5837

The larger issue is fuel. Even with efficient technologies, if we shift a significant fraction of our current power generation to nuclear, we’ll run out of fuel in a few decades. Uranium isn’t renewable, and once we’ve split it apart into xenon and iodine isotopes, we can’t put them back together without a supernova.

There actually is no easy or quick solution to any of this. We simply can’t build up nuclear capacity in the U.S. in any sort of time frame that will probably matter. Immediate action on climate change requires us to change consumption patterns. I.e, what we really need is mandatory power usage restrictions and to tax gasoline into (well, actually out of) the stratosphere. That probably won’t happen, and if it did would exacerbate the negative and destabilizing effects of climate change, so we’re pretty screwed.

Hey folks, we can’t tech ourselves out of this. We use too much energy, almost all of the sources we use have limited and dwindling supply on any timescale that matters to us, and the sheer volume of harmful byproducts production generates is uncontrollable. Not trying to be a fatalist–we should do what we can–but we’ve already locked ourselves into this ride.

5838

If the U.S. produced as much from renewables as Germany does, we could close all of our extant coal plants.

5839

I mean… yeah, sorta. Uranium is a non-renewable energy source, like coal, natural gas or oil. But uranium is a fairly common element and most of what is mined today is taken from easily-accessible areas. Per a 2015 report, the planet’s reactors have about 130 years’ worth of fuel from cheap supplies; if you go deeper/slightly more expensive, you more than double that.

Then there are breeder reactors, alternate isotopes, and more efficient designs that could stretch those numbers out significantly.

It’s absolutely true that there is a finite amount of uranium available to us, but it’s not something that should concern us in even the medium-long term unless you are actively measuring ONLY commercial viability.

I really disagree with this. Advances in wind power, advances in solar power, and advances in nuclear power are the only solutions to this issue that don’t involve consigning huge swathes of the planet to second-class energy citizenry. And it’s only my opinion, but I really think we MUST tech our way out.

5840

This isn’t actually true, as there are tons of untapped resources for Uranium that we just don’t bother exploiting because currently there is plenty of easily mined ore. But if you really needed to, you can even extract uranium from seawater. Or you can switch to a thorium based fuel cycle, which is even more abundant.

But that’s somewhat moot, because nuclear doesn’t need to even be the final permanent solution. You could totally make nuclear reactors that buy you a few decades, because in a few decades you can develop other renewable sources.

Again, France built 57 nuclear reactors, providing almost all of their power, in less than 15 years… in the late 70’s. We can built multiple nuclear reactors, and house them on a freaking boat the size of a city, in 5 years.

We absolutely could do it, if we wanted.

Technology is the ONLY way you get out of this. Any other idea is pure fantasy. Folks aren’t going to voluntarily reduce their standard of living. The developing world isn’t going to suddenly stop improving their lifestyle.

The idea that you will solve this via reduced consumption has absolutely zero chance of working. Zero.

5841

There is as much chance of us doing this as there is of us reducing consumption. And that chance is, I agree, zero. My point was more that we’re already fucked. I think it’s maybe possible that we could tech ourselves out of this, though I suspect our collective demand for energy is insatiable and I’m actually pretty skeptical about humanity’s ability to solve problems of this scale, but it’s not politically or economically feasible. I mean we absolutely could also reduce our energy consumption, if we wanted, and it would be much more sustainable in the long term. But we won’t… until we are forced to.

5842

There’s very real reasons we can’t/won’t cut back on energy consumption on a large enough scale, because that is going to destroy quality of life as well as the economy. You can’t really put that genie back in the bottle.

I don’t see how building nuclear reactors is anywhere near that in difficulty. That’s just education and infrastructure spending.

5843

This goes back to the ww2 thing. Like the US went from 1.6% of GDP spent military in 1940 to 5% in 1941, 16% in 1942, 32% in 1943. If we treated this like an actual threat, we could do a lot. Throw 20% of GDP at new energy infrastructure and research and things would happen quickly. Even better, that investment would actually be economically productive, while all war material produced in the 40’s might as well have been dumped into the ocean, from an economic perspective.

5844

No.

Reducing overall energy consumption has never been done, ever, in the history of the human race.

Building 57 nuclear reactors is a thing which is actually possible. It’s already been done. It’s easy.

Seriously, what do you guys saying, “This can’t be done” think is actually hard about this? It’s not hard. It’s a solved problem. It’s just building things that we’ve already built a million times.

The idea that building nuclear reactors is hard is just absurd and objectively false on its face.

I mean, jesus christ, we built freaking spaceships, flew up, and landed on the moon in less than a decade.

5845

I think Matt is arguing about the lack of Americans (and their government) ability/will to pursue and complete big projects today. A cultural problem, rather than a technical problem. I disagree with him that it’s as impossible as cutting energy consumption sufficiently, though.

5846

Well, if we can’t build things which we already built a ton of, then yeah, we’re pretty hosed, because we sure as hell won’t be building a ton of stuff we don’t even know how to build yet.

It’s definitely not as hard as doing something which has literally never happened, ever, though.

5847

I’d bet that energy consumption fell in Rome between say 300 AD and 500 AD. Maybe not the kind of model you want to follow though.

5848

I’m not saying it’s technically difficult (though a new reactor costs between $10 billion and $20 billion to construct and bring online, so building 50 of them would not be “easy”.) I’m saying it won’t happen. In the last 20 years, the United States has added one (1) single reactor to its capacity, and that one was at an existing plant. And there is only one (1) new nuclear power plant currently even at the planning stage in the U.S. (Blue Castle, in Utah.)

Also, the U.S. currently produces about 20% of its energy with its nearly 100 currently operating reactors. (And we produce about 1/3 of the world’s total nuclear energy, more than any other country.) Adding another 50 reactors to that inventory wouldn’t even replace coal and would probably be more expensive than a commensurate investment in new renewables.

I’m a nuclear supporter. I’ve worked around nuclear energy technology for my whole career. I just don’t think it will ever happen on a large enough scale to make a difference for climate change.

5849

But this is at least partly because you’ve got opposition to nuclear coming from corporations on the right, and activists on the left.
Those activists on the left supposedly think that climate change is the greatest threat in the history of the world. So they shouldn’t be opposing any carbon neutral options. They need to stop that.

Those hundred reactors currently in operation are not modern reactors. Many of them are quite small by comparison to a modern reactor like an AP1000. Many of those reactor cores are only putting out a few hundred MW, while an AP1000 is smaller, easier to build, and dramatically more reliable, while also putting out around 1100 MW.

I forget if it was you, but weren’t you the guy who was a nuke tech on a sub? Someone here was.

That’s the thing that is so crazy… this technology is mature enough that we can put it on boats. We just need someone to lead us in that direction.

And frankly, I think that someone needs to be from the left. They need to be able to speak to the left leaning activists and say, “Look, this is the only way we save the planet. Get on board.” And that’s gonna get you a decent chunk of right wing support too, because supporting nuclear is the majority position on the right.

5850

But it is precisely the fact that we understand the potential driver of doom that changes it from a foregone conclusion to a choice, a terrible outcome in the universe of all possible futures. I run models through my brain; I check them with the calculations I do on a computer. This is not optimism, or even hope. Even in the best of all possible worlds, I cannot offer the certainty of safety. Doom is a possibility; it may that we have already awakened a sleeping monster that will in the end devour the world. It may be that the very fact of human nature, whatever that is, forecloses any possibility of concerted action.

But I am a scientist, which means I believe in miracles. I live on one. We are improbable life on a perfect planet. No other place in the Universe has nooks or perfect mountaintops or small and beautiful gardens. A flower in a garden is an exquisite thing, rooted in soil formed from old rocks broken by weather. It breathes in sunlight and carbon dioxide and conjures its food as if by magic. For the flower to exist, a confluence of extraordinary things must happen. It needs land and air and light and water, all in the right proportion, and all at the right time. Pick it, isolate it, and watch it wither. Flowers, like people, cannot grow alone.

5851

Those final two paragraphs are kind of incongruent with the rest of the post, which is pretty apocalyptic. It’s worth quoting the Franzen article she’s responding to:

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I draw from the prescriptions of policy-makers and activists, share certain necessary conditions.

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy.
. . .
The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets.
. . .
Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting.
. . .
Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.

If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically —a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.

5852

I don’t know if you were referring to me, but I was a submarine nuc. This nuclear debate is frustrating for me. Either climate change is an existential threat to our civilization or not. If it is, failing to embrace proven, carbon free power generation is suicidal It’s not a zero sum game, we can build power plants and invest like crazy in renewables to replace them. The people opposed to nuclear power as a least a significant part of the carbon solution are either ignorant or don’t really see climate change as a significant threat.

5853

It really has nothing to do with nuclear per se. It’s a question of how societies make decisions. Existential threats that take multiple lifetimes to materialize don’t produce the kind of fear necessary to galvanize people to painful action. That’s true about every necessary solution here.

The thing is, this is what representative democracy is for. Representatives are supposed to make the hard decisions and impose them on their constituents and then pay the electoral cost for having done the right thing. That works for wars, which are proximate, but sucked for slavery and inequality and pollution and climate change.

5854

That pretty much sums up my feelings. How about a bumper sticker:

Nuclear or die.

5855

Of course we’re not really talking about 57 reactors. The energy consumption of 70’s France is a long way from 2020’s Europe, US, China, India, and whole entire rest of the world. Each reactor can be better but it’s still more like 1000 (very, very rough questimate)

Ultimately I think technology is the answer but I’m not optemsitic about any solution that treats reducing energy consumption as an impossible goal while assuming that it is easy to put the entire developed world on a wartime economic model in the face of a threat that is dire but not immediate.

5856

But the world didn’t build 57 reactors in France.

France, alone, built 57 reactors. And it wasn’t wartime. It was simply in response to the oil crisis.

The US could easily build far more.

Reducing energy consumption is literally impossible. We all understand that, right?

The population of Earth is increasing. Even if you forced the developing world to stop improving their standard of living, and stay below the Western world forever, human energy consumption is going to increase. Always. Forever.

If you want to decrease humanity’s carbon footprint, the only viable option is to replace fossil fuels with carbon neutral energy. And the only way to do that currently, is with a large nuclear component to provide baseline generation.