You are not impressing anyone by playing the "I'm smarter than you card", you are only shaming yourself and not addressing the points of the discussion
Solar plants with natural gas backup turbines are still cheaper than nuclear plants per mwatt
I hope I do t sound too irated, but I'm indeed highly frustrated by the fact that wherever I have this discussion about nuclear power i dont see anyone who is actually ready to have the discussion, only people who believe in an ideal world where nuclear plants are all safe, where 3 mile Island "wasn't a big deal", and where the exclusion area in Fukushima "is a minor externality"
Again, if you want to argue, you will have to bring real world arguments
Yeah, it is, and that's where things get interesting such as logistics, economics trends, risk assestment
At the moment the US is going through a natural gas boom, companies many times have a serious over supply of it, and they are releasing it into the atmosphere, the Bakken Oil Fields at night are quite literally visible from the International Space Station[0] because of the colossal amounts of natural gas flares of companies burning excess natural gas. All of that is simply wasted energy, and extra CO2 and unburnt natural gas that enters into the atmosphere
One of the reasons why so many coal plants in the US are going through hard economic times is because they are being undercut by both solar, wind and stupidly cheap natural gas turbines [1].
To build nuclear plants today in the US, would be an horrendous economic decision, because those would instantly become stranded assets that would need to be bailed out by the general public via overly expensive electricity bills. In the meantime, gas is just so readily available that's being burnt on an unimaginable scale, all of that energy could be simply packaged and used as electricity.
In the meantime in the rest of the world, most countries are already divesting from big bulky centralized energy sources, simply because of how expensive they are. They just can't compete with cheaper renewables with a assistance of natural gas, and in the long as prices fall even further run those natural gas assistance plants can be replaced with batteries.
In short, what I advocate, is simply Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. If we have nuclear plants already built, use them, but dont build more, if a country is experiencing a surplus of natural gas, use it, and please dont burn it as waste.
That's a false choice, as natural gas is already being wasted and burnt as a byproduct, if that natural gas were used as an energy source, then we could better control the burning process and reduce emissions. Building nuclear plants would actually just increase the amount of natural gas that ends up being burned as a byproduct all the while not helping us in the grand scheme of things
> Building nuclear plants would actually just increase the amount of natural gas that ends up being burned as a byproduct all the while not helping us in the grand scheme of things.
I don't know where you're sourcing that argument. Seems like nuclear beats most renewables (solar specifically) in terms of carbon emissions and potential for quickly and reliably replacing our generation in a centralized way:
Solar in particular can vary wildly when it comes to the CO2/MWatt because of geography, the ratio of CO2/Mwatt in Atacama desert will be wildly different from a solar plant in Germany, but still, when averaged out, the values of the plants themselves are mostly equivalent.
Yet the problem happens when costs and other externalities are thrown into the picture, a solar plant doesnt need to worry about the storage of nuclear waste, and the mining of new facilities to store that waste, nor the extraction and refining process for Uranium which has all sorts of caveats, solar needs only worry of silica extraction, rare earths (which are needed by other industrial processes anyways) and refining and production, then simple disposal. And unlike Nuclear, the waste disposal of solar panels is comparatively super straight forward.
The big one is the economic cost, where solar and wind heavily undercuts nuclear energy production
And solar/wind can be expected to continue falling in price as technology continues to advance and economies of scale pick up the slack, same is not the case for nuclear technology, where safety requirements balloon up the price of the plants, waste management, uranium extraction, and in a competitive disrupted market such as the modern market of energy production, nuclear plants are falling by the wayside as a consequence of continued delays, ever increasing safety requirements and waste management fees increases.
Lastly, nuclear plant construction, is neither "easy, nor speedy". it is an absolutely gruesome afair which has lead to the bankrupcy of many companies
Neither is waiting 15 years until a next generation of nuclear plants are built....
Natural gas is the resource that we have right now, and as it stands, in Bakken Oil Fields, natural gas is being burnt as excess waste. That gas needs to be used, there has to be a demand for it. Because otherwise companies will continue to burn it, as they dont have a place to store it
Also, I'm not advocating for long term usage of Natural gas, in due time natural gas plants need to be phased out in favor of batteries, which will work as a way to stabilize a renewable energy based grid, but we are not there yet.
If the world were perfect, then yes, I would agree to Nuclear Fission, but alas here we are, where nuclear plants construction is constantly delayed
>>Dr Portugal Pereira said: "If we want to decarbonise our energy system, nuclear may not be the best choice for a primary strategy. Nuclear power is better late than never, but to really address climate change, it would be best if they were not late at all, as technologies like wind and solar rarely are."[0]
> Neither is waiting 15 years until a next generation of nuclear plants are built....
Well, certainly it's shameful how bad we're at doing large projects in the Western world today. That being said, even if we in the short term won't relearn how to do them on budget and schedule (as Russian, Korean, and Chinese designs appear to be doing) there's plenty we can do while waiting for such long-term projects to finish. Like, massively expanding wind, solar, high voltage grids, pumped hydro, EV's, public transport, heat pumps, energy efficiency measures, demand response and whatnot.
> Natural gas is the resource that we have right now, and as it stands, in Bakken Oil Fields, natural gas is being burnt as excess waste. That gas needs to be used, there has to be a demand for it. Because otherwise companies will continue to burn it, as they dont have a place to store it
Sure, it's better to burn the gas for power rather than just flaring it off. But, we really should think about how to ASAP scale down and eventually shutdown the fossil industry (barring a magical fairy^H CCS improvements).
> Also, I'm not advocating for long term usage of Natural gas,
As the article I linked to mentions, at this point we can't really think of gas as some kind of "bridge fuel" either. Gas infrastructure we build now will have an economic lifetime of several decades. So if we ever decide to tackle climate breakdown, those will be stranded at an enormous cost to society.
> in due time natural gas plants need to be phased out in favor of batteries
I'm skeptical batteries will ever become cheap enough for bulk storage to cover when wind/solar don't produce in an industrialized nation. I do think they will be very successful for ancillary services like frequency control or peak shaving.
Real world arguments include comparing radiation exposure from coal, gas and oil exploration to the nuclear power.
When you extract gas for the turbines from the ground, it's not just hydrocarbons. The scale of hydrocarbon use makes even relatively small amount of radioactive materials comparable.
Solar plants with natural gas backup turbines are still cheaper than nuclear plants per mwatt
I hope I do t sound too irated, but I'm indeed highly frustrated by the fact that wherever I have this discussion about nuclear power i dont see anyone who is actually ready to have the discussion, only people who believe in an ideal world where nuclear plants are all safe, where 3 mile Island "wasn't a big deal", and where the exclusion area in Fukushima "is a minor externality"
Again, if you want to argue, you will have to bring real world arguments