Still way better than coal on the deaths-from-air-pollution metric.
But not a reasonable or good option. We need to stop celebrating the transition from coal to fracked gas and get on with actual low carbon energy like solar, hydro, nuclear, wind.
Nuclear being the best of those :)
With nuclear you don't need to build vast new storage and transmission, or cover the landscape with energy harvesters.
Then there is the problem that nuclear is terrible at anything but baseload, so you still need gas turbines for reacting to load. Everytime this is brought up nuclear proponents say research in new nuclear power generation will solve all of it. But they have been saying this for decades while renewable are there and all the solutions for its downsides exist.
See the calculation starting on this page https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_166.shtml
> Land use
> Let’s imagine that Britain decides it is serious about getting off fossil fuels, and creates a lot of new nuclear reactors, even though this may not be “sustainable.” If we build enough reactors to make possible a significant decarbonization of transport and heating, can we fit the required nuclear reactors into Britain? The number we need to know is the power per unit area of nuclear power stations, which is about 1000W/m2 (figure 24.10). Let’s imagine generating 22 kWh per day per person of nuclear power – equivalent to 55 GW (roughly the same as France’s nuclear power), which could be delivered by 55 nuclear power stations, each occu- pying one square kilometre. That’s about 0.02% of the area of the country. Wind farms delivering the same average power would require 500 times as much land: 10% of the country. If the nuclear power stations were placed in pairs around the coast (length about 3000 km, at 5 km resolution), then there’d be two every 100 km. Thus while the area required is modest, the fraction of coastline gobbled by these power stations would be about 2% (2 kilometres in every 100).
The book also has sections about the economics of clean up. About fast breeder reactors and thorium designs.
Is there anywhere in the world where the private operator of a nuclear power plant if covering all their own costs for clean up and decommissioning? Genuine question - I am well aware I could be wrong.
My understanding is that nuclear is always about energy independence - not cheap energy. (Don't get me wrong, the sooner we remove coal, biomass, wood and gas from our energy mix the better.)
> Is there anywhere in the world where the private operator of a nuclear power plant if covering all their own costs for clean up and decommissioning? Genuine question - I am well aware I could be wrong.
It's surprisingly hard to (quickly) find who is paying for those decommissioning funds. I imagine there's a levy on active nuclear power plant operations that goes into these funds.
You can find a lot of discussion online about whether those funds are big enough, and worries that they might not be.
Perhaps the most quantitative treatment I found is from https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_167.shtml
> Economics of cleanup
> What’s the cost of cleaning up nuclear power sites? The nuclear decommissioning authority has an annual budget of £2 billion for the next 25 years. The nuclear industry sold everyone in the UK 4 kWh/d for about 25 years, so the nuclear decommissioning authority’s cost is 2.3 p/kWh. That’s a hefty subsidy – though not, it must be said, as hefty as the subsidy currently given to offshore wind (7 p/kWh).
The situation is actually more complicated than that see [1]. Essentially it comes to book keeping, however after 2017 the operators had to pay into a government fund to ensure sufficient funds to decommissioning (currently this holds 24 billion euro). Estimated decommissioning cost for a nuclear power plant are 1.2 billion euro (there is some dispute about the numbers though). This number does not include wast storage.
[1] https://www.iwr-institut.de/de/presse/presseinfos-kernenergi... (sorry only in German)
(I'm German as well. But for other people: Google Translate has gotten really good.)
My understanding is that much of the wood that is burnt is actually shipped half way around the world to the UK and other countries just so it can earn 'carbon credits to be burnt there. I may be wrong, it was a while since I read the article. It also generates a lot of localised air pollution.
You have to be kidding me.
No, in the US utilities are generally privately-owned, and are "responsible" for the cleanup.
Their playbook is:
1) Extend the operating license for an additional 20 years, safe or not.
2) After that, declare bankruptcy.
But the main point still remains, nuclear power is bad at everything but baseload. And pointing at breeder or thorium reactors is exactly the thing I mentioned earlier. Technology that is completely uneconomical or unproven on commercial scale. Even France stopped doing breeders.
You are still ignoring the land use of open pit mining as well.
At the end nuclear is an uneconomic technology with significant unresolved issues even after decades of heavy subsidising, while renewable are cheaper proven and continously getting cheaper. The only reason to keep nuclear on the table is to keep power generation highly centralised and monopolized thus favouring few large corporations. It's ironic that nuclear is often proposed by self-confessed libertarians even though its the epitome of centralised corporatism.
The comment you are replying to merely said that decades of subsidizing nuclear didn't remove technical issues. And perhaps you can say the comment implied that the technical issues with renewables did mostly go away, without making any comment on whether renewables got any subsidies and on whether they helped or hindered.
(I would even go so far to argue that most of nuclear's remaining technical issues are from continued government meddling. But that's down to public opinion that wants government control of nuclear power. In places like eg Germany, for a long time the government was much more pro-nuclear than the population.)
The book I linked to mentioned some of that. It's just not much of an issue, since you need so little fuel. (And you could filter that fuel out of the ocean, if you really needed to.)
> At the end nuclear is an uneconomic technology with significant unresolved issues even after decades of heavy subsidising, while renewable are cheaper proven and continously getting cheaper. The only reason to keep nuclear on the table is to keep power generation highly centralised and monopolized thus favouring few large corporations. It's ironic that nuclear is often proposed by self-confessed libertarians even though its the epitome of centralised corporatism.
I'm just as happy as the next guy that decentralisable renewable options like wind and solar are becoming more and more competitive. Even the ascent of shale gas is a boon for the environment as long as it is replacing coal.
Nuclear fission (and fusion) are interesting as technologies. And especially fission is contrarian enough these days to attract certain types of admirers.
I do agree that in practice given global public opinion as it is, nuclear power is nigh guaranteed to remain centralised.
I am arguing that nuclear power generation has some flaws, but also that it doesn't have all the flaws.
Nuclear energy also used to serve as a useful reminder to the peak oil doomsayers (and these days to the climate change doomsayers), that in principle we could keep living a very energy intensive lifestyle, even if we were to stop using fossil fuels completely, and even if renewable solar and wind never took off.
Some people seemed to get an almost religious elation out of predicting that our sins would need to be paid for with lots of hardship and privation. Instead of just taking a hit of perhaps 10% of GDP or so to run everything on nuclear instead of oil.
(Similar to how the Club of Rome folks predicted doom from overpopulation. To broad popular appeal.)
As you point out, we are even luckier: renewables like wind and solar haven gotten cheaper faster than expected, so we found an even better alternative to oil and coal.
But it's good to know that there's another backup that in the grand scheme of things is not much worse than cheap oil used to be.
It is a terrible measure for human well being. Many things which are actually detrimental increase the GDP (accidents, obesity, depression, pollution...). The inventor of the GDP Simon Kuznets even warned against using it to judge progress, but instead it has become this metric that is the be all.
Btw, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History suggests a more nuanced history of the concept.
Nuclear can load follow but chooses not to for economics reasons. Markets are human constructs and can be adjusted as needed. Also nuclear works fine with all forms of energy storage.