Why More and More Environmentalists Want to Go Nuclear
interestingengineering.com
interestingengineering.com
Our current problem is that we need energy, and we currently have several ways of producing it several of which produce much more green house gas than others. Nuclear looks like a less than ideal solution, but one that we know how to do today, and one that can replace coal/gas in the interim buying time while we get other tech ready to go.
The barrier for getting new plants up is going to increase as we tackle the carbon footprint of concrete. At least until someone certifies these new concretes for building nuclear plants.
Some cement plants are reducing their emissions by including fly ash into their mix, and as coal plants wind down across the world, I don't know what other waste streams there are to backfill that, or if in the near term removing coal from our energy mix actually amplifies the percentage of our overall carbon footprint represented by concrete.
I think the target is a 60% reduction. If we can replace electric generation, half of concrete, and transportation that would account for about 49%. The rest is agriculture and methane which are their own headaches.
Concrete is probably one of the last things on our CO2 emission hit-list. Kind of an extra credit compared to power generation and transportation.
https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/#:~:tex....
So I have this conversation with coworkers all the time. Thinking in fractions of the status quo is a logic trap, and most of us fall into it.
As Gretzky famously said, "skate to where the puck is going to be."
We need to halve our CO2 emissions. That means concrete is 16% of the target. That is way too large of a fraction to ignore. We will not get where we are going if we don't look at this, and hard. 1/6th of our target is practically a call to action. 8% is more likely to invite foot dragging.
If you lose your job and have to change careers, it doesn't matter if your fancy car is 12,15,18% of your current monthly expenses. What matters is that it's now 40% of what you have available to spend, and you simply cannot be spending that much on a car. Getting rid of the car is more important that weening yourself off of a daily Starbucks run, steaks, or starting to use coupons.
We cannot be spending 1/6th of all carbon output on concrete. Especially if we're going to make suggestions that involve huge increases on concrete usage.
I wish as a species we could all wrap our heads around this. It gets really old explaining to people that they need to look at the thing that is taking 5% of run time because it's "only 5%" when rationally it should be using .25% of resources and thus it's taking 20x as long as it has any right to be. They won't look at it until overall runtime is down 25% and now we are creeping up on double digits. It's a delaying tactic, and we can't wait for other people to do their part before we start on ours. These are not ordered lists.
Concrete isn't negligible, however the unavoidable 4% of emissions for standard concrete isn't enough of a deterrent to require us to curb its use in favor of other methods immediately. Especially considering it's utility. With enough carbon free energy we could offset that 4% very easily. In the same way we can create carbon neutral fuels with sufficient cheap energy.
2. Uranium can be extracted from seawater (virtually limitless) at an estimated cost of 2 cents/kWh
3. Renewables have even more stringent metals and rare earths requirements
It makes perfect sense if you consider the original reasoning - to make weapons, then progressively adapted to make them less useful for making weapons.
Still, I can't help but feel that fans of this mythical "innovative private sector" have a lot to answer for. Here's a 100-fold optimization in fuel use - not in fact a trivial cost, even for nukes - that's been on the table for more than fifty years, with the only drawback that nobody has literally given you the schematics. Now we're burning a shit-ton of gas and funding the tanks for the privilege.
Everything around nukes is massively expensive -- building, fueling, operating. To the extent they steal money from building out renewables and storage, everything spent on them only adds to the climate crisis.
a) The cost of fuel is currently so low as to be practically zero. Fuel cost does not materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant.
b) The basic reason for this is that they use so little fuel, because the fuel is so incredibly energy dense, last I checked > 1 million times more dense than fossil fuels. This is essentially impossible to grasp intuitively, which is one of the reasons there are so many completely wrong takes on this topic. See: https://xkcd.com/1162/
c) One result of the fact that fuel is so cheap, practically, is that we currently throw away 95% of the fuel after use. Because it's not worth the effort to actually use all of it.
d) One upshot of throwing away most of the fuel is that we also throw away the fuel that current reactors generate in production. Alas, those are also the nastiest fission products. This is not some far away technology, we have been doing this to get fissile materials for atomic weapons for almost a century now. And we have been repurposing fissile material from nuclear warheads since at least the early 2000s (might have been late 1990s).
e) So if we were to simply use all the existing fuel, we could do "this" for another 20x 100-150 years, so 2000-3000 years. The reason we are not doing this is that it's not currently economically viable, fresh Uranium is just too cheap, and since the political landscape is so irrationally negative there is no incentive for investing when current fuel reserves are sufficient for the current reactors.
Fuel supply and waste are political problems, not technical ones.
>Unfounded fears about nuclear technology may be undercutting the fight against climate change.
*Unfounded* is not the word I would use to describe fears of massively proliferating reactors across the globe. Advocates simply don't accept that the known problems are worth discussing.
Does it have to be across the globe?
There are untold piles of designs that have never been built due to fear. Many of them solve problems with proliferation, or are fail safe with regards to meltdowns, but they never see the light of day because people run around fearmongering about issues which are basically nonexistent, or solved. Now granted, for example, pebble beds (which tend to be quite robust to both proliferation as well as meltdowns) have other issues with respect to how uneaven the fuel burns and how hard it is to reprocess. But that in many ways is by design. I mean we don't have "problems" with current reactors where we take ~95% of the fuel out and call it "waste".
And so much of modern reactor design is basically building a giant bomb shelter around the plant, that even in the face of full blown wars its hard to see how the reactors are any more dangerous than many other heavy industries we take for granted (aka do you know what your local mega fab is storing onsite?)
If solar/wind had 1/2 of the regulatory overhead to assure that say the thorium tailings from rare earth mining (neodymium/etc) never got into the drinking water/air/etc then you would never see a single new solar/windmill either.
Unreliable power is dangerous too.
So, sure shift the blame to the "backup sources" rather than mentioning that the wind farms were operating at something like 5% of the nameplate capacity.
This is an interesting statement, and though true I think it's a bit disingenuous.
I'm no expert on nuclear or nuclear power, but I recently listened to a Canadaland podcast about nuclear waste [0] and did a little extra reading [1][2] on deep geological nuclear disposal. If what I heard/read is to believed, it sounds like although the international science community has agreed on the best and safest way to bury nuclear waste, this hasn't _actually_ ever been done.
It's one thing to say to a community "in theory, we all agree that if everything is done correctly this is the best solution" and another COMPLETELY to trust that 1) The task will be done right, 2) The governing body (NGO, government, etc) will be around for the full lifetime of the nuclear waste being a threat (~150+ years), and 3) Said governing body will be well-funded enough the entire time to do the job right.
I believe that the engineering solutions are sound, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss the concern "often good science isn't executed very well". Until this is addressed, I'm not sure "but the science says!" is going to be a very effective response. For something as high-stakes as this, we need a more comforting guarantee.
[0] https://www.canadaland.com/nuclear-waste-ignace-ontario/ [1] https://cen.acs.org/environment/pollution/nuclear-waste-pile... [2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
EDIT: typo
The fate of the barrels was an example in my differential equations course. (tl;dr: They burst when they hit the sea floor.) Wikipedia suggests that "by 1980, most of the radiation had decayed". Excepting what hadn't, of course.
All that observed, the problem with nuke plants is absolutely not the waste. The overwhelming problem is the outrageous cost, and that they don't start displacing fossil fuels for years, if ever. A dollar sunk into a nuke plant instead of renewables is simply sunk, as far as the climate is concerned.
The cost of consumer rooftop solar is as high or higher than nuclear, do you also think that cost is outrageous and we should abandon it?
>...and that they don't start displacing fossil fuels for years, if ever.
Solar, wind and nuclear have about the same carbon footprints. A few links:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low...
Carbon footprint is not in play.
By people: underground nuclear bomb tests Naturally: there are some spots where nuclear fission reactions have happened on their own, leaving the waste where the fissile uranium used to be
These aren't going to be the same contents as what power plant waste looks like, of course, but they certainly provide some evidence on how safe/not safe it is
While the article mentions "electricity in France was almost 40 percent cheaper than in Germany as of the first half of 2020" this is from the existing fleet power stations almost all of which were mostly built 30-40 years ago. Even France seems incapable of building new nuclear power stations at a reasonable cost:
"EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months. The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
And for countries which have large investments in renewable energy, nuclear seems a poor match for balancing variable output since its costs are almost all capital expenditure so it never makes sense to run at less than full capacity.
He's followed by Stewart Brand, who wasn't left with much cred decades ago when he made those statements. I guess those were their best choices???
What can't be denied is that there isn't time or willing money to go heavily nuclear at this point ... too late. Maybe they're hoping that they can keep enough from caring for so long that there'll be no options left - only billions of desperates.
I’m sure it was environmentalists that made it so a decade long tax-funded project isn’t possible in the US.
Oh yeah and I guess it was environmentalists made this expression famous: I don’t want to smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud