I hope people noticed the part about subsidizing coal. Natural gas is so cheap that coal is no longer competitive, which is a good thing.
The administration is extending the life of coal plants that aren’t profitable.
Some would argue coal has to go at all costs, and I understand it is awful for the environment and kills people due to pollution (absolutely horrible). However, getting rid of nuclear and coal completely is premature according to much of the literature put out by independent and neutral parties. It's ok for places like Germany to get rid of Nuclear power when they can get it from France down the road.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/thats-a-recor...
>would have had rolling blackouts with millions in damage.
Well. There is more than one solution to that problem. What batteries bring to the table are grid stability, which addresses exactly the types of damage problems you are talking about.
We will do this, do not worry. But give it 5 years, maybe a decade.
Add a carbon tax, then maybe nuclear might still make sense.
It's the job of the State (in broad terms) to either force how that's supposed to work through legislation, or to nudge it with legislated incentives.
If what we have now is that coal is a guarantor for base load conditions, I can see how a politician may come to the (on the surface) reasonable conclusion that we need to prop up the guarantor of base load, coal in this case, if coal was in danger of being closed due to it not being profitable anymore.
This kind of thinking has a LOT of precedent in other areas. (The US subsidized corn to make starvation in case of a global blockade/war impossible. The EU subsidized farms in general for the same reason.) These stop gap measures can easily spiral out of control.
What see is a severe lack of vision. We should legislate, by force or nudge, towards a bright solution with modern solutions. Batteries, a decentralized grid etc is much better option for national security than some large coal plants.
Not just defending status quo.
Several regions of our grid don't have near enough of these resources. You might only have 10% of your fuel-mix as renewable, but the percentage is constantly growing.
Having a nuclear plant that can generate a freaking GW 24/7 for years gives you fuel diversity and security. Coal plants typically have months of fuel on-site.
In the future, we can imagine tons and tons of renewable and batteries working together for a distributed and secure grid, but we're just not there yet despite a lot of excitement just like Musk hasn't really setup a Mars colony yet.
If only Trump wasn't hell-bent on spoiling that relationship.
That's a bullshit ticket to do anything they want. Next.
> grid resiliency
As others have mentioned, batteries. Next.
> unprofitable nuclear (from GP)
> However, getting rid of nuclear
Do you recognize the difference between antiquated, unprofitable nuclear power plants and modern ones like those in the article? Your comment seems to lump them all togther, which suggests you don't. The US has many of the former and none of the latter. The latter would be beneficial.
The only real option we have right now is hydro and more expansive hvdc grids.
Subsidizing running it when you only need it around as reserve seems like a really bad idea.
While I do think other renewable energy sources (solar/wind/geothermo) are the true safer source for mankind's long term continuity, I don't think we can achieve carbon neutral without Nuclear. If we discourage nuclear, it might not even matter in the carbon neutral in 50 years as climate change could potentially wipe a lot of us out on mother earth as it's currently enroute to a irreversible disastrous future.
[1] https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/natural...
Somehow I don't think nuclear has any chance of coming back. The tone of the article is that no one can figure out how to build them.
By the time we have lots of nuclear plants, we'll have even more cheap solar panels and cheap batteries.
Probably true, for the better. But we shouldn't shut down all the existing nuclear plants prematurely simply we fear a meltdown. Newer design are MUCH safer and Fukushima type meltdown is much less possible.
Don't forget, the weather dependent, and high peak output during daytime but zero output at night time nature of the solar is still unresolved until mass grid-scale battery or some sort of energy storage device is deployed ubiquitous into our power infrastructure. That's gonna take forever.
We haven't found another truly safe and renewable yet mass-scale energy source yet - nuclear is one right now. Don't abandon it before we find a reliable replacement.
Given how hysteric the response is to radiation risk, I'd really like to see a trustworthy source describe how and why the legal limits are set to what they are - maybe one day I will.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136
Fortunately, the meltdown at Fukushima didn't cause too much damage, but that was mostly just luck and a beneficial location. Can you imagine the cost and disruption of a similar meltdown 25 miles outside of New York City? Or at the Pilgrim Nuclear Station that's ~30 miles outside of Boston?
Fundamentally the reason it is hard for average citizens to understand the dangers of radioactive materials, is because humans are pretty bad at understanding huge numbers, similar to how we are poor at dealing with low probabilities.
The big number in question is avogadro's number. A tiny speck of material contains huge amounts of nuclei. A single nuclear disintegration (after being say ingested) can cause mutations in multiple ways (chemically by daughter nucleus and alpha particle, compton effect knocking an electron away, beta particle ionization, ...). for a given level of enrichment in a radioactive material, the number of fissionable nuclei is proportional to Avogadro's constant, it's pretty hard to fathom the number of future disintegrations.
Another way in which the paramount requirement that these materials not mix with our environment is hard to visualize is again Avogadro's number: once mixed into the environment it becomes very hard, to unmix them, again because of the sheer number of nuclei in even small samples of normal matter.
Then there is also of course our poor intuition with low probability events, and that any unforseen rate/probability that is greater than the sum of all rates/probabilities of all known failure mechanisms would easily dwarf this sum of known failure probabilities, since we engineer the known ones to be as small as possible.
Just today I read in the local paper that our nuclear reactors apparently weren't built to specification, and the steel in the reinforced concrete is degrading, and would not withstand many events (like a plane crashing into the reactor)
There is a known example of a hijacked plane, where the perpetrators threatened to crash into an experimental nuclear reactor. Cryptocurrencies did not exist yet so they were forced to land in order to receive their demands, today they would not have to...
The legal limits are defined in terms of natural background radiation.
The noise is non-trivial: 1 in 4 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point.
I don't agree with any part of that. Public fear of nuclear power has nothing to do with the magnitude of disintegrations per second/becquerels/curies, Compton scattering, schroedingers equation, or any other science buzz word you want to apply. Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about?
The resistance to nuclear power is a straight up FUD campaign. Everyone knows how radiation works - you get sunburned every day and you drastically raise your chances of getting skin cancer. In fact nuclear power is safer per twh than any other fuel source, by a lot. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
This is the stuff or horror movies and the supernatural. It even comes with the same kind of charms and potions that the supernatural stories do! You take pills to protect you, and your wear a charm in a string around your neck to detect the evil. You give the charm to a temple where the learned priests pour over the results. (Not really, but you give the film to a lab for development.)
This is not like sun bathing at all - you sit in the sun for an hour, you feel the heat and the radiation, and you think, maybe I should get inside? Nah, not yet, it feels so good. Maybe I should not have another drink? Nah, it feels good. These are normal tradeoffs we do all the time between pleasure (or convenience) and risk.
I was not explaining public fear of nuclear power, as you seem to think I was explaining that, I was explaining why it is so hard to scientifically understand the level of danger of radioactivity without exagerating the threats (wheither nuclear power, or other sources of radioactivity).
"Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about?"
I am not making this complicated, I am replying some of the ways why understanding the real dangers of radioactivity are hard to understand, as the post to which I replied asked. It's laudable and pretty rare when a person solicit's a greater level of detail of why a certain class of threats (here radioactivity) is treated as so dangerous by governments and scientists.
No not everyone knows how radiation works, and I specifically consider the comparison to sunburns very disingenious: UV has a shallow penetration depth, and organismms succeed in evolving proteins to absorb the UV in this thin layer of penetration depth in the skin: melanin!
There is no melanin for gamma rays!
That said, of course certain forms and levels of UV can be very dangerous (i.e. ozone producing mercury line in cramped spaces, cataracts, inadequate natural or artificial skin protection,...)
Let me illustrate how Avogadro's constant is essential to understand threats from radioactivity:
Suppose it was a much smaller number, say a hundred, then mole of material consists of ~ 100 molecules/atoms/nuclei (I am knowingly conflating them because I consider orders of magnitude not a pedantic factor of low order).
1. That means that a typical mole of material could only have ~100 future disintegrations, since the radioactive nuclei have a decay chain of a certain length, and we ignore small constant factors. So in this alternative unniverse with small Avogadro number, the same amount in weight or volume of material has much less opportunity to cause mutations.
2. It also means that if we consider a mole of contaminated material from Chernobyl in our alternate world, that we are talking about ~100 nuclei, some of which are radioactive. Then it becomes feasible to sort all matter which we suspect contaminated by say mass spectrometer.
However in our world Avogadro's number is enormous, so for us it is mandatory to monitor radiation levels, and to lock away and protect radioactive materials until they decay.
I agree there certainly EXISTS a straight up FUD campaign, but not all of the resistance to nuclear power is part of this FUD campaign. Just like there is a campaign to manufacturee consent for nuclear power, and not all people pro nuclear power are part of that campaign.
Solar is good, but the amount of power we can get out of it, even at much greater saturation levels than where we are at today, is not a vast amount more than we have access to today with fossil sources. Many of the upcoming resource issues (cheap, potable water and phosphorus for fertilizer come to mind as some of the more pressing needs) are not an issue from a lack of the material itself, but an issue of being able to provide quantities of the material at a low enough price, because the energy required using current systems of production is too expensive. If electricity were, say, 10x or 100x cheaper than it is today, entire categories of issues would simply cease to be, because we could, quite literally, power our way out of them.
(* nuclear as it stands today is not cheap. It has the potential to be, however. Solar and wind have much harder limits simply due to the physical constraints of having less energy available to harvest per unit space.)
//
Relevant links for the interested:
I'm not confident we'll ever see anything of the sort. Just based on the scale of current/projected electricity usage we're talking pyramid++ level projects.
Assuming we did have reasonable grid-scale storage, though, we'd bump into a pretty painful issue: the climate crisis is one of energy of which electricity is just a portion.
We don't just need grid scale storage, we need storage to handle gridS for low carbon synthetic fuels, shipping, and air travel. We know what that looks like for fission: approx 10 times current reactor numbers. We have no idea what that looks like for WWS...
The power output can cary massively, especially with multiple reactors, and there are verified designs that are inherently load-following. You build nuclear capacity to demand, including peaker plants and such, you do not (and in all probability can not), try and store your way through peak demand.
2. the 3.3Gw is 24x7 minus downtime/maintenance. The 53GW is less than 12h/day, depending on how it is installed it may well be far less than 12h/day of peak output. So likelier to be ~ 12-18Gw on a continuous basis given night time, cloud cover, rain, efficiency losses, etc. I agree the solar is still significant but it is less than the raw numbers make it appear.
2. Some quick duckduckgo'ing suggests average capacity factor of Chinese utility solar is around 15%. (Really good locations like SW USA can reach up to 27%) . With a capacity factor of 90% for nukes, it's 3 GW nukes and 8 GW solar.
So in terms of our ability to adjust future climate forcings, releasing lots of methane in the short term and observing the many negative effects in the near future seems much better to me than releasing lots of CO2 and seeing the cumulative effects of those CO2 emission grow more slowly but last longer.
I think humans tend to deal better with quickly emerging crises than slow ones, so I’d much rather have a methane ecosystem we see problems with than exchange it for an equal forcing amount of CO2.
Of course, we can and should pursue CO2 reductions and fix accidental CH4 emissions at the same time.
Finally the biggest sink of methane in the atmosphere is the hydroxyl reaction in the troposphere which - generates carbon dioxide.
Certainly the hydroxyl reaction leaves behind CO2, but much less of it than an equivalent forcing of plain CO2, is my point.
I still tend to think investing in cheap CH4 plants and pipelines is better than investing in coal, but I’ll happily concede the point that increased radiative forcings from any source have non-reversible effects, and we should be pricing in those externalities as soon as we can.
The sooner we can get a (high) radiative forcing tax in place, the better.
yeahnah, we can see the problems with CO2 just fine thanks.
I'm actually asking, I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge on this.
Of course our knowledge of all the current and emergent syncs and sources for all GHG emissions is an evolving science, so we can’t speak with precision about all this.
Those free market lovers at it again!