4 ms·

I really like your idea on a personal 'neat' would-be-nice level, but it makes one of the most common mistakes in the nuclear<->climate-change discussion: time.

I really like your idea on a personal 'neat' would-be-nice level, but it makes one of the most common mistakes in the nuclear<->climate-change discussion: time. The development of next-gen/thorium/msr/whatever from first-commercial-success to repeatable-and-therefore-cheaper is, even in a highly optimistic scenario, a 30+ year proposition. I fervently believe we should fund and invest in that r&d, but even if it pans out (which I bet it would, but you have to acknowledge its our guess), its simply not a part of our "it is time to act now" timeline. I do this all the time too, its largely a part of the fact that many of us are middle aged men now. We were taught to think of, and mentally frame this as, an "over the course of the next several decades" type of problem. In which case a nuclear solution was fairly obviously the best path available. The problem is we didn't take that path. And the decades have passed. So while we should start down that path now ASAP from an r&d/investment perspective, it is almost completely a distraction today from a "net-zero in 20-30 years" perspective. I guess what I'm mostly trying to say is, whenever engaging in the climate-change/energy-generation-mix "debate" these days, try to mentally factor in time as one of the top constraints in your model. Here's an IPCC chart of four example scenarios that show you what the slope of the curves need to look like: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3b.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...

DennisP 5y ago
Yes, if we rapidly decarbonize to renewables and figure out the storage issue, we don't need nuclear. And we should certainly attempt that. But if we overshoot, like in that P4 scenario, we're going to need massive carbon capture down the road, and nuclear fits quite well into that scenario. Also, if storage remains expensive at scale, so that wind/solar gets very expensive past 80% market penetration, nuclear would be a low-carbon way to fill in that last 20%. It doesn't do away with the need to roll out wind/solar as fast as we can, but it helps us with the hard part later. Nuclear also may be well-suited for industrial applications requiring process heat instead of electricity.

DennisP 5y ago

Yes, if we rapidly decarbonize to renewables and figure out the storage issue, we don't need nuclear. And we should certainly attempt that. But if we overshoot, like in that P4 scenario, we're going to need massive carbon capture down the road, and nuclear fits quite well into that scenario. Also, if storage remains expensive at scale, so that wind/solar gets very expensive past 80% market penetration, nuclear would be a low-carbon way to fill in that last 20%. It doesn't do away with the need to roll out wind/solar as fast as we can, but it helps us with the hard part later. Nuclear also may be well-suited for industrial applications requiring process heat instead of electricity.