In 2019, just 4 % of the global primary energy came from nuclear power (the figure is about 10 % if we restrict to electricity). Hence replacing fossil sources by nuclear would entail large-scale construction of new nuclear reactors. By the time we're done building these, we will already have exceeded our CO₂ budget for keeping below 1.5 °C at a reasonable certainty.
Also, at the current rate, the Uranium reserves last for approximately 140 years; if all fossil sources were switched for nuclear, it would last for 10 years. This problem can in principle be alleviated by innovative reactor types, but realistically they won't be available for large-scale production in the next couple years.
Luckily, we do have all the technology for phasing out fossil energy while staying within our CO₂ budget: water, wind, solar, storage of synthetic gas, gas-fueled power plants (fueled by synthetic gas obtained using renewable energy). Energy production with these alternatives is cheaper than with nuclear; this fact is an additional issue for expanding nuclear power -- it's not economically viable.
You either have to use seawater uranium or use breeder reactors of any fuel cycle. If you use both, uranium will last on the order of how long the nuclear fusion fuel of the sun will last (i.e. billions of years).
Most importantly, you don't need to only build breeder reactors right now. The "won't be ready in 10 years, forgetaboutit" argument doesn't really stand, especially as we look to powering direct carbon capture tech alongside decarbonizing a growing world.
National nuclear energy programs have always and will always consider a transition to breeder reactors essential for any meaningful long-term energy source. This has been the known plan since the mid-1940s.
Fun fact (pointed out to me by user pfdietz): If you dig up any average rock on earth, it has more energy in nuclear fuel (uranium and thorium) than a piece of pure coal of the same mass. WOW!
I wrote up a little page on this recently (featuring GNU Units if you saw that article yesterday): https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
This is a so well known misconception that it is hard to not consider it propaganda by this point.
Known reservers of Uranium are of that size, yes. That's because with nobody bothers to look for more, because not only is there enough known for now, but finding more would actually increase competition and lower the prices - losing those who own the reserves the money.
There is way more Uranium just in the ocean water.
Meanwhile, all the technologies you're listing are either already maxed out (hydro), intermittent with unsolved storage (solar and wind), or vapourware (power to gas, etc).
Wikipedia paints a different picture but I consider that a fair point and I will look into it, thank you.
> intermittent with unsolved storage (solar and wind)
Can you be more specific about that? I know the figures only for Germany. Here, solar and wind match up almost perfectly (solar excees in the summer, wind excess in the winter) -- we would only need to store energy reserves for about two weeks. Gas tanks capable of storing these amounts already exist, they have been built several decades ago.
> or vapourware (power to gas, etc)
This is the first time that I hear power to gas described as vapourware. I'm very interested in that topic, could you give some more details or pointers?
Surely the onus is on whoever is claiming the technology does exist to provide some details of it.
I checked Wikipedia though [0] and the world's total installed P2G capacity looks like...less than 100 MW? It's at best one step above vapourware.
Trying to understand how this is an argument.
I'm unsure of the CO2 quantities so I cant make a statement as to whether its worth the CO2 cost.
What I can say is that wind, solar and other renewable alternatives also have initial CO2 costs, possibly lower than that of nuclear reactors.
I think it amounts to "this only solves half the problem, so we shouldn't do it".
Most big problems aren't solved by just doing one thing. When global warming is finally solved, it will have been by 10 separate things that each solved 5-20% of the problem.
Also, imposing an arbitrary deadline in 2029 is horrible project management. In a commercial project it's also dumb, but at least there you can cancel the project, and people move on to do other things.
For Earth, we can't cancel the planet in 2029 if targets weren't met.
But at our current rate, the global CO₂ budget will be fully exhausted in about eight years.
Hence we need to seize other measures, measures which reduce our emissions on a shorter timescale: switching to wind+solar+storage and in the process democratizing energy production, rethinking mobility (massive expansion of public transport, massive price reduction of public transport, massive investion in biking infrastructure, making outer city districts more attractive), putting a prize on CO₂ with a substantial steering effect (but ensuring that the proceeds of such a tax are given, in equal parts, to the population, so that people who contribute less-than-average to the climate crisis have more money available at the end of the day), transforming the system (because even with a prize for CO₂, there are lots of valuable things which cannot be measured in dollars, and competition pressure in unchecked capitalism deepens inequality and exploitation), ...
We don't actually know that. It's a model projection. Academic models have a long history of being wrong and seemingly always in the direction of being too pessimistic, across a variety of fields.
Do we need to transition away from fossil fuels? Sure. Are the models so robust and so beyond question that nuclear should be ruled out on the basis of a handful of years of construction time? No way. The science is nowhere near solid enough for that.
Nobody serious is suggesting we do nothing but deploy nuclear reactors. Just in the energy sector, we should do a massive build-out of wind, solar, transmission, and, yes, nuclear.
> switching to wind+solar+storage and in the process democratizing energy production
These have large economies of scale too. While you might want to install a small propeller in your back yard, it's much more cost effective to get the energy from the grid supplied by a large scale wind farm.
> rethinking mobility (massive expansion of public transport, massive price reduction of public transport, massive investion in biking infrastructure, making outer city districts more attractive), putting a prize on CO₂ with a substantial steering effect (but ensuring that the proceeds of such a tax are given, in equal parts, to the population, so that people who contribute less-than-average to the climate crisis have more money available at the end of the day), transforming the system (because even with a prize for CO₂, there are lots of valuable things which cannot be measured in dollars, and competition pressure in unchecked capitalism deepens inequality and exploitation), ...
These may all be good ideas (and personally, I would certainly agree with some of those), but has nothing to do with whether the needed energy is produced by renewables, nuclear, or mass deployment of hamster wheels.
At this point, it seems likely to me that we are doomed to at least a 1.5°C global temperature rise.
The figure about the proportion of nuclear power is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption, the figure "140 years" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium.
> Could we really build enough solar and wind at today's level of technology (assuming sufficient economic motivation) without also blowing through our CO2 budget?
A back of the envelope calculation suggests that the necessary construction efforts require the emission of a couple of Gt CO2e. For comparison, at the start of 2018 our CO2 budget was 420 Gt (now it's about 320 Gt).
https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch
> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here [https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf]. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data [https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_car...]).
> If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
> For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear.
> The astoundingly low amount of nuclear waste is thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom.
More: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
Edit: replaced “containable” in second sentence with numbers
How much will it cost to re-capture an contain the CO2 generated by coal and gas?
I'm my current view, nuclear waste can be sequestered and stored effecting only a tiny fraction of the planet while greenhouse gases effect the whole planet.
That question can be answered be asking yourself how society would look if the government was efficient, logical, morale and free of corruption. In other words, its an interesting philosophical question, but not one that has any relevance to reality. Unfortunately most people, no how nominally "intelligent" they are, insist that the world exists as they wish it would, rather than it actually does. In reality, mistakes happen, incompetence happens, corruption happens, and unforeseen circumstances happen - all of which render nuclear waste (and facilities that produce nuclear power) much riskier and more dangerous than they would be in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this bit of undeniable objective reality is extremely unpopular (and offensive) to technocrats and others who worship blindly at the altar of human society and technology.
Here in Germany, we still have not found where to put nuclear waste long-term, and there is no solution in sight.
Even if one day we find one, how do we communicate the potential dangers of nuclear waste to a civilization that is supposed to understand what we're communicating in 30000, 50000 years? With a fancy unicode symbol, like U+2622?
We have no idea what people 3000 years ago were trying to tell us with their fancy symbols.
Nuclear energy is the analogy of tech debt that can never be paid back, ever.
The reason why the "waste" is dangerous is that there's a lot of energy in it - energy that can still be extracted at a later date. It might very easily be very valuable in the future.
Germany is really sad case, where they stopped using nuclear and replaced it with "clean coal". Terrible thing for the planet.
The Greens talk about nuclear waste and Fukushima, and meanwhile German green-washed coal plants and cheating diesel engines put crazy things in the air.
For similar reasons note that coal burning power plants add WAY more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants.
So humans don't create radiation, they just mine it, concentrate it, extract energy from it, and then dispose of it. So we are just moving it around, not creating additional radiation.
Imagine we extract uranium from ocean water, the radiation levels in the ocean would go from low, to even lower. If we take the nuclear waste and distribute it across the ocean the radiation levels would (at worst) raise to the levels we started with.
Based on what I've read all the scientists that are experts in relevant fields say that dealing with nuclear waste is a political problem, not a scientific one. There are multiple reasonable solutions. My favorite it making giant spikes out of a mix of radioactive material and glass. Covering the spike with steel and dropping it where the ocean is deep, near a subduction zone, and the sedimentation rate is higher than the leakage rate. By the time the spike hits the ocean floor it's going fast enough to bury itself deeply, the sediment fills in behind and will keep getting deeper, and the spikes will get sucked beneath the continental plate and not bother anyone ever again.
Yes that means higher concentrations of those decay products to deal with in the short term, but these mostly have quite short half lives in the grand scheme of things, in the order of years or decades.
The environmental impacts of nuclear energy are often grossly overestimated, this is why so many environmentalists are advocating for nuclear energy.
Problem: "no known human civilization has ever endured for so long, and no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period" [0]
The problem isn't the "sticking into the ground" part.
It's the finding of that place that will stay geologically inactive, uncivilized, and not near water sources for the next 100000 years. And then taking that bet.
It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me".
Plastic stuck into the ground is not radioactive. Plastic stuck into the ground also degrades in a fraction of a fraction of the half-life of Plutonium.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
Possibly, but unless there is other realistic low-carbon energy source (and it seems there isn't - hydro is already built everywhere where it can be, and solar and wind are intermittent with large-scale storage being unsolved problem) there won't be any people born after you.
What we need to do is evaluate the risks from all the current options. Fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear energy and come up with a balanced strategy. There are people dying right now from radioneucleotides released from fossil fuels, or just ambient radioactivity. It's a matter of relative risk.
I have 2 points here. 1) The half life is longer than recorded history so this isn't really fair. We've seen humans continually advance. Sure, there has been setbacks and some regressions but we haven't ever come even close at reverting back to the stone or even bronze age. That is highly unlikely and if that were to happen we'd probably have bigger problems. 2) Not all waste is equal. A good rule of thumb is that high energy waste is short lived and long lived waste is low energy. Why? Because high energy waste is shedding particles much faster than low energy. Simply if you use a bucket to remove the water from your swimming pool you'll finish a lot faster than you would if you used a tea cup.
> no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period
This is false and I'm not sure where you got this information from. We chose the location for the Seed Vault (and the GitHub vault) for similar reasons. There's plenty of other locations as well, several within the US. As for the bet, I'm betting on generations of PhD holding geologists to make that decision over really anyone else. As long as what they say doesn't set off any bullshit alarms I don't see why they shouldn't be believed. They are in fact the experts in the subject matter and just rejecting their work with no real evidence is rather arrogant and surprising to see on HN. I believe them for the same reason I believe climate scientists. I've read their work, seems reasonable, I've talked to them and they seem reasonable and passionate and well studied. How arrogant would I need to be to tell them they are wrong. My expertise lies in other fields.
I'd also suggest reading what actual plans are and understanding the scale of the waste problem. I find that many people over estimate the scale by many orders of magnitude. [0]
> It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me".
I'd say that not taking care of climate is saying "Fuck other people who are born after me." You're letting perfection get in the way of progress. We can say similar things about strip mining and rare earth materials. The things we'd need to develop battery storage to make renewables a feasible path forward. We can't wait for a miracle in battery storage. We needed to act 20 years ago. So now we have to make compromises. And as we drag our feet we are still polluting with coal and oil. To me that is the real "fuck you" to future generations. That we got so caught up in perfection that we let high pollution levels continue right on while we prayed for a miracle.
So sure if you mine uranium and concentrate it, you get a high peak source, but you are literally removing radiation from one place, and moving it to another.
So if you concentrate uranium out of ocean water and them spread the radioactive waste back into the ocean (at the same concentration) you are actually benefiting the ocean.
You can hold fresh nuclear fuel in your hand and be fine. Once it goes in the reactor to be fissioned, you'd get a fatal radiation dose in seconds if you stood next to it unshielded.
Carbon's best case scenarios is worst than nuclear's worst case scenario.
Actually in some countries nuclear waste is already (part of) today's fuel using existing reprocessing technology.