There is that alternate timeline where the US built the 500 reactors we were planning to build by 2000 and in which, in 2021, global warming was seen as a minor issue rather than a "climate crisis".
> in 2021, global warming was seen as a minor issue rather than a "climate crisis".
I just want to push back on this. The US isn't the sole contributor to climate change and I'm tired of pretending like it is. We need to stop with this Americentric thinking, this is a global crisis. Nor is electricity the only factor. The US is about 15%. We'll round up to 25% assuming the EU follows the US. That's still 75% of the emissions not coming from the west. We need to also look where emissions are coming from. In the US that is 29% transportation, _25% electricity_, 23% industry, 13% commercial & residential, 13% agriculture.
If the US (and EU) grids went highly nuclear that doesn't mean we'd also have more electric vehicles or more electric appliances. We would look a lot more like France (in energy). It isn't just the price of electricity that has caused these things to become more popular. For example, with cars the battery technology is a big example of why we see them now and not in the past. There may have been more pressure for this, but it isn't an assumption we can make.
So if we're just talking the US, that's 25% (electricity) * 15% (US global contribution) or 3.75%. Let's say electricity and transportation and industry, that's still only 11.55% of global emissions, and that is an absurd overestimate. Yeah, 10% of emissions (I'll say conservative estimate that includes EU) would be a big deal, but it wouldn't turn climate change into a minor deal. Though we would have a large leg up from our current position as we'd be able to focus less on clean electricity production and more on all the things that produce emissions and carbon capture techniques/technologies.
All sources are from EPA.
Edit: I'm not sure why people think I'm anti nuclear or even uninformed on it (many people that know my account will know my expertise here). I'm also not sure why people don't think I care about China's emissions. I'm saying that the problem is much bigger and complicated than any single country. Even if one country should be picking up the mantle and leading the way, they aren't. So what do we do then? That's my complaint. Because "what do we do" has been mostly complaining.
Edit 2: To be clear, my quip is about global warming being a "minor issue" if we had just built said reactors. This is just flat out wrong. If the US was 0 emissions, there's still the other 85% being produced. France is doing great, I know. They are an amazing example (I'm not anti-nuclear?), but they aren't 0 emissions either. No one is?
> The US isn't the sole contributor to climate change and I'm tired of pretending like it is.
The hypothetical being discussed is "what if the US had went the same route as France and built an electricity grid with the majority of power being generated from nuclear rather than fossil" and for that we would consider the impact to the total (or cumulative) emissions during those decades.
In particular, the nominal cumulative emissions of the US were approximately the double of China. (A higher factor if considered per capita)
If the US had built nuclear technology many other countries (particularly NATO) would have also seen a higher nuclear adoption.
This would have accelerated some trends such as electric ovens and stovetops, electric trains (maybe even nuclear-electric rather than disel-electric), and local micro-nuclear generators on industry such as in metalwork.
Let's say the US went to 0 emissions. That's 15% of the global emissions whipped out (note, France is doing awesome, and setting a great example, but not anywhere near 0 emissions). If the US was 0 emissions since 2000, we'd still be in a climate crisis. That is essentially what I'm saying. It would be decreased from where we are, yes. But it wouldn't be a "minor issue" as the OP stated.
If the US had built 500 nuclear reactors, I have no doubt we'd be exporting tech and basing trade agreements on getting other countries to buy our reactors. China might still use coal, but US manufacturing would be more attractive with practically free electricity. There are lots of reasons what OP posited would be true.
South Africa, Brazil, and Pakistan all already have nuclear power. South Africa and Pakistan even developed nuclear weapons, though SA gave theirs up just before they ended apartheid. IMO the proliferation concerns are a little irrational and overblown, so if we're positing a counterfactual where US policy wasn't governed by an irrational fear of nuclear technology, I think it's fair to assume this would change as well.
I'm very aware of the proliferation issue. To be clear, I have worked in the nuclear space.
But that still doesn't mean that fears of proliferation would have disappeared if we had a larger reliance on nuclear power.
Those countries weren't said as examples of countries without nuclear power. They are examples of countries that have it but still likely wouldn't have had any exports from the US. I thought the Pakistan example made this abundantly clear. Maybe I confused people by including Brazil, but there was pressure on them during the cold war.
> But that still doesn't mean that fears of proliferation would have disappeared if we had a larger reliance on nuclear power.
Not necessarily, but you're positing a world in which the widescale adoption of nuclear power has no effects at all, and I think that's an unreasonable assumption. Right now we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports because we see nuclear as some dangerous fringe technology rather than as the default energy source for a 21st century civilization.
> you're positing a world in which the widescale adoption of nuclear power has no effects at all
No I'm not. I'm saying that if the US went highly nuclear that it does not directly follow that the rest of the world would also. I'm saying it is a bad assumption to make.
> Right now we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports
It still is a big deal, but it was even a bigger deal 20-30 years ago (the timeframe we are talking about). As a good example, less than 10 years ago I was working on a project that involved nuclear technologies and a university partner. I was not allowed to talk specifics to any of the international students that were _directly_ working on the project (you bet they were smart enough to figure out what they were making). While nothing was classified, it still fell under ITAR and the FBI was talking to me several times a year. Nuclear technology exports are still a very big deal.
> I'm saying that if the US went highly nuclear that it does not directly follow that the rest of the world would also.
I agree that it does not directly or necessarily follow. But I think it would be more likely.
> Nuclear technology exports are still a very big deal.
Sorry, I think my comment came across the exact opposite of what I meant.
When I said "we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports", what I meant was, when we restrict the export of nuclear technology, we don't see it as an unfair imposition on other countries to deprive them of nuclear energy the same way we might see depriving them of food or natural gas. In other words, exporting nuclear technology is a big deal; depriving the rest of the world of nuclear energy is not a big deal. Sorry for the confusing phrasing.
Right now, American voters and policymakers don't think of nuclear energy as the primary power source for a modern civilization. When we have those annoying ITAR regulations that you had to follow, everybody thinks that's perfectly reasonable because nuclear technology is spooky and scary mad science that nobody actually needs anyway. That's not the same attitude we would have if we switched to wholesale nuclear energy in the 1970's.
Am I saying export laws would necessarily be less stringent in this scenario? No, but there are probabilities between 0 and 1, and you seem to be implying that since the probability is <1, it must be 0.
The odd thing was that the proliferation fear hit suddenly when Pakistan hit the bomb.
Iran under the shah, for instance, got a small-scale kit for reprocessing plutonium. High enriched uranium wound up in research reactors all over the place. It's nice stuff, makes it very easy to get a critical mass in a small space.
The EU and India/Asia would go a long ways toward solving the carbon pollution problem. Where we don't sell the reactors, then we'd sell the power using underwater HVDC cables (i.e. to Central and South America).
So you're saying this wouldn't have helped because only the industrialized countries would be using nuclear and that would still leave the industrializing countries using carbon? And this is a point worth quibbling over, since they produce hardly any of the carbon? If so, you're wrong, climate change would indeed be a minor issue if this had happened.
US also influences policy adopted by other countries, so if the US adopted the French nuclear model, we would influence other countries.
I think we're hurt by our domestic oil and gas reserves here. We have powerful interests who want the US to use its domestic oil and gas reserves, so a large-scale shift TO nuclear and AWAY FROM gas seems quite difficult to execute.
This is quite limited though and is why I talked about also including Europe. The limitation is that the US isn't going to let developing nations have nuclear power or they'll limit it, a la Iran Deal. The technology isn't really being exported, so that influence wouldn't be exactly global. Just to rich trading partners (i.e. the west, Japan, and Korea).
> The technology isn't really being exported, so that influence wouldn't be exactly global.
China has started exporting their Hualong One reactor with at least two Pakistani Nuclear Power Stations building a total of 5 Hualong One reactors: Karachi and Chashma.
Argentina is expected to start building a Hualong One reactor by next year and it is under consideration in the United Kingdom.
> Most reactors on order or planned are in the Asian region, though there are major plans for new units in Russia.
The article mentions Turkey as well, using Russian tech. When a NATO country chooses nuclear tech from the country that brought us Chernobyl, the US is definitely asleep at the wheel.
Why not? Most developing countries don't want nuclear weapons. They're a liability. If I were a country like Jordan (random example), I would be perfectly happy signing a (presumably good) deal for nuclear power, even if it came with anti-proliferation controls.
Exporting technology for reactors is tricky business. While yes, you can build reactors without proliferation concerns (see Iran Deal), there's the issue that if you're learning to build reactors you're going to export the knowledge necessary to build weapons. That's the tricky part. And if you have any nuclear technology, we're going to have to spend more money to spy on you to ensure that's all you are doing.
Nuclear weapons aren't always a liability either. It is one of NK's greatest defenses. Specifically that if attacked they know they will lose and have no real reason to not use the hail mary. This helps their chances even if China decides to no longer protect them. Obviously this is country dependent though and depends on a lot of factors. But just trying to say that it isn't always a liability.
The US (and EU) are largely deindustrialized, having offshored nearly all of their grossly polluting industries to the Global South and Asia. It doesn't feel particularly fair to point fingers at the developing world when we've externalized nearly all of our pollution onto them.
(That doesn't, of course, excuse China's coal-fired plant growth, or any other form of egregious pollution. Only to say that these things don't happen in a vacuum.)
To call the US or EU deindustrialised is hilariously wrong. It manufactures more than ever before in its history. It's less polluting because it pays to process waste and designs processes to minimise waste, not because manufacturing is done elsewhere.
> The United States is the world's third largest manufacturer (after the People's Republic of China and the European Union) with a record high real output in Q1 2018 of $2.00 trillion (i.e., adjusted for inflation in 2009 Dollars) well above the 2007 peak before the Great Recession of $1.95 trillion.
A common narrative but also wrong. Even when we take into account the externalized pollution the US and EU still have lower emissions compared to 30 years ago.
87 % of China’s emissions is caused by their own needs. 13 % for playing factory of the world.
Asia has a lot of people, no surprise they pollute a lot.
this is a point that seems to be largely overlooked overall on the impact a specific country has on global emissions.
Overall, the US has a bigger impact than a country like Spain simply because you need to also factor in the supply chain emissions that come with it (in this case, a lot of it being generated somewhere else but being consumed in the US).
> If the US (and EU) grids went highly nuclear that doesn't mean we'd also have more electric vehicles or more electric appliances. We would look a lot more like France (in energy). It isn't just the price of electricity that has caused these things to become more popular. For example, with cars the battery technology is a big example of why we see them now and not in the past. There may have been more pressure for this, but it isn't an assumption we can make.
I don't know that the original poster is implying there's a certainty about this, but it's certainly a possibility. If the US had bet heavily on nuclear, there's a lot of dominoes that would fall with this. There'd be more investment in nuclear and potential benefits from that. There'd be less demand for fossil fuels, consequently less exploration & development of fossil fuels. It would also have changed positioning and strategy when it comes to global climate change initiatives. It's at least conceivable there'd be a dramatic global impact, but modeling the systemic consequences of one decision is problematic at best.
I feel like you’re arguing a straw man; is anyone actually saying or thinking that the US is the sole cause of climate change? Everyone I talk to about climate is under the impression that China is the big bad wolf (although that’s overly-simplified and not true either).
The US is influential, for better or worse; I think many people rightfully expect the US to be a leader on climate policy.
On your point, keep in mind that American consumption causes a tremendous amount of off-shore emissions. We have artificially “low” emissions because we outsource them to regions like Southeast Asia.
> The US is influential, for better or worse; I think many people rightfully expect the US to be a leader on climate policy.
This is the root of my problem. Yeah, the US _should_ be the leader on climate policy. But we've been failing for the last 20 years. At what point are we going to acknowledge that someone else needs to pick up the mantel. And as you've mentioned, it isn't like China is going to do it (you can shift my comment to China + US and the sentiment will hold true, but maybe I conveyed my thoughts poorly. Communication is difficult, especially over heated topics).
I totally agree that China isn’t going to step up on climate. I don’t think there is another power able to drive international consensus like the US on this issue. Whether that’s a blessing or a curse is mostly a matter of perspective :)
I genuinely believe that we can change course on climate policy, but it won’t happen in one or two national elections. Electing people who care about sustainability at every level of government is necessary for big changes to happen federally and internationally. We’ve got a lot of work to do!
> Yeah, the US _should_ be the leader on climate policy. But we've been failing for the last 20 years. At what point are we going to acknowledge that someone else needs to pick up the mantel.
If nobody has, then everyone has been failing, not just us. So the US might as well do the right thing "after we've tried everything else", as Churchill didn't actually say.
The US has been responsible for a large plurality of the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. China is now the largest emitter, but it's not particularly close if you integrate that function over time.
For nearly all of the time before China outstripped the US, the EU (if you include EU-27) was a larger contributor than the US anyway. And much of the early US emissions edge came before nuclear power was invented. Global warming itself was poorly understood prior to the 1960s: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-of-glob...
A transition to nuclear would have helped, certainly! But climate change would not be "minor."
> Nor is electricity the only factor....In the US that is 29% transportation, _25% electricity_, 23% industry, 13% commercial & residential, 13% agriculture.
That 25% figure is not fully independent of where the electricity comes from.
The primary baseload energy source for US electricity is natural gas. If you're using natural gas for electricity, it's wasteful for people to have electric ovens, electric ranges, electric hot water heaters, electric heaters, and other electric household appliances that primarily work by generating heat. It's more efficient to use gas directly, both economically and ecologically.
Where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, the primary power source is hydroelectric. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've lived my whole life without utility gas, and I've lived in a lot of different places. Other places have district heating systems--Iceland, for instance, can support district heating easily since their primary energy source is geothermal. Nuclear energy makes solutions like that more viable. It can also be a source of process heat for industrial applications.
If we went highly nuclear, I think we would have more electric appliances, for the same reason we already have more electric appliances in parts of the country that don't use natural gas as a primary source of energy. In that world, I think climate change would be, maybe not a "minor issue", but certainly less major than it is now. It would be more major than the mitigations we adopted to fix the ozone layer, but aside from transportation (which we are currently electrifying anyway), it would be a lot more straightforward than it is now.
Nobody's pretending the US is the sole contributor to climate change. China's emissions exceed those of all other developed countries combined[0]. And, when you look at the top 20 companies in terms of carbon emissions, it turns out that 12 of them are state owned (thus, non-US companies), and, unsurprisingly, all of them are energy companies[1].
OTOH, the US is not at all blameless here. If the US military were its own country, it would rank 55th in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, beating out 140 other countries[2].
> If the US military were its own country, it would rank 55th in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, beating out 140 other countries
It's a valid point about the military, but all militaries run on fossil fuels and a handful of big carriers/subs that runs on nuclear.
During WW2, we ran petrol/oil pipelines from the UK under water to Normandy. Each pipeline was a steel cable rolled up along an enormous floating drum called a conundrum that weighed as much as a destroyer. There were 7 of them.
Then we extended those pipelines on land as we pushed East. There were 73 allied divisions, each requiring an average of 7 tons of supply each day, with 2/3 of that being fuel. The USSR had something like 600 divisions.
Modern armies need even more oil as jets are thirsty. Oil and gas infrastructure is critical to modern warfare at the moment, and I don't really see electric tanks or jets on the horizon. So that's not going to be an area where will be reducing much CO2 any time soon.
Long term, perhaps hydrogen might be a replacement for vehicles, and smaller nuclear reactors even for combat ships?? But we'd need to be able to make a lot of hydrogen very quickly, and have something like a strategic hydrogen reserve for wartime. The explosive nature of hydrogen is also a challenge when you are being bombed and shot at, and there are supply chain issues as to what operation Pluto would look like if it was hydrogen.
> Modern armies need even more oil as jets are thirsty. Oil and gas infrastructure is critical to modern warfare at the moment, and I don't really see electric tanks or jets on the horizon. So that's not going to be an area where will be reducing much CO2 any time soon.
Well, we could just not maintain military bases all over the goddamn planet, and retain a mostly defensive military. More realistically, I suspect that significantly reducing overseas deployments would also significantly reduce the military's carbon footprint.
I do concede that this may not be geopolitically realistic. I also agree that nuclear seems like a realistic solution for carriers and combat ships. Just eliminating diesel-powered aircraft carriers would probably go a long way, I would guess.
Hey, I'm all for reducing the presence of U.S. bases abroad. I don't think we should be policing the world.
But at the same time, let's not kid ourselves - this will result in more wars, except it wont be U.S. ships and planes burning the fossil fuels, the fossil fuels will be expended by foreign troops and all the rebuilding necessary as a result of more conflict.
Here is an article in the WSJ about the significant increase in coups in Africa as a result of the U.S. pulling back and Europe also easing off of its policing role due to covid:
If the world was run on Uranium and Thorium which are universally distributed in the earth's crust and in the ocean people would have a lot less to fight about.
Honestly? A lot of people are. Don't get me wrong, the US is a big part of the problem. I'm not trying to state otherwise. As a single country we are the second worse, and the worst on a per capita scale. To be clear, I'm not trying to say that the US is not a major contributor. We definitely are and should be leading the way to solve this problem.
The issue is that we aren't leading the way, despite the best efforts of many of its citizens. But I also don't see anyone else stepping up. I also don't see people considering that the rest of the globe that isn't electrified is making the choice of "clean energy or a hospital." We know what they'll go with every time and we shouldn't blame them.
This is the most complicated problem that humankind has ever faced. We are doing a disservice by over simplifying the problem. We are doing a disservice by turning this into a political "shoulda-coulda" or "but they waste more" game. At the end of the day it doesn't matter, emissions still happen even if one person is more at fault. The worst part? The countries that emit the most will also be able to deal with the crisis more easily, and thus have less incentive to actually solve it.
I'm not saying the US isn't to blame. I'm saying the problem is far more complicated than the US and it's going to take more than them to solve it.
You're absolutely right. However, I'd argue that per capita emissions is a misleading metric here, in light of the fact that when you drill down even deeper and look at the top 100 corporate polluters, which are collectively responsible for 71% of our greenhouse gas emissions[0], virtually all of them [1] are energy companies.
Now, yes, individual people consume energy, thus forming most of the basis for this "per capita emissions" metric, but, in the alternative timeline where the world got serious about clean energy 20-30 years ago, guess what happens to that metric? It drops in direct correlation with the amount of investment in clean energy.
But, as to the rest of what you write here, the solution, at least in my mind, seems fairly simple, if not easy: developed countries must invest massively and immediately in clean energy and carbon sequestration technologies, as well as properly pricing carbon emissions via carbon taxes so that that negative externality is included in every single consumer decision. Further, developed countries must engage in clean energy technology sharing and development projects throughout the world[2]. We need the entire world to be on the same page, and, China, the US, and Europe need to be leading the way.
So, yes, absolutely, the problem scope vastly exceeds the US (it's global), so, therefore, the solution must be global as well.
> But, as to the rest of what you write here, the solution, at least in my mind, seems fairly simple, if not easy: developed countries must invest massively and immediately in clean energy and carbon sequestration technologies
This is something I actively fight for. I often state that the US (and west) don't need to be carbon neutral by 2050, but carbon negative now. That's how we unburden the developing world. That's how we pay back for the damage cause mostly by us.
But CCS is still a complicated subject and highly debated within the green communities (just like nuclear is). People think we can get away with just planting trees, but the research and experts don't think that's true (especially since new growth forests are carbon sources (fact that surprises many people) instead of carbon sinks (old growth forests are major sinks btw)). We're going to need a wide breadth of methods to solve this and we shouldn't be taking any off the table as long as the result is that we're carbon negative[0].
[0] The arguments against CCS tend to be that if we have them then the coal and ng companies can still operate. Though this obviously misses the point since we care about the resultant emissions more than the source.
China will be the problem in the future. The United States has been the problem for decades.
The US remains responsible for a large plurality of the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. China is now the largest emitter, but it's not particularly close to the US yet if you integrate that function over time.
It’s also a matter of seeing your spheres of control. There is basically nothing a random peep can do about China as it’s state run. But at least in the US you can maybe have some marginal effect. Besides the US is nowhere near where they need to be just because China is worse
Electricity is an energy carrier. "Transport", "Industry", "Commercial" and "Agriculture" are categories of use.
We could use more electricity in all of those areas.
Next-generation nuclear reactors will operate at much higher temperatures and be more economical as a result. Some of the high cost of nuclear energy is because low-temperature operation is expensive. A PWR has huge steam generators inside the confinement vessel because using hot water to boil steam and spin a huge steam turbine is wasteful.
Next-generation reactors will have a gas turbine powerset that fits in the employee break room of the turbine house. Next-generation reactors will make hydrogen for fuels and fertilizer using processes like
There is no reason the rest of the world couldn't follow if the "Union of Concerned Scientists" wasn't afraid of a Muslim Planet. (It was Pakistan getting the bomb that put the kibosh on advanced reactors are sustainable nuclear fuel cycles.)
I still think you're oversimplifying it. Let's look at one common technology: cooling. Our current cooling solutions aren't carbon free. They use 6% of US electricity and are nowhere near carbon free. These aren't amounts that can be ignored either nor are they the only emitting technology we don't have a great solution for (heating you can pump hot water to homes, which nuclear provides a great solution to generate said heated water). It's worse because the feedback loop.
You also can't talk about next-generation reactors because they don't exist right now (at least in production).
What I'm trying to say here is that this doesn't help our pro-nuclear case. It is cherry picking post hoc analysis. Climate change would still be a real problem, even with our leg up. Because frankly, climate change is much harder than getting solar, wind, and nuclear everywhere. It is also bigger than America, the EU, and China (total of 54%).
>Our current cooling solutions aren't carbon free.
Are you referring to HVAC cooling (refrigerators, heat pumps, etc.), or reactor cooling (cooling tower, etc.)? Neither has any intrinsic carbon emissions though. HVAC needs electricity[0], but has no emissions other than incidental CFC release[1]. Nuclear / industrial equipment cooling typically needs water, but doesn't release any carbon.
[0]Ostensibly nuclear in the context of this thread.
I was always under the impression that the US gets the most negative press about emissions because we have the highest per-capita (no way we were ever going to top China in total emissions lol). However, the US doesn't even appear to be top-10 on the per-capita chart [0], even coming in under some large countries likes Canada and Australia.
There's a bit of a cognitive dissonance here though. The US is the leader of the world and everyone looks to us on how to build their countries. No one wants to admit it but everyone wants to be as good as us. However, when we fail to live up to our reputation, the rest of the world is right to call us out for not living up to our reputation (that, to be fair, we regularly leverage). If you're in the US and you don't want to be criticized, that's fine, but then you can't also claim that the US is the best/strives to be the best.
The US should lead the way. The problem is that we aren't and can't get our leaders to do anything. I'm also not concerned with the criticism, as it is warranted. I'm concerned that the problem still persists and no one else will pick up the mantle. This is just kicking it down the road and saying that someone else should solve it. Even if that's true, it doesn't mean the problem isn't getting worse in the mean time.
To be fair it's not even your leader's fault. Most of the people are against doing anything about green energy.
Hydro quebec produce TWh of green electricity but failed to bring it sucessfully anywhere.
You might be right on the minor local point that we would still have a climate problem if the US went all-in on nuclear, but it would be a lot easier to get the US to pass border adjustments (“carbon tariffs” if you will) on China or whomever if our emissions were in good shape. We wouldn’t have a fossil fuel industry lobbying hard to preserve pollution and there wouldn’t be as much pearl clutching about the effects of the economy. Moreover, if we had 70 years of investment in nuclear, we would probably be able to quickly and cheaply stamp out safe, cost effective nuclear power plants all over the world (think about how much progress on SMRs could have been made in the same amount of time). Moreover, abundant, cheap energy would have almost certainly precipitated the electrification of everything from heavy industry to transportation to indoor heating/cooking/water-heating/etc (on the near-certain assumption that nuclear would be far cheaper than fossil fuels).
Well the whole reason we don't have nuclear is because of the fossil fuel industry lobbying. So I'm not sure we can really make these conclusions. It is post hoc thinking. As much as I'd love to live in an atomic punk era with SMRs being prolific. Luckily there's been a lot of investment lately into them and we're starting to see good results. So it isn't too late.
> Well the whole reason we don't have nuclear is because of the fossil fuel industry lobbying. So I'm not sure we can really make these conclusions. It is post hoc thinking.
I think you misunderstood (or maybe I'm misunderstanding). I agree that "the whole reason we don't have nuclear is because of the fossil fuel industry lobbying", but I don't see how that invalidates any conclusions.
> Luckily there's been a lot of investment lately into them and we're starting to see good results. So it isn't too late.
Well, it's certainly too late to help us meet Paris Climate Agreement targets, which largely depend on our emission rates b the end of the decade (there's no way we're going to start cranking out enough SMRs to put a serious dent in emissions because we started reinvesting in nuclear too little too late). SMRs might play a role several decades out, but it's too late for the short term (and of course the short term is going to have a lot of ramifications for our future climate).
Part of the reason to be critical of the US isn't just our high overall carbon emissions, but our per-capita carbon emissions. US citizens emit far more carbon per-person than Chinese people do. That is worth criticizing
I'm willing to bet that per-capita, the US produces far more economic output per KG of CO2 than most of the rest of the world. Like with any statistic, you can slice and dice it any way you want to fit an agenda.
Uh...why not the proper comparison, which is GDP per kg CO2? While I believe that GDP is Θ(1) bound to CO2 emissions, any comparison should include those constants. Your chart is missing the connection between kWh consumed and GDP generated.
> the connection between kWh consumed and GDP generated
If you don't mind those numbers being normalised by population size, and CO2 emissions being used as a more relevant metric than kWh, then this chart might be helpful:
This is just standard CCP propaganda to deflect from the fact that China is the world's highest emitter of CO2. While US emissions have been trending down for the last 10 years, China's emissions have been trending up.
And at the end of the day, CO2 molecules have no nationality: it's why we don't waste our breath criticizing Qatar for having the world's highest emissions for capita when it produced just 0.1% the total emissions of China.
if that's the case, why do you think american citizen deserve to pollute a lot more than Chinese citizen? why would being born inside US border somehow makes it ok to pollute more than if you were born inside china
By your logic, if China were to split in 150 small countries, they could pollute as much as they like because technically each of them would be low on the list of highest emitter.
it's so obvious that per-capita metrics are a far more practical metric to use that I am convinced those repeating this flawed argument have no real interest in tackling climate change
I'm not sure I'd call 70%->50% "phasing out". I'd call it "reducing dependence." I see nothing wrong with this. It would still be one of the most heavily nuclearized countries. So that term is misleading.
I wouldn't call anything "phasing out" short of a plan to denuclearize.
France is still going to be the green model. Mixture of zero emitting sources. The energy problem is complex. As one example, a big reason for this change is that France heavily relies on others to get its uranium.
Sorry about the vulgar comment... I am always getting really riled up about people dragging Germany through the mud for its energy policy.
Not because Germany doesn't deserve it. It absolutely does. But we should stick to facts - Germany simply should have gotten rid of coal before nuclear but of course the government (CDU/SPD parties) historically cared more about existing coal jobs than potential new jobs in nuclear - especially in the 80s.
If you keep doing it, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Not really: nuclear only impacts electricity production, which only covers 25% of greenhouse emissions in the US [1]. So even if that went to zero, it would be a huge help, but there's still 3/4 more to improve on.
25% is too pessimistic, though. If you have universal nuclear power, EVs don't ever have to charge from coal plants, so you've got a direct path to attacking the transportation 25%. Gas heating and cooking have electric alternatives, so you have a direct path to attacking that 25%. As for industry, I suspect a very decent fraction of its 25% consumes energy (and, therefore, could be readily substituted for electric) rather than hydrocarbons.
In any case, the many gigatons of CO2 we put into the atmosphere by killing nuclear are completely indefensible.
Agreed. I actually think China might be able to lead on climate in a matter of decades even though they aren’t on a good trajectory. They don’t have to worry about anti-nuclear activists. Also, a dictatorship does have the benefit of not needing to wrangle so many people to make a decision like this.
This also means that they lack crucial self corrective capacity should something go wrong - their environmental track record is ugly, and that's just what is known.
Dictatorships can cover things up, and with something that has potentially global consequences like nuclear, it's better to have a transparent, cooperative collective decision, not a paranoid "yes or death" regime mandating that everything is fine.
I'm not advocating for dictatorships, I'm saying that the unilateral decision making authority can actually work out under the right conditions.
Yes, China's environmental track record is ugly, but China also tends to undercommit and overdeliver. If Xi Jinping's administration wants China to be overwhelmingly nuclear by 2050, it can probably get it done. Moreover, it's probably a good move for China--they'll be able to meet emissions targets while having abundant energy to cement their position as the world's manufacturer while the west is fucking around with unreliable renewable energy. Not only will Chinese goods be cheaper, but doing business with China will actually help western countries reduce their carbon footprints.
Our failure to appropriately invest in nuclear will accelerate China's rise to global dominance.
1. The conversion of airplane gas turbines to power generation which have about 1/10 the capital cost of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear plants. (People still quote the cost of coal as if it was a benchmark but it has been uncompetitive since 1980. So much in energy research is like a stopped clock.)
2. A wrong model for what causes nuclear accidents (e.g. the pressure vessel doesn't burst, instead the power goes out like it did at Fukushima.) Existing plants and new designs had to be retrofit -- U.S. power plants went through post-TMI and post-911 upgrades, but Japan did nothing.
3. Racism and islamophobia. When Pakistan got the bomb the fear of proliferation exploded, putting an end to research in new nuclear reactors (which could have a gas-turbine based cost structure) and sustainable nuclear fuel cycles. (e.g. it's possible to not just use Plutonium as a fuel, but even destroy the most pernicious fission products.)
Fossil fuels are too cheap and approval times for new fossil fuel power stations are surprisingly still much faster than for nuclear. Even though the health impact from the latter has historically been orders of magnitudes (at least 1000x) higher.
You are getting some truly bizarre responses. The real answer is that the same crowd of people obsessed with climate change today were against nuclear power yesterday.
The generation that had a great fear of nuclear bombs due to duck and cover exercises in schools when they were kids started coming into political power (the boomers) and have been in power ever since. Most people don't really separate the idea of a mushroom cloud going up into the sky and a nuclear reactor meltdown in their head. The nuclear power industry should have taken a clue from all of the other industries that use nuclear/radioactive tech and removed the word nuclear from the technology description. Maybe call it isotopic power?
Hopefully younger generations, that seem to be completely unaware that we still live 15 minutes to nuclear armageddon, won't have such a visceral negative view of it and see it as a viable zero carbon energy source.
I long thought that the simultaneous release of "The China Syndrome" and TMI led to public fear of nuclear power (TMI happened two weeks after the movie debuted!). But apparently people have studied this and these disasters really didn't have a major effect -- public sentiment generally stayed the same around the time of the accidents[1]
The passage of PURPA in 1978 had a bigger effect. Suddenly utilities were opened to competition. Combined with a slowdown in growth of electric power demand and the window closed on new nuclear.
I thought it was well known: Building nuclear power stations has been extremely expensive and time-consuming.
Why would anyone invest in that? The answer is climate change, but conservatives in the US have opposed any action on that issue, so there hasn't been political will.
The US accounts for 18% of global emissions. In fact China and the US together don't account for even half of global emissions, tendency falling. The world is a little bit larger than those two players, even if not reflected in US discourse.
I am curious what would be the number if you take into account that good chunk of the world is servicing US and Europe. Basically the developed countries outsourced the pollution.
In this alternate reality, why didn't the entrenched fossil fuel interests delay it as they delayed, in this reality, any attempt to introduce pollution controls, banish lead from gas, efficiency mandates, recycling, renewables, trains, sensible city design and belief in science generally (all widely accepted to have happened) and also nuclear (the world seems split on whether to blame the same fossil fuel groups for this, or, and I feel this is where you were heading, those damn hippies and environmentalists who, coincidentally I'm sure, have been under attack for decades from the very same groups).
Only if the rest of the world followed suit. And I highly doubt 100% of other developed and developing nations would have. It also doesn’t fix emissions from cars, planes, shipping vessels, etc. If carbon levels were 50% what they are I also doubt the propaganda would be much different.
We are hearing crazy talk about using Fischer-Tropsch chemistry to make jet fuel for the same reason we are hearing so much about direct air capture and other pipe dreams.
If we really decarbonized everything easy to decarbonize (including cars) we'd have very little to worry about.
Moving the focus to airplanes and other science fiction, we create an excuse to not decarbonize what can be decarbonized.
This is just false. There's a lot of sectors that produce emissions besides electricity and transportation. They aren't exactly getting their energy through other means, which still produce emissions. The climate crisis is a very difficult problem to solve and it isn't helping pretending that the only thing we need to do is get electric cars and convert our electric generation sources to zero emission sources. It is far more complicated than that. We also have to do it in a way that the rest of the world (which is 85% of emissions) can afford.
Fully agree. As a pro nuclear person, I don't get why people do this propaganda. It only hurts our position as it is very dishonest. Though I also really dislike how Americentric the global climate crisis is. Yeah, America is a big contributor, but only 15%. I don't see anyone else really stepping up to solve it. If America isn't going to act, why isn't _your_ country stepping up? It's the global equivalent of "well the rich guy isn't playing fair, so why should I?"
> Climate change will continue regardless of people. Only possible change is the rate.
The rate is the problem. No one is proposing massive, economy remaking, changes because of the planets nature ebb and flow. It's because the rate of warming we are causing is absolutely terrifying when you compare it to what would be expected naturally.
> Of course it will reverse course eventually and the ice sheets will be back.
And you're evidence of this is...? I don't see where you'd get it from considering current trends are so ridiculously out of whack from the natural record there isn't any analogue to compare.
I only have a limited understanding of nuclear reactors, but IIUC these would have produced nuclear waste, which we currently don't have any long-term storage plans for. Not having storage plans for this waste (beyond "put it in pools of water near the reactors, or maybe send it to south carolina) suggests to me that nuclear power may not actually be a workable solution. Sorry to sound ignorant, but it seems like building 500 plants would exacerbate that problem dramatically.
Doesn't it seem like solar + batteries is a much better solution? We could cover large parts of the US with solar panels, store it during the day, and charge large fleets of electric cars overnight. Then, the issue is one of non-radioactive toxic waste storage instead of radioactive toxic waste storage, which seems a bit more tractable.
The cost of batteries is declining rapidly, but it is still an order of magnitude too high. Will it get low enough? We don't know.
Most of the time you can get away with a relatively small amount of storage but sometimes you get an extended "dry spell", so you might need two weeks or more storage to be entirely reliable.
Renewables have been workable so far because of low-cost gas turbines fired by methane that take up the slack: we know now that methane is 80 or so times more potent a global warming gas than carbon dioxide, so if you lose 1% of the gas in handling it is a big problem.
The fact is that nuclear waste is not waste. The light water reactor extracts about 1% of the energy that a fast reactor could extract from uranium. In fact, molten salt fast reactors can not only consume plutonium and other actinides but also destroy a good fraction of the most dangerous fission products.
There is a lot more to nuclear waste than just the fuel rods. Lots of materials that are either used by workers at the plant or part of the plant become radio active and can no longer go to a regular landfill of other trash processing facilities. That is why some energy companies are trying to default rather than pay for decommissioning plants once they have reached the maximum age that they were constructed for.
There's a much bigger problem with solar than storage: Energy Density. And energy density isn't a problem we can solve, it's bounded by the laws of physics.
An average nuclear power plant puts out 1GW of energy in under 2.5 square kilometers, or 1 square mile. To achieve the same output (Since you'd need double the panels + storage to produce energy at night) you'd need to destroy 450 square kilometers of natural habitat to generate the same energy with solar panels. Realistically you'd need much more than that to account for cloudy days, and even more to offset electrical transmission losses because no one is building a solar farm in latitudes that see 100+ cloudy days per year.
Detractors of nuclear will argue "Why don't we do rooftop solar".. well, 56% of the world's population lives in cities where that's not possible, and that number isn't decreasing. NYC for example uses on the order of ~50GW or 51 Terawatts per year. You'd have to cover 15% of the state in silicon glass to get anywhere close to powering it. Personally, I'd rather take a chance on nuclear in lieu of the the massive amount of environmental destruction required to power modern society with solar energy.
Excellent sanity check, and I'll add another calculation for comparison.
449 nuclear reactors in the world [0]
2 disasters leading to large exclusion zones
average area of those exclusion zones 1300 square miles [1]
average exclusion zone per reactor (very roughly) 5.8 square miles
15.0 square kilometres
So solar panels use up about 4 times as much space as "average" nuclear reactors (not including the relatively small area used by the plant itself[2]), but of course the value of land with solar panels on is much higher than radioactively contaminated land.
To some extent, for a fair comparison, you should also use old sole panel efficiency here. Nuclear power plants have progressed tremendously in terms of safety.
There’s also widespread reporting that the evacuations and exclusion zones, in Fukushima at least, were excessive.
Nuclear waste is waste. That's what's sitting in big piles in pools all around the country. My point was entirely political, basically if the obama administration can kill a good idea like Yucca after a decade+ of research, it's clear we don't have the political will to deploy nuclear in the US.
That "dry spell" storage doesn't need to be batteries. It will have a low number of charge/discharge cycles, so what you want is low capital cost, and you don't care much about round trip efficiency. Hydrogen burned in turbines serves this need rather well compared to batteries.
Coal and oil also release methane as part of the production process. Gas isn't as good as renewables, but a shift to using gas produced electricity for heating and EVs etc with or without renewables is still a good move.
Storing nuclear waste is a problem, but seems somewhat exaggerated. We have been doing it quite successfully. Waste reprocessing drastically reduces that amount too.
Renewables + batteries, why not. This technology is not at a stage yet where we can use it. There are literally no “guaranteed power on demand” facilities from renewables+batteries.
Nuclear technology is mostly old and boring by now.
>
I only have a limited understanding of nuclear reactors, but IIUC these would have produced nuclear waste, which we currently don't have any long-term storage plans for.
We currently have an inefficient long-term storage plan for it - store it on-site.
We had an efficient, cheaper long-term storage plan (Yucca mountain) that failed for political, not technical reasons.
I can't seem to find great numbers of how much land we expect to lose to climate change, I expect it will be quite large.
I'm personally pro nuclear, but it's pretty clear we were building fairly dangerous plants back when Chernobyl & Fukushima were built. I still don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the world would be worse or better if we had built many of them in the US.
The Fukushima incident shouldn't really be compared with the Chernobyl incident. Chernobyl was very preventable. As for Fukushima, the earthquake science didn't realize that such a quake was possible in the region until pretty close to the event happening, meaning little time to act in it. While people will point out early reports and hypothesis, that's not how science works. We need to peer review. The science has come a long way since then (specifically from computational modeling), but that's different from building reactors with the potential to explode (something the west didn't do) and pushing it's bounds (even if we didn't know about xenon spiking at the time).
Chernobyl NPP wasn't really dangerous design if run by competent people, many of those kind of NPP reactors are still working decades without a major incident. It was a mistake of the chief of the shift to proceed with unsafe test caused by the failure of the Soviet political system to maintain proper level of understanding and safety in the NPP. The personnel did not have the correct mental model of the device.
Fukushima was a bad plant because they built it in a tsunami zone. Otherwise its design isn't dangerous either. But it got destroyed by unexpected tsunami. People should have expected the tsunami can happen and not build the plant there. People were stupid, NPP design would be fine if built far from tsunamis.
