One recommendation, at your earliest convenience do something about this:
> I didn’t mention nuclear because I don’t know much about it.
I don't blame the author for refusing to take a position on nuclear.
My reasoning is that any technology that can produce an enormous amount of energy without burning hydrocarbons is worth more than a little consideration, even if it presents serious engineering and regulatory challenges, and especially to anyone who is concerned about carbon emissions.
Reprocessing isn't a necessity; it extends fuel supplies but even Terrestrial Energy's simple burner design without reprocessing is six times as fuel-efficient as conventional reactors. Running on thorium is more complicated, but all the molten salt companies other than Flibe are starting with uranium.
What do you do with the spent fuel salt mix then?
From Terrestrial Energy's page on waste:
- The IMSR burns its fuel far more efficiently than conventional reactors and leaves only one-sixth of the plutonium waste per unit of energy
- The IMSR creates power far more efficiently than conventional reactors and leaves one-third less fission product waste per kWh of electricity
- With the addition of IMSR waste fuel recycling, the IMSR can consume all its fuel and leave no plutonium waste
- Recycling liquid fuel waste is technically and economically far more viable than recycling of the solid fuel waste of conventional reactors.
Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all coal with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob...
And the mining of uranium looks awfully similar to the mining of coal. (Of course you need far fewer uranium mines for the same amount of energy.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ara...
Perhaps your concern is that people would get complacent with what can only be a temporary solution (even if temporary means thousands of years), but if AGW is regarded as an urgent and critical problem to solve, I don't think you can afford to ignore the opportunity.
> Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction.
In that 200 years a whole lot more uranium will become available for economical extraction, exactly the same as what happened with oil and natural gas.
And then there is thorium, which we have more of than we know what to do with.
Then there's mining Uranium from the Ocean which puts a ceiling on the price of Uranium at 15x the current price. Economically unfeasible today, but it is the max it could ever cost.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/nuclear-fuel-from-th...
I of course don't believe that there's an infinite supply of oil. Only that we haven't exhausted the millions of years of dead trees, which before the the emergence of white fungus with the ability to eat them, covered the Earth a hundred meters deep in some places.
The problem with your remark was caused by the doomers who took the flag of Peak Oil (TM) to claim that everything was going to crash and burn when the peak reached. Then when reality turned out to be more nuanced than that, the general public just went on to laugh the whole thing off and keep ignoring the real issues.
In an ideal world, we should be in the middle of a crahs program to retool the whole industry to work with renewables and mitigate the effects of other related issues like climate change/global weirding... but instead, we are doing too little and too late.
And given the rapid pace of EV cars, the market is going to solve the oil problem far faster than any mandated crash problem, well within the dozens of years of oil reserves we have left are exhausted.
It is not that the house is on fire right now. It is that we live in a house with no fire alarm and not up to code, but everybody is dragging their feet to fix that because "it has never happened before".
And since you mention EV cars... where do you think the electricity to power them is comming today? What percentage comes from non-reneweable sources? And what percentage of the car market lives near the bigger sources of reneweable sources?
The only thing to dispute is "when."
Sure, it can't carry us to a Kardashev Type II civilization, but we're only responsible for the problems of today.
> Two technologies could greatly extend the uranium supply itself. Neither is economical now, but both could be in the future if the price of uranium increases substantially. First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
Unless we build a very large number of conventional reactors over the next couple decades, which isn't likely, we've got time to develop more advanced reactors.
Sure it is, Nuclear doesn't just mean uranium fission, fusion reactors are nuclear as well and they will be a big thing in the future and we get better at doing it.
I used to think this as well, but I'm not sure I believe it anymore. I suspect that by the time we're able to make fusion power work, the solar/wind/batteries combo may be so cheap as to make fusion pointless for mainstream power generation.
So is the sun.
But seriously, the amount of fissile fuel we have available greatly would suffice for hundreds of years of energy, and leave very little waste, if we only invested in nuclear technologies a bit more.
Unless we have a major breakthrough in mining uranium or we actually manage to make breeder reactors safe and cost effective then nuclear is not really a viable option.
Edit. I should have been more precise in my language. By low carbon I am meaning minimal carbon, not just lower carbon. Natural gas is lower carbon, but it is not low carbon.
It really doesn't matter too much because there just isn't enough uranium to make it a viable alternative at the scale we need to have a significant impact on carbon emissions.
Neither concrete, nor uranium mining have to burn fossil fuels (and CO2 sequesting concrete is a real thing). They are decoupled from their fuel source, but the lack of incentives to improve that situation at present (due to the near entirety of electrical generation being fossil fuels) is the bigger problem.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...
That leaves a 50% chunk due to chemistry. For that we have things like eco-cement, or carbon sequestration technologies.
Estimates I've seen that showed large CO2 emissions from nuclear were wildly overblown. In one case, they assumed that nuclear power would lead to full-scale nuclear war and included the carbon impact of the war.
In any case, if the NRC would let companies start building molten salt reactors, we could have much simpler construction. For starters, they'd be at atmospheric pressure, eliminating the need for large steel-reinforced containment domes and high-pressure reactor vessels. We could mass-produce reactors in factories or shipyards.
So would I. Getting good data in this area is near impossible.
For something complex you can use the rough rule of thumb that the dollar cost is proportional to the emissions - as complexity increases the actual emissions converge towards the economy wide average. On this basis the emissions from building a current generation nuclear power plant is very high.
But I don't think anyone would claim that the construction of a modern coal plant has significant emissions compared to actually burning the coal.
https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
This report from the UK is interesting reading [1].
1. http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn_383-carbon-fo...
1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012....
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012....
Once we have molten salt reactors, nuclear's impact should drop further, both because they need much less concrete, and because they need much less uranium. Even Terrestrial Energy's basic version is 6 times more fuel-efficient than conventional light-water reactors. Transatomic's is 75 times better than LWRs, and can be fueled by our existing nuclear waste stockpiles, which could power all of civilization for decades, no mining required.
But maybe you want to stay with currently deployed technology. In that case, you have to take into account that we mostly back up renewables with natural gas, which is five to fifty times worse than nuclear.
That sounds really preposterous.