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.
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.
Realistic ? (Score:2)
Apart from the dangers
a/ do we have enough uranium ?
b/ where do we store the waste ?
I can't RTA because it's behine a paywall (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
Nay! (Score:2)
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!
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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 of all, and 2nd (Score:2)
No kidding (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
Nuclear doesn't mean more of the same old (Score:2)
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.
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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
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I must be imagining my zero power bill due to my solar panels then?
Not on the equator, not in the desert. Solar for home use scales easily.
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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.
Sure if... (Score:2)
To paraphrase Obi-wan.... (Score:2)
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
easier solution (Score:2)
The Free Market has spoken (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The Free Market has spoken (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The Free Market has spoken (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
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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.
This guy has an issue with time. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
why is this modded insightful ? 5 years. (Score:3)
.
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
Re:This guy has an issue with time. (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit. Countries with low interference from regulatory agencies can produce a full 1+ GW plant in 5 years.
China, for example, where the reactors are built by the state, has been pumping out reactors [wikipedia.org], each taking 5 or 6 years. The Yangjiang-4 reactor took just 4 years 4 months.
So, no, it really is the bullshit lawsuits, agency interference, and ignorant NIMBYism that makes it take 30 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in the West.
B.S., even major energy companies don't agree (Score:2)
Christ, you don't even see energy companies wanting to buy already built plants. This article is complete utter bull shit.
Nuclear would at least make things easier (Score:2)
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
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Um, you know this is the same tech that generates more than 1/8th of Earth's electricity with the least deaths per petawatt-hour, right?
Germany (Score:2, Insightful)
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
First time for everything. (Score:2)
When "The Nuclear Option" is a good thing.
Re:The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:4, Insightful)
They have proven him right actually. Everything from increasing grid stability issues to decommissioning costs is becoming more and more of a question mark on both wind and solar as they become less of a boutique and more widespread adopted forms of power generations.
And there are no solutions in sight to those problems as of yet.
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Re:The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:5, Insightful)
And don't think for one second that wasn't the intention.
Anti-Nuclear activist, including many in Congress, have done everything they can to gun up the nuclear power industry.
As a technology, nuclear is only in it's very first stages.Promising technologies like breeder reactors that can burn nuclear wastes to almost inert piles or rock were arbitrarily outlawed. Promising avenues such as micro reactors are mired in red tape and make no mistake, lawsuits will follow them where ever they think of putting one.
What is needed:
1. Two to Three standard designs, vetted by some group of nuclear engineers as safe. Facilitates factory production of components
2. Processes to fast track environmental reviews
3. Limited indemnity for developers to prevent frivolous lawsuits.
4. Some form of expedited processed in the courts to review lawsuits and settle them quickly.
5. Reopen Yucca Mountain. Fuck Harry Reid. Hell, bury his soon to be dead ass in it.
6. Ongoing research into new designs, module designs, etc.
Re:The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
There was an interesting interview recently on the new nuclear power plants being built in Finland (one is by AREVA, and other is by Rosatom). Both are besieged by delays.
Problem appears to be that while tech is found to be perfectly adequate and safe, regulatory regime handling nuclear power construction has effectively been sabotaged by our green party, who sat in the government a few times at this point. They now require full vetting of the entirety of design process of the power plant down to the last designer (as in people, not just plans), arcane requirements on leadership systems within organisations designing, building and running the power plant and so on. Things that have essentially nothing to do with building and running the actual power plant.
It has little to nothing to do with safety, but it basically puts a massive bureaucratic paperwork load on every company involved, making building new power plants almost impossible. Rosatom apparently literally hired the former head of the regulatory body and several former officials to help formulate the paperwork needed, and even they couldn't do it because it was so arcane.
Morale of the story: don't underestimate the willingness and ability among the most zealous green activists to actively sabotage any form of power generation that isn't halal with their religious convictions by penetration of both elected and unelected power structures within the state and corruption of these institutions. We used to have nuclear regulatory body that was hailed as so good in handling its job efficiently without compromising safety, that it was literally getting paid by foreign governments to come and provide its expertise to them. Not any more.
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The UK doesn't have any of those problems, but the new nuclear plants are even more expensive, delayed and now being cancelled. We had to guarantee way above market rate for the lifetime of the plant, and even then only a French company with Chinese money was willing to build it.
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5. Reopen Yucca Mountain. Fuck Harry Reid. Hell, bury his soon to be dead ass in it.
Develop non-meltdown thorium nuclear power plants, build MSR reactors that can consume "expended" nuclear fuel rods, and develop a rational policy to reprocess nuclear waste, and there won't be a compelling need for a Yucca Mountain repository.
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Reprocessing plants are also nuclear weapons plants.
This is not a problem if you put reprocessing plants on military reservations like the Nevada test Site, which also happens to be where Yucca Mountain is located. If we want to be serious about this whole climate problem Yucca now and start shipping waste to it. At the same time, we start installing a breeder reactor to reprocess spent fuel. With Yucca as a buffer, it won't fill up before the breeder is completed.
Parallelization (Score:2)
5. Reopen Yucca Mountain. Fuck Harry Reid.
Surely the latter half of step 5 can be done in parallel with steps 1-4, right?
Still, I'm not exactly sure why that's a requirement anyway...
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There's zero reason to build current generation nuclear reactors. They generate nuclear waste, inefficient, and pose a continent-wide meltdown threat.
But what we should be doing is plowing investment into prototype next generation nuclear reactors, that by design won't melt down,can consume radioactive material besides pure uranium/plutonium, and can consume expended fuel rods from previous generation nuclear reactors. Those nuclear reactors wouldn't be subject to as expensive nuclear regulation, or need
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while not pointing out that the issues and design problems with manual points, carbs, and other stuff have long since been solved.
Nuclear plants that are in operation today are based on designs from the 1950's. There's no point in building more of those, because they pose a risk of meltdown, and their waste is a region wide hazard (e.g. Fukushima). They can't have "long been solved", when there aren't reactors that have been built and demonstrated yet. But we could advance that technology now (CANDU & MSR) by building the prototypes, and once proven, widely implement the new designs, where needed. The real problem is that nucl
Re:The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
Former is solved by cutting down the more recent regulatory items that have little to nothing to do with actual safety of operation, and everything to do with making nuclear power less competitive.
Latter is solved by either storing it underground or recycling it. Former is currently being held back by NIMBY style green activism, latter is being held back by nuclear proliferation fears.
There are no unsolved technical issues here, unlike with solar and wind. Issues here are political, ideological and bureaucratic.
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12 module SMR to be online in mid 2020s [nuscalepower.com] a snails pace?
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What would the basis of lawsuits against solar and wind be?
Perhaps you don't understand the idea behind "frivolous lawsuit". The point isn't to have a valid claim but to stop construction and raise costs to the point the company never builds again or goes bankrupt. Preferably both.
The problem is not using science to drive policy. Driving policy based on politics and ideology is bad. That is why those frivolous lawsuits that have crippled the nuclear industry are bad. No industry can survive that kind of crap. Do I really need to explain this to you?
Re:The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:4, Informative)
The reverse is true. Now that Solar and Wind are hitting above 10% total grid they've realized their utilization factors are significantly higher than estimated. On top of this storage can now be provided within a deployed cost that's still cheaper than even old coal power. And a huge mitigating factor is that base load is no longer relevant. In addition changes in US federal law allowed for the economical use of load shifting such that demand can now follow supply rather than the prior paradigm of demand being an unchangeable quantity.
The end result being that renewable resources can provide significantly higher contributions to the grid without impacting stability. Add in storage and Renewables can easily provide nearly all our power if not all. And at the cheapest source of power we'd have to be fools not to use it. Fools who bow down to old technology or fossil fuels to enrich the elite that have invested in them.
Re:The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:4, Insightful)
Sneaky bastard!
Utilization factor = power generated / (power that could be generated when the resource is available).
Capacity factor = power generated / (power that could be generated in all hours).
Solar and wind are typically dispatched as 'must run' being 'use it or lose it', so their utilization factor is near 100%. But that just shows that 'utilization factor' is a statistical lie cooked up to obscure CRAP capacity factors.
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This is incorrect, it's far easier to dump the renewable resources than the fixed generators and that's typically what happens.
I had used the wrong word apparently, I was discussing capacity factors. Capacity factors assigned to solar and wind were concocted 30 years ago when these resources were new, now that we've hit double digit percentages the new studies are showing capacity factors that are 60% or higher for raw generation and once storage is added in they have capacity factors of ~90%, nearl
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2017 Auction prices in Colorado for a 25 year power purchase agreement for solar + storage generated bids of $0.03 kwh. This is less than HALF the price for coal generated from 100 year old paid for plants. Both Wind and Solar submitted bids in this range and both included storage.
Stop fabricating numbers.
Re: The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:2)
A law to allow demand to follow supply. I wasnâ(TM)t aware this was not legal!
Re: The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:4, Informative)
The law change allowed companies other than the power company to buy and sell demand. This rather small change has had MASSIVE effects on the power market which is why the power companies appealed this change all the way to the supreme court.
The result of this relatively "small" change in the law is that now there is an entire market of companies paying high energy users to turn off demand to keep peak prices much lower than prior. It's also caused the whole concept of base load to go out the window as this demand shifting is balancing demand against supply rather than the prior reverse.
Prior to this change the power companies had no incentive to incentivize demand shifting. Higher peak prices meant more unregulated profits in their pockets.
Grid stability is a solved problem: Batteries (Score:2)
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I'm glad that this problem which no one else has solved has been solved by you.
Have you considered becoming the richest man on the planet by incorporating and selling this idea to literally every single grid operator? That is, of course, if you have solved the problems that make battery technology of very limited usefulness for purpose as of writing this, and not just blowing hot air as most people claiming to have an easy solution to great technological problems of the world are.
Somebody else is already doing that (Score:2)
Re:The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile here in South Australia with our world leading renewables, our grid is holding fine under the extreme load of a record breaking heatwave of 4 days above 41C. We now increase grid stability nation wide. Want to try some other discredited talking points?
Bumper sticker energy policy is wrong (Score:3)
Indeed, solar electric cannot save the day. Here's a handy rule of thumb:
Any energy policy proposal that fits on a bumper, or in a tweet, is wrong.
I wrote a short summary of an energy mix proposal that could work. It's over 30 pages, and doesn't go into detail.
No single technology is going to work for the United States. The US is a big country, with widely varying geography and population density. Various energy sources have different strengths and weaknesses at different times. Delaware might be able to r
Re:Bumper sticker energy policy is wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Any energy policy proposal that fits on a bumper, or in a tweet, is wrong.
Somebody should put this on a bumper, or in a tweet.
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So does nuclear - namely, nuclear waste. Peak global nuclear energy production was ~2.7 trillion TWh/year. Increasing that to 100 trillion TWh/y using current technologies means 37x as much nuclear waste production, and we haven't even figured out a safe way to deal with the waste we're already producing.
Some newer technologies could eliminate a lot of that - but we haven't really tested any of them at scale yet.
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The very fact that nuclear waste is radioactive means that the reactor design is inefficient and leaving fuel unburned.
Breeder reactors can burn fuel down to nearly inert lumps of rock.
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The very fact that nuclear waste is radioactive means that the reactor design is inefficient and leaving fuel unburned.
Breeder reactors can burn fuel down to nearly inert lumps of rock.
Only if you leave out all of the fission products. They remain hot at dangerous levels for centuries. Breeder reactors only burn actinides.
Re:The sun is the largest nuclear reactor (Score:4, Insightful)
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Solar and wind have a huge scaling problem. Land requirements, energy storage and grid connectivity/balancing become increasingly problematic the more you build.
Solar does take up land it is true, so it helps a lot to put it on top of land already in use (buildings, or over roadways). Wind is easily integrated into farming, and land otherwise left in its natural state, off shore wind is an option also. The power grid in effect gets rebuilt every 30 years anyway due to regular maintenance investment, so redesigning it as necessary while doing that reduces additional cost. It is straightforward in any case not "problematic" (sort of like pointing out a new housing de
what about orbiting solar panels? (Score:2)
I've read a semi-plausible mid-21st-century scenario where the US military (in a conflict situation) under pressure figures out how to beam energy from large solar panels in the Earth's orbit to the surface of the planet. Then of course over time it is commercialized for civilian use.
(It's from "The Next 100 Years" by George Friedman of Geopolitical futures.)
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Its an old scifi trope. Its about collecting solar energy in geosynchronous orbit, where it doesn't get dissipated by an atmosphere, converting it to microwaves, and then beaming the microwaves to a receiving station that can convert the energy to electrical power with little loss. Just ignore the possibility that it can be used as a giant, space MASER weapon.
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Orbital solar for terrestrial power is IDIOTIC.
Until launch costs are much, much lower. Just put up 999x as many solar cells on the ground, make much more power for much less money.
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But Sol is a fusion reactor. Earthlings can't generate practical fusion powered reactors yet.
Solar panels are merely utilizing a teensy amount of solar radiation at about a 10% conversion efficiency. That's probably not going to power the world, certainly not at night.
10% of solar radiation is plenty (Score:2)
Way to warp the news (Score:5, Insightful)
A guy with a PhD in Nuclear Physics (and a consultant) thinks we should use nuclear power.>
In other words:
A guy who actually knows what the hell he is talking about comes up with great clean solution, is ridiculed by armchair pundit who apparently would rather watch the planet die than admit nuclear power was ever a good idea.
Re:Way to warp the news (Score:5, Interesting)
A guy with a PhD in Nuclear Physics (and a consultant) thinks we should use nuclear power.>
In other words:
A guy who actually knows what the hell he is talking about comes up with great clean solution, is ridiculed by armchair pundit who apparently would rather watch the planet die than admit nuclear power was ever a good idea.
And climate scientists agree: Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change [theguardian.com]
Get back to me... (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Proper funding of costs for decommissioning of private reactors as they reach the end of their useful life.
3. A rational emergency fund pool.should, dear god, catastrophic failure occur to a private facility.
Re:Get back to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. When you have a viable (politically and otherwise) solution to long term waste storage.
That's an unfair burden. We do not have a viable solution to global warming by this measure. His advocacy is an attempt to change the political situation such that it becomes viable.
#2 is an actuarial exercise.
#3 is also an unfair burden - we do not currently have an emergency fund pool for when Florida goes underwater. We use our national resources to deal with disasters.
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"For profit" is an implementation detail. We can and do regulate the holy hell out of nuclear power plants. It's not like Joe Billionaire builds nuke plants with his personal fortune - they are built and operated by corporations. Corporations who get their charter from government. Utilities as such are just an extension of government, funded with private capital. Yeah, the allowed profit goes to the shareholders. If it was run by a government commission, those same people would profit from the bonds used to
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1: What is the waste you refer to? Why is it a problem? (Hint: It's not really a problem, and can be re-purposed if idiots like you weren't spewing FUD).
2: Most of the cost is for building and decommissioning is due to unnecessary red tape. (No, I'm not saying to get rid of all regulations. Just the bulk of them as they are pointless.)
3: Modern reactors basically cannot have the catastrophic failures that a handful of reactors in all of history have experienced.
Re:Get back to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. When you have a viable (politically and otherwise) solution to long term waste storage.
Maybe we could just blow it into the air and/or dump it into the sea, just like the coal-fired plants do.
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Re:Get back to me... (Score:5, Informative)
1. In the US, at least, we do. It's called Yucca Mountain [wikipedia.org]. it wasn't politically acceptable to the previous Administration for #UNKNOWNREASON, but the current Administration would probably be fine to use this purpose-built facility for what it was built for - long-term storage of nuclear waste.
2. Done. All nuclear plants already pay into a decommissioning fund [nrc.gov] that is controlled and overseen by the NRC.
3. Every nuclear power plant buy insurance from the Government [naic.org] to cover people and property.
So, we're where you want to be (at least in the US); what's the hold-up to rolling out more nuclear?
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1. In the US, at least, we do. It's called Yucca Mountain [wikipedia.org]. it wasn't politically acceptable to the previous Administration for #UNKNOWNREASON, but the current Administration would probably be fine to use this purpose-built facility for what it was built for - long-term storage of nuclear waste.
No. It wasn't acceptable to the DOE who specified that the geology should be part of a concept for the facility called "Defense in Depth". As it stands the facility is built into a porus pumice mountain instead of into a granite facility. Tests of ground water at the facility found Chlorine 55 which originated from atmospheric test nuclear explosions which tells us that it takes less than 50 years for ground water to enter and leave a facility that is supposed to contain radio-isotopes for 100s of thousa
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1, You just need a building that doesn't let groundwater in, and put some guards in front of it.
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Re:Really (Score:5, Informative)
And his argument is "Proof by I Can't Believe The Alternative Because It Involves Large Numbers"
Nuclear power plant construction is exceedingly slow and exceedingly expensive. You can produce power much faster by instead sinking that capital that he wants to sink into nuclear power plants instead into factories to produce solar panels, wind turbines, HVDC lines, and grid-scale storage.
The ability to produce solar panels and wind turbines - per dollar of capital invested - are reflected in their power prices. Which are much cheaper than nuclear. Regardless of whether the numbers sound large to one Joshua S. Goldstein.
Or to put it another way: Coal is already dying. Quickly. And it's not nuclear that's killing it. It's a mix of NG (low carbon), solar (near-zero carbon) and wind (near-zero carbon).
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Yeah, but when you need to plaster a third to half the country with wind and solar to even get close to providing enough energy, then even the most blind of idiots must realize that this is probably not going to be our salvation.
Also: Do you believe the production of silicon for PV is not harmful to the environment? Especially in those amounts? Not to mention the question of whether we are even able to find enough raw materials for it.
I agree that nuclear power has been done wrong in many ways. And we can n
Re:Really (Score:5, Informative)
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It is still a lot, but that isn't the bottle-neck. The real problem is sourcing the raw materials and rare-earths for that much production. The costs go down, when we have cheap oil, because demand falls. When oil gets expensive, demand for solar goes up, but the raw materials become scarcer, which drives price up. It isn't so much that factories don't have capacity, its that they have supply-chain issues with building that much. Also, a solar panel loses its ability to create power as it ages, so you effec
Re:Really (Score:4, Informative)
It is still a lot, but that isn't the bottle-neck. The real problem is sourcing the raw materials and rare-earths for that much production.
There is no significant demand for rare earths in grid scale renewable power. Solar cells use silicon, boron, and phosphorus. Windmills use conventional electromagnetic generators. Grid scale batteries will use sodium ion batteries when they come on-line. There are no critically scarce materials required.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, but when you need to plaster a third to half the country with wind and solar to even get close to providing enough energy, then even the most blind of idiots must realize that this is probably not going to be our salvation.
And yet nuclear power plants that take decades to get built, if they get built at all, and which suffer routine cost overruns at the tune of multiples of the estimated cost is our salvation?
While wind and solar and large transmission lines also suffer from NIMBYism, they are nothing like nuclear. I think it's actually more likely that enough of those could get built even at the scale needed than enough nuclear power plants could built in the same time-period for the same amount of money.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
HVDC lines, and grid-scale storage.
Nuclear might have issues, but so do these.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Really (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
They have experts for a reason other then just being a well spoken advocate for "The Man"
One of the biggest issue I have with our current state of things, Experts are just ignored or discredited because they have found that some things may not be convenient for the person, worse conflict with their world view, or even worse going against your aligned parties talking points.
Nuclear Energy really should be in America energy play book, to supplement and support other forms of green energy as well. That said
Re:Nuclear deaths per terawatt prove otherwise (Score:5, Informative)
The swath of nuclear enegy's death toll per terawatt tell a different story. It is in a bloody category to its own compared to every other form of energy out there, even solar.
I can't tell if you are saying nuclear is the safest or deadliest. I'm assuming you mean the safest. At least that's what the WHO seemed to think in 2010. The WHO ranked them as follows:
Coal: 170,000 deaths per trillion kilowatt hours. 1,963,500 annual total deaths
Hydro: 1400 per trillion KW. 4851 annual deaths
Solar(rooftop): 440 deaths per trillion KW. less than 102 deaths per year
Wind: 150 deaths per trillion KW. 102 deaths per year
Nuclear; 90 per trillion KW. 353 total deaths per year
Nuclear was rated as 1889 times safer than coal. Wind was rated 1133x safer than coal, solar was rated 386x safer than coal.
Granted, this was published one year prior to the 2011 Fukushima disaster. However as far as I know there has only been one death which was tied directly to radiation exposure as of 2018. There were four workers who received compensation who were diagnosed with leukemia and thyroid cancer as a result of exposure. In comparison, over 18,000 were killed by the earthquake and tsunami. Another 500 some died afterward do to disaster related reasons. This included patients who starved to death in a hospital.
Re: (Score:2)
The deaths in the nuclear industry undoubtedly counted people falling off ladders, crushed by equipment, etc.
How many people have been irradiated to death?
Sol invinctus (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
This is why I have concerns about nuclear power without a major change in stakeholding. In Russia, a company that did a crappy job would have its execs shot. Same with China, except the organs would be sold. Europe would try them and put them in prison for a long time. Here in the US, if a contractor made a nuclear reactor that never worked, the execs would get bonuses and the taxpayers would have another Superfund site to go with. If anyone went to prison, it might be a low level worker.
Re: (Score:2)
Fukushima was a decades old already outdated reactor design and it suffered an earthquake so severe it literally moved the entire goddamn planet as well as one of the most brutal tsunamis in recorded history and it killed precisely NO ONE due to radiation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Geothermal and wave would be viable if we would do the same -- plus they don't leave that bullshit radiation nonsense WHEN(*) they fail.
Geothermal energy doesn't scale. The total heat energy emitted through the Earth's crust is something like 1/10000th of the total Solar irradiance across the surface. Like wind, it's great in the few places that it's great. Wind and wave power are simply poor ways to harvest solar power. Sure, there are a few places where the energy available is far higher than average, and it makes sense there, but again it doesn't scale.
Solar is really the only thing that will scale (to 10B people consuming power at current US rates). We might make fission work as a stopgap, but world uranium reserves are actually quite low compared to what would be needed, they'd be exhausted quickly, and there's no evidence we could mine uranium at a rate that would keep up with that scale
The point of TFA is that we can't build modern solar fast enough. That's a fair point, as it has a long toolchain and is beyond what a third-world nation can manufacture for itself. But there's also solar thermal, which only takes 19th century technology to make work. Right now, solar thermal is just below where it makes sense financially. There are places where modern solar is cheaper per Watt than natural gas, but solar thermal just isn't. But it's not a huge difference, just enough to cross the line into not being worth it.
tl;dr: We can build all the solar thermal we'd need, and build it fast, and build it locally in emerging nations, if it were really a priority. It's the only non-fossil fuel answer that's true of.
It's worth pointing out, however, that if we're talking about replacing almost all power generation in just a few decades, orbital solar wins. At current launch costs and energy prices, it already works (it's just less profitable than other things). However, the more we did it, the cheaper it would get. Given we're talking trillions of dollars, just the minimal corporate R&D budget that would inevitably be spent to cut costs would be orders of magnitude higher than all worldwide space-related research funding ever.
Re: (Score:3)
Agree with you on geothermal, but wind is actually a very good source. The most important property of wind is that its availability tends to be negatively correlated with solar irradiation. This means that by combining wind and photo-voltaic power generation, you will get a much more reliable source of power, and the requirements for storage will go down massively. In my opinion, storage is really the main issue, so one should try to increase the size of the electricity networks as much as possible - thi
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
But let's keep investing into archaic unsafe technology and pollute the environment when they fail
People like you spreading this complete strawman bullshit and generations of Greenpeace psychos before that are the reason that we have no modern, safe nuclear options. Updated designs using passive reactor safety, such as Generation IV [wikipedia.org], *can't* have an uncontrolled meltdown -- in the event of a problem, gravity automatically shuts down the reaction. Ask the French [wikipedia.org] -- they generate 40% of their own power via nukes plus they generate electricity for a good chunk of the rest of Europe using nuclear. Please educate yourself instead of using 70 year old stereotypes about nuclear power -- because thanks to the misinformation you are spreading, we are stuck with ancient, unsafe reactor designs.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ask the French
You mean the country that's abandoned plants under construction? That says new nuclear plants aren't economically viable [cnbc.com]? Do you really want us to ask them?
Also, your education seems to have left out what to do with the waste. And no, you can't reprocess it all. First, it's not all spent fuel. Second, a reprocessing plant is also a nuclear weapons plant, which means it's not a practical global solution.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4)
That's funny . . . looks like they're expanding 19 existing sites [montelnews.com], and French nuclear power output rose by 3.7% last year [reuters.com]. Sorry dude, despite the little snit thrown by anti-nuke pols in the French gov't, France is the leader in European nuclear power, and they're going to stay that way for a very long time.
The entire premise of the article you linked to is that the costs of renewables "could" drop by certain levels. These hopeful projections -- backed by no real data, I might add -- also reference dates 40-50 years in the future, which is just silly theater. No one has any specifics about future efficiency gains even close to that far out. In that amount of time we will certainly have entirely new ways of working with nuclear energy too, but this apparently wasn't taken into consideration. But the most damning statement is that the plants won't be economically viable due to excess capacity. That is, they are saying we'll literally have too much power for them to pay for themselves, which is literally laughable. There is no time in recorded history that human energy consumption has ever dropped -- ever -- and the new technologies we are developing consume electricity at an ever increasing rate.
You have somewhat of a point about waste, which is not nil -- but it would be vastly improved over today's situation, and I trust people like the French to come up with real-world solutions, as they have for many decades now.
Re: (Score:3)
The trouble is there are companies that all they do is supply these inefficient fuel rods and nothing more. They have a vested interest seeing to it that no other type of nuclear reactor comes online. They employ lobbyists.