So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don’t mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn’t seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
“Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”
It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:
Current nuclear power generation is non-renewable. It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen. And it goes without saying that waiting to scale up some novel unproven or inexistent sustainable way of nuclear power production is out of the question, for time and safety reasons. Which brings me to point 2.
We need clean, sustainable energy right now if we want to have any chance of fighting climate change. From start of planning of a new nuclear power plant to first power generation can take 15 or 20 years easily. Currently, about 10% of all electricity worldwide is produced by about 400 nuclear reactors, while around 15 new ones are under construction. So, to make any sort of reasonable impact, we would have to build to the tune of 2000 new reactors, pronto. To do that within 30 years, we’d have to increase our construction capacity 5 to 10 fold. Even if that were possible, which I strongly doubt, I would wager the safety and cost impacts would be totally unjustifiable. And we don’t even have 30 years anymore. That is to say nothing of regulatory checks and maintenance that would also have to be increased 5 fold.
So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.
It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen.
Nuclear fission using Uranium is not sustainable. If we expand current nuclear technologies to tackle climate change then we’d likely run out of Uranium by 2100. Nuclear fusion using Thorium might be sustainable, but it’s not yet a proven, scalable technology. And all of this is ignoring the long lead times, high costs, regulatory hurdles and nuclear weapon proliferation concerns that nuclear typically presents. It’d be great if nuclear was the magic bullet for climate change, but it just ain’t.
We’d run of our uranium that’s economical to extract using current technology and at current prices. All known mineral reserves could power the world on exclusively nuclear energy for several thousand years at least.
All known mineral reserves could power the world on exclusively nuclear energy for several thousand years at least.
You got a source for that? Because the one I linked says that we run out of known Uranium deposits by 2100 at current usage rates. Our known Uranium deposits run out mid-century if we use nuclear to follow the IEA Blue Map plan to reduce carbon emissions by 50%, and we run out of even speculated deposits by 2100 under that scenario. Where are you getting “several thousand years” from? Is Thorium part of the mineral reserves to which you’re referring?
Plants absorb that nuclear energy and whether we eat them, or eat animals that ate them, that is still energy from a nuclear source.
Some of those plants ended up rotting for millenia underground, and we dig that up, now in the form of coal, oil or natural gasses- then burn it…thats still just nuclear power.
Even the wind is nuclear power, as is its mostly caused by the uneven heating of the air by the sun, as the earth rotates, leading to the creation of higher and lower pressure areas.
The podcast (which was about solar energy- i work for a solar panel company, thats why it was on in the work van, lol) went on to say that logically, nuclear, solar, to an extent wind are therefore the best ways to ‘generate/ harvest’ power- everything else is just laundering nuclear energy through an inefficient, and usually destructive battery.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don’t do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
The radiation would only affect a small area of the planet not the whole world, and technically radiation doesn’t even cause climate damage. Chernobyl has plenty of trees and plenty of wildlife, it’s just unsuitable for human habitation.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
Here’s my favorite way to put it: because of trace radioactive elements found in coal ore, coal-fired power plants produce more radioactivity in normal operation than nuclear power plants have in their entire history, including meltdowns. And with coal, it just gets released straight into the environment without any attempt to contain it!
And that’s just radioactivity, not all the other emissions of coal plants.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Mmmm I agreed with you until reading this. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report showed us that Wind + Solar + Battery Storage are still a safer bet for rolling out non-fossil fuel energy sources at the fastest rate we can launch them. Nuclear sadly still takes too long to build.
I think there is a space for advanced nuclear, though. Small Modular Reactors, Fast Breeders, and such should be encouraged going forward. The US (and I think UK) each have funds specifically designated to the development of advanced nuclear too.
But old nuclear will take too long to get a hold on emissions. I still think nuclear fits in a well-balanced energy portfolio, but not of the specific technology of the 1950s-1990s.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
I mean, Chernobyl is kind of an outdated example. Fukushima would be the more recent one to point at, or even Three Mile Island. Not particularly useful for your argument. Still, I think if people got educated about all 3 of those examples from history, they’ll come out convinced that nuclear is still a safe bet.
Problem is, like I said above, that conventional nuclear takes too damn long to build.
I don’t know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don’t create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.
8 years to build, not 30. Instead we are building many many more coal and gas plants. What a terrific alternative. Fallacy of renewables without storage is done. It’s never going to happen.
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
The long lead times for construction that invalidate nuclear power as a way of mitigating climate change was a point recognized in 2009 by the body whose mission is to promote the use of nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Nuclear power is not a near-term solution to the challenge of climate change,” writes Sharon Squassoni in the IAEA bulletin. “The need to immediately and dramatically reduce carbon emissions calls for approaches that can be implemented more quickly than building nuclear reactors.”
Wealer from Berlin’s Technical University, along with numerous other energy experts, sees takes a different view.
“The contribution of nuclear energy is viewed too optimistically,” he said. “In reality, [power plant] construction times are too long and the costs too high to have a noticeable effect on climate change. It takes too long for nuclear energy to become available.”
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, agrees.
“Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build,” he said. “When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.”
He pointed out that the world needed to get greenhouse gases under control within a decade. “And in the next 10 years, nuclear power won’t be able to make a significant contribution,” added Schneider.
Long lead times against nuclear have bee raised for the last 25 years, if we had just got on with it we would have the capacity by now. Just cause the lead time is in years doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.
My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.
No it wouldn’t. China laid more concrete in 5 years than the entire world did in 100 years. I highly doubt that converting the entire world to nuclear is going to use that much more concrete. I mean hell, they laid like 15 or 20,000 miles of high speed rail in just a few years. They built like 300 million apartment units.
Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).
That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you’re right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can’t, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world’s construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems “10x increase world construction capacity” was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.
Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can’t find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it’s dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.
I won’t bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I’m still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones…
Not all 7,000 construction workers would be working on the site concurrently. Different trades come and go depending on the phase of the project. So at first you’ll have the civil engineering earth movers come in, who clears the site and excavates the foundations. Then you’ll have the concrete crews come in who pour the foundations and do all of the concrete work. Obviously on a nuclear power plant there is a lot of foundation work, as well as a lot of above ground concrete so probably a good chunk of the construction workers will fall into this category.
Power plants also have a lot of structural steel work, electrical and special equipment that would likey fall under the piping category but each of these uses a separate set of skilled labor that does not overlap.
If you were going to actually try to build 3,300 nuclear power plants, you would rotate crews from project to project which would increase efficiency rather than hiring 27 million separate workers.
In any case, I don’t think converting the world’s total electrical power generation to 100% nuclear is by any stretch of the imagination a good idea. Personally I think maybe 15 to 25% nuclear power generation would be a more realistic mix, similar to the US electrical power generation. The rest of the power should be solar, wind, hydro, wave and geothermal as they are absolutely cheaper to build.
Long lead times, cost overruns, producing power at a higher price point than renewables, long run time needed to break even, even longer dismantling times and a still unsolved waste problem. Compared to renewables that we can build right now.
“We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable” is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
It’s crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.
Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.
we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Force the Board of directors to live in close proximity to the plant
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
The risks are lower in literally everything else…?
a wind mill going down and a nuclear plant blowing up have very different ramifications
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
The worst nuclear disaster has led to 1,000sq miles of land being unsafe for human inhabitants.
Using fossil fuels for power is destroying of the entire planet.
It’s really not that complicated.
Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
You mean under ground from where it was dug out?
The plant itself, water inevitably getting in contact with wastes and leaking also.
You mean water under ground? It was in contact million years before any of us was born.
Both sound terrible.
I don’t really want to pick the lessor of two evils when it comes to the energy.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don’t mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn’t seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
“Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”
It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
If the Soviets hadn’t cut corners and Chernobyl hadn’t happened in this first place, this is likely where we would already be.
I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:
Current nuclear power generation is non-renewable. It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen. And it goes without saying that waiting to scale up some novel unproven or inexistent sustainable way of nuclear power production is out of the question, for time and safety reasons. Which brings me to point 2.
We need clean, sustainable energy right now if we want to have any chance of fighting climate change. From start of planning of a new nuclear power plant to first power generation can take 15 or 20 years easily. Currently, about 10% of all electricity worldwide is produced by about 400 nuclear reactors, while around 15 new ones are under construction. So, to make any sort of reasonable impact, we would have to build to the tune of 2000 new reactors, pronto. To do that within 30 years, we’d have to increase our construction capacity 5 to 10 fold. Even if that were possible, which I strongly doubt, I would wager the safety and cost impacts would be totally unjustifiable. And we don’t even have 30 years anymore. That is to say nothing of regulatory checks and maintenance that would also have to be increased 5 fold.
So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.
Nuclear fission using Uranium is not sustainable. If we expand current nuclear technologies to tackle climate change then we’d likely run out of Uranium by 2100. Nuclear fusion using Thorium might be sustainable, but it’s not yet a proven, scalable technology. And all of this is ignoring the long lead times, high costs, regulatory hurdles and nuclear weapon proliferation concerns that nuclear typically presents. It’d be great if nuclear was the magic bullet for climate change, but it just ain’t.
We’d run of our uranium that’s economical to extract using current technology and at current prices. All known mineral reserves could power the world on exclusively nuclear energy for several thousand years at least.
You got a source for that? Because the one I linked says that we run out of known Uranium deposits by 2100 at current usage rates. Our known Uranium deposits run out mid-century if we use nuclear to follow the IEA Blue Map plan to reduce carbon emissions by 50%, and we run out of even speculated deposits by 2100 under that scenario. Where are you getting “several thousand years” from? Is Thorium part of the mineral reserves to which you’re referring?
I heard a bit from a podcast that stuck with me:
ALL Energy is nuclear energy-
The sun is a nuclear power source.
Plants absorb that nuclear energy and whether we eat them, or eat animals that ate them, that is still energy from a nuclear source.
Some of those plants ended up rotting for millenia underground, and we dig that up, now in the form of coal, oil or natural gasses- then burn it…thats still just nuclear power.
Even the wind is nuclear power, as is its mostly caused by the uneven heating of the air by the sun, as the earth rotates, leading to the creation of higher and lower pressure areas.
The podcast (which was about solar energy- i work for a solar panel company, thats why it was on in the work van, lol) went on to say that logically, nuclear, solar, to an extent wind are therefore the best ways to ‘generate/ harvest’ power- everything else is just laundering nuclear energy through an inefficient, and usually destructive battery.
This sort of generalization is ignorance.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don’t do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
The radiation would only affect a small area of the planet not the whole world, and technically radiation doesn’t even cause climate damage. Chernobyl has plenty of trees and plenty of wildlife, it’s just unsuitable for human habitation.
Here’s my favorite way to put it: because of trace radioactive elements found in coal ore, coal-fired power plants produce more radioactivity in normal operation than nuclear power plants have in their entire history, including meltdowns. And with coal, it just gets released straight into the environment without any attempt to contain it!
And that’s just radioactivity, not all the other emissions of coal plants.
Mmmm I agreed with you until reading this. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report showed us that Wind + Solar + Battery Storage are still a safer bet for rolling out non-fossil fuel energy sources at the fastest rate we can launch them. Nuclear sadly still takes too long to build.
I think there is a space for advanced nuclear, though. Small Modular Reactors, Fast Breeders, and such should be encouraged going forward. The US (and I think UK) each have funds specifically designated to the development of advanced nuclear too.
But old nuclear will take too long to get a hold on emissions. I still think nuclear fits in a well-balanced energy portfolio, but not of the specific technology of the 1950s-1990s.
I mean, Chernobyl is kind of an outdated example. Fukushima would be the more recent one to point at, or even Three Mile Island. Not particularly useful for your argument. Still, I think if people got educated about all 3 of those examples from history, they’ll come out convinced that nuclear is still a safe bet.
Problem is, like I said above, that conventional nuclear takes too damn long to build.
I don’t know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don’t create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.
Ahh… no. New solar and wind generation can be spun up much faster than nuclear.
Long term nuclear is great…
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
So we can’t just spam build nuke plants right now to fix everything.
30 years ago that would have worked.
8 years to build, not 30. Instead we are building many many more coal and gas plants. What a terrific alternative. Fallacy of renewables without storage is done. It’s never going to happen.
That is factually false information. There are solid arguments to be made against nuclear energy.
https://isreview.org/issue/77/case-against-nuclear-power/index.html
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Long lead times against nuclear have bee raised for the last 25 years, if we had just got on with it we would have the capacity by now. Just cause the lead time is in years doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
when is the best time to plant a tree? 30 years ago. When is the second best time? now.
Surely the second best time would have been 29 years ago
Don’t fuck this up for me bro
As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.
My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.
No it wouldn’t. China laid more concrete in 5 years than the entire world did in 100 years. I highly doubt that converting the entire world to nuclear is going to use that much more concrete. I mean hell, they laid like 15 or 20,000 miles of high speed rail in just a few years. They built like 300 million apartment units.
Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).
That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you’re right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can’t, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world’s construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems “10x increase world construction capacity” was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.
Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can’t find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it’s dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.
I won’t bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I’m still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones…
Not all 7,000 construction workers would be working on the site concurrently. Different trades come and go depending on the phase of the project. So at first you’ll have the civil engineering earth movers come in, who clears the site and excavates the foundations. Then you’ll have the concrete crews come in who pour the foundations and do all of the concrete work. Obviously on a nuclear power plant there is a lot of foundation work, as well as a lot of above ground concrete so probably a good chunk of the construction workers will fall into this category.
Power plants also have a lot of structural steel work, electrical and special equipment that would likey fall under the piping category but each of these uses a separate set of skilled labor that does not overlap.
If you were going to actually try to build 3,300 nuclear power plants, you would rotate crews from project to project which would increase efficiency rather than hiring 27 million separate workers.
In any case, I don’t think converting the world’s total electrical power generation to 100% nuclear is by any stretch of the imagination a good idea. Personally I think maybe 15 to 25% nuclear power generation would be a more realistic mix, similar to the US electrical power generation. The rest of the power should be solar, wind, hydro, wave and geothermal as they are absolutely cheaper to build.
Long lead times, cost overruns, producing power at a higher price point than renewables, long run time needed to break even, even longer dismantling times and a still unsolved waste problem. Compared to renewables that we can build right now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
the largest fission plant was literally working 5 years after construction started
fission plants are just more expensive now because we don’t make enough of them.
I guess safety standards changed but even wind power kills more people per watt than fission so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nuclear could’ve easily worked if people didn’t go full nimby in the past few decades
Thank you. The pro-nuclear bullshit from Reddit seems to be spilling over.
“We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable” is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
It’s crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.