Show Summary
On this episode energy systems expert James Fleay joins Nate to talk about the current state of nuclear energy and its potential applications in the future. Out of all the potential ‘replacements’ for the subsidy of the fossil labor force we’ve grown used to, nuclear energy is one of the most frequently suggested as being the savior of our modern lifestyles. What is the reality of the benefits and costs of nuclear energy? How does it fit into our current mix and our financial situation? Does it have the ability to support ‘human flourishing’ for millenia to come? Will the expansion of it result in a toxic waste situation that we can’t come back from? Or is nuclear energy simply one more piece to the puzzle for complex societies to support – and eventually reduce – their energy demands?
About James Fleay
James Fleay is an Australian engineer and energy project manager with two decades of experience in design, delivery, operation, and carbon sequestration in the power, oil, and natural gas sectors. Ten years ago, he joined the oil and gas sector to work on the design, delivery and operation of some of Australia’s largest complex energy (LNG) projects. This included 2 years work on one of the largest carbon capture and sequestration projects in the world and another 3 years on a ground-breaking deep-water subsea compression gas project in Australia’s North West. He is the founder and manager of DUNE, Down Under Nuclear Energy, with the purpose of studying the investment case for nuclear energy in Australia and understanding the parameters for its success.
Watch on YouTube
Show Notes & Links to Learn More:
00:30 – James Fleay
04:19 – Energy Portfolio of Australia
05:17 – Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis
06:30 – Advantages and Challenges of Nuclear Energy
07:20 – What are the costs of nuclear energy?
08:00 – Long-term asset
08:40 – Hinkley Point Project**
10:47 – How many nuclear plants exist and how many are being built
11:12 – Uranium vs plutonium reactors
11:46 – Joseph Tainter, Dennis Meadows
17:03 – Short term vs long term nuclear waste disposal
17:04 – Long term waste disposal options
17:20 – Political barriers to long term waste disposal
20:59 – Manhattan Project
21:05 – Market’s short sighted decision making
21:48 – Nuclear programs in south korea, japan, china, UAE
22:51 – Uranium is non-renewable, just like any other fuel
23:16 – World Nuclear Association
23:26 – Estimates of known uranium reserves are ~90 yr supply based on today’s plants
24:12 – Improvements in efficiency of extraction of energy from uranium
24:10 – 1980-2008 electricity generated from nuclear plants globally increased 3.6 times (Figure 5), but the amount of uranium used only increased by 2.5x (Figure 2.8)
24:30 – Uranium in the seas
24:45 – Receding Horizons
25:25 – Uranium as a byproduct
26:10 – Uranium 235 vs Uranium 238
27:14 – Thorium
28:49 – Molten Salt Reactors
29:29 – Fast Neutron Reactor
29:45 – IAEA advantages of thorium
30:03 – Uranium 233 and Uranium 232
31:05 – Chinese experimental thorium reactor
32:18 – Fusion
32:46 – Gamma Radiation
36:00 – Human demand interaction with energy availability
38:15 – Sharpe Ratio
38:47 – Hydrocarbon global distribution
41:30 – Nuclear energy and industrial heating processes
42:20 – The challenge of replacing liquid fuels
48:45 – Throw away culture and cars
49:03 – Rise of air cargo over the last few decades
50:35 – Long history of environmentalism in australia
51:50 – Australia’s political issues with nuclear energy
54:45 – Success and affordability of recent construction of nuclear power plants
55:44 – Labor costs in Japan and around the world
56:45 – The US’s lack of careful planning for infrastructure and overlooking of replacement plans
1:06:00 – EROI
Teaser photo credit: Bruce Nuclear Generating Station (Canada), one of the largest operational nuclear power facility in the world. By Chuck Szmurlo – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1841973
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“absolutely no solutions yet for high-level waste.”
Long-term solutions are currently being developed. The first of these might be ready for evaluation in around ten years, but development of additional options will continue even after that. In the meantime, we have ample short-term solutions.
“Only the functionally insane would consider this technology safe in any manner ”
Global nuclear power spent fuel management has involved the handling and storage of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of spent fuel over many decades with a total aggregated death toll of zero. There are hardly any comparable heavy industries which can come even close to matching that safety record. And calling people insane for acknowledging that reality is a sign of being outside the reality-based community. And name-calling in general isn’t nearly as convincing as advancing actual arguments.
24:30 “There’s lots of uranium in the oceans, It requires a much higher spot price than we have today. I think at least 10 times higher.”
Around 20 years ago, extraction from seawater using the filtration methods at that time would have cost around $1000 per lb. of yellowcake. With the switch to adsorbent approaches and other advancements that have been attained since then (typically happening every two or three years) that cost has come down to around $90 per lb. That’s roughly double the current spot price rate for uranium. With no further advancements, It could become sufficiently profitable to be worth pursuing if the spot price were to increase by only 4 times what it is now. Such a price jump is not likely to happen soon, but it also seems unlikely that there won’t be any more advancements in extraction technology.
However, we are also developing reactors which could fully utilize any isotope of uranium. Once running, the supply of uranium that we already have in storage could fuel such reactors for centuries. The quantity of energy just in our stored uranium greatly exceeds all the energy we’ve ever gotten from fossil fuels.
29:54 thorium “has intrinsic proliferation resistance” because of (32:47) “extremely active gamma radiation from uranium 232.”
It is not true “intrinsic” protection if it can be easily and cheaply defeated. U-232 and 233 come from protactinium 232 and 233 (the two are always created together), but protactinium needs to be removed from the neutron flux quickly after forming to avoid wasting neutrons. And then as the protactinium becomes uranium, the uranium is pulled out to feed back into the reactor. But Pa-232 and Pa-233 have very different half-lives. So if you take out a batch of protactinium and wait 52 days, and then pull out all the uranium (to put back into the reactor), the remaining protactinium would be better than 99.99999999999% pure Pa–233, which will produce equally pure U-233, which would make excellent ultra-super-weapons-grade bomb fuel with a very small critical mass. (best fuel for a suitcase bomb) This process would reduce the gamma protection from uranium 232 by a factor of around 250 billion, and arbitrarily higher levels of purity would be attainable by just changing the timing.
35:40 “nuclear combined with solar and wind is not a good combination because nuclear is flat line”
Molten salt reactors would not have this limitation. And any kind of hotter reactor coupled with molten salt heat storage could create a fast-ramping flexible power plant even if the reactor output remained rock-steady.
To my mind, this was the least impressive of the GS interviews I’ve watched. It did have some good stuff, but the two big downers were: Nate brought up the risks of reactors–500 around the world soon, perhaps, if the ones abuilding get finished–not being shut down properly if there is some kind of collapse. Spent fuel requires constant energy flow to stay cool. Of course this is only a problem if it happens while the stuff is still radioactive– 100,000 years, maybe? Perhaps because Nate mentioned one particular scenario, an EMP pulse, Fleay asks whether Nate is assuming that will happen, Nate denies it, and Fleay acts like if we don’t assume this will happen, it’s safe to assume it won’t–and Nate lets him get away with this illogical dismissal of an extremely serious issue.
The other one was when Nate brings up the possibility of degrowth, or getting over the idea that we MUST find a way to supply every desired watt of power instantly no matter what the cost…and Fleay dismisses this as a bad choice. But growth forever is impossible, growth now is killing the planet which we really do depend on. I point out that humans lived without any electricity or liquid fuel until the last four or five generations…it’s not like we’ll all die if we can’t burn through prodigious amounts of electric and other power as some of us have gotten used to.
As to why South Korea and Japan and UAE can build reactors faster, on time, without cost and time overruns–I suspect it’s because they’re capitalist, but not the kind of insane hyper capitalism we have in the US where we simply can’t do something unless it makes the rich richer–and if it does make the rich richer, we have to do it, no matter how destructive it is. This dynamic will get in the way of rational planning, together with the government getting jerked around by the highest bidder.
until the last
“Spent fuel requires constant energy flow to stay cool. Of course this is only a problem if it happens while the stuff is still radioactive– 100,000 years, maybe?”
Spent fuel is at risk of decomposition if it loses water coverage in the first three months out of the reactor. After about a year, heat production will have fallen low enough that the fuel could be moved into dry cask storage if needed, but there is usually no urgency to get the fuel out of water that soon, so cool-off time in the pool is more commonly in the 5 to 10 year range to also give gamma levels time to subside. No energy input is needed for cooling after the fuel has been moved into dry-cask storage.
“Nate mentioned one particular scenario, an EMP pulse,”
That’s a threat to the grid, or to the grid-interface transformers at nuclear power plants. But grid blackouts and transformer failures at nuclear power plants are fairly routine occurrences, and those are only a problem if you have something also take out the backup generators and batteries, and/or their connections (both of which happened at Fukushima, which is why the working generators on site were useless). More recent designs can cool without electricity for two or three days, and several designs in development are aiming for passive cooling all the way to cold shut-down without electricity. I am hoping the newer designs will make it easier to retire the older designs sooner.
“The other one was when Nate brings up the possibility of degrowth, or getting over the idea that we MUST find a way to supply every desired watt of power instantly no matter what the cost…and Fleay dismisses this as a bad choice. But growth forever is impossible”
I think growth in reliable clean energy will make it easier to shrink the dirty energy sector–which is going to be the most urgent and imperative task for the next few decades. Whether or not we will ultimately also shrink the clean energy sectors is not something we need to decide right now.
“humans lived without any electricity or liquid fuel until the last four or five generations…it’s not like we’ll all die if we can’t burn through prodigious amounts of electric and other power as some of us have gotten used to.”
And you won’t die if you quit using all your electronic devices and sever your connection to the internet. But that’s unlikely to happen simply because you don’t want to do that, and wants are the main driver in the growth of energy consumption these days. And convincing a few billion people to voluntarily scale down or give up on their wants seems like a remote possibility at this point.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1467&context=wwu_honors
https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-leaves-a-bitter-legacy/a-47420382
…and this is just the low- and medium-level waste… …still no valid solutions after many decades; only pretend solutions which will the future must bear…
So, absolutely no solutions yet for high-level waste. Only the functionally insane would consider this technology safe in any manner – which is a weird thing to say, but consider that we’re doing nothing to avoid the worst case scenario of Climate Breakdown; so…