If you want to treat climate change as an existential threat, then you do whatever it takes to keep all existing nuclear running until fossil fuel plants are gone from the entire continent. And you put a little money to subsidize/stimulate new nuclear on the off chance some of the advanced nuclear concepts work out (or as a backup in case renewables improve slower than we think).
You don’t have to stop or even slow renewables deployment to do this. They are fairly different industries with different workforce’s, so there are resources to do both simultaneously without significant interference. And you’re not going to get “too much” electricity as cheap abundant electricity will help accelerate decarbonization of other things like building heat and transport and industrial processes.
Existing nuclear ESPECIALLY must be protected. And existing hydro. Number 1 and number 2 (tied with wind) clean energy sources.
Nuclear power produces as much energy in our country as coal. We can phase out coal twice as fast if we at very least keep nuclear around a few years longer.
It is so upsetting to see CA close down precious nuclear power plants, not because they have built a better alternative to using natural gas or other dirty fuels to cover this load, they haven't, but because it is unprofitable to do the required maintenance and necessary improvements.
The need for profit is killing our planet. When it comes to basic essential things like shelter, energy, food, water, profit is pure parasitic loss and should be eliminated. These things really should run at a loss, considering these things generate all other economic activity there is, but we insist that they must be run privately and for profit.
I mean, if everything runs at a loss, we eventually all starve to death.
I think there's a big difference between running things "for profit," which I agree is not always necessary, and attempting to run things "cash flow positive."
When we have resources like electricity that are very feasible to charge for, one of the best ways to make sure our overall system is operating efficiently and not just wasting resources is to charge for the resource and aim for slight cash-flow positive - the goal being to break even with a small margin for error.
If break-even isn't economical under the current market rules, but something is a social good we want to maintain, like nuclear power, we can adjust the rules of the market. This actually makes sense for base load power, as we know there's a floor that we don't want to fall beneath, and renewables are so elastic that we sometimes fall below that floor. Plus the transmission network needs to be kept in balance, so we can't actually handle huge swings in power.
But the solution here is not to say "profit is killing our planet," it's to fix the rules of the market to get the outcome we want. Profit, in general, is a good thing. But yes, sometimes the system gets into a state where bad outcomes are profitable, and we do need to fix that.
Nuclear really is not that precious when it comes to solving climate change. We have undergone a massive tech shift, the consequences of which have not filtered out into many academic models.
Seemingly just in time, solar, wind, and storage are scaling both in production capacity and in falling costs to solve our climate problems. These will be the backbone of getting to 80% carbon free electricity in the next decade, and 0% carbon not that long after. This will be far cheaper than any other source of energy generation we can use, and will save us massive amounts of money.
One of the better grid modelers out there, Christoper Clack, who has no opposition to nuclear and in the past has made strong arguments for it being a cheaper way to get to 0%, also has an amazing new mode out this year that says we should do something very unintuitive: deploy massive amounts of distributed solar and storage close to power meters (e.g. on people's homes). This will result in a much stronger distribution grid that can both shave peaks of demand, resulting in far less very costly distribution infrastructure, and which will empower far even cheaper deployment of larger amounts of utility-scale solar and wind in future decades.
Nuclear would be nice if it weren't so expensive, and if it were our only option we should keep it around, but there's little reason to create make-work when we have cheaper options, and options that will have additional benefits for the grid such as greatly increasing reliability and resilience. Massive distributed solar and storage will create an absolutist rock solid grid that will be able to weather disruptions far better than one with large generators that become almost like single points of failure.
Profit in general is not the problem. It’s that we have no idea how to price externalities. If you could prove in court a correlation between coal production and disastrous weather events then you would enable massive class action suits against coal producers, eliminating any profit potential. No investor would go near it and the problem would solve itself.
When San O went down the Friends of the Earth rejoiced (activist group mentioned in the article). CA lost 8% of its power and put out an extra 10m tons of CO2 the following year.
If the negative externalities that are killing our planet are included in the cost, those killers become less profitable. This can be done via taxes or other means.
> not because they have built a better alternative to using natural gas or other dirty fuels to cover this load, they haven't, but because it is unprofitable to do the required maintenance and necessary improvements.
Solar and wind are pervasive and cheap in California. If nuclear is no better for the environment and more expensive, why should it keep running?
The whole "profit" thing is a way to manage scarce resources, i.e. minimize waste. That's exactly what we want.
You're right that for basic needs like shelter, energy, food, and water, we shouldn't accept that some people might have to go without. So we have tipped the scales through programs like section 8, progressive energy rates, EBT, etc to get that outcome will still seeing other resources efficiently used.
>If you want to treat climate change as an existential threat
Chasing that rabbit down the hole, what happens if the US does wean off fossil fuel entirely, but countries like Russia and China continue (and say it is projected to increase 400X like China in the last 30 years). Then its an existential threat, does that mean use of force, or limit ourselves to diplomatic means that will ultimately fail and just accept the resulting existential outcome? Does the analysis change when it is a less diplomatically controversial Country such as India?
Alternatively what if those Countries beat the US to weaning off fossil fuel and determine overnight any continued US use of fossil fuel is an existential threat and act of war?
It sounds like hyperbole but I remember when the US began regulating incandescent light bulbs and it was floated by certain media outlets as an attack on freedom and liberties. We have literally seen murders of people telling others to wear a mask during the pandemic, and I watched a news segment claiming a normal year sees 150-300 FAA incidents on planes and we have seen 1,300 already this year mostly related to passengers refusing to wear masks and many times escalating to attacks on the airline workers for attempting to enforce the CDC mask guidelines. We live in violent and chaotic times, where millions and millions of people allow themselves to be worked up into mobs by a media that does it willfully and deliberately. I don't see it as an easy transition domestically much less globally, and those in power don't care about the science but seem to froth at the mouth for this kind of discontent.
Suppose that a genie gives every human on earth access to infinite power, with no externalities like CO2 or radioactive waste. Would it make the world a better place or would it turn into a dystopian nightmare?
I think it would be like pouring sugar over a bacteria colony. The earth's crust could be economically strip mined. Ore could be smelted into metal at negligible cost, which could in turn be used to make more machines to strip mine the crust at a faster rate. Oceans could be boiled to access rare metals, or maybe just for fun by a bored teenager.
This isn't to detract from OPs practical comment, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
The natural resources of the earth are completely insignificant if you have access to infinite power. We could travel to and mine planets that are about to be consumed by blackholes or stars.
..and with infinite power, even that isn't necessary because we could simply create whatever matter we wanted directly from energy.
Funding for each may actually benefit the others. For example, FLiBe salt is being considered as a coolant in some Gen IV fission, as well as compact fusion and concentrated solar. Production will increase if there is a definite market for it, making it easier to obtain.
Except budgets by definition are limited. We cannot do all the things all the time. Sorry to be a buzzkill but we need adult minds on this problem, not simpletons who can’t understand how limited our options are at this point.
This is a good provision, but they are going to have to aggressively promote new sources of nuclear power, if they are going to feed all the new Electric Vehicles coming online AND replace coal. Not just keeping old aging plants operating.
A broad carbon price that starts small but rises gradually over time would be better than passing a hodge podge of half measures. Virtually all economists say this would be more economically efficient (cheaper) and it doesn't create distortions by favoring politically popular projects over less sexy but more effective solutions.
If we treat all industry as spherical cows, a common carbon price comes out as a great way to incentivize industrial change.
However, once we get into the particulars of different industries and the varying levels of difficulty they have in decarbonizing, and the very different levels of lobbying power they have to influence that price, and the difficult of enforcement across different sectors, a common shared policy across all sectors starts to be far less efficient than tailoring the solution to each industry.
For example, steel is pure commodity, very difficult to eat any cost from stranded assets, and has far less ability to call up capital to solve the problem than, say, natural gas. So the price will have hugely different consequences for steel than natural gas production, and there are different tailored industrial policies that will make the transition happen much more time- and cost-efficiently.
I'm not sure I understand. Wouldn't that mean that steel producers just end up passing on more of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices, resulting in reduced steel consumption? It sounds like a tax would work fine.
By the way, I'm working on the assumption of a carbon price applied on fossil fuels at the source, such as the Energy Innovation Act would include.
Here's the thing. Nobody wants to admit that solving climate change will involve reducing the standard of living of a lot of people. Some things will be more expensive, and people will consume less. If you think about it, without massive technological innovation, how could it be any other way?
You claim that “the price will have hugely different consequences for steel than natural gas production” as if that’s a problem so big that we should agree with you that a carbon tax is not a great solution. Why is that so bad - isn’t raising the price of steel exactly what a carbon tax should do?
I'll have to read the book because I thought this was actually the strength of the method not a weakness - that difficulty to decarbonize means it'll either push alternatives that are easier to into the market or allow the market to pay the cost to do the difficult changes in the most efficient way it can find.
Book criticizes failed market based efforts. (Duh.) Carbon pricing is a tax, not a market solution. (Right?) Further, most recently, carbon pricing policy proposals have been decoupling price from impacts, in recognition that good policy accommodates good politics.
So it seems to me the authors of carbon pricing proposals agree with this book, and pivoted accordingly.
This is the reality of carbon taxes as implemented in some Western European countries and Canada. A generic tax that applies to a limited set of activities then a sector-by-sector specific plan for most large industries depending on a lot of factors.
I suppose I should really read the book. But I am suspicious. To me having a carbon tax emphatically does not mean embracing some "capitalism solves all problems" ideology. Direct intervention is still needed, but direct intervention works best in conjunction with carbon taxes. You don't want the market trying to "route around" your direct intervention because there is no incentive to play ball.
If anything, it's actually this sort of nuclear subsidy that could be too hands off --- if it's like a 1990s throw money at ISPs for fibre with no strings attached tpye thing. I would say Carbon tax and nationalize the nukes.
Noah Smith has an article on Substack arguing that economists have largely failed to produce useful research on climate change, in part because of a preoccupation with carbon taxes to the exclusion of other research topics. The article is subscription only (edit: not true, see reply below), but his four big points are these:
* First, academic economists have basically ignored the topic. A survey of top economics journals found that, out of 77,000 total articles published, only 57 (0.074%) were about climate change.
* Many of the most cited papers have turned out to be crap, with basic calculation and data coding errors the authors have had to publish corrections for. Smith argues that this is partly because economists don't collaborate with other researchers much, especially natural sciences like climate change.
* The most important model for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis is the DICE model created by Richard Nordhaus. But the DICE model has big problems, the most important of which is that, due to discounting of future economic effects, it basically ignores the welfare of future generations. The DICE model also assumes that preventing climate change will be very expensive, and hasn't adjusted for recent technology advances on that front.
* Last, economists have been obsessed with carbon taxes, and haven't dealt with how politically unpopular they are, especially in international negotiations. This is, IMO, similar to how economists love to promote free trade, saying that the losers can be compensated via money from the overall economic gains, leaving everyone better off, and ignoring that this never, ever actually happens.
I'm in the camp that thinks that economists haven't earned a ton of credibility on the specific topic of climate change. Our best shot, IMO, is massive R&D efforts and CO2-removal geoengineering (especially wave-powered olivine weathering, as promoted by Project Vesta). Accompanied by crippling taxes on heavy emissions industries, but I think people will have an easier time accepting those if it's clear that governments are pursuing alternatives to taxes too.
This sounds like a good article, I'll check it out. However, the claim that free trade doesn't lead to gains for losers in the economic sense is inaccurate. The poorest people worldwide have seen massive improvements to quality of life, even if things aren't perfect. Looking just at historical infant mortality rates, food/water access, education, and other broad metrics indicates life has been massively improving over the last century, worldwide. It's naive to think that free trade hasn't contributed to that.
As a quick example, free trade has allowed more developed nations (like the US) to leverage the labor markets in less developed nations, like China. As a result, money has flowed into those labor markets and increased the quality of life in those areas.
To be clear, those labor markets aren't perfect, and free trade as a universal good is a ridiculous idea. My point is just that free trade has led to a lot of good the world over and the referenced statement is over simplifying something that is very complicated.
I agree with your view on economists, but CCAS is a clown show that politicians use to delay taking real action. Biological and geoengineering strategies have promise but it will take decades of research, and we need to act now.
As far as convincing people, the way Canada gives taxpayers a big carbon tax refund is a good way to sell it. People love getting a summer bonus, and it still pushes people towards better solutions.
Not sure if a price that "starts small" is enough at this point. It may have been 15 years ago, but it seems like now it won't be enough to stave off a massive disaster. If there's only political will to start small, then obviously we should do that. It seems like the can kicking of the past has come to bite us in the ass, though, and these sorts of actions will not do it.
Given the uncertainty of climate effects, we should actually be starting very very very high, and then bringing it down as we have more certainty about the worst case effects. I need to find that paper from financial analysts that say that simpler, more politically achievable schemes with low starting prices completely mismodel the financial risk...
A small price now, combined with projections that it will rise substantially over time will still affect the calculations of any major capital purchase. Of course, convincing people the price will rise is made difficult by the lack of seriousness to date.
I'm not convinced a carbon tax is politically viable. For some reason, they are incredibly unpopular. In very blue Washington state, they've made several attempts to pass one, and each has failed. The most recent was basically the cadillac of carbon taxes, they threw in everything you can throw in to address concerns. It still failed.
I've been reading "Seeing Like a State", and this reminds me of the sort of legibility problems that States historically had around taxation. The premise of the book is that the State reorganizes society to make it easier to administer often times to the detriment of society itself. For instance, a medieval European kingdom wants to tax grain - there are no markets which determine the price of grain. There is no universal measurement, there is no universal language. Instead, each village has its own tradition founded upon hundreds of years of bitter dispute between the local lord, the peasants, and the local clergy. A peasant is given some number of baskets each year and is told to fill them up. The peasant and the lord don't trust each other. The peasant suspects baskets are bigger this year and the lord suspects the peasant will scheme to avoid filling them. So, everything is codified - the basket is filled from a certain height (eg shoulder) with a grain with a certain amount of wetness to a certain level - either mounded, semi-mounded, potentially leveled off with a specific tool, etc... Any changes to the system stand to create a revolt. Also, no one has a surname, detailed maps for productivity of fields don't really exist, and lets say 90% of males in England have 1 of 6 names. Peasants don't own anything anyway, but they have complex rules around the communal usage of land (even though that's illegal). Kings are forced to rely on the local knowledge of lesser lords as middlemen who can navigate the local systems without causing revolts; they in turn refuse to do anything to fix a system that benefits them greatly.
Anyway, that's about what I see happening if you try to tax carbon. There is no legibility into what causes pollution from the outside - you can't look at the good itself, you must know the history of all inputs down to the raw goods and then some! If you just tax the creation of carbon domestically, you will encourage offshoring everything that necessarily pollutes to places that will pollute way more. If you just tax big players, businesses will split off divisions to be under the limit. If you just tax certain industries, you will send them offshore (apart from air travel). The righter solution would be to implement a carbon VAT, so that you align the incentives of producers and consumers. Now, you are in the business of taxing grain from peasants! How much pollution goes into foreign steel? Who knows? Are their carbon offsets real? Do we just put a tariff on foreign steel which feels sorta right? That will violate trade deals and will doubtlessly punish the honest players the most, once again encouraging more pollution.
The only way to make this work is to put the carbon tax into a fund that the US government has no access to, and to empty the fund every year, writing each American a check.
I would make a bit of of a change, though--make the carbon tax refundable. Lets say you tax CO2 emissions at $100/ton. You then pay $100/ton to anybody who effectively sequesters CO2.
In fact, I would pretty much scrap the emissions rules and replace them with taxes of this sort. There should be no acceptable level followed by fines, there should be a cost from the first gram.
Depends on how it works. "Offsets" for example basically allow companies to pay other companies to not cut down trees that it wouldn't cut down anyway. A direct tax on carbon emissions would avoid that sort of thing.
I don't know if that's better or worse, but my intuition is that a sweeping, solve-all solution will take forever to get through and measures like this are easier to push through faster. In software terms, it's more akin to a gradual refactor than a rewrite.
Unfortunately, at least in the US, Congress doesn’t appear to work that way. If they pass something, it is assumed to solve the problem, and they won’t want to touch it again for at least a decade.
Nuclear power capital requirements (up front) are one of the biggest roadblocks to building new plants, followed by regulatory complexity and cruft that hasn’t been streamlined to allow new reactor designs to be implemented.
Doing both, removing subsidies from dirty energy and moving them to nuclear, would be the best case.
I hear about regulatory cruft, but have never heard of examples of what would be changed.
We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate enough. By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear reactors.
But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve nuclear.
Whether subsidies are a good idea or not in general for nuclear is an interesting question. The article states that the current plan is to give production tax credits - tax credits for energy produced. Such a subsidy, which does not help mitigate the up front capital costs, would therefore not really address the root problem in the US.
To the more general question though: subsidies are to incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear power production.
Nuclear power requirements (up front) has also a big issue: the cost of money. The only viable solution is to have state-owned nuclear energy, because only states can borrow cheap money (ie. even at negative rates), where private companies are required to bleed interests during decades.
Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.
So don’t build big plants. Micro reactors are far cheaper, easier to maintain and a distributed network of micro reactors would greatly reduce the burden on our already archaic national electric grid.
Ideas about how to run governments need to be thought of in context of how the government operates. If was emporer of the USA, I would do what you suggest. But if I was president, I probably could not.
I think a better approach is to change some of the regulation. Most of it is good, but some of it is kinda insane. My father worked on nuclear plants in the 70-80's. According to him, from the 80's on it effectively was so much regulation that it was not at all worth building a plant.
With technological advancement, a little change in regulations could go a long way.
If you know, I would love to hear some of the specific regulations that he thought were ineffective and or hampering our nuclear power construction. I've seen it mentioned in this thread without specifics.
Yes, I'd much rather that my taxes go to an up-front long term investment than have it blown away reacting to something that could have been prevented!
It's a good investment for taxpayers, unlike subsidizing dino juice.
Couldn't say it better. Subsidies don't work out the way you want. Look at ethanol: it's an incredibly dirty fuel source (using tons of diesel to make "fuel", smart!) but the ethanol lobby and unions have entrenched themselves permanently so its not worth the fight.
It just occurred to me that the EV transition will also affect food prices, that should be interesting. Big agro and big oil batting against it. Not sure how we are making even the little progress we are.
According to 2014 Elon Musk, if you cover the same square footage as taken up by a nuclear power plant and its exclusion zone with solar cells, you’ll get more electricity than the nuclear power plant would have supplied.
2014 was a long time ago. It’s possible both technologies have improved since then. I wonder why we don’t hear about this comparison more.
Probably because it ignores the fact that solar isn’t predictable (nighttime? clouds? dust?) and nuclear is.
Solar is NOT a replacement for nuclear. It absolutely can augment power generation, but it - especially solar cells - is not a reliable base load provider.
No amount of hand waving by solar cell proponents will change that. If we ever discover a way to reasonably store electrical power that’s far more reliable and cost effective than chemical batteries then that equation will change - but we aren’t there today. Nuclear is here now and there are more than enough designs that are inherently safe and cost effective that never get discussed because everyone emotionally freaks out as soon as the word “nuclear” is uttered :p
The same I would think is true with coal power plants. Our local coal plant has a huge footprint, especially when you consider the cooling pond/lake, scrubbers, support buildings etc. This is not even considering the mining of fissile material/coal to feed these facilities as well, which also often have a large footprint as well. Plus the additional storage of waste, both short term and long term.
The problem is capital doesn't care about the big picture. Nuclear power is an upfront costly measure, you don't see a return for perhaps decades. That's fine if you are a public agency since in time, this will pay for itself, and the concern is about bettering the public in the best way possible, not making a quick return on investment.
It's not fine if you are a private energy company with shareholders who are looking to take on a gain and who are only looking at life one quarter at a time. Executives would rather invest in something cheaper where their investors will see a quicker return, because that's how executives keep their jobs. Executives and shareholders care about themselves and their profit, while the government is designed to care about the collective, although its great power is frequently commandeered by individuals seeking personal profit.
Yeah, agreed. And it’s super annoying when people use the fact that a subsidy isn’t as efficient as a carbon tax (or some other broad measure) as justification for ending it (without a carbon tax replacement). For instance, Virginia (a Blue state) passed a usage fee on EVs (that’s actually higher than the typical state gas tax would be for the same distance traveled in a regular vehicle) in order to “compensate” for the fact that EVs don’t pay gas tax. Therefore turning the Pigouvian gas tax into an anti-Pigouvian fee for acting on the desire to use more efficient and lower emissions transportation. (Not to mention you ALSO were taxed on electricity and the battery... plus personal property tax for the battery... just to add insult to injury.) I guess because of the (false) perception that only rich f**ks buy electric cars. “Oh, but it’s JUST for paying for the roads!” Yeah, like the Pigouvian aspect didn’t matter and as if the state gas tax is solely used for roads.
I support serious measures to address climate change and oppose anything that gets in the way of such measures. If the government wants to give a free pony to people who installs solar panels, that's fine by me. More optimal policies are preferably, of course, but that's a secondary concern.
Right now, it seems the most likely outcome is that we keep using fossil fuels, so I'm desperate for anything!
(The exception are measures such as banning plastic straws, which I oppose because it's actually a significant inconvenience—which means spent political capital—but will do exceedingly little for the planet.)
If we're treating this as a world-critical issue, we shouldn't wait for market forces to fix it. Like evolution, market forces may converge on good solutions, but not quickly enough to save a species from near extinction.
So, yeah, stop subsidizing dirty companies, but also subsidize those solutions that get us out of this mess faster.
> The notion that there are large subsidies for fossil fuels is not backed up by the data.
The absence of Pigovian taxes to internalize te environmental externalities is a de facto subsidy equal to the value of the externalized negative impacts (it's paid by society at large through the externalized impacts rather than through government, but the impact is the same.)
Massive repeated bailouts for the fossil fuel auto industry, gutting of EPA regulations to redefine pollution so as to let oil and gas and auto industries avoid financial responsibility for the pollution and other environmental damage (fracking quakes for example) they cause, and multi-trillion-dollar decades-long wars and military engagements all in the service of oil and gas, taxpayer funded, would beg to differ with your claim.
The capital requirements for starting a nuclear company is likely much large than starting, say, an EV company. Subsidies for EV companies greatly helped in getting the technology off the ground. Subsidies might be a necessary evil in this case.
In general I oppose subsidies, but I think it's a good idea here. Nuclear solves some major problems with other types of clean energy - it's just prohibitively expensive. I'm all for exploring all alternatives to fossil fuels in parallel - I think the seriousness of the climate situation warrants it.
But that cost is largely a function of strong regulations and lack of innovation. If the government gets the ball rolling with subsidies it might get to the point where it doesn't need them anymore. Reducing regulation where appropriate could help too - but in general there are risks and regulation is warranted.
And because it makes so much sense - implement a carbon tax that ramps up slowly to the full cost of the externalities of fossil fuels. It's the most effective thing to fight climate change, but instead of doing that we actually subsidize fossil fuels?!? I don't get it.
I support not destroying the planet. Whatever gets the job done at this point. Removing subsidies is a political shitshow, and you're effectively saying "I support a decades-long political sparring contest while the planet burns."
I think it's safe to say we're not operating under a democracy/republic anymore, so whatever will appease the coroporate/banking overlords the quickest is the best path forward.
The french didn't need anything fancy. They stadardized and then scaled production of reactors. They now have the cheapest energy on the planet, sell excess to others, and have no carbon output from electricity generation.
As someone opposed to nuclear power, I agree with both points. Nuclear power cannot exist without subsidies for development, construction and all the externalities.
It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
> It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
Right, because free markets are not capable of pricing in externalities (and in fact they actively incentivize externalities). If they were capable of this, fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive, and nuclear would be cheap.
In a free market perhaps, but nuclear power comes with loads of government oversight and regulations (and therefore costs) due to the inherent risk factors. Given that, subsidies seems appropriate.
Politics is like 25% solving problems and 75% a popularity contest and that's being generous. No sane politician would ever remove something providing a benefit until well after it's outlived it's usefulness.
Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets. The construction is too expensive and too slow - allocating capital to nuclear ends up slower than allocating the same capital to renewables for hitting climate targets. If you look at reports of lifetime costs for utility scale energy, Nuclear is the most expensive and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Solar and wind is already 3-4x cheaper than nuclear, and by the time the decade is out it will likely be 10x cheaper even with attendant storage.
I’ve yet to see any renewable plan that could cover big northern cities.
Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and it’s not exactly known for being sunny in January.
NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that’s just for NYC. Probably double if you include the entire metro area.
You aren’t going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of NYC.
First of all, did you look at a map? 300 miles from NYC gets you to upstate New York, or western Pennsylvania, or rural West Virginia. Second, NYISO, which covers New York State, already imports lots of power from Quebec, Ontario, New England, and PJM (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and more).
Why is there a requirement that power be generated within 300 miles? NYC already gets plenty of power from further away than that. With HVDC transmission, we can transmit power thousands of miles efficiently. PNW hydro power is used in LA, for example.
You need baseload power. On a dark windless night, when everyone is charging their electric cars, you can't just have brownouts and blackouts.
And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.
Most countries are pretty far away from the amount of renewables where you start requiring lots of storage. You can easily do 50% renewables for electricity with hardly any storage at all.
Increasingly, nations are analyzing their grid requirements and concluding that 100% renewables is feasible, the baseload concept ends up being a constraining requirement that nuclear plants levy upon the rest of a future grid design.
> The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary. Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster. But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?
China seriously invested in it heavily, met a modicum of success in building a wave of nuclear plants, but near the middle of the full plan decided to halt any new construction. I think even with low regulation, and a focused investment it was turning out more expensive than the alternatives.
Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction for the buck.
Loan subsidies passed under GWB were supposed to result in a nuclear renaissance in the form of Westinghouse's AP1000 GEN III+ reactor. The 2 projects started under Obama have been unmitigated financial disasters. One was cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground, the other is about to come online after going 2x+ over money and time budget.
All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the government takes on construction risk.
You're not responding to the premise of the article: subsidize existing nuclear, not new nuclear. You're taking on an easier argument, but instead you need to clarify: how is allowing carbon-free existing nuclear fall due to price a good thing for the climate?
I am perhaps missing it, but my takeaway from the article was that doesn't seem to actually specify existing nuclear, preferring to talk about nuclear subsidy. If it were only existing nuclear I would mostly agree on keeping it save for certain certain end of life reactors (e.g diablo canyon built near an earthquake fault).
Solar and wind are nuclear power. We keep the reactor 93 million miles away, in a huge gravitational containment system, and even so tens of thousands of people die from cancer caused by the radiation every year in the United States alone, despite two layers of shielding and multiple kinds of voluntary prevention protocols.
There is no renewable energy source that is faster than simply maintaining existing nuclear capacity. Lots of nuclear power plants are at risk of closing. A small subsidy to keep them open until we build out sufficient renewables to shut down all fossil fuels is a freaking steal considering the effects of climate change.
I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.
Nuclear power plants aren't just an all-or-nothing kind of risk. There is plenty that could go wrong and either halt its operations or affect its environment.
For instance, a lot of plants increase the average temperature of the rivers they dump their cooling water in. That issue has become more threatening over time since climate change is doing the same.
A better idea - have the navy build them and then sell the completed, operational plant (say, after a year of successful operation) to the highest bidder in an auction. Put whatever constraints are needed on the sale, and guarantee the construction for a decade.
At that point, they should create a government-owed corporation to hand off operation to.
End-of-life for plants is a huge issue. The owners of plants are obligated to collect fees for cleanup, decommissioning, and remediation of power plant sites. But what has happened (unsurprisingly) is that operators will sell these plants to someone else, who signs a contract, accepting all future legal liability for any issues resulting from operations or cleanup, then those cleanup fees (which total in the hundreds of millions) get put into an escrow account.
Of course, these new owners are limited liability corporations who find that it's cheaper to provide campaign donations to high-level state officials who then pressure state agencies to allow half-assed measures to be used for containment of toxic chemicals. This is an ongoing issue in right now because so many coal plants have been driven out of business.
If these people won't spend an extra million bucks to line coal ash containment ponds appropriately, I have no faith they will do so with significantly more expensive nuclear waste.
> At that point, they should create a government-owed corporation to hand off operation to.
The difference is that rightly or wrongly, the public doesn't see the military spending as wasteful government spending in the way they see spending on the Postal Service or for some, health programs like Medicaid.
There's an argument that a way to sell renewables to the climate change denying sections of the population is to have the military involved in its implementation.
If you think about it, the military has functions of 1) protecting the US against existential threats and 2) providing a path toward a dignified livelihood for a lot of the population. Climate change also poses existential threats, and there is an opportunity to create a path to a dignified livelihood for many people by tackling it with renewables.
US Naval reactors are not a substitute for commercial power plants. They use highly enriched fuel, and are optimized for small volume and low maintenance costs, not net generation efficiency. They're at least one if not two orders of magnitude smaller than what's economic in power plants, and they are not in any way built with an efficient "model T" style production line.
US Naval reactors are not some silver bullet no one has thought of. They're a different tool, and it's not clear the Navy would be particularly more effective in creating a future of factory built small modular reactors vs any other company that's attempted it so far.
Exactly, people who bring this up don't understand the different one-off reactor designs used in maybe a handful of vessels, or that the Navy reactors are meant to go without refueling for up to 25 years. They are also made by third-party contractors, not hand-built by the Navy itself.
The complexity, capital costs and liability risks make commercial "small nuclear" unfeasible. It's "go big or go home".
Do they ever use a parked carrier to power something? It seems like it would be useful to run at least a portion of a base using a carrier anchored in the harbor, or as response to downed power infrastructure after a natural disaster. Quick googling indicates an aircraft carrier allegedly could be able to power 12,000 homes.
It's a neat idea; based on the fact that the Navy has a lot of operational experience with nuclear power (especially small heat sources)? How well does that experience translate to a large-scale reactor? And is the Navy particularly good at building things? I would imagine that the (private) shipbuilder has at least as much knowledge around the tech.
The Navy acquires many reactors annually and operates a ton of small to medium reactors. I think they mostly buy the reactors from contractors, but either way, they have a ton of operational experience.
Maybe funding it via the navy is politically palatable.
I think its more fund the navy under the guise of a defense spending bill that ends up going for an RFP to energy companies to build the reactors "for the navy"
I was talking to an ex-navy reactor man at a bar once. He said one of the most important things for naval reactors is to make sure you were making the "right kind of bubbles." I never found out if this was some kind of navy joke or if he was talking about Nucleate boiling.
Naval reactors are currently built by GE and Bechtel. They are designed at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, a national lab of DOE, operated by Fluor. Fluor is a parent company of NuScale which just got a license from the NRC to be able to build a civilian small modular reactor (SMR). Their first project is scheduled to come online at the end of the decade.
Hmm. That's an interesting idea. Seems like they are experts in building relatively small nuclear plants and maintaining them in harsh conditions for years. Wonder if it's feasible though. Maybe they are too slow to build. Maybe they are too expensive.
I think the manufacturing is required to be contracted out. The military can and does sell many things if they no longer have need for them. You can find some of that stuff in surplus shops, but they even sell old aircraft and other vehicles.
I think the premise is that the US Navy is quite good at building nuclear power plants as multiple reactors power each and every submarine and Aircraft carrier we have. By the numbers the Navy has more nuclear powered ships than the US has nuclear power plants. There's also precedent for smaller scale plants that are lower maintenance and less dangerous.
Fukasima was a dumb design from the start, and plenty of people pointed it out before it was built. Holding it up as the poster child for why all talk about nuclear power generation should not even be discussed is beyond disingenuous.
You mean a title for those who don't read the article but still vote or comment as if they did? But as far as I know, the purpose of titles is to make you want to get the paper or visit the site and read the article, not fully summarize the topic. .
LoL, 40 years too late. The irony is that if the anti-nuclear environmentalist movement hadn't had as much strength in the 80's, we would be electric carbon neutral and just have transportation to go.
This movement was heavily pushed along by the established fossil fuel power industry. It's much less "grass roots" than it appeared to be on a surface level.
I’d prefer to see continuing or additional tax credits for solar and battery storage directly to the consumer. This would dovetail nicely with an infrastructure plan by making the incentives higher for panels made in the U.S.A. Keeping the incentives directly to the consumer would take a good deal of the chances of corruption and back room deals out of the equation I.E. the Solyndra scandal.
We have come a long way since the RBMK reactors in use at Chernobyl. Generation III reactors are significantly safer than the older nuclear reactors. They are now passively safe, in that they shut themselves down without operator intervention.
The issue with solar is that there are a lot more deaths for a given amount of energy than for nuclear. Yes, they're spread out so it's less dramatic, but overall nuclear is safer and also produces very useful medical isotopes.
What's really missing for nuclear is economics of scale. If we could just organize a repeatable build model so many operational challenges would be solved.
That said, I'll take anything. Wind, solar, batteries, tidal, nuclear. They're all far, far better than coal or oil from a public health and climate change standpoint. It's such a shame so much was wasted on the Iraq War, since the entire USA could have been powered by green energy with half what was spent.
Which ones are those? As far as I can see, ALL “clean energy” has some trade offs.
Mining lithium is a horrible, polluting process that wastes tons of fresh water. One thing to put small quantities into phones and computers. Another to suggest that they should be used for all cars (unless the end goal is to have only the super rich driving cars).
Solar panels involve mining coal (so much more moving away from the coal economy) and quartz, and will pile up as toxic junk after 10 years or so.
Wind turbines can’t be repurposed after their useful and short (comparatively) life and will pile up as junk.
It’s not even a question of “don’t have catastrophic outcomes”, it’s a question of a slow-moving guaranteed catastrophic outcome, or the possibility of a fast catastrophic outcome.
We're not talking about the perfect vs. the good here. We're talking about a power source (nuclear) that can result in virtually unlimited harm to human life in cases of serious failure vs. power sources that, while not as well-developed, are much lower-risk long-term.
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You don’t have to stop or even slow renewables deployment to do this. They are fairly different industries with different workforce’s, so there are resources to do both simultaneously without significant interference. And you’re not going to get “too much” electricity as cheap abundant electricity will help accelerate decarbonization of other things like building heat and transport and industrial processes.
Existing nuclear ESPECIALLY must be protected. And existing hydro. Number 1 and number 2 (tied with wind) clean energy sources.
Nuclear power produces as much energy in our country as coal. We can phase out coal twice as fast if we at very least keep nuclear around a few years longer.
The need for profit is killing our planet. When it comes to basic essential things like shelter, energy, food, water, profit is pure parasitic loss and should be eliminated. These things really should run at a loss, considering these things generate all other economic activity there is, but we insist that they must be run privately and for profit.
I think there's a big difference between running things "for profit," which I agree is not always necessary, and attempting to run things "cash flow positive."
When we have resources like electricity that are very feasible to charge for, one of the best ways to make sure our overall system is operating efficiently and not just wasting resources is to charge for the resource and aim for slight cash-flow positive - the goal being to break even with a small margin for error.
If break-even isn't economical under the current market rules, but something is a social good we want to maintain, like nuclear power, we can adjust the rules of the market. This actually makes sense for base load power, as we know there's a floor that we don't want to fall beneath, and renewables are so elastic that we sometimes fall below that floor. Plus the transmission network needs to be kept in balance, so we can't actually handle huge swings in power.
But the solution here is not to say "profit is killing our planet," it's to fix the rules of the market to get the outcome we want. Profit, in general, is a good thing. But yes, sometimes the system gets into a state where bad outcomes are profitable, and we do need to fix that.
Seemingly just in time, solar, wind, and storage are scaling both in production capacity and in falling costs to solve our climate problems. These will be the backbone of getting to 80% carbon free electricity in the next decade, and 0% carbon not that long after. This will be far cheaper than any other source of energy generation we can use, and will save us massive amounts of money.
One of the better grid modelers out there, Christoper Clack, who has no opposition to nuclear and in the past has made strong arguments for it being a cheaper way to get to 0%, also has an amazing new mode out this year that says we should do something very unintuitive: deploy massive amounts of distributed solar and storage close to power meters (e.g. on people's homes). This will result in a much stronger distribution grid that can both shave peaks of demand, resulting in far less very costly distribution infrastructure, and which will empower far even cheaper deployment of larger amounts of utility-scale solar and wind in future decades.
Nuclear would be nice if it weren't so expensive, and if it were our only option we should keep it around, but there's little reason to create make-work when we have cheaper options, and options that will have additional benefits for the grid such as greatly increasing reliability and resilience. Massive distributed solar and storage will create an absolutist rock solid grid that will be able to weather disruptions far better than one with large generators that become almost like single points of failure.
Solar and wind are pervasive and cheap in California. If nuclear is no better for the environment and more expensive, why should it keep running?
The whole "profit" thing is a way to manage scarce resources, i.e. minimize waste. That's exactly what we want.
You're right that for basic needs like shelter, energy, food, and water, we shouldn't accept that some people might have to go without. So we have tipped the scales through programs like section 8, progressive energy rates, EBT, etc to get that outcome will still seeing other resources efficiently used.
Chasing that rabbit down the hole, what happens if the US does wean off fossil fuel entirely, but countries like Russia and China continue (and say it is projected to increase 400X like China in the last 30 years). Then its an existential threat, does that mean use of force, or limit ourselves to diplomatic means that will ultimately fail and just accept the resulting existential outcome? Does the analysis change when it is a less diplomatically controversial Country such as India?
Alternatively what if those Countries beat the US to weaning off fossil fuel and determine overnight any continued US use of fossil fuel is an existential threat and act of war?
It sounds like hyperbole but I remember when the US began regulating incandescent light bulbs and it was floated by certain media outlets as an attack on freedom and liberties. We have literally seen murders of people telling others to wear a mask during the pandemic, and I watched a news segment claiming a normal year sees 150-300 FAA incidents on planes and we have seen 1,300 already this year mostly related to passengers refusing to wear masks and many times escalating to attacks on the airline workers for attempting to enforce the CDC mask guidelines. We live in violent and chaotic times, where millions and millions of people allow themselves to be worked up into mobs by a media that does it willfully and deliberately. I don't see it as an easy transition domestically much less globally, and those in power don't care about the science but seem to froth at the mouth for this kind of discontent.
I think it would be like pouring sugar over a bacteria colony. The earth's crust could be economically strip mined. Ore could be smelted into metal at negligible cost, which could in turn be used to make more machines to strip mine the crust at a faster rate. Oceans could be boiled to access rare metals, or maybe just for fun by a bored teenager.
This isn't to detract from OPs practical comment, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
..and with infinite power, even that isn't necessary because we could simply create whatever matter we wanted directly from energy.
Funding for each may actually benefit the others. For example, FLiBe salt is being considered as a coolant in some Gen IV fission, as well as compact fusion and concentrated solar. Production will increase if there is a definite market for it, making it easier to obtain.
I very much doubt FLiBe was ever seriously considered for solar applications.
Nuclear is 4 times more expensive, it would be interesting to know if we could boost renewable much further much faster.
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https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Making+Climate+Policy+Work-p-978...
If we treat all industry as spherical cows, a common carbon price comes out as a great way to incentivize industrial change.
However, once we get into the particulars of different industries and the varying levels of difficulty they have in decarbonizing, and the very different levels of lobbying power they have to influence that price, and the difficult of enforcement across different sectors, a common shared policy across all sectors starts to be far less efficient than tailoring the solution to each industry.
For example, steel is pure commodity, very difficult to eat any cost from stranded assets, and has far less ability to call up capital to solve the problem than, say, natural gas. So the price will have hugely different consequences for steel than natural gas production, and there are different tailored industrial policies that will make the transition happen much more time- and cost-efficiently.
By the way, I'm working on the assumption of a carbon price applied on fossil fuels at the source, such as the Energy Innovation Act would include.
So it seems to me the authors of carbon pricing proposals agree with this book, and pivoted accordingly.
See https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI... for more of that.
If anything, it's actually this sort of nuclear subsidy that could be too hands off --- if it's like a 1990s throw money at ISPs for fibre with no strings attached tpye thing. I would say Carbon tax and nationalize the nukes.
* First, academic economists have basically ignored the topic. A survey of top economics journals found that, out of 77,000 total articles published, only 57 (0.074%) were about climate change.
* Many of the most cited papers have turned out to be crap, with basic calculation and data coding errors the authors have had to publish corrections for. Smith argues that this is partly because economists don't collaborate with other researchers much, especially natural sciences like climate change.
* The most important model for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis is the DICE model created by Richard Nordhaus. But the DICE model has big problems, the most important of which is that, due to discounting of future economic effects, it basically ignores the welfare of future generations. The DICE model also assumes that preventing climate change will be very expensive, and hasn't adjusted for recent technology advances on that front.
* Last, economists have been obsessed with carbon taxes, and haven't dealt with how politically unpopular they are, especially in international negotiations. This is, IMO, similar to how economists love to promote free trade, saying that the losers can be compensated via money from the overall economic gains, leaving everyone better off, and ignoring that this never, ever actually happens.
I'm in the camp that thinks that economists haven't earned a ton of credibility on the specific topic of climate change. Our best shot, IMO, is massive R&D efforts and CO2-removal geoengineering (especially wave-powered olivine weathering, as promoted by Project Vesta). Accompanied by crippling taxes on heavy emissions industries, but I think people will have an easier time accepting those if it's clear that governments are pursuing alternatives to taxes too.
As a quick example, free trade has allowed more developed nations (like the US) to leverage the labor markets in less developed nations, like China. As a result, money has flowed into those labor markets and increased the quality of life in those areas.
To be clear, those labor markets aren't perfect, and free trade as a universal good is a ridiculous idea. My point is just that free trade has led to a lot of good the world over and the referenced statement is over simplifying something that is very complicated.
As far as convincing people, the way Canada gives taxpayers a big carbon tax refund is a good way to sell it. People love getting a summer bonus, and it still pushes people towards better solutions.
Carbon tax is different from other taxes as the primary purpose is not to raise money for govt, it's to reduce carbon producing activity.
So take all the proceeds and distribute directly to every citizen to use as they want - e.g to buy petrol if that's their choice.
When people see those checks arriving they'll be more positive.
Sounds like I need to read about that.
Also, shit. There goes one of my last hopes. Really hope Project Vesta pans out, because I don't see much else.
Anyway, that's about what I see happening if you try to tax carbon. There is no legibility into what causes pollution from the outside - you can't look at the good itself, you must know the history of all inputs down to the raw goods and then some! If you just tax the creation of carbon domestically, you will encourage offshoring everything that necessarily pollutes to places that will pollute way more. If you just tax big players, businesses will split off divisions to be under the limit. If you just tax certain industries, you will send them offshore (apart from air travel). The righter solution would be to implement a carbon VAT, so that you align the incentives of producers and consumers. Now, you are in the business of taxing grain from peasants! How much pollution goes into foreign steel? Who knows? Are their carbon offsets real? Do we just put a tariff on foreign steel which feels sorta right? That will violate trade deals and will doubtlessly punish the honest players the most, once again encouraging more pollution.
https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en
https://clcouncil.org/
I would make a bit of of a change, though--make the carbon tax refundable. Lets say you tax CO2 emissions at $100/ton. You then pay $100/ton to anybody who effectively sequesters CO2.
In fact, I would pretty much scrap the emissions rules and replace them with taxes of this sort. There should be no acceptable level followed by fines, there should be a cost from the first gram.
That would have been the plan 30 years ago.
Right now, we can either turn it up to 11 when the scheme starts, or face horrible consequences.
Doing both, removing subsidies from dirty energy and moving them to nuclear, would be the best case.
We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate enough. By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear reactors.
But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve nuclear.
To the more general question though: subsidies are to incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear power production.
Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.
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Kill two birds with one stone and all that…
With technological advancement, a little change in regulations could go a long way.
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It's a good investment for taxpayers, unlike subsidizing dino juice.
2014 was a long time ago. It’s possible both technologies have improved since then. I wonder why we don’t hear about this comparison more.
Solar is NOT a replacement for nuclear. It absolutely can augment power generation, but it - especially solar cells - is not a reliable base load provider.
No amount of hand waving by solar cell proponents will change that. If we ever discover a way to reasonably store electrical power that’s far more reliable and cost effective than chemical batteries then that equation will change - but we aren’t there today. Nuclear is here now and there are more than enough designs that are inherently safe and cost effective that never get discussed because everyone emotionally freaks out as soon as the word “nuclear” is uttered :p
[1] https://cdn.britannica.com/s:800x1000/00/196800-050-E30A2B4A...
If Elon is a willing to start selling power walls at 100$ / kwh retail at scale then we’ll talk.
It's not fine if you are a private energy company with shareholders who are looking to take on a gain and who are only looking at life one quarter at a time. Executives would rather invest in something cheaper where their investors will see a quicker return, because that's how executives keep their jobs. Executives and shareholders care about themselves and their profit, while the government is designed to care about the collective, although its great power is frequently commandeered by individuals seeking personal profit.
Since there is not sufficient political consensus for the former in the US, the latter is a good interim solution.
Right now, it seems the most likely outcome is that we keep using fossil fuels, so I'm desperate for anything!
(The exception are measures such as banning plastic straws, which I oppose because it's actually a significant inconvenience—which means spent political capital—but will do exceedingly little for the planet.)
So, yeah, stop subsidizing dirty companies, but also subsidize those solutions that get us out of this mess faster.
There are currently more subsidies for solar and wind.
The absence of Pigovian taxes to internalize te environmental externalities is a de facto subsidy equal to the value of the externalized negative impacts (it's paid by society at large through the externalized impacts rather than through government, but the impact is the same.)
Massive repeated bailouts for the fossil fuel auto industry, gutting of EPA regulations to redefine pollution so as to let oil and gas and auto industries avoid financial responsibility for the pollution and other environmental damage (fracking quakes for example) they cause, and multi-trillion-dollar decades-long wars and military engagements all in the service of oil and gas, taxpayer funded, would beg to differ with your claim.
Hell the 2003 invasion was originally called "Operation Iraqi Liberation" - before that blatant of an acronym was deemed unseemly.
But that cost is largely a function of strong regulations and lack of innovation. If the government gets the ball rolling with subsidies it might get to the point where it doesn't need them anymore. Reducing regulation where appropriate could help too - but in general there are risks and regulation is warranted.
And because it makes so much sense - implement a carbon tax that ramps up slowly to the full cost of the externalities of fossil fuels. It's the most effective thing to fight climate change, but instead of doing that we actually subsidize fossil fuels?!? I don't get it.
I see this argued a lot for many industries, has it ever actually happened for any of them? It doesn't seem realistic, but I'd love to be wrong.
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I think it's safe to say we're not operating under a democracy/republic anymore, so whatever will appease the coroporate/banking overlords the quickest is the best path forward.
"Freedom fries?"
Also, I think you're confusing cost and price there.
It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
Right, because free markets are not capable of pricing in externalities (and in fact they actively incentivize externalities). If they were capable of this, fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive, and nuclear would be cheap.
But if the objective were to curry favour with as many people as possible, subsidising everything works better than leveling the playing field.
Everybody gets a taste.
If nuclear had to compete with coal on actual safety, nuclear would already be cheaper than coal.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and it’s not exactly known for being sunny in January.
NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that’s just for NYC. Probably double if you include the entire metro area.
You aren’t going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of NYC.
We do need more transmission (another thing the White House is working on: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...), but power import/export over long distances is already commonplace.
Edit: And if you really want to look to the future, you could read the proposal for a North American Supergrid: http://northamericansupergrid.org/
2) Rooftop solar
3) National grid improvements that make transferring power from renewable sources further away more efficient
4) There are massively huge areas of empty land within 100 miles of NYC. This map shows roughly the 100 miles west of NYC. Take note of all of that unused space, which is most of it: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7560624,-75.4552232,170414m/...
And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.
As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.
> The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary. Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster. But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?
Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction for the buck.
All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the government takes on construction risk.
I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.
You don’t need to cover the whole planet.
In Fukushima total cleanup costs could go up to a trillion dollars : https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Act
End-of-life for plants is a huge issue. The owners of plants are obligated to collect fees for cleanup, decommissioning, and remediation of power plant sites. But what has happened (unsurprisingly) is that operators will sell these plants to someone else, who signs a contract, accepting all future legal liability for any issues resulting from operations or cleanup, then those cleanup fees (which total in the hundreds of millions) get put into an escrow account.
Of course, these new owners are limited liability corporations who find that it's cheaper to provide campaign donations to high-level state officials who then pressure state agencies to allow half-assed measures to be used for containment of toxic chemicals. This is an ongoing issue in right now because so many coal plants have been driven out of business.
If these people won't spend an extra million bucks to line coal ash containment ponds appropriately, I have no faith they will do so with significantly more expensive nuclear waste.
The difference is that rightly or wrongly, the public doesn't see the military spending as wasteful government spending in the way they see spending on the Postal Service or for some, health programs like Medicaid.
There's an argument that a way to sell renewables to the climate change denying sections of the population is to have the military involved in its implementation.
If you think about it, the military has functions of 1) protecting the US against existential threats and 2) providing a path toward a dignified livelihood for a lot of the population. Climate change also poses existential threats, and there is an opportunity to create a path to a dignified livelihood for many people by tackling it with renewables.
US Naval reactors are not some silver bullet no one has thought of. They're a different tool, and it's not clear the Navy would be particularly more effective in creating a future of factory built small modular reactors vs any other company that's attempted it so far.
The complexity, capital costs and liability risks make commercial "small nuclear" unfeasible. It's "go big or go home".
Maybe funding it via the navy is politically palatable.
There’s the problem, this kind of short term thinking that is just long enough to let someone else deal with it.
Also, guarantees on paper don’t mean as much as physical reality. Ask any native American or Fukashima resident about how much guarantees are worth.
White House eyes subsidies for existing nuclear plants to help meet climate targets.
This movement was heavily pushed along by the established fossil fuel power industry. It's much less "grass roots" than it appeared to be on a surface level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactorhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
What's really missing for nuclear is economics of scale. If we could just organize a repeatable build model so many operational challenges would be solved.
That said, I'll take anything. Wind, solar, batteries, tidal, nuclear. They're all far, far better than coal or oil from a public health and climate change standpoint. It's such a shame so much was wasted on the Iraq War, since the entire USA could have been powered by green energy with half what was spent.
Mining lithium is a horrible, polluting process that wastes tons of fresh water. One thing to put small quantities into phones and computers. Another to suggest that they should be used for all cars (unless the end goal is to have only the super rich driving cars).
Solar panels involve mining coal (so much more moving away from the coal economy) and quartz, and will pile up as toxic junk after 10 years or so.
Wind turbines can’t be repurposed after their useful and short (comparatively) life and will pile up as junk.
It’s not even a question of “don’t have catastrophic outcomes”, it’s a question of a slow-moving guaranteed catastrophic outcome, or the possibility of a fast catastrophic outcome.