"They’ve spent too much time consuming both NATO and Russian propaganda, which falsely portray the war as “total” in scope."
Russian propaganda certainly does not present the war as total. On the contrary, it presents the war as limited. With few exceptions, the word "war" is avoided in official Russian statements, it is called "Special Military Organization" to emphasize the limited nature (with the underlying threat that the SMO could be upgraded to a full war).
As far as Switzerland is concerned, the main reason why it is hardly contemplated to increase the share of nuclear energy to French levels (it had been decided that no new NPPs would be built in Swii, but it is likely that this will be changed so that there is the option to replace old NPPs in the future) is that there is a lot of baseload and often storage capable hydro power (many large dams in the mountains). Of course, these large dams would even more vulnerable in wars than nuclear power plants, and the destruction of dams would lead to vast destruction in significant areas - compared to large scale hydro power, nuclear energy is hardly particularly risky. In the case of Switzerland, that is hardly a very part of the consideration (even though Switzerland has many military installations, especially in the mountains, had quite a significant army during the cold war - now, the Swiss army is small in percentage of GDP terms, but since Switzerland is rich, in absolute terms, it is still significant for a small country, but even though there are many plans for crises of all kinds, an all-out war with bombing dams and NPPs is hardly a scenario considered likely).
Your argument has been exactly my position for as long as I can remember, so you score high on the one-item intelligence test (the extent to which you agree with me), ha-ha.
Seriously, you have apparently been very smart all of your life. How many high school physics students volunteer to give a talk on liquid fluoride nuclear reactors? Okay, so maybe you were naive in thinking it was the "one weird trick" cure-all. Pushing ideas with heart-felt commitment is, as far as I can tell, the way that science achieves progress. We do not have to perfect our ideas inside of our own heads before throwing them out there into the marketplace of ideas. If Mercier and Sperber (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21447233/) are correct, what typically happens is that we submit our pet ideas to our audience with the deck stacked in favor of our ideas and allow the intelligent reasoning power of our community to scrutinize our what we have put out there.
RE microreactors, it might need deregulation and liability reform, but there's a lot of opportunity for small modular reactors to make nuclear power more decentralized. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power for example. safety concerns seem pretty easy to mitigate since the footprint is so small, you just chuck it in a belowground pool with a concrete lid. GE is currently constructing the BWRX-300, which has passive cooling/safety (you don't need to keep pumping the water to keep it cool), in TN. Hope that works out, but it's been delayed a few times. Sadly the only operationg SMRs are in Russia and China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM, which also has passive cooling). The economics don't look good right now, but there is a lot of room for improvement if you can mass produce them
One argument for more nuclear power plants is to save the petroleum for military uses.
An economy or military which relies on battery power would indeed be incredibly vulnerable, whether the batteries are charged by nuclear, coal, or giant solar farms. The Grid is not reliable, as thunderstorms repeatedly prove.
But nuclear power can also be used to make liquid fuels, which can be dispersed and stockpiled.
Maybe with multi layer solar cells and sodium ion batteries, we might see rural and suburban homes getting completely off the grid. That would indeed by more robust than nuclear. Max Max compatible!
The US dialed back nuclear power due to safety concerns. The president who did the dialing back was a nuclear engineer (Jimmy Carter). Carter put an end to research on breeder reactors due to proliferation concerns. Plutonium is chemically separable. LFTRs also create chemically separable fissionables. The Union of Concerned Scientists was warning of that danger in the 1970s. I have a note card with a quote on the subject left over from high school debate.
Go to the Flibe Energy web site and you will find that they are moving forward with molten salt tech with conventional uranium, while doing some government funded studies on how to do strict accounting for thorium breeders.
With the new high temperature superconductors, we'll probably have fusion reactors before LFTRs get off the ground. And you will see countries using fusion for more than 18% of their grid power in a few decades after the first reactor-- unless there is a materials bottleneck for the superconductors.
you can't "save" petroleum for very long, it goes bad and costs money to store. What is necessary is to have a large production capacity. when you shut down production, it's hard to restart. Obviously there is an argument for maintaining a "strategic reserve" which I support but nuclear maximalism isn't the way.
There has never been a successful implementation of nuclear-to-fuel at mass scale. I am opposed to basing current policy on speculative predictions.
Not pumping as much oil is one way to store oil for future generations. Evidence is strong that our petroleum based economy will involuntarily end. Oil reserves are not infinite. I dug pretty deep into the numbers when having an extended debate with Ahnaf Ibn Qais on whether we will run out of fuel before we become a true spacefaring nation. https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/proem-to-the-aenean-future
Best case estimates of eventual available oil are about 2 trillion barrels, which is about 70 years worth at the current world burn rate. Even the Arabs are looking into alternative energy.
70 years is plenty of time to make the transition away from petroleum dependence and become spacefaring. (I took the anti doom side of the debate.)
Nuclear energy has not been used to make liquid fuels because nuclear energy is more valuable as base load grid power. Saturate grid demand and then marginal nuclear power goes to other uses, such as process heat, making liquid fuels, etc. For example, we could stretch the Canadian tar sands if we had a source of heat other than burning part of the tar.
It might make more sense to use solar and wind to make liquid fuels. The intermittent nature of these alternatives is much less of a concern when using the electricity for electrolysis than for powering the grid. Also, alternative energy is often far from consumers. They are using geothermal energy in Iceland to make methanol right now for that reason.
Wouldnt supplying more nuclear for homes and businesses free up oil for more strategically important things? If every lightbulb in America was powered by nuclear, or even 65% of lightbulbs, there would be a lot of excess oil and coal that could be used for plastics, cars, drones, and tanks. The decrease in demand might hurt domestic oil production in the short term, but if gas gets below $2/gallon then suddenly it becomes even cheaper to transport things in trucks, and it’s already very cheap to transport things in trucks.
It's an interesting article with aome good points, but it's not very accurate from an engineering perspective:
1) Most countries aren't designed to sustain prolonged bombardment by anyone, and that's an efficient choice for most: we don't need to design systems to the same tolerance as Taiwan/Ukraine.
2) Existing reactors are well-protected from attack as-is by their containment vessels, which are several feet of concrete. Upcoming Gen IV reactors can't really melt down, so the worst that happens to one under attack is it shuts down, same as any power plant. Not a perfect solution for existing plants, but not a problem in the future either.
3) It's not that PRC nuclear development will outshine our capacity all of a sudden, the problem is that they're testing new stuff we won't even prototype. The concern is that they'll leapfrog us, find something that works, and then scale it from there.
4) SMRs aren't supposed to be tiny and distributed. This is a common misconception made worse by foreign buyers who loudly say that's what they want. The purpose is to allow mid-size power plants to be economically feasible. Instead of a massive plant or nothing, SMRs get you 40%, 70%, or 80%, not tons of little 5% scale plants.
Nuclear power has a very high ceiling, but also a high floor. I couldn't fairly recommend it for many countries, but the US is definitely positioned to scale it for grid use while keeping hydrocarbons for the military. There's no grand conspiracy, it's just an expensive up-front investment and engineers suck at communicating with the public. I'm a nuclear engineer so I'm always glad to see my little niche getting time in the spotlight!
1 and 2 together) Nuclear is no worse than other plants from the lens of defense planning. It's not magically better, but it's not worse
3) A fine position to have; in practice it's difficult. If you don't have a critical mass (ha ha) of expertise, materiel, and production lines, getting new nuclear tech online is really hard. This is why few countries build their own and many import.
4) SMR is "small modular reactor," not "submarine reactor." The Navy's stuff is highly specialized for a purpose, but they do not come in all sizes.
I enjoy reading your policy work which is very thought provoking, but you're not an engineer.
1. Did you read the report on bombing oil fields in WWII? Huge distinction.
2. We have a large mass of experts already, they just need more money directed toward research rather than production. Manhattan Project is the gold standard. I'm in favor of cutting Social Security and Medicare and putting $1 trillion per year into tech research, including nuclear.
3. I'm not an engineer, but a sub-sized reactor could be scaled up to create all sizes. The problem isn't the size, but the feasibility of residential utilization.
1) Won't dispute the report at all, I'm commenting on the reactor itself. I don't know enough about uranium supply chains to compare apples to apples, but with the plant that turns [fuel] into [electricity] there's little difference in resilience.
2) For much of nuclear science, production *is* research. It takes a long time with few reactors to create the isotopes we need for testing. More reactors is the first part of expanding research
3) Navy reactors are meaningfully different designs which can't be scaled. They use very highly enriched uranium to achieve their compactness, which isn't feasible anywhere else. It's comparing a sports car to a dump truck: yeah, the same general components are there, but a bigger sports car can't do a dump truck's job.
1. If you bomb an oil field nothing happens. If you bomb a nuclear power plant it shuts down and takes 3 years to rebuild. Details in article.
2. Counter-point: if this were true, we should just force countries to let us build nuclear reactors for them via tariff deals. Don't need to build them all in America.
3. Right, not feasible due to qualitative differences, different tech. And I would really like a large sports car...
The exaggerated emphasis of the military by people like DeepLeftAnalysis (who at least openly calls himself an imperialist) is a clear sign of American decline.
In the first decades after WWII, the US had a lot to offer to the world, for example it was the most important investor in many countries and it had a much larger share of the world economy than it had today.
These times have passed, and now those who still want to cling to sick dreams of US dominance have to pretend it is the US military that makes it it a "real country' (and hope there are still people who have not noticed that the countless wars the US started against weak countries caused a lot of instability and suffering, but hardly a single one of them can be called a success for the US).
Because the US can offer little else to the rest of the world, the vision of these people with sick dreams of US dominance is that the US behaves in a Mafia-style way, creates threats (military and with "NGOs" that target other countries) and then offers Mafia-style "protection" to some countries.
Of course, this Mafia-style vision of the declining US is much less attractive to most of the rest of the world than the goals of rising powers like China based on mutually beneficial trade and cooperation.
Yes you can knock out a nuke power plant. You can do the same to nat gas. If speed is needed to replace a broken plant, you build a new nat gas plant replacement, especially if you already have some nat gas infrastructure in place for transport. 100% nuclear could be dangerous but 50%+ I don’t agree with the risks.
I don’t see how NPPs are any more vulnerable than other sources of electricity. Gas and coal generators could be bombed just as easily. Solar and wind farms may be dispersed, but their weak link is the long distance connections to reach consumers- again, easily bombed.
There are many reasons why nuclear penetration has stalled, but I don’t think military security has much explanatory power.
You are dismissing the "nukes fall everyone dies" point too readily. Nuclear bombs are mostly in silos, submarines, and air bases from which they can be easily deployed without additional input of energy. Hence, it doesn't matter if China can turn all our lights off by blowing up our nuclear power plants: the counterstrike would still be the end of organized society in China. They know this, we know they know this, et cetera. You want to have some resilience against nuclear war, talk about food and potable water production and distribution systems. Electricity is not fundamental to human survival.
A former staff member at an Ontario (Canada) powerplant leaked vulnerabilities explicitly so that foreign powers or terrorists might exploit them was recently found not criminally responsible
This was a well put together argument and exposed some of my ideological blind spots and biases. Can’t believe I never connected Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian nuclear power to what China would inevitably do in Taiwan.
France did not loose WW1 and the Americans had nothing to do in changing the tide of the war ( the Renault FT tank was enough for France to win on it’s own). On the contrary the anglos had to restrain the French who were about to invade Germany from the West and the East ( d’Esperey).
Hitler was deeply respectful of the French martial spirit…
"They’ve spent too much time consuming both NATO and Russian propaganda, which falsely portray the war as “total” in scope."
Russian propaganda certainly does not present the war as total. On the contrary, it presents the war as limited. With few exceptions, the word "war" is avoided in official Russian statements, it is called "Special Military Organization" to emphasize the limited nature (with the underlying threat that the SMO could be upgraded to a full war).
As far as Switzerland is concerned, the main reason why it is hardly contemplated to increase the share of nuclear energy to French levels (it had been decided that no new NPPs would be built in Swii, but it is likely that this will be changed so that there is the option to replace old NPPs in the future) is that there is a lot of baseload and often storage capable hydro power (many large dams in the mountains). Of course, these large dams would even more vulnerable in wars than nuclear power plants, and the destruction of dams would lead to vast destruction in significant areas - compared to large scale hydro power, nuclear energy is hardly particularly risky. In the case of Switzerland, that is hardly a very part of the consideration (even though Switzerland has many military installations, especially in the mountains, had quite a significant army during the cold war - now, the Swiss army is small in percentage of GDP terms, but since Switzerland is rich, in absolute terms, it is still significant for a small country, but even though there are many plans for crises of all kinds, an all-out war with bombing dams and NPPs is hardly a scenario considered likely).
The Russians claim that "all of NATO is fighting us" which is not true.
Dams are indeed vulnerable to attack, and I wouldn't suggest we become a dam-centered economy either.
Your argument has been exactly my position for as long as I can remember, so you score high on the one-item intelligence test (the extent to which you agree with me), ha-ha.
Seriously, you have apparently been very smart all of your life. How many high school physics students volunteer to give a talk on liquid fluoride nuclear reactors? Okay, so maybe you were naive in thinking it was the "one weird trick" cure-all. Pushing ideas with heart-felt commitment is, as far as I can tell, the way that science achieves progress. We do not have to perfect our ideas inside of our own heads before throwing them out there into the marketplace of ideas. If Mercier and Sperber (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21447233/) are correct, what typically happens is that we submit our pet ideas to our audience with the deck stacked in favor of our ideas and allow the intelligent reasoning power of our community to scrutinize our what we have put out there.
Isn't that kind of the way blogging works?
RE microreactors, it might need deregulation and liability reform, but there's a lot of opportunity for small modular reactors to make nuclear power more decentralized. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power for example. safety concerns seem pretty easy to mitigate since the footprint is so small, you just chuck it in a belowground pool with a concrete lid. GE is currently constructing the BWRX-300, which has passive cooling/safety (you don't need to keep pumping the water to keep it cool), in TN. Hope that works out, but it's been delayed a few times. Sadly the only operationg SMRs are in Russia and China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM, which also has passive cooling). The economics don't look good right now, but there is a lot of room for improvement if you can mass produce them
I'm happy for us to follow Russia and China, but they're not maximalists.
One argument for more nuclear power plants is to save the petroleum for military uses.
An economy or military which relies on battery power would indeed be incredibly vulnerable, whether the batteries are charged by nuclear, coal, or giant solar farms. The Grid is not reliable, as thunderstorms repeatedly prove.
But nuclear power can also be used to make liquid fuels, which can be dispersed and stockpiled.
Maybe with multi layer solar cells and sodium ion batteries, we might see rural and suburban homes getting completely off the grid. That would indeed by more robust than nuclear. Max Max compatible!
The US dialed back nuclear power due to safety concerns. The president who did the dialing back was a nuclear engineer (Jimmy Carter). Carter put an end to research on breeder reactors due to proliferation concerns. Plutonium is chemically separable. LFTRs also create chemically separable fissionables. The Union of Concerned Scientists was warning of that danger in the 1970s. I have a note card with a quote on the subject left over from high school debate.
Go to the Flibe Energy web site and you will find that they are moving forward with molten salt tech with conventional uranium, while doing some government funded studies on how to do strict accounting for thorium breeders.
With the new high temperature superconductors, we'll probably have fusion reactors before LFTRs get off the ground. And you will see countries using fusion for more than 18% of their grid power in a few decades after the first reactor-- unless there is a materials bottleneck for the superconductors.
you can't "save" petroleum for very long, it goes bad and costs money to store. What is necessary is to have a large production capacity. when you shut down production, it's hard to restart. Obviously there is an argument for maintaining a "strategic reserve" which I support but nuclear maximalism isn't the way.
There has never been a successful implementation of nuclear-to-fuel at mass scale. I am opposed to basing current policy on speculative predictions.
Not pumping as much oil is one way to store oil for future generations. Evidence is strong that our petroleum based economy will involuntarily end. Oil reserves are not infinite. I dug pretty deep into the numbers when having an extended debate with Ahnaf Ibn Qais on whether we will run out of fuel before we become a true spacefaring nation. https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/proem-to-the-aenean-future
Best case estimates of eventual available oil are about 2 trillion barrels, which is about 70 years worth at the current world burn rate. Even the Arabs are looking into alternative energy.
70 years is plenty of time to make the transition away from petroleum dependence and become spacefaring. (I took the anti doom side of the debate.)
Nuclear energy has not been used to make liquid fuels because nuclear energy is more valuable as base load grid power. Saturate grid demand and then marginal nuclear power goes to other uses, such as process heat, making liquid fuels, etc. For example, we could stretch the Canadian tar sands if we had a source of heat other than burning part of the tar.
It might make more sense to use solar and wind to make liquid fuels. The intermittent nature of these alternatives is much less of a concern when using the electricity for electrolysis than for powering the grid. Also, alternative energy is often far from consumers. They are using geothermal energy in Iceland to make methanol right now for that reason.
Wouldnt supplying more nuclear for homes and businesses free up oil for more strategically important things? If every lightbulb in America was powered by nuclear, or even 65% of lightbulbs, there would be a lot of excess oil and coal that could be used for plastics, cars, drones, and tanks. The decrease in demand might hurt domestic oil production in the short term, but if gas gets below $2/gallon then suddenly it becomes even cheaper to transport things in trucks, and it’s already very cheap to transport things in trucks.
No, because it's production that matters, not reserve.
It's an interesting article with aome good points, but it's not very accurate from an engineering perspective:
1) Most countries aren't designed to sustain prolonged bombardment by anyone, and that's an efficient choice for most: we don't need to design systems to the same tolerance as Taiwan/Ukraine.
2) Existing reactors are well-protected from attack as-is by their containment vessels, which are several feet of concrete. Upcoming Gen IV reactors can't really melt down, so the worst that happens to one under attack is it shuts down, same as any power plant. Not a perfect solution for existing plants, but not a problem in the future either.
3) It's not that PRC nuclear development will outshine our capacity all of a sudden, the problem is that they're testing new stuff we won't even prototype. The concern is that they'll leapfrog us, find something that works, and then scale it from there.
4) SMRs aren't supposed to be tiny and distributed. This is a common misconception made worse by foreign buyers who loudly say that's what they want. The purpose is to allow mid-size power plants to be economically feasible. Instead of a massive plant or nothing, SMRs get you 40%, 70%, or 80%, not tons of little 5% scale plants.
Nuclear power has a very high ceiling, but also a high floor. I couldn't fairly recommend it for many countries, but the US is definitely positioned to scale it for grid use while keeping hydrocarbons for the military. There's no grand conspiracy, it's just an expensive up-front investment and engineers suck at communicating with the public. I'm a nuclear engineer so I'm always glad to see my little niche getting time in the spotlight!
1. Knocking out a power plant doesn't require a sustained attack.
2. Shutting a plant down is not viable if we are dependent on that plant.
3. I support research into new qualitative tech. Not maximalism of current tech.
4. Submarines have small nuclear reactors. They come in all sizes. Not currently viable for residential use.
5. If you were an oil engineer calling for more drilling I would suspect your biases! I remain unconvinced that we should emulate France.
Should have clarified:
1 and 2 together) Nuclear is no worse than other plants from the lens of defense planning. It's not magically better, but it's not worse
3) A fine position to have; in practice it's difficult. If you don't have a critical mass (ha ha) of expertise, materiel, and production lines, getting new nuclear tech online is really hard. This is why few countries build their own and many import.
4) SMR is "small modular reactor," not "submarine reactor." The Navy's stuff is highly specialized for a purpose, but they do not come in all sizes.
I enjoy reading your policy work which is very thought provoking, but you're not an engineer.
1. Did you read the report on bombing oil fields in WWII? Huge distinction.
2. We have a large mass of experts already, they just need more money directed toward research rather than production. Manhattan Project is the gold standard. I'm in favor of cutting Social Security and Medicare and putting $1 trillion per year into tech research, including nuclear.
3. I'm not an engineer, but a sub-sized reactor could be scaled up to create all sizes. The problem isn't the size, but the feasibility of residential utilization.
1) Won't dispute the report at all, I'm commenting on the reactor itself. I don't know enough about uranium supply chains to compare apples to apples, but with the plant that turns [fuel] into [electricity] there's little difference in resilience.
2) For much of nuclear science, production *is* research. It takes a long time with few reactors to create the isotopes we need for testing. More reactors is the first part of expanding research
3) Navy reactors are meaningfully different designs which can't be scaled. They use very highly enriched uranium to achieve their compactness, which isn't feasible anywhere else. It's comparing a sports car to a dump truck: yeah, the same general components are there, but a bigger sports car can't do a dump truck's job.
1. If you bomb an oil field nothing happens. If you bomb a nuclear power plant it shuts down and takes 3 years to rebuild. Details in article.
2. Counter-point: if this were true, we should just force countries to let us build nuclear reactors for them via tariff deals. Don't need to build them all in America.
3. Right, not feasible due to qualitative differences, different tech. And I would really like a large sports car...
The exaggerated emphasis of the military by people like DeepLeftAnalysis (who at least openly calls himself an imperialist) is a clear sign of American decline.
In the first decades after WWII, the US had a lot to offer to the world, for example it was the most important investor in many countries and it had a much larger share of the world economy than it had today.
These times have passed, and now those who still want to cling to sick dreams of US dominance have to pretend it is the US military that makes it it a "real country' (and hope there are still people who have not noticed that the countless wars the US started against weak countries caused a lot of instability and suffering, but hardly a single one of them can be called a success for the US).
Because the US can offer little else to the rest of the world, the vision of these people with sick dreams of US dominance is that the US behaves in a Mafia-style way, creates threats (military and with "NGOs" that target other countries) and then offers Mafia-style "protection" to some countries.
Of course, this Mafia-style vision of the declining US is much less attractive to most of the rest of the world than the goals of rising powers like China based on mutually beneficial trade and cooperation.
You are ignorant of the preparedness movement of Teddy Roosevelt. Go back to North Korea.
Using "China" and "mutually beneficial trade and cooperation" in the same sentence immediately disqualifies you as a good-faith poster.
Yes you can knock out a nuke power plant. You can do the same to nat gas. If speed is needed to replace a broken plant, you build a new nat gas plant replacement, especially if you already have some nat gas infrastructure in place for transport. 100% nuclear could be dangerous but 50%+ I don’t agree with the risks.
I don’t see how NPPs are any more vulnerable than other sources of electricity. Gas and coal generators could be bombed just as easily. Solar and wind farms may be dispersed, but their weak link is the long distance connections to reach consumers- again, easily bombed.
There are many reasons why nuclear penetration has stalled, but I don’t think military security has much explanatory power.
No, I literally quote the studies from WWII that you did not read.
You are dismissing the "nukes fall everyone dies" point too readily. Nuclear bombs are mostly in silos, submarines, and air bases from which they can be easily deployed without additional input of energy. Hence, it doesn't matter if China can turn all our lights off by blowing up our nuclear power plants: the counterstrike would still be the end of organized society in China. They know this, we know they know this, et cetera. You want to have some resilience against nuclear war, talk about food and potable water production and distribution systems. Electricity is not fundamental to human survival.
A former staff member at an Ontario (Canada) powerplant leaked vulnerabilities explicitly so that foreign powers or terrorists might exploit them was recently found not criminally responsible
>France gets away with 65% nuclear reliance because they have been protected from German invasion by American occupation for the last 80 years.
big if true
What about renewables per se, like solar and geothermal or wind? Do you a have something to say about those maximalists?
Behold! Your allowance for up to 65% nuclear power is acceptable.
This was a well put together argument and exposed some of my ideological blind spots and biases. Can’t believe I never connected Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian nuclear power to what China would inevitably do in Taiwan.
France did not loose WW1 and the Americans had nothing to do in changing the tide of the war ( the Renault FT tank was enough for France to win on it’s own). On the contrary the anglos had to restrain the French who were about to invade Germany from the West and the East ( d’Esperey).
Hitler was deeply respectful of the French martial spirit…
france did loose