It's also currently building 35 nuclear reactors around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
It's widely accepted that renewables, efficiency, carbon fees and global legislation are the leading ways to cut emisions.
Nuclear is cool tech, it just seems people are strangely monomaniacal about it and I've never understood why.
Maybe it's like "flying cars" and it caught people's attention at an early age and persists as a idea even when it's not actually as generally useful as decent public transport and city planning.
By whom? The benefit of nuclear power is that it is low on CO2 emissions (unlike fossil fuels) and can produce sufficient amount of power for an industrial society (unlike renewables)
I agree on your first point (and posted some stats that back it up) but not on your second.
Just stop for a moment and ponder, who has a strong financial motive to spread the idea that renewable energy (and carbon fees and all that other stuff) is not a good solution.
Have you noticed that the thing that links nuclear boosters is their opinion on renewables being useless?
Do you mean that renewables (wind, solar, what else?) can't produce enough energy for the industry is just an opinion not a fact? I'm happy to see the data that would refute it.
I think we need to build lots more renewables, and every government in the world has plans to do so, which is a good thing.
It seems a weird stance to take though, since existing nuclear also can't do that and would similarly need built out. Are you sure you're trying to support nuclear? Because that sounds like an argument for the fossil fuel status quo.
But the same trick will not work with renewables to my best knowledge. We can't realistically place enough wind turbines or solar panels, say, in Germany or in France to cover their energy consumption.
So no, we don't agree on that then.
Renewables and related tech is more than capable of powering a modern civilization. In fact it's better at doing that than any other option, including a nuclear heavy mix.
Ironically, the bits that I'm most fuzzy about renewables working well for (because they're not the low hanging fruit that we can immediately do) would also need to be done to move to a mostly nuclear powered civilization since it's basically about electrification of fossil-carbon-based process.
You don't hear much talk about it because absolutely no-one, especially the people who bang on about it on internet forums, thinks there's any chance at all of nuclear being a potential replacement for all fossil fuels, so it would be a waste of time to even draw up such plans.
Luckily, you can just take all the renewable plans drawn up by the actual governments for their actual plans and then just scale up the nuclear element and scale down the renewables to get some idea if it would work.
And it would work, at much greater cost in money, carbon, time and blood than doing it with renewables.
Which people seem to know on some level, but argue about trivialities and gotchas as if they didn't.
If you have any specific concern about what renewables can't do, I'll happily provide some sources to show why you're misinformed, and why a heavily nuclear grid will hit the same issues at a greater cost.
Idk, Europe? Since we're buying those solar panels from China it can't possibly be China right? (Or just say what you mean so we don't have to guess at it)
They almost certainly get their news via a fossil-fuel funded media-political complex that has a long and very well-documented history of lying about climate change, its causes and its solutions.
And the propaganda has worked. Even when they think they're defending nuclear power and being rational most of their talking points don't even make sense except from the point of view of maintaining the fossil fuel status quo.
It's all very weird and fascinating.
So not only does it theoretically produce electricity better using e.g. CO2 in the Brayton cycle, but the heat can be used - possible in conjunction with a turbo air heater - to use for industrial heat.
There are a lot of very lucrative industrial processes that need high temperatures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine#Thermodynamics_o...
Yip, above that temperature metal alloys start corroding quickly.
In Europe wind alone has many times the capacity (see https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/id... )
Production intermittency will solved thanks to continent-scale deployment, storage, smartgrid...
Unlike renewables, fuel-based energy sources like nuclear (and coal/gas) do not reduce the amount of energy available to Earth's biosphere.
This is 100% a feature and not a bug.
> It's not a sustainable practice
The very opposite. If we want to slow down climate change we need exactly zero-sum energy sources that do not release extra heat into the atmosphere.
> if we assume that as a society advances technologically, it requires ever more energy per citizen
Nothing in your claims indicates that is not possible to produce more energy using renewables.
> if we assume that as a society advances technologically, it requires ever more energy per citizen (and no, the various green initiatives have not disproven that assumption
Citation needed.
It's in fact the opposite, the sun radiates too much energy, that's how we get to global warming when not enough gets radiated back into space. Using nuclear adds even more energy, renewables don't.
Coal tops Wind as primary electricity source in Germany presently.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec... https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/coal-ov...
When you close your nuclear reactors, say hello to Coal.
If you look at the actual development of electricity generation in Germany [1], it is very clear that nuclear power (pink) was replaced by renewables (bright green) and not by coal (brown and dark green).
[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...
Of course Germany's ancient nuclear reactors could have been kept running by a bit longer, but the overall effect would not have been dramatic. On the other hand, old GE-designed boiling water reactors suffered a bit of an image problem after three of them melted down in Fukushima.
Furthermore, the effects of air pollution are more evident there so it's easier to sell the tradeoff, IMO(I know almost nothing about China, TBH).
There is enough to be worried about.
The CCP central leadership often responds to public opinion when local leaders are shown to be corrupt/incompetent (or scapegoated for other reasons).
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-so...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Even the old, poorly maintained, shitshow reactor park we have been stuck with has evidently been safer than everything else.
And this was predictable for a while since the deployment was just starting (e.g. most of the deaths are in the construction phase and then the panels generate for decades afterwards.) and the stat is in deaths per TWh.
Note that similar applies to carbon intensity, both pay up front in carbon terms and then work off that debt. Comparing old solar Vs newly installed solar is a similar fudge to nuclear vs solar, and gives misleading conclusions.
Nuclear is much better than coal, but it's hard to find a positive comparison to modern renewables without really cherry picking old data.
Clicked one link, 2012 data, another has 2012 in the URL. A third, published in 2018 is using the 2012 data, I think I've made my point.
More up to date:
I've seen that summary. I'm sceptical:
Their references (2007,2016) do exclude some significant accidents and do not account well for total accumulated deaths.
I have not researched any better sources myself, however.
The failure of just a single dam - the Banqiao in China in 1975 - killed more than 150,000 people.
Way more than all the deaths from nuclear power, ever.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/Typhoon-Nina-Banqiao-dam-fa...
Okay, let's look at Wikipedia[1]. Random example. Val Di Stava Dam Italy 1985, 268 fatalities. Many, many more than were killed directly by Fukushima, but fewer than were killed by the stress of evacuation.
Read the list. More than one dam failed, but the fatalities are accepted fatalistically and shrugged off. It seems like there is a double standard here.
Disclosure: I think that as of 2019 nuclear is uneconomic and not worth building, but if the choice is between nuclear and fossil fuels, nuclear wins hands down in safety terms.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...
Anyway I don't think it makes sense to compare hydro where the risk dynamics are simple, to nuclear where they are complex and require great long-term competency to mitigate.
And this sort of ordeal may be way more of a concern with a nuke plant.
In particular Fukushima was in a stupid place, engineers were well aware of the the many 100s of years of experience with earthquakes in the ring of fire and calculated that a large expensive wall would be required to protect plant. The sensible place to put the plant was in a different prefecture.
Politics intruded, the plant was put in a stupid place, and the expensive wall was shrunk.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-58026038
They leak was minor and not a risk, but they fact that they didn't follow best practices speaks volumes.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem...
You cannot have a massively expensive and centralized energy source without having huge political, military (!) and economical implications. And risks of corruption and coverups.
There is no "intrusion". This is an intrinsic problem of such technology.
The way to substantiate this is to look at data because otherwise it would lead to unnecessary scaremongering, precisely the things holding nuclear energy back amongst other reasons (cost, etc.)
Put it in another context with far greater consequences than Fukushima disaster - the current Coronavirus pandemic and possibility of links to Wuhan Lab, one accident and it shut down the world and caused millions of deaths. Far more than all nuclear tragedies combined. Not to mention, the economic toll and far reaching consequences of the society.
Kind of boggles my mind why the society doesn't look at Level 5 bio labs in the same exact or more serious way than Nuclear power plants. Even if Wuhan lab hypothesis is incorrect, we should have more resources and focus on how to make these GoF studies/Level 5 labs secure, and essentially as safe as nuclear power plants or better. Public awareness just isn't there.
Origins of Coronavirus should be investigated with 100x more rigor than 6 people touring the facility from WHO for 3 days only to see presumably a massive coverup.
Also, it's a fallacy to think the CPC simply ignores popular sentiment. Fukushima had as much of an impact in China as it did in Japan - all new plants were paused (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/16/china.nuclea...) and it may have factored into the decision to go all-in on solar and wind power over the past decade instead.
That's what I meant by:
> While China isn’t going to face similar voter pressure, one accident like Fukushima could make things really chaotic quickly.
Also nuclear is a brittle technology, disrupt society (refugee-crisis or a economic crisis) and the technology decays and degrades fast.
This applies to every electricity generation method except small-scale hydro, and maybe small pockets of coal.
Everything else needs advanced materials manufacturing - high-tech steels, fluids and ceramics for oil drilling and fracking, rare earth mining for magnets for wind turbines, all kinds of crazy stuff for PV.
Small-scale hydro and small-scale coal can't support society.
China is a technocratic autocracy. Although they rely on the approval of the masses, they can plan long term, instead from election to election. And they calculate whether it's worth or not to manipulate the public opinion on certain topics.
I think French nuclear energy companies profited off that handsomely.
It's largely a secular trend in most of the world as nuclear energy usage has continued to fall, mostly for financial reasons.
Germany was going to switch to renewables? Yeah, haha, good one.
There's this myth that Germany started burning more coal in response to the nuclear shut down. That kind of never happened. Coal proportion in Germany has been slowly shrinking for years, just like in most of the rest of the world. Peak coal was around the same time Fukushima happened. It actually dropped almost as fast as nuclear in the years after: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
The only thing other than renewables that has had any growth in Germany is gas. But it's not nearly as much as the amount of coal and nuclear that disappeared from the market. The real story is that the energy market has nearly doubled in 20 years in Germany. Fossil fueled plants combined are now only about 40% of that. With coal gone and the overall market continuing to grow, that will drop to single digit percentages pretty soon. Like nuclear in Germany today.
The French nuclear market is slowly shrinking as well. They too are shifting to renewables and are slowly shutting down aging nuclear plants from last century. They are still building a few new plants of course but it does not compensate for the lost capacity. A lot of aging plants are reaching their end of life in the next decades. Most of them will not be replaced probably. And with decades long planning cycles, you can kind of tell by noticing that plans for those are simply not being conceived. Just not a thing. Most ongoing nuclear construction in Europe is many years late, billions over budget, and simply the result of planning cycles that started in decades ago.
Up until Fukushima there were still new plants being considered/pondered/dreamed off (those plans looked increasingly less likely to ever happen). 2011 was the year when renewables became the one and only answer to future proofing Germany's energy needs.
Nuclear became part of the problem instead of the solution. No more new plants was an easy and extremely popular decision across the political spectrum. Which immediately raised the sensible question what to do with the remaining old ones. Which was promptly answered by "lets just get this over with and move on with renewables". There only was around 16GW of nuclear capacity at the time, 8 of which is gone by now. The rest is going in the next few years. It wasn't that big of a deal replacing one expensive source of energy with another that wasn't that cheap either (at the time).
Germany was not ready to do that with coal twelve years ago because at the time it was still most of its energy generation so it simply couldn't. That simply isn't true anymore. Renewables are now cheaper and coal is now the expensive option in the market. Once coal is gone, the next obvious target will be gas and oil plants (around 4% of the market).
Here's some bad news: the albedo effect of coal smoke is supressing global warming by about 1,5°C - about half of the warming to date.
We don't just have to shutdown coal: we have to capture a lot of the 2000 GT already in the atmosphere.
Which is why all the IPPC projects assume enourmous CCS.
Evaporate more water using waste heat from nuclear plants, industrial plants, or just by building huge vertical pipes that use convection to push warm damp air a kilometer up. Produce more clouds!
This all can be done without burning (additional) carbon to power it.
Under no circumstances is burning more carbon helpful.
In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 7.9% of the gridpower in 2019).
The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 11 years behind schedule, it will cost at least 19 billion € (initial budget: 3.7 billion ).
The long term plan was to next make a breeding version of the reactor and use thorium directly but development was cancelled.
Those using government funds can label it as "military research" or something similar and then they're looking at a least a few decades of no-one asking them where the money went and why.
> In the US and other western countries it is mostly by commercial companies
> this requires decades long planning and commercial companies are unable to work unless they get quick results.
and yet that didn't stop SpaceX from leapfrogging entire nation-states in rocket technology, being the first to develop fully reusable rockets that land themselves, and as a result, are by far the cheapest option for launching things like commercial satellites.
I don't see why commercial companies can't accomplish similar things in the nuclear power space.
There are western startups working on thorium powered molten salt reactors, see this 2019 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps8oi_HY35E, from another comment in this thread [1].
Maybe you should head over to the US Department of Energy website and take a look [1], [2].
Nuclear research is nice, but doesn't help one bit compared to building reactors even with 50-year-old tech.
This thorium experimental reactor in China, is just that, an experimental one. If everything goes well, they'll have a commercial version in 2030, but it's way to early to estimate how likely this is.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2020/10/29/the-futur...
[1] http://thebigpicturemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/...
from [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 ?