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.

Comments

Re:Not Ready For Prime Time

[kheldan]

Friend, with respect: Please take off the blinders, OK? One of my personal philosophies is 'If what you're doing isn't working, then try something else, repeat the process until success', and it's worked pretty darned good for me so far; I see no reason why this philosophy can't be applied to everything else, but people need to open their minds to it. I'm not concerned with any current proposals, I'm concerned with the bigger, long-term picture, and I see nuclear power in the form of thorium-based reactors in that picture. If nothing else it'll give Humanity some much-needed breathing room while physicists and engineers work on creating even better solutions to the world's energy problems.

Re:renewables

[SoftwareArtist]

Fortunately, wind and solar complement each other nicely. The wind tends to pick up around sunrise and sunset, two times when solar is far from its peak. Storms also tend to bring increased wind at the same time they block the sun. As a result, wind and solar are anticorrelated, and the sum of the two is much more consistent than either one alone.

But in any case, all this means is that we need to incorporate storage into the grid. That's a big project, but it doesn't require any new technology. Existing, mature technologies (batteries, thermal storage, hydrogen, etc.) are well up to the task (though undoubtedly they'll continue to advance with time). In contrast, most proposals for nuclear rely on cutting edge, very immature technologies (breeder reactors, thorium, etc.).

Re:That's exactly right

[jblues]

I can't understand why, whenever I wind power death happens, it just seems to be covered up. I have lost three close friends to wind power in just in the past few years:

• James: Stopped for a picnic nearby to a wind-farm, with his fiance, Andrea. They'd spread out the picnic blanket and sat down to eat scotch eggs, and drink champagne. "Watch the blades against the backdrop of the sky! It is so relaxing!" he implored his beloved, and they did that for hours. There they were, in a picturesque field, holding hands, and idly describing the shapes they could see in the clouds. "A dragon!", "A dwarf!", "Your tits!", when suddenly a freak strong wind blew up and . . . . well, James was so fixated on following the turbine blades that his head started to spin at 350 revolutions per minute, in a figure-of-eight motion, at first like a very congenial Indian, and then progressively more violent. What happened next should not be written about. James was laid to rest with his head expertly reattached, but it was necessarily a closed-coffin funeral.
• Lilia: TBD, but definitely wind power related.
• Wang: Took his Tesla out for a drive when it started to get low on juice. By the selfies that were left behind, he clearly thought himself very clever for hacking a wind turbine to recharge it. But the car now had such a gloriously full battery that he floored it, pedal-to-the-metal all the way home, and ended up driving right past his own house, crashing into a power-pole at the end of the street.