Ugh, if the US had just kept up the pace of nuclear construction in the 80s instead of shutting it down, we would be approaching 100% CO2-free electricity today. Not 50 years from now, today. But we threw it all away!
I'm not sure this is true. Simply because I'm not aware of a technology that has a 0 CO2eq lifetime emission. Production, yes (nuclear, renewables), but lifetime, no. It would be a HUGE step in the right direction and have dramatically reduced our load (20% of global) on the climate problem (probably influenced other countries too). But I want to be accurate here. (I know I'm splitting hairs here)
Nuclear energy actually had the most extreme growth adoption curve of every energy source ever. Even faster then the adoption of coal or oil in the centuries before.
It was totally crazy, but then form basically one year to the next, it totally flat lined. You can guess when that was.
The problem with nuclear power is that it's a hard decision to reverse. Once we make it, we have to stand by it to the end. We can't reduce funding on nuclear power and expect it to end well.
While this is true, the regulatory chances after Three Mile Island and the general changing attitude towards nuclear made it impossible for the industry to adjust to the changing market.
Nuclear growth was so incredibly fast at first that it was maybe a bit unsustainable, but going from the fastest ever growing energy to total stagnation for 40 years is a difficult thing to explain.
The regulatory change with the biggest impact on nuclear occurred before TMI. It was the Calvert Cliffs decision, a SCOTUS case that nuclear power plants were not exempt from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act.
While this had the largest short term impact, I would argue the larger cultural, organisational, regulatory approches had the more fundamental long-term effect.
Imagine a crazy tycoon on a gigantic barge in the middle of the ocean using gigantic nuclear reactors to direct-carbon-capture CO2 into fuel and then selling it to become a 21st century petro power.
You’re technically right (the best kind of right!) but so is he when he says nuclear approaches 100% CO2.
Maybe solar+storage could get even closer close?
Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse.
The rationale behind it is simple physics. Enriched nuclear fuel is the most energy-dense material we can access, so unless a new fundamental law is discovered, nuclear energy will have the best EROI, e.g. require the least energy overall to be produced (also note that most of the energy deployed is for security reasons).
EDIT: another option for solar+storage to tend towards 0 residual carbon footprint is a life duration 10 or 100 times longer. Something to consider.
> Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse.
I'm going to add some nuance. As far as I'm aware, this is only true for photovoltaic solar. My understanding is that concentrated solar (mirrors heat up water tank and you have a steam turbine) has lower lifetime emissions than nuclear.
That being said, storage does have a heavy footprint that many ignore. This is a harder number to accurately measure the impact, but if we're talking about a sane fully renewable system you have to have a lot of storage. Places like Southern California can get away with a day or two's worth of storage because there is little variation in conditions. But if you travel up the coast 500 miles things get drastically different. Even more so as you get into Washington. You're going to have to have at least a week's worth of storage. Same thing for the east coast.
That said, these options are still better than coal. It is debatable if we're talking about coal + CCS though and likely doesn't beat gas + CCS. Though the counter argument to this is CCS in the manufacturing of your solar and batteries. Again, gets tricky and there's factors to include like tearing down existing coal and gas plants.
TLDR: this problem is unsurprisingly extremely complicated even though we make it out to not be.
Could a highly efficient grid solve the "local weather" problem? While it might be cloudy in Washington, at the same time it's likely sunny in Nevada, or Texas, (or Mexico if you had cross border production), etc..
The broader the area you can depend on, the less you need "bad weather backup" systems.
Potentially. But there's a big if and quite a few drawbacks. If our power is dependent on such long range travel there is a lot more opportunity for failure. Since we're talking about power, this does mean both lives and millions to billions of dollars worth of economic activity. There's various reasons things could go down. A bird. Russia hacking our grid. Joe Schmoe crashes his truck. You name it. The only way to reduce two of these events is to build a large and complex network with many fail-safes, but that makes the second possibility easier. But if it goes down in Texas we're talking about Northern California, Oregon, and Washington potentially losing power.
Having local sources of power is highly reliable and contains disasters to only be local. While I do believe we should have smarter grids there is much wanting in using this as a solution to the regional issues of renewable efficiencies and storage requirements.
nit: while this is true you cannot pick up enriched nuclear fuel off the ground. You have to process many tons of ore. Overall it's still better but this is not guaranteed by simply the energy density of fuel rods.
Absolutely, and uranium mining will require more energy over time, as the best sources get depleted.
Still, AFAIU,
1) the mining is not the largest energy requirement (security enforcement measures and refining require much more energy and infrastructure)
2) In the golden age of nuclear, it was commonly thought that we would have breeder reactors by now, that would make the fuel processing hundreds of times more efficient, and thus the question would be obsolete... Unfortunately, only India and Russia are still actively working on that technology.
I'm aware I'm splitting hairs. But I bring this up because there are a lot of misconceptions about climate, including the energy sub-problem. I.E. people think if we go renewables (or nuclear) we've solved the climate issue, let alone just the energy problem. Or rather, I think people think all we need is renewables and electric cars. Where in reality even after implementing these two (important) parts we still have a long way to go. And that the idea of this is so prevalent that it is actually hindering progress.
So I'm being nuanced. But HN is a place for nuance.
Transportation and energy account for a little under 60% of the problem.[0] (There's a lot more to those than electricity and cars) Another more mainstream issue is agriculture, but people pretty much talk exclusively about water usage and emissions from animal byproducts. This has a political motive. It is the majority of that sector though, to be fair to the vegans. If cows were a country they would be the third worst polluter (please support lab grown meat and reduce your meat intake. Even just eating red meat once a month and chicken the rest of the time has a significant impact on your personal emissions. And please don't bring up cows eating algae).
But there's a lot of less sexy parts that we're nowhere even near close to solving. Concrete and steel production is one of them. These are the largest contributor to emissions in construction, and pretty much the only way to solve this issue is with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) or new materials that we don't yet know about. [1] The same is for plastics. Frankly, we don't have a good way around steel, concrete, or plastics without making some extremely hard compromises. These materials MAKE the modern world and literally save lives.
Another less sexy issue is air-conditioning/refrigeration and heating. These systems are almost pure emitters yet we never discuss them. Again, we're nowhere near solving these issues. Again, these technologies save lives and enable the modern world. They are extremely difficult problems and even harder to scale.
I'd suggest reading some of Gate's Notes, since they do provide a good high level introduction to the material and I think he is pretty informed on the subject (unfortunately much more than any politician that I'm aware of). I'd start with: A Question To Ask About Every Climate Plan[2]. And then: Climate change and the 75% problem[3]. For another perspective I'll suggest Rees's blog post: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist[4] (article includes link to part 2).
I work with some climate scientists and these blogs reflect a lot of their concerns (in much more approachable ways). I'm actually deeply upset that the topic has become so politicized. I personally do not feel that either side is taking the issue seriously (though one side is at least acknowledging the problem and partly addressing less than half the problem but also encouraging the infighting. Better than nothing I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
But if you're wondering why climate scientists outright say: "We're fucked" are are extremely pessimistic, this is a short introduction to why. We don't have the technology to fix the problems, we aren't willing to admit many things are problems, a significant part of the political elite won't acknowledge that the problem even exists, and even if we solved all of this in America that only accounts for 20% of global emissions and how can we ask developing nations to either go without modern technology and let their people die or emit greenhouse gasses? I'm pretty on board with the "we're fucked" sentiment. But I hope we're wrong and I hope people can learn the facts and the non-sexy parts can become of great concern (i.e. get a shit ton of funding). And for the love of god, I hope CCS stops becoming a political topic...
[1] I personally get upset about the people that don't want to use CCS in gas and coal facilities partly because of this. It is a great way to force mass adoption of these technologies. Plus, it isn't like we can just dump coal at this point. Pretty much for the same reason a heroin addict can't cut cold turkey. We're in too deep /minirant
More than half the concrete used in the world is in China, and the main reason for that is they use building infrastructure as a jobs program and consequently build a large amount of unnecessary structures. They could stop doing this and cut world concrete use nearly in half.
Meanwhile about 40% of CO2 emissions from concrete are as a result of fuel combustion for the kiln. There is no obvious reason this couldn't be done using a more sustainable fuel (wood/biomass) or some alternative heat-generation method.
> Another less sexy issue is air-conditioning/refrigeration and heating.
Air conditioning is almost entirely powered by electricity already, so if you solve generation you solve that. In theory heat can be the same -- electric heat pumps are very efficient. The biggest problem there is the economic cost of replacing everyone's oil and gas furnaces with electric heating, but it's not as though it's a technological problem. The solution is known. Impose a carbon tax and people would do it.
A carbon tax is really the best thing we could do, because it hacks at the problem from every angle. If you can make cement with less CO2, now it's more cost effective to do it that way. If you can't then it's more cost effective to use less cement. One way or another CO2 emissions go down. If you want them to go down more, make the tax higher. Right now the cost of emitting CO2 is effectively zero, which is not ideal.
Maybe it would.
Or maybe one of them would have blown up (lets say e.g. on 9.11.2001) and due to bad luck (winds not blowing onto the pacific, but towards densely populated areas during crucial hours) have rendered some major cities inhabitable for years or decades.
We will never know.
That said:
I agree that replacing nuclear power with coal power is insane.
I am for continuing nuclear research and for using nuclear power with designs which are inherently safe if it's cheaper than renewable alternatives at a given ___location.
Nuclear already provides 20% of our energy, and that with old dangerous plant designs, so we've already seen a healthy slice of that risk. Was avoiding the risks of building new reactors worth pumping our atmosphere full of carbon?
After 40 years of stubbornly refusing to use the green energy at our feet, solar and wind tech finally advanced enough to become practical, and they'll gain marketshare faster than people will give nuclear a fair shake, so they're pretty clearly the way forward.
The carbon-free atmosphere that nuclear could have delivered is just a historic could-have-been at this point, and we'll just have to live with the consequences of our bad decision.
That's right! Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown due to flooding. Or somewhere in the midwest where one suffered a Fukishima type disaster from a tornado. Or if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed and irradiated a massive area.
The fact is that nuclear energy carries real and tangible risks along with its benefits. Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks which only serves to increase skepticism among an already skeptical public.
> Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown
If the nuclear industry were a person, when it built Fukushima it wouldn't have been old enough to drive a car. Today, it would be retired. It learned a thing or two in the intervening years. If Fukushima had been built a mere 2 years later it wouldn't have had its fatal flaw. There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic.
> if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed
> Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks
The people who don't take the risks seriously are the people who refuse to perform numerical comparisons and instead make snap judgements on the basis of meltdowns being scary.
Other energy sources have risks too. The Banqiao dam makes Chernobyl look tame, but hydroelectric has a squeaky clean rep. Even solar and wind do worse per kWh, because their density is so low that they require (comparatively) tons of install work and upkeep, so the severe slip & fall accidents add up.
So yeah, we do care about the tangible and serious risks. We should pay more attention to them. I don't think that calculus points in the direction you think it does.
>There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic
Pretending that the only potential danger posed by nuclear power and its toxic byproducts come from older plants is exactly the attitude my post addressed. No system is perfect, even under "ideal" circumstances. Natural disasters, negligence, greed, incompetence and human error are only a few of the everpresent factors that lead to inevitable system breakdowns - no matter what sort of system it is. Its disheartening but not at all surprising that those who worship blindly at the altar of technology exhibit many of the same delusional tendencies that those who worship at other religious altars do.
>Other energy sources have risks too.
Every endeavor comes with potential risks and rewards - which should be dispassionately scrutinized and quantified. The fact is that nuclear power is uniformly touted as a risk free panacea by the overwhelming majority of its advocates and any discussion of the very real risks is ridiculed or dismissed.
Did you even bother to google where these plants are located? One of my colleagues' wives is an operator at Waterford. It shut down during the 2011 floods in good time.
