A nuclear power plant can easily take a decade to build (Hinkley C, announced 2010, approved 2016, generation expected 2025), how many decades will it take to build enough plants to replace our current fossil fuel based generation?
It is time we don't have anymore. We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.
If it takes about a decade to build a nuclear plant then building enough nuclear plants should take... about a decade? It's not as if you build one, wait until it's completely finished and then start building a second one somewhere else. You build more than one starting right now and then more than one is finished in about a decade. Less if people would stop using "it takes too long" and similar as an excuse to make it take longer to build them.
Only if the world had unlimited access to appropriately skilled engineers and trades people, and the mountain of resources required to construct a nuclear power station.
Training people for something as specialised as building nuclear power stations is very time consuming in its own right.
>It's not as if you build one, wait until it's completely finished
If you assign a worker to Hinkley C then he is going to work at Hinkley C until it is finished. You can't just send him to a different plant. That would delay Hinkley C.
So hire more workers. Most "nuclear plant construction work" isn't some foreign species of construction work. It's pouring concrete and laying pipe. The main part that isn't is the reactor vessel itself, but that's the part that can be made on an assembly line and shipped in.
> more specialized factories
Building a factory takes what, a year? Then it's mass production.
> a proven design
This is literally the main reason construction takes as long as it does already. If it isn't accomplishing that then throw that process away and build them all in three years with plenty of time left over to correct any issues before bringing them online.
> If you assign a worker to Hinkley C then he is going to work at Hinkley C until it is finished. You can't just send him to a different plant. That would delay Hinkley C.
Fortunately there is not only a single worker in the entire country, and arbitrarily many can be trained on a scale not measured in decades.
And how much is climate change estimated to cost?
Maybe energy is too cheap! An average pair of jeans is travels the world 3 times at various stages of manufacture and distribution. That shouldnt be happening
So i'm guessing it probably is pretty close to impossible to build too many in one go simultaneously, like other relative mega-structures or infrastructure, you are generally limited to a handful in generalized localities at any one time.
You can go from the existing stock of people with degrees in things like physics and chemistry to a graduate degree in nuclear engineering in less than three years, much less doing that for construction work.
Secondly, just because one plant takes a decade to build, that does NOT mean we can't build 100 plants in a decade. Again, your argument does not make any sense. If we had started 20 years ago, we very well could be stamping out SMRs by the hundreds, today.
Finally, granting the urgency you claim, there is no evidence to suggest replacing fossil fuel based generation with renewable is going to be quicker than nuclear. To frame it as such is misleading.
So I'm personally undecided and with my limited knowledge believe that investing in renewable energy and new, modern nuclear power plants seems to be the right solution. In any case, change needs to occur as soon and fast as possible. But I'd be interested in sources to better information, particularly the claims I've heard that the costs for nuclear power plants is too high.
Is there an unbiased,reliable source for looking up complete ecobalances for energy sources, including the whole lifespan and all manufacturing of components and their disposal?
Full ecobalance is hard, many variables, many will vary by country or by state/county.
You think that can be done faster than 10 years?
Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. Keep expanding the renewables until 0-carbon moments are possible and curtailment starts to be a problem. Maybe 50%?
(or, in meme format: noooo, you can't just replace everything with renewables! haha wind turbine go brrr)
Building one-offs after spending years battling scientific illiteracy in the courts is indeed time consuming, but there is actually no reason we couldn't just churn them out assembly line style. The technology is pretty mature now.
We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.
Those things aren't without lead time either. Wind farms don't grow on trees. Solar panels have an intricate manufacturing process requiring rare earth elements.
And don't forget reducing power usage. Corona has shown that we can drastically reduce the amount of commuters on the road and airplanes in the sky.
Covid isn’t a good example of a sustainable balancing of the environment over human activity.
"Renewables", as usually pitched, are anything but renewable. Solar with gas peaking plants is not renewable. Wind with gas peaking plants is not renewable. Nuclear on the other hand, is extremely green and can be working at 100% capacity on windless sunless drought-stricken days.
If we end up with way too much energy production, we undercut fossil entirely, plus get to use some to start physically fixing environmental damage being done. Carbon capture, etc.
The total levelized cost of energy (LCOE[1]) for both wind and solar is now lower than nuclear: it's cheaper to procure equivalent power production via non-nuclear means.
The UK's Business, Energy and Industry Strategy department published energy production cost estimates in 2016[2], and the Open Energy Information organization has collated similar statistics[3].
You're spot on that post-energy-generation storage remains a problem - I'd be really glad to hear if anyone in this thread has up-to-date knowledge of where we are with regards to that.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy
[2] - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
This is the key reason we are talking about nuclear, it is not simply about levelized cost.
It'd be really useful to understand how large a gap exists there - it's not something I'd claim to know about at all.
Here's a starter reading resource from the National Renewable Energy Lab in the US: https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/declining-renewable-...
And some more reading material from OpenEI: https://openei.org/wiki/Solar+Storage
So you can either build 10x as many nuclear plants and run them at .1 capacity most of the time or build 5x as many and use some of the surplus energy to create stored power like hydrogen.
Doing either of those things with renewables will be massively cheaper than nuclear.
There doesn't seem to be anyone who is actually enthusiastic about nuclear, only people who are misinformed about renewables because their news sources have been trying to prop up fossil fuel interests for the last two decades.
I believe they also think world GDP _increase_ (not actual GDP) might be 6% less due to this, but don't quote me on that.
This is the number 1 authority on climate change.
While there are risks associated with that increase, it won't be the end of the world. Despite what the sensationalist media says, or democratic politicians and 15 year olds predicting the end of the world in 12 years. That is simply not true. The world will not become a ball of flame, in a few decades. Not even the UN thinks so.
There is plenty of time to build nuclear power plants, if that's how we wanted to deal with this issue.
What happens after 2050? Climate change continues, even if the world goes completely carbon neutral. Economic damage continues.
Read the report, the only way to keep to 2 degrees is to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. The sequestation industry would have to be larger than the oil industry was at its peak.
Given that we can't even switch to renewables and plant trees, what are the odds we will subsidise an enormous industry to fix the atmosphere?
This is also in the IPCC's report, but gets ignored everywhere.
Reading LT3000s post on this is very insightful: https://lt3000.blogspot.com/2019/11/contrarianism-esg-invest...
Eating habbits are a great parallel - I have been gaining weight during lockdown, and discussed it with a friend, and he replied "don't worry, you will only reach a certain weight and then stop growing." Well, thats true, but I don't want to reach equilibrium of 150kg. Similarly, 2 degrees is the point we will reach in 2050, the global equilibroum will be much higher. We will reach it asymptotically, but that doesnt help.
There will be no cooling, because the CO2 level in the atmosphere dictates the equilibrium point.
Further to the post, it is interesting but gives the impression of renewable technology as if we are still in the 70's. Firstly, coal is not neccessary, we have steel production with hydrogen instead of coal. Secondly, US is massively behind other developed nations, coal is gone or dissapearing from power generation of most major economies within 5 years.
Lastly it claims EU's carbon price is damaging for the economy, but thats a ridiculous claim - the price is absolutely miniscule. $25 means an average cost of ~150 per head per year. Thats nothing! Lastly, that money doesn't dissapear, it funds infrastructure, so we can reduce taxes elsewhere.
If you take an unbiased look at climate change, resource exhaustion, and species extinction, then it becomes hard to believe that mankind will have the conditions to thrive on Earth in 200 years from now. It may be possible, maybe with technological inventions, but it certainly doesn't look that way. We're only about 200 years into massive industrialization and have already damaged Earth on an unprecedented scale.
The current species extinction graph alone should worry people way more than it tends to do right now. Changes to the oceans are also extremely alarming, because certain conditions in the oceans could trigger a collapse of most of the ecosystem.
Suppose there was some event that killed all homeless people - it might not affect GDP much. Should we do let such event happen and conclude it's no big deal?
Yes, this is called homelessness.
OK, not all homeless people, or even most, but the survival rate for homelessness is absolutely terrible and few care. ( https://www.crisis.org.uk/media/236799/crisis_homelessness_k... "Homeless people are more likely to die young, with an average age of death of 47 years old and even lower for homeless women at 43")
Similarly with the millions of refugees coming from Syria and Libya, "let them die at sea" is a popular position and "murder them rather than letting them in" is gaining traction.
The pandemic has really opened my eyes to just how OK people are with the mass death of strangers.
That example does not strengthen your case. While not unopposed, there are still lots and lots of pro refugee people and many countries let them in.
Homelessness is a far unsexier issue where you can absolutely say people don’t care enough, but refugees are more of a counterexample.
Westerners, on the other hand, will just stay at home thanks to AC and pretend everything is fine.
Of course GDP won't be a big deal. By the time the worst effects are there the Chinese population will have aged to the point where getting rid of the elderly is better for the GDP than keeping them.
People with more money generally can afford more bullets. I wouldn't rely on them.
"live by the sword, die by the sword"