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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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do not let "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough"
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road -- yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I completely agree with everything you said except for ONE little thing:
You are grossly misrepresenting how far that can is kicked down, for the worse. It doesn't kick it down a couple thousand years, it kicks it down for if DOZENS of millennia assuming we stay at the current energy capacity. Even if we doubled or tripled it, it would still be dozens of millennia. First we could use the uranium, then when that is gone, we could use thorium and breed it with plutonium, which would last an incomprehensibly longer time than the uranium did. By that point, we could hopefully have figured out fusion and supplement that with renewable sources of energy.
The only issue that would stem from this would be having TOO much energy, which itself would create a new problem which is heat from electrical usage.
Then you just move the planet slightly further away from the sun! Problem solved!
No man you gotta move the moon closer, since it's cold
I like the cut of your jib, sir.
The U235 is good for about 3 years, and pinning everything on something that has never had more than a half proof of concept is a bad choice.
As if breeder reactors don't exist
Some of the biggest blunders of all time come across because too many people let perfect be the Nemesis of good
Why is it supposed to be easier to get people onboard with nuclear (which is decreasing) than wind and solar (which are increasing at triple the rate of the nuclear construction peak in the 80s and growing at 20% p.a.)?
People are on board with VRE. Some of the are on board with nuclear too, but it's not working.
Nucleur isn't all it's cracked up to be, maybe it would be economical if we had heavily invested in the tech decades ago. But current plants have major issues, here is a snippet from another article:
Article
Study: Why investing in Nucleur is bad for the environment
I really cannot stand that phrase because it’s commonly used as poor rationale for not favoring a superior approach. Both sides of the debate are pushing for what they consider optimum, not “perfection”.
In the case at hand, I’m on the pro-nuclear side of this. But I would hope I could make a better argument than to claim my opponent is advocating an “impossible perfection”.
But that is exactly what's happening. People are pretending like the alternative to investing in nuclear is living off 100% renewables from tomorrow.
Buying time isn't a great argument for nuclear when it takes so much longer than wind or solar to build a plant - median time of 88 months to build a nuclear plant compared to 8-14 for solar.
People will get on board when they see the cost per kwh.
So best time to do it was 88 months ago... What the next best time to do it?
Doing solar that's several times faster to build, cheaper per kwh, and doesn't require digging radioactive bullshit out of the ground seems like a better idea, no?
The answer is actually both. Highly developed nations have huge energy demands and they're probably going to need everything.
Nuclear is most of the time over budget and planning. That's a fact.
Over budget and over planning is bad.
...but also irrelevant - I gave the average real world delivery times.
Which isn't unusual for large construction projects. Nuclear is biggest cost problem is that each power plant is essentially a mega civil engineering project. They require cooling ponds, cooling towers, huge reactors, turbines, and radiation shields.
All of which are fairly large structures that have to be built to pretty high tolerances and have little room for construction defects which are very common in the industry. I work in construction and I can tell you that the majority of construction projects, whether they are an office building, a highway or a bridge run over budget.
There are always going to be factors outside of the control of the design team and the developer. Contractors may run out of labor, supply chains may have many years to complete some of the equipment and these issues compound the schedule which is already very complicated. Do we have an even discussed the expanded and politicized planning and safety rules and certifications that a new nuclear plant is going to need to follow.
I think the solution for micro reactors is pretty intriguing, except we need lots of power not small amounts of power. But a mass-produced reactor that rules off of an assembly line in a factory is likely to be on time and on budget because they can correct for for the problem of building things in the field. It's really hard for people to fabricate complicated machines when they're being rained on in the middle of winter during a storm.
The problem with Nuclear's "good enough" is that Nuclear is currently worse than other technology we have in almost every way.
It is absolutely true that solar and wind are better because more money has gone into their research. But because of that, they are better options in almost all real world power situations.
The problem with focusing on nuclear is... why waste all that political capital just to spend 100x the money or more that you could spend to be 100% renewbles in the short term? The front-loaded TCO is the real issue with that one. If you wanna hit 0 emissions tomorrow with Solar/Wind, you're just paying the up-front costs, knowing there are per-year costs (still cheaper than fossil fuels) to keep it going. If you want to do the same with nuclear, you're paying for almost all of it out of the gate for 50 years worth. Suffice to say, that's a budgeting nightmare.
And what's left is space. Nuclear creates a lot of power in a small area. But wind and solar are both far more easily/efficiently integrated into the space we are already using.
No way. Batteries are expensive as hell. Solar+Battery is at best equal to nuclear in the current numbers. And probably worse overall... forget the actual damages as far as mining all the lithium and other rare metals.
You're in the green after about 10-15 years with nuclear. So I'm not sure why you bring this point up repeatedly. https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY?t=600
TCO shouldn't matter to stop climate change.
There's plenty of decommissioned coal/gas/oil plants that are perfect sites for nuclear. Ironically it costs more to clean up the radioactivity left behind by these plants than the nuclear plant will release in it's whole lifetime.
Batteries+solar runs $77/MWH with current technology. Nuclear runs $175/MWH with current technology (both of these numbers are TCO, not just running costs) 1 and 2. Months back I did a fairly exhaustive analysis on reddit. Wish I'd kept a link of that, but I cut and ran. More importantly, a nuclear plant is usually "locked in" to current efficiency for 50 years or more, where solar farms and battery farms can be traded up. By end-of-life, that nuclear plant will still be a $175/MWH-TCO plant, but could be competing against solar+battery in the order of $50/MWH TCO as large scale battery tech is skyrocketing of late.
I ended up anti-nuclear from a position of knowledge and research, not a position of "omg it's nuclear". I started pro-nuclear until I did the math a LOT.
Per Nuclear Power Economics and Project Structuring, the capital cost accounts as 60% of the total cost of ownership. Yes it's in the green (capital-wise), by year 10-15. But 60% of Every penny that needs to be spent on a nuclear plant is spent before you hit the "on" button. Solar plants go green in 5 years, but more importantly, you amortize the cost (and continue to do so) over the life of the plant. The latter is always more feasible for a large scale project.
Compare that to solar roofs, solar parking shades, windmills that can often be installed in "spare lots", etc.
EDIT: And to be clear, I'm not even saying there may never be an appropriate use for a nuclear plant in going green. There's just very few of them. Going solar in a big city is a custom gig, but dropping a nuclear plant in its outskirts, not so much. Luckily for me in the US, there's a whole hell of a lot of unused or unusable land just begging for solar plants.
According to the EIA.gov, nuclear is between 36 and $88 per megawatt hour for LCOE for advanced nuclear. Your numbers are way off.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf
Strange. I must be mis-reading your numbers, because the chart I'm reading on your link shows an LCOS/LCOE between $88 and $98... The numbers I was quoting was probably conventional nuclear, and that's a fair correction. I would really appreciate if you are able to address why my references disagreed with your reference, as I didn't come out with my numbers off-the-cuff. Is it conventional vs advanced nuclear, or is it a different measurement entirely?
Note also, however, that Advanced Nuclear still loses to Solar handily in every single chart presented in that document. In addition, none of that addresses the front-loaded cost of nuclear vs solar, which amounts to an entire order of magnitude.