Is Nuclear Power Vital to Hitting CO2 Emissions Targets?

Obviously you can continue to argue about environmental damage and cost of the land being unusable for many years as well. I actually felt a bit better about nuclear safety though - if old reactor designs that are poorly managed can be hit by tsunamis, melt down and still not result in many deaths, the safety looks better than expected. Possibly the risk model changes for a determined attacker?

EDIT: current state of Wikipedia is pretty much in agreement with the above, but it's an article with a lot of edits and some points have no references. The number of deaths "due to evacuation conditions" is much higher than I remembered (~1500).

For wars it's another story, most militaries could bomb the hell out of a nuke and cause some grief. One rather crazy idea to deal with this is to build nukes on large ships, 10 miles offshore. Worst case, they retreat as designed into one of the most unaccessible places on the planet (the bottom of the ocean), where they stay cooled and avoid releasing radiation until things calm down and the planned recovery operation begins.

Other pluses in this scenario include possible shipyard construction (could be cheap), ability to use power purchasing agreements to get nuclear power to countries that don't have nuclear regulatory infrastructure (the NRC could regulate plants worldwide), and enhanced safety since you're always coupled to a great heat sink and there are 0 people living within your evacuation zone. Anyway that's a bit far-fetched but I love the idea.

Chernobyl was a massive fuck-up that IIRC wasn't even possible in Western plants of the time, let alone afterwards.

Fukushima demonstrates the risks of building a power plant in a tsunami zone, but its death toll is zero, and even the worst estimates of cancer deaths are only in the hundreds. A single coal mining disaster kills more than that, and we have them fairly regularly.

In short, the risk can be dismissed, especially if you factor in the risks of things like coal mining and emissions.

sigh (I hear this too often.)

No, it doesn't. Thorium in conventional, solid fuel reactors is useless. Also, conventional, solid fuel reactors are a relatively dumb idea.

We need better reactors. We have known that since around 1954. One particular design of a more efficient, safer, and likely cheaper reactor would benefit from being fuelled with Thorium. But it's about the reactor, not the Thorium!

By the way, Chernobyl and Fukushima were very different events. Different reactors, different physics, different ourcome. Don't get hung up on Thorium, learn something about reactor physics instead.

Off-grid power is very small compared total energy used in the USA.

I did look at the Google map you're referring to and I converted the scary colors to numbers using the hard-to-find scale and was shocked to learn that the numbers were well within the safe zone. Even the orange.

European reactor constructions are looking rough. But that doesn't have to be the only case. In UAE, the South Koreans are building 4 huge PWRs on budget and schedule. The South Koreans somehow consistently deliver on nukes. The Americans and Europeans could hopefully learn from them how this is done.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516...

Indeed, because it's cleanup of political, not nuclear fallout.

Energy policy is Germany has always been a political issue. The government decides what gets done, who does it, how it is cleaned up, and who makes money from it. That can work, except it doesn't if politicians are fickle.

The fast breeder at Kalkar (SNR-300) had been planned and construction had started. Then the government changed (from CDU to SPD), the new government didn't like the idea of the reactor and added new ridiculous requirements, for example a cooling device for the ground under the reactor already in construction. You can probably guess how expensive it is to install anything under an existing building. In the end, the whole power plant was constructed, but never fuelled, and finally demolished. Now it serves as an example for how expensive nuclear power is---but really, the expense is all due to politics.

Decommissioning of the current light water reactor fleet is just the same thing. They got shut down prematurely because one particular reactor in Japan was flooded by a tsunami (and everybody knows Germany gets inundated by tsunamis all the time), which makes decommisioning relatively more expensive. It is obvious that the operators don't want to pick up the cost for this purely political decision. Given the political landscape right now, it's likely they aren't able to, either. In addition, the government promised to take care of the waste, but isn't actually doing it. (The original plan involved recycling in fast breeders, which isn't happening, thanks to politics.) Since there is no plan for the waste (thanks to politics) and the industry isn't allowed to come up with a plan themselves (thanks to politics), the expected cost for waste disposal is infinite. Decommisioning of the plants should have been funded by the operators. But the rules have been changed for no good reason. Effectively, everything has to be decontaminated to ridiculously low levels, and the workers doing it must not be exposed to anything. This is impossible, so it's infinitely expensive. Thanks not to technical difficulties or health concerns, but politics.

So yes, the needed money is stolen from everyone ("the tax payer picks it up"), but that's not the fault of the nuclear industry, it's the fault of incompetent, technically illiterate politicians.

> Sellafield cleanup

Military facility. (It was purely military when it was still called Windscale, and that's when it got contaminated.)

> New reactors in Europe are 2-3x over budget

Everything in Europe is over budget. Berlin Airport, Stuttgart central trainstation, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg... Europe, but especially Germany, lost the ability to get anything done. Sad, but true. The Energiewende (German energy turnaround) is also over budget, and underdelivering.

> The chunk of Japan that's a no-go zone isn't that small.

If that chunk is a no-go zone, then so is Denver, Colorado. The customary limit of 1mSv/a is below natural background! And people live in areas that "badly contaminated" all over the world with no ill effects. Calling something that radiates that weakly a "no-go zone" is another political hatchet job.

> I'd rather spend the 200 billion... on energy storage

Go ahead. Do that and get rich by buying electricity when the sun shines and selling it when it doesn't. If you can do that, more power to you! The practical problem with that plan is---you can't. And if you could... well, you'd probably be buying nuclear electricity at night and selling it during the day.

My bet is that dust inhalation during coal mining caused an order of magnitude higher number, that is not even counting accidents such as groundwater pollution.

Human body is quite good at dealing with radiation damage, compared to chemical damage, chronic physical irritation or other sources of inflammation.

Huh? Citation certainly needed since by ANY metric you are 100% incorrect. Count the number of nuclear subs, nuclear power plants, plutonium power sources, controlled fusion reactions in testing, fission reactions being carried out across the globe by nations at different stages of development, etc and tell me it is "often" not done safely.

The fact that nuclear is so scary to get wrong is precisely why we (by and large) get it right.

And thus is the problem with the court of public opinion on this. Nuclear is the safest per Kw/h, period. But yes, there are accidents and they are plastered over the news for weeks. Whereas coal mining disasters? Well it's just coal mining, not related to the coal power plant that coal was all headed too.

In an ideal world, fission power could be avoided, but while we wait for that, the greenhouse gases are building up. Fission has to be evaluated against the politically feasible alternatives.

When you must always be in defense mode, do you begin to internalize that perspective almost as though it is a debating position?

During the Fukishima disaster there were some of the worst arguments immaginable given by nuclear energy proponents. For example: you can't expect the engineers to have designed for such a massive earthquake and a tsunami!

If you can enumerate a thousand things that happen about once a thousand years, you can reasonably expect about one of them to occur in the next year, but it can be difficult to nme them unless you are in the right frame of mind. How many natural disasters occur every decade that we are "shocked" could ever happen?

My impression is that the engineers behind Fukishima were not actually insane, and did try to build a plant that would survive an earthquake and a tsunami, but their models were incorrect about the likelihood of different wave heights, and perhaps even more accurately, the cooling system simply had insufficient redundancies.

Finally, what I really feel most discussions lose sight of is that both Chernobyl and Fukishima were very far from being worst case disasters. In both disasters once an uncommon set of events set them in motion, an also uncommon amount of heroism and ingenuity prevented the disasters from spiralling further out of control. I don't mean to say so much that it is unimaginable that people would risk their lives to save others in their own towns, so much as to say that that was the last line of defense, and it was necessary to use it, contrary to what I what the models should rely on. What if instead, the on site engineers had been as reliable as the New Orleans police during hurricane Katrina?

Seriously. I'm fascinated by the Internet too, but it's like people are forgetting that centralization == efficiency, distribution == waste. There are ways to achieve reliability without totally decentralizing the grid, and what we need now is not adding few more nines after decimal point of the already 99.999something% reliable grid. We need efficiency all across the board to reduce waste.

Utilities mostly shy away because of politics, not cost.

A lot of different things make nuclear power expensive to build and operate. Compared to coal/natural gas they need a lot of extra buildings and much thicker walls etc. Compared to solar they need armed guards, and exclusion zone, regular inspections, etc. Space wise you can grow food in the middle of a wind farm without issue.

It turns out the real problem is not construction costs so much as operation and decommissioning costs, which have little to do with economy's of scale. The decommissioning costs have also gotten much worse as investment returns have dropped. Paying for things 40 years down the line means return on investment becomes critical.

We agree on the chemistry. The point of my ps is the C becomes CO2 the H becomes H2O, but we don't care about H2O. Which is why hydrocarbons produce less CO2 per watt than coal.

I especially like the "Solar Roof" from Tesla that is probably what was needed to make it mainstream. When building a house customer has a checkbox to a regular roof or solar roof, but otherwise it looks about the same. One day the solar roof might be the default choice in many areas of the country probably.

1) The good dam spots are occupied, to put it lightly.

2) Hydroelectric dams aren't exactly built to be replaced

3) The technical side of hydroelectric power generation hasn't changed much in recent years; the old dams hold up pretty well for efficiency in taking energy from the water flow.

Hydroelectric dams were great before global warming became an issue.

The effect of all the above points is that a modern dam would be situated in a place either too small or too risky or too troublesome to put one before. With the effects that dams have on the surrounding environment, it's unfeasible to imagine a scenario without government on board.

Given that they must be involved anyway, the state's scarce resources might be better placed in other energy investments than the remaining high growing fruit left on the hydroelectric branch.

...amongst non-intermittent sources. But cheaper alternatives (gas, coal) generate CO2, so I assume they are out of interest for these people.