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Greenpeace's comment is pretty disappointing. They refuse to back nuclear without offering any reasonable alternative (let's be honest if there was a good alternative we would already be using it). Hand-wavey stuff about hydrogen and turbines don't cut it I'm afraid. They have done good work in the past, but perhaps if they had backed nuclear a long time ago we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now?

I've actually been pretty critical of them for years because of this stance they have.

And before anyone comments about Chernobyl, my view is all energy production comes with risks. You have to weigh those up against global climate change IMHO.

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> Greenpeace's comment is pretty disappointing.

But completely unsurprising. Greenpeace pivoted from an anti-military nuclear to an anti-civilian nuclear stance to try and remain relevant, they've been a negative force in the world ever since.

They've been raising awareness about AGW while actively fighting one of the best tools to mitigate it for more than 30 years.

Don't mention nuclear on HN if you value your karma ... but in the UK, at least, civilian and military nuclear have never really been independent.

See, for example, the UK government's otherwise incomprehensible willingness to pay extraordinary sums for new nuclear capacity such as Hinkley C[1]:

"it is difficult fully to comprehend the persistent intensity of official UK attachments to nuclear power, without also considering aims to maintain nuclear submarine capabilities". [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

[2] https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=2016-...

> Don't mention nuclear on HN if you value your karma ... but in the UK, at least, civilian and military nuclear have never really been independent.

By "military nuclear" what is meant is mostly "nuclear arsenal". Hence the peace part of Greenpeace.

I don't think the military angle plays a big role in the British case. Hinkley C uses mostly foreign technologies and expertise, not domestic one. There were even talks about building a plant using Chinese technologies! Also submarine and power plant reactors are two very different beasts, so building the latter does not help much with maintaining expertise for the former. Plus Britain is quite dependent on the US help to maintain its nuclear capabilities.

But I think it's true for Russia, maintaining full nuclear cycle does help with supporting its military nuclear capabilities. Thus the substantial political support which the industry gets there. For example the floating plant [0] is based on reactors used in icebreakers, which in turn have roots in submarine reactors.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...

I think that doesn't explain Hinkley, but it does explain the Rolls Royce initiative. These modular nukes are much more like the zip it up and leave it for 25 year nuclear powerplants that they make for subs.

"One of the best" assumes that nuclear power generators are competently run and fuel competently disposed of. Which organisations do you trust more to be more competent than the Japanese (Fukushima) and Germans (who ditched unknown, unrecorded, probably large quantities of nuclear waste in an incompletely built facility)?

We have better, anyway. The combination of wind, power, burning things that have grown in our lifetime and time-shifting power usage seems to be good enough AFAICT.

By the latter I mean that a lot of big power users don't really need to run all the time. A company like BMW needs a lot of electricity to produce a car, but the factories are built with capacity to spare (building extra capacity while building is cheaper than adding if a car sells well) and most the power-hungry bits can be shut down for a while if the power grid really needs it. Unless a car model is really, really popular and the factory runs at full capacity, but in the case competing factories don't.

I think this is a pipe-dream.

There is no energy grid anywhere in the world t1hat has ever run only on intermittent power sources.

As for the hypothetical BMW factory, what are the workers meant to do while the power is low?

You have to be honest that cost of such setup would be significantly higher because you need huge amount of storage, or large overcapacity, or both.

Lastly, zero people died from radiation at Fukushima - the tsunami killed 15,000. Why is anyone surprised that a natural disaster can damage a building? Do we have tsunamis in UK and Germany?

The story is completely overblown.

150 years ago there was no energy grid anywhere in the world. We've come a long way since then. You seem really confident that a renewable grid will never happen. Do you have credible projections on storage and deployment costs that indicate asymptotic bounds on cost that are above the cost of similar projections for comparable nuclear?

I am not saying it won't happen. You are free to argue we should be paying more for energy so its sustainable, but unless you are going to bring some serious evidence you can't just claim the problem is easilly sorted and wind + solar grid would be cheaper than nuclear.

Current and projected cost of storage is relatively high, the most cost efficient storage is hydro and compressed air, they are not showing any kind of fast decrease in cost.

Maybe there is potential in energy grids that span continents and have large over-capacity - then you dont need much storage.

I am assuming we are talking about imminent future, in 50 years maybe math is different, but thats too late for climate change.

It doesn't make sense to invest into storage until you are well beyond 80% renewable energy. If we had 80% renewables today then climate change wouldn't be as big of a problem as it is right now, so the next best thing is to build more renewables until we actually hit bottlenecks.

Nuclear power has always been a government funded energy source so unless government policy changes and UK orders 50-100 of these power plants by 2050 then nuclear power is not going to make any difference. Convincing all governments on the planet to invest into nuclear power is extremely unlikely. Without the introduction of a CO2 tax nuclear power will always look bad vs coal and coal will always look bad vs renewables and from what I can tell the vast majority of people don't want a CO2 tax even though it would be the best solution for climate change.

> There is no energy grid anywhere in the world t1hat has ever run only on intermittent power sources.

"Nothing can ever happen for the first time."

> zero people died from radiation at Fukushima

This is false, and lower the credibility of the people that keep repeating this fake mantra again and again.

How is it false? Would you care to provide any kind of source or at least state what you believe the actual figures are?

Official statistics says the only fatalities were from physical injuries, stuff like collapsing walls, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

>A company like BMW needs a lot of electricity to produce a car, but the factories are built with capacity to spare

So interestingly, one of the reasons why the steam engine took off in working factories was because you didn't have to rely on the intermittent nature of water or wind power.

Greenpeace's real opposition is mainly that, since SMR's are related to submarine reactor designs, they're subsidising those same subs. Sort of like if you oppose beef by-products because you think a cow died for it.

They're wrong - the cow died regardless, because of high-profit steak, and the submarines are funded regardless of whether we also get carbon-free power from it - but it's a valid argument.

But yes, in northern latitudes - in winter we run fossil fuels, which create literally millions of tonnes of gaseous waste for ever tonne of solid nuclear waste, or we freeze and die.

If you respond but what about [green magic], congratulations, you've not done the sums for winter in cold countries, and I'm not wasting time arguing with you. Go do them.

I don't think you can dismiss the beef/submarine by-products argument without further analysis.

If the beef by-products are being sold by cow farmers for a profit, that makes slaughtering a cow more profitable for farmers. It could mean that more cows are farmed, the price of beef goes down, and therefore the demand goes up. It's only if beef by-products are relatively worthless that your argument is justified, and from a quick search that doesn't seem to be true at all - byproducts are worth 10-15% of the carcass [1].

Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies.

[1] https://www.farmprogress.com/story-beef-byproducts-buoy-catt...

> Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies.

it's still a silly position. pretty much any research in physics/engineering enables the military to create more efficient ways of killing people. should we stall all technological progress to starve the military?

Thanks to long-standing agreements with the US, British submarine reactors are largely copycats of the American ones. And everything about them is super-classified, hard to see how they could use any of that knowledge for civilian reactors.

At most one could argue that if this civilian reactor project succeeds beyond the wildest dreams, they could use that knowledge to design indigenous submarine reactors rather than relying on the Americans. If so, one hopes they could, as the French have already done, switch to low enriched fuel and reduce proliferation risk.

You don’t need magic. You have tons of cheaper ways to reduce your fossil fuel use. Efficiency in building upgrades is almost always the cheapest way to reduce heating emissions. Geothermal is next.

I also strongly agree with the other reply’s point - reducing the amount of money made in raising a cow or increasing the cost of building a nuclear submarine has an attritive impact on both. Those strategies work, potentially better than any other strategy!

The part everyone forgets is that there have been plenty of other power plan disasters far worse than Chernobyl and most of them were Hydropower. Judging nuclear power by Chernobyl is an absurd proposition.

Chernobyl won't be habitable in the next 20.000 years. I doubt there's a hydropower disaster comparable to that.

The way things are going, large part of the planet (say, latitudes -30...30) won't be habitable in the next XX years

Nuclear can cover the gap at poles.

Anyway, nuclear power GENERATES heat and electricity, so it increases global temperature, while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature.

> while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature

Do you know why solar panels looks dark, almost black? Because they absorb as much solar as they can. IN real life if you cover surface with panels, albedo would decrease and system as a whole would absorb MORE solar energy. But part of absorbed energy would be converted to electricity and do some work. At the end it all would be heat, so on pure heat basis solar panels would increase temperature

Problem with solar panels is solvable: a special material to emit heat in a narrow infrared region, to which Earth atmosphere is transparent, is already invented in India. It will keep solar panels cool, which will increase their efficiency. Per watt price for this material is unknown for me.

The direct thermal energy output of human industry is small compared to the indirect effect of greenhouse gases:

• https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/2017-s...

• http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15%20terawatts%2F%28sur...

Tell that to the ton of wildlife around everything but the refactor proper?

And also even taking your argument at face value, I fully believe a handful of 20,000 year dead zones would be superior to global warming at our current rate. The alternative we get now is way more than 20,000 years of wrecked biodiversity almost everywhere.

How is the orange website so full of self-avowed rationalists so incapable of comparing sudden and quick vs slow and steady harm...

Point is, current energy sources can be stopped and reworked, once you go with nuclear disaster you assume the 20k year scenario. Tell me you won't change your opinion in that time span.

"can be" isn't good enough. There's a lot of stuff we could do, but won't. I'll take my chances with the nuclear powerplants, thank you.

Don't take mine, please

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Quarter-million people killed, 7 million houses destroyed. Thats enough to wipe a small coutry, like Czech Republic, off the map.

Both these disasters are pretty horrible, of course, but I think the OP's point was that Chernobyl and nuclear disasters leave an area uninhabitable for periods of time that far outstretch the entirety of human civilization up to now.

Horrible dam failures don't do that, though of course there's a massive human cost for infrastructure failures like that. There's nothing like the "this is not a place of honor" warnings (for regions contaminated with nuclear waste) for dam failures, e.g.

In fact fair few parts of the exclusion zone are under discussion to be reopened very soon, and Chernobyl is quite habitable for some definition of habitable. Thousands of people stay and live there (decontamination workers, and a big tourist trade), though they are only allowed to stay three months at a time. They are exposed to less radiation than an airline pilot or a stewardess receives in the course of their job -- so "habitable" is relative.

Chernobyl is not over yet. Still there. Still kills.

Reasoning is that coal kills more every day. As someone else said under one of the parent comments, even hydro kills more than nuclear. Dams have wiped out whole regions.

https://www.dw.com/en/in-europe-1-in-8-deaths-linked-to-poll...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...

Our fear of nuclear power plants is irrational. We should be improving this technology not abandon it.

And, Chernobyl seems to thrive, just without humans.

https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000154-1bd...

So we should kill nuclear AND coal plants, and replace them with wind and solar energy.

Nuclear is safer that putting PV on rooftops.

However, just as nobody seriously tried to run a national power grid on PV 30 years ago because it was too expensive, today nuclear is the expensive white elephant of power that can only be justified by other benefits such as weapons and radioisotope medicines.

> Judging nuclear power by Chernobyl is an absurd proposition.

Exactly this. Nuclear is held to an absurd different standard to all other forms of energy generation.

If we consider damage to wildlife: fossil fuels, in particular oil, kills millions of birds and fish. Nuclear? Zero as makes no difference. If anything, nature is thriving around Chernobyl. Wind farms routinely kill birds, and no outcry, but cover the birds in a bit of oil, and it's front page.

Deaths mining uranium again, practically zero since such little is needed, vs the thousands of deaths mining coal, or drilling for oil.

Deaths through breathing in pollution? Fossil fuel plants have and are killing millions of people, and quite literally, the planet.

I believe Chernobyl + Fukushima accidents combined have directly killed less than 100 people. Greenpeace would have you believe that millions will die from cancer, but that's strongly disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

> let's be honest if there was a good alternative we would already be using it

No one's using the SMR's that are proposed here either. They're hoping to get the first one online in 10 years. A lot of nuclear fans get excited about unproven future tech when it comes to nuclear and then dismiss non-nuclear alternatives for being unproven future tech.

SMRs are used in Nuclear Subs are they not? What we are talking about here is using them for civilian power.

The unproven bit is the use of factories to make Lego-like peices for the construction.

No one should be inherently excited about SMRs for the technology alone. The excitement is it's a way to hack around political failure.

- Renewable are great, but our current political economy just likes them because they don't require coordination and are marginally cheap. But when trying to do a completely renewable economy, those benefits dissipate when we need electricity storage or arbitrage/rationing on a huge scale, and that requires good good old coordination and politics again.

- Regular nuclear power plants are great but the anglo-sphere can't do them for the same reasons they can't do subways.

- Tiny nuclear power plants aren't intrinsically better at all, but perhaps can both have reneweable's ability to accommodate our shitty political economy, and maintain that ability all the way to 100% no fossil fuels for electricity.

There's nothing great here, just a last ditch to throw technological band-aids on social issues.

We are humans. You gotta work from that premise.

Similar opinions are expressed by a number of Green political groups around the world, and I've also struggled to reconcile their commitment to slowing global climate change with their rejection of nuclear power.

Ignoring the typical arguments against nuclear, I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies. Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy. So nuclear places the focus of energy transformation in the wrong place, and allows governments to believe they are solving the problem when much larger investment in renewables is required.

I'm not qualified enough in the area to agree or disagree with the implicit tradeoffs there, it's just the argument I've heard.

It's not hard to understand their argument, if you make the attempt.

More CO2 is avoided per unit of currency spent with renewables than with building nuclear plants.

> I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies.

If we're taking climate change seriously, we need massive investment in clean electricity generation. There's place for both nuclear and renewables.

Secondly, the goal is to reduce emissions. Increasing renewables (or nuclear for that matter) isn't the goal. What we need is a least-cost zero-carbon grid. If that happens to be 0% nuclear, fine. Just as fine as if that happens to be 100% nuclear. Most likely it'll be a combination (see e.g. work by Jenkins, Caldeira etc.).

> Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy.

They aren't powered by wind or solar either, which are the renewable sources with, so far at least, the best potential. That's why there needs to be, together with a massive push to clean and expand the electric grid, a massive push to electrify transportation and heating.

Here is an easier argument for the nuclear anti-support: Green parties across the globe are spouting Chinese propaganda to further China's hold on the energy market (since they own 99% of rare-earth metals + a good grip on otherwise "green" energy manufacturing).

I'm not attempting to argue against the merit of hydrogen as a feature of the energy infrastructure....But, the only reason hydrogen is taking off, in a political sense, is because it's a transport mechanism. "Green" people like it because it can support renewable sources although it works just as well for fossil fuels.

The potential of nuclear is locked between two well funded lobbies. Nuclear is extremely viable and I'm consistently disappointed with people's inability to recognize and invest in the necessary research for cleaner and safer plants. Or, those who succumb to an illusion that fusion will be ready and commercialized in the near future.

Hydrogen is taking off because, first, there's already a global demand for many megatons of the stuff each year, and second, because the cost per kWh (equivalent) of storage capacity for it is extremely low, compared to just about any other scaleable way to store excess electrical power.

Well they're not building an RBMK reactor so Chernobyl is not really relevant since they are totally different type of NPP

In any case, an RBMK would still be very safe. They're well tested and we know not to do the thing that makes them explode.

Additionally, you could just not skip the containment dome like the builders of Chernobyl did.

"we know not to do the thing that makes them explode" This is not the core problem. The core problem is that explosion can still happen - even if we "know not to do the thing that makes them explode". It can happen because of a natural disaster, because of war and because of other unpredictable reason. To avoid the possible explosion and consequences altogether it is better to not have them in the first place!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the way to avoid an explosion: "don't pull the control rods all the way out"

It would take a very specific kind of war or natural disaster to pull out the control rods from a nuclear reactor, methinks.

Don't steer a civil plane into a tower, please, because the tower will collapse.

Any technology will have deaths, that's inevitable. Without advocating for one versus the other, we should consider what will be number of deaths/diseases/etc versus costs/climate impact/energy produced over the lifetime of a solution

> we know not to do the thing that makes them explode.

We collectively know a lot of thing, but as soon as you leave the opportunity to a human an accident will happen sooner or later. We know not to start heavy machinery while there is a maintenance technician inside it, but it still happens.

This is why we have safety lockout systems, to avoid an accident even if we know better.

Which is why nuclear reactors in the west all have safety confinement domes.

The RBMK has a lot of issues that make it really unsuitable for further development:

1. Because of the size of the core, it develops uneven reactivity during operation and requires attention to be paid to this.

2. The measures put in place do not entirely eliminate the chance of a power excursion.

3. The cost of a suitable containment building would make RBMK more expensive than an equivalent VVER installation. Also as far as I can tell no such containment building has ever been designed.

4. No international agency or government would allow the construction of a new RBMK. Edit: to be clear, this is not only because of the safety issues, but also because of the nuclear weapon proliferation issues associated with the design.

Overall, the cost savings of a RBMK depend on not having a large containment structure and the RBMK was on its way out as a design by time the Chernobyl accident happened. The large number of RBMKs under construction at the time was largely because of initiatives to increase the installed nuclear capacity in the Soviet Union during the mid 80s, existing RBMK sites would receive additional reactors and all but one of the new sites were to receive VVER reactors.

There is a good alternative, and we are already using it.

Solar PV and wind turbines are already the cheapest and greenest source of energy and are set to decrease in price more as they ramp up.

They're already causing the closure of existing coal and nuclear plants for purely economic reasons.

It sometimes feels like people with oddly strong opinions on nuclear power are posting from some alternate dimension where the only alternative is coal.

Nuclear is cool tech, so are vertical wind turbines and wave powered generators and concentrated solar molten salt generators. But they're all more expensive than PV and turbines.

Of course solar and wind are awesome, but they are dependent on external factors and thus not fully comparable. If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power. Nuclear and fuel-burning power plants are not like that, and the difference matters.

You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)

There are (at least) 6 solutions for the sun not shining.

In order of desirability.

1: A mix of renewables. Not solar or wind or hydro or geothermal, but a good mix.

2: A large grid. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.

3: Over-provisioning. Size your installations for cloudy days and winds at 2km/h. Solar&wind are an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, so 1.5X - 3X over-provisioning is still a lot cheaper.

4: Indirect storage. If you're overprovisioned, then you will have lots of excess power, even more power than you can store in your batteries. (See 5). So use that power to hit several goals at once. For example, if you use it to produce methane, you can use that methane for carbon storage, use it to power peaker plants (see 6) or sell it for profit.

5: batteries

6: peaker plants. If 99.9% of your power is handled through 1-5, the emissions from the remaining 0.1% are negligible and can be offset with #4.

> If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power.

No wind or sun? What are we talking about here, an apocalypse? I know you're exagerating, but sun AND wind tend to balance each other out. If there's a freak occurence where there's "none" of either for several days.. well running some gas power plants once in a while is a drop in the bucket when it comes to CO2, and at such a small scale you could probably create the fuel renewably (biogas or synthetic gas from electricity+H2+CO2). I think finding a way to reuse the gas power plants we have already built in a CO2-neutral way will be a big key to solving the climate crisis quickly enough.

> You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun,

And/or just integrate the continent with more HVDC lines. Germanys main problem now is getting power from the windy north to the industrial south. But if they manage to construct some HVDC lines they should be able to get pretty close to 100% renewable. They could restart the nuclear industry too, but I don't see how that's an easier problem than building HVDC lines.

Getting more off-shore wind should also help, since the wind is more stable there.

And why just "AN" energy storage solutions? There are dozens of different ones being constructed commercially right now, and they each have their strong sides. Li-ion is better for fast frequency regulation, flow batteries for medium term storage, and pumped hydro, and possibly compressed or liquified air for long term.

> or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)

If you mean the Scandinavian region, there's already two solutions that are working great: exchanging power with Norway (where you got tons of hydropower to smooth out long term energy fluctuations) and trash burning power plants (which also supplies heat to nearby homes and businesses). We don't need to move south, we just need everyone in the south to send us all their trash for us to burn during the winter ;) If we can move more plastics over to bioplastics, then it could even end up being renewable. Yeah, we should recycle/reuse as much as possible, but there will always be a huge stream of material that's just too mixed up or recycled too many times.

And finally there's deep hydrothermal. It has most of the benefits of nuclear, at possibly a similar cost if we scale it up. The great thing is we can re-use a LOT of expertise from the oil and gas sector, which I think will be important for scaling it up quick and to gain political support from worker in that field.

I'm not against nuclear, we should definitely use the expertise we already have to keep developing and building reactors. But I'm not convinced about a large scale global bet on it, and I don't think it's as essential to solving the climate crisis as some would have us believe.

Isn't there a high environmental cost to building PVs? (extraction of required resources from mines - I realise nuclear requires this too). I like green energy a lot, but don't believe they come at zero cost. Also PVs work for half of the day at best, and wind blows sometimes... What we need is all of the above. Diversity in energy.

When most vehicles are electric are need to be charged at night, I'm not sure PV and turbines will cut it.

There is. In order to satisfy the materials need, the world will probably move to strip mining and child labor.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/18/green-energy-dirty-side...

Edit: evidence for terrible ecological impact of renewals. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17928-5

Not sure why you've been down-voted for this.

There's a reason the anti-nuclear people want to talk about radiation and not mining. In terms of pollution from resource extraction nuclear is inconsequential (relative to our other available energy sources) because it requires an infinitesimal amount of stuff you actually need to pull out of the ground. Oil, coal, minerals for solar panels, minerals for batteries, etc. require orders of magnitude more environmentally impacting activity per output because you need so much more of them for the same capacity.

Disclaimer: Wind might be better than nuclear in terms of mining impact. I don't know enough about the supply chain for those materials to make a good estimate and I haven't read any analysis of it. Hydo is obviously the best in terms of mining but it F's up watersheds and river systems for different reasons so it's kind of hard to make a comparison. Geothermal is good too but we can't all live in Iceland.

They're fighting yesterday's battles. We should have been pushing nuclear hard 10 and 20 years ago. Today we have alternatives that are both much cheaper and much quicker.

We need to increase electricity production because of the transition to EVs and we need a way to guarantee supply whenever it is needed.

Renewables should be encouraged but they are not a panacea and I doubt that they are enough as things stand. In addition, most renewables sources have their own downsides so it's not all positives.

The beauty of EVs is you don't need guaranteed supply. If you only have power half the day you can charge during that half the day. Most EVs already support time mode charging and price based charging exists in a few.

For always needed power we can just over provision and for variable power we can just turn it off if it's a particularly calm night. A surprisingly large amount of electricity use can be adjusted by a few hours. For example see how car charging locations are now adding batteries to allow them to avoid high demand charges by time shifting loads.

You need to guarantee a minimum level of daily production because even if an EV can charge at different times of the day it needs to be charged every day. This is in addition to all the other electricity needs.

In the UK solar is not that great because of the gloomy winters (when heating demand is at its peak, and the UK wants to also move away from gas central heating...).

Best bets, IMO are tides and offshore wind. But wind can also be quite variable.

If you add all of this up "just over provision" becomes unrealistic. There needs to be extensive storage capacity but I don't think we're quite there yet. Certainly batteries do not seem a very environmentally friendly option. Even this may bot solve the problem.

All in all I think renewables can minimise the need for nuclear power but cannot replace it, at least for now.

The Greenpeace guy's comments are devastatingly on the mark. This idea faces very serious headwinds, not because of naysayers or greens, but because it its own inherent inferiority, especially compared to where renewables and storage are likely to be by the time any of these could be online.

The thing that gets me is: even if hydrogen and turbines can solve the issue, it's still years and years and years out and may or may not end up being good enough. We've got nuclear as an option RIGHT NOW for a problem we have to solve RIGHT NOW.

I think what frustrates me more than anything are the people that just think/say: "well we have amazing scientists so we'll find a solution to the problem when it becomes an issue" - in response to global warming. And more often than not they're the people saying that scientists warning that global warming is going to be a catastrophe that may be impossible to stop are just overreacting.

Green Peace kind of feels like its policy is being set by one of those folks...

We can build hydrogen turbines and storage caverns (and renewables to make the hydrogen) much faster than we can make nuclear power plants. Electrolysers are being built at gigawatts/year rates now, and factories can be scaled up rapidly.

The speed argument comes down strongly against new nuclear power plants.

A global deployment of nuclear would still need a vast amount of engineering hours to complete. There may be room for optimisim, but that is also true of other technologies. And those other technologies are often simpler. It may well be easier to deploy battery farms with new technology than build an existing nuclear design.

> hydrogen and turbines can solve the issue, it's still years and years and years out and may or may not end up being good enough. We've got nuclear as an option RIGHT NOW for a problem we have to solve RIGHT NOW.

If you look at the past ten years of the UK, we've hugely expanded our wind production, shut down and demolished almost all the coal plants, and ... failed to build a nuclear plant.

Renewables are the technology that's ready. Nuclear is the technology that suffers huge time overruns.

> They have done good work in the past, but perhaps if they had backed nuclear a long time ago we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now?

Yes, clearly our problems are due to the misapplication of Greenpeace's weighty, almost unfathomably formidable influence on public policy.

It's possible that Greenpeace's quote is misinterpretable; it depends on the context it was taken from.

"Greenpeace ... says if the government wants to take a punt on some new technology to tackle climate change it would be better off investing in hydrogen or geothermal power."

(emphasis mine)

Perhaps they consider renewable energy to be existing -- that is, not new -- technology. Here is Greenpeace's renewable energy policy:

https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/renewable-energy/

No, actually it's not. None of these can satisfy the energy needs. We have data[1]. The only technology that displaces cole & natural gas power supplies is nuclear (& hydro technically but that's generally tapped out).

To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions than Greenpeace & he's actually an expert on SMR and nuclear energy policy:

> He says UK SMR's 10-year time-scale for its first plant may prove optimistic. The one constant in the history of the nuclear industry to date is that big new concepts never come in on time and budget, he says.

> He is sceptical[sic] that the factory concept can deliver significant cost savings given the complexity and scale of even a small nuclear plant. Smaller plants will have to meet the same rigorous safety standards as big ones, he points out.

> He says where the concept has been tried elsewhere - in the US and China, for example - there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations.

> Finally, he questions whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready.

> "Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," says Prof Ramana.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

Thanks for the video reference - I'll check that out.

> No, actually it's not.

Sorry, not sure I follow - which part of my comment were you responding to here?

> To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions

Yep - there are some fairly blunt conclusions in a recently co-authored publication[1] of theirs regarding SMR prospects for the UK and elsewhere:

"There is every likelihood that, as with the previous nuclear renaissance, SMRs will be still born with few reactors built. This will mean that public money will again have been wasted on nuclear technology, but, as previously, the main cost will be the opportunity costs of the options not pursued and properly funded because resources have been pre-empted by the nuclear sector."

One perspective of many, but worth considering.

[1] - https://sppga.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/09/sub2...

there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations

Did he mention that the delays and costs are attributable to lobbying by... Greenpeace?

> No, actually it's not. None of these can satisfy the energy needs.

Of course they can, and already do in some countries.

> We have data[1].

Or at least a TED talk. Checking it out...

1:26 "From 36% to 31%": Well, it certainly dropped, but it doesn't look from a quick scan as if that trend is continuing after 2010. Looks like it goes up after 2013. And, indeed if I check the source he used, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, it has figures now up to 2019, which show we're at 37% so the trend has reversed in the right direction. Also, that talk was given in 2016, so why are the figures only up to 2013? I was able to get last year...

Moving on...no, wait, that graph looked a bit weird. That "arrow" was meant to look like a trend line, but it's actually just hovering above two points. What're the rest of the data for, decoration? That's just two cherry picked points! That isn't statistics, it's join-the-dots.

We're less than 2 minutes in and it's not looking good for the "we have data" video.

2:07: "There's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy": ironically, these are carbon neutral, but at any rate, these are not the countries that have the highest CO2 emissions, so why are we trying to suggest it's their fault?

2:44: "Barely makes up half": not true anymore; renewables have overtaken nuclear and as mentioned, have reduced the usage of fossil fuels already.

2:50: "Let's take a closer look in the United States." - This seems a bit like talking about how to get to the Superbowl and suggesting we take a closer look at the Cleveland Browns. Would it not be a good idea to look at countries who're actually good at renewables?

3:15: "People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader": Heh, no, I think of countries and states with >80% electricity from renewables as leaders. California doesn't qualify.

3:21: "What about Germany?": Ah, lets move on from Cleveland and talk about the Detroit Lions...Why is it that the nuclear fanboys always want to talk about Germany, rather than the other countries in Europe who have far more renewable energy.

3:21: "and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.":

Narrator: "They met their targets."

3:36: "Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time": Genuinely baffled by this one. This guy thinks there's only daylight 20% of the time? He thinks that wind turbines are built in areas that only have wind 20% of the time? Is he a complete idiot?

I think I'll stop here. I've just one more point to add: this guy says he's been travelling and researching this himself, yet his actual graphs came from the BP report I mentioned earlier. Why did the data come from an oil company if they compiled it themselves? I get the feeling that the real push for nuclear is simply a stalling tactic being pushed by fossil fuel interests, because they know that if countries simply rolled out wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal etc today, they couldn't possibly compete and they'd be finished.

What do you reckon?

If Greenpeace was full of scientists that understood nuclear power (not weapons), I'd take them seriously.

Instead it's full of people that get their science from tabloid newspapers and facebook.

Greenpeace is full of scientists.

Greenpeace opposes GMOs under the pretense that they are unsafe for human consumption. They may have scientists on staff, but that doesn't make them immune to spreading unscientific opinions.

The bulk of Greenpeace policy is driven by its membership, which is very much not full of scientists I'm afraid.

Is Greenpeace well regarded? As in, when they say things does it tend to influence policy?

I thought they lost their credibility in at least the United States.

Well proliferation is a constant bogey man but sadly far too much politics is involved that seems to insure it occurs more often than not. Just that the world tolerates North Korea should be example enough that politicians would rather look the other way and hope nothing goes boom.

That ten year lead time seems to be excessive for announcing at this time unless its more of a trial balloon - looking to gauge public and political reactions before sinking more money into it. Renewable combined with storage solutions cannot guarantee one hundred percent coverage and I doubt they ever will. However a well connected grid with wind and solar spread across the country as a whole can minimize some of the effects of weather.

Personally I imagine biomass/fuel could be a very attractive option if executed properly (sustainably and locally sourced): * Where you grow the biomass you could create somewhat biodiverse piece of nature * Storage of biomass is cheap * Knowledge and machinery from regular fossil fuels can be (partially) reused * No waste that will need to be looked after for 1000s of years in fear of leakage/terrorism

Unfortunately biomass seems to be looked at similarly as nuclear; just because it could be executed poorly the whole idea is written off..

Biomass's effective power/area is too low.

That was an initial thought of mine about a decade ago. The energy densities don't work out.

At present rates of per-capita energy consumption, population, and rates of plant growth, there is either not enough primary productivity, or too large an environmental impact. Humans simply use immense amounts of energy.

Other sources, lower per-capita usage, and/or fewer people, are the options.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/tag/biofuels/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A102639131768...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings...

Thank you for providing these links backing your claim, so far I haven't been able to disprove the numbers that have been used. I still feel like it could be made competitive somehow, I'll get back to shouting that biofuel is an option when I've found out how :)

I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History and Energy and Civilization (along with many other books on resources). The "Burning Buried Sunshine" paper (Springer link above)describes human energy use relative to net primary production. As of the late 1990s humans wwere accounting for (using directly or indirectly) 20% of all net primary production, with other energy use roughly doubling that.

Whether or not remaining biological systems could survive on just 60% of plant life is a possibility, though the impacts would likely be large. Further growth in human energy consumption would obviously be limited.

I'd come across that independently, Smil also cites it.

Where does the US store highly radioactive waste from the nuclear plants?

In managable containers that you can bury underground?

Has the US actually decided on a permanent nuclear waste repository?

Permanent means they can’t reuse it so

They did but then Nevada had a NIMBY moment for a bit of uninhabited desert so they are back to square one.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-us-...

At one of 121 locations near our nuclear plants. We are not allowed to recycle the waste so it sits there waiting for transport.

> They refuse to back nuclear without offering any reasonable alternative

Use less energy?

The OP asked for reasonable alternatives.

Using less energy, at least on a scale that actually matters, is just never going to happen.

Sure, we can - and should - be striving towards energy efficiency, but without regressing a hundred years or so as a society a meaningful reduction in energy usage is impossible.

Agree. Given the push back green NGO:s and parties have directed towards nuclear energy around the globe it's as if they were funded by the coal industry.

Greenpeace is to the environment what Peta is to pets ( https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peta-taking-pets/ )

Smaller, safer, mass produced (and low start time) reactors is one way that fission power could make a comeback.

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