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Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking

• hinkley 6y ago
  Don't. Compare. Percentages. Stand-up Maths called this out recently and it's good to mention. I think this might be the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8 Give me the output and our total consumption please.
  • kylegill 6y ago
    It actually served to make me more skeptical to the article only seeing percentages. Thanks for calling that out as well.
  • hinkley 6y ago
    Punchline is at ~12:45 for anyone who doesn't want to watch a bunch of stuff about voting. Basically you can only compare (or add, or subtract) percentages if the quantities they represent are exactly equal. And since the quantities of power production change from year to year, they're doing the same thing he's complaining about.
    • lucb1e 6y ago
      Skipped to 12:45, still talking about voting. Something about voting by party vs by candidate and that being why the math with percentages didn't work out in the earlier example, which seems to be context I'm missing from the previous 12 minutes.
  • rrrazdan 6y ago
    While usually people use percentages in the wrong way, in this case they used and compared them the appropriate way. Percentage here is used as a ratio of total output and a decline in that ratio over time is a decline in role. Exactly what the articles headline asserts. It doesn't matter that nuclear may have grown in absolute numbers. The assertion is that its role has declined which is true.
    • hinkley 6y ago
      It's still a bit sketchy because total output matters in a world where we push for more efficient use of power. Could we put enough fancy light bulbs and triple glazed windows and heat pumps out there to run everything on nuclear (I am biased against nuclear but I'm also biased against coal externalities) and solar/wind? What's our shortfall? In this case it's not the % of nuclear I care about. It's how much base load it can provide. Bad budgeting is one of my peeves about software and so I get a little grumpy when I see it happening elsewhere.
  • _Microft 6y ago
    Don't compare absolute values only either, show both.
    • hinkley 6y ago
      Yes! I'm glad to see this idea seems to be spreading around HN . Show both, or you're lying to part of your audience by omission.
  • tchvil 6y ago
    His books and Rubik's appearing little by little in the back are hilarious.
    • hinkley 6y ago
      I didn’t even notice it until right after he bagged on the other guy for doing it. By the end it’s just a shelf of his books.
  • flor1s 6y ago
    He says you can't "combine" percentages, not that you can't "compare" percentages, "you can't add and substract between them".
• bezelbuttons 6y ago
  We need to build all forms of renewable energy and stop falling into the trap of "Build X not Y" where X and Y are one of solar/wind/hydro/nuclear. One form is insufficient. Nothing will get accomplished with this climate 'whataboutism' type of argument. (I'm making a comparison to whataboutism, I recognize the difference)
  • hannob 6y ago
    When you have two solutions to a problem and one works very well and the other does not and only makes headlines with cost overruns and delays then surely you should "build X, not Y". I know a lot of HN readers don't like this, but the debate is over. Nuclear lost, renewables won. Get over it.
    • White_Wolf 6y ago
      What makes you think this is a one solution problem? Very few things in life are black & white. Life comes in shades of gray and problems with multiple solutions(more or less optimal for the time when the decision is taken). Every type of energy comes with downsides: -Solar - storage and delivery infrastructure costs -Wind - same as above -Hydro - same as above + if you build many/too big you change the center of mass leading to changes in the planets rotation speed -Coal/gas/any fuel burned to produce energy - Usually cheaper than other to buil but produces a lot of pollution -Nuclear - Build cost + waste disposal Any kind of energy storage you use for any of the above will need to be recycled at some point. I would count this as a downside for any solution that requires storage to handle peak usage and can't be ramped up. Edit:Some typos(most likely missed some) and formatting
      • hannob 6y ago
        > What makes you think this is a one solution problem? I don't think that. I think Solar + Wind complement each other nicely. I think hydro can be good if the circumstances allow it. I think we'll need to explore a variety of storage technologies, better grids and demand side management to complement wind+solar. I just don't think that an extra expensive technology with plenty of problems is contributing anything.
• Krasnol 6y ago
  There is a pattern to those countries where it's not shrinking: • Only four newcomer countries are currently constructing nuclear power plants and all are plagued by financial difficulties and delays • An econometric analysis suggests that countries classified as potential newcomers tend to be less democratic • On the supply side, the dominant driving force is the geopolitical interests of countries that export nuclear power https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.742611.de/dwr-20-11-1.pdf https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...
• tyronehed 6y ago
  Fukushima--that's why nuclear is held in ill repute.
  • hef19898 6y ago
    Nuclear was already considered a risk before Chernobyl by a portion of the population. Fukushima just reaffirmed that.
    • hobofan 6y ago
      What Fukushima mainly highlighted is that humans are too stupid to self-regulate, which is a necessary requirement to running these nuclear reactors safely. There were many prior safety concerns that were ignored, and all that in a country experienced with nuclear power. If they didn't manage to ensure that they were operating their plants safely, I don't know why I should trust my local regulatory bodies to.
      • hef19898 6y ago
        That is common tone, isn't it? The Soviets were quite experienced with nuclear reactors as well, and yet Chernobyl violated their own rule and regulations during design and construction. And operations. And since this happened already it will happen again. I changed my mind on nuclear power so, now I see it as an important stop gap to transform our electricity production to renewables. Existing nuclear power plants would allow us to phase out fossil fuel now. And they would buy us time to figure out storage for renewables. New nuclear plants won't help, so, their construction time is simply too long.
        • redis_mlc 6y ago
          > That is common tone, isn't it? I think you meant, "That is a common theme, isn't it?"
  • bpodgursky 6y ago
    Nuclear was in ill repute before Fukushima. The only reason Fukushima even happened was because we stopped building new nuclear plants to replace the old ones decades ago.
• jonplackett 6y ago
  Question: how much is building new nuclear plants about producing nuclear weapons? Is that still important? In the UK we’re spending an INSANE amount of money on a new reactor and I’m wondering if that has anything to do with the government’s motivation.
  • hannob 6y ago
    A lot of people think that the only reason Hinkley C is built is exactly this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
• rgbrenner 6y ago
  People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse because by the time it's complete the economics will be even poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn't make economic sense on any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost, regulatory difficulty, etc. So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.
  • nimish 6y ago
    Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries. Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale. RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
    • scotty79 6y ago
      You can overbuild and burn excess energy mining crypto. I think crypto will be what dictates future energy prices and investments.
    • sir_bearington 6y ago
      > Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries. Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else. But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7. > RIP, only France did nuclear right :( And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
• 0xmohit 6y ago
  Bitcoin's role in the world's energy consumption is increasing.
  • techrat 6y ago
    You could even argue that if it wasn't for Bitcoin, we could shut down another unsafe Nuclear power plant or two. https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-bitcoin-need-more-energy-than-whole-countries/a-56573390 https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-bitcoin-need-more-energy-than... >Back at the start of 2017, Bitcoin was using 6.6 terawatt-hours of power a year. In October 2020, that was up to 67 terawatt-hours. Now a few months later, it has nearly doubled to 121 terawatt-hours, the Cambridge researchers found, enough to run their entire university for nearly 700 years.
• cletus 6y ago
  I'm not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear power or Bitcoin. So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it's not because the technology can't be safe. It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with: - Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel; - Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6); - Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin profit margins that are the norm for utilities; - The failure modes are awful; and - Dealing with the waste. Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree so I'm not sure we're seeing anything close to the true cost of nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far seems to have been far more of a political statement than an economic choice. As for fusion power, that's more murky. I really hope there's commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I'm not yet convinced there will be. Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains the "mess". Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have turbulence issues and we don't have a good story for containing the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare (for us here on Earth). I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option. I've seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night/day cycles, no weather, no atmospheric interference).
  • christiansakai 6y ago
    When we get that solar panels in orbit, how do we transfer the energy back to Earth?
    • thinkcontext 6y ago
      Lasers or microwaves are the current candidates.
    • isaacg 6y ago
      Here's an article from the Department of Energy that outlines a few options: https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power Microwaves and lasers are the two options they describe.
• killjoywashere 6y ago
  Again, I will observe that even though more people will most certainly die from solar and wind installations due to falls and machinery accidents, there is no catastrophic downside. So as much as I think Ansel Adams (37-year board member Of the Sierra Club) was right, that nuclear is a great solution, it simply isn't worth the political capital at this point in history. You'll have to wait until the uninformed die out, which will take longer than evolution.
  • kens 6y ago
    > Ansel Adams (president of the Sierra Club) I thought that was interesting, but I checked and no, Ansel Adams was not president of the Sierra Club.
    • killjoywashere 6y ago
      Good catch, corrected. He was a member of the board of directors for 37 years. I apologize, I'm recalling from his autobiography, which I read about 23 years ago, on loan from a friend.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• philipkglass 6y ago
  Global nuclear generation increased by 95 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2019, relative to 2018: https://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/global-trends-reports/world-nuclear-performance-report.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/g... Global wind and solar generation increased by 265 TWh in 2019: https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/global-wind-and-solar-energy-growth-rate-in-2019-was-slowest-this-century/2-1-769738 https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/global-wind-and-solar-ener... Nuclear was still well ahead in 2019 with 2657 TWh vs. 2103 TWh for wind and solar (699 solar, 1404 wind). But if these relative growth rates continue it will take only 3.3 years for solar + wind generation to eclipse nuclear generation globally ((2657 - 2103) / 170). Hydropower is still the far-and-away leader of non-fossil electricity generation at 4306 TWh in 2019 (106 TWh growth over 2018): https://www.hydropower.org/news/invest-in-hydropower-to-tackle-coronavirus-and-climate-crisis-impacts https://www.hydropower.org/news/invest-in-hydropower-to-tack... But it's a lot harder to build new hydro projects than new wind or solar projects.
  • cbmuser 6y ago
    And how much of that _generated_ electricity from solar and wind is actually produced on demand? Electricity generated from nuclear power can follow the load, neither wind nor solar can do that meaning you will _always_ need backup power plants. Germany has 50% renewable energy in its electricity mix, yet their greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector are seven(!) times as compared to France. There is a reason why China is nuclear power plants like crazy. They understand that electricity is worthless if it can’t be produced on demand. > https://twitter.com/YanQinyq/status/1368830510210899968 https://twitter.com/YanQinyq/status/1368830510210899968
    • philipkglass 6y ago
      China has significantly reduced its nuclear ambitions over time. Back in 2009 it planned to have 86 GW of installed nuclear capacity by 2020. It actually reached 47.5 GW in 2020. See this recent post and its children for citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26216394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26216394 China is the world's leader in building new nuclear reactors. And in building new solar farms. And in building new wind farms. China is the world's biggest energy producer, so it is going to lead on a lot of absolute energy measures. China can build reactors cheaper than the West, but it can also build solar farms cheaper than the West. China is adding output from renewables faster than from nuclear projects.
• krupan 6y ago
  Has anyone ever done an actual detailed comparison of unsubsidized nuclear vs. unsubsidized wind/solar? I’d love to see a breakdown of not just dollar costs, but environmental impacts like how much land is required, wildlife affected, supplies acquisition, lifetime of the equipment, disposal of waste/worn out parts, etc.
• doggydogs94 6y ago
  My observation is that climate activists would much prefer a new coal plant to a new nuclear plant.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    This was downvoted but the reality in Germany is that this is literally happening. I'm in some Fridays for Future chats and coal gets them going, but nuclear is worse. There's a reason Germany phases out nuclear fission before fossil fuels. It blows my mind and my german colleagues are in favor of continuing to decommission nuclear plants. When pressed specifically, they do concede that perhaps it's not the best idea to do it in this order, but they're not against the plans either. Meanwhile 92% of Germany's energy consumption is still fossil fuels, but at least it won't be nuclear!
• johnchristopher 6y ago
  I have a very stupid naive question: can a green grid supply enough energy to power a hadron collider, that kind of huge scientific R&D things ? It seems wind and solar can provide for the normal grid but what about industries hungry for a lot of throughtput ? Huge batteries ? How does it work ?
  • Armisael16 6y ago
    You just build more solar panels/wind turbines/geothermal/whatever. Why wouldn’t renewables be able to scale?
    • johnchristopher 6y ago
      In my very child-like view of how electricity works you need sustained massive input to feed massive machines. Like we need boosters that are really powerful to lift us off from earth's gravity well, that's why we can't hook up our space shuttles to an outlet in the wall because it doesn't deliver enough raw power.
      • Armisael16 6y ago
        I mean, yeah, you do. Why wouldn't renewables be able to power a grid that runs those things? CERN doesn't have an on-site power plant - it just hooks into the European grid via a French substation (it also has a connection to a Swiss substation as a partial backup, but it isn't used during normal operation).
  • thinkcontext 6y ago
    CERN is like any other big customer of the grid. They have very specialized technology on their premises but they shouldn't have to really care how the electricity they consume is generated. The point of "the grid" is that it is able to serve all the customers plugged into it. If "the green grid" isn't able to serve CERN, then it will have failed many other customers as well.
    • 6y ago
• choeger 6y ago
  Nuclear power (in its current form) is extremely impractical compared to wind and solar. 1. It is obviously dangerous, requiring extreme safety measures. 2. It requires large amounts of water. 3. It is unpopular. 4. It is so complex that building plants regularly exceeds budgets (there is little repetition and thus little learning) 5. It requires ridiculous storage/transport protocols for spent fuel. In Fukushima, one of the biggest concern was the spent fuel pool. That stuff is so hot, you cannot safely move it across the country and thus it has to accumulate on-site. Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency). We are not at the point where we can use 100% solar/wind yet but the path is clear. On the other hand, we might be able to do the same with safe and efficient nuclear power, but that path is much less clear. Molten salt? Micro plants? Thorium? There is no one out there doing any of that fancy new stuff in practice, sonny bet is on mass-scale of solar, wind, and batteries.
  • jjoonathan 6y ago
    Yep, the environmental movement successfully dragged its heels for 40 years until something other than nuclear became viable. It's a pity, because if we just hadn't stopped rolling out nuclear 40 years ago, and had merely continued at the same pace, our grid would be 100% nuclear today. Not 20 years from now if we hurry, today. One can only imagine the CO2 we wouldn't have had to remove from the atmosphere. What's done is done, though, and I'm glad there is finally a way forward that meets with their approval.
    • legulere 6y ago
      The largest problem of nuclear price is the price of construction. Construction doesn’t keep up with efficiency gains in the rest of the economy and as a result gets more and more expensive.
      • AstralStorm 6y ago
• gandalfian 6y ago
  Funnily enough most of these issues people mention with renewables are the same ones Britain faced introducing nuclear power! They coped by shaping demand with variable electrify tarrifs, creating the world's largest electrical vehicle fleet (milk floats) and charging them off-peak, encouraging storage heaters and electric water cylinders in houses and building pumped storage hydro. What goes around comes around. If you want hope for the future look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station
• cybert00th 6y ago
  >Today, nuclear power supplies about 10% of the world’s energy, down from 13% in 2010. Its use might continue to fall, although it will remain a part of the global energy mix for many decades, with a role in decarbonizing energy supplies as the fossil-fuel age comes to a close. An overly optimistic statement if every I saw one. China is a case in point,they're bringing more and more fossil-fuelled power stations online by the year. And at that rate, the rest of the world risks being left behind in energy poverty or becoming dependent on China et al for their energy needs. Wars have been fought over less.
• Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  A bad thing for climate change.
• Robotbeat 6y ago
  Regardless of what you think about new nuclear's potential, we need to protect and upgrade (and possibly even resurrect recently-mothballed) existing nuclear power plants. "Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!" Oh, really? Are you going to do that AFTER phasing out fossil fuel plants or BEFORE? Because if it's before, you're making the case that climate change is a lower priority than retiring the cleanest and one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed. Because you could ALWAYS choose to just replace those fossil power plants with wind and solar and batteries instead, but you're making the decision to keep that fossil fuel plant running longer than it needs to. Similar argument for getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams. And I'm talking about long existing plants, here. All those cement emissions (and reservoir emissions for hydro) already happened and were "paid for." We need to protect all near-zero energy sources until the last fossil power plant on the continent is decommissioned. Then go ahead and retire your nuclear or hydro power plant. (Addressed to no one in particular, but these arguments in favor of premature retiring of functioning clean energy power plants are widespread and it ticks me off. Plus, retiring them early also increases the cost of electricity, which slows electrification. I bet electric cars would be a LOT more popular--and fossil fuel cars less popular--in Germany if their electricity price weren't so insane.)
  • protastus 6y ago
    I agree with the need to maintain and upgrade nuclear plants. However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed". The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Costs_of_the_cleanup_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks. Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world. Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.
• ncmncm 6y ago
  > "that did not lead to any loss of life, but, 7 years later, some 31 people died" Undercounting casualties of nuke disasters has a long tradition.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Those 31 people really make a difference on, umm let me check [1], "three to four million deaths per year". Not to dismiss undercounting in general. I may think that nuclear fission is a good option to expand today, but it's not like a religion that I identify with. It's possible I've been using wrong figures and therefore my conclusion is wrong. But then do point out where the missing deaths (or cancer cases, etc.) per produced TWh are or I will continue to believe it's better to expand nuclear fission than to keep using fossil fuels with vague hopes for "let's build solar and wind in undefined locations with magic storage technologies, and hopefully some breakthroughs here and there." (--most climate action plans that look beyond 2025) [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy "Eliminating fossil fuels could cut premature deaths from air pollution by around two-thirds. That’s three to four million deaths per year."
    • flor1s 6y ago
      Nuclear has its fair share of NIMBY-ism (especially regarding storage of waste), also benefits from "magic" energy storage technologies (so you can run them at higher efficiency) and is also reliant on breakthroughs (technological and regulatory) here and there to support many people's arguments why it's such great technology. If both solutions didn't have up and down-sides there wouldn't be such long discussions on HN about it.
      • pfdietz 6y ago
        In particular, powering the world with nuclear instead of fossil fuels means commercializing either breeder reactors or seawater uranium extraction.
    • ncmncm 6y ago
      If you are treating Soviet casualty reports at face value, I don't know what to say. Comparisons to coal and oil are not interesting; those sources will fall away as they become increasingly uncompetitive. Wind is being installed all over the world in multi-use locations, including offshore shared with boats, and onshore shared with farms and ranches. There has been absolutely no shortage of viable sites, and there will not be. Solar is also compatible with multiple uses, although there has been little need for it. Many locations benefit from solar roofing. I daresay you have seen plenty of parking lots roofed with solar, and a great many more without, yet. Similarly, hydro and municipal reservoirs, and canals, where reduced insolation means reduced evaporation. Anyone suggesting a shortage of sites that would actively welcome solar installations has no globe. Even on farmland, numerous crops benefit from partial shade. I haven't see that yet, because there has been absolutely no shortage of other sites. Thus, "undefined locations" is not honest. We can easily see exactly where they are being installed, with no need to guess or wonder abstractly. Multiple storage methods are known, all low-tech, with the only open question being which ones will end up cheapest to deploy. Underground compressed air and gravity storage have been demonstrated. Production of ammonia from air and water may end up, not cheapest, but most valuable. I trust you will not repeat these canards. They do you no credit. Nuclear is uncompetitive today, and getting moreso every day, as costs of wind and solar continue their free fall. Geothermal may ultimately come to challenge them, particularly for baseline load. You can, if you like, think of geothermal as nuclear power without the huge decommissioning cost commitment.
• fuoqi 6y ago
  It's quite disingenuous to project Chernobyl and Fukushima to modern reactors. When you hear about them, always remember that they were designed in 60s and represent the second generation of nuclear reactors. The nuclear technology came a LONG way since then and modern reactors are counted as generation 3+. After Fukushima safety requirements for reactor designs have been revisited and what do you know? Modern VVER reactors satisfies them without any changes! I suspect other modern designs have performed similarly in this regard. Also when you hear about issues with construction time/cost or about nuclear waste storage, examples are usually US-specific. There is also Olkiluoto plant, but its issues are more about building a new reactor design using an Agile-like methodology. Nuclear waste problem can be more or less solved with "burner" reactors and fuel recycling, the field in which Russia and France have promising advancements. Should the old reactors be retired? Yes! Should we abandon the nuclear energy for fashionable renewables? Absolutely, no! At the very least until the storage problem will be properly solved.
• nullifidian 6y ago
  Nuclear energy is very eco-friendly. Even when it catastrophically melts down / explodes Chernobyl-style -- the outcome is creation of "no humans allowed" nature reserves (exclusion zones), which are sorely needed.
• s21n 6y ago
  We need nuclear because closing the gap between 80% and 100% clean energy will be much harder and more expensive without it. Comparing the cost of building energy sources today it may look that nuclear is more expensive than renewables, but that's because we are not counting the cost of the additional infrastructure needed by them, which rises exponentially with the share of renewables in the mix. Also, no energy source is environmentally neutral. Building renewables and it's supporting infrastructure en masse will have a huge ecological impact. You can reduce that impact using nuclear energy (that also have it's impact on nature, but elsewhere). For example, nuclear power plants kill fish, wind turbines kill birds. By using both energy sources it's easier to limit building plants only in areas, where the impact will be low. We'll be still killing some birds and fish, but the chances that it's well within the ability of populations to recover will be much greater, than if we decided to focus on one source. We need nuclear because it saves nature.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    > We need nuclear because closing the gap between 80% and 100% clean energy Nuclear would be terrible for this. The last 20% of demand not served by renewables is highly intermittent, a market for which nuclear would be a very poor solution. If one is not using nuclear for base load, one should not use nuclear at all.
• wlpu 6y ago
  So much anti nuclear absolutism I recommend watching this https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM for a pragmatic lense Fossil fuels, even temporary, kills several magnitudes more people than nuclear
• phs318u 6y ago
  While laws like the Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act [0] are still in place, good. While it could never be proven, my suspicion is that this law has done more to hinder the adoption of newer, safer nuclear power plant designs over the years, than any other single thing. [0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucle...
• docmechanic 6y ago
  I highly recommend William T. Vollmann's Carbon Ideologies, Volume One for a literary appraisal of the viability of nuclear energy as an alternative to carbon-based fuels. Normalization on the Rocks - page 499 in my hard copy - provides food for thought in any discussion of government "safety standards" after the Fukushima disaster.
• beloch 6y ago
  How much of this is due just to Germany switching from Nuclear to coal after the Fukushima incident?
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    Germany didn't switch from nuclear to coal after Fukushima.
    • beloch 6y ago
      "Eight of the seventeen operating reactors in Germany were permanently shut down following Fukushima. Chancellor Angela Merkel said the nuclear power phase-out, previously scheduled to go offline as late as 2036, would give Germany a competitive advantage in the renewable energy era, stating, "As the first big industrialized nation, we can achieve such a transformation toward efficient and renewable energies, with all the opportunities that brings for exports, developing new technologies and jobs". Merkel also pointed to Japan's "helplessness"—despite being an industrialized, technologically advanced nation—in the face of its nuclear disaster.[9] The nuclear electricity production was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity importing. One study found that the nuclear phase-out caused $12 billion in social costs per year, primarily due to increases in mortality due to exposure to pollution from fossil fuels." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
      • pfdietz 6y ago
        Coal usage in the German electricity sector has declined since Fukushima, so there was no switch from nuclear (or anything else) to coal.
• jimmaswell 6y ago
  Such a shame that we didn't get to have super cheap, nearly unlimited power by proliferating nuclear because people are stupid and panic over statistical anomalies like Chernobyl and politicians/their constituents purposely made nuclear too overencumbered with BS to be profitable half the time. No doubt fossil fuel companies et al played into this because nuclear was such an existential threat to them. We could have been living in an energy utopia but we weren't ready.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    You didn't get super cheap power from nuclear because that was never in the cards. And they knew that from the start: the cost of a nuclear plant was never going to be less than the cost of a coal plant, and ended up being considerably more when all the engineering got done.
• bartimus 6y ago
  It seems renewable strategies are still experimental and will rely on some sort of base load system for the foreseeable future. The base load systems being either gas plants or nuclear plants. We can place our bets on gas hoping we can one day turn those plants off using some sophisticated storage solution. The safer bet - however - is perhaps on small flexible nuclear reactors. Once mass produced (~ 10 years) I expect those will be taking over the energy market because of economic factors. Disrupting many complex solutions that are currently being invested in.