Finally folks are overcoming their fear of the spicy rocks.
Once we get to economical seawater extraction of Uranium, we'll have virtually unlimited renewable energy. [1]
[1] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac...
Once we get to economical seawater extraction of Uranium, we'll have virtually unlimited renewable energy. [1]
[1] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac...
True for like 99% of things that could ever exist. The big question is is it possible, and is that really the only hurdle. IMO Uranium extraction isn't the bottleneck to nuclear power, building and maintaining the plants is.
+in 70 years we'd probably have fusion
Strictly speaking, U-235 is the only fissile isotope of any element that is found in any significant amounts in nature. However, breeder reactors can also be useful. The only two starter points I'm aware of in nature for significant energy extraction are U-238 and Th-232. U-238 breeder reactors are politically complicated because they can relatively easily be used to generate significant amounts of Plutonium which is usable in bombs.
Th-232 reactors have technical hurdles that are probably surmountable; specifically the neutron economy is significantly tighter than U-238 breeder reactors (this is why you often see liquid-salt reactors proposed for Th; chemically separating the decay products gives plenty of breathing room in the neutron economy). The U-233 it generates is also usable in bombs, but since it will tend to also generate U-232, which is both difficult to work with and easy to detect, it's considered less of a proliferation risk.
This all misses my original point though. At any point in the first half of the 20th century we had enough oil to last us for centuries at then-present day usage. Yet here we are.
Also, this phenomenon is called the "income effect"[0]: as the price of a good Y falls relative to other goods, consumers' "income" will increase in a real sense (i.e. they'll be able to consume more of all goods), so they may increase consumption of Y, depending on whether Y is "inferior," "normal" or "luxury." The definitions of these concepts have to be made carefully to avoid circularity, but suffice it to say that 99% of goods are not normal.
Energy, however, is a normal good when measured, though a 2x increase in income leads to less than a 2x increase in energy consumption for a sufficient starting level of income. (If you were living in a remote village that was only recently electrified, for instance, electricity would be a luxury good: increases in income would lead to significant increases in consumption of electricity up to a certain point.)
What's more interesting is how firms react. Decreases in energy costs could lead to significant increases in productivity for firms, allowing for economies of scale that did not exist ex ante. This isn't really "consumption" per se, as energy is being "converted" into another good. But it seems likely that firms' demand for energy could increase quite a bit as the price for energy decreases.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_choice#Income_effect
Wind's currently cheapest, but solar will likely catch up pretty soon...
France largely got around this by exporting power, but that obviously doesn’t scale if everyone tries to export power on the weekends nobody wants to import it.
The blast at Chernobyl was due to a positive void coefficient that meant over-heating led to a positive feedback loop (plus some other process failures that led to that initial overheating). Also those figures for the Chernobyl reactor were for thermal output, not electrical output. The figures are an order of magnitude off, the reactor would normally put out 3GW, not 3 MW and was idled down to 700MW for the test. 700 kW is, like, a beefy muscle car.
Which leads me to think storage/batteries is not the issue & that manufacturing, installation & infrastructure is. I also imagine getting land permits, regulations, politics, etc. is also a huge factor.
I would be far less sceptical about massive deployment of renewables if somebody could point me to a study that shows: Given this grid, this amount of wind, solar and storage in that areas and the historical weather data of the last 30 years it would have resulted in this amount of overproduction, blackouts....
It's about as renewable as solar, which is to say, we will eventually run out - but at that point the heat death of the universe is a more pressing concern.
[1] https://cna.ca/2016/07/27/theres-uranium-seawater-renewable/
Edit: let’s see how many people will continue to ignore other comments to get the same point in I guess.
That's a pointless argument and unrelated to "renewable", which means it won't get used up.
That said, why would we run the entire world on nuclear, or go for a nuclear-only strategy when we also have solar and wind and geothermal and hydroelectric? For that matter, why should we exclude nuclear from the energy mix available to us?
Different sources of power have different properties with different tradeoffs, but if you can cover your bases with multiple types, why wouldn’t you?
Geothermal I think only works in some places without causing earthquakes. [3]
Wind and solar are good, though.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/hundreds-new-dams-co...
[2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hydropower-emissions-fossil...
[3] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-sol...
Actually something of a dream of mine is to see nuclear reactors eventually replace some of our dams, maybe restore some of the lakes and tributaries that have been lost, but presently new reactor construction is prohibited here per a ballot initiative from before I was born.
My larger point is that society is going to continue to demand increased electricity generation, which means new plants and installations. It’s one thing to want to replace existing installations but if you’re going to service future demand, then new sources of multiple types have to remain on the table. I would take nuclear over gas-fired plants, but I would take gas-fired plants over coal-fired plants.
For what I understand, the California State Water Project as visioned in the 1960s, had Stage I and Stage II. Only Stage I was built. Then from the 1980s onward, there was political opposition and Phase II was never started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project...
Also lets put things in perspective, Global Warming means future generations will need to adapt to new weather patterns. Some animal and plant species will become extinct, others may thrive.
Nuclear war will end civilization and make many parts of the world completely uninhabitable.
Nuclear war has been looming over us all since 1949, this week is no different than last week or 10 years ago.
Nitpicking:
The sun is expected to stop fusing helium in about 8x10^9 years [1]. The heat death will occur in around 1.7x10^106 years [2]. (if at all, there are some uncertainties around that)
Which means that while they are both far, the heat death as predicted is much much further than the other. In short, the heat death of the universe won't be a pressing concern at all when we run out of solar.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dwarf#Future_of_the_Sun 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Ba...
Also the sun contains 99% of the mass of the solar system. The remaining 1% includes Jupiter. I'm not sure how much effect we can have when only leveraging 1% of 1% of the solar systems mass.
binge at your own risk:
You complain about people overblowing a minor concern with solar, but you do the same with uranium extraction.
Also, I take issue with your suggestion that we can do pumped storage at scale: we can’t. There are not a lot of suitable sites for that: we either lack enough altitude delta, or lack water, or would have to flood huge swaths of land, often already more productively used. I like hydro, and I like pumped storage, but unlike nuclear, you can’t do it just about anywhere.
US is actually particularly lucky when it comes to hydro: most other countries are too flat, too dry, or too short on wastelands. Even if we could pull it off, most can’t, and they need power too.
Really? That sounds interesting. Can you send me some materials on this?
> there are no industrial scale mining operations extracting uranium from seawater, and there is no evidence that existing prototypes would scale up to global power requirements
This is true, but again, hardly relevant, because nobody really tried to do that at scale, as there is no good reason for it for as long as mined uranium is cheap.
Pumped storage works, because it pumps absolutely enormous amounts of water. You can't handle comparable amounts of solid blocks similarly easily.
And no, pumped storage is nowhere near on the scale required to make renewables feasible. For example, the US uses about 500 GWh of electricity every hour, but only ~20GWh of pumped storage. The pumped storage facilities take about as long to build as nuclear power plants. Storage is also just one of the challenges to making renewables feasible. The fact that renewables are geographically dependent means we'll also have to make large expansions to transmission infrastructure [1].
1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
Not with what we actually know how to economically recover, AFAIK, though sources vary widely on such figures.
And yes, pumped storage takes a long time to build, but that is not a disadvantage compared to nuclear plants, as you note. Expanding transmission infrastructure also falls under the line of boring things we know how to do, if the political will is there. I am mostly just pointing out that while both require massive infrastructure investments, making nuclear truly sustainable relies essentially on speculative research in a way that solar + pumped storage does not. Plus, nuclear has other advantages (like being usable in deep space, under the ocean, etc.), which makes it feel a little wasteful to use for power generation on a planet bathed in sunlight. So I don't really understand the strong preference for nuclear that a lot of people seem to espouse.
With breeder reactors there is enough economically usable fuel to last billions-with-a-b of years.
According to what I'm seeing, there are only 5 solar plants that produce > 1 GW in the entire world. 1 GW is very small by the standards of nuclear or even large hydro installations.
What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering all that "unused land" (which they call "wilderness") with solar plants?
You're shifting goalposts here.
The technology you favor doesn't exist on the scale needed, any more than breeder reactors do. The French Superphénix experimental breeder reactor produced 1.2 GW of electricity, in 1985. That's more than any solar installation in the world except for one.
Probably "wow, thanks for using all that desert?" The environmental argument against solar is by far the weakest out there given that literally every other alternative has substantially worse externalities (whether you think the risks of nuclear waste are worth it or not--I'd imagine most of us do--they obviously exist!). I'd actually go so far as to say that the vast majority of people who claim they are against large solar deployments for environmental reasons are arguing in bad faith.
I do not understand what you're saying as far as "scalability" required of solar farms. What challenges of scale do you think will exist? Solar does not have economies of scale in terms of deployment, only construction (and it is already cheap enough, without subsidies, to undercut fossil fuels in many countries). Deploying a large or small farm scales basically linearly in the number of solar panels, until it becomes such a large fraction of the grid that storage becomes a concern (which we are nowhere close to). This is not comparable to the obvious challenges of mining and processing enormous amounts of seawater (which takes a long time to mix thoroughly and for which we still don't have a good way of actually isolating the uranium) compared to small amounts.
Again, many informed people have issues with solar, but none of their issue is that it couldn't provide the power required. The reason there are not larger solar deployments is that people have not invested in larger solar farms, not that there is some scalability or economic limit; a large farm being a fraction of the size of some nuclear plants is pretty meaningless, considering that it costs proportionally less than the same nuclear plant (which is why I bought up square footage--because that's the only metric by which trying to argue that a single nuclear plant generating more electricity than a large solar farm actually means anything). There is absolutely no technical hurdle there, and frankly I can't really imagine what you think the technical hurdle would be.
Now maybe someone or something will answer "The Last Question" one day and solve that problem. I wager we wont be around to see it.
say current costs:
$10 is my uranium cost
$90 is the rest
total = $100
ocean extracted uranium:
$100 is my new uranium cost
$90 (as before)
total = $190
And I know the tech community loves thinking of themselves as supremely rational scientists immune to the follies of emotions. But no actual physicist (or physician) thinks a fear of radioactivity is something that needs to be overcome. Those that work with such material respect the inherent danger. They try to overcome the danger, using a bit of fear to stay concentrated (and get the funding).
Declaring your willingness to install a mini-reactor in your garden shed, as sometimes happens in these discussions, is the hallmark of scientism.
Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. These days, it's still too expensive, but now it also just takes too long for it to be useful for the climate emergency.
Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude. But tech bros are emotional: they consider those technologies to be girly, and therefore still bring up big hairy nuclear reactors whenever anyone fails at avoiding them at parties.
Nuclear power is not a technology of the future, it is just a technology of a future, specifically the future of the 1960s or so. It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades.
Wind and solar are also subsidised - by electricity consumers. Their volatility has a price that is currently absorbed by the grid and is ultimately paid for by you and I.
Physics grad student here and I agree with this comment whole-heartedly. I love the idea of nuclear power but I also understand that it requires enormous CapEx and that the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis. We absolutely shouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants but any money spent on new plants is money that could otherwise be spent generating lower cost Wind/Solar in a shorter period of time.
Meanwhile, France enjoys a low carbon grid together with low energy prices as do many parts of Canada, parts of eastern europe and so on.
It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period.
Is it? This adds nothing to the discussion. If it were actually 50% and i claimed 30%, that would be a distinction worth pointing out.
Since we are being pedantic, you should really look up the figures for energy share from wind in 2021 in Ireland. It fell to 29% which completely negates your claim of it growing rapidly.
I am framing it as carbon vs no carbon. A new nuclear plant's timeline to carbon-neutrality compared to the counterfactual where an equal capital investment is made in solar/wind is well over a decade. Given the time crunch we are on to lower emissions, I simply do not think we have the time to waste building new plants. That said, we should not be decommissioning plants that are still operable.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/record-year-rene...
South Australia is 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees.
So now based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up.
This is not even considering that closer to the poles have much better wind resources, especially in winter time.
So, the 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation
This of course discounts any geopolitical concerns, which makes it harder. But on a US or EU continental we easily have the technology today.
South Australia is also incredibly sunny and has the advantage of being an arid desert. Again, that does not scale well.
South Australia sits at 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees.
Based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up.
This is not even considering that closer to the poles the wind resources are much better, especially in winter time.
The 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation
This of course discounts any geopolitical concerns, which makes it harder. But on a US or EU continental scale we easily have the technology today.
Texas has been building wind and solar like crazy since then, such electricity in Texas in 2021 was 24% wind + 4% solar [2].
Texas is building 6.1 GW of solar in 2022 and 3.8 GW of wind [3]. So that indeterminate point in the future where ERCOT is more than 30% wind+solar is probably 2023 or 2024. It might even be 2022.
[1] https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2020/augu... [2] https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation [3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818
> the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis
In that particular sense, it's not a crisis: if you think N megadeaths will occur in time T as a result of climate change (making no comment on that because I don't know much about N as a function of T), there are still (10000 - N) million humans around at time T to suffer from lack of a solution. In that situation, it doesn't make sense to say "it's a crisis, so a solution that helps after time T can't possibly help"?
So for people who think that we won't have a solution until we build a lot of nuclear power, the slogan "climate crisis" seems likely to badly damage those 10000-N million humans because it gives us an excuse to never solve the problem. People could reasonably disagree with the antecedent ("won't have a solution until we build nuclear"), but I hope you see a bit how the other side sees it?
Greetings from an ex-Physics grad student on the other side by the way! Other side both of this debate and of being a grad student I suppose. Have a nice day over there :wave:
Yet have been incapable of offering a way to power my oven on a cold windless night without burning something.
Virtually all solar and wind installation are accompanied by a thermal power plant (usually gas) that's supposed to takeover when renewable can't be trusted. Yet the eco crowd refuses to factor in the cost of these - otherwise completely useless - backup power plants in the cost of their magical solution. They also conveniently refuse to look at the CO2 produced when using those.
In short, renewables are cheap (if you forget that you also have to create a full backup system) and produce no CO2 (if you forget to measure what's produced by the backup system). Selective memory at it's finest.
Yes, I know, batteries are coming. There is a new breakthrough that will made this practical every 5 year. We have been hearing that same song for the past 4 decades. In reality, energy storage is quite close to optimal. There are some improvements made here and there, but nothing that will be a game changer: if it does not work now (it doesn't), it probably won't in a near future.
Isn't that still a net win? If you're burning N tons of CO2 now, you're burning N-Y during the hours when you don't have to be running the fossil plant. Bonus points if your new backup plant is cleaner (say, NG vs coal)
Similarly, the cost of running gas only should be computed as: cost of gas power plant + cost of gas. And the cost of the renewable option should be computed as : cost of renewable power plan + cost of backup gas power plant + cost of backup gas. You can't magically exclude the backup from the calculation. And suddenly the renewable option sounds way more expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...
2. batteries are already here. The US built 3.1 GW of grid-scale batteries in 2021, and utilities have filed with the EIA that they are building 10 GW of batteries in 2022-2023.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51518
3. the market for grid-scale batteries scarcely existed before the explosive build-out of solar in the past 3 years. Before recently, the only economic use of grid-scale energy storage was to store excess electricity produced overnight by nuclear power plants at places like the Bath County Pumped Hydro plant, or the "store nuclear-produced energy and release it during commercial breaks of EastEnders" pumped hydro plants in the UK.
This means that there is suddenly a huge market incentive to develop new energy storage tech, and the market incentive simply didn't exist 10 years ago. I expect that to produce dividends.
It is currently exponential, anything else is a lie, and I don't even know what the intentions would be of someone perpetuating such nonsense. Now there will easily be at least a whole generational period in which we don't really know for sure if we have leveled off, that is just the nature of human reproduction, seems safer to wait at least 1 generation before we have declared victory on our biggest enemy.
[1]https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-g...
Singapore is just one example that has been discouraging population increase then switching to encouraging population increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_planning_in_Singapo... Yet there is still a net increase during all this time. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SGP/singapore/populati...
I think asking the world to agree on something this potentially controversial, when you and I can't even agree on the nature of the increase, is asking too much.
That's literally what makes it not exponential (I.e. when it falls low enough that it is no longer proportional to the derivative). Sigmoid functions, catenary functions (hyperbolic trig), even the complex exponential (regular trig), and the like all have exponential terms. We don't use the term "exponential growth" in any of these cases unless there is growth without bounds - aka the real coefficients are positive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...
I found the actual population estimate he seems to be referencing are from the Lancelet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... There are enough referenced facts on that wiki page to know that is not a certainty.
Human population is obviously not strictly exponential, as there have been worldwide phenomena that lower it globally, and these will happen again in the future, but if the net growth rate is even 0.1% it is not linear, it is exponential. Only when the growth rate equals the replacement rate (deaths) will it suddenly be static, but if it increases even a hair over that its exponential at that moment (because new humans produce more new humans).
Also as we know from microbiology human population with finite resources can't be exponential in the long run as resources will limit it, so sure its not an exponential function because it obviously is a logarithmic function (likely with a whole other side to the graph once it reaches its peak). Sure maybe we are smarter than this, but it does seem like a leap to get there. So yes technically you are 100% right human population is not and cannot be exponential, it just has been for the past few centuries, and there isn't a good reason to expect it not to be in the future.
It's expensive because Chernobyl caused the whole world to develop cold feet. Innovation stopped and funding for nuclear dried up after 2-3 accidents. Solar and wind were super expensive (vis-a-vis coal or gas) in 2010 and before compared to 2022 and people were railing against solar for that reason alone. But only a decade later, the cost has fallen by an order of a magnitude, making it far more practical and a valuable source of energy because society invested money and resources to bring the cost down.
Imagine having 3 children and lavishing all your attention and resources on two of them, leaving one to fend for itself and then turning around and saying that the aloof one has no talent, skills and is basically a burden on the society.
Nuclear is not a panacea but railing against the technology because humans goofed up, then refused to pay more attention and do things correctly in the future is an irrational stance.
But we didn't even become more careful with existing reactors. The companies running them kept being textbook capitalists and cut costs wherever possible. Outsource maintenance to questionable Eastern European workers. Inspections reveal unexplainable micro fractures near the reactor core? Just declare it safe and carry on. Workers on-site monitoring the operations are retrained electricians, because well, both things have something to do with electricity right?
I'm not afraid the technology is inherently unsafe. I'm worried because it's run by companies maximizing profit, and regulated (indirectly) by politicians caring about getting re-elected, and maybe about their hometown/electoral district.
Humans being terrible at something, at some time in the past, is not a sole reason to write off the technology. The response should be to rather focus on improving the process and policy rather than shrugging off nuclear which IPCC has admitted is necessary to meet our climate goals.
Most American's are very worried about dying from terrorism while most are actually being killed by heart attacks.
At a certain point it is a matter of what people want to believe and what is actually happening on the ground.
A few months earlier, the company had claimed that "oh yeah, we checked that, everything's fine!" and employees were later convicted for providing false information to and hiding evidence of the leak from government inspectors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...
There hasn't ever been a nuclear plant built which was not subsidized. Wind and solar needed a kick-start, now they bid to even get permission to build off-shore wind power.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]
> Over-commitment to nuclear power brought about the financial collapse of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a public agency which undertook to build five large nuclear power plants in the 1970s. By 1983, cost overruns and delays, along with a slowing of electricity demand growth, led to cancellation of two WPPSS plants and a construction halt on two others. Moreover, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion of municipal bonds, which is one of the largest municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The court case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.[49][50][51]
> A cover story in the February 11, 1985, issue of Forbes magazine commented on the overall management of the nuclear power program in the United States:
> "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.[55]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
I am not sure why nuclear needs to be perfectly competitive to be a valuable option. Govts worldwide subsidize infrastructure programs to varying degrees. Roads are subsidized. Water treatment plants are subsidized. Hell, agriculture and farming cannot survive a free market without government subsidies in most of the planet. Companies like Apple and Tesla won't build manufacturing plants without tax breaks (effectively a subsidy.) Amazon won't build an office without asking for a tax break from the cities.
The expectations of nuclear are irrationally high.
And your quotes all point to policy issues which can be fixed with proper governance. Just because it "became" non-competitive 5 decades ago is no reason to not pursue it going forward given that any help against the climate emergency is welcome. Even IPCC in a report some time back accepted that meeting the climate target is not possible without the help of nuclear and in a good policy environment nuclear can be cost competitive.
Today you can use solar to produce hydrogen which you then burn and still economically come out ahead of nuclear. Not that it would be sane to do which is why it haven't been adopted.
Similarly, I'm not sure that for decisions in 2022-2050, we should be relying on lessons learned half a century ago in the 1970s about tech which was designed and deployed even earlier than that, during the absolute infancy of nuclear power tech.
Renewables are here and vastly cheaper. Steam based plants like nuclear and coal lost their competitiveness with the advent of the CCGT plants in the 80s. Both are dead simply due to their shared thermodynamic cycle. Renewables are pushing CCGT plants more and more towards only existing as peakers.
I don't think this is really a thing, and I suspect this appeal to ridicule is being made in bad faith.
My impression is that there's currently an active and honest debate going on right now on whether nuclear is necessary or not.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou...
Every argument I've heard about nuclear was about getting to carbon neutral or negative fast enough to avert climate disaster, and providing a stable base load in light of generation fluctuation of solar and wind, and current lack of sufficient storage to smooth load - generation curves.
That said, it's likely we can't fix our regulation AND build new plants in time to fix climate change, so I agree with you there. I don't have any agenda about what tech we use to solve this problem -- I'm perfectly happy with solar, wind, or flower power if that's what it takes :)
The idea that some safety costs are entirely frivolous, obviously so, with no serious argument against that notion, just doesn't strike me as believable. Yes, government projects (and private industry projects) tend to run over budgets. The saying is "work expands to meet the budget provided", but that's intended to be cynical snark, not descriptive of reality. There are plenty of governments that care less for safety than the nations of the global north, yet they haven't found this holy sweet spot of safe efficiency, as far as I can tell.
The reason we still have to run coal and natural gas plants is to cover the times that wind and solar aren't producing. Nuclear is a substitute for coal and natural gas, not wind and solar. Because we're shutting down old nuclear plants and not building new ones, coal plants are still going up in many parts of the world. Even if nuclear was ten times as dangerous, it would still be a net win on safety compared to natural gas and especially coal.
But also, my understanding is that a whole bunch of these deaths were at Chernobyl. From the article I linked:
The deaths from Chernobyl, 35 years ago, were due to unforgivably bad reactor design that we‘ve advanced far beyond now. There were zero deaths from radiation at Three Mile Island or at Fukushima. (The only deaths from the Fukushima disaster were caused by the unnecessary evacuation of 160,000 people, including seniors in nursing homes.)
Did you check out the article from my original comment? It does explain things much better than I can. And about your last point of the sweet spot of safe efficiency -- Jack Devaney, the author of the book that the article is about, is currently partnering with the government of Indonesia to produce nuclear power that's cheaper than coal: https://thorconpower.com/ The website is pretty generous with info, and doesn't set off my bullshit/vaporware detector. Maybe it's already happening.
If I understand correctly, in saying that this is scientism, you're saying something like that people on the other side of this debate think science and technology are the only relevant things going on here? Another possibility is that they do think other things are relevant (cost, political considerations, ...) but that they think that the expense is not intrinsic to the technology.
While I'm sure you've heard the "but it's expensive because of the anti-nuke people!" claim many times and have your own well-considered reasons to think that mistaken in some sense -- if I'm wrong and it turns out that it being expensive has nothing very much to do with anti-nuke protests, does that really make me a scientist? "Scientist", the way you're using it, is a statement about somebody's epistemelogical beliefs, I think?
> It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades.
This could be seen as ad hominem and could usefully have been omitted I think
We don't fear that russian rockets hit WEC.
I *know* that the money I've given to a gas company to cover periods of low wind and solar in the last twelve months has funded those rockets, and the emissions have turned fertile ground into desert, the latter being if anything more lethal.
That is a cold certainty.
And I came off a conference call on battery tech today. So let me say this: anyone who says batteries will replace that blood money is a liar.
private market analysts, government strategists, and scientists.
As always, please show me a credible plan that says otherwise. I would be extremely happy to be proven wrong.
Those are extraordinary claims. I'd require a bit more support.
- 65e15 kg = Uranium in Earth's crust
- 709000 = 709,000 MJ/kg energy density of natural U²
- 500e12 MJ = 500 million TJ annual global energy usage
- 92e6 = 65e15 × 709e3 / 500e12
Australia has about 1.7e9 kg of reserves at current prices¹. That comes to 2.4 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium [2] https://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#page=26
I definitely would argue we need improved nuclear power even if just for improving space exploration, but we also need to accept that our whole current way of thinking with regards to growth is doomed and we cannot just innovate our way out of it without at least changing the rules.
Having to find extraterrestrial and/or extrasolar sources of power four hundred years from now is far from doom.
Further in the same ridiculous analogy that book points out if we built Dyson spheres around every star in the Milky Way we could get along for 2500 years at our current energy consumption growth rates.
Doomed is not really the right word you are correct, because it just won't happen, we will meet the limit of physics and realize we can't keep increasing our energy usage even if we wanted to. But our desire to have GDP monotonically increasing is doomed for sure.
Wind turbines and solar are cheaper and getting cheaper every year and they don't have anywhere near the myriad of problems nuclear does.
That's why we had 30GW of renewables deployed in 2021 in the US, while 5GW of nuclear shut down in the same time period. We're replacing nuclear power generation capacity six times faster than we're losing it, with wind and solar. Because it's cheaper and easier. Investors, industry, and governments consider "what is the way forward for generation?" solved and are focusing on energy storage and grid modernization.
You know what nobody has said in the history of mankind?
"Oh fuck, that crazy dictator is shooting his tanks at that wind farm! Will this cause a nation-scale disaster?"
"Oh fuck, terrorists are trying to steal old solar panels!"
"That country developing wind power generation will politically destabilize the entire region."
"It's so sad that thirty years after that solar farm fire disaster, kids within hundreds of miles from it still have significantly higher cancer rates."
"Oh fuck, that tsunami damaged that wind farm, we need to evacuate people from thousands of square kilometers of area around it and not allow fishing anywhere near it"*
(By the way, more than ten years later, there is still a no-entry zone approximately half the size of Tokyo.)
>We're replacing nuclear power generation capacity six times faster than we're losing it
That's a rather odd metric, don't you think? "We haven't added or removed a single reactor, and we added a wind turbine. We're adding infinitely-many wind turbines for every reactor we're losing!"
>"Oh fuck, that crazy dictator is shooting his tanks at that wind farm! Will this cause a nation-scale disaster?"
The same can't be said for, say, hydroelectric dams. Those are arguably even more dangerous than nuclear plants.
>"Oh fuck, terrorists are trying to steal old solar panels!"
Oh, no. Now all they need to do is separate the uranium from the graphite in the fuel pellets and enrich it in centrifuges and figure out how to build nuclear bombs.
>"It's so sad that thirty years after that solar farm fire disaster, kids within hundreds of miles from it still have significantly higher cancer rates."
I really don't think that's true of Chernobyl.
>"Oh fuck, that tsunami damaged that wind farm, we need to evacuate people from thousands of square kilometers of area around it and not allow fishing anywhere near it"*
You need to evacuate because there was a tsunami and flooding. Look up how many people died as a result of the tsunami and as a result of the nuclear accident.
A nuclear reactor has the same placement restrictions as any other thermal power plant: it needs significant cooling, which usually means a nearby large body of water. Since wind and solar need almost no cooling, they can be placed in some locations where a nuclear power plant can't. There's also other restrictions due to size and safety which limit nuclear power plant placement even more.
Imagine a hydroelectric dam "Chernobyl". At least the mid to longterm consequences would be softer. I think they would have figured out a few years later how to rebuild everything.
Chernobyl (>35 years ago) on the other side is still buzzing and the rebuilding of the sarcophagus is ongoing and will be for a long time
Well except the millions of people with emotional scars because their relatives died and they were displaced.
(Also, the comparison isn't 1-to-1, since Chernobyl wasn't attacked. I have no idea what the failure modes of modern reactors are when damaged by munitions.)
more than half the cost is financing and construction risk