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Why James Hansen Is Wrong About Nuclear Power (thinkprogress.org)
mdsolar writes: Climatologist James Hansen argued last month, "Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change." He is wrong. As the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and International Energy Agency (IEA) explained in a major report last year, in the best-case scenario, nuclear power can play a modest, but important, role in avoiding catastrophic global warming if it can solve its various nagging problems — particularly high construction cost — without sacrificing safety. Hansen and a handful of other climate scientists I also greatly respect — Ken Caldeira, Tom Wigley, and Kerry Emanuel — present a mostly handwaving argument in which new nuclear power achieves and sustains an unprecedented growth rate for decades. The one quantitative "illustrative scenario" they propose — "a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system" — is far beyond what the world ever sustained during the nuclear heyday of the 1970s, and far beyond what the overwhelming majority of energy experts, including those sympathetic to the industry, think is plausible.
Yes imagination can get you when you don't see how simple the construction itself is. That building, it's simple. Yes it requires the use of special materials but the structure itself is far simpler than any skyscraper would ever be. Those reactors? Simple by any standard used in the process industry. Which only leaves the question of scale.
I was right there with you in my thoughts. I thought scale was an incredible problem right up until I visited the largest oil refinery in Europe after visiting a tiny one in Australia. Everything was the same, the equipment was the same, the way they worked was the same, the effort put into maintaining it was the same. Things were only slightly larger though. A refinery that had 6 times the throughput had far less than double the foot print and the reactor vessels etc were less than double the size. Likewise on the co-generation facilities. Turbines with 10 times the power generation capacity were also less than double the size.
I also had the opportunity to visit a large industry motor / generator repair house to go check on the progress on one of our 2.5MW motors while they were overhauling a 300MW generator for the local power station. The diameter of the rotor was maybe 5 times the size of our little baby but the duty was over 100 times the power. My mind was absolutely blown. Powerlevels and throughput of industrial machinery scale what seems like exponentially with the size of equipment.