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

Ahh the old argument

[Anonymous Coward]

If it doesn't solve it completely, don't do it at all. Selectively applied of course..

Worthless post

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Worthless post

[phantomfive]

mdsolar, this is absolute trash. No citations, only "it can't work".

There's a link in the summary. I suggest clicking on it. It contains supporting evidence for what is stated in the summary, which is what most people would consider a 'citation.'

Wrong

[mwvdlee]

{anything} is the only viable path to {anything}

Is wrong by definition.

It's energy density, stupid

[tylersoze]

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.

Re:It's energy density, stupid

[SoftwareArtist]

> 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).

Ok, you just managed to make three totally false claims in the space of one sentence:

1. You would need to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar panels to supply all our energy needs. No. Not even close. Consider that if you cover the roof of a typical house in solar panels, they will generate more energy than what is used by that house. You can find lots of details at http://www.techinsider.io/map-.... "If solar is 20% efficient (as it has been in lab tests) at turning solar energy into power, we'd only need to cover a land area about the size of Spain to power the entire Earth renewably in 2030." In fact, solar compares quite favorably to other energy sources in terms of land area required, if you take into account things like the land needed to mine coal or the area of the reservoirs needed for hydroelectric. And for solar, much of that "land area" can just be on top of roofs that are already there.

2. Solar panels require more maintenance than nuclear power plants. Seriously? Is that a joke? Once installed, solar panels take almost no maintenance at all. Operating a nuclear power plant is a very complicated, very expensive business. There's no comparison at all.

3. Creating solar panels takes more energy (or almost as much energy) as they produce. This is a myth that's been floating around for years, but has never been true. From http://solarcraft.com/solar-en...: "A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conclusively demonstrates that the manufacturing energy cost versus the energy production payback for solar modules is generally less than 4 years." And you think it takes no energy to build and operate nuclear power plants, not to mention mining uranium?

Re:It's energy density, stupid

[FlyHelicopters]

Consider that if you cover the roof of a typical house in solar panels, they will generate more energy than what is used by that house.

There are several things wrong with that statement.

First, that isn't true of all houses. I've had my house looked at, covering my roof would provide only 1/3 of my total energy use, and that is taking into account multiple energy efficient improvements that I've made.

Second, houses do NOT use the majority of power. They actually are a modest user of power. Manufacturing and industrial uses use far more power.

LFTR

[kheldan]

Nuclear powers' 'various nagging problems' won't be an issue if we started using thorium-based reactors.

Re:LFTR

[Rei]

Right. Because the civilian nuclear industry has in sixty years hardly seen fit to invest anything in it, but that's clearly because they're ignorant nitwits who can't see how much clearly better it is, right?

Sorry, but thorium is not the be-all end-all. There are lots of lists touting its advantages that people like you and the gp love to share that conveniently omit the downsides. And the disadvantages aren't just "it's immature mothballed technology". You have to produce their (large) initial fuel load from other reactors, adding a lot of cost and robbing them of output for quite a while. Either that or use expensive, proliferation-risky highly enriched uranium or plutonium to start them, which itself has all sorts of problems related to limited solubility - and none of the workarounds are appealing. LTFRs have salt-freezing difficulties (so muchso that the leading "solution" is to run the entire reactor building blazingly hot rather than trying to heat every line) and use beryllium, a highly expensive, limited resource that's extremely toxic when aerosolized. They also are less controllable due to a lot of the delayed neutrons coming from outside the core. Moving the fuel (and thus waste) around also means that you can plate out waste onto your pipes and valves, potentially causing reduced flows or blockages. The tellurium formed tends to corrode the nickel-based alloys used. The alloys are also very damaged by long-term neutron exposure, and the alloying "fix" reduces the temperature limit, to a low level that may not be acceptable. The graphite has short lifespans and tends to accumulate radioactive daughter products and become a bulky, dangerous waste stream. It also has a potentially risky positive feedback loop, increasing U-233 fission as it heats up (remember Chernobyl? Same thing). The fuel (and thus waste) is fluorides, which are highly water soluble and thus a storage hazard, requiring a conversion step before storage (every such step adds costs and increases risk of spills). Fluoride wastes also over time tend to outgas hydrofluoric acid, uranium hexafluoride, and other extremely dangerous gases. Nobody has any clue what decommissioning costs would be, which is a massive unknown - the tiny Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment had huge decommissioning costs compared to its size. LFTRs are a serious proliferation risk via the protactinium extraction pathway, a necessary step if you want a half-decent power output, and the diversion would be very easy to hide because it's hard to quantify exactly how much protactinium the reactor should be producing at any given time. Protactinium can be used to produce very pure U233, which is a suitable material for making bombs. Another easy proliferation pathway is via extraction of Np-237 - working with a constantly reprocessed, fluoride-based stream makes proliferation almost too easy (the supposed "anti-proliferation" nature of LFTRs is that you can't (without difficulty) just extract the uranium due to U232 contamination... but that's irrelevant because it makes Pa-233 and Np-237-based proliferation so easy). LFTRs have to use expensive highly enriched lithium (7Li) to avoid becoming a major source of tritium outgasing and losing a lot of their neutronicity (which is already for many reasons a huge challenge in thorium reactors - they're much harder to simply "make work")

But no no, let's go on about how it's the solution to everybody's problems and that the industry is a bunch of morons for not throwing all of their money into it...

Really, a LFTR is pretty much backwards from where reactors should be going in every regard. You want your fuel and waste to be contained in small, stable elements, not flowing all over the place and touching (and degrading) everything. You don't want random, potentially rogue states having their hands on reprocessing equipment and liquid fluorides. You don't want to have to use more rare, expensive, and toxic materials in your construction and operation. You want delayed neutrons and negative v

Lack of fuel

[mdsolar]

The proposal also runs out of uranium before all the reactors are built. http://slashdot.org/journal/53...

Solved problem

[thegarbz]

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.

Nope, James Hansen has at least this right

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That's exactly right

[stomv]

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.

Re:That's exactly right

[Rei]

These "X can't solve our energy" problems debates all generally come back to the concept of, "I personally can't imagine it". They see what vast scale of effort/material/etc it takes to build something, declare it impossible, and then declare something that they don't know as much about and haven't yet been overwhelmed by to be the solution.

Let's make it simple. If you're making hundreds of megawatts from something (let alone gigawatts), it's going to be mind-bogglingly huge and expensive, period. Doesn't matter whether you're talking about wind, water, solar, geothermal, nuclear, or whatnot - anything that can make and harness that much power is huge.

Since this is about nuclear: here's a cutaway of a "small" (180MW) reactor. This is just the reactor building, not all of the associated buildings, such as the (very large) turbine house, primary and backup support systems, power distribution infrastructure, and on and on. Again, that's a small reactor. And not only does all of that have to be built, but engineered to great precision, for the obvious reasons of the toxicity of what it's containing and the highly corrosive environment that it creates. Now think of how much you'd have to build to add new/replacement 3-4 terawatts. It's mind bogglingly vast.

But you know what, it's all mind bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of dams is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of wind turbines is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of solar panels and the factories to churn them out is mind-bogglingly vast. And on and on and on. There's a reason why electricity production eats up such a large chunk of the planet's GDP - it deals in mind-bogglingly vast things. Some things take less material and more manpower, while others take more manpower and less material... and ultimately material itself equates to manpower. All of these things are captured in the construction cost figure, which amortized plus maintenance and operations costs yields the cost of the electricity. So one doesn't have to trust some sort of "I can't conceive of that, it's too big!" sense - they just need to look at what the power costs (undistorted by external factors). The market will pay for whatever is cheapest, and will build whatever factories or mines or whatnot that it needs to in order to make it happen.

Turnaround times are an issue, but they're not be-all end-all. Because even the longest turnaround times on projects are generally no more than a decade to a decade and a half. Climate change is an issue that needs to be approached over the course of decades. So even if the need to ramp up production of the projects' "dependencies" before the projects themself can commence, there's still plenty of time. IF there was confidence that that it's the best option.

Ultimately, however, since people can't see the future, nobody knows what's going to be cheapest. Different people have different views. Different countries offer differing market conditions and resources. So ultimately, no one solution is going to be taken up as the "be-all, end-all". Many routes will engage in parallel, and with each iteration, the data gleaned from earlier attempts will influence decisions as to what to make next.

But one thing is for sure: what ever is built, it's going to be mind-bogglingly vast. That's what we 7,4 billion humans do.

Re:That's exactly right

[angel'o'sphere]

Note that the world leaders in green power -- Denmark and Germany have retail customer electricity prices approaching 40 cents a kw/hr. And German carbon emissions have actually been increasing despite their massive wind and solar buildout.
Wrong on all accounts.
Neither is CO2 emission increasing nor do we have so high prices. The typical price mentioned in the internet is something like 28cents. And that is only so high for two reasons: we don't use much power, so we have a relatively high "base cost" and we have taxes, note able CO2 taxes on power.
It would make more sense to compare a 900 sqare feet flat total energy costs in your country with mine ... I have something like 3500kWH per year, for the flat, two persons. So mine is something like 1750kWh. As my combined gas and electricity bill is more 720EUR per year, 2/3 of it for gas. This is roughly 235EUR for electricity, which turns to 13cents ... see: the "average of 28 cent" is already wrong for my personal electricity bill. But perhaps I have it wrong in my mind and electricity versus gas is 1/1 and I pay 360EUR per year for electricity, that would be: 20cent. Oh, I forgot, I got a refund of 500EUR this year, so last year I only payed 1000EUR (720*2-500), so the prices above are much lower even.

In Denmark electricity prices are high because of the even higher taxes.

Comparing Apples with horse shit makes no real sense. You want to argue that going for wind and solar would make electricity expensive in your country, but it would not. Both are meanwhile cheaper than coal and nuclear, so regardless of the tax scheme or what ever reason keeps your electricity prices low, it wont change just because you switch to green energy.

Re:That's exactly right

[Xyrus]

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.

Yes, it can. Nuclear power has a ridiculous energy density.

We simply don't have the capacity to build that many nuclear power plants simultaneously,

We most certainly could. The biggest hurdle is policy, which adds enormous cost and time to nuclear power projects and makes it so that only handful of companies even want to try.

nor do we have the fuel,

Again, this is not really issue. Compared to the massive increase in mining that would be required for, say, building billions of solar panels the increase needed to support increased nuclear is a mere pittance.

nor do we have the money.

Yes we do, if we had any sort of a sane process. Most of the cost of a solar plant is spent just dealing with that. The actual cost of the plant is just little more than an equivalent coal plant, and takes about a year or two longer to build.

I'm all for renewables, but the ramp up and resulting ecological disaster zones that would be created by creating massive pit mines to get all the materials for building out on the scale necessary to "decarbonize" never seems to be discussed. We would have to increase production by orders of magnitude, and we simply cannot do that in any reasonable time frame. We can't even do that with all nuclear.

In the meantime, a mixture of both will get us towards that goal but we need to set aside for "adaptation" strategies.

The real problem, of course, is this should have been started several decades ago.

Re:That's exactly right

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:That's exactly right

[FlyHelicopters]

https://www.ovoenergy.com/guid...

That says German average price is 35 cents per kWh.

Do you dispute that number being the average across Germany?

The US number given is 12 cents, and that is accurate for the average, but I pay much less, just over 7 cents in Texas. That doesn't make the 12 cent number wrong, just that it isn't MY number.

Maybe your number is lower, but I suspect that 35 cents is correct as a national average in Germany.

Re:That's exactly right

[Solandri]

But you know what, it's all mind bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of dams is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of wind turbines is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of solar panels and the factories to churn them out is mind-bogglingly vast.

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. And on a global aggregate, the number of deaths caused by wind turbines per MWh of energy generated far exceeds the number of deaths caused by nuclear, Fukushima and Chernobyl included. Nuclear is safer, its deaths are just more exotic radiation deaths which, like an airliner crash, happen all at once and grab headlines, not mundane falls by maintenance workers which don't even make the local news.

The global installed PV capacity is about 200 GW. But that's just peak generating capacity. Once you factor in night, weather, angle of the sun, maintenance, PV solar only has a capacity factor of about 0.125. So that 200 GW of capacity only generates 200*0.125 = 25 GW on average throughout the year. Fukushima Daiichi I had a capacity of 4.7 GW, and nuclear's capacity factor worldwide is about 0.9. So its average generation had it remained operational would've been 4.2 GW. In other words the combined power generation of every PV solar installation in the world is slightly less than just 6 Fukushima-sized power plants.

That's the huge difference in scale we're talking about when comparing these technologies. How many people died installing and maintaining all those PV installations throughout the world? If it's more than 1/6th what Fukushima killed, then PV solar in regular operation kills more people than half-century-old nuclear technology on its worst day.

Re:That's exactly right

[Uecker]

Don't worry. Germany is fine. You are reading the wrong magazines.

Yes, it is a problem that pumped-storage is shutting down, but is shutting down because it is currently not needed. The are simulations by Fraunhofer that additional storage is needed in Germany only when going over 60% renewables. In other words: storage isn't really an issue at the point where we are.

The customer prices in Germany are very high (30 cents / kWh) but only 6 cents are for the feed-in tariff for renewables. So this isn't the only one of many reasons for the high price (which is intentionally high). Also part of the industry is exempt and then pays much less than for example in California.

Coal is indeed a problem. But you have to understand that coal is big in Germany for reasons entirely unrelated to the Energiewende. Coal is simply really cheap and locally mined (jobs!) - while gas is expensive in Europe.

Re:That's exactly right

[ooloorie]

The customer prices in Germany are very high (30 cents / kWh) but only 6 cents are for the feed-in tariff for renewables. So this isn't the only one of many reasons for the high price (which is intentionally high). Also part of the industry is exempt and then pays much less than for example in California.

Yes, only 6 cents are for the feed in tariff for renewables. The rest of the difference is consumer prices being raised in order to give energy hungry industries low electricity prices. In different words, Germany has a hidden regressive tax on electricity customers in order to increase corporate profits of energy hungry industries. And I wouldn't be so sure that that is allowed to continue, given that it amounts to unfair competition and trade practices. Both the EU and the US may sooner or later decide to stomp down on these hidden subsidies.

Re:It's the least worst option

[kheldan]

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.

renewables

[phantomfive]

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.

Offshore wind

[mdsolar]

Offshore wind looks to have a good chance at getting very cheap. The capacity there is overwhelming.

Re:Offshore wind

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Higher cost than nuclear?

Nuclear scales up better, and is more consistent than wind power. It also stands up to tropical storms much better, for those parts of the world that have them. The much larger difficulty for nuclear is its waste, which has never been handled well. Another is its limited supply: until and unless we can switch to thorium as a more plentiful nuclear fuel, uranium and similar high energy yield isotopes are rare. And refining "fuel grade" uranium is very awkward, and dangerous if misused to make weapons grade uranium. One can use breeder reactors to enhance low grade uranium, but it still consumes the low grade uranium.

Re:Offshore wind

[MarkRose]

"Fuel grade" uranium can be very cheap, depending on the reactor technology chosen. For instance, CANDU reactors run find on unenriched uranium. CANDU can also burn thorium.

I think LFTR is the way to go, once the technology is fully developed, since it is much more efficient and produces far less waste.

Re:Offshore wind

[Chas]

They said "SCALES BETTER". Not necessarily "costs less".

In terms of land-use, nuclear has between 4 and 6 times the energy density per installation. And that stays fairly constant over the life of the reactor. PV Solar and wind have diminishing output over their lifetime due to component aging. Not familiar enough with non-PV solar facilities to know about component wear, though they're operating on a principal similar to molten salt reactors. So I'd guess their maintenance costs could be comparable (note I said COMPARABLE, not IDENTICAL, meaning one could be used to form an educated guess about the other).

1: Think Wind and Solar projects aren't being subsidized, you're nuts.

2: Sure, a solar plant might be cheaper, initially. But, output, over time will be lower than if you'd dedicated the land to a nuclear facility. Wind also has to deal with wear and tear. Also, the CLEANUP COSTS of a wind facility, in most cases, are actually pushed by the power company back on the land owner. So, you have an even gross of windmills on your land. When the facility eventually EOL's, how much does it cost to remove 144-ish thick concrete pads?

Additionally, costs can be brought down through mass production means. Right now, pretty much every reactor is a "one off" or a "kitbash" (a standard desgin that's been modified in situ)

3: Education costs? You mean teach people that nuclear != Bombs? Or you mean staff training? You basically have some form of staff training for any power generation system out there (if you think that large scale solar and wind don't have some fairly steep training, you haven't been paying attention).

4: All power facilities in this day and age have security costs and issues. And, if we move to Thorium MSRs, we remove much of the threat of someone trying to steal fissionable material or blow a reactor.

5: Decomissioning costs. Part of that is the fact that currently active reactors are giant Rube Goldberg nightmares with designs from the 70's based on tech from the 50's. Modern reactors are orders of magnitude simpler and built with the entire power generation lifecycle in mind.

6: Endless waste storage. One of the beauties of MSRs. What little waste actually needs to be stored only needs to be stored for a couple hundred years. Not 10,000. Moreover, most of that radiologic fuel is only a step up from inert. Also, let's talk about all the waste produced manufacturing solar and wind facilities? You know, the costs being paid by the Chinese people because its government currently doesn't give a shit about. On top of that, were reprocessing of nuclear fuel NOT, stupidly, prohibited, much of what is currently sitting in parking lots and locked rooms could be used AGAIN. Reducing the amount of overall waste, and ensuring that the remainders, though quite "hot" (radiologically speaking) would be extremely short-lived. Additionally, some of it can be used in a constant cycle between MSR style reactors and more traditional uranium-based boiling water reactors.

Basically, nuclear, done right could be a massive boon to our power industry.
Done wrong, yeah, it's a cluster fuck.

But renewables simply are NOT going to get us there.

Hell, the biggest obstacle, overall, is the shitty, all-but-nonexistent state of the national power grid.
A better power distribution system on a national level WOULD allow for better, faster adoption of renewables. As renewable power could be generated in bulk in places where such things make complete sense, and the power could be distributed to places where installing renewable power would never, ever pay back even its initial costs.

Monster wind farms in Texas, crazy amounts of solar out in the southwest region. Then sell in places like Montana, Idaho, Michigan, etc.

Advances in power storage are going to be needed too. Because we can't afford to simply pump water uphill everyplace that needs to store power. This would help reduce the bursty nature of such renewable systems. And I'm sorry, natural gas isn't the answer (there's still CO2 produced there!)

Even then, we still need a known-steady form of baseline power.

If we're decarbonizing, it's basically nuclear or nothing.

Re: Offshore wind

[terjeber]

oak Ridge ran a functioning thorium reactor from 1965 to 1969. US shut down thorium research in 73, and has not done much since. If one could operate a thorium reactor 50 years ago, how is it a pipe dream?

About that cost problem

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re:Not Ready For Prime Time

[mdsolar]

If you are concerned with some far future scenario, then you misunderstand the proposal.

Re:Newsflash

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

I would gladly jump on the nuclear bandwagon

[Opportunist]

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.

The waste solution

[GPS Pilot]

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.

Let me see if I have this right...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.