Nuclear Power in Equestria and Elsewhere · 9:57pm Dec 29th, 2013
It has been pointed out that Rock Farms and Nuclear Reactors was somewhat ridiculous. But Equestria runs on ridiculous ideas, so why not nuclear power?
Well to start, Ponyville already has an enormous hydroelectric dam, which should produce far more electricity than that required by a small town. Plus as ponies have direct control over solar, wind and water resources, it would seem that renewables are a better bet.
But we can easily find an excuse to favour nuclear.
My aim with this story was not to argue the case for or against nuclear power, but to explain, with Pinkie Pie's help, some basic nuclear physics and outline some of the issues surrounding nuclear power. And to write a fun story with rock cakes and coffee machines. But at this point it seems appropriate to write a blog post giving my opinions on nuclear energy.
I don't work for the nuclear industry – I'm a physics lecturer, battling, in my way, general ignorance of science and technology. Antinuclear campaigners are notorious for churning out junk science arguments not unlike Diamond Tiara's debate tactics in Rainbooms and Rationality, with vastly exaggerated claims of the impact of nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima.
In recent years this group has come head to head with a growing number of more rational environmentalists, who have learnt to check the scientific literature after years of fighting climate change denial, and who see nuclear energy as the best route to a low carbon future. But just because so much of the anti-nuclear propaganda is rubbish, that doesn't necessarily mean that nuclear power is safe and clean and only shunned by the public out of ignorance. The reality is, as always, more complex.
Nuclear power is very expensive. Over the years the safety criteria for new power plants have got progressively more and more stringent. It's very difficult to assess the economics of a nuclear plant. Unlike coal or gas plants, you have a very high initial investment to build a reactor; then many years of relatively low running costs; followed by high decommissioning costs – which, as this will be 20+ years in the future, you may as well just take a wild guess. Over the lifetime of the plant you don't know how electricity prices will fluctuate; and you don't know how interest rates will change, which will set the main expense – paying off the enormous bank loans you took out to build the thing. Don't even try to budget for the insurance against a possible accident. As an extra uncertainty, you don't know how the public and political opinion will change over the lifetime of your plant. But if past experience is anything to go by, a high profile incident in a distant foreign land, which you had nothing to do with, could well lead to calls to shut your plant down.
So should we spend public money on this? Displacing much needed funds from schools, hospitals, universities and particle accelerators? It's unlikely new nuclear power plants will be built without some sort of government support – whether as direct investment, or a guaranteed electricity tariff, or something else.
Unfortunately, while renewable energy is the much more desirable technology, deploying it on a large scale is taking time. You need an awful lot of wind turbines to equal one large thermal plant. And you need to identify and purchase suitable sites, argue the aesthetics with the local population, assess the impact on wildlife, build new power lines and support infrastructure, and an energy storage or backup generators. All this takes time, and trying to force it along any faster will just lead to an irate public and environmental damage from inappropriately sited wind turbines.
Is nuclear safe? Well nuclear plants are designed with enough multiple safeguards so the risk of any predictable incident is negligible. But what about some unforeseen problem? All we can do is look at the past history, and although the industry has not lived up to the initial optimism in the 1950s, the safety and environmental record is no worse than other comparable industries. There always remains a risk that something will go wrong. But at this point we have to compare it to the other risks: that a failure to reduce carbon emissions will lead to catastrophic climate change; or that a failure to provide new power plants will lead to sky-high energy prices and the associated social problems. Both of these strike me as rather more likely.
So my position is to support the building of a new generation of nuclear power plants, while developing renewable options and energy efficiency savings as fast as possible, with the hope that in the longer term nuclear fission will not be needed. My fear is without new nuclear plants, then in ten years time we could see excessive electricity prices, leading our politicians to abandon commitments to cut carbon emissions and build more coal fired plants. If we abandon all hope of controlling climate change, then this looks rather more likely to devastate the world economy over the next fifty years. Meaning less money to do cool scientific research, and buy pony toys.
The situation does vary from country to country, so let me clarify my statement – I support the building of a new generation of nuclear power plants in the UK – where I am most familiar with the issues. It seems the situation in the USA is not dissimilar. In other regions it may be different. Countries with large potential renewable resources would probably do better to make exploiting these a priority. As France has such a large nuclear capacity, they should maintain this. Given the chaotic administration and high levels of corruption and organised crime in Italy, it is reassuring that they are not pursuing nuclear power (despite a long history of leading nuclear physics research).
Of course, it may be any decision in Europe or America will turn out to be globally irrelevant as the biggest growth in nuclear energy is in China, India and other rapidly developing countries.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in China and India, as those countries are both notorious for corruption and supply quality issues. Without intensive QA the possibility of a disaster goes up extensively. One of the reasons why nuclear power in the USSR was so problematic -- not only poor designs but also shoddy QA on the materials used in the designs.
Well, I enjoy physics as much as the next man, but I really can't agree with your conclusions. I see two main arguments against nuclear power, but both are not rooted in physics but in economics:
Right now there is a huge gap between the costs of insurance and the actual potential costs of a design basis accident. In Germany a nuclear power station has to cover for 2.5 billion Euros, but looking at Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island or Windscale suggest that you would need a whole lot more money. Fukusima is officially projected for a whooping 100 billion. Take your own guess how much it will actually cost.
The other one is the problem of nuclear waste. There is no site in the whole world for high-level radioactive waste. I noted that you gave 200.000 years as an estimate for long-term storage in your story, but that's a rather optimistic estimation considering that some fission products have half-lives that measure in millions of years.
And my main problem with both points is that a few enterprises go ahead and build those power stations and expect the tax payer to cough up for both.
The whole thing simply isn't manageable, neither short-term nor long-term.
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Chernobyl was not a real accident. It was a result of human incompetence, or, more precisely, a result of incompetent managers getting incompetent order to make something potentially dangerous without estimating risks involved. They had to turn off every safeguard installed. So, when argue about nuclear energy risks, use arguments about chernobyl with care.
As for radioactive wastes, coal power plants produce significant amount of radioactive ash. While nuclear wastes can be collected, stored and even utilized, radioactive coal ash, after traveling for some time, may be inhaled by humans. Even though I'd like to see shift towards renewable source, it is unlikely that they will cover significant amount of global energy demand in near future, and burning of fossil fuels must be ended as fast as possible. For this reason, shift toward nuclear power plants looks attractive.
I see your point of view a lot clearer now. I agree that renewable energy is less efficent than a nuclear power plant and can't be forced, but then again, how much are they funded or even promoted? Yes, everyone knows about them, but there is an incredible large nuclear lobby while renewable energy doesn't have such a thing because it's just less profitable.
And for the ponit of security risks: Fukushima is still a problem and will remain as such for at least couple of years. The ocean is still contaminated, even if we don't hear anything about it anymore. If we look at the growing amount of nuclear power plants, we can also come to logical conclusion that there are more possibilties, more ways in which things can go wrong. And sooner or later there WILL be another meltdown. every technology has its flaws and I would bet all I have that I will live to see another nuclear catastrophe.
I have to state again that the main problem isn't really that there wouldn't be enough energy, it's just that there is so much energy wasted. The majority of all of the energy that is produced goes into industry, factories and such. If we now take a look at our western society, we see that it is reigned by profit and consumerism. Planned obsolescence is the prime example for this. Pretty much everything we buy could last for at least twice as long at it does, but it wouldn't be profitable. The energy shortage is merely a symptom and tackling it with more nuclear power plants won't solve anything.
My worries are mostly about the ecological problems that come with nuclear energy and I don't think it is actually the best solution in the long term. I am aware that we can't simply turn off every single power plant in an instant but we could at least stop building new ones and go for other options instead.
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Just to make a point: Humans are bound to make mistakes sooner or later. Nothing is ever going to change that, so I'd say Chernobyl is still an accident since it wasn't intentional. Human failure is as much of a risk as Tsunamis and earthquakes are.
Dont forget, that all thermal power stations have massive energy storage methods built in, ssuch as kinetic turbine energy, thermal mass energy, fuel storage depots which can reach Months of supply equivalent for when transport is disrupted by weather, so any design that doesnt inclue storage, non electronic filtering, shouldnt even be considered, also, any design for which passive energy storage cannot be safe, such as waterless nuclear cores over heating, shoudnt be considered, unless the core is at the bottom of a big hole in which sefauly large supply of water can be iverted easily, and the deign taken into consideration that water will end up there when youdont want it.
Pile all the waste in one place isolated and protected, like Area 51, add a low temperature thermal plant instead of relying on cooling, reduces the coolingoad requirement, let it warm t enviroment for the next couple thousand years.
You could always ask for a waste burner to be part of the cost of a power station, a neutron generator such as a pulse fusion reactor etc.
Personally, I'm somewhat against large, centralized power generation of any kind. If [name of relevant administration(s) here] intends to continue to hang critical electrical transmission lines out in the open, at the mercy of the elements, I'd rather we all have distributed systems with numerous, smaller generators and other forms of redundancy built in. Makes it much harder to blackout a fifth of a continent when your power comes from, for instance, tens of thousands of wind turbines and solar panels.
More complex systems might take more time to plan and implement, but from my own POV as a systems designer, I'd prefer to spend time proactively building a robust system, instead of reactively and repeatedly fixing a "cheaper" system afterward.
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Altogether larger power stations are far more efficient for the same energy input into them. A distributed system works in theory until you realize that it's electromagnetism that limits the efficiency of power generation. Every major power generation system* uses generators that are much more efficient the larger the magnetic fields involved. It's a limitation imposed by magnetic permeability.
One of the idiot ball moments of wind power is the fact that the usable electricity per unit of force exerted to produce it is really low. It's why wind turbines are getting bigger and bigger as fast as materials science will let them.
And while I'm not familiar enough with Nuclear Power to be certain of this, I wouldn't be surprised if Wind isn't more complicated per MW/h than Nuclear. It's why another of the problems and long-term costs for Wind is maintenance.
* PV cells are not a major power generation system at this point, although there are now several large test fields operating. Large operational solar plants tend to be molten salt steam generation systems.
am i the only one that thinks pinkie is about to get to work on a mako reactor?
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Thanks for all your comments. I agree with most of what you have said, even if we have come to different conclusions. You're very right to point out that reducing energy wastage should be a first priority - that has the most potential to make an impact.
I've come to believe that we won't navigate the growing energy crisis without nuclear power after years of watching the disappointingly slow progress with renewables (largely for the reasons you have given), and seeing just how politically unpopular high energy prices are. But at this point we need to pursue every option: efficiency improvements, nuclear, solar, wind, wave, tidal, carbon capture and storage.
I find myself arguing the anti-nuclear case more often than pro-nuclear, when talking with friends who work in conservation - who don't like wind turbines, or tidal power, or biofuels, and latch onto nuclear as 'the best solution' - possible because it's the one they least understand. Then I have to explain that yes, nuclear has a part to play, but we can't produce all our energy that way, and in the long term it would be better to find ways of deploying large scale wind farms with minimal environmental impact.
Energy is a complicated issue, and it's not clear what the best strategy is. Which is why we need to have these public debates.
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The picture is Pinkie in front of the core at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble - a 50MW reactor producing beams of neutrons for research.
Does it look like a mako reactor? I don't know much about them.
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kinda, yeah, same design philosophy