Thanks for the reply, it means a lot that you’re willing to engage with my actual arguments.
When I say cheaper, I refer to a metric known as TCOE - total cost of electricity. It represents all of the various costs required to put a kWh of electrical energy onto the grid.
Regulatory controls obviously are a major factor to the cost of nuclear, but we can’t just waive all regulation to get cheaper electricity, that would be incredibly dangerous.
The thing is, with renewables, once they’re built, they continue to generate electricity for many, many years and require no fuel. Whereas nuclear power requires that a material be extracted from the ground, refined, handled and stored to very precise specifications, and then the waste products from that also have to be managed in a very particular (and expensive) way. You’re essentially arguing that nuclear could be cheaper than renewables if we removed ideological barriers to nuclear, but that’s just not true. Nuclear has very expensive costs associated with it that will mean it’s always more expensive than renewables. The gap will only widen with time as we get better at producing the renewables, too.
For your faster to provision article, it’s truly mind-boggling what the author writes. Did you actually read it or did you just copy-paste links)? Do you actually agree with everything written in that article?
The author has many cherry-picked examples, such as comparing how much electricity supply was added in a single year for various countries. That comparison obviously favours nuclear, because a nuclear power plant takes decades to build, but the year it comes online it provides a huge glut of (expensive) electrical supply. The obvious response to that graph is to divide each installation by the number of years needed to provision it. I checked that out manually for a few of the nuclear plants mentioned in the article and the energy gains essentially vanish into meaninglessness.
Also, maybe it’s a bit of an unfair criticism but the line where he wrote “Why does a nuclear power plant need multiple coolers for the reactor? An aeroplane only has one!” was one of the dumbest things I have ever read in my life.
it’s becoming more difficult to find places to build turbines
No it isn’t. At present, 0.8% of German land area is used by wind farms and there are plans to increase that to 2%. For comparison, agricultural land uses over 50% of the land. Feel free to provide a source for your claim though.
For less environmentally damaging - there are a lot of factors. The us bconcrete, the use of water, extraction of uranium, the biodiversity loss of clearing land for a power plant, the large amount of industrial processes and traffic to commission. Same to operate. Same to decommission. The handling of waste products. The irradiation of water. The co2e emissions of nuclear. I could go on and on.
Your archive link didn’t work and I don’t use Twitter. But I’m not particularly interested in the biased opinion of individuals either way. The environmental impact of nuclear is a well known issue. If you want more information you can just look it up.
I don’t speak German but I did Google around and found this, translated from the German wiki:
The memorandum was partly criticized. According to the Green Party politician Hans-Josef Fell , the CO 2 savings potential is massively overestimated [26] , as the journalist Wolfgang Pomrehn calculates at Telepolis [27] , he only states a maximum initial savings potential of 4% of annual emissions . A publication by the IPPNW also accuses the authors of ignoring the study situation and market developments by claiming that there is only one alternative between fossil and nuclear power generation
Your book is written by a guy employed by the nuclear industry. That isn’t going to be an unbiased view exactly, is it?
nuclear matter is inexhaustible
Nothing is infinite, so that’s a dumb claim right out the gate.
“identified uranium resources [would last] roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total”. Including undiscovered sources. I don’t need to tell you that todays current consumption of nuclear power is really, really low in comparison to other forms of energy, approximately 10%. If we used even 30%, that 240 years becomes 80 years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
Breeder reactors aren’t available and can be dismissed the same way cold fusion is. Worth investing in research in case it’s useful in the future but for now it is not viable.
For decentralisation - smaller reactors is more decentralised but even more expensive and higher environmental impact per kWh. And it’s still less decentralised than renewables.
Even your own link shows that renewables are as safe or safer than nuclear, dude, what the fuck are you thinking about. Additionally, the sources of the data on fatalities caused by renewables are the most ridiculously cherry picked examples I have ever seen, you should look up the paper as it’s genuinely hilarious. And looking exclusively at death rates per kWh is not exactly the whole picture. When it comes to accidents, according to Benjamin Sovacool, nuclear power plants rank first in terms of their economic cost, accounting for 41 percent of all property damage, more than even fossil fuel plants. I couldn’t find information on the number of injuries but I’d bet any amount of money that nuclear causes more injuries than renewables.
More reliable - it’s kind of a “sum of its parts” thing. The sun is always there, so is the wind and the waves and the oceans and geothermal energy. If we don’t have one of those then we’re all fucked anyways. Uranium is a resource which can run out, have shortages, have breakages in the supply chain, and so on. Fewer accidents, less of a target for people who want to disrupt it, if a bunch of them are destroyed in an earthquake then it wouldn’t cause huge disruption, and so on.
And finally, responsiveness. It’s very easy to turn on and off wind and hydro generators on demand, for example. You can look up “smart grid” if you want to learn more. Nuclear is much, much slower than Solar to turn off and on, so Solar can be though of as baseline power and wind/hydro provide conditioning.
https://smartgrid.ieee.org/bulletins/june-2019/maintaining-power-quality-in-smart-grid-the-wind-farms-contribution
Final question: If you had the choice between buying magic power banks that fully charged your phone once a day for free, no questions asked, for $50 each, and you can buy one a day, or a regular one you have to buy uranium for to fill your phone with, which costs $150 and you can buy one every 10 years, which would you choose?
