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First of all the assumption of nuclear being low carbon is really doubtful. Nuclear requires fuel and uranium mining is a very expensive and dirty process. The

First of all the assumption of nuclear being low carbon is really doubtful. Nuclear requires fuel and uranium mining is a very expensive and dirty process. The real carbon impact on nuclear depends largely on the quality of the uranium ore and for bad quality ores the impact maybe worse than natural gas. See here for more details. https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-power-not-low-carbon https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-... Furthermore, the massive risks of nuclear are inescapable for any right-thinking person. Furthermore, the almost eternal nuclear waste problem is still there and still has not been solved. Furthermore, even if gas is more carbon intensive it is better overall, because it allows for zero carbon generation like solar and wind to flourish. Because gas can be used to compensate when there is no wind and no sun. Nuclear is absolutely useless in these cases because it is very slow to start up and turn off. The fact that nuclear is "24/7" is not actually a positive thing when you want to to work with cheap solar/wind energy. Eventually we will develop suitable storage solutions but until then gas is a good interim solution.

acidburnNSA 6y ago
The myth of nuclear being not low-carbon has been wholly rejected by a large and significant meta-analysis of the IPCC itself, as clearly seen in Table A.III.2 in [1], which puts nuclear at 12 gCO₂-eq/kWh, the lowest on the list except for wind at 11. Solar is around 40. Natural gas is 490. Coal is 820. The data are plotted here [4] directly from that table. It's no surprise either. When uranium has 2,000,000x more energy per mass than any chemical, and when splitting atoms has nothing to do with carbon emissions, it's very difficult to make it high-carbon through lifecycle issues. I went deep with someone a while back on here who claims that nuclear was closer to 100 gCO₂/eq than the IPCC number of 12g CO₂-eq/kWh, and they realized they were using 1950s energy values for gaseous diffusion enrichment instead of much-more-efficient centrifuges. Another source verifying that nuclear is very low carbon include [2] (which is a writeup for [3]). Tell me nuclear is expensive. Tell me you're concerned about accidents. Tell me what about the waste. But do not tell me nuclear is not low carbon. This is an absolutely unjustifiable belief propagated in public almost exclusively by institutional anti-nuclear organizations with a long and storied history of using incorrect information to make nuclear look bad. The real clincher to this argument is that we all agree there are no direct carbon emissions in fission. Splitting uranium makes no CO₂. So it's all lifecycle stuff. And in a 100% nuclear future, 100% of the mining, transportation (electrified), enrichment, etc. would be nuclear powered and so the carbon emissions would be literally 0. Same can be said for all other non-combustion sources. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... [2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low-carbon-footprints https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9 [4] https://whatisnuclear.com/img/lifecycle-carbon-emissions-300dpi.png https://whatisnuclear.com/img/lifecycle-carbon-emissions-300... (plot of data from [1]) > Furthermore, the massive risks of nuclear are inescapable for any right-thinking person. Furthermore, the almost eternal nuclear waste problem is still there and still has not been solved. That is the story at least. Fortunately we have scientific methods to help prevent us from fooling ourselves even when things are postulated that seem wrong. The actual fact is that nuclear is way safer than mainstream energy sources (gas, biofuel, oil, coal), and is perfectly on par with wind and solar. If this sounds crazy, please dig into the data! I admit it is surprising, but it is true. When you look at the data [5], nuclear is actually amazingly safe. So much so, that it's irrational even in the face of nuclear accidents to not shut down all fossil and replace it with nuclear from a public health perspective. This is because the toll of air pollution (both from fossil and biofuel) kills about 8M people every single year. I invite everyone to read the WHO reports on the impact of Chernobyl and compare with 8 Million deaths per year and tell me who's right-thinking! [5] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy > Because gas can be used to compensate when there is no wind and no sun. Yeah except gas emits 490 gCO₂-eq/kWh when the wind is not blowing and sun is not shining and that is wholly incompatible with solving climate change, even if we cover the whole country with wind, solar, and gas plants. With nuclear you get 0 carbon 100% of the time in any geography or season. Check electricitymap.org [6] for live emissions data and take a look at nuclear-heavy ontario and france compared to germany for real-world live proof of this. [6] https://www.electricitymap.org/ https://www.electricitymap.org/ Lastly, nuclear waste is a solved problem already. Did you know that zero people have been injured or killed by stored nuclear waste in dry casks (which is where we put them now)? You can walk right up to them [7]. We have a long-term solution like Onkalo [8] but even in the interim it's crazy to not build zero carbon energy even though we have properly handled commercial nuclear waste for 70 years. Again, remember that our current energy systems today are killing 8 million people per year. [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g [8] http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/onkalo http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/onkalo
- bananabreakfast 6y ago
  This is an excellent run down of a clear view on nuclear. However, I'd like to add that nuclear waste is also very much a solved problem beyond just storing it safely as well. Nuclear reprocessing [1] is capable of taking all spent nuclear byproducts and turning them into not just vastly more useful energy, but also comparatively tame byproducts that do not require extreme storage methods as they are of no harm to humans in less than 100 years. It literally closes the nuclear fuel cycle and is ~80 year old technology. The only reason we don't do this is economic. Uranium in America is plentiful and incredibly cheap. It is currently less expensive to buy fresh Uranium for ancient reactors and store toxic waste forever than to build reprocessing plants and breeder reactors and have no toxic waste. Reprocessing is done routinely in Europe, Japan and Russia where Uranium is not as cheap and they incidentally don't have any problems with nuclear waste. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

acidburnNSA 6y ago

The myth of nuclear being not low-carbon has been wholly rejected by a large and significant meta-analysis of the IPCC itself, as clearly seen in Table A.III.2 in [1], which puts nuclear at 12 gCO₂-eq/kWh, the lowest on the list except for wind at 11. Solar is around 40. Natural gas is 490. Coal is 820. The data are plotted here [4] directly from that table. It's no surprise either. When uranium has 2,000,000x more energy per mass than any chemical, and when splitting atoms has nothing to do with carbon emissions, it's very difficult to make it high-carbon through lifecycle issues. I went deep with someone a while back on here who claims that nuclear was closer to 100 gCO₂/eq than the IPCC number of 12g CO₂-eq/kWh, and they realized they were using 1950s energy values for gaseous diffusion enrichment instead of much-more-efficient centrifuges. Another source verifying that nuclear is very low carbon include [2] (which is a writeup for [3]). Tell me nuclear is expensive. Tell me you're concerned about accidents. Tell me what about the waste. But do not tell me nuclear is not low carbon. This is an absolutely unjustifiable belief propagated in public almost exclusively by institutional anti-nuclear organizations with a long and storied history of using incorrect information to make nuclear look bad. The real clincher to this argument is that we all agree there are no direct carbon emissions in fission. Splitting uranium makes no CO₂. So it's all lifecycle stuff. And in a 100% nuclear future, 100% of the mining, transportation (electrified), enrichment, etc. would be nuclear powered and so the carbon emissions would be literally 0. Same can be said for all other non-combustion sources. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... [2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low-carbon-footprints https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind-nuclear-amazingly-low... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9 [4] https://whatisnuclear.com/img/lifecycle-carbon-emissions-300dpi.png https://whatisnuclear.com/img/lifecycle-carbon-emissions-300... (plot of data from [1]) > Furthermore, the massive risks of nuclear are inescapable for any right-thinking person. Furthermore, the almost eternal nuclear waste problem is still there and still has not been solved. That is the story at least. Fortunately we have scientific methods to help prevent us from fooling ourselves even when things are postulated that seem wrong. The actual fact is that nuclear is way safer than mainstream energy sources (gas, biofuel, oil, coal), and is perfectly on par with wind and solar. If this sounds crazy, please dig into the data! I admit it is surprising, but it is true. When you look at the data [5], nuclear is actually amazingly safe. So much so, that it's irrational even in the face of nuclear accidents to not shut down all fossil and replace it with nuclear from a public health perspective. This is because the toll of air pollution (both from fossil and biofuel) kills about 8M people every single year. I invite everyone to read the WHO reports on the impact of Chernobyl and compare with 8 Million deaths per year and tell me who's right-thinking! [5] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy > Because gas can be used to compensate when there is no wind and no sun. Yeah except gas emits 490 gCO₂-eq/kWh when the wind is not blowing and sun is not shining and that is wholly incompatible with solving climate change, even if we cover the whole country with wind, solar, and gas plants. With nuclear you get 0 carbon 100% of the time in any geography or season. Check electricitymap.org [6] for live emissions data and take a look at nuclear-heavy ontario and france compared to germany for real-world live proof of this. [6] https://www.electricitymap.org/ https://www.electricitymap.org/ Lastly, nuclear waste is a solved problem already. Did you know that zero people have been injured or killed by stored nuclear waste in dry casks (which is where we put them now)? You can walk right up to them [7]. We have a long-term solution like Onkalo [8] but even in the interim it's crazy to not build zero carbon energy even though we have properly handled commercial nuclear waste for 70 years. Again, remember that our current energy systems today are killing 8 million people per year. [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g [8] http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/onkalo http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/onkalo

bananabreakfast 6y ago
This is an excellent run down of a clear view on nuclear. However, I'd like to add that nuclear waste is also very much a solved problem beyond just storing it safely as well. Nuclear reprocessing [1] is capable of taking all spent nuclear byproducts and turning them into not just vastly more useful energy, but also comparatively tame byproducts that do not require extreme storage methods as they are of no harm to humans in less than 100 years. It literally closes the nuclear fuel cycle and is ~80 year old technology. The only reason we don't do this is economic. Uranium in America is plentiful and incredibly cheap. It is currently less expensive to buy fresh Uranium for ancient reactors and store toxic waste forever than to build reprocessing plants and breeder reactors and have no toxic waste. Reprocessing is done routinely in Europe, Japan and Russia where Uranium is not as cheap and they incidentally don't have any problems with nuclear waste. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing