
The Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables - hirundo
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/14/the-real-reason-they-hate-nuclear-is-because-it-means-we-dont-need-renewables
======
timoth3y
I work in the energy industry and find these kinds of articles frustrating.
Rather than arguing the facts, they paint a caricature of "the other side."

Many environmentalists, particularly those focused on greenhouse gasses are
very supportive of nuclear energy. The strongest argument against nuclear is
not environmental. It is economic.

New nuclear plants take over a decade to bring online, last 40+ years, and
cost $20 billion plus. In an industry moving towards distributed generation
and decentralization this is out of place. We can't predict our energy needs
50 years in advance.

Furthermore, nuclear plant construction tend to run 100%+ over budget and
those costs are passed onto the ratepayers rather than borne the utilities.

The levelized cost of wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear. They can
be brought online in months rather than years, they can be deployed at
whatever scale is needed and we can use market forces to do so.

What's not to love?

However, as many informed environmentalists will point out, it will be almost
impossible to get to zero carbon emissions in the next 50 years without
nuclear power.

The truth is far more interesting and much less confrontational than these
kinds of articles lead you to believe.

~~~
lsfanwetew233
>> The levelized cost of wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear. They
can be brought online in months rather than years, they can be deployed at
whatever scale is needed and we can use market forces to do so.

I'm not personally aware of any place where this is actually true.

Even assuming you are not building out wind and solar on the scale of a
country like germany you still need comparable subsidies to incentivize power
producers to build new renewable energy sources; to say nothing of the grid
management cost. You can quibble with exactly how large the subsidy is and, to
be fair; unless you are employed by a consulting comapany you will never have
access to the internal accounting figures that actually value the marginal
cost of electricity produced by variable renewable sources compared to
conventional sources but the subsidy is almost certainly not less than 15-17%
of the wholesale price. Given that this subsidy is guaranteed by law to extend
far into the future it simply defies imagination to assume that the levelized
cost is somehow comparable at all.

I see this kind of argument a lot and a fair number of times someone claims
they work in the energy industry or at a think tank with renewable energy or
something. If that is the case I find it strange that they can't name actual
examples where wind/solar don't require subsidies. It's usually just a link to
a Lezard report with strange CoC assumptions.

~~~
olau
You need to be careful not to compare existing, written-off power plants with
new plants. What's compared is what would happen if you start a tender for a
new generation capacity - what generation capacity would then win.

Regarding your questions: subsidies have fallen over the years, and we're
beginning to see the first projects without direct subsidies:

[https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/17408602/solar-wind-energy-
ren...](https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/17408602/solar-wind-energy-renewable-
subsidy-europe)

And yes, it's true that running a grid is much more complicated than just
LCoE.

------
chrisco255
"Nuclear energy is the most certain future source" -John McCarthy

FAQ:

[http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html](http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html)

------
jhayward
This is a slanted screed by a guy who publishes nothing but nuclear-shilling
and attacks on renewable technology[1]. I don't know why anyone would read it,
except to catalog the cherry-picking, omissions, and outright falsehoods. It
is basically an example of the Brandolini Principle.[0]

So, to make the ad-hominem explicit, consider the source.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521?lang...](https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521?lang=en)

[1]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/#641ea3afb...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/#641ea3afb1b8)

------
hirundo
"Even if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and
socially benign,” said the god head of renewables, Amory Lovins, in 1977, “it
would still be unattractive because of the political implications of the kind
of energy economy it would lock us into."

Namely, the status quo. Cheaper energy will tend to pacify the masses. If you
want big changes to the power structure, pacific masses are a bug.

And ecologically, wealthier people with time on their hands playing with their
nuclear powered electric ATVs and boats and whatnot will occupy and damage
more ecosystems. They'll consume more of all sorts of resources.

The increase in human energy use by itself, clean or not, works against many
popular ecological and political goals.

------
smashingfiasco
He’s right, environmentalists don’t want solutions, only perpetual problems.
It’s why I can’t take any of them too seriously.

They like to say stuff about how we need to fight for our lives over climate
change, after that group set nuclear power generation behind by multiple
decades at this point.

They like to complain about how it’s too risky, when their public fear
mongering have effectively left us with a fleet of reactors for the 1960’s and
1970’s that have outlived their planned lives. And the NRC has no choice but
to extend their operating licenses until it becomes too expensive for the
utilities to maintain. So they get shut down.

Wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the lot of these talking heads have had
their palms greased by the renewable industry.

Eff them all.

~~~
voxl
Yikes. Talk about ignoring externalities. The energy industry is still run by
oil and gas, not renewables, not nuclear. We've made a lot of progress but to
think that Nuclear is a better solution than renewables is not an
automatically won debate.

------
adfm
Despite rigorous engineering, you still get:

Fukushima Daiichi

Chernobyl

Three Mile Island

Enrico Fermi Unit 1

SL-1

Sodium Reactor Experiment

Windscale

via [https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-
accidents...](https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-
accidents/history-nuclear-accidents#.XGYa3KSIYlQ)

~~~
jhayward
You are omitting the whole next layer, which is all the plants that were run
in "risk-enhancing mode" but just by chance didn't have a catastrophic
accident. Davis-Besse's corroded pressure vessel head, which was covered up
for 6 years before being reported, is a good example.

~~~
adfm
My bad. Thanks for bringing that up.

Also, we're just now getting to see spent fuel at Fukushima?

[http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201902140041.html](http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201902140041.html)

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Yes, total clickbait, but still.

------
zunzun
Nuclear energy would at least stop additional solar waste from accumulating.
So that would be a big plus.

------
informatimago
I don't think so.

The problem with the watermelons (green outside, red inside), is that they're
a runaway psyops from the cold war time KGB. It's basically a headless chicken
that keeps running in the courtyard.

More interesting would be the reason why nuclear power has not been more
developed BEFORE renewables could be considered. And the reason is:

1- civil nuclear power has been developed using uranium instead of thorium
since this produces plutonium as by-product, which is useful to build nuclear
weapon.

2- we want to prevent nuclear weapon proliferation, therefore we have to
prevent proliferation of uranium-based civil nuclear power.

The solution is to start to develop thorium-based civil nuclear power. This
doesn't lead to military-use or ecologically problematic by-products, so it
can be used everywhere on the planet.

~~~
erentz
> 1- civil nuclear power has been developed using uranium instead of thorium
> since this produces plutonium as by-product, which is useful to build
> nuclear weapon.

All of the plutonium production for weapons was done in special purpose
reactors at Hanford, WA. It takes a pretty specialized process to extract the
plutonium from the fuel slugs. And btw most used nuclear fuel in the US is
still sitting in tanks next to the power plants that they were used in.

We also stopped producing plutonium a fairly long time ago because we have
more than enough for all the weapons we could ever conceivably want to
produce.

The reason we have the reactors we do is probably more to do with the US navy
than anything.

~~~
mikevp
The reason you don't try to make bombs from power reactor plutonium: The long
fuel cycle of power reactors produces too much Pu240 and Pu242. It's dang near
impossible to get a nuclear explosion if there's much of those isotopes; their
high spontaneous fission rate makes the bomb "fizzle" before the core can be
sufficiently compressed.

Those who pretend to believe that industrial civilization can be run on "sunny
days when the wind is blowing" energy are engaged in arithmetic denialism.

