The author also wrote "The Wretched Atom" and is clearly nuclear-phobic.
Nuclear power is the only hope to stop climate change.
Nuclear power is the only hope to stop climate change.
Not only is nuclear power clean, it's two orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels and on-par with wind and solar (it's considerably safer than rooftop solar, in fact). And that is including Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Further, while nuclear is expensive, Small Modular Reactor designs are safer, smaller, simpler, and faster to build. We should be building them now if only to make sure we have the experience if we need to scale them up quickly.
Yes, nuclear waste has to be dealt with, but there's very little of it and we already have to deal with it.
Ignoring nuclear and praying for a breakthrough solution for the renewable base load problem is tremendously risky and there's virtually no upside.
Don't we have Geiger counter that can measure the amount of radiation emanating from nuclear power plants, including Chernobyl?
The cover-up of Chernobyl lasted barely days.
> with no good estimate of the indirect deaths and illness from exposure.
Only a multitude of studies. The current consensus in the scientific community is that somewhere around 20,000-30,000 total deaths attributable to Chernobyl have or will occur.
A little nuclear waste goes a long way. If you have any concrete, practical suggestions for ways to deal with it, the world needs you. Summarizing them here will make me an advocate.
I see your point, but it also doesn't go a long way. It's very dense and solid, and tends to stay put as far as wastes go.
> If you have any concrete, practical suggestions for ways to deal with it, the world needs you. Summarizing them here will make me an advocate.
This is wrong for a couple of reasons:
1. We already know how to deal with nuclear waste: [deep geological repository][0].
2. Moreover, we can continue to safely manage nuclear waste above ground for a very long time. Far longer than we can continue fossil fuel pollution. And this worst-case solution is still far, far, far safer than fossil fuels.
If skeptics aren't convinced, I don't think their skepticism is founded in reason.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
(To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)
It's important to finance renewables research and there's a bright future for them but, right now, nuclear is the best hope for mostly clean energy with a lot less negative environment impact than Coal and Fossil Fuel.
I am pro-nuclear, but would like to actually see how an equal amount of resources would lead to what power and when to give arguments like this teeth or debunk them.
See https://youtu.be/KC7YD98HixM. It does cost more to generate nuclear power but it’s also the only viable clean and “firm” (turn on and off based on demand) type of power generation available to us.
Demand will also follow supply, setting pricing to availability will (and has) significantly alter usage patterns.
Also, having too much peak power and not enough baseline power isn't a today problem and won't be until solar/wind sources are at a much larger scale. Rolling industrial blackouts (or price spikes) in the middle of the night might become a thing, but still.. meh?
Cost isn't the only dimension, but there is the question "how do we best utilize our available resources?" and we might be able to better find the best allocation if we had a nice comparison about the cost/reward of sinking those resources into wind, solar, or nuclear. We need all of them, but there is certainly a tradeoff between how much we put towards each.
In the summer months peak usage is near peak solar generation, and usage is as much as 60% higher than minimum daily usage. With the rise of electric cars, a whole lot of usage will be able to be scheduled for times of excess.
There is a lot of current room for renewables to displace carbon. There will probably always be some fossil fuel capacity for peaking plants and battery systems are already being deployed in places.
The point at which we have too many renewables and a gap in generation is a long time off, and possibly with battery systems and demand shifting will never happen. It seems like the time to solve that problem will be measured in decades, there's no need to say renewables aren't a solution now when they can solve a huge portion of the problem starting immediately.
For the environmental groups themselves, this is a rather complex topic since they will be forced to embrace something they’ve vilified for several generations.
Anyways I hope there’s a stronger push for nuclear but I’m not counting on it. There’s no subsidies/incentives in the BBB plan, no major political player seems to be embracing nuclear etc
People who take a lot of stock in these types of predictions generally cannot see the value of economic growth and try to save the world by enforcing their own set of puritanical environmental restrictions.
Malthus [1] was of opinion that humanity growth/wellbeing is bound to be curbed by wars/famines due to limits of resources.
He was mostly correct up until industrial revolution.
There are, though, people who still subscribe to Malthus idea of impending doom.
I just see generalized policies of degrowth and basically destruction of the middle-class (whatever that means) everywhere in the western world:
- Local lockdowns rather than closing borders in time for the virus
- Increased tolerance of petty crime to make the cities as inhabitable as possible
- Very incompetent energy policies that will make energy skyrocket in price
- Policies and incentives making it harder and harder to be able to afford a car.
- Deindustrialization (that's been going on for a while) and no effort to reverse it.
- Basically no research or very bad research on basic health improvement treatments that don't involve medication.
And small things like that adding up one by one. Would be not so strange if different countries were failing in different ways, but seems strange to see so many countries consistently "failing" in the same way.