bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
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Another user here asked me this question via a PM, and as I had been considering setting out all of the arguments and supporting data in one spot, I figured now was the time to do it.
There are two major questions here:
1) Why do I think Nuclear Power is worthy of support?
and
2) Why am I so persistent and passionate in my support of it?
The answer to both questions comes down to an assessment of the facts, coupled with an understanding of the underlying problems that any power generation technology might be expected to address.
My starting assumptions are:
1) Modern civilization is a good thing;
2) Modern civilization requires and benefits from the provision of energy in forms that are highly flexible, inexpensive, and reliably and constantly available;
3) Modern civilization should minimize the impact it has on the environment;
4) The most urgent current threat to our environment is Climate Change due to CO2 emissions.
Number 1 seems to me to be axiomatic, but there are some who have argued otherwise. Certainly a return to pre-industrial civilization, or a collapse of civilization altogether would inevitably imply a large reduction in human population, either by genocide, starvation, disease, or a combination of these things. If you think that such a state of affairs is desirable, then I don't think we can ever really agree on very much at all.
Number 2 is, again, obvious to me, but there are people who have argued that the provision of widespread, cheap and reliable energy to mankind would be a disaster. That opinion was particularly popular during the 1960s and '70s 'population panic', when people such as Paul Ehrlich were deeply concerned that human population growth would lead to inevitable disaster:
In the context of the (now debunked) idea common in 1976 when he said the above, that the world's population would continue to grow exponentially, and that cheap, abundant energy would help to stimulate such growth, this may have been a justified fear. But it is just fear; Population growth turns out to be closely linked to poverty, so not only does cheap, abundant energy NOT spur population growth - it actually helps to limit it. Increasing wealth, education, and availability of safe contraception has eliminated the problem, and defused the 'population bomb'. We need that cheap, abundant energy - as long as we can get it without wrecking the environment in which we live and upon which we depend.
Number 3 follows logically from the observation that humans depend upon our natural environment, and its relative stability for the survival of our technologically advanced civilization.
Number 4 is the consensus of most educated people who study ecology and the environment, and is so widely acknowledged that I barely feel the need to state it; More information (if such is needed) can be found here.
So, we need sources of energy that are cheap, abundant, reliable, and which have minimal impact on the environment - in particular, that minimize CO2 emissions.
What are our options?
Most of our energy use in the developed world is either in the form of: Electricity; Internal Combustion Fuels; and/or Industrial Process Heat. These are currently produced by a range of technologies (with their % share of world primary energy consumption in 2015):
1) Oil (33%)
2) Coal (30%)
3) Natural Gas (24%)
4) Hydro (7%)
5) Nuclear (4%)
6) Others (includes Wind, Solar, Biomass, Geothermal) 2%
The total primary energy produced was around 169,000TWh, of which about a third is lost to supply systems and entropic losses, or in non-fuel uses of petrochemicals. Around a quarter of the remainder is electricity generation, and the other three quarters is mostly domestic, commercial, and industrial heating, and vehicle fuels. We know how to convert electricity into both heat and combustion fuels, so I shall concentrate here on electricity production - with enough cheap electricity, we can supply almost all of the world's energy needs.
Clearly, if we are to do something about Climate Change, we must act to minimize the use of sources 1, 2 and 3 (above), while maintaining (and indeed increasing) our total global energy production.
So, what are the options?
Hydro - Currently 7% of primary energy production, and about 17% of electricity production.
Hydro power is an excellent low-emissions power source, but it requires significant resources to generate - in particular, large dams must be built, in suitable sites, and large areas of land must be given up to the storage of water for these facilities. The number of really suitable sites not yet developed is low, and it is difficult to see how this technology could ever exceed about twice its current contribution to world power. Pumped storage hydro can be used to 'buffer' other electricity generation techniques - but suitable sites for such systems are even more scarce than for simple generation systems; And pumped storage is not a generation system in its own right, as it consumes more power than it produces.
Nuclear Fission - Uses energy dense fuels to generate heat without carbon dioxide emissions. Unpopular, but not for any sound technological or scientific reasons. Nuclear power is the main form of electricity generation in almost all developed countries and regions that have low emissions from electricity generation; Only Hydro power currently shares that honour (in countries like Norway, with large numbers of suitable hydro sites per head of population), and it remains to be seen whether any other technology ever can achieve that goal.
Wind - Wind power is diffuse, intermittent, and (as currently implemented) asynchronous. It has very low emissions, but requires considerable resources, including steel and concrete for towers, rare-earth metals for magnets, and various expensive and energy consuming composite materials for turbine blades. Wind power can only provide 24x7 electricity in combination with other systems; Today, that usually implies Combined Cycle Gas Turbines, which are great for the frackers and gas producers, but awful for emissions.
Solar - Similar to Wind power, solar power requires large collecting areas, lots of expensive resources, and typically generates asynchronous power. Solar power can only provide 24x7 electricity in combination with other systems; Today, that usually implies Combined Cycle Gas Turbines, which are great for the frackers and gas producers, but awful for emissions.
Biomass - Crops grown specifically for use as fuel, or for conversion into fuel. Use large areas of farmland that could be used for other purposes; Bio-fuels can play a role in reducing emissions, but at the scale we would need to make a serious impact in the 87% of Primary energy currently from fossil fuels, we are going to need several planet's worth of farmland, in addition to the one we are currently using to feed ourselves.
Geothermal - An excellent choice for people living near to active geological strictures, such as Hawaiians and New Zealanders, the costs escalate dramatically in geologically stable regions. This is a good option where it is available, but that's not enough of the world to make a real impact
New technologies not yet deployed at significant scale (if at all):
Tidal power - Similar to hydro, the number of suitable sites is small. It's a nice idea, but nobody has yet made it cheap and effective enough to be considered as a significant part of the mix
Wave power - Has problems with intermittency and the lack of an effective low-maintenance collection technology.
Nuclear Fusion - Is at least twenty years away, and always will be. There really isn't anything much to recommend Fusion over Fission; It's basically like nuclear fission that doesn't work and costs a huge amount more. Might one day become viable, but will need some significant breakthroughs to bring costs within cooee of the level needed for a viable energy supply system.
So, what are the critical things we demand of our energy sources; And how do the various options above compare in their ability to meet these?
There are six main characteristics we need from our energy sources:
1) Low Carbon Dioxide Emissions
2) Minimal environmental impacts other than CO2 emissions during routine use
3) Minimal hazard to people and the environment during extreme events (accidents, natural disasters, etc.)
4) Low cost per unit of power supplied, after including all externalities and expenses
5) Reliable 24x7 supply, or suitable backups that do not raise the costs to unreasonable levels
6) Minimal use of resources and land
So which technologies are best, based on these criteria?
1) Low Carbon Dioxide Emissions
There are a number of different studies on full life-cycle emissions for various sources. One contributor to the differing values is assumptions about the lifespan of the various generators - the emissions due to making steel for wind turbine towers, for example, must be included - but obviously the more power that tower generates during its lifetime, the lower the emissions per kWh of power generated. A similar consideration applies to making the reactor vessel for a nuclear power plant. Further complicating matters is the question of where the power to build these components is sourced - as the power mix changes, so do the emissions due to building new equipment.
Wikipedia provides a few different sets of results, that vary due to their starting assumptions.
The 2014 IPCC report gives the following median values, (expressed as grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour (gCO2eq/kWh)
The best of these could reasonably be described as 'Very Low' (Wind and Nuclear); 'Low' (Hydro, Concentrated Solar, Geothermal); and 'Moderate' (Solar PV)
Then there is a step up to burning stuff, with Biomass 'very high' (~20x Wind/Nuclear); Gas 'Extremely High' (~60x Wind/Nuclear); and Coal 'Catastrophic' (~70x Wind/Nuclear).
BUT - If you have Wind or Solar power, you get them only a fraction of the time - Solar has a 'capacity factor' around 20%, so 80% of the time, you are using something else; Wind has a 'capacity factor' around 30-50%, so 70-50% of the time, you are using something else.
If that 'something else' is Gas (and today, and for the foreseeable future, it almost certainly is), the adjusted emissions for Wind with Gas backup are between 376 and 520 gCO2eq/kWh (Very to Extremely High); and for Solar PV ~600 gCO2eq/kWh (Extremely High).
This is where Energiewende fails - Germany not only has to back up her wind power with fossil fuels; She even backs some of it up with Coal.
The difference between the two strategies for CO2 reductions - Wind (+fossil backups) vs Nuclear is clearly illustrated by the video, showing actual CO2 emissions in Europe over the course of a year. France and Sweden are consistently 'green'; Germany and Denmark are very occasionally green, when conditions are ideal; But otherwise are consistently brown.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6EOoC_kKI0[/youtube]
2) Minimal environmental impacts other than CO2 emissions during routine use
All technologies generate waste. Burning coal generates ash, which contains high levels of mercury, and of various radioactive materials and particulate soot; Burning gas generates soot, and oxides of nitrogen and carbon; Manufacturing Solar panels generates large volumes of toxic waste, and the panels themselves require disposal at the end of their life. Wind turbines too need steel and cement for their towers, and rare earths for magnets; And the turbines require disposal when they are decommissioned.
Of all of the technologies for making electricity, only one has a controlled and planned system to capture, store, and protect the environment from, its waste products - Nuclear power.
Other technologies just dump their waste in the environment, and forget about it; Part of the reason for this is that they always have, and nobody said 'no'; Another part of the reason is that there is just so MUCH of it. Nuclear waste is tiny, in comparison to the power obtained from it.
Nuclear waste is widely feared; Mostly because the anti-nuclear lobby have been very effective in conflating power plant waste, (which is carefully stored and monitored, and which has never caused a single injury to any person in the history of the industry); with nuclear weapons production waste, such as the big mess at Hanford. Nuclear Weapons have a similar relationship to Nuclear Power as the relationship between Napalm and Gasoline; You would think a person crazy if he opposed automobiles on the basis that Napalm is an horrific weapon.
The truth about nuclear waste is so boring that people find it hard to believe - having been told all their lives how scary it is.
In terms of routine pollution of the environment, Wind and Solar do OK. But no technology comes CLOSE to being as kind to the environment as Nuclear power on this metric.
3) Minimal hazard to people and the environment during extreme events (accidents, natural disasters, etc.)
Everyone has heard of the 'big three' worst nuclear accidents in history - Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; Fukushima. All three known as 'disasters'. Which is a bit strange, as two of the three resulted in ZERO radiation related deaths. Three Mile Island didn't even result in anyone being injured. At Fukushima, two men were hospitalized as a precaution after wading through radioactive water - They had burns equivalent to severe sunburn on their legs, and made a full recovery with minimal treatment. The only other casualty at Fukushima was a man who was killed falling from a crane during the earthquake - He is counted as a 'Nuclear Power Fatality' in the below analysis, but doesn't make an impact on the numbers per TWh, because they are only expressed to two decimal places.
Not counted as 'Nuclear Power Fatalities' are the over 2,000 people who died due to the needless and harmful "precautionary" evacuation. Had this evacuation not taken place, the radiation death toll is estimated at 0.4 people over the next few decades (The lifetime risk of death from a 100 millisievert dose of radiation — more than any resident actually received — is about 0.5 per cent).
The only time anyone has been killed by radiation at a nuclear power plant was at Chernobyl, where an unauthorized experiment on an inherently unsafe Soviet reactor design led to 43 deaths from acute radiation sickness, and an estimated 50 or so more from thyroid cancers in the surrounding area (all of which could have been prevented if the authorities had issued Iodine tablets immediately, instead of trying to cover up the accident).
Almost nobody has heard of the world's worst power generation accident, which killed an estimated 171,000 people - that's equivalent to one Chernobyl 'disaster' every fortnight, for the entire sixty year history of the Nuclear Power industry. Can you imagine if Chernobyl happened every two weeks? There's no WAY we would still use such a dangerous source of electricity, right? But we do.
Nuclear power has the lowest death rate per unit of power generated of ANY technology currently in use. Wind power is about four times as deadly as nuclear; Solar is about ten times. Both are incredibly safe, of course.
And note that many of the fossil fuel related deaths in the above link are not accident related - they are from routine operation of the technology - that is, they belong in point 2 (above).
We have seen the worst case nuclear accidents - an uncontained meltdown (Chernobyl) when reactors are poorly designed, leading to fewer than 100 fatalities; And the impact of a massive natural disaster on an older, but well designed, facility - where multiple meltdowns occurred, along with some big and visually impressive hydrogen explosions, but nevertheless, not one person was seriously injured (unless you count falling from a crane during an earthquake as a 'nuclear accident'). It really is hard to see how a disaster worse than Chernobyl could possibly occur in the nuclear power industry. Before 1986, we could only imagine how awful a 'worst case' accident might be - and imagination is a powerful thing. But as it turns out, even a massive and devastating nuclear accident is not as big, or as deadly, as many 'routine' accidents in other generation industries - and is FAR less deadly than the routine operation of coal power plants.
4) Low cost per unit of power supplied, after including all externalities and expenses
Pretty much all of the technologies listed (apart from nuclear) have large externalities - costs of the technology not bourne by the company employing it, such as pollution cleanup, waste disposal, medical costs due to pollution, decommissioning and disposal costs for plant at the end of its life, etc.
The largest of these is the cost of climate change that is not bourne by fossil fuels - and I would strongly favour a move to price fossil fuels appropriately to reflect those costs, although calculating them is not easy.
After considering these externalities, Wind and Nuclear look very good, with Solar OK, and the fossil fuel technologies far more expensive. But again, we need to consider capacity factor. Wind and Solar have low capacity factors, and intermittent supply, which implies a further cost to fill that gap.
5) Reliable 24x7 supply, or suitable backups that do not raise the costs to unreasonable levels
Capacity Factor is hugely important to modern civilizations. We need power 24x7, as it is demanded. Nuclear and fossil fuel sources not only have far higher capacity factors than wind or solar (in the order 80-95% for nuclear and 60-80% for coal), they also have operator control over downtime schedules, so that the short time that a given unit is not producing can be matched to troughs in overall demand, and/or can be scheduled not to coincide with downtime on other similar generating units.
This is not possible with wind or solar; Night time is at roughly the same time for all Solar Power generation in a given area, and calm or cloudy weather tends to be similarly widespread.
The solution usually employed today is rapid-response Gas turbine generators, but as we saw at point 1 (above), these eliminate much of the benefit of lower emissions from renewable sources.
Other solutions have been mooted, but not implemented at scale; Batteries are hugely expensive, have short lifespans, and the sheer quantity of storage needed is vast. To match the output of a 1.1GW nuclear power plant, with a 90% Capacity Factor, producing 1GW of power, you need 5GW of installed capacity of Solar Power at 20% Capacity Factor; PLUS at least 1 GW week (168GWh) of storage - and you had better hope that it's not cloudy for more than a few days in a row. This hugely increases the expense above what a mere glance at the nameplate capacity suggests.
Pumped Hydro Storage might offer some hope - but again the sheer scale of the storage needed becomes a major issue - there just are not enough suitable sites, even if we didn't balk at the environmental harm caused by flooding large numbers of mountain valleys.
We need about 2.8TW of electricity to meet current world demand. This could be met with ~3TW of Nuclear power capacity; Or with ~7.5TW of Wind power capacity operating at 40% Capacity Factor, and backed by ~2.25EWh (2,250TWh) of storage; Or with 15TW of Solar power capacity operating at 20% Capacity Factor, and backed by ~1.125EWh (1,125TWh) of storage - Solar has a lower capacity factor than wind, but long overcast periods are less common than long calm periods in most places)
One alternative to all that storage (and an Exawatt is a seriously INSANE amount of storage) would be super long distance, high capacity grid connections linking the whole world - while it is sunny in Australia, the US could get solar power from there, and then when it is night in Australia, the Australians can get solar power from sunny California, or the Sahara. Again though, the costs would be astronomical - and transmission losses would imply even more generating capacity to cover those losses.
All of this storage and/or super long distance distribution is pie in the sky though; We simply cannot build such infrastructure today, and may not be able to (even at great expense) for many decades, if ever.
Only one low emissions technology has had historical build-out rates on a large scale that are sufficient to make a big difference to climate change - Nuclear power.
6) Minimal use of resources and land
By comparison, the Point Beach nuclear power plant in Wisconsin has a total site area of 1,200 acres (less than 1.9 square miles), and generates 1,023MW of power with a Capacity Factor in 2017 of 93.24%
Of course, a solar farm can sensibly be sited in desert land that isn't much use for anything else; But there is still a non-zero environmental impact from covering all that land in solar panels or reflectors. Equally, the land beneath wind towers can be used for grazing, but again, the impact on that land is not zero.
So I have plenty of good reason to support Nuclear Power - it is as good as, or in most cases better than, any alternative power source, on any conceivable measure, and FAR better than any other, when all of the costs and benefits are weighed. It's so good that many people raised on anti-nuclear alarmist propaganda simply cannot believe that the benefits are real, or that the costs and drawbacks are so few - But they are.
But why am I so passionate about it? Why is this such a 'hobby-horse' topic for me?
Well, basically for the same reason that I am passionate about my atheism. Because poorly informed people are fucking up my world by their powerful lobbying against reason.
In summary, I advocate for nuclear power because the facts tell me that it is the single most effective thing I can do to combat climate change. There's no point in my buying an electric car, while my state emits ~900 gCO2eq/kWh when making my household power. It would be greener for me to drive a big V8 gas-guzzler running on unleaded gasoline than an electric car.
If I can persuade the politicians and the electorate to support the replacement of just one Coal power plant with a similarly sized nuclear plant, then I will have done FAR more to help save the environment than a million committed hippies earnestly driving their Leafs and using Compact Fluorescent Lights powered by Wind (which would almost certainly be backed with Gas turbines fueled by fracking; and perhaps in future by hugely expensive and massively polluting batteries).
Further information:
Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation - Brook et al, Journal of Conservation Biology, December 2014
Breaking the Cycle of Anti-nuclear Indoctrination - Russ Finley, Biodiversivist blog, February 2018
The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all - George Monbiot, The Guardian, April 2011
Blowing-Up The Myths Around Nuclear Power And Terrorism - Geoff Russell, New Matilda, April 2016
Or for those who prefer video:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izpR_8UqoWs[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emeWOGLCi9w[/youtube]
There are two major questions here:
1) Why do I think Nuclear Power is worthy of support?
and
2) Why am I so persistent and passionate in my support of it?
The answer to both questions comes down to an assessment of the facts, coupled with an understanding of the underlying problems that any power generation technology might be expected to address.
My starting assumptions are:
1) Modern civilization is a good thing;
2) Modern civilization requires and benefits from the provision of energy in forms that are highly flexible, inexpensive, and reliably and constantly available;
3) Modern civilization should minimize the impact it has on the environment;
4) The most urgent current threat to our environment is Climate Change due to CO2 emissions.
Number 1 seems to me to be axiomatic, but there are some who have argued otherwise. Certainly a return to pre-industrial civilization, or a collapse of civilization altogether would inevitably imply a large reduction in human population, either by genocide, starvation, disease, or a combination of these things. If you think that such a state of affairs is desirable, then I don't think we can ever really agree on very much at all.
Number 2 is, again, obvious to me, but there are people who have argued that the provision of widespread, cheap and reliable energy to mankind would be a disaster. That opinion was particularly popular during the 1960s and '70s 'population panic', when people such as Paul Ehrlich were deeply concerned that human population growth would lead to inevitable disaster:
Paul Ehrlich said:
In the context of the (now debunked) idea common in 1976 when he said the above, that the world's population would continue to grow exponentially, and that cheap, abundant energy would help to stimulate such growth, this may have been a justified fear. But it is just fear; Population growth turns out to be closely linked to poverty, so not only does cheap, abundant energy NOT spur population growth - it actually helps to limit it. Increasing wealth, education, and availability of safe contraception has eliminated the problem, and defused the 'population bomb'. We need that cheap, abundant energy - as long as we can get it without wrecking the environment in which we live and upon which we depend.
Number 3 follows logically from the observation that humans depend upon our natural environment, and its relative stability for the survival of our technologically advanced civilization.
Number 4 is the consensus of most educated people who study ecology and the environment, and is so widely acknowledged that I barely feel the need to state it; More information (if such is needed) can be found here.
So, we need sources of energy that are cheap, abundant, reliable, and which have minimal impact on the environment - in particular, that minimize CO2 emissions.
What are our options?
Most of our energy use in the developed world is either in the form of: Electricity; Internal Combustion Fuels; and/or Industrial Process Heat. These are currently produced by a range of technologies (with their % share of world primary energy consumption in 2015):
1) Oil (33%)
2) Coal (30%)
3) Natural Gas (24%)
4) Hydro (7%)
5) Nuclear (4%)
6) Others (includes Wind, Solar, Biomass, Geothermal) 2%
The total primary energy produced was around 169,000TWh, of which about a third is lost to supply systems and entropic losses, or in non-fuel uses of petrochemicals. Around a quarter of the remainder is electricity generation, and the other three quarters is mostly domestic, commercial, and industrial heating, and vehicle fuels. We know how to convert electricity into both heat and combustion fuels, so I shall concentrate here on electricity production - with enough cheap electricity, we can supply almost all of the world's energy needs.
Clearly, if we are to do something about Climate Change, we must act to minimize the use of sources 1, 2 and 3 (above), while maintaining (and indeed increasing) our total global energy production.
So, what are the options?
Hydro - Currently 7% of primary energy production, and about 17% of electricity production.
Hydro power is an excellent low-emissions power source, but it requires significant resources to generate - in particular, large dams must be built, in suitable sites, and large areas of land must be given up to the storage of water for these facilities. The number of really suitable sites not yet developed is low, and it is difficult to see how this technology could ever exceed about twice its current contribution to world power. Pumped storage hydro can be used to 'buffer' other electricity generation techniques - but suitable sites for such systems are even more scarce than for simple generation systems; And pumped storage is not a generation system in its own right, as it consumes more power than it produces.
Nuclear Fission - Uses energy dense fuels to generate heat without carbon dioxide emissions. Unpopular, but not for any sound technological or scientific reasons. Nuclear power is the main form of electricity generation in almost all developed countries and regions that have low emissions from electricity generation; Only Hydro power currently shares that honour (in countries like Norway, with large numbers of suitable hydro sites per head of population), and it remains to be seen whether any other technology ever can achieve that goal.
Wind - Wind power is diffuse, intermittent, and (as currently implemented) asynchronous. It has very low emissions, but requires considerable resources, including steel and concrete for towers, rare-earth metals for magnets, and various expensive and energy consuming composite materials for turbine blades. Wind power can only provide 24x7 electricity in combination with other systems; Today, that usually implies Combined Cycle Gas Turbines, which are great for the frackers and gas producers, but awful for emissions.
Solar - Similar to Wind power, solar power requires large collecting areas, lots of expensive resources, and typically generates asynchronous power. Solar power can only provide 24x7 electricity in combination with other systems; Today, that usually implies Combined Cycle Gas Turbines, which are great for the frackers and gas producers, but awful for emissions.
Biomass - Crops grown specifically for use as fuel, or for conversion into fuel. Use large areas of farmland that could be used for other purposes; Bio-fuels can play a role in reducing emissions, but at the scale we would need to make a serious impact in the 87% of Primary energy currently from fossil fuels, we are going to need several planet's worth of farmland, in addition to the one we are currently using to feed ourselves.
Geothermal - An excellent choice for people living near to active geological strictures, such as Hawaiians and New Zealanders, the costs escalate dramatically in geologically stable regions. This is a good option where it is available, but that's not enough of the world to make a real impact
New technologies not yet deployed at significant scale (if at all):
Tidal power - Similar to hydro, the number of suitable sites is small. It's a nice idea, but nobody has yet made it cheap and effective enough to be considered as a significant part of the mix
Wave power - Has problems with intermittency and the lack of an effective low-maintenance collection technology.
Nuclear Fusion - Is at least twenty years away, and always will be. There really isn't anything much to recommend Fusion over Fission; It's basically like nuclear fission that doesn't work and costs a huge amount more. Might one day become viable, but will need some significant breakthroughs to bring costs within cooee of the level needed for a viable energy supply system.
So, what are the critical things we demand of our energy sources; And how do the various options above compare in their ability to meet these?
There are six main characteristics we need from our energy sources:
1) Low Carbon Dioxide Emissions
2) Minimal environmental impacts other than CO2 emissions during routine use
3) Minimal hazard to people and the environment during extreme events (accidents, natural disasters, etc.)
4) Low cost per unit of power supplied, after including all externalities and expenses
5) Reliable 24x7 supply, or suitable backups that do not raise the costs to unreasonable levels
6) Minimal use of resources and land
So which technologies are best, based on these criteria?
1) Low Carbon Dioxide Emissions
There are a number of different studies on full life-cycle emissions for various sources. One contributor to the differing values is assumptions about the lifespan of the various generators - the emissions due to making steel for wind turbine towers, for example, must be included - but obviously the more power that tower generates during its lifetime, the lower the emissions per kWh of power generated. A similar consideration applies to making the reactor vessel for a nuclear power plant. Further complicating matters is the question of where the power to build these components is sourced - as the power mix changes, so do the emissions due to building new equipment.
Wikipedia provides a few different sets of results, that vary due to their starting assumptions.
The 2014 IPCC report gives the following median values, (expressed as grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour (gCO2eq/kWh)
| Generation Method | gCO2eq/kWh |
| Coal (pulverised) | 820 |
| Gas (Combined Cycle) | 740 |
| Biomass | 230 |
| Solar PV (Utility Scale) | 48 |
| Solar PV (Rooftop) | 41 |
| Geothermal | 38 |
| Solar (Concentrated) | 27 |
| Hydro | 24 |
| Wind (Offshore) | 12 |
| Nuclear | 12 |
| Wind (Onshore) | 11 |
The best of these could reasonably be described as 'Very Low' (Wind and Nuclear); 'Low' (Hydro, Concentrated Solar, Geothermal); and 'Moderate' (Solar PV)
Then there is a step up to burning stuff, with Biomass 'very high' (~20x Wind/Nuclear); Gas 'Extremely High' (~60x Wind/Nuclear); and Coal 'Catastrophic' (~70x Wind/Nuclear).
BUT - If you have Wind or Solar power, you get them only a fraction of the time - Solar has a 'capacity factor' around 20%, so 80% of the time, you are using something else; Wind has a 'capacity factor' around 30-50%, so 70-50% of the time, you are using something else.
If that 'something else' is Gas (and today, and for the foreseeable future, it almost certainly is), the adjusted emissions for Wind with Gas backup are between 376 and 520 gCO2eq/kWh (Very to Extremely High); and for Solar PV ~600 gCO2eq/kWh (Extremely High).
This is where Energiewende fails - Germany not only has to back up her wind power with fossil fuels; She even backs some of it up with Coal.
The difference between the two strategies for CO2 reductions - Wind (+fossil backups) vs Nuclear is clearly illustrated by the video, showing actual CO2 emissions in Europe over the course of a year. France and Sweden are consistently 'green'; Germany and Denmark are very occasionally green, when conditions are ideal; But otherwise are consistently brown.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6EOoC_kKI0[/youtube]
2) Minimal environmental impacts other than CO2 emissions during routine use
All technologies generate waste. Burning coal generates ash, which contains high levels of mercury, and of various radioactive materials and particulate soot; Burning gas generates soot, and oxides of nitrogen and carbon; Manufacturing Solar panels generates large volumes of toxic waste, and the panels themselves require disposal at the end of their life. Wind turbines too need steel and cement for their towers, and rare earths for magnets; And the turbines require disposal when they are decommissioned.
Of all of the technologies for making electricity, only one has a controlled and planned system to capture, store, and protect the environment from, its waste products - Nuclear power.
Other technologies just dump their waste in the environment, and forget about it; Part of the reason for this is that they always have, and nobody said 'no'; Another part of the reason is that there is just so MUCH of it. Nuclear waste is tiny, in comparison to the power obtained from it.
Nuclear waste is widely feared; Mostly because the anti-nuclear lobby have been very effective in conflating power plant waste, (which is carefully stored and monitored, and which has never caused a single injury to any person in the history of the industry); with nuclear weapons production waste, such as the big mess at Hanford. Nuclear Weapons have a similar relationship to Nuclear Power as the relationship between Napalm and Gasoline; You would think a person crazy if he opposed automobiles on the basis that Napalm is an horrific weapon.
The truth about nuclear waste is so boring that people find it hard to believe - having been told all their lives how scary it is.
In terms of routine pollution of the environment, Wind and Solar do OK. But no technology comes CLOSE to being as kind to the environment as Nuclear power on this metric.
3) Minimal hazard to people and the environment during extreme events (accidents, natural disasters, etc.)
Everyone has heard of the 'big three' worst nuclear accidents in history - Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; Fukushima. All three known as 'disasters'. Which is a bit strange, as two of the three resulted in ZERO radiation related deaths. Three Mile Island didn't even result in anyone being injured. At Fukushima, two men were hospitalized as a precaution after wading through radioactive water - They had burns equivalent to severe sunburn on their legs, and made a full recovery with minimal treatment. The only other casualty at Fukushima was a man who was killed falling from a crane during the earthquake - He is counted as a 'Nuclear Power Fatality' in the below analysis, but doesn't make an impact on the numbers per TWh, because they are only expressed to two decimal places.
Not counted as 'Nuclear Power Fatalities' are the over 2,000 people who died due to the needless and harmful "precautionary" evacuation. Had this evacuation not taken place, the radiation death toll is estimated at 0.4 people over the next few decades (The lifetime risk of death from a 100 millisievert dose of radiation — more than any resident actually received — is about 0.5 per cent).
The only time anyone has been killed by radiation at a nuclear power plant was at Chernobyl, where an unauthorized experiment on an inherently unsafe Soviet reactor design led to 43 deaths from acute radiation sickness, and an estimated 50 or so more from thyroid cancers in the surrounding area (all of which could have been prevented if the authorities had issued Iodine tablets immediately, instead of trying to cover up the accident).
Almost nobody has heard of the world's worst power generation accident, which killed an estimated 171,000 people - that's equivalent to one Chernobyl 'disaster' every fortnight, for the entire sixty year history of the Nuclear Power industry. Can you imagine if Chernobyl happened every two weeks? There's no WAY we would still use such a dangerous source of electricity, right? But we do.
Nuclear power has the lowest death rate per unit of power generated of ANY technology currently in use. Wind power is about four times as deadly as nuclear; Solar is about ten times. Both are incredibly safe, of course.
And note that many of the fossil fuel related deaths in the above link are not accident related - they are from routine operation of the technology - that is, they belong in point 2 (above).
We have seen the worst case nuclear accidents - an uncontained meltdown (Chernobyl) when reactors are poorly designed, leading to fewer than 100 fatalities; And the impact of a massive natural disaster on an older, but well designed, facility - where multiple meltdowns occurred, along with some big and visually impressive hydrogen explosions, but nevertheless, not one person was seriously injured (unless you count falling from a crane during an earthquake as a 'nuclear accident'). It really is hard to see how a disaster worse than Chernobyl could possibly occur in the nuclear power industry. Before 1986, we could only imagine how awful a 'worst case' accident might be - and imagination is a powerful thing. But as it turns out, even a massive and devastating nuclear accident is not as big, or as deadly, as many 'routine' accidents in other generation industries - and is FAR less deadly than the routine operation of coal power plants.
4) Low cost per unit of power supplied, after including all externalities and expenses
Pretty much all of the technologies listed (apart from nuclear) have large externalities - costs of the technology not bourne by the company employing it, such as pollution cleanup, waste disposal, medical costs due to pollution, decommissioning and disposal costs for plant at the end of its life, etc.
The largest of these is the cost of climate change that is not bourne by fossil fuels - and I would strongly favour a move to price fossil fuels appropriately to reflect those costs, although calculating them is not easy.
(Source)
After considering these externalities, Wind and Nuclear look very good, with Solar OK, and the fossil fuel technologies far more expensive. But again, we need to consider capacity factor. Wind and Solar have low capacity factors, and intermittent supply, which implies a further cost to fill that gap.
5) Reliable 24x7 supply, or suitable backups that do not raise the costs to unreasonable levels
Capacity Factor is hugely important to modern civilizations. We need power 24x7, as it is demanded. Nuclear and fossil fuel sources not only have far higher capacity factors than wind or solar (in the order 80-95% for nuclear and 60-80% for coal), they also have operator control over downtime schedules, so that the short time that a given unit is not producing can be matched to troughs in overall demand, and/or can be scheduled not to coincide with downtime on other similar generating units.
This is not possible with wind or solar; Night time is at roughly the same time for all Solar Power generation in a given area, and calm or cloudy weather tends to be similarly widespread.
The solution usually employed today is rapid-response Gas turbine generators, but as we saw at point 1 (above), these eliminate much of the benefit of lower emissions from renewable sources.
Other solutions have been mooted, but not implemented at scale; Batteries are hugely expensive, have short lifespans, and the sheer quantity of storage needed is vast. To match the output of a 1.1GW nuclear power plant, with a 90% Capacity Factor, producing 1GW of power, you need 5GW of installed capacity of Solar Power at 20% Capacity Factor; PLUS at least 1 GW week (168GWh) of storage - and you had better hope that it's not cloudy for more than a few days in a row. This hugely increases the expense above what a mere glance at the nameplate capacity suggests.
Pumped Hydro Storage might offer some hope - but again the sheer scale of the storage needed becomes a major issue - there just are not enough suitable sites, even if we didn't balk at the environmental harm caused by flooding large numbers of mountain valleys.
We need about 2.8TW of electricity to meet current world demand. This could be met with ~3TW of Nuclear power capacity; Or with ~7.5TW of Wind power capacity operating at 40% Capacity Factor, and backed by ~2.25EWh (2,250TWh) of storage; Or with 15TW of Solar power capacity operating at 20% Capacity Factor, and backed by ~1.125EWh (1,125TWh) of storage - Solar has a lower capacity factor than wind, but long overcast periods are less common than long calm periods in most places)
One alternative to all that storage (and an Exawatt is a seriously INSANE amount of storage) would be super long distance, high capacity grid connections linking the whole world - while it is sunny in Australia, the US could get solar power from there, and then when it is night in Australia, the Australians can get solar power from sunny California, or the Sahara. Again though, the costs would be astronomical - and transmission losses would imply even more generating capacity to cover those losses.
All of this storage and/or super long distance distribution is pie in the sky though; We simply cannot build such infrastructure today, and may not be able to (even at great expense) for many decades, if ever.
Only one low emissions technology has had historical build-out rates on a large scale that are sufficient to make a big difference to climate change - Nuclear power.
6) Minimal use of resources and land
(source)
By comparison, the Point Beach nuclear power plant in Wisconsin has a total site area of 1,200 acres (less than 1.9 square miles), and generates 1,023MW of power with a Capacity Factor in 2017 of 93.24%
Of course, a solar farm can sensibly be sited in desert land that isn't much use for anything else; But there is still a non-zero environmental impact from covering all that land in solar panels or reflectors. Equally, the land beneath wind towers can be used for grazing, but again, the impact on that land is not zero.
So I have plenty of good reason to support Nuclear Power - it is as good as, or in most cases better than, any alternative power source, on any conceivable measure, and FAR better than any other, when all of the costs and benefits are weighed. It's so good that many people raised on anti-nuclear alarmist propaganda simply cannot believe that the benefits are real, or that the costs and drawbacks are so few - But they are.
But why am I so passionate about it? Why is this such a 'hobby-horse' topic for me?
Well, basically for the same reason that I am passionate about my atheism. Because poorly informed people are fucking up my world by their powerful lobbying against reason.
In summary, I advocate for nuclear power because the facts tell me that it is the single most effective thing I can do to combat climate change. There's no point in my buying an electric car, while my state emits ~900 gCO2eq/kWh when making my household power. It would be greener for me to drive a big V8 gas-guzzler running on unleaded gasoline than an electric car.
If I can persuade the politicians and the electorate to support the replacement of just one Coal power plant with a similarly sized nuclear plant, then I will have done FAR more to help save the environment than a million committed hippies earnestly driving their Leafs and using Compact Fluorescent Lights powered by Wind (which would almost certainly be backed with Gas turbines fueled by fracking; and perhaps in future by hugely expensive and massively polluting batteries).
Further information:
Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation - Brook et al, Journal of Conservation Biology, December 2014
Breaking the Cycle of Anti-nuclear Indoctrination - Russ Finley, Biodiversivist blog, February 2018
The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all - George Monbiot, The Guardian, April 2011
Blowing-Up The Myths Around Nuclear Power And Terrorism - Geoff Russell, New Matilda, April 2016
Or for those who prefer video:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izpR_8UqoWs[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emeWOGLCi9w[/youtube]
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