> Nuclear requires a lot of concrete and steel, both sources of carbon emissions
Alternative sources of energy also require materials to produce them. Natural gas plants require similar amounts of concrete and steel but have lower energy yields. Renewable sources like wind and solar require immense amounts of materials, including heavy metals and other toxic, non-recyclable materials. Because they are far less dense (~50 watts per sq. meter versus 2000-6000 watts per sq. meter from nuclear), they have a substantially greater environmental impact.
> As for the "efficiency" of hydrogen, the only efficiency that matters is economic efficiency, and all indications point to hydrogen storage of wind/solar to be more economically efficient than nuclear.
Solar and wind are heavily subsidized, at least in the United States, while nuclear is subject to expensive and arbitrary regulatory burdens. There’s not a level playing field to support the argument that nuclear energy is not economically competitive.
From the perspective of physics, hydrogen is necessarily less efficient than other energy sources. Generating the initial source of electricity to produce the hydrogen has a given level of inefficiency. Then actually producing the hydrogen compounds the amount of energy wasted. Finally, utilizing the hydrogen as an energy source also loses some energy. There’s no scenario where it’s more efficient to use hydrogen as an intermediary than it is to use the original source.
You keep making statements without backing them up and when others refute them with giving actual evidence you ignore them and move to another unbacked statement.
Regarding your statement that nuclear receiving high regulatory costs and renewables being highly subsidised, that statement is false again. The subsidies received by nuclear are significantly larger than the ones received by renewables.
That isn't really evidence, the environmentalists have a terrible track record of calling everything a subsidy.
In Australia we have a fuel tax as part of a user-pays philosophy for road maintenance. Because they don't use public roads, mining companies were exempted from the fuel tax. This gets classed as an enormous subsidy for coal which is technically true but realistically silly. If renewables were buying fuel and not using public roads they'd be exempted too.
There is a big handwave there where we take it, on faith, that these subsidies were just handouts as opposed to, say, reasonable tax exemptions like in the Australian case.
You’re right that I should have been citing my sources. I’ve been largely relying on the book Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger. It’s well worth reading.
The (decade old) source you provided for energy subsidies appears somewhat dishonest, as the date ranges appear cherry picked. Why is it that the source only looks at nuclear subsidies up until 1999, while subsidies to other energy sources are considered through 2009?
The choice of units in this source is also odd. What have the subsidies been in terms of energy output? At its peak, nuclear was producing some 16-20% of US power. I imagine normalizing on a $/MWh basis could paint a different picture.
Looking at a more recent source [0], it appears that recent nuclear subsidies have been marginal and are far outpaced by renewable subsidies. If we consider prior subsidies a sunk cost, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to subsidize a new, less environmentally friendly, source of energy when our best in class is already excellent.
Shellenberger is not rational when it comes to nuclear. If you base your information off what he says, you will only see the world through his rose colored glasses.
For him, it is a political wedge issue meant to drive partisan policy development.
If we are to be hard nosed climate hawks, we need to look at the reality of nuclear, as it exists today, and the reality of our capacity to change our industrial processes. And having done that, after being very bullish on nuclear starts in the 2000s, I do not see how Shellenberger can be taken the least but seriously. He doesn't address the reality of nuclear on the ground, instead focusing on political statements.
I just downloaded it from libgen and checked. There are no claims about rare earth elements. The two major arguments he marshals against solar power are "discarded solar panels are toxic waste" and "energy density!!!". He rounds out the argument with some outdated EROI numbers.
The PV EROI numbers could use an update pretty much everywhere. I have some ballpark-corrected numbers that I keep in my head but the academic literature badly lags industry. You can read a "new" solar EROI paper in 2020 and after dereferencing all its citation pointers find it's still using key numbers from 2008. Thinner cells, lower kerf loss, polysilicon reactor optimization, crystal growing optimization, higher cell efficiency (PERC), bifaciality, and the increasing prevalence of single axis trackers mean that a state of the art solar farm in 2020 has significantly better EROI than the same capacity farm in the same place in 2010. But industry cares about costs, not EROI, and academics who write about EROI seem to lack the will to gather numbers from current industrial practice.
I also occasionally suspect that good solar EROI analysis doesn't happen because people are anchored to previous conclusions. Whether that's nuclear promoters or deep green/"degrowth" types. Both would like to say "there is no alternative" to their visions of the future and a high solar EROI would demonstrate an inconvenient alternative. Or just inattentive grad students and advisors who assume current EROI numbers should be in line with older ones.
I saw an ad on TV last night (possibly a mining industry ad. Not sure, as is so often the case with tv ads) that said there was 4 tonnes of copper in each wind turbine.
So add that to the mix of what it takes to build a wind turbine. I'm not sure of the cost of copper production but I bet it's not cheap or easy on the environment.
It was probably mining industry promotion. This report from Navigant Research, prepared on behalf of the Copper Development Association, contains both statistics and copper industry scheming regarding copper use in wind power:
Most uses of copper in wind power can be substituted by aluminum when copper prices rise. Speaking on behalf of copper producers who want to impede substitution, the report says:
Substitution by aluminum can be addressed with proactive promotion based on copper’s known benefits of higher energy efficiency (reduction of energy losses) and assurance of long‐term reliability. Aluminum is vulnerable here due to its lower strength, relaxation behavior and corrosion resistance. The downstream technical and economic risks associated with “value engineering” copper out of critical components are unknown. And, because the costs or repair, maintenance and downtime are known to be high in wind‐energy plants, copper promotion based on reducing life‐cycle costs through improved reliability and efficiency should be a worthwhile undertaking. Institutional promotion through the establishment of prudent codes, standards and recommended practices is also recommended.
It's a mixture of highlighting legitimate engineering concerns, raising FUD about failure to address those concerns, and trying to get copper specifically entrenched in codes and standards so that aluminum will not be allowed to compete with copper.
For answering the specific question of how much copper current wind power uses, see table 2-1. There's a lot of variation. The project built with 2.1 MW turbines from Suzlon had a copper intensity of 6.8 tonnes (14,900 pounds) per megawatt, while the project with 3.0 MW turbines from Vestas took only 2.5 tonnes (5600 lbs) per megawatt. Mass of copper per turbine is a poor metric because turbines come in various generating capacities.
I know we've probably all moved on, but just for the record, I saw the ad on Australian tv. It was a BHP ad. (I've seen it again since the earlier comment)
> while nuclear is subject to expensive and arbitrary regulatory burdens
One major thing about nuclear is that we do not even truly understand the effects of wide-ranging low doses of nuclear radiation.
I am repeating here from an earlier post:
There are many things we do not understand about radiation. The traditional models on radiation dosis and health effects are probably too simple. There is a strain of research on epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation:
Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus.
Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion.
There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far.
I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions.
The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development.
Why are you dwelling so much on radiation? Do you plan on them dumping them into your front yard or something. The simple solution is to look at rates of cancer and other radiation induced conditions around nuclear plants. Also amongst the people working there? Are they higher? Do your research but I assure you that you won't find anything. It's been studied to death. Chernobyl doesn't figure in because modern reactors aren't Chernobyl style. It was a terrible design even when it was brand new. Now go look up the same information around coal plants.
Alternative sources of energy also require materials to produce them. Natural gas plants require similar amounts of concrete and steel but have lower energy yields. Renewable sources like wind and solar require immense amounts of materials, including heavy metals and other toxic, non-recyclable materials. Because they are far less dense (~50 watts per sq. meter versus 2000-6000 watts per sq. meter from nuclear), they have a substantially greater environmental impact.
> As for the "efficiency" of hydrogen, the only efficiency that matters is economic efficiency, and all indications point to hydrogen storage of wind/solar to be more economically efficient than nuclear.
Solar and wind are heavily subsidized, at least in the United States, while nuclear is subject to expensive and arbitrary regulatory burdens. There’s not a level playing field to support the argument that nuclear energy is not economically competitive.
From the perspective of physics, hydrogen is necessarily less efficient than other energy sources. Generating the initial source of electricity to produce the hydrogen has a given level of inefficiency. Then actually producing the hydrogen compounds the amount of energy wasted. Finally, utilizing the hydrogen as an energy source also loses some energy. There’s no scenario where it’s more efficient to use hydrogen as an intermediary than it is to use the original source.