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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.
> 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.
The last 30 years have proven otherwise. Solar has continued to improve despite the incessesant pushback from short-sighted scientists and lobbyists. There's no reason we can't scale solar and wind. Looking to the future, the economics of wind and solar are the only ones that make any sense.
The only reason nuclear is "viable" is because we've dumped thousands of dollars of research into nuclear reactors.
Geothermal and wave would be viable if we would do the same -- plus they don't leave that bullshit radiation nonsense WHEN(*) they fail.
But let's keep investing into archaic unsafe technology and pollute the environment when they fail while we 50+ years for the short-sighted consequences to go away! /s
(*) Anyone who rides motorcycles quickly learns it is NOT a matter of IF you will go down but WHEN.
Apart from the dangers
a/ do we have enough uranium ?
b/ where do we store the waste ?
What was posted in the abstract is not enough to justify the conclusion. Battery storage, wind and PV are dropping on a curve that now makes energy much cheaper than that provided by fossil fuels and much cheaper than nuclear, who's cost have been going up. I'm actually a fan of nuclear and think while it needs to be carefully regulated we could use more of it. But there's no clear reason other sources can't grow at a fast enough pace. We do need to commit to do required items. For example, we need to build a newer smarter grid than the US, which will require some work that's not just engineering. 10 years ago it would have been sensible to say we could not replace fossil fuels without nuclear. That's no longer a reasonable position to have. Saying that nuclear is a good component to be in a mix is reasonable but is not what the abstract states.
To the UN
To Ted Turner!
Corporatism != Free Market
Don't try to distract us with mere math!
We woke types know that the real solution is actually driving cars with really tall tail lights, and also of course sneering at Republicans!
Which power generation method is actually the safest per gigawatt of generation? That's right, the scary one!
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1st renewables 2nd everyone cal also really save more, just switch stuff off you do not need! 3rd fusion
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.
There are alternative nuclear technologies under development. They need better support and investment.
Traveling Wave Reactor can run on depleted uranium, which already exists in massive quantities. See Terra Power.
Then there is liquid fluoride thorium reactor. See Flib Energy.
Both or either would take us beyond the limitations and problems of the reactors built half a century ago.
Want to save the planet/ Try consuming less resources and energy. Nicole Foss on renewables (and nuclear) http://bit.ly/2rzS5Pq
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
The toxic waste dumps from producing the panels are mostly in China, so they don't count!
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!
If you can find something to do with the waste I would be for it.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Why bother analyzing the argument when you can just call it "biased" and be done with it
Exactly. If you go to the Midwest you will see wind farms. That is the future. Wind and Solar with batteries.
I've read a semi-plausible mid-21st-century scenario where the US military (in a conflict situation) under pressure figures out how to beam energy from large solar panels in the Earth's orbit to the surface of the planet. Then of course over time it is commercialized for civilian use.
(It's from "The Next 100 Years" by George Friedman of Geopolitical futures.)
Yeah, but when you need to plaster a third to half the country with wind and solar to even get close to providing enough energy, then even the most blind of idiots must realize that this is probably not going to be our salvation.
Also: Do you believe the production of silicon for PV is not harmful to the environment? Especially in those amounts? Not to mention the question of whether we are even able to find enough raw materials for it.
I agree that nuclear power has been done wrong in many ways. And we can now see that companies haven't properly prepared decommissioning of these things.
However, those things CAN be solved.
1. When you have a viable (politically and otherwise) solution to long term waste storage.
2. Proper funding of costs for decommissioning of private reactors as they reach the end of their useful life.
3. A rational emergency fund pool.should, dear god, catastrophic failure occur to a private facility.
Individuals or persons not counting themselves among the number of those who refer to themselves as "the Sith", would be hard-pressed to make a statement as utterly categorical, and not admitting, upon mature reflection, of views which, at the end of the day, would have to be said to be more balanced (in an, of course, non-epistemological fashion) and, frankly, more sophisticated.
I wish I could take credit for it... but it's not mine.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Actually, per this 2011 article, Nevada is second only to CA in geothermal power generation, and has more capacity planned than anywhere else in the US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3970 Wikipedia puts NV, as of 2013, generating 15.3% of all the geothermal power in the US (again, second only to CA): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy_in_the_United_States Per this 2016 ranking, NV is up to 22%: http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/updated-map-of-geothermal-electricity-generation-in-u-s/
Additionally, it's also really windy (anecdotally, I lived in Reno for 13 years... it was always windy just east of the Sierra Nevada mountains) and sunny in NV year-round (Reno averages 250 sunny days per year, Las Vegas averages 300... US average is 200). NV might be the best state in the US for diverse renewable energy. Hell, if they ever figure out that whole Yucca Mountain fiasco, it could even be a good place for nuclear as well.
1. We do have workable fusion reactors. They were developed here, and are now in use in places we're not supposed to talk about. How do you think we power those weapons systems? You will not see them in commercial use before 2040, they're still being worked on. Kind of like fax machines and laptops, which existed in non-commercial usage way before they were in commercial usage.
2. Fission reactors are an absolute nightmare on the cradle to 250,000 year grave cycle, and a security nightmare. Stop. Just stop.
3. It's easy to replace fossil fuel energy today:
A. Implement 120 percent Renewable Portfolio Standards for every nation and state and province. For every new KWHr you need you have to decommission 20 percent existing grandfathered fossil fuel energy, and all new energy is renewables. If you mix renewables (many scientific papers show this) you get a power yield curve that closely matches the actual energy usage. It also makes you resilient and easier to recover from massive storms, massive floods, and other natural disasters.
B. End all tax subsidies for all fossil fuels: depreciation, exemptions, exclusions, incentives, fleet requirements. Period. No exceptions.
C. Stop whining. It's actually cheaper to use renewables than fossil fuels. It's why the West Coast is a cheap energy powerhouse. Adapt. Wind and solar jobs are way better than coal mining.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You don't need to plaster the US with that much wind and solar. It would take about a HALF of a percent to power the nation.
They have experts for a reason other then just being a well spoken advocate for "The Man"
One of the biggest issue I have with our current state of things, Experts are just ignored or discredited because they have found that some things may not be convenient for the person, worse conflict with their world view, or even worse going against your aligned parties talking points.
Nuclear Energy really should be in America energy play book, to supplement and support other forms of green energy as well. That said Nuclear Energy is dangerous and need proper oversight and controls, with a clear disaster plan ready. It isn't a Clean, Safe to Cheap to Meter energy. But it is a powerful source of energy with its current environmental trade offs not conflicting with the largest problem we have now which is CO2 emissions.
Some of the biggest problems there are too many people who just want energy at any cost, and people who are thinking of a Utopian free energy with no trade offs. Proper planning is knowing the trade-offs, understand if an area can deal with it and if the energy created is worth the risk.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
HVDC lines, and grid-scale storage.
Nuclear might have issues, but so do these.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You've already got a fusion power plant at a safe 93,000,000 miles distance. Learn to use it correctly you damn dirty apes.
Only using less energy can save us. But failing that, nuclear will buy us some time.
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.
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.
It takes about 30 years to build one nuclear power plant.
When arguing that an alternative is too slow to construct, you really shouldn't be pushing something that is even slower to construct.
It takes longer than 3 decades to get through the red tape to even start building a new Nuclear plant.
Christ, you don't even see energy companies wanting to buy already built plants. This article is complete utter bull shit.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
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.
nt
This is why I have concerns about nuclear power without a major change in stakeholding. In Russia, a company that did a crappy job would have its execs shot. Same with China, except the organs would be sold. Europe would try them and put them in prison for a long time. Here in the US, if a contractor made a nuclear reactor that never worked, the execs would get bonuses and the taxpayers would have another Superfund site to go with. If anyone went to prison, it might be a low level worker.
Do the math.
It is still a lot, but that isn't the bottle-neck. The real problem is sourcing the raw materials and rare-earths for that much production. The costs go down, when we have cheap oil, because demand falls. When oil gets expensive, demand for solar goes up, but the raw materials become scarcer, which drives price up. It isn't so much that factories don't have capacity, its that they have supply-chain issues with building that much. Also, a solar panel loses its ability to create power as it ages, so you effectively need to build 1/20th of your entire requirement every year.
This will probably happen over time, but the energy grids are not ready for 1/2 of all vehicles chewing through MWh of energy. I have a Tesla, and it works great. We also have solar panels on our building at work (2500 sq. ft. worth of panels), which is where I charge, but I can't imagine what would happen to power demand and supply (which is as oversubscribed as wide area networks are, in terms of back-bone / last mile) if suddenly all cars needed their energy from the grid. The panels do not nearly provide enough power for the car and the building.
As someone who lives in Massachusetts and has solar, depending on your home, it may be completely practical to eliminate your electric bill with solar roof panels. First you do the stupidly simple stuff like switching all your lights to LEDs to minimize your electric use, but aside from that, if you have a good sunny roof, you can easily eliminate your summer and possibly even winter electric bills. Even with two electric cars, we don't have electric bills in the summer.
It's entirely practical even in regions as far north as Massachusetts to build homes with a net-zero electric usage, especially if the builder takes the roof orientation into account. Older homes can be more tricky depending on the architecture, shading, vents, and such.
All that said, I agree that nuclear is a fine option for the base of the grid.
How much waste do you think there is, honestly? It isn't a lot.
What about smaller self contained reactors? Once a design for a reactor like that is tested and approved it can be manufactured in volume and deployed without nearly as much cost in terms of construction and approval. It seems like most existing nuclear plants are large, unique, one-off designs that ran up the construction costs and required significant approval costs to prove their design was safe.
I don't see why nuclear is the only solution when renewable + storage is on the verge of being cheaper than fossil fuels in $/kwh, and is far cheaper to build in the first place. How can land use be such a dire limitation when there's tidal power, offshore wind/solar, and rooftop solar?
But solving global warming would be much easier if people would drop their stupid illogical opposition to nuclear power. They're scared to death of extreme localized disasters from wildly unlikely scenarios, but show zero concern for the much more likely if slightly less damaging localized disasters from fossil fuels, or the inevitable slow-motion worldwide trainwreck of global warming that fossil fuel use creates.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It is still a lot, but that isn't the bottle-neck. The real problem is sourcing the raw materials and rare-earths for that much production.
There is no significant demand for rare earths in grid scale renewable power. Solar cells use silicon, boron, and phosphorus. Windmills use conventional electromagnetic generators. Grid scale batteries will use sodium ion batteries when they come on-line. There are no critically scarce materials required.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The deaths in the nuclear industry undoubtedly counted people falling off ladders, crushed by equipment, etc.
How many people have been irradiated to death?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Germany's effort was intended to get technologies going, and it did just that. You can thank us later. We're still paying for it with every kWh we consume. The guaranteed kWh price paid to solar, biomass, wind and some other renewable electricity producers come out of a surcharge which is currently at ~0.064€ per kWh.
It is quite unfair and misleading to compare that effort during an early phase of the technology to a future manufacturing ramp up. Nuclear was afforded many more decades to get the technology sorted, but it hasn't, despite massively higher subsidies. Instead nuclear power becomes more expensive all the time, and still defers the majority of the cost into the future, because of an unsolved waste problem. Nuclear fuel sourcing is an environmental and safety nightmare, which just like the waste problem would also need to be scaled up.
You just need to look at this discussion here on Slashdot to find the never changing arguments: "New nuclear power plants will finally be safe and not produce waste. We'll use thorium and pebble bed reactors." Well, talking about Germany, there was the THT-300 in Hamm-Uentrop, Germany. Was, as the problems with the technology couldn't be solved and it has been dismantled. A research reactor of the same type in Juelich has radioactively contaminated the groundwater and can currently not be dismantled because of the unexpectedly high radioactive contamination. Yeah, let's scale that up to replace fossil fuels. "But AC, we'll use some other new reactor type." Listen to yourselves. After many decades of strong financial and political support for nuclear power, you're still peddling some future as yet undeveloped technology that will finally make nuclear deliver on its promises, promises that were made about every generation of reactors, and have been broken every time. Meanwhile the disasters keep on coming. At the current scale, there is roughly one uncontained meltdown every 30 years. Would you like to multiply that accident count by the scale factor that would be required if we were to replace fossil fuels with nuclear power. Will annual meltdowns be news or will we get bored of that?
Besides, how do you think scaling up nuclear power will work technically? You do know that nuclear power plants need huge amounts of cooling water, don't you. That's why they're all built next to rivers or oceans. You can't build many more on rivers, because that kills the rivers. At the required scale, you would have to litter the coasts with them. There are no such problems with solar. You can put that stuff everywhere. It works in Germany, which is further north than Quebec.
Somebody is already doing that
There's no political will to even recognize that there's a problem much less attempt to solve it.
The only reasonable course of action for scientists is to stop making dire predictions and recommending drastic action we all know aren't going to happen and start thinking about ways to fix it once it does happen. Time to stop trying to warning about the impending problems and start working on ways to deal with it. Forget about how to prevent 5 degrees in temperature increases by a concerted world effort. It's not happening. Start thinking about ways to farm Siberia... Greenland.... Canada... Antartica even. Maybe start thinking about how to lower the temps AFTER we hit +10 degrees. As a species... we're not going to do anything until it smacks us in the face.
We're just not that smart.
5. Reopen Yucca Mountain. Fuck Harry Reid.
Surely the latter half of step 5 can be done in parallel with steps 1-4, right?
Still, I'm not exactly sure why that's a requirement anyway...
When "The Nuclear Option" is a good thing.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You can complain when you come up with a way to handle the waste stream.
And no, we can't use reprocessing for it all. First, a big chunk of the waste isn't fuel. Second, reprocessing plants are also nuclear weapons plants. So they're not a viable global solution.
Grid scale batteries will use sodium ion batteries
Sodium Sulfur I believe is a vastly better option than Na-ion. But yeah, Li-ion grid batteries are just a stopgap solution.
Yes, but the problem is that they haven't been solved. I wonder at this point if we can actually solve them. We can't even agree on where to store the waste. It's as if I couldn't get the toilet to work so I just started putting my urine in jars and stacking it in the back yard. Nuclear requires long-term planning and long-term, intensive, near-religious commitment to rigorous safety procedures. And the Japanese, a culture known for loving procedures and rules, couldn't even pull it off. Before I go all pro-nuclear, I want proof that we are grown-up enough to run it.
US already has nuclear weapons, therefore they're a viable solution in the US. China, India, Russia, France, Israel, UK, and Pakistan are nuclear weapons states and contain almost 50% of Earth's population. The non-proliferation argument is basically bullshit, especially since states that already have weapons can reprocess for states that don't.
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (BANANA): Each Greeny has their pet solutions for the problem. And for each solution, there is a highly vocal group that will shout down the solution. The result is, every solution is shouted down and we get mired in our inertia. Hydro, wind, tidal, nuclear, solar, geo all have their detractors when the solutions are mentioned. Save the fish, the birds, the Oregon Orange Stinky Ground Owl. Meanwhile, we sit and idle waiting for someone to do something and blaming others for the problem. I'm done, build the nuclear power plants, install the infrastructure for fast electric charging, do it NOW.
HVDC and HVAC lines are extensively used in China (bringing power from the sparsely populated but energy-rich interior to the densely populated coast), and to a lesser extent in Europe. The US is a laggard.
Hey, guys, I'm just pleased as punch to report that it's a fleet of a hundred Vogon Battle Destroyers!
100 trillion kWh per year to replace fossil fuels, says the nuke professor. There's a rule of thumb in solar capacity calculations, which is that for every kWp of installed capacity, you can expect roughly 1000kWh per year. That's a rather pessimistic capacity factor of 1:9, in case you're wondering. So 100 trillion kWh per year would need 100 billion kWp of installed capacity. You get roughly 0.15Wp per square meter with current run of the mill solar panels (sorry, no freedom units, this is science), which means it takes 7 square meters per kWp. For 100 billion kWp of solar panels, you would need 700 billion square meters, or 700 thousand square kilometers. That's almost exactly the size of Texas. To power the world, not the country, with solar panels alone.
Given that pollution and climate change is caused by too many human beings burning too much fossil fuel, I would like to suggest that replacing "Nuclear Energy" with "Vasectomy" would be far more appropriate.
The benefits would be far more than just reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Reduced pressure on housing stocks would make home ownership more affordable. The M25 would operate properly at all times of the day not just 03:00. Just two examples.
Before anybody asks, I have just the one child and will not be having any more.
Indeed, solar electric cannot save the day. Here's a handy rule of thumb:
Any energy policy proposal that fits on a bumper, or in a tweet, is wrong.
I wrote a short summary of an energy mix proposal that could work. It's over 30 pages, and doesn't go into detail.
No single technology is going to work for the United States. The US is a big country, with widely varying geography and population density. Various energy sources have different strengths and weaknesses at different times. Delaware might be able to rely on a single source and get away with it, though it would probably be expensive and / or dirty. The US needs to come me many. Nuclear has a key role to play.
Yeah, but when you need to plaster a third to half the country with wind and solar to even get close to providing enough energy, then even the most blind of idiots must realize that this is probably not going to be our salvation.
And yet nuclear power plants that take decades to get built, if they get built at all, and which suffer routine cost overruns at the tune of multiples of the estimated cost is our salvation?
While wind and solar and large transmission lines also suffer from NIMBYism, they are nothing like nuclear. I think it's actually more likely that enough of those could get built even at the scale needed than enough nuclear power plants could built in the same time-period for the same amount of money.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
US already has nuclear weapons, therefore they're a viable solution in the US.
The US also has treaty obligations that restrict reprocessing. So no, it isn't a viable solution at this time. So do most of the other countries you listed.
The non-proliferation argument is basically bullshit, especially since states that already have weapons can reprocess for states that don't.
Yeah, it's not like ships ever fail to reach their destination for a variety of reasons. And nobody would love a ship full of depleted fuel as a dirty bomb.
Also, shipping isn't going to be getting off fossil fuels anytime soon. So, you're gonna have to include all that CO2 shipping spent fuel around the world, forever, as part of your "carbon neutral" solution.
I said more or less the same thing recently, and got shouted down for it. Here we have a couple PhDs saying the same thing; you all going to shout them down, too?
They're right and people need to come around to that truth. We need to stop using fossil fuels, use more renewables to tide us over, design safer nuclear reactors (YES, IT'S POSSIBLE, DAMNIT), devise better and safer methods to deal with spent fuel (YES, IT'S POSSIBLE, DAMNIT), and in the meantime keep up the R&D for practical FUSION REACTORS. Then, maybe, JUST MAYBE, we can save ourselves from extinction.
Yes the same PG&E that dumped approximately 370 million gallons of chromium-tainted wastewater into unlined wastewater spreading ponds around the town of Hinkley, California, which eventually killed and maimed many residents of Hinkley and made Erin Brockovich famous.
Moderate-sized solar panel factories (500Wp or more production per year) routinely cost around $500m-$1bn, and take around 3-5 years from bare dirt to first panel shipped (let alone full production output). The one I helped build up took 3-1/2 years and cost $500m - starting from an existing-but-empty complex of buildings and infrastructure.
Also, note that solar panel prices (around $0.80/Wp) are artificially depressed due to Chinese market-dumping and subsidization - it normally costs far more to build a panel that's going to still work 25+ years later (around $1.50/Wp or so.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Thin-film solar uses fun bits like Cadmium, Indium, Gallium...
Mono- and Polycrystal panels use crystallized silicon dioxide as their base, but require a brew of chemicals and materials to crystallize, wafer, coat, and process into a working PV cell.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I'll use easy numbers...
Say a small 3.8 GW Nuclear reactor. Takes 30 years to build, but will exist for 60.
A very large (80m) wind turbine is 3.8MW. So it will take 1000 of them to match what the reactor does. But is doesn't because it isn't always windy. Then there is storage and efficiency loss and construction cost. I'll not even get into base electrification of the grid. Suffice it to say It'll actually take about 2000 of them to replace the reactor. But it won't, because after 25 or 30 years they will have to be replaced, so double it again, so 4000 turbines... Now compare and contrast how much that will cost, how long that will take to build, how much physical space etc...
For perspective I know of one built 10 years ago probably now that did 80 2.3 GW and it cost about 500,000,000 dollars. Which I don't think includes the cost sharing agreements to be signed with landowners... So grabbing a calculator and assuming that land actually exists for this (which it likely doesn't), that would be about 6.25 million a turbine, so multiple that by 4000, wow interesting an even 25 Billion. Now compare that again to what a nuclear reactor costs? Not so different now...
Anyway the main benefits to both wind in solar is the fact that the are high maintenance (of middle wage employment), and low initial capitol investment in comparison to nuclear, that is about it. Nuclear also employees a lot of people, but wages are typically higher, and also the initial investment is such, length of construction times, and lifespans, make money behave funny so to speak. When things like inflation and whatnot actually can play a serious role in outcomes. The problems with wind (other than the obvious), is the the best locations are on the water where all the most expensive and influential real estate is, and the problem with solar is that flat open farmland is where it likes to exist.
Anyway I love renewables, but they have some fundamental problems. Nuclear has to nationalize it is as simple as that. It is not something that is reasonable to do by commercial enterprise.
No, BH is not investing in power plants that I know of
Berkshire Hathaway Energy owns all of the following:
BH is actively investing in utility companies that own power plants, in power plant supply chain (both fossil and RE), and its utility companies are actively building power plants (both fossil and RE).
Support a few technologists in Washington.
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.
There's already been several nuclear disasters, Fukushima the most recent large one that literally made a city uninhabitable. So how exactly is that "fake news" when it literally happened?
There is huge concern in the US as most of the US reactors are ancient and should be decommissioned, the longer they are open the more likely an accident is to occur. And unlike Fukushima, which was along a huge ocean, US reactors are along rivers, many of which are used for agriculture and drinking water. Even if the reactor doesn't melt down, spent fuel is being kept in storage tanks along those rivers and there is huge concern of leaks that can really decimate entire regions of the country. There is a huge disaster looming that no one is addressing, except for the environmentalists that you are putting down.
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.
Where exactly is the contradiction here? "Environmentalists that oppose coal also oppose gas as both contribute to pollution and climate change! ... News at 11". Gas is NOT a replacement for coal even though the gas lobby of course would love for you to think that. Gas extraction, fracking, and pipelines are destroying communities, ruining drinking water, and burning gas still contributes to climate change and air pollution. It shouldn't be considered any sort of long-term solution, yet politicians are digging in to support the fracking industry. Environmentalists of course oppose this and ask: why not more renewable energy?
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.
Nothing is perfect, the laws of physics say so. Environmentalists understand that. The thing is, in comparison, solar is much better than fossil fuel usage -- and wind, hydroelectric, geothermal are even better than photovoltaics.
But you do bring up a good point -- keeping up manufacturing at today's levels is unsustainable. This is why environmentalists also call for a reduction in waste -- reduce, reuse, recycle. Keep our impact and carbon footprint as low as possible, and we're not going to be able to do that if we're stuck on fossil fuels for energy.
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.
Again, environmentalists are very aware of trade-offs and costs. An ecological economics that factors this in is one that says society needs to develop energy efficiency and reduce waste, meaning we only build as much as we absolutely need for a good life putting people first instead of business profits, but that sort of economics is very incompatible with the capitalist model of production that says "build as much as you can all the time to sell on the market!". Some people have brain meltdowns when you question the basic tenets of capitalism, but that's the real stance of wanting good stuff without paying for it. You are paying for it, in human costs of pollution and effective slavery, as well as climate change. So what sort of future do you want?
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 s
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
If you actually plan on replacing most or all of the electrical production facilities and vehicles world wide without a large military taking over the world and dictating policy to every nation , I'm afraid you will be disappointed.
Not that I oppose the idea of getting rid of dependence on fossil fuels, but if you plan on producing approx 1 billion passenger cars ( and somehow forcing people to scrap the existing ones). http://www.worldometers.info/c...
Replacing nearly 900,000 power plants https://www.carbonbrief.org/ma...
Replacing 2 to 3% of the global economy https://www.investopedia.com/a...
My guess would be you are already way behind, regardless of what method you choose because you first have to convince those in control to take action on a massive scale and most of them are no where near doing that.
So IF the first preposition is correct ( and I hope it's not), there isn't much hope of going beyond that tipping point. If the chaos and wars it generates doesn't lower our carbon output , we will probably fix the problem over the coarse of 100 years or so.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
But that's solar energy, so it must be bad.
I seriously don't believe most of the data regarding "cancer spikes" .
I grew up near a supposed cancer spike location, in Ventura County California. My father spent years working on the site. He's 83 now.
The independent analysts came in , studied rates, determined they were normal.
To this day, people still point to paid groups who conducted studies intended to prove these supposed spikes. They DEMAND soil radiation levels lower than naturally occurring. They point to little kids getting cancer as proof. It's entirely hysteria driven.
We already will have 10 billion people within about 20 years. THEY ARE ALREADY BORN, years ago! They will grow up and have kids at predictably lower rates = 10 billion. The best hope is to keep the kids already born from having more kids. Really, we should be fixing all boys at birth for free without permission. It can be undone, but not by mistake.
Leveling off at 10B is a poor goal. Naturally, this goes against all current forms of capitalism which depends upon endless growth and religions who are still in "an arms race" in birthing newly indoctrinated members... and their attempts to keep members from thinking too much while being educated in STEM...
We shouldn't waste time on these Nuclear BS distractions which attack and always underestimate and distort the others. Solar scaled more than expected and far exceeded skeptical nuclear propaganda ALREADY and it is still growing. Nuclear takes a decade to build; is centralized, cost prohibitive, needs heavy subsidies forever, and is so dangerous wars are threatened as each 3rd world nation gets into the business. I'd rather they build on a fault line than with a weak government.
Next generation nuclear is 5 years off... it'll solve all that... when it gets solved in 5 years ... as we've been promised for 30+ years! No credibility to make plans around it.
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They included the people falling off ladders as "solar deaths" - is that SOLAR being dangerous? Nope, ladders. It's disingenuous illiterate shit, perfect for propaganda. People fell off LADDERS. Solar killed NOBODY.
If it was during the installation of the panels or maintenance, then yes it's solar related. Just the same as black lung, mine collapses, etc are part of the deaths for coal, or falling off of a oil rig is counted as a death for oil power generation.
The idea that nuclear power (including ALL spent fuel rods in ALL concrete pools in earthquake zones, derp, THOUSANDS OF POOLS) is perfectly safe,
While there is risk, the point is how many measured deaths have there been per kilowatt generated. Not fear mongering. What about all of those heavy solar panel arrays and wind turbines suspended above houses in areas that are prone to earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes?
forgetting Chernobyl and Fukushima et all, is for RETARDED ILLITERATES.
As I stated, there was one confirmed death from radiation at Fukushima and four instances of cancer that have been linked to it. Or are you counting all of the people that were killed by the tsunami too? Chernobyl is included in the numbers from the WHO paper. So, no Chernobyl was not forgotten.
Actually, no, they excluded those deaths, especially in the mining and construction.
I don't have the WHO publication in front of me, but almost all of the papers I've read on the topic do include deaths from mining and construction.
In fact some risk assessments that I've read include mining accidents for materials needed and assembly of components for construction as well. So they include accidents from mining iron to make the steel that is used as well as deaths in the steel manufacture, etc. As well as pollution from the energy needed to build the components.
that used to be public. In the process they tend to make them worse (go look at privatized school buses sometime) but that doesn't stop them because we really, really hate paying taxes. Most of us (60-80% depending on how you run the numbers) live paycheck to paycheck. So a 2% tax raise could push a lot over the edge to bankruptcy, homelessness, etc.
I'd argue this is all by design, but it doesn't matter. We live in the world as it is, not the way we want it to be.
I don't trust nuclear because of crap like Fukushima. There's an outside chance in hell the 70+ year old CEOs might spend the last few months of their lives in jail. I don't know the Japanese legal system but in America if a CEO did that it likely wouldn't make it to trial before they died of old age; and that's assuming you could find a prosecutor to take the case.
Sooner or later we'll privatize it and make it unsafe. We'll run the plants too long or cut a corner or two. The consequences from a nuclear meltdown last decades and kill people with cancer. Worse they kill slowly over time, so you can end up in battles over whether the meltdown "really" caused your cancer. Battles you'll be fighting while dying of cancer...
Find a way to make a nuke plant cheaper to run safely than dangerously. Do it now with tech we have that's ready for production. I've heard and seen a lot of companies that claim they can do it but I haven't seen a reactor built for testing let alone production that meets that bar. Or find a way to convince Americans that government is the solution, not the problem, and that privatizing things doesn't fix them.
Until then go right ahead and have all the nuke plants you want in saner countries like France and Germany. I'll oppose nuclear until in America until one of those two conditions is met. So far I'm still waiting...
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Cost is what kills nuclear power. Not hippies, not regulations, not politicians.
1) You simply cannot justify spending $20 billion and 20 years building a new nuclear power plant when wind and solar can be rolled out in far less time.
2) No other power sources requires plans to rapidly evacuate everyone in a 20 mile radius if there's a meltdown. No other power source (aside from hydro) poses an imminent risk of death to surrounding populations.
3) You cannot justify forcing hundreds of future generations to deal with your waste. Imagine if the last neanderthals had nuclear power 40,000 years ago - and people were still having to deal with the radioactive waste today, like Europe has to deal with unexploded ordinance from WWII.
4) The "baseload power" FUD that is always levied at wind and solar applies much moreso to nuclear power. Nuclear power plants shut down on a regular basis for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance. For days, months, or even years at a time, blowing a gigawatt sized hole in your grid. That means that for N nuclear power plants to power said grid, you need at least N+1, to step in for the one that's shut down. Which is no different from needing to build excess wind and solar generation across your grid to provide for dark or windless days.
From http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Lifecycle emissions (gCO2eq/kWh)
Nuclear, 12
Coal, 820
Also worth considering the volume. Nuclear waste volume is much lower per tonne than for coal.
Wind and solar passed it in cost effectiveness years ago, and that's even allowing coal to externalize all its environmental and health effects. Nuke fans sure like pretending it's either coal or nuclear, though.
Again we see those who pretend to believe that industrial/technological civilization can be run entirely on "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy are continuing to engage in arithmetic denialism.
At this point, solar power costs less than coal power delivered in most of the US, to the point where it's cheaper to build new solar power capacity (and cover the capital costs) and operate it than to keep operating the coal plants.
And nuclear power costs more than that - $112/MWh, compare to $40 for industrial scale solar power or $29 for wind power. Coal is $60. (All best-case numbers, from https://www.lazard.com/media/4... ).
And if you look at the costs over time, nuclear power is not only extremely expensive, but the cost has increased dramatically over time, while in contrast the real world cost of wind and solar has dropped dramatically over time.
Cost is relevant because for $X that can be invested in capacity, a strategy that generates 1/4th as much power for the same investment is 1/4th as effective in shifting current capacity away from coal and oil to a clean source.
So while if I were a nuclear power plant salesman, I would certainly try to sell nuclear power as "clean" - because "radioactive" and "expensive" aren't much of a sales pitch - if you are looking for clean energy sources, the most effective clean energy sources are wind and industrial scale solar, because they can produce clean power for 1/4th the cost. And you don't have to figure out how to safely dispose of radioactive waste.
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Nuclear power plant construction is exceedingly slow and exceedingly expensive.
The old designs are. They are working on small, modular reactors that could ideally be mass produced. Even the 20-year old Gen 3 reactors are much cheaper and faster to build. Keep in mind that most people's idea of a nuclear power plant are what were designed in the 50's and 60's, and built in the 70's. Technology has progressed since then.
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We had a recent article about concrete being a huge source of atmospheric CO2. Nuke plants use a LOT of concrete. Has that been accounted for? Maybe it has, but it seems worth mentioning.
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Even older plant took at most 10 years not fucking 30. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The first nuclear plant were NOT done in 45+30=74, they were done in the 50ies (first was 1954). Even without googling that should have been readily apparent to mods....
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The biggest issue with nuclear isn't safety (at least in the G20). The biggest issue is development and deployment time. If we started a massive nuclear plant building program, the first plants would be coming on-line in 15 to 20 years. In the meantime we will have had to build solar, wind, and hydro to fill in the gap. Long term, nuclear can be part of the mix. But energy solutions need to arrive faster than nuclear can.
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Thin-film solar uses fun bits like Cadmium, Indium, Gallium...
The vast majority of thin-film solar panels are cadmium telluride solar panels made by First Solar. Yes, they use cadmium and tellurium, but the safety hazards are mostly occupational -- CdTe is a compound with properties different from its chemical elements, just like water is made from hydrogen and oxygen yet is not explosive like its components are (it's even used to put out fires). Indium and gallium are used in CIGS solar panels, but those make up a tiny minority of thin-film solar panels.
Oh, and thin-film solar panels make up less than 5% of the total solar market. More than 95% is silicon-based.
Mono- and Polycrystal panels use crystallized silicon dioxide as their base, but require a brew of chemicals and materials to crystallize, wafer, coat, and process into a working PV cell.
The nastiest things in that "brew of chemicals" are silane, phosphorus oxychloride, some of the solvents that go into the silver paste used to screen print the metal contacts on the cells themselves, and perhaps some of the chemicals that go into making the vinyl-based encapsulants and teflon-based backsheets in the final solar module. People like to draw parallels between solar cells and some of the nasties used to make microchips -- no idea if that's what you're doing -- but it simply doesn't work that way.
That's not to say the industry is perfect -- Jinko Solar, for example, faced violent protests 8-10 years ago after it dumped waste into a river and killed fish that the locals depended on for their livelihoods -- but the waste products are generally far less potent than the microchip industry. They're also far higher in volume, and it's an industry that depends on having a "green" image, so the risks are often overstated.
We aren't going to stop using fossil fuels. We aren't going to build thousands of nuclear plants.
We are going to have to live with climate change. It's a done deal. We have 7.5 billion people and are still growing.
If the "west" cuts back on fossil fuel use it will just make it cheaper for Africa and Asia to burn it.
Don't buy waterfront property.
A nuclear engineer tells us that nuclear energy is the solution. Who could have guessed.
I suppose that there is valid information in his claims and conclusions, but it is important to consider his training when interpreting his recommendations. I find it a bit disingenuous that this is not identified in the summary and what little of the article I can see from this side of the paywall doesn't mention it.
I would gladly volunteer my back yard, but I know for a fact that at least one of my neighbours would be a cunt about it.
Just like at yucca.
Tweedle Dee: Oh noez, the sky is falling! Carbon, carbon, carbon! The skyyyyyyy is falling!
Tweedle Dumb: Quick, we must build dangerous, uninsurable, uneconomical, preposterously expensive machines that produce tons of hypertoxic radioactive waste!!
Tweedle Dee: OMG you saved the environment!!!
We have plenty of nuclear weapons, so clearly the lack of waste reprocessing isn't a barrier to them.
The single biggest threat to the national security of the United States is all that highly radioactive, hypertoxic, barely contained nuclear waste that's sitting around in spent fuel pools. Thousands of tons spread out across the entire country. Just waiting for an enterprising terrorist, a war, a natural disaster, or our good old friend human error.
When the nuclear industry fixes this godawful horrible situation they have already created... then and only then can we discuss building more nuke plants. Until then - WTF are you thinking? Your existing operations currently today endanger the state itself and every man woman and child therein. No, of course you can't expand.
Is there way to read the one article without getting a subscription to the whole newspaper?
Actualy NO.
Nuclear is not excedingly slow or expencive. It is excedingly slow and expencive in the USA. This is due to political factors. not the tecnology itself.
In Korea the average build time the last years have been 55 months.
And no country have been able to roll out wind or solar anything near the speed that nuclear can be rolled out.
se:https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/nuclear-reactors-cover-the-world-053534/
The reason renewables are built is politics and subsidies not tecnology.
Breeder reactors.
is dead technology.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
...or maybe we could go back to arguing about GamerGate
It would probably be less repetitive.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This is where the deception starts Rick. This is where the poorly thought out idealism is started so that people will pick up a cognitively cheap idea about nuclear power that they can simply repeat. They're refer to these supporters as useful idiots, because they are despised by the very people who created them in the first place, the Nuclear Industry's PR machine.
You're being manipulated and deceived into displaying contempt for people who have valid concerns, which are your concerns too, to reduce their effectiveness. They do it by hi-jacking your good intentions, that you want the best for everybody. Keep reading and slowly it will dawn on you why Nuclear power doesn't solve anything.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Pretty minds caged with desperation. Don't believe what they are telling you.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Do we get to speak in these sponsored pieces?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
is because more and more they're not being allowed to do that. Even in China they're trying to rein it in.In America our president and his EPA chief tried to eliminate rules about coal waste dumping and got blocked by the courts. They then tried to expand subsidies to make an otherwise unprofitable business profitable (it's not socialism when they do it) and again got blocked by the courts (The tried to declare a national emergency so they could spend emergency funds and the courts called them on it).
That said, coal is being replaced largely by Wind and Solar right now. At first it was Gas plants but even those are falling by the wayside at the moment (that might not last though, it's only in the last year that use of Natural Gas is down and it might be down to a rush to get wind & solar subsidies in before the end of 2019).
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Says the nuclear energy nut who won't put a cent into Polywell fusion, despite a working reactor only costing $100 million to get up. Worth the crapshot at this point IMHO.
I did. This is on Federal land - it's ALL of our backyard. But facts don't matter when you have a good bashing going on, do they?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Even if that were the case, it would offset the the almost 2 million people who are killed by coal per year. So it would decrease the overall number of people killed per year, reduce particulate/chemical pollution, and reduce CO2 emissions.
IÃ(TM)d suggest the solution is to mandate better safety precautions regarding working on rooftop solar, but in Australia that is regarded as blasphemy as fighting safety standards (aka red tape) is one of the governmentÃ(TM)s holy missions.
Or they could start installing more commercial solar and wind farms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... brings up a lot of interesting points
Rare earth materials is not needed. Wind turbines can be without magnets and will reduce their efficient some bit, but they'd still be highly effective. Lithium ion batteries are about to require no rare earth materials and will start mass production in the next year with increased charge rates and more cycles. Then there's iron flow batteries which are highly scalable, but do need more testing to make sure they're being designed to minimize maintenance.