Nuclear is not an alternative. It has a lot of unwanted side effects and it just does not scale to solve the problem. It's extremely costly, comes with costly unsolved problems and is slow to build up.
> It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.
We are trying that since 66 years, since the first nuclear power plant.
What we have achieved so far is a nuclear industry which is hardly able to keep the status quo of installed power generation, sky high rising costs for building nuclear power plants, extremely long build times, very little technological progress in the last decade, unsolved financial and technological problems, ...
If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
All the promised next-gen problem solvers like breeders, thorium fuel cycle, reprocessing industries, ... have been more costly and financially toxic.
> We are trying that since 66 years, since the first nuclear power plant.
Evidently not very hard, as I've seen in my home state of California. Any nuclear development gets constant fierce pushback, and if it does somehow come to life, every last issue with it becomes yet another reason to kill it in the crib.
If we were earnestly trying to achieve energy independence, then Rancho Seco (near where I grew up) would've been done right and still operational, rather than half-assed and doomed to fail.
> If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.
Ah yes, the "two economists walking down the street and there's a dollar bill on the sidewalk" argument. Never heard that one before.
> Evidently not very hard, as I've seen in my home state of California
The US had been one of THE major proponents of nuclear technology. If the country lost interest, there must be a deeper reason than 'we did not try hard enough'. I would guess that the US invested more than a trillion dollar (in todays money) in its nuclear industry.
Instead lately the US invested in fracking with huge climate impact and President Trump was supporting coal mines...
It’s weird that in the post-9/11 years everyone seemed to talk about how the USA waged wars for oil and how oil is what props up USD, but now two decades later there “must be a deeper reason” why nuclear didn’t get to succeed on its own merits.
There is very little electricity generation from oil anywhere. I doubt that oil had or has a huge impact on the electricity energy policy.
What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas, which is used for electricity production in the US. It has a share of roughly 40%. Coal adds roughly another 20%. That makes around 60% gas + coal in the US for electricity production.
For Germany gas + coal has 40% share in electricity production (2020).
> There is very little electricity generation from oil anywhere.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of American transportation gets its power from oil. Anything that could disrupt that - like, say, nuclear power making electricity sufficiently ubiquitous and cheap to make electric vehicles practical - is a threat to the oil industry. Further:
> What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas
Which (as the name "fracking gas" would suggest) derives specifically from fracking as a means to extract oil from deposits otherwise inaccessible. That is: gas and oil come from more or less the same place, sold by more or less the same people with the same reasons to want to suppress alternative energy sources like nuclear (and solar, and wind, and geothermal).
The costs are hard to argue with, yeah. I certainly wouldn’t try with my limited understanding of the world of energy politics. I did enjoy learning more about the history of why nuclear is so expensive though even if it isn’t entirely useful knowledge. It’s pretty dry and I don’t have a PDF link handy to share, but I found the “President’s Report on Three Mile Island” (iirc, prepared for Carter while in office) to be a very very interesting read. Also these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three
Not shutting down plants is an alternative to instead slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did.
And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems too, like causing more deaths for most of them.
Large scale solar might be less lethal, but pretty much every other power source causes more short term deaths.
I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives by extending the lifetime of e.g. hydro and fossil fuel plants, all of which are far more dangerous.
The fear mongering over nuclear has killed more people than nuclear ever has.
> Not shutting down plants is an alternative to instead slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did.
Germany accelerated the development of renewable energy. That was the goal. Nuclear had to go first. Coal is following. The Germany time scale to rebuild its electricity landscape goes over many decades.
By investing many many billions into renewables, instead of investing them into nuclear, Germany helped to kickstart the renewable energy industry, which will over a long period of time be much more successful replacing fossil fuels, than nuclear ever did or will do.
Just building a nuclear power plant here and there will not solve the CO2 problem. Scaling renewable to make it cheap and able for large scale distributed deployment is the way forward.
Yet looking at energy transfer maps, it seems that a lot of German renewable investment ends up exported elsewhere, so that central and southern germany keeps importing nuclear power from France, and uses lignite from local + imported lignite power from elsewhere.
Anyway, the argument is that instead of panic-closing nuclear power plants requiring more gas and coal plants being run in their place, they could have instead ran them as long as possible while building up the renewables.
Sure electricity gets exported a lot and Germany is a large exporter of electricity. That's a European market now. That's what we (the EU) have been doing for decades now: EU wide markets instead of country markets (or smaller). That's also a large building block fir a new electricity landscape: EU wide connected grids, in many places with high-capacity HVDC lines.
Germany was not 'panic closing' nuclear. The nuclear exit was hotly debated for decades and decided long before Fukushima.
Germany was doing a lot more than just closing 'some' of its nuclear reactors and setting a timeline for closing the rest.
Germany also removed the centralized monopoly business model around the big nuclear&coal-based electricity companies. The electricity production was in the hand of four large companies who had divided Germany into four monopolistic regions. These large companies had zero intention investing into renewable, since that already owned all the market and were free of competition. The government opened up the market and reduced the influence of the companies.
Germany has in sum now not more coal power than in had then. It has less coal capacity.
Turning off the nuclear plants was not in any way a requirement for investing into renewables, so setting them up against each other this way is disingenuous in the extreme.
Nobody here that I can see are saying not to invest in renewables. But the extremist anti-science, anti-nuclear fear-mongering is as harmful to society as anti-vaxxer propaganda. It's causing real harm and real lives lost.
> Turning off the nuclear plants was not in any way a requirement for investing into renewables, so setting them up against each other this way is disingenuous in the extreme.
That's completely ignoring the history. The nuclear industry was started top down by the German government and the big utilities. The WHOLE electricity market (production and distribution) was in the hand of only a tiny few monopolistic companies, with deep ties into politics.
The anti-nuclear movement started as a grassroots movement against this corrupt systems, which forced their energy politics upon the country.
None of these former monopolistic companies had ever invested in renewable energy or had any interest in it. They were sitting on multi-billion Deutsche Mark businesses which were like printing money. The risks for the nuclear technology was even nicely taken up by the state.
Breaking up these monopolistic markets against their will and against the will of many well-earning politicians which after their political career were moving into these big utilities took roughly three decades.
Thus breaking up the market, getting rid of these huge obstacles to a new distributed / decentralized energy landscape was one of the key achievements.
The anti-nuclear movement is not anti-science. The nuclear industry has time over time shown its incompetence. Fukushima has exposed how it worked in Japan: the reactor fleet had multiple technical problems (technical designs, systemic underestimated risks, too expensive to fix problems, ...). Many of these problems were technical and many were political problems. The height of a Anti-Tsunami wall is depending on both a risk calculation and a cost problem. These are not independent in a corrupt industry&politics. Companies and regulation authorities will not cause costs (which were needed to upgrade the site) and thus the risk calculations will be down in a way, that the company will not carry extreme costs, which might have had negative effects on its profitability. The tsunami risk will be calculated as so unlikely that the existing installation looked safe - even though Japan is known for strong earth quakes.
Also: the dismantling of a nuclear installation on an Earth Quake fault line is both a problem of determining the risk and a cost problem. In the end the costs and the hope, that nothing will happen, were the reason that no actions were taken. A single earth quake showed for multiple nuclear installations that the risk calculations were wrong. Thus we have the effect that in Japan the majority of nuclear power plants is still offline and the technical problem of reactors with their meltdown is still for a few decades unsolved.
It's not anti-science to break up corrupt and dis-functional energy monopolies.
Running Fukushima as it was designed (and paid for) was 'anti-science' and politically corrupt. Just before the Fukushima accident happened, there were safety inspections and they found nothing of these problems, which later killed the Fukushima site. After the tsunami there were multiple events which early were described as completely unlikely: loss of outside power, loss of emergency power, reactor meltdowns, hydrogen explosions, heating-up spent fuel pools, completely useless emergency plans, need for additional cooling via pumping sea-water damaging the buildings, fear of additional earthquakes hitting structurally weak buildings, radioactive water exiting the building, ...
The whole scale of the Fukushima ebents exposed the anti-science, design-to-cost philosophy of the nuclear industry and its political proponents.
Renewables seem like a great way to cap the total possible energy usage of humanity and keep us in a lower-evolved state. I want the future promised by unlimited nuclear energy instead.
Don't worry, it won't. At some point a large nation will eventually start using nuclear at scale and the competitive advantage will be clear so then everyone will have to follow suit.
That is, of course, presuming civilization does no collapse because of climate change. Fingers crossed!
China is still steadily increasing it's nuclear power capacity, and it's share of total electricity production in China has kept growing, though still only about 5%-6%.
The 2020 National People's Congress reportedly supported aiming for 6-8 new reactors a year, which would double the existing deployment in 6-8 years, and the aim is to not just increase the number of reactors but doing so at a pace that will increase the overall proportion of electricity from nuclear.
For a while it seemed like it would be Japan since they were experimenting with a breeder reactor way back in the ‘80s. After a bunch of false starts it really seemed to be happening in 2010 but then of course the Fukushima accident happened the next year and put a stop to everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
It’s just frustrating to see energy programs fail due to public opinion shift brought on by random perfectly-timed coincidence since there’s not really anything to blame or at fault. Like how The China Syndrome talks about “an area the size of Pennsylvania” and came out exactly twelve days before the actual Three Mile Island accident lol
The closing of the Japan breeder had nothing to do with public opinion. It was a long list of technical failures and accidents, plus extreme costs which broke its neck.
Like: 'On August 26, 2010, a 3.3-tonne "In‐Vessel Transfer Machine" fell into the reactor vessel when being removed after a scheduled fuel replacement operation.'
Plus the Fukushima earthquake (and the following tsunami) showed that a lot of Nuclear installations in Japan were not safe against heavy earthquakes.
