The IPCC's Shifting Position On Nuclear Energy

Lasrick writes Suzanne Waldman writes about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its stand on nuclear power over the course of its five well-known climate change assessment reports. The IPCC was formed in 1988 as an expert panel to guide the drafting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratified in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The treaty's objective is to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a safe level. Waldman writes: 'Over time, the organization has subtly adjusted its position on the role of nuclear power as a contributor to de-carbonization goals," and she provides a timeline of those adjustments.

Comments

About time.

[LWATCDR]

Solar's production curve does not match the peak user curve of electrical power. Wind is a good bit better but still needs natural gas peaking plants to back it.
For low carbon base load power you have only three choices.
1. Hydro
2. Nuclear
3. Geothermal.
1 and 3 are location limted.

Re:About time.

[garyisabusyguy]

I live in a desert, we host a very large nuclear power plant

They purify and re-use ground water with many cooling ponds built into their cycle

There is no need for a continuously flowing river in this design

Re:About time.

[nobuddy]

I had to build a small datacenter (about 25 1u servers and some routing/switching hardware) that the client needed 5 days of reserve power. The battery unit for this was surprisingly small. It was about 5 foot cube, and packed full of lead acid batteries. This was in early 2003. I imagine today's battery technology can make that even denser. Tesla's battery technology has been released in to the wild, and it is light years beyond lead acid technology.

Re:About time.

[CrimsonAvenger]

No one wants to live next to a nuclear plant. Would you?

I'd have no problem at all with that. Nearest one is about 40 miles away now....

Note that I'm biased, of course. Having worked in the field back in the day, I know a lot more about the subject than most /.'ers....

Re:About time.

[gurps_npc]

Storage is notoriously DIFFICULT.

If you came up with some kind of Shipstone (Heinlein's super battery) then your idea would work.

But using current technology, electrical storage is:

1) heavy

2) Expensive

3) Leaky (slowly losing power, converting it to heat)

4) Relatively short term - see leaky.

5) Limited lifespan (each charge cycle decreases how much the next one can hold).

6) inefficient - it takes 200 units to store 100 units.

So while your idea works in principle, in practice it fails.

Re:About time.

[itzly]

The IPCC doesn't write a single report. The have 3 different working groups, each writing their own report. The first group deals with the science, the second deals with the impacts, and the third deals with mitigation. Obviously, the 3rd one is the most politically influenced.

How do they exactly phrase their call for centralized authority ? What's the page number ?

Re:About time.

[Solandri]

The same solutions can be applied to electricity. We can improve storage, by using things like flow batteries.

Once you factor in charging and discharging losses, batteries end up cutting solar's already-abysmal energy per $ ratio nearly in half. Pumped storage (pumping water uphill into a dam) is currently the best energy storage option, and even it sits at between 70%-80% efficiency.

Using the energy as it's produced (or in the case of fossil fuels and nuclear, producing the energy as it's needed) is always the best option. I mean hypothetically, if you're going to use PV solar to pump water uphill for storage, it's really no different from installing thousands of square km of cheap black-painted panels just underneath the ocean surface, raising the temperature of the top layer of ocean water, increasing the evaporation rate, resulting in more rainfall, giving you the same increase in water stored behind dams for probably a lot less cost. Why even bother with the intermediate lossy steps of converting solar to electricity, then electricity to mechanical motion?

Re:Ask Japan...

[digsbo]

Exactly how many nuclear disasters does it take before we figure out we should be using newer, safer, cleaner nuclear technology?

FTFY.

Re:Ask Japan...

[GameboyRMH]

1 with a modern reactor?

So far we've had a partial meltdown that hurt nobody, an "accident" so cartoonishly stupid that it should more accurately be called insider sabotage, and an outdated reactor that was hit with multiple extreme natural disasters simultaneously.

These emotional knee-jerk reactions from Japan, Germany and others are counterproductive and could hurt financially if any kind of global carbon-trading scheme is put in place. Besides, I prefer my nuclear waste nice and contained rather than flowing continuously from the smokestack of a coal power plant.

Re:So... nuclear power is still supported?

[ShanghaiBill]

Concerns about rising costs seem to have come and then faded away with new technology.

Concerns about rising costs have NOT faded away. Nuclear costs are higher than ever, and rising, as costs of other power sources continue to fall. Post-Fukushima safety measures will raise costs. Waste storage will raise costs. Reduced subsidies will raise costs. Fuel reprocessing actually raises costs rather than reducing them. New technologies, such as pebble beds, thorium fluoride, traveling wave reactors, are decades away, even if they work at all.

There may be good reasons to build new nukes, but cost is not one of them.

Opportunity cost

[mdsolar]

Nuclear is so much more expensive than wind, that using it slows the progress of clean energy by tying up resources. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/R...