From "Is There a Nuclear Option for Stopping Climate Change?" by Spencer Bokat-Lindell (NYT).
August 27, 2021
"Nuclear power may be safer than the public believes, but the public’s beliefs matter a great deal in a democracy."
"Solar and wind power are extremely popular with Americans, but nuclear power is viewed unfavorably, with more people opposing its expansion than supporting it..... 'It’s absurd to be "pronuclear" or "antinuclear" on an ideological/identity basis,' David Roberts, an energy and climate journalist, said last year. 'The world should build whatever carbon-free options are fastest and (with all costs considered) cheapest. Nuclear doesn’t currently fit that bill, but new reactor designs might change that. If so, build them; if not, don’t.'"
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Absurdly, literally trillions are being spent subsidizing wind, solar, and biomass. Just a few hundred billion would make nuclear cheap and safe and available forever.
If climate change is really the existential crisis that the alarmists say it is then nuclear power should be pursued as fast as possible. It offers the only reliable source of energy that can power the growing needs of the developing world. Period. Reluctance on nuclear seems to be stuck in some quaint Rousseauian fantasy of living in harmony with Mother Earth that never existed and never will. Opposition to nuclear only points out that the motivation of climate alarmists is social and not scientific. As they say, green on the outside and pink on the inside.
Once before Three Mile Island I was a nuke engineering major and we knew what was the cheapest long term energy solution.Solar and wind were and are unreliable and kill birds.Coal was dirty and oil was going away.Geo and hydro were not available everywhere.Then lawyers became involved and nuke got very expensive.Very fast.Solutions like Yucca Mountain were engineered for the long term storage problem.Killed by Harry Reid.Since then I have gotten old and nobody seems to learn much.
We've still not come to grips with the disposal of solar panels, and the minerals and chemicals that would leach out of them in a waste site. Imagine the number of solar panels it would require to power a city. Where do those panels get disposed? How does it break down without destroying the ground water?
And how do we we get the rare earth minerals needed in solar panels? From the Chinese, of course. The Chinese who, by the way, are ingratiating themselves with the Taliban as I write this, looking to establish rights to mining rare earth minerals in Afghanistan, for payment to the Taliban. All of which we are paying for (of course) through our buying of Chinese-made goods to fill our lives.
And the same applies to wind turbines and the blades powering those turbines. We have relatively few wind turbines in use now, yet the blades are already filling landfills. Have you seen the size of those things? How do we dispose of a nation full of them?
And in the end, solar panels and wind turbines do not produce nearly enough power to run a city, let alone a country. You would need an America blanketed with solar panels from coast to coast to power this nation. It won't work. It's still best used in small doses, mainly in residential use with a bit of commercial use to offset regular sources (read: oil, gas, electric).
So nuclear is actually the best answer. And there are new designs, as well as new methods of fusion on the horizon. It would be good to see it happen sooner rather than later. But in the meantime, we'll probably need to get back to drilling and mining because we're going to need electricity to power our electric cars being mandated. I wonder if they've thought about where they'll get their electricity for all those electric cars?
1. I don't trust the thinking of any man with a hyphenated last name.
2. CAGW is a total and complete scam that only benefits the elites and China.
3. Per Yale Environment 360, China is building 3,000 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants.
4. Solar and wind are unreliable and expensive. The American people are idiots to favor this. Look at the deadly and expensive blackouts in TX this year.
Texas had too much wind in its grid because of the 26% first federal income tax credit.
Nuclear is the only real option that would actually work with current technology. There are completely safe designs that produce salt waste.
To put these numbers into perspective: the yearly consumption of electricity of the average affluent person (western standards of living) requires one gram of thorium per year. This thorium will be turned into one gram of fission products. Of this gram, about 83% only requires storage for 10 years. The remaining 17% needs storage for about 300 years, after which the radiotoxicity of this fraction is lower than that of uranium ore.'
Wind and terrestrial solar are unable to maintain consistent load to support an alternating current electrical system. They will never be as efficient as nuclear.
Only stupid people support Wind and Solar energy and oppose MSRs.
Stupid people and evil people that want to send us back to the stone ages.
They'll never go with nuclear because the environmental movement isn't about protecting the planet, it's about attacking western society and the middle class.
Now return to your habitation pod, watch Netflix, and eat your bugs.
A lot of the issues are straight-out nonsense. "Nuclear waste" is one that people mention a lot. I don't know if they realize that all the nuclear waste that has ever been created could fit in one super-sized Walmart. Put a big fence around it and a couple of signs saying Danger. It's the stupidest issue in the whole world.
The high expense of nuclear is an issue, but misleading. A very large part of the high cost is a regulatory system which makes building a nuclear plant take decades and pass multiple huge barriers. Even environmentalists who have come to support nuclear haven't come to support getting rid of all that regulation. China, of course, has no such problems and is building away.
On the flip side, the article does not mention the most important issue with renewables: they cannot currently replace the main power source of an area, because they do not provide power whenever you need it. Places that try to rely on them have (so far) always ended up buying power from something else for peak load. California is trying to use batteries to fix the problem, which is a good idea, but you just can't have enough batteries, plus batteries create big environmental issues of their own.
I hate to break it to these people, but the climate is going to keep changing no matter what humans do.
That said, nuclear power is much more sensible that wind (which is complete boondoggle except in certain rare sites) and solar (which is environmentally horrific in the long run and not reliable in the short run.)
Nice to see the comments re-enabled. I have always enjoyed the thoughts of other readers on this forum.
I think the science points to large number of smallish standardized liquid thorium salt reactors, with associated spent fuel processing.
"Solar and wind power are extremely popular with Americans..."
Solar and wind aren't very popular with me. Here in California, we're about to hit the days of late summer and fall when the heat and wind start up, meaning soon there'll be brownouts and blackouts because, as it turns out, solar panels don't work in the dark, and wind turbines are incredibly inefficient; a huge percentage at any given time are still.
Besides, those giant wind farms are about as heinous a scar on the landscape as anything I can imagine...except for the heinouser solar farms--acres of panels that I can't believe environmentalists--the same people who don't want a single dead tree cut down in a forest, thus multiplying our fire danger--don't sabotage with spikes and mines.
We're all supposed to be driving electric cars in 9 years, but there isn't enough juice to supply all the toasters. Bring on the nukes. Please.
If the AGW thing were actually an existential crisis, we'd act like it was a crisis and build nukes.
Since the greens don't like nukes, it must not be a real crisis IMHO. Like medieval dispensations, the green/left promises: "give us money and we'll save your souls"
Wind and solar are NOT the solution to base load satisfaction or 24/7 grid stability.
Building wind and solar only make ROI sense by mining the tax advantages. Every solar or wind installation must be paired with a NG power plant, so you buy two sets of capital investment, two sets of staff and pass the cost on to rate payers.
In effect, building wind and solar is a tax on poor people.
don't get me started on EVs replacing ICEs.
The media pushes negative stories about nuclear power and positive stories about wind and solar. My Dad was a nuclear physicist who lamented the negative public perception around nuclear power. It’s ridiculous to assume that humans can transition away from oil, gas, and coal, and not use lots of nuclear power. It’s not like we’re all going to magically become Amish and stop using electricity.
I go back and forth between being a disillusioned supporter and a regretful opponent of greatly expanded nuclear energy. Too many people are too terrified of all things nuclear.
About 20,000 people died from the tsunami that caused the Fukushima disaster. No one died directly from radiation exposure. Which got more attention, the tsunami or the meltdown?
In about August of 2021 I read an analysis on a semi-reputable website attributing 11,000 American deaths since March to fallout from Fukushima. I pointed out that this made no sense, and for my trouble I was told I was a shill for the nuclear industry, or lying on behalf of the government.
The highest radiation dose I've read of is 25 rem. Nobody dies from that. Nobody gets sick from that in the short run. Your chances of dying of cancer, in the fullness of time, go from about 20% without that dose to about 21% with it. So how did any ostensibly sane person think 11,000 Americans had died from radiation, when nobody had come down with acute radiation sickness (which is what can kill you in the short run) and nobody had had time to develop radiation-induced cancers?
Well, there was an uptick in our death rate that spring and summer. Somebody multiplied a tiny, tiny rate increase by a population of 320 million, got 11,000 deaths, pointed to Fukushima and said, Well, what else could it have been? And lots of people believe that. Lots of people involved in Operation Tomodachi think all their health problems since then were caused by radiation: That they got hit with much more fallout than anyone admits, and that the denials are exactly what you'd expect in a cover-up.
Now and then, someone screws up. Or nature manages to exceed the design margin for safety. And then a lot of people think the whole thing is a mistake, and countries like Germany that care more than we do about their carbon footprints decide to shut down their whole nuclear industry.
I don't think we'll convince enough people that nuclear is the way to go to make a big difference.
The world should build whatever carbon-free options are fastest and (with all costs considered) cheapest. Nuclear doesn’t currently fit that bill, but new reactor designs might change that. If so, build them; if not, don’t.
Heresy! Heresy!
But also wisdom.
“ The world should build whatever carbon-free options are fastest and (with all costs considered) cheapest.”
What about RELIABLE?
“ The world should build whatever carbon-free options are fastest and (with all costs considered) cheapest.”
What about RELIABLE?
Or maybe more carbon dioxide in the air is better for growing things. And a warm planet is better for humans than a cold one. The last 1,000 years were the coldest millennium in the last ten millennia. We should be thinking about what we are going to do when the glaciers return.
25,000 years ago there was ice a mile thick where Lake Michigan is. Too much carbon dioxide in the air should be the least of our worries.
'They'll never go with nuclear because the environmental movement isn't about protecting the planet, it's about attacking western society and the middle class.'
They'll never go with nuclear because the environmental movement isn't about protecting the planet, it's about shaking down western society and the middle class.
What about RELIABLE?
---------
Reliability is a cost factor.
You mean the twitterverse is against nuclear power. I don't think the average person cares where their power comes from. As long as the AC works, their good. I've said for years that if your solution to climate change issues doesn't start with nuclear power, you're really interested in graft or political power or both.
It'll be a while before nuclear will be able to fill the void. There are a lot of old people just waiting to relive their youth in the anti-nuke movement. We see it in all the old (white) guys and gals getting excited with the new anti-racism protests. More about them feeling 20 again than reality. But they, like all of us, are dying off or getting to old to make much of a fuss.
Full disclosure, I switched out of engineering into Physics in undergrad to learn about nuclear. After all, the idiot box told me that Reagan was going to kill us all in a fiery hell. Neutron bombs were going to kill all living things but leave Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings intact. With many a colonel thinking that's just the ticket for getting the Ruskies. They built nuclear power plant across the river when I was in high school with its massive towers spewing death, or steam if you take the time to actually learn about them.
Now that doesn't mean that US nuclear power plants didn't have their problems. They treated each one like a Frank Lloyd Wright creation, unique, using new untested ideas and ended up with the same, maybe a pretty facade but bloody hard to maintain and operate inside. South Korea went the Henry Ford way of perfecting a design then manufacturing it to be dropped into place with standardized operating processes. If we go the South Korea way, it will work out. If we go the one-off, designer-vanity way of the path, failure. But for the time being, advances have to be below the radar of the nostalgic protester class.
We will either build nuclear power plants, or live like the Amish in the future, and living like the Amish is probably me be ridiculously optimistic in the alternative.
Nuclear power is scary!
Think about how many people died at Three Mile Island.
"Nuclear power may be safer than the public believes, but the public’s beliefs matter a great deal in a democracy."
That would be a valid comment, if it was coming from people who haven't been spending a great deal of time and effort encouraging the public not to trust nuclear power.
But, since that isn't the case, it's a garbage argument.
The real problem with nuclear power is that teh AGW / "Climate Change" movement is about destroying Western Civilization as it currently exists, not about "saving the Planet".
Nuclear power allows society to continue on, and thus must be destroyed
Without huge government subsidies wind and solar make zero economic sense. Upstream and downstream pollution from the manufacturing and disposal of wind and solar power components is never mentioned in news or political discussion of energy. Nobody invests in wind or solar except for the subsidies whether as tax credits or flat out gifts and graft.
More slavery and child abuse exists in the green energy supply chain than in any domestic oil & gas operation. More child slavery than at The Bulwark. More child abuse than The Weekly Standard or George Conways house.
Back in the early '80's, during my second attempt at getting kicked out of the Engineering College at Iowa State; i used to walk through Coover on my way to skipping my Eng Mech 274 (statics) class
Didn't take any classes at Coover, it was all EE (and Nuc E); but was a great shortcut to the parking lot
Anyway, everytime i'd walk through; i see a bumpersticker on a Prof's door, that said:
MORE PEOPLE DIED IN TEDDY KENNEDY'S CAR;
THAN AT THREE MILE ISLAND
and everytime, i'd smile
LakeLevel: “ Absurdly, literally trillions are being spent subsidizing wind, solar, and biomass. Just a few hundred billion would make nuclear cheap and safe and available forever.”. But your objection is off the mark. The problem with nuclear is, it would solve the energy (and “carbon problem” as well). And then? No more grift.
The whole point is the grift.
Do the public's beliefs [about Covid] matter a great deal in this democracy?
He is certainly correct that the political framing of the issue is key. And I completely agree that the ideological war against nuclear power is insane at many levels -- as my home state of NY will soon find out with the closing of Indian Point. But the idea that 'climate change' is going to be stopped by a change in attitude regarding nuclear power -- or even a change in policy favoring its development -- is quite silly.
First, just consider the story in the US. One of the most obvious characteristics of the American system of government today is how easy it can be to stymie any large scale project. That's true about nuclear plants, it's true about wind-farms, it's true about large-scale solar fields, it's true about pipelines, and on and on. Despite all the talk about a carbon-free electrical grid, it will never happen. The reasons are in part technical -- there isn't enough juice in solar/wind to overcome the intermittency and storage problems; and new technologies that might work at the required scale are either not yet developed (proposed electric storage technologies; fusion/better fission; carbon sequestration; various ideas about 'ocean or geothermal power,' etc.); or even more toxic politically (the NIMBY forces, or the hard core, ideologues opposed to any alternative will block all of them using politics or the courts). Just look at how all of that has played out up to now in the US, and then try to explain why in this 50/50 country it will be different going forward.
Even if those issues could be resolved (and they can't), the costs of the proposed solutions are so astronomical that to implement those 'solutions' would eat up most of the entire federal budget (and a huge chunk of GNP) that isn't eaten up by entitlement taxes and mandated transfer payments. When the happy-talk can no longer obscure that unhappy fact, the 'climate change' proposals become clearly and obviously dead everywhere. At that point, much more affordable and efficient proposals about now to adapt to the impact of 'climate change,' whatever that impact may turn out to be, will take center stage, as Lomborg and others keep saying. Again, just look at what happened at the state and federal level with 'free medical care.' States that tried it were faced with going broke and had to change course; and the feds got scared off just by the projected costs. Retooling the entire US economy to be carbon-free will be much, much worse in its financial and economic impact.
On top of that, the world outside the US and the EU has no interest (other than rhetorical) in the 'climate change' mantra. The plans in China, India, Africa and everywhere else in the under-developed or developing world for expanded use of coal or other carbon based fuels make the very idea of causing reductions in the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 utterly chimerical -- and once you get past the silly talk, all anyone is proposing is achieving marginal reductions in the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2, not actual decreases in the concentration. No way that huge swaths of the world, struggling to escape crushing poverty, will postpone their own development and economic growth just to keep Little Greta and her merry band, let alone rich Western lefties, from frowning at them.
It's all virtue signaling all the way down, starting with the notion that 'climate change' is a scientific rather than an economic problem. It's all about values -- what kind of world does the world's population want to live in -- which science can't measure and doesn't try to. Articles like this one that avoid those unfortunate realities are just completely counterfactual and ridiculous.
Murphy's Law. If something can go wrong, then, in the fullness of time, it will go wrong. That's the thinking behind closing down the reactors. A full scale reactor fuck up could wipe out an entire state so the risks outweigh the benefits.....I can understand the rationale. What I don't understand is why this same thinking doesn't apply to creating enhanced function in virology labs.
To make your electrical grid run on only solar and wind power is to not have an electrical grid or, at least, not an electrical grid reliable enough to be useful. For some reason, I think "no more electricity" is not a popular position.
if we are going to be snippy about it - the way americans pronounce it should be nucularpower
CON: Chernobyl and Fukushima. Big con.
PRO: Most efficient power source to date. And the Musk, Bezos and Branson transport systems will be able to carry spent rods to the moon since they'll already be there mining lithium.
I remember Stephen Den Beste, of loving memory. An engineer, he would comment on the latest solar / wind idea, and use math to show it doesn't scale.
Each time, he'd get blowback from people who refuse to do the math.
Through example, he showed me that we're doomed, and everything that has happened since has not changed my mind.
If people are serious about net-zero carbon emissions, nuclear is the ONLY viable option to get it done. If they are not pushing nuclear power, they are not being serious.
The largest producer of nuclear waste is medicine: radiation treatments for cancer and their associated paraphernalia. ANY discussion of future energy requirements and solutions that doesn't involve nuclear is insanity.
The "climate change" crisis is all a scam. The Earth's temperature fluctuate as the Sun's total irradiance changes, not as CO2 concentration changes. When there are a lot of sunspots, the Sun is in an active period with more radiation, a stronger solar wind and stronger magnetic fields. Those stronger magnetic fields keep cosmic rays away from the Earth and reduce the cloud cover created by those cosmic rays. Exactly the opposite happens when there a few or not sunspots. The Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age was a result of no sunspots.
The climate models ignore solar activity. They are not validated against the last 40-years of climate data and cannot match the temperature records. Their temperature predictions are three times higher than the actual temperature. Climate models are crap. GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The next solar cycle is predicted to have few sunspots. The current solar activity is matching these predictions. The next few solar cycles are predicted to be weak, with corresponding cold temperatures predicted.
I don't think I have previously made this comment on the Althouse blog about my little tangle with solar energy in Saunders County, Nebraska. If I have, here it is again.
OPPD selected a developer to build 81mw of solar panels on 500 acres of prime irrigated farm ground in Saunders County. The county seat is Wahoo.
I tried to gain some clients to fight this thing. I went to the public first meeting and spoke. My pitch line was, "Nebraska is the Cornhusker state; not the Chinese solar panel state."
I won! And, without a doubt, I turned the tide. But that vote was only advisory. The County Board had the final say.
There was a large crowd. The meeting was at the fair grounds. A woman had organized some opponents. I had briefly met her and another woman at the meeting and another info meeting at the VFW.
This project is going to cost OPPD $125m. OPPD only has $1b in revenue. And, as a political subdivision, it can't use the 26% federal income tax credit. The developer hired a liberal lobbyist lawyer (CA law school) who is the king of wind in NE.
On the way out the door, the CEO of OPPD was totally shocked but he did acknowledge me.
The local woman organizer told me she hired a lawyer from Lincoln. But he didn't show up at the first meeting.
I wasn't going to take "no" from one person, so I sent letters to all the people within a certain distance from the project. This is allowed by the NE rules of professional responsibility. I also took out an ad ($75) in the local paper.
No responses from my letter.
But one of my letters went to the vice-chair of the County Board because he owns land in the area. He's the leading lawyer in Saunders county and owns lots of land and the title company. The Chairwoman was recused because she is leasing her land to the solar company. This guy was also at the first meeting along with the County Attorney (a complete idiot, IMO). He saw what I had done. (One of my friends clerked for him in law school at UNL.)
I show up the day of the meeting with no clients. Vice chair calls me out and limits my speech time because I have no client. Stupidly, I answered his question honestly.
Lincoln lawyer shows up at the last minute and hand delivers a "law review" type six page letter telling the farmers on the County Board why they shouldn't grant the special use permit.
And the Lincoln lawyer then gives a terrible speech and buries his best point. The best legal point was also buried on page 3 of his brief.
The best point (and I'm an expert on the rules of statutory construction) was that the regs required that any use must be in harmony with the surrounding area. The surrounding area was a cemetery, farms and some homes. The solar panel was clearly not in harmony. That was my first point.
County Board votes unanimously for the project. Oddly enough the mayor of the closest village (Yutan) was against it. My view is that they wanted that $300k a year in extra tax money. These solar panels will probably be made by Chinese slaves. Human rights? Who cares!
And OPPD rates the solar panels at ZERO output in the winter.
Here's the worst part. This Lincoln lawyer (per my one source) charged these people $16k. I would have done a better job for $5k. They were unhappy. I tried to get hired for the appeal, but the leader wouldn't even talk to me. This one woman totally screwed this thing up.
I was confident I could have won the trial in district court. The opponents missed the appeal deadline. The value of their property will decline.
I'm still mad about this. But I have a plan to win in the end. Like the Left, I will never quit.
The stumbling block for nuclear power has always been an uneducated public that is easily manipulated by green fanatics and grifters. The navy has been operating nuclear reactors in submarines and aircraft carrier for some 60 years without serious incident, and there is absolutely no reason civilian power plants should not be doing the same. Unfortunately, you can't reason with an ignorant population and you can't convince the innumerate that the risks are minuscule if they don't understand even the basics of probability and statistics and risk assessment. Particularly so when there are dozens of Solyndra-type scams out there buying politicians. We'll never get to nuclear power until the only other option is to freeze in the dark.
One follow-up to the Saunders County solar project. The developer says it will spend $300k on trees and shrubs. My buddy runs the largest and best nursery in Omaha. I gave him the lead. It is a bid project, but he has a chance.
If Althouse and Meade ever visit Omaha, I will give you a personal tour of Mulhall's Garden Center. It is epic!
"Solar and wind power are extremely popular with Americans..."
So were The Love Boat and Dallas.
The key to nuclear energy is a standardized plant, not only for reduced design and construction costs, but for reduced licensing and environmental review costs. Can you imaging having to hand build every car, and then licensing that car? That is what we have today.
And as far as radioactive wastes go, when someone tells you that we will have to live with these wastes for thousands of years, they do not understand that by definition, that is a low level of radioactivity. In other words, the half life is so long that the actual radiation is very low.
Our problem is that most people are ignorant about nuclear power. We would do well to actually educate people about the real benefits and dangers, so that we demistify nuclear.
Is there a nuclear power option for stopping climate change? No. The climate has always changed and so we can expect it to continue to change, regardless of how we produce power.
Now, what they mean to ask is if there is a part for nuclear energy to play in the exaggerated manmade climate change crisis that the climate change religion is preaching. Yes, it is the only answer if they really believed in this crisis that they keep preaching about. The fact that they keep regulating nuclear energy production out of practicality shows that there is no crisis.
Nuclear power is scary. Global warming is scary. Terrific energy has been expended to make them both so, regardless of the truth of the matters. But we better figure out something soon, as California is scheduled to shut down its last nuclear power plant next year. My utility, PG&E, is running TV commercials advising setting AC thermostats at 78, others promoting electric cars, and still others asking us to not use much electricity between 4 and 8 pm. And city after city is prohibiting natural gas hookups in new construction.
Where is this electricity going to come from? The wall socket, stupid!
The biggest problem with nuclear power is the construction trades unions. Doing bad welds so that your pals can inspect and fail them, then you get to cut it down and to the welding and re-inspection and add double the cost and union man hours. The cost of union labor caused overruns that would make anyone a fool to build now. The only hope is to build small non refuelable reactors of about 75 to 100 mw and collect them together. If they can be built in factories and shipped complete to the site (fuel separate) instead of by union labor in the field they would not cause massive overruns.
The enlightened only care about people's opinions sometimes. Against nuclear, we need to go along. Against unlimited illegal immigration, we need to ignore them, their just misinformed and racist. Against masking, we'd better mandate it.
I do not want to be ugly here, BUT......While I do not believe AGW is the boogeyman it is made out to be by a huge number of statists intent on increasing their power by using it as such, I do not believe it is necessarily the smartest thing in the world to run an uncontrolled experiment on how much CO2 we can pump out before it does cause damage, on the only world we happen to have access to. But if you do not believe that nuclear power is the only viable option we have currently, then you are not qualified to have an opinion.
"My utility, PG&E, is running TV commercials advising setting AC thermostats at 78, others promoting electric cars, and still others asking us to not use much electricity between 4 and 8 pm."
"In order to avoid the possibility that there might not be enough electricity to go around, we want you to voluntarily go without electricity."
Brilliant.
"My utility, PG&E, is running TV commercials advising setting AC thermostats at 78, others promoting electric cars, and still others asking us to not use much electricity between 4 and 8 pm."
"In order to avoid the possibility that there might not be enough electricity to go around, we want you to voluntarily go without electricity."
Brilliant.
I wish everyone would watch Illinois Energy Prof on Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Energy. He explains nuclear energy's risks and benefits with great clarity, but without the math that scares many people away.
I recommend his entire channel, especially his deep dives on Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. I'm learning things I never knew about nuclear energy and related sciences, and I've been a proponent all my life. He's that good.
I also recommend Charlie Martin and his banana equivalent dose. This one's a little more math-intensive, but it illustrates people's absurd misunderstanding of nuclear risk.
When the sun is burning out and future earthlings are freezing to death, they will curse their ancestors...us.
"If only they had burned the cheap coal and oil that was available back then, it could have warmed the planet and saved mankind!"
“Nuclear is the only real option that would actually work with current technology. There are completely safe designs that produce salt waste.”
Have been getting IEEE Spectrum for a quarter century or so now, and every couple years they have articles on modern nuclear designs. One of the big improvements with modern designs is that they are fail safe, not fail dangerous or catastrophic, as is the case with extant nuclear reactors. That means that if anything untoward happens, they stop automatically, and you have to do something to keep them operating. Contrast that with the extant reactors that go can go critical, with uncontrolled nuclear reactions, if things go wrong, and they aren’t, for example, properly cooled. The other things that these fission reactors designs can bring is modularity, which means offsite manufacturing and little onsite Union labor requirements, and the possibility of putting them much closer to the loads they need to support.
One of the funny things about the crazies in CA, is that one of two fusion projects in the country, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is located at Lawrence Livermore, in Livermore, CA, which is essentially run by UC Berkeley. It uses a bunch of high powered lasers to get fusion (as contrasted with the projects using magnetic confinement), and hit break even a week or two ago for a very short period of time. I was at LLNL several times in the 1980s when I had a DOE Q clearance, and it isn’t that far east of San Francisco. My relationship to the NIF is that several of us worked with someone who independently invented technology that they thought might be key. He had a signed NDA with UC, which they violated, allowing a German researcher to take his idea back home, and file a patent for it there. He sued for trade secret infringement, and had a good case - except that the CA Supreme Court ruled that the statute of limitations (SoL) had run while they were actively lying to him and hiding their TS infringements. The rest of the country runs under the “discovery” rule, where the SoL for TS doesn’t start until the TS owner discovers (or should have) the infringement. TX may be in the same situation (I wrote a brief when I was working there in the late 1990s about it). In any case, he was faced with one branch of the CA govt (Supreme Court) protecting another (UC system), screwing a CA citizen.
The solution to NIMBY issues is to build the fusion and large fission reactors across the border in AZ or NV. Give an Indian tribe enough money and they would likely be excited about it. Already happening with coal plants. And if anything happens, it is in the middle of a very sparsely populated desert (there is a significant water issue with current Gen fission plants). Then run power lines in across the desert, which is far safer than what PG&E is facing with the wildfire problems caused by their failure to clear the increasing fuel along their power lines headed north to the NW hydro generators. Oh, and it would be a short train ride to the Yucca Mtn nuclear deposit site that Obama shut down at the behest of Harry Reid.
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