> In a worst case scenario, if we go full solar, but are unable to slow a climat change that induce more cloudy weather (because more global evaporation) we are actually solving nothing.
In the worst case scenario, all of the nuclear reactors simultaneously explode (because more earthquakes), raining down a radioactive armageddon on the hordes of screaming peasants below.
There was a thread about nuclear power on here during the year, and some commenter had crunched the numbers on how many nuclear power plants we'd need to fully power the planet. It was in the tens of thousands. Even in the best case scenario, at this density we'd be looking at a Fukushima style disasters occurring regularly, not just every 30 years. That's best case scenario.
Worst case scenario is that it gets more cloudy and our solar doesn't work as well. But lets not forget solar power still works on a cloudy day, just not as well
I'm not an engineer so I've probably got this wrong (would appreciate a correction). The Westinghouse AP-1000 (a Gen3+ reactor) produces 1,117 MWe of power. Say we want to replace all coal plants with nuclear.
2013 world electrical energy generation was 23,322 TWh, with 41.3% being coal (so, 9,632TWh from coal). Presumably consumption was somewhat less (overproduction, transmission losses etc.), but let's just use this figure as it's probably grown anyway in the last few years. So:
(a) Coal generation in MWh: 9,632 * 1,000,000 = 9,632,000,000MWh
Number of AP-1000s needed to replace all coal plants = (a) / (b)
Total plants to replace coal = 984.4
That seems absurdly small, so I assume I've gotten a unit conversion wrong. Any engineers able to help me out here?
EDIT: If 984.4 is indeed correct, if an AP-1000 costs $7bn to build on average (using the expected cost of the two US Vogtle plants), this works out to $6.89 trillion. That doesn't seem too bad, particularly given US safety standards appear to be a fair bit better than the world average...
Nuclear plants require appreciable scheduled downtime for refueling and other maintenance operations. Not an order of magnitude difference or anything, but I would bump up your required nuclear plant count by at least 15% to account for this.
On the other hand, I would expect repeated installation of the same AP-1000 model to reduce in cost over time, so that will help out a bit - although R&D into more interesting plant designs may bring prices up as well.
Ok, I was definitely wrong about how many it would take, but you can't argue the risk, however managed by safety standards, is orders of magnitude higher than any risk from solar.
What's wrong with regular Fukushima scale disasters? They're not very deadly. We already have frequent mining disasters in the coal industry and don't care about that. If anything, nuclear power needs less safety to reduce costs and become competitive.
For some reason people are still scared of radiation even after seeing how harmless Chernobyl turned out to be compared to predictions.
> Fukushima scale disasters? They're not very deadly.
except for the people that literally had to give up their lives in order to save the situation and not let it grow many times worse. knowing they were stepping into the radiation that would kill them in a few hours (if they were lucky).
hey if it's not very deadly, why don't you volunteer for being one of those heroes the next disaster
also Fukushima is not yet done doing damage, not by a long shot.
let's evaluate the "once every 30 years is no biggie, really" thing once we spent 30 years trying to clean it up.
> how harmless Chernobyl turned out to be
because all those malformed children being born must've been a hoax, or something.
btw I wasn't against nuclear energy at all (except by now it's kinda too late really, and once we realize the next plan B will be too late, but at least we'll keep on making new humans to witness the carnage) but it was because I thought we could actually do better than Chernobyl and Fukushima, not to take it as a calculated risk. That is horrible. I'd easily give up "air-conditioning and data centres" to prevent that shit (easy to say, I don't have AC, and data ... well we could really do with a little bit less of those, take a moment and think about what is stored in those because it's so ridiculously cheap, at best it's worthless data).
I know we've passed the 400ppm threshold, it's too late to prevent that, but its not "too late" to switch the planet to renewable energy. It can never be too late for that. We can't stop the catastrophic effects of climate change that we'll likely see in our lifetimes, but we can hopefully stop it from being even worse
Except that Clouds are the actual big unknown in climat change equation. You can found a lot of articles about that I'll quote this one but you should look and document by yourself.
Nuclear reactors cannot explode. Even in the case of a core meltdown you wouldn't see a chain reaction leading to any kind of explosion.
What might happen in disaster situations is the backup generators that power the cooling systems explode. But that wouldn't cause radioactive material to rain down either since these generators would be running off a petroleum (or similar) fuel.
In the worst case scenario, all of the nuclear reactors simultaneously explode (because more earthquakes), raining down a radioactive armageddon on the hordes of screaming peasants below.