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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.
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.
They have proven him right actually. Everything from increasing grid stability issues to decommissioning costs is becoming more and more of a question mark on both wind and solar as they become less of a boutique and more widespread adopted forms of power generations.
And there are no solutions in sight to those problems as of yet.
Yes, I'll agree, but with current nuclear regulations, I don't see a new reactor being built at anything other than a snails pace, and that's if were lucky. Plus what do we do with the waste later, we currently can't agree to a good solution to what we have.
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
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.
And don't think for one second that wasn't the intention.
Anti-Nuclear activist, including many in Congress, have done everything they can to gun up the nuclear power industry.
As a technology, nuclear is only in it's very first stages.Promising technologies like breeder reactors that can burn nuclear wastes to almost inert piles or rock were arbitrarily outlawed. Promising avenues such as micro reactors are mired in red tape and make no mistake, lawsuits will follow them where ever they think of putting one.
What is needed:
1. Two to Three standard designs, vetted by some group of nuclear engineers as safe. Facilitates factory production of components
2. Processes to fast track environmental reviews
3. Limited indemnity for developers to prevent frivolous lawsuits.
4. Some form of expedited processed in the courts to review lawsuits and settle them quickly.
5. Reopen Yucca Mountain. Fuck Harry Reid. Hell, bury his soon to be dead ass in it.
6. Ongoing research into new designs, module designs, etc.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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!
Why bother analyzing the argument when you can just call it "biased" and be done with it
The reverse is true. Now that Solar and Wind are hitting above 10% total grid they've realized their utilization factors are significantly higher than estimated. On top of this storage can now be provided within a deployed cost that's still cheaper than even old coal power. And a huge mitigating factor is that base load is no longer relevant. In addition changes in US federal law allowed for the economical use of load shifting such that demand can now follow supply rather than the prior paradigm of demand being an unchangeable quantity.
The end result being that renewable resources can provide significantly higher contributions to the grid without impacting stability. Add in storage and Renewables can easily provide nearly all our power if not all. And at the cheapest source of power we'd have to be fools not to use it. Fools who bow down to old technology or fossil fuels to enrich the elite that have invested in them.
But let's keep investing into archaic unsafe technology and pollute the environment when they fail
People like you spreading this complete strawman bullshit and generations of Greenpeace psychos before that are the reason that we have no modern, safe nuclear options. Updated designs using passive reactor safety, such as Generation IV, *can't* have an uncontrolled meltdown -- in the event of a problem, gravity automatically shuts down the reaction. Ask the French -- they generate 40% of their own power via nukes plus they generate electricity for a good chunk of the rest of Europe using nuclear. Please educate yourself instead of using 70 year old stereotypes about nuclear power -- because thanks to the misinformation you are spreading, we are stuck with ancient, unsafe reactor designs.
Yes don't distract us with the real math that a modern nuclear plant costs upwards of $20BILLION to build. With a 75 year life that's power at almost $0.30 a kwh.
Exactly. If you go to the Midwest you will see wind farms. That is the future. Wind and Solar with batteries.
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.
I too have solar on my rooftop, but under a PPA. I've spoken to people who've outright purchased solar, and virtually to a person, they say their electrical bills dropped to zero and they even made money selling electricity back to their utility. Either they're all shilling for the solar providers or there's some truth to that.
While solar panels may be dirty to create, they have a 25-, 30- or more year lifespan and the technology continues to get more efficient each year.
I have a hard time believing solar isn't going to dominate at least a large portion of our energy production in the coming decades.
Fuel rods: we use 5% of the energy and then we discard them.
The trouble is there are companies that all they do is supply these inefficient fuel rods and nothing more. They have a vested interest seeing to it that no other type of nuclear reactor comes online. They employ lobbyists.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear waste is a political issue, not a technical one. It is hard enough to build a regular waste dump, never mind a nuclear waste storage facility
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.
Its an old scifi trope. Its about collecting solar energy in geosynchronous orbit, where it doesn't get dissipated by an atmosphere, converting it to microwaves, and then beaming the microwaves to a receiving station that can convert the energy to electrical power with little loss. Just ignore the possibility that it can be used as a giant, space MASER weapon.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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
Sneaky bastard!
Utilization factor = power generated / (power that could be generated when the resource is available).
Capacity factor = power generated / (power that could be generated in all hours).
Solar and wind are typically dispatched as 'must run' being 'use it or lose it', so their utilization factor is near 100%. But that just shows that 'utilization factor' is a statistical lie cooked up to obscure CRAP capacity factors.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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.
Orbital solar for terrestrial power is IDIOTIC.
Until launch costs are much, much lower. Just put up 999x as many solar cells on the ground, make much more power for much less money.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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
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.
The very fact that nuclear waste is radioactive means that the reactor design is inefficient and leaving fuel unburned.
Breeder reactors can burn fuel down to nearly inert lumps of rock.
Only if you leave out all of the fission products. They remain hot at dangerous levels for centuries. Breeder reactors only burn actinides.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
There are alternative nuclear technologies under development. They need better support and investment.
This is exactly what they said about pebble beds. And then we built them. And they turnout out to be awful in practice.
That pattern has repeated itself with every exciting new nuclear technology to date.
With that track record, putting all our eggs in the exciting new nuclear technology basket would be insane.
Agree with you on geothermal, but wind is actually a very good source. The most important property of wind is that its availability tends to be negatively correlated with solar irradiation. This means that by combining wind and photo-voltaic power generation, you will get a much more reliable source of power, and the requirements for storage will go down massively. In my opinion, storage is really the main issue, so one should try to increase the size of the electricity networks as much as possible - this way at most times there will be generation of power by wind and solar in some places at least.
12 module SMR to be online in mid 2020s a snails pace?
Ask the French
You mean the country that's abandoned plants under construction? That says new nuclear plants aren't economically viable? Do you really want us to ask them?
Also, your education seems to have left out what to do with the waste. And no, you can't reprocess it all. First, it's not all spent fuel. Second, a reprocessing plant is also a nuclear weapons plant, which means it's not a practical global solution.
Meanwhile here in South Australia with our world leading renewables, our grid is holding fine under the extreme load of a record breaking heatwave of 4 days above 41C. We now increase grid stability nation wide. Want to try some other discredited talking points?
I must be imagining my zero power bill due to my solar panels then?
Not on the equator, not in the desert. Solar for home use scales easily.
The law change allowed companies other than the power company to buy and sell demand. This rather small change has had MASSIVE effects on the power market which is why the power companies appealed this change all the way to the supreme court.
The result of this relatively "small" change in the law is that now there is an entire market of companies paying high energy users to turn off demand to keep peak prices much lower than prior. It's also caused the whole concept of base load to go out the window as this demand shifting is balancing demand against supply rather than the prior reverse.
Prior to this change the power companies had no incentive to incentivize demand shifting. Higher peak prices meant more unregulated profits in their pockets.
This is incorrect, it's far easier to dump the renewable resources than the fixed generators and that's typically what happens.
I had used the wrong word apparently, I was discussing capacity factors. Capacity factors assigned to solar and wind were concocted 30 years ago when these resources were new, now that we've hit double digit percentages the new studies are showing capacity factors that are 60% or higher for raw generation and once storage is added in they have capacity factors of ~90%, nearly the same as nuclear.
2017 Auction prices in Colorado for a 25 year power purchase agreement for solar + storage generated bids of $0.03 kwh. This is less than HALF the price for coal generated from 100 year old paid for plants. Both Wind and Solar submitted bids in this range and both included storage.
Stop fabricating numbers.
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
That's funny . . . looks like they're expanding 19 existing sites, and French nuclear power output rose by 3.7% last year. Sorry dude, despite the little snit thrown by anti-nuke pols in the French gov't, France is the leader in European nuclear power, and they're going to stay that way for a very long time.
The entire premise of the article you linked to is that the costs of renewables "could" drop by certain levels. These hopeful projections -- backed by no real data, I might add -- also reference dates 40-50 years in the future, which is just silly theater. No one has any specifics about future efficiency gains even close to that far out. In that amount of time we will certainly have entirely new ways of working with nuclear energy too, but this apparently wasn't taken into consideration. But the most damning statement is that the plants won't be economically viable due to excess capacity. That is, they are saying we'll literally have too much power for them to pay for themselves, which is literally laughable. There is no time in recorded history that human energy consumption has ever dropped -- ever -- and the new technologies we are developing consume electricity at an ever increasing rate.
You have somewhat of a point about waste, which is not nil -- but it would be vastly improved over today's situation, and I trust people like the French to come up with real-world solutions, as they have for many decades now.
The UK doesn't have any of those problems, but the new nuclear plants are even more expensive, delayed and now being cancelled. We had to guarantee way above market rate for the lifetime of the plant, and even then only a French company with Chinese money was willing to build it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Um, you know this is the same tech that generates more than 1/8th of Earth's electricity with the least deaths per petawatt-hour, right?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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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....
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Reprocessing plants are also nuclear weapons plants.
This is not a problem if you put reprocessing plants on military reservations like the Nevada test Site, which also happens to be where Yucca Mountain is located. If we want to be serious about this whole climate problem Yucca now and start shipping waste to it. At the same time, we start installing a breeder reactor to reprocess spent fuel. With Yucca as a buffer, it won't fill up before the breeder is completed.
while not pointing out that the issues and design problems with manual points, carbs, and other stuff have long since been solved.
Nuclear plants that are in operation today are based on designs from the 1950's. There's no point in building more of those, because they pose a risk of meltdown, and their waste is a region wide hazard (e.g. Fukushima). They can't have "long been solved", when there aren't reactors that have been built and demonstrated yet. But we could advance that technology now (CANDU & MSR) by building the prototypes, and once proven, widely implement the new designs, where needed. The real problem is that nuclear plants are not cost effective compared to alternate energy, and would require long term investment from national governments, until their hazards and regulations are reduced to the point that they become attractive investments by deep pocketed corporations.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
What would the basis of lawsuits against solar and wind be?
Perhaps you don't understand the idea behind "frivolous lawsuit". The point isn't to have a valid claim but to stop construction and raise costs to the point the company never builds again or goes bankrupt. Preferably both.
The problem is not using science to drive policy. Driving policy based on politics and ideology is bad. That is why those frivolous lawsuits that have crippled the nuclear industry are bad. No industry can survive that kind of crap. Do I really need to explain this to you?