USA needs nuclear to achieve net zero, says US Energy Secretary Granholm

[NNadir]

USA needs nuclear to achieve net zero, says Granholm

Preserving the existing fleet of nuclear plants, driving the development of advanced reactors and investing in nuclear R&D are all essential to the USA's clean energy transition, Jennifer Granholm, secretary of the US Department of Energy (DOE), stressed this week. Speaking at the annual general meeting of the American Nuclear Society, Granholm told nuclear industry workers and students watching the webinar: "We need you".

"President Biden is absolutely committed to getting this country powered by clean energy, using every single clean energy tool available," Granholm said.

This is the only way, she said, that the USA will meet its targets of a 52% reduction in CO2 emissions by the end of 2030, 100% clean energy by 2035 and a net-zero economy by 2050.

"Those are big goals, so let me say it loud and clear: Carbon-free nuclear power is an absolutely critical part of our decarbonisation equation," she said.

The Biden Administration is acting on this through its 2022 budget proposal and in its American Jobs Plan, she said. The budget request calls for a USD1.8 billion of funding for the country's nuclear energy programme.

The first priority though, she said, is to preserve the existing nuclear fleet, which generates 20% of US electricity and represents more than half of its carbon-free power.

"DOE already works across the nuclear sector, which includes some of you. We work with you and we work with you on projects to reduce the operating costs and increase revenues from the nuclear fleet, and with this budget we've put USD175 million into these modernisation efforts. A lot of it is going into developing and deploying new and improved fuels to enhance performance and to reduce costs. And we're going to keep doing everything that we can to encourage our partners in the states to keep their reactors online," she said...

[roamer65]

1. Sorry, Jennifer.

No to Enrico Fermi Unit 3.

Michiganders will understand.

I’m not going to pay higher rates to service $20-$30 billion of debt on a nuke plant.

[NNadir]

3. I wonder if they'll understand weeks of temperatures over 100F.

Probably not.

Anti-nukes, to my mind, are the exact equivalent of anti-vaxxers.

Their ignorance is coming home to roost, all over the planet.

19,000 people died today from air pollution, not counting the people who died today from heat exhaustion.

And still, the anti-nukes carry on.

Here is the most recent full report from the Global Burden of Disease Report, a survey of all causes of death and disability from environmental and lifestyle risks: Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (Lancet 2016; 388: 1659–724) One can easily locate in this open sourced document compiled by an international consortium of medical and scientific professionals how many people die from causes related to air pollution, particulates, ozone, etc.

Secretary Granholm is speaking to young nuclear professionals, highly educated people, not people who think that if anyone, anywhere, at any time, can even imagine a death from radiation, irrespective of any low level of education, it is therefore OK for 7 million people to die every year because nobody knows what to do with dangerous fossil fuel waste.

[USALiberal]

30. +1000! Nt

[BlueLucy]

41. That's exactly right.

Anti Nuke is a lot like anti vaxx.

[Music Man]

2. Good!

Nuclear power is safe, clean, and efficient. Many environmental activists have gotten nuclear wrong for decades, and the way nuclear has been portrayed in pop culture has not done it any favors.

Yes, there are small amounts of nuclear waste, but it is usually stored on site. Nuclear ends up using much less land than wind and solar. Anybody serious about climate change and reducing CO2 will be for nuclear.

[roamer65]

4. Never mind Chernobyl, Fukushima Dai'ichi and Three Mile Island, eh?

...or that Toledo Edison’s Davis-Besse was about a 1/4 inch of blistered steel jacketing away from a complete pressure loss in 2002. The cast iron reactor vessel head had eroded to that point, almost unnoticed.

How about sticking solar panels on just about everyone’s roof first?

[Music Man]

5. Go look up how many people died in each of those accidents.

Heck, look up how many lasting health effects or even long-term deaths stemmed from those incidents.

Meltdowns seem scary, but they're largely sensationalized.

[NNadir]

13. Never mind the 70 million people who died from air pollution since Fukushima while...

...some people imagined that Fukushima was the only energy disaster that ever mattered.

The indifference to 70 million deaths by the anti-nuke squad is morally appalling.

Here is the most recent full report from the Global Burden of Disease Report, a survey of all causes of death and disability from environmental and lifestyle risks: Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (Lancet 2016; 388: 1659–724) One can easily locate in this open sourced document compiled by an international consortium of medical and scientific professionals how many people die from causes related to air pollution, particulates, ozone, etc.

Nuclear energy saves lives: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It follows that anti-nuke ignorance, selective attention and moral indifference kills people.

[uponit7771]

16. If I was big oil nuke energy would be the enemy. I would put good money on it they're behind ...

... any FUD about nuclear power safety.

We've had them in carriers on water for generations without major incidences, the safety issue has been addressed by that fact alone

[Klaralven]

21. +1

[USALiberal]

31. It's obvious you have done research on this! Nt

[jmowreader]

73. There is a huge problem with solar panels

Namely, it’s not safe to fight a fire in a building that has them because they generate electricity any time light touches them...and fires are fought with an electrically conductive fire suppressant agent called water.

[GulfCoast66]

6. I totally agree.

The technology has improved over the years.

Certainly not risk free. And while I strongly support wind and solar, it’s not enough.

[NNadir]

7. I don't support wind and solar, but I'll take what I can.

[USALiberal]

32. Why against wind and solar? Nt

[NNadir]

56. The short life span, the destruction of pristine wilderness, the entrenchment of dangerous...

...natural gas as a back up, the obscene materials requirements because of its low energy to mass ratio, and the fact that its waste profile represents distributed pollution.

I feel that mining should be the last resort, and it behooves us to close material flow systems. Subsidies to the so called "renewable energy" business are mining subsidies, and I note that almost all of the world's steel, including that in wind towers, is still made using coke formed by heating coal with coal generated heat.

The cost is another factor. We have spent trillions of dollars in this century on solar and wind with no result. If the goal was to address climate change - it wasn't actually - it's a very, very, very expensive failure. If you need to have a two systems, one of which is redundant, to do what one can do, the result is both economically and environmentally onerous. If you pretend that making electricity worthless on a bright sunny day with a wind blowing is a good thing, while ignoring the whole system, you're not paying attention.

There is a reason that the highest consumer electricity prices in the OECD are in Denmark and Germany.

Once again, it represents the bourgeois rich doing their thing at the expense of the poor.

The automobile was the first major industrial distributed energy system. It was a wonderful solution to the problem of horse manure in cities, but it turned out to be a much greater risk to the environment than the problem it solved.

We should learn from our mistakes. We don't, but we should.

[Happy Hoosier]

54. I support all three.

I can‘t see am argument against wind and solar though.

[PSPS]

8. Modern designs like the "modular" reactor, are nothing like reactors of old.

For one thing, they no longer require pressurized vessels. They are also much smaller. And almost all of the spent fuel can be recycled. And, of course, we really have no choice in the matter if we want to achieve carbon zero.

[NNadir]

9. Nevertheless, the "old" reactors, built on 1950's through 1970's technology...

...did a spectacular job.

In 2013 Jim Hansen and a colleague calculated how many lives they saved and the amount of carbon dioxide they had prevented from being dumped into the atmosphere: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895).

We cannot make nuclear reactors much "safer" than they already are, since they are extraordinarily safe compared to all other technologies. This doesn't mean they're risk free; it only means that they are vastly superior to all other options.

We can, however, make them more productive by raising their thermodynamic efficiency to much higher levels. I have been thinking about heat networks to accomplish this for many years now.

[uponit7771]

10. K&R, its 2021 forget curing cancer if we can't make nuclear safe. 40 years ago maybe things were

... more volatile, slower computers and sensors couldn't see danger coming, now there's no way I'm convinced we can't make nuclear safe.

We've had them in carriers for generations without major incident, its safer on land than water.

[NNadir]

11. It is unrealistic to demand that they be "safer."

The death toll associated with nuclear energy is extraordinarily low already.

The only difference is that if there is a leak of radiation somewhere, or some other glitch in a nuclear plant, it's international news.

Regular gas explosions, and tens of millions of air pollution deaths every decade are on the back pages, if they appear at all.

There will be no accounting in our news media of the deaths associated with the current Western heatwave, and if there is any, it will not have the staying power of, say, Fukushima. They will go down the memory hole just like the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

[uponit7771]

12. Safer doesn't have to be less volatile. They can be standardized, modular, smaller while giving out

... more stable heat.

I think that's the idea of Small Modular Reactors, if they can be made cheaper there would be more.

I think they should be subsidized, I wouldn't mind my tax dollars going towards that greener energy.

We're still giving contracts to companies to make nuke plants, the for profit motive is a bother to me alone but even then we can regulate.

To your point, airliners are LESS safe than nuke plants given the numbers of incidents since the 50s.

[NNadir]

18. I'm not sure that I agree with "standardization."

Traditionally, nuclear plants have been seen as electricity generating tools.

They can do much more than that, particularly in thermochemical (high efficiency) settings, giving high exergy and reduced entropy.

Their thermal efficiency is rather poor, generally around 33%, although some gas cooled reactors reach 40%.

California as of 2019, produced about 278,000 GWh of electricity, with about 9% of that power coming in two small buildings at the Diablo Canyon plant, with a very small land footprint, a plant which is due to shut because of appeals to ignorance.

California total electric system.

One can calculate, without much difficulty, that by doubling the thermal efficiency via combined cycle/heat networks from 33% to 66%, which might marginally increase the land footprint - one could power all of California (with a potential side product of desalinated water) with just 7 or 8 such footprints. Raising the thermal efficiency would be ideal in some areas, not in others.

We don't build just one kind of diesel engine, nor one kind of standard building. To realize nuclear energy's benefits to the maximum, and to eliminate climate change, perhaps capture carbon dioxide, we will require a highly flexible and highly variable nuclear fleet.

[uponit7771]

34. Standardization to bring down price per GWH which is reason we don't have a higher portion of ...

... our energy base to nuke yet; cost.

If investors are not creating their own wheel(s) when it comes to gating design the cost get cut considerably, some peripheral aspects of a nuke plant can be customized cause they'll have to.

Force instance, I've seen it with FOSS 20 times too many, some software gets standardized and cost sink and devices become way easier to work with and on.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

“One way to think about it as you’re bringing more of the entire construction process into manufacturing plants, that can be much more standardized.” That kind of increased standardization is part of what has led, for example, to a 95 percent cost reduction in solar panels and in lithium-ion batteries over the last few decades, she says. “We can think of it as making these larger projects more similar to those manufacturing processes.”

The GWH cost of nuke plants are up there still, we standardize we bring them down

[NNadir]

35. The capital cost of nuclear plants represent a gift to future generations.

It is now possible to design nuclear plants to run between 6 to 8 decades. The benefits would accrue to future generations but since we hold future generations in barely disguised contempt, we are unwilling to pay because we think only of ourselves.

If we were serious about addressing climate change - and there's no evidence we are - standardization would fall out of the massive scale at which nuclear plants would need to be built. But they are not, and should not, be "one size fits all."

[NNadir]

36. The capital cost of nuclear plants represent a gift to future generations.

It is now possible to design nuclear plants to run between 6 to 8 decades. The benefits would accrue to future generations but since we hold future generations in barely disguised contempt, we are unwilling to pay because we think only of ourselves.

If we were serious about addressing climate change - and there's no evidence we are - standardization would fall out of the massive scale at which nuclear plants would need to be built. But they are not, and should not, be "one size fits all."

[WHITT]

14. Except

Carbon-free nuclear power

No such thing. Does not exist. Will never exist.

Not to mention 'nuclear power' is THE MOST EXPENSIVE MANNER to generate electricity.

Oh, and where do we store the radioactive waste for the next 2000 years?

[uponit7771]

15. The waste is now recyclable and nuke power is RELATIVELY carbon free. 40 years ago safety was

... maybe an issue but with newer designs there are more chances of 10% of airliners crashing daily.

We need to come out of the fear of nuclear energy, it'll hold us back

[WHITT]

17. Nope

The waste is now recyclable

Hype.

nuke power is RELATIVELY carbon free

No, it is MASSIVELY not carbon-free.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

19. IPCC disagrees ...

Nuclear is low-carbon

Nuclear power plants produce no greenhouse gas emissions during operation, and over the course of its life-cycle, nuclear produces about the same amount of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per unit of electricity as wind, and one-third of the emissions per unit of electricity when compared with solar.

(the source for the graph displayed in that section is IPCC)

Nuclear energy has shown that it has the potential to be the catalyst for delivering sustainable energy transitions, long before climate change was on the agenda. France generates over 70% of its electricity from nuclear power – the largest nuclear share of any country globally – and its electricity sector emissions are one-sixth of the European average. In around 15 years, nuclear power went from playing a minor role in the French electricity system to producing the majority of its electricity, showing that nuclear energy can be expanded at the speed required to effectively combat climate change.

https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/how-can-nuclear-combat-climate-change.aspx

That is why the International Energy Agency has concluded that meeting the goal of 2 degrees C will require doubling nuclear power’s contribution to global energy consumption by mid-century. Late last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reached a similar conclusion: in most scenarios consistent with the target of 1.5 degrees C, nuclear energy would have to more than double.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-cant-solve-climate-change-without-nuclear-power/

[WHITT]

37. But

Nuclear power plants produce no greenhouse gas emissions during operation

But MASSIVE amounts during construction.

No cigar.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

45. Full lifecycle it's the lowest there is ...

So ... no cigar back at you.

[WHITT]

60. They're Undercounting

The mining of the uranium emits carbon. Transporting the uranium ore to the uranium processing plant emits carbon. The construction of the uranium processing plant emits carbon. Operating the uranium processing plant emits carbon. Transporting the processed uranium to the uranium rod manufacturing plant emits carbon. The construction of the uranium rod manufacturing plant emits carbon. The uranium rod manufacturing plant emits carbon. Transporting the uranium rods to the nuclear power plant emits carbon. The mining, creation, and transporting of the MASSIVE amounts of concrete and cement involved in the construction of nuclear plants emits MASSIVE amounts of carbon.

NOT.EVEN.CLOSE.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

63. Says you ...

And creating, say, Solar Panels involves a lot of the same processes. Such as rare earth element mining, mostly in China, which still currently uses mostly coal for power, for example?

Honestly, there's people who are experts on this like folks working at the IPCC, who understand the concept of 'full life cycle' ... but you expect me to just believe you that 'they're undercounting', just on your word?

Got any, ya know ... proof at all?

[WHITT]

66. I Just Laid It Out For You

but it's never enough.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

68. That's what I thought ... you have words but you don't have statistics

When it comes to science ... 'words' are, quite simply ... never enough.

[StevieM]

46. You make it sound like the total amount of carbon put out as about the same.

That isn't even close to true.

Currently, we use fossil fuels for producing most things: highways, buildings, etc. The same could be said about making renewable energy. There are fossil fuels involved, at least for now. We are in the midst of a very long process of transitioning.

Switching over the nuclear, whether you support the idea or not, will lead to a massive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The total amount produced will decline dramatically.

[USALiberal]

51. Lol, nice try!?nt

[DiamondShark]

58. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

Running these plants are guaranteed multiple generations of jobs, as compared to Gas/Oil jobs that are only there until they are not profitable.

[WHITT]

61. Actually

Two years ago, there were more jobs in solar & wind than in nuclear, oil, gas, coal, and timber, COMBINED.

Today, there are more jobs just in solar than in nuclear, oil, gas, coal, and timber, COMBINED. Plus the jobs in wind.

[uponit7771]

25. Neither of those are fact based, I think its "hype" to have mRNA vaccines but they work and cancer

... should be next.

[NNadir]

28. You do realize, don't you that there are literally thousands of papers...

...in the primary scientific literature addressing the carbon dioxide impact of all forms of energy? These papers come under the general heading of LCA, "life cycle analysis."

If one reads any subset of say, 20 or 30 of these, I have probably read many hundreds if not thousands of them in my lifetime, one can clearly and unambiguously recognize statement in which a person is simply making stuff up.

There are no forms of continuous reliable energy with a low a carbon impact as nuclear energy.

In some papers some forms of solar electricity approach it in some climatic zones, if and only if, one ignores the climate impact of the necessary backup. However the solar industry is not sustainable, owing to its poor energy to mass ratio, and its environmentally odious waste profile. Electronic waste is already an intractable problem of distributed pollution and any effort to make solar energy a meaningful source of energy will greatly exacerbate this already huge environmental risk.

[Elessar Zappa]

29. Nuclear energy

is BY FAR the best choice to reduce carbon output. It’s scientific fact.

[USALiberal]

33. You are obviously uninformed on this! Nt

[NNadir]

20. Actually, the most expensive form of energy is dangerous fossil fuels, by orders of magnitude.

The reason is that dangerous fossil fuels are causing climate change, and climate change is very, very, very expensive.

It involves the uncontrolled dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste. If the gas industry were required to meet nuclear standards, that it prove - even to the satisfaction of uneducated rubes - that it's waste is harmless, it, and the wind and solar industry that depend on access to it, would collapse in a New York second.

The problem is that the Ayn Rand mentality anti-nukes is indifferent to this because the cost will be paid by future generations.

From my perspective, while they nickel and dime and ignore the fact that so called "renewable energy" is dependent, entirely, on access to dangerous natural gas, they focus with their puerile nickel and diming selective attention on a few hours at noon when electricity becomes worthless, and not on the expense of the whole picture.

There is a reason that Denmark and Germany have the highest electricity prices in the OECD.

There is also a reason that the United States was able to build well over 100 nuclear reactors in about 25 years while producing the lowest price electricity in the world.

The giant subsidy to the gas/coal/wind/solar industry is the Western heatwave, and there's going to be a lot more of this, because there are people who repeat rote nonsense that "nuclear is too expensive" and "nuclear is too dangerous."

Rather than chant nonsense they would better spend time opening science books, but that won't happen.

[uponit7771]

27. +1, "climate change is very, very, very expensive..."

[WHITT]

39. Oops

The giant subsidy to the gas/coal/wind/solar industry

You omitted MASSIVE nuclear subsidies.

[NNadir]

42. Comparable to what?

Over the last 30 years I've been hearing insipid muttering about nuclear subsidies from partisans of so called "renewable energy" on which in this century has soaked up trillions of dollars for no result other than the acceleration of climate change.

The subsidy for the failed solar/wind/gas/coal industry is, again, climate change.

The solar/wind industry has failed despite decades of mindless cheering, failed to produce the roughly 30 exajoules of energy that nuclear energy has been reliably producing for more than 30 years on subsidies paid in the mid 20th century.

Is some whiny person somewhere going to show something called "numbers" to show that nuclear subsidies amount to the "subsidy" represented by climate change? Do any of these people whining about subsidies have even a remote idea of the human, economic, and environmental cost of climate change?

We should massively subsidize nuclear energy because it works.

From my perspective the tiresome chanting of the same pablum year after year, decade after decade is extremely dangerous, because it's quite literally destroying the planet.

[WHITT]

62. The Average Cost

of a kW of nuclear via a utility is 15 cents. Utilities in Texas offer coal power @ 6 cents/kW, wind power @ 3 cents/kW, and solar @ 3 cents/kW.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

65. Where's your proof? Everyone supposed to just 'take your word'? nt

[WHITT]

67. Eh

Throw a dart. There's plenty of utilities advertising their rates.

[NNadir]

71. I always say, if one doesn't know what one is talking about, make stuff up.

The useless solar and wind industry, which has spectacularly failed to address climate change, and is something of a fetish among people who despise facts in general, drives up the cost of energy precisely because it makes electricity worthless for a small portion of the day.

This means that the O&M costs for the gas plants, without which so called "renewable energy" would suffer a well deserved death, given its environmental costs, need to be covered by the shorter periods in which the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, a condition for which the Germans, who are suffering from this ignorance, have a word: Dunkelflaute

By the way, that link has a link in it to something called a "reference." It's a reference to a scientific publication, Environmental Science & Technology 2021 55 (9), 5629-5635. If one is interested in the fate of humanity, one should back up what one says, and not play Trumpy and invent things.

It's a little work to collect references, but if one is lazy and just makes stuff up, well then, one doesn't really give a shit, does one?

The subsidy for the solar and wind industry besides the huge taxes paid in that off shore oil and gas drilling hellhole, Denmark, and that big dangerous natural gas importing and coal burning hellhole Germany is climate change. Let me repeat, since it seems not to get through: The biggest subsidy on the failed, useless, and unsustainable gas/wind and solar industry, is again, climate change. It's a subsidy being paid by every living thing on Earth, and will continue to be paid by every generation that comes after us, while anti-nukes tout making electricity worthless for a few hours a day when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing,.

Now besides having contempt for the poor, who subsidize the bizarre fantasies of bourgeois reactionaries who want to return the world to the early 19th century, most anti-nukes have contempt for the facts.

They are easy however to find in the age of the internet.

The electricity rates for Europe are published, and if one is not prone to make stuff up, takes two minutes of googling to find them, again, if one isn't lazy. It's right here: Energy prices in 2019 household energy prices in the EU increased compared with 2018

It contains this wonderful bit of language:

Across the EU Member States, household electricity prices in the second half of 2019 ranged from €10 per 100 kWh in Bulgaria to around €30 per 100 kWh in Denmark, Belgium and Germany

The electricity rates in the countries I have bolded are, Germany, 28.1 Euros/100 kwh, and 29.2 Euros/kwh in that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole with all the wind turbines, Denmark. This compares to France, which emits almost no dangerous fossil fuel waste to the planetary atmosphere to generate electricity, unlike Germany and Denmark, where the price of electricity is 19.1 Euros/100 kwh.

These are something called "facts." Facts matter. Bullshit, by contrast, is Trumpian, Trumpian being a word that is synonymous with "fallacious."

Of course, all of the wind turbines in that off shore oil and gas drilling hellhole Denmark, as this link to their Energy Agency Webpage shows in naked truth.

Truth is something supported by references.

The Danes aren't lying, at least about what they are doing with oil and gas, but they are lying when they say they are doing anything to address climate change.

In general, I find anti-nukes to be extraordinarily ignorant, having repeated the same Trumpian bull about nuclear energy, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. I've been hearing this made up bull for 50 years; when I was young, uneducated, lazy and gullible, and frankly quite stupid, I actually believed it, but I grew up:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

You know what ignorance does, whether it comes from people like Trump or people like, say, Harvey Wasserman?

It kills people.

History is going to look at this reactionary enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy," the same way it looks like the efforts to end the bubonic plague by crowding into rat infested cathedrals to pray.

We hit 420.01 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere this year in the last week of April 2021, a record. In the first week of the year 2000, the concentration of this dangerous waste was 368.7 ppm. So much for "renewable energy will save us."

People died in the streets from heat exhaustion in Vancouver British fucking Columbia yesterday, this after half a century of materialist consumerist Ayn Rand Bullshit about how "cheap" solar and wind are.

I wonder if there is a single anti-nuke on this whole damned planet who gives a shit. They'd rather whine stupidly about Fukushima.

This is the real subsidy for the solar and wind industry, its uselessness, and its reliance on access to dangerous fossil fuels, loss of life, and we are only beginning to understand the depth of it.

Very old nuclear plants ran for more than half a century, without a single loss of life. Modern plants can be designed to last 60 to 80 years. Each plant is a gift to future generations. My father's generation gave me the Oyster Creek Nuclear Reactor, which came on line in 1969 and operated without a loss of life from pollution until two years ago.

By contrast, the dangerous fossil fuels which must be burned whenever the sun goes down while the wind isn't blowing, dunkelflaute, along with the landfill that every damned piece of so called "renewable energy" will be within 25 years are liabilities for future generations, shit they'll have to clean up after bourgeois ignoramuses who bought into and spread this anti-nuke bullshit, and do this clean up in a world where the atmosphere is destroyed, the best metal ores mined and processed into dumped junk, forests rendered into industrial parks laced with asphalt for diesel service trucks for wind turbines, coastal shelves littered with plastic peeled off wind turbine blades, grease leaking into the seas, and God knows what else.

The ethics of antinukes are appalling.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

[John ONeill]

38. Nuclear cost

The most expensive way to generate power is actually rooftop solar - and that's not even counting the batteries you'd need to buy every decade or so to try to make it dependable. ( The figure in red on the graph for nuclear shows the median price for established nuclear - it's pretty cheap.)https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/latest-lazard-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-published-nov-2019/

[oasis]

22. Let's get going with it then. K and R.

[Klaralven]

23. First we have to rebuild some steel mills that can forge the components

[hunter]

53. It wouldn't bother me if they were made in South Korea.

The people there seem pretty nice.

Like it or not, here in the 21st century there is only one economy, just as our planet has only one atmosphere.

[retread]

24. Gen IV molten salt reactors should at the very least be a part of the discussion.

[Elessar Zappa]

26. So glad she said it.

Nuclear is the ONLY way, as of now, that we even have a hope of meeting emission goals.

[edhopper]

40. We have been ten years away from a working fusion reactor

since I was in college in the 70s. One day that will be a reality.

[hunter]

43. The human race has worked itself into a corner...

... and nuclear energy is the only way out.

My opinions about nuclear energy have evolved over the years, especially as it became clear there's more than enough fossil fuels in the ground to destroy this world's natural environment as we know it.

(My misanthropic self used to think peak oil was a GOOD thing that would force us to reexamine our high energy consumer economy...)

Once I started to do the math I began to realize "renewable" energy (yes, those are scare quotes) simply can't support 7.9 billion people or the high energy consumer lifestyles many affluent people are now accustomed to.

Your posts here have been part of that evolution.

If we commit to an anti-nuclear future then billions of people will die prematurely by global warming or by the lack of industrial scale energy sources that provide potable water, treat sewage, and sustain the large scale high technology agricultural infrastructure that feeds 99% of us.

We have to get serious about quitting fossil fuels.

Expensive renewable energy experiments in California and Germany have failed. All they have done is increase our long term dependence on natural gas.

Germany is worse off than California because they will have to increase their imports of gas from Russia, thus compromising their political and social ideals. And they will continue to mine and burn coal.

Nuclear powered France closed its last coal mine in 2004. Miners who had worked more than twenty years in the mines continued to receive their salaries until they reached retirement age. So it's not impossible to quit coal.

It seems to me the Reagan Revolution and the anti-intellectual Republican party has turned the U.S.A. into a "cant do" nation. Trump certainly demonstrated that "can't do" spirit. He didn't accomplish much of anything, contributed to the deaths hundreds of thousands of people, and left a huge mess to clean up as well.

The innumeracy and anti-intellectualism of many "green" activists doesn't help.

[NNadir]

59. Why, thank you...

For many years, I've felt like my posts were spitting in the wind, inasmuch that over the years, the most generally applauded idea to climate change on our end of the political spectrum was to wait for the magic so called "renewable energy" paradise that never came, is not here, and won't come.

It's nice to hear that I participated in changing a mind. (I knew you were not hostile to nuclear, but I didn't know how you came to it.)

From the over all tenor of this thread, I would say minds are changing on the left, but I suspect it's mainly because the failure and consequences connected with waiting for the so called "renewable energy" nirvana is graphically exposed in these heat events. One hopes it isn't too late to save something.

I will say that when I started writing at DU, roughly 20 years ago, I was enthusiastically in favor of so called "renewable energy" even though by that time I'd figured out that nuclear energy is the best form of industrial energy there is. It was in my readings to address the "we don't need nuclear because wind and solar are so great" rhetoric that one hears so often, that I realized that so called "renewable energy" was a reactionary, unsustainable, and environmentally disastrous program.

Thanks very much, be all that what it may, for reading and above all, thinking about what you read, and demonstrating the important capacity to change your mind.

Unless we all demonstrate capacity to change our minds in the face of reality, humanity will fail.

[PETRUS]

44. "Yes, but..."

I do think nuclear power needs to be part of the strategy. We also need to figure out degrowth. Even with cleaner energy, ecological collapse is pretty much inevitable if we continue to increase our material footprint. I'm also skeptical that we can scale up nuclear quickly enough to meet emissions targets if we're maintaining pro-growth policies at the same time.

[NNadir]

47. The environmental superiority of nuclear energy is independent...

...of decisions about growth or no growth.

I share your reservations about material "footprints," and note that the high energy to mass ratio of nuclear energy requires far less mining that either dangerous fossil fuels and/or so called " renewable energy."

In fact the reason that so called "renewable energy" is not sustainable is connected with the requirements for vast mining to support it. This topic is receiving an increasing amount of attention in the primary scientific literature.

It can be shown that in a plutonium based fuel cycle, the energy content of the thorium already mined and dumped, as well as the vast amounts of mined and isolated "depleted" uranium, in a breed and burn scenario could pretty much eliminate all energy related mining for centuries.

I note that the land footprint of nuclear power is vastly lower than any other form of energy.

[harumph]

49. I agree.

I had hoped we would be farther along with renewables & I agree we're running out of time - quickly.
Accordingly, I'm coming around to NNadir's position. What are your thoughts however about the heat sink problem? I do recall that France and Germany were having some problems awhile back. Genuine question.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwave/hot-weather-cuts-french-german-nuclear-power-output-idUSKCN1UK0HR

[NNadir]

57. You have correctly touched on nuclear energy's most important drawback.

Most pressurized water and boiling water reactors, which dominate the world's current nuclear fleet operate at low thermal efficiency, Rankine efficiency, roughly in the neighborhood of 33%. This means that 67% of the primary energy is rejected to the environment for these reactors. This is not a problem generally in winter (when in fact the efficiency is slightly higher because of the Carnot relation), but it is a serious problem in summer, particularly in the era of climate change.

The work that is extracted from a heat engine is called the "exergy." The second law of thermodynamics precludes the exergy from ever reaching 100% of the primary energy expended, but one can increase the exergy by various procedures to much higher percentages than is generally observed in nuclear plants built on 1970's technology. The efficiency is a function of the difference between the heat sink and the heat source.

This problem can be solved - although it may seem counterintuitive - by raising the temperature at which reactors operate - a topic that is the subject of much discussion in nuclear engineering circles.

Most dangerous fossil fuel plants have efficiencies in the same neighborhood of the majority of the existing nuclear fleet. However, in the last century, advances in materials science allowed for the development of "superalloys" and thermal barrier coatings, generally ceramics. These have allowed more efficient dangerous natural gas plants to be built, so called "combined cycle" plants. Some of these operate at thermodynamic efficiencies close to 60%.

My approach to thermodynamically efficient nuclear plants would be this: A Brayton cycle using air as the working fluid, coupled to sulfur iodine thermochemical cycle, coupled to a cycle known at the Allam cycle, although in my thinking one might call it a "reverse Allam cycle" for the capture of carbon dioxide, coupled to a steam (Rankine) cycle, with the cooling coming from the preheat of air for the first (Brayton) cycle. My idea - based on certain chemical considerations - would be for the Brayton cycle to operate at temperatures in the neighborhood of 1500C.

It certainly seems possible to raise the overall thermodynamic efficiency to the realm of 70% or even higher, by such a scheme.

This type of scheme is known as a "heat network," and it is the best idea in energy.

The anti-nuke moron Amory Lovins sold the world a bill of goods saying that the purpose of efficiency is to reduce the use of energy. He made this statement as a result of his poor education and his lack of familiarity with Jevon's paradox.

I, by contrast, embrace Jevon's paradox. For me the purpose of efficiency is not to reduce energy use but rather to extend it to those who lack it, the number of such people being unimaginably and unacceptably large.

Unlike what seems to be the case with the obscene Lovins in his bourgeois aerie in Snowmass, I actually think poor people matter.

[Ron Green]

50. Your ideas about the environmental superiority of nuclear power

(which seem to have merit) are indeed independent of questions of growth and degrowth, but those growth issues are much larger and more important.

Nukes may be an elegant band-aid, but they’re still a band-aid.

[hunter]

70. Not a band-aid. More like first aid for a sucking chest wound.

Agriculture and fossil fuels caused an explosive growth of the human population and punched a lot of holes in this planet's ecosystem.

Now we have to fix that.

Preferably without killing people or by allowing Mother Nature to deal with the problem in her customary manner.

Most highly innovative species on this planet don't last long. Exponential growth kills.

Humans are not exceptional.

Let's fix the sucking chest wound first by doing everything we can to quit fossil fuels.

[hunter]

52. Wouldn't replacing coal plants with nuclear plants be part of that "growth?"

Next, shutting down the least efficient gas power plants and most onerous hydroelectric projects.

And, at the same time, building affordable "automobile optional" urban housing.

And so on.

To someone currently suffering a crappy low paying job that's not making the world a better place, or someone who can't find work at all, employment in any of these endeavors would be "growth" even as the per capita environmental footprint in developed nations declines.

It's not ethical to impose "degrowth" on people who live in poverty, people who already suffer the smallest survivable environmental footprints.

Anyone living in a shack in places like Kolkata, Cairo, or Mexico City isn't really the problem. Even with the garbage and sewage in the streets, their per capita environmental footprint is far, far smaller than that of any affluent "first world" person. Improving the infrastructure of these communities is the right thing to do even when it increases the per capita environmental footprint. That's economic growth.

I don't have a lot of patience with people who say overpopulation is the problem, especially affluent people who point to people in other nations who have no economic power. Someone who has an environmental footprint a hundred or even a thousand times greater than some family of five living in a slum really shouldn't be talking about "two-child" policies or anything like that.

It's apparent to me that the economic empowerment and education of women, along with realistic sex education and easy access to birth control, is the most ethical path toward a sustainable human population.

The poster children for overpopulation ought to be the Duggars, 19 kids and counting. Never give a million dollars to people like that.

[PETRUS]

55. Those are sensible thoughts and questions!

I need to remember that not everyone has read the same things I've read. When I refer to "degrowth," that's shorthand for a body of thought and research that (it seems) few people have been exposed to.

Whether or not replacing coal with nuclear, or building affordable "automobile optional" urban housing (etc.) registers as growth depends on what else is happening with the economy. Those sectors should show growth, but the idea is to scale back energy and material use elsewhere.

You also wrote "It's not ethical to impose "degrowth" on people who live in poverty, people who already suffer the smallest survivable environmental footprints." Absolutely true! One of the themes that appears in all the degrowth literature I have encountered is the idea that rich nations use far more energy and materials than what is required to provide people with good, long, healthy lives. One of the objectives of degrowth proponents is to create the environmental space for development where necessary. That is, the richest people don't need any more "growth" but the poorest people do, and we're bumping up against ecological limits so additional resources used should mostly benefit the people who are struggling to meet basic needs rather than people who already have luxury.

Finally, I completely agree with your comments on population and empowerment of women.

If you're interested in learning more about degrowth and what people really mean (and don't mean) when they talk about it, let me know and I can point you to some reading.

[harumph]

48. My uncle worked on some of the early Westinghouse reactors.

I had hoped we would be farther along with renewables & I agree we're running out of time - quickly.
Accordingly, I'm coming around to NNadir's position. What are your thoughts however about the heat sink problem? I do recall that France and Germany were having some problems awhile back. Genuine question.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwave/hot-weather-cuts-french-german-nuclear-power-output-idUSKCN1UK0HR

[jeffreyi]

64. Agree.

[WarGamer]

69. I highly recommend Bill Gates new book

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Well done, it's his passion.

I'm actually more pessimistic than he is... I think we're fucked no matter what... but he has thoughts on nuclear energy, likes it if done right.