When I was a early teenager, I was the treehugging hippie of my friend group. One of my friends suggested that I should join greenpeace and start volunteering with them. I thought it was a good...
When I was a early teenager, I was the treehugging hippie of my friend group. One of my friends suggested that I should join greenpeace and start volunteering with them. I thought it was a good idea and started to research things, in the end I decided that greenpeace has done more bad than good with their nuclear power stance and I wont be joining or volunteering with them. My friend was very surprised about this because she also thought that nuclear power is bad and evil etc. Luckily she wasn't the kind of person to die on stupid hills and I managed to persuade her to pro-nuclear stance with my (very limited) knowledge of the issue.
Whenever nuclear power is a topic, I like to tell an anecdote, I have told it here on Tildes previously.. My dad worked in the local power station, he told me this story. The station uses peat as a power source. After a few decades of usage, they rebuilt the burning furnaces and sold the scarp metal to russia. On the border crossing the russian customs officials said that it had too much nuclear radiation to go over the border. So they solved the issue by taking the scarp metal to a landfill area, left it out for a summer. The rain washed away most of the radiation and they could take it over to russia. After hearing this story I did some research, apparently nuclear power plants have the least amount of radiation leaking to the outside because they have such rigorous limits for leaks etc. Burning peat and coal dont have that. Peat has a lot of natural radiation, when you dump tons and tons of it to one place and burn it, the radiation that is normally spread over vast areas in the nature, accumulate into that one place and are happily flying out of the chimneys.
It's cold war era thinking. The first generation hippies were raised under the fear of nuclear war and taught to hide under desks as a safety measure. Nuclear power was just something under the...
It's cold war era thinking. The first generation hippies were raised under the fear of nuclear war and taught to hide under desks as a safety measure. Nuclear power was just something under the same umbrella, so when you have have a generational subculture's mindset set as anti-government and anti-war, anti-nuclear is just tacked on the side.
Most everyone has moved on from cold war era thinking a long time ago. Sounds like the hippies should have as well.
I would go as far as to say that they havent done any research on the matter if they think they are ticking time bombs. But whatever the case is, this is going to hurt them in the long run. I know...
I would go as far as to say that they havent done any research on the matter if they think they are ticking time bombs. But whatever the case is, this is going to hurt them in the long run. I know that during the early days they got a lot of support because of their misunderstandings/lies but now that information is more freely available its easier to find out the truth.
It's a sad irony that anti-nuclear environmentalists may have single-handedly stopped us from preventing climate change. Safe, clean, nuclear power would have naturally taken over much of the grid...
It's a sad irony that anti-nuclear environmentalists may have single-handedly stopped us from preventing climate change. Safe, clean, nuclear power would have naturally taken over much of the grid due to standard market pressures if they just did nothing and would have bought us decades to work towards renewable technology by reducing emissions.
They may have just been inevitable though. Personally I have a pet theory that anti-nuclear sentiment was and is still being pushed discreetly by various security apparatuses purely as a way of stopping nuclear proliferation. By reducing demand for nuclear energy domestically and stopping the world from seeing how effective it is, foreign governments can't point to nuclear energy as an obvious need for their own grid. It's a lot easier to take the high ground to stop a country from getting nuclear bombs than it is to stop a country from wanting clean and cheap energy. Really it's just to preserve the status quo of nuclear powers.
A lot of my stance on nuclear power is based on statistics and a belief in entropy and corruption. Accidents will happen, and when they do, the risk for worst case scenarios is much higher than...
A lot of my stance on nuclear power is based on statistics and a belief in entropy and corruption. Accidents will happen, and when they do, the risk for worst case scenarios is much higher than with other forms of energy production. We still don’t really know what the consequences from fukushima is. And imagine if the train in palestine had been carrying nuclear material?
Better behavior for humanity would be to reduce demand.
You may want to re-think "worst case scenario", because we may be living it with how much coal we've been burning for the last 150 years. The impact of fossil fuel pollution on our health is far...
You may want to re-think "worst case scenario", because we may be living it with how much coal we've been burning for the last 150 years. The impact of fossil fuel pollution on our health is far more pronounced than you might expect, costing the world hundreds of billions in medical expenses, lost productivity, and early deaths. But people don't really think about it because it doesn't happen all at once when a coal power plant suddenly fails catastrophically.
The potential worst case scenarios for nuclear power can be heavily mitigated with better reactor designs and more modern fuel cycles, all of which would have been possible 30 years ago if heavy opposition to nuclear energy didn't basically kill the industry. Meanwhile, the last 30 years of continued coal burning has already killed millions and has set us on an unavoidable collision course with climate change that could kill millions more.
Even ignoring the effects of pollution, simply mining all the coal we burn has killed more people per megawatt of energy produced than nuclear energy has.
How about both (kind of)? Googling led me to: https://www.politico.com/story/2008/03/why-a-greenpeace-co-founder-went-nuclear-008835 ...and while Friends of the Earth certainly isn't pro-nuclear,...
Unfortunately, Patrick Moore is now a climate change denialist that claims Round Up is safe to drink. https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM https://youtu.be/RLqXkYrdmjY (near the end of the video, don't...
Unfortunately, Patrick Moore is now a climate change denialist that claims Round Up is safe to drink.
I love how Greenpeace cities the construction delays, when some of that delay is due to litigation that they either did directly or inspired. What many folks don't realize is that to really kill...
I love how Greenpeace cities the construction delays, when some of that delay is due to litigation that they either did directly or inspired.
What many folks don't realize is that to really kill off use of hydrocarbons, non-fossil fuel energy needs to be cheap and plentiful. We need to get off gas and oil for heating, cooking and plastics.
Plastics are a huge one. Almost all plastic is not recyclable using non- energy intensive methods. But if energy is cheap enough, it can be recycled which would help close the hydrocarbon loop.
What is the cheapest way to make massive amounts of energy? Nuclear.
Protests against nuclear energy has always definitely been way off the mark - it has never been safer. However, let us also not pretend that it is going to be what solves the climate crisis.
Protests against nuclear energy has always definitely been way off the mark - it has never been safer.
However, let us also not pretend that it is going to be what solves the climate crisis.
Of course its not but its the best thing we have to slow it down by getting rid of fossil fuels while we get the renewables into play properly. I personally haven't heard anyone saying that...
However, let us also not pretend that it is going to be what solves the climate crisis.
Of course its not but its the best thing we have to slow it down by getting rid of fossil fuels while we get the renewables into play properly. I personally haven't heard anyone saying that nuclear is THE solution.
Renewables are eating nuclear's lunch right now. They're cheaper and faster to deploy. There is IMO no need for new nuclear projects right now. Maybe in 20 years once some of these newer reactor...
Renewables are eating nuclear's lunch right now. They're cheaper and faster to deploy. There is IMO no need for new nuclear projects right now. Maybe in 20 years once some of these newer reactor types mature and we can reasonably claim to burn nuclear waste; or maybe once we run into post-climate-crisis issues of scaling our energy generation further. But right now, no need. Build stupid amounts of renewables. Arguably, a GW of nuclear built is money that you can't use to build more than 1 GW of renewables; even more so (presumably) 10 years from now. And AFIAR, that even includes the required storage and/or overbuild.
It's not really an either-or situation. The thing about renewables is that unless you happen to live in the parts of the world where geothermal energy is available, they're not reliable. Sometimes...
It's not really an either-or situation. The thing about renewables is that unless you happen to live in the parts of the world where geothermal energy is available, they're not reliable. Sometimes it's raining - sometimes its winter. Sometimes the wind isn't strong. But people still need energy. That's why Sweden, for instance, is heavily investing into more nuclear reactors - as it turns out, being high latitude is not amazing for your consistency in solar energy.
Grids need a mixture of energy generation, some of which need to be bedrock generation, that is reliable and can meet demand where other sources fail. Traditionally, that has been coal. To really transition off of fossil fuels in the grid, you need a real replacement for coal, and that is nuclear.
Let me address this comment along with @Grayscail 's together, just because once I explain why we don't strictly need nuclear, it'll also be clear why we won't start suddenly needing it in 10 or...
Exemplary
Let me address this comment along with @Grayscail 's together, just because once I explain why we don't strictly need nuclear, it'll also be clear why we won't start suddenly needing it in 10 or 20 years.
Caveats first: This is a blueprint for a renewable grid by a german academic (Prof. Quaschning) - I'm sure I've regaled Tildes with his playbook before. His work obviously focuses on Germany, so I'm not sure to what degree these ideas apply to countries with dissimilar effectivenesses of renewable generation, and I also can't promise that I'm relaying his ideas accurately. With that out of the way...
How do you convert to a renewable grid? Well, first of all you start building lots of renewables. Until you reach the point where renewable generation peaks above net consumption, you don't even need to have any storage. Until you reach the point where local renewable generation minus local consumption exceeds transport capacity, you also don't need to think about distribution. Longer-term, both of these are important factors. If you have more different sources of renewable energy, this is less of an issue: Wind and Solar for example usually give a decent approximation of real-world consumption. Solar can even be built to peak in mornings and evenings. So if Sweden can't do solar, maybe this plan wouldn't work as well for them. I'm going to keep looking at Germany though.
Germany has more solar capacity in the south and more wind capacity in the north (Fuck Bavaria and their stupid rules. If you know you know.) So if you want to use the sum of both to power all of Germany you need powerful transmission infrastructure. (To give an order of magnitude, the german relevant agency estimates 8 billion € for all the additional high-voltage capacity that is planned for the 2020s.) These powerful transmission lines help de-correlate power generation, i.e. smooth out generation, by connecting parts of the grid with different generation characteristics. Sweden might have options here by connecting to grids around the region (Norway, DK, baltics) to de-correlate generation, and by connecting e.g. wind power from the north and the south. If it's calm in the south but windy in the north, the south doesn't need to tap into storage just yet.
Next up, short term storage. This is mostly the job of batteries, as they are efficient, store decent amounts of power, can react quickly, and there's no relevant hard limits to how much you can build. Pumped hydro is doubtlessly much cheaper, but limited by geography. So, let's build batteries then, right? Only a relatively small amount of batteries can stabilize a grid quite a bit. I've previously done back-of-the-envelope math here with my own power consumption in a 2-person apartment: 2500 kWh/a. An electric car has about a 100kWh of battery capacity. That car could thus power my home for 2 weeks. We don't need two weeks, and certainly not tomorrow. For now, a few hours is already a nice little buffer. While we're building up our renewable generation, we can slowly build that storage capacity up to a level there or thereabouts. Note that we can use newer battery technologies as they come online. We're also not nearly as limited as electric cars in what kind of performance these batteries have: We don't need lightweight and small, we just need efficient and cheap. But even if we don't assume that future technologies will come to save our asses, we'll be fine with existing battery technologies. Note also that with this simple calculus, a battery that can power my home independently of the grid for two weeks can extend that life even when it's calm and dark for a while longer if I use the trickle of power that the grid is still producing. So this battery will not really die after two weeks; that's an unreaslistic worst case.
Ok, now long term storage, and this is where people usually don't see an option and thus think we need base load capable power plants to tide us over. It's crucial here that how much we actually use this depends on how de-correlated our eletricity generation is (thus reducing the odds of continued insufficient generation over multiple days) and how much storage we have. The more storage, the better our generation is de-correlated, the less long-term storage we need.[1] Since long-term storage is expensive, we want to push our reliance on this as low as possible, using previous steps. With that out of the way, how do we store power? Synthetic gas. Depending on your convictions and infrastructure, this could be hydrogen, synthetic methane or synthetic ammonia. Hydrogen is a fickle beast, but it's also the energy-intensive step of making ammonia or methane. So, whenever generation exceeds demand, use excess generation to make hydrogen. The plants for this are dead simple: Just zap water with electricity. Optionally, a few additional steps to make sure the hydrogen is more easily stored and handled, and off into the gas grid it goes. The gas grid, handily, has both storage infrastructure to the tune of almost a month of primary energy needand also a way to convert that gas back into power. Also, those gas power plants are relatively cheap to build, so it's not like we're building expensive infrastructure with no intent to use it. This approach also offers a nice transition towards long-term storage: The emergency energy storage is already there, it's just that right now we're filling it using the cleanest among the fossil energy sources - natural gas. As we build up renewables, base load plants start to lose economic viability, so we're going to lose our coal plants first. Gas plants stay partially online in peaker duty. And as we build up renewables to where we have substantial excess generation, we start generating synthetic methane that we feed into the grid, reducing the need for natural gas. This also offers us a handy way of using biomass methane - currently that's being burned continuously, but what you really want is to push that into the grid and store it for a rainy day. There's also the benefit that the long-term energy storage can be effectively shipped around the world to balance out grids world wide.
If you're now thinking: But wait, couldn't we just build a few nuclear plants to fix that expensive long-term storage problem? The answer, IMO, is "yes, but". You could, but you're building nuclear plants for the purpose of running them a few weeks a year at best. Of course you're going to run them more than that in the hopes of offsetting your investment, but while renewables dominate the market, they also set the price, which means a nuclear plant can't really compete. They're going to operate at a loss for most of the year. So: In my expert-informed opinion you don't really need them. If you already have them, by all means, use those nuclear plants. But as long as there's still spots out there to put wind turbines, I don't see the need for new ones.
That doesn't mean I think you shouldn't. There's reasonable political reasons to want nuclear power plants; but I don't think they're strictly informed by the needs to generate electricity. Could be because one wants those bombs, or because one wants to keep that industry around just in case. Could also be one disagrees with some of the assumptions that go into the above playbook. But I think I've given a reasonable view into how we can make do without nuclear power, and I'm personally convinced that within that environment, nuclear power is economically unviable even if you account for storage issues.
[1] Taking energy-intensive industries offline is also worth a thought here, particularly if the business has the necessary flexibility to do so. Maybe a blast furnace can't be turned off at a moment's notice, but maybe chemical plants can adapt to the availability of electricity and build flexible, cheap and inefficient plants rather than efficient, inflexible and expensive ones. Then they could build twice as much capacity as previously and run it only when power is basically free. This decreases overall reliance on storage.
I appreciate you giving a thorough explanation. I agree with the general point that nuclear power is not necessary. I think that if any grid wants to reconfigure their grid to DC that could work,...
I appreciate you giving a thorough explanation.
I agree with the general point that nuclear power is not necessary. I think that if any grid wants to reconfigure their grid to DC that could work, and if they want to stick with an AC grid then as long as they invest in synchronous condensers then that would probably be fine too.
I'm unconvinced that that will happen. I think some of the analysis of the economics involved use current market conditions and marginal prices and extend them out to covering 100% of the grid, which might not work. Electricity pricing in my country works such that everyone gets paid out at the rate if the highest bidder within a block. Which is to say that when solar and wind are mixed with something more expensive like coal or gas, they get paid at the higher rate and get to pocket the difference. That stops happening once you're filling the whole grid with solar at some times, or all wind at some times, and don't have something more expensive to set the price.
I also worry that people are encouraging flooding the grid with asynchronous sources without worrying about frequency stability loss from taking all the synchronous sources out. I saw a paper recently arguing that Africa as a whole might want to reconsider or halt even their hydropower development because solar and wind are so cheap. But the analysis in the paper still ends up requiring coal and natural gas to provide frequency stability, and it just downplays the environmental impact of that by assuming coal and nat gas with CCS. I think at a macroeconomic analysis this might look like it's a good idea, but that conclusion is based on projections of CCS technology that might be just coal companies blowing smoke, so to speak.
I do like your idea about hydrogen. I think even disregarding everything else we should pursue that just because ammonia is needed for fertilizer and other chemicals and hydrogen can be used for steel foundries. But from what I've seen it seems like it'd be risky to try to use existing natural gas infrastructure to move it. Hydrogen is really small and leaks about of everything, and it's easy to ignite. If it were used as some kind of energy storage I would think it would be more likely that it gets made and stored on site and run through a fuel cell or something.
I'm worried that what will happen is the same thing that happened 50 some years ago. Environmentalists were aware that carbon emissions were a problem, and they were aware that nuclear accidents were a problem, but they decided that nuclear accidents posed the bigger risk. Which they do, in terms of the worst case scenario. But we aren't dealing with the worst case scenario. We are dealing with the mundane low risk scenario that we didn't do anything about for 50 years, even though we had an opportunity. I think the conversation we are having now is similar to the conversations people had back in the 80s, and I feel like the world made the wrong choice back then by not pursuing every avenue it could right from the start.
But all that said, you are entitled to your opinion and I don't think there's anything that makes your perspective wrong, just different from mine.
Cheers! I appreciate the reply. On most things, I think I agree. For example, how we set the price for electricity - that's a system that was designed for a grid that heavily relied on power with...
Cheers! I appreciate the reply. On most things, I think I agree. For example, how we set the price for electricity - that's a system that was designed for a grid that heavily relied on power with large marginal costs - which renewables don't have. So renewables would in theory go as low as 0, because if it doesn't cost you anything to make power, you take anything you can get to offset your investment. That breaks the price to such a degree as to not offset investments enough. Which is a problem. The bright side of it is that power gets ridiculously cheap for the consumer. We can square these two away, charge the consumer extra and use that to compensate renewable plants. How we structure a market around this, I don't know, but it's a market problem for sure. It's not like the money isn't there. Regardless, it's a feature of every post-fossil energy market. Adding nuclear to the mix will only help a little bit because nuclear too has most of its costs regardless of whether it's making any juice.
As for frequency stability, isn't the simple but maybe suboptimal solution here to just throw more spinning mass at the problem? I.e. flywheels.
And as for hydrogen infrastructure, if I'm not mistaken there's some cheap stuff you can do to give at least bigger pipes a H2-proof lining. And we're building H2-capable pipes by now, I believe. That would mean we'd have to get rid of small-scale consumers, but that's probably a good idea regardless. In any case, my proposal was to store the CH4 or NH3 centrally, so the H2 wouldn't move through distribution pipes. Maybe some localized storage so you can make lots of H2 quickly and digest it slowly while excess power is already gone, but that's probably difficult to do. Also, if I'm not mistaken, H2 leaks are very slow (unless the pipe would also leak other gasses) so it's not much of a safety concern. I'd not expect explosive mixtures, just efficiency losses. Well, maybe hydrogen embrittlement, but I can't say whether that even applies outside of aerospace applications.
Yeah, this is exactly it. Ideally we'll want to get to 100% renewables, but that is not going to happen in a short enough time-frame. Nuclear is going to need to be part of any realistic plan to...
Yeah, this is exactly it. Ideally we'll want to get to 100% renewables, but that is not going to happen in a short enough time-frame. Nuclear is going to need to be part of any realistic plan to lower carbon emissions. At this point, I don't think there's away around geo-engineering as well.
I agree we need to build stupid amounts of renewables but at the same time we need to make sure the grid is balanced and that in 20 years when the older nuclear stations start to be at the end of...
I agree we need to build stupid amounts of renewables but at the same time we need to make sure the grid is balanced and that in 20 years when the older nuclear stations start to be at the end of their lives, we need to (probably) replace them. Building a nuclear plant takes a loooong time (check out Olkiluoto and its many issues), so IMO we should be building some all the time. Not in an effort to replace everything else with nuclear but to make sure we are not caught with our pants down when we realise we need new ones in a few years. I'd rather we spent a decade building one plant properly than do it in 2 years in a hurry.
Isn't it that pretty much all nuclear countries redefine lifetimes as necessary? Even the ones who are still building new ones? Maybe not Korea and Japan, as they've kept building at a moderate...
At this time, pretty much all governments in the world who have vowed not to build new nuclear power plants are redefining the corresponding end of life dates of pre-existing nuclear power plants and are just extending their lifetime as long as needed, sometimes by 30-40 years.
Isn't it that pretty much all nuclear countries redefine lifetimes as necessary? Even the ones who are still building new ones? Maybe not Korea and Japan, as they've kept building at a moderate pace, but e.g. France is sitting on a fleet of reactors that they can't begin to replace before EOL.
I get frustrated when I see this kind of sentiment, because on one hand people say that it's too late to consider nuclear and maybe if we had done it 10 or 20 years ago when people were asking...
I get frustrated when I see this kind of sentiment, because on one hand people say that it's too late to consider nuclear and maybe if we had done it 10 or 20 years ago when people were asking about it that would be fine, but now it's too late, it could be 10 or 15 years before these get built.
And then on the other hand you have people saying there's no point in doing something right now, yes maybe the last 10-15% of the grid cant be done with renewables alone, but we won't have to deal with that for like 10 years, let's just worry about it then.
And then when that does come up it'll just be too late again.
I disagree on your general premise but it's like to bring up interstellar exploration specifically. In the short term NASA uses MMRTGs (essentially a uranium battery) to power rovers and other...
There is IMO no need for new nuclear projects right now.
I disagree on your general premise but it's like to bring up interstellar exploration specifically. In the short term NASA uses MMRTGs (essentially a uranium battery) to power rovers and other exploratory vessels. In the mid term nuclear is likely our best option for manned mission to anything farther than Mars.
For me the answer to which technology should we use to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is always all of them.
Yes, some of us protested in the 70s against nuclear power because we were duped by the fossil fuel industry. And yes, some of us protested nuclear energy because we were anti-institutional...
Yes, some of us protested in the 70s against nuclear power because we were duped by the fossil fuel industry. And yes, some of us protested nuclear energy because we were anti-institutional hippies. But most of us, including myself, weren’t protesting the science and engineering of nuclear power, we were protesting it AS IT WAS IMPLEMENTED.
There’s a grand collective amnesia surrounding this subject today. It was well-established at the time that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was one of the most corrupt and ill-run agencies in the country.
In those days, there was absolutely a connection between the nuclear power industry and the black budget nuclear weapons industry. I recognize that no such connection exists anymore but in all these new online campaigns about the glory of nuclear power, I’ve never had my concerns allayed about the reestablishment of its corrupt misuse once again.
This country is extremely good at writing blank checks to power companies and providing little to no oversight. In these comments, people say that without the environmentalist anti-nuclear left we would have avoided climate change. But I would argue that without our protests, Three mile island would have just been the beginning.
In the position that we are in today we should be pushing for solar and wind energy (onshore wind is the cheapest form of power available today, and photovoltaic cells are pretty cheap too and...
In the position that we are in today we should be pushing for solar and wind energy (onshore wind is the cheapest form of power available today, and photovoltaic cells are pretty cheap too and it's really amazing how much the cost has come down by – they also allow mixed land use, for example sheep farming has become profitable in the US again because sheep and solar panels can coexist but methane-emitting cows cannot). A lot of the issue here is around redesigning grids to work with the periodic nature of such power; it requires a lot of weather forecasting and incentives for industry and consumers to match their consumption to available supply.
One big issue is also winter. Where I'm from the sun doesnt rise for weeks during winter. The streams, rivers and even the sea freeze. Wind is available but highly unreliable.
One big issue is also winter. Where I'm from the sun doesnt rise for weeks during winter. The streams, rivers and even the sea freeze. Wind is available but highly unreliable.
That is definitely a problem (although in most places I think that it is less of a problem, as there is still sun, just less of it), and a reason why multi-modal power generation is necessary. We...
That is definitely a problem (although in most places I think that it is less of a problem, as there is still sun, just less of it), and a reason why multi-modal power generation is necessary. We can also build power lines (or export green hydrogen) between countries with lots of sun, and those without.
You write that as if sheep don't fart or poop. Individual sheep don't produce as much methane as individual cattle but you can also support more of them than cattle.
You write that as if sheep don't fart or poop. Individual sheep don't produce as much methane as individual cattle but you can also support more of them than cattle.
When I was a early teenager, I was the treehugging hippie of my friend group. One of my friends suggested that I should join greenpeace and start volunteering with them. I thought it was a good idea and started to research things, in the end I decided that greenpeace has done more bad than good with their nuclear power stance and I wont be joining or volunteering with them. My friend was very surprised about this because she also thought that nuclear power is bad and evil etc. Luckily she wasn't the kind of person to die on stupid hills and I managed to persuade her to pro-nuclear stance with my (very limited) knowledge of the issue.
Whenever nuclear power is a topic, I like to tell an anecdote, I have told it here on Tildes previously.. My dad worked in the local power station, he told me this story. The station uses peat as a power source. After a few decades of usage, they rebuilt the burning furnaces and sold the scarp metal to russia. On the border crossing the russian customs officials said that it had too much nuclear radiation to go over the border. So they solved the issue by taking the scarp metal to a landfill area, left it out for a summer. The rain washed away most of the radiation and they could take it over to russia. After hearing this story I did some research, apparently nuclear power plants have the least amount of radiation leaking to the outside because they have such rigorous limits for leaks etc. Burning peat and coal dont have that. Peat has a lot of natural radiation, when you dump tons and tons of it to one place and burn it, the radiation that is normally spread over vast areas in the nature, accumulate into that one place and are happily flying out of the chimneys.
It's cold war era thinking. The first generation hippies were raised under the fear of nuclear war and taught to hide under desks as a safety measure. Nuclear power was just something under the same umbrella, so when you have have a generational subculture's mindset set as anti-government and anti-war, anti-nuclear is just tacked on the side.
Most everyone has moved on from cold war era thinking a long time ago. Sounds like the hippies should have as well.
I would go as far as to say that they havent done any research on the matter if they think they are ticking time bombs. But whatever the case is, this is going to hurt them in the long run. I know that during the early days they got a lot of support because of their misunderstandings/lies but now that information is more freely available its easier to find out the truth.
It's a sad irony that anti-nuclear environmentalists may have single-handedly stopped us from preventing climate change. Safe, clean, nuclear power would have naturally taken over much of the grid due to standard market pressures if they just did nothing and would have bought us decades to work towards renewable technology by reducing emissions.
They may have just been inevitable though. Personally I have a pet theory that anti-nuclear sentiment was and is still being pushed discreetly by various security apparatuses purely as a way of stopping nuclear proliferation. By reducing demand for nuclear energy domestically and stopping the world from seeing how effective it is, foreign governments can't point to nuclear energy as an obvious need for their own grid. It's a lot easier to take the high ground to stop a country from getting nuclear bombs than it is to stop a country from wanting clean and cheap energy. Really it's just to preserve the status quo of nuclear powers.
It really does seem like any time there's an especially shitty situation, there's a corporate lobby right in the middle of it.
I would not be surprised by that at all.
A lot of my stance on nuclear power is based on statistics and a belief in entropy and corruption. Accidents will happen, and when they do, the risk for worst case scenarios is much higher than with other forms of energy production. We still don’t really know what the consequences from fukushima is. And imagine if the train in palestine had been carrying nuclear material?
Better behavior for humanity would be to reduce demand.
You may want to re-think "worst case scenario", because we may be living it with how much coal we've been burning for the last 150 years. The impact of fossil fuel pollution on our health is far more pronounced than you might expect, costing the world hundreds of billions in medical expenses, lost productivity, and early deaths. But people don't really think about it because it doesn't happen all at once when a coal power plant suddenly fails catastrophically.
The potential worst case scenarios for nuclear power can be heavily mitigated with better reactor designs and more modern fuel cycles, all of which would have been possible 30 years ago if heavy opposition to nuclear energy didn't basically kill the industry. Meanwhile, the last 30 years of continued coal burning has already killed millions and has set us on an unavoidable collision course with climate change that could kill millions more.
Even ignoring the effects of pollution, simply mining all the coal we burn has killed more people per megawatt of energy produced than nuclear energy has.
Even the original founder of Greenpeace is pro-nuclear.
Actually, might be Friends of the Earth... but it's definitely one of them 🤦🏻♂️
How about both (kind of)?
Googling led me to: https://www.politico.com/story/2008/03/why-a-greenpeace-co-founder-went-nuclear-008835
...and while Friends of the Earth certainly isn't pro-nuclear, it's less anti-nuclear than before. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2014/sep/12/friends-of-the-earths-shift-on-nuclear-should-be-celebrated-not-denied
Unfortunately, Patrick Moore is now a climate change denialist that claims Round Up is safe to drink.
https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM
https://youtu.be/RLqXkYrdmjY (near the end of the video, don't have a timestamp)
I love how Greenpeace cities the construction delays, when some of that delay is due to litigation that they either did directly or inspired.
What many folks don't realize is that to really kill off use of hydrocarbons, non-fossil fuel energy needs to be cheap and plentiful. We need to get off gas and oil for heating, cooking and plastics.
Plastics are a huge one. Almost all plastic is not recyclable using non- energy intensive methods. But if energy is cheap enough, it can be recycled which would help close the hydrocarbon loop.
What is the cheapest way to make massive amounts of energy? Nuclear.
Protests against nuclear energy has always definitely been way off the mark - it has never been safer.
However, let us also not pretend that it is going to be what solves the climate crisis.
Of course its not but its the best thing we have to slow it down by getting rid of fossil fuels while we get the renewables into play properly. I personally haven't heard anyone saying that nuclear is THE solution.
Renewables are eating nuclear's lunch right now. They're cheaper and faster to deploy. There is IMO no need for new nuclear projects right now. Maybe in 20 years once some of these newer reactor types mature and we can reasonably claim to burn nuclear waste; or maybe once we run into post-climate-crisis issues of scaling our energy generation further. But right now, no need. Build stupid amounts of renewables. Arguably, a GW of nuclear built is money that you can't use to build more than 1 GW of renewables; even more so (presumably) 10 years from now. And AFIAR, that even includes the required storage and/or overbuild.
It's not really an either-or situation. The thing about renewables is that unless you happen to live in the parts of the world where geothermal energy is available, they're not reliable. Sometimes it's raining - sometimes its winter. Sometimes the wind isn't strong. But people still need energy. That's why Sweden, for instance, is heavily investing into more nuclear reactors - as it turns out, being high latitude is not amazing for your consistency in solar energy.
Grids need a mixture of energy generation, some of which need to be bedrock generation, that is reliable and can meet demand where other sources fail. Traditionally, that has been coal. To really transition off of fossil fuels in the grid, you need a real replacement for coal, and that is nuclear.
Let me address this comment along with @Grayscail 's together, just because once I explain why we don't strictly need nuclear, it'll also be clear why we won't start suddenly needing it in 10 or 20 years.
Caveats first: This is a blueprint for a renewable grid by a german academic (Prof. Quaschning) - I'm sure I've regaled Tildes with his playbook before. His work obviously focuses on Germany, so I'm not sure to what degree these ideas apply to countries with dissimilar effectivenesses of renewable generation, and I also can't promise that I'm relaying his ideas accurately. With that out of the way...
How do you convert to a renewable grid? Well, first of all you start building lots of renewables. Until you reach the point where renewable generation peaks above net consumption, you don't even need to have any storage. Until you reach the point where local renewable generation minus local consumption exceeds transport capacity, you also don't need to think about distribution. Longer-term, both of these are important factors. If you have more different sources of renewable energy, this is less of an issue: Wind and Solar for example usually give a decent approximation of real-world consumption. Solar can even be built to peak in mornings and evenings. So if Sweden can't do solar, maybe this plan wouldn't work as well for them. I'm going to keep looking at Germany though.
Germany has more solar capacity in the south and more wind capacity in the north (Fuck Bavaria and their stupid rules. If you know you know.) So if you want to use the sum of both to power all of Germany you need powerful transmission infrastructure. (To give an order of magnitude, the german relevant agency estimates 8 billion € for all the additional high-voltage capacity that is planned for the 2020s.) These powerful transmission lines help de-correlate power generation, i.e. smooth out generation, by connecting parts of the grid with different generation characteristics. Sweden might have options here by connecting to grids around the region (Norway, DK, baltics) to de-correlate generation, and by connecting e.g. wind power from the north and the south. If it's calm in the south but windy in the north, the south doesn't need to tap into storage just yet.
Next up, short term storage. This is mostly the job of batteries, as they are efficient, store decent amounts of power, can react quickly, and there's no relevant hard limits to how much you can build. Pumped hydro is doubtlessly much cheaper, but limited by geography. So, let's build batteries then, right? Only a relatively small amount of batteries can stabilize a grid quite a bit. I've previously done back-of-the-envelope math here with my own power consumption in a 2-person apartment: 2500 kWh/a. An electric car has about a 100kWh of battery capacity. That car could thus power my home for 2 weeks. We don't need two weeks, and certainly not tomorrow. For now, a few hours is already a nice little buffer. While we're building up our renewable generation, we can slowly build that storage capacity up to a level there or thereabouts. Note that we can use newer battery technologies as they come online. We're also not nearly as limited as electric cars in what kind of performance these batteries have: We don't need lightweight and small, we just need efficient and cheap. But even if we don't assume that future technologies will come to save our asses, we'll be fine with existing battery technologies. Note also that with this simple calculus, a battery that can power my home independently of the grid for two weeks can extend that life even when it's calm and dark for a while longer if I use the trickle of power that the grid is still producing. So this battery will not really die after two weeks; that's an unreaslistic worst case.
Ok, now long term storage, and this is where people usually don't see an option and thus think we need base load capable power plants to tide us over. It's crucial here that how much we actually use this depends on how de-correlated our eletricity generation is (thus reducing the odds of continued insufficient generation over multiple days) and how much storage we have. The more storage, the better our generation is de-correlated, the less long-term storage we need.[1] Since long-term storage is expensive, we want to push our reliance on this as low as possible, using previous steps. With that out of the way, how do we store power? Synthetic gas. Depending on your convictions and infrastructure, this could be hydrogen, synthetic methane or synthetic ammonia. Hydrogen is a fickle beast, but it's also the energy-intensive step of making ammonia or methane. So, whenever generation exceeds demand, use excess generation to make hydrogen. The plants for this are dead simple: Just zap water with electricity. Optionally, a few additional steps to make sure the hydrogen is more easily stored and handled, and off into the gas grid it goes. The gas grid, handily, has both storage infrastructure to the tune of almost a month of primary energy need and also a way to convert that gas back into power. Also, those gas power plants are relatively cheap to build, so it's not like we're building expensive infrastructure with no intent to use it. This approach also offers a nice transition towards long-term storage: The emergency energy storage is already there, it's just that right now we're filling it using the cleanest among the fossil energy sources - natural gas. As we build up renewables, base load plants start to lose economic viability, so we're going to lose our coal plants first. Gas plants stay partially online in peaker duty. And as we build up renewables to where we have substantial excess generation, we start generating synthetic methane that we feed into the grid, reducing the need for natural gas. This also offers us a handy way of using biomass methane - currently that's being burned continuously, but what you really want is to push that into the grid and store it for a rainy day. There's also the benefit that the long-term energy storage can be effectively shipped around the world to balance out grids world wide.
If you're now thinking: But wait, couldn't we just build a few nuclear plants to fix that expensive long-term storage problem? The answer, IMO, is "yes, but". You could, but you're building nuclear plants for the purpose of running them a few weeks a year at best. Of course you're going to run them more than that in the hopes of offsetting your investment, but while renewables dominate the market, they also set the price, which means a nuclear plant can't really compete. They're going to operate at a loss for most of the year. So: In my expert-informed opinion you don't really need them. If you already have them, by all means, use those nuclear plants. But as long as there's still spots out there to put wind turbines, I don't see the need for new ones.
That doesn't mean I think you shouldn't. There's reasonable political reasons to want nuclear power plants; but I don't think they're strictly informed by the needs to generate electricity. Could be because one wants those bombs, or because one wants to keep that industry around just in case. Could also be one disagrees with some of the assumptions that go into the above playbook. But I think I've given a reasonable view into how we can make do without nuclear power, and I'm personally convinced that within that environment, nuclear power is economically unviable even if you account for storage issues.
[1] Taking energy-intensive industries offline is also worth a thought here, particularly if the business has the necessary flexibility to do so. Maybe a blast furnace can't be turned off at a moment's notice, but maybe chemical plants can adapt to the availability of electricity and build flexible, cheap and inefficient plants rather than efficient, inflexible and expensive ones. Then they could build twice as much capacity as previously and run it only when power is basically free. This decreases overall reliance on storage.
I appreciate you giving a thorough explanation.
I agree with the general point that nuclear power is not necessary. I think that if any grid wants to reconfigure their grid to DC that could work, and if they want to stick with an AC grid then as long as they invest in synchronous condensers then that would probably be fine too.
I'm unconvinced that that will happen. I think some of the analysis of the economics involved use current market conditions and marginal prices and extend them out to covering 100% of the grid, which might not work. Electricity pricing in my country works such that everyone gets paid out at the rate if the highest bidder within a block. Which is to say that when solar and wind are mixed with something more expensive like coal or gas, they get paid at the higher rate and get to pocket the difference. That stops happening once you're filling the whole grid with solar at some times, or all wind at some times, and don't have something more expensive to set the price.
I also worry that people are encouraging flooding the grid with asynchronous sources without worrying about frequency stability loss from taking all the synchronous sources out. I saw a paper recently arguing that Africa as a whole might want to reconsider or halt even their hydropower development because solar and wind are so cheap. But the analysis in the paper still ends up requiring coal and natural gas to provide frequency stability, and it just downplays the environmental impact of that by assuming coal and nat gas with CCS. I think at a macroeconomic analysis this might look like it's a good idea, but that conclusion is based on projections of CCS technology that might be just coal companies blowing smoke, so to speak.
I do like your idea about hydrogen. I think even disregarding everything else we should pursue that just because ammonia is needed for fertilizer and other chemicals and hydrogen can be used for steel foundries. But from what I've seen it seems like it'd be risky to try to use existing natural gas infrastructure to move it. Hydrogen is really small and leaks about of everything, and it's easy to ignite. If it were used as some kind of energy storage I would think it would be more likely that it gets made and stored on site and run through a fuel cell or something.
I'm worried that what will happen is the same thing that happened 50 some years ago. Environmentalists were aware that carbon emissions were a problem, and they were aware that nuclear accidents were a problem, but they decided that nuclear accidents posed the bigger risk. Which they do, in terms of the worst case scenario. But we aren't dealing with the worst case scenario. We are dealing with the mundane low risk scenario that we didn't do anything about for 50 years, even though we had an opportunity. I think the conversation we are having now is similar to the conversations people had back in the 80s, and I feel like the world made the wrong choice back then by not pursuing every avenue it could right from the start.
But all that said, you are entitled to your opinion and I don't think there's anything that makes your perspective wrong, just different from mine.
Cheers! I appreciate the reply. On most things, I think I agree. For example, how we set the price for electricity - that's a system that was designed for a grid that heavily relied on power with large marginal costs - which renewables don't have. So renewables would in theory go as low as 0, because if it doesn't cost you anything to make power, you take anything you can get to offset your investment. That breaks the price to such a degree as to not offset investments enough. Which is a problem. The bright side of it is that power gets ridiculously cheap for the consumer. We can square these two away, charge the consumer extra and use that to compensate renewable plants. How we structure a market around this, I don't know, but it's a market problem for sure. It's not like the money isn't there. Regardless, it's a feature of every post-fossil energy market. Adding nuclear to the mix will only help a little bit because nuclear too has most of its costs regardless of whether it's making any juice.
As for frequency stability, isn't the simple but maybe suboptimal solution here to just throw more spinning mass at the problem? I.e. flywheels.
And as for hydrogen infrastructure, if I'm not mistaken there's some cheap stuff you can do to give at least bigger pipes a H2-proof lining. And we're building H2-capable pipes by now, I believe. That would mean we'd have to get rid of small-scale consumers, but that's probably a good idea regardless. In any case, my proposal was to store the CH4 or NH3 centrally, so the H2 wouldn't move through distribution pipes. Maybe some localized storage so you can make lots of H2 quickly and digest it slowly while excess power is already gone, but that's probably difficult to do. Also, if I'm not mistaken, H2 leaks are very slow (unless the pipe would also leak other gasses) so it's not much of a safety concern. I'd not expect explosive mixtures, just efficiency losses. Well, maybe hydrogen embrittlement, but I can't say whether that even applies outside of aerospace applications.
Yeah, this is exactly it. Ideally we'll want to get to 100% renewables, but that is not going to happen in a short enough time-frame. Nuclear is going to need to be part of any realistic plan to lower carbon emissions. At this point, I don't think there's away around geo-engineering as well.
I agree we need to build stupid amounts of renewables but at the same time we need to make sure the grid is balanced and that in 20 years when the older nuclear stations start to be at the end of their lives, we need to (probably) replace them. Building a nuclear plant takes a loooong time (check out Olkiluoto and its many issues), so IMO we should be building some all the time. Not in an effort to replace everything else with nuclear but to make sure we are not caught with our pants down when we realise we need new ones in a few years. I'd rather we spent a decade building one plant properly than do it in 2 years in a hurry.
Isn't it that pretty much all nuclear countries redefine lifetimes as necessary? Even the ones who are still building new ones? Maybe not Korea and Japan, as they've kept building at a moderate pace, but e.g. France is sitting on a fleet of reactors that they can't begin to replace before EOL.
I get frustrated when I see this kind of sentiment, because on one hand people say that it's too late to consider nuclear and maybe if we had done it 10 or 20 years ago when people were asking about it that would be fine, but now it's too late, it could be 10 or 15 years before these get built.
And then on the other hand you have people saying there's no point in doing something right now, yes maybe the last 10-15% of the grid cant be done with renewables alone, but we won't have to deal with that for like 10 years, let's just worry about it then.
And then when that does come up it'll just be too late again.
I disagree on your general premise but it's like to bring up interstellar exploration specifically. In the short term NASA uses MMRTGs (essentially a uranium battery) to power rovers and other exploratory vessels. In the mid term nuclear is likely our best option for manned mission to anything farther than Mars.
For me the answer to which technology should we use to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is always all of them.
I hope this trend continues. We need to view nuclear as part of the sphere and strategy of clean energy.
Yes, some of us protested in the 70s against nuclear power because we were duped by the fossil fuel industry. And yes, some of us protested nuclear energy because we were anti-institutional hippies. But most of us, including myself, weren’t protesting the science and engineering of nuclear power, we were protesting it AS IT WAS IMPLEMENTED.
There’s a grand collective amnesia surrounding this subject today. It was well-established at the time that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was one of the most corrupt and ill-run agencies in the country.
In those days, there was absolutely a connection between the nuclear power industry and the black budget nuclear weapons industry. I recognize that no such connection exists anymore but in all these new online campaigns about the glory of nuclear power, I’ve never had my concerns allayed about the reestablishment of its corrupt misuse once again.
This country is extremely good at writing blank checks to power companies and providing little to no oversight. In these comments, people say that without the environmentalist anti-nuclear left we would have avoided climate change. But I would argue that without our protests, Three mile island would have just been the beginning.
In the position that we are in today we should be pushing for solar and wind energy (onshore wind is the cheapest form of power available today, and photovoltaic cells are pretty cheap too and it's really amazing how much the cost has come down by – they also allow mixed land use, for example sheep farming has become profitable in the US again because sheep and solar panels can coexist but methane-emitting cows cannot). A lot of the issue here is around redesigning grids to work with the periodic nature of such power; it requires a lot of weather forecasting and incentives for industry and consumers to match their consumption to available supply.
One big issue is also winter. Where I'm from the sun doesnt rise for weeks during winter. The streams, rivers and even the sea freeze. Wind is available but highly unreliable.
That is definitely a problem (although in most places I think that it is less of a problem, as there is still sun, just less of it), and a reason why multi-modal power generation is necessary. We can also build power lines (or export green hydrogen) between countries with lots of sun, and those without.
You write that as if sheep don't fart or poop. Individual sheep don't produce as much methane as individual cattle but you can also support more of them than cattle.