The hypothetical being discussed is "what if the US had went the same route as France and built an electricity grid with the majority of power being generated from nuclear rather than fossil" and for that we would consider the impact to the total (or cumulative) emissions during those decades.
As such, here is an "Our World in Data" article on the cumulative CO₂ emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
In particular, the nominal cumulative emissions of the US were approximately the double of China. (A higher factor if considered per capita)
If the US had built nuclear technology many other countries (particularly NATO) would have also seen a higher nuclear adoption.
This would have accelerated some trends such as electric ovens and stovetops, electric trains (maybe even nuclear-electric rather than disel-electric), and local micro-nuclear generators on industry such as in metalwork.
But that still doesn't mean that fears of proliferation would have disappeared if we had a larger reliance on nuclear power.
Those countries weren't said as examples of countries without nuclear power. They are examples of countries that have it but still likely wouldn't have had any exports from the US. I thought the Pakistan example made this abundantly clear. Maybe I confused people by including Brazil, but there was pressure on them during the cold war.
Not necessarily, but you're positing a world in which the widescale adoption of nuclear power has no effects at all, and I think that's an unreasonable assumption. Right now we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports because we see nuclear as some dangerous fringe technology rather than as the default energy source for a 21st century civilization.
No I'm not. I'm saying that if the US went highly nuclear that it does not directly follow that the rest of the world would also. I'm saying it is a bad assumption to make.
> Right now we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports
It still is a big deal, but it was even a bigger deal 20-30 years ago (the timeframe we are talking about). As a good example, less than 10 years ago I was working on a project that involved nuclear technologies and a university partner. I was not allowed to talk specifics to any of the international students that were _directly_ working on the project (you bet they were smart enough to figure out what they were making). While nothing was classified, it still fell under ITAR and the FBI was talking to me several times a year. Nuclear technology exports are still a very big deal.
I agree that it does not directly or necessarily follow. But I think it would be more likely.
> Nuclear technology exports are still a very big deal.
Sorry, I think my comment came across the exact opposite of what I meant.
When I said "we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports", what I meant was, when we restrict the export of nuclear technology, we don't see it as an unfair imposition on other countries to deprive them of nuclear energy the same way we might see depriving them of food or natural gas. In other words, exporting nuclear technology is a big deal; depriving the rest of the world of nuclear energy is not a big deal. Sorry for the confusing phrasing.
Right now, American voters and policymakers don't think of nuclear energy as the primary power source for a modern civilization. When we have those annoying ITAR regulations that you had to follow, everybody thinks that's perfectly reasonable because nuclear technology is spooky and scary mad science that nobody actually needs anyway. That's not the same attitude we would have if we switched to wholesale nuclear energy in the 1970's.
Am I saying export laws would necessarily be less stringent in this scenario? No, but there are probabilities between 0 and 1, and you seem to be implying that since the probability is <1, it must be 0.
Iran under the shah, for instance, got a small-scale kit for reprocessing plutonium. High enriched uranium wound up in research reactors all over the place. It's nice stuff, makes it very easy to get a critical mass in a small space.
I think we're hurt by our domestic oil and gas reserves here. We have powerful interests who want the US to use its domestic oil and gas reserves, so a large-scale shift TO nuclear and AWAY FROM gas seems quite difficult to execute.
China has started exporting their Hualong One reactor with at least two Pakistani Nuclear Power Stations building a total of 5 Hualong One reactors: Karachi and Chashma.
Argentina is expected to start building a Hualong One reactor by next year and it is under consideration in the United Kingdom.
> Most reactors on order or planned are in the Asian region, though there are major plans for new units in Russia.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...
> China is planning at least 150 new nuclear reactors in the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
If it goes anything like their buildout of high speed railway China would probably end up doubling the reactor capacity built by 2035 over this plan.
Nuclear weapons aren't always a liability either. It is one of NK's greatest defenses. Specifically that if attacked they know they will lose and have no real reason to not use the hail mary. This helps their chances even if China decides to no longer protect them. Obviously this is country dependent though and depends on a lot of factors. But just trying to say that it isn't always a liability.
(That doesn't, of course, excuse China's coal-fired plant growth, or any other form of egregious pollution. Only to say that these things don't happen in a vacuum.)
> The United States is the world's third largest manufacturer (after the People's Republic of China and the European Union) with a record high real output in Q1 2018 of $2.00 trillion (i.e., adjusted for inflation in 2009 Dollars) well above the 2007 peak before the Great Recession of $1.95 trillion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
Overall, the US has a bigger impact than a country like Spain simply because you need to also factor in the supply chain emissions that come with it (in this case, a lot of it being generated somewhere else but being consumed in the US).
I don't know that the original poster is implying there's a certainty about this, but it's certainly a possibility. If the US had bet heavily on nuclear, there's a lot of dominoes that would fall with this. There'd be more investment in nuclear and potential benefits from that. There'd be less demand for fossil fuels, consequently less exploration & development of fossil fuels. It would also have changed positioning and strategy when it comes to global climate change initiatives. It's at least conceivable there'd be a dramatic global impact, but modeling the systemic consequences of one decision is problematic at best.
The US is influential, for better or worse; I think many people rightfully expect the US to be a leader on climate policy.
On your point, keep in mind that American consumption causes a tremendous amount of off-shore emissions. We have artificially “low” emissions because we outsource them to regions like Southeast Asia.
This is the root of my problem. Yeah, the US _should_ be the leader on climate policy. But we've been failing for the last 20 years. At what point are we going to acknowledge that someone else needs to pick up the mantel. And as you've mentioned, it isn't like China is going to do it (you can shift my comment to China + US and the sentiment will hold true, but maybe I conveyed my thoughts poorly. Communication is difficult, especially over heated topics).
I genuinely believe that we can change course on climate policy, but it won’t happen in one or two national elections. Electing people who care about sustainability at every level of government is necessary for big changes to happen federally and internationally. We’ve got a lot of work to do!
If nobody has, then everyone has been failing, not just us. So the US might as well do the right thing "after we've tried everything else", as Churchill didn't actually say.
For nearly all of the time before China outstripped the US, the EU (if you include EU-27) was a larger contributor than the US anyway. And much of the early US emissions edge came before nuclear power was invented. Global warming itself was poorly understood prior to the 1960s: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-of-glob...
A transition to nuclear would have helped, certainly! But climate change would not be "minor."
That 25% figure is not fully independent of where the electricity comes from.
The primary baseload energy source for US electricity is natural gas. If you're using natural gas for electricity, it's wasteful for people to have electric ovens, electric ranges, electric hot water heaters, electric heaters, and other electric household appliances that primarily work by generating heat. It's more efficient to use gas directly, both economically and ecologically.
Where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, the primary power source is hydroelectric. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've lived my whole life without utility gas, and I've lived in a lot of different places. Other places have district heating systems--Iceland, for instance, can support district heating easily since their primary energy source is geothermal. Nuclear energy makes solutions like that more viable. It can also be a source of process heat for industrial applications.
If we went highly nuclear, I think we would have more electric appliances, for the same reason we already have more electric appliances in parts of the country that don't use natural gas as a primary source of energy. In that world, I think climate change would be, maybe not a "minor issue", but certainly less major than it is now. It would be more major than the mitigations we adopted to fix the ozone layer, but aside from transportation (which we are currently electrifying anyway), it would be a lot more straightforward than it is now.
OTOH, the US is not at all blameless here. If the US military were its own country, it would rank 55th in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, beating out 140 other countries[2].
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[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57018837
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed...
[2]: https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter...
It's a valid point about the military, but all militaries run on fossil fuels and a handful of big carriers/subs that runs on nuclear.
During WW2, we ran petrol/oil pipelines from the UK under water to Normandy. Each pipeline was a steel cable rolled up along an enormous floating drum called a conundrum that weighed as much as a destroyer. There were 7 of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pluto
Then we extended those pipelines on land as we pushed East. There were 73 allied divisions, each requiring an average of 7 tons of supply each day, with 2/3 of that being fuel. The USSR had something like 600 divisions.
Modern armies need even more oil as jets are thirsty. Oil and gas infrastructure is critical to modern warfare at the moment, and I don't really see electric tanks or jets on the horizon. So that's not going to be an area where will be reducing much CO2 any time soon.
Long term, perhaps hydrogen might be a replacement for vehicles, and smaller nuclear reactors even for combat ships?? But we'd need to be able to make a lot of hydrogen very quickly, and have something like a strategic hydrogen reserve for wartime. The explosive nature of hydrogen is also a challenge when you are being bombed and shot at, and there are supply chain issues as to what operation Pluto would look like if it was hydrogen.
Well, we could just not maintain military bases all over the goddamn planet, and retain a mostly defensive military. More realistically, I suspect that significantly reducing overseas deployments would also significantly reduce the military's carbon footprint.
I do concede that this may not be geopolitically realistic. I also agree that nuclear seems like a realistic solution for carriers and combat ships. Just eliminating diesel-powered aircraft carriers would probably go a long way, I would guess.
But at the same time, let's not kid ourselves - this will result in more wars, except it wont be U.S. ships and planes burning the fossil fuels, the fossil fuels will be expended by foreign troops and all the rebuilding necessary as a result of more conflict.
Here is an article in the WSJ about the significant increase in coups in Africa as a result of the U.S. pulling back and Europe also easing off of its policing role due to covid:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-coups-in-africa-at-hig...
More likely, if the world was run on Uranium and Thorium then people wouldn't be able to blame wars on oil.
The issue is that we aren't leading the way, despite the best efforts of many of its citizens. But I also don't see anyone else stepping up. I also don't see people considering that the rest of the globe that isn't electrified is making the choice of "clean energy or a hospital." We know what they'll go with every time and we shouldn't blame them.
This is the most complicated problem that humankind has ever faced. We are doing a disservice by over simplifying the problem. We are doing a disservice by turning this into a political "shoulda-coulda" or "but they waste more" game. At the end of the day it doesn't matter, emissions still happen even if one person is more at fault. The worst part? The countries that emit the most will also be able to deal with the crisis more easily, and thus have less incentive to actually solve it.
I'm not saying the US isn't to blame. I'm saying the problem is far more complicated than the US and it's going to take more than them to solve it.
Now, yes, individual people consume energy, thus forming most of the basis for this "per capita emissions" metric, but, in the alternative timeline where the world got serious about clean energy 20-30 years ago, guess what happens to that metric? It drops in direct correlation with the amount of investment in clean energy.
But, as to the rest of what you write here, the solution, at least in my mind, seems fairly simple, if not easy: developed countries must invest massively and immediately in clean energy and carbon sequestration technologies, as well as properly pricing carbon emissions via carbon taxes so that that negative externality is included in every single consumer decision. Further, developed countries must engage in clean energy technology sharing and development projects throughout the world[2]. We need the entire world to be on the same page, and, China, the US, and Europe need to be leading the way.
So, yes, absolutely, the problem scope vastly exceeds the US (it's global), so, therefore, the solution must be global as well.
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[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
[1]: Perhaps literally all of them. I had to scroll down to about number 75 before I saw one that might not be an energy company, just from the name.
[2]: This solves the "clean energy or a hospital" problem.
This is something I actively fight for. I often state that the US (and west) don't need to be carbon neutral by 2050, but carbon negative now. That's how we unburden the developing world. That's how we pay back for the damage cause mostly by us.
But CCS is still a complicated subject and highly debated within the green communities (just like nuclear is). People think we can get away with just planting trees, but the research and experts don't think that's true (especially since new growth forests are carbon sources (fact that surprises many people) instead of carbon sinks (old growth forests are major sinks btw)). We're going to need a wide breadth of methods to solve this and we shouldn't be taking any off the table as long as the result is that we're carbon negative[0].
[0] The arguments against CCS tend to be that if we have them then the coal and ng companies can still operate. Though this obviously misses the point since we care about the resultant emissions more than the source.
The US remains responsible for a large plurality of the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. China is now the largest emitter, but it's not particularly close to the US yet if you integrate that function over time.
We could use more electricity in all of those areas.
Next-generation nuclear reactors will operate at much higher temperatures and be more economical as a result. Some of the high cost of nuclear energy is because low-temperature operation is expensive. A PWR has huge steam generators inside the confinement vessel because using hot water to boil steam and spin a huge steam turbine is wasteful.
Next-generation reactors will have a gas turbine powerset that fits in the employee break room of the turbine house. Next-generation reactors will make hydrogen for fuels and fertilizer using processes like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
There is no reason the rest of the world couldn't follow if the "Union of Concerned Scientists" wasn't afraid of a Muslim Planet. (It was Pakistan getting the bomb that put the kibosh on advanced reactors are sustainable nuclear fuel cycles.)
You also can't talk about next-generation reactors because they don't exist right now (at least in production).
What I'm trying to say here is that this doesn't help our pro-nuclear case. It is cherry picking post hoc analysis. Climate change would still be a real problem, even with our leg up. Because frankly, climate change is much harder than getting solar, wind, and nuclear everywhere. It is also bigger than America, the EU, and China (total of 54%).
Are you referring to HVAC cooling (refrigerators, heat pumps, etc.), or reactor cooling (cooling tower, etc.)? Neither has any intrinsic carbon emissions though. HVAC needs electricity[0], but has no emissions other than incidental CFC release[1]. Nuclear / industrial equipment cooling typically needs water, but doesn't release any carbon.
[0]Ostensibly nuclear in the context of this thread.
[1]Mostly a non issue post Montreal-Protocol
There's a bit of a cognitive dissonance here though. The US is the leader of the world and everyone looks to us on how to build their countries. No one wants to admit it but everyone wants to be as good as us. However, when we fail to live up to our reputation, the rest of the world is right to call us out for not living up to our reputation (that, to be fair, we regularly leverage). If you're in the US and you don't want to be criticized, that's fine, but then you can't also claim that the US is the best/strives to be the best.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
here is the lastest failure.
https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/baker-hydro-corridor...
IMO they will fail in new york as well.
I think you misunderstood (or maybe I'm misunderstanding). I agree that "the whole reason we don't have nuclear is because of the fossil fuel industry lobbying", but I don't see how that invalidates any conclusions.
> Luckily there's been a lot of investment lately into them and we're starting to see good results. So it isn't too late.
Well, it's certainly too late to help us meet Paris Climate Agreement targets, which largely depend on our emission rates b the end of the decade (there's no way we're going to start cranking out enough SMRs to put a serious dent in emissions because we started reinvesting in nuclear too little too late). SMRs might play a role several decades out, but it's too late for the short term (and of course the short term is going to have a lot of ramifications for our future climate).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-vs-gdp
Why don't you slice and dice that based on your agenda and tell us what we should conclude?
If you don't mind those numbers being normalised by population size, and CO2 emissions being used as a more relevant metric than kWh, then this chart might be helpful:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
And at the end of the day, CO2 molecules have no nationality: it's why we don't waste our breath criticizing Qatar for having the world's highest emissions for capita when it produced just 0.1% the total emissions of China.
if that's the case, why do you think american citizen deserve to pollute a lot more than Chinese citizen? why would being born inside US border somehow makes it ok to pollute more than if you were born inside china
By your logic, if China were to split in 150 small countries, they could pollute as much as they like because technically each of them would be low on the list of highest emitter.
...which is why per capita is a better measure than per country. Here's a comment from a while ago that shows the math [1].
I wouldn't call anything "phasing out" short of a plan to denuclearize.
France is still going to be the green model. Mixture of zero emitting sources. The energy problem is complex. As one example, a big reason for this change is that France heavily relies on others to get its uranium.
Thank you for your alternative facts, now go collect your paycheck for that dumbass statement.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
https://energytransition.org/2018/01/german-energy-consumpti...
Not because Germany doesn't deserve it. It absolutely does. But we should stick to facts - Germany simply should have gotten rid of coal before nuclear but of course the government (CDU/SPD parties) historically cared more about existing coal jobs than potential new jobs in nuclear - especially in the 80s.
We've already had to ask you repeatedly not to do this kind of thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495121 (Sept 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24191783 (Aug 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21073496 (Sept 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19107028 (Feb 2019)
If you keep doing it, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
I just want to push back on this. The US isn't the sole contributor to climate change and I'm tired of pretending like it is. We need to stop with this Americentric thinking, this is a global crisis. Nor is electricity the only factor. The US is about 15%. We'll round up to 25% assuming the EU follows the US. That's still 75% of the emissions not coming from the west. We need to also look where emissions are coming from. In the US that is 29% transportation, _25% electricity_, 23% industry, 13% commercial & residential, 13% agriculture.
If the US (and EU) grids went highly nuclear that doesn't mean we'd also have more electric vehicles or more electric appliances. We would look a lot more like France (in energy). It isn't just the price of electricity that has caused these things to become more popular. For example, with cars the battery technology is a big example of why we see them now and not in the past. There may have been more pressure for this, but it isn't an assumption we can make.
So if we're just talking the US, that's 25% (electricity) * 15% (US global contribution) or 3.75%. Let's say electricity and transportation and industry, that's still only 11.55% of global emissions, and that is an absurd overestimate. Yeah, 10% of emissions (I'll say conservative estimate that includes EU) would be a big deal, but it wouldn't turn climate change into a minor deal. Though we would have a large leg up from our current position as we'd be able to focus less on clean electricity production and more on all the things that produce emissions and carbon capture techniques/technologies.
All sources are from EPA.
Edit: I'm not sure why people think I'm anti nuclear or even uninformed on it (many people that know my account will know my expertise here). I'm also not sure why people don't think I care about China's emissions. I'm saying that the problem is much bigger and complicated than any single country. Even if one country should be picking up the mantle and leading the way, they aren't. So what do we do then? That's my complaint. Because "what do we do" has been mostly complaining.
Edit 2: To be clear, my quip is about global warming being a "minor issue" if we had just built said reactors. This is just flat out wrong. If the US was 0 emissions, there's still the other 85% being produced. France is doing great, I know. They are an amazing example (I'm not anti-nuclear?), but they aren't 0 emissions either. No one is?