Is Nuclear Power Our Energy Future, Or in a Death Spiral?

[sue4e3]

It is now generally agreed that the world must rapidly reduce carbon emissions in order to fight off dangerous climate change, but the “how” of that process remains up for debate. And within that debate, nothing seems to produce such starkly opposing viewpoints as nuclear energy. Some experts and advocates argue that carbon-free nuclear power represents the only real hope of keeping the planet’s temperature in check. Others claim that nuclear is risky, unnecessary and far too expensive to make a dent.

The same basic data set — nuclear plants currently in existence, those under construction, the status of new technologies, the history of costs and delays, and a few striking accidents — produces those totally contradictory opinions and predictions. Nuclear power is a Rorschach test: You see what you want to see — a rosy nuclear future or an old-world dinosaur in a slow death spiral — reflecting your own views on the energy present and future. In all likelihood, no one will be proven right or wrong for decades.

Today and Tomorrow

Nuclear power today accounts for around 10 percent of the total electricity generation around the world. This varies sharply by country — in the U.S. the rate is about 20 percent, in Russia and Germany it is a bit lower than that, while some other European countries get 40 and 50 percent from nuclear reactors. France has long led the way proportionally, at more than 75 percent (it has the second most total reactors, behind the U.S.). China, though building rapidly, drew less than 3 percent of its power from nuclear in 2014.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/nuclear-power-energy-future-or-dinosaur-death-spiral-20103

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Do we have any safe way to dispose of nuclear waste yet?

Because short of shoving it onto rockets and sending it off to the moon, nothing on earth seems to truly be safe.

[hunter]

2. Oh bother. Do we have safe ways to dispose of ANY of our industrial waste???

Starting with carbon dioxide, not to mention all the toxic shit like lead and mercury that have a "half life" of FREAKING FOREVER.

The "waste" argument is absurd. There's just not that much nuclear waste in the world compared to all the other equally toxic crap industrial society spews freely into the air, water, and soil.

Anyone who drives a car or flies in a plane to an antinuclear rally is the worst sort of hypocrite because they'll be spewing carcinogenic and toxic micro-particles the entire way there and back, not to mention climate-wrecking greenhouse gasses, or all the mining, refining, and recycling wastes generated by the automobile and aircraft industries. The same folks who fret about inconsequential amounts of tritium pay no attention at all to the fossil fuel toxins they breathe, drink, eat, and bathe in.

No, I am not a booster of nuclear power. Instead I'm some kind of Luddite, and not a successful one. I can't even convince people in my own family to get rid of their cars or refrigerators. Best I do is avoid buying any manufactured goods new; not cars, not cell phones, not computers, not solar panels for my roof. I'll make exceptions for things like underwear and socks, or the occasional LED lamp to replace a fluorescent, but I'm not always successful in my thrift store shopping and dumpster diving.

If we were a rational species we'd simply ban fossil fuels and see how things shake out. Simply tear down all the fossil fueled power plants and oil refineries, sorry folks, against the law. But we won't. And most assuredly the storms on the horizon, and the storms that are killing people right now, today, and causing this great mass extinction, are NOT a consequence of nuclear power. Even accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are small curiosities compared to the daily carnage of fossil fuel use.

This civilization is going to die, simply because is not sustainable. Maybe we can see it off gently, like hospice care as opposed to the violations of aggressive surgeons and intensive care units, pursuing the vain belief it can be saved, or worse than that a violent suicide by war, defending religions and ideologies that the universe pays no heed.

[GliderGuider]

6. Nail on the head.

If we were a rational species we'd simply ban fossil fuels and see how things shake out. Simply tear down all the fossil fueled power plants and oil refineries, sorry folks, against the law. But we won't. And most assuredly the storms on the horizon, and the storms that are killing people right now, today, and causing this great mass extinction, are NOT a consequence of nuclear power. Even accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are small curiosities compared to the daily carnage of fossil fuel use.

This is a deadly accurate understanding of the situation.

[kristopher]

8. Emotionalized sophistry disguised as nihilism

Oh woe is me, where is the hope amidst death and destruction eternal.
Where shall I seek solace in hope or striving for all is but naught...

[kristopher]

9. I forgot - nuclear power is a fucked up way to meet our energy needs.

We can do everything we need far more safely and for less money, while achieving greater quality of life with renewables and energy efficiency.

'Yes we can' switch to 100 percent renewable energy
European Union environment ministers are discussing implementation of the Paris Agreement on Friday (04.03.). A timely transition out of fossil fuels is doable, says Alexander Och from Earthwatch. That is, if we act now.
Protest at Eiffel Tower at COP21 in Paris (Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier)
Can we switch from fossil fuels to renewables in time to keep temperature rise to 2, ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius?
Not only can we do a transition to truly sustainable systems - financially, economically, socially and environmentally sustainable - we are in the midst of it. There is no one global trend in that direction, but there are many places, municipalities, provinces, whole countries, regions that are transitioning away from fossil fuels toward renewable ways of producing energy, and smarter ways of consuming energy. So it is absolutely doable.

http://www.dw.com/en/yes-we-can-switch-to-100-percent-renewable-energy/a-19085227

[hunter]

11. I have plenty of hope and optimism that this hyper-industrialized society will end.

I never did appreciate cars and airplanes and Apple computers, nor do I believe the solar panels sprouting on our neighborhood rooftops will "save" the world.

Still I manage to find plenty of meaning in life without any ideologies or evangelisms focused on solar or nuclear or whatever "power."

I think the video of the ostrich chasing the bicyclists down the road illustrates the reality of modern society quite well.

A road was built and then people drive their cars along it, stopping occasionally to abandon their garbage. Did you notice that? All the garbage? And then things get weird.

It's not just litter. Even fascist techno-utopias like Singapore, or Yosemite Valley in the summer season, all have the dirt, it's just hidden away better; swept under the rug.

Automobiles and airplanes isolate us from our world. Just walk along any road, explore any airline "destination" on foot, and you'll notice that liter, and see and smell the dirt and dust of burnt fuel, brake pads, and tires. And it's the same everywhere. Only the languages printed on the garbage change.

[phantom power]

10. "Do we have safe ways to dispose of ANY of our industrial waste?"

+1e100

[NNadir]

3. In order to understand the answer to this question, one would need to understand something....

...called science.

Any answer to this question would involve an understanding of science, but the people who ask it, ask it because they, um, don't understand science, engineering or technology.

Thus the question cannot be answered, not because it doesn't have an answer, but because any answer would be beyond the comprehension of the questioner.

I note with due contempt that dangerous fossil fuel waste kills 7 million people per year, and yet no one is concerned with shoving it into rockets and sending it off to the moon.

This is reported in one of the most comprehensive surveys of risk factors and death ever compiled:

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010

Nowhere, absolutely nowhere in that important paper, authored a wide array of academic physicians, epidemiologists and health authorities does the word "nuclear" appear.

Exactly, how many people, in the last half a century of the accumulation of so called "nuclear waste" (which by the way is not "waste" at all) has used nuclear fuel killed? As many people as will die in the next twenty minutes from air pollution?

Which is likely to have killed more people, so called "nuclear waste" or the air pollution created by generating electricity to run computers so people can bad mouth the form of energy invented by the finest minds of the 20th century?

The solution to the so called "problem" of "nuclear waste" is to leave the used nuclear fuel in place until such time that humanity is no longer ruled by ignorance. It does what real wastes do not do: It decays, often into extremely valuable materials.

Has any event associated with nuclear energy, including the events of Chernobyl and Fukushima, hyped ad nauseum, killed anything like the hundreds of millions who died because of air pollution since the first nuclear plants came on line in the 1950s?

Don't know? Don't care?

Well then, what exactly is left to say?

I say: Nuclear energy need not be perfect; it need not be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is. This somehow offends people. They insist that nuclear energy be perfect or that everything else will be able to kill at will. Where is there a shred of intellectual or moral integrity in such an argument?

Unfortunately, the fear and ignorance that attaches itself to nuclear issues has, in fact, be a chain that has been attached to what might have been the last, best, hope of humanity. This ignorance will prove, I expect, comparable in a scale of destruction probably not seen since the times of the black death.

Have a nice week.

[cprise]

7. Nuclear waste isn't "real waste"; merely needs utopian society for a solution.

Its always fun to summarize your posts.

As for that 40X scale-up of the nuclear industry to meet global needs in 2050... maybe utopia will make that possible, too, because it sure isn't compatible with political instability, wars and natural disasters like earthquakes. We can let the third world burn feces for energy, or just take over their governments outright instead of playing the usual destabilization games; That will finally make those places safe for capitalism/nuclear.

[NNadir]

12. Spending two trillion dollars on so called renewable energy in the...

...the last decade alone has not caused that pathetic scam to scale to 1/5 the scale in terms of delivered energy to which the nuclear industry scaled 30 years ago.

It is rather laughable, to the point of absurdity to say nuclear advocates are being utopian, when the grotesque failure of so called "renewable energy" is written so clearly in the planetary atmosphere every time the concentration of carbon dioxide is measured as it is many times a day, all over the planet.

If the nuclear incur were to scale by a factor of 40 - which it won't do because ignorance is now an unstoppable force of destruction - it would be producing more than 1000 exajoules per year, nearly twice the current consumption from all the world's energy supply from all the world's energy sources, including the coal, gas, and oil about which antinukes don't care while humanity waits, like the heros wait in Beckett's absurdist play for Godot, for the grand renewable nirvana that no pile of wasted money can deliver.

I can't say whether it's amusing or appalling when clearly illiterate people attempt to summarize an argument which features points that are entirely beyond their weak knowledge base.

Nuclear energy provides about 28 exajoules of primary energy. The expensive, failed, toxic and unsustainable solar and wind industries after half a century of cheering, chanting, prayer, pleading, and incessant demands on scarce resources, both material and financial, don't produce 5 exajoules combined.

Current world energy demand is thought to be on the order of 560 exajoules.

As for war, when was the last nuclear war? The shit heads who allow the fossil fuel tragedy to continue unabated because they want to whine through science fictions about nuclear wars, never call for bans on oil, even though oil wars occur pretty much continuously.

Of the last million people to die in the violence of war, how many were killed as a result of petroleum diverted to make weapons of mass destruction?

One wonders if anti-nukes know that they are being intellectually dishonest or whether they're simply too stupid to know what honesty might be. Speaking only for myself, having encountered the insipid statements of so many of them, I am inclined to believe the latter.

Have a nice day tommorrow.

[Duppers]

4. Good article

Thank you.

[sue4e3]

5. your welcome