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I don't get this kind way of thinking. We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants. This article even

I don't get this kind way of thinking. We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants. This article even mention it, obviously on the last place in a strange way "and to advanced nuclear plants with zero emissions". As if there were some non-advanced nuclear plants that have non-zero emission. Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap. In addition, in large parts of the World they just does not make sense as there is not enough sunny/windy days. For nuclear energy we have everything - knowledge, infrastructure, experience. What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? Eco people fought vigorously nuclear energy for years and now we are where we are. Time to say that they've made a costly mistake and move on.

gdubs 7y ago
I’m all for nuclear. But we haven’t yet replaced petrochemicals or concrete, for example. Energy production is just one slice of the pie.
jnordwick 7y ago
In the words in Rahm Emanuel: "Never let a serious disaster go to waste." I think you are missing out on modern environmentalism's most important goal, control. Control of the economy and control of the social structure. The end goal for most seems to be green socialism, not just green. It wasn't a mistake that most of the Green New Deal had nothing to do with the environment and most to do with takeover of the economy and social structure. Any solution that doesn't let them do that, is not acceptable. Being center left, I would love for more practical solutions to be used, but the more progressive wing of my party (D) will never accept any solution that doesn't also include a huge power shift to government and progressive causes.
fredgrott 7y ago
not Solar, we have battery ways of storing it now..my local high school uses it in fact.
Maximus9000 7y ago
I too am pro-nuclear, but isn't it too late for traditional nuclear to save us? We need solutions very quickly and the typical nuclear power plant takes 10 years to build. In my uneducated opinion, the only way I see nuclear working is if there are small modular reactors that are produced quickly in a factory assembly line.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Far too late. 10 years to build is optimistic, and that is on top of a good decade or 2 of bureaucracy before even breaking ground.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    France managed to bring its nuclear generation from close to 0% to over 75% in 15 years.
    - Maximus9000 7y ago
      Interesting... actually, that is actually fairly compelling evidence that it can be done. Thanks! For anyone interested, citation is here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      In the 1970's, yes. Nowadays it seems to take 10 years to build something as simple as a subway station.
      - manfredo 7y ago
        Technology hasn't regressed. Nuclear plants get built cheaper and faster on a per unit basis when they're built as part of a series of production. France built dozens of copies of the same four reactor designs. By comparison, many new projects are one off or part of only a single digit number of copies.
metalliqaz 7y ago
The obvious answer is public distrust of nuclear. There have been several high profile nuclear disasters, not to mention the universal distaste for living anywhere near a nuclear waste dump. Plus reactors are very expensive to build, and they have to compete with cheap fossil fuels for energy cost. In 30 years we haven't been able to tie fossil fuel companies to the carbon cost of their product.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Like solar & wind, nuclear also needs supplementing with peaker plants. Nuclear can be used for peaking, but current designs cannot, and nobody is going to pay the crazy costs of nuclear just to have it idle 23 hours a day as a peaker. And storage for renewables is a last resort. Instead of storage: 1. build in areas with reliable winds (offshore trade winds) 2. better interconnection ("the wind is always blowing somehwere") 3. over-provisioning. If you build 3 times as much wind power as you need, it's still a lot cheaper than nuclear and you need a lot less storage. 4. storage. It's expensive, but if you did 1-3 correctly, you don't need much of it. Nuclear is safe, but it's also crazy expensive and takes decades to build.
- kardos 7y ago
  > nobody is going to pay the crazy costs of nuclear just to have it idle 23 hours a day as a peaker. Are we anywhere near the limits of what can be done with time-of-use pricing? If we flatten the "duck curve" then nuclear is a good match.
  - throwaway100773 7y ago
    You would need utility scale storage to flatten the load curve. The peaks and super peaks are not going away until there is a viable storage mechanism with enough capacity. We are talking significant changes in demand between even the early afternoon and the super peak in almost all load areas (pjm California ercot). The other alternative is a massive buildout or behind the meter solar which theoretically could solve this issue.
    - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
      What the above poster is suggesting is adjusting demand dynamically based on price. That requires consumers to throttle their own usage (probably using automated systems that know the real-time price of electricity). You can run the dishwasher or charge your car or cool your home when electricity is cheap.
      - 7y ago
cowmoo728 7y ago
1. huge bureaucratic hurdles 2. huge political hurdles 3. no ROI and no clean energy without billions of up-front investment and 20 years I think we should have started spending hundreds of billions on nuclear power plants yesterday, but now we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. If it really does take 20 years to build enough nuclear power plants (construction that will be fueled by carbon) we have to make some other clean energy investments RIGHT NOW that will soften the blow until we finish building those reactors.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  1 & 2 are political decisions, fueled by "nucleophobia". If it can solve global warming in 20 years, that's an easy win to take. There is no emergency forcing anything faster, and I doubt that it's even possible to find a cure (that isn't worse than the disease) that works faster anyway.
  - baddox 7y ago
    I thought it’s more just that nuclear power plants aren’t economically or politically viable any more, since wealthy governments are no longer subsidizing them with their massive and growing nuclear weapons programs.
  - class4behavior 7y ago
    > 1 & 2 are political decisions, fueled by "nucleophobia". You say nuclear isn't dangerous because of all the safety measures, yet here you're qualifying those safety measures as mere overreaction.
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 7y ago
    > If it can solve global warming Not to be pedantic, but nothing is going to solve it. We're talking about efforts to mitigate it.
- wang_li 7y ago
  Nuclear has huge hurdles and long implementation times because of hysterical anti-nuclear activists. It's not inherent in the engineering. If we care about climate change, it needs to be acknowledged that the activists created artificial delays and those should be removed forthwith.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
The article is advocating for increased nuclear. But energy is just one piece of the puzzle, and it's the piece that's the furthest along the deployment curve from emergence to diffusion to reconfiguration. According to the article the other pieces are cars, buildings, trucks, agriculture, aviation, shipping, steel, cement and plastics. Nuclear won't replace any of them.
gfodor 7y ago
There are so many people who in one breath will say climate change is the biggest existential threat that will kill us all soon and when asked about nuclear will suddenly start hand wringing about politics and ROI. When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly. It’s just too bad people on all sides can’t get there before reality sets in further, including those who claim to be legitimately fearful (if they aren’t pushing for nuclear now, and fast, they’re not truly fearful.)
- willis936 7y ago
  That’s the thing about this issue: humans aren’t built to deal with it. > When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly. By this point it is far too late for any action to have meaningful consequence. People are raising hands now, when the effects are practically nonexistent on a human timescale, because if we wait until the effects affect us, then we are well and truly fucked. Society won’t collapse this century, but it might in a few hundred years.
  - gfodor 7y ago
    Well, my own prediction is a) that we will mitigate climate change and b) it will not be through any of the activism methods being pursued today. The reason we will succeed is because we are, luckily, converging on market incentives which will (as a side effect) fix climate change. Specifically, it seems likely that the next iteration of technology startups focused on energy should be able to create products that are both clean and radically reduce energy costs, and hence will be in-demand by the global markets. For example, small nuclear reactors, or solar products. These will be easily exportable, and as such will cause a virtuous cycle of iteration and innovation. In retrospect, the advocacy of regressive policies like "everyone should fly less" will be just another chapter of the long serious of luddites thinking the only solution to problems is to reverse technological progress in the face of new, unexpected problems raised through the continual growth of the global economy.
    - rayiner 7y ago
bobajeff 7y ago
>What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima. You might say those were caused by outdated tech or bad management. I'm someone who doesn't think my local or national government would be immune to those failings.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  America has a huge problem with corporations bribing politicians to loosen "costly" regulations at the expense of our health and environment. The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating. So while nuclear is plenty safe when handled correctly, it's completely understandable to feel like America is not a country which can be trusted to handle things correctly.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    > The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating. All of this is completely wrong. Fracking has enabled us to simultaneously reduce CO2 emissions (by reducing coal mining) while reducing our reliance on foreign oil. Nuclear would be a huge leap forward, again maintaining energy independence (no reliance on Chinese solar panels) while cutting CO2 output. You’ve got it backwards. America, and the rest of the world, has a problem with environmentalists who can’t do cost-benefit analysis. Thanks to nuclear, France hit CO2 emissions per capita of 6.5 tons back in 1990. Now it’s at 4.6. Germany is still around 9. By the time Germany gets to similar levels using wind and solar, France will have been sitting at those lower levels for 50 years. Everyone in Germany becoming vegans tomorrow won’t make up for half a century of unnecessary CO2 emissions because environmentalists were afraid of nuclear.
    - mywittyname 7y ago
      I'm not talking about CO2, I'm talking about the localized effects of fracking, which is leaking into the water supply and probably renders the area around fracking sites uninhabitable. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-contaminate-drinking-water/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont... We still can't get companies to tell the public what's in these fluids because they are protected trade secrets.
seanwilson 7y ago
> What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? People aren't always rational, people will strongly resist changing their current viewpoints and people will very strongly resist making lifestyle changes. Politicians know this also when looking to get elected. Reducing meat consumption and reducing the number of flights we take are other areas people need to look at but you'll be met with the same problems at a personal and political level.
the8472 7y ago
How many gigawatt of nuclear power are built each year, and what's the trend curve on those numbers? And what are the equivalent numbers on solar and wind?
scalio 7y ago
What do you do with the waste? Blow it into the sun?
- pdonis 7y ago
  You reprocess it to remove all the stuff that isn't actually "waste" because it's usable as fuel. What remains presents a much smaller storage problem which has known working solutions.
- manfredo 7y ago
  Bury it underground. The amount of waste generated by nuclear power is a fraction of 1% of all the toxic waste generated by heavy industry. The entirety of the United States' nuclear waste from electricity generation occupies a volume the size of a football field in footprint and 10 yards high [1]. A coal plants generates this much waste every hour. 1. https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste
mikojan 7y ago
> We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants. We don't know that since to this day we do not know what cost a nuclear power plant actually imposes on society. The geological issue of ultimate storage for example is absurdly complex and remains unresolved. Here in Germany there's only very few potential locations[1]. None of them without potentially hazardous downsides. [1]: https://www.bgr.bund.de/DE/Themen/Endlagerung/Bilder/BGR_Ber_Wirtsgest_karte_g.jpg https://www.bgr.bund.de/DE/Themen/Endlagerung/Bilder/BGR_Ber...
- Luc 7y ago
  A surface level bunker would be fine. I really don't see why it needs to be deep under ground.
darksaints 7y ago
> Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap. We do have energy storage now, and it is already pretty damn good. Lower costs of production offset the cost of any inefficiencies of storage.

gdubs 7y ago

I’m all for nuclear. But we haven’t yet replaced petrochemicals or concrete, for example. Energy production is just one slice of the pie.

jnordwick 7y ago

In the words in Rahm Emanuel: "Never let a serious disaster go to waste." I think you are missing out on modern environmentalism's most important goal, control. Control of the economy and control of the social structure. The end goal for most seems to be green socialism, not just green. It wasn't a mistake that most of the Green New Deal had nothing to do with the environment and most to do with takeover of the economy and social structure. Any solution that doesn't let them do that, is not acceptable. Being center left, I would love for more practical solutions to be used, but the more progressive wing of my party (D) will never accept any solution that doesn't also include a huge power shift to government and progressive causes.

fredgrott 7y ago

not Solar, we have battery ways of storing it now..my local high school uses it in fact.

Maximus9000 7y ago

I too am pro-nuclear, but isn't it too late for traditional nuclear to save us? We need solutions very quickly and the typical nuclear power plant takes 10 years to build. In my uneducated opinion, the only way I see nuclear working is if there are small modular reactors that are produced quickly in a factory assembly line.

bryanlarsen 7y ago
Far too late. 10 years to build is optimistic, and that is on top of a good decade or 2 of bureaucracy before even breaking ground.
- manfredo 7y ago
  France managed to bring its nuclear generation from close to 0% to over 75% in 15 years.
  - Maximus9000 7y ago
    Interesting... actually, that is actually fairly compelling evidence that it can be done. Thanks! For anyone interested, citation is here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    In the 1970's, yes. Nowadays it seems to take 10 years to build something as simple as a subway station.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      Technology hasn't regressed. Nuclear plants get built cheaper and faster on a per unit basis when they're built as part of a series of production. France built dozens of copies of the same four reactor designs. By comparison, many new projects are one off or part of only a single digit number of copies.

metalliqaz 7y ago

The obvious answer is public distrust of nuclear. There have been several high profile nuclear disasters, not to mention the universal distaste for living anywhere near a nuclear waste dump. Plus reactors are very expensive to build, and they have to compete with cheap fossil fuels for energy cost. In 30 years we haven't been able to tie fossil fuel companies to the carbon cost of their product.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Like solar & wind, nuclear also needs supplementing with peaker plants. Nuclear can be used for peaking, but current designs cannot, and nobody is going to pay the crazy costs of nuclear just to have it idle 23 hours a day as a peaker. And storage for renewables is a last resort. Instead of storage: 1. build in areas with reliable winds (offshore trade winds) 2. better interconnection ("the wind is always blowing somehwere") 3. over-provisioning. If you build 3 times as much wind power as you need, it's still a lot cheaper than nuclear and you need a lot less storage. 4. storage. It's expensive, but if you did 1-3 correctly, you don't need much of it. Nuclear is safe, but it's also crazy expensive and takes decades to build.

kardos 7y ago
> nobody is going to pay the crazy costs of nuclear just to have it idle 23 hours a day as a peaker. Are we anywhere near the limits of what can be done with time-of-use pricing? If we flatten the "duck curve" then nuclear is a good match.
- throwaway100773 7y ago
  You would need utility scale storage to flatten the load curve. The peaks and super peaks are not going away until there is a viable storage mechanism with enough capacity. We are talking significant changes in demand between even the early afternoon and the super peak in almost all load areas (pjm California ercot). The other alternative is a massive buildout or behind the meter solar which theoretically could solve this issue.
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    What the above poster is suggesting is adjusting demand dynamically based on price. That requires consumers to throttle their own usage (probably using automated systems that know the real-time price of electricity). You can run the dishwasher or charge your car or cool your home when electricity is cheap.
    - 7y ago

cowmoo728 7y ago

1. huge bureaucratic hurdles 2. huge political hurdles 3. no ROI and no clean energy without billions of up-front investment and 20 years I think we should have started spending hundreds of billions on nuclear power plants yesterday, but now we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. If it really does take 20 years to build enough nuclear power plants (construction that will be fueled by carbon) we have to make some other clean energy investments RIGHT NOW that will soften the blow until we finish building those reactors.

BurningFrog 7y ago
1 & 2 are political decisions, fueled by "nucleophobia". If it can solve global warming in 20 years, that's an easy win to take. There is no emergency forcing anything faster, and I doubt that it's even possible to find a cure (that isn't worse than the disease) that works faster anyway.
- baddox 7y ago
  I thought it’s more just that nuclear power plants aren’t economically or politically viable any more, since wealthy governments are no longer subsidizing them with their massive and growing nuclear weapons programs.
- class4behavior 7y ago
  > 1 & 2 are political decisions, fueled by "nucleophobia". You say nuclear isn't dangerous because of all the safety measures, yet here you're qualifying those safety measures as mere overreaction.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 7y ago
  > If it can solve global warming Not to be pedantic, but nothing is going to solve it. We're talking about efforts to mitigate it.
wang_li 7y ago
Nuclear has huge hurdles and long implementation times because of hysterical anti-nuclear activists. It's not inherent in the engineering. If we care about climate change, it needs to be acknowledged that the activists created artificial delays and those should be removed forthwith.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

The article is advocating for increased nuclear. But energy is just one piece of the puzzle, and it's the piece that's the furthest along the deployment curve from emergence to diffusion to reconfiguration. According to the article the other pieces are cars, buildings, trucks, agriculture, aviation, shipping, steel, cement and plastics. Nuclear won't replace any of them.

gfodor 7y ago

There are so many people who in one breath will say climate change is the biggest existential threat that will kill us all soon and when asked about nuclear will suddenly start hand wringing about politics and ROI. When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly. It’s just too bad people on all sides can’t get there before reality sets in further, including those who claim to be legitimately fearful (if they aren’t pushing for nuclear now, and fast, they’re not truly fearful.)

willis936 7y ago
That’s the thing about this issue: humans aren’t built to deal with it. > When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly. By this point it is far too late for any action to have meaningful consequence. People are raising hands now, when the effects are practically nonexistent on a human timescale, because if we wait until the effects affect us, then we are well and truly fucked. Society won’t collapse this century, but it might in a few hundred years.
- gfodor 7y ago
  Well, my own prediction is a) that we will mitigate climate change and b) it will not be through any of the activism methods being pursued today. The reason we will succeed is because we are, luckily, converging on market incentives which will (as a side effect) fix climate change. Specifically, it seems likely that the next iteration of technology startups focused on energy should be able to create products that are both clean and radically reduce energy costs, and hence will be in-demand by the global markets. For example, small nuclear reactors, or solar products. These will be easily exportable, and as such will cause a virtuous cycle of iteration and innovation. In retrospect, the advocacy of regressive policies like "everyone should fly less" will be just another chapter of the long serious of luddites thinking the only solution to problems is to reverse technological progress in the face of new, unexpected problems raised through the continual growth of the global economy.
  - rayiner 7y ago

bobajeff 7y ago

>What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima. You might say those were caused by outdated tech or bad management. I'm someone who doesn't think my local or national government would be immune to those failings.

mywittyname 7y ago
America has a huge problem with corporations bribing politicians to loosen "costly" regulations at the expense of our health and environment. The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating. So while nuclear is plenty safe when handled correctly, it's completely understandable to feel like America is not a country which can be trusted to handle things correctly.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating. All of this is completely wrong. Fracking has enabled us to simultaneously reduce CO2 emissions (by reducing coal mining) while reducing our reliance on foreign oil. Nuclear would be a huge leap forward, again maintaining energy independence (no reliance on Chinese solar panels) while cutting CO2 output. You’ve got it backwards. America, and the rest of the world, has a problem with environmentalists who can’t do cost-benefit analysis. Thanks to nuclear, France hit CO2 emissions per capita of 6.5 tons back in 1990. Now it’s at 4.6. Germany is still around 9. By the time Germany gets to similar levels using wind and solar, France will have been sitting at those lower levels for 50 years. Everyone in Germany becoming vegans tomorrow won’t make up for half a century of unnecessary CO2 emissions because environmentalists were afraid of nuclear.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    I'm not talking about CO2, I'm talking about the localized effects of fracking, which is leaking into the water supply and probably renders the area around fracking sites uninhabitable. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-contaminate-drinking-water/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont... We still can't get companies to tell the public what's in these fluids because they are protected trade secrets.

seanwilson 7y ago

> What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? People aren't always rational, people will strongly resist changing their current viewpoints and people will very strongly resist making lifestyle changes. Politicians know this also when looking to get elected. Reducing meat consumption and reducing the number of flights we take are other areas people need to look at but you'll be met with the same problems at a personal and political level.

the8472 7y ago

How many gigawatt of nuclear power are built each year, and what's the trend curve on those numbers? And what are the equivalent numbers on solar and wind?

scalio 7y ago

What do you do with the waste? Blow it into the sun?

pdonis 7y ago
You reprocess it to remove all the stuff that isn't actually "waste" because it's usable as fuel. What remains presents a much smaller storage problem which has known working solutions.
manfredo 7y ago
Bury it underground. The amount of waste generated by nuclear power is a fraction of 1% of all the toxic waste generated by heavy industry. The entirety of the United States' nuclear waste from electricity generation occupies a volume the size of a football field in footprint and 10 yards high [1]. A coal plants generates this much waste every hour. 1. https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste

mikojan 7y ago

> We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants. We don't know that since to this day we do not know what cost a nuclear power plant actually imposes on society. The geological issue of ultimate storage for example is absurdly complex and remains unresolved. Here in Germany there's only very few potential locations[1]. None of them without potentially hazardous downsides. [1]: https://www.bgr.bund.de/DE/Themen/Endlagerung/Bilder/BGR_Ber_Wirtsgest_karte_g.jpg https://www.bgr.bund.de/DE/Themen/Endlagerung/Bilder/BGR_Ber...

Luc 7y ago
A surface level bunker would be fine. I really don't see why it needs to be deep under ground.

darksaints 7y ago

> Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap. We do have energy storage now, and it is already pretty damn good. Lower costs of production offset the cost of any inefficiencies of storage.