We really should build more Nuclear.
Nuclear is the real clean energy.
Nuclear is the real clean energy.
“Stabilising the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow. It meets no technical or operational need that these low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper, and faster."
"The report estimates that the average construction time for reactors worldwide was ten years, significantly longer than the World Nuclear Association’s estimated construction time of between five and eight years. Nuclear reactors are also slow to start and a number have closed, with nine units closing over 2018 and a further five units expected to close over 2019."
"The report also states that nuclear power is more expensive than renewables. Nuclear energy costs around $112-189 per megawatt hour (MWh) compared to $26-56MWh for onshore wind and $36-44MWh for solar power. Levelised cost estimates for solar and wind also dropped by 88% and 69% respectively, while they increased by 23% for nuclear power."
https://www.power-technology.com/news/nuclear-energy-report-...
"All power plants, coal, gas and nuclear, have a finite life beyond which it is not economically feasible to operate them. Generally speaking, early nuclear plants were designed for a life of about 30 years, though with refurbishment, some have proved capable of continuing well beyond this. Newer plants are designed for a 40 to 60 year operating life. At the end of the life of any power plant, it needs to be decommissioned, cleaned up and demolished so that the site is made available for other uses."[1]
I was actually really pro nuclear power until I started reading about how they're starting to be outclassed by wind and solar and are just too slow to build to meet fossil fuel reduction targets in time, especially those set for 2030 considering their ~10 year build times. I still think it's fine if anyone wants to pursue building new plants, it just seems like less people are willing to fund new ones because of these issues.
But I agree there have been some that have been shut down purely for political reasons or due to pressure from certain green activists (I don't think there's a green hivemind and I've seen many people concerned about climate change support nuclear power and think it's quite safe, especially considering the alternative of climate disaster), and those should not have been shut down.
[1]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Throughout the US and Europe, all recent attempts at building new nuclear have suffered from massive construction failure. Not from regulatory burdens, but from just building what was designed by engineers. Vogtle, Summer, Flamanville, Hinkley, and Olkiluoto have been huge disappointments.
France's only hope for new nuclear to replace their aging fleet is now small modular reactors, a technology that in the past has been rejected foe being too costly since the costs are supposed to go down with larger reactors, not smaller.
If we get new nuclear, it will either be because Russia builds it (and there's no evidence that Russia could take a US construction crew and get a completed project), or because we try a new form of nuclear.
I think it's time to realize that nuclear technology does not fit our current skill set. And that wind, solar, and storage have leapfrogged nuclear in terms of advanced technology.
So lobby your senator and congressperson to create and pass legislation enabling nuclear (changing radiation limits to be scientifically based, and banning NIMBY lawsuits, for example), and to fast-track the whole approvals process. (Type-approval of factory-made designs, for example. And automatic approval of coal furnace replacement with type-approved reactors.)
If you’re suggesting hydro, wind and solar are not clean energy though I think you need to expand on that.
Plus, fusion likely has the same kind of practical, economic limitations (huge upfront capital cost and long build time) that make fission hard to justify in an environment of small, cheap fossil fuel burners and wind/solar units.
That said the cheapest fusion power we'll ever have access to will always be solar power because the capital costs of building our solar system's sun are already well and easily sunk/amortized.
I'll add that as well as reaching Qtotal > 500, we need continuous operating life to be of the order of 10 million seconds, "only" 13 orders of magnitude away. Not going to happen in 2 years, or 5 years, or 40 years.
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The mininum viable Qplasma would be in the neighborhood of 100.[1] Fusion may get competitive for electricity generation with a Qtotal > 500.[2]
1. Sabine Hossenfelder, How Close Is Nuclear Fusion?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&t=8s
2. Nicholas Hawker, A simplified economic model for inertial fusion, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33040650/
Nuclear is finite but so is coal and oil and we are nowhere close of running out of it. New reserves will be discovered once there's demand. And used fuel can be recycled in breeder reactors.
If we had scaled up on nuclear, there's no way every reactor would have had the best engineers, best contractors, best governance -- there would certainly be some that cut corners or got built on a fault line or vulnerable to some other unpredictable disaster or terrorist attack.
California's last nuclear plant is almost done. Environmentalists are against nuclear and so it's difficult to build more.
In all the world, I believe only about 100 nuclear plants are even planned. Most of which are in China.
Looks to be about 1,000 new coal plants being built or at least planned. Most of which are in China. Which will no doubt operate for decades.
Obviously North America is more interested in Solar, Wind, and Natural Gas. Eventually we will get to gridscale power storage. Suddenly it'll be problem solved.
Check out the autopsy of VC Summer's failure, or the delays at Vogtle, and you won't find any environmentalists to blame. At least I haven't been able to find any hint of that, and if it were possible to blame environmentalists, I would think that the contractor and utility would be screaming it.
We have already kickstarted positive feedback loops like thawing of the tundra, reduced albedo due to smaller ice sheets, ... . We actually need to go carbon negative for a while to offset those. The technology you mention surely will help greatly in avoiding speeding things up, but they won't take us back to preindustrial levels alone.