Really really need nuclear power to actually make this a "clean" technology. And I hope we're paying attention to the environmental impact of lithium mining too while we're at it. And rare earth minerals.
I used to think this too, until solar started to take off unexpectedly. We will need nuclear in the long run, but at the moment, I don't think massive adoption is a necessity.
As for Lithium, even if Li-ion remains the best technology we have for the next ten years (which it might not be? [1]), we should be able to find better ways of mining Lithium [2], like electrolysis from seawater. After all, it's probably the most abundant metal in the universe.
No. Given how long it takes to build a nuclear powerplant, we need them right bloody now. Yes, solar is seeing fast growth right now, but it will also hit the ceiling very fast, probably around 10-15% of the average total production, due to the physical realities of power grids. Germany is the poster boy for solar, but they've installed three times as much generating capacity in the form of new coal-fired power plants as they have in solar over the past six years.
There is a lot of misinformation and misinterpretation of what is happening with coal in Germany since the decision to phase out nuclear. This article [1] goes into a lot of detail, with charts and figures, on what is actually happening and shows that the simplistic interpretation that you are making (and which has been repeated elsewhere quite a lot) is not true.
Interesting, especially the part about the financial situation for coal power. But there is a serious weakness: it presents the false dichotomy between "keeping nuclear and coal, no more renewables" and "reducing nuclear while increasing renewables". There's no mention of the (obviously better) option 3: "reduce coal while increasing renewables, keep nuclear the same".
And what I said about coal power is factually correct. Germany installed 11 GW in new coal power plants from 2011 to date. When you crunch the numbers, that gives you a production of ~80 TWh per year from the new coal plants.
Now, as the article you linked points out, this has replaced old coal plants being phased out. This means their argument of "nuclear power was old and needed replacing, so we might as well just scrap it" could be equally applied to coal.
There is really a lot of politics in that, not just economics. For example there was a decision to wind down all nuclear power plants, and coal was used for a while to compensate for that. Meanwhile, the parties in power changed and nuclear power pants are not being closed down as quickly as planned anymore.
Solar is about to take a legislative beating, as the oil lobbyists have won. In the UK if you want to install a Solar array, there are no subsidies - in fact, you have to pay a levee for "taking money from oil producers".
And don't forget the subsidies for oil and gas in the UK are ~20x those of renewables.
But hey, as we all know, co2 is love, and "this green crap all has to go".
Depends on how broad your definition of subsidy is.
Oil and gas companies operating in the UK are some of the largest direct contributors to the UK exchequer, and so the tax breaks they're able to claim for certain activities are also relatively large.
(with the government indirectly getting those tax breaks back and more by taxing domestically-sold fuel at high rates by world standards)
Renewables, by contrast, make up ~7% of the UK's electricity generation and <1% of its fleet of road vehicles, so even the relatively generous subsidy schemes don't make that much of dent in the UK budget.
Of course not. We shouldn't have governments at all, because all they do is exploit us. That's why they exist.
All you need to see is that they're taking our money by force, and you can make sense of everything they do - it's all about keeping us blind to the exploitation so that they can keep on doing it.
King's had "The Divine Right" to rule over everyone else, and governments have "The Social Contract", which amounts to the same thing.
Can you quote any source on that ? Last I checked (and that was after this year's budget), there's still a 1.63p/kWh subsidy on domestic solar. Certainly no levee for "taking money from oil producers".
The levy for "taking money from oil producers" does not exist. What the OP is probably referring to is the phasing out of the roundabout renewables' subsidy mechanism whereby renewable energy suppliers received tradable Climate Change Levy Exemption certificates which power consumers could purchase to claim tax breaks against the "Climate Change Levy".
That's just part of the tapering off of subsidies for renewable energies as they become more widespread. Although the amounts can be discussed, renewables are still very much subsidised with public money, and solar is no exception.
I've been a customer of Ecotricity for a while now, and they've been able to consistently improve their mix while keeping prices stable. I don't believe the regulatory environment is working against them, and they don't make that claim either.
I never tried to argue the industry wasn't subsidised (and am a bit perplexed at attracting downvotes for posting a neutral clarification of the legislative changes?), but it's fair to say that plenty of energy firms were objecting about the unanticipated abolition of the Climate Change Levy exemption, not least Drax who saw their earnings forecast hslved.
Those are fairly strong statements, and not what I've seen of the UK market, so would be interested to see your references.
whilst the tories are indeed changing the subsidy picture, renewables in the UK can still get FiT tariffs to quite a reasonable degree, which is driving a lot of the investment in these areas.
Everytime I read a comment like this (claiming nuclear is clean, ignoring the atomic waste contaminating your land with radiation for the next hundreds of thousands of years, which is starting to become a severe problem for example here in Germany), I notice that the commenter is usually from the US. I wonder why this is?
The waste produced by a nuclear power plant is orders of magnitude less than what a coal power plant produces. Even if we only look at radioactive waste - coal power plants produce more of it, only instead of being stored in a special underground site it is dispersed into the atmosphere giving us cancer.
So yes, nuclear waste is a serious issue, but let's not forget that the alternatives have major environmental costs as well.
Nuclear waste is orders of magnitude less in volume but orders of magnitude more dangerous, to the point we have to plan to keep it out of reach for literally millenia.
1. Nuclear waste, even when not processed, is not that large in volume and it can be stored in a space on the order of a hectare (about 2.5 acres) for the entire US nuclear waste production over several decades. Consider the comparative amount of storage needed for just coal ash, as well as the environmental hazards that presents.
2. The reason the US does have comparatively more waste is because the government forbids any reprocessing of nuclear fuel. For example, merely separating out the more radioactive isotopes, you can greatly reduce the volume. Reprocessed fuel can also be partially reused in a nuclear reactor and the French have great experience with that.
3. Even reprocessed "spent" fuel can be useful in 3rd and 4th generation reactors. Spent fuel today is still a valuable future resource, so it needn't be buried and guarded for millennia afterwards.
4. Natural nuclear fuel usage can be greatly more effective with nuclear breeding, which can turn non-fissile U-238 and Th-232 into the fissile U-235 and U-233 respectively. Right now, what's actually burned is mainly U-235, an extremely rare isotope (the minor constituent of "natural uranium") and that's comparatively as rare and expensive as platinum. Breeding can increase the energy obtained from the same quantity of fuel by 10-100 times.
The other point that we tend to forget about nuclear waste is that it is not only minuscule in term of size, but it can also be confined. When a factory releases gas in the atmosphere, we loose control of this gas.
To me the main problem with nuclear energy is not the waste, which even if we never intend to recycle is such a tiny volume that being afraid of it is like an elephant being afraid of a mosquito. The problem is rather the chernobyl/Fukushima risk.
I am not a specialist but I understand that switching to Thorium could reduce a lot that risk. Most nuclear reactors around the world have been built in the 60s/70s. I would expect that if we decide to replace them, there would be a sufficient critical mass to justify the cost of moving away from uranium.
For Fukushima: ".. no confirmed casualties from radiation exposure.." "no evidence to support the idea.. will lead to an increase in cancer rates or birth defects".
The problem is that these accidents have actually happened even in countries that were deemed to be "serious" (Soviet Union, Japan). The cost of having a whole region devastated and becoming a no man's land for several dozen years is I think unacceptable, particularly if it is avoidable with alternative nuclear fuels.
I would not put the USSR and Japan in the same league as far as concern for environmental or human safety in the operation of nuclear reactors. Fukushima was the result of a confluence of unlikely natural events. Chernobyl was not an accident, it was caused by an intentional experiment deliberately conducted against the better judgment of the plant operations staff.
Especially because we had in Germany several reactors (which also tended to have issues) of the same design as Fukushima-1, for example Krümmel, Brunsbüttel, Philippsburg, Isar-
The toll from fossil fuels is however much easier to deal with. The worst case scenario for a nuclear reactor failure in Germany, is that there is no Germany afterwards.
That's a big claim. Do you have big evidence to back it up?
Take into consideration that 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan did not cause Japan to not exist afterwards. In fact, the damage and death toll from those two bombs was less than from the wholly conventional Tokyo firestorm.
Yes, nuclear technology is a big lever, and yes, big levers are dangerous. But it's simply not as earth-shatteringly more dangerous as people believe.
Remember that there have been no deaths so far from the Fukushima meltdown, which was about as bad as you can imagine, with bad siting, bad technology, bad safety precautions, awful handling etc. At the same time, the Tsunami that caused the meltdown did cause over 15000 deaths.
I agree with your position but comparing to bombs is not a good comparison. Nuclear reactors contain far more fissile material than the bombs dropped on Japan. Of the two, Little Boy had by far the most fissile material, with 140lbs of U235. By contrast, a nuclear reactor will contain many tons of fissile material. The possibility for widespread long-term contamination of the landscape is therefore much greater.
Again, I think you've reached the right conclusion, but looking at the lack of long-term damage from the bombs doesn't tell us anything either way about the potential for damage from a reactor.
1) I wrote "take into consideration". That means that this is something to consider, not something that proves my thesis conclusively. So your criticism is misplaced.
2) You also miss the fact that bombs are designed to cause as much damage as possible, whereas reactors are designed to contain damage as much as possible. A candle contains much more energy than a stick of dynamite, yet the former is far more damaging.
It makes no sense to "take into consideration" the long-term radioactive contamination caused by 150lbs of fissile material when considering the potential damage from a reactor accident. I stand by my statement.
Since both of those links only bring up the Hiroshima bomb to show that Chernobyl was orders of magnitude worse in terms of release of radioactive material, I'd say both of those support my point rather well.
Actually, they disprove your point, which you would notice if you'd actually read both the link and what I wrote.
First, they show conclusively that "amount of radioactive material" is not the be-all/end-all measurement that you make it out to be. Nuclear tests put a total of 100-1000 times the nuclear material of Chernobyl into the atmosphere, and yet we are also still here.
> It makes no sense to "take into consideration" [..]
Furthermore, they do exactly what you claim "makes no sense". They "take into consideration" the effects of the bombs, and they compare those effects. They do come to the conclusion that the effects are different, one factor being that Chernobyl had more material, a counter-effect being that the radiation from Chernobyl is much more low-level and thus much less harmful (in fact, there are indications that low-level radiation may be beneficial).
But "into consideration" they certainly take. QED.
That's all fine, but for example Fukushima is still not under control, and may still cause enormous harm.
That kind of stuff is why we need to get rid of nuclear power altogether. All that's holding us back is politicians and their bribes.. and of course, to a lesser extent, people who rationalize not moving away from nuclear power.
Fukushima was an unsafe design. Chernobyl was both an unsafe design and being operated in an obviously risky and neglegent way when it failed. These kinds of disasters won't happen with more modern reactors that already exist. Even if they do, making a few permanent wildlife reserves in the irradiated areas isn't a global catastrophe. The world is full of uninhabited and uninhabitable places.
Fukushima was a standard design. Built by European and US companies in the same style as dozens of plants in Germany.
This is not "Fukushima was unsafe". If you say "Fukushima was unsafe", then half of Germany’s reactors are unsafe.
Shutting them down was the only option.
> making a few permanent wildlife reserves in the irradiated areas isn't a global catastrophe
You are talking about Japan. A country with one of the highest population densities worldwide. Declaring a whole province – and one with lots of history – off-limits is not going to happen. Currently they’ve been digging out the ground in half of the province.
----------
EDIT: Some more info:
Fukushima was a Boiling Water Generator built by General Electrics. Reactors of the exact same design are Krümmel (Germany), Brunsbüttel (Germany), Philippsburg (Germany), Isar (Germany). Krümmel and Brunsbüttel had constant issues, including the town next to it having the highest cancer rate on the planet.
The same design used by Fukushima is described in Wikipedia as "the second most common type of electricity-generating nuclear reactor".
The design was unsafe. The company knew this. In fact it had been known for 35 years. It was not unfixably unsafe, and in fact 5 of the 10 reactors had been upgraded. These 5 shut down properly during the Tsunami and survived without problems.
The main design flaw was that the vital emergency cooling equipment was sited in an unprotected building outside the protected reactor. This is especially troubling if you site your reactor on a Tsunami-ridden coast. It's less of a problem in the middle of Germany, where there are no Tsunamis. Or to put it another way: if you have a Tsunami reaching the middle of Germany, a meltdown at these powerplants is going to be among the least of your problems.
Well the way for a reactor to "demonstrate an improvement" over Fukushima would be to withstand the same kind of earthquake + tsunami that Fukushima didn't.
It doesn't make sense to say it's hard to demonstrate improvements when it's not even under our control.
But demonizing nuclear power has nothing to do with it.
> Well the way for a reactor to "demonstrate an improvement"
> over Fukushima would be to withstand the same kind of
> earthquake + tsunami that Fukushima didn't.
Gee, what a great idea! In fact, a slightly improved reactor was operating in the other Fukushima plant, and all its reactors were shut down safely after being hit by the same Tsunami.
More modern designs are safer still. For example, there are designs that do not require external power for a shutdown at all.
I'm sure that the people behind Chernobyl and Fukushima were no less convinced that the design was safe and operated perfectly fine, than you are convinced that modern reactors are safely designed and operated correctly.
All that's holding us back is politicians and their bribes..
No, unfortunately, that's not all that's holding us back. There are still some pretty substantial, e.g., storage and transmission problems with the renewables.
Unless you want us to keep burning coal or some other nonsense like that...
There are no storage or transmission problems. Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.
Build power lines from everywhere to everywhere, and refit transformer stations to be up to the load of users producing more than using, and you fix that, too. (Incidentally, in Germany we’re having a huge debate about a huge powerline currently, NIMBY is one of the worst things that happened)
> Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.
You do realize that the largest ever energy-generation accident was a dam failure? 171000 people killed in 1975 when a dam in China failed. And overall, hydroelectric facilities claim 94% of the fatalities of energy-production accidents.
That type of storage has no dam that could fail – you take two lakes, one higher than the other, connect them with a tunnel, and place a turbine in the tunnel. Now you can push the water up (store energy) or let it flow down (produce energy).
That's debatable. Coal is known to cause far more deaths than nuclear. Even Fukushima was nothing compared to the 10's of thousands killed by the tsunami.
"Far more" is even an understatement. Coal kills more people every year than nuclear ever has, and that still holds true even if you include the two bombs dropped on Japan in "nuclear."
Yes. Perfectly working coal produces more radiation than perfectly working nuclear.
When coal has a major incident, though, it still produces the same pollutants as if it's working correctly.
When nuclear has incidents, like the plants of Brunsbüttel and Krümmel that frequently had leaks, you end up with the highest leukemia quote worldwide [1].
Krümmel had major issues, with nuclear fuel being found in the area around the reactor, outside, on the ground, with the power plant leaking coolant frequently, and more incidents. [1]
Mismanagement with Nuclear can lead to far more problems than mismanagement with coal.
> When coal has a major incident, though, it still produces the same pollutants as if it's working correctly.
Yeah. No.
"Coal mining accidents resulted in 5,938 immediate deaths in 2005, and 4746 immediate deaths in 2006 in China alone according to the World Wildlife Fund"
So each year more deaths from coal accidents alone than the entire predicted, somewhat speculative and hard to ever prove death toll from Chernobyl over the next 20 or so years.
This was a solved issue with Yucca Mountain in the US, but then fear mongering and political back-peddling caused it to be blocked at the last minute. Nuclear plants had to help pay for its development and then got screwed when it came time for the payoff.
How long does it take non-nuclear waste to decay? For many types of dangerous waste, the answer is "forever." Yet we treat the nuclear stuff as being much worse. Why is that?
From Germany here. The issue is not that nuclear is "clean" in an absolute sense, it's that the alternatives are incredibly more dirty and dangerous so relative to those it is incredibly clean.
Here are 3 articles comparing the death-rates of various means of generating power.
For each death attributable to nuclear, 4000 are attributable to coal. 4000:1. Incredible, but apparently true.
NASA shows the deaths that have already been prevented due to nuclear, currently the rate appears to be 80000 per year. That's 80000 people alive per year who would have been dead without nuclear:
It's fair to say the author's methodology is interesting. Only 50 deaths from Chernobyl count... as it would be "tenuous" to count other people that eventually died from radiation poisoning (even using the figures accepted by bodies responsible for promoting atomic energy). It's apparently not "tenuous" to count ballpark estimates of a million lives shortened due to coal particulate poisoning, however, or indeed to guesstimate 1/6 of all roofing deaths are likely to be from solar. It's something of an understatement to say this is not the most intellectually honest exploration of statistics around an issue.
Compare with the New Scientist's claim - based on a study by the IAE - that the ratio should be around 14:1 for coal, and 1.5:1 for natural gas. Better than coal, certainly, but not spectacularly safe even compared with burning other fossil fuels
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053-600-fossil-f...
They say the death toll could reach 4000 (from the pool of emergency workers), but so far only 50 have been confirmed.
' [..] the radiation-induced increase of about 3% will be difficult to observe.'
'Poverty, “lifestyle” diseases now rampant in the former Soviet Union and mental health problems pose a far greater threat to local communities than does radiation exposure.'
'Persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas'
'Notes Vinton, “The most important need is for accurate information on healthy lifestyles, together with better regulations to promote small, rural businesses. Poverty is the real danger. We need to take steps to empower people.”'
If you're going to count a WHO estimate on lives shortened due to coal power in your fatality statistics, which the author does, it's probably not a good idea to dismiss the equivalent estimate of 4000 for Chernobyl, which the author also does. Even organizations existing to promote atomic energy aren't disputing the validity or relevance of that figure
I mean, if you're doing a sincere comparison with "people whose lives may have been shortened by coal dust" and "back of the envelope guesstimate how many people die installing domestic solar", you simply don't pick "people definitely proven to have died from radiation poisoning at Chernobyl" as your comparison point.
Coal would look remarkably safe (which it isn't) if you required similar standards of proof of coal dust rather than lifestyle factors being the cause of premature death.
While both the coal dust and Chernobyl future deaths are somewhat statistical in nature, there is a huge difference that you would acknowledge if you were sincere. The coal deaths are already occurring. They are, as far as I can tell, sufficiently statistically significant that they are not seriously in question.
The future Chernobyl deaths are just that: predictions about what may happen in the future. They think it could happen, but they don't know. And due to the extremely low level of the signal, it will be very hard to tell if they do occur, because as the WHO report states, other effects such as poverty are much more significant.
So, no, the comparison to coal dust is not unfair at all.
But, for the sake of argument, let's completely ignore the coal dust and other respiratory or global warming effects, and concentrate on just the proven accidents. Heck, let's be super unfair and leave in the estimated possible statistical future deaths from Chernobyl, but only consider the documented deaths from coal accidents. That gives us 4000 deaths for Chernobyl and 4000-6000 per year for coal. So even when being totally unfair towards nuclear, it is somewhere between 20-40x safer than coal.
When you level the playing field, you have the 50 deaths from Chernobyl and around 131 others, though that includes lots of accidents not related to power generation. Around 180. Let's double it and call it an even 400. So 10x fewer deaths than coal. Except that's per year vs. since ever. So we're talking around 500-1000x safer.
No matter how you slice and dice the numbers, nuclear power is vastly safer than existing means of power generation, even given the sorry state of the industry today.
Of course, we should still be doing as much solar as we can (just be careful when installing!), and we should improve reactor designs so they are even more safe. For example using the liquid fuel thorium reactors, or concepts such as PIUS, which uses passive mechanisms relying mostly on physical laws to shut down and cool the reactor, rather than active mechanisms that can fail as they did at Fukushima-Daiichi. And hope that one or more of the multitude of nuclear fusion projects makes a breakthrough.
> While both the coal dust and Chernobyl future deaths are somewhat statistical in nature, there is a huge difference that you would acknowledge if you were sincere.
OK then, I sincerely acknowledge that the estimate of 4000 Chernobyl casualties is much more widely accepted (including by the nuclear industry) than the WTO's more speculative guess at how many people are having their lifespan reduced by exposure to coal particle dust. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise, but then I'm also perplexed by your assumption that none of the 3940 total casualties the WHO predicts from increases in rates of cancer and leukaemia among those most closely exposed to Chernobyl radiation have happened yet.
The lack of confirmed Chernobyl deaths is because - as the report you linked to states - cancers are common cause of death among people not exposed to nuclear accidents, not because 50 acute radiation sickness victims and 9 kids with thyroid cancer are the only people living or working near Chernobyl to have died a bit young over the last 30 years. I mean, I'm not sure any individual lung cancer has been directly proven to be a result of working down a coal mine either, but it would be an unusually outspoken proponent of coal that argues that it should be discounted as a risk altogether because of that, or because of difficulties gauging the precise size of the effect when miners tend to be poor and smoke a lot.
I'm going to go out on a limb and consider a published study
suggesting nuclear is around 14 times safer than coal[1] and 1.5 times safer than natural gas a little more valid than your own back-of-the-envelope exercise, or indeed a blogger whose use of statistics is rather creative.
[1]though much as with flying being safer than driving, that's to a large extent because nobody is suicidal enough to run a nuclear plant with safety standards comparable to those of Chinese coal mines.
Except that that is in all likelihood not a nuclear issue at all. If you read that article you quoted, you will see that the only study to actually look at other such clusters found that the main correlation were not geographical factors (such as proximity to nuclear facilities or air bases), but rather demographic factors.
"Im Zuge der Auswertung der Studie zeigte sich, dass nicht Umweltfaktoren, wie die Nähe zu Kernkraftwerken, zu Militärflugplätzen oder anderen häufig als Verursacher in Rede stehender Anlagen mit dem Auftreten der Leukämiefälle korrelieren, sondern dass demografische Faktoren die signifikantesten Merkmale darstellen, in denen die untersuchten Cluster übereinstimmen."
We could also start getting our shit together and build some breeder reactors that burn up >90% of what we now call "waste" and produce end-products with much shorter half-times than current reactors.
Germany started their nuclear power phase-out in 2002, well before Fukushima. In 2010 the Merkel government decided to extend the lifetime of the existing power plants by 8 to 14 years, which was heavily criticized at that time. The only thing the Fukushima 2011 incident resulted in was that the phase out was accelerated but it would have occurred nonetheless.
> if the waste is dealt with properly and stored safely
At least in Germany, nobody figured out yet how to store the waste properly for a long-time. Remember, that the country is densely populated. For example, take a look at the Asse II mine.
Nobody has yet built a storage site for high-level waste. There are three attempts, the two German ones failed. WIPP in New Mexico looks promising but is far from perfect. Even for less-radioactive waste, the current situation doesn't look too good.
The thing is: No matter how often it is repeated, there is currently no safe place to store a sufficient volume of nuclear waste securely anywhere in the world. It's not just a simple question of "paying someone else".
Developing those sites seems possible but the solution to the waste problem isn't there yet.
There's a storage site being build in Finland. Should ne ready to start accepting waste around 2020. The waste will ne stored in bedrock, around 450m below surface.
They used the nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague but that waste was shipped back to Germany afterwards. Same with the waste that was processed in Sellafield, though nothing has returned yet from there.
Using those sites for commercial waste is not allowed anymore since 2005 though.
The biggest problem with nuclear waste that everyone keeps overlooking is the potent NIMBY issue. In democracies politicians need to do what their constituents want in order to survive. And constituents will forever be scared to the bone about nuclear waste anywhere near them.
The simple political reality in Germany is that you will not be able to build nuclear power plants and that's that. Germany is a democracy and the will of the people will not allow it. All other considerations and discussions and arguments are wasted breath. Germany will have to do without it. I don't think that's so bad, all things considered. It's an interesting experiment and I'm quite optimistic.
Because coal power releases more radiation than nuclear power, and those energy sources are what americans know best. Nuclear is the lesser of two evils, and less ubiquitous. It's somewhat of a false dichotomy.
I'm pro-nuclear because it's one of the lowest risk forms of electricity production in terms of human lives per kilowatt, with the possible exception of utility scale solar.
The occasional wind turbine workers and rooftop solar installers have been killed doing their work; in extremely small numbers but each turbine and rooftop only makes a minuscule quantity of energy.
Hydro is usually very safe, except that the dams can fail and wipe out entire cities. When Banqiao Dam failed, 26 thousand people died. If you want to talk about the "what if" dangers of nuclear, you have to accept that Hydro's "what if" scenarios are far, far, far more deadly.
Deaths per trillion kW hours
170,000 Coal
36,000 Oil
24,000 Biomass
4,000 Gas
1,400 Hydro
440 Solar (rooftop)
150 Wind
90 Nuclear
That link seems to be unrelated, you probably put the wrong one.
I notice that Wind and Solar aren't much worse than Nuclear, though, and they don't produce highly radioactive, toxic waste we must safely store for millenia, don't take decades to set up, don't cost as much, do not require incredibly high levels of competence to be safe...
I'm all on board for wind and solar, we should be deploying as much of it as possible. But if we want to eliminate fossil fuels from the world economy in the next 50 years, we need more than just solar and wind.
Saying that nuclear power produces "highly radioactive, toxic waste" is extremely misleading and demonstrates a core misunderstanding of the nuclear fuel cycle. This stuff is only scary because it has been pitched as the boogie monster by anti-nuclear weapons campaigners who were completely uneducated about the difference between the two.
If you educate yourself about nuclear power, your views might change.
If we were to stop using hydro or wind the number of related deaths would quickly drop.
With a lifetime of 100.000 years, today's nuclear waste has a potential to kill tenths millions.
Your claim of future deaths has no rational basis.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the nuclear fuel cycle, and some very basic facts about radioactive material. The stuff that "kills" has a short half-life. The stuff that lasts for millennia is almost safe enough to store in your underpants.
Rather than parrot ignorant statements of others, please consider learning more about nuclear energy.
And I wonder how you know where they're from, considering there is no city/country listed on their profile. Can you please explain how you arrived at that from OPs simple comment?
For cars we don't really need nuclear power, rooftop photovoltaics are almost as cheap as coal and getting cheaper fast. Their main drawback is intermittency, but cars can charge overnight or in the office parking when the production of electricity exceeds the demand.
Furthermore, electric cars can be used as energy reservoirs during high demand periods.
Theoretical range is pretty much worthless if the battery level depends on some unpredictable outside factor. "I can't take that detour because I did not press priority charge yesterday" isn't exactly what people buy cars for. And taking a more global perspective, it seems quite wasteful to routinely drive around heavy battery overcapacity that is only filled when the trip happens to begin at a time of energy surplus. It can surely make a lot more sense for certain kinds of commercial fleets with very predictable usage patterns, if the typical downtime is long enough.
With photovoltaics the production of electricity doesn't usually exceed the demand at night... So to charge cars at night you still need another technology for base load.
No we don't. We need solar and batteries that can provide "car charging" for free or almost free, like what Tesla is doing for Model S.
Also, nuclear is not perfectly clean either. The reactor may produce clean energy, but everything else that is needed to power it and maintain it is not clean energy.
This!
People always forget about indirect cost when talking about cheap nuclear energy (risk factors aside). Nobody has never build a profitable nuclear power plant without substantial government subsidies (way higher than for all renewable energy sources). Operators need government help for security, fuel supply, waste handling and much more. There is no insurance company on earth which will cover a nuclear power plant without state guarantees (ask yourself: Wouldn't a profit oriented insurance company cover these risks, of these were really as low and controllable as people say here?).
Nobody has ever built a profitable coal power plant without substantial government subsidies either, but nobody calls them "not economically viable."
The difference, of course, is that coal subsidies are in the easier-to-ignore form of "allow you to kill a lot of people downwind from your plant without compensation."
Even if we get electric cars (with good batteries) before the electric grid catches up to be more efficient, the fact that they're plugged into the grid means that we only have to upgrade the central power plants/distribution to help. It's a much better world where each vehicle needs improvement to make improvements.
I agree. Though to me the benefit is not so much to have a zero environmental impact. Even the cleanest energy (nuclear power, dams) have some environment costs (nuclear waste, destroying the eco system of a valley).
To me the biggest impact of moving to electric cars is to move the pollution (air+noise) away from where people live. And that benefit alone is certainly worth significant undesirable effects on areas where people do not live (mines, etc).
A car is about one ton of metal. Whatever the source, it takes the same energy to move it around. Underground resources on the Earth are limited. Each new tech revolution brings us 60 years more of petrol/nuclear/(place any fantasm here), but the number of revolutions is limited, just like Moore's law.
What is happening here is that a car would be the equivalent of a 60-horse carriage in the Middle Age. What kind of kings are we to deserve such servitude from the nature? The ideal of having cars is not a good idea. Carpooling isn't even a reasonable solution.
Americans don't become aware of it because they live with very cheap petrol with low taxes. The rest of the world invents new urbanism based on the impossibility of having 1 car per person. We mix companies and residential area, so we can just walk to work. We're solving the last mile issue of food delivery. We're researching the equation of population density vs pollution. And even in my country (France), petrol isn't expensive enough to make people realize that cars are an un-solution to quality of life.
Even if supposing that we can bury the pollution and invent magical energy, there are major political side effects to digging this energy out. All this money US is spending on war shouldn't be carried by all taxpayers but integrated in the cost of a gallon of petrol. Then they'll realize what is the real cost of petrol. You may assume new forms of energy / pollution burial wouldn't create the same side effects as petrol, but I'm afraid that might be a fantasy.
I am not sure I follow this moral stance vs nature. My computer is able to calculate billions of operations per second. That's more powerful than what the most brilliant mathematicians of the middle age could ever achieve. Should I feel guilty to use all that might to watch kitty videos on youtube? Everything we do has a cost on nature. When I eat a burger, a cow has to go. When I build a house, I don't want any bug or rodent in there. Yes tigers are heading toward extinction but guess what, I don't want to have to live with them when I walk in the countryside, so they will have to stay in zoos or national parks. To me the limit on pollution is to ensure that we do not generate a nuisance or hazard for ourselves or our kids. I have no sense of "fairness" vs nature.
The problem of cars in dense urban area has more to do with pollution (which electric cars solve) and space (traffic jams) than morality.
Your computer consumes barely no energy (in Joules). I'm not making a generalized abstract comparison, I'm making an energy consumption comparison.
When you eat a 10th of a cow per year (200g/day), you consume the same energy as one seat in a Paris-NYC flight, and the same energy as necessary to heat a house for a year, and the same energy as the Earth produces per year, per inhabitant. So, choose only one of those ;)
It's not about saving tigers, kitties, noise or morality. It's that the Earth doesn't produce that much energy, so we're not in a stable situation on the long term.
There are "footprint comparators" that you might have seen on the Internet: A European has a footprint of 2.5, which means it requires 2.5 Earths of wheat fields and uranium mines to feed, cloth and house everyone like a European. It takes 6 Earths to nurture someone like in the US.
So we can only sustain this pace of spending resources as long as we keep others poor (aka as long as Middle East/China/Asia don't enter into a consumtpion society). That's where I claim: We may have to take part with our cars in the future and therefore we'd better build our cities so that we don't need to move around that ton of metal per person.
The side effects of emitting CO2, nuclear waste, wars in the Middle East or costing an unsuspected cost through taxes are just different forms of the same constraint, which can be studied through energy consumption in Joules per inhabitant.
Our relationship with nature is symbiotic, not adversarial. We work better when we work to strengthen nature, not deplete it.
To give an example, there has been some concern recently about diseases affecting bees. Beside adding to the variety of the world, bees play an important function in pollination. Could we do this pollination artificially? Probably yes, but not without a considerable amount of effort, and bees do this work very well for free.
Besides this, I don't want the world to be dominated by a single species, for me the world is far richer and more interesting from the contributions of nature (if want to view yourself as separate from it, whereas really we're part of it).
Cars are strangely enough one of the only energy usages we have right now that is not dependent on base load power. Inherently they must carry the energy they need with them, and therefore can store it from any time of day. So it'd be fine to supply them entirely with intermittent, variable sources like wind and solar, given sufficient total wattage.
