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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
There was an interesting interview recently on the new nuclear power plants being built in Finland (one is by AREVA, and other is by Rosatom). Both are besieged by delays.
Problem appears to be that while tech is found to be perfectly adequate and safe, regulatory regime handling nuclear power construction has effectively been sabotaged by our green party, who sat in the government a few times at this point. They now require full vetting of the entirety of design process of the power plant down to the last designer (as in people, not just plans), arcane requirements on leadership systems within organisations designing, building and running the power plant and so on. Things that have essentially nothing to do with building and running the actual power plant.
It has little to nothing to do with safety, but it basically puts a massive bureaucratic paperwork load on every company involved, making building new power plants almost impossible. Rosatom apparently literally hired the former head of the regulatory body and several former officials to help formulate the paperwork needed, and even they couldn't do it because it was so arcane.
Morale of the story: don't underestimate the willingness and ability among the most zealous green activists to actively sabotage any form of power generation that isn't halal with their religious convictions by penetration of both elected and unelected power structures within the state and corruption of these institutions. We used to have nuclear regulatory body that was hailed as so good in handling its job efficiently without compromising safety, that it was literally getting paid by foreign governments to come and provide its expertise to them. Not any more.
1. When you have a viable (politically and otherwise) solution to long term waste storage.
That's an unfair burden. We do not have a viable solution to global warming by this measure. His advocacy is an attempt to change the political situation such that it becomes viable.
#2 is an actuarial exercise.
#3 is also an unfair burden - we do not currently have an emergency fund pool for when Florida goes underwater. We use our national resources to deal with disasters.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Former is solved by cutting down the more recent regulatory items that have little to nothing to do with actual safety of operation, and everything to do with making nuclear power less competitive.
Latter is solved by either storing it underground or recycling it. Former is currently being held back by NIMBY style green activism, latter is being held back by nuclear proliferation fears.
There are no unsolved technical issues here, unlike with solar and wind. Issues here are political, ideological and bureaucratic.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
1. When you have a viable (politically and otherwise) solution to long term waste storage.
Maybe we could just blow it into the air and/or dump it into the sea, just like the coal-fired plants do.
https://www.scientificamerican...
No sig today...
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.
1. In the US, at least, we do. It's called Yucca Mountain. it wasn't politically acceptable to the previous Administration for #UNKNOWNREASON, but the current Administration would probably be fine to use this purpose-built facility for what it was built for - long-term storage of nuclear waste.
2. Done. All nuclear plants already pay into a decommissioning fund that is controlled and overseen by the NRC.
3. Every nuclear power plant buy insurance from the Government to cover people and property.
So, we're where you want to be (at least in the US); what's the hold-up to rolling out more nuclear?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
Any energy policy proposal that fits on a bumper, or in a tweet, is wrong.
Somebody should put this on a bumper, or in a tweet.
It is not the doing of things that is difficult. What is difficult is getting in the right mood to do them. ~~ Brancusi