[aljg]

Half as much damage as coal is a pretty low bar! Natural gas also meets it, for example.

Your broader point is strong though, and there's no reason 4th-gen nuclear power plants being designed now couldn't deliver a quarter (or less) the damage of coal while still being economical.

[aeternum]

Could they really be economical though? There is potential for harm (including terrorism) that must be insured against, you also need to pay a premium for the land compared to solar/wind since few want to live nearby. The construction timelines are huge compared to solar/wind and you don't have the economies of scale that drive prices down.

Nuclear easily beats coal if we include the environmental costs but it's also up against solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal options which have seen huge efficiency gains in the last decade.

[opo]

>Half as much damage as coal is a pretty low bar! Natural gas also meets it, for example.

Natural gas has advantages over coal, but if we are talking about effects on climate change, natural gas is unfortunately comparable to using coal. The CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are much lower than a coal plant, but it isn't clear that if you account for methane releases during production/transporting/storage that it is better for climate change than coal.

>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...

As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947