I do think the Iran crisis should continue to push countries towards nuclear + solar. Like Ukraine helped shift some in Europe back to supporting nuclear after foolishly shutting down reactors.
The same holds for hydro. Even worse, there would be no time for evacuation. Yet nobody is considering banning dams.
Edit to add: Before anyone jumps on for this it's important to note that without the Banquiao disaster the rates are about the same. Still means "nuclear is unsafe" is kind of a red herring.
The precise mechanism was: radioactive particles fall to ground, or are washed to ground by rain, which concentrates them on vegetation with a lot of surface especially leafy vegetables, grass. Leafy vegetables are eaten directly by humans. Grass is eaten by cows, which again concentrates the radionuclides in milk. Humans drink milk, eat cheese concentrated from milk.
Not all radionuclides produced in nuclear fission have the same health impact on population in case of a nuclear disaster. To have a significant health hazard a radionuclide needs to have 3 properties: volatility, half-life, bioaccumulativity.
Volatility - some radioactive elements (heavy metals) are not moved far away by air, some radioactive elements like radioactive noble gases dilute very fast.
Stuff with a short half-life will transform into stable elements before migrating far. Stuff with with very long half-life will not produce much radiation during human lifetime.
Bioaccumulativity, radioactive stuff needs to stay in body to do damage. If it's eaten and then pooped out next day it usually doesn't cause much damage.
Most dangerous for general public in case of nuclear disasters are:
Iodine-131 (half-life 8 days): Iodine is stored in thyroid gland and stays in for long time in body. Especially children need a lot of iodine per kilogram of body weight. In regions where there is not enough of iodine in food (lacking seafood, table salt without added iodine), human body will try to get every bit of iodine from environment and hold it in body as long as possible.
Cesium-137 (half-time 30.04 years) : Alkali metal that forms salts. Has tendency to accumulate in soft tissues.
Strontium-90 (half-time 28.91 years) : Chemically similar to calcium. Has tendency to be incorporated into bones, teeth and stay in body for very long time.
https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q10097/
Big part of radiation dose to the population could be prevented if the Soviet state didn't tried to cover up the Chernobyl and would prevent people from eating local food and milk, because most of the damage is done by eating iodine-131 in the first weeks after accident. Timely administration of potassium iodide tables would also help.
Chernobyl liquidators were affected with much broader range of radionuclides (radioactive stuff that did not migrate far) and with much high concentrations (radioactive stuff was not diluted much).
Direct deaths: 2 killed by debris (including 1 missing) and 28 killed by acute radiation sickness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
There many estimates about impact of Chernobyl disaster. I think the most comprehensive study is from Chernobyl Forum.
"On the death toll of the accident, the report states that 28 emergency workers died from acute radiation syndrome and 15 patients died from thyroid cancer. It roughly estimates that cancers deaths caused by the Chernobyl accident might eventually reach a total of up to 4,000 among the 600,000 cleanup workers or "liquidators" who received the greatest exposures."
Do not underestimate excess water.
A government affidavit in 2006 stated the leak caused 558,125 injuries including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
"After the disaster, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government remained silent to the public, while no media were allowed to make reports."
"The official documents of this disaster were considered a state secret until 2005 when they were declassified."
If Ukraine didn't have nuclear energy they would be blacked out now.
Russia has bombed the switchyards and trandformers of other NPPs though.
(0) https://co2coalition.org/2024/05/21/coals-importance-for-sol...
(0) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we...
https://www.solar.com/learn/what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-...
That link is also using an average including older reactors that require more highly enriched uranium (enrichment is energy-intensive), newer designs that can run on natural or low enrichment uranium can do 1.31g/kWh:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/article...
Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.
(See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)
In both the amount of released radionuclides and health effects of the accidents, Chernobyl accident was much, much bigger than Fukushima.
It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but because of the huge difference in energy density, the coal plant has to burn millions of times more coal than nuclear reactors consume uranium, and thereby generates tens of thousands of times more toxic and radioactive coal ash than the nuclear plant generates nuclear waste.
Then they put the stuff into "wet surface impoundments" which is industry for dumping the toxic sludge into a lake. Those things frequently poison entire towns without any kind of terrorist attack.
I can't speak to that. But nearly 50 years ago I did a deep dive into what would likely happen in the event of a nuclear "accident" (a term of art) in a Navy ship's reactor in port. This was when I was doing the Navy's prep course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of sea duty running aircraft-carrier reactors. Current-design civilian reactors are much larger, so the effects of a missile-strike meltdown would be correspondingly worse. If I had to guess, it'd be far worse than even the missile strike you postulate.
Footnote: AFAIK there has never been a nuclear accident aboard a Navy ship, submarine or otherwise. That's something in which nukes take immense pride. It's largely because of the zero-defect, second-checking culture ferociously instilled by Admiral Hyman Rickover during his decades in charge of "The Program."
Back to non-missile dangers: Human error is what I've always worried about for nuclear power plants. From what's been made public, both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl could easily have been averted — had it not been for cascades of operator errors. Can we confidently say that such errors are less likely today? To be sure, many civilian nuclear plants in the U.S. are run by Navy veterans. But my guess is that working in such plants doesn't provide the same motivations and incentives as "the Fleet." (And a flock of suicide drones won't care either way.)
Relatedly: I was just reading an account of Air France Flight 447, which flew itself into the middle of the South Atlantic — killing all aboard — because of cascades of egregious pilot error that defeated all the autopilot systems.
You may have seen the famous test of ramming a F4 Phantom into a reinforced concrete walls without much effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ
It's certainly possible to blow them up, but they very unlikely to melt down like Chernobyl did anymore due to all the effort put into preventing that. Easier to just launch radioactive materials at your enemy if that's the result you want.
§ 50.150 Aircraft impact assessment.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part050/p...
Containment buildings for nuclear reactors are the strongest non-military buildings ever build. You need something much stronger than a small airplane, or simple drone, missile to breach it. Even a 155mm artillery granite or a anti-tank missile is not enough. You would probably need specialize bunker buster munition, or nuclear explosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building
The Russian army will not directly attack nuclear power plants in Ukraine. They could not gain much from release of radioactive material as the radioactive material would also migrate to Russia. The Russian army is attacking the infrastructure connecting power plants to the grid, to deny the electricity production. (And is attacking must power infrastructure in Ukraine).
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hits-several-key...
Error rather than intentional targetting has to be considered.
Imagine a cruise missile (e.g. tomahawk) or a bunker buster bomb rather than an anti-tank missile.
The premise that such plants will not be targetted may apply to Russia (I doubt it) but may not apply to Israel or the USA.
A collision at 50 km/h is going to have roughly 1% the force of one at 500km/h.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...
Eve China, the best nuclear power builders out there, are shifting away from massive nuclear to storage and wind and solar.
Without a major technological innovation in the nuclear power space, I don't see how it can compete, except at the poles and in niches with very poor renewable resources.
Grid storage is cheap enough that Texas, a purely profit-driven grid is now overtaking California in the amount of battery storage deployed. 58GWh of new grid storage was added in 2025 alone, and the growth is still exponentialhttps://seia.org/news/united-states-installs-58-gwh-of-new-e...
I see now that your original post had a fantastical claim that we need weeks of battery storage, which is a fantastical claim. In reality we will need variable amounts of battery but a "week long" battery is not supported by a single detailed grid study I have ever seen.
When I have asked Pell to justify claims of "weeks long battery" the only justifications have been "I heard it from someone else", or napkin math that contains many errors, and in places where there are not errors choices are made to estimate an upper bound rather than a lower bound, indicating that the calculator doesn't understand how napkins math can be useful.
And for super cheap infrequently used storage, here's a recent purchase at $33/kWh of a 30GWh battery by Google:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176841
I don't expect such batteries to be used much, despite being a fraction of the cost of current LFP batteries, because we really won't need much storage with such a low power:energy ratio.
To make sure we are on the same page are you envisioning a grid powered 100% by wind + solar + batteries?
Don't forget existing hydro, new advanced geothermal, existing nuclear (until they all reach end of life), etc. etc. etc.
Also, 5 was a typo, it should have been 4 of course! Form energy has been making a major splash for years, having first modeled out the grid case for this type of battery, and ensuring that all materials and battery chemistry allowed a potential route to success. It's iron-air.
Plus, referring to this in terms of "hours" isn't exactly the most informative reference, the more underlying characteristic of storage is if it's meant for daily cycling, meaning that it makes mine every single day from arbitrage, or if it's multi day which is not a super profitable form of arbitrage at the moment. Daily cycling makes a ton of sense with solar. Longer term cycles make more sense paired with wind.
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30386-6
Firm low-carbon resources consistently lower decarbonized electricity system costs
• Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases
• Without these resources, electricity costs rise rapidly as CO2 limits near zero
• Batteries and demand flexibility do not substitute for firm low-carbon resources
Non-tropical equatorial countries don't have meaningful seasonality, so they don't need seasonal storage.
For countries far north of the equator, it's more challenging, but there are multiple tools to address this, including: over-building so you have enough in winter, using wind which is seasonally negatively correlated with solar, importing power over HVDC, and diversifying wind spatially to reduce correlations which drop more than linearly in distance.
For small countries very far away from the equator that have highly variable insolation and limited geography to decorrelate, nuclear may be better. But it cannot be asserted a priori without a simulation study tailored to the specifics of that location. When I said that nuclear is bad, I am talking in generalities about the common case (United States) at current market prices.
The paper that you linked is old, we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar.
" we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar."
But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive.
No it doesn't. Why do you just say that? There are simulation studies like CSIRO's work which show that it's still cheaper than nuclear after you account for everything.
The price of grid storage is absolutely falling exponentially with respect to time.
You're welcome to go find your own data of course, you'll struggle to find more direct numbers because significant grid storage has only become affordable in the last few years.
The term vaguely makes sense if there are sources of electricity that output a constant supply that are cheaper than the dispatchable sources of power. Like nuclear was supposed to be (but in the end is not). Or in some very specific locations hydro (without a reservoir) and geothermal are. But as often bandied about as a "type of power that must be filled" it simply doesn't exist. The type of power that must be filled is dispatachable power, everything else is just "well what cheap non-dispatchable sources can we use to avoid using more expensive dispatchable power".
Dispatchable power is the only sort of power that provides 24x7 power with predictable rates. If there's more demand, you produce more power (at the same cost). If there's less, you produce less so you can sell what you do produce at the same cost.
Those large industrial customers often also end up selling the electricity in the market. Power companies need multi-decade commitments before they are willing to build anything as capital intensive as a nuclear reactor. In that time, industrial customers need to modernize their factories to keep them competitive. Which is often the time they realize it's more profitable to invest that money somewhere else and wind down the old factories.
That's the most expensive one, especially if you both need it to be reliable (can't be a battery that can run out) and need it to not emit CO2 (can't be natural gas peaker plants). So what you want is to minimize the amount of dispatchable power that you need.
Which is what baseload does up to the point that it's generating the "base" (i.e. typical daily minimum) amount of load, because then you don't need any of that portion of the load to be dispatchable since the baseload plants will handle it ~100% of the time.
If baseload is half of peak load then you only need 50% of peak load to be dispatchable because baseload sources handle the other half. If you have no baseload sources then you need enough dispatchable sources to handle 100% of the peak load in case that's the only thing available some days/times, e.g. when peak load is after sunset and solar output is zero.
The difference gets even more significant when you consider the possibility of reducing demand through pricing. Suppose raising the price by a moderate amount can lower the daily average demand by 25%; past that you start hitting inelastic demand and would need unrealistically high prices. If you have baseload as 50% of generation then you now only need dispatchable sources to handle 25% of peak load because the other 25% can be achieved through pricing. Without baseload sources you need 75% -- three times as much instead of twice as much.
More than that, it reduces to 25% the amount of long-term dispatchable power you need, i.e. things that cost a fixed amount to have and are also expensive to use but can't run out of capacity. Things you might only use two weeks out of two years, like hydrogen fuel cells or expensive flow batteries; you don't want to need three times as much of those.
Meanwhile you can use short-term dispatchable power (i.e. normal batteries) to do things like handle the peak demand in the early evening while charging them using solar during the day. The period after sunset but before the load falls off is only a few hours long, so you only need 50% of total capacity for ~15% of the hours in the day, i.e. having only 7.5% of daily capacity would mean that you don't have to use demand suppression through pricing unless you have an extended supply shortfall from renewables. Whereas if you don't have baseload then you need enough batteries for ~50% of daily capacity because now you need enough batteries to handle the entire peak demand in the early evening instead of half and the entire demand late at night instead of none. On top of the long-term storage in case the batteries run out.
This is the assumption that justifies the term "base load". In most cases it is simply false.
> especially if you both need it to be reliable (can't be a battery that can run out)
No source of power is 100% reliable, in practice power plants have unplanned outages a single-digits-percent amount of the time. Batteries charged by non-dispatchable power easily match this.
Of course in reality you want a grid with many power plants so that when one is down the rest probably aren't. "Probably" does some work though, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/half-of-f...
Excess dispatchable power helps make up for when that probably doesn't turn out in your favor.
> and need it to not emit CO2
If we're banning CO2 emissions then up until the last couple of years in most places your only option would be to overbuild nuclear until the point that it was dispatchable and not base load power. Naturally no one did this because it would be obscenely expensive. Now of course you'd have the options of any of the clean energy sources (nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, etc) powering batteries.
Which is the reason batteries can't make for a reliable grid by themselves. There is a strong correlation for every battery being unable to provide power at the same time because they all start discharging instead of charging when demand exceeds supply and the longer that continues the fewer batteries you have that still have any charge, and therefore the higher the withdrawal rate on the remaining ones to extract the same number of total watts, until you have none.
> "Probably" does some work though, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/half-of-f...
This is why you want a diverse set of generation sources so that you don't get correlated outages. It's better to have nuclear and renewables than just one or the other. France is unique in the world for having more than the optimal amount of nuclear. And it's really more like nuclear is concentrated in France and connected to a European grid containing several other things, but then you can't say that 50% of generation was offline because of this.
Also notice that even the "unplanned" reduction in output was still pretty planned. They find an issue that requires mitigating at multiple plants, so more than the usual number have to be taken offline at some point in the same year, but they get to choose when and can do most of them outside the period of peak seasonal demand, instead of letting the weather choose when.
> Excess dispatchable power helps make up for when that probably doesn't turn out in your favor.
Suppose you had enough battery storage to run the whole grid for 24 hours instead of for 4 hours. Then you unexpectedly discover that half of your power plants (regardless of what type they are) have to be taken offline for two months for repairs/maintenance. How much good are you getting out of 20 hours when you essentially need 30 days?
> If we're banning CO2 emissions then up until the last couple of years in most places your only option would be to overbuild nuclear until the point that it was dispatchable and not base load power.
Hydro is even older than nuclear and there are places where it's close to 100% of generation. If you don't have enough dam sites for that but still have some then using nuclear for base load and hydro for load following has been a solid option with zero fossil fuels since nuclear became available.
But nobody is even proposing to use nuclear as dispatchable power. Its purpose is base load regardless of what form of dispatchable power you use, and the purpose of base load is to reduce the amount of dispatchable power that you need.
This is historically true. However these days natural gas is often cheaper. Of course prices fluctuate, but in general coal has been losing favor because it is expensive. Note that cheap is not just the direct fuel costs, it also includes overhead, that you can throttle natural gas often makes it cheaper overall even when the direct costs are slightly more.
Also unreliable wind+solar is - when working - vastly cheaper than anything else. As such running natural gas at twice the price vs a coal plant can still be a lot cheaper just because you don't have to buy fuel when the wind blows/sun shines.
Comparing nameplate capacity for generation methods with much different capacity factors is misleading. China generates the majority of its electricity from coal, and is still adding more. They're adding more in renewables than coal by nameplate capacity, but coal likewise has a higher capacity factor than renewables, so it's really about the same. Then they say "increasing the proportion of renewables" because the initial proportion of renewables was close to 0.
Coal is a baseload source but not one you actually want to use.
If you use electricity to synthesize gas and then burn that later to generate electricity that is still cheaper than nuclear power.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Nobody builds nuclear power because it's cost effective or green. They either have nukes like China or have purchased an option on nukes (like Iran or Poland).
For that scenario, nuclear is still marginally cheaper (at today's prices at least).
There is still nowhere in the world nuclear power makes economic sense.
The problem with nuclear today is just that it simply hasn't kept pace with the lowering cost of alternatives.
its really not. The new(ie 90s) french reactors are about as fast as Combined cycle gas turbines. Even if its not, it works well enough, spain has shit all battery capacity and manages well enough
but if you have lots of renewables you need batteries ideally, which means the hypothetical argument of "its too slow" goes away because batteries are there to even out the supply.
It's never an economic decision to build nuclear power stations. They're 5x the cost of solar and wind.
Modeling by the American Farmland Trust (AFT) finds that 83% of projected solar development will be on agricultural land, of which 49% will be on land AFT deems “nationally significant” due to high levels of productivity, versatility, and resiliency. In May 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) reported that between 2009 and 2020, 43% of solar installations were on land previously used for crop production and 21% on land used as pasture or rangeland.
In a few years we'll have to deal with an impending disposal issue on farmland:
Forecasts suggest that 8 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their lifecycles by 2030. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory reports that less than 10% of decommissioned panels are recycled. Many end up in landfills at the end of their lifecycle, which could be problematic, according to researchers with the Electric Power Research Institute because panels could break and leak toxic materials like lead and cadmium into the soil. If decommissioned panels are not disposed of properly, they could contaminate the surface and groundwater in the surrounding area, making disposal a major issue for farmers and rural communities who rely on groundwater for needs ranging from crop irrigation to drinking water.
Depending on how the panels are put in place, the land and soil quality will increase significantly because its reverting to fallow and long rooted stabilising plants will have 25 years to build up the biome again. Converting land back to farming is pretty quick.
I understand the point your making, and I do agree with the end of life cycle issues. THere is going to be a lot of lead leaching into water courses if not dealt with properly.
If you replaced ONLY existing fields used to grow corn for ethanol, and turned those into solar panels, you would already exceed the entire current US demand for electricity.
Solar energy is a phenomenal use of land, of which we have enormous amounts of in this country.
Currently their liability is capped at $300 million. Fukushima cleanup cost $800 billion.
End the insurance free ride first and then maybe lets talk about deregulation.
Seeing that already here in Canada. All parties (except one) seem united in their newfound aspiration to just mine and ship more of the stuff.
Talking about transition is politically toxic here right now.
I strongly suspect it was primarily created by the US threatening to annex us via "economic force" and thus creating a need to prioritize our short term economic strength over longer term charity things like climate change.
But Canada has a pretty great climate apart from a bit of snow, I wouldn't take warmer at the cost of a small risk of desertification, forest fires, hurricanes, etc. Climate change is unfortunately not just in the nice and warm direction.
Warmer over here in the west means wetter, which means land slides and floods (plus more wild fires in drier seasons). It also means a pivot in tourism (from glaciers, ski resorts, frozen north) to well, who knows what at this stage.
Logging also becomes even less advisable (see land slides etc.).
So less "hey win win" (with an implied wink), more "hey win, lose, lose, ?".
I also think that there's a bigger force at work which is that despite actually being only 2nd or 3rd in Canada's GDP by percentage, energy sector is basically the majority of what's on the TSX and a key driver in equity growth in Canada. And so, the old maxim applies in regards to climate change and Canadians generally: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I'm from Alberta originally and talking to extended family etc about this topic is just painful. Not officially climate change denying, but in practice fully actually
Ahem, have I missed something? Do you know more then the rest of us? I mean, has the nuclear waste problem actually been solved?
Climate change is a problem for 50 years ago. And now. Very, very much now.
Having to, in the worst case, designate some small areas that we choose as uninhabitable "nuclear waste zones" in a few decades is vastly preferable to having to designate entire regions of the world as uninhabitable "too hot to live" zones around the same time. And that's if we don't find some better way to handle the nuclear waste.
* Not in the sense of "a permanent and comprehensive solution". However, the actual spent nuclear fuel can now be reprocessed and reused in newer reactor designs, down to a tiny fraction of what we would have considered "nuclear waste" with the earliest designs in the mid-20th century.
It's actually more diverse than I thought.