Nuclear, solar and wind are the cleanest and safest forms of energy. The metric to use is deaths/TWH: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Chernobyl for example left a huge area uninhabitable. And it's still a mess. When the Russians kicked up dust in there with their tanks recently it caused measurable radiation in a much wider area.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
New fossil fueled power plants is being built, and existing one is being modernized rather than decommissioned. They view fossil fuels as being good as far as providing a "reserve energy", meaning the energy needed when the weather do not produce enough energy.
If we we all agree that air pollution and fossil fuels are bad, then this plan is bad. It is very bad. It so bad that we should not be doing it, and we should definitively not have it as the primary plan for this century.
If we agree on this, then the comparison should be between the long list of alternatives where fossil fuels are not involved.
This common flawed claim ignores the metric "How much effort is required to keep the number of deaths low?" which is an essential part of it.
Nuclear is not safe. It is just kept from harming us by a large crew of skilled people and billions of dollars' worth of safety measures.
Solar and wind have no such requirements, so the comparison is a bit like saying that the safest tools are a brush, a broom and a gun.
This is of the order of fractions of pennies when we compare to fossil fuel subsidies. Fossil fuels to the tune of $7 trillion/year[1] and cause 10 million deaths/year.
Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
> large crew of skilled people
If we stop subsidizing fossil fuels, then the energy markets will be fair, nuclear will win (or at least a major play along with solar and wind) and there will be a ton of skilled workforce. We didn't have a skilled javascript workforce 2 decades ago, now we have millions.
I can't see nuclear winning, it is at least the second most subsidized energy source we have and already more expensive than solar+storage, which is only getting cheaper while the true costs of nuclear are revealed to be larger than any estimates have indicated.
France recently had to pay a 50 bn downpayment for the fictional cost of nuclear they have operated with for decades, and that's just the beginning. In the US, the government covers a lot of the cost, for example by having the army maintain security for spent fuel.
The latest nuclear reactor in europe, Finlands OL3, had to reduce production earlier this year because the market price of electricity was too low. And that's already now, from a plant that is already in place. How can any project making new nuclear plants ever hope to be profitable if existing plants are already (granted, intermittently) losing money?
The first answer to that is to not build a large chimney on the power plant and release all the waste by releasing it into the air. At that point we are now safer than all fossil fuel power plants and can impose a full ban on all use of fossil fuel plants in the power grid. Releasing toxic waste into the environment and into the air must be made illegal.
The second requirement is to do simple repairs and maintenance of buildings. Here we can look at hydro power and see how they often fail at preventing flooding. The effort must be high enough that it can handle bad weather. Anything less should be illegal and severely punished.
So the level of efforts need to be at least at that minimum. We could demand even more, but I am afraid a majority of people would object if we banned all fossil fuel, all hydro, and all nuclear from the grid.
Is this a bad thing? Investing a lot into safety measures to avoid catastrophes seems better than investing significantly less because we assume is safe.
Could you elaborate on why this investment is an argument against nuclear?
I once talked to people that worked at Angra Nuclear Power Plant in Brazil and they said the real danger is actually the spent nuclear fuel. The power plant itself is safe due to many redundant safety measures, continuous tests and monitoring. I don't have a source for this, and don't take my words for absolute truth, I'm not an expert in the subject.
> kept from harming us by a large crew of skilled people
I'm glad to hear people working with nuclear are skilled ;) I assume people working in solar/wind/hydro are also skilled at their craft. And I'm sure you didn't imply that, maybe the phrasing wasn't the best?
It is not an argument against nuclear, it is an argument against the claim that nuclear is safe.
If something requires a large staff of skilled workers and very expensive equipment in order to prevent harmful effects, it is of course not safe - wouldn't you agree?
Solar and wind require skilled people too for sure, but not in order to prevent a catastrophe, which was my point here.
Absolutely, and with renewables that's part of the consideration from the start since everyone is well aware of it.
What you describe is in fact one of the major downsides to nuclear, since they generate so much energy in one point of failure.
Having a (ahem) redundant array of inexpensive devices generating power is much less likely to suffer abrupt and large losses such as the one europe suffered just last week, when their largest reactor went offline for a few days. https://yle.fi/a/74-20061159
If flying was inherently safe (in the same way that solar power is safe), the WTC twin towers would still be standing today.
So comparing solar and nuclear is a bit like saying a broom is safer to the user than a gun, while ignoring the user is in a gunfight.
I appreciate the simile! My argument was aimed against the claim that nuclear is safe because it hasn't killed many people. It is a common claim and I personally find it annoyingly disingenuous. Nuclear should be argued for without resorting to logical fallacies or falsehoods.
(Separately, I believe that solar+storage is the fastest gun in the west) ;-)
Making an a posteriori argument that nuclear is safer is just sticking your head in the sand to the potential harms. Fukushima was hardly over 10 years ago...
Not one person died during the actual meltdown.
Only one death is directly tied to cancer caused by radiation from the disaster.
A bit over 2000 deaths are assigned as being caused or related to the evacuation.
People already live in the evacuation zone again, it's not "irradiated and unliveable for hundreds of years" or whatever. That's fear mongering nonsense.
Here's the thing: every source of energy contains risk.
Solar and Wind are never going to be reliable enough to produce a baseload. If we switch 100% to unreliable but safe energy production like Solar and Wind, then the risk becomes "Our power goes out in the dead of winter and we freeze to death" or "our power goes out during a heatwave and our AC fails so the heat kills us"
Or maybe we need to store all of this in batteries. But storing Potential Energy is always risky, batteries can explode or start incredibly dangerous fires, including toxic fumes. Even something simple like pumping water up a hill as energy storage comes with risk. Or cutting down a tree to burn for fuel, the tree could fall on someone.
We don’t need baseload. You can go 100% renewable just fine with existing technology, at a lower total energy cost than what we have today. You can check out Marc Z Jacobsens studies for some concrete details. Whatever technology we get before we reach 100% will just make it cheaper and easier.
People who think we need baseload don’t take into account everything else we’d have to do to get to net zero carbon. It’s not just the grid. It’s everything. And a lot of that comes with an insane amount of flexible load and energy storage.
Like, all of transportation being battery (or hydrogen for trucks/planes I suppose) electric… you buy a car and you instantly have the energy storage capacity to power your home for a couple of days or so. I’ve got my car set to charge whenever electricity is cheapest right now. It’s dead easy. I don’t care if I charge on Monday or Thursday. South Australia even have vehicle-to-grid up and running already.
Steel and fertiliser production needs to switch to green hydrogen. All that hydrogen production will represent a huge amount of buffered energy. Just build some extra storage tanks and you can handle lower electricity inputs for a few days.
Hell, you can even keep some gas power plants around and feed the hydrogen into those on very rare days with extremely low sun and wind. You can run gas turbines on 100% hydrogen. It’s already demonstrated.
There’s increasingly serious plans about switching gas pipelines in the North Sea to transport hydrogen instead of natural gas. First by making hydrogen from natural gas and storing the resulting CO2 underground. Then later switching to green hydrogen from floating off-shore wind.
Seasonal demand changes in the north will be handled with geothermal heat wells and thermal energy storage. There’s already large buildings that just dump their excess rooftop solar energy into geothermal wells in summer. You get a surprising amount of that back in winter. And of course the geothermal wells gives you “baseload” heat energy as well.
I suspect advanced deep geothermal will become viable for electricity production in many regions within 10 years as well. All those oil and gas people will dump a lot of investments and engineering efforts in it to attempt to leverage their expertise in a new industry.
>> Here's the thing: every source of energy contains risk. Solar and Wind are never going to be reliable enough to produce a baseload.
Are nuclear power plants guaranteed sufficient uptime to provide baseload? Germany faced an energy crisis a couple years ago because too many of their nuclear plants were undergoing scheduled maintenance at once, and were unable to contribute to baseload when Russia cut off Germany’s oil supply.
At least batteries can be stored in a variety of locations, as opposed to one central location that may be susceptible to natural disasters or a terrorist attack. Same with solar and wind farms. Europe was on tenterhooks during the bombing of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant a year back. I don’t think the wind and solar farms that were destroyed during the invasion even made the news.
I agree, everything comes with risk. The point I’m trying to make is that nuclear power comes with unique risks that are inarguably far more horrible than the risk of a tree falling on someone or a solar panel electrocuting a maintenance worker or something.
So, you say bluefirebrand was downplaying the Fukushima disaster. Sure. I can say you're downplaying the Fujinuma Dam, which I'm mentioning because it was destroyed by the same earthquake as damaged the reactor, killing 8 in a downstream village.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujinuma_Dam
It was a very big earthquake. The Fukushima reactor should've been built with that in mind, so nobody gets a free pass on this, I think it is a valid example of "even rich developed nations don't explore and plan for all the risks correctly". But still, the earthquake itself caused way more damage than the reactor.