From an article in Scientific American.
“If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored,” argues Staffan Qvist, a physicist at Uppsala University, who led the effort to develop this nuclear plan. “The mantra ‘nuclear can’t be done quickly enough to tackle climate change’ is one of the most pervasive in the debate today and mostly just taken as true, while the data prove the exact opposite.”
The report claims that nuclear power could replace all fossil-fuel electricity generation within thirty years.
I personally would rather see how some newer designs work, both in terms of safety and cost, before advocating a lot of nuclear power plant construction.
France made a strategic decision to move to majority-nuclear-powered electricity generation in the late 70’s, building lots of plants throughout the 80’s, and since then it has provided nearly all their base-load power, about 75-80% of total energy, with the remaining peak-load mostly being provided by gas with some hydro too.
Since the sector is mostly state-owned and probably subsidized for national security and other reasons, it’s hard to know whether its truly cost competitive, but household consumer rates are in the middle of the EU pack.
Their nuclear safety record seems to me to be slightly better than average on a per-capacity basis. France’s CO2 emissions are 25% less than the UK’s, and less than half of Germany’s – and that’s despite both of those countries having already made plenty of expensive non-nuclear efforts to constrain emissions and expand use of renewables. Unlike all the countries completely dependent on Russia for gas, they are also less vulnerable to certain international influences, price volatility, or any potential supply crisis.
I think worries about nuclear safety are more than a bit overblown. Yes, Chernobyl killed a bunch of people but that was a reactor lacking what we would consider elementary safety features. If we look at Fukushima, well, Fukushima killed no more people than a typical coal plant for the same amount of energy production.
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs-coal.html
I remember back in high school (15 years ago now) thinking how crazy it was that people who were concerned about the greenhouse effect were generally also opposed to nuclear power.
At present, we know of exactly one carbon-neutral way to provide baseload power generation (nuclear). And we’ve known about that way for 60 years. And we’ve known that excessive CO2 concentrations posed risks for decades too. But somehow nuclear’s share of power generation has been on a steady downward trajectory for my entire life?
Nuclear is quite safe (certainly safer than mining coal or drilling oil) and nonpolluting. People get concerned about nuclear waste, but it’s very manageable. You put it in a big drum, then don’t open the drum. The only reason it’s so burdensome is that the nuclear power generation process leaves its pollutants in concentrated form in the reactor rather than spewing them into the atmosphere, so it’s impossible for operators to avoid the responsibility of dealing with it. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Electricity is not a transportation fuel, no matter how it is generated. Most petroleum ultimately becomes transportation fuels: gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel. How do we substitute for that? Electric cars are not a substitute for IC engined cars. What about planes?
Nuclear electricity is a substitute for coal. It is also a substitute for base load natural gas plants. That’s the plus.
Transportation fuels are generally liquids due to their energy density. When it comes to nuclear power, that’s the minus.
Don’t discard the plus just because there is a minus.
With enough electricity the mythical hydrogen economy could be realized.
Synthesizing methane from water, electricity, and atmospheric CO2 is almost trivial. Synthesizing heavier hydrocarbons isn’t trivial but it’s still fairly well understood. The problem is that the gas to produce a Joule of heat is much cheaper than a Joule of electricity and it would have to be half to be 2/3 the cost to make up for inefficiencies.
Suppose we knew that nuclear power was so dangerous that it would kill an average of 1,000,000 people a year if we completely substituted nuclear for fossil fuel power generation worldwide. That is orders of magnitude worse than the historical record and any theoretical model but still suppose it were true. Since we are also told that climate change threatens the very existence of human civilization if not all human life would that not still be a realistic trade off? What then do we learn from the fact that the very Greens who are most vociferous about the looming climate catastrophe are, at the same time, vehemently opposed to even the existence of nuclear power much less its expansion.
Difficult to evaluate costs for a nuclear reactor. Plenty of good designs our there, since we’ve got 60 years of experience building the things, but NIMBYism is a killer. Sucks, it’s not just our back yards — you can explain you’re going to build your new power plant a couple dozen miles off-shore on an artificial reef, and you’ll still get hit with demands for thirty years of preliminary environmental studies. It’s just a whole lot easier and more profitable to stick to coal plants — people are comfortable with coal plants in their back yards and happy to pay the extra costs for the safety of being non-nuclear.
Until we repeal the carter era executive order banning the reprocessing of spent fuel, expanding nuclear in the US is a mistake.
Nuclear works in France because they have less than 1/10 the spent fuel waste per MWh and 1/100 is possible with modern designs.
Carter banned reprocessing to win over hearts and minds of the anti-proliferation crowd. That moral authority won hardly seems worth the cost of piling up tens of thousands f years of toxic material.
Second, civilian nuclear in the U.S. is based on Pressurized water reactor designs. Now there are some oddities of this–it is not the best technology for a land based reactor. It’s chief benefit is that it is well sealed (good for safety) and compact. Thus the navy selected it for nuclear subs and thus it was adopted commercially because utilities relied on its use by navy for regulatory approval. The problem is that the pressure containment pushes the limits of material science because the metal must be strong and withstand the neutron flux. This is why the san ofre retrofit went wrong and they had to shutdown.
That said, it is a better design than Chernobyl. The Chernobyl design is not used in the west.. It had what is known a positive void coefficient which means it runs away if the coolant vaporizes. PWR tend to self limit.
In addition to new fission-plant design proposals from players like TerraPower and NuScale, there is the good old Canadian CANDU reactor which is extremely safe in operation and runs on natural (unenriched) uranium, eliminating the risk of fuel diversion to weapons development, as well as the cost of fuel enrichment. There are thirty-one CANDU’s in Canada and other countries, plus sixteen more “similar-to-CANDU” reactors in India. The CANDU is proven in commercial service since the early 1970’s (and CANDU’s built then are still running). Nearly all safety concerns about fission reactors for electrical generation can be eliminated just by building CANDU’s, both to add capacity and to replace existing dangerous PWR’s and other reactors.
It is very important to note that CANDU R+D costs are mostly sunk, so CANDU’s can be built with little delay and at comparatively low cost. Any “serious” global-warming alarmist should promote the rapid deployment of CANDU’s to replace coal-fired generating plants. Of course the Al-Gore gang are not serious about anything except lining their pockets by selling indulgences (I mean, “carbon offset credits”).
Are we getting viable innovation on the cost and safety margins? If not, why not? Is it because you can’t even study something associated with the unacceptable nuclear designs of the past? Are we locked into these unacceptable legacy designs by regulation that is not allowed to progress? Do we need to start calling the new ideas something else to avoid the stigma that comes with “nuclear” to at least make progress on innovations?
William MacAskill estimates that the average American would offset all his carbon emissions by donating $105 a year! That is cheap. Nuclear needs to get cheaper to compete even co2 neutral,
Nuclear isn’t economic and can only exist by government assuming the risk. It may be acceptable, but the cost of miles and miles of no go land for tens of thousands of years is no small cost.
The government assumes the risk likely because they effectively mandate the risky reactor design.