There's three necessities I see in a green scale initiative: carbon tax, nuclear, and sequestration (CC).
I also have a hard time taking anyone serially if they don't talk about how we need a diversified energy portfolio nor understand the difficulties of energy density. I feel like many repeat popular points but do not spend time trying to understand. I think that's how we get politicians that consider climate change as one of their top priorities saying that geoengineering and CC are "false solutions". I also don't know any climatologist who isn't pro nuclear (which means nuclear + renewables, not nuclear vs renewables).
The IPCC endorses the use of nuclear power too[0]. Being anti nuclear seems to me, as a scientist, anti-scientific. Since it is against what the scientists studying this are recommending.
Anti-scientific, or we learned from our mistakes? We can barely build a bridge that lasts for 50 years, but somehow we are going to magically build containment units for waste which last 1,000s?
The science has shown us that Nuclear electricity is incredibly dangerous, and that humans are mostly too incompetent to maintain it safely. I say this as the child of a Nuclear Physicist who spent half of his life working on weapons, and half at a power plant. Dad didn't think we were up to the responsibility either.
I was just in Belarus, a friend of mine told me that since Chernobyl 20 members of her family have died of cancer. Cancer isn't fun, I will tell you from experience.
There's more to consider than "does it work in the lab?" and "will it be cheaper"?.
Options for death are basically either heart attack, cancer or other [0]. Cancer is horrible, but that isn't a very telling example without more detail.
> We can barely build a bridge that lasts for 50 years, but somehow we are going to magically build containment units for waste which last 1,000s?
We've had nuclear power for ~70 years. There is a very high likelihood that if we push on with nuclear power we will either be reprocessing that 'waste' for fuel at some point or it will be inert enough that it doesn't really matter.
The idea that we in 2019 need to take responsibility for the next 15 generations is absurd. Anyone who tried that at any point in the past would have been at best wasting their time; technology has moved too quickly. Our ancestors might as well have worried that by 2019 we'd look back on them with contempt for not leaving us a strategic 10t reserve of bronze for forging our swords and shields.
The biggest risk is that in 60 years they will dig it up and hurl it at their enemies, on purpose, as a dirty bomb.
>Anti-scientific, or we learned from our mistakes?
I would say that when you are valuing the opinion of the public and/or political groups over the opinion the scientific consensus (i.e. the IPCC and other) then that is the definition of anti-scientific. (As to Chernobyl, I would also call building a positive void coefficient reactor is also anti-scientific, considering it was against recommendation).
Can you explain more about why they don't make sense?
My understanding is that they're extremely desirable. They're a drop-in replacement for millions of hydrocarbon plants. They can scale up/down with demand. They produce enormous amounts of energy and emit no C02.
Think of the materials and industrial waste to produce 1 nuclear power plant versus all of the battery, solar cells, and turbines to equal the same in power and scalability.
Besides, why do the technologies need to be exclusive? Shouldn't we be using them all where it makes sense?
For something as capital intensive as a nuclear power plant, throttling their output makes them uneconomical. They have almost zero opex so you barely save a penny.
>Think of the materials and industrial waste to produce 1 nuclear power plant versus all of the battery, solar cells, and turbines to equal the same in power and scalability.
Please, also think of the carbon footprint of those materials. Every ton of cement produces 1 ton of CO2. Every ton of steel produces 1.8 tons of CO2. The mere process of building a hydroelectric dam and wind turbine involves emitting CO2 into the environment. Even the process of growing silicon crystals and doping them with ions to create a solar panel produces CO2 that must be offset over the lifetime of that solar panel. Carbon capture solutions, on the other hand, can involve simply planting trees. Each acorn that is dug into the ground will capture a ton of CO2 over the course of a decade.
Carbon capture with trees might work but it definitively will require a lot of manual work. The trees have to be cut down, stored in old mines and replanted periodically.
Cost [1]. Time from breaking ground to "permission to operate" as well (even if you cut red tape and systemize manufacturing of nuclear generators, you will not be as fast as wind, solar, and batteries).
Solar PV Thin Film Utility Scale: $36-$44/MWh | Onshore Wind: $29-$56/MWh | Nuclear: $112-$189/MWh
Can you build nuclear faster than the rest of the world can build and install PV solar and onshore/offshore wind turbines? Unlikely. Tesla installed the Hornsdale Power Reserve in 90 days. Bigger utility scale battery systems will take longer, but no where near 10 years.
You conveniently forgot to list the costs of storage from the source you linked. The costs range from $108-$471 for utility scale storage. So nuclear is the clear winner in cost because it doesn't require this.
I just want to break in here because that's a large range in prices. To explain those, they are because the different amounts of storage capacity. These very drastically in location. So somewhere like SoCal needs less than in the Bay area because SoCal is almost always sunny and windy. The Bay has plenty of shady days (go talk to the people at LLNL, there's plenty of people there working on this problem). Alternatively, places like Seattle have long periods of low sun and wind so need extremely high amounts of storage.
This is the argument for a nuclear substitute, specifically in places where renewables are difficult. You don't replace renewables in SoCal with nuclear, you replace coal in Seattle with nuclear (and continue the expansion of renewables and storage).
The underlying reason the IPCC promotes nuclear is that it is the only existing technology that can fill in the gap for renewables. It can handle load balancing, reduce storage costs/vulnerability, and helps with the duck curve (which has to this date not been solved by batteries). This isn't a "fund nuclear vs fund battery research" argument (seriously guys, stop with this!). This is a "well this works and we can start building it right now. Let's do that while we keep inventing new solutions because things are too bad to not have a backup plan. We also need to increase the total funding and use every feasible option on the table" kind of argument. I'm not sure why this is so difficult to see. No pro nuclear person is anti renewable. If they are I'll call them anti-scientific too.
No pro nuclear person is anti-renewable. Come on. Let's stop having this debate. It's not a VS game, we have to use every available option.
Edit: I want to reiterate what I said in my original comment. Not following the expert advice of those working in climate is anti-scientific. You may be as smart as them but you sure aren't as close to the data and have access to tons of other people working on the same problem. Trust the scientists. If you don't give a good reason, but you're going to have to go into as much detail as they do. You don't argue with scientist about dark matter, which we know less about than climate. It's just shocking to me that people here get all up in arms and ignore the expert advice.
I've seen plenty of anti-renewable and pro-nuclear (and often pro-fossil fuel, from the same source) advocacy from people in the US Right. It is simply false to say “no pro-nuclear person is anti-renewable.”
It is accurate to say that some pro-nuclear people are also pro-renewable.
> It's not a VS game
When it comes to resource allocation, it absolutely is. There aren't infinite resources to allocate.
> I've seen plenty of anti-renewable and pro-nuclear (and often pro-fossil fuel, from the same source) advocacy from people in the US Right.
I've seen this from politicians but not people. The people are really just against the subsidies, at least that I've seen. Which is fair, but I'd still consider dumb.
I'll also add, like I said I would, that I'll call those people anti-scientific as well. Because they are ignoring the expert advice on an extremely nuanced and complicated problem.
> When it comes to resource allocation, it absolutely is. There aren't infinite resources to allocate.
I think both camps can agree that we need to spend more. That's a big part to the argument. You can't say "this is a catastrophy happening, we have only so many resources" when we clearly do have more. They need to be reallocated to the high importance problems at hand (I'd argue climate is in fact a military issue, and there have been plenty of high ranking generals that agree. So let's allocate some of those funds). So I get the argument, but I don't think it's the right argument to make. Because the resources are there to do both, just not currently. Shifting the argument to the zero sum argument doesn't address the underlying issues. (We have enough resources that we'd run into problems of how to effectively spend them long before we ran out).
(1) Politicians are a subset of people, so if you've seen it from politicians, you've seen it from people.
(2) I've seen it from people who are not politicians (mostly people who are both highly partisan and politically engaged, but then, those people are overrepresented in public policy discussions of all types. They are also disproportionately influential in government since they are reliable voters and provide the foot soldiers for political campaigns.)
> When it comes to resource allocation, it absolutely is. There aren't infinite resources to allocate.
The pro nuclear people want to allocate resources away from fossil fuels. The pro renewables want to allocate away from fossil fuels.
Nobody has run the numbers on how much environmental damage renewables do. Given the sheer orders of magnitude involved in nuclear power, I'd bet it turns out to be more environmentally friendly even after waste is considered. It would certainly be competitive; we actually try to rehabilitate nuclear plants. Solar panels just get dumped afaik.
The pro nuclear types are just more scientific about how to get to the goal than the wind-and-solar-or-coal-before-nuclear types.
>This is a "well this works and we can start building it right now."
I have never heard this argument. The problem with nuclear power plants is that you always need the next generation plant design that solves the flaws of the previous generation. Almost every pro nuclear strategy involves new types of reactors that by definition haven't been proven. Of course we can always just build more current or old generation nuclear power plants which then strengthens anti-nuclear fears again.
We could make wide progress with current generation plants. Evidence? France. Also a ton of research studies. I'm not sure why you think we need gen IV reactors. Sure, that'd be nice, but gen III is good enough. I've never heard the argument that we "need" new l newer designs. The argument I've heard there is that it's safer and cheaper so probably easier to get public opinion on the side of the scientific consensus.
My comment within this thread communicates my belief that batteries will get cheaper faster than nuclear (solar and wind are fast approaching 1 cent/kwh; as that cost continues to decline storage will be the bulk of the cost of utility power). If you think I'm wrong, invest in nuclear. If nuclear was a clear winner, it would be funded and built. But it seems there are better ways to replace the last 100GW of US nuclear generating capacity, based on market participant actions.
Nuclear is being funded and built all around the world. There's 50 reactors under construction right now[1]. My original statement was that the aversion to it is political, not economical and certainly not scientific.
There is no panacea. We need a well-rounded, safe, stable, and diversified energy portfolio and it must include nuclear. It also needs wind, solar, and high-density energy storage (batteries and other such strategies).
Except that nuclear is running 24/7 even if it is not windy (minus the costly maintenance). As long as we don't have a superconductor grid around whole hemisphere, it seems to be the best way to generate power at night.
If it was the best, the entire US commercial generator fleet wouldn't be on death's door due to the economics.
If you want to subsidize the last 59 US nuclear plants based on their low CO2 emissions, extending their operating license (if it can be done safely) until cleaner base load arrives, that's a sound decision. Building more nuclear is not. I question if we even have the fortitude to fund safe cleanup of existing decommissioned plants (spent rod casks have been sitting onsite in Zion, IL 19 years after that nuclear generator has been shut down, with nowhere to go [1]).
Batteries will get cheaper faster than nuclear ever will, considering every automaker is moving to electric vehicles [2].
> Batteries will get cheaper faster than nuclear ever will
That's a bold claim. Batteries could also suffer from law of diminishing returns. It might not be physically possible to store energy much more densely, without catastrophic failures.
I don't think it is [1] [2]. Regardless of cell and pack density, there's plenty of open land to install outdoor enclosures. Utility storage isn't cars, where density is terribly important.
I fear you do not sufficiently appreciate the gravitas of the energy storage problem.
The big Hornsdale power reserve in Australia is 130 MWh. Say you want to store 6 hours of US average energy consumption. That's 1 500 000 MWh, or 11 000 Hornsdale stations. Just for 6 hours of electricity storage.
It's ~6000 Tesla Megapack stations [1], along with HVDC transmission lines (if we're upgrading transmission lines from AC->DC, drop those aerial lines underground while you're at it for reliability and to stave off the NIMBYs). I entirely appreciate the scale of the problem we're facing regarding energy storage (climate change keeps my up at night), hence my arguments for solutions available today, not those that might (might!) start producing power in a decade. You can buy these battery stations today (Tesla quotes a 3 month deployment cycle). You can recycle their battery cells today.
There are over 7,000 power plants in the United States run by over 3,000 companies. There are over 55,000 substations and over 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. I don't believe what I'm proposing is unreasonable. Hard? Sure. But unreasonable? Absolutely not. Going to the Moon was hard, and we still went to the Moon.
Why is energy density necessary for cheap batteries? Economies of scale can result in far greater cost reductions than are possible simply by reducing the amount of needed materials for a given capacity.
> Why is energy density necessary for cheap batteries?
So you can put them in cars, boats, planes, and other things.
Yeah, I know, we have Teslas. But do you know it's twice the weight of an ICE alternative? Weight matters a lot. While we've made a lot of progress in the last few decades, the best research batteries are still 100x below any fossil fuel in terms of energy density.
Which Tesla is twice the weight of an equivalent ICE car?
The Model S (2019) appears to look roughly the same and appears to be roughly the same size as the Audi A7 (2019), and is just a bit heavier (Tesla curb weight 4883 lbs, Audi 4332 lbs).
I was comparing with ranges, sorry should have specified. Equivalent cars with ranges. Though maybe this isn't the best because a model S is a sports car (I guess they are heavier than I thought). To better compare I think that Audi is a good comparison (price, style, luxury).
So though they're weights are similar the Audi has a range of 424.6/559.9 and the Tesla has 285. That's 50.1%-67.2% of the range (let's say 60%).
Yes, ~300mi is a mostly comfortable range, but it's the same weight for 60% the range (and 5k more). To get the same range we'd have to add a ton of weight, which would probably push us to 2x (maybe the original comparison was decent enough?).
Model S and X range is close to 370 miles with the long range battery and Raven drivetrain (in production for several months), not 300.
With Supercharger stations being no more than 150 miles apart (and that distance shrinking as more stations keep coming online), home charging, and per mile costs half that of internal combustion vehicles you mentioned, it’s a no brainer even considering the vehicle is somewhat (but not outrageously) heavier.
> If it was the best, the entire US commercial generator fleet wouldn't be on death's door due to the economics.
This is an extreme oversimplification of the issues in nuclear. I'll suggest it's as extreme of an oversimplification as saying "the only reason we don't have nuclear is because public FUD".
I also have a hard time taking anyone serially if they don't talk about how we need a diversified energy portfolio nor understand the difficulties of energy density. I feel like many repeat popular points but do not spend time trying to understand. I think that's how we get politicians that consider climate change as one of their top priorities saying that geoengineering and CC are "false solutions". I also don't know any climatologist who isn't pro nuclear (which means nuclear + renewables, not nuclear vs renewables).
The IPCC endorses the use of nuclear power too[0]. Being anti nuclear seems to me, as a scientist, anti-scientific. Since it is against what the scientists studying this are recommending.
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/the-ipc...