Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass).
I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses.
Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or beat nuclear, with lower setup costs and other barriers to entry. A wide variety of storage are being actively developed (with real investor support) to cache cheap surplus production from solar/wind, making a mostly-solar grid viable. What will our solar/wind/storage grid look like in 30 years?
Nuclear as a stepping-stone to solar won't matter. It's faster and easier to just to straight to solar.
> Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass).
You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead.
Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.)
What matters is that solar is generally perceived to be safer, easier, and cleaner than nuclear at any scale. I feel confident that I could set up my own solar installation safely, and that makes me more likely to do so, regardless of the fatality rates of using ladders or driving to the hardware store.
Because it's easier for clean energy adopters to take small steps towards solar than large steps towards nuclear, I think that's what they will do.
The risk of injury or death while installing solar may be greater than nuclear by the numbers, but if a guy falls off his roof installing a solar panel it doesn't poison the land around him for hundreds of years
If a guy falls off a roof building a nuclear plant, it doesn't poison the land for hundreds of years either. A more fair comparison would be if a PV manufacturing plant had an industrial accident and hundreds of thousands of gallons of nasty chemicals o to the land.
Yes I suppose it would. But if I had to choose (and I really hope I never do) I'd rather have silicon tetrachloride spilled in my town than nuclear waste.
> The paper’s investigation, published in March 2008, profiled a Chinese polysilicon facility owned by Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., located near the Yellow River in the country’s Henan province. This facility supplied polysilicon to Suntech Power Holdings, at the time the world’s largest solar-cell manufacturer, as well as to several other high-profile photovoltaics companies.
> The reporters found that the company was dumping silicon tetrachloride waste on neighboring fields instead of investing in equipment that could reprocess it, rendering those fields useless for growing crops and inflaming the eyes and throats of nearby residents. And the article suggested that the company was not alone in this practice.
Moving manufacturing/construction out of China and into the US increases regulatory oversight. It's very likely that nuclear manufacturing done in the US is cleaner than solar manufacturing done in China.
But where do those 0.04/TWh deaths in nuclear come from? Are they mostly from a low-probability high-death count event? Is it 1 person per year over a thousand years from solar, or maybe the whole village at once in a thousand years, from nuclear?
If it really is more along the lines of nuclear is safe, but once every five years a worker at the plant might slip up and be exposed to dangerous levels by accident, then I guess I think the comparison makes more sense.
This is the thing I don't get about nuclear proponents. While I'm not an opponent, we can scale sustainable energy sources now, we could have a Manhattan project type of program that, while costly, could replace the majority of our energy sources as fast as we can manufacture the panels and turbines. There is so much lead time in building a nuclear plant, it costs so much and then continues to be pretty costly in maintenance.
With a couple of years of development effort we could build a medium sized nuclear reactor that would be extremely save, extremely fuel, cheap fuel (essentially free), extremely reliable and it would solve availability issues.
You can literally mass produce the reactor and send it to standardized facilities all over the place, on or of the grid.
This would not even be very costly, a robust reactor development program to start with and some commercialization of the tech and regulatory change to allow it. No Manhatten projected needed.
I think doing what you suggest and replacing all coal and natural gas plants with reliable energy is pretty insane in comparison. Not to mention that that is only the easy part of the problem. I don't know a reliable way to solve the availability issue. The only close to viable approach is Musk-Style mass production of batteries. Even that is only viable if we continue to make leap and bounds improvements to batteries.
This is about solving the energy needs of 10 Billion people in this century. A Manhattan style mass production of solar cells and wind turbines will not get it done.
Thorium has the highest energy density and its practically unlimited, both in the ground and we already mine it. It simply is not that hart do build a modular reactor that can be mass produced. We know it works, and we know that it solved all the problem we have, including availability, pollution and global warming.
I think a lot of the love for nuclear is technophilia, not reason. We love nuclear because it's hard, requiring exotic engineering and, yes, risk. There's a bigger sense of triumph in it.
I think people love it because you can get an average American's lifetime supply of energy from 1.5 soda cans of fuel and produce 3 soda cans of waste. And it's 24/7 reliable and emission free. That astounding energy density and associated tiny footprint is exciting all on its own.
Solar and wind don't provide predictable power. Even places with high reliance on these tend to have an ongoing dependency on coal (or nuclear) to handle times when supply from renewables drops.
This has been discussed ad nauseam, we need 1) storage, 2) smarter grids (which we need anyways). Of course there will have to be investment but what better investment could there be? We get 1) jobs, 2) cleaner air, 3) to keep living and have future generations able to live as well or better than we did.
Then why are you claiming that you do not understand it? Yes, there are potential mitigations but there are major engineering concerns with large scale storage. You say that we can scale solar today but the reality is we can't yet.
Nuclear is sustainable energy that we can scale now without additional concerns about also scaling energy storage. That's why people are interested.
But we can't really scale nuclear, not in any kind of reasonable time frame. Take this for example [1], billions of dollars and decades to finish. Nobody thinks there won't be a transition period where we have to use existing coal, natural gas and nuclear but in terms of what we should be investing in right now, sustainable should be the focus I think. I have no issue with new nuclear plants where it makes sense, but it doesn't seem economically like it is actually that great of a choice given how expensive they are and how long they take to build.
I think we'll be able to solve the storage-grid engineering problems and scale solar faster than we would be able to scale nuclear. Nuclear is expensive to build.
I don't think storage is really the ideal long term solution either, storage is more short term and is more like a buffer I think. The ideal is having large interconnected grids with a great diversity of sources. We essentially have the technology right now, its just a matter of building the infrastructure which nobody is really willing to foot the bill for even though its needed for everyone.
Only until we provide energy storage as part of the power grid - which is coming. Capture surplus from solar/wind when the sun shines and the wind blows, dump it back into the grid when demand exceeds generation. This is doable with technology that's a century old.
As well as larger more interconnected grids (probably utilizing HVDC).
It reminds me of this onion article [1]. Its obviously hyperbole, there are actual real issues to resolve but compared with building nuclear weapons and going to the moon?
Nuclear being safer than other major sources just means we shouldn't demonize it and stop everything right now out of panic. it means it's just an important asset while waiting for renewables to take off.
See my argument above, though... it's going to be faster and cheaper to replace a standard deviation's worth of fossil electricity with solar/wind than it would be to replace it with nuclear. So the "transitional power" argument doesn't really hold.
What's the lifespan of an solar farm with equal output to a nuclear plant? We're about to approve nukes for 80 year life spans.
Nuclear has super low operating cost and a long lifespan. The only real economic downside is how flipping expense they are to build and a major reason for that is we don't have much experience building them (because they've lasted so many decades).
You're also assuming that solar/wind will be faster when we don't have any real solutions for using those sources as a baseload. Storage and distribution is nowhere near being able to handle such demand. The cost of revamping our grid once those technologies do reach maturity is going to be staggering aswell.
Solar and wind are promising but they are still a __long__ way from being proven enough to gamble an entire energy plan on.
That ignores another factor- we've been decommissioning nuclear and replacing it with natural gas & coal capacity while we wait for the eventual renewable ramp.
Yes, but that's not an effective argument for building new plants in the face of my critique. It's possibly an argument for delaying the decommissioning of older nuclear plants, but those decommissions are probably due to age-related safety concerns - the owners would likely prefer to keep the old plant running, if possible.
I've argued elsewhere for a flat-out ban on new domestic coal-fired plants. Coal is by far the worst safety and environmental offender. If we forced power companies onto a renewable-or-nothing path, we might see faster progress.
It IS an effective argument when public accepts solutions like Energiewende - ignore age of nuclear plants and decomisdion them all while building coal capacity.
Guess why so many people like nuclear when observing such stupidity.
Breeder reactors are ridiculously dangerous. There's a good reason nobody uses them except for weapons-grade material generation.
They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?
The Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 on what is now the Idaho National Lab was the first reactor to demonstrate full passive safety in 2 related tests in 1986. In the first, they turned off all primary pumps and did not insert the control rods. The reactor shut itself down and established natural circulation decay-heat removal. This class of event (unprotected loss of flow) would melt the core of almost any other kind of reactor. Then they did a unprotected loss of heat sink to the same result. My dissertation advisor was there, and said that it was glorious. They knew that they had finally achieved truly safe, socially acceptable nuclear energy. Less than a month later Chernobyl happened and the advanced breeder reactors with their inherent safety have still not been developed commercially.
Breeders use low-pressure coolants with very high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and boiling points so they can go to natural circulation easily at decay heat levels.
Breeder reactors are as noted by acidburnNSA extremely safe.
And yes they're a weapons grade problem, thats the point, if we want to store nuclear "waste", which to be honest is just unused nuclear fuel. The way to do that is to make it more radioactive so that its half life is lower.
It is a tradeoff, if we wish to complain about storing unspent nuclear fuel for 10 000 years, we have to accept that we are willingly ignoring other options that can solve that problem of long term storage.
> Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?
Is there a specific insinuation here? Why do you consider this a constructive way of arguing your point whatever it may be?
Fracking sludge isn't a thing? Coal tar sands waste isn't a thing? Mines that leak sulfuric acid aren't a thing? Black lung isn't a thing? Radioactive coal dust isn't a thing?
Our current energy production has hazards and costs that we do not currently account for while we place far too much burden on the alternatives to justify themselves.
Yes, it's much better to burn up the fuel and spread it into the atmosphere where it will cause a massive climate change. Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.
> Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.
Last I checked, it still is. Solar can't get anywhere near baseline production that we need currently due to lack of storage options. And solar is the only thing which currently has even the possibility of scaling.
Careful how you phrase that. There are lots of storage options that are viable - batteries, gravity, thermal, compressed air, etc - but none that have become major commercial products or installed on the grid at scale. Yet.
But there is no reason it should be impossible, or even outrageously difficult, to store enough offline energy to make a solar/wind grid viable. And, given modern software's ability to manage an automated pricing market from diverse sources, there's tremendous pressure to do just that.
This is why we're seeing massive active investment in storage products - not just Tesla, but many competitors. And not government funding, but rather venture capital. This is a technically feasible market worth hundreds of billions to whoever gets there firstest with mostest.
So I'm not the least bit concerned. Storage options will happen, and they will happen very quickly.
I can build a house today in the Northeastern US that's completely solar powered and off-grid. It adds about 15% to the cost to build. (2500 square foot home, 68k for panels, 18k for batteries, an extra 5k for a heat pump instead of a gas or propane heater.) The price of the panels and batteries is only going to drop.
For on-grid solar, the panels are already the cheapest form of energy available, when paired with a heat pump instead of natural gas. (When paired with using a giant resistor they cost equivalent to natural gas.)
I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses.
Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or beat nuclear, with lower setup costs and other barriers to entry. A wide variety of storage are being actively developed (with real investor support) to cache cheap surplus production from solar/wind, making a mostly-solar grid viable. What will our solar/wind/storage grid look like in 30 years?
Nuclear as a stepping-stone to solar won't matter. It's faster and easier to just to straight to solar.