It might be abundant and clean, but it's not renewable, and like every energy source, nuclear has associated capital and operational costs.
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:
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....
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.
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.