Should we consider nuclear energy to be clean ?

Or is it the dirtiest way of producing energy known to man ? Sure it doesn’t produce the easy to see pollutants of more traditional energy pollution , but there are the issues of containing the waste , which can be radioactive for thousands of years , accidents and leaks of radiation can , and do , also occur. What’s the consensus on here ?

I think you’ve answered your own question there. If it produces toxic waste then it isn’t clean. Is it better than burning fossil fuels though?

Does sound a bit like you have made you mind up.

Ask the folks no longer living in Tchernobyl or Fukushima.

Or watch the coverage of the clusterf8ck of nuclear waste recycling that is Sellafield……

It’s not clean but it produces a lot of energy and doesn’t produce emissions.

Yep. This might be a lesser of two evils thing. Of course, we should try to reduce consumption and we should be prepared to spend more on renewables. Looking at the cost of nuclear (and nuclear research), if we’d been spending that much on renewables research then things would now be a lot better.

Nothings clean everything has a byproduct.

Just depends which ones most palatable to you

I think nuclear is important as part of a wider energy resilience

It has pros ace cons. I don’t think its one or the other

The uk has lots of horrible waste to sort out. It’s expensive. There is the risk of accidents. It’s not really a solution for the world. Most countries didn’t have access to it.

But it is low carbon

I think the uk were fine for one more generation if power stations. I’m just annoyed the decision was made late so we couldn’t develop our own new technology and ended up buying in the tech

Just depends which ones most palatable to you

Which one has the lowest impact potential should be the main driver. Health of people and planet should come first. Does that mean nuclear, wind, solar, wave, fossil etc? They’ve all got pro’s and con’s to them. Fossil fuels clearly aren’t great for starters. Nuclear seems good but if things go a bit wrong the shit hits the fan big time.

Ridiculously safe compared to coal, oil, gas. Tiny amounts of waste, like a few hundred cubic metres for everything done worldwide ever, compare that to huge spoil heaps around every mining town. I’d have one of those small modular reactors Rolls Royce were touting on the edge of every city.

@drac it doesn’t produce carbon emissions (although it does, everything being done to manage the waste at sellafield is being powered by a gas fired power plant) but it does produce significant quantities of aqueous emissions and, despite filtration, some emissions of radioactive material to air but the big issue is the waste.

How clean does clean have to be? We are inherently dirty as a species just by our existence.

One day we’ll probably create the technology to clean up radiation or something.

Tiny amounts of waste, like a few hundred cubic metres for everything done worldwide ever,

High level waste perhaps but there are thousand of tonnes of low and intermediate level wastes at drigg  and other sites, all of which requires active management fro another 100 yrs plus

the high level stuff is going to need a geological disposal facility which will cost tens of billions, whereas Yorkshire’s coal tips are now parks and housing estates.

Yes, it produces no emissions, waste can be managed effectively and if we progress it as we were pre Fukushima, we’d be in a decent position for the next generation or two. Through life management is required and costed at the outset, it all falls apart with historical arrangements that tend to leave the bill with the government

Not against it btw but you have to be honest about the impacts

thousand of tonnes of low and intermediate level wastes at drigg and other sites, all of which requires active management fro another 100 yrs plus

So what, sounds like a very small problem to me, a basic warehousing and access control issue.

I suggest you give Drigg a call and let them know

The active management is up to disposal, when it’s in the ground the management tends to be over, bar the usual site assessments, we do it better than a lot of others, who tend to just find a mine, chuck it down there and then pour concrete!

Wrong. No active waste is in the ground in the uk (we’ll mayb some stuff from the 50’s/60’s) all the stuff at Drigg is above ground, containerised and monitored continually. The high and higher intermediate level stuff is still on site at sellafied. They’re encapsulating it in 3m3 boxes filled with concrete and then storing it in facilities, there are 3 encapsulation plants and about a dozen product stores working or in construction. These are replacing the silos built in the 70’s 80s that are dropping to bit and each facility costs ~£1bn. The only reason they’ve built these stores is that getting the geological disposal facility built before the MSSS and other silos disintegrate is proving impossible as nobody wants it in their backyard.

admittedlythey could do what the Russians and the septics  do, as you describe, but would be very illegal over here

Yes, but isn’t the plan to do this by 2030 or something at Drigg, as it’s meant to be closing down at some point, not looked at nuclear stuff in years to be honest, so have no clue what the future plans are these days, bar that we’re behind whatever plan we had by at least 10-20 years now.

When it’s in the ground…….

But most of it isn’t in the ground…not anywhere near…and that’s going to remain the case for decades to come if not longer

And as for building new nuclear, we’d be better off spending billions investing in renewables of all types, and getting a rapid return on it, than spending billions on not quite building sizewell C.

2030- ROFLCOPTAZZ

The product stores they are building now are designed to last 50-100years so that tells you something about how optimistic they are about the GDF

I’m not anti but anti think people are down playing the waste.

I was involved , as a teacher, in the consultation about what we will need to do with out waste. The consultation was really to fund out what the students thought.

Storage I’d likely upto 100,000 years. The problem is that anything other than deep burial assumes a continuity in out society. The consensus is that on these time scales we can’t assume that continuity. I remember the look of anguish on a 14 year old girls when asked “If some one is harmed by the waste in 10,000 years do we have have a moral responsibility.”

I think it’s questionable that we are building more capacity with out worksble plan for the waste.

I meant closing down to any new arrival, so a locked site after that, not abandoned, not sure what the plan was for future disposal, again going out of scope of the question again, as there has been no issues with the storage at places like Drigg from what i remember.

It’s not sustainable.  With current gen2 and even gen3 reactors and the latest reprocessing, there’s around a 100-160 years of fissile material available in the crust and that’s assuming CURRENT levels of consumption.

Low level waste has to be continually guarded as it’s easily incorporated into dirty bombs, this vastly increasing their effectiveness for area denial.  This massively increases disposal and storage costs.

The environmental footprint of a modern reactor  build is absolutely bloody enormous.  A single reactor like HPC is an order of magnitude worse than all the offshore wind turbines that all of norther Europe have installed.

I’d prefer us to install more wind and just burn gas until such time as chemical or electrical energy storage can be scaled to fill the gap.

Nuclear is a knee jerk reaction to on demand energy (which it still can’t actually provide) with a MASSIVE head and tail that substantially outweigh its benefits.

The consensus is that on these time scales we can’t assume that continuity. I remember the look of anguish on a 14 year old girls when asked “If some one is harmed by the waste in 10,000 years do we have have a moral responsibility.”

That’s a hypothetical harm against a current and ongoing harm caused by our use of fossil fuels.

The solution to waste storage is plasma drilling technology and then to dump it in the mantle.  That’s the only long term storage solution.

Yeah sorry, conflating two things, the LLW at Drigg will likely go for landfill or incineration dependant on characterisation but it’ll still cost millions to store it until then and require new facilities to do the disposing

i can see the high level stuff being lost in a subduction zone once the roofs start caving in on the product stores c.2150

Renewables are great, but we will need something to power us through windless nights and (especially) windless stints in winter. We will also want a whole bunch more power in the future for our EVs and heatpumps. Nuclear is far from perfect but is much better for the planet than fossil fuels.

I agree with the concerns over storage. It seems like we’re just passing the buck to our kids and their kids.

As far as I can tell, the geological disposal facility is nowhere near being decided and will likely be in an area of low population with potentially complex geology, rather than a geologically more appropriate site.

The comment about no waste tips like coal is wide of the mark. Uranium is mined so also results in large mine waste dumps in parts of Canada, Australia, Niger, Kazakhstan etc.. just not Yorkshire, Notts etc..

there is CO2 produced – in the building and commissioning of the plant as well as in generation but total lifespan orders of magnitude less than fossil fuel.  Radioactive waste no one has come up with a proper solution.

each facility costs ~£1bn.

A single (quite big tbf) oil refinery can cost 15 times that.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-22/mexico-s-new-oil-refinery-s-cost-rises-to-as-much-as-18-billion?embedded-checkout=true

Every form of power production is dirty if you start looking at building and commissioning, especially when you’re talking the levels of rare earths and metals that we’re using for a lot of the green energy production, there’s a lot of pollution and contamination, but that’s in other countries i guess, so at least here we can talk about how green it is.

Every form of power production is dirty if you start looking at building and commissioning,

Yup.  Beware greenwashing.  there is no such thing as clean or co2 free electricity

I don’t like it but I think it has its place at the moment, hopefully it will die out as we get more renewable sources and grid storage.

Out of interest, how many of the ‘very against’ posters have deliberately chosen a nuclear free green tariff?  (As opposed to a green tariff that may include some nuclear)   And who does them, I’m currently with EDF so the majority of my energy mix is ‘carbon free’ and of course a large portion of it is also nuclear.

I have to teach this at a basic level.

I feel quite strongly people need to know the pros and cons.

I come down in the side as uk nuclear being just better than fossil fuels. But i wouldn’t want to sell it like a used car

I am an engineer and strong supporter of renewables.

My take is that nuclear is relatively safe, far more harm is caused by extraction and burning of fossil fuels, just as an everyday background that doesn’t make the news.

Having said that I do not support nuclear development as I do not consider that we should be generating products that will be harmful for hundreds of years. That just seems like pushing the problem onto future generations.

Just my input, I do not consider the choices available to be simple black/ white.

I suggest people might want to have a look at David Mackay’s book (downloadable free from https://www.withouthotair.com/). He was a Departmental Chief Scientific Adviser and I always felt had a very objective view of energy matters. The book is a bit dated now but the basic facts and arguments still stand.

One thing which is not clearly appreciated is the scale of our current use of fossil fuels- only about 20% of current energy use is electricity, much of which is generated by burning gas, and an awful lot of the remaining 80% is also fossil fuel. When you start to think about a 100 GW grid, or large scale hydrogen production and distribution, things get prohibitively complicated and you find you need a North Sea full of large offshore wind turbines or a Wales covered with solar panels. It is very difficult to devise a credible net zero energy mix which provides energy in the quantities we require at reasonable cost.

Of course, one of the difficulties in all this is that opinions reflect ‘heart’ or ‘head’ and there’s no point trying to rebut ‘heart’ opinions with ‘head’ arguments, and it’s very easy just to talk past one another.

Fusion must be just around the corner. Surely by now.

Will be interesting to see if the current government’s policy of funding early stage design of small nuclear ever leads to anything tangible. Rolls Royce and Hitachi seem to be taking it seriously.