Wow, where are we getting these awesome nuclear plants that last more than twice as long as anything we build today?
Breeder reactors I do believe … God-awful expensive to build and run but has the advantage of less waste afterward …
100 years … I’d like to think our technology will be advanced enough by then to tap into the full potential of solar energy … compare WWI airplanes to what we have today …
A tornado alone is unlikely to cause a breach, though it could definitely damage the cooling towers or other external equipment requiring an emergency shutdown and indefiniate repair, but the largest interplate fault in the continental United States and the one that was the source of the largest measured earthquake east of the Rocky Mountains. Much of the state is also subject to periodic flooding and much of southwestern and south-central Missouri is underlaid by a karst substrate making it subject to often unpredicted sinkholes. There are very few areas in the United States that could legitimately be argued to be essentially geologically inert for the expected lifespan of a nuclear reactor, and there are any number of conceivable ways that a reactor could be damaged such that it is no longer capable of active control and containment, which is exactly what happened at Fukushima even though all design safety evaluations indicated that the degree of redundancy should have make that scenario virtually impossible.
The point of this is that while current boiling water reactor safety is often predicated on using redundant systems allowing critical functions to remain online in order to protect against random failures or expected seismic or weather conditions, given the high potential for persistant contamination in the case of a core meltdown and escape of highly radioactive and bioactive molten corium materials, assuming that safety systems need to remain active to prevent meltdown is itself a critical risk, even if the probably of such an event is assumed to be very low. One absolute design criteria should be passive safety and the ability of a reactor to contain radioactive materials even in the case of a catastrophic loss of control and active safety systems. That is a difficult although not insolvable problem, but one that needs to be addressed before we “save the planet” only to go bankrupt cleaning up an “impossible” accident that compromises agricultural and economic stability.
Stranger
Thank you. If I had to be in an above-ground structure sorting a powerful tornado, I’d choose to be behind the missile shield of a nuclear reactor. And that still looks to be a sound choice. At least it will protect me from flying wind turbine blades.
The main problem with Nuclear power in the US is Ike made a serious blunder when he turned it over to the private sector. Almost all the trouble comes from how energy companies set their rates, which includes them getting a “reasonable” ROI, which in the Nuclear business meant nobody ever used the same design twice because all those millions doing a new design were part of the investment that they got to recover a persentage of, so the possibility we’d have electricity that was so cheap it wasn’t worth metering (an actual possibility if you go with standard designs) never got here.
The secondary problem is BigOil&Coal spend zillions bad mouthing Nuclear and pushing renewables, with the full knowledge that as you noted the wond doesn’t always blow nor the sun shine. That and our own media never followed up on the very few accidents in Nuclear power.
Three Mile Island - ZERO fatalities, half the plant never stopped producing electricity and no discernable environmental impact. The media also missed some really good news - back on 26 April 1986 the Dept of Energy had a bunch of reporters in to see a test of their new breeder reactor at Argonne Labs in Idaho. the reporters were assembeled in the ocntro lroom and the entire colling system for the reactor was turned off. Few minutes later, the reactor had shut itself down… that reactor, now totally offline for political reasons, restarted with no problems, reused 80% of what is radioactive waste in our standard hot water reactors and CANNOT melt down. The reason you missed this is that was the same day a bomb plant in the Ukraine that had been converted to also produce electricity failed - place called Chernobyl
Fatalities at Chernobyl? FIVE from the initial explosion, 24 others died due to radiation posioning. Deaths from Coal polution in the USA - 13,000/year.
Fact is, Nuclear power is the SAFEST way to get electricity with a “fatality rate” slightly BELOW Hydroelectric, mostly because we now have a around 500TONS of highly refined Uranium because of the Nuclear Arms reductions with Russia so there’s no more mining accidents.
Here’s a table from FORBE’s on the “risk” from various fuels
Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)
Coal – global average 100,000 (50% global electricity)
Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity)
Coal – U.S. 10,000 (44% U.S. electricity)
Oil 36,000 (36% of energy, 8% of electricity)
Natural Gas 4,000 (20% global electricity)
Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy)
Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)
Wind 150 (~ 1% global electricity)
Hydro – global average 1,400 (15% global electricity)
Hydro – U.S. 0.01 (7% U.S. electricity)
Nuclear – global average 90 (17% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)
Nuclear – U.S. 0.01 (19% U.S. electricity)
It is notable that the U.S. death rates for coal are so much lower than for China, strictly a result of regulation and the Clean Air Act (Scott et al., 2005). It is also notable that the Clean Air Act is one of the most life-saving pieces of legislation ever adopted by any country in history.
Except we already know how to build a totally fail-safe reactor that reprocesses 80% of what would be radioactive waste in a hot water reactor. the core is designed so shutting off the cooling system TOTALLY causes the fuel to expand until it is no longer critical, and the temperature stabalizes at a few hundred degrees. The containment facility is designed to survive crashing airliners and etxtreme earthquakes - Fukashita(sp) would’ve been fine IF the core had shut down as would’ve been the case using the design proven at Argonne Labs in Idahoe on 26 April 1986… Instead the extreme heat produced hydrogen gas that exploded breeching the containment vessel.
We know exactly how to have safe Nukes, what we don’t know how to do is assuage EXXON for their multi-Trillion “loss” (accounting entries only) when nobody wants all that oil they’ve still got in the ground.
Emphasis mine
The same day Chernobyl went poof … one of the most amazing coincidences in history …
Oh goodie, the NEI found us.
I just want to point out that the first sentence in the opening post, is false.
Characterizing “the chosen solution” as being ONLY SOLAR, is a false allegation. I don’t know of any significant players in decision making positions, who pretend that ONLY SOLAR is the way to go.
This is, I think, a willful mis-characterization of the primary groups who are working to make changes.
Others have already pointed out that it is also false to pretend, in the opening post and later, that switching to a Nuclear emphasis would promise significantly faster results, especially to pretend that there are no significant consequences or costs involved.
Another major problem with nuclear (and hydro) is a rather large carbon footprint in the construction of the power plants … cement is made in a kiln at (I think) 1,700ºC …
From “The Cement Industry and Global Climate Change: Current and Potential Future Cement Industry CO2 Emissions” – Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies 1 – 4 October 2002, Kyoto, Japan:
If you realistically look at the problem scope and alleged mitigation needed, it seems unlikely that nuclear, renewable or any combination can achieve this within the required timeframe.
According to leading climatologists, there is no safe level of anthropogenic warming emissions. The emission levels must be brought to zero, which effectively means near-zero hydrocarbon burning on a global scale. Bill Gates interviewed top climate scientists and summarized this in his TED Talk “Innovating to Zero”: Bill Gates: Innovating to zero! | TED Talk
The required timeframe for achieving zero emissions varies based on projected temperature rise you’re willing to accept, but 2C is often mentioned as the safe upper limit, although many climate scientists say 2C is too high and greater reductions are needed.
If their models are correct, to limit global temp rise to 2C would require the entire earth be on non-hydrocarbon energy by (currently) 2037: http://www.trillionthtonne.org/
That would mean – worldwide, by 2037 – no jet planes, no diesel trucks, no gasoline or diesel cars, no coal power plants, no natural gas plants, and all HVAC refrigerant worldwide replaced with something else: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06EFDB113BF932A15755C0A9649D8B63&pagewanted=all
This means the current global energy consumption (transportation, residential, industrial, commercial) of roughly 520 quadrillion BTUs – must come entirely from non-hydrocarbon sources. However the actual energy production target must be higher, since there would be a significant deployment timeframe and global consumption increases each year. By 2020 global energy consumption is expected to reach 629 quadrillion BTUs (184,000 terawatt hours), and by 2040, 800 quadrillion BTUs (235,000 terawatt hours): https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/world.cfm
From a climate change standpoint, addressing only the electrical segment does little good, but it’s unclear how even that one sector could satisfied by nuclear or renewable or any combination by 2037. Global electrical generation is about 24,000 terawatt hours, see IEA Key World Energy Statistics 2016: http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/key-world-energy-statistics.html
There are currently 440 nuclear plants worldwide which provide about 11% of that 24,000 terawatt hours, or roughly 2,640 terawatt hours. Increasing that to just 50% of current global electrical generation would require 1,560 new reactors within 20 years.
However the EIA projects that world electrical consumption will increase by 1.9% per year through 2040, so the actual total generation capacity needed by 2037 will be 36,000 terawatt hours. 50% of that would require about 3,000 nuclear plants, not including the 440 now operating. This also assumes some other non-hydrocarbon source could provide the other 50%, much of which must be base load continuous generation.
When Bill Gates interviewed leading climatologists, he asked (trying to make the problem more manageable) can’t we just reduce warming emissions by 50% or so. The clear answer was no – it must go to zero emissions. His conclusion was “We need energy miracles…in a pretty tight timeline”. He optimistically compared mankind’s ability to achieve this monumental task to past “miracles” like the microprocessor. Whether a single high tech breakthrough is relevant to global industrial deployment of non-hydrocarbon energy within a couple of decades is a point for further discussion.
Even a miracle in power production technology–say, cheap, clean, and fungible nuclear microfusion, a la Iron Man’s “fusion in a tuna can” --would still require implementation on a global scale, which is both politically and economically unlikely without a consensus of industrial nations agreeing to fund the practical implementation including sustaining funding of the necessary infrastructure in developing nations. And such a technology would almost certainly lend itself to military applications of some kind which would lead to export controls and restrictions. Practically speaking, we are still going to need liquid hydrocarbon fuels for some aspects of long distance transportation as electrochemical batteries are unlikely to become cheap enough and will never be more than a few percent of gas gallon equivalent (GGE) (although automated driving technologies may squeeze enough efficiency to make it practical for long haul cargo carrying and reduce the current waste we see in urban heavy traffic).
So even with a concerted effort to develop a sustainable replacement for net hydrocarbon power generation we still need to address both supplementary technologies to offset carbon emissions that can be easily and cheaply implemented (wind and solar) even if they can’t carry more than a modest fraction of the load while also making long term plans to mitigate the effects of climate change (displaced populations, affected agricultural regions, increased flooding and global major storm activity), all of which takes determination, ingenuity, and consistency, which are qualities that are in short supply among most the critical nation state players. But hoping or praying for a magic technology to replace coal and oil essentially overnight is about as practical a strategy as waiting for Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, or the Great Pumpkin to fix the problem.
Stranger
I’ve got to disagree with you on this point. You only have to look at the rapid spread of the internal combustion engine in all its forms. Make it economic and people will switch. Light bulbs are another example. And post WW2 interference shows that developing nations are best left to get on with it themselves.
But back to nuclear power: have there been any advances in thorium reactors recently? I’ve been reading variously about how China is looking into it. Because using thorium addresses many of the issues with uranium. And coal is a natural source of thorium, so you could use the thorium in the coal to convert the coal to petrol.
As you can see from this graph, growth of automotive internal combustion engines to the current gigantic scale was not rapid in historical terms: https://evolution-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/cars.jpg
This was US only – worldwide it was even slower. From a global warming standpoint, the entire global transportation infrastructure must be changed to non-hydrocarbon methods within about 20 years – and not just the ground-based transportation sector. Aviation fuel alone produces about 12% of all transportation CO2 emissions, and that must also be replaced with something else.
It is easy to say “make it economic and people will switch”. If you could make it economic to travel to Mars, people would go but the task is how to achieve that.
Global energy consumption by 2020 (only three years from now) will be about 629 quadrillion BTUs (184,000 terawatt hours). Of this 629 quadrillion BTUs, about 80% is and will be hydrocarbon-based. So the task is how to provide about 500 quadrillion BTU of energy from non-hydrocarbon sources, and do it within about 20 years.
It took 30 years to simply phase out leaded gasoline globally, and it’s still not completely done as some holdout countries are still manufacturing and using it.
The global aspect is crucial to understanding the problem scope. According to climatologists, a single non-compliant large industrial nation could cause global warming all by themselves. E.g, China alone produces more global warming emissions today than all nations on earth combined produced in 1965, by which time man-made climate change was supposedly well underway.
So if the problem was not difficult enough from a technical, industrial deployment, and timeframe standpoint, it must also be implemented on a global scale with no holdout nations, and within that timeframe. Whether this is achieved by international consensus, regulation, treaty or whatever – it must be achieved, according to emission and climate sensitivity criteria specified by the IPCC and other researchers.
This thread is about nuclear power but that is one small slice of the electrical sector which is one small part of the multi-sector global energy picture. Globally all electrical energy consumption is only about 12% of total energy consumption. Of that 12%, about 10.7% is currently nuclear generated. IOW currently only about 1.2% of global energy is nuclear generated. See 2016 IEA Key World Energy Statistics: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/key-world-energy-statistics.html
If anybody wants an example of institutional resistance to change even in the face of an unarguable and manifest public health hazard, read about Clair Patterson and his almost four decade campaign against the addition of tetraethyl lead in gasoline. It is fucking horrifying just how long it took and how organized the campaign against eliminating TEL was even when there were suitable alternatives that were cost effective. Pure…fucking…horror.
Stranger
Well there were the small matters of the Great Depression and WW2, but otherwise it’s pretty much linear until saturation was reached.
Actually, in many places it’s only just started which means that implementing new technology will be much easier. Many farmers in Indonesia still use oxen and donkeys in their paddy fields.
This is a self-correcting issue. As petro-fuels become more and more expensive as resources dwindle, alternatives will become more and more economic and so people will switch.
The increasing cost of petro-fuels will achieve that.
There’s far more than 20 years’ consumption of hydrocarbons available. More like 50 years of reasonably-priced oil, and a century or more for the tail end, though the price by then will be non-trivial. It’s just a question of economics - how much you’re prepared to pay for the fuel.
And the #1 thing they could do is switch from coal to nuclear, solar, and wind. But it’s not economic.
25 years ago - 1992 - China was nowhere. They’ve achieved much in the past 25 years. To suggest that they - and by extension the rest of the world - can’t switch in the next 25 is plain ignorance.
The UK had the Dash for Gas in the 90s - power stations were built very quickly, the first taking less than two years to build.
Pretty much every factory can switch to electricity. Car batteries are gradually improving; lorries will be next. Trains are switching, with many passenger trains here already electric. Larger ships can switch to nuclear power. Aircraft are a luxury. So it takes you four days to cross the Atlantic? Big whoop; have your meeting via video-conference. That leaves construction, farming, and small-scale fishing as the difficult areas. Areas where you can’t just hook up to the nearest electrical outlet. And the military, of course.
Nuclear power isn’t the whole of the solution by any means, but it should be a large part of it. 67% of the world’s electricity is generated from fossil fuels. If you’re serious about AGW then uranium-powered nuclear power provides a quick and simple solution that is well-understood and readily available. To date, pretty much every nuclear power plant has been built as a one-off. There are over 550 coal-fired power plants in the US. Imagine all of those being replaced by cookie-cutter - so economies of scale kick in - nuclear power stations as part of a nationwide program. American electricity could be coal-free within a decade. Is America serious about CO2 or not?
The only effective approach to dealing with our growing energy needs energy needs is to address the growth itself. Huge fractions of our energy consumption go towards producing huge amounts of garbage, from Happy Meal action figures to phones (EoLed by millions each week) to cars and appliances that demand replacement because repair or reconditioning is not an option. The most viable and practical source of energy available is to not waste so fucking much.
It really comes down to a choice: we can ride an unsustainable, inequitable socio-economic system into humanity’s grave or we can try to turn things around and try to last another millennium or three. Because this kind of growth is going to run up against a bunch of walls that are not going to yield. Nuclear energy, even renewable energy, is not going to fix the bridge that is out at the bottom of this grade or the brakes we have burned up on the way down.
While you are correct in your assessment that a good portion of the energy we use goes to wasted products and services that provide no lasting benefit, the reality that is world electric power consumption has gone up steadily through the decades despite significant if incremental improvements in both transmission and end use (energy efficient appliances and structures). It would certainly be sensible to reduce electricity consumption and you and your neighbors might all agree until Christmastime comes around and everybody on the block is in competition to have the most dramatic light display, and then power consumption goes up 500% in a month. So much for abating global warming. Hey, at least a few of your neighbors went out and bought LED lights that consume only 30% of the energy for the same lumen level, but since they got them on sale they bought three times the amount of lights, negating the energy conservation advantage of LEDs.
While that example may be somewhat hyperbolic, the reality is that people aren’t really capable of weighing about hypothetical hazards long in the future against immediate needs, even if those hazards are quantifiable and the immediate needs are frivilous. Excepting basic human nature to change in response to hazards that will become evident only many decades after the people making those decisions today expect to be dead is not a reasonable or fruitful expectation. Practical abatement the expected harms of climate change falls in three pillars; increased energy efficiency, especially in building codes and commercial buildings where large reductions in power consumption can be required; immediate measures to reduce carbon emissions, such as point of source carbon sequestration systems (costly but allowing the use of some existing power generation systems), rapid deployment of renewable energy power generation or low carbon footprint/second generation biofuels to replace the worst offenders in atmospheric carbon production; and a long term plan to develop carbon neutral power generation and synthetic fuels for mobile/portable applications that have neutral or even negative carbon generation.
Practically speaking, that probably isn’t enough to prevent exceeding the 2 °C threshold, and in absence of some technomagical way to extract and sequester carbon directly from the atmosphere, we’re going to have to cope with the long term effects of climate change, so that also needs to be part of the plan, including dealing with reduced agricultural and aquacultural yields, the lost of real estate in low laying coastal cities, and increased weather volatility. Without some unforeseen developments we’re probably looking at some degree of famine, but the greater concern from a world security standpoint is conflict over resources resulting in wars. The US Department of Defense is already evaluating and to an extent forecasting scenarios in which this occurs, which is a further argument for working against the proliferation of nuclear weapons because the last thing a world already faced with mass famine needs is regional or even limited global thermonuclear war.
But hey, and unobserved massive asteroid may strike the Earth and cause catacalysmic regional destruction and global impacts for years, because we aren’t doing anything to look out for that much less abate it either. We are a very short-sighted species (although still with a longer ability to anticipate the future than any other animal on the planet) and expecting that to change on a personal level is a fool’s errand. We could make long standing international committments to such efforts that would be binding such that short sighted partisanship wouldn’t derail them, but as we’ve seen, we can’t even make good decisions about electing or appointing leaders with such foresight. So, basically, we (or our descendants, anyway) are fucked.
Stranger
Well said, Stranger, well said indeed …
"… including dealing with reduced agricultural and aquacultural yields, the lost of real estate in low laying coastal cities, and increased weather volatility … "
This is something of a foregone conclusion … these things are going to happen … I just don’t see any of the alternatives coming about in time to prevent these events … at best we can mitigate the damage … maybe a 5’-6" sea level rise instead of the anticipated 6’ rise …
One thing that’s not talked about is that just building new nuclear power plants is only half the answer … we also need to decommission the fossil fuel plants at the same time … unfortunately with human nature as it is … once these new carbon-neutral energy sources come on line … we’ll just use more energy … these old polluting plants will just keep belching out CO[sub]2[/sub] until we’ve no more fossil fuels to burn …
… and when there’s no more fossil fuels to burn … that’s when the “shit hits the fan” as it were …