(I was David's Editor for "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air". There's been quite a bit of interest in updating the book, but there are obvious difficulties. If have suggestions, let me know. Niall Mansfield sewtha-2.0@uit.co.uk )
Now add: (1.) electrification of freight transport, (2.) tackling the (relatively) quick wins in industry electrification, and (3.) carbon capture, and one gets to 75% emissions reduction with less than one percent of cost increase and zero behavioural changes (such as eating less meat or flying less often) are required.
I can't find any other combination in this calculator that leaves nature so untouched, requires so little land use, requires no behaviour adjustment, or is so cheap while still reducing emissions meaningfully. (Well, geothermal is nearly as good but then its maximum potential is only a small percentage of energy demand and it's also a bit more expensive per Joule.)
Probably the most unrealistic part is public support for the choice, but in a perfect world? Would it be this simple?!
Carbon capture and less than one percent cost increase looks suspect to me
Without any carbon capture, you're still at 61% emissions reduction and the cost actually decreases by 0.8% from today rather than increasing by 0.6%. If you get to 61% with the only change being "build nuclear and make use of it" (no lifestyle changes, no cost changes, no landuse changes), that would be amazing.
Hence my main question is about the nuclear aspect. The argument against nuclear is usually that it's super scary and dangerous (easy enough to disprove that with numbers, so long as you're not talking to someone from germany) and the fallback argument is that it's so expensive now that PV+wind became so much cheaper. This calculator seems to show the opposite of that latter argument (when looking purely at price).
There is new research in nuclear which if successful would bring costs down but it’s hard to see how maxing out on nuclear reduces average costs.
Edit: I see now. The original data is at least over 5 years old, at which point it’s possible that wind/solar may still have been more expensive than nuclear.
Editx2: The original book on which the original site is based was published in 2008/2009.
It’s not clear how much of the data on this new site has been updated.
2017 known supply is enough for 130 years at current usage (supplying about 10% of global energy). Each doubling of production halves the peak timeline. Basically no one expects discovery to outpace usage.
So, at best, nuclear is a stop gap and part of a different long term solution. Which could be fine! But the extremely low LCOE and fast build time for modern renewables suggests that nuclear is simply losing the race for relevance.
The exponentially decreasing cost curve is the part that I think people haven't actually internalized. The arguments on the pro-nuclear side are pretty much the same as they were ten years ago. (right down to 'we'll have thorium in ten years!') But things are very different now: It's like arguing for large scale investment in punch-card sorting machines circe 1960. Yes, the punch-card sorting machines can be used to manage all your bank data, but the digital processing are getting exponentially better with time and have been actually better for a couple years. But the proponents of punch card sorting machines haven't internalized the message yet.
What you think is an exponential curve is actually the left side of a sigmoid.
Uranium demand is declining, there has been almost no Uranium prosection in the last decades; Therefore it's no wonder reserves are diminishing. If demand picks up, prospecting will renew, and a lot more uranium will be discovered. This is not accounting for thorium reserves, which have never been seriously prospected.
Because xenon is the most common fission product, and it's a gas, the reaction must be stopped before all fuel is used, as otherwise the solid fuel pellets would crack. If you assume 3% enriched uranium (U-235) and 97% depleted uranium (U-238) (a typical fuel load), the fuel pellets are unusable after about 1/3 of enriched uranium is spent. So the fuel is removed and "thrown away" while it still has 2% U-235 in it.
Switching to liquid fuel reactors assuming no other changes would immediately increase supply 3 times (because xenon simply bubbles out). Switching to liquid fuel breeder reactors ~ 100 times. Switching to breeders based on thorium - around 1000 to 10000 times.
Peak uranium is only a problem because we're using a very inefficient nuclear reactor technology - water reactors. Why? Because they were chosen by the military and the technology/know-how was already there. Efficiency was really low on the military's list of priorities.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
The same point was made in the Hot Air book as well [2]
[2] https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml
Since this is roughly the remaining lifetime of the Sun, there's a very strong argument to consider nuclear fission breeder reactors just as renewable as the solar-derived energies (wind, solar, hydro, biofuel)
We need solutions that pay back as fast as possible, not stuff that will go neutral in 20 years.
Current nuclear supplies 10% of global ELECTRICAL energy, not total energy. If you scale burner reactors to supply the 18 TW of primary energy demand the world uses, projected cheap uranium runs out rather quickly.
Niall - great to see you here. My mind goes towards helping others with "powers of 10 math" about climate. SWITHA for me embodied this concept of "how to think about the climate" more than anything.
That type of thinking is needed more now than ever. Even that line "2 billion years of energy reserves", so powerful.