We had nuclear power in Italy. From my house, I could see the cooling towers of the abandoned nuclear power plant in Trino [1] in the distance.
There was a referendum in November 1987 asking whether to abolish any form of nuclear power. It won with 80% of yes votes. This was a year after the Chernobyl disaster. Over the next few decades, Italy started to import electricity at a premium, mostly from its French neighbour, which has never stopped investing on nuclear and is today Europe's largest electricity exporter.
No politician dared touch this hot potato ever again for the following 24 years, until the June 2011 referendum, that asked whether to revive plans for nuclear power. It failed with 94% of No votes. This was 3 months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
I do not trust politicians, nor anti-nuclear activists, to ever do the right thing and drop their outdated stance on the matter.
I agree with you on all counts, it's especially sad that we're still basically bound to an irrational emotional response to Chernobyl.
Just a bit of context for non-Italians:
> It failed with 94% of No votes.
Referendums in Italy have weird rules. They may only be called to repeal existing laws. In this case, the then-standing Berlusconi IV cabinet had approved a new nuclear plan, and a referendum was called to abolish it. A referendum is successful if both the repeal votes are more and the turnout is more than 50%. So if you don't want to repeal the law, you just don't go to the polls at all.
This is just to say that when looking at Italian referendums the important number is not the Yes/No valid votes but the turnout, which in this case was 55% or something like that IIRC.
I'd agree that the public opinion is still anti-nuclear, but it's more 55-45 than 95-5.
>still basically bound to an irrational emotional response to Chernobyl.
It's hardly irrational. Nuclear power is effectively still uninsurable by private insurers and the taxpayer clean up bill for Fukushima is around $800 billion.
It wouldn't be irrational to build more power stations if they were cheap but nuclear power is even less economic than using wind and solar power to synthesize gas for storage and burning that to generate electricity:
>Italy started to import electricity at a premium, mostly from its French neighbor
Of course the French taxpayers now face decades of vast nuclear decommissioning costs. Italy doesn't. Rather as a country with lots of sun and many sparsely populated windy areas it can stock up on increasingly cheap renewables aided by possibly dirt cheap future battery prices. So you may be right, but equally maybe history will look quite favorably on Italy's energy choices. We will see.
If it's extremely safe we can let private insurers decide whether to shoulder the financial burden of a Fukushima style event and taxpayers no longer have to be on the hook for those pesky $1 trillion clean up events.
I'm all in favor of eliminating the act and adopting a wait and see approach to "will sophisticated insurers have an appetite for this risk?" but for some reason a lot of pro nuclear activists who are adamant that it is 110% safe aren't so sure about slashing this subsidy.
In any real case they should have both built out renewable energy and maintain and even expand the existing fleet of nuclear reactors. Nuclear might be historically expensive and storage an issue, but it is carbon free, and for the moment that is the most important problem we need to solve.
Additionally to what the sibling commenters say, we don't have a lot of sun nor wind in the Po Valley, where most of the industries are, and please point me to any G7 country that produces most of their energy from hydroelectricity, which Northern Italy has a decent potential for.
Renewables are just now starting to become economically viable, but distribution is still an unsolved problem. The wind farms in Sardinia are not gonna power Milan.
"[in Germany] in 2022, CO2 emission goals were exceeded by 40 million metric tons due to the increased use of coal-fired power plants resulting from the necessary cuts in natural gas consumption; estimates for 2023 assume 38 million metric tons.
The Emsland, Isar II and Neckarwestheim II nuclear power plants supplied a total of 32.7 billion kilowatt hours of low-emission electricity in 2022. German private households most recently consumed an average of 3190 kWh of electrical energy per year. This means that these three power plants can supply more than 10 million, or a quarter, of German households with electricity. The resulting reduction in the amount of electricity required from coal-fired power plants could save up to 30 million tons of CO2 per year."
Do please remember that amongst the reasons nuclear is expensive and slow is the weight of legal peril and delay intruded by .. the anti nuclear movement.
Not all, by any means but in the "it takes too long" side of things, there's a reason.
One of the reasons Germany is behind countries like Portugal in Wind power, is exactly the legal ways that anyone can prevent wind farms to be deployed, because "they are ugly", or "break the landscape view", or other nonsense.
Thankfully some states are finally voting on changing this.
Regulation also slows down green projects. There are reasons for these regulations and some of them will be around for thousands of years...
Green energy is cheaper, less risky and regulation (while also painful) is easier in most cases. As a result a project can be built much faster. Land usage is bigger but mixed usage is OK (e.g. solar over crops, parking lots etc.). Wind can reside in the sea and geothermal can be in the middle of the city.
I think the discussion over nuclear is based on data from a decade ago. The world changed. It isn't Greenpeace that should object, its the business interests. It just isn't viable anymore and the viability is declining, since solar/wind, storage etc. keep improving at an amazing rate.
From both an engineering sense and an aesthetic sense, I would much rather have 2 nuclear plants serving as base load (not total load) for 10M people, supplemented by solar/wind, than relying solely on solar/wind/storage. (In part because that requires an incredible amount of storage to preserve the current uptime in my part of the US, but also because it's a much better match to the load profile [engineering] and a smaller footprint near people [aesthetics].)
> It just isn't viable anymore and the viability is declining, since solar/wind, storage etc. keep improving at an amazing rate.
Yes renewables are growing at an amazing rate. But they don't cover countries' energy needs entirely, all the time. Which you need for a power grid.
The storage problem is by no means solved. And eg. hydro is only an option in a few places.
So you need other power generation to fill in the (big!) gaps.
Right now, that's a choice between a) let power grid go down, b) fossil, or c) nuclear. Note this is temporary! Only needed until sufficient storage comes online to let renewables do the job.
Given the urgency of the situation we're in, I see nuclear as the lesser evil here. And it's very annoying that NGOs like Greenpeace are actively blocking that escape hatch with their outdated stance. They should NOT get in the way of those working to reduce CO2 emissions. Even if nuclear.
Renewables industrialize much more land than nuclear and nuclear solve the challenge of renewables being dependent on the weather. Renewables are far more expensive than nuclear when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
It's ridiculously uneconomic of course but a limited number will continue to be built in spite of this because of the overpowering military imperative.
If you have nuclear weapons/submarines/carriers/etc. like Russia or the United States or France it shares some of the gargantuan cost of building and maintaining them. I expect North Korea will get into it in the next few years too for precisely this reason.
Countries like Iran, Sweden and Korea, on the other hand, want to be able to manufacture a weapon on a tight deadline because of extremely self evident geopolitical fears.
Nobody else builds nuclear power plants. The vast power of the global hippy-industrial complex apparently prevented it :/
Of course, the western nuclear military industrial complex, who always HATED environmentalists with a seething passion, are aware of just how massively uneconomic it is but that doesn't stop them from trying to dress up as "young climate activists" to sell a form of power that is 5x more expensive as a green gamechanger. Consent for enormous subsidies needs to be manufactured somehow if nuclear power is to remain competitive with solar and wind.
China has reactors started in for example 2010 and 2015 that were finished in 5 or 6 years (and some others that took 10 years). India and Japan has reactors started in 2000 finished in 5-6 years. Pakistan has reactors stared in 2011 and 2016 finished in 6 years. Korea has reactors started in 2000, 2005, 2006, finished in 5 years.
Wind and solar have legal perils as well. Mostly NIMBYs, but some sincere concerns exist about impact on wildlife, loss of agricultural space, etc.
I think the reason the effects of those concerns in monetary terms pale in contrast to nuclear, is that nuclear technology is much more complex and complicated and therefore many more issues need to be addressed. At this stage, it's still a pretty immature technology and it can't progress very fast because it's considered more hazardous than alternatives.
As it is, I'm tempted to agree with the young climate activists if nuclear could short term buy us time to instantly shut down coal and gradually transition to renewable sources. Problem is, that even building "off the shelf" nuclear plants tends to take way longer than wind or solar.
My father pointed out an interesting counter to this to me recently: how many birds are killed by wind farms and how many are killed by house cats?
Studies show a million or so birds killed in the US by wind each year. Other studies estimate cats kill billions of birds- and most aren't eaten, because the cats are well fed pets.
> loss of agricultural space
Is that something we're short of? I'd argue that food prices, ignoring recent inflation fluctuations, are the cheapest they've been ever in the history of humanity. Hunger only exists in the world because capitalism dictates that those who are poor must starve.
The opposition to renewables is pure NIMBYism. Though I'd still back new nuclear any day (and my province recently announced some!)
Why is the sourcing of nuclear fuel never talked about as a problem? France needs to maintain boots on the ground in Africa to protect their uranium mines. The German public, amongst others would be extremely against that level of direct imperialism.
In France, although no domestic uranium exploration and mine development activities have been carried out since 1999, majority government-owned Orano (formerly Areva) and its subsidiaries remain active abroad.
As of 2020, Orano S.A. has been working outside France, focusing on discovery of exploitable resources in Canada, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Namibia and Niger. In Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger, Orano is also involved in uranium mining operations.
In addition, as a non-operator, Orano holds shares in several mining operations and research projects in different countries. In 2020, Orano started exploration in Uzbekistan.
Total nondomestic exploration expenditures remained relatively steady from 2017 to 2018 at about USD 30 million per year, before declining by 17% to around USD 25 million in 2019 and 2020.
)
Also, I can't find any mention of the French having problems cooling down their reactors last year due to drying out rivers.
Nuclear might have been an option fifty years ago, but now it's too late to start, and we should focus on storage and renewables instead, if you ask me.
> France needs to maintain boots on the ground in Africa to protect their uranium mines
It seems rather coincidental to me that one of the countries where France has military presence happens to be a minor uranium producer (we're talking about Niger here I assume).
France has military presence in many more countries, and Niger is (or was, since there was a coup there recently) only a supplier for 1/5th of France's supply, and easy replaced with other sources. None of the other suppliers have French military bases.
Uranium is also very easy to stockpile since it takes little space, which makes it much easier to switch suppliers if needed.
A non-sanctioned country can buy uranium on the open market relatively easily. Production happens in many places [1], including Canada and Australia.
French power plants don't need to worry much about African politics, at worst they'll have pay Canada or Kazakstan a little extra for short notice delivery. And even then, Uranium is a small part of the overall cost of nuclear energy.
There are good reasons to reject nuclear power on purely historic analyses of the projected vs actual costs of nuclear projects[0]
It is very disheartening in Australia to listen to the Nimby objections to wind and solar farms in a country that is almost uniquely empty. I cannot imagine that objections to the location of nuclear power here would be any different.
> There are good reasons to reject nuclear power on purely historic analyses of the projected vs actual costs of nuclear projects
That is if you forget to factor in the lifespan of nuclear projects, which is easily 2-3 times longer than solar and wind, and doesn't require associated (not yet existing) massive storage.
(Not saying this for Australia specifically, there is no nuclear industry there whatsoever so any new project will have significant human resource obstacles on top of all others; just as a general point which is so often forgotten).
If people had been responsibly building nuclear 20 years ago the world would be better off today, but today ramping up storage and renewables seems like a better use of R&D investments and subsidies.
Nuclear and solar can each scale to ~40% of the annual supply for most grids without storage, but for different reasons they both need increasing amounts of storage as you ramp them past that point.
Solar because the sun doesn’t shine at night and peak consumption is mornings and evening, but Nuclear because demand varies though the day and season while the costs per kWh increase the more its capacity factor drops. France both had lower capacity factors and exchanged a great deal of power with its largely non nuclear neighbors. Exchanging power with less nuclear countries doesn’t scale to a worldwide increase in nuclear.
However nuclear also costs more per kWh as a baseline and runs into similar problems as the percentage of solar energy increases. Without storage, a 20% solar 30% nuclear grid is less profitable for nuclear than a 10% solar 30% nuclear grid. Given the long lifespans of nuclear power plants nobody wants to invest in nuclear if it’s expected to be unprofitable 20+ years from now.
> and doesn't require associated (not yet existing) massive storage.
That's not quite true. Nuclear generation is more flexible than wind and solar but much less flexible than thermal fuels, particularly gas. Although you can choose when you turn a nuclear power station on and off, you can't do so quickly, and your choices are somewhat constrained (regular downtime is required).
Nuclear worked well in the energy mix when it supplied base load (ie generate roughly the minimum daily load at all times) while coal supplied predictable peak load and gas could supply unexpected peaking. As this mix changes, availability patterns of nuclear start to be more of a burden. In a system without fossil fuels, you would have to have (some) energy storage, regardless of the split between nuclear, solar and wind.
The exact number for how much storage, how much overcapacity, or how much natural gas generation you would need vary with the proportions of solar, wind and nuclear of course, but it's an oversimplification to suggest that they are trivial if you use mainly nuclear.
The lifespan is included in these calculations already.
This actually favours nuclear since they generally assume that a nuclear plant will be able to sell all its produced energy over many decades, even as solar is predicted to be cheaper than just their running costs for much of that time period.
> lifespan of nuclear projects, which is easily 2-3 times longer than solar and wind
Not sure it is a really solid argument. For wind maybe yes, but life expectancy of solar panels is about 40 years (warranty are 25-30 years but are pessimistic with margins). And with very low maintenance during the lifespan and easy replacement.
Nuclear reactors have 60 years lifespan yes, but with massive continuous maintenance during the life cycle.
I'm sorry but the lifespan of the power plant is irrelevant.
LCoE is measured in dollars per MWh. If your powerplant is projected to go from $55/MWh to $110/MWh no amount of lifespan doubling is going to change that.
I was at a dinner with people who were at the Franklin Dam protests. I remarked off hand that in hindsight it would have enabled a great pumped hydro opportunity for Tasmania. The looks were intense.
There's a certain pragmatism that we need to adopt as we hurtle into the middle of the climate crisis. Seeing a lot of wind Tubines and solar panels on the landscape is a small sacrifice that we should be willing to pay. And it's not like they make the land unusable. Live stock don't mind turbine, and love to graze in the shade of solar panels.
You're conveniently omitting that a lot of these costs are driven by onerous regulations and delays put in place by the same anti-nuclear activists. You can't simultaneously lobby for bloating the costs and then use those bloated costs as evidence against nuclear's effectiveness.
Shocking that this article is originally from the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/29/young-cl... and they either didn't find out or didn't care to mention that as well as being a 'young climate activist' she works for a nuclear-industry-funded pressure group.
Do you have proof that she gain money or benefits because of its involvement in such group, and/or that that group is funded by the nuclear industry, as you said? I found no information about that, just a generic and vague "partners" page.
> It was co-founded by the ENS, the French Nuclear Society (SFEN) and the American Nuclear Society (ANS) in 2015.
They say that on that page. So at that point, it's on them to make clear if they've created a seperate and independent org that can actually live up to the obviously false from the start claim of being "grassroots". As far as I can tell this is just a project run by those nuclear industry orgs, not an independent charity so all funding is entirely opaque, and asking for donations is just a front.
But someone is paying to get that team of about thirty to every global COP gathering so they can "flash mob" and paying to producing the multiple slightly too glossy websites and get them in all the papers.
Just the time off from their employers in the nuclear industry must add up.
This is maybe the impatience of youth running up against the false certaintly of middle age.
I think the reality is that both sides have good points. Nuclear looks like the only way to create enough energy density to power modern societies. On the other hand, build times for current mainstream nuclear plants are too long given the critical situation we're in, and we still dont have widely deployable solutions to the waste problem.
So, following your argument, we should at least continue to run existing infrastructure?
I wonder why these debates only focus on problems such as waste, catastrophic risk or investment/financing, but not sourcing of uranium, which might not be available from "friendly countries".
> So, following your argument, we should at least continue to run existing infrastructure?
Qualified yes. I personally don't see how we can make it through the critical coming decades without nuclear, but that implies we'll continue to create nuclear waste. The only solution we have is to deep burial. While I think thats fairly safe, the only operational facilitiy is Onkalo in Finland. We're going to need to build more, and deep excavation takes a lot of time and safe sites are limited. Not every country that will want to deploy nuclear power will have a way to dispose of the waste.
The other alternatives are shoot it into the sun (too dangerous at scale) or shallow storage (dereliction of duty of future generations).
So I dunno really.
As for uranium resources, theres a lot in Australia.
Public opinion will swing back in favor of nuclear power as more and more people grow up without having known the disasters that were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl first hand.
Kids these days don't give a shit about Chernobyl - And Fukushima was already more than a decade ago. Most 30 somethings are most likely not even aware of the Harrisburg accident.
What they do know is that their apartments are smaller than their parents were when they were their age. They can't afford to drive cars like their parents did and they can barely afford to pay the electric bills in the winter.
At the same time they are well informed about the causes of climate change, an enormous release of green house gasses into the atmosphere, to power the economy. So what else is there to feed the economy with energy? Wind & Solar? Get real. The obvious solution is to run those electric generators using steam turbines fueled by uranium.
I'm in Canada and we use CANDU reactors their technology is amazing it came about out of necessity due to a young nation with few resources. The fuel is natural uranium not plutonium. I think it's the best design, it can even use thorium which I think India uses (they're tripping over it there).
Readit News
There was a referendum in November 1987 asking whether to abolish any form of nuclear power. It won with 80% of yes votes. This was a year after the Chernobyl disaster. Over the next few decades, Italy started to import electricity at a premium, mostly from its French neighbour, which has never stopped investing on nuclear and is today Europe's largest electricity exporter.
No politician dared touch this hot potato ever again for the following 24 years, until the June 2011 referendum, that asked whether to revive plans for nuclear power. It failed with 94% of No votes. This was 3 months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
I do not trust politicians, nor anti-nuclear activists, to ever do the right thing and drop their outdated stance on the matter.
--
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
Just a bit of context for non-Italians:
> It failed with 94% of No votes.
Referendums in Italy have weird rules. They may only be called to repeal existing laws. In this case, the then-standing Berlusconi IV cabinet had approved a new nuclear plan, and a referendum was called to abolish it. A referendum is successful if both the repeal votes are more and the turnout is more than 50%. So if you don't want to repeal the law, you just don't go to the polls at all.
This is just to say that when looking at Italian referendums the important number is not the Yes/No valid votes but the turnout, which in this case was 55% or something like that IIRC.
I'd agree that the public opinion is still anti-nuclear, but it's more 55-45 than 95-5.
It's hardly irrational. Nuclear power is effectively still uninsurable by private insurers and the taxpayer clean up bill for Fukushima is around $800 billion.
It wouldn't be irrational to build more power stations if they were cheap but nuclear power is even less economic than using wind and solar power to synthesize gas for storage and burning that to generate electricity:
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Of course the French taxpayers now face decades of vast nuclear decommissioning costs. Italy doesn't. Rather as a country with lots of sun and many sparsely populated windy areas it can stock up on increasingly cheap renewables aided by possibly dirt cheap future battery prices. So you may be right, but equally maybe history will look quite favorably on Italy's energy choices. We will see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
If it's extremely safe we can let private insurers decide whether to shoulder the financial burden of a Fukushima style event and taxpayers no longer have to be on the hook for those pesky $1 trillion clean up events.
I'm all in favor of eliminating the act and adopting a wait and see approach to "will sophisticated insurers have an appetite for this risk?" but for some reason a lot of pro nuclear activists who are adamant that it is 110% safe aren't so sure about slashing this subsidy.
Why do you think that is?
Renewables are just now starting to become economically viable, but distribution is still an unsolved problem. The wind farms in Sardinia are not gonna power Milan.
The Emsland, Isar II and Neckarwestheim II nuclear power plants supplied a total of 32.7 billion kilowatt hours of low-emission electricity in 2022. German private households most recently consumed an average of 3190 kWh of electrical energy per year. This means that these three power plants can supply more than 10 million, or a quarter, of German households with electricity. The resulting reduction in the amount of electricity required from coal-fired power plants could save up to 30 million tons of CO2 per year."
https://www.replanet.ngo/post/open-letter-save-german-nuclea...
Not all, by any means but in the "it takes too long" side of things, there's a reason.
Thankfully some states are finally voting on changing this.
Deleted Comment
Green energy is cheaper, less risky and regulation (while also painful) is easier in most cases. As a result a project can be built much faster. Land usage is bigger but mixed usage is OK (e.g. solar over crops, parking lots etc.). Wind can reside in the sea and geothermal can be in the middle of the city.
I think the discussion over nuclear is based on data from a decade ago. The world changed. It isn't Greenpeace that should object, its the business interests. It just isn't viable anymore and the viability is declining, since solar/wind, storage etc. keep improving at an amazing rate.
Yes renewables are growing at an amazing rate. But they don't cover countries' energy needs entirely, all the time. Which you need for a power grid.
The storage problem is by no means solved. And eg. hydro is only an option in a few places.
So you need other power generation to fill in the (big!) gaps.
Right now, that's a choice between a) let power grid go down, b) fossil, or c) nuclear. Note this is temporary! Only needed until sufficient storage comes online to let renewables do the job.
Given the urgency of the situation we're in, I see nuclear as the lesser evil here. And it's very annoying that NGOs like Greenpeace are actively blocking that escape hatch with their outdated stance. They should NOT get in the way of those working to reduce CO2 emissions. Even if nuclear.
If you have nuclear weapons/submarines/carriers/etc. like Russia or the United States or France it shares some of the gargantuan cost of building and maintaining them. I expect North Korea will get into it in the next few years too for precisely this reason.
Countries like Iran, Sweden and Korea, on the other hand, want to be able to manufacture a weapon on a tight deadline because of extremely self evident geopolitical fears.
Nobody else builds nuclear power plants. The vast power of the global hippy-industrial complex apparently prevented it :/
Of course, the western nuclear military industrial complex, who always HATED environmentalists with a seething passion, are aware of just how massively uneconomic it is but that doesn't stop them from trying to dress up as "young climate activists" to sell a form of power that is 5x more expensive as a green gamechanger. Consent for enormous subsidies needs to be manufactured somehow if nuclear power is to remain competitive with solar and wind.
China has reactors started in for example 2010 and 2015 that were finished in 5 or 6 years (and some others that took 10 years). India and Japan has reactors started in 2000 finished in 5-6 years. Pakistan has reactors stared in 2011 and 2016 finished in 6 years. Korea has reactors started in 2000, 2005, 2006, finished in 5 years.
I think the reason the effects of those concerns in monetary terms pale in contrast to nuclear, is that nuclear technology is much more complex and complicated and therefore many more issues need to be addressed. At this stage, it's still a pretty immature technology and it can't progress very fast because it's considered more hazardous than alternatives.
As it is, I'm tempted to agree with the young climate activists if nuclear could short term buy us time to instantly shut down coal and gradually transition to renewable sources. Problem is, that even building "off the shelf" nuclear plants tends to take way longer than wind or solar.
Reminds of the idiot filming the wildfires as he played golf.
My father pointed out an interesting counter to this to me recently: how many birds are killed by wind farms and how many are killed by house cats?
Studies show a million or so birds killed in the US by wind each year. Other studies estimate cats kill billions of birds- and most aren't eaten, because the cats are well fed pets.
> loss of agricultural space
Is that something we're short of? I'd argue that food prices, ignoring recent inflation fluctuations, are the cheapest they've been ever in the history of humanity. Hunger only exists in the world because capitalism dictates that those who are poor must starve.
The opposition to renewables is pure NIMBYism. Though I'd still back new nuclear any day (and my province recently announced some!)
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...
( Or, if you prefer, the Nuclear Energy "Red Book":
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_79960/uranium-2022-resource...
Nuclear might have been an option fifty years ago, but now it's too late to start, and we should focus on storage and renewables instead, if you ask me.
[edit]: fixed a typo
It seems rather coincidental to me that one of the countries where France has military presence happens to be a minor uranium producer (we're talking about Niger here I assume).
France has military presence in many more countries, and Niger is (or was, since there was a coup there recently) only a supplier for 1/5th of France's supply, and easy replaced with other sources. None of the other suppliers have French military bases.
Uranium is also very easy to stockpile since it takes little space, which makes it much easier to switch suppliers if needed.
Deleted Comment
French power plants don't need to worry much about African politics, at worst they'll have pay Canada or Kazakstan a little extra for short notice delivery. And even then, Uranium is a small part of the overall cost of nuclear energy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
It is very disheartening in Australia to listen to the Nimby objections to wind and solar farms in a country that is almost uniquely empty. I cannot imagine that objections to the location of nuclear power here would be any different.
[0] https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/08/29/nuclear-power-small-mod...
That is if you forget to factor in the lifespan of nuclear projects, which is easily 2-3 times longer than solar and wind, and doesn't require associated (not yet existing) massive storage.
(Not saying this for Australia specifically, there is no nuclear industry there whatsoever so any new project will have significant human resource obstacles on top of all others; just as a general point which is so often forgotten).
Nuclear and solar can each scale to ~40% of the annual supply for most grids without storage, but for different reasons they both need increasing amounts of storage as you ramp them past that point.
Solar because the sun doesn’t shine at night and peak consumption is mornings and evening, but Nuclear because demand varies though the day and season while the costs per kWh increase the more its capacity factor drops. France both had lower capacity factors and exchanged a great deal of power with its largely non nuclear neighbors. Exchanging power with less nuclear countries doesn’t scale to a worldwide increase in nuclear.
However nuclear also costs more per kWh as a baseline and runs into similar problems as the percentage of solar energy increases. Without storage, a 20% solar 30% nuclear grid is less profitable for nuclear than a 10% solar 30% nuclear grid. Given the long lifespans of nuclear power plants nobody wants to invest in nuclear if it’s expected to be unprofitable 20+ years from now.
That's not quite true. Nuclear generation is more flexible than wind and solar but much less flexible than thermal fuels, particularly gas. Although you can choose when you turn a nuclear power station on and off, you can't do so quickly, and your choices are somewhat constrained (regular downtime is required).
Nuclear worked well in the energy mix when it supplied base load (ie generate roughly the minimum daily load at all times) while coal supplied predictable peak load and gas could supply unexpected peaking. As this mix changes, availability patterns of nuclear start to be more of a burden. In a system without fossil fuels, you would have to have (some) energy storage, regardless of the split between nuclear, solar and wind.
The exact number for how much storage, how much overcapacity, or how much natural gas generation you would need vary with the proportions of solar, wind and nuclear of course, but it's an oversimplification to suggest that they are trivial if you use mainly nuclear.
This actually favours nuclear since they generally assume that a nuclear plant will be able to sell all its produced energy over many decades, even as solar is predicted to be cheaper than just their running costs for much of that time period.
Not sure it is a really solid argument. For wind maybe yes, but life expectancy of solar panels is about 40 years (warranty are 25-30 years but are pessimistic with margins). And with very low maintenance during the lifespan and easy replacement. Nuclear reactors have 60 years lifespan yes, but with massive continuous maintenance during the life cycle.
This is an older article. As far as I understand this is even more in favor of green energy now.
LCoE is measured in dollars per MWh. If your powerplant is projected to go from $55/MWh to $110/MWh no amount of lifespan doubling is going to change that.
There's a certain pragmatism that we need to adopt as we hurtle into the middle of the climate crisis. Seeing a lot of wind Tubines and solar panels on the landscape is a small sacrifice that we should be willing to pay. And it's not like they make the land unusable. Live stock don't mind turbine, and love to graze in the shade of solar panels.
https://netzeroneedsnuclear.com/about-us/
That's not a good look, but about what I'd expect from the nuclear industry.
They say that on that page. So at that point, it's on them to make clear if they've created a seperate and independent org that can actually live up to the obviously false from the start claim of being "grassroots". As far as I can tell this is just a project run by those nuclear industry orgs, not an independent charity so all funding is entirely opaque, and asking for donations is just a front.
But someone is paying to get that team of about thirty to every global COP gathering so they can "flash mob" and paying to producing the multiple slightly too glossy websites and get them in all the papers.
Just the time off from their employers in the nuclear industry must add up.
https://twitter.com/storklompen/status/1697335006757073147
The person is also a teenage student.
https://netzeroneedsnuclear.com/about-the-team/
And despite them accidentally leaving off their employers/jobs basically everyone on that page works in the nuclear industry.
"Hannah Fenwick, a senior commercial officer at National Nuclear Laboratory"
edit to add:
Here's a "hilarous" anti-renewable meme cartoon from their australian branch:
https://nuclearforclimate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/...
In which renewables are a square wheel, grinding the economy to a halt, well that's a helpful message to be sending australians.
I think the reality is that both sides have good points. Nuclear looks like the only way to create enough energy density to power modern societies. On the other hand, build times for current mainstream nuclear plants are too long given the critical situation we're in, and we still dont have widely deployable solutions to the waste problem.
I wonder why these debates only focus on problems such as waste, catastrophic risk or investment/financing, but not sourcing of uranium, which might not be available from "friendly countries".
Qualified yes. I personally don't see how we can make it through the critical coming decades without nuclear, but that implies we'll continue to create nuclear waste. The only solution we have is to deep burial. While I think thats fairly safe, the only operational facilitiy is Onkalo in Finland. We're going to need to build more, and deep excavation takes a lot of time and safe sites are limited. Not every country that will want to deploy nuclear power will have a way to dispose of the waste.
The other alternatives are shoot it into the sun (too dangerous at scale) or shallow storage (dereliction of duty of future generations).
So I dunno really.
As for uranium resources, theres a lot in Australia.
Public opinion will swing back in favor of nuclear power as more and more people grow up without having known the disasters that were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl first hand.
Kids these days don't give a shit about Chernobyl - And Fukushima was already more than a decade ago. Most 30 somethings are most likely not even aware of the Harrisburg accident.
What they do know is that their apartments are smaller than their parents were when they were their age. They can't afford to drive cars like their parents did and they can barely afford to pay the electric bills in the winter.
At the same time they are well informed about the causes of climate change, an enormous release of green house gasses into the atmosphere, to power the economy. So what else is there to feed the economy with energy? Wind & Solar? Get real. The obvious solution is to run those electric generators using steam turbines fueled by uranium.