I really don't understand the assault on nuclear power. It's literally the only proven clean energy solution for solving the base load problem, and it's not like we can only choose between nuclear and renewables--we can and should have a diverse energy portfolio.
Not only is nuclear power clean, it's two orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels and on-par with wind and solar (it's considerably safer than rooftop solar, in fact). And that is including Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Further, while nuclear is expensive, Small Modular Reactor designs are safer, smaller, simpler, and faster to build. We should be building them now if only to make sure we have the experience if we need to scale them up quickly.
Yes, nuclear waste has to be dealt with, but there's very little of it and we already have to deal with it.
Ignoring nuclear and praying for a breakthrough solution for the renewable base load problem is tremendously risky and there's virtually no upside.
Nuclear was built up as the boogeyman in the mid 20th century as a vehicle to garner political support for various factions and to boost sentiment for conflict with the USSR. That’s why. It worked as a useful tool to grab people’s attention and give them strong opinions.
> Yes, nuclear waste has to be dealt with, but there's very little of it and we already have to deal with it.
A little nuclear waste goes a long way. If you have any concrete,
practical suggestions for ways to deal with it, the world needs you.
Summarizing them here will make me an advocate.
I see your point, but it also doesn't go a long way. It's very dense and solid, and tends to stay put as far as wastes go.
> If you have any concrete, practical suggestions for ways to deal with it, the world needs you. Summarizing them here will make me an advocate.
This is wrong for a couple of reasons:
1. We already know how to deal with nuclear waste: [deep geological repository][0].
2. Moreover, we can continue to safely manage nuclear waste above ground for a very long time. Far longer than we can continue fossil fuel pollution. And this worst-case solution is still far, far, far safer than fossil fuels.
If skeptics aren't convinced, I don't think their skepticism is founded in reason.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
(To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)
To be fair, the number of people killed directly or indirectly from Chernobyl (as well as children born with birth defects, higher cancer rates regionally, etc) is hotly disputed and certainly higher than the "official" tally.
The number of people killed just by coal power plants in Europe is around 20k a year, choosing to abandon nuclear without clean alternatives in place first was irresponsible.
I totally agree, but it's disingenuous to compare estimated indirect deaths from coal plants to direct deaths of a nuclear accident that was covered up for decades with no good estimate of the indirect deaths and illness from exposure.
To the extent that the comparison is disingenuous, I would think it's because we're comparing the criminal mismanagement of a Soviet nuclear facility with ordinary coal facilities. Frankly Chernobyl wouldn't happen in the west (and thus using it as a reason not to invest in nuclear seems disingenuous), and certainly not with newer, smaller, and safer reactor designs.
> a nuclear accident that was covered up for decades
The cover-up of Chernobyl lasted barely days.
> with no good estimate of the indirect deaths and illness from exposure.
Only a multitude of studies. The current consensus in the scientific community is that somewhere around 20,000-30,000 total deaths attributable to Chernobyl have or will occur.
One of the most frustrating thing is that whenever I talk to people who claim to be environmentalist, they are deeply against nuclear power and don't want to face the facts that Germany's decision to quit nuclear was not a net positive for the environment and instead had a negative impact by keeping Coal factories open longer than they should have been.
It's important to finance renewables research and there's a bright future for them but, right now, nuclear is the best hope for mostly clean energy with a lot less negative environment impact than Coal and Fossil Fuel.
Most people follow/mirror the views of the leaders they identify with. Unless environmental groups come out in favor of nuclear energy, people will continue to be against it.
For the environmental groups themselves, this is a rather complex topic since they will be forced to embrace something they’ve vilified for several generations.
Anyways I hope there’s a stronger push for nuclear but I’m not counting on it. There’s no subsidies/incentives in the BBB plan, no major political player seems to be embracing nuclear etc
Maybe you need to talk to more? I would say I’m an environmentalist who is in favor of nuclear power, and I know more. (Edit: I and my friends went to school for physics so maybe that has something to do with it)
Nuclear does take a long time to design, approve, and build. I would like to see somebody do a financial analysis comparing the cost and power generated timeline for spending the same amount of money on solar, wind, and nuclear. It doesn’t seem that research is really an impediment to majority renewable energy at this point.
I am pro-nuclear, but would like to actually see how an equal amount of resources would lead to what power and when to give arguments like this teeth or debunk them.
Small Modular Reactor designs aspire to solve for this, but they're new and we need to actually get some experience building and operating them before we can really understand the economics and risks. We should be doing this stuff now so we can scale up quickly in the future.
You're not wrong, but any realistic outcome of going in this direction would take decades until it was at meaningful scale. We're more in a "we need to do things now" kind of situation, we should still put some resources towards things we won't have for decades, but that can't be the primary focus.
Renewables don’t have a solution now either (no base load, remember?), nor do they even have anything concrete on the horizon, so they certainly ought not be the primary focus. So if not nuclear nor renewables, then what?
In the summer months peak usage is near peak solar generation, and usage is as much as 60% higher than minimum daily usage. With the rise of electric cars, a whole lot of usage will be able to be scheduled for times of excess.
There is a lot of current room for renewables to displace carbon. There will probably always be some fossil fuel capacity for peaking plants and battery systems are already being deployed in places.
The point at which we have too many renewables and a gap in generation is a long time off, and possibly with battery systems and demand shifting will never happen. It seems like the time to solve that problem will be measured in decades, there's no need to say renewables aren't a solution now when they can solve a huge portion of the problem starting immediately.
Cost shouldn’t be the only dimension to evaluate solutions to planet-wide problems.
See https://youtu.be/KC7YD98HixM. It does cost more to generate nuclear power but it’s also the only viable clean and “firm” (turn on and off based on demand) type of power generation available to us.
Nuclear is definitely not very responsive to demand, if you shutdown you have to wait days before you can restart, and it has a slow response to output levels.
Demand will also follow supply, setting pricing to availability will (and has) significantly alter usage patterns.
Also, having too much peak power and not enough baseline power isn't a today problem and won't be until solar/wind sources are at a much larger scale. Rolling industrial blackouts (or price spikes) in the middle of the night might become a thing, but still.. meh?
Cost isn't the only dimension, but there is the question "how do we best utilize our available resources?" and we might be able to better find the best allocation if we had a nice comparison about the cost/reward of sinking those resources into wind, solar, or nuclear. We need all of them, but there is certainly a tradeoff between how much we put towards each.
I just see generalized policies of degrowth and basically destruction of the middle-class (whatever that means) everywhere in the western world:
- Local lockdowns rather than closing borders in time for the virus
- Increased tolerance of petty crime to make the cities as inhabitable as possible
- Very incompetent energy policies that will make energy skyrocket in price
- Policies and incentives making it harder and harder to be able to afford a car.
- Deindustrialization (that's been going on for a while) and no effort to reverse it.
- Basically no research or very bad research on basic health improvement treatments that don't involve medication.
And small things like that adding up one by one. Would be not so strange if different countries were failing in different ways, but seems strange to see so many countries consistently "failing" in the same way.
Malthus wrote in the 1800s about how society was on the verge of collapse because we were all going to run out of resources.
People who take a lot of stock in these types of predictions generally cannot see the value of economic growth and try to save the world by enforcing their own set of puritanical environmental restrictions.
Not only is nuclear power clean, it's two orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels and on-par with wind and solar (it's considerably safer than rooftop solar, in fact). And that is including Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Further, while nuclear is expensive, Small Modular Reactor designs are safer, smaller, simpler, and faster to build. We should be building them now if only to make sure we have the experience if we need to scale them up quickly.
Yes, nuclear waste has to be dealt with, but there's very little of it and we already have to deal with it.
Ignoring nuclear and praying for a breakthrough solution for the renewable base load problem is tremendously risky and there's virtually no upside.