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Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet (wsj.com)
Joshua S. Goldstein, a professor emeritus of international relations at American University, and Staffan A. Qvist, an energy engineer and consultant, writing for The Wall Street Journal: Climate scientists tell us that the world must drastically cut its fossil fuel use in the next 30 years to stave off a potentially catastrophic tipping point for the planet. Confronting this challenge is a moral issue, but it's also a math problem -- and a big part of the solution has to be nuclear power. Today, more than 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, which are used to generate electricity, to heat buildings and to power car and airplane engines. Worse for the planet, the consumption of fossil fuels is growing quickly as poorer countries climb out of poverty and increase their energy use. Improving energy efficiency can reduce some of the burden, but it's not nearly enough to offset growing demand.
Any serious effort to decarbonize the world economy will require, then, a great deal more clean energy, on the order of 100 trillion kilowatt-hours per year, by our calculations -- roughly equivalent to today's entire annual fossil-fuel usage. A key variable is speed. To reach the target within three decades, the world would have to add about 3.3 trillion more kilowatt-hours of clean energy every year. Solar and wind power alone can't scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. Even Germany's concerted recent effort to add renewables -- the most ambitious national effort so far -- was nowhere near fast enough. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany's peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That's just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target.
Any serious effort to decarbonize the world economy will require, then, a great deal more clean energy, on the order of 100 trillion kilowatt-hours per year, by our calculations -- roughly equivalent to today's entire annual fossil-fuel usage. A key variable is speed. To reach the target within three decades, the world would have to add about 3.3 trillion more kilowatt-hours of clean energy every year. Solar and wind power alone can't scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. Even Germany's concerted recent effort to add renewables -- the most ambitious national effort so far -- was nowhere near fast enough. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany's peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That's just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target.
And his argument is "Proof by I Can't Believe The Alternative Because It Involves Large Numbers"
Nuclear power plant construction is exceedingly slow and exceedingly expensive. You can produce power much faster by instead sinking that capital that he wants to sink into nuclear power plants instead into factories to produce solar panels, wind turbines, HVDC lines, and grid-scale storage.
The ability to produce solar panels and wind turbines - per dollar of capital invested - are reflected in their power prices. Which are much cheaper than nuclear. Regardless of whether the numbers sound large to one Joshua S. Goldstein.
Or to put it another way: Coal is already dying. Quickly. And it's not nuclear that's killing it. It's a mix of NG (low carbon), solar (near-zero carbon) and wind (near-zero carbon).
Hey, guys, I'm just pleased as punch to report that it's a fleet of a hundred Vogon Battle Destroyers!
The swath of nuclear enegy's death toll per terawatt tell a different story. It is in a bloody category to its own compared to every other form of energy out there, even solar.
I can't tell if you are saying nuclear is the safest or deadliest. I'm assuming you mean the safest. At least that's what the WHO seemed to think in 2010. The WHO ranked them as follows:
Coal: 170,000 deaths per trillion kilowatt hours. 1,963,500 annual total deaths
Hydro: 1400 per trillion KW. 4851 annual deaths
Solar(rooftop): 440 deaths per trillion KW. less than 102 deaths per year
Wind: 150 deaths per trillion KW. 102 deaths per year
Nuclear; 90 per trillion KW. 353 total deaths per year
Nuclear was rated as 1889 times safer than coal. Wind was rated 1133x safer than coal, solar was rated 386x safer than coal.
Granted, this was published one year prior to the 2011 Fukushima disaster. However as far as I know there has only been one death which was tied directly to radiation exposure as of 2018. There were four workers who received compensation who were diagnosed with leukemia and thyroid cancer as a result of exposure. In comparison, over 18,000 were killed by the earthquake and tsunami. Another 500 some died afterward do to disaster related reasons. This included patients who starved to death in a hospital.