The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.
The currently identified reserves of Uranium could last us at least 200 years, even longer if you enrich it more or use newer reactor designs. If you extract it from seawater we've got about 60000 years worth
Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Wind and Solar are indeed cheap, but have higher materials throughput than nuclear, and they use orders of magnitude more land. This land use will almost certainly have a larger impact on the environment than Nuclear. There is also new research that is showing wind turbines are a major cause of insect decline as well.
The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
Now lets say you've got solar and wind up the wazoo, and battery banks to load shift. Can you still power society 24/7? Nope. You still need either hydro, natural gas, or nuclear to run the grid in a stable and reliable manner. Batteries to provide base load overnight would require so much money and materials that I don't see this happening any time soon without major breakthroughs in battery tech.
What about pumped hydro? Well... turns out dams need to manage water levels for practical reasons and while some pumped hydro can be useful, the available capacity for this when you take into account electricity production and practical water management issues is minimal.
Why can't we cover the deserts in solar and wind and transmit it? Or move electricity from one area to another when the wind isn't blowing or its cloudy? Well transmission is expensive and incurs energy loss in a major way. transmission and sub-transmission lines today account for about a 30% energy loss. Now you're talking about tripling or quadrupling the transmission infrastructure at a minimum, and moving energy over great distances, which is VERY expensive compared to producing it near where it is consumed.
Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.
I grew up in Hanau and was born in that city one year before that happened (you may also refer to the sources if you don't trust the org publishing the English summary):
Children found funny metal pill or drop-like objects in the forests around the plant and played with it. While there were reports of inspectors and interested civilians being blocked from taking measurements.
After this and Chernobyl nobody has a right to complain about me being a retarded monkey... or dying maybe 1-5 years earlier than normal due to earlier onset of cancer.
Humans can not be trusted (at scale) to keep such material secure and even in labs accidents can happen. Same is true for large scale use of dangerous chemicals, too.
> Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly reactive metals?
> The inherent radiation danger seems largely overblown to me. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused any real human impact beyond psychological terror, and it was an unsafe design with zero safety features. It's design flaws were kept secret from the operators, and they were experimenting beyond operational parameters in a "hold my beer" fashion. It's like looking at Bhopal and saying that pesticide manufacturing isn't worth it for humanity because its too dangerous.
Human operators can never be trusted. And machines built by humans will also fail, but at least risk could be more easily calculated. (Well, at least until machine learning came along and we started to introduce some "human factor" back into the algorithms for better or worse.)
If we were able to avoid using most pesticides we would do so already. Unfortunately our way of producing food for the masses with low manual effort and low technology (large machines, monoculture) forces us to keep using them, for now. We will see what alternatives we can build (robotic farming, indoor farming and maybe a few organic farms) that can do with less or no pesticides. I don't think anyone questions the harm widespread pesticide use has done to our ecosystem. Pesticides are just like chemical weapons. What you really want is the bug not eating your plant, not multiplying in excess and staying mostly out of your bottom-line. Using pesticides is like waging a war against the bug species in question (with collateral damage) instead of finding ways to fix the root-causes. As someone who picked potatoe bugs from a field once, I can relate to the waging a war option, but that doesn't mean it's the right course of action.
> The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
True. I also don't see how lithium based batteries have a long future in large scale energy storage. Too high environmental impact and political risk. (Everyone designs battery cars and China controls most needed rare earths. How is that not a dependency.) I have high hopes in direct hydrogen storage. Efficieny is important, but not the single most important factor. Total cost (over lifetime) and environmental impact - also in countries where the raw materials are mined - should be considered.
This one states that "Transmission Losses is approximate 17% while distribution losses is approximate 50%.". So these 50% loss in the distribution part are shared by any other power generation except distributed local (on your own roof or in your basement). The 17% in the transmission area do not sound so much and are lower than I expected. I do however take from that article that baseload power generation should be as distributed as possible to avoid unnecessary losses in distribution (smaller power lines/transformers of the villages/buildings).
> Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
This one is unfortunately true. Every idea has its merrits and downsides. I'd rather err on the biome uninhabitable by us humans, though.
> At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.
Let us use this compact and efficient method for powering the ion engines to travel to some other planets, instead of using them here, with the risk of lowering our homeworld's value.
> Are there breeder designs that do not involve molten, highly reactive metals?
There are vehicles that use highly reactive fluid called gasoline. Many people drive them safely because we are smart and designed them to be safe enough to be worth the benefit of travel. There are homes heated by explosive fuel (natural gas). People even cook with it. Sometimes people bring water to a hazardous boiling condition in order to cook or make tea.
The utilization of hazardous material in safe ways to benefit humanity is old hat, and wholly appropriate in many cases.
> There are vehicles that use highly reactive fluid called gasoline. Many people drive them safely because we are smart and designed them to be safe enough to be worth the benefit of travel. There are homes heated by explosive fuel (natural gas). People even cook with it. Sometimes people bring water to a hazardous boiling condition in order to cook or make tea.
>
> The utilization of hazardous material in safe ways to benefit humanity is old hat, and wholly appropriate in many cases.
True, still people - including myself - keep burning their hands on the stove or with hot water occasionally. Humans also sometimes accidentally ignite some fuel and die a fiery death (electrostatic discharge at fuel station for example). But accidentally irradiating your and all your 1000 neighbors properties for centuries or until the next top soil replacement is a whole different matter. Before real accidents actually happened it was probably easier to convince people risk was tollerable. Now eating wild boar and some mushrooms in the forrest here is considered a health hazard, cause of high levels of cesium. Boar meat tastes great. It is a damn shame it can't be eaten in many cases. Same for the mushrooms:
Quote:
"Wer seine persönliche Belastung verringern möchte, sollte in den höher belasteten Gebieten Deutschlands auf den Genuss selbst erlegten Wildes und selbst gesammelter Pilze verzichten." -> "If you want to reduce your personal stress, you should refrain from enjoying game and mushrooms you have hunted yourself in the more polluted areas of Germany."
To summarize, I believe your argument is not unfounded but still doesn't properly account for the difference in scale (time, affected area and severity) of the worst possible effects if something should go wrong. And we know there always remains some risk.
People evaluate not only using analytic thinking, but also from observation and influenced by emotions. And the last two processes seem to disfavour use of nuclear power.
A reactor based on nuclear fission is going to be a hard sell in any region that has been affected by one or multiple accidents before. I hope we can get fusion to work and somehow find a way to shield it properly without causing too much waste. Or concentrate heavily on renewable energy storage (efficiency is a goal that has to be weighed against other factors and may be improved later).
The currently identified reserves of Uranium could last us at least 200 years, even longer if you enrich it more or use newer reactor designs. If you extract it from seawater we've got about 60000 years worth
Then if you use breeder reactors, there is so much Thorium on the planet that we can pretty much assume we will have solved fusion by the time we run out.
Wind and Solar are indeed cheap, but have higher materials throughput than nuclear, and they use orders of magnitude more land. This land use will almost certainly have a larger impact on the environment than Nuclear. There is also new research that is showing wind turbines are a major cause of insect decline as well.
The other issue is that you need something for dispatchable and base load energy. Solar and Wind do not produce 24/7, and as a result their capacity factors are typically ~29% and ~40%. They can produce cheap electricity, but not on demand, and not 24/7. So this means you're now looking at creating giant battery banks to load shift by an hour or two to charge when there is excess production and prices are cheap. Oh yeah... these battery banks are nowhere near 100% efficient either, and currently require tons of lithium, which is getting very expensive.
Now lets say you've got solar and wind up the wazoo, and battery banks to load shift. Can you still power society 24/7? Nope. You still need either hydro, natural gas, or nuclear to run the grid in a stable and reliable manner. Batteries to provide base load overnight would require so much money and materials that I don't see this happening any time soon without major breakthroughs in battery tech.
What about pumped hydro? Well... turns out dams need to manage water levels for practical reasons and while some pumped hydro can be useful, the available capacity for this when you take into account electricity production and practical water management issues is minimal.
Why can't we cover the deserts in solar and wind and transmit it? Or move electricity from one area to another when the wind isn't blowing or its cloudy? Well transmission is expensive and incurs energy loss in a major way. transmission and sub-transmission lines today account for about a 30% energy loss. Now you're talking about tripling or quadrupling the transmission infrastructure at a minimum, and moving energy over great distances, which is VERY expensive compared to producing it near where it is consumed.
There is a good article here on the technical challenges: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-po...
Don't forget that deserts are part of Earths ecosystems too, and host a variety of wildlife that is also worthy of conservation.
At the end of the day nuclear can produce an absolutely massive amount of energy with little land use and a high degree of safety with zero ongoing carbon emissions and a lower materials throughput than any other source. In my opinion we would be stupid to not use it.