I always thought this too. Just googled "how many nuclear reactors for all worlds energy needs". First result: "Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs" [1].
Global energy needs at 15TW. Would need 15K nuclear plants total. Currently we have 440 @ 375GW total.
It's an interesting read.
But I agree that it is completely absurd that climate activists make such dire predictions of apocalyptic scenarios, and then won't consider a completely obvious stop-gap that would buy 100 years to get our act together.
That calculation is like taking the consumption of a car from the 60s and multiplying by the known petrol capacity at the time, it just makes absolutely no sense to predict future capacity.
It does not account in technology changes and discovery of more fuel sources. The reason it's not done yet is because the problem isn't the lack of fuel but the lack of plants.
They are, as a sibling comment demonstrates, deluded, after decades of being maliciously lied to by 'environmental' movements with ties to the fossil industry.
Anyone against nuclear is a shill for petrochemical power, there are no exceptions. There are the deluded and the liars, that's it.
Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so.
Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax dollars at, and there are multiple reasons:
1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind.
2) Nuclear power costs explode if the capacity factor of your plants decreases: Meaning that they are basically ONLY viable for baseload power (running at full tilt all the time), which makes them very unflexible and a really bad match with other renewables (=> which, again, are cheaper per MWh than the fission reactors).
3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?!
4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year.
> 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind.
This argument is an important one, but most of the reasons that this is the case is a related problem to the ever lasting light bulb problem, they last too long. Because we're not building them they're expensive to build. Once we start building them the costs go down.
> 3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?!
Fukushima is the latest in scare tactics. The level of radiation released was low and the government overreacted to that danger. Further, it was built right next to the ocean which was itself right next to a major fault line running under that ocean, with backup generators that were at ground level.
> 4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year.
See my response to point #1. Because we're not building them, we're not used to building them so they're slow to build.
Is the fact that Fukushima was built in a poor location with poorly designed generators part of nuclear's failure to deliver on safety promises? That is to say, if nuclear power cannot reliably avoid design failures then that sounds to me like it is failing to deliver on safety promises.
Have you ever been involved with building or maintaining a nuclear plant?
I have family members who built plants back in the 80's and some still maintain them.
They claim the main issue has to do with government regulation(s) and unions. I can dive into it further, but effectively the regulation(s) required inspection on ever weld a welder would make. This meant you needed two welders on site, one making a weld and one signing off. You'd have a pipe fitter line up the pipe(s), a different inspector would have to come around and sign off on that work. Sometimes they wouldn't show up, so you'd end up with a days work lost (everyone still getting paid). If someone who was part of a different union or not unionized tried to do the work, the union would strike / the person would be fired.
Then at the end of it, the regulation(s) would change slightly and they'd have to cut out a large section and start all over.
This happened at multiple plants in the 80's per my family members. Today, they're pushing the plants past where they're really safe to use. In the case of Fukushima, they didn't even have a cut-off switch. It was an earlier design.
All that being said, Illinois has been running on mostly nuclear power for decades, as has France. No issue in terms of safety and relatively cheap power (natural gas being cheaper). An updated design, with a reduction in unionization and a loosening of regulations would make nuclear far better than any alternative.
You can do the math yourself and it comes out cheaper and safer than wind or solar. The other thing to consider is what happens when the power goes out in a place like Texas for a week or two due to weather conditions -- people die. Solar, coal, wind, nuclear all have pros/cons. Thus far in the United States nuclear has caused far fewer casualties than per gigawatt than any alternative.
>the main issue has to do with government regulation(s)
You can't have it both ways - but of course they want to.
The Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act shifts the risk of nuclear accidents onto the tax payers. In return, the industry accepts regulations. Tell the nuclear industry that we're taking away your insurance caps and they'll say "we can't stay in business".
1) I don't believe this for a moment, not when you include capacity factor and storage requirements for renewables to actually compete with on-demand power. What do you do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? How long can your storage solution sustain that? If it's anything less than "infinity", it's inferior to nuclear.
2) This is just trying to spin reliability as a disadvantage. You can throttle nuclear just fine. Overbuilding in order to have "peaker" nuclear plants is perfectly viable - France's grid does so. Pointing out the difficulties of integrating with flighty, unreliable renewables is a point against renewables, not nuclear - you are failing to account for grid storage, then complaining that nuclear is a poor grid storage solution. Well, yeah!
3) The safety record of nuclear vastly exceeds any other power generation technology, even if you factor in Chernobyl. We are making the perfect the enemy of the good. I daresay that India could weather a nuclear incident or two and still come out ahead of the 2 million people who die yearly there from air pollution, in large part from burning fossil fuels.
4) This just point 1 repeated, and again, you ignore grid storage. True, you can throw up PV or wind quickly enough, but it won't solve your energy problem. People were complaining about how slow it is to construct nuclear plants decades ago. If we'd ignored them and started building, we'd be in a much better situation now. The best time to build a nuclear plant is 20 years ago; the second best time is now.
How many terawatt-years of electricity can the entirety of accessible uranium reserves produce?
How many terawatt years of non-low-grade-heat energy do we need between now and 2030?
Now that we know that PWRs are irrelevant, can we move on from the constant gaslighting about how 'the next one will he cheaper we swear' or 'it's totally safe if everything goes perfectly always, just ignore the mines'. Or are you just trying to distract from the only thing that can replace the majority of (or even a tiny minority of) fossil fuels?
5) Most countries do not have access to them for political reasons, and this will not change, ever. A few government will even mass murder their people if they try to do it without authorization.
Monde Diplomatique made a documented article about France plan to bury its own nuclear waste in Meuse department...
It has been a clownshow, with fire incident lasting weeks because an elevator tire went to flame, necessity to run a water pump for the next 10.000 or 100.000 years (no joke) because the underground storage facility would be underwater after 3 days and will probably leak radioactive materials in the surrounding aquifere and will go back to surface after a few hundred years. In short, they have no realistic plan for long term storage.
Maybe there is just an olympic swimming pool of radioactive waste in the US (I suppose so it's about 4000m3), but it is not the way you store it for tens thousand of years. And definitively not the cost of a swimming pool.
There are roughly 40,000t of accessible fissile material (U235 and Pu239) on earth.
You need about 3.5t to run a GW of PWR for 6 years. This generates up to half a tonne of Pu239.
Primary energy is about 17TW. You need about 12TWe to meet this. We'll assume 5TW of heat needs can be met with a geographically isolated low head steam generator.
Assume your reactors are free and all mining capacity grows at 100% p.a. from the current ~200t of U235 that isn't in inaccessible tails per year and reactors are constructed in record times of 5 years.
Make it make sense. Provide a net zero solution for 2050.
The nuclear power I push for is still in development. It amazes me that you push for bad and unsafe designs combined with bad economics and management practices.
Lots of reports pointing out Russia funds environmental groups. China does the same - but more openly - advertising cheap solar and wind (neither function as well as nuclear).
Right now wind and solar have dropped so much in price that they represent a serious threat to fossil fuels on a short time frame. Have all storage problems been worked out? No. But even moving 50% of our current fossil sources to renewables would have a huge impact on the profits of those industries and it’s now completely feasible in the short term and very cheap. If I was in the fossil fuel extraction industry I’d be throwing every astroturfing dollar into FUD calling for those plans to be abandoned because “only nuclear works.”
PS I’m 100% supportive of a mix that includes cheap renewables and more costly nuclear baseload. It’s when you see comments promoting nuclear and renewables as somehow in opposition, that’s the tell.
> Right now wind and solar have dropped so much in price that they represent a serious threat to fossil fuels on a short time frame.
I recommend sitting down and calculating the input cost for solar / wind. It's being subsidized substantially.
There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude, for instance.
I'm for cheap energy - period. It's directly correlated with improvements in life. If solar / wind get us there, great. If nuclear improves it, let's do it. Right now natural gas is also very cheap, should be drilling as much as we can. The more we maximize growth and cheap energy now, the quicker we advance technology, innovation and automation.
> There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude, for instance.
You're thinking of nuclear. Which has a variety of critical resources and no plan reduce them. Renewables live in the real world where using less of a scarce resource allows you to outcompete your competition.
Modern perc panels use 30-50g (so half of silver production would produce 500GW/yr) of silver per net kW with commercial but not fully deployed technologies to reduce it to 18-30g, and feasible technologies to bring it below 5g (which is what a nuclear reactor uses). This is the only limiting resource that renewables necessarily use more of than nuclear other than concrete.
And how do you get scale when the costs are so steep? Cut US regulations to lower costs and you also give up taxpayer supported insurance caps without which no new nuclear would ever be built. It's unsolvable while wind and solar have already gotten far cheaper than nuclear.
I don't think people realize that when you have a huge commodity income stream under threat of ceasing to exist, it's quite realistic to spend a huge percentage of this on lobbying to stretch it as far as it will go.
Such as by constantly filling the internet with lies about how the technologies that are eating 1% of your market share per year, and growing by 20-40% per year can't possibly solve the problem and we must divert all funding from it to a technology that costs 3x as much, has consistently gotten more expensive with time, and can't scale?
Tbf, fracking does have proven issues with geological stability and soil contamination. But it would be very hypocritical of the UAE to go on an anti-nuclear tirade, since they themselves use nuclear energy.
Obvious things are often wrong. It is not just uneconomical, but also physically impossible to replace fossil fuels with nuclear using known mineable uranium reserves.
What people often don't understand about radioactivity, is that if you have short halflife, like weeks, the radiation is dangerous but doesn't last long. And if you have huge half life, like a million years, then radiation is basically non-existent and not dangerous at all.
This lack of understanding is why people spread FUD about radioactive waste that will poison the planet for million years.
No, seriously, coal burning released more radiation into the environment than actual nuclear waste. Long-term storage is a problem but it's still a better problem to have to solve than fossil fuel pollution.
It also amazes me that the government activists, those folk attending COP conferences, never suggest holding a video conference for COP as an example to us all. Instead an estimated 400 private jets have arrived in Egypt (where domestic climate protesters are locked up) along with 33,000 delegates though the largest emitters, India and China are not represented. Do all these people really believe that there's a climate emergency in terms of CO2 emissions? Their actions seem to belie it. Moreover not much results from these jamborees.
Apparently, a private jet can emit two tonnes of carbon dioxide in an hour and is five to 14 times more polluting per passenger than a commercial plane.
