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If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power. There is zero chance of moving off carbon energy sources without cau

If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power. There is zero chance of moving off carbon energy sources without causing catastrophic mayhem, unless we use massive amounts of nuclear. For instance, the last 4 years my state has averaged 37% production of total possible installed wind generation capacity. This is a very windy state which is in the top 2 for installed wind capacity and number one per capita. But throughout a day wind power can very from nearly zero to close to max capacity. Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for. The only solutions are continue with our gas turbine/wind power mix where we build enough gas turbines to handle 100% of the load for when the wind production is bottoming out, or replace everything with nuclear. Nuclear gets us to net carbon zero fastest and with technology easy to export to developing countries in desperate need of plentiful, reliable, cheap electricity.

ptkd 5y ago
I see this take a lot, and it’s kind of misinformed. The primary drawbacks of nuclear are: 1) incredible slow to build. A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 2) extremely expensive, with a massively frontloaded cost. By contrast, solar and wind are fast to install and now cheaper. > wind power can be zero at some parts of the day There are a few solutions to this actually. First, having a more nationalized grid can amortize variant weather conditions (very unlikely it’s not windy everywhere, for example). Second, there actually are long-duration battery solutions coming out. Look up “energy tower” for a very weird one, and “form energy” for a more traditional model. Finally — I will agree that nuclear is probably some piece of the pie in the future. But analysts think we can get to 80% renewables with currently existing tech: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2012/06/20/255704/the-us-could-run-on-80-percent-renewable-electricity-by-2050/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2012/0...
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  If it was actually code red, we would waive literally all safety regulations and environmental policy reviews, and break ground on new plants tomorrow. And cost would be no object.
  - varelse 5y ago
    I suspect you mean if the west believed it was actually code red... Good luck with that...
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      Yes. I do actually think it is critical, but it's clear that most people are using "code red" as a semantic device, not out of belief that we should act with _true_ urgency.
  - lutorm 5y ago
    Cost being no object doesn't mean you should choose unnecessarily expensive solutions...
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Nuclear power can be fast to build. It would need to be constructed in volume, with immutable designs. Right now, America builds so few nuclear plants that they are essentially all one-off designs. Mass production is key here. Vis-à-vis costs, the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects. Cost is an easily overcome obstacle. If a mandate came down to produce 1000 new nuclear reactors by 2030, I think it could be achieved. The country just needs the political will to make it happen.
  - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    > the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects This is because the federal reserve's printed money goes basically into treasuries and stocks. The rich save basically all of their money. If they decided to spend it on real-world goods, there would be huge inflation. But it's probably all nil. The cost of building enough nuclear power plants with economy of scale is probably near the same as building enough solar and wind farms.
    - dantheman 5y ago
      Except that you miss the part where solar and wind need normal power plants to provide power when they aren't running.
      - munk-a 5y ago
        Balancing systems do exist - I used to swim in Smith Mountain Lake[1] as a kid and that entire lake is a gigantic battery. During low demand periods they pump water into a reservoir to then run the turbines during peak demand hours. None of these systems are perfectly efficient - but we've got a lot of options in our tool belts for ways to balance peak demand that don't require more continuous production capacity. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mountain_Dam#Hydroelectric_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mountain_Dam#Hydroelectr...
        MagnumOpus 5y ago
- korantu 5y ago
  The report talks about hypothetical setup with smart girds and customers reacting on price change. This configuration was never tried at 80% scale. It might or might not work. People did try decarbonise industrial economy to 70% - it worked with technology existing not now but in the eighties. And it did not put any limitations on consumers, while taking just 10 years to implement. Surely at code red we should be looking at things that were shown to work?
- biztos 5y ago
  > long-duration battery solutions This isn't practical everywhere, but on the island of El Hierro (Canary Islands) there is a wind-and-battery solution in the form of a wind-pumped hydro-electric station. In effect there is a big pool of water acting as a battery and the wind turbine "charges" it. When I ran across it on a trip to the island I was really impressed. Very original solution! https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-configuration-of-the-Hydro-wind-power-plant_fig1_282575056 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-configuration-...
  - mikelward 5y ago
    I first heard about pumped hydro back in 2007. https://www.google.com/amp/s/grist.org/article/monbiot-we-can-provide-all-or-most-of-our-electricity-from-renewable-source/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/grist.org/article/monbiot-we-ca... https://books.google.com/books?id=vsPYv7jm-34C https://books.google.com/books?id=vsPYv7jm-34C
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Zar_zbiornik.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Zar_zbiornik.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%BBar https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%B... - another one from Poland, likely one of the largest batteries in the world (build in 1979 - 2 000 000 tons of pumped water, 440m height difference, typical working duration is 4 hours and 5.5 hours for pumping water back) https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz... and another one General concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... If it would be actually climate emergency then we would be building in mountains all where reasonable. No matter the damage to some rare species, panorama and tourism.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- shookness 5y ago
  Small modular nuclear reactors could be an answer to your primary concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/
  - bccdee 5y ago
    Yeah I hear this every time, but very few small modular reactors (SMRs) have actually been built on account of economic and safety barriers to building them [1]. Now, I'm sure these are soluble problems. I'm by no means anti-SMR. But most of the actual serious proposals I've heard discussed for decarbonization lean much more heavily on already-existing technologies such as solar panels, which are getting cheaper and more efficient every year and which we are putting in the grid right now. Most of the time, when I hear people talking about SMRs, it's as an excuse to do nothing. "This research tech will solve the climate problem, so all we need to do now is wait for it to pay off." Like the original poster in this thread, who claimed that a lack of investment in nuclear somehow proves that things aren't really that bad. Apparently, the IPCC does expect and hope for substantial increases in nuclear power as a portion of our energy supply [2][3], but "[a]chieving a rapid decarbonization of the electricity sector will require, at first, deploying proven technology," presumably because nuclear on its own is not enough, and because SMRs are too experimental to lean on in any substantial way. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544220312445 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... [2]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048732 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048732 [3]: https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/the-ipcc-1-5c-special-report-nuclear-energy%E2%80%99s-impo.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/the-ipc...
- tda 5y ago
  Don't forget the substantial costs to clean up. Just think about growing up in a world full of EOL nuclear plants left by generations before you that need to be cleaned up... In a political unstable world due to an ongoing climate crisis. Even today we as a whole struggle with decommissioning nuclear plants, and the costs are astronomical this is already a huge problem now, let alone in a post climate change world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
  - MagnumOpus 5y ago
    Just think about a world full of EOL toxic waste ash ponds left by coal power plants, each of them vastly more toxic and teratogenic than any nuclear plant, let alone a decommissioned one. In fact, you don’t need to imagine it, you are living the dream.
- voldacar 5y ago
  >A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized If this were truly "code red" and people really believed that, we would find a way to push the bureaucrats out of the way and build nuclear capacity way sooner than 20 yrs. Humans can do amazing things under dire stress. This is not happening, so I will assume "code red" is hyperbole, something that the IPCC is not entirely known to shun.
  - dakna 5y ago
    > people really believed that > we would find a way to In this case "people" and "we" just doesn't refer to the same cohort.
  - GVIrish 5y ago
    Humans don't always react rationally in code red situations though. Right now the irrational fear of nuclear power is stronger than the fear the average person or politician has of climate change. Doesn't mean that the climate change situation isn't dire.
  - outworlder 5y ago
    > This is not happening, so I will assume "code red" is hyperbole If you take the current pandemic as an example of what we do when under dire stress, I don't think we should be that confident. Yes, some people can perform astonishing feats, and yet other people can deny there's even a problem even when it's obvious.
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      I wouldn't call a disease with a mortality rate < 1% and that is really only a threat to old people "dire stress"
      - bertil 5y ago
        I take it you haven't talked to any medical professional recently.
- 1-6 5y ago
  I think we're also forgetting that adoption of nuclear power is also dependent on a stable government. Geopolitical risks probably outweigh all the drawbacks mentioned.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  If people believed that global warning is an extinction threat for humanity / code red / critically important... Then waiving almost all regulations on nuclear power and accepting some meltdowns would be reasonable. And also waiving nearly all regulations on solar power, wind power, massive construction of hydropower etc.
  - varelse 5y ago
    That I would guess is exactly the strategy China is adopting. And the west IMO will reel in horror at even a single meltdown there and back off any plans to adopt nuclear the day that happens, wasting precious time we really don't have.
  - elproxy 5y ago
    It isn't all about electricity generation: how areagriculture, land use, global logistics (to a good extent) affected by electricity generation ?
- krona 5y ago
  > A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 500 days for a small modular reactor (450MW) https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx#section-leading-the-consortium/deliverable https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor... At least, that's what the brochure says.
- elproxy 5y ago
  Yes it's slow to build today, though it hasn't always been the case: France once built 56 reactors over 15 years [0]. Yes it's expensive, but once again, this isn't a feature of Nuclear power, but one of the capitalist (or at the very least neoliberal) system it is built into: 60% of the Hinkley point C costs are due to the mode of financing (not 100% public) [1]. The real question is not whether this or that type of electricity generation is better (although it's also an important question), but rather how we can completely redesign our socio-economic system to quickly wean ourselves off of fossil fuels (hint: global logistics are far from electrified), reduce emissions from the agricultural sector (we do need to eat), etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... [1] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/ https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/
mtooth 5y ago
Agreed - if the situation is as dire as presented then nuclear fission is the only clear solution today for baseload power. All the rebuttals I usually read seem to present hypothetical alternatives that may very well come to fruition but we have nuclear as a well-tested and known solution to the problem ready for us to begin using today should we simply decide to act.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Meanwhile California is busy decommissioning Diablo plant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant I don’t see a path forward without Nuclear. Europe and China has done better in this area than US. There is a bunch of fear mongering in liberal California circles about Nuclear. Well informed and technically minded people I know in Bay Area all support Nuclear power. Frankly the media has done an awful job of fear mongering with the term “Nuclear” and “Radiation”.
  - causalmodels 5y ago
    New York just decommissioned the Indian point nuclear plant [1] due to some shady politics. The largest planned solar installation in the US was defeated by environmental groups because it would be an eyesore [2]. At some point we’re going to have to grapple with the fact many “concerned” groups don’t actually care about climate change. Instead they use it as a stalking horse for other political projects. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47776 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47776 [2] https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-environment-and-nature-las-vegas-nevada-9bf3640dfefbc6f7f45a97c6810f5ff7 https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politic...
    - Frondo 5y ago
      Did you read article #2? The group that stopped the solar installation was something called "Save Our Mesa": > But a group of residents organized as “Save Our Mesa” argued such a large installation would be an eyesore and could curtail the area’s popular recreational activities — biking, ATVs and skydiving — and deter tourists from visiting sculptor Michael Heizer’s land installation, “Double Negative.” The group itself is not in any way an environmental group, they claim to be locals who want to save their tourism industry. Their own website: http://www.saveourmesa.org http://www.saveourmesa.org > The majority of our community’s revenue comes from tourism. We lost a lot of tourism and businesses when the shrinking lake levels of Lake Mead occurred closing a nearby beach. We have struggled but built back our economy through OHV tourism. When people come and camp/hotel for a week, they buy our gas, our groceries, eat in our restaurants, use our mechanics and parts stores. This allows these businesses to thrive thus keeping us self sufficient. Feedback from many of our Snowbirds was that they would look for new places to go, that’s lost revenue. People would not come to recreate, that’s lost revenue.
h1fra 5y ago
While I agree Nuclear is the most probable solution it's not easy to build and fuel is very sparse. France who is leading the way is 100% depend on other countries, I'm not sure it will play well in the coming years > 85% of uranium is produced in six countries: Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, Namibia, Niger, and Russia. And the second issue is to focus on electricity production, while there is a ton a other things creating pollution. You won't save the planet if you still have thousands of ships on the sea and planes in the air; meat and clothes production too... There are a dozen of topics to be addressed, with multiple solutions and I would say none of them are being really tackled. (except energy in the less efficient way = no green worldwide grid)
- FabHK 5y ago
  > You won't save the planet if you still have thousands of ships on the sea and planes in the air Aviation contributes only 2% of global air pollution, though maybe 5% of global greenhouse effect (due to the high altitudes airplanes operate at). Textile production, indeed, contributes more to climate change than aviation and maritime shipping combined [1]. However, with abundant electricity you can switch many transportation modes to electric, and (where technical constraints don't allow that yet, eg intercontinental aviation) maybe utilise synthetic fuels. > I would say none of them are being really tackled I would say many challenges are being tackled, and the intensity will increase even further. [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20201208STO93327/the-impact-of-textile-production-and-waste-on-the-environment-infographic https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/202...
  - m4rtink 5y ago
    Synthetic aviation fuels are effectively a fuel-air battery as long as you pull in CO2 from the air making it.
    - bertil 5y ago
      The altitude thing makes it a little more complicated than that, but… yes, essentially: 1. any flight that could be a train journey, make it so; if anything, luxury high-speed train is so much more enjoyable that whatever flying allows at the same cost; there will be electric short-distance planes soon, but we probably want to use those for over-seas journeys; 2. no matter what source of CO2 will remain after we address ICE cars, coal, red meat, dairy, cement and much more, we will need to go negative to restore sanity to the climate, so pulling CO2 will be essential. The message is: all hands on deck, starting by the big stuff. Flying isn’t huge, but it needs addressing.
tda 5y ago
As pointed out in he comments below, the climate crisis will reduce political stability. And stability is essential to ensure that there will be a strong enough society left to properly decommission a nuclear plant when it will be EOL in 50 years. Decommissioning is likely to be vastly more expensive than initial construction, and after that you still need to figure out how to make sure no one will want to touch the waste for the next few thousand years. For the current crisis we need to put a cap on carbon extraction now, and quickly bring extraction rates down to zero. Let the price of oil rise and capitalism should sort it out. Only when fossil fuel prices rise to say 500 USD per barrel will people and industries start effectively reducing consumption. Other than on extremely energy intensive activities (transatlantic flights) fossil fuel prices are just a rounding error.
- lake_vincent 5y ago
  "capitalism should sort it out" Oh, you sweet summer child!
  - tda 5y ago
    We can at least try putting a price on fossil fuels. Actually the 1973 oil crisis had a profound effect on behavior, so yes a capitalistic system is perfectly capable of responding to something being (artificially) scarce. OPEC should really get their shit together and start another oil crisis "in order to save the world"
- GVIrish 5y ago
  If you can't sell people on nuclear power, there is no way in hell you're gonna sell people on extreme taxes on oil. And even if you could, the base load problem will still be there. Maybe if carbon were heavily taxed it would incentivize energy storage solutions but as of right now cost effective solutions are no viable yet.
jasonlaramburu 5y ago
>Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for There are many options (electrochemical, gravity etc) for grid-scale energy storage of various durations that are commercially-viable today. 0-8 hours tends to be the most needed duration in the US but there are solutions that can store power for days or weeks without losses. Even in a 100% nuclear or gas-fired world storage is critical. During the Texas blackout both nuclear and gas assets failed due to the cold temperatures.
- elproxy 5y ago
  Besides the fact that electricity generation is merely one aspect of GHG emissions (hello agriculture, land use, transportation, etc). The ultimate argument against the "let's not radically change our ways and only retool the engine" view is the following: we have ~120 years of known reserves for the current fission reactors, with a potential 10x multiplier with fast neutron reactors should anybody (other than the russians and the chinese) bother to invest into researching the field. How many more doublings in our economy (and hence energy use) does it take to consume it all ? At a measly (by economists and politicians standards) rate of 2%/year, you get a doubling every 35 years. in 350 years (yeah I know this sounds very far in the light of the current news) we'd have increased our demand by 3 orders of magnitude...
eloff 5y ago
To me this makes so much sense. But when you look at the costs involved it's far cheaper and less risky to deploy 2x in renewables and a bunch of energy storage plus some gas plants and long distance transmission. New innovations in nuclear maybe have a chance to change this, but renewables are still getting cheaper so even if they succeed they must still beat the moving target. In another world where we had embraced nuclear long ago and kept innovating it would have made so much sense. It still will be a part of the solution, but the economics really aren't there and the private sector isn't dumb. Markets will allocate capital according to risks and returns and nuclear will continue to be overlooked until it can compete.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Nuclear is able to compete on merit and has been forever, but we chose to create a legal environment in which one or two dedicated NIMBYs could stall a project indefinitely. That's the entire reason why "the economics aren't there." We aren't talking about costs of building a reactor or risk of it melting down, we're talking about the cost and risk of 1001 strategically sequential ground squirrel environmental impact studies pushing the project duration out to infinity. Allowing this is a political choice, not an evaluation of the technology. I tend to agree with you that the ship has sailed, though. If we had just kept building at the same pace as 40 years ago (linear extrapolation, not exponential) then we'd recently have celebrated the completion of a zero-emission grid. Unfortunately, we chose to pump the atmosphere full of CO2 instead. Ugh.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    It's not really the ahead of time NIMBY complaints but the potential for future liability shifts which existing plants will not be exempt from. A good number of plants constructed in the 60s and 70s hit their EOL (after getting a a bunch of lifetime extensions from governments) and then had their nice glittering warchest of profits eaten away by cleanup expenses (which sometimes exceeded the cash left in those contingency funds with the deficit falling on state & local governments). There have been issues with water contamination due to poor holding pool sealing and due to unforseen natural disasters. Nuclear power requires millions in its initial investment. It has a not-insignificant profit margin over other power sources, but it also has a significant chance for large liabilities (more often due to changing laws than meltdowns). The result is an investment with an extremely high investment threshold (you don't build small nuke plants) with a decent short term prospect and a poor long term prospect that's extremely hard to get out of. This makes nuclear a really bad option for private investors when held up in comparison to tech and the like. Meltdowns can happen and they're catastrophic but the bigger impediment is the unpredictable legal and fiscal liabilities involved. And, honestly, it's my personal opinion that a fair amount of these post-de-facto fiscal liabilities are extremely just and fairly applied - they're externalities we were ignoring decades ago. This is a segment of the market where we need government funding and guarantees to get things done - and we should do so since nuclear is an extremely safe and clean option for power generation.
ttul 5y ago
While it's true that the state has to backstop the externalities of nuclear through insurance guarantees, the obvious and present externalities of carbon burning massively outweigh these guarantees. The state picks up a huge ROI by covering nuclear risks while taxing the living shit out of carbon pollution.
juanuys 5y ago
Wasn't Bill Gates going to build a new type of reactor [0] before Trump became president and shut down US/China collaboration [1]? It seems there's some movement from Mr. Gates around nuclear again, but not sure if the Natrium stuff is the same as the TWR (travelling wave reactor) of 5 years ago. [2] 0. https://www.terrapower.com/ https://www.terrapower.com/ 1. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/terrapower-china-bill-gates-trump/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/bill-gates-warren-buffett-new-nuclear-reactor-wyoming-natrium https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/bill-gates-w...
zacmps 5y ago
> Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for. Interestingly not the case. New Zealand is currently considering what would become the largest battery in the world, Lake Onslow. Consisting of a giant artificial lake and hydro dam it could store ~12 terawatt-hours. This would be enough to smooth over any variations in renewable load and remove the need for fossil fuel peaker plants.
lvs 5y ago
Can you kindly edit your comment to remove the accusation that people worried about nuclear power don't believe in the severity of climate change? These people are just looking at a different risk assessment.
outworlder 5y ago
> If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power In theory. I used to say the same thing until recently. Now, I'm not sure. Let's say we decide that yes, nuclear is the way to go, as it provides a lot of energy with barely any pollution (other than mining and construction). The 'waste', while a problem, is inconsequential compared to spewing crap in the atmosphere. Let's also assume that the designs will not cause proliferation concerns (we have such designs, as well as more plentiful fuels). In fact, let's assume we will use the best designs we have in general. Even then, what's the turnaround time to construct new power plants? The figures I've seen suggest it takes almost a decade until a plant is operational. Do we still have the time do build them in enough numbers to make a difference?
- wizardofdos 5y ago
  No we don't. We have to reduce comsumption, and not just a bit but by a lot.
gefhfff 5y ago
There are storage possibilities beyond batteries, e.g. hydrogen/methane
elihu 5y ago
I'm tentatively in favor of more nuclear power plants, but I'm not convinced it's the only solution. We definitely need more electricity that comes from non-carbon-emitting sources, but solar and wind seem to be winning on cost. In order to rely more heavily on wind and solar, we will need either enormous batteries or better power distribution across the grid. Lithium iron phosphate cells should be pretty cheap in mass quantities, and they don't require nickel or cobalt. They can also last a very long time, so cost is amortized over many years. If the batteries cost $100 per kwh and a typical household needs 30 kwh to get through a 24 hour cycle, then that's $3000 worth of batteries per household. The real cost would be higher when you add in battery management systems, chargers, inverters, and so on, but if it's centrally managed it doesn't seem like the manufacturing, installation, and operation cost would be insurmountable. In terms of the energy grid, I think it would be a good idea to look into constructing major transcontinental high voltage DC lines so the United States can buy solar power from, say, Algeria when the sun is shining there and sell surplus power to Europe and Asia when it's daytime in the U.S.. To sum up: I think nuclear could be a part of the solution, but it isn't the only option. We do have alternatives.
krasi0 5y ago
Let's not forget that there are many regions in the world (say in the middle East or Africa) where the situation is constantly volatile to put it mildly and where a nuclear power plant would be impossible to be secured properly against insurgency.
ropable 5y ago
Nuclear is an especially sensible option in my country (Australia) IMO; we have an abundance of uranium ore, a geologically stable continent, a high-quality interconnected electrical grid (over most of the population), and a reliable political/governance environment. It would be an enormous improvement over our current reliance on coal-fired generation for base loads.
8eye 5y ago
hard pass on that, way too many issues in disaster zones. also, not good for you at all if it gets anywhere near people
LightG 5y ago
It's not about "belief" ... short termism is what will do for humanity.
marvoronc345 5y ago
nice
asoneth 5y ago
I'd love to see new reactors come on line, but I remain skeptical that nuclear power will be widely used in the US as long as it remains so scary to so many people. It's scary because disasters stay on the front page for months if not years, it's associated with civilization-ending weapons, radiation and the illnesses it causes are mysterious, we don't really have a great plan for dealing with waste, and nuclear advocates are (by-and-large) a bunch of energy nerds who actually believe some new reactor design or statistical analysis will finally convince the American public to go pro-nuke. The scarier climate change becomes, the more people seem willing to accept nuclear power. But that could be too little too late.

ptkd 5y ago

I see this take a lot, and it’s kind of misinformed. The primary drawbacks of nuclear are: 1) incredible slow to build. A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 2) extremely expensive, with a massively frontloaded cost. By contrast, solar and wind are fast to install and now cheaper. > wind power can be zero at some parts of the day There are a few solutions to this actually. First, having a more nationalized grid can amortize variant weather conditions (very unlikely it’s not windy everywhere, for example). Second, there actually are long-duration battery solutions coming out. Look up “energy tower” for a very weird one, and “form energy” for a more traditional model. Finally — I will agree that nuclear is probably some piece of the pie in the future. But analysts think we can get to 80% renewables with currently existing tech: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2012/06/20/255704/the-us-could-run-on-80-percent-renewable-electricity-by-2050/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2012/0...

bpodgursky 5y ago
If it was actually code red, we would waive literally all safety regulations and environmental policy reviews, and break ground on new plants tomorrow. And cost would be no object.
- varelse 5y ago
  I suspect you mean if the west believed it was actually code red... Good luck with that...
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Yes. I do actually think it is critical, but it's clear that most people are using "code red" as a semantic device, not out of belief that we should act with _true_ urgency.
- lutorm 5y ago
  Cost being no object doesn't mean you should choose unnecessarily expensive solutions...
mywittyname 5y ago
Nuclear power can be fast to build. It would need to be constructed in volume, with immutable designs. Right now, America builds so few nuclear plants that they are essentially all one-off designs. Mass production is key here. Vis-à-vis costs, the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects. Cost is an easily overcome obstacle. If a mandate came down to produce 1000 new nuclear reactors by 2030, I think it could be achieved. The country just needs the political will to make it happen.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  > the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects This is because the federal reserve's printed money goes basically into treasuries and stocks. The rich save basically all of their money. If they decided to spend it on real-world goods, there would be huge inflation. But it's probably all nil. The cost of building enough nuclear power plants with economy of scale is probably near the same as building enough solar and wind farms.
  - dantheman 5y ago
    Except that you miss the part where solar and wind need normal power plants to provide power when they aren't running.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      Balancing systems do exist - I used to swim in Smith Mountain Lake[1] as a kid and that entire lake is a gigantic battery. During low demand periods they pump water into a reservoir to then run the turbines during peak demand hours. None of these systems are perfectly efficient - but we've got a lot of options in our tool belts for ways to balance peak demand that don't require more continuous production capacity. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mountain_Dam#Hydroelectric_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mountain_Dam#Hydroelectr...
      - MagnumOpus 5y ago
korantu 5y ago
The report talks about hypothetical setup with smart girds and customers reacting on price change. This configuration was never tried at 80% scale. It might or might not work. People did try decarbonise industrial economy to 70% - it worked with technology existing not now but in the eighties. And it did not put any limitations on consumers, while taking just 10 years to implement. Surely at code red we should be looking at things that were shown to work?
biztos 5y ago
> long-duration battery solutions This isn't practical everywhere, but on the island of El Hierro (Canary Islands) there is a wind-and-battery solution in the form of a wind-pumped hydro-electric station. In effect there is a big pool of water acting as a battery and the wind turbine "charges" it. When I ran across it on a trip to the island I was really impressed. Very original solution! https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-configuration-of-the-Hydro-wind-power-plant_fig1_282575056 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-configuration-...
- mikelward 5y ago
  I first heard about pumped hydro back in 2007. https://www.google.com/amp/s/grist.org/article/monbiot-we-can-provide-all-or-most-of-our-electricity-from-renewable-source/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/grist.org/article/monbiot-we-ca... https://books.google.com/books?id=vsPYv7jm-34C https://books.google.com/books?id=vsPYv7jm-34C
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Zar_zbiornik.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Zar_zbiornik.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%BBar https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%B... - another one from Poland, likely one of the largest batteries in the world (build in 1979 - 2 000 000 tons of pumped water, 440m height difference, typical working duration is 4 hours and 5.5 hours for pumping water back) https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz... and another one General concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... If it would be actually climate emergency then we would be building in mountains all where reasonable. No matter the damage to some rare species, panorama and tourism.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
shookness 5y ago
Small modular nuclear reactors could be an answer to your primary concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/
- bccdee 5y ago
  Yeah I hear this every time, but very few small modular reactors (SMRs) have actually been built on account of economic and safety barriers to building them [1]. Now, I'm sure these are soluble problems. I'm by no means anti-SMR. But most of the actual serious proposals I've heard discussed for decarbonization lean much more heavily on already-existing technologies such as solar panels, which are getting cheaper and more efficient every year and which we are putting in the grid right now. Most of the time, when I hear people talking about SMRs, it's as an excuse to do nothing. "This research tech will solve the climate problem, so all we need to do now is wait for it to pay off." Like the original poster in this thread, who claimed that a lack of investment in nuclear somehow proves that things aren't really that bad. Apparently, the IPCC does expect and hope for substantial increases in nuclear power as a portion of our energy supply [2][3], but "[a]chieving a rapid decarbonization of the electricity sector will require, at first, deploying proven technology," presumably because nuclear on its own is not enough, and because SMRs are too experimental to lean on in any substantial way. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544220312445 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... [2]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048732 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048732 [3]: https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/the-ipcc-1-5c-special-report-nuclear-energy%E2%80%99s-impo.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/the-ipc...
tda 5y ago
Don't forget the substantial costs to clean up. Just think about growing up in a world full of EOL nuclear plants left by generations before you that need to be cleaned up... In a political unstable world due to an ongoing climate crisis. Even today we as a whole struggle with decommissioning nuclear plants, and the costs are astronomical this is already a huge problem now, let alone in a post climate change world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  Just think about a world full of EOL toxic waste ash ponds left by coal power plants, each of them vastly more toxic and teratogenic than any nuclear plant, let alone a decommissioned one. In fact, you don’t need to imagine it, you are living the dream.
voldacar 5y ago
>A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized If this were truly "code red" and people really believed that, we would find a way to push the bureaucrats out of the way and build nuclear capacity way sooner than 20 yrs. Humans can do amazing things under dire stress. This is not happening, so I will assume "code red" is hyperbole, something that the IPCC is not entirely known to shun.
- dakna 5y ago
  > people really believed that > we would find a way to In this case "people" and "we" just doesn't refer to the same cohort.
- GVIrish 5y ago
  Humans don't always react rationally in code red situations though. Right now the irrational fear of nuclear power is stronger than the fear the average person or politician has of climate change. Doesn't mean that the climate change situation isn't dire.
- outworlder 5y ago
  > This is not happening, so I will assume "code red" is hyperbole If you take the current pandemic as an example of what we do when under dire stress, I don't think we should be that confident. Yes, some people can perform astonishing feats, and yet other people can deny there's even a problem even when it's obvious.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    I wouldn't call a disease with a mortality rate < 1% and that is really only a threat to old people "dire stress"
    - bertil 5y ago
      I take it you haven't talked to any medical professional recently.
1-6 5y ago
I think we're also forgetting that adoption of nuclear power is also dependent on a stable government. Geopolitical risks probably outweigh all the drawbacks mentioned.
matkoniecz 5y ago
If people believed that global warning is an extinction threat for humanity / code red / critically important... Then waiving almost all regulations on nuclear power and accepting some meltdowns would be reasonable. And also waiving nearly all regulations on solar power, wind power, massive construction of hydropower etc.
- varelse 5y ago
  That I would guess is exactly the strategy China is adopting. And the west IMO will reel in horror at even a single meltdown there and back off any plans to adopt nuclear the day that happens, wasting precious time we really don't have.
- elproxy 5y ago
  It isn't all about electricity generation: how areagriculture, land use, global logistics (to a good extent) affected by electricity generation ?
krona 5y ago
> A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 500 days for a small modular reactor (450MW) https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx#section-leading-the-consortium/deliverable https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor... At least, that's what the brochure says.
elproxy 5y ago
Yes it's slow to build today, though it hasn't always been the case: France once built 56 reactors over 15 years [0]. Yes it's expensive, but once again, this isn't a feature of Nuclear power, but one of the capitalist (or at the very least neoliberal) system it is built into: 60% of the Hinkley point C costs are due to the mode of financing (not 100% public) [1]. The real question is not whether this or that type of electricity generation is better (although it's also an important question), but rather how we can completely redesign our socio-economic system to quickly wean ourselves off of fossil fuels (hint: global logistics are far from electrified), reduce emissions from the agricultural sector (we do need to eat), etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... [1] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/ https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/

mtooth 5y ago

Agreed - if the situation is as dire as presented then nuclear fission is the only clear solution today for baseload power. All the rebuttals I usually read seem to present hypothetical alternatives that may very well come to fruition but we have nuclear as a well-tested and known solution to the problem ready for us to begin using today should we simply decide to act.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Meanwhile California is busy decommissioning Diablo plant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant I don’t see a path forward without Nuclear. Europe and China has done better in this area than US. There is a bunch of fear mongering in liberal California circles about Nuclear. Well informed and technically minded people I know in Bay Area all support Nuclear power. Frankly the media has done an awful job of fear mongering with the term “Nuclear” and “Radiation”.
- causalmodels 5y ago
  New York just decommissioned the Indian point nuclear plant [1] due to some shady politics. The largest planned solar installation in the US was defeated by environmental groups because it would be an eyesore [2]. At some point we’re going to have to grapple with the fact many “concerned” groups don’t actually care about climate change. Instead they use it as a stalking horse for other political projects. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47776 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47776 [2] https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-environment-and-nature-las-vegas-nevada-9bf3640dfefbc6f7f45a97c6810f5ff7 https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politic...
  - Frondo 5y ago
    Did you read article #2? The group that stopped the solar installation was something called "Save Our Mesa": > But a group of residents organized as “Save Our Mesa” argued such a large installation would be an eyesore and could curtail the area’s popular recreational activities — biking, ATVs and skydiving — and deter tourists from visiting sculptor Michael Heizer’s land installation, “Double Negative.” The group itself is not in any way an environmental group, they claim to be locals who want to save their tourism industry. Their own website: http://www.saveourmesa.org http://www.saveourmesa.org > The majority of our community’s revenue comes from tourism. We lost a lot of tourism and businesses when the shrinking lake levels of Lake Mead occurred closing a nearby beach. We have struggled but built back our economy through OHV tourism. When people come and camp/hotel for a week, they buy our gas, our groceries, eat in our restaurants, use our mechanics and parts stores. This allows these businesses to thrive thus keeping us self sufficient. Feedback from many of our Snowbirds was that they would look for new places to go, that’s lost revenue. People would not come to recreate, that’s lost revenue.

h1fra 5y ago

While I agree Nuclear is the most probable solution it's not easy to build and fuel is very sparse. France who is leading the way is 100% depend on other countries, I'm not sure it will play well in the coming years > 85% of uranium is produced in six countries: Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, Namibia, Niger, and Russia. And the second issue is to focus on electricity production, while there is a ton a other things creating pollution. You won't save the planet if you still have thousands of ships on the sea and planes in the air; meat and clothes production too... There are a dozen of topics to be addressed, with multiple solutions and I would say none of them are being really tackled. (except energy in the less efficient way = no green worldwide grid)

FabHK 5y ago
> You won't save the planet if you still have thousands of ships on the sea and planes in the air Aviation contributes only 2% of global air pollution, though maybe 5% of global greenhouse effect (due to the high altitudes airplanes operate at). Textile production, indeed, contributes more to climate change than aviation and maritime shipping combined [1]. However, with abundant electricity you can switch many transportation modes to electric, and (where technical constraints don't allow that yet, eg intercontinental aviation) maybe utilise synthetic fuels. > I would say none of them are being really tackled I would say many challenges are being tackled, and the intensity will increase even further. [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20201208STO93327/the-impact-of-textile-production-and-waste-on-the-environment-infographic https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/202...
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Synthetic aviation fuels are effectively a fuel-air battery as long as you pull in CO2 from the air making it.
  - bertil 5y ago
    The altitude thing makes it a little more complicated than that, but… yes, essentially: 1. any flight that could be a train journey, make it so; if anything, luxury high-speed train is so much more enjoyable that whatever flying allows at the same cost; there will be electric short-distance planes soon, but we probably want to use those for over-seas journeys; 2. no matter what source of CO2 will remain after we address ICE cars, coal, red meat, dairy, cement and much more, we will need to go negative to restore sanity to the climate, so pulling CO2 will be essential. The message is: all hands on deck, starting by the big stuff. Flying isn’t huge, but it needs addressing.

tda 5y ago

As pointed out in he comments below, the climate crisis will reduce political stability. And stability is essential to ensure that there will be a strong enough society left to properly decommission a nuclear plant when it will be EOL in 50 years. Decommissioning is likely to be vastly more expensive than initial construction, and after that you still need to figure out how to make sure no one will want to touch the waste for the next few thousand years. For the current crisis we need to put a cap on carbon extraction now, and quickly bring extraction rates down to zero. Let the price of oil rise and capitalism should sort it out. Only when fossil fuel prices rise to say 500 USD per barrel will people and industries start effectively reducing consumption. Other than on extremely energy intensive activities (transatlantic flights) fossil fuel prices are just a rounding error.

lake_vincent 5y ago
"capitalism should sort it out" Oh, you sweet summer child!
- tda 5y ago
  We can at least try putting a price on fossil fuels. Actually the 1973 oil crisis had a profound effect on behavior, so yes a capitalistic system is perfectly capable of responding to something being (artificially) scarce. OPEC should really get their shit together and start another oil crisis "in order to save the world"
GVIrish 5y ago
If you can't sell people on nuclear power, there is no way in hell you're gonna sell people on extreme taxes on oil. And even if you could, the base load problem will still be there. Maybe if carbon were heavily taxed it would incentivize energy storage solutions but as of right now cost effective solutions are no viable yet.

jasonlaramburu 5y ago

>Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for There are many options (electrochemical, gravity etc) for grid-scale energy storage of various durations that are commercially-viable today. 0-8 hours tends to be the most needed duration in the US but there are solutions that can store power for days or weeks without losses. Even in a 100% nuclear or gas-fired world storage is critical. During the Texas blackout both nuclear and gas assets failed due to the cold temperatures.

elproxy 5y ago
Besides the fact that electricity generation is merely one aspect of GHG emissions (hello agriculture, land use, transportation, etc). The ultimate argument against the "let's not radically change our ways and only retool the engine" view is the following: we have ~120 years of known reserves for the current fission reactors, with a potential 10x multiplier with fast neutron reactors should anybody (other than the russians and the chinese) bother to invest into researching the field. How many more doublings in our economy (and hence energy use) does it take to consume it all ? At a measly (by economists and politicians standards) rate of 2%/year, you get a doubling every 35 years. in 350 years (yeah I know this sounds very far in the light of the current news) we'd have increased our demand by 3 orders of magnitude...

eloff 5y ago

To me this makes so much sense. But when you look at the costs involved it's far cheaper and less risky to deploy 2x in renewables and a bunch of energy storage plus some gas plants and long distance transmission. New innovations in nuclear maybe have a chance to change this, but renewables are still getting cheaper so even if they succeed they must still beat the moving target. In another world where we had embraced nuclear long ago and kept innovating it would have made so much sense. It still will be a part of the solution, but the economics really aren't there and the private sector isn't dumb. Markets will allocate capital according to risks and returns and nuclear will continue to be overlooked until it can compete.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Nuclear is able to compete on merit and has been forever, but we chose to create a legal environment in which one or two dedicated NIMBYs could stall a project indefinitely. That's the entire reason why "the economics aren't there." We aren't talking about costs of building a reactor or risk of it melting down, we're talking about the cost and risk of 1001 strategically sequential ground squirrel environmental impact studies pushing the project duration out to infinity. Allowing this is a political choice, not an evaluation of the technology. I tend to agree with you that the ship has sailed, though. If we had just kept building at the same pace as 40 years ago (linear extrapolation, not exponential) then we'd recently have celebrated the completion of a zero-emission grid. Unfortunately, we chose to pump the atmosphere full of CO2 instead. Ugh.
- munk-a 5y ago
  It's not really the ahead of time NIMBY complaints but the potential for future liability shifts which existing plants will not be exempt from. A good number of plants constructed in the 60s and 70s hit their EOL (after getting a a bunch of lifetime extensions from governments) and then had their nice glittering warchest of profits eaten away by cleanup expenses (which sometimes exceeded the cash left in those contingency funds with the deficit falling on state & local governments). There have been issues with water contamination due to poor holding pool sealing and due to unforseen natural disasters. Nuclear power requires millions in its initial investment. It has a not-insignificant profit margin over other power sources, but it also has a significant chance for large liabilities (more often due to changing laws than meltdowns). The result is an investment with an extremely high investment threshold (you don't build small nuke plants) with a decent short term prospect and a poor long term prospect that's extremely hard to get out of. This makes nuclear a really bad option for private investors when held up in comparison to tech and the like. Meltdowns can happen and they're catastrophic but the bigger impediment is the unpredictable legal and fiscal liabilities involved. And, honestly, it's my personal opinion that a fair amount of these post-de-facto fiscal liabilities are extremely just and fairly applied - they're externalities we were ignoring decades ago. This is a segment of the market where we need government funding and guarantees to get things done - and we should do so since nuclear is an extremely safe and clean option for power generation.

ttul 5y ago

While it's true that the state has to backstop the externalities of nuclear through insurance guarantees, the obvious and present externalities of carbon burning massively outweigh these guarantees. The state picks up a huge ROI by covering nuclear risks while taxing the living shit out of carbon pollution.

juanuys 5y ago

Wasn't Bill Gates going to build a new type of reactor [0] before Trump became president and shut down US/China collaboration [1]? It seems there's some movement from Mr. Gates around nuclear again, but not sure if the Natrium stuff is the same as the TWR (travelling wave reactor) of 5 years ago. [2] 0. https://www.terrapower.com/ https://www.terrapower.com/ 1. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/terrapower-china-bill-gates-trump/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/bill-gates-warren-buffett-new-nuclear-reactor-wyoming-natrium https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/bill-gates-w...

zacmps 5y ago

> Those periods of near zero production can last non-trivial amounts of time no realistic battery could provide for. Interestingly not the case. New Zealand is currently considering what would become the largest battery in the world, Lake Onslow. Consisting of a giant artificial lake and hydro dam it could store ~12 terawatt-hours. This would be enough to smooth over any variations in renewable load and remove the need for fossil fuel peaker plants.

lvs 5y ago

Can you kindly edit your comment to remove the accusation that people worried about nuclear power don't believe in the severity of climate change? These people are just looking at a different risk assessment.

outworlder 5y ago

> If anyone actually believed it was "code red for humanity" they'd be pushing nuclear power In theory. I used to say the same thing until recently. Now, I'm not sure. Let's say we decide that yes, nuclear is the way to go, as it provides a lot of energy with barely any pollution (other than mining and construction). The 'waste', while a problem, is inconsequential compared to spewing crap in the atmosphere. Let's also assume that the designs will not cause proliferation concerns (we have such designs, as well as more plentiful fuels). In fact, let's assume we will use the best designs we have in general. Even then, what's the turnaround time to construct new power plants? The figures I've seen suggest it takes almost a decade until a plant is operational. Do we still have the time do build them in enough numbers to make a difference?

wizardofdos 5y ago
No we don't. We have to reduce comsumption, and not just a bit but by a lot.

gefhfff 5y ago

There are storage possibilities beyond batteries, e.g. hydrogen/methane

elihu 5y ago

I'm tentatively in favor of more nuclear power plants, but I'm not convinced it's the only solution. We definitely need more electricity that comes from non-carbon-emitting sources, but solar and wind seem to be winning on cost. In order to rely more heavily on wind and solar, we will need either enormous batteries or better power distribution across the grid. Lithium iron phosphate cells should be pretty cheap in mass quantities, and they don't require nickel or cobalt. They can also last a very long time, so cost is amortized over many years. If the batteries cost $100 per kwh and a typical household needs 30 kwh to get through a 24 hour cycle, then that's $3000 worth of batteries per household. The real cost would be higher when you add in battery management systems, chargers, inverters, and so on, but if it's centrally managed it doesn't seem like the manufacturing, installation, and operation cost would be insurmountable. In terms of the energy grid, I think it would be a good idea to look into constructing major transcontinental high voltage DC lines so the United States can buy solar power from, say, Algeria when the sun is shining there and sell surplus power to Europe and Asia when it's daytime in the U.S.. To sum up: I think nuclear could be a part of the solution, but it isn't the only option. We do have alternatives.

krasi0 5y ago

Let's not forget that there are many regions in the world (say in the middle East or Africa) where the situation is constantly volatile to put it mildly and where a nuclear power plant would be impossible to be secured properly against insurgency.

ropable 5y ago

Nuclear is an especially sensible option in my country (Australia) IMO; we have an abundance of uranium ore, a geologically stable continent, a high-quality interconnected electrical grid (over most of the population), and a reliable political/governance environment. It would be an enormous improvement over our current reliance on coal-fired generation for base loads.

8eye 5y ago

hard pass on that, way too many issues in disaster zones. also, not good for you at all if it gets anywhere near people

LightG 5y ago

It's not about "belief" ... short termism is what will do for humanity.

marvoronc345 5y ago

nice

asoneth 5y ago

I'd love to see new reactors come on line, but I remain skeptical that nuclear power will be widely used in the US as long as it remains so scary to so many people. It's scary because disasters stay on the front page for months if not years, it's associated with civilization-ending weapons, radiation and the illnesses it causes are mysterious, we don't really have a great plan for dealing with waste, and nuclear advocates are (by-and-large) a bunch of energy nerds who actually believe some new reactor design or statistical analysis will finally convince the American public to go pro-nuke. The scarier climate change becomes, the more people seem willing to accept nuclear power. But that could be too little too late.