Climate Change Goals Bring New Embrace of Nuclear Power (and Gas in EU)
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Climate Change Goals Bring New Embrace of Nuclear Power (and Gas in EU)
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"Lawmakers in the European Union voted to include nuclear power and natural gas in the bloc's list of investments deemed sustainable," reports the Wall Street Journal, in a move the EU hopes leads to greater funding for a transition away from coal:
Burning natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide that is generated by coal, and nuclear-power plants don't produce carbon dioxide when they are operating. But environmentalists, lawmakers and some investors have argued the plan risks diluting investments in other projects such as renewable energy.
More U.S. political leaders are also warming to nuclear power, reports the New York Times, "driven by the difficulty of meeting clean energy goals and by surging electricity demands."
The Biden administration has established a $6 billion fund to help troubled nuclear plant operators keep their reactors running and make them more economically competitive against cheaper resources like solar and wind power.... In addition to the $6 billion fund, the administration is providing $2.5 billion for two projects meant to demonstrate new nuclear technology, in Washington State and Wyoming. A separate bipartisan measure introduced last year is aimed at preserving and expanding nuclear energy in the United States. The bill, whose backers include Senators Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, and Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, would provide financial assistance like tax credits, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax policy organization....
The rising costs of other sources of power have made nuclear energy more competitive around the world, including in the United States, which has the largest fleet of nuclear plants of any country. They produce about 20 percent of the nation's electricity and 50 percent of the clean energy. The United States maintains 92 reactors, though a dozen have closed over the last decade — including, a month ago, the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, about 55 miles southwest of Grand Rapids.... Industry leaders recognize that the age of new large-scale nuclear plants in the United States has passed, chiefly because of runaway costs... But many in the industry say smaller reactors that can be expanded over time offer promise of avoiding long delays and high cost. These reactors, they say, can be built in factories and delivered to approved sites. And the reactors' high-temperature steam could also yield significant amounts of hydrogen, a carbon-free alternative fuel to natural gas.
The project locations can plan for as many as a dozen units but start with just one. But a plant with 12 units would produce half the electricity or even a little less than many other large nuclear facilities.
None of the smaller reactors have been certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which approves licenses and operations of the nation's nuclear power plants. But NuScale Power, a company that designs and markets small reactors in Oregon, expects to receive certification of its design by the end of the summer. A developer then would need approval for a license to build and operate the unit. Thomas Mundy, chief commercial officer for NuScale Power, said his company's product could be built and put into use in about three years, a fraction of the time it takes to build larger reactor units. And the cost, Mr. Mundy said, is competitive with new natural gas facilities at a levelized cost — the electricity price needed to break even at the end of the plant's life — of $45 to $65 a megawatt-hour.
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If we are pinning our hopes on nuclear we have already lost. Too slow, too expensive, accident waiting to happen.
Even gas is expensive now. This week off shore wind contracts were sold at auction for one quarter the cost of gas based electricity. One quarter.
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The real issue is that proven nuclear needs cool water (lots of it) to operate. Already, nuclear plants around the world are being run at reduced capacity during the summer because there isn't enough cool water.
Which means we have to go with an unproven new salt based system. It's projected to be wonderful. Just as the current nuclear plants were.
But I still think a nuclear baseline power with plenty of energy storage* and as much alternative energy as possible is the way to go.
* not just batteries.
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It would make more sense to just rely on gas for the few days a year we might actually need it. Concentrate on building up renewable energy and taking advantage of it being incredibly cheap.
There's a cost of living crisis. We can't afford this.
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Things that run just a few days a year tend to be extremely expensive (and slightly less reliable). It might work as a government thing but never as a private enterprise thing.
I'm not a fan of nuclear but the right nuclear clearly has a place in the mix. We simply need to get off of natural gas production and usage as much as possible.
We can afford this. It's just a matter of prioritizing it over other budgetary choices. The world is wealthy compared to only 50 years ago. The issue is most of the wea
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Governments are going to have to be involved if we are going to meet our climate goals. We can't rely on capitalism to get us there.
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Even more reason to use the gas for the stuff we really need it for (heating and industry) and not for energy generation.
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There's the proven system of liquid sodium too, proven to be flammable.
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Natural gas still needs cooling water, it's the deltaT that make the turbines spin the alternator to generate the electricity.
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The reactor can run just fine with the warmer water. The reason why some are run at reduced capacity in the summer is to avoid heating the lake or river water too much and hurting the fish.
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"The reactor can run just fine with the warmer water. The reason why some are run at reduced capacity in the summer is to avoid heating the lake or river water too much and hurting the fish"
Some nuke plants have had to shut down when the "fish" were made of jelly.
https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com] -
Also you may want to look at western u.s.a. and keep in mind that nuclear plants use 50,000 gallons of water *per minute*.
In the process they are literally emptying an aquifer that took 6,000 years to fill up.It's not sustainable.
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Why not built a power plant net to a big lake or something? Also, it's not like all of the water evaporates. Some probably does, but most of it is returned to the lake, but warmer.
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That's great. Except for the fact that wind can't provide anywhere near the amount of electricity we need. It will never be more than a niche. Also there's the little math problem:
no wind = no electricity-
no wind = no electricity
There's a fix [ametsoc.org] for that. As a bonus, it can also help solve the problem of heat waves shutting off nuclear power plants [slashdot.org].
Of course solar is even better for heat waves because PV generation coincides with A/C usage.
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Of course solar is even better for heat waves because PV generation coincides with A/C usage.
Where does this idea come from? This is easily proven false by real and actual data from utilities. They have a name for it, "duck curve". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's funny how the last section in your link proves your claim false!
They decided against building the extra cooling because they wanted to save money. Such heat waves are rare and they didn't believe the extra cooling was worth the extra cost.
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My link above--I'm sorry, your link above--proves otherwise!
Meanwhile, here on planet Earth, today my AC is going to have to run for three hours after the sun sets today because the outside air is still vastly hotter than the desired inside temperature (82 F).
The link says that peak is earlier but you seem to have mistaken that for meaning that there is significant demand reduction in the evening, which is false.
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No, I don't doubt that the heat lingers after the sun sets. I only doubt the claim that "Solar PV is a terrible idea for providing power to air conditioning in a heat wave. [slashdot.org]" Because most of the electrical demand on a hot day coincides when the sun is up and PV panels are producing power.
And as the Anonymous Coward in this thread explains, there are low-tech ways to time-shift the evening cooling demand to the daylight hours [slashdot.org].
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Why do you believe the EU is caving in on allowing nuclear fission and natural gas to lower CO2 emissions?
Because linking enough wind farms together to provide baseload power is going to take more time and coordination between countries.
There's not enough land area in Europe to collect enough wind and sun to meet their energy needs.
Are you lying? Because this study [plos.org] says powering Europe with wind and solar alone would require only 2% of the continent's land area.
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For large buildings, the simplest and most obvious is to use thermal cold storage in conjunction with AC - say, a saline reservoir which is super cooled to -20C cooled using intensive energy using compressors during the daytime that can then be drawn on at night for cooling with relatively low energy usage fans.
Refrigerators can also use this, and hot water systems are already basically doing this to store energy from off peak night time electricity for use during the day, so can be trivially be changed to-
Oh look - turns out I'm not the only one to come up with such schemes.
Carrier's already done it.https://www.carrier.com/commer... [carrier.com]
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Please explain how wind generators can create power when there is no wind.
Thank you.
Have a nice day!-
Well, your user name is an epic fail, because you seem to have overlooked the blatantly obvious fact that you cannot only generate power with wind and that you can _store_ power large-scale. Well, places you just, say, > 100 years in the past regarding knowledge of the tech state-of-the-art, but who is counting.
Well, this will be done and working despite complete morons like you claiming it cannot.
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Ah, so the cost of wind and solar is not just wind and solar, but also storage. I wonder how that changes the equation. Let's just ignore the fact that there is "large-scale" storage as of yet. There are small scale experiments, that's about it.
And for the record, your username is the stupidest one I ever seen.
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My take is that this is just some nuclear assholes trying to get even richer. No nuclear that matters will be built anytime soon in the EU. Far, far too expensive and far, far too slow to establish.
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Luckily environmentally friendly countries in the EU are in fact building new nuclear plants [carnegieendowment.org].
From the article:
France, the EUâ(TM)s leading atomic state with nuclear weapons and fifty-six power reactors, is poised to launch a major reinvestment in nuclear power. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Poland are preparing to build new power reactors.Germany (the last true hold out) in short order will be re-starting nuclear plans they planned to close.
Your planet-killing philosophy is dead s
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Nothing of that is actually true. France plans 2-4 reactors. That is to keep their nuclear arsenal maintained, that is not their power strategy. May come online in 20-30 years if Flamville (which is _still_ not running) is any indication. "Preparing to build" means absolutely nothing. Germany _cannot_ "restart" reactors. Absolutely impossible. That is not how it works. Germany cannot even extend the running-time of the 3 still online.
Seriously. You are the one advocating species-suicide here and you have z
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You wonder why nuclear, the cleanest, least radioactive, lowest CO2, most environmentally friendly, least deaths / kwh is so scary? I'm sure the fossil fuel lobby has nothing to do with this at all, nope, nothing. We wouldn't be in this mess if we had kept going in 70's and 80's and innovate better nuclear plants.
Also fuck you, and your dimwitted opinion.
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People who have been whining about nuclear power for decades but are now telling us climate change is an emergency are basically a joke.
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Yep. Accident waiting to happen. So far, we've had three nuclear "disasters". Collectively, the three killed almost as many people as die in traffic on any given morning in the US, much less the world.
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Where corruption led to a massive disaster that caused the city to be evacuated for around 10 years. Worse the CEO who caused it got off scot-free and the public is blaming the engineers who tried to mitigate the disaster. Seriously look it up.
If I was an engineer and I was paying attention you couldn't pay me enough to work on a nuclear reactor after that. A businessman will come in, cut my budget and then when there's inevitably a disaster shift the blame to me and get out smelling like roses. Meanwhile you have billions of dollars of property damage.
I'm well aware that the problems with nuclear aren't technical their social but that doesn't mean those problems aren't real. Nerds like to pretend social problems aren't real problems and that we can just tech our way out of everything. Doesn't work that way in the real world..-
It doesn't matter, nuclear still wins.
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Tell that to the victims of Fukushima and Chernobyl. They might not be dead, but that doesn't mean they didn't have their lives ruined.
They are also economic disasters. Japan is still paying for Fukushima, with the cost looking to be around half a trillion Euros/USD. Worse still last month a court ruled that the government's free insurance against this kind of thing is actually worthless as they are not liable, and TEPCO doesn't have the money.
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A similar point can be made about global warming. Because it is slow onset doesn't make it less of a catastrophe, even though quantifying the damages is less straightforward. Still, I assume everyone agrees that the damages of global warming are significantly more of a concern than those of nuclear catastrophes. So if facing the choice between global warming and nuclear power, well the choice is pretty easy. The question is, is there a viable third option.
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But that's a false choice. It's actually between nuclear and renewables.
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Renewables are the third option I am referring to. However it is still unclear to me whether it is viable. What I have read seems to indicate that emissions incurred by renewables are not that great compared to nuclear, but I find it hard to determine what is a reliable source of information on this topic. France wants nuclear, Germany wants gas, some countries are anti-nuclear or pro-nuclear, lots of articles are in fact partisan. If you have information that you find reliable, I am happy to know about it.
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Right, this is all the fault of the meltdown at Fukushima. The tsunami had nothing to do with the trillions of dollars that will be spent on the cleanup.
Of the hundreds of civil nuclear power reactors in operation all over the world all the anti-science anti-nuclear anti-logic people have against nuclear power are a handful of second generation nuclear power plants to point to as examples of how bad nuclear power must be. That's like saying we should not build new passenger jetliners because the de Havila
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More than three.
That's the logic that people playing Russian roulette use to play another round.
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Should compare it with gun deaths in the land of the free-to-be-an-idiot, that will stir something up.
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If every nuclear reactor on the world went full chernobyl, with the worst accident numbers given, it would kill as many people as 7 years of coal and oil operating normally.
It is very slow and expensive to build as a solution for global warming, but it costs nothing to not turn off the existing ones that are still fine, like germany is doing.-
The accidents are indeed not really the problem, though the reactors should be government operated.
The biggest problem with fission plants is the waste they leave behind for thousands of years.
If now we could get fusion plants operational, it would be another matter.-
You mean the full lifetime of waste that is simply stored on site in a swimming pool sized area? Which is so harmless that they can just shoot a documentary showing you where and how it is stored without protective clothing?
You wonder why nuclear waste is such a problem, but it's absolutely okay to pollute neighborhoods with car exhausts (and tire rubber particles), oil/coal power plant exhausts, airplane exhausts, all of which are FAR FAR more damaging to our health then the measly insignificant little bit
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Are you including deaths caused by Godzilla every time he smashed Tokyo?
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Godzilla is not that lethal.
He comes, he smash like 20 buildings then he goes away.
That's what? 10.000 people on the worst, worst case.
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> If we are pinning our hopes on nuclear we have already lost.
> Woke, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - ACThere's no wind in space, son. Eventually we'll be fully nuclear on earth and in the cosmos.
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Well it's not surprising that gas is expensive, with the world's largest exporter of natural gas embargoed.
People prefer simple ideas, even if they aren't very good. A more realistic approach to something as big as climate change involves lots of alternatives going forward *in parallel*, including newer, more economically attractive forms of nuclear energy, but also conservation and renewable energy.
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New nuclear power plants are economically obsolete.
They cost 4x more per kWh than any other alternative.
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We seem to alternate to various kinds of power.
Nuclear is our salvation...until Fukishima or Three Mile Island...
The "future of power" seems more faddish than factual.:(
JoshK.
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I think the main issue with nuclear power is it really should be zoned and regulated up the wazoo, which has significant ongoing costs that is anathema to people of a certain political bent. Who, I might mention, also seem to believe wind and solar power were directly inspired by Satan.
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Indeed. Technology has progressed since Three Mile Island and the movie "The China Syndrome."
JoshK.
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Even China is struggling to get nuclear power built out compared to other energy generation options, and it's not the ultimate power solution you seem to think it is do to other limiting factors, such as awater usage.
https://www.colorado.edu/cas/2... [colorado.edu]
If China, with it's complete control of regulations and financing can't get build Nuclear out to be competitive with renewables, then there's zero chance other countries can.
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Though saying, using new plants that uses the waste of the old plants as fuel would be a good thing.
Even if they are expensive, reducing the radioactive waste worldwide would be worth it.
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A ton of methane is dumped in the process of natural gas production and natural gas produces CO2.
One of the few good things to come out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fact that it will accelerate the move off of fossil fuels.
Sad thing is, I have thought for 8 years that it was too late. And current CO2 release (over 40 gigatons per year) is now 16 gigatons per year over what the promised/projected release levels were back then (we were going to supposedly be down to 24 gigatons).
5C is *baked* in at this point. The rain bands will move away from current croplands. Large regions will become essentially uninhabitable as the wet bulb temperature goes over 35C. The coastal cities will be flooded. There will be large forced migration/displacement of people all over the world. Many tropical diseases and insects will spread up to between 50 and 60 degrees lattitude. And the permafrost will melt.
And if the locked up methane starts to sublimate, then things get bad.
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Add to that that while natural gas emits less CO2 when burnt, when transported as liquefied over an ocean and counting the whole supply chain, it is reportedly in the same emission ballpark as if we burned coal directly. (Jean Baptiste Fressoz mentioned it in an interview, no other sources as of now)
> 5C is *baked* in at this point.
I thought 3C was still physically possible, if we crashed the global economy within 10 years...
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Ships are crazy efficient. I can't see transporting it on ships increasing the total CO2 emissions to the level of coal.
Last time I calculated it, We blew thru the 3C carbon budget in 2026. But it may be 2025 now with emissions up from 38gT per year to 40gT per year and rising. The sea rises another foot in the next 18 years at this rate. So it will probably rise faster in reality.
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Nope, Russia is moving channels of fossil fuel sales to asia and Europe is planning to replace with coal. Fossil fuel use will continue to rise on this Earth. Just wait till India gets to China's level, you aint' seen nothing yet.
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Ukraine found huge natural gas reserves in the Donbas. They gave Shell the contract to exploit the gas. Once that came online it would have replaced Russian gas with lower transit costs to Europe. Russia invaded to stop that. Europe is supporting Ukraine so that it can get that gas for cheap ( or free as repayment for Lend Lease). Noone is actually planning to move away from gas. ts just about who sells it and and at what price.
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Ukrainian natural gas reserves are off the table for at least 5 years now.
I think that's long enough to help foster more alternative energy and nuclear.-
It isn't. It takes at least twice that long to get a reactor built, even without any big mean green protesters getting in the way.
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They aren't declaring natural gas sustainable. They are declaring as sustainable the construction of natural gas plants that are also fitted to run on (green) hydrogen.
I won't deny it's a stretch (are gas-burning cars "sustainable" because of synfuel?). But it does not cement the investment into natural gas for the life of the plant.
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Well, there's no such thing as green hydrogen, nor infrastructure to even attempt it (which is difficult, as hydrogen is a bitch to work with) so there's that.
The idea is just a distraction.
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Nuclear power and natural gas as energy sources to lower CO2 emissions are not new. The United Kingdom department of energy hired Dr. David MacKay to do a study on what options they had for energy. From that study came a number of presentations, interviews, and a book, all of which were readily available to anyone looking.
Book: http://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
Interview (which is quite short): https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/davi... [ted.com]Dr. MacKay went through the numbers on our energy options in a way that anyone with a high school education should be able to understand. We are not going to get enough energy without nuclear fission as an energy source. There may be a handful of exceptions but even then these nations would want to develop nuclear power for military defense, civil cargo ships, and space exploration.
Every nation has had access to these studies, not just those created by Dr. MacKay, that tell them that nuclear fission and natural gas would lower CO2 emissions while lowering energy costs. The EU has been avoiding these clear facts for far too long. Now that they recognize the uncomfortable truth means we may finally see real and sustained gains on improving human civilization and protections of the natural environment.
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Orbital solar mirrors could work. Unlike fusion sources, which some propose, it requires engineering rather than new physics. NASA has been studying this and doing small scale, pilot projects for years, and it does seem feasible. The idea of using a stable, already exising fusion generator does upset advocates of developing fusion poer on earth, but they've been trying a long time with very little sign of producing any working systems.
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There's no way to scale it economically. With Falcon, launch costs are about $2400/kg and satellite solar panels work out to about 20kg / kW so for launch costs alone you are looking at $4800 / kW or about 48 Billion / GW. With starship, that might be $100/kg, or $2B per GW which looks a lot better, but this is only considering launch cost, not the rest of the plant, and not including ground stations to receive the power, or the fact that these are going to need to be refuelled or replaced often if in low e
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The traditional idea is to mine the moon and near-Earth asteroids with low delta v requirements so as to not have to obtain materials or fuel (even if for fairly inefficient aluminum-oxygen rockets) from Earth, and to build and assemble as much as possible purely in space.
Photovoltaic panels are probably a long way off, but aluminum mirrors concentrating light on a small boiler that is built and launched from Earth, and the structure to keep it all connected, would be more plausible.
But it would take a long
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Solar sails can provide arbitrary amounts of delta V. The plentiful water for other space projects could, in theory fund other projects like solar mirrors. The very low thrust of solar sails is offset by the free fuel and the constant propulsion of solar wind and light pressure. There is effective ongoing research in progress:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-rel... [nasa.gov]
It's not particularly suitable for short-term, manned missions, but for longer term missions like asteroid mining or retr
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The start-up costs for solar mirrors are large. Expect launch costs/kg to drop as the number of launches increase. And if solar sails continue to advance, they can be used to bring in asteroids or ring material from gas giants such as Jupiter to provide bulk metals and most especially, water. The solar mirrors do not require near as much up front investment in new technology or facilities as numerous fission plants, or most especially fusion power.
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You really need to find a new source. McKay has been widely and repeatedly debunked, and being dead is now unable to respond to criticism.
In any case, European nuclear is not going to work. Currently in France 50% of reactors are offline, and even on a good day their capacity factor rarely gets above 70%. It's actually quite comparable to offshore wind, only less predictable because you can't forecast nuclear reactor failures as well as you can forecast the weather.
Plus, we can't afford it.
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Dr. MacKay was "debunked"? By whom? Where? When? Provide sources or I can only assume you are full of shit. We just had the EU declare nuclear power vital to solving their energy problems, do you believe none of them did their research to know this won't work? Did you send the EU a note that they made a big mistake?
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No they aren't. They are appeasing the nuclear lobby making use of the gas problems.
If they'd read their studies they'd see nuclear is a hinderance, not a solution to the "Climate change goals". It's a long term good thing to invest in, but not a solution that has even the tiniest impact on our CO2 ambitions.
There are two goals. One sub 20 years, the other in 28. It is completely impossible to have a single nuclear power project go live before the first goal, and the second goal assumes a steady ramp down i
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What sources? The 2035 targets, or the 2050 targets? You can find those on the EC website, as well as any green activist website links (extinction rebellion, Greenpeace). Hell go to the original IPCC papers if you want, or just look up the agreements and discussions at the last G20 (not the current one, that's all about Russia Russia and more Russia), or the last G7 conference.
Or the other point that we can't build it? Honestly for that you can just take your pick of any western reactor project started in t
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Wasn't MacKay they guy that computed that you would need more land for solar and wind to power the UK than the size of the UK?
But look, Germany already produces 16% of its primary energy (and ca. 50% of electricity) using renewables with just a tiny fraction of the land used. So something was off...
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Coal plants too. Germany makes great cars, but as an example of managing an electric grid they are more of a cautionary tale to the world.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com] -
16% of primary energy in Germany is from renewables. But Germany does not use more than 1/6th of its land for renewables. In fact, it uses much less. That already shows the argument that one needs more land than is available (assuming UK is similar to Germany) can not be true.
It is currently discussed to make 2% available for wind power which would be a massive expansion (and the land could still simultaneously be used for other things). Solar should be less than 0.1%. Biomass may use more land, but it doe
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Dr. MacKay showed all his math and where he got his data. If you believe the numbers were randomly generated then you should be able to point to every error, by page and paragraph, with references to sources of your own. Since you failed to provide any data showing Dr. MacKay's numbers are wrong then how is anyone to know you are not just full of bullshit?
Can anyone provide data showing Dr. MacKay wrong?
There was a paper by Mark Jacobson, Mark Delucchi, et al that claimed to show we could power the world
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It's funny that a dubious study by someone nobody know
It's funny a dubious poster on Slashdot po-poohs a painfully researched and calculated article with absolutely zero facts at his command, jus because he "feels" like it's inaccurate but cannot be arsed to do any of the math himself.
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Every US military base of the appropriate size should have at least one of these. Lots of bases have lots of open spaces that might be a good fit for these and security will be tight being that they're placed on a military base. In addition, the bases could sell power back or supplement the local communities if additional power is needed if they're spec'd correctly and the base will have a secure source of power for it's own needs helping to offset the costs to the US Gov't.
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Forget it. Maybe in 40 or 50 years.
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What is the source of your data that leads you to believe 40-50 years is the right time frame for the OP's SMR plan?
Have a nice day!
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Sure, because military bases aren't already typically superfund sites every time we close one. Wait, yes, yes they are. In that regard, yes, scads of untested SMRs and military bases are ideal matches.
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Its what Roger Pielke calls the Iron Law. When faced with the real world consequences of their emission reduction policies on jobs, welfare, cost of living, governments will blink.
What we see here is the EU starting to reverse. The last thing to go will be the top line story. So there will still be lots of statements that global warming is the greatest threat to humanity since.... And they will still publicly continue to claim that moving to wind and solar and electrifying everything will both be possib
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^ VERY Insightful
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Yes, they are large economies. But the important ones who have no intention of changing are the largest and fastest growing emitters. Starting with China.
The alarmed nations account for under 25% of global emissions, and falling. The conclusion is inescapable: emissions will rise. They will be north of 40 billion tons by 2030, and probably will hit 45 billion by 2040.
Regardless of what the West does.
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LFTRs in 5 seconds — nobody has ever demonstrated a commercially viable one, but we're all supposed to accept their immediate proliferation in the name of salvation.
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I wonder where we'd be now if we listened to morons like you screaming "noone has ever demonstrated a commercially viable PV outside of space satellites, we need to cut funding to PV research and invest 100% in the current green fad (which iirc was hydro)" 20 years ago.
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There are no current climate change goals within EU policy that nuclear power could possibly contribute to. The first set of goals are due before we would even get a single plant powered up (if we signed agreements to start building nuclear plants today). The second goal would be impacted but... critically all climate goals assume a model of a steady ramp down in emissions to the goal point, not turning on a magic wundermachine the day before we're supposed to be CO2 neutral. As a result the 2050 goals would suddenly look like 2036, and the 2035 goals more like 2029. To say nothing of the wundermachine contributing a shitton of CO2 emissions during construction that will take a couple of years to offset itself.
We should absolutely build nuclear plants.
We should absolutely ignore nuclear plants when talking about our CO2 ambitions and goals as its is yet another distraction contributing to yet another missed deadline.
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Gas is better than nuclear.
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With a username like that, I'm not surprised you support No Clear energy policy.
As for me, my only objection to Nuclear is the lack of reactors that can be economically deployed at the small town level. Nuclear power seems to be all about centralization, since that's where they're safest and easiest to secure in case of who knows what natural or human-induced disaster.
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Really the biggest problem with nuclear energy is that it is competing with an energy source (fossil fuels) where the major cost (pollution) is externalized. Now if we insisted that fossil fuel plants contain their byproducts the way we insist nuclear plants do, nuclear would be a lot cheaper.
The second biggest problem is that nuclear plants are expensive to run, even when they're not generating power. Large scale grid storage projects aren't just good for solar and wind; they'll greatly improve the econo
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Really the biggest problem with nuclear is that you can only make it look good with a false dichotomy, by comparing it to coal power. Coal, it might be noted, is actually superior to nuclear in every way but pollution. It's not good at load following, but it's still better than nuclear. It's cheaper, and faster to build. That's why we built so much of it.
Solar or Wind plus battery storage is literally cheaper than coal, let alone nuclear. The idea that we need, want, or can even benefit from nuclear power i
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Those nuclear plants are "troubled" because of graft and corruption, and that is why nuclear power will never be viable in the U.S.
Instead of properly maintaining their power plants, nuclear operators in the U.S. have spent the last 40 years bribing politicians for reduced regulations so that they can keep operating with minimal investment in maintenance. Less maintenance = More $$$$ for the CEO.-
It will never be viable because of regulation
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LOL, Nuclear has faced the problem of a populace that thinks it knows nuclear when it is mostly dumbfucks that only jump on an anti-nuclear bandwagon due to accidents. Sorry, don't mean to insult people, but my parents are on that bandwagon and I've tried to explain why new nuclear power is not like old nuclear power (even though it is). For example, meltdowns - literally can't happen when the fuel is already melted, as per some fast reactors. Still, having grown up with nuclear == light water reactors I ge
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Freud was here, he slipped on your argument.
New nuclear power is like old nuclear power in that it has the same big problems. Even a meltdown is not necessarily that big a problem, with sufficient containment, compared to the waste problem. To wit, processing the waste makes nuclear, already the most expensive form of generation, even more expensive. In a world run by capitalism, it doesn't make sense to build nuclear power. People want to build large nuclear power projects because they are large capital pr
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In other words, no. Just tossing out random accusations based on nothing. And the question was not general sleaze. It was very specific to nuclear plant running/owning company CEOs. Please try to stay focused.
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I understand you can get land real cheap around Chernobyl
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Yes you can, and people actually live there [wikipedia.org]. The greens have spent *millions* in research trying to find any negative health consequences of that, to no avail.
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I'm not so sure about that anymore. It looks like wind, solar plus storage (batteries, pumped hydro or hydrogen) might be able to provide what we need. But I'm saying "might", and I would love for someone to run the numbers on that. And by someone I mean anyone who has some influence with our government. So far all I am hearing is "no nukes", "no coal or gas", "use less power", or "renewables can cover 100% of our needs", with no numbers to back that up. Everyone is just spouting the party line, whethe
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You ascribe far more logical thinking than is actually present in this issue.
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