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Earth

Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet (wsj.com) 569

Joshua S. Goldstein, a professor emeritus of international relations at American University, and Staffan A. Qvist, an energy engineer and consultant, writing for The Wall Street Journal: Climate scientists tell us that the world must drastically cut its fossil fuel use in the next 30 years to stave off a potentially catastrophic tipping point for the planet. Confronting this challenge is a moral issue, but it's also a math problem -- and a big part of the solution has to be nuclear power. Today, more than 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, which are used to generate electricity, to heat buildings and to power car and airplane engines. Worse for the planet, the consumption of fossil fuels is growing quickly as poorer countries climb out of poverty and increase their energy use. Improving energy efficiency can reduce some of the burden, but it's not nearly enough to offset growing demand.

Any serious effort to decarbonize the world economy will require, then, a great deal more clean energy, on the order of 100 trillion kilowatt-hours per year, by our calculations -- roughly equivalent to today's entire annual fossil-fuel usage. A key variable is speed. To reach the target within three decades, the world would have to add about 3.3 trillion more kilowatt-hours of clean energy every year. Solar and wind power alone can't scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. Even Germany's concerted recent effort to add renewables -- the most ambitious national effort so far -- was nowhere near fast enough. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany's peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That's just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target.

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Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet

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  • Apart from the dangers
    a/ do we have enough uranium ?
    b/ where do we store the waste ?

  • by MarkWegman ( 2553338 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @01:51PM (#57967122)
    What was posted in the abstract is not enough to justify the conclusion. Battery storage, wind and PV are dropping on a curve that now makes energy much cheaper than that provided by fossil fuels and much cheaper than nuclear, who's cost have been going up. I'm actually a fan of nuclear and think while it needs to be carefully regulated we could use more of it. But there's no clear reason other sources can't grow at a fast enough pace. We do need to commit to do required items. For example, we need to build a newer smarter grid than the US, which will require some work that's not just engineering. 10 years ago it would have been sensible to say we could not replace fossil fuels without nuclear. That's no longer a reasonable position to have. Saying that nuclear is a good component to be in a mix is reasonable but is not what the abstract states.
    • But there's no clear reason other sources can't grow at a fast enough pace.

      Hm. Mineral extraction and manufacturing can only happen so fast. There is a limit. Have you run the numbers on how much power we need? It would take centuries to manufacture that many solar panels... and that would be using existing tech only. Replacing them with better tech later...

      That is a LOT of sand that is needed.

  • Don't try to distract us with mere math!

    We woke types know that the real solution is actually driving cars with really tall tail lights, and also of course sneering at Republicans!

    • Yes don't distract us with the real math that a modern nuclear plant costs upwards of $20BILLION to build. With a 75 year life that's power at almost $0.30 a kwh.

  • 1st renewables 2nd everyone cal also really save more, just switch stuff off you do not need! 3rd fusion
  • No kidding (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @02:06PM (#57967252)
    Unfortunately the environmentalist fake news machine has been in high gear for nearly forty years convincing millions of otherwise intelligent people that nuclear power equals three-eyed fish and glow-in-the-dark babies. Same people who want to shut down coal-fired power plants but also don't like natural gas pipelines or LNG terminals to replace the electricity. Same people who demand solar on every roof but would flip a shit if they knew how "dirty" solar panel and power electronics manufacturing is.

    As usual, I blame society. For real this time. Too many people seem to have grown up with the idea that it's possible to have all the good stuff without paying for it in some way, either with cash, lack of reliability, pollution of one form or another, and usually some combination of all of the above.

    For the record, I'd prefer to live down the street from a nuclear plant than a gas or coal or oil-burning power plant. And I did the math: if I covered my roof in solar panels, I'd lower my electric bill by at most 50-60% on sunny days, and only 30% averaged year round. If I covered my whole property in solar panels and battery energy storage, I might reduce my electric bill to zero, but with the money it would cost to do that (batteries being the biggest drain), I could buy enough electricity, even at inflated Taxachusetts rates of close to 25cents/kWhr, to last me more than a lifetime, and certainly way more than the lifetime of the batteries. Aggregating this stuff in centralized facilities won't make it cheaper by any significant amount.
    • Yes kidding (Score:4, Informative)

      by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @02:49PM (#57967692) Homepage Journal

      As someone who lives in Massachusetts and has solar, depending on your home, it may be completely practical to eliminate your electric bill with solar roof panels. First you do the stupidly simple stuff like switching all your lights to LEDs to minimize your electric use, but aside from that, if you have a good sunny roof, you can easily eliminate your summer and possibly even winter electric bills. Even with two electric cars, we don't have electric bills in the summer.

      It's entirely practical even in regions as far north as Massachusetts to build homes with a net-zero electric usage, especially if the builder takes the roof orientation into account. Older homes can be more tricky depending on the architecture, shading, vents, and such.

      All that said, I agree that nuclear is a fine option for the base of the grid.

  • There are alternative nuclear technologies under development. They need better support and investment.

    Traveling Wave Reactor can run on depleted uranium, which already exists in massive quantities. See Terra Power.

    Then there is liquid fluoride thorium reactor. See Flib Energy.

    Both or either would take us beyond the limitations and problems of the reactors built half a century ago.

    • I too have solar on my rooftop, but under a PPA. I've spoken to people who've outright purchased solar, and virtually to a person, they say their electrical bills dropped to zero and they even made money selling electricity back to their utility. Either they're all shilling for the solar providers or there's some truth to that.

      While solar panels may be dirty to create, they have a 25-, 30- or more year lifespan and the technology continues to get more efficient each year.

      I have a hard time believing solar

    • There are alternative nuclear technologies under development. They need better support and investment.

      This is exactly what they said about pebble beds. And then we built them. And they turnout out to be awful in practice.

      That pattern has repeated itself with every exciting new nuclear technology to date.

      With that track record, putting all our eggs in the exciting new nuclear technology basket would be insane.

  • If you can find something to do with the waste I would be for it.
  • Individuals or persons not counting themselves among the number of those who refer to themselves as "the Sith", would be hard-pressed to make a statement as utterly categorical, and not admitting, upon mature reflection, of views which, at the end of the day, would have to be said to be more balanced (in an, of course, non-epistemological fashion) and, frankly, more sophisticated.

    I wish I could take credit for it... but it's not mine.

  • False choice (Score:2, Insightful)

    1. We do have workable fusion reactors. They were developed here, and are now in use in places we're not supposed to talk about. How do you think we power those weapons systems? You will not see them in commercial use before 2040, they're still being worked on. Kind of like fax machines and laptops, which existed in non-commercial usage way before they were in commercial usage.

    2. Fission reactors are an absolute nightmare on the cradle to 250,000 year grave cycle, and a security nightmare. Stop. Just stop

  • Only using less energy can save us. But failing that, nuclear will buy us some time.
  • by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @02:33PM (#57967536)

    The Free Market has spoken. It doesn't like the finances of nuclear power. It considers it too risky, too long-term. (It does however like the finances of wind and solar).

    That's fine! There are many things we do (such as nationalized health care and military defense) which the free market is bad at. Nuclear is another one. We should just be explicit that it will mean governments spending large amounts of taxpayer money to push it through.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @03:18PM (#57967938) Journal

      The Free Market has spoken. It doesn't like the finances of nuclear power. It considers it too risky, too long-term.

      What's practical for an investor isn't necessarily what's practical for society at a larger scale. The risk of a specific power plant may be more than an investor can stomach (compared to other investments), but the risk spread over a nation or planet may be low on average compared to the alternatives.

      For example, Warren Buffett has said that his Berkshire Hathaway fund can accept investment risks that small funds cannot because BH has shares or ownership in a large volume of companies. Any single new investment may be risky by itself, but since it's pooled with a diverse set of other such investments, the extra risk does not matter to BH. It's partly why the "rich get richer": the big cats can gamble and profit off of things smaller cats can't simply because they are smaller.

      No, BH is not investing in power plants that I know of, but I'm just making a point that risk is a matter of size and perspective. The risk and payoff equation of an investor will be different than that of society as a whole.

    • by Major Blud ( 789630 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @03:43PM (#57968114) Homepage

      The Free Market has spoken. It doesn't like the finances of nuclear power

      I'd hardly call the political and regulatory nightmare behind nuclear power "The Free Market".

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        If you removed all regulation and government involvement nuclear would be impossible to build because no-one could get insurance for it. The insurance policy would have to cover potentially trillions of dollars in damage. Even a relatively contained accident like Fukushima Daiichi is costing hundreds of billions to fix.

  • by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @02:38PM (#57967584)

    To reach the target within three decades, the world would have to add about 3.3 trillion more kilowatt-hours of clean energy every year.

    It takes about 30 years to build one nuclear power plant.

    When arguing that an alternative is too slow to construct, you really shouldn't be pushing something that is even slower to construct.

    • You can even google it easily if you want :

      Modern nuclear power plants are planned for construction in five years or less (42 months for CANDU ACR-1000, 60 months from order to operation for an AP1000, 48 months from first concrete to operation for an EPR and 45 months for an ESBWR) as opposed to over a decade for some previous plants.

      .
      Even older plant took at most 10 years not fucking 30. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] The first nuclear plant were NOT done in 45+30=74, they were done in the 50ies (fir

  • It takes longer than 3 decades to get through the red tape to even start building a new Nuclear plant.

    Christ, you don't even see energy companies wanting to buy already built plants. This article is complete utter bull shit.
  • I don't see why nuclear is the only solution when renewable + storage is on the verge of being cheaper than fossil fuels in $/kwh, and is far cheaper to build in the first place. How can land use be such a dire limitation when there's tidal power, offshore wind/solar, and rooftop solar?

    But solving global warming would be much easier if people would drop their stupid illogical opposition to nuclear power. They're scared to death of extreme localized disasters from wildly unlikely scenarios, but show zero con

  • Germany (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Germany's effort was intended to get technologies going, and it did just that. You can thank us later. We're still paying for it with every kWh we consume. The guaranteed kWh price paid to solar, biomass, wind and some other renewable electricity producers come out of a surcharge which is currently at ~0.064€ per kWh.

    It is quite unfair and misleading to compare that effort during an early phase of the technology to a future manufacturing ramp up. Nuclear was afforded many more decades to get the techno

  • When "The Nuclear Option" is a good thing.

The gent who wakes up and finds himself a success hasn't been asleep.

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