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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.
If it doesn't solve it completely, don't do it at all. Selectively applied of course..
mdsolar, this is absolute trash. No citations, only "it can't work". Fuck you and your worthless do nothing attitude. Please leave. You are approaching Bennett Haselton levels here. No, actually, he prodives bad arguments and poor citations. This is actually worse. This is Jon Katz level.
{anything} is the only viable path to {anything}
Is wrong by definition.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
In all these debates I'm always amazed how the simple "big picture" of the physics involved is disregarded. It all boils down to energy density. Is there any other power generation technology that comes close? The only other alternative is to reduce our energy usage and if that ain't gonna happen you need to build lots of reactors producing lots of energy. Sure you can cover the surface of the Earth in solar panels I suppose, but that seems to be a bit of a maintenance headache (not to mention the energy cost of creating the panels in the first place). It seems to me all the negatives of nuclear boil down to the cost of making it safe which surely we can do a more efficient job of? We can't keep holding out hope for fusion, we need to make plans for relying on fission for the foreseeable future.
Nuclear powers' 'various nagging problems' won't be an issue if we started using thorium-based reactors.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The proposal also runs out of uranium before all the reactors are built. http://slashdot.org/journal/53...
If you're going to complain about high construction costs it's worth looking at what has caused those costs. Nuclear power is completely unaffordable. We simply can't build any more plants. Yet somehow the world has built hundreds already with many in the USA which currently has very cheap power. The east is still building them. So what is this mythical high cost? After all the cost of materials has reduced, the cost of construction has only increased marginally and the designs these days aren't very complicated from a control perspective.
Oh that's right regulatory overhead.
James Hansen is right about this. Nuclear reactor technology has advanced to the point that safe-by-design reactors can be built, with technology that prevents meltdown in the event of total power and coolant failure. No other technology offers the energy density necessary to replace fossil fuel power plants.
Has a breeder program. Sounds like a great plan.
mdsolar's point isn't that we should build no new nuclear, at least not in this thread. His point is that nuclear can't, in and of itself, decarbonize the electric sector. We simply don't have the capacity to build that many nuclear power plants simultaneously, nor do we have the fuel, nor do we have the money.
The first one might be overcome. After all, if world leaders were able to simultaneously lay out this plan and get political support for it, part of the plan would include training more engineers, trades, and other jobs necessary. We might not be able to build 100 per year in 2016 (or even 2020), but we could ramp up.
The second one might be overcome. After all, with pressure for more fuel, we might go out and find more fuel, develop new techniques to find, recover, and process more fuel, etc. I doubt we could overcome it, but generally speaking if we went "long" on nuclear, at least some more fuel would turn up.
The third one is the toughest. Nuclear power, today, is more expensive than wind and in some places, more expensive than solar. Given that wind and solar don't have the political opposition, don't have 10-15 year lags from "let's build it" to "let's turn it on", and can be built in more places at far smaller increments, it's really tough to argue that we should spend the money on nuclear when there are cheaper options. But -- that could change. Improving the regulatory climate could help lower construction costs, as could improvements in design. Wind and solar $/kW will continue to fall for a while, but perhaps their supply inputs will become scarce and, at least for wind, the locations for the best wind become scarce. At some point in the future it's possible that the $/kWh for nuclear will become cheap enough, but it's not there now.
My view: don't put any option off the table, but let's spend our money to get the most decarbonization per buck. Right now, that means going long on energy efficiency, retiring the old coal units, building wind and solar where we can, and keeping (most) nuclear units already built up and running, so long as their safety is secure. Simultaneously, we should price carbon appropriately, eliminate subsidies on oil, coal, and gas, and be working to lower the cost of all no-carbon generating options using both technology and regulatory approaches. All of those things, together, will result in a steady least cost decarbonization of our electric sector, and if/when/where nuclear can beat out wind and solar, so be it.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
It's not the 'least worst option', it's the best option. Thorium is plentiful compared to uranium, and more to the point it's plentiful here in North America (no need to buy it from someone else), thorium reactors don't need the complicated high-pressure reactors that uranium-fueled reactors need, thus lower construction costs, easier and cheaper management, they can't 'melt down', and the list of problems solved goes on and on. People need to get over their paranoia about anything with the word 'nuclear' in it and allow themselves to be saved by LFT reactor technology.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
There are two problems with solar: night and clouds. There is one problem with wind: it's not always windy. Wind installations are typically combined with natural gas burners to supplement electricity when it's not windy enough.
Nuclear is the only power source that can handle a huge load constantly without interruption. That is why Hansen supports it, because if you want to stop releasing CO2 into the atmosphere without messing up our lifestyles, it's the only way with current technology.
The article cites this paper, which claims to have found a way to handle electricity generation from wind/water/solar while dealing with the interruptions. It assumes by 2050 all residential and commercial heating will have thermal storage, like this community in Alaska. It is up to you to decide if that is a reasonable or practical assumption.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Offshore wind looks to have a good chance at getting very cheap. The capacity there is overwhelming.
The technological problem with nuclear power is that no one has come up with a passively safe design.
Actually, recent generations are passively safe.
Safety systems that depend on human intervention have been shown to be impossible to implement and maintain consistently, at least in a commercial environment.
Code for "profit is evil!" There are 440 commercially operated nuclear plants in the world (as of January 2016) with a safety record spanning about 50 years indicating that they do a pretty good job compared to alternate power sources like hydro, coal, wind, or solar.
We can't even maintain safety and quality control standards during the construction phase. We repeatedly have had nuclear plants fail at least in part because they weren't constructed to spec.
You have yet to demonstrate that the "specs" actually help make nuclear power safer, let us note. A lot of relatively poor choices, extending the lives of old nuclear plants, happens because no one is making enough new plants to specs that the old plants could never achieve.
I have always suspected that the high upfront cost of new reactors is primarily caused by the Greens' legal delay strategy. Stretch the construction timetable out far enough, and bonding cost will eventually eat up any conceivable budget. Look to China to see what can be done where Greens have no input to the process. According to Reuters, China is building eight reactors of the standard AP-1000 design for $24 billion. In the US, we are close to spending about that much for just one new plant.
And yes, the China program went through the same post-Fukushima safety check cycle as in Japan. Like Japan, they chose to proceed.
If you are concerned with some far future scenario, then you misunderstand the proposal.
You might like this http://slashdot.org/journal/25...
ThinkProgress is the political blog of the "Center for American Progress", a highly partisan political organization. Romm himself is also highly partisan, and the argument in his article is a political one, not a scientific one. In short, please keep this partisan political crap off Slashdot.
Yes, uranium reactors need massive amounts of cooling. Thorium reactors don't. Given the immense reserves of thorium on the planet(as common as lead) if the greens had been pushing that since the 70's, we could have eliminated coal completely and the majority of oil and LNG usage within the next 30 years.
Actually, climate scientists are underrating the thread.
The situation is far worth than you get from the "news".
E.g. if you look at the prognosis of sea level rising of the last 30 years. It was a fan with an prognosed upper bound and an prognosed lower bound. A sane person would expect the actual increase to vary around the middle, approaching probably both bounds alternating over time.
Guess what: the sea level increase is ABOVE the upper bound constantly since 15 years or more. And "the scientists" did adjust their estimates every year: and failed every year.
Same for temperature increase. There are idiots like you proclaiming that the warming has stopped 10 years ago. However the educated agree, 2014 was the warmest year in recorded history, and ... we are evaluating right now, but are already pretty certain, that 2015 was even warmer.
Because telling dramatic stories is how you get money and power without earning it.
Actually, a climat scientist does not earn more money as an plasma physicist or aerodynamics researcher. Money for PhDs or Professors at universities or research institutes are the same, regardless of actual topic they work in (*facepalm*). You are an idiot.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That is an idiotic statement (which, given your general tone, doesn't surprise me).
By not contributing to global warming, "cooling resources" become more plentiful. You are still trapped in your circular logic.
Let's take this opportunity to look at some numbers. Apparently, worldwide energy consumption is between 10TW and 20TW, depending on whose number you use. Radiation from the sun dumps around 120 000TW into the planet. Assuming all energy consumed ends up as heat and ignoring the fact that some of the incoming energy will be stored (photosynthesis) or used for the 10-20W mentioned above (wind, solar), we're still talking about a factor of 6 000. It not a drop in the figurative bucket, but it's not much more.
Let's assume even that small additional source of heat needs to be compensated for. Well, that's easily accomplished by trapping carbon dioxide, reducing the greenhouse effect and allowing for more heat to radiate out into space. A forestation campaign would help a lot in this regard, but converting carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons is also a valid solution - the catch is that it requires the development of better processes. The advantage is that it also allows for traditional fuels to be synthesized in a carbon-neutral way, making this an easy transition for the big sector that needs them, aviation.
Ultimately, a mix of solutions would have to be adopted, according to the desired concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Even if CO2 trapping turns out not to be viable, the massive decrease in CO2 output would go a long way towards keeping global warming at manageable levels.
Of course, this all hinges on nuclear power being adopted on a much more massive scale, which presents a number of engineering challenges which will have to be overcome. I'd say that's better than sitting around saying "But it won't work! Let's not do anything instead!", because *that* is the realistic alternative.
But I first need one answer: What are we going to do with the waste?
I am certainly NOT going to accept that companies build reactors, reap the profits and then miraculously go out of business when the reactors are no longer profitable and society gets the spent fuel dumped on its back. Anyone building a nuclear reactor must prove that he not only has a plan for how to get rid of the waste but also the monetary background to do so. That money could e.g. be parked in government bonds, these things tend to have a long run time, much like those reactors.
And we can ensure that way that the companies will clean up after themselves when everything's said and done. Because that's the one problem we face today whenever one of those things go out of business: They are dumped upon the population and we're stuck with a rotting piece of radioactive trash that costs a fortune to get rid of.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This deserves repeating:
because no one is making enough new plants to specs that the old plants could never achieve.
The reason we had disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl is because we stopped building new reactors at the rate we were before. If we kept building reactors at the same rate then we'd have seen new reactors replace the old. Instead we now run the reactors until they fail. Considering how these old reactors were built they tend to fail spectacularly.
Water cooled reactors with solid fuel separate the hot fuel from the water with zirconium metal. If the zirconium gets too hot it will burn, using the water as an oxygen source. This releases hydrogen gas into the reactor vessel, building pressure. If the gas is not released in a manner to prevent ignition then you have the makings of a large fuel-air bomb, sitting right on top of some very hot (and now likely molten) radioactive sludge. BOOM! Then radioactive debris, still molten and/or burning, now rains down over the reactor site. Good job guys, let's keep these things running for the next fifty years, because God knows we can't build them better than this.
Oh, but we can build them better. We can build air cooled reactors. No water needed. Not only do we do away with an oxygen rich coolant (and don't fool yourself, water is largely made of oxygen, air not so much) that is corrosive, but we do away with the zirconium cladding too. Other benefits to air cooling is that the reactor does not need to be near water, and the water nearby is not super heated by the reactor, the fishes would be pleased.
We can use liquid fuel, fuel that is already molten so it cannot "melt down" like a solid fuel reactor. A solid fuel reactor that turns itself, through meltdown, into a liquid fuel reactor will burn itself a new reactor vessel into the floor of the previous vessel. It will burn itself into a nice spherical shape to assure a good neutron economy making sure it gets nice and hot. A liquid fuel reactor cannot do this because the floor of the reactor would be built in a way that, in the unlikely event it happens, if containment it lost the fuel will spread out. Without concentrating the fuel the fission chain is broken, and cannot restart.
The arguments against nuclear power are based on building new reactors with the same flaws that existing reactors have. We can build new ones without those flaws. That's not saying these new designs will be flawless, but at least the new flaws will not result in the reactor undergoing rapid self disassembly on worldwide television. These molten fuel reactors could fail but at least they won't spread burning radioactive pieces all over the place.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Why you need a citation for a no brainer is bejond me ;)
We can't stop Global Warming using nuclear power because we won't be able to cool stuff using water.
Do you know why Germany is selling so much power to France during summer time?
I guess not. It has something vague to do with cooling of nuclear power plants, google is your friend, so I can spare me citations for what is considered 'common knowledge' here in my world ....
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
waste, which has never been handled well
We built a perfectly good, and safe, and vast long-term waste sequestration facility inside Yucca Mountain. It was never put into use thanks to brain-dead Nevada politicians. Never mind that it's not even in anyone's back yard.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Correct: the systems shown in the cutaway diagram are not that complex. In fact, over the decades, more engineering has gone into the subsystems inside the tractor-trailer truck that's included in the picture; its engine, and electronic engine control system, and diesel exhaust scrubber, and even the design of its tire tread, to name a few examples.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
This is what people don't seem to get. They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer. Um no, Fukushima's generation capacity was equivalent to about 7,000-10,000 wind turbines.
So much of the story is left untold, thank you for telling. No one ever seems to ask: What is good about Fukushima Daiichi?
Fukushima's first reactor went on-line in March 1971 [cite] and 5 others followed up to 1979. Without accounting for cumulative downtime (hard to find), let's keep it simple, cut everything here by a third if you like, I come up with a combined total of ~159.12 Gigawatt-years of electricity. That's ~636.5 million tons of coal [cite] that did not have to be expensively imported and burned to help resource-poor Japan become the industrial giant it is today. Think of it as ~1.8 trillion tons of CO2 [cite] that did not enter the atmosphere, if you like. That's just one nuclear power plant with reactors that are not big by today's standards. More stats, and the interesting observation on how the hysterical press of Japan does not necessarily reflect public opinion,
"A poll taken in February 2015 by the Mizuho Information & Research Institute of Japan asked whether or not the respondent would use nuclear-generated electricity if the costs were the same or less than they were that month, and 67% said âoeyesâ. Only 32% replied in the negative. This contrasts with a number of media polls with voluntary and hence non-representative participation, and the distortion is compounded by a 2012 news media survey finding that 47 of the 50 most popular press outlets in Japan said they were antinuclear."
Japans few nuclear plants have provided as much as ~30% of Japan's electricity and I am confident they will pass that figure once more. Nuclear has contributed greatly to the country's wealth in ways that no other energy source could have, or ever could. There is a great deal of hidden peril facing the entire human species that is a direct result of stalling the Industrial Revolution --- by sweeping nuclear energy under the rug. As Kirk Sorensen says so eloquently,
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common."
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
...You take an industry that really has the best safety record of any energy producing industry, and demonize it for years on end. Protests, Movies (Stupid ones at that), over regulation, lawsuits (endless, countless lawsuits), and then you bitch and moan that it's too expensive.
I see.
So, because there's a cool-down time on a reactor, I'm a liar or a dupe?
Take a look at the designs for molten salt reactors. Basically the fail state for them drains the reaction chamber and is essentially an off-switch for power generation.
Sure, the fuel needs time to actually cool off (thermally).
But hey, so does the molten salt (or other thermal medium) in a non-PV solar plant too.
And, again, PV solar and wind simply aren't as stable and dependable a power generation platform. This is why you can't use them for baseline power.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The contrapositive of your question: Why are renewable proponents so vehemently opposed to anything but renewables? How about instead of living with the status quo (coal) we start building out *anything* that would get us off of effectively burning mountains and blowing it into the stratosphere?
That means a good mix of wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and yes, nuclear.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Look, because you follow the crowd and news and like to frequent propaganda alarmist green sites, does not mean you are "educated" on the matter.
Sea level rise is at about 3mm per year and has been since the end of the last ice age.
Temperatures have been pretty flat for 18 years now and the evidence shows this.
2014 was the "warmiest" year by something like 0.01C with an error margin of 0.1C with a 34 or 38% (I forget which) level of confidence.
I think the facepalm should go to you and all those who follow the "IN" crowd and like to believe the boogeyman scare stories of your generation.
Only a few climate scientists profit from all this scare mongering, Jaggadish Shukla being one of them. But it only takes a few very vocal ones in the media to stir up a frenzy and control the narrative, especially when backed by big money like the Rockefellers and governments like the U.N.
You think you are being smart, but you believe exactly what they want you to. You are being misled and you need to open your eyes.