After watching the series Chernobyl and kind of trying to read a bit more about nuclear energy, I have been meaning to start a thread in the Social forum to discuss. But, I was surprised at how much positive energy there is from the climate scientists towards nuclear because it releases little/no CO2 to make energy. Some arguments for nuclear that consistently come up are as follows:
1. It's the safest form of energy production according to the World Health Organization, British Medical Journal, etc by quite a bit. I think they say deaths are somewhere in the 0.04 people per Terawatt Hour of energy produced. Comparatively, coal is somewhere in the 150 deaths per TWH. Wind and solar are somewhere around 12, iirc.
2. Radiation is widely misunderstood and vilified. (Not sure I agree with this part) But, nuclear power plants release so little during normal operations it can be ignored. Obviously that's not the problem, it's the accidents that people worry about. This is where everyone will focus their attention; but climate scientists seem to pretty consistently argue that the risk, of which there is almost none (see point 1), are dwarfed by the rewards. One thing I found pretty interesting was that if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that monitors radioactivity at nuclear plants was in charge of fossil fuel plants, all the fossil fuel plants would be shut down for emitting too much radiation.
3. There's a lot of discussion over my head about advanced technology, including molten salt reactors that use thorium (which has a much shorter decay time) and apparently are fail safe in their design. Apparently there was a commission 50 years ago or so that discovered this but for whatever reason the technology was ignored until somewhat recently. I think Bill Gates is pushing this technolgy in China and India or somewhere.
4. Regarding environmental impacts to wildlife, nuclear is the most condense footprint that kills/displaces the least amount of animals/habitat. Wind is killing birds of prey (owls, hawks, eagles, etc) Vast arrays of solar is displacing wildlife and typically occurs in undeveloped land where wildlife is plentiful.
5. Nuclear provides a base load that wind and solar simply can't and the ability to store energy (batteries) is woefully inefficient.
6. They all like to compare France (70% nuclear) to Germany (huge push to go renewable with wind and solar while phasing out nuclear which was only 20%) and note that France is emitting less CO2 while Germany despite hundreds of billions spent on renewables is emitting more CO2 (see point 5).
https://medium.com/third-way/france-ger ... b65090fc96 Quote:
Implemented in 2010, Germany’s Energiewende, or “energy transition” is a strategy to develop a low-carbon economy. The plan seeks to increase the use of carbon-free power by promoting wind and solar while simultaneously closing another carbon-free energy source: the nuclear plants that as recently as the early 2000s accounted for nearly 30% of German electricity generation. The result has been clear — more emissions and some of the highest electricity prices in Western Europe. After receiving roughly $220 billion in government incentives since 2010, Germany’s wind and solar generation has increased — just not nearly enough to fill-in the demand gap left by shuttered nuclear plants. Germany has turned to coal plants to keep the lights on, relying primarily on lignite, which is a particularly dirty and energy-inefficient form of coal.
By essentially replacing zero-carbon nuclear power with coal, German emissions actually increased in 2013, 2015, and 2016. Just last week, German leaders acknowledged that the nation will miss its 2020 emissions target by a wide margin and is several years behind schedule at best. Without the nuclear phase-out, Germany would have likely met or surpassed this target. In the end, Germany sacrificed its climate agenda in order to fulfill its anti-nuclear agenda.
France, like Germany, also experienced a surge in anti-nuclear sentiment following the 2011 Fukushima Daichi incident. After his election in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron intended to scale back nuclear in his country to 50% by 2025 — by replacing nuclear power plants with wind and solar power. However, after assessing the impact of this action on emissions and electricity prices, it became clear that renewables could not be deployed fast enough to offset the rapid nuclear phase out in France. In fact, emissions would actually increase as natural gas plants provided electricity in the interim and electricity prices would go up to pay for their deployment. In response to these findings, France has extended phase out target dates to the 2030–2035 period to allow more time for the deployment of renewables required in its 2015 Energy Transition for Green Growth Act.
Which brings us back to the accidents and safety of nuclear power, a risk where I think there is a wide division between what the medical and scientific community has said and what general perception is.....but that's a post for another day and, frankly, much more difficult to write intelligently about and why I haven't posted this topic in Social.