Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/educational-magazin...

The late 1960s through 1980s saw a shift in the antinuclear movement toward protesting the development of nuclear power as an energy source. The antinuclear movement succeeded in virtually halting the governments' development of nuclear power.

Seems the success is very clearly visible both environmentally and economically?

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190067/carbon-intensity... [2] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/co2...

>It works so "well" that the French taxpayer will have to pay the UK so they can deliver their guaranteed energy prices the over-due and over budget reactor they desperately try to finish will generate.

Pretty much the entirety of the problems we've had with the EPR program has to do stopping building nuclear power plants for decades and losing the associated skill-set and industrial base.

this missing capacity is less the usual slowdown of reactors because of the hot rivers (which by the way is done for environmental and not technical concern) and maintenances process, than a consequence of a previous nuclear plant closing (for political/electoral reasons). another consequence of this missing plant was to reopen two charcoal power plant _this_winter_.

a large part of the EPR slowdown in fr is due to security concern that changed while the project was already started, china EPRs which was similar but a lot less constrained was done in time.

on the price: 25% of the energy produced by nuclear in fr is sold under the market price to private retailers because of anti-monopolistic EU laws and stupidity of our governement. the electricity price in EU is usualy indexed on the worst gaz plant available, with the actual price of gaz raising and all of the 25% already acquired, a lot of them are just closing.

given those constrains, yes this model works more than well...

the project to close "50%" (in fact 15 reactors) until 2030 is another political subject which will probably never become a reality given that most renewable alternatives projects end up being blocked/hated everywhere.

funny fact: replacing ALL the current transport and electric energy supply in fr by wind turbines has been evaluated to require one of the most efficient available turbine for each km² on ALL the french territory...

This is a little pessimistic: these numbers rely on current proven reserves without reprocessing. Of course, if you want to use a bunch more uranium, prices will go up and the number of proven reserves will increase. This won't necessarily take a massive price swing-- heck, even at current prices new reserves will continue to be found.

> Then the price will skyrocket, and nuclear is already more expensive than renewables.

Fuel is a negligible portion of the cost of nuclear. You could triple the cost of fuel without materially impacting the operating costs of a reactor, and the overall costs of nuclear energy are not dominated by operating costs, but instead capital costs.

And, we're leaving out that reprocessing fuel is possible and proven (though there are proliferation concerns0.

This has already been addressed. Natural uranium can be gathered from seawater at about 2 to 5x the current cost. Considering how small fuel costs are in nuclear, that isn't much of a problem. And the amount available from all the world's oceans is orders of magnitude greater than that available from terrestrial mines. Even if we start extracting vast quantities from seawater some believe that more will be leached from rock, renewing the supply.

https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac...

https://cna.ca/2016/07/27/theres-uranium-seawater-renewable/

"The advances by PNNL and ORNL have reduced the cost of extraction by a factor of four in just 5 years, but the cost is still about $200/lb compared to traditional uranium mining which ranges between $10 and $120/lb."

Nothing happened. The reactor just sat there peacefully doing nothing, because it was a fast neutron reactor, the EBR-2.

> they're more dangerous and still experimental

They were neither in 1986. But sure, let's build more "grid storage", which isn't even experimental.

This isn't a reason to not do it. That gives us 40 years to figure out alternative processing patterns or alternative energy production.

The fire at the lithium battery station would burn out after a while, and the area repopulated very soon.

The nuclear waste land like Chernobyl is uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.

Japan: in the past they invested in nuclear power, now they don't want it anymore BUT need gridpower and have no other way to obtain it than to (reluctantly) restart some reactors.

Instead of worrying about the loss off coolant, the operators worried about the reactor "going solid", which is slang for "no steam bubble is left in the primary coolant circuit". This made sense on the small Navy reactors they were trained on, but on the large land based ones. Arguably, it never made sense to take a submarine engine and turn it into a power plant.

The state has ~150 million dead trees ready to ignite, and needs to reduce the size of its forests by roughly the size of Maine in order to get back to a safer fire risk. That is just irresponsible forest management.

When you are in that situation, needing to run power lines across a tinderbox that should have never been allowed to exist, then you're not going to be able to have reliable power no matter the bonus scandal.

"PG&E paid top execs $17 million in bonuses from 2012 to 2017"

You really think 17 million would have made a difference? Is that enough money to even bury 1 mile of transmission lines at Californian's exorbitant infrastructure cost?

3x the cost (5-7x if you take out the batteries) with a small chance of catastrophe doesnt really add up any more unless the country is trying to maintain a nuclear industry for military purposes.

Say it's a cold cloudy day with no wind and it's been so for a week. You'll need the capacity of that coal/nuclear plant those days. And let's say every other day of the year solar and wind make enough power. So who pays the extremely high fixed cost of the nuclear and coal plant so it's available that one week you need it? No one wants to, so they're shutting them down. The power company could still be paying the bond for the plant, but ultimately that's the consumer's money. Then, surprise, you end up with blackouts or you pay for new natural gas plants to be built. Prices and fragility go up.

It's likely cheaper to make demand more flexible, but that has a cost too.

You can keep big gas plants around in a high intermittent grid and fire them up 10% of the time. The way we view LCOE right now, those plants would be insanely expensive while wind/solar would be super cheap. But we would still pay for the backup capacity. This kind of system cost is what matters dramatically more than LCOE.

Take the simplest case and ignore CO2 and carbon tax for now. The base power stations have to be sufficient to supply the whole power grid when the wind doesn't blow, and the sun doesn't shine. Ok, so now imagine what happens if we simply remove all the solar panels and all the wind turbines. What happens? Nothing happens. The grid still works normally. In other words the cost of all those windmills, solar panels, their construction, their maintenance, etc, it is all extra cost that the consumer has to pay somehow.

So isn't the magic market supposed to fix all this? Why doesn't market dynamics take care of this? Because government regulation doesn't allow fixed power plants to charge a fixed yearly fee. If the government did allow this then the market would indeed price everything correctly.

Now if you add a carbon tax, having a number of windmills on the side does eventually become advantageous, but never compared to non-intermittent sources of renewable power like hydro or nuclear which could also charge this fixed yearly fee.

But all those materials are 100% recyclable as raw matters the next week after the wind turbines close.

With nuclear, you can't touch those iron an concrete in generations. And we need to include in our calculus the two concrete sarcophagous that were required in Chernobyl also. We will be pouring tons of concrete for a lot of time in that place.

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

Basically, in his description this is entirely due to the environmental movement. Any time a nuclear plant gets planned the green groups move in a mountain of lawyers and lock down the process for years and years. The costs this adds to the projects are staggering and it is solely because of this that nuclear power can't be built in the US. In Europe, people have no problem building nuclear cheaply and on time.

More seriously, I've not been there for some years now so I'm somewhat out of touch, but at one point I was working in the industry (but not employed by any French organization, EDF, etc.), nevertheless I had a reasonable overview of what the French were doing as far as power generation was concerned.

Everyone who I met almost to a person including my nontechnical aunt and uncle who lived in Paris, were pro nuclear power. They saw it as a cheap source of power and also it represented engineering excellence and prowess for France.

I'm guessing, but perhaps the main reason for this collective view stems from de Gaulle's early entry into both military and nuclear power immediately after WWII - from early 1946 onward, thus nuclear power was well established in the the halcyon days of the 1950s before worldwide controversy broke out over the nuclear industry. There's also France's rebuilding phase after WWII, where modernist ideas took hold more strongly there than in many other countries. That attitude probably smoothed the way.

Then there's that French Gaullism (which I admire but it's no fun being on the pointed end of it), which basically says 'we're doing it our way and to hell with the rest of you'. Perhaps that attitude has dissipated somewhat by now (at least as far as the nuclear industry is concerned). Flamanville, though, does seem to be overly uncharacteristic when compared with previous efforts.

Anyway, whatever the French did early on in nuclear power genertaion, it was very successful compared to other countries, as the percentage of nuclear power produced in France is second to none.

In reality, the fossil fuel disaster is much more severe with far bigger environmental impact.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...

The problem here is that China's share of total energy from renewables has decreased from about 33% in 1990 to 13% in 2018[1].

Solar and Wind are not particularly useful given they are unreliable. Hydro is useful as it is reliable, but after the three gorges dam project, there isn't a lot left on the table in terms of hydro for China.

Note that this is not because China is reducing renewables but rather it's energy needs are increasing so rapidly.

And 58% of China's energy usage - 74 Terrawatt hours - is from coal, and that number is increasing -- 220 million more tons of coal being added just this year[2]

[1] https://www.worlddata.info/asia/china/energy-consumption.php

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-coal/chinas-coal-consu...

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 US government has been taxing power generated by nuclear power for decades and has collected billions of dollars to cover any costs in the future. 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 and no money has been collected to cover the costs. 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.)

Energy sources have their caveats. Nuclear plants using rivers decrease output when rivers overheat. Solar panel efficiency falls 0.38% per degrees celcius under and over 25. We think failing nuclear and gas is a big deal because it's reliable most of the time. We do not think failing solar panels in night (because they can't produce energy) or hot and cold weather is not a big deal because it's designed to be that way. If that's the case, how is it viable to compare the prices?

Similarly thinking you can combine a bunch of unreliable energy sources and "tranche" them in order to get a smaller stream of reliable energy is very much like the gaussian copula problem that got us into the financial crisis. Yes, it's possible to do it in theory, but very hard to do so in practice due to the financial incentives involved and lack of knowledge about risk.

The level of discourse in our energy markets really needs to be improved, and quickly, otherwise we are going to make a lot of foolish choices.

When heated, the calcium carbonate in limestone breaks into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, which is released into the air. The calcium oxide is ground with limestone and gypsum to make cement.

Half of the CO2 emissions in the production of concrete come from the reaction that breaks up the calcium carbonate and the other half from the fossil fuels required to heat the kilns and transport the materials.

Things we should also consider. Getting rid of cars. Investment in mass International and intranational public transit.

Meat alternatives that require less physical space. reining in massive fishing fleets (half the oxygen and half the carbon captured comes from the ecological systems in the ocean which we ravage) Invest in renewable energy, like tidal, solar, geothermal, etc

Even if we were to go 100% nuclear tomorrow (which just isn't possible, we'd (the entirety of earth) would run out of nuclear fuel in 90 years), that would account for about 1/4 the carbon emissions of the planet per year.

Climate change is more than just the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it's about how we as a species, integrate with the rest of the species on this planet.

If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.

Nuclear energy now provides about 10% of the world’s electricity from about 445 power reactors.

This isn't hard math.

    Each day more than 2 million people pick up a copy of The Wall Street Journal or read it online, more than any other newspaper in the country, except USA Today, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

    “More than three-fourths of them have a college degree, and their average household income is $234,909.

The Wallstreet Journal will never push an idea unless there's money to be made by its investors or affiliates, in the short term. and in the short term, I mean over 10 or 15 years.

A forest has more value, in the short term, cut down than is does if left alone. Petrochemicals have more value, in the short term, if they are being pumped, refined, and processed (and then that carbon is captured) than it were just left alone to begin with.

The absolute truth about dealing with the current climate crisis is that doing it right will not be profitable, in the short term, it will be an enormous undertaking across many fronts, and scientific disciplines, political agreements across nations states, etc.

More than 60 years is, by the usual means of counting generations, at least two and pushing three generations.