I do understand that less nuclear means more coal and that this is a difficult decision.
But nuclear fans claiming that the problem with nuclear reactors is just "stupid Russians" disqualify themselves immediately.
Have we? The problems aren't just in Russia, but they're drastically less bad than Chernobyl.
Three Mile Island was essentially a worst case for internal meltdowns, and didn't involve any actual radiation release. Fukushima was vastly worse, but the problems revealed were remedied at similarly-designed reactors worldwide. (And most of those weren't nearly so exposed to severe storms.)
I'm honestly not sure what you're referring to with French and Dutch reactors, I'll have to look into that.
But overall, most of the things profiled as "severe problems and gross negligence" appear to have caused zero fatalities and zero radiation release. I know organizations like Rolling Stone have been running accounts of how the NRC is terrible and American nuclear plants are in crisis, but the problems raised don't actually amount to radiation risks.
I've never seen a convincing claim that the examples of actual release or meltdown risk, as opposed to mere sloppy management, are 'legion'.
> more coal and that this is a difficult decision
10,000 fatalities from coal per year in the USA alone. I agree that there's a tradeoff here, but I honestly have no idea why it's 'difficult'. Even the Chernobyl disaster is going to kill fewer people than coal kills when everything goes according to plan.
I'm not sure this is enough. "We almost head a nuclear meltdown in a densely populated area but zero fatalities so far!" is not inspiring confidence that there will be no fatalities in the future.
> 10,000 fatalities from coal per year in the USA alone.
Where did you get that number?
Three Mile Island isn't evidence of safety just because no one died, what matters to me is that there was no realistic route beyond "shielded meltdown". A lot of the fears raised by opponents of nuclear appear to be outright impossible. (Sadly realistic fears, mostly around hot waste disposal, don't seem to get as much coverage.)
The coal number is deaths from health effects of coal burning. Estimates vary widely, but 7,500 is a minimum and 10k is conservative. It's worse per capita and per watt in other countries, too - US plants are cleanish and US coal is low-particulate. Moving China onto nuclear power would be a vastly bigger gain (even per watt) than the US.
Accidental deaths are nontrivial for power sources, but don't dominate pollution effects. Coal is mostly pollution-derived because it's so dirty, oil is a mix because rigs are dangerous, wing & solar are wholly accident-based simply because there's no lethal pollution there. Nuclear causes approximately zero deaths of any kind, but again, tail risk.
US source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...
Global deaths/TwH source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
In addition to the yet unsolved waste disposal problem you mentioned, there is the problem of mining the nuclear fuel. This can be quite dangerous to the miners, especially in countries with lax security standards. I would expect the most deaths due to nuclear power happen there.
The category of reactor that Chernobyl belonged to is grossly outclassed in terms of safety and 'meltdown' by multiple "modern" designs (produced primarily in the 50s through 70s). Even some operational since the 70s.
Chernobyl, that accident, is much more a story of piss poor crisis management set to the backdrop of poor government systems and the weaknesses of authoritarian regimes than a nuclear scare story. If citizens think their government might murder them they are less likely to take spontaneously delivered iodine pills, for example.
Chernobyl the humanitarian disaster... kinda wasn't. Most of the cancers were a highly treatable kind and didn't show up in anywhere near the predicted scale (says the WHO). Our nuclear models are _very_ conservative. The actual problems faced by them now? A poor healthcare system and high rates of substance abuse.
And for the mathematically inclined: combining Chernobyl, Fukishima, 3 Mile Island, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and imagining that disaster every year, we still hit death rates that compare favorably with the respiratory illness and cancer deaths caused by coal.
If only nuclear power were scale-able and low-carbon, we might have something worth investing in...
Germany has vast financial resources at its disposal. They could go on a natural gas plant building binge and link deals to the US on imports for long durations that the US would be thrilled to do. That would help narrow the trade deficit Germany has with the US ($65 billion annually; natural gas trade could solidly knock out half of that), so killing two birds with one stone. With help from the US abundance of natural gas supply, Germany could replace half its coal power in the next ~15 years using natural gas and significantly reduce its CO2 output just from that (and a big chunk of the other half could probably be knocked out by gradual renewable growth from where they're already at).
When talking about gas we're always looking at Russia, and the current geopolitical situation makes this very unattractive.
Can those amounts of gas realistically be shipped to Europe?
The US is about to become the world's energy kingpin, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia in both oil and gas; that vast supply will be pushed outward:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/iea-sees-...
The average price of natural gas in Europe tends to be around $6, typically twice that of the US market. Once you add in the total cost of LNG (processing, transport, etc.), you get to a cost closer to $7.x to $8.x right now (that will come down with volume in the next few years, as the US is building several big new LNG terminals on the Atlantic and the Marcellus shale gas supply in the mid Atlantic is growing rapidly).
That's also before we get to technological innovation, which the US energy industry has always been renowned for, and has done wonders for the US shale industry the last decade (dramatically lowering costs, enabling the industry to survive the oil plunge and rapidly rebound, etc., entirely thwarting OPEC expectations of crushing the industry).
To ship gas to Europe, the US will need to spend about 50B-100B+ (minimum) building LNG facilities on both port sides, and then build something like 10,000 LNG Carriers (oceanic ships) to meet demand. Which would cost another 100B+ (maybe even 1T).
After all the infrastructure is set up, the prices will be at least 2-3 what they pay now (as they have to do things to and with the LNG that Russia does not in the process of delivery).
Its not feasible, unless you want the US taxpayers to pick up the bill and then subsidize it.
These were back of the envelope calculations. It could be a factor of 10 off in either direction.
> Its not feasible, unless you want the US taxpayers to pick up the bill and then subsidize it.
Oh, if that's possible, sure, thank you very much! ;-)
That worked for German defence policy, so there's precedent...
Langeled (1166 km) and Nord Stream (1222 km) transport gas under the sea, and a US-to-Germany pipeline would only be about 5 times that distance. I estimate Boston-to-Hamburg could be done for $60 billion, and it could make stops in Newfoundland, Ireland, and Britain.
The US is already expected to add 66 MTPA of LNG export capacity by 2019:
http://analysis.petchem-update.com/supply-chain-logistics/us...
Were you perhaps estimating the numbers to replace all of Europe's thermal coal consumption?
Wait, isn't that why we're funding Al-Nusra and all manners of terrorists in Syria and overthrowing the Ukrainian government? To stop it from happening.
1. Beating of the students on 30th of November. Before that the protests were small and getting smaller.
2. Use of lethal force against protesters which lead to a lot of supporters abandoning Yanukovych making it possible to vote against him in parliament with 328/450 votes.
If both of those are acts of "overthrowing government" then US could control it on such a level, that overthrowing is just plain unnecessary.
We can say that the Shah delivering a royal decree to dismiss Mossadegh makes the Iranian coup logically inevitable rather than looking at the CIA astroturfing for BP hegemony.
We can say that Torrijos's death is logical because he stepped in a plane at the wrong time rather than looking at the US reverting Jimmy Carter's deal to restore the Panama Canal control back to Panama
I'll admit that domestic gas consumers wouldn't like this plan any more than they like other plans to increase foreign gas demand, raising domestic prices, but it's not clear that the faction benefitting from low domestic gas prices is more influential than the collective of the groups mentioned above.
They, however, certainly downplay the tail risk of nuclear.
> McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.
I'm all for pricing-in the externalities. And if that makes nuclear a relatively better investment, hurrah! If new technologies turn nuclear into something supportable in normal capital markets, hurrah! But there is no proof-of-concept yet.
And every time we saw that it's not true.
After several decades of this we don't trust you anymore. As no sane person would.
You might even be objectively right. But your safety arguments werde wrong the first two hundred times. Why listen to your explanation of your two hundred and first attempt? Let's try something else where experience doesn't virtually guarantee us that we'll be burnt.
> And every time we saw that it's not true.
Every time? That seems a bit excessive does it not?
It's very easy to dismiss any information you disagree with if you over-generalize like that.
For example: "You told us the earth was headed for a new ice age. Why should we believe you now when you say it's getting too warm?"
Nuclear has the fewest deaths per kWh, period. It's really simple. Now, the cost of bringing new ones online is prohibitive, but shutting down existing ones was really dumb.
After the accident, Chernobyl continued to provide power to Ukraine, up until it's last reactor was shutdown in 2000.
I'm not trying to take an anti nuke stand, just pointing out deaths isn't the whole of the risk.
Coal has made _three_ orders of magnitude more land uninhabitable for human habitation than has nuclear.
And whereas fish may thrive behind a dam, nothing humans can eat will grow in a coal strip mine, ash flow, or other coal-related topography change. Whereas in nuclear exclusion zones, wildlife flourishes.
But first, I agree there are always trade offs. We have alao been horribly slow in finding better energy.
As for hydro + coal and uninhabitable land. I think it depends on what you define as inhabitable in the first place. Much of it is done in obscure (?) areas that few care about. Of course, this contributes to out of sight out of mind. None the less, this should be considered.
On the other hand, nukes are closer to population, as well as near water. And, as mentioned, for these more people are more aware of them. You can also thank Hollywood for the fear(s).
- https://phys.org/news/2017-10-greenpeace-fireworks-french-nu...
Or the still not practically solved used fuel problem. Or that Germany already now often does not run nuclear power plants (that are for now still allowed to run) because they are too expensive.