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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.
Unfortunately the environmentalist fake news machine has been in high gear for nearly forty years convincing millions of otherwise intelligent people that nuclear power equals three-eyed fish and glow-in-the-dark babies. Same people who want to shut down coal-fired power plants but also don't like natural gas pipelines or LNG terminals to replace the electricity. Same people who demand solar on every roof but would flip a shit if they knew how "dirty" solar panel and power electronics manufacturing is.
As usual, I blame society. For real this time. Too many people seem to have grown up with the idea that it's possible to have all the good stuff without paying for it in some way, either with cash, lack of reliability, pollution of one form or another, and usually some combination of all of the above.
For the record, I'd prefer to live down the street from a nuclear plant than a gas or coal or oil-burning power plant. And I did the math: if I covered my roof in solar panels, I'd lower my electric bill by at most 50-60% on sunny days, and only 30% averaged year round. If I covered my whole property in solar panels and battery energy storage, I might reduce my electric bill to zero, but with the money it would cost to do that (batteries being the biggest drain), I could buy enough electricity, even at inflated Taxachusetts rates of close to 25cents/kWhr, to last me more than a lifetime, and certainly way more than the lifetime of the batteries. Aggregating this stuff in centralized facilities won't make it cheaper by any significant amount.
Geothermal and wave would be viable if we would do the same -- plus they don't leave that bullshit radiation nonsense WHEN(*) they fail.
Geothermal energy doesn't scale. The total heat energy emitted through the Earth's crust is something like 1/10000th of the total Solar irradiance across the surface. Like wind, it's great in the few places that it's great. Wind and wave power are simply poor ways to harvest solar power. Sure, there are a few places where the energy available is far higher than average, and it makes sense there, but again it doesn't scale.
Solar is really the only thing that will scale (to 10B people consuming power at current US rates). We might make fission work as a stopgap, but world uranium reserves are actually quite low compared to what would be needed, they'd be exhausted quickly, and there's no evidence we could mine uranium at a rate that would keep up with that scale
The point of TFA is that we can't build modern solar fast enough. That's a fair point, as it has a long toolchain and is beyond what a third-world nation can manufacture for itself. But there's also solar thermal, which only takes 19th century technology to make work. Right now, solar thermal is just below where it makes sense financially. There are places where modern solar is cheaper per Watt than natural gas, but solar thermal just isn't. But it's not a huge difference, just enough to cross the line into not being worth it.
tl;dr: We can build all the solar thermal we'd need, and build it fast, and build it locally in emerging nations, if it were really a priority. It's the only non-fossil fuel answer that's true of.
It's worth pointing out, however, that if we're talking about replacing almost all power generation in just a few decades, orbital solar wins. At current launch costs and energy prices, it already works (it's just less profitable than other things). However, the more we did it, the cheaper it would get. Given we're talking trillions of dollars, just the minimal corporate R&D budget that would inevitably be spent to cut costs would be orders of magnitude higher than all worldwide space-related research funding ever.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A guy with a PhD in Nuclear Physics (and a consultant) thinks we should use nuclear power.>
In other words:
A guy who actually knows what the hell he is talking about comes up with great clean solution, is ridiculed by armchair pundit who apparently would rather watch the planet die than admit nuclear power was ever a good idea.
And climate scientists agree: Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change
Anything that comes from a DC based consultant needs to be discarded completely. These guys are paid to come up with "conclusions". I would say the same thing about a guy who said that wind power was the only way.
There was an interesting interview recently on the new nuclear power plants being built in Finland (one is by AREVA, and other is by Rosatom). Both are besieged by delays.
Problem appears to be that while tech is found to be perfectly adequate and safe, regulatory regime handling nuclear power construction has effectively been sabotaged by our green party, who sat in the government a few times at this point. They now require full vetting of the entirety of design process of the power plant down to the last designer (as in people, not just plans), arcane requirements on leadership systems within organisations designing, building and running the power plant and so on. Things that have essentially nothing to do with building and running the actual power plant.
It has little to nothing to do with safety, but it basically puts a massive bureaucratic paperwork load on every company involved, making building new power plants almost impossible. Rosatom apparently literally hired the former head of the regulatory body and several former officials to help formulate the paperwork needed, and even they couldn't do it because it was so arcane.
Morale of the story: don't underestimate the willingness and ability among the most zealous green activists to actively sabotage any form of power generation that isn't halal with their religious convictions by penetration of both elected and unelected power structures within the state and corruption of these institutions. We used to have nuclear regulatory body that was hailed as so good in handling its job efficiently without compromising safety, that it was literally getting paid by foreign governments to come and provide its expertise to them. Not any more.
1. When you have a viable (politically and otherwise) solution to long term waste storage.
That's an unfair burden. We do not have a viable solution to global warming by this measure. His advocacy is an attempt to change the political situation such that it becomes viable.
#2 is an actuarial exercise.
#3 is also an unfair burden - we do not currently have an emergency fund pool for when Florida goes underwater. We use our national resources to deal with disasters.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Former is solved by cutting down the more recent regulatory items that have little to nothing to do with actual safety of operation, and everything to do with making nuclear power less competitive.
Latter is solved by either storing it underground or recycling it. Former is currently being held back by NIMBY style green activism, latter is being held back by nuclear proliferation fears.
There are no unsolved technical issues here, unlike with solar and wind. Issues here are political, ideological and bureaucratic.
The Free Market has spoken. It doesn't like the finances of nuclear power. It considers it too risky, too long-term. (It does however like the finances of wind and solar).
That's fine! There are many things we do (such as nationalized health care and military defense) which the free market is bad at. Nuclear is another one. We should just be explicit that it will mean governments spending large amounts of taxpayer money to push it through.
1: What is the waste you refer to? Why is it a problem? (Hint: It's not really a problem, and can be re-purposed if idiots like you weren't spewing FUD).
2: Most of the cost is for building and decommissioning is due to unnecessary red tape. (No, I'm not saying to get rid of all regulations. Just the bulk of them as they are pointless.)
3: Modern reactors basically cannot have the catastrophic failures that a handful of reactors in all of history have experienced.
1. When you have a viable (politically and otherwise) solution to long term waste storage.
Maybe we could just blow it into the air and/or dump it into the sea, just like the coal-fired plants do.
https://www.scientificamerican...
No sig today...