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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..
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.