Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen, saving us from a cracking nuclear dome and an untold number of other hassles.
Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100."
I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while paying a lip service saying "Oh don't worry, in 30 years maybe we will switch to renewables."
I can't see why solar isn't now the leading candidate. Nuclear is cool and all, but the simplicity of a butt-tonne of solar in a field can't be overlooked. It's not likely to fail catastrophically, maintenance is modular and low-impact. The skills needed are trades not degrees and if we can get the power output/battery/backup balance right, as a society we have clean, reliable energy indefinitely.
I say that knowing we are barreling toward fantastic solar participation in the grid in many countries, and I feel it's just a matter of time before it becomes the dominant source of our energy, especially as battery solutions come into play. It's also not the end of the world to have some backup gas generators that fire up once in a blue moon. Compared to 100% fossil fuels, the occasional gas turbine firing up on a stormy week would be negligible. Alternatively, novel storage methods such as hydro storage could make even backup energy green.
There are probably cities where it wouldn't work right now, but I can't imagine there being many places where it couldn't work at all.
Solar and nuclear are complementary technologies. Nuclear produces power at night when solar doesn't, solar produces power during the day when the demand is higher. It significantly reduces the amount of storage batteries you need, which is the primary impediment to using solar exclusively.
Solar is also problematic during winter. We need to replace fossil fuels as a heat source, but when heating with electricity at scale during winter, the demand rises at night meanwhile the days are shorter and solar generates less. Heating New York and Chicago in winter using solar and batteries doesn't have promising economics.
Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech.
In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech.
By the time you generate power from some actual generation source, pay the conversion losses both ways and then pay the equipment, land and maintenance costs of the storage technology, it isn't cost-competitive. And then people keep burning carbon.
In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
Wind is regionally intermittent. If it's a still night in one place there is a significant probability that it will also be a few miles from there. But transmitting power over a thousand miles isn't cost-competitive. Both the infrastructure cost and the transmission losses scale with the distance, making the cost quadratic with the transmission distance. On top of that, it multiplies your costs for the generation, because if you're not going to use storage you need enough generation in Region A to power both Region A and Region B when it's a still night in Region B, but you also need that much in Region B for when it's still in Region A. Even if that only happens one night out of five.
There are also national security implications. For all but a small handful of countries "1000 miles away" is in another country. Who does Israel connect its grid to? Or Japan? Does Germany enjoy buying power from France? What do you do when your neighbor raises the price?
Then everyone, including the bigger countries, takes on a large-scale dependency. Lose the long-distance transmission lines and the brownouts aren't just regional, it's the whole continent. There are ways to harden against that but then we're raising the cost even more.
Nuclear is a poor complement to solar. To compensate for solar's fluctuations, you need anti-corelated and throttable power sources as well as storage.
You need a mix. Solar is great during the day in nice weather. It's useless at night, it's significantly reduced in bad weather, and it's completely inelastic to demand. If the population of a large metropolitan area turns on their air conditioner for an unexpectedly hot (but cloudy) day, you can't just generate more solar power. Pumped storage reservoirs can alleviate that demand to some degree, but we would need to flood significant new chunks of land and invest in relocation of humans/wildlife and construction of new dams and hydro plants. Combining solar with wind power, geothermal, and biomass can help to mitigate the issues of each solution alone. It's also just a good idea to have multiple systems in place as it makes the entire thing less prone to catastrophic failure.
I basically agree, but it’s the current cost of storage (or, equivalently, global high-tension interconnects) that’s keeping it from being a no-brainer. I’m confident solar will take over in the next decade.
I can’t say I agree with you there. Worst case for nuclear power is highly contaminated local areas (highly unlikely with modern designs), whereas the worst case for climate change is global environmental collapse.
I'm a nuclear proponent, but this ignores airborne particles and ecological collapse which can propagate and have very broad effects. Those things can be managed, but the 'worst case' of nuclear is not negligible.
Though even poor management of nuclear materials very quickly eliminates the worst cases.
You’re very much correct, although I think the reality of the threat of wide scale contamination is often overstated.
To use Chernobyl as an example, since that’s the worst case of an airborne release from a nuclear plant that I know of, the absolute worst case in the case of a steam explosion breaching the other reactors’ containment was contamination of a significant portion of Europe.
Modern reactors are designed so that such things are almost impossible, even without competent operators.
The worst case for climate change is a mass extinction event. So while I agree with you that the worst case of nuclear is non negligible, the probabilities and scale of such events push me towards the opinion that nuclear energy is an extremely good option for limiting our use of fossil fuels in the near future.
Of course a serious nuclear incident may cause a reversion to fossil fuels. That may not be rational but that is human nature. Not much you can do about that.
So the worse case of nuclear power is actually global warming caused by fossil fuels. And an eye watering San up bill that has opportunity costs for decades.
Chernobyl made around 1,000 sq mi 'uninhabitable' for around a century. (Some of the area will be safe to occupy in far less time, some in far more) If we learned nothing from that accident and had one such accident per decade while providing all the world's electricity, we would lose about 10,000 square miles of land to radioactive contamination.
Those assumptions seem extremely unfavorable to me - accidents should be less frequent and less severe with modern reactor designs and sane operating procedures. But yet, powering the US alone with solar would take approximately 17,500 square miles - and irradiated zones from nuclear accidents are less damaging to the environment than solar panels are.
Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky. If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.
Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a tenth of that - 1,000 square miles. 10,000 square miles is the total from one accident per decade and an average exclusion zone duration of 100 years.
If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.
It would have made a large part of the continent have higher radiation doses, but even with linear-no-threshold I don't think that France/UK/Spain/Italy would have been uninhabitable. Or even close to that. And the point was, even with the most incompetent leadership we've seen at a nuclear power plant, that didn't happen.
Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
Well, sure - you can take the solar panels and move them somewhere else if you want. But if you're using solar for power, you can't really get rid of them - just move them around.
it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable
Some details and references for this would be nice. I find it hard to believe, though of course sometimes things I find hard to believe turn out to be true :-).
The area under the reactor core was filled with water, and if the corium (molten core material) had contacted that water it would have caused a steam explosion and launched additional material outside of the reactor building.
There's an interesting StackOverflow post relating to this here: [0] That just deals with the size of the steam explosion though, not the potential effects. (And for reference, I've seen the largest explosion that did occur listed as ~10T equivalent)
The thing I'm skeptical about is the claim that this would have rendered a large part of the continent uninhabitable. The Stack Exchange discussion is interesting but (as you say) doesn't really bear on that.
Yeah - worst case was 20x more radioactive material (well, I suppose no-seriously-wtf case would be 80x, but that requires the other three active reactors to have gone up as well) since at least 5% of the reactor core was released.
Comments
Ironically, if we did go full nuclear, the oceans probably wouldn't have risen, saving us from a cracking nuclear dome and an untold number of other hassles.
Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100."
I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while paying a lip service saying "Oh don't worry, in 30 years maybe we will switch to renewables."
I can't see why solar isn't now the leading candidate. Nuclear is cool and all, but the simplicity of a butt-tonne of solar in a field can't be overlooked. It's not likely to fail catastrophically, maintenance is modular and low-impact. The skills needed are trades not degrees and if we can get the power output/battery/backup balance right, as a society we have clean, reliable energy indefinitely.
I say that knowing we are barreling toward fantastic solar participation in the grid in many countries, and I feel it's just a matter of time before it becomes the dominant source of our energy, especially as battery solutions come into play. It's also not the end of the world to have some backup gas generators that fire up once in a blue moon. Compared to 100% fossil fuels, the occasional gas turbine firing up on a stormy week would be negligible. Alternatively, novel storage methods such as hydro storage could make even backup energy green.
There are probably cities where it wouldn't work right now, but I can't imagine there being many places where it couldn't work at all.
Solar and nuclear are complementary technologies. Nuclear produces power at night when solar doesn't, solar produces power during the day when the demand is higher. It significantly reduces the amount of storage batteries you need, which is the primary impediment to using solar exclusively.
Solar is also problematic during winter. We need to replace fossil fuels as a heat source, but when heating with electricity at scale during winter, the demand rises at night meanwhile the days are shorter and solar generates less. Heating New York and Chicago in winter using solar and batteries doesn't have promising economics.
Storage is easy for renewables, regardless of local geology, using already existing tech.
In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
By the time you generate power from some actual generation source, pay the conversion losses both ways and then pay the equipment, land and maintenance costs of the storage technology, it isn't cost-competitive. And then people keep burning carbon.
Wind is regionally intermittent. If it's a still night in one place there is a significant probability that it will also be a few miles from there. But transmitting power over a thousand miles isn't cost-competitive. Both the infrastructure cost and the transmission losses scale with the distance, making the cost quadratic with the transmission distance. On top of that, it multiplies your costs for the generation, because if you're not going to use storage you need enough generation in Region A to power both Region A and Region B when it's a still night in Region B, but you also need that much in Region B for when it's still in Region A. Even if that only happens one night out of five.
There are also national security implications. For all but a small handful of countries "1000 miles away" is in another country. Who does Israel connect its grid to? Or Japan? Does Germany enjoy buying power from France? What do you do when your neighbor raises the price?
Then everyone, including the bigger countries, takes on a large-scale dependency. Lose the long-distance transmission lines and the brownouts aren't just regional, it's the whole continent. There are ways to harden against that but then we're raising the cost even more.
Nuclear is a poor complement to solar. To compensate for solar's fluctuations, you need anti-corelated and throttable power sources as well as storage.
You need a mix. Solar is great during the day in nice weather. It's useless at night, it's significantly reduced in bad weather, and it's completely inelastic to demand. If the population of a large metropolitan area turns on their air conditioner for an unexpectedly hot (but cloudy) day, you can't just generate more solar power. Pumped storage reservoirs can alleviate that demand to some degree, but we would need to flood significant new chunks of land and invest in relocation of humans/wildlife and construction of new dams and hydro plants. Combining solar with wind power, geothermal, and biomass can help to mitigate the issues of each solution alone. It's also just a good idea to have multiple systems in place as it makes the entire thing less prone to catastrophic failure.
I basically agree, but it’s the current cost of storage (or, equivalently, global high-tension interconnects) that’s keeping it from being a no-brainer. I’m confident solar will take over in the next decade.
Unlikely. I think the consensus is that the globe was already warming, humanity may have just sped it up.
By many orders of magnitude, so the rise of the ocean would have been negligible by human scales.
its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100."
I'm fairly certain nuclear catastrophe is far worse than global warming.
I can’t say I agree with you there. Worst case for nuclear power is highly contaminated local areas (highly unlikely with modern designs), whereas the worst case for climate change is global environmental collapse.
I'm a nuclear proponent, but this ignores airborne particles and ecological collapse which can propagate and have very broad effects. Those things can be managed, but the 'worst case' of nuclear is not negligible.
Though even poor management of nuclear materials very quickly eliminates the worst cases.
You’re very much correct, although I think the reality of the threat of wide scale contamination is often overstated.
To use Chernobyl as an example, since that’s the worst case of an airborne release from a nuclear plant that I know of, the absolute worst case in the case of a steam explosion breaching the other reactors’ containment was contamination of a significant portion of Europe. Modern reactors are designed so that such things are almost impossible, even without competent operators.
The worst case for climate change is a mass extinction event. So while I agree with you that the worst case of nuclear is non negligible, the probabilities and scale of such events push me towards the opinion that nuclear energy is an extremely good option for limiting our use of fossil fuels in the near future.
Of course a serious nuclear incident may cause a reversion to fossil fuels. That may not be rational but that is human nature. Not much you can do about that.
So the worse case of nuclear power is actually global warming caused by fossil fuels. And an eye watering San up bill that has opportunity costs for decades.
Chernobyl made around 1,000 sq mi 'uninhabitable' for around a century. (Some of the area will be safe to occupy in far less time, some in far more) If we learned nothing from that accident and had one such accident per decade while providing all the world's electricity, we would lose about 10,000 square miles of land to radioactive contamination.
Those assumptions seem extremely unfavorable to me - accidents should be less frequent and less severe with modern reactor designs and sane operating procedures. But yet, powering the US alone with solar would take approximately 17,500 square miles - and irradiated zones from nuclear accidents are less damaging to the environment than solar panels are.
Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky. If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.
Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a tenth of that - 1,000 square miles. 10,000 square miles is the total from one accident per decade and an average exclusion zone duration of 100 years.
It would have made a large part of the continent have higher radiation doses, but even with linear-no-threshold I don't think that France/UK/Spain/Italy would have been uninhabitable. Or even close to that. And the point was, even with the most incompetent leadership we've seen at a nuclear power plant, that didn't happen.
Well, sure - you can take the solar panels and move them somewhere else if you want. But if you're using solar for power, you can't really get rid of them - just move them around.
Some details and references for this would be nice. I find it hard to believe, though of course sometimes things I find hard to believe turn out to be true :-).
The area under the reactor core was filled with water, and if the corium (molten core material) had contacted that water it would have caused a steam explosion and launched additional material outside of the reactor building.
There's an interesting StackOverflow post relating to this here: [0] That just deals with the size of the steam explosion though, not the potential effects. (And for reference, I've seen the largest explosion that did occur listed as ~10T equivalent)
0: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480113/how-large...
The thing I'm skeptical about is the claim that this would have rendered a large part of the continent uninhabitable. The Stack Exchange discussion is interesting but (as you say) doesn't really bear on that.
Yeah - worst case was 20x more radioactive material (well, I suppose no-seriously-wtf case would be 80x, but that requires the other three active reactors to have gone up as well) since at least 5% of the reactor core was released.
Unless your idea of a "nuclear catastrophe" includes a global thermonuclear war, no, it really isn't.