This means things like Nuclear power, ecologically disastrous in the long term, get a nice thumbs up (see France e.g.) because of their short term 'benefits'.
Nuclear power is a highly ideologised subject. In recent years in this area decisions have been made entirely based on fear and political opinion rather than scientific facts (like the relative safety of alternative reactor designs). 'nuclear' has become a hot-button word. Everything connected to it is perceived as negative. Probably some people nowadays would even argue against nuclear fusion because it's 'nuclear'.
In combating climate change by drastically reducing carbon emissions we're facing a huge task, which likely is an uphill battle we can't even really win in the short term. The best we can hope for is mitigating the consequences as much as possible.
Nuclear power is a stopgap measure that can help with that until better alternatives are available. We've been using nuclear fission for power generation for more than 50 years now. The waste generated during that time is there already, if we want it or not. It has to be dealt with anyway. Adding 20 or so more years of nuclear power generation on top of that doesn't exacerbate that problem all that much.
Trying to get rid of coal, oil, gas and nuclear power all at the same time seems like a pretty foolish endeavour.
> their short term 'benefits'.
Global warming is 1000x worse than a few radioactive waste we can store and no technology can match the CO2/Khw ratio of nuclear. Short term benefits is exactly what we need now.
Offshore wind is currently in the £60/Mwh range. Storage is in the 250k/MWH, or £900m/hr for Hinckley production.
- aging power plants, we haven't build any in a long time and many are now passed the initial lifetime expetency, but can't be shutdown as they should since there is no replacement ready
- price not taking plants destruction into account. None have been fully destructed yet, so we don't know how much it coat exactly but it's far from cheap since you have tons of midly radioactive material to treat
- still no proper way to dispose of the waste. There research etc, but right bow we're basically storing lots of materials that will be radioactive for millennias
- new generation plants project (EPR) is many years late and many times over budget because of critical defects in components.
- probably other arguments I forgot
I am personally undecided on the matter, but what is certain is that nuclear might be the best solution we have, but it certainly isn't without downsides.
Neither are the alternatives. Governments, and civilians alike, should carefully weight the advantages and disadvantages. What I mainly know about it is from memory from elementary school. Because this is precisely what we did. Each group was tasked to use pictures/photos from magazines, papers, etc to make a collage and a list of the + and - of each of these sources.
That said, can someone ELI5 why Thorium is the future for nuclear energy? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
Very much true. Nukes produce 60% of the carbon-free energy in the USA!
> Now we would only need to build next generation (Thorium) reactors.
There are lots of advanced next gen reactor designs with passive safety, advanced process heat, renewable fuel (replenished from erosion into seawater), etc. Only a handful of which use Thorium. The whole Thorium thing was a rebranding attempt by a guy named Kirk Sorensen who wanted to have a advanced nuclear rebirth. I don't like it because I want to see advanced nuclear of all fuels, not just Thorium! But that's a minor point.
The S. Koreans and Russians have standardized their reactor designs and built a bunch of them, and in doing so they learned how to fabricate the parts and put them together very cost effectively. The rest of the nuclear industry needs to learn from this to keep construction costs down. Options for this include:
1. Build nuclear reactors in shipyards. This is a controlled environment with high replicability. Then deliver the nukes on barges or even operate them a few km offshore with subsea cables.
2. Pick a design and stick to it. The entire industry goes around saying they have the latest and greatest design but none of them are great unless someone works the kinks out of constructing it. The best solution here in my mind is to develop national open source reactor designs.
If we had Fukushima every few years and nuclear storage accidents happen frequently, it's unlikely that it would be worse than delayed retreat from hydrocarbons caused by aversion to nuclear power.
Here an article about wildlife in Chernobyl - https://www.nature.com/articles/526166a
The long term consequences are very long term, hundreds thousands of years. The problem of storing nuclear waste material is still unsolved and extremely expensive. Radiation poisoning is ecologically extremely disastrous. E.g. the shield in Chernobyl has to be rebuilt every few decades because the radiation weakens every shielding material over time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
> The long term consequences are very long term, hundreds thousands of years.
That differs per isotope AFAIK.
Also, you could regard it as temporary solution between coal, less efficient/safe/fill_in nuclear power plants, and solar/wind/biomass. Because global warming is here right now, and we gotta deal with it right now.