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: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.).