Nuclear Energy Will Not Be the Solution to Climate Change

> But rather than placing unfounded faith in the ability of nuclear power to save the planet, we need to focus on the real threat: the changing climate. And we need strong government support of noncarbon-emitting energy technologies that are ready to be deployed today, not ten or 20 years from now, because we have run out of time. We cannot wait a minute longer.

So, are those technologies actually ready to go? Or is there a different article about why those technologies are not immediately up to the challenge of battling climate change?

Renewables will doubtless play an important role, but there are well-known reasons that they are not a panacea, such as the intermittency and storage issues.

Beware of thinkpieces that talk about how good or bad X is without considering X relative to the alternatives. I forget where I read it first, but I recall some smart folks consider this to be the most common and elementary fallacy in policy deliberation.

We are currently building new fossil fueled power plants all over the world, and in some cases as an response to closing down nuclear plants. If the argument is that nuclear power plants take too long to be an effective solution to climate change, building new fossil fueled power plants can't be the alternative.

Rather than advocating against new nuclear power plants, start by advocating a complete stop against new fossil fuel power plants. As long we continue with renewing and expanding the capacity for fossil fueled energy, all the discussion about nuclear in the context of climate change becomes silly.

I'm sorry, but duh? Is this controversial? Solar, wind and batteries are all now in the steep part of an S-curve and fundamentally have far stronger economics behind them on Earth for the foreseeable future. They don't require special military risk materials or restrictions, the core materials are widely available and cheap, they have massive multiple use, both centralized and highly decentralized usage cases, capability for amortization across a huge range of industries as well as residential, etc etc etc. Just like we've seen so many times before, it is unlikely to even matter if other solutions have certain strengths in certain cases: sheer scaling leading to enormous R&D, capital investment and refining of implementations trumps somewhat better features nearly every time. Same reason hydrogen is total dead end, debates about its merits frankly don't even matter in the same way debates about POWER/PowerPC or MIPS or Alpha or whatever ISA's merits vs x86 didn't particularly matter. Even thermonuclear fusion is probably just plain too late at this point to have any critical impact on AGW.

Now, I strongly support both nuclear fission and fusion continuing to get development and investment, even if it needs to be government to do it. Fission has a lot of other non-energy very important use cases like medical or utility isotope mass production for which net energy production is a nice cherry on top. We'll also need nuclear power longer term for outer solar system exploration and development. Even in terms of pure power production, modular micronuclear could have a valuable role to play at latitudes near the poles or exotic situations.

But there shouldn't be any illusions about where the train in general is going. Solar and wind resources are so abundant they can cover all energy needs, storage and grid improvements are massively efficient and help everything anyway, and they've all got the market behind them. Tipping point passed awhile ago. That's that.

Incredible that this goes through slow and expensive builds yet fails to even mention the much better recent builds of the Hualong One (China), the VVER (Russia/various), and the APR-1400 (Korea/UAE) models of reactors. Who the heck edited this!?

I'm tired of reading articles that say X is not the solution. Let researchers do research and find contributions that can avert disaster. It's not like the physicists working in nuclear can effectively be redirected to work on solar, wind, etc.

Nuclear energy requires very little material handling to build and run.

There will always be a use case for dense energy.

California can import boutique sun grown energy from the deserts just fine. Germany can import Danish wind power. But some nations that would directly have to trade limited arable land for power and/or who do not have wide enough land area (or good enough relations with their neighbors) or grid capacity to roll out solar or wind will likely find that dropping in nuclear to replace fossil fuels is the most cost effective solution.

Pretending that everyone is going to magically go to solar and wind and that hydro and nuclear will not at a bare minimum continue to exist for specific niches is foolish.

I always feel like people that write these articles don't understand that energy pricing is the most regressive tax ever created. The world (read not US only) needs extremely cheap environmentally sound energy production far in excess of current capacity. Specifically China, India, Africa all need vastly more energy production to bring up their standard of living. Even the US would be greatly improved by vastly cheaper energy.

Arguing against nuclear from the future mix of energy seems like it misses the boat global energy requirements and total environmental impact.

I would like mention a fundamental problem with the state of our current economy. The 2008 bailout killed all perceived risk of holding onto money. This resulted in extremely cautious saving behavior in corporations. These companies are looking for the next investment. They don't care what it is.

If corporations are lenders then the rest of the economy must become borrowers. We don't want citizens to take that burden so the government takes the debt on.

What's the macroeconomic function of saving? It's to make surplus resources available that can be used for investments. What those investments are doesn't really matter but here is an amazing opportunity: You can save the economy by fighting climate change. It's not one or the other, the second one directly leads to the first one.

So, instead of letting the government take on debt we have to ask ourselves: "What do we have to do so that green investments become attractive to private companies?" Specifically, companies should be able to fund and build nuclear reactors to be able to profit off of them without government support (government insurance just means your tech isn't safe enough). If this is not possible (I hope it is possible) then we should look elsewhere.

Unfortunately How to write a FUD article on Nuclear,

1. "we don't know if the reactors will save carbon over lifetime".

Surely this is better than strip-mining most of the ocean and asia for rare-earth metals for circuitry and/or batteries. (Li-ion ones will be needed at a local (and hyper-local) level to store supply/demand fluctuations from renewables).

2. "boogey man". This used to be something like "Nixon backed this over thorium-salt", or "something, something, nuclear-weapons". Here it's "big bill" himself.

The fact the gates foundation is investing in something should make the product be seen as common-sense, e.g. "in the future we need clean water". (And they want to be in a position to sell it back to you for nominal profit).

3. Bringing up long lead times.

Lets be honest a huge amount of this is public opinion/pressure and political manoeuvring. Nuclear as a word has all of the cold war rhetoric (from all sides) attached to it. If governments wanted Fission plants built within a decade it would happen. As it stands globally many factors are squeezing Nuclear construction projects due to their admittedly _very high_ up-front costs compared to technologies such as Wind.

The alternatives to starting this now and having it available in 10 years are, realistically, more coal plants. This is until renewables and energy storage take the next quantum step.

Wind, sun, wave and other renewables are only useful for non-baseline energy production until we invest in huge (normally gravity derived) batteries, and these take a long time to plan/construct/build infrastructure for.

4. Safety

Frankly I've always viewed this as a mute point. Had the Fukishima plant been in a country which doesn't have regular earthquakes/tsunamis it would still be 'just working'. Why the accident here should mean a plant in the lowlands of Germany (arbitrary geo-location) should close is entirely a political/posturing decision and not one based on science.

5. Not this article, but people mix the fusion/fission work into a mess.

Fusion has been bigger on promise than it's delivered so-far. But frankly this is a no-brainer small annual investment given the potential cost/benefit ratios for clean power, and frankly how close we now are.

Fission plants unfortunately do have nuclear waste. But then so do dead solar cells, dead lithium batteries, aged coal plants. There is nothing for free. But, when the nuclear waste can be captured in nice small drums and put at the bottom of a disused mine-shaft and sealed off from the environment isn't this the same ethos as carbon-(re-)capture on steroids?

It probably doesn't hurt much to start building a couple of nuclear plants and to keep existing ones running a while longer. But it's pretty clear that renewables and storage have won and we should put most of our money behind them.

BS.

We need carbon extraction plants and Nuclear power to reverse the changes we are making to the planet.

Is this more covert fossil fuel advocacy to forestall solutions? We should do any and everything.

There are still boomer zombies who hold a weekly anti-nuclear protest in Berkeley. Boomers are notably the biggest generation ever. Public opinion is going to be anti-nuclear until they’re dead and buried. You can’t fix it!

Rather than go into a long rant about how this is bullshit FUD, I’ll just remind everyone that the founding donation to Friends of the Earth (anti-nuclear NGO) was made by Robert Orville Anderson, an oil baron.