> If nuclear could compete on cost,
For the life of me, I cannot understand the disconnect in thinking for people who recognize the need for bold action on climate change and then in the next breath fret about money.
It's gonna cost money. It's gonna require work. It's going to not only be opportunity cost, but require us to do stuff. This is what it means to have climate change as a priority. It's a priority above money, above GDP growth, above even the standard of living. It should be our highest priority, and we should be prepared to roll up our sleeves and hit everyone up for money. It's a debt we need to pay, and there's no getting out of it.
> The more we learn about nuclear, the more expensive it seems to get, in contrast to pretty much any good tech.
At this point in time we need to push the dollar cost much further down our list of priorities and be shooting for what's going to avoid catastrophe and what's sustainable. (spoiler: nuclear energy is absolutely sustainable; there are literally billions of years of nuclear fuel accessible to us).
To you and I perhaps it is 'just money' because your standard of living is sufficiently high that a 10%, 20% or even 50% reduction is a sacrifice of comfort, and not existential. But contracting the growth prospects for India by 25% over the next decade means consigning millions of people to crippling poverty.
This idea that money is some morally lesser concern just fundamentally misunderstands what money is. Aggregate wealth is just all the stuff we have. Less money means less stuff. Less stuff means more poverty. That may be worth while, if we think climate change is severe. But it's always extremely important to keep this in perspective.
Climate change is primarily going to hurt the world's poor, and so are the cuts we'll have to make to combat it. But if you don't keep that in perspective, the cure may end up worse than the disease.
People say this, but I'll note that humans have lived through "crippling poverty" for most of our 2 million year existence. It is only crippling poverty by today's distortion lens (also a shifting baseline).
We should focus on what people really need to live quality lives, which is: good health (read: access to modern healthcare, freedom from pollution, disease), good food (read: freedom first from starvation, from malnutrition, poor diet), shelter from the elements, and then the rest of Maslow's hierarchy. Cars, TV, home appliances, and the whole lot of today's energy-hungry living isn't sustainable, and I'd argue isn't even the thing we should be shooting for. People of the past lived very different and satisfying lives that we simply can't imagine because, frankly, we are spoiled. People lived in tribes and hunted with spears for 100,000 years at least. And you know what, they beat those drums, painted their faces, tracked the stars, and contrary to whatever we might believe from our high place of "development" they actually enjoyed their lives.
This is a totally other conversation, but let's just say, I disagree with a lot of what you say about money and what it means to people. Money's new. We've been around a lot longer.
That's very easy to say. But it's hard for me not to notice that you're commenting on web forums, which means you probably haven't given up on the creature comforts of modernity. If you're not willing to do it, what gives you the right to tell half of India to?
> We should focus on what people really need to live quality lives, which is: good health (read: access to modern healthcare, freedom from pollution, disease), good food (read: freedom first from starvation, from malnutrition, poor diet), shelter from the elements, and then the rest of Maslow's hierarchy. Cars, TV, home appliances, and the whole lot of today's energy-hungry living isn't sustainable, and I'd argue isn't even the thing we should be shooting for. People of the past lived very different and satisfying lives that we simply can't imagine because, frankly, we are spoiled. People lived in tribes and hunted with spears for 100,000 years at least. And you know what, they beat those drums, painted their faces, tracked the stars, and contrary to whatever we might believe from our high place of "development" they actually enjoyed their lives.
I see a whole lot of people saying things like this, and literally no one actually living it. The contradiction is hard to ignore. Maybe the old way of living wasn't really that nice.
Well you quite obviously are not going to due to selection bias. But yes, there are people who have tried to simplify their lives down, both now and since the dawn of the modern era. Pick any level of tech you like: log cabin, lean to, nothing but a knife. People try. Some succeed. Sometimes they write books, sometimes books are written about them. Very few post on hackernews. Nowadays it's pretty much impossible to escape the modern world, so I wouldn't hold my breath for naturalist/primitivists to rise up and take over the world.
But I'm not really arguing for anything. We're headed back to sustainability one way or another.
Which is another way to say: "How dare you criticize capitalism from your smartphone?"
This argument is so old, overused and has been debunked so much already, but I'll do it once again for you, even though it would take the intellectual honesty and introspection capacity of an 8 years old to realize it's a really bad argument.
1) We don't choose to be born and live in this society. It just happens, and we don't get to learn the survival skills necessary to do without it. Therefore, one could say we're stuck in it. Especially considering nowadays everything is property of someone, you can't just go and take a piece of forest to have your primitive tribe there.
2) Technology and innovation ARE NOT EXCLUSIVE to Capitalism. Repeat it once again if you need. Soviets had a space program too you realize that? Saying that Capitalism is the only way to have innovation, because someone invented iPhone under Capitalism means having no idea of what false correlation is. I'd suggest studying the very basis of statistics before making such claims.
>Maybe the old way of living wasn't really that nice.
Maybe we can take the best from both worlds. Lose the hunger for profit, the abstract finance, the exploitation and keep the progress.
You're not stuck. Learning survival skills is not very hard. You are simply waking up every single day and choosing not to do it. Nobody is stopping you.
> 2) Technology and innovation ARE NOT EXCLUSIVE to Capitalism. Repeat it once again if you need. Soviets had a space program too you realize that? Saying that Capitalism is the only way to have innovation, because someone invented iPhone under Capitalism means having no idea of what false correlation is. I'd suggest studying the very basis of statistics before making such claims.
Of course the Soviets had a space program. It's all they had. Their economy was falling apart. Centrally planned economies can do things. They're particularly effective at mustering the entire population behind a single project: like the space race.
They're much less good at doing all the things necessary to run a modern economy simultaneously. Everyone who has ever tried to run an economy this way has failed. The Soviets, the Chinese, North Korea is still making a valiant effort, but it sure doesn't seem to be working out very well for them.
It's true that capitalism isn't the only way to have innovation. It's also true that it's the only way to do it consistently, over a long period of time, across a broad array of industries. There are precisely zero counter-examples in world history. Of course, that doesn't prove it can't be done. But the numbers don't look very good.
> Maybe we can take the best from both worlds. Lose the hunger for profit, the abstract finance, the exploitation and keep the progress.
It'd be nice. I think if you want ideas like that, Glen Weyl's book Radical Markets is probably for you. Fundamentally you aren't going to make any progress on creating that world until you recognize that markets are not your enemy. Centralized state planning is not and never will be an effective way of coordinating an economy. It can be useful in some domains, but it simply doesn't work to run an entire economy that way. What you can do, however, are create market mechanisms that are more progressive than what we have now, by having properly designed taxation schemes, as described in the aforementioned book.
It seems like you're gunning for some weird primitivist angle that just isn't realistic. These problems are solvable with good public transit infrastructure and a few thousand hectares of solar panels. Obviously there's no escaping some impact on our lifestyle, but "hey, destitution isn't so bad when you have family" is a bizarre leap out of left field. No climate scientists are realistically suggesting that we "end home appliances."
Humans have died through crippling poverty for most of our existence, and that baseline, however shifted, is still not enough to ensure that everyone - in both developing and developed countries - can have good health, good food, and shelter.
Sure, this is mostly due to inequal resource distribution, but I don't believe that the crisis caused by climate change will rectify that, at least by itself.
Just because we've staved off collapse for a few decades with technological tricks, doesn't mean the argument was wrong.
If you've got a really strong claim to make that sustainable farming at scale is unviable, then you must have a source to back that up.
Which is what maybe ~1% of the most wealthy and lucky of human population currently get, some of the time.
> and then the rest of Maslow's hierarchy.
Oh wow, I like Maslow's "hierarchy". Although satisfaction of the human needs laid out there defy "provision", they are to be earned and achieved by the person.
> Cars, TV, home appliances, and the whole lot of today's energy-hungry living isn't sustainable, and I'd argue isn't even the thing we should be shooting for.
The very things which people invented, and are willing to pay for, to further themselves in the satisfaction of their needs. Which needs are laid out in Maslow's theory of motivation.
I presume you do realise this. Could you please explain how do you resolve this conflict?
A. Provision every human being with complete satisfaction of entire set of needs (bodily, security, society, esteem, knowledge, beauty, self-actualization and transcendence).
B. Take away from people, and punish them for having devices which are universally known to affordably address specific and provably existing human needs.
How do you propose to do A (at all), and then insist on B?
Am I right that you are a communist? Would you like to have a chance to live in the USSR?
Money is not magical but they may conceal the truth as the rabbit in a hat. Money is numbers and with numbers you can do math, its easy to grasp. But money doesn't in itself explain the factors around. A product or service may have a certain cost because of the quality or because it's subsidized or because its valued different or because of another unaccounted factor. And what if its something that is invaluable? No money in the world can be fixed to it. The risk of letting money be the priority is that we may see the number but not the damage to the nature behind it. As climate change probably will take lives or even humanity in the future and life has one of the highest value, or at least the life of oneself, therefore it is a priority above money.
> Something "costing money" means that it reduces the amount of goods and services we can create. Climate change "costs money" in the sense that it reduces global output. Reducing global output has a human cost, especially for low income nations.
And if it's so then what says the cost needs to be distributed evenly? Around 5% of the world population hold 70% of the world wealth(at least 2012).
> To you and I perhaps it is 'just money' because your standard of living is sufficiently high that a 10%, 20% or even 50% reduction is a sacrifice of comfort, and not existential. But contracting the growth prospects for India by 25% over the next decade means consigning millions of people to crippling poverty. > This idea that money is some morally lesser concern just fundamentally misunderstands what money is. Aggregate wealth is just all the stuff we have. Less money means less stuff. Less stuff means more poverty. That may be worth while, if we think climate change is severe. But it's always extremely important to keep this in perspective. > Climate change is primarily going to hurt the world's poor, and so are the cuts we'll have to make to combat it. But if you don't keep that in perspective, the cure may end up worse than the disease.
If we would divide the aggregated wealth equally between all people then the standard of living would probably be pretty decent and economical growth wouldn't be necessary. Thou I find it hard to imagine that ever happening. The difficulty for people to work without incentives. The difficulty for people to realise it's just not their hard work but mostly luck that brought their wealth.
Climate change hopefully will change peoples views and values. If we won't find a cure we may at least embrace the disease.
It is clear that climate change is an emergency. However, the amount of resources, including money, to address that emergency is finite, so it would be illogical (or even unethical) not to use resources in the most economical way possible.
New nuclear power plants have a cost of, for example, over 90 £ / MWh. New solar and wind energy can deliver at less than half that price:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
There is also another motication to build nuclear power plants - they subsidize military use of nuclear weapons. To cite from the article above: "On 12 October 2017, The Guardian reported that researchers informed MPs that the UK government was using the expensive Hinkley Point C project to cross-subsidise the UK military's nuclear-related activity by maintaining nuclear skills. The researchers from the University of Sussex, Prof. Andy Stirling and Dr. Phil Johnstone, stated that the costs of the Trident nuclear submarine programme would be prohibitive without "an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure".[97]"
(The linked reference [97] is https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...)
On top of that, such plants, even with very conventional nuclear technology, take more than a decade to build. To address climate change, we need big and radical changes in energy production in the next twenty years. Building new nuclear energy is very clearly too slow to achieve that.
So, at that point, using nuclear to address climate change is merely a distraction. There are much better ways to address this problem.
If Governments allow commercial development of nuclear power stations that cannot be used to produce enriched uranium (thorium being one of those), then free market forces will push the cost of design, and building them down, making the price of nuclear electricity much lower.
There's no economy of scale to the current nuclear industry. Each power station design is different in some way.
Imagine a commercial small sized, modular nuclear power plant, produced at scale. Nuclear subs, and aircraft carriers already have a version.
"Building new nuclear energy is very clearly too slow to achieve that."
I'd disagree, it is, as usual politics getting in the way of science, not the engineers or physicists. If the financial incentives are there, it would be solved very quickly. Fission isn't fusion, and the physics and engineering is well understood. Not directly comparable, but look at what SpaceX has achieved in 20 years in terms of design and engineering.
Nuclear plants have always been uninsurable without an explicit liability cap (currently set at $200 million).
The "free market" would never have let it happen in the first place without that subsidy (& several others).
Nuclear only ever exists and will only ever continue to existing because of subsidies.
The desire for subsidies is probably why this article exists, in fact.
What really killed the first wave of nuclear in the US was not TMI or over-regulation, but the passage of PURPA that began to open the markets to competition from non-utility suppliers.
And then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others have come along and shown that an industry that expensive can be profitable, cheap, and safe.
It's not a perfect analogy by a long shot, but it's similar in terms of (historical) investment.
There's no reason to believe that nuclear should be any different. The engineering and physics is well understood.
I'd say that you've omitted the word "current", i.e. "current Nuclear plants have always been uninsurable", and "current Nuclear only ever exists and will only ever continue to existing because of subsidies."
I'll re-iterate my previous comment, if Governments would step back from over regulation, and the desire for reactors to produce weapons grade uranium and plutonium as a by-product, then new designs could be achieved quickly, cheaply, and safely. Molten-salt is being actively researched: https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/04/166330/meltdown-...
It's not like there are a variety of startups nipping at their heels. They want to make a profit but they're not doing it because they're convinced they will.
As for the word "current"... well, if the nuclear industry thinks it's so safe and thinks it can prove it to the insurance industry why don't they prove it and forgo their public insurance subsidy? They fought for this subsidy in the first place, they can give it up just as easily.
Why not let the free market decide if they're safe rather than providing taxpayers as a backstop?
The free market is pretty evidence based, so it would decide they are safe. I doubt the public insurance subsidy works the way you are representing it. They'd not insure against the risk of a catastrophic meltdown in a free market, the risk is too low. The "insurance" is probably more of a government tax on the assumption that there is latent risk. I'm not going to say that is unreasonable, but it doesn't have anything to do with how safe the industry thinks it is.
Consider Fukushima, the result of one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history (Wikipedia says 4th largest [0]). Free markets don't bother to insure against that sort low-risk event. It would be like insuring San Francisco against the fact that it is on an active fault line - the market doesn't bother to insure against a risk that rare.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Largest_e...
The free market is entirely based on investor hype. We have economic downturns ever 7-ish years, like clockwork, because some bubble burst again. It's a fallacy to treat investors like rational actors.
Well, for one, a rocket launch going wrong can certainly kill people, but it won't make an entire region uninhabitable.
> The engineering and physics is well understood.
as are the safety issues which is why there what research there is for a modern nuclear reactor design would not repeat those mistakes (e.g. molten-salt).
Whether the region around Chernobyl is uninhabitable is debatable, given that animals have returned to it in abundance.
I am repeating here from an earlier post:
There are many things we do not understand about radiation. The traditional models on radiation dosis and health effects are probably too simple. There is a strain of research on epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig...
Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus.
Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion.
There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9728737/
http://www.crause.de/elbmarschleukaemie.html
https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leuk%C3%A4mieclus...
Some researchers also have found there is a correlation between the proportion of sexes of humans at birth, and radiation:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...
I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions.
The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development.
Another interesting observation is that in Chernobyl, insects seem more affected by radiation than vertebrates. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig... https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679916/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-...
> Look all I'm saying is that if we let the free market do whatever it wanted with gene therapy, cancer would be cured already. The market innovates. Look at SpaceX.
You can't dismiss huge technical challenges and engineering problems with "uh the free market can probably innovate a solution." Likely what would happen is a dozen nuclear startups would spring up like mushrooms after rain, vacuum up hundreds of millions in VC funding, spin their wheels for five years, and then dry up, leaving us with nothing.
The market isn't there to innovate. It's there to generate revenue, and it only innovates insofar as it is easy and profitable to do so. It's not a magic wand you can wave at situations you dislike. Frankly, if you want someone to innovate for you, ask the government [1].
Whilst I agree with your broad point, climate change is a systems problem and requires systems thinking and systemic change.
If you make nuclear available, but it is not competitive with fossil fuel energy, then we will continue to use fossil fuel energy. A relatively small number of oil company executives with a profit motive are going to make this decision for everyone, directly and indirectly.
'Doing stuff', as you say, involves governments of the people heavily regulating the most powerful corporations on the planet to ensure they can't make this decision in the wrong direction.
Government action in this direction hasn't happened for the last 30 years, and doesn't look close to happening in the present.
As such, it's reasonable for climate change activists to make plans to meet the market where it's at and prioritise competitive renewable products above nuclear.
I'll make kind of absurd argument, but how is nuclear not competitive with dying? You could always tax the shit out of fossil fuels and they won't be competitive. You could also make other laws that punish fossil fuel usage with death penalty since you could argue its a crime against humanity. I mean, law is an abstract construct. This is a live or death situation. Even if we need to abandon 30 years of economic growth for the sake of surviving, then maybe it's what we need to do.
We have technically been able to do this as a species ever since global warming was discovered yet even in the face of an extinction level event we apparently still can't make ourselves do it. Fossil fuel lobbies are just too powerful. Carbon taxes are mostly weak or non existent. It's the species level way of saying "why don't you just give up smoking?". Not that easy.
Yet it is apparently possible to make solar + wind + storage + demand shifting energy cost competitive even without subsidies and very competitive with subsidies. The fossil fuel industry hasn't managed to shut it down. Species level nicorette patches.
One day we'll be able to tax the shit out of fossil fuels - once it is a nearly dead industry without much political muscle. By then it probably won't matter, though.
It's pointless posturing: following, not leading.
They'll gradually and then suddenly ratcheted up as the fossil fuel industry loses political power in various countries. It'll be far too little and too late to mitigate the worst effects of global warming though.
Your suggested laws ain't coming.
Nuclear is not on the critical path, as we have several alternative paths that reach the same carbon neutral end result. They will do this so with less cost than nuclear, by nearly all accounts (but not all accounts. However it seems quite likely to me that climate scientists will change their opinion as they revise the costs of nuclear to incorporate modern construction attempts.)
Why are we to choose the more expensive option? Simply because we like nuclear and want to subsidize it more than other clean energy sources? What good comes from nuclear's extra expense?
I am a big fan of nuclear but, I'm wondering, is this true? Do we have enough fuel for current nuclear reactors to run for....how long? Someone, also on HN, said we have enough fuel for maybe 150 years if we relie solely on it. So what is the truth?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
(Above link says 1000 1000 MW reactors for 100,000 years, but doesn't mention how much that is with reprocessing--that is hundreds of times the rate of global nuclear power production today).
The question is, how much does it cost to extract it?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
There are also many tonnes of gold dispersed in rivers and seawater. It is however not economical to extract it.
Also, uranium mining is often causing a lot of health problems. Like in the German SAG/SDAG Wismut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(mining_company)#Impact...
And, in order to not wander too far off topic of energy economics, how is the extraction of uranium from seawater going to be economical?
It is possible that we exhaust both and still have no fusion or asteroid mining after couple centuries from now, but we’d have to be extremely lazy to be in that position.
This needs breeder technology which is a different kettle of fish. The only existing plant was the Japanese Monju plant which was closed due to numerous problems and accidents, including a dangerous liquid sodium fire. You can read about it here:
You can extract plutonium from spent fuel, I agree to that. This is what makes spent fuel processing expensive and this is what was used in 1945 and also turns any fuel waste into a proliferation issue. But converting depleted uranium (U-238) from spent fuel into fissile plutonium or whatever isotope, like GP suggested, is a different thing which would necessarily need some nuclear reaction.
I'll add that with current technology, you can't reprocess MOX fuel another time (too many higher isotopes of Pu and transuranics beyond Pu are produced), so any Pu in it after it's consumed must be disposed of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300
One main point of the discussion was that such a breeder reactor uses fast neutrons and this has the effect that it is far less controllable. Normal fission power plants use slow neutrons, that is neutrons which come from a nuclear reaction, and are slowed down by a moderator, which is water. Breeder reactors do use fast neutrons and need a far higher energy density. One consequence this has is that they need really exotic and difficult to handle coolants, such as liquid sodium. I therefore call bullshit in that there is nothing complicated in them.
Also, such reactors have a different safety behavior. A key task of any nuclear technology is to keep the chain reaction of atoms and neutrons under control. This happens at the microsecond scale, and some chain reaction needs to be going for the reactor to not fizzle out, so it is anything but trivial.
If the reaction in a normal pressured-water fission reactor becomes too strong, this has the effect that immediately the water heats up. This makes the water less dense, and this reduces the effect of its moderation, which makes the neutrons faster, which reduces their potential to react with uranium atoms, and therefore it slows down the reaction. This achieves self-control. What happens when this self-control is lost, is perhaps best illustrated by the Chernobyl accident.
A fast breeder reactor does not have such an inherent control via the moderator and coolant. It was therefore judged by the public to be more complicated, and more dangerous.
A funny thing is that during that discussion, the proponents of nuclear energy said again and again that nuclear power plant's are safe and that they in particular can't explode.
I still remember the twitter post with these pictures:
For this reason, I suspect only a homogenous fast reactor (molten salt reactor using chloride salts, for example) could be licensed.
I’m still pro-nuke though! In fact the whole situation made me so. Before I was naively thinking we better seek alternate fuels.
See for example:
https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1421
and in more length:
http://theoildrum.com/files/O_118_Michael_Dittmar.pdf
The author also notes that, as of today, nuclear energy contributes only a very small part of the delivered energy mix.
Nuclear is an excuse to do absolutely nothing.
The issue raised by GP comment is how you allocate that insane expense. As I read it, they are only suggesting we spend on the most affordable technologies available to lessen the impact of climate change, not the most expensive.
Nuclear power is a zero emissions source of power. Alternative renewables (e.g. wind, solar) require fossil fuels to power the electrical grid when they are not able to generate power. The sources you mention are also substantial less effective from an energy density perspective. The amount of energy they output, relative to the energy input to construct them and the amount of land they consume, is orders of magnitude less than that produced by nuclear.
Storing energy is incredibly expensive. If we were to use lithium ion batteries to store electricity, it would cost trillions of dollars to produce and maintain the batteries. This does not include the immense environmental damage that would occur as a consequence of this policy (land usage, mining, waste products, etc.)
> If nuclear could compete on cost, we should go for it, but it can't without a major tech breakthrough
Nuclear energy is more cost effective than alternatives. The main issue is that antinuclear activists, funded by the fossil fuel industry, have lobbied to make it cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants by way of onerous regulation and prolonged legal battles. Countries that have reduced their reliance on nuclear power, for example France, have seen their electricity prices and carbon emissions rise as a consequence. We also know that nuclear power plants can operate for longer than previously believed — at least 80 years, as opposed to the 40 years that was previously assumed. This understanding further drives down the cost of electricity derived from nuclear energy, as it reduces the need to construct new facilities.
> For example, we will definitely need to start producing hydrogen
Why? Producing hydrogen is inefficient and unnecessary if you have a consistent source of energy, which nuclear provides.
> As it is, it's a dinosaur from the past, a legacy of a time before we had better tech.
Nuclear energy is safe, causing fewer deaths and adverse health impacts than alternative sources of energy. It is cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable than alternatives while also being far more environmentally friendly. If it is a dinosaur, then so are the transistors that make up computer processors, which are roughly as old and somehow are still the subject of cutting edge research.
Renewables are about an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. $15/MWh vs $112/MWh. So what you do is overprovision your renewables. In other words, build more than you need. The major reason to do this is so that when the wind is barely blowing and/or it's a cloudy day you still get enough power to supply your needs without peakers. Then on the days when you're producing excess power (ie, most of them), you use that excess energy to produce methane from CO2. Use that methane to run your natural gas peakers, making them carbon neutral. This is likely much cheaper than batteries, certainly if you already have the gas peakers.
You'll have to overprovision to cover the very unlikely time that both the wind and sun disappear for a long stretch, so you'll be overprovisioned all other times. Methane production takes Hydrogen as an input, so you can use some of that excess energy to create extra Hydrogen. Or you can turn methane into plastic for use or storage. Or just sell the extra electricity, there are several industries that can soak up cheap electricity (please not to bitcoin miners though).
> Nuclear energy is more cost effective than alternatives. The main issue is that antinuclear activists, funded by the fossil fuel industry, have lobbied to make it cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants by way of onerous regulation and prolonged legal battles.
Even in China, nuclear is incredibly expensive and takes a long time. So I don't think regulation is the main problem.
> Why? Producing hydrogen is inefficient and unnecessary
Clean steel & cement.
When there is zero wind and zero sun then it doesn't matter how much over provisioning there is: your output will be zero.
I live in Ontario, Canada, where we do have wind and (some) solar in our energy mixture. Wind can go from 100 to 2900 MW, and solar from 0 to 350 MW.
Looking at the Supply tab (18-24 Oct), on Tues, Oct 20, at 05:00 we had 173MW of wind and zero solar (sunrise@07:48):
* http://www.ieso.ca/power-data
The amount that we would have had to to "overprovision" to get useful renewables would have been ridiculous. Luckily our 9,500MW of nuclear just chugs along filling our base load with >4,000MW total available hydro helping, as well as some gas peakers.
If we built another 3000MW of nuclear then we could handle our base load with that, and hydro would be used for the variable portion of demand.
As someone who lives <50km from a nuclear power plant [0] bring in more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickering_Nuclear_Generating_S...
What he suggested is that we use the overprovisioning to generate methane or hydrogen so it propells us through a few weeks of no wind or sun.
So, instead of 1GW of Nuclear you have 2GW of solar/wind + 1GW electrolysis and 1GW of hydrogen capacity.
This gives you better network stability than nuclear and the cost are or will soon be lower than the nuclear
I have no issue with using renewables per se; I'm just skeptical about basing the entire system on them:
That does not really happen over large geographic regions, within which one can distribute energy via the electrical grid. In Germany, there has been a lot of research put into that before the non-nuclear strategy was decided. It was a political decision, but it has been prepared by many, many engineers and researchers.
In fact, there are times where Germany exports needed energy to France, in spite of that France has much more nuclear power. Sometimes that happens in hot sommers, when rivers have to little water and they become hot. Then, nuclear plants need to be shut down because otherwise they would cause environmental damage.
Other times, it happens in winter, because a lot of heating in France is electrical to accomodate for nuclear energy. But sometimes there is a shortfall, and it turns out that on windy winter days there is an excess of wind energy in western and northern Europe.
Another thing, storing energy is not necessarily expensive. A lot of energy use is things like room heating, room cooling, or hot water. Now, heat can be stored efficiently for many hours. (In larger tanks or earth installations, it can even be stored efficiently for months).
In general, Germany has not planned for and refuses to build any significant kind of energy storage. Existing pumped hydro plants are even shut down. Transmission lines to even out the regional differences due to weather and consumption are planned, but do not exist yet for the usual reasons and will not exist for the next decade or so. This means that Germany relies on the rest of the European grid to balance out its excess production or consumption phases, of course at a significant cost in stability and money. Cherry-picking times where the balancing-out causes energy exports to France is just propaganda imho.
How connected are grids in Canada?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
Ontario specifically is part of the NPCC:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Power_Coordinating_C...
It connects to Michigan, NY in two places, and Quebec in a few.
I think there are a lot of complications that are encountered when doing this sort of calculation. You might get a max output of "$15/MWh" or "$112/MWh" but that's only a portion of the picture.
Firstly Nuclear is X amount of power essentially on tap 24/7 where X is between some Min and Max value. From what I understand this makes grid management much simpler and reduces storage, transmission, and conversion losses. Even in the best case situation of "renewable" energy you'll see, in the absolute best case claimed by pumped hydro storage, you're seeing about an 87% efficiency.
Suppose you had a nuclear power plant that could output 100W consistently. Suppose you wanted to build a similarly efficient "renewable" energy source. How much more peak power would it need to output to be competitive? If we assume the power source is 0% efficient at night and 100% efficient during the day, off the bat, you'd need to generate 200W continuously during the day. Then you'd need to generate an extra 13% on those extra 100Ws to make up for storage losses (1.13*100 ~= 113). That means 100W from Nuclear is ~= 213W "renewable". Obviously this is a terrible calculation and not at all accurate but it's just a sample of some of the math that needs to be done.
Another factor that I've been skirting around is that "renewable" sources of energy are often not so renewable. Specifically things like like solar require a huge amount of rare metals & complex fabrication. Right now none of those externalizations are represented in the price of solar because there are no carbon taxes in countries that manufacture them.
Money in this case is a proxy of what needs to be measured and should not be the only factor we optimize for.
Also, nuclear combines well with thermal storage because you don't incur double conversion losses. If you store heat from the reactor during the day when solar is generating, use it during the peak demand in the evening when it isn't, and then run directly from the reactor overnight, you don't really need any other storage.
The bottom half of the demand is the easy half, why would you use your most expensive power for the easy stuff?
> Also, nuclear combines well with thermal storage because you don't incur double conversion losses. If you store heat from the reactor during the day when solar is generating, use it during the peak demand in the evening when it isn't, and then run directly from the reactor overnight, you don't really need any other storage.
In other words, you're running your nuclear at a 50% duty cycle, doubling it's price. I don't think there is much appetite for power that costs over $200 per MWh.
> The bottom half of the demand is the easy half, why would you use your most expensive power for the easy stuff?
Factoring in carbon footprints nuclear would likely beat our battery based storage options if carbon output was taxed. Nickel–metal hydride battery and LiPo are not carbon neutral and are consumable components.
> In other words, you're running your nuclear at a 50% duty cycle, doubling it's price. I don't think there is much appetite for power that costs over $200 per MWh.
50% duty cycle means 50% fuel usage (not really but not not) meaning you're not really "wasting" energy here.
Another question to ask ourselves: we make the Total Cost of Ownership of a plant far better than it even currently is? We can do this by extending the lifespan of a plant to amortize construction. If you could design a power plant to last 100 to 200 years, that could be amortized further factoring into lower costs. We can also do this by reducing construction costs or improving efficiency.
I think those are accomplish-able goals (at least judging by China's adoption of Nuclear). Current plants in the USA operate for ~40 years. That means current plants were built with ~$today-50 (or more) years of physics and material science knowledge.
For context, that's the 70s. In the 70s:
- C was invented
- TTL logic was just starting to be used
- Stainless steel did not exist <- this statement was wrong
Edit: philipkglass pointed out that stainless steel is quite a bit older. Disregard that last item.
Stainless steel was about 60 years old in the 1970s.
That’s one type of building material among many that are needed in huge quantities.
Concrete sold today can be bought with an advertised lifespan of 100 years. If you replace a coal plant with a nuclear plant how many years would it need to be net carbon negative? What is the grams of CO2 / kWh of nuclear vs coal vs solar?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_degradation#Carbonati...
Also there is the all energy used for processing concrete which a lot times is not from CO2 neutral source.
It's not so easy when you have to meet it even when there is no wind or sunlight for twelve hours straight.
> In other words, you're running your nuclear at a 50% duty cycle, doubling it's price.
You're still running it at a 100% duty cycle, you're just shifting the generation times. You have a reactor that can produce heat enough to generate 1GW continuous power, so it stores that heat for six hours a day during peak solar generation, then generates 2GW for six hours to cover peak demand in the evening, then generates 1GW directly for twelve hours overnight. It's generating 1GW worth of heat at all times, you're just converting the heat to electricity at different times of the day.
The problem are week long wind droughts with heavy cloud cover. That's where there's a clear argument for geothermal, hydro, and hydrogen. Maybe natural gas with carbon sequestration. If nuclear wants to join these options, it needs to prove itself as something that can be built. And as somebody who doesn't believe that we are close at all to natural gas with carbon sequestration, I think we are a lot closer to making that work than we are to having the managerial and technical skill capacity to build new nuclear.
Nuclear is not the only option, we have so many more.
We have that with current generation systems too; we don't run natural gas at full bore all the time, usually. Most generators run at a capacity factor far below 100%.
The difference is that renewables generate power at zero marginal cost, while a natural gas turbine has fuel costs and wear and tear.
So we are going to have massive amounts of super cheap energy, for those applications that are not time sensitive.
Hydrogen production through electrolysis would be a great way to store this extra, nearly free energy. However this is unfortunately not a perfect match the intermittent surplus of renewables, since the capital costs of electrolyzers makes it so that constant production would be best. But at least some surplus energy will go this route.
Storage has several options, for example we could store hydrogen only for short periods before converting to methane or ammonia or other more stable chemical forms. We could convert pipelines perhaps.
Hydrogen has a lot of difficulties, but it is also, even now, an essential part of our economy and we work with it at scale. It will be a while before "green" hydrogen from electrolysis is cost competitive with fossil fuel derived hydrogen, but it will almost certainly happen.
There's a great, but long, two part series on hydrogen in Europe from what most would call a very skeptical stance, yet as a fellow hydrogen skeptic it convinced me that hydrogen will play a much larger role in the future:
https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
And also industrial feedstock, immediately, and after a while, aircraft fuel.
While you can do an emergency shut-down quickly, normally adapting the power output of a nuclear plant takes many hours:
https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-shut-down-a-n...
The usual figures given for PWRs are something like "These reactors have the capability to regularly vary their output between 30–100% of rated power, to maneuver power up or down by 2–5%/minute" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuc...). This means that you can regulate your PWR over its power range within slightly more than half an hour at worst.
There is a lower limit to how much you can regulate your reactor down due to various limitations like Xenon poisoning. Because of that, a controlled complete shutdown is slower, because you need to get through the "icky" region between e.g. 30% and 0%. Also, you usually prepare for the longer phase the reactor will stay shut down. But all in all, shutdown is different from load following, and a conclusion that nuclear plants can't load-follow from a question about shutdown is just asking the wrong questions and drawing questionable conclusions from it.
A lot of energy use is room heating. But nobody wants their bedroom and living room in the night warmer than during the day.
Besides cost, the other issue with nuclear, or any large single generator, is that they can go down unexpectedly and their output drops from whatever to 0. This is less common when generation is from many individual generators. If a wine turbine goes out, it only drops the output of the wind farm by some small fraction.
However, it does require lead, cadmium, and other dangerous materials. Solar power can produce up to 300x the toxic waste as nuclear power does.
[0] https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste...
A quick search shows that the company referenced in that article, Solyndra, made CIGS panels, which, like I said, are relatively rare, in large part because they were a failed startup that went out of business.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
The vast majority of panels use crystalline Silicon.
The article also conflates warrantied lifespan with average lifespan. Solar PV cells can last much longer than 20 years.
https://www.presse.uni-oldenburg.de/einblicke/54/files/asset...
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34372005/solar-che...
That's not so simple. Demand for energy is fluctuating hugely, and nuclear power cannot be freely switched on and off. This is also the case for large coal plants. So, with using renewable energy, grids need to become more agile, and a somewhat larger amount of freely controllable power sources is needed. Another strategy is to average out fluctuations over large areas.
Even today, 6% of all natural gas consumed in the world goes to making hydrogen (about 700 cubic kilometers of H2 per year at STP). The major use is in making ammonia.
Which makes a lot of sense: It's a way to utilize the overproduction from renewables and existing gas infrastructure can be retooled for hydrogen without too much investment [1].
There are even considerations for a European hydrogen backbone by gas infrastructure companies from nine EU member states [2]
[0] https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/ueber-fraunhofer...
[1] https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/german-pipeline-oper...
[2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/gas-grid-operat...
The hydrogen industry exciting right now, and honestly I can't imagine saying that even a year ago. Europe's investing tens of billions of dollars in it, which will result in massive changes and improvements for the technology. A similar investment in nuclear would not move the needle at all.
The UK's first nuclear power plant cost half a billion in today's money. The current (and only) one being built in the UK is up to 23Bn for construction, plus ~50Bn in electricity subsidies, and is overbudget and delayed.
> cost prohibitive to build nuclear power plants by way of onerous regulation
> It is cheaper
You can't have it both ways. Everything is cheap if you exclude the costs which are annoying. Where, and how, is this regulation going to be removed, and how cheaply and how quickly? The fossil fuel lobbyists aren't going to roll over cheaply and let it happen. Nor are they going to agree to disallow lobbying for the greater good. They should, but they won't. Then what?
Renewables + short term storage + hydrogen will likely be cheaper than a grid based on nuclear, even with the inefficiency of hydrogen. One contributing reason for that (for the hydrogen) is that a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is 1/20th the capital cost per MW of a nuclear power plant.
You can check this out with some plausible assumptions for 2030 technologies and real climate data at
Nuclear requires a contract to buy all of that energy all of the time - and nobody really does that anymore at nuclear output levels. It’s the reason many large coal plants died of natural causes, nuclear is 2-3x worse
You have a huge upfront cost for building the plant, and then when it is running, relatively little, or very little cost for generating any additional kWh of energy. The funny thing is that when you run an energy market, what determines the market price is the marginal cost, that is, the cost for generating that additional unit! It is the same as when you run a car factory, people are going to give you money for the one car you produce, not for building the factory.
Now, with the marginal cost being near zero, that means that the market price is near zero as well. The price on the energy market goes to near zero. (And this is a very good thing because fossil energy has a much higher marginal cost and is competed out of the market, which is good for our planet's climate).
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-no...
With the consequence that both nuclear and renewable need some kind of subsidy or other mechanism which makes sure that the upfront cost is somehow financed.
What's also nice is that much of the subsidy goes in advance. And specifically with renewable power, it is very predictable and can be planned well. You cannot promise, as in so many other areas where government money is spent, that you build it at a cheap price, and then come back and demand more.
And the latter is one reason why big nuclear energy constructors, like Westinghouse, appear to go bust one after another.
As for cost, you are contradicting yourself when you say it's cheap (it's not), and when you say that it's expensive because of anti-nuclear activists. See, for example, France, whose new nuclear projects are not cost competitive despite having a strongly pro-nuclear regulatory situation.
As for the "efficiency" of hydrogen, the only efficiency that matters is economic efficiency, and all indications point to hydrogen storage of wind/solar to be more economically efficient than nuclear. (And for the record, for energy efficiency both nuclear and hydrogen are about 50% efficient, but like I said the only efficiency that matters for deployment is cost efficiency.
Alternative sources of energy also require materials to produce them. Natural gas plants require similar amounts of concrete and steel but have lower energy yields. Renewable sources like wind and solar require immense amounts of materials, including heavy metals and other toxic, non-recyclable materials. Because they are far less dense (~50 watts per sq. meter versus 2000-6000 watts per sq. meter from nuclear), they have a substantially greater environmental impact.
> As for the "efficiency" of hydrogen, the only efficiency that matters is economic efficiency, and all indications point to hydrogen storage of wind/solar to be more economically efficient than nuclear.
Solar and wind are heavily subsidized, at least in the United States, while nuclear is subject to expensive and arbitrary regulatory burdens. There’s not a level playing field to support the argument that nuclear energy is not economically competitive.
From the perspective of physics, hydrogen is necessarily less efficient than other energy sources. Generating the initial source of electricity to produce the hydrogen has a given level of inefficiency. Then actually producing the hydrogen compounds the amount of energy wasted. Finally, utilizing the hydrogen as an energy source also loses some energy. There’s no scenario where it’s more efficient to use hydrogen as an intermediary than it is to use the original source.
Regarding your statement that nuclear receiving high regulatory costs and renewables being highly subsidised, that statement is false again. The subsidies received by nuclear are significantly larger than the ones received by renewables.
Source europe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Too_much_money_for_dirt...
Source europe: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Subsidies-For-O...
In Australia we have a fuel tax as part of a user-pays philosophy for road maintenance. Because they don't use public roads, mining companies were exempted from the fuel tax. This gets classed as an enormous subsidy for coal which is technically true but realistically silly. If renewables were buying fuel and not using public roads they'd be exempted too.
There is a big handwave there where we take it, on faith, that these subsidies were just handouts as opposed to, say, reasonable tax exemptions like in the Australian case.
The (decade old) source you provided for energy subsidies appears somewhat dishonest, as the date ranges appear cherry picked. Why is it that the source only looks at nuclear subsidies up until 1999, while subsidies to other energy sources are considered through 2009?
The choice of units in this source is also odd. What have the subsidies been in terms of energy output? At its peak, nuclear was producing some 16-20% of US power. I imagine normalizing on a $/MWh basis could paint a different picture.
Looking at a more recent source [0], it appears that recent nuclear subsidies have been marginal and are far outpaced by renewable subsidies. If we consider prior subsidies a sunk cost, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to subsidize a new, less environmentally friendly, source of energy when our best in class is already excellent.
[0] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/09/23/energy-subsidies-re...
For him, it is a political wedge issue meant to drive partisan policy development.
If we are to be hard nosed climate hawks, we need to look at the reality of nuclear, as it exists today, and the reality of our capacity to change our industrial processes. And having done that, after being very bullish on nuclear starts in the 2000s, I do not see how Shellenberger can be taken the least but seriously. He doesn't address the reality of nuclear on the ground, instead focusing on political statements.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
The PV EROI numbers could use an update pretty much everywhere. I have some ballpark-corrected numbers that I keep in my head but the academic literature badly lags industry. You can read a "new" solar EROI paper in 2020 and after dereferencing all its citation pointers find it's still using key numbers from 2008. Thinner cells, lower kerf loss, polysilicon reactor optimization, crystal growing optimization, higher cell efficiency (PERC), bifaciality, and the increasing prevalence of single axis trackers mean that a state of the art solar farm in 2020 has significantly better EROI than the same capacity farm in the same place in 2010. But industry cares about costs, not EROI, and academics who write about EROI seem to lack the will to gather numbers from current industrial practice.
I also occasionally suspect that good solar EROI analysis doesn't happen because people are anchored to previous conclusions. Whether that's nuclear promoters or deep green/"degrowth" types. Both would like to say "there is no alternative" to their visions of the future and a high solar EROI would demonstrate an inconvenient alternative. Or just inattentive grad students and advisors who assume current EROI numbers should be in line with older ones.
So add that to the mix of what it takes to build a wind turbine. I'm not sure of the cost of copper production but I bet it's not cheap or easy on the environment.
Might be something to factor in.
https://www.copper.org/publications/pub_list/pdf/a6198-na-wi...
Most uses of copper in wind power can be substituted by aluminum when copper prices rise. Speaking on behalf of copper producers who want to impede substitution, the report says:
Substitution by aluminum can be addressed with proactive promotion based on copper’s known benefits of higher energy efficiency (reduction of energy losses) and assurance of long‐term reliability. Aluminum is vulnerable here due to its lower strength, relaxation behavior and corrosion resistance. The downstream technical and economic risks associated with “value engineering” copper out of critical components are unknown. And, because the costs or repair, maintenance and downtime are known to be high in wind‐energy plants, copper promotion based on reducing life‐cycle costs through improved reliability and efficiency should be a worthwhile undertaking. Institutional promotion through the establishment of prudent codes, standards and recommended practices is also recommended.
It's a mixture of highlighting legitimate engineering concerns, raising FUD about failure to address those concerns, and trying to get copper specifically entrenched in codes and standards so that aluminum will not be allowed to compete with copper.
For answering the specific question of how much copper current wind power uses, see table 2-1. There's a lot of variation. The project built with 2.1 MW turbines from Suzlon had a copper intensity of 6.8 tonnes (14,900 pounds) per megawatt, while the project with 3.0 MW turbines from Vestas took only 2.5 tonnes (5600 lbs) per megawatt. Mass of copper per turbine is a poor metric because turbines come in various generating capacities.
Referendum voters. And those of us involved in public service, even if at a peripheral level.
One major thing about nuclear is that we do not even truly understand the effects of wide-ranging low doses of nuclear radiation.
I am repeating here from an earlier post:
There are many things we do not understand about radiation. The traditional models on radiation dosis and health effects are probably too simple. There is a strain of research on epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig...
Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus.
Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion.
There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9728737/
http://www.crause.de/elbmarschleukaemie.html
https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leuk%C3%A4mieclus...
Some researchers also have found there is a correlation between the proportion of sexes of humans at birth, and radiation:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...
I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions.
The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development.
Another interesting observation is that in Chernobyl, insects seem more affected by radiation than vertebrates. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig... https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679916/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-...
Nuclear and offshore wind are equivalent (median: 12 gCO2eq/kWh)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
> Alternative renewables (e.g. wind, solar) require fossil fuels to power the electrical grid when they are not able to generate
Overprovision is part of a solution. Storage may tackle part of the challenge ( https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/declining-renewable-... ).
On a large geographic scale renewables are able to continuously generate enough energy. We know how to transport energy (and nuke plants also need it), and interconnecting grid is considered a win whatever the type of source used (nuclear, wind...).
See https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-... , which doesn't seem to me more ambitious than hoping to quickly multiply by 10+ the existing nuclear power generation capacity, and hoping that there will be enough practically available combustible for them.
> The amount of energy they output, relative to the energy input to construct
The net outcome is positive.
Moreover renewables don't need fuel, and therefore there is no need to worry about cost/reserves/geopolitical turmoil/terrorist actions/waste.
> amount of land they consume
For solar there are many adequate deserts and unused surfaces. For offshore wind there are huge pertinent areas.
> Nuclear energy is safe, causing fewer deaths and adverse health impacts
There are many ways to consider this. Here is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
> If it is a dinosaur, then so are the transistors
Transistors sci/tech made and makes huge progress. The nuke promises/dreams (fusion, no-waste...), albeit massively subsidized for decades, are stuck.
Many crops benefit from partial shade. So, farms. Likewise cars, so parking lots. Likewise roofs, so warehouses and factories. Likewise irrigation (reduced evaporation), so reservoirs and canals.
That book was heavily criticized because it did, in the eyes of critics, not adhere to limiting described effects to such ones commonly and easily attributed to radiation.
Fact is, we know surprisingly little about radiation effects. Especially, we clearly do not have a complete theory on the effects of ionizing radiation - especially on children.
See also this comment from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24879155
https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-nuclear-won-t-cut-it...
If we don't have lot of time left, than we don't need to waste money on nuclear.
That's not exactly true, apart from mining for example the construction of a reactor building requires huge amounts of concrete. Also, mined uranium needs to enriched by centrifuges before it becomes usable, which is a process that requires a lot of energy.
But does centrifuge enrichment not use still, in absolute terms, a large amount of energy?
Looking at the EROEI numbers of different enrichment levels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI#EROEI_and_payback_period...
This isn't true. Pump solar/wind is cheaper than gas plants.
Gaseous, sure. It also emits radioactivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
Until we decarbonize construction, mining, and other energy needed to produce energy sources, everything still has a carbon emussions footprint.
The process of nuclear fission is zero-carbon (unlike combustion) and the lifecycle carbon emissions for nuclear are 12 gCO2-eq/kWh compared to 40 for solar, 490 for fracked natural gas, and 820 for coal.
It's easier and meaningful in my opinion to just call nuclear zero carbon.
Now the OP argument disingenuous because he also included emmissions of other sources into wind and solar. However as many have already pointed out it would be much easier to run a grid on renewables only than at nuclear only, because for renewables you only need a large enough grid and overprovisioning. Nuclear on the other hand is very bad at handling variable loads, so you will essentially have to overprovision to the the peak demand and run your plants at that demand and burn the energy somehow. Note that Belgium used to do that by illuminating all their highways at night.
The life-cycle numbers I give are sourced directly from an IPCC meta-analysis [2]. With nuclear, the entire life-cycle is extraordinarily low carbon even though it requires lots of concrete to build because you get about a billion Watts 90% of the time for 60 years given that much concrete.
As for what's easier, the common answer seems to be that variable renewables are ok for a while but at deep decarbonization, the situation is much easier and cheaper if you include some kind of low-carbon energy that can run 24/7, aka a "firm low-carbon source" [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
Pretty much everything on Earth emits radioactivity. Oh, and you get cosmic radiations every day as well.
Is more a mushroom shape than a zero shape.
Hmm, did you ever consider that ... nuclear power involves storing a huge amount of energy! Those huge cement walls and vassals require huge investments of money, energy, and materials. Just as much, that is energy invested in a particular location and assuming that location will continue to require energy. That's energy that's wasted if something goes wrong the construction or operation of the plant and that's energy that's gone at the end of life of the plant.
If you just require energy storage, it may be expensive but there are a number of flexible methods, some of which scale very easily (and others are cheaper but only at large scale, etc).
I do actually agree on the sentiment. We should be using the cheapest form of energy with a little bit of a concession to reliability.
But the problem with saying "nuclear costs more" is it is clearly over-regulated. We accept, for coal, about 3 orders of magnitude [0] more deaths per TWh than nuclear, as we have for the last 30 or 40 years†. At any point, literally hundreds of lives could have been saved moving to a technically excellent form of energy. We didn't do that. Ditto for renewables despite the terror displayed by the climate change lobby.
Humanity has, when tested, shown an overwhelming willingness to go with cheap power and disregard some really quite high social costs to get there. Nobody likes that inconvenient fact, but nuclear has been grossly over-regulated when assessed against humanities choices through the industrial revolution and beyond.
If we hold nuclear to the same standards all of us sitting in fossil-fuel based economies are accepting right now it would be much cheaper. If we held solar to the same standards of doing no harm as nuclear, it would be much more expensive.
So yes; cheapest option please. But can we also be consistent about the standards that we hold our energy to before we make that choice?
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
† Misread the chart. Originally said 4 and thousands. Point still stands.
In places where new nuclear has been built, it has not proven to be a spectacularly desirable energy source. The entire Western world has failed at building new reactors, causing bankruptcies and state acquisitions and restructurings. Even nuclear darling France is pulling back from new nuclear, instead looking to renewables and storage, including hydrogen. China tried valiantly but is pulling back from very large scale deployment. South Korea has had some success, but that's because quality control turned out to be a scam, so who knows about the quality of the reactors they built.
Russia's Rosatom has had some success, probably, but nobody trusts them.
The remaining market for nuclear are where there are corrupt bureaucracies where the prospect of a massive single project makes the potential for massive bribes possible. This is why coal succeeds in India, for example.
As for "doing no harm" with solar, I have yet to see any concrete examples of solar causing definitive harm. A solar failure doesn't cause massive environmental harm. The mining issues are similar to uranium mining. If solar is causing harm, I'd love to know how, but having searched for this and come up empty, and having people claim that solar causes harm and never follow through with specifics, I'm extremely skeptical of the claim. At least until there's some evidence to look into.
Until we can reliably contradict nuclear and also see that it actually seems like a good financial deal (taking into account all the costs of failed builds), nobody will really want to put up money for nuclear unless it's for ulterior reasons: corruption or nuclear proliferation or subsidizing a nuclear submarine fleet or something like that.
They aren't comparable. There are something like 50 mines supplying the entire global uranium industry [0]. And I happen to know Australia quite well, 3rd biggest uranium supplier globally with 2 active mines and one reprocessing old waste heaps. More than half our production comes from a mine that isn't even a uranium deposit, it is really a copper mine [1]. That is a top 3 global uranium producer - a uranium mine, a copper mine and an old dump. Good luck supplying the production of a serious number of solar panels with that sort of mining setup.
There are no issues associated with uranium mining. The industry is too small.
I'm surprised it takes 50 mines for uranium, that's far far more than I had expected.
Nuclear power is doing measurably less harm - in deaths, in habitat damage, in volume of waste produced and management thereof. Solar companies also aren't going to be held liable for the social costs of grid disruption which will inevitably cause outages or require additional countermeasures by other parties to secure their electricity supply.
Nobody is going to protest when solar company employees get skin cancer. Nobody is going to protest solar power when toxic sludge from carelessly-disposed heavy metals waste (or indeed solar panels themselves) contaminates drinking water in some rural town. Groups won't be organised to phase out solar installations in response to accidents in foreign countries.
And I think solar is perfectly fine, I just don't see why we impose all these silly restrictions on nuclear when it is a measurably superior form of energy.
> I'm surprised it takes 50 mines for uranium, that's far far more than I had expected.
Sounds like you might be in for a nasty shock when you find out how many coal mines the world has.
EDIT: Looked at Our World in Data, and all renewables and nuclear are actually comparable. They're orders of magnitude below fossil fuels and biomass.
Hydrogen is just a means of STORING energy and it is one of the worst for this purpose.
If we restrict the discussion just to storing energy as chemical energy, like with hydrogen, then almost any alternative has either better energetic efficiency or better energy density and in most cases is much better for both criteria.
For example, flow batteries have excellent energetic efficiency, much better than hydrogen could ever achieve, but they have low energy density, i.e. they must be very large for a given storage capacity.
For high energy density, nothing beats the method invented by the living beings a few billions of years ago, i.e. storing energy in hydrocarbons.
How to make synthetic fuel has already been known for about a century, it just is not much used yet because fossil petroleum is cheaper.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of money in pointless hydrogen research, all the efforts should have been directed to improving the efficiency and cost of fuel cells using some hydrocarbons and of the synthesis of some hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide.
That these targets are indeed achievable, unlike using hydrogen for storage, which has fundamental limitations, is proved by the existence of the living beings which use their equivalents.
People who say this aren't thinking clearly.
There are different storage use cases. For diurnal storage (daily charge/discharge cycles), hydrogen is indeed inferior to other technologies.
But this is not the only storage use case.
Other use cases are seasonal storage (particularly important at high latitudes) and backup storage (especially for rare events when it's both cloudy and windless over large areas for extended periods). For those use cases, hydrogen can be much better than things like batteries or compressed air (or flow batteries, or storage in synthetic hydrocarbons).
Converting the energy stored in hydrocarbons back to electrical energy can be done with the current technology at efficiencies well over 50% using Diesel engines.
Higher efficiencies can be reached with fuel cells. It is true that for now, especially for room-temperature fuel cells, much more research has been done for fuel cells with hydrogen.
However room-temperature fuel cells are handicapped anyway by the need for expensive catalysts. High temperature fuel cells can be made to work almost as well with hydrocarbons as with hydrogen. Their lifetime needs improvement, but it is likely that better results could have already been obtained if the research efforts in energy conversion would not have so dispersed over a very large number of directions, most of which were obviously wrong since the beginning.
Right now it is indeed possible to obtain hydrogen from water with a higher efficiency than hydrocarbons, because it can be done in a single simpler step, the electrolysis.
Nevertheless, in an optimized synthesis, the efficiency of obtaining hydrocarbons instead of hydrogen, also sequestering carbon dioxide as an added benefit, should have a very close efficiency, as proven by the countless bacteria that do a similar job.
It is possible right now to capture carbon dioxide and store energy in synthetic hydrocarbons, then generate electrical energy from the stored hydrocarbons.
However the cost and efficiency of doing that would be much less than desirable and possible.
That is why I said that this would require much more R&D than now, but this would be a certain solution for the long term storage problem.
For short term storage, high-efficiency solutions, e.g. flow batteries, pumped water, compressed air and so on, are better solutions.
So, where do you get the carbon from? Atmospheric capture? That blows the "easier" claim right out of the water. Biomass? Not practical on the very large scale needed.
Efficiency of conversion in combined cycle plants is around 60%.
Some of the CFCs and HFCs get collected, mostly at industrial sites. Car and residential mostly leaks.
At least xFCs don't acidify oceans.
This is a pretty gross falsehood.
Nuclear power is could be cheap and safe, but we _make_ it expensive by banning any form of innovation and by lying to the public about how risky it is compared to alternatives. The idea that nuclear is bad and costly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the public incentivize politicians to ban it or regulate it into oblivion.
We should not be building the same basic reactor design as we have in the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that we're stuck on big, expensive containment vessels and water is a clue about what is happening to nuclear.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-national...
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...
In fact, it is not even new technology, because before natural gas, gas for household use was generated from coal:
I’ve said this before. It’s not one or the other. The fallout of climate change is potentially so catastrophic, you need to spend the money on nuclear anyway. You have to double down just in case renewables don’t pan out 100% the way we hope. You want to spend the money to maximise the chances of a working solution.
Think of it like COVID vaccine trials. We’re spending money on multiple vaccine candidates in parallel.
The only question is how to deal with intermittency of renewables. For which we have tons of options, with nuclear being a poor contender, IMHO. There are certainly some models of zero carbon energy grids that say nuclear is the cheapest way to achieve zero carbon, but I think those models have not adequately accounted for several key observations about the world, namely: 1) how storage technologies are getting cheaper far faster than anyone anticipated, by an order of magnitude, 2) how we will build a lot of hydrogen infrastructure anyway to decarbonize industrial processes that we can't electrify, and 3) how nuclear is getting more expensive every year because it relies on industrial techniques that have been optimized in the past, and where we are now losing skills. Even if we correct 3), I don't think it could outweigh 1 & 2.
That's not to say that nobody should invest in nuclear, just that nobody should bother with gen 3 or 4 designs, as they are already obsolete. Look to the tiny startups, and forget about the giant conglomerates of yesteryear like EDF, Toshiba/Westinghouse, and Hitachi.
And if we don’t quite solve it? Then what? This is why Bill Gates is on the board of a nuclear startup. Everyone wants renewables. But not investing in other forms of carbon free energy is simply gambling because a carbon free future must happen.
It's already solved. The only question is how expensive it would be. But nuclear's best case is already pretty expensive.
A lot of the cost of nuclear is about bringing down risk to an acceptable level. And this is why nuclear accidents have increased to cost of nuclear plant construction: They have partly confirmed, and partly uncovered, areas in which plants were not safe enough.
The Three Miles Island accident has shown that it is possible that cooling fails, with the consequence of a reactor core melting down, and having a significant aggregation of critical reactive material sitting at the bottom of the reactor vessel. As any physicist knows, an uncontrolled aggregation of fissile stuff can go boom. And this is what in fact happened in Fukushima - several times.
In addition, there has been modeling since thee eighties what happens if cooling fails, and the results have been ... not so good. The pressure vessels will not withstand heat and pressure for longer than hours. Which is too little time for wide-range evacuation in a densely populated area.
In addition, in Fukushima we've seen what happens if a plant loses electrical power from cooling systems. This is also a real danger in the US plants which are in some cases exposed to disasters like hurricanes or flooding.
We have also seen that the storage of used fuel in a nuclear plant is a mayor hazard because it needs to be continually cooled for a long time. And on top of that in plants constructed so far, it has much less protection, so an airplane falling into such a spent fuel storage can cause a significant accident.
Then, in the Japanese Monju plant we've seen that breeder reactors which are cooled with liquid sodium are difficult to keep safe in case of a fire. We also now that such breeders can become super-critical if certain things line up. And so on.
So, in short, nuclear became more expensive, because we know much more what can go wrong. Whining about "regulatory hurdles" will not cut it. What is the intention here is apparently to cut down on safety regulations, which will have the result of increased risks.
No, that wasn't what happened at Fukushima. There was no "boom" from a nuclear chain reaction there.
If I remember correctly, there were also reports of some observations of short-lived fission products. But we still do not know exactly what happened.
Roughly the same could have happened in Three Miles Island, because the reactor was melting down, but the process was stopped, possibly very little time before the reactor would have been destroyed.
It can absolutely compete on cost, the only 'breakthrough' we need is operational fidelity.
It's 'expensive' for the same reason that the AHA web site cost $1B to build when it should have cost $50M or the tunnel in Boston went 5x over budget.
Also, there's the issue of liability and insurance is problematic, it needs to be externalized i.e. we need to have rules, safeguards around what happens and how people are comped.
The 'modern world' is significantly harangued by our inability to build complicated things with effectiveness, Nuclear Power is just an artifact of that.
Without a 2 order magnitudes improvements in cost, any plans towards building anything nuclear are probably futile over the course of a 5 decade run time of the facility starting about 2-3 decades from now given current and likely improvements with alternatives in terms of cost reductions in the same time span. Sub 1 $ct /kwh energy plants are very close (there have been a few solar bids in the 1-1.5 $ct range recently). I expect prices to routinely start dipping below that as early as next year.
If you consider e.g. organic solar panels mass produced using some inkjet style production process, producing many TWH of solar capability might become a matter of just printing such panels by the square mile using cheap production processes that don't involve a lot of exotic materials, energy, etc. That's not feasible just yet but there are plenty of researchers playing with prototypes for this right now. So, that has the potential to deliver some order of magnitude cost advantage over the already dirt cheap current state of the art for clean energy. That's what I call a feasible path to delivering orders of magnitudes cost improvements. We have similar things in the works for energy storage. And off shore wind is also delivering nice improvements still. Hell, at with that kind of improvement, even producing synthetic fuel at ludicrously low inefficiencies could still be worth the trouble from a cost perspective over anything nuclear. And there's research chipping away at that problem as well (i.e. doing it more efficiently and cheaper).
IMHO there's actually nothing stopping people coming up with dirt cheap nuclear in theory but lots of non trivial obstacles preventing us from getting there on a timescale where it matters. And then once we do get there; there's still the notion that mass producing material for dirty bombs poses some non trivial security challenges. E.g. mass deploying micro reactors all over the world massively increases the possibility that some of them end up in the wrong hands. All it takes to create a dirty bomb is some cheap explosives and some radioactive material. All it takes to depopulate e.g. downtown Manhattan is one such bomb. Nuclear safety not just about reactor failure but also ensuring the nuclear waste is properly secured for however many millennia it takes for it to degrade.
Another issue is the lack of ambition on growing the energy market. A lot of projections are based on our current energy consumption patterns and seem to assume that ballpark what we currently consume globally does not need to grow by orders of magnitude. The reality is that throughout history, our ability to deliver cost improvements for energy production has always resulted in increased demand together with economic growth. There's no shortage of useful things we could do with a supply of dirt cheap peta watt hours. Unlocking that potential would create something similar to the industrial revolution in terms of economic growth. IMHO that's exactly what this century is going to be about. A few orders magnitude improvement in cost would go hand in hand with a few orders magnitude increase in energy produced.
The premise that we need to get nuclear done is based on the notion that we can somehow break that pattern of it being too expensive by orders of magnitudes. However, I don't see how this could happen. Most articles I read about nuclear seem to ignore the security aspect and tend to gloss over the cost aspect or just generally even lack the ambition to do better than even current approaches in the market.
So, I'll just put a stake in the ground and spell it out: anything over 0.001$ per kwh is basically going to be obsolete from a cost perspective before it is ready for the market I.e. shipping in volume and at a relevant price point for the state of the art for other technologies at that point. That's decades from now at the earliest IMHO.
And that's only a 10X improvement over today, which is arguably not good enough. To play it safe, you really need to be thinking closer to 0.0001$ per kwh or better. That would be at least a 100x improvement. I can see fusion delivering this potentially towards the end of the second half of this century (earliest) but not nuclear in any of its current imagined incarnations. Certainly not in under 2 decades like this article seems to suggest: too little, too late and for too much $. It just doesn't add up.
Offshore wind will have removed most gas/coal plants from the equation around that time in any case. China is currently talking about 2060. The UK is talking 2030. Nuclear does not really factor into those intentions. Wind and solar are outstripping everything else in terms of growth currently. If you break down new capacity coming online, coal and nuclear are mere footnotes (production with that is actually shrinking in lot of markets). New nuclear coming online is not keeping pace with old nuclear going offline. And there's a lot of that happening currently as a lot of 1960s/1970s reactors are basically at the end of their useful life.
If the panels are too cheap, the cost of the inverter becomes the bottleneck. That is, there's a limit to how low you can go; even if the panels cost zero to produce, you still have to produce the inverters.
Where is this prof getting it wrong by a factor of 100? What is he leaving out?
We are not even scratching the surface of the potential energy we extract from fission. If we approached it with the same vigour as renewable, and Greenpeace didn't effectively make Nuclear politically toxic, we might already be 'most of the way' towards carbon neutrality.
They're conventional reactors of 10x smaller size using LEU. Kind of like naval reactors but without enriched nuclear fuel used on military ships designed to operate for 30 yr without refueling the reactor. They can make better safety guarantees than utility scale.
Fusion perhaps. But fission, patently untrue. The price of existing nuclear fission power plants is artificially high because politicians want weapons grade nuclear material, ill-informed "public opinion" and regulation.
And to qualify my "ill-informed public opinion", Chernobyl's direct death toll was 31. Fukishima was zero. Yet nuclear is held to some different standard to all other energy. A nuclear accident, with zero deaths is front page news but the millions of people that have died world wide from burning or mining coal, or drilling for oil, isn't.
The design of nuclear reactors is uranium based, and over 50 years old.
There's no commercial incentive to make better, cheaper nuclear fission power plants because Governments won't let anyone try. Search for 'nuclear startup' and they're all fusion. Making France (EDF) or Japan (Hitachi?) compete 'on tender' to build the UK a new power station is not really competition unfortunately.
And this is a very good thing - we have an exact number that encapsulates the entire cost of this energy for good.
And if low operating expenses is a good thing, then solar and wind and battery storage are far better than nuclear on that front.
This research was completed by the United Aircraft Corporation in the late 60's and early 70's before it was canceled by Nixon along with the Mars program. It was under a NASA contract for space exploration so the literature was written in the context of the arms race but it is even more compelling as a terrestrial reactor as it uses a tiny amount of fuel (tens of kilos instead of tens of tonnes) and actively keeps that fuel at supercritical so if power is lost the entire thing fizzles out. This is a fast neutron design with an extremely high neutron cross section, far beyond that of any other reactor, easily allowing you to feed nuclear waste into it and very efficiently transmute much of it into fuel or more manageable waste that is then separated out by centrifuges (which are already in the design to separate usable UF6 from the neon exhaust). UAC was set to win a contract to test the reactor with nuclear fuel when Nixon pulled the plug. They even had a design mapped out for a slow neutron reactor that would have made it economically viable in the 70s.
All of the technological breakthroughs in computation, material science, and nuclear engineering needed to make this happen at an industrial scale have been discovered since the project was canceled. If it weren't for all the anti-nuclear hysteria, we might have actually had someone willing to take the risk to bring the nuclear lightbulb reactor to market. Sadly, almost all of the scientists and engineers that worked on this design have passed on so the institutional knowledge is gone and our best opportunity to head off climate change remains bogged down by pointless arguments over thorium and molten salt reactors.
If we ever switched to nuclear based power production, the most pressing issue of our lifetime would immediately become managing uncontrolled radioactive waste. The carbon based and renewable based power production industry advocates will make sure of it.
Why? There's no rational reason to be terrified, unless you've been propagandized.
Climate change is generally considered to be a gradual problem eveolving over the next 80 years, while we've had corona pandemics since 2003. People die every day of poverty and malnutrition.
The only serious Corona virus pandemic is today, in 2020, not in 2003. Unsurprisingly, the people leading the charge to stifle measures aimed at preventing climate change also happen to be the very ones who stated that COVID 19 is a hoax, a conspiracy (first the US Democratic Party was blamed responsible for the hoax) – but soon it became the Chinese virus, and now they have no solution other than to encourage people from stop testing altogether and to stop wearing masks altogether.
Mind boggling.
So fixating on climate change is myopic at best. There are many problems to work on now, and over the next 80 years.
What? No. Geothermal is proven to trigger earthquakes. Not firm or viable or scalable at all. Not even low carbon.
Energy density is a thing. Nuclear beats all other sources of energy on that single metric.
It's like pointing out that solar runs on photons, and therefore it's "fuel" has infinite energy density. It doesn't really impact its use by humans.
Beyond the unknowns of ecological damage, the increases in forest fire and storm event damages we're already seeing are also hitting us now, not in decades. Further, from everything I have read thus far since that report was released , most of the models have underestimated the release of methane, which could mean we're already accelerating faster than previously thought. All of this also assumes that there will be a massive effort to cut emissions to 0 in a reasonable time - a big assumption in the time of Trump's America.
"Trump's America" is a strange TDS moment, when you have "Xi's China", sheesh. Nothing is GOING to change.
What a defeatist attitude...but I expect nothing less from weak people that vote for/support a weak man.
We managed to absolutely crush CFCs in the late 80's and reverse the damage that we were doing to the Ozone layer. Only in Trump's America is America relegated to a non-actor on the world stage...and he did it by choice.
Not sure what makes you think this has anything to do with Trump, per se. I don't care about Trump. This is about fixating on the wrong things, which is at the heart of how the problem has become so severe.
We don't need nuclear, because we have other options for firm low-carbon energy (geothermal) and energy storage of surplus and super-cheap intermittent renewables (lithium ion, flow batteries, hydrogen, methane, compressed air, liquid air...).
If nuclear could compete on cost, we should go for it, but it can't without a major tech breakthrough. The potential tech breakthroughs (SMRs) are far less technologically mature than any of our other options.
For example, we will definitely need to start producing hydrogen in order to decarbonize heavy industry (e.g. steel production, ammonia production, etc.). So we need hydrogen infrastructure because it's the only foreseeable path for several parts of our economy. It will get developed. Even this article, which is interpreted as heavily skeptical of hydrogen, sees a huge future for hydrogen on the grid:
https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
Nuclear will only have a future if it can solve its construction problem, and compete with more modern technologies. As it is, it's a dinosaur from the past, a legacy of a time before we had better tech. The more we learn about nuclear, the more expensive it seems to get, in contrast to pretty much any good tech.