leggo.
In the 1970's nuclear construction halted rapidly as the US and France realised they had overbuilt and the costs were higher than expected. The chinese built about fifty in short order, but they also slowed down remarkably. Maybe they are not finding them as cheap or straightforward as advertised? Certainly they have doubled and redoubled renewables construction in the same time frame, so they want the energy. Increasing build rates in the US is unlikely to get the sudden economies you suggest. Even if Santa could just give the US a couple of dozen new reactors for free, they might not stay open. In the last twenty years, the most common reason for closure has been "operational losses" on paid-off plant, with plants closing an average decade before their license expires. SMRs are not just a "little" too small for economical operation. Gigawatt(electrical) plants are uneconomical. Globally, over 100 Nuclear reactors are likely to close by end of 2030. Build completion rates would need to increase by 2.5x just to maintain existing capacity. Nuclear engineering graduate numbers are stagnant or down compared to the 1990s, and all of those will be required for decommissioning work. There simply is no scope to increase graduate numbers without a three to five year delay, and no scope to even marginally increase the fleet without more than triple the present build completion rate.
I agree with you. It will be a challenge just to keep the same power generation from nuclear power as today, but maybe that is the ambition we need to have at least. The key problem is how the future energy system should look like (let us say in year 2060) if you want to get rid of most of the fossile fuels until then. When you have maxed out the amount of wind and solar that is practical to deploy without costly and difficult massive storage then all alternatives will be costly and difficult to handle.
@@BoB-Dobbs_leaning-left Dozens of companies have tried and failed at SMR. It's exactly dissimilar to Nuclear Power Leggo - none of these parts are injection moulded. There is not automated assembly line, there is no real saving in making 10 small as to 3 larger, or 100 instead of 30. Some things take longer on the small scale like welding and checking weld joints and safety checks.
@@torericson2089 I do not think that even maintaining existing nuclear capacity is a worthwhile ambition. There are states with 70% non-hydro renewables, and no indication that there are limits to further deployment. Storage requirements can be minimised by planning further rollout to match the highest spot prices. Placing PV further west and orienting towards the western horizon extend solar generation later in the day, supplying more of the evening peak consumption directly with less storage. Choosing wind sites with consistent late afternoon and evening winds does similar. Even if we hit some point, say 95%, where supplying the last 5% is more expensive, the question is then "how expensive". At that point, not very. Not only are renewables costs still falling, but supply lines are stronger, with more stock awaiting installation or upgrade than ever. Putting this generation and storage in distributed locations that otherwise see little use need not be a loss, it can be an investment in resilience: Community emergency centers with facilities in case of floods or cyclones, and other public buildings. This last few percent may be under-utilised, hence expensive, but not "difficult to handle", as they will simply be "more of the same" of components that are commonly available. There may be some very remote regions at high latitude where nuclear will always be necessary, at unavoidably high cost. Maybe. However, in any location where renewables can function at all, even at low efficiency, they will easily undercut nuclear, which simply isn't getting cheaper at all.
last generation of reactors, WPR (EPR in french) seems quite difficult to build safely. At least in France at Flamanville it has been in construction for 14 years, with lots of red cards given by the french "Agence de Sûreté Nucleaire" (nuclear safety agency) due to defective concrete layers, and even a flawed steel part of the reactor itself...The finance director of EDF resigned when the Hinckley Point contract was about to be signed because he didn't want to be involved in that shit show.
Mainly because french never built PWR on their own, and not in the last 30 years. They also can't plan correctly and because most of red flags should never have been raised in the first place and just were overreaction.
@@louisdrouard9211 Even the Chinese needed 9 Years (they thought, they could do it in 4) just for building the EPR. And China is notorious for fast building. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
@@ohlala9546 I am not sure I understand your point. The Chinese are notorious for fast construction, so the only PWR they had issues with is the French one, which tends to support my argument : delays due to bad design and issues on the vessel manufactured by AREVA. And yet, they were still twice as fast as the European EPR.
@@louisdrouard9211 The "Problem" with the EPR is its focus on safety. That just costs time. France could probably build older Reactors in 4-6 years, they just wouldn't be up to security standards. And if i researched that correctly, the EPR is based on the German "Konvoi" design, and developed as a French-German joint venture. The Konvoi Reactors all needed 6-7 Years for construction (in Germany). I don't really believe that the EPR is such a bad design that it alone is the reason for long construction periods. I think it has to do with the low amounts of NPP built in the last 3 centuries, thus "loosing" the routine (due to skilled workers finding other jobs) and the higher focus on security (in design and location, thus more bureaucracy - even in China). Additionally the biggest problem of NPP (and renewables due to higher demand of space) is the not-in-my-backyard mentality. There might be a lot of people pro nuclear, but there are also a lot of those that dont want a nuclear power plant near their home, due to concerns of property value etc.
That’s called research, should we also stop any funding to fusion research cause we didn’t get fusion reactor working after 2 month ?
I found it interesting that during the extremely hot summer recently in Europe the nuclear plants were having problems cooling down the rods due to the water coming into the plant as extremely warm. In addition rivers water levels were dropping to historically low levels. Building nuclear plants means they will need a much larger water supply that is stable, such as is found on the coasts instead of inland. Then we need to take into consideration that the oceans are also warming much faster than thought would happen at this time.
If global warming goes to hell (like the earth is doomed and billions dead already) ocean temperature will raise by around 5C probably. That's not going to cause major cooling issues. Also air cooled reactors are a thing
Thanks a lot for the best video to the topic. What i wonder, the power plant Olkiluoto in Finnland costs 11Mrd€ and has a power output of 1600 MW. When they run the plant for 60 years to 97%, it will cost 1,3ct/kWh. Even with a high factor for the running costs, that should be mutch cheaper than solar and wind power.
If I correctly recall, we paid 6 billion and the contracter just had to take the 5 billion loss as we took a fixed contract.
The one person who died at the Fukushima power plants was a worker who tried to manually open vents at the top of a reactor building. He was killed by the hydrogen explosion he was trying to prevent.
We will never know the number of deaths from radiation exposure over time, but I can guarantee that it's nit zero
@@dionysusnowHow exactly can _you_ guarantee it, especially if, as you say, it can't be known. If "we'll never know", then how do _you_ know? (As a note, radiation is measurable and knowable.)
@@dionysusnow - The actual amount of radiation emitted from the Fukushima disaster is a fraction of what was emitted from Chernobyl. They're not even on the same scale. And the city of Fukushima's current radiation levels are effectively the same as normal background radiation levels with people already moving back into the area. What may happen is that people may get more regular checkups from that region to screen for cancer. Oddly, in other examples of places with the stigma of radiation exposure, this fact increases the lifespan of the residents. Not because they caught cancer earlier, their rates of cancer were the same as the rest of the population, but because they caught other risk factors earlier like high blood pressure, and other more common health issues.
Deaths related to radiation isn't zero. It is just the closest to zero.
@@bobjohnson1633 Great way to put it. The again, deaths from radiation from coal-fired plants are enormous in comparison.
Have you included the cost of decommissioning these facilities? We've had enough time to estimate total costs (construction plus decommissioning) but I haven't seen such numbers. I'm not certain that anybody knows how to calculate decommissioning costs. According to DOE, "...traditional, rate-regulated electric utilities or indirectly regulated generation companies - are not required today to have all the funds needed for decommissioning."
There should be plenty of decommissioning data. They have been many closed down since the mid 70's.
DOE says it costs about $400 million to decommission a facility. Not sure if I believe it.@@boroblueyes
Decomissioning, risks and radioactive waste are never included in the total costs. Those costs are externalized. There is also no insurance company that takes the risk for a nuclear power plant. With all real costs included, nuclear power plants are completely uneconomical. Therefore the numbers are always faked by the nuclear power lobby. With PV costs below 1ct per kWh, the nuclear power BS will find its natural termination.
Decommission data is plenty and is often factored into a plant's costs. This is because plants last super long (most running up to 80+ years with recent regulatory updates) that they can get enough revenue to pay for their own decommissioning without subsidies. The biggest issue is often the initial construction costs and interests, due to that a running plant in the west would take a quite a bit of years to actually pay that debt even before they actually start turning a profit.
@@boroblueyes Over 200 reactors closed. Only 21 decommissioned. Big difference.
Sabine, you are wonderful! I will argue all day that carbon is plant food, and "climate change" is not human induced. Outside of that, the math supports nuclear power over any other renewable energy source, and I applaud you for pointing that out.
Excellent video. I have shared this with several friends. I have made many of these or similar arguments when debating this with friends. Thanks for sharing an awesome explanation of these concerns and why they can be overcome and are being overhyped.
It took 14 years to build the third reactor in Finland and the cost was exceeded by 200%. It takes time to earn interest on 11 billion Euros....
In superyacht building it is not unusual to exceed the cost by 3, 4, or even 5, and yet the orders keep coming!
Luckily the Finns got a fixed price contract so the 5 billion extra cost is the problem for the French builder.
It was a first-of-a-kind design (EPWR if I'm not mistaken) and no other plant has taken so long in Europe, except maybe Hinckley point C. 2 in the entire continental fleet. And they're new designs that are built after almost 3 decades of stagnation following 2 accidents (1 serious, 1 seriously overestimated)
this is exactly the kind of content I'm always looking for here, fantastic!
Thank you very much for this very informative documentation! There is one thing, I would like to add: Since nuclear power provides its energy on a steady (and to a certain degree) also adjustable level, it is not directly possible to compare the costs/kWh with the costs/kWh of wind and solar energy, which depend on weather conditions. Therefore we have to add the costs for overcapacity and storage necessary to make weather dependent energy sources compatible with weather independent energy sources like wind and solar. I would guess, on a guts level, that this reduces the 2-3 time difference of your calculation significantly.
Nice. I was particularly impressed with how many factors you brought into play. Huge projects are hugely complicated, and complexity makes poor news copy. I know from personal experience as a former energy reporter. I lost track of nuclear power some time ago, but a good deal of the danger for earlier designs was that a lack of automated safety systems - at least reliable ones. As a result, the make-or-break was up to humans and electrical power plant operation should be routine. It takes a lot of management effort to bring close attention to routine. The US Navy ran a fleet of relatively crude early-model reactors safety because of a focus on safety that went beyond paranoia. Finally, nuclear power got a bad reputation in part because of hare-brained applications. My father was a jet engine engineer during the Right Stuff period of the 1950s and once he and another engineer were pulled aside and asked to do development on a project that was made up of two huge turbojets joined by a gray box where the combustion chamber would have been. Dad rejected the assignment because it was obvious that the box was a fission reactor and 1) if it was properly shielded, no airplane would every get off the ground or 2) if it was unshielded, the pilot wouldn’t get to the target alive.
Super Video Sabine, dir zuzuhören macht unglaublich viel Spaß und bereichert einen mit sehr interessanten Infos! Mach weiter so!
22:00 - another issue with the coverage of the Fukushima disaster is that it has nothing to do with the plant and everything to do with the flood wall, which the company dithered for years about raising to the level they should've been at.
Right. All other NPPs on the same coastal line who were hit by the Tsunami were covered by flood walls of about 9m height. The Fukishima plant had a 6m wall, not high enough. The scandal is that 2 years earlier engineers demanded an increase of that wall. With the help of politicians the operator managed to circumvent that. In short: Similar to Chernobyl or to the Explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle poor human made decisions were the cause. Technology should be child proof.
It had everything to do with the incorrectly designed and inspected and operated plant which shouldn't be there in such shape in a first place. You see - there was another similar plant nearby, with backup generators installed PROPERLY. No drama whatsoever. Fukusihima with 3 reactors on meltdown was collosal FAQUP, saved only by containment vessels. Also - it has problem all huge PWR/BWR share - heat dissipation.
Thank you Sabine + crew for this nice video. Yes in the 70s 80s many countries were building Pressurised Water Reactors quite efficiently in large numbers. In these times they had nice teams of specialised workers that had training, experience, were iteratively getting more efficient, plus these programs were backed by governments. Side note: PWRs are normally much safer than Chernobyl's RBMK or Fukushima's Boiling Water Reactor. The current PWRs being built are impeded by several context issues: First of all they must indeed meet much tougher (nonetheless desirable) standards than the existing plants. Second the workforce has to be mostly trained from the ground up. Thirdly the work organisation of modern companies tend to rely too much on management (implying less productivity since there are now almost as many white collars as blue collars). I firmly believe in nuclear energy as a viable way to help reduce co2 emissions. Yours truly, a former blue collar of the nuclear power field (9 years+ experience in both reactor maintenance and construction).
Whats so nice at this video? The statement at 1:00 that there is only a little waste - ok 15.000t in Germany is real a little waste. But we have no idea where to place this little 15.000t. When atomic wast store ASSE was opened, it was promised, that the waste is save for 1 million years. A few years later the waste come out and now we have an further big cost issue to solve the ASSE problem. And yes it would she not bother at all to live near nuclear waste, because it would not happen to her. And we have now good other possibilities to get rid of the nuclear waste. We put it into bullets for the army and should on countries which we don't like. I have seen a man who suffer from nuclear waste in real. To get an first impression whats going on look the video "deadly dust" from Frieder Wagner. I would really know where she has the numbers of did by nuclear events? And then she compare it with people die on climate change - where we have no real sign for it. It was claimed by climate experts in 2007, that in 2013 the North pol is ice free. Now we are 10 years above and its still ice there. 2018 it was announced coldest temperature in antarctic since measurement are done. And what all about the statistics of building time - and Japan with 3 years. Do we not know, that they where to fast - they made mistakes in evaluating earth quacks? And US - did they in the past not work to fast and not evaluting the human factor - think about 3 mile island? And yes the insurance fee is low - because in case of an nuclear event, the liability for the operator is limited. Exceeding cost have to take over the state - so we all. And also very interesting - manufacturer liability is excluded. The new housing for Tschernobyl was paid from a lot of countries. And this housing will last only a few decades. Then additional big cost will rise up - a never ending story. And it is more expensive than solar power. So why we should spend money into expensive system, where a lot of cost for nuclear waste and nuclear events still not included? And small nuclear reactors are fine? Due to the high number of reactors needed the statistical chance for fault rises up! The only explanation for this video is - she get paid for it.
@@iurlcLet me clear some misconceptions you have. The waste Storage in Asse was never intended as a final storage facility, that's why there was only mild and medium radioactive waste stored there (so mostly contaminated labtrash or construction waste). In fact is was seen as a test site to research the long-term storage of nuclear waste. A different story is Gorleben, which was a final storage, but that location was mainly chosen for political reasons (it's very close to the GDR border). Uranium bullets are not nuclear waste and not radioactive. You would damage yourself more than the enemy, if they were. In fact Uranium is used because it is dense and hard, ergo good to penetrate armor. The real way to recycle radioactive waste, and now I mean burned fuel rods, is recycling/refurbishment. Plus the fact, that newer reactors probably use the fuel more efficient so that you don't have to through away your fuel rods after only burning 5% of the fuel.
@@iurlcFor the climate change comparison, I think Sabine is talking about future deaths here. Further, it's hard to pin done the death toll here anyways, but if we say e.g. that the Ahrtal catastrophy, was only caused partially or made worse by climate change, we have a higher death toll easily than Fukushima has. Though I have to criticise Sabine here for here Whataboutism.
To do some Whataboutism myself about radioactive dust, I would be more concerned living next to a coal plant. This Question in EU-Parliament did put some sources together: E-003567/2022. Apparently, coal power plants make 20times more radioactive waste then Nuclear plants. To the amount, that some companies filter the ash fit uranium to sell it to said nuclear plants 😂
That is a valid point. For us who grew up in the Cold War era, even the word 'nuclear' causes some anxiety. So it's is hard for most people who went through that to separate the difference between nuclear war and nuclear energy. But we are slowly getting there. Really, we are just on the cusp of this new technology, even though it's been around for decades. It's only now that it's need and understanding is reaching the masses. But it will be a whole new industry. Just like when we started flying airplanes, then military jets, then commercial airliners...we went through some pretty steep learning curves. Same with the creation of railways across the world, vehicles built on a massive scale and the building of highways and traffic systems, the building of the first traditional power lines and telephone lines, building oil rigs in the oceans, and even the invention of the internet. It is akin to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution all those years ago. But now the Technical Revolution I guess. But the same challenges. In the end we will have a whole new industry, a whole new set of educational programs to supply the skills needed both in labor and administration, a whole new infrastructure of getting that energy to market. So, not only will be have a chance at saving the planet, we will also create many, many jobs. Even in the US, cities like Detroit and Chicago, who used to rely heavily on industrial companies for building cars, steel plants, logging, shipping, and more, who are now without those industries and have plunged into decline for many years now; well, they have the potential to become places that produce nuclear energy, thereby reviving the cities. It's just an example. But the point is that nuclear energy is where we are going, have to go, and will provide benefits that society in general cannot even imagine right now. There will room for blue collar workers, white collar workers, entrepreneurs, and everything in between. It's exciting I think. And I grew up in the cold war era. Literally in grade 1, along with fire drills as usual, we did 'nuclear bomb' drills. It was simple. Hide under your desk, keep your eyes closed and cover your face with your clothes, breathe less, and pray. Pretty stupid looking back. But what else could we do? lol
It doesn't really matter if it takes fifteen years to build a reactor as by then, some of the interim PV and wind turbines will be reaching end of life and need replacing. So replace them with something reliable that gives operational capacities in the 80+% range and will last for 60+ years.
Nice video. I toured a hydro power plant in Switzerland several years ago and I recall them saying it took them 25 years to upgrade the plant which was finished recently. About 20 years of that time was related to planning. Carrying out environmental impact surveys, getting the buy in from the local community, politicians, etc. This was a long and iterative process and this was just a small hydro plant. I can imagine this would be much harder for nuclear power plants as I assume more people will be concerned if someone wants to build one nearby.
Case Olkiluoto-3, twenty three years in construction and soon to be finished (yes, not near major towns, in already two-reactor area etc etc), been in production for some test-runs (yes at the moment it is producing afaik after some "minor" delays). Now let's extrapolate that to, say, new, near population center, new powerplant, to location that maybe has, say, tides or other coolant problems (rainfall change in, say, next 50 years possible ? Maybe ?). I mean, why build according to deal and plans that were agreed upon, when you can just bribe inspectors. Oh the companies forgot, they can only "bribe" politicians in Finland, not authorities, small country and such you have nowhere to hide when sh*t hits the fan and you're the inspector that "let it slide just once".
@@tondekoddar7837 Soon to be finished? OL3 testing phase ended last April, ever since it has been fully in commercial operation. They were two days offline in November due minor fault on turbine side.
For big hardware projects Switzerland has become a "veto paradise". There are numerous legally or politically entitled veto players at work slowing down or blocking every large infrastructure or other project. The environmentalists, who are mainly to blame for this, now find themselves in a dilemma with large hydro, solar and wind projects.
@@johann1416 Having lived 25 years in Switzerland as well as a number of years in the UK I would agree with your assessment of Switzerland but the UK is also a nightmare to organise large projects. I was studying in the UK when the Channel Tunnel was opened in 1994. The French had a high speed rail link to the tunnel very quickly. The British took till 2007 to build their high speed rail link. Most of this again was the “not in my backyard” problem. So it isn’t just Switzerland who has these problems.
Crazy. The most recent hydro station near me here in Canada was designed and built in a bit under 3 years, ahead of schedule. Sounded like their biggest issue was the environmental impact studies before getting approval to construct. Pretty small one, just 185 MW.
I love long videos, not a fan of your new short news clips.
X2
This was extremely informative. Thanks a lot!
Fantastic video looking a subject that is misunderstood. One thing to note, and maybe you should make a video about this, but the Levelized Cost of Energy fails to take into account that a civilization needs power 24/7. Solar panels work at best 25% of the day, wind about 30% depending on location. Fossil and nuclear have annual availability of >90%. So, for intermittent sources of powers there is an additional cost of backup power that is not accounted for in the Levelized Cost of Energy. The chart at 12:47 would look much different if that were considered in the equation. Thanks.
Very informative and interesting video. I also liked the football joke. It reminds me of an article in the Guardian: "Football pitch-sized area of tropical rainforest lost every six seconds". Here in Oz an observant ABC reporter once pointed out that if we reforested one football field every six seconds then we could not only compensate for deforestation but also help reduce certain kinds of bad behaviour. By the way, it seems to me that the graph at time 6m42s in the video has 'median' and 'mean' swapped.
Re median/mean: I initially thought this too, but actually the video graph is correct, since the mean always sits closer to the “long tail”, which in this case is the left side of the distribution. Though the video would have been much clearer if instead the example graph had the long tail to the right (long tail of high values instead of long tail of low values), showing how the mean becomes artificially high when a small number of high values are included, which is the point of the Sabine’s argument. Whereas the video graph shows the opposite example where extreme low values bring down the mean, which despite being valid, causes confusion since it’s incongruous with the discussion
Another point recarding accidents. The likelyhood for an accident does increase with each power plant being built. If we take into account, that world wide we did build almost no power plants at all compared to how many power plants we need, we already did have quite a few accidents.
Do you have the numbers for how many accidents traditional fossil fuels have resulted in?
Another great SabineH video. I was always wondering why atomic power plant construction is so slow and expensive. Here I got the answer, together with the info that most is self-inflicted. Thanks Sabine&team. Actually, it is time for a video "how it all began". About the channel, I mean.
Very good video thank you. In addition to the cost-deployment feedback loop there is another issue that nuclear alone faced. While the nuclear industry spent the last 30 years talking about safety they spent little time on technical development. Other technologies only had commercial drivers and focused on construction cost, or productivity, or operating cost and made strides in those areas. Even coal managed to improve fuel consumption by about 30%. Nuclear today is pretty much the same amount of materials, the same efficiency, the same productivity as 40 years ago.
After Chernobyl and Fukushima, safety rightly became important. Chernobyl is a tomb that will require centuries of maintenance. Fukushima is producing contaminated wastewater that Japan is now dumping into the global ocean. Meanwhile, China just started building new reactors with the first 4th Gen reactor now on line, after trial of a Thorium Molten Salt reactor in the desert. Passively safe and reliable.
@@ZweiZwolf Yeah, I wouldn't eat fish in Japan, unless I knew it came from nowhere near Japan. I understand that nuclear needs to be part of the mix, but her saying Fukushima was nothing to worry about, because only one person died at the scene, was straight up insulting. You don't win people over by being dishonest about the risks, because people will figure you out and that will end the conversation before it begins, or they will find out later and never trust you again.
@@Pushing_Pixels Exactly so. The forthright response would have lambasted Japan for their dishonesty & recklessness. If the waste water is so clean and safe, why isn't Japan using it for drinking and crop irrigation? Otherwise, she might as well say that the world should accept Chernobyl-type meltdowns every few years as the "safe" alternative to other inherently "unsafe" energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal.
Great video. Very informative. One minor quibble is that in lifetime costs you mentioned construction and operating costs but didn't specifically call out decommissioning costs, which are likely to be significant
Decommissioning costs are spread over the lifetime of such a plant. When properly accounted for, it's not that much.
@@hanslepoeter5167go tell the folks in Germany. I'm sure they'll be delighted to hear you found a cheaper solution.
She also use Solar Panels as the only Solar harvesting option in the cost comparison which is infuriating. There are many solar harvesting alternatives vastly cheaper than what's represented by the cost of building a solar panel power plant at scale. And there's no reason to focus on centralized production either. Which pissed me off a little bit more. Solar scales to the individual at the lowest possible cost. Why does ANYONE need a giant centralized power plant? WHY? Where's the NEED. All I see is wants, and people who want money. My money. No.
@@MattCastersfolks in Germany who closed their plants prematurely due to made up fears
@@ZennExile Actually, solar PV panels are now the least expensive type of solar power. I was under the impression they were the most expensive myself until recently. Apparently economies of scale and efficiency increases via R&D have really made an impact on PV panels.
Quality content as always and lots of jokes. Fortunately, my country has finally opted for nuclear energy (after 15 years of delay :/) and pumped hydro storage for renewable energy.
Brilliant analysis, Sabine. Comprehensively done.
There is an important point about the 2-3x higher energy cost compared to renewables that you didn't mention : nuclear delivers the energy when you need it. With renewables you either need batteries, more Intercontinental high power lines, and or significant overcapacity for the "Dunkelflauten". Factor that in and you see why China and other countries do still build them! Of course we can also try to adjust demand more to production, this can be done particularly well when generating heat using heatpumps, but the previous points still hold
I like your reasoning, it's more balanced than the hysterical reasoning we hear so much of. Regarding lengthy construction times due to excessive regulations, a contractor/manager friend of mine says that this is true with any large building project in the United States, and is particularly acute in California, California, where onerous regulations Add inefficient regulatory agencies slow construction down tremendously, vastly inflating their cost.
Hello Sabine, when discussing LCOE for different generation methods it is also important to consider the limitations of LCOE calculations. As long as there are limitations to energy storage, not every kWh is equally valuable as electricity generation has to be matched to the current demand. This is escpecially true for intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar and makes nuclear even more competitive because it is assured low-carbon power.
Storage costs 45$/MWh. Just buy enough: battery, gravity or hydrogen. Still waaaaaaaaaaaay less than 222$ for nuclear.
See my general comment regarding using LCOE verses EROEI.
Most LCOE calculations I've seen so far discount the amount of projected future electricity production (in the denominator) as if it were a monetary quantity, too. And at the same rate of discount, by the way. That's left me scratching my head...
How much does solar power cost when it produces zero power at night?
@@slugface322Usually whatever a coal plant costs… 🥲 “This is fine, everything’s fine”
Sabine, this video is a two thumbs up! I wish we’d been talking about this level of gravity 50 years ago when Lovelock began espousing Gaia. Personally I have settled on meditation and serving my local community in any way that is within my wheelhouse. See the film Living in the Time of Dying. I’d like to hear your thoughts on steps forward as you’ve made a great leap in airing this video. Again many many thanks Jerry
Fine video, thanks. But let me comment to some details (I have nearly 32 years professional experience in NPP, mainly Chemistry, Reactor Physics, Health Physics, nuclear waste etc.). You're right, Fukushima is an example that even in worst case conditions, nuclear power with light water reactors does not kill people. But it could have been avoided. The main reason, "built too fast", is rather the occurrence of tsunamis, happening every some decades, were not evaluated during commissioning. The government must be blamed for that. Second, management failure during the accident was horrible. Societal restrictions worsened the scenario. There should absolutely be no restrictions about who can of may talk to whom. During the accident, I followed the incoming news and was desperate. In my head, all the training about accidents was rolled up and I saw helpless the catastrophe coming. About the explosion of hydrogen: They had no recombinator catalysts (Palladium). In a rich country like Japan, no one can tell me that they hat no money to buy these essential things in a case of LOCA and meltdown. About construction costs and productivity: I agree, that management failures are wide spread. But one main problem to delay constructions is on the regulatory level. I one applies to build the same reactor on different sites, the authorities differ and have their learning process, individual questions, huge delay. In Germany, one solution found at a place was not accepted in another state. The other issue is the number of suppliers of nuclear grade materials. Today, you are lucky to find one. In the 1970s, there were several, number growing. Problems occur when manufacturing faults are detected very late. That rises costs enormously. During the last decade costs to finance long therm loans would have been low. In Germany, we calculated the costs for fuel and operation about 10 % of the total costs. In case of Natural gas, the fuel costs dominate heavily. The very high energy density is the main advantage of nuclear, as you said. But, as known for decades, only relying on U-235 is not the solution. But, all opportunities with U-238 and Th-232 combine technical issues with weapons grade material in hands of unscrupulous dictators. To solve the energy problems of the world, nuclear energy can't be restricted to stable democracies with skilled and educated personal. And, are those democracies really stable? To reduce the amount of nuclear waste to be stored underground, reprocessing is necessary. In the wrong hands, even these plants are dangerous. Sure, I'm a supporter of reprocessing instead of direct disposal.
Tepco's not wanting to reinforce/move critical plant because of cost when they knew of tsunami issues was at the core of the disaster.
Just want to add a thing or two that were slightly out of the scope of the video. When talking about cost usually we talk about LCOE, but LCOE is not perfect, in the case of renewables it fails to consider that becomes progressively difficult to add new renew sources past a certain trashhold that is different from state to state. Also it fails to consider cost of system (renew such as solar panels and wind turbines are more "diffused" so you need more connection to move the electricity from point A (where there are ideal condition to install these sources to point B the consumer), also, they do not take into consideration batteries to store the energy. Essentially while using LCOE it appears that renew have a big advantage over other sources when other variable are taken into account then there isn't anymore as clear of an advantage. If you want any source you can search for different metric, the IEA has suggested a metric called "VALCOE: Value adjusted levelised cost of energy"
Adding decentralized infrastructure like solar power does not strain the grid significantly. The grid connections for solar power are already there and since the electricity is sourced AND consumed locally the necessity for huge transmission lines that carry GWs of Power is reduced. You might have a minor point with wind power but in reality your argument actually stands against huge power plants which additionally add lots of several points of failure to the grid. There is some merit in considering the cost of energy storage solutions for LCOE but these as well synergize with other necessities in shifting the way we use energy. the use of fossil energy for things other than electricy gets overlooked frequently. Natural gas is used for heating, liquid fuels are needed for transportation purposes. Coke is needed for steel production. The list goes on. Liquid fuels will still be needed in the future as electrifying is not viable e.g. for planes. Steel production will need to switch to a hydrogen-based process. Storage infrastructure for renewables is contrary to popular belief not only batteries but consists mostly in the need for a hydrogen-infrastructure. The hydrogen-infrastructure can provide replacements for bot liquid fuels as well as natural gas. That also leaves the possibility to leave gas-powered infrastructure (from single home heating appliances to natural gas power plants) in place and utilizing it further until it can be replaced organically due to not being needed anymore. Those synergies are the reason why just adding the cost of storage infrastructure to the LCOE of the solar grid is not viable. An honest approach would be to look at the LCOE of battery storage separately, knowing that it will be quite high compared to the LCOE of wind or solar power. One might argue that we can build nuclear powered hydrogen infrastructure as well, but that would be ON TOP of the already high LCOE of nuclear power AND you would need even more power plants to cover the energy needs. Even narrowing the topic down to electricity Sabine seems to ignore the practical side of things. Building one NPP might take 3-5 years but as another commenter discovered as well, you can only build so many at once. Replacing only fossil electricity would take 20-30 years but then there's a giant supply gap for replacing direct consumption of fossil fuels. I am quite bummed about Sabines narrow and incomplete approach to the topic in this video as she does not really consider anything besides electricity. For 2022 in germany electricity represented 21% of the total direct energy consumption with natural gas taking the top spot at 28%, mineral oil at 18%, coal at 15%. At this point it is fair to say that Sabine leaves out 80% of the problem to make her numbers and conclusions look good which is at most a sorry excuse for a scientific approach.
@@frankb__431 I partly agree with you but some things I want to add: 1. Hydrogen is a power vector whose efficiency power to power is around 30%. Hydrogen is quite voluminous so it's difficult to carry in its gaseous form, so you would need to invest energy to convert it to a liquid and then back into gaseous when you need to burn it. 2. The cost of a hydrogen infrastructure is huge, while I too think it will be used to some degree I doubt that it would be able to completely substitute fuel and natural gas. 3. There is the cost of production, currently hydrogen is nearly entirely "gray" hydrogen the one produced by natural gas. The "green" hydrogen is extremely low % and has the problem of cost, renewables produce intermittently this means that you can have periods when the electrolysis plants are not working and period when they are. What do you do? Do you build enough so that no energy is wasted? Ok but then you have some plants that are non-operational 70%-60% of the year. 4. "Pink" hydrogen (the one produced with nuclear) seems good (as of cost/production) because it's a bit more reliable and constant compared to "green" hydrogen" but data is still limited.
@@riky-gl8nl thank you, great response! 1. That is true. Hydrogen is expensive, but needed for lots of processes in the chemical industry with steel being the most prominent example. Nonetheless we won't get anywhere without a hydrogen infrastructure albeit limited to the applications where it is not feasible to directly use electricity in any way. Planes and ships come to mind. Those will also be the fields where energy costs will rise. 2. Indeed it is. But I don't see any viable alternatives that would allow getting on a net zero path. Carbon sequestration on that scale is equally as expensive while not really providing a final solution AND not benefitting from the synergies I mentioned. 3. Yes, I think that we will need loads of capacity for hydrogen synthesis. Upside is that it can be used as a means to regulate grid stability. Currently the grids are regulated on the supply side. In the future grid regulation will take place mostly on the load side. What we have to consider is this: We don't need enough production capacity to cover peak outputs as we can utilize short-time battery storage as well. The problem is that a hydrogen infrastructure is needed nonetheless, although to a lesser extent (guesstimation: at most 30-40% less?) for a nuclear powered grid at the cost of losing the synergetic and therefore cost-cutting effects with seasonal storage. Meanwhile hydrogen production facilities are much easier built and scale much better to higher capacities than a NPP. 4. "Pink" hydrogen seems good but one of the strongest argument for expanding nuclear energy is that we would not need that much excess production capacity. From my understanding pink hydrogen would introduce the same excess capacity through the backdoor. Speaking as a german we are currently at ~70GW peak consumption. Pink hydrogen would double or triple that number leading us to a whopping 100-200 additional reactors needed. At this point all the public bawling about shutting down our last 3 reactors in 2022 is not even remotely adequate. I would like to add, that in the public the reliability of nuclear power plants is wildly overstated. Krümmel and Biblis A as the worst examples from germany had plant availabilities of
Would love to see an unbiased estimate of cost/energy over plant lifespan for all energy sources. Needs to account for storage in case of renewables but also decommission of nuclear which is lengthy and costly.
@@jukamala The cost of decomissioning is already included in the prize per MW/h of nuclear energy something that is not kept into account for the renewables
Getting better at the quiz! Thanks for things like that, it's fun!
One of the reasons for high interest rates on building loans could be due to the number of nuclear plants that began construction but were not finished, I've seen 2 plants that were begun but unfinished after spending around $2 billion each.
Nice 👍. Thank you for the informative video!
I'm so glad you made this video. Kyle Hill covers most topics around nuclear, but the cost is something I thinn he hasn't addressed very well (if he has at all).
The cost doesn't matter, more money is wasted on the military
@@moritakaishida7963 terrible argument.
Thanks for clarifying the cost and time arguments as always with pure math and sources. I would like to also see how arguments like "nuclear is finite resource for max 50 years anyway" stands up. And then another that is more political "nuclear makes countries depend on imports potentially from not friendly countries"
Thank you, Sabine, for some rational words on this topic 👏
20:37 Absolutely! Perfect storm of worst case scenarios and more damage was done from the panic to get away than by the plant with the irradiated area being (relatively) small. Then there is the question of how to renewables compare if we take away the subsidies.
Your cost of power graph around 12 minutes or so in is wrong for wind and solar because it ignored storage costs. All other methods can deliver on demand. They cannot.
That's only necessarily a bad thing if a particular market lacks enough flexible generation (i.e. gas). In a functioning power market, there should be enough money to make from supply shortages that storage and flexible generation becomes available when it is needed.
@@stephenwatson2964 Yeah, there isn't really much of a willingness to spend $$$ on a gas plant that you only get to run as a backup. It should be a requirement on any supplier to have minimum guarantees. IOW, let the wind and solar folk build their own backups to ensure dependable supply.
Good video, Sabina. More power to you!
When I was at Cornell where Hans Bethe was teaching graduate students but dropped in to guest lecture Physics 101 and was charming and easy to follow (that's just name dropping my comment has to do with the accuracy required in theoretical physics verses wealth management at about 13:10) at the end of the second semester I went to the TAs' office to find out my grade and pick up the final. My TA handed me my test and said "you did really well I'll see you next year" and I responded "no I'm a math major this is my first and last physics class". His immediate response was "You should change. Math is far too finicky, in my field astro physics all you need is the right power of tens to get a Nobel Prize". I was glad to see that traditional physics humor has soldiered on in spite of experimental accuracy now reaching 5 orders of magnitude or more. I ultimately went into a field, medicine, where accuracy is often pretended to be 3 or even 4 significant digits and yet is rarely 2. I applaud to attempt rein in the expectations that we can know exactly the answer as opposed to a more realitic advice "Keep your eyes open".
Thank you for a good video! A few things to consider that were not mentioned in the video: 1) Although a nuclear power plant is expensive, it easily lasts for 60 years, much longer than any other power plant, except for hydroelectric power plants. 2) The operation of a nuclear power plant is independent of the weather. While electricity produced by wind and solar power is cheaper, their production is weather and time-dependent. A nuclear power plant produces electricity consistently. Therefore, nuclear power may cost more. 3) If we look at individual countries and how quickly they have succeeded in increasing fossil-free energy production, nuclear power built in the 70s and 80s has been much faster to construct than renewable energy today. There is no technical barrier to why it couldn't be done again. The best example of nuclear power construction today is the Barakah plant in the United Arab Emirates. It is a complex built by South Korea, featuring four identical units. I don't have the numbers at hand now, but the cost of each unit has consistently decreased, coinciding with a general drop in prices, and these reductions are significant.
Hi Sabine, would you research about nuclear plant dismantling costs, and long term storage and whether or not these decommission costs have been paid by the companies did they go bust and have governments bail them out and are they still ongoing.
In the end the public ends up footing the bill for that. You can't tell me any company now is building up the assets to safeguard nuclear waste for hundreds or thousands of years. They are long gone when the costs start piling up.
Exactly @@lb2791
jeah this is onesided and really ignores excellent points from the green scientists.
And wind/solar?????
@@TheJon2442 never heard of the government footing the bill for the dismantling and disposal of those. That's paid for by the energy companies.
Truly fantastic video, Sabine! Thanks a bunch for all the work you do! 😊 Happy new year! And stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
It's finally completed: kzhead.info/sun/fsZshNKlrqpthZs/bejne.html
I am a US coderivative and I love it! Very objective. Love it!
Late the the post but I live down the road from watts bar. Some of the crew stayed at the hotel I work at for the outage and refueling this year. It was pretty cool to talk to some of them.
I thought I was alone thinking that Fukushima disaster was actually an argument for nuclear power plants, rather than against. Thanks for explaining it in such a clarity.
I was a US Navy Nuc, I see Fukushima as an argument for Nuclear, but not PWR's.
I am 81, so I have been around since the start of the idea of nuclear power plants. I also thought Japan's situation demonstrated how well the safety systems actually worked. The biggest problem with nuclear energy is that the average person equates atom bombs with nuclear energy. That made the public distrustful and then a dumb movie doubled down on the fear of an accident at a nuclear power plant. The media pushed that fear to the maximum. Nuclear power plants cost so much to build and take so long because the average person equates atomic energy with atom bombs and nobody wants one of those plants in their neighborhood. When there is an accident at a nuclear power plant, again the media jumps on the fear of the public to sell their "papers", by failing to report on how well the safety systems actually worked(not counting the Soviet Union's very poor nuclear energy programs).
@@williamromine5715 Scott Manly here on YT did an excellent video on the technical aspects of the Chernobyl failure. It outlined just how poor the design was.
Fukushima cost 200 billion so far. Just for an electricity plant. That's an insane amount of money. Fukushima was game over for nuclear.
@@Prometheus4096 the 200 billion is not for Fukushima, it's for making politicians look strong. Rational handling would have cost a fraction. But even 200 billion should be compared to 60 trillion kWh generated between Chernobyl and Fukushima. It comes out to an accident cost of 0.3 cents. And new NPPs are orders of magnitude safer, so we can expect accident costs like 0.3/100 = 0.003 cents/kWh.
What about costs for decommissioning, storage, and disposal of nuclear waste? Decommissioning of the German nuke-plant Greifswald (since the 1990s) costs so far around 6,5 Billion Euro, and some say, the process of decommissioning will take perhaps until 2060 or so. Plus: no one knows what storage will cost.
They always skip over this. 😂
Thanks for yet another informative and timely video
Hi Sabine. I love your take on just about everything. Could you have a look at Olivine (the mineral) and it's potential to "scrub" Carbon Dioxide from the air. It might not fix pollution in general. It might be a good replacement for all of the rain forest reductions, however. I sit here on the edge of my seat. from Canada
23:44 "small modular reactors ... some of them have turned out more expensiv than expected" shocker ^^
Par for the course with everything.
Main few problems is: 1 we dont have a common way to build them - so checking for errors and improving them with the red tap becomes a nightmare. 2) Larger and larger something gets - the larger the complexity gets as well and that means any changes can reset the design/building back years. Recommend we just stop building bigger plants - and start looking at making them smaller and more module in design using a few companies to make them in house and then ship out to locations instead. This would fix a number of those issues and make any red tap issues really a non-issue as you can just keep improving the design for everything under the sun. The design though would have to be shared across countries - or at least - work togather to make it happen. NATO could allow for this. Granted, Solar isnt much behind either... in terms of new tech that could help 1) make it cheaper, and 2) improve the collection rate from 20% up to 40%. Batteries are also going to see some improvement here shortly as well by moving away from Li to Na follow up by getting away from active carbon to Si and S for double the power dens per cell 180 -> 540 for home and grid scale storage. I think both need to be made, but solar does have a cleaner over all path.
Bigger Reactors have the advantage of making cheaper electricity through economies of scale.
SMRs are elas described, smaller, 'mass produced' shippable reactors with the aim of doing as you say: improving quality by being a consistent design, manufactured in dedicated factories doing nothing but making them etc etc.. SMRs are starting to gain traction overcoming a lot of regulatory hurdles, but they present some of their own issues that have meant they have only started to look promising in the last few years. It will be interesting to see how they do all the same as it makes total sense to standardise designs etc.
Smaller does not mean reduced complexity. On balance smaller is more expensive.
Renewables are important, but not sufficient. Battery development is great, but has it´s limits.
@@preisschild4622 There are two kinds of scale, actual size and total quantity. The massive size can help with various square-cubed considerations, of which there are numerous, from heat flow, the volume flow, basically anything that goes into or out of the unit scales up faster than the diameter of the vessels, which causes its own set of headaches. Small, numerous reactors benefit from manufacturing at scale, which, if they can catch on, might be produced in the 100's per year.
More problems of NPPs: - Long-term safeguarding of waste (my favorite unsolved problem). - No controllability to be able to work together with wind power and photovoltaics. - Not quickly adjustable in power and therefore bot cost inefficient with fluctuating energy output in competition with cheaper Windpower and Photovoltaics. - All the unpleasant incidents, even if we haven't had any major accidents yet.
We can already predict the amount of solar and wind power generated, There are many solutions available for nuclear waste, new rectors are much faster with power throttling and It is a good base load power source that isn't dependent on variability of solar or wind, and won't take an insane amount of lithium to make it work
@@misham6547 What is your solution to nuclear waste? Moreover, radioactive energy sources are not an endless resource. Mining for it is an environmental problem and can be a dependency on foreign countries. I don't think power control can be as good as it needs to be to work with PV and wind. I also don't think nuclear power is a good solution financially to fill the gap that PV and wind sometimes have.
@@Gaston413 you have to mine more materials for renewable. Modern reactors have waste that can be recycled. Nice try.
@@misham6547 There are not many solutions for nuclear waste. There is one "working" solution and a lot of thinkable but either limited solutions in development. The one "working" is to bury the shit until it becomes a problem for the next generations. Hooray!!! The other fantasy solution is to transmutate the worst waste, which is future development of totally questionable success and left the medium and low radiated shit untouched. Buried stuff again. Hooray!!! And the latest project of development reactors with waste for duration about 300 Years (Half- Life- Time?), will it ever work stable unter the extreme conditions of the radioactive material, and at what maintanance cost? And i ask you atom energy fanboys, how do you want to keep up with the costs of renewables?
@@patrickbateman1660 Old reactor material is also enriched for reuse, but this is expensive. And there is waste that currently cannot be recycled. Unless you consider the firing of uranium ammunition in war-torn countries to be a legitimate means of disposal. New reactor types are intended to convert this waste further into more harmless substances, but these are under development and not ready for use. And it is uncertain whether they will ever be able to run economically.
I really appreciate the explanation of the explanation of statistics here, I think a good understanding of statistics is one of the most important factors in becoming really informed about a subject.
*Finally* a full-ish picture of inflated cost of nuclear power (and nuclear waste "problem", and what Fukushima accident shows etc). Thank you, Dr. Hossenfelder!
I agree it was a great video. I would've liked to see her discuss how things work in the US Navy. No one has a better nuclear safety record, and yet they're more than capable of cranking out new reactors like no tomorrow. (Also, you should check out Elina Charatsidou, Atomic Blender, Atomic Age of Reason, Kyle Hill and others for more videos like this one)
@@jeffbenton6183 Thorcon makes small reactors that are movable. Based on the Navy ship standard.
@@jeffbenton6183Yes, I remember US Navy dunking their nuclear waste to pacific ocean in barrels filled with concrete . I bet they have open records for everyone for everything they do, will you point me there please ? While googling on it, take a look at Olkiluoto-3 power plant construction, 23 years and counting (can't bribe Finnish civilian servant or slide from building rules signed between companies in paper )) ? Go dismantle 80%-built nuclear reactor, NOW). While calculating that delay in power, company trust in local infrastructure, cost and security (Finland does have rather large neighbor you know?) of power, all of which are going to be and have been paid by taxpayer.
@@frederickmfarias3109 Rolls Royce does too. And third company (I think Canada) name of which I don't remember now. Those are really wasteful on terms of amount of waste generated though, so I'll take Olkiluoto-3 any day (check wiki or anything on that). Though construction may take few days longer, for reality and locality (Physical) reasons.
@@frederickmfarias3109 Thanks! I'll look into it. Unfortunately, it can't be exactly the same design, because it's illegal to use weapons-grade highly enriched uranium except for maritime reactors.
This is such a strong video. You express the economics with a physicist's analytical eye.
Supply and demand and government tyranny.
no she doesn't. She completely lacks an understanding of the energy monopoly that (nuclear) power plants represent and like 99.5% of the populace the realization that most of our current problems (environmental destruction, stark wealth inequality, wars, etc.) are CAUSED by such monopolies (in all their forms).
You forgot statistics, from 80's to 2030's she forgot Finnish nuclear power plant construction speed and reality though. Sabine's team has strong grasp of reality and localization (as, say, universe is not locally real as physicists say).
one of your best vids to date. the research, the presentation, and the delivery just gets better and better
Thank you Dr. Hossenfelder for your video. We need more reliable power to continue to master the climate.
@sabineHossenfelder The figures used as a maximum do not seem to include two reactors: Flamanville 3 where construction started in 2007 and is still ongoing and Hinkley Point C started work in 2016 but they are already years behind. By my calculations the best way to reduce carbon emissions is the use of wind and PV (also possible rain charge collection which has been demonstrated and I am making some cells from microscope slides). The other thing needed is energy storage. Many houses are suitable for energy storage at the 30kWh level. Now that sodium cells are available the cost should drop through the floor. Industrial units could use flow batteries which store MWh of power. As far as I can see the reasons this is not happening here in the UK are entirely political.
I wonder about the insurance costs you mentioned. What do these insurances actually cover and do all nuclear power plants have them? It seems in all actual examples of nuclear accidents, the public ended up covering most of the costs of the resulting damages and the restoration efforts. If nuclear power plants are underinsured then it's no wonder the insurnce costs don't make up a large part of the energy costs.
Why should insurance cover the cost of extreme over evacuation? And unnecessary “cleanup”?
@@peterfireflylund Counterquestion: Why should governments do "extreme over evacuation" and "unnecessary cleanup"? You're basically implying that they're totally incompetent (while you are not, of course).
no they do not. www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html
@@peterfireflylund Insurance is supposed to cover all those costs which the insurance buyer is legally obliged to bear. Simple as that. Doesn't matter if you think something is unnecessary. You would have to take that up with the law makers to get rid of the legal obligation.
They cover only to a certain limit (a few Billion Dollars). Higher damages need to be paid by the taxpayer.
As usual and really interesting video from Sabine. However, there was no mention of decommissioning. I recognise that the volume of waist was mentioned, but the structures need to be decommissioned as well.
Great video. The LCOE cost difference between Nuclear and renewables is very much compensated by additional renewable costs not traditionally incurred by the generator. (1) Wind and Solar have inherent capacity factors which means that they must have around a 3 times larger connection into the grid (or local battery) to provide the same average energy. (2) The additional storage for renewable power when it not required is extremely expensive. eg My domestic 5kW solar cell installation costs less than the 13kW-hr battery required to balance my daily demand and I am a massive exporter. It would be interesting to develop a method to evaluate these additional costs