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Regardless of what you think about new nuclear's potential, we need to protect and upgrade (and possibly even resurrect recently-mothballed) existing nuclear po
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.)
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.
Storing spent nuclear fuel (etc) is not a "hidden" cost. It's actually included in the cost of nuclear fuel, at least in the US.
Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami. That's how safe nuclear is.
> still didn't kill anyone
That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaster-still-affects-32-million-japanese https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...
https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effects_of_fukushima_meltdown https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...
"Psychological effect" is not very convincing, especially since much of the psychological effect is due to paranoid over-zealous evacuations. Nuclear being blamed for the psychological problems caused by people (including officials in particular) being irrationally afraid of nuclear. People directly die from natural gas explosions or falling off roofs installing solar panels pretty regularly.
There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).
If we scale up nuclear by 10 times, so that all power generation is handled by nuclear power plants, and we are extremely unlucky that we have 10 Fukushimas every year, and even if you count all the 1700 (non-radiation-related) death/Fukushima, we are still at 17,000 death/year, which is significantly lower than the number of death caused by fossil fuel power generation. (A quick Google search yielded 8.7 million/year).
Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation.
There are three more things to keep in mind:
1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year.
2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures.
3. Death is much worse than having to relocate.
Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.
Some additional info along the points you make
https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/wind-and-solar-reliance-would-black-out-the-us/ https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/wind-and-solar-reliance-would-...
I'm not against solar and wind. We actually COULD do 100% solar, wind, and storage. See here: https://model.energy https://model.energy
However, it's going to take much longer if we start with phasing out nuclear before fossil, which means spewing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. We can't afford that time.
If it costs more money to keep these dinosaurs running than installing solar and wind and batteries to replace natural gas and coal, then... you're wasting money on nuclear.
"Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind, and it's only going to get much much worse in the next decade, especially if perovskites hit mainstream utility solar and cheap grid storage (such as that military salt water battery or increasing-density LFP) becomes a reality.
The barrage of hydrogen, nuclear, and synthetic fuel stories is indicative of the desperation of the market reality of solar/wind/electric vehicle/battery economics to oil/gas/nuclear/ICE.
Once the price curves flatten out, then maybe next-gen hydro/nuclear/geothermal can chase a stable price point. I do think nuclear can still beat solar/wind once the economics of those stabilize and with the right regulatory, after all I'm a LFTR stan.
"Old Nuclear" plants will be propped up by the military that want their weapons grade isotopes.
Well I’m fine with that. I’m just arguing for replacing those fossil fuel plants first. We don’t have time or money (which is to say, productive capacity without significantly reducing quality of life somewhat for most of the population) or climate capacity to go the other way.
Storage with solar is currently generally economical competitive for about 75% of output for 4hrs, with a charge cycle per day.
In order to replace fossil fuels using wind and storage you would need significant more than 4 hours, using a much slower charge cycle. If we want to have something like 1 week of storage, with an expected charge cycle of 2 weeks (ie one week where the wind is producing more than the grid, followed by one week where it is producing less), we are talking about 42x in capacity, and the investment will get repaid 14x slower for each dollar invested.
Prices will need to drop and production will need to be heavily increased before batteries is viable for wind, and until then more fossil fueled power plants is being built in order to match the capacity of wind.
If I had to choose between battery and nuclear, my choice is neither. Simply ban fossil fuels while we wait for people to make up their mind.
6y ago
While I agree with you that shutting down existing nuclear plants, assuming they're in proper operating condition, is a bad idea vs the urgency of climate change.
But nuclear power has never been the ultra cheap clean power slam dunk you're portraying. I've been hopeful someone will come up with a clever innovation that changes the cost numbers, but so far every attempt has tanked.
With hydroelectric dams, there is an urgent motivation to bring many of them down: ecosystem collapse. It hurts to lose the storage capacity, but there's a growing awareness of just how severe the damage has been. I don't expect Grand Coulee to come down any time soon but talking with someone who does modeling related to this for NOAA made clear a lot of them are going away.
EXISTING nuclear is extremely cheap. Like solar and wind, the vast majority of the cost is the upfront building, and so it costs pennies to operate afterward.
And your comments about hydro dams is just proving my point about climate change just not being a major priority. Local concerns take precedence. It’s not that these local concerns shouldn’t matter, but folks just don’t seem to be willing to replace fossil fuels first. It shows how little most people really care, including (unfortunately) people who ostensibly ought to, like environmental activists and regulators and pro-environmental politicians. I really think Greta Thunberg was right about that.
No, local concerns are not dominating, and I don't think you can read this as some measure of relative prioritization like that. It's too complex to reduce to such a simple imagined dynamic. Understanding that sustainable ecology requires both removing some of these dams and addressing climate change is urgent is in fact possible simultaneously.
Not saying I disagree with the sentiment, but I think there are other environmental impacts to consider besides just climate change. Hydroelectric dams have in many cases destroyed complete ecosystems. There have been case studies of how getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams have revitalized otherwise decimated wildlife populations. Check out the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine as an example.
Sure, and maybe there are good arguments for getting rid of nuclear, too. But I want it explained clearly and rationally to me why tackling climate change should be a secondary priority to (why it should wait for) addressing these other local issues FIRST. Because that’s implicitly what’s going on. And claim all you want that “we can do both simultaneously,” and I’ll be happy, but WHERE in the bill is it written to eliminate any fossil fuels on that grid at the same time as turning off these dams? And I’m not just talking about replacing the dam’s electricity. That is simply going nowhere from a climate perspective (ie it isn’t reducing emissions relative to inaction).
Are the hydro dams literally going to be turned off simultaneously (the same day) with shutting off all connected fossil fuel plants? Because if not, then it isn’t actually simultaneous.
> tackling climate change should be a secondary priority to (why it should wait for) addressing these other local issues FIRST
That is very much situational. A big part of why climate change is bad is because it will cause complete ecosystems to collapse. If dams or anything else accelerate that faster than climate change, there is an argument to be made that they should take higher priority. In the case of the Kennebec River that's exactly what happened.
> "Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!"
I hear you, so please don't misinterpret this comment.
Statistically speaking, I'd imagine that it's actually the increases in production via wind and solar that has in fact caused nuclear (as percentage) to fall. Coal, at least in the USA can't be much different than nuclear.
How much nuclear production has come online since 2010 (i.e., the article's reference point)? Now how many solar panels? Given the long lead time of nuclear (i.e., planning, approval, producing) it's hard to imagine it catching solar anytime soon.
Should nuclear press on regardless? Probably. If only because if nuclear can be the last 15% to 20% of steady output (read: not subject to weather and such) that'll be enough to prevent rolling blacksout and other events due to shortages.
So little nuclear has come online since 2010 partly because of fear-mongering from activists and people for the last 20 years complaining that Nuclear takes too long to build.
If only 20 years ago people realized all our climate and energy problems wouldn't be solved and we should build the safest, cleanest and only technology to prevent climate change caused by energy production...
No, it's because nuclear fell out of the running economically. In large part this was due to the steady advance in gas turbine (and combined cycle) power plants. The capital cost of these plants is just incredibly low, 10-20 times cheaper per kW than a nuclear plant.
If "activists" stopped spending all their time fear-mongering about how expensive, dangerous, and time-consuming nuclear is we could have had massive government subsidies to almost entirely end fossil fuel production for energy!
https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP294.pdf https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP294.pdf
This paper has some nice maps illustrating why Californians need to do some serious modeling before making electrification choices.
My favorites are:
Figure 2 - fixed monthly charge (showing CA undercharges for fixed infrastructure costs)
Figure 3 - marginal cost per residential KWh (showing CA recoups it in very-high rates)
Figure 9 - marginal profit over social cost (showing CA is super expensive, even post-carbon-tax)
Other than the oft-mentioned risks of nuclear, it is (1) not as cheap as you think and (2) not straightforward to maintain in a warming environment.
1. Nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, due to the high costs for construction and dismantling. This does not dismiss your argument, because running a nuclear power plant is fairly cheap. The costs therefore speak towards keeping nuclear power plants running as long as they remain safe.
2. Existing nuclear power plants use huge quantities of fresh water for cooling. The required water quantity and temperature make nuclear power plants prone to droughts, which can cause shutdowns, and to flooding events, which can shut down or damage the plant. Both droughts and floods are increasing in frequency due to climate change. This speaks towards closing down power plants that are particularly vulnerable. In any case, grid operators need to be able to mitigate nuclear power plant outages. The cost of nuclear power is even less attractive when overcapacity is needed to accommodate potential outages.
This is pointless. Everything we do kills people. The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs. Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment: what are the costs of the alternatives?
The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives.
All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly.
So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.
> The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs.
> Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment
The two conflicting viewpoints posited in the same paragraph, seems ironic. The first is the issue, but requires veracity. The second is nonsensical. Humans make these decisions every day.
This is not contradictory. If you want to compare two solutions, you need to have a number for both. So in itself a number you assign to nuclear energy is useless (for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear is either terrible or bad as an energy production source), unless you contrast it with the equivalent for the alternative.
Humans make a lot of stupid decisions rooted in gut feeling and prejudice all the time. A small subset of these decisions involve long-term industrial strategy at a national level or the life of millions of people. For these decisions we ought to do better.
> However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed".
I'd rewrite it as
> one of the safest power sources humankind has ever developed[0]
because this is difficult to dispute. Cost is a more complicated matter and depends what you're counting and how you're comparing. Are you including tragedy of the commons? I.e. carbon emissions, mining, storage (batteries, waste, etc), land usage, etc. If any of these are included in the costs the price changes quite a bit and I'd argue it is not in good faith to compare solar and wind to hydro, coal, nuclear, etc if you don't include battery storage/costs because intermittent energy isn't equal to continuous (unless you over allocate).
To continue along the line of the gp the worst case estimates of nuclear deaths (including future deaths) is still lower than 8 years of of coal in the US using the best case stats. If we use more reliable data (the consensus from the UN and other independent studies) even including future deaths are lower than a single year of coal's best case in the US. So how much do you value human life? Because we're talking about 81 people[1] (4k if we assume we don't get better at treating cancer over the next 20 years) vs 39k PER YEAR (low 7.5k high 42k per year US coal particulate related deaths). Let that sink in again: 31 people died immediately from Chernobyl, an additional 50 due to Chernobyl, 0 from 3 Mile Island, and 0 Fukushima. Those are the deaths of nuclear power.
> The order of magnitude of Fukushima ...
> 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.
I'm often frustrated by Fukushima being brought up and people implying that it came down to human stupidity. Yes, that was a factor, but there was a much larger and significantly more important factor. The earthquake that caused the tsunami was the largest in recorded (by actual measurement) history (for Japan) and the 4th largest EVER recorded. The second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth. Based on this the likelihood of an earthquake and tsunami like that happening within the lifetime of the powerplant was incredibly low. Were the earthquake an 8.5 Fukushima wouldn't have happened. It is an absurd statement to chock this up to human fault. We're talking about an absurdly rare and freak event, and no one died.
As to the cost of the cleanup (which includes tsunami cleanup as well as radiation fwiw), well we could make it a lot cheaper if we reduced the acceptable levels of early death by radiation. The hard part is that there may or may not be small radioactive particulate on the ground and this could get introduced into water or food (getting inside the body). Letting people move back would still likely result in less deaths than coal does per year. I'm not advocating for this, I think that'd be insane, but why is this insane? Why is pumping out more coal not more insane? What's the difference? We're talking about human lives and livelihood here. When it is more humane to send people back to live in a radioactive zone than keeping coal plants online, maybe we should re-question our priors. What issue are we trying to solve? Because if it is saving human lives we're doing a pretty bang up job. If it is cost, ditto. If it is climate, ditto.
The arguments being made here are often absurd. There is no question that nuclear is clean and safe. The question is about cost, how much you value human life, how much you value carbon, and how much you value pollution. But if you think lives are cheap, climate change isn't real, and (not or) pollution isn't a big deal, then yeah, continue fighting against nuclear because it is costly.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
> The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...
Even the oft-cited $200 billion is an exaggeration. Bear in mind these figures from from politicians, nowhere near this amount has actually been spent. As far a figures for the money actually spent, let's go with your own source:
> In 2016, University of Oxford researcher and author Peter Wynn Kirby wrote that the government had allocated the equivalent of US$15 billion for the regional cleanup
Let's see if we can get more recent sources on spending related to Fukushima. Form a 2020 article [1]
> Since fiscal 2014, it has set aside about 35 billion yen annually for the interim storage facilities. The funds come from revenues earmarked for nuclear energy-related projects in the special account.
> But expenditures concerning the storage facilities are running a lot higher than initially envisaged.
> An estimate released in late 2016 by the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry showed that the project will eventually cost 1.6 trillion yen, compared with an initial projection of 1.1 trillion yen.
> The government has allocated an additional 12 billion yen annually for the storage facility project since fiscal 2017.
Okay, so the Japanese government is saying that it'll cost 1.6 trillion yen (about $15 billion dollars) total. They're actually spending 35 + 12 = 47 billion yen annually, which is ~$433 million. $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power.
1. http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13225190 http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13225190
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
> $15 billion over 30 years is a big bill. But amortized over the hundreds of nuclear power plants in existence, it adds little to the overall cost of nuclear power.
That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place. It has had its share of accidents too.
I wouldn’t be betting against more accidents in the next 30 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_nuclear_inc...
> That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place.
I think it would be worth comparing to the costs of incidents with other energy forms. Deepwater Horizon comes to mind with a cost 2 or 3 times that number (not counting fines). To say nothing of all the spills/incidents we don't hear about with tankers spilling/leaking on the open waters, just far enough away nobody notices.
Yes, but the cost is spread out over all the nuclear plants in operation. Nuclear energy already provides 10% of the world's nuclear power. We currently average one significant nuclear catastrophe every 20 years. $15 billion every 2 years is a miniscule cost relative to the amount of power nuclear energy provides.
And that's assuming newer plants don't have any improved safety over Fukushima. We already feature secondary containment, which would have prevent Chernobyl from being nearly as bad as it was, the Soviets just didn't build secondary containment. The reality is that we only have one instance of a meltdown breaching secondary containment in over 70 years of nuclear power operation.
And lastly, all this needs to be viewed relative to the ecological impact of covering several percent of the Earth's land surface in solar panels, and the environmental damage from fossil fuels that will be necessary until effective energy storage is developed.
> There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.
Is it really that big of a problem? Sure, the cost of dealing with these is not negligible but in the end, it is just a matter of digging a hole in a deserted place and putting things there. It is dangerous stuff and is to be handled with care, but we deal with dangerous stuff all the times: explosives, toxic chemicals, weapons, ... and nuclear waste is not that high on the list.
The usual argument is that nuclear waste can stay hot for thousands of years. In fact, while true, the kind of stuff that stays radioactive on these time scales tends to be weak, The most concerning elements are usually those with decades-long half lives. Compare to stable but toxic elements like mercury that last forever.
Also worth noting that coal contains long lived radioactive elements that end up in the atmosphere after being burned. So, coal plants also produce nuclear waste, but instead of having it conveniently stored in a specialized facility, it is released in the atmosphere to be stored into your lungs. As I said, long life elements are weak, so it is not that much of a problem, but it is not a reason to do the worst thing that can possibly be done with these.
And while we keep talking about waste, this is only waste because we don't use it. Radioactive "waste" is made of rare elements that produce energy, and maybe a treasure for future generations.
Right. People need to check up on the latest Nuclear advancements. We're getting quite good at refining waste products down to safe enough levels of radioactivity, and then we can even further utilize the remaining waste in other applications.
It's not like we've hit a dead end with nuclear research, people have just seen too much Chernobyl stuff and cast a large net on the whole science.
Addressing your points in order:
The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estimated cost is about $200 billion per the Japanese government:
https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200 https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200
So, to obtain a real comparison between the two, you'd have to add up the total costs of cleanup, environmental damage, health damage to people and animals, and all the other total costs of both fossil fuels generation and nuclear power.
Hint: Whether you're looking at total cost of ownership per gigawatt hour or cost to produce electricity per GWh, nuclear is cheaper.
>There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware.
Not as touchy as you think. Most of the contaminated materials that exist are from nuclear weapons production, which is a completely separate problem from power plants. Right now, those power plants (at least in the US) are mostly storing their spent fuel in dry casks on site with few or no problems.
The amount of dry cask storage needed fits within the boundaries of those sites so far.... IE, spent fuel is not a huge volume of material.
> 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.
This statement can apply to any real world engineering endeavor. You don't eliminate risk in a large project anyway. You anticipate it and mitigate it. You assume things will go wrong and make sure when they do that nothing particularly bad happens. That's just good design.
> "Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind,
That's like saying that someone who owns 90% of a publicly traded company is worth $9 billion just because the stock has a market cap of $10 billion. If they'd actually try to cash that stock, they'd run out of buyers and the stock price would go way, way down.
Solar and wind are great now, because we can pick a random spot and build it without needing storage and don't have many people objecting to it. (Yes, the lawsuits are there already, but so far we've only gotten to the low hanging fruit. It'll get much worse before we're anywhere near 50% green energy.) It's cheap if you just look at the cost of the pure panels/turbines.
The earth has a finite amount of habitable land. If you start filling that up with solar panels, land price will increase because you have to buy it from people that wanted to plant crops there or live there. A few countries like the USA and Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and sun aplenty.
We currently use about 162 PWh worldwide, only 27 of which is electricity[1]. We're barely starting to make a dent in electricity production and what you hear left and right is "not in my backyard" and "not on my the neighbor's roof that I have to look at every day" (--my dad). We'd barely have the space if people wouldn't complain, let alone if we can only build it away from civilization. And that's replacing electricity production alone, we haven't really started on transportation, making things (cement, steel, plastics, ...), growing things (fertilizer, cow farts), and heating/cooling. What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems like it will easily triple the cost with current technology (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of construction, maintenance, and energy transportation. For example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and reiterate). Solar I don't know, but for some reason we're not doing that on the same scale as wind, presumably for a good reason. There just aren't any easy shortcuts here, only compromises.
Let's not dismiss fission energy just yet. It might seem expensive today, but between a known ~2x price increase (iirc going full nuclear would increase the energy price by that much from today's price, though France has me wondering if I might be misremembering) and a larger cost if you do solar/wind+batteries+need-to-win-lots-of-lawsuits-for-space (which works out to be about 3x for just the hardware, using today's technology), I'll have fission reactors please. Until we have better tech, let's get started with the current tech and hope it becomes obsolete and we get cheaper energy with a sunk cost rather than not try because we might sink some cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy
[2] How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need - Bill Gates - 2021
> like environmental activists
Having worked in energy (and radiation) I've always been confused by the fact that the activists aren't aligned with the scientists. I have yet to meet a single climate scientist that is anti-nuclear. Most of them are shy about their support and will end up saying things like "but we can't get support for nuclear, so why even try?"
The only real argument against nuclear is cost. Safety it is number 1 (you can see numbers from my other post), emissions (lifetime) it is on par with solar and wind (without batteries), waste isn't as big of an issue as it is made to be (waste is magnitudes smaller than most people think and storing on site is perfectly acceptable), it is clearly environmentally friendly (low footprint, you can recycle fuel, most emissions are from construction). The only argument against it is cost. The only argument is that the cost of climate and human lives is low. I'm really frustrated with the misnomers people are making about this.
The "it's all the activist's fault" argument has long since become ludicrous. No, it's because the nuclear lied about how cheap it would be, then failed to execute properly.
> although it's more than just using Li-ion batteries.
It'd probably be helpful to elaborate, rather than just insist that the above commenter is wrong and loosely suggest at other solutions.
Things like hydrogen storage, synthetic methane, and thermal storage remain in the prototyping phase. I think it's not correct to say that they can, seeing as there isn't even a commercial market for these technologies let alone one that we know will scale. By comparison countries have already powered >80% of their electricity with nuclear.
It's clear than nuclear power can completely replace fossil fuels. Renewables might be able to replace it, but that's a gamble based on assuming a new storage solution will work excellent. Not just better, but truly blows-everything-else-out-of-the-water phenomenal. When the stakes at play are stopping climate change, this is a very risky assumption to make.