I am for research in fission, but it is expensive in deployment and it needs to solve the problem with nuclear waste in my opinion. I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium.
> look at German electricity prices
True, pretty expensive. But they also include capital for investment in energy infrastructure. Such as building lines to get power from the north (high production) to the south (high consumption). The implementation tends to slow, but there are other reasons for that.
Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities.
So fission can be utilized, but I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision.
> I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium.
There are 3 fission fuels occurring in nature: Th232, U235, U238
Actually, our reserves of Uranium are greater (by energy available to generate) than all of our Coal, Oil and Natural Gas reserves combined.
Our Thorium reserves are even greater than those.
In fact, Thorium is extracted as a byproduct of Rare Earth Metal extraction, and so we currently mine enough Th232 per year to replace the entire global energy and fuel industry
even though there is no demand for Th232 extraction. Kind of mind blowing.
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> [fission] it is expensive in deployment
I don't see where this idea comes from - in real life, regions which are powered by more fission have significantly cheaper electricity than those who are powered by less.
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> the problem with nuclear waste
I genuinely don't think there is a problem with nuclear waste, and that this concern is a myth / misunderstanding based on a mix of fear-mongering via conflation with nuclear weapons and a lack of comparison.
Consider the following: all energy sources have waste products - nothing is 100% efficient.
Fossil fuels pump literally billions of tonnes of toxic gas into the air as their waste product. It moves around, we can't store it, and it is responsible for the deaths of millions of people each year through air pollution.
Renewables production has the same issue (although different gases), and also tends to pollute the water and local environment with other toxic chemicals and metals.
Nuclear fission produces the most dense, least amount of waste of any source, which is solid and easy to manage. We know where quite literally all of it is, and it doesn't hurt anybody or negatively affect the environment in any way as long as you keep it store somewhere.
As far as I'm concerned, nuclear energy does not have a waste problem, it has a waste solution. Global warming is the problem with energy waste, more specifically it is the problem with hydrocarbon waste.
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> Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities.
Agree with you. Renewables tend to vary in effectiveness based on location - in those locations which are well-suited for them, I think they should be used! Though I'm not sure what you mean by "could open up more possibilities" - we've had hydro power for thousands of years.
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> I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision.
Note the following excerpt from Mike Shellenberger on Twitter:
Germany’s renewables experiment is over.
By 2025 it will have spent $580B to make
electricity nearly 2x more expensive & 10x
more carbon-intensive than France’s.
The reason renewables can’t power modern
civilization is because they were never
meant to.
A major new study of Germany's nuclear
phase-out finds
- it imposes "an annual cost of
roughly $12B/year"
- "over 70% of the cost is from the 1,100
excess deaths/year from air pollution
from coal plants operating in place of
the shutdown nuclear plants"
Data is for overall efficiency, not power production.
And Shellenberger is a nuclear lobbyist for that matter and his statements should be scrutinized. I am not fully content with the decision to make such a cut for fission power generation, but all these numbers are conjecture.
I think it is extremely foolish to make caricatures of people. Twenty years ago, Elon Musk was a software startup guy who had no idea about anything hardware - but that's only because nobody bothered to consider the full human behind the caricature.
Mike Shellenberger was an anti-nuclear activist for much of his early life and has always been (and is still) an environmentalist. Furthermore, he may be a lobbyist now (I'm not sure if you are right or wrong), but he ran for governor of California a few years ago. He has been very explicit in explaining his reasoning for shifting from anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear in multiple talks and articles.
Take a look at the full human, and your justification for scrutiny fades away. Everybody should be scrutinized to an extent, but he is not fundamentally a biased lobbyist with financial incentives.
> Germany has much to do for carbon efficiency, but for total emissions it is somewhere in the middle.
This is the problem, man. Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on renewables and they still have high GHG emissions - all they have to show for their massive spending is a couple thousand extra deaths per year and higher electricity prices.
If you gave my company the same amount of money, we'd have the entire world to net zero emissions within two decades.
Goes to show the inefficiency of government funded programs, and the awful incompatibility of renewable energy with a reliable, affordable consumer electricity market.
> I like to use current numbers, because extrapolating development is often pretty close to lying.
We can use current and past numbers: for its entire existence, nuclear fission has been the (a) safest, (b) highest fuel density, (c) least waste-producing, (d) lowest emissions, (e) most reliable mass energy source humanity has ever had.
The new generation of reactors will only improve this divide between fission and everything else. If you are against extrapolating development and want to rely on established numbers, you must conclude [fission > renewables]
I know I'm biased, but I'm also right about all those superlatives.
> look at German electricity prices
True, pretty expensive. But they also include capital for investment in energy infrastructure. Such as building lines to get power from the north (high production) to the south (high consumption). The implementation tends to slow, but there are other reasons for that.
Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities.
So fission can be utilized, but I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision.