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Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

341 points by erentz 5y ago

notTheAuth 5y ago
Pretty sure LESS industrial feedback loop generating behavior is the best climate-change solution. Nuclear power probably seems pretty great to WSJ and capitalist readers who want to own it all, and need the public to be ok with nuclear power again, though.
TeeMassive 5y ago
I'm sure nothing bad will happen to our nuclear waste in the next 500 millions years.
largolagrande 5y ago
(french guy speaking) Fun fact, I just saw yesterday evening at the theatres an ad by EDF (the French multinational electric utility company, largely owned by the French state, and the only operator of all the nuclear plants in France) to promote nuclear energy as the best climate-change solution, since it is a "97% CO2-free electricity". You can see the ad here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js85xSOamhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js85xSOamhQ Look at how they use in the ad a young girl (probably very concerned about CO2) to promote nuclear energy... I was a bit shocked by this gross greenwashing manipulation. Nuclear energy is by no way a solution: - The cost of dismantling a nuclear plant is huge. - The storage of nuclear waste (which we will now have to keep in France) is a joke: how can buried silos withstand several millennia? - We will have a major nuclear accident in France one day. The question is not if it will happen, but when it will happen. In 1999, there was a level 2 incident at the Blaye nuclear power plant (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Blayais_Nuclear_Power_Plant_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Blayais_Nuclear_Power_Pla...), admittedly an incident and not an accident, but to use a metaphor, it is like driving a car with no spare wheel and no brakes. On a straight road, no problem, but if there is a bend... When we have our Fukushima, we will have another talk about it ;) Until we find a proper way to deal with nuclear wastes or succeed with the nuclear fusion, we all know the best way to reduce the CO2 emissions is to reduce the energy consumption drastically. This means somehow giving up with the growth mindset aka capitalism. I'm afraid we won't make it.
polishdude20 5y ago
It's interesting how research into nuclear tech has resulted in one thing that can get us all killed and one thing that can save us all from being killed.
- deleted 5y ago
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- dgoodell 5y ago
  When you compare the energy density of nuclear to chemical materials, it sorta makes sense. It’s almost mind-boggling in its potential. In the early days of atomic energy it’s easy to see why people (or at least sci-fi)l authors) imagined so much promise. We really thought we were entering a new era in humanity. Sadly, it didn’t really work out that way, and the most significant application of this new energy source ended up being weapons. Interestingly, those opposed to nuclear technology only managed to stop its peaceful application.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > We really thought we were entering a new era in humanity. The nuclear power industry has really only existed for a generation. The promise is still there.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The nuclear power industry has really only existed for a generation. More than 60 years is, by the usual means of counting generations, at least two and pushing three generations.
- godelski 5y ago
  Why is this surprising? This honestly seems rather unsurprising to me. You have a thing with a high energy density. So you release energy from it. Do you collect that energy or just expend it in a destructive manner? We can do the same thing with batteries if we really wanted to, but they don't have a high energy density compared to other things (and it would likely be a war crime...). We could easily do the same thing with nitrates (think dynamite) or other bomb ingredients. They all can create heat that we can use to turn turbines and create energy. We just would want to burn them in a controlled manner.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Related, “The Real Reason Biden’s Climate Agenda Is Failing Is Because It’s Anti-Nuclear”: https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-bidens-climate-agenda https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-... The author of the above article also wrote a book called “Apocalypse Never” that explores practical approaches to managing climate change and recently appeared on the Jordan Peterson podcast to talk about it, including the role of nuclear energy: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000539217329 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-...
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Yes, that’s pretty much what I suspected.
jimmySixDOF 5y ago
It's time to being back the 1950's Atoms for Peace program [1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/atoms-peace-program https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-...
kitsune_ 5y ago
We can't build reactors fast enough. And electricity is only a part of what generates emissions. It's no where close to a solution. Looking up the world's energy numbers, how much of total energy production and emissions are from electricity, how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant, how many nuclear power plants are built per year etc. will show you this.
- CapitalistCartr 5y ago
  If it were important to us, we could build modular reactors on a massive scale. There are several manufacturers with serious designs. And yes, electricity is "only a part", but it's a big part. A solution needn't be a singular one to make a huge difference. Personally, I think nuclear isn't our best choice. But it is a viable choice and we could make it work.
  - derekjdanserl 5y ago
    I disagree with this. Capitalism stands between what is important to us in the aggregate and what we actually do.
  - andygates 5y ago
    "Serious designs" are nice but no pathfinder demo plants yet. And all that stretches the timescales.
- vimy 5y ago
  China is gonna build 150 reactors in 15 years for 440 billion dollar. They lack the defeatist attitude common in the West and it shows.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    West: China invented gunpowder and failed to exploit it. China: West invented nuclear power and failed to exploit it.
  - merb 5y ago
    ... and in the same time they build even more hydro and other renewables, with even more money. china is just using everything to stop being that dependant on coal. it's just that their governement just does not care and builds everything, because china needs more energy every year. they quadrupled their energy needs in the last years. just because they build nuclear does not mean that they don't build other stuff.
ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
It is a shame that I see a title like this and my first thoughts are “who is paying for this article to be published” - is it genuinely someone with the right answer or an agenda - I would need to read the article then try to understand the particular points of view, instead I’ll do something else
- derekjdanserl 5y ago
  What would someone have to gain out of this? And who? The biggest barrier to nuclear power is the initial cost and time required to turn a profit.
  - rozab 5y ago
    Same people who killed Karen Silkwood, I guess.
  - natmaka 5y ago
    It also is the potential "phase-out chain reaction": after most accidents more nations begin a nuclear phase-out (closing plants before they could be profitable). Each accident also adds to the financial risk, for a nuclear investor, induced by a legal action against a nuclearized neighbor initiated by a non-nuclearized nation, claiming that it is unduly exposed to a risk. There also is a feedback loop there because more and more nations phasing it out reducing the market, to the point of more and more nuclear companies folding up. Areva, the French one, is bankrupt and consumed billions of euros. Westinghouse nuclear division was bought by Toshiba then filed for chapter 11. KEPCO (South Korea) is healthy and performs but the Korean gov plans a nuclear phase out. Siemens is out of this market for quite a while (due to Germany nuclear current phasing-out process). Most current and perceptible projects (there are less and less of them) are Russian (Rosatom) and set for non-democratic nations (this is IMHO related to the NIMBY effect and to cronyism).
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  A fair question to ask - about any opinion piece on any topic whatosever. You think solar/wind proponents are any less likely to be corrupt/intellectually dishonest/self-serving than oil, coal, or nuclear ones? Come on
TheDudeMan 5y ago
California is prematurely closing its perfectly good nuclear reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Closure_in_2024%E2%80%932025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Clos...
- qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
  Thanks to the "Friends of the Earth" and "Natural Resources Defense Council" for pushing us to coal, natural gas, and blackouts... Also raising rates to pay for the premature decomissioning. ' https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-electricity-to-offset-plant-closures-11634376600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-el...
  - jyounker 5y ago
    The blackouts are because of fire-risk from transmission lines, and this is largely because PGE paid out bonuses instead of paying for needed repairs to the transmission system. This group of corrupt execs are the same people entrusted to make safety and maintenance decisions for Diablo Canyon.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      While it's true that the bonus scandal is a thing, that's about trimming trees in urban areas near powerlines, and is unrelated to the problem of how one can run lines through millions of acres of forests that should never exist in California. The state has ~150 million dead trees ready to ignite, and needs to reduce the size of its forests by roughly the size of Maine in order to get back to a safer fire risk. That is just irresponsible forest management. When you are in that situation, needing to run power lines across a tinderbox that should have never been allowed to exist, then you're not going to be able to have reliable power no matter the bonus scandal.
    - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
      https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/pacific-gas-electric-execs-got-big-bonuses-meeting-safety-goals-n1102681 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/pacific-gas-el... "PG&E paid top execs $17 million in bonuses from 2012 to 2017" You really think 17 million would have made a difference? Is that enough money to even bury 1 mile of transmission lines at Californian's exorbitant infrastructure cost?
nickdothutton 5y ago
Realistically if we were going to go big on nuclear we needed to do so 30 years ago. In the UK at least, it takes decades for planning permission and more decades for design, build, commissioning, and finally entry of a reactor into operational service.
- willis936 5y ago
  Oh? What changed? The old quote: The best time to invest in nuclear was 40 years ago. The second best time is right now.
- derekjdanserl 5y ago
  How is this useful?
- goatlover 5y ago
  Why does it need to take decades to build something we already know how to do, assuming we're actually facing a dire climate catastrophe? Is it the case that we can't technically build nuclear plants in a few years time? Because I very much doubt that.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  "In the UK at least, it takes decades for planning permission and more decades for design, build, commissioning, and finally entry of a reactor into operational service." In France it's another matter altogether, there are nuclear power stations everywhere and about 70% of the country's energy comes from nuclear. (Years ago, during a conference I was at in Avignon we even had a tour of the nearby UF6 gaseous diffusion plant and it was almost considered matter of fact.) Compared to anglophone counties like the US, UK, Australia and NZ, France is heavenly peaceful when it comes to establishing new nuclear plants. Why is it that if one speaks English one's overly likely to object to nuclear power?
  - laurencerowe 5y ago
    While it used to be a different matter in France, they last completed a reactor more than 30 years ago and the one currently being built is beset with the same time and cost overruns as those in the U.K. > A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor.[1] In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...
gefhfff 5y ago
Not true, it's too late for nuclear power. Additionally it is quite expensive compared to renewables and makes the burden on future generations even bigger. Anyway, don't shut down any working plant early... We need everything we have atm
- willis936 5y ago
  Too late in what sense? The problems time out and solve themselves?
  - throwaway821909 5y ago
    Renewables got cheaper to the point where it's not competitive Counter-argument: Wind and sun are unreliable Counter-counter-argument: Why not build 10x the amount of wind and solar if it's so cheap, and automatically break the circuit when not needed?
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      You can build even 100x the amount of solar, but the sun will set anyway.
      - Krasnol 5y ago
        I don't understand how this argument got so popular even though the ignorance is so obvious. Nobody builds ONLY solar or ONLY wind or ONLY hydro. Why should you? Please stop repeating this...it's ridiculous.
      - rhacker 5y ago
        So if you plan on building 4KW solar, and then decide to do 100X that, you can generate ~1800KWH per day (400 * 5 hours per day of ideal sun * fudge factor). If you have the battery storage for that you can probably get through 66 days from one sunny day. The cost would be super prohibitive too, but not everyone needs 100X out there solar to get through some rough days. My personal plan is 30KW (over the next few years) so I can get through like 4 days. And heck, a stormy day will still generate enough electricity.
zeptonix 5y ago
Yep, let's do that. Then on the other end we can write opinion pieces like this: https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361 https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p... The great thing about opinion pieces is everyone's always right in their own opinion piece.
- rob_c 5y ago
  Fukoshima in many ways was an odd victory for design and planning given it survived more than it was officially built to withstand
KarlKemp 5y ago
The International Monetary Fond, not known to be populated by treehugging hippies with naturalistic fallacies as a major character trait, published this beautiful graph: https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/eng-april-4-cotw-solar-1.png https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/eng-april-4... Nuclear now costs three times as much as solar & wind! And that data ist from 2017. Both technologies are also not showing any slowdown in improvements, while nuclear tends to get more expensive. The trend for batteries happens to be extremely similar. Nuclear is dead. Maybe people arguing against it in the 1980 were wrong. Maybe it’s safe. None of that matters, because it’s simply too expensive. And, increasingly, it’s also just too late: a nuclear power project takes 15 years, which is twice as much as we have. The only energy that still keeps it in the news is this weird tie-in with the culture wars, where, apparently, a certain segment likes nuclear power because it’s big, ugly, dangerous and sciency. They are living the future of the past.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  I think it's misleading to compare peak nuclear generation against peak solar/wind- in order to be comparable with nuclear's baseload, renewables need to be built in conjunction with a boatload of batteries. Otherwise you just end up burning fossil fuels at night time.
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    It’s not comparing peak-to-peak. That’s what “levelized” means. It’s price per actual megawatthour produced.
    - Rebelgecko 5y ago
      At least in my state, a MWh produced at 3pm is much less useless than one produced at 8pm
  - natmaka 5y ago
    In order to cope with renewables variability various approaches complement each other but need investments in order to produce the baseload: continent-scale wind generation patterns benefiting from lo-correlation between wind regimes, a mix (wind, solar, biomass...), storage, smartgrid... Money spared because they are more and more cheap will be invested in those ways, letting us benefit from their main characteristics (no major risk, no combustible, very low emissions, no dangerous waste, no risky and expensive decommission...).
shirro 5y ago
Nuclear is one of a number of alternatives that needs to be seriously considered but due to the long timelines and high costs of nuclear it is also one of the best stalling tactics for the fossil fuel industry seeking to extend the life of their assets. Possible increased adoption of nuclear in the future is not a reason to avoid setting sunset dates for emitting technologies now and commence transition to whatever low emission technologies are the most available and affordable right now.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  We can't afford to wait or not to hedge our bets. Nuclear is a hell of a hedge since we know it works. We know the French model works really well, but for some reason we, the country with the most heavily armed forces in the world, can't "protect" it. BS, moneyed interests and tree huggers are keeping us from fixing the problem until fusion comes along or uber cheap battery density 100x better than what we have currently comes along.
  - santjego 5y ago
    I can't imagine any type of plant I'd like built in a mad rush less than a nuclear power one. I am not against it, but it is not a magic bullet, either.
  - Krasnol 5y ago
    > We know the French model works really well It works so "well" that the French taxpayer will have to pay the UK so they can deliver their guaranteed energy prices the over-due and over budget reactor they desperately try to finish will generate. It's so fantastic that every summer they have to buy dirty coal energy from Germany because their rivers get too hot and every winter because...it's too cold and their ageing fleet is breaking down all the time. The success is so staggering that they plan to reduce their fleet by 50% until 2030 and replace that with renewable energy. Hooray... --------------------- Edit: since the Astro-Turf reached me and I can't reply anymore due to downvotes, here are the answers to Bayart: > I don't down where you get that broadly France relies on German coal in the summer and winter. Why do you try to lie about something everybody can google. This is the first result for "France river hot": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwave-idUSKCN1UK0HR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa... > Pretty much the entirety of the problems we've had with the EPR program has to do stopping building nuclear power plants for decades and losing the associated skill-set and industrial base. Weird because EPR didn't stop building. They just stopped building in France so this can't be right. Also: the reactors currently still under construction started construction when all the people from the peak construction times where still there. They still can't manage to build on budget or on time. Not even close. ---------------- @corban1: Only because Germany doesn't hide their subsidies doesn't mean that the French taxpayer is not paying for their ageing fleet (or overpriced projects abroad) with their taxes... Also the fact that coal is an important job motor in troubled regions of Germany which is why it's still there (but is being phased out completely soon).
Pigalowda 5y ago
The oldest operational nuclear power plant in the US is Nine Mile Point 1 in New York and Beznau in Switzerland coming online in 1969. I wonder how much maintenance cost and updating compares to 50 years of a wind mill or solar farm.
elihu 5y ago
I'd be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper, that's what's going to get built. Also, renewables don't require a high degree of trust in the human operators to manage risks appropriately. I think that's really the main sticking point with nuclear; reliable reactors can be made, but how do you manage the humans who maintain the plants in a way that's not susceptible to corruption or corner-cutting? If nuclear can be made to handle more of our energy needs for a reasonable cost, then that's a good thing, and if it can be made cheaper by updating regulations without sacrificing safety, then I think that would be awesome. But I think we should plan for the future under the assumption that most of our energy will come from renewables. That's the lowest-risk plan that doesn't require major regulatory changes or new technology. (Apparently there are also some major lithium iron phosphate patents that are expired or expiring soon, which should open up cheap battery manufacturing to companies outside of China.)
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > d be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper Cost is not just a single factor. Energy density is very important too. Solar farms take huge amounts of space to produce very little energy compared to a nuclear plant.
  - elihu 5y ago
    Solar farms can be pretty big, but we have the space for it. If you look at a map of the United States, there's a lot of land in the Southwest that gets a lot of sunlight and isn't usable for growing crops. It's an ecosystem, and anything that intrudes on that ecosystem will be somewhat disruptive, but as long as reasonable care is taken I don't see it as a problem to use a smallish fraction of that land for solar production.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      Not all of the United States is in the southwest, and why should the southwest destroy all their natural environments to power the rest of the rest of the country over lossy power lines when local nuclear could do it?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lizknope 5y ago
Does the US really need more electricity generation? Electricity use is stable or even dropping although 2020 may be an outlier. Electric cars will change this though. At a personal level I use significantly less electricity now compared to 15 years ago. HVAC replacement, insulation upgrades, computer and consumer electronics power reductions, lowered my summer electric bill by 40% https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-01/americans-electricity-use-just-keeps-falling https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-01/americ... https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...
- ironmagma 5y ago
  It’s good to have too much capacity, rather than just the right amount, as Texas learned during last winter.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  I guess that depends on whether you believe electric vehicles will be a thing.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  Even if that's true (and according to the EIA total generation has been approximately flat for like 10 years) there's still the roughly 20% of generation which is done by burning coal. Replacing that with nuclear makes a meaningful change in total carbon emissions.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  > Electric cars will change this though. Yes, this is what we have to plan for. 20 to 30% of new cars sold in the US will be electric by 2030 (I suspect it'll even be higher than that). Projected to be 45% to 50% by 2035. We'll need more generation and some major grid improvements.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  "I use significantly less electricity now compared to 15 years ago." You're lucky. Often the more financially well off one is the easier it is to introduce energy efficiencies. Many poorer people are handicapped by the cost of house repairs, insulation upgrades, window double glazing, etc. Moreover, the condition of their houses are more likely to be in a worse state in respect of necessary maintenance, this further reduces their starting base. The same situation will also apply to their motor vehicles, they'll be the last to convert to electric cars, etc.
voidfunc 5y ago
Technically? Sure, its a great solution. Politically? Totally dead in the water. Its not a good solution unless you are an authoritarian government. (I am pro-Nuclear)
dave333 5y ago
Haven't read the paywalled article but the idea that nuclear is clean compared to coal is ridiculous as evidenced by Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Windscale. Nuclear pollution is about 1 trillion trillion times worse than coal and is sufficiently common - roughly one major nuclear accident per decade to be non-negligible. It's not safe to assume nuclear power is getting safer when terrorism and nations that sponsor terrorists are getting worse.
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  Including all accidents mentioned, nuclear energy is a few hundred times safer than coal, per TWh generated [1]. In fact, air pollution from fossil and biofuel combustion kills as many people that died and will die from Chernobyl (around 4000) every 7.5 hours, and counting. When you dig into the data, nuclear is shockingly safe. And that's not even considering climate change impacts, where nuclear is about as low carbon as you can get, in the full lifecycle. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- clavicat 5y ago
  >the idea that nuclear is clean compared to coal is ridiculous as evidenced by Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Windscale What kind of “evidence” is that? If you add up all the deaths that resulted from these disasters, it’s an small fraction of the people that die from coal pollution every year—670,000 in China alone. How are you getting a trillion times worse?
sabujp 5y ago
The market agrees, just look at recent prices of uranium, uranium mining companies, and now nuclear infrastructure companies are also starting to take off
weatherlight 5y ago
It's bullshit. Electricity is only 28% of global emissions. What about the other 3/4ths? And on that 28%... The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption. Nuclear energy now provides about 10% of the world’s electricity from about 445 power reactors. This isn't hard math.
- corban1 5y ago
  Economically accessible coal resources will deplete in 30 years. (1950)
  - weatherlight 5y ago
    Mining for coal and uranium are two very different things
- erentz 5y ago
  > Electricity is only 28% of global emissions. What about the other 3/4ths? How much of fixing the other 3/4ths requires more electricity to substitute? > The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption. Or it could be as much as 4 billion years. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
  - acidburnNSA 5y ago
    Indeed! Nuclear breeder reactors, which have been the long-term plan all along, are just as sustainable as wind and solar on Earth. It's sad how many people have forgotten about breeder reactors. One of the first reactors ever built on the planet was designed to prove that breeding was possible, which it did in 1952. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I Plus, nuclear makes heat and electricity. The heat can be used to help with building heating directly with conventional reactors, and can help with industrial processes as well. Higher-temperature reactors can more directly handle industrial process heat.
travisgriggs 5y ago
I grew up in a nuclear community (Richland WA, the town where it seems like half of everyone works at Hanford). My first job (after lawn mowing) was working at Exxon Nuclear (which got bought by Siemens then sold to Framatome and then morphed into Areva). I learned to code there. My first tools were tools that helped engineers optimize nuclear fuel assembly design for efficiency. I see these articles. I barely read them. I’m a supporter already. I get all the various details and arguments. I left that industry though. For two reasons. 1. Regulation makes it so that what seems cool and high tech is mostly 60’s tech. 2. I got discouraged working in an industry that I knew could help the world but was so reviled and feared at large. These days I work in ag automation. Feed the world. Robots and the cloud. That sort of thing. And yet… yesterday, some of the assembly techs were spooked by the supposed ability to have a small magnet stick to the injection site of a Moderna vaccine. I watched grown men spend multiple hours coming to the conclusion that “the magnets didn’t stick after all but something weird was going on.” I’ve concluded that Darwin was wrong. Humanity has the ability to out wit natural selection any more. That leads me to believe that nuclear technology (sufficiently advanced to be indiscernible from magic) has as much likelihood of mankind applying it to their benefit as they do of burning witches to save the planet.
alfor 5y ago
Was the best solution, not anymore. Solar wind and batteries are coming fast. Today, they are already the cheaper to build and operate But the price of batteries keep on getting lower. I think that in 5-10 years with very few exception all new generation will be from solar and wind.
benjamir 5y ago
Nope. Most of the construction attempts of the last two decades failed. We need coal replacements before 2032. Even if you try to build nuclear plants _on time_, that will fail. So it cannot be _the_ solution -- no matter your stance on nuclear power; maybe part of the solution; but not _the best solution_!
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > We need coal replacements before 2032. You are not going to get a replacement for coal before 2032. That's like 10 years away. If you work really hard and get incredibly lucky, you may limit the increase in coal use by 2032 to be roughly zero. But you are talking about massive infrastructure projects, and that's a really tough sell because, for example, you are seeing significant increases in energy usage in developing countries: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50256 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50256 See also the world forecast here: Of the world’s existing coal-fired generating capacity, 99% consists of boilers and steam turbine units that are as much as 30% less efficient than natural gas-fired combined-cycle units that use the latest technology. Because natural gas-fired generators are more efficient than coal-fired generators at converting fuel to electricity, natural gas-fired generation is often a lower-cost option, even if the fuel price of natural gas is slightly higher than the fuel price of coal. However, the absence of regional carbon policies or regulations along with rising natural gas prices after 2030—particularly in Asia and in regions that rely on higher-cost liquefied natural gas (LNG)—is likely to make coal the most economical generation fuel to pair with increased intermittent generation from wind and solar. This shift reverses the trend observed over recent decades. Although the cost of mining coal will likely raise coal prices after 2030, we project that coal prices will remain low relative to natural gas prices and provide a cost-competitive option to natural gas-fired generation. Increases in coal-fired generation in Other non-OECD Asia—which includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, among other countries—will account for over 75% of our projected increase in global coal-fired generation from 2030 to 2050. For Other non-OECD Asia, we project that renewable energy sources will account for about 60% of the generation increase over the projection period, primarily from wind and solar. Coal-fired generation will account for nearly all of the remaining growth. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50256 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50256
guscost 5y ago
I will probably never care about “climate change solutions”, but I’m happy to support this campaign to rehabilitate nuclear power, because it is a very good idea.
halfjoking 5y ago
No it isn’t. 500 million years ago when Earth’s CO2 level was 5000 ppm, did they have nuclear power? Is that what saved the planet to make it habitable for humans? No - the levels changed because of exposed olivine rocks that absorbed the CO2. That’s how nature fixes high CO2 levels. Why does the solution have to be anything other than that? If humanity spent $1 trillion per year on extracting olivine, and putting those rocks on tropical beaches, we’d easily solve climate within a couple decades. It costs $21/ton of CO2 sequestered.[1] It’s easily the most affordable solution. [1] https://www.vesta.earth/ https://www.vesta.earth/
- brightball 5y ago
  This is a solution that I haven’t heard until now. Thank you for sharing.
- halikular 5y ago
  They didn't burn fossil fuels at that time. The only sane way to approach this problem is at the root, hence we need to stop emitting additional fossil CO2. What's here already is hard to put back in the ground.
- 542458 5y ago
  Interesting. Does 21/ton include the cost of using the land? Edit, looks like rock isn’t put on the beaches, but rather into relatively fast moving shallow seas. https://legacy.projectvesta.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/mitigation-of-c02-emissions-by-stimulated-natural-rock-weathering.pdf https://legacy.projectvesta.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/m... I’ve got to say, this does look interesting.
- cranx 5y ago
  We’d also die of mesothelioma. But hey, the co2 was captured.
  - elil17 5y ago
    As I understand it, olivine is not the same as asbestos and does not cause mesothelioma. Does the carbon capture reaction cause it to become dangerous?
pxi 5y ago
It's possible to run a large region (almost) entirely from renewable's, here's the proof: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m But Nuclear could still an excellent option depending on various metrics. I rather see some 'risky' nuclear options being considered before any of the geo-engineering ideas take hold (as they will if we don't get a move on).
- 0xy 5y ago
  South Australia is building brand new gas peaking plants, and the state says further investment in gas is necessary. So it seems this isn't correct. [1] Gas is not renewable, and it's nearly as bad as coal. It's also worth noting their batteries to store renewable energy are not renewable either, not to mention the huge societal impacts on relying on child slavery to prop up your grid (lithium and cobalt mining have a big child labor issue). Especially worth noting South Australia's battery manufacturer Tesla has an extremely poor record when it comes to supply chain environmental management. Some of Tesla's suppliers have dumped toxic wastewater into water systems, as well as utilised child slaves in the Congo to source rare earth materials. [2] Green energy indeed! [1] https://www.murrayvalleystandard.com.au/story/6607101/650m-gas-power-plant-at-tepko-would-be-one-of-sas-biggest/ https://www.murrayvalleystandard.com.au/story/6607101/650m-g... [2] https://fortune.com/2021/09/30/tesla-ipe-environmental-violations-suppliers-child-labor-congo-drc-glencore/ https://fortune.com/2021/09/30/tesla-ipe-environmental-viola...
  - pxi 5y ago
    Interesting... thanks for the links. SAPGen is a private company so what ever they build will need to compete with all that wind and solar. Also did you look at the graph from Tasmania? - too bad they are doing other unrelated environmentally bad things. For frequency control, it seems like the Tesla batteries now have some competition in the form of synchronous condensers. For storage there seems to be several better alternatives than lithium.
- halikular 5y ago
  Nuclear power is one of the safest means of electricity generation, but it's very costly due to over regulation. Contrast this to commercial aviation which is tightly regulated and in turn very safe, but it's not over regulated that it becomes too expensive or regulations with diminishing returns that only put unnecessary road blocks.
cranx 5y ago
Do we need more fissile plutonium? More bomb plants sounds less desirable for the human race than transitioning to renewables.
rob_c 5y ago
Good article nice reading. Once built nuclear plants are basically giant nuclear batteries which we can run up or down on demand which is easier and probably more efficient than storing a huge excess of renewable surplus at creation.
- andygates 5y ago
  Nuclear power stations have very slow demand response. That used to be done by gas peakers and hydro; in a decarbonised world that changes to battery peakers and hydro.
anm89 5y ago
Why does it feel like when you ask people everybody knows this but when you actually try to do it everyone suddenly hates it?
elil17 5y ago
I like nuclear and I used to think it was a silver bullet. I still believe that nuclear is very safe for life (in fact, it is even safer than solar on a per-kWh basis due to the high number of deaths associated with people falling off roofs while installing panels) and the enviroment, but I now understand more about some of it's disadvantages. Specifically: 1. It is very expensive. Nuclear has a levelized cost of over 10 cents per kilowatt hour, which is very high compared to solar and wind (not including energy storage). The levelized cost means that it is a cost which includes the costs of capital. 2. Load shifting can greatly reduce the need for energy storage. By shifting certain loads (e.g., some particularly energy intensive industrial processes) away from peak hours, we can greatly reduce the need for energy storage. Further, application tailored energy storage solutions (e.g., thermal energy storage for HVAC applications) can also be an effective solution. 3. While nuclear is not dangerous to humans anymore, the financial cost of accidents is huge. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, while it only killed one person, cost one trillion dollars to contain and remediate. When you add it the probability of disasters and the cost of remediating them, the levelized cost of nuclear would be much, much higher. Thus, while I don't oppose new nuclear power plants, I do think our society's resources are better spent on further research into nuclear (both fission and fusion) and lower cost energy options like wind and solar.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  I used to oppose nuclear, but I now think it's a worthwhile backup, or perhaps one strand in a diversified approach to getting off fossil fuels. There is, sadly, no one single technology that can replace fossil fuels for even any one major category of use (electricity, industrial, buildings, transport). We're going to end up with a massively more complicated energy supply system. In this context I think it's still worth pursuing nuclear. The cost argument has only arisen recently. As late as 2010 nuclear was competitive, or at least not obviously uncompetitive apart from its massive regulatory burden. It seems to me that a lot of nuclear's costs arise from the "as low as reasonably achievable" doctrine (ALARA), which in turn is founded in the "linear no threshold" theory (LNT) of the effects of radiation. LNT is falsified by the health statistics of the Denver population vs the coasts, and many other real-world observations. If fission had fixed, scientifically determined thresholds and performance standards to work to, and a less hostile regulatory environment (removing the veto of NIMBYs), it would really interesting to see how it competes. It can scale up to the necessary scale in 30 years. Fusion, on the other hand, can't conceivably help us with the transition in the time we have available. It'd be best to park it for 50 years and redeploy those physics Ph. D.s into material science for photovoltaics, batteries, electrolysis, and fuel synthesis.
blinkingled 5y ago
Have we figured out how to store or process nuclear waste safely? I have vaguely uneasy recollection of reading about American nuclear waste.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Honestly, that’s not the actual problem. Waste is basically solved already. I am very pro-nuclear, but if I were to steelman the anti-nuclear argument, it’d be proliferation concerns.
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  We definitely know how to do it. We just have to get people to agree to do it. We are supposed to put it in Yucca Mtn but that is stalled out politically. Finland, meanwhile, is proceeding with their equivalent at Onkalo. https://www.posiva.fi/en/ https://www.posiva.fi/en/ https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
4WIW 5y ago
Looks like this opinion doesn't matter much: the last operational nuclear plant in California is closing in a few years.
mk81 5y ago
Anyone that looks into this unemotionally comes to this conclusion.
ncmncm 5y ago
Nukes might have been useful as a climate-change solution if they were not intimately, inextricably tied to massive, long-term (wholly legal) corruption. The bulk of the cost goes to corruption; but much worse is that they take many extra years to complete beyond what normal construction would take, because nobody actually involved wants that gravy train ever to dry up--anyway, not until after their kids graduate college--and deliver exactly zero watt-hours of energy, in the meantime, if indeed they are ever completed at all. The latest failed US nuke project has cost ratepayers $30B already, is nowhere near done, and most likely never will be done. Fortunately, solar and wind projects seem thus far immune to corruption. They often start delivering power immediately after they are begun, or anyway long before the project is done. They may easily be extended after they are "done", either on-site or somewhere entirely else. Long before solar and wind produce enough power that we have reason to worry about "grid stability", storage solutions will be coming on-line, cheaply. Factories for iron-air batteries are being constructed at a frenzied pace, but they will compete with liquified air, ammonia, hydrogen, and other solutions according to local conditions. (Ammonia and hydrogen have the advantage that they are, also, feedstock for other processes.) In the meantime, the single best possible use for a renewable-energy dollar is more solar panel; later, storage will be a good investment. Besides generating capacity, and storage, we will need a lot of long-distance high-voltage transmission lines, and ships to carry liquified ammonia to burn at higher latitudes where solar is not practical, and where relying just on long transmission lines is too risky.
renewiltord 5y ago
Nuclear energy is not tenable given the current political climate. We’re not optimizing on technology alone. We’re optimizing along the manifold that includes people’s opinions since they do have de-facto veto rights here. I see nuclear power as a solution to climate change as unviable since no one wants one in their vicinity. The plants are unbuildable because of unions and widespread corruption. Nuke fans are just like big C Communists. If only we all worked together for the good of humanity, we could all live in comfort and there wouldn’t be any hunger and all the little kitty cats will have warm beds and fluffy pillo- no. Well, your comrades in the venture are corrupt fucks. Nuke is unbuildable and pissing away money into an abyss of non power generation is not okay. China can build nukes, blessed are they. The US cannot.
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floppiplopp 5y ago
No, it isn't. Building up the needed capacity will take decades and cost an enormous amount of money that is better spend elsewhere. Fuel supply is limited, with cost for exploration quadrupled over the last 15 years, and a doubling cost for uranium fuel over the same period. Commercially viable known uranium reserves are used up by roughly 1/3 since 1950, depleting ever faster with more reactors. Even if we had the reactors already, even if we wouldn't need to spend trillions, the fuel simply isn't there for cost effective usage until the end of the century. Alternative reactors, thorium or fusion are experimental at best. So no, nuclear won't change anything soon.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
It's a shame that this totally genuine supporter of nuclear power doesn't believe in electric vehicles. You'd think EVs and nuclear would make a great pairing. But no, strangely, in his opening paragraph in this very honest attempt to sell nuclear power to a skeptical public he's more worried about gasoline costs and silly politicians subsidizing uneconomic cars. Hmmm, whatever could he mean by that surprisingly vague swipe. > The United States has only 241 coal units in operation, so shuttering them would be a meaningless exercise in virtue-signaling. I'm beginning to doubt the authors sincerity in seeking solutions to this problem.
mpcannabrava 5y ago
So happy this is finally published as a WSJ headline. (hence, one assumes, starting to get public acceptance as a reasonable policy)
tim333 5y ago
Trouble is nuclear costs go up, solar goes down: graph https://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/Solar-Nuclear_graph.jpg https://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/Solar-Nuclear_grap... Batteries etc are falling too, so project ahead so solar seems to win out. Which is good news really as we've had nuclear for decades and it still hasn't stopped developing countries burning fossil fuels and probably never will. On the other hand if solar costs like a quarter that of fossil it'll probably take over. (article graph came from https://www.ncwarn.org/2010/07/solar-and-nuclear-costs-the-historic-crossover/ https://www.ncwarn.org/2010/07/solar-and-nuclear-costs-the-h...)
b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/ is working on making reactors modular and smaller. It will still be a while as most of it still is in R and D.

341 points by erentz 5y ago

Pretty sure LESS industrial feedback loop generating behavior is the best climate-change solution. Nuclear power probably seems pretty great to WSJ and capitalist readers who want to own it all, and need the public to be ok with nuclear power again, though.

TeeMassive 5y ago

I'm sure nothing bad will happen to our nuclear waste in the next 500 millions years.

largolagrande 5y ago

(french guy speaking) Fun fact, I just saw yesterday evening at the theatres an ad by EDF (the French multinational electric utility company, largely owned by the French state, and the only operator of all the nuclear plants in France) to promote nuclear energy as the best climate-change solution, since it is a "97% CO2-free electricity". You can see the ad here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js85xSOamhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js85xSOamhQ Look at how they use in the ad a young girl (probably very concerned about CO2) to promote nuclear energy... I was a bit shocked by this gross greenwashing manipulation. Nuclear energy is by no way a solution: - The cost of dismantling a nuclear plant is huge. - The storage of nuclear waste (which we will now have to keep in France) is a joke: how can buried silos withstand several millennia? - We will have a major nuclear accident in France one day. The question is not if it will happen, but when it will happen. In 1999, there was a level 2 incident at the Blaye nuclear power plant (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Blayais_Nuclear_Power_Plant_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Blayais_Nuclear_Power_Pla...), admittedly an incident and not an accident, but to use a metaphor, it is like driving a car with no spare wheel and no brakes. On a straight road, no problem, but if there is a bend... When we have our Fukushima, we will have another talk about it ;) Until we find a proper way to deal with nuclear wastes or succeed with the nuclear fusion, we all know the best way to reduce the CO2 emissions is to reduce the energy consumption drastically. This means somehow giving up with the growth mindset aka capitalism. I'm afraid we won't make it.

polishdude20 5y ago

It's interesting how research into nuclear tech has resulted in one thing that can get us all killed and one thing that can save us all from being killed.

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dgoodell 5y ago
When you compare the energy density of nuclear to chemical materials, it sorta makes sense. It’s almost mind-boggling in its potential. In the early days of atomic energy it’s easy to see why people (or at least sci-fi)l authors) imagined so much promise. We really thought we were entering a new era in humanity. Sadly, it didn’t really work out that way, and the most significant application of this new energy source ended up being weapons. Interestingly, those opposed to nuclear technology only managed to stop its peaceful application.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > We really thought we were entering a new era in humanity. The nuclear power industry has really only existed for a generation. The promise is still there.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The nuclear power industry has really only existed for a generation. More than 60 years is, by the usual means of counting generations, at least two and pushing three generations.
godelski 5y ago
Why is this surprising? This honestly seems rather unsurprising to me. You have a thing with a high energy density. So you release energy from it. Do you collect that energy or just expend it in a destructive manner? We can do the same thing with batteries if we really wanted to, but they don't have a high energy density compared to other things (and it would likely be a war crime...). We could easily do the same thing with nitrates (think dynamite) or other bomb ingredients. They all can create heat that we can use to turn turbines and create energy. We just would want to burn them in a controlled manner.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Related, “The Real Reason Biden’s Climate Agenda Is Failing Is Because It’s Anti-Nuclear”: https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-bidens-climate-agenda https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-... The author of the above article also wrote a book called “Apocalypse Never” that explores practical approaches to managing climate change and recently appeared on the Jordan Peterson podcast to talk about it, including the role of nuclear energy: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000539217329 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-...

KarlKemp 5y ago
Yes, that’s pretty much what I suspected.

jimmySixDOF 5y ago

It's time to being back the 1950's Atoms for Peace program [1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/atoms-peace-program https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-...

kitsune_ 5y ago

We can't build reactors fast enough. And electricity is only a part of what generates emissions. It's no where close to a solution. Looking up the world's energy numbers, how much of total energy production and emissions are from electricity, how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant, how many nuclear power plants are built per year etc. will show you this.

CapitalistCartr 5y ago
If it were important to us, we could build modular reactors on a massive scale. There are several manufacturers with serious designs. And yes, electricity is "only a part", but it's a big part. A solution needn't be a singular one to make a huge difference. Personally, I think nuclear isn't our best choice. But it is a viable choice and we could make it work.
- derekjdanserl 5y ago
  I disagree with this. Capitalism stands between what is important to us in the aggregate and what we actually do.
- andygates 5y ago
  "Serious designs" are nice but no pathfinder demo plants yet. And all that stretches the timescales.
vimy 5y ago
China is gonna build 150 reactors in 15 years for 440 billion dollar. They lack the defeatist attitude common in the West and it shows.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  West: China invented gunpowder and failed to exploit it. China: West invented nuclear power and failed to exploit it.
- merb 5y ago
  ... and in the same time they build even more hydro and other renewables, with even more money. china is just using everything to stop being that dependant on coal. it's just that their governement just does not care and builds everything, because china needs more energy every year. they quadrupled their energy needs in the last years. just because they build nuclear does not mean that they don't build other stuff.

ed_elliott_asc 5y ago

It is a shame that I see a title like this and my first thoughts are “who is paying for this article to be published” - is it genuinely someone with the right answer or an agenda - I would need to read the article then try to understand the particular points of view, instead I’ll do something else

derekjdanserl 5y ago
What would someone have to gain out of this? And who? The biggest barrier to nuclear power is the initial cost and time required to turn a profit.
- rozab 5y ago
  Same people who killed Karen Silkwood, I guess.
- natmaka 5y ago
  It also is the potential "phase-out chain reaction": after most accidents more nations begin a nuclear phase-out (closing plants before they could be profitable). Each accident also adds to the financial risk, for a nuclear investor, induced by a legal action against a nuclearized neighbor initiated by a non-nuclearized nation, claiming that it is unduly exposed to a risk. There also is a feedback loop there because more and more nations phasing it out reducing the market, to the point of more and more nuclear companies folding up. Areva, the French one, is bankrupt and consumed billions of euros. Westinghouse nuclear division was bought by Toshiba then filed for chapter 11. KEPCO (South Korea) is healthy and performs but the Korean gov plans a nuclear phase out. Siemens is out of this market for quite a while (due to Germany nuclear current phasing-out process). Most current and perceptible projects (there are less and less of them) are Russian (Rosatom) and set for non-democratic nations (this is IMHO related to the NIMBY effect and to cronyism).
wly_cdgr 5y ago
A fair question to ask - about any opinion piece on any topic whatosever. You think solar/wind proponents are any less likely to be corrupt/intellectually dishonest/self-serving than oil, coal, or nuclear ones? Come on

TheDudeMan 5y ago

California is prematurely closing its perfectly good nuclear reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Closure_in_2024%E2%80%932025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Clos...

qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
Thanks to the "Friends of the Earth" and "Natural Resources Defense Council" for pushing us to coal, natural gas, and blackouts... Also raising rates to pay for the premature decomissioning. ' https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-electricity-to-offset-plant-closures-11634376600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-el...
- jyounker 5y ago
  The blackouts are because of fire-risk from transmission lines, and this is largely because PGE paid out bonuses instead of paying for needed repairs to the transmission system. This group of corrupt execs are the same people entrusted to make safety and maintenance decisions for Diablo Canyon.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    While it's true that the bonus scandal is a thing, that's about trimming trees in urban areas near powerlines, and is unrelated to the problem of how one can run lines through millions of acres of forests that should never exist in California. The state has ~150 million dead trees ready to ignite, and needs to reduce the size of its forests by roughly the size of Maine in order to get back to a safer fire risk. That is just irresponsible forest management. When you are in that situation, needing to run power lines across a tinderbox that should have never been allowed to exist, then you're not going to be able to have reliable power no matter the bonus scandal.
  - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
    https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/pacific-gas-electric-execs-got-big-bonuses-meeting-safety-goals-n1102681 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/pacific-gas-el... "PG&E paid top execs $17 million in bonuses from 2012 to 2017" You really think 17 million would have made a difference? Is that enough money to even bury 1 mile of transmission lines at Californian's exorbitant infrastructure cost?

nickdothutton 5y ago

Realistically if we were going to go big on nuclear we needed to do so 30 years ago. In the UK at least, it takes decades for planning permission and more decades for design, build, commissioning, and finally entry of a reactor into operational service.

willis936 5y ago
Oh? What changed? The old quote: The best time to invest in nuclear was 40 years ago. The second best time is right now.
derekjdanserl 5y ago
How is this useful?
goatlover 5y ago
Why does it need to take decades to build something we already know how to do, assuming we're actually facing a dire climate catastrophe? Is it the case that we can't technically build nuclear plants in a few years time? Because I very much doubt that.
hilbert42 5y ago
"In the UK at least, it takes decades for planning permission and more decades for design, build, commissioning, and finally entry of a reactor into operational service." In France it's another matter altogether, there are nuclear power stations everywhere and about 70% of the country's energy comes from nuclear. (Years ago, during a conference I was at in Avignon we even had a tour of the nearby UF6 gaseous diffusion plant and it was almost considered matter of fact.) Compared to anglophone counties like the US, UK, Australia and NZ, France is heavenly peaceful when it comes to establishing new nuclear plants. Why is it that if one speaks English one's overly likely to object to nuclear power?
- laurencerowe 5y ago
  While it used to be a different matter in France, they last completed a reactor more than 30 years ago and the one currently being built is beset with the same time and cost overruns as those in the U.K. > A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor.[1] In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...

gefhfff 5y ago

Not true, it's too late for nuclear power. Additionally it is quite expensive compared to renewables and makes the burden on future generations even bigger. Anyway, don't shut down any working plant early... We need everything we have atm

willis936 5y ago
Too late in what sense? The problems time out and solve themselves?
- throwaway821909 5y ago
  Renewables got cheaper to the point where it's not competitive Counter-argument: Wind and sun are unreliable Counter-counter-argument: Why not build 10x the amount of wind and solar if it's so cheap, and automatically break the circuit when not needed?
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    You can build even 100x the amount of solar, but the sun will set anyway.
    - Krasnol 5y ago
      I don't understand how this argument got so popular even though the ignorance is so obvious. Nobody builds ONLY solar or ONLY wind or ONLY hydro. Why should you? Please stop repeating this...it's ridiculous.
    - rhacker 5y ago
      So if you plan on building 4KW solar, and then decide to do 100X that, you can generate ~1800KWH per day (400 * 5 hours per day of ideal sun * fudge factor). If you have the battery storage for that you can probably get through 66 days from one sunny day. The cost would be super prohibitive too, but not everyone needs 100X out there solar to get through some rough days. My personal plan is 30KW (over the next few years) so I can get through like 4 days. And heck, a stormy day will still generate enough electricity.

zeptonix 5y ago

Yep, let's do that. Then on the other end we can write opinion pieces like this: https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361 https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p... The great thing about opinion pieces is everyone's always right in their own opinion piece.

rob_c 5y ago
Fukoshima in many ways was an odd victory for design and planning given it survived more than it was officially built to withstand

KarlKemp 5y ago

The International Monetary Fond, not known to be populated by treehugging hippies with naturalistic fallacies as a major character trait, published this beautiful graph: https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/eng-april-4-cotw-solar-1.png https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/eng-april-4... Nuclear now costs three times as much as solar & wind! And that data ist from 2017. Both technologies are also not showing any slowdown in improvements, while nuclear tends to get more expensive. The trend for batteries happens to be extremely similar. Nuclear is dead. Maybe people arguing against it in the 1980 were wrong. Maybe it’s safe. None of that matters, because it’s simply too expensive. And, increasingly, it’s also just too late: a nuclear power project takes 15 years, which is twice as much as we have. The only energy that still keeps it in the news is this weird tie-in with the culture wars, where, apparently, a certain segment likes nuclear power because it’s big, ugly, dangerous and sciency. They are living the future of the past.

Rebelgecko 5y ago
I think it's misleading to compare peak nuclear generation against peak solar/wind- in order to be comparable with nuclear's baseload, renewables need to be built in conjunction with a boatload of batteries. Otherwise you just end up burning fossil fuels at night time.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  It’s not comparing peak-to-peak. That’s what “levelized” means. It’s price per actual megawatthour produced.
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    At least in my state, a MWh produced at 3pm is much less useless than one produced at 8pm
- natmaka 5y ago
  In order to cope with renewables variability various approaches complement each other but need investments in order to produce the baseload: continent-scale wind generation patterns benefiting from lo-correlation between wind regimes, a mix (wind, solar, biomass...), storage, smartgrid... Money spared because they are more and more cheap will be invested in those ways, letting us benefit from their main characteristics (no major risk, no combustible, very low emissions, no dangerous waste, no risky and expensive decommission...).

shirro 5y ago

Nuclear is one of a number of alternatives that needs to be seriously considered but due to the long timelines and high costs of nuclear it is also one of the best stalling tactics for the fossil fuel industry seeking to extend the life of their assets. Possible increased adoption of nuclear in the future is not a reason to avoid setting sunset dates for emitting technologies now and commence transition to whatever low emission technologies are the most available and affordable right now.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
We can't afford to wait or not to hedge our bets. Nuclear is a hell of a hedge since we know it works. We know the French model works really well, but for some reason we, the country with the most heavily armed forces in the world, can't "protect" it. BS, moneyed interests and tree huggers are keeping us from fixing the problem until fusion comes along or uber cheap battery density 100x better than what we have currently comes along.
- santjego 5y ago
  I can't imagine any type of plant I'd like built in a mad rush less than a nuclear power one. I am not against it, but it is not a magic bullet, either.
- Krasnol 5y ago
  > We know the French model works really well It works so "well" that the French taxpayer will have to pay the UK so they can deliver their guaranteed energy prices the over-due and over budget reactor they desperately try to finish will generate. It's so fantastic that every summer they have to buy dirty coal energy from Germany because their rivers get too hot and every winter because...it's too cold and their ageing fleet is breaking down all the time. The success is so staggering that they plan to reduce their fleet by 50% until 2030 and replace that with renewable energy. Hooray... --------------------- Edit: since the Astro-Turf reached me and I can't reply anymore due to downvotes, here are the answers to Bayart: > I don't down where you get that broadly France relies on German coal in the summer and winter. Why do you try to lie about something everybody can google. This is the first result for "France river hot": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwave-idUSKCN1UK0HR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa... > Pretty much the entirety of the problems we've had with the EPR program has to do stopping building nuclear power plants for decades and losing the associated skill-set and industrial base. Weird because EPR didn't stop building. They just stopped building in France so this can't be right. Also: the reactors currently still under construction started construction when all the people from the peak construction times where still there. They still can't manage to build on budget or on time. Not even close. ---------------- @corban1: Only because Germany doesn't hide their subsidies doesn't mean that the French taxpayer is not paying for their ageing fleet (or overpriced projects abroad) with their taxes... Also the fact that coal is an important job motor in troubled regions of Germany which is why it's still there (but is being phased out completely soon).

Pigalowda 5y ago

The oldest operational nuclear power plant in the US is Nine Mile Point 1 in New York and Beznau in Switzerland coming online in 1969. I wonder how much maintenance cost and updating compares to 50 years of a wind mill or solar farm.

elihu 5y ago

I'd be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper, that's what's going to get built. Also, renewables don't require a high degree of trust in the human operators to manage risks appropriately. I think that's really the main sticking point with nuclear; reliable reactors can be made, but how do you manage the humans who maintain the plants in a way that's not susceptible to corruption or corner-cutting? If nuclear can be made to handle more of our energy needs for a reasonable cost, then that's a good thing, and if it can be made cheaper by updating regulations without sacrificing safety, then I think that would be awesome. But I think we should plan for the future under the assumption that most of our energy will come from renewables. That's the lowest-risk plan that doesn't require major regulatory changes or new technology. (Apparently there are also some major lithium iron phosphate patents that are expired or expiring soon, which should open up cheap battery manufacturing to companies outside of China.)

ekianjo 5y ago
> d be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper Cost is not just a single factor. Energy density is very important too. Solar farms take huge amounts of space to produce very little energy compared to a nuclear plant.
- elihu 5y ago
  Solar farms can be pretty big, but we have the space for it. If you look at a map of the United States, there's a lot of land in the Southwest that gets a lot of sunlight and isn't usable for growing crops. It's an ecosystem, and anything that intrudes on that ecosystem will be somewhat disruptive, but as long as reasonable care is taken I don't see it as a problem to use a smallish fraction of that land for solar production.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Not all of the United States is in the southwest, and why should the southwest destroy all their natural environments to power the rest of the rest of the country over lossy power lines when local nuclear could do it?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lizknope 5y ago

Does the US really need more electricity generation? Electricity use is stable or even dropping although 2020 may be an outlier. Electric cars will change this though. At a personal level I use significantly less electricity now compared to 15 years ago. HVAC replacement, insulation upgrades, computer and consumer electronics power reductions, lowered my summer electric bill by 40% https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-01/americans-electricity-use-just-keeps-falling https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-01/americ... https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...

ironmagma 5y ago
It’s good to have too much capacity, rather than just the right amount, as Texas learned during last winter.
rsj_hn 5y ago
I guess that depends on whether you believe electric vehicles will be a thing.
Godel_unicode 5y ago
Even if that's true (and according to the EIA total generation has been approximately flat for like 10 years) there's still the roughly 20% of generation which is done by burning coal. Replacing that with nuclear makes a meaningful change in total carbon emissions.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
> Electric cars will change this though. Yes, this is what we have to plan for. 20 to 30% of new cars sold in the US will be electric by 2030 (I suspect it'll even be higher than that). Projected to be 45% to 50% by 2035. We'll need more generation and some major grid improvements.
hilbert42 5y ago
"I use significantly less electricity now compared to 15 years ago." You're lucky. Often the more financially well off one is the easier it is to introduce energy efficiencies. Many poorer people are handicapped by the cost of house repairs, insulation upgrades, window double glazing, etc. Moreover, the condition of their houses are more likely to be in a worse state in respect of necessary maintenance, this further reduces their starting base. The same situation will also apply to their motor vehicles, they'll be the last to convert to electric cars, etc.

voidfunc 5y ago

Technically? Sure, its a great solution. Politically? Totally dead in the water. Its not a good solution unless you are an authoritarian government. (I am pro-Nuclear)

dave333 5y ago

Haven't read the paywalled article but the idea that nuclear is clean compared to coal is ridiculous as evidenced by Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Windscale. Nuclear pollution is about 1 trillion trillion times worse than coal and is sufficiently common - roughly one major nuclear accident per decade to be non-negligible. It's not safe to assume nuclear power is getting safer when terrorism and nations that sponsor terrorists are getting worse.

acidburnNSA 5y ago
Including all accidents mentioned, nuclear energy is a few hundred times safer than coal, per TWh generated [1]. In fact, air pollution from fossil and biofuel combustion kills as many people that died and will die from Chernobyl (around 4000) every 7.5 hours, and counting. When you dig into the data, nuclear is shockingly safe. And that's not even considering climate change impacts, where nuclear is about as low carbon as you can get, in the full lifecycle. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
clavicat 5y ago
>the idea that nuclear is clean compared to coal is ridiculous as evidenced by Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Windscale What kind of “evidence” is that? If you add up all the deaths that resulted from these disasters, it’s an small fraction of the people that die from coal pollution every year—670,000 in China alone. How are you getting a trillion times worse?

sabujp 5y ago

The market agrees, just look at recent prices of uranium, uranium mining companies, and now nuclear infrastructure companies are also starting to take off

weatherlight 5y ago

It's bullshit. Electricity is only 28% of global emissions. What about the other 3/4ths? And on that 28%... The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption. Nuclear energy now provides about 10% of the world’s electricity from about 445 power reactors. This isn't hard math.

corban1 5y ago
Economically accessible coal resources will deplete in 30 years. (1950)
- weatherlight 5y ago
  Mining for coal and uranium are two very different things
erentz 5y ago
> Electricity is only 28% of global emissions. What about the other 3/4ths? How much of fixing the other 3/4ths requires more electricity to substitute? > The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption. Or it could be as much as 4 billion years. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  Indeed! Nuclear breeder reactors, which have been the long-term plan all along, are just as sustainable as wind and solar on Earth. It's sad how many people have forgotten about breeder reactors. One of the first reactors ever built on the planet was designed to prove that breeding was possible, which it did in 1952. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I Plus, nuclear makes heat and electricity. The heat can be used to help with building heating directly with conventional reactors, and can help with industrial processes as well. Higher-temperature reactors can more directly handle industrial process heat.

travisgriggs 5y ago

I grew up in a nuclear community (Richland WA, the town where it seems like half of everyone works at Hanford). My first job (after lawn mowing) was working at Exxon Nuclear (which got bought by Siemens then sold to Framatome and then morphed into Areva). I learned to code there. My first tools were tools that helped engineers optimize nuclear fuel assembly design for efficiency. I see these articles. I barely read them. I’m a supporter already. I get all the various details and arguments. I left that industry though. For two reasons. 1. Regulation makes it so that what seems cool and high tech is mostly 60’s tech. 2. I got discouraged working in an industry that I knew could help the world but was so reviled and feared at large. These days I work in ag automation. Feed the world. Robots and the cloud. That sort of thing. And yet… yesterday, some of the assembly techs were spooked by the supposed ability to have a small magnet stick to the injection site of a Moderna vaccine. I watched grown men spend multiple hours coming to the conclusion that “the magnets didn’t stick after all but something weird was going on.” I’ve concluded that Darwin was wrong. Humanity has the ability to out wit natural selection any more. That leads me to believe that nuclear technology (sufficiently advanced to be indiscernible from magic) has as much likelihood of mankind applying it to their benefit as they do of burning witches to save the planet.

alfor 5y ago

Was the best solution, not anymore. Solar wind and batteries are coming fast. Today, they are already the cheaper to build and operate But the price of batteries keep on getting lower. I think that in 5-10 years with very few exception all new generation will be from solar and wind.

benjamir 5y ago

Nope. Most of the construction attempts of the last two decades failed. We need coal replacements before 2032. Even if you try to build nuclear plants _on time_, that will fail. So it cannot be _the_ solution -- no matter your stance on nuclear power; maybe part of the solution; but not _the best solution_!

rsj_hn 5y ago
> We need coal replacements before 2032. You are not going to get a replacement for coal before 2032. That's like 10 years away. If you work really hard and get incredibly lucky, you may limit the increase in coal use by 2032 to be roughly zero. But you are talking about massive infrastructure projects, and that's a really tough sell because, for example, you are seeing significant increases in energy usage in developing countries: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50256 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50256 See also the world forecast here: Of the world’s existing coal-fired generating capacity, 99% consists of boilers and steam turbine units that are as much as 30% less efficient than natural gas-fired combined-cycle units that use the latest technology. Because natural gas-fired generators are more efficient than coal-fired generators at converting fuel to electricity, natural gas-fired generation is often a lower-cost option, even if the fuel price of natural gas is slightly higher than the fuel price of coal. However, the absence of regional carbon policies or regulations along with rising natural gas prices after 2030—particularly in Asia and in regions that rely on higher-cost liquefied natural gas (LNG)—is likely to make coal the most economical generation fuel to pair with increased intermittent generation from wind and solar. This shift reverses the trend observed over recent decades. Although the cost of mining coal will likely raise coal prices after 2030, we project that coal prices will remain low relative to natural gas prices and provide a cost-competitive option to natural gas-fired generation. Increases in coal-fired generation in Other non-OECD Asia—which includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, among other countries—will account for over 75% of our projected increase in global coal-fired generation from 2030 to 2050. For Other non-OECD Asia, we project that renewable energy sources will account for about 60% of the generation increase over the projection period, primarily from wind and solar. Coal-fired generation will account for nearly all of the remaining growth. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50256 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50256

guscost 5y ago

I will probably never care about “climate change solutions”, but I’m happy to support this campaign to rehabilitate nuclear power, because it is a very good idea.

halfjoking 5y ago

No it isn’t. 500 million years ago when Earth’s CO2 level was 5000 ppm, did they have nuclear power? Is that what saved the planet to make it habitable for humans? No - the levels changed because of exposed olivine rocks that absorbed the CO2. That’s how nature fixes high CO2 levels. Why does the solution have to be anything other than that? If humanity spent $1 trillion per year on extracting olivine, and putting those rocks on tropical beaches, we’d easily solve climate within a couple decades. It costs $21/ton of CO2 sequestered.[1] It’s easily the most affordable solution. [1] https://www.vesta.earth/ https://www.vesta.earth/

brightball 5y ago
This is a solution that I haven’t heard until now. Thank you for sharing.
halikular 5y ago
They didn't burn fossil fuels at that time. The only sane way to approach this problem is at the root, hence we need to stop emitting additional fossil CO2. What's here already is hard to put back in the ground.
542458 5y ago
Interesting. Does 21/ton include the cost of using the land? Edit, looks like rock isn’t put on the beaches, but rather into relatively fast moving shallow seas. https://legacy.projectvesta.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/mitigation-of-c02-emissions-by-stimulated-natural-rock-weathering.pdf https://legacy.projectvesta.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/m... I’ve got to say, this does look interesting.
cranx 5y ago
We’d also die of mesothelioma. But hey, the co2 was captured.
- elil17 5y ago
  As I understand it, olivine is not the same as asbestos and does not cause mesothelioma. Does the carbon capture reaction cause it to become dangerous?

pxi 5y ago

It's possible to run a large region (almost) entirely from renewable's, here's the proof: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m But Nuclear could still an excellent option depending on various metrics. I rather see some 'risky' nuclear options being considered before any of the geo-engineering ideas take hold (as they will if we don't get a move on).

0xy 5y ago
South Australia is building brand new gas peaking plants, and the state says further investment in gas is necessary. So it seems this isn't correct. [1] Gas is not renewable, and it's nearly as bad as coal. It's also worth noting their batteries to store renewable energy are not renewable either, not to mention the huge societal impacts on relying on child slavery to prop up your grid (lithium and cobalt mining have a big child labor issue). Especially worth noting South Australia's battery manufacturer Tesla has an extremely poor record when it comes to supply chain environmental management. Some of Tesla's suppliers have dumped toxic wastewater into water systems, as well as utilised child slaves in the Congo to source rare earth materials. [2] Green energy indeed! [1] https://www.murrayvalleystandard.com.au/story/6607101/650m-gas-power-plant-at-tepko-would-be-one-of-sas-biggest/ https://www.murrayvalleystandard.com.au/story/6607101/650m-g... [2] https://fortune.com/2021/09/30/tesla-ipe-environmental-violations-suppliers-child-labor-congo-drc-glencore/ https://fortune.com/2021/09/30/tesla-ipe-environmental-viola...
- pxi 5y ago
  Interesting... thanks for the links. SAPGen is a private company so what ever they build will need to compete with all that wind and solar. Also did you look at the graph from Tasmania? - too bad they are doing other unrelated environmentally bad things. For frequency control, it seems like the Tesla batteries now have some competition in the form of synchronous condensers. For storage there seems to be several better alternatives than lithium.
halikular 5y ago
Nuclear power is one of the safest means of electricity generation, but it's very costly due to over regulation. Contrast this to commercial aviation which is tightly regulated and in turn very safe, but it's not over regulated that it becomes too expensive or regulations with diminishing returns that only put unnecessary road blocks.

cranx 5y ago

Do we need more fissile plutonium? More bomb plants sounds less desirable for the human race than transitioning to renewables.

rob_c 5y ago

Good article nice reading. Once built nuclear plants are basically giant nuclear batteries which we can run up or down on demand which is easier and probably more efficient than storing a huge excess of renewable surplus at creation.

andygates 5y ago
Nuclear power stations have very slow demand response. That used to be done by gas peakers and hydro; in a decarbonised world that changes to battery peakers and hydro.

anm89 5y ago

Why does it feel like when you ask people everybody knows this but when you actually try to do it everyone suddenly hates it?

elil17 5y ago

I like nuclear and I used to think it was a silver bullet. I still believe that nuclear is very safe for life (in fact, it is even safer than solar on a per-kWh basis due to the high number of deaths associated with people falling off roofs while installing panels) and the enviroment, but I now understand more about some of it's disadvantages. Specifically: 1. It is very expensive. Nuclear has a levelized cost of over 10 cents per kilowatt hour, which is very high compared to solar and wind (not including energy storage). The levelized cost means that it is a cost which includes the costs of capital. 2. Load shifting can greatly reduce the need for energy storage. By shifting certain loads (e.g., some particularly energy intensive industrial processes) away from peak hours, we can greatly reduce the need for energy storage. Further, application tailored energy storage solutions (e.g., thermal energy storage for HVAC applications) can also be an effective solution. 3. While nuclear is not dangerous to humans anymore, the financial cost of accidents is huge. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, while it only killed one person, cost one trillion dollars to contain and remediate. When you add it the probability of disasters and the cost of remediating them, the levelized cost of nuclear would be much, much higher. Thus, while I don't oppose new nuclear power plants, I do think our society's resources are better spent on further research into nuclear (both fission and fusion) and lower cost energy options like wind and solar.

tuatoru 5y ago
I used to oppose nuclear, but I now think it's a worthwhile backup, or perhaps one strand in a diversified approach to getting off fossil fuels. There is, sadly, no one single technology that can replace fossil fuels for even any one major category of use (electricity, industrial, buildings, transport). We're going to end up with a massively more complicated energy supply system. In this context I think it's still worth pursuing nuclear. The cost argument has only arisen recently. As late as 2010 nuclear was competitive, or at least not obviously uncompetitive apart from its massive regulatory burden. It seems to me that a lot of nuclear's costs arise from the "as low as reasonably achievable" doctrine (ALARA), which in turn is founded in the "linear no threshold" theory (LNT) of the effects of radiation. LNT is falsified by the health statistics of the Denver population vs the coasts, and many other real-world observations. If fission had fixed, scientifically determined thresholds and performance standards to work to, and a less hostile regulatory environment (removing the veto of NIMBYs), it would really interesting to see how it competes. It can scale up to the necessary scale in 30 years. Fusion, on the other hand, can't conceivably help us with the transition in the time we have available. It'd be best to park it for 50 years and redeploy those physics Ph. D.s into material science for photovoltaics, batteries, electrolysis, and fuel synthesis.

blinkingled 5y ago

Have we figured out how to store or process nuclear waste safely? I have vaguely uneasy recollection of reading about American nuclear waste.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Honestly, that’s not the actual problem. Waste is basically solved already. I am very pro-nuclear, but if I were to steelman the anti-nuclear argument, it’d be proliferation concerns.
acidburnNSA 5y ago
We definitely know how to do it. We just have to get people to agree to do it. We are supposed to put it in Yucca Mtn but that is stalled out politically. Finland, meanwhile, is proceeding with their equivalent at Onkalo. https://www.posiva.fi/en/ https://www.posiva.fi/en/ https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

4WIW 5y ago

Looks like this opinion doesn't matter much: the last operational nuclear plant in California is closing in a few years.

mk81 5y ago

Anyone that looks into this unemotionally comes to this conclusion.

ncmncm 5y ago

Nukes might have been useful as a climate-change solution if they were not intimately, inextricably tied to massive, long-term (wholly legal) corruption. The bulk of the cost goes to corruption; but much worse is that they take many extra years to complete beyond what normal construction would take, because nobody actually involved wants that gravy train ever to dry up--anyway, not until after their kids graduate college--and deliver exactly zero watt-hours of energy, in the meantime, if indeed they are ever completed at all. The latest failed US nuke project has cost ratepayers $30B already, is nowhere near done, and most likely never will be done. Fortunately, solar and wind projects seem thus far immune to corruption. They often start delivering power immediately after they are begun, or anyway long before the project is done. They may easily be extended after they are "done", either on-site or somewhere entirely else. Long before solar and wind produce enough power that we have reason to worry about "grid stability", storage solutions will be coming on-line, cheaply. Factories for iron-air batteries are being constructed at a frenzied pace, but they will compete with liquified air, ammonia, hydrogen, and other solutions according to local conditions. (Ammonia and hydrogen have the advantage that they are, also, feedstock for other processes.) In the meantime, the single best possible use for a renewable-energy dollar is more solar panel; later, storage will be a good investment. Besides generating capacity, and storage, we will need a lot of long-distance high-voltage transmission lines, and ships to carry liquified ammonia to burn at higher latitudes where solar is not practical, and where relying just on long transmission lines is too risky.

renewiltord 5y ago

Nuclear energy is not tenable given the current political climate. We’re not optimizing on technology alone. We’re optimizing along the manifold that includes people’s opinions since they do have de-facto veto rights here. I see nuclear power as a solution to climate change as unviable since no one wants one in their vicinity. The plants are unbuildable because of unions and widespread corruption. Nuke fans are just like big C Communists. If only we all worked together for the good of humanity, we could all live in comfort and there wouldn’t be any hunger and all the little kitty cats will have warm beds and fluffy pillo- no. Well, your comrades in the venture are corrupt fucks. Nuke is unbuildable and pissing away money into an abyss of non power generation is not okay. China can build nukes, blessed are they. The US cannot.

deleted 5y ago

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floppiplopp 5y ago

No, it isn't. Building up the needed capacity will take decades and cost an enormous amount of money that is better spend elsewhere. Fuel supply is limited, with cost for exploration quadrupled over the last 15 years, and a doubling cost for uranium fuel over the same period. Commercially viable known uranium reserves are used up by roughly 1/3 since 1950, depleting ever faster with more reactors. Even if we had the reactors already, even if we wouldn't need to spend trillions, the fuel simply isn't there for cost effective usage until the end of the century. Alternative reactors, thorium or fusion are experimental at best. So no, nuclear won't change anything soon.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

It's a shame that this totally genuine supporter of nuclear power doesn't believe in electric vehicles. You'd think EVs and nuclear would make a great pairing. But no, strangely, in his opening paragraph in this very honest attempt to sell nuclear power to a skeptical public he's more worried about gasoline costs and silly politicians subsidizing uneconomic cars. Hmmm, whatever could he mean by that surprisingly vague swipe. > The United States has only 241 coal units in operation, so shuttering them would be a meaningless exercise in virtue-signaling. I'm beginning to doubt the authors sincerity in seeking solutions to this problem.

mpcannabrava 5y ago

So happy this is finally published as a WSJ headline. (hence, one assumes, starting to get public acceptance as a reasonable policy)

tim333 5y ago

Trouble is nuclear costs go up, solar goes down: graph https://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/Solar-Nuclear_graph.jpg https://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/Solar-Nuclear_grap... Batteries etc are falling too, so project ahead so solar seems to win out. Which is good news really as we've had nuclear for decades and it still hasn't stopped developing countries burning fossil fuels and probably never will. On the other hand if solar costs like a quarter that of fossil it'll probably take over. (article graph came from https://www.ncwarn.org/2010/07/solar-and-nuclear-costs-the-historic-crossover/ https://www.ncwarn.org/2010/07/solar-and-nuclear-costs-the-h...)

b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago

https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/ is working on making reactors modular and smaller. It will still be a while as most of it still is in R and D.