The Economics of Nuclear Energy

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Credits:
Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus

References:

Thank you to AP Archive for access to their archival footage.


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Thank you to my patreon supporters: Adam Flohr, Henning Basma, Hank Green, William Leu, Tristan Edwards, Ian Dundore, John & Becki Johnston. Nevin Spoljaric, Jason Clark, Thomas Barth, Johnny MacDonald, Stephen Foland, Alfred Holzheu, Abdulrahman Abdulaziz Binghaith, Brent Higgins, Dexter Appleberry, Alex Pavek, Marko Hirsch, Mikkel Johansen, Hibiyi Mori. Viktor Józsa, Ron Hochsprung

[MichaelSteeves]

I'm an I&C Engineer at a nuclear plant. You covered things very well (as I would expect from you!). There are a couple points that weren't covered.
1) Nuclear plants can only run as long as they have the "social capital" required. If the population decided they are uncomfortable with nuclear, the plant will end up shutting down.

2) Instead of spending money on fuel (possibly imported), a Nuclear plant spends it on salaries for well paid professionals. That money stays in the community. Purely commercial plants don't fully take this into account, but government owned/supported plants recognize the benefits.

[Sean_]

"requires voters who understand the energy market..."
Well shoot, there goes the future.

[Jim_]

Our rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity

[NeovanGoth]

13:20 Keep in mind that variable renewables produce additional costs due to the necessity of building up overcapacity, backup, introduction of smart grids, and so on. While it is quite cheap to produce a unit of energy using renewables, it is much more expensive to provide an average unit of energy to a consumer, that, depending on the time of the day and the weather, may come from a cheap renewable source, or from an expensive backup like hydrogen or batteries.

[DiasMurik]

I work at a nuclear power plant, and honestly it's the most amazing piece of engineering I have ever seen.

[benjones]

Short term thinking is what got us here in the first place.

[chinmaykane]

The arguments on both sides are complex and I feel that just by discussing them, it makes a difference.
The conclusion that you have drawn may or may not be very accurate, but it makes us think and thats all that is needed. Just people being more aware of stuff affects their behaviour positively.
Thank You for making these videos.

[veritea]

1:35 "Wind is intermittent...Needs to be propped up, and natural gas is the perfect solution for that." I disagree. Peaker plants are inefficient and very expensive. Battery storage is not only shown to be much cheaper, but the market shows it being more profitable this year in the U.S. The cost of battery storage fell to half cost this year, and is forecasted to again next year. 81% of new power generation in the U.S. is made of solar and battery storage.

[advanceringnewholder]

10:05 That's a saddening truth. Politicians only think in 5 years, as it's about them not us

[mobashshirkareem]

0:48 France produces 71 percent of its electric energy needs from nuclear, not 61. Anyway, nice video. Please make a video on pros and cons of nuclear energy, gen 4 nuclear reactors and thorium powered nuclear reactors

[shubham-pawar]

People fear what they don't understand.

[jamesharding]

The single biggest issue with nuclear is still, IMO, a lack of public understanding. People look at anything to do with “nuclear” or “atomic” the same way a young child looks at shadows in a dark room: They don’t understand it, and it scares them because of that.

[BigHeadClan]

The Illinois EnergyProf is a criminally under-rated channel, hopefully he sees a lot of love from the community from that shout-out.

[fratenebram]

"... Requires a Voter to understand..." - Oh sh***t

[davidhendriks]

Awesome to see you referring to the Illinois Energy Professor. His videos are really good, and taught me loads about energy production and the economics thereof.

[zd]

Anybody who has worked at nuke plants and has actually done the e=mc2 equations laughs at renewables. The "safety costs" at nuke plants are due to SOCIETY, not primarily engineering. Fission is hilariously more efficient, all things considered (total society wide economic costs). Fusion will be the holy grail. Societies are too full of people who are too stupid, lazy, or ignorant to embrace the best fuel tech we have now, which is fission. And not 1950's plant designs either.

[joeybroda]

It's also amazing how much the set-up to deal with renewables varies by region. I live in a northern area with lots of hydro but almost no solar investment. For us the challenge isn't day-night fluctuation in energy; it's that hydro is insanely productive during the spring run-off in Feb-May. We have to spill over the dams because we can't use all of the electricity. But the challenge is could we store say an entire extra month of power and release it over the other months? The thinking now is that batteries wouldn't be effective at seasonal storage, and more effort is going into the production of hydrogen or synthetic methane for long term storage.

[keenheat]

feels like a line graph with profit/loss on the y axis and years in the x axis is easier to read.

[sethjansson]

People: Nuclear bad, it makes radioactive waste.

Also people: setting the Earth on fire by putting a fat blanket of carbon dioxide around it.

[carlb]

I agree with part of your presentation. The French proved the small reactor factory built concept in the 1960's when they built their very successful nuclear power station grid from this type of small reactor. You mentioned how well their system works then totally ignored their model and only analyzed the bloated; HUGE one off nuclear teakettle designs they have been building here and elsewhere. These designs are kind of like redesigning a jumbo jet from scratch every time you build one: REALLY STUPID. Small modular, factory built is WAY cheaper. Small modular reactors: Liquid Fueled Thorium Molten Salt is orders of magnitude better yet.

There are a number of fundamental problems of any solid fueled nuclear reactor. Nuclear fuel ALWAYS swells due to the intense radiation, reaction byproducts quickly contaminate the reaction and cannot be remove from the solid fuel, unless the fuel is recycled. Also it only allows utilization of a very small portion of the energy in the nuclear fuel (about 1-3%), requiring fuel bundle replacement in about 18 months. When the core is decommissioned you still need to store the highly radioactive waste for thousands of years. Spent fuel MUST be continuously covered in highly purified water for at least centuries to keep the fuel bundles below melting temperature. The continuous heat from the fuel, evaporates the water quickly (hundreds of gallons in a short period of time) ALL spent fuel is currently stored in pools, on site at the nuclear plant and there are no plans to recycle it as it is expensive and hard to do conventionally. Uranium is somewhat water soluble (Thorium is not), so there is a groundwater contamination concern.

I used to oppose nuclear energy, mainly due to high pressure steam explosions (3 times so far) and long term storage of highly radioactive fuel for 10k+ years. I have changed my mind, but only if we build Thorium liquid fueled, Molten Salt reactors (such as LFTR) instead of the boiling water conventional reactors we have now. Currently Thorium is a waste product of a number of mining operations, is orders of magnitude more plentiful than uranium and is basically as safe as dirt (it needs conversion inside the reactor to become useful fuel, conversion takes 30 days and is free). Molten salt solves ALL of the fundamental problems of boiling water reactors, as part of their nature. They also cheaply and easily burn current stocks of used fuel rods leaving only a small residue that is safe in about 300 years. They effectively use about 95+% of the nuclear energy in the fuel. No expensive explosion proof containment structure needed, as it cannot explode (it operates at ambient air pressure). They are walk away safe (Oak Ridge Tennessee ran a molten salt reactor safely for 6, 000 hours and performed walk away safe tests on it at full power in the 1960's). In fact they shut it down every weekend because no one wanted to stay. They are well suited to the SMR form factor and easily allow continuous removal of very valuable medical isotopes on an ongoing basis. These medical isotopes are impossible to remove from boiling water reactors. They also provide high temperature waste heat that can be used in many high temperature processes now, such as steel, fertilizer or concrete making, just to name a few. Desalinization of sea water on a huge scale is easy and cheap.

The only remaining hurdles are some slight metals compatibility proving needed. Chemical separation is a far superior and cheaper process. The inventor of the nuclear tea kettle reactor (Alvin Weinberg) said it was fine for military use but was a very poor choice for commercial reactors, as we have seen 3 times. For many years he strongly promoted the Thorium, liquid fueled reactor as a far superior choice. Thorium is useless for making bombs which is one of the main reasons they used uranium instead back in the 1950’s. See Thorium Alliance you tube videos for a good overview. An excellent boiling water reactor problems review is a 1hr You Tube video: