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).
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.