Global Warming and the Necessity for Nuclear Power

Great Debates
1

I’d like to talk about a very fundamental disconnect in the debate over global warming: The chosen solution of renewable power is fundamentally incompatible with the claim that time is short and something must be done now.

Have a look at the state of the solar and wind industries across the world. It is not looking good. Germany started moving strongly towards renewables in 2000, including a heavy emphasis on solar. Germany’s energy costs are about twice the EU average. There are enough solar panels in Germany that it can generate close to 100% power on bright sunny days. And yet… Germany only gets about 6.5% of its energy from solar power. The power just isn’t there when you need it.

And worse, all this investment in solar and wind has hardly made a dent in Germany’s CO2 emissions. The U.S. has reduced CO2 by about twice that of Germany since the start of Germany’s big push to solar. The problem is that if you can’t provide power for long periods of time, you still need to have a fossil-fuel based grid to supply baseload power. There’s just no getting around that.

A major push towards solar power in Ontario has yielded similar results. Huge expenditures with very little to show for it and the highest electricity prices in Canada by a good margin. And for all that, solar power provided less than 0.4% of Ontario’s energy needs in 2013.

Globally, according to REN21, Wind/Solar/biomass and geothermal combined only supplied 1.4% of global energy in 2014.

Now, take off your political and ideological hats, and just think about this as an engineering problem. Understand that the first few percent are going to pick up the low hanging fruit, and there will be diminishing returns as the choice locations are used up.

Now, how long do you really think it will take before we get to a point where we can knock off fossil fuels (which supplied 78.3% of global energy)? If your answer is “on the order of many decades”, you’re probably in the right ballpark.

And yet we are told that the need for speedy action is imperative, because time is short. If you believe that, then the current focus on renewables is a recipe for failure.

The only answer then is nuclear power. This is the only non-CO2 emitting power source we know of that could feasibly replace a significant portion of our fossil fuel consumption in a period of a decade or two. The ONLY one. Wishful thinking about a sudden mass conversion to solar power is not helpful when there is a real problem to be solved. People’s lives depend on it.

If we wait for solar and wind, a decade from now we’re going to be looking at maybe a couple of doublings in capacity if we’re lucky, which will bring it up to a whopping 7.2% of our electricity needs. And I believe that is a very optimistic scenario. Large solar plants take a long time to construct, and there are often years of legal entanglements before they even start. They require so much space and so much material that we could run into resource limitations if we tried to do it much quicker.

But nuclear plants can be built quickly if we change some of the regulatory rules. For example, a rule that says once a design and pilot plant has been approved safe, identical plants should be subject to much more rapid regulatory review. In addition, a law preventing lawsuits once a site has been approved would remove a lot of the capital risk that goes into a nuclear plant.

Add in carbon taxes, with a promise that the carbon tax revenue will go straight into nuclear research and production, and you could ramp up nuclear power very quickly. Small Modular Reactors may make that process even faster.

If you’re an activist in the environmental movement, I hope you give this some serious thought, and then start working to change minds within your organization or social group. There will be no political will to do this unless politicians see that the public is ready for it. That’s what the global climate movement should be pushing for. Because it’s the only thing that will work.

Comments?

2

I agree with much of the point you are making. Two things. One - reduction in carbon emissions is planned for on a decades long time scale. It’s evident from the stated carbon emissions goals of several countries. Two - criticizing Germany’s efforts to switch to renewables while focusing on their solar seems disingenuous because the other renewable sources of energy are ignored. It’s enough to show how much more energy generation can be accomplished in a given amount of time by relaxing regulations on nuclear versus the most optimistic renewable scenarios.

3

I have to say that I do agree with a lot, but this is too pessimistic and ignores that Germany and many other countries and even California are willing to continue with the efforts in this front (California is planing to get renewals to power the state up to 33% by 2010), what you point out as the issue of the power not being there when you need it does refer to the issue of not being able to storage the energy, but the reason why Germany is still bullish on wind and Solar is that they are also working on the storage issue.

Having said that, I again do agree with a lot of the OP, with the point that also a lot of the ones proposing change also do consider nuclear power as a part of the solution; in fact most of the proposals and plans in the USA do not concentrate on just solar and wind, different sources of energy are considered. Sadly, it has to be also mentioned that a lot of the proposals like the carbon tax are non starters for a lot of the Republicans that control congress now.

4

I as the average joe schmo would be totally down, if there was a safe way to handle the waste from the reactor. Could we possibly send this to the moon or something of that nature? If we can not cause another Chernobyl and you could convince the public that would be okay to do, AND you couldn’t somehow rob the reactor to get stuff to make a dirty weapon with…

The pro nuclear folks need to jump this hurdle I would think.

5

I’ve always thought the hazard of the waste has been played up to a ludicrous level. The idea that we need some place that will be stable and safe to store and contain it for a hundred thousand years or whatnot is utter nonsense. Our planet is full of remote locations far away from any current inhabitants. Pick a spot out in the middle of the desert, build a facility, and then keep it in good repair regularly. Who cares if the earth shifts and it might leak over the next hundred years? You FIX IT and keep it secure. If no humans are around to fix it anymore, then keeping it contained is utterly irrelevant.

But overall, it definitely seems to me that some of the largest blame for global warming today has to go to the people who have been blocking nuclear power for decades. Twenty years ago we had enough evidence of global warming that environmental objections to nuclear should have seriously diminished…ten years ago there was enough that any environmental objections should have vanished, and environmentalists of all stripes should have become the greatest proponents of immediate large-scale nuclear efforts.

There may yet have been opposition on both safety and NIMBY grounds, but if the environmental opposition had near-universally turned to support, it seems like there’d be a much better chance that today, we would no longer be on a seemingly inevitable slide past the point of no return on climate change (which we may or may not have crossed already, depending on what I’m reading on any particular day). And personally, I’d rather have had a dozen more Chernobyl-scale incidents, to imagine a horrible, worst-case scenario far beyond the likelihood of any realistic level of catastrophe that would have come from expanding nuclear power, than the global warming track we might inevitably be on now.

6

I’d be a lot more inclined to believe your analysis if you were making a fair comparison between renewables and nuclear. Solar plants are held up for years because of legal entanglements; but if we just prevent lawsuits against nuclear plants they can be up and running lickety-split. Technical progress on renewables is slow; but we can speed up research on nuclear power by funding it with a carbon tax.

7

I agree that nuclear power needs to be emphasized; and I applaud Mr. Stone for writing a long post with no snide remarks about misguided liberals or tree-huggers. I didn’t know he was capable of that.

Don’t worry — if government money is diverted to nuclear power companies not in the portfolios of Koch Brothers et al, those posting rational remarks now will be first to whine. Look at the program started by G.W. Bush which eventually helped finance Solyndra. That government program has outperformed many private portfolios overall (and everyone knows a venture capitalist whose ventures never fail isn’t venturing enough) but the meme “The Stupid Kenyan stole our money and flushed it down the toilet with Solyndra” attracted almost as much attention, for a while, as the murders Hillary commited at Benghazi.

8

Nice detailed analysis of nuclear power by Richard Carrier (well researched, with sources linked):

The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear

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[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
I’d be a lot more inclined to believe your analysis if you were making a fair comparison between renewables and nuclear.

[/quote]

It would also help Sam’s credibility if he were somewhat more candid about sourcing his rather carefully cherrypicked claims. For instance, he shifts from talking about Germany’s renewable energy in general to their solar energy in particular, because saying Germany gets only 6.5% of its total energy from solar sounds more discouraging than saying Germany gets around 12% of its total energy consumption from renewables.

Likewise, he claims that the US reduced carbon emissions almost twice as much as Germany did in the time since Germany started a “big push to solar”, which presumably means in the early 2000s. He carefully ignores the fact that most of the US’s 12% carbon emissions reduction over 2005-2015 came from the natural gas/fracking boom plus the effects of the Bush 2008 recession, and that the US has not actually been outperforming Germany in carbon reduction either over the last few years or long-term:

IOW, the habitually carbon-blasting US experienced a sort of “carbon crash diet” during a few years due mostly to a massive recession and the fracking boom. The much more carbon-frugal Germany, OTOH, with nowhere near as much low-hanging fruit available in the area of potential carbon emissions reduction, nonetheless has achieved larger and steadier reductions over a longer period.
None of this, of course, in any way negates the various genuine benefits of nuclear power as an energy source. It just confirms that you can’t look to Sam Stone’s post for an honest and thorough appraisal of the comparative benefits and costs.

10

As we see in this thread, liberals would rather use global warming to bash Republicans than do anything substantive about the problem.

This kind of thing should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, nothing is a no-brainer when you are dealing with the Luddites in the green movement.

They make some superficial noises about nuclear energy, but the problem is when to believe them.

Regards,
Shodan

11

As Robot Arm astutely noted, though, it only looks easy because of Sam’s skewed comparison.

Inconvenient “regulatory rules” hobbling construction with “legal entanglements” are lamented in the case of solar plants but briskly dismissed as NBD in the case of nuclear plants. Size and expense issues are fretted over in the case of solar plants but blithely waved away as an easy quick fix with a carbon tax in the case of nuclear plants.

This sort of disingenuous “no-brainer” framing of the issue starts looking somewhat less simple when you actually use your brain on it.

12

I don’t know what you are talking about. If you are claiming that liberals sue solar plants as much as they sue nuclear, I will need to see a reasonable cite.

Regards,
Shodan

13

The Daily Caller looks at the Democratic Platform and not what Clinton put in hers:

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/10/10/hillary-clintons-plan-for-combatting-climate-change-and-making-america-the-clean-energy-superpower-of-the-21st-century/

Looks to me as more of what Obama has been doing, by contrast a guy that ran on a platform to drill, drill and drill is not going to make much of an effort to help Nuclear power by looking for a tax on carbon, it is less likely so when he thinks that the effort needed is based on a “hoax”.

14

Who said anything about liberals specifically suing them? Lawsuits cost the same amount regardless of the political alignment of the person suing.

First get back to me with a safe way to handle the waste from a coal-burning power plant. There’s a lot more of that, by any measure (even if we measure just by the amount of radioactive waste), and everyone just ignores it completely. Do you know what the worst American radiological disaster associated with power generation was? The Kingston coal ash spill.

And on the larger topic, what we really need to be doing about global warming is, in a word, everything. We need to ramp up wind power, which is already practical and competitive. We need to push R&D on solar to get it to the point where it’s practical and competitive, too. We need to develop new renewable sources, like tides, waves, and geothermal. We need to transition what fossil fuels we have away from coal and more towards gas, which is both less carbon-intensive and more time-flexible, enabling it to fill in gaps in wind and solar. And yes, we need to build a lot more nuclear plants, too. And even with all of that, we still need to brace ourselves for impact and prepare for the changes that global warming will bring, because we haven’t done all those other things fast enough, and we’ve already had significant climate change and will continue to have more of it.

15

About that “paltry” point that I did notice he does not source:

16

That’s what I mean - was she lying on her platform, lying during the debates, or simply ran as a representative of a party that was lying on its platform?

Or did she mean she was going to award grants so people could build nuclear plants on their roofs?

Regards,
Shodan

17

Clearly the Daily Caller did mislead others, but I can see why you will not deal with that. What does count indeed is what Clinton did put in writing and what the current president was doing. The point stands more because of who was elected as president.

Most of what the OP is talking about nuclear will not be improved in a Trump administration because for Trump any effort to add the actual costs to the use of fossil fuels is based on a “hoax” and he will most likely ramp up efforts to increase the use of fossil fuels. That will, for all purposes, make nuclear power plants less viable.

18

About your claim that removing obstacles to construction of nuclear plants “should be a no-brainer”. You’ve been misled by Sam’s optimistic handwaving about the simplicity and ease of just “changing regulatory rules” to to make nuclear construction a snap.

In fact, even with all the fast-tracking and massive support provided in the 2005 Energy Policy Act and subsequent funding, new nuclear construction is still heavily stalled in the US:

This launch failure has jack-shit to do with imaginary hordes of angry liberals all fired up to sue nuclear power plants: on the contrary, as repeatedly noted, the relatively liberal President Obama has been an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear power. The real obstacle is simply that nuclear power plants are way freaking expensive, and highly publicized occasional disasters make the public in general wary of them. (Not just liberals, either: only slightly more than one-half of Republicans and slightly more than one-third of Democrats support nuclear energy generation.)

So investors are not finding nuclear power attractive, despite the favorable financing and regulatory packages that the government is offering for them. Instead of just whining about those terrible anti-nuke liberals, why not try changing some hearts and minds among your anti-nuke fellow conservatives who constitute nearly half of all US Republicans? :dubious:

19

Pretty shameless, dude. One post mentions the Koch brothers, all the others up to this point were basically agreeing with the OP that nuclear would be good but he provided a tilted summary of the argument for it. But you need to turn it into typical partisan sniping by saying it’s already typical partisan sniping. Shameless.

20

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](http://www.richardcarrier.info/about)He sounds like a smart guy, but I don’t think energy is really his field, eh.