3 ms·

Here's a source for your claim that nuclear is cleaner than (just about) everything else: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-ii

• johnmorrison 7y ago
  Thankyou! These are some really great points. I think it's always important to look at the full supply chain life cycle effects of energy sources - keeping in mind that they need to be built from processed materials, potentially repaired, and decommissioned after a lifetime. Once you account for the emissions of material throughput in building power plants and renewables, the sheer volumetric density of nuclear energy compared to all other sources pushes it far ahead in terms of cleanliness. You need a lot less concrete and steel per kWh generated. Also your point about batteries is really important, because we would need to scale production many (many) orders of magnitude in order to reliably power a modern grid with majority renewable energy, and we don't really understand how that supply chain is going to look. Unlike processing and manufacturing industries which generally have positive economies of scale, the problem with resource extraction (esp. with metals) is that the cost to extract has a negative forcing function driven by our prioritization of the most profitable reserves. If you mine all the cheap reserves first, you will eventually be left with only the expensive ones.