Does Nuclear Power Compete With Conservation, Wind, Solar and Biomass?
One of my frequent frustrations is getting involved in an energy policy discussion with someone that goes something like this:
Them: I am deeply concerned about global climate change and the effects of mankind’s continued use of dirty fossil fuels on our planet’s health.
Me: I used to operate power plants that produced zero emissions. What do you think about taking a new look at using nuclear power to replace fossil fuel consumption? Them: I do not like nuclear power. We can get all the power that we need by conservation, wind, solar and biomass.
Me: How do you expect for windmills and solar panels to produce power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining? Can you really shut down fossil plants if you build wind turbines and put solar panels on buildings?
Them: No, but the grid can provide all the back-up we need. We already have paid for building the existing plants and should not spend any money on building new ones while we transition to a new economy where we can live within our natural energy income.
Me: But that means that we have to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels when we could be building plants that make them unnecessary.
Them: I do not like nuclear power and do not want to replace one poison with another.
These conversations often go on far longer until either I or my opponent gives up from frustration or exhaustion.
As a technically trained power plant operator, I have apparently not learned the right words to use to convince people that comparing wind and solar power to a reliable electricity supply is a bit like comparing a bicycle to a city bus or a metro rail.
Sure, the sun and wind are forces that man can harness to do work or make electricity, just like a bicycle is a pretty good form of transportation in certain circumstances. However, I would look pretty silly trying to carry dozens of people on my bicycle. In fact, it gets pretty challenging just to carry enough stuff with me to provide a change of clothing and a raincoat in case of inclement weather. My legs are in pretty good shape, but I need a rest after about 25 miles.
When it comes to reliable power that is available on demand, it is hard to beat a fossil fuel powered generator, unless, of course you have a generator that runs off of the heat produced by an atomic fission reactor. As a guy who used to operate an electric power grid that ran almost exclusively on fission power - granted, it was a small, self-contained grid on a ship - I can personally testify that the system works fine and lasts a long (long, long) time. I have been an ocean sailor and spent enough days becalmed to also be able to testify that the sun sets every single day, making solar cells worthless as a power source until well after sunrise the next day, and the wind changes direction or disappears without any warning more often than many people care to admit.
Reducing fossil fuels for power production so that humans cause less damage to the planet is a big, difficult endeavor. It seems silly to undertake that challenge without using the best available tools. The photo accompanying this post is from just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of the world’s operating coal mines that currently supply about 6 Billion tons of coal each year. That is my target competition when I think about the benefits of investing the time, effort and treasure required to build new nuclear power plants.
Help me, folks. Why is it so difficult to agree that uranium fission competes with fossil fuel combustion and that conservation, wind, sun and biomass “alternatives” are simply not in the same power generation league?
Related links:
First High Resolution Wind Map
Cost of Wind vs Cost of Nuclear to Replace Coal
Nuclear vs. Wind Farms Debate - rather misses the point.
Update (posted May 20, 2008 at 1800 EDT) There is a great article on the front page of Wired dated May 19, 2008 titled Inconvenient Truths: Cutting Carbon Is the Only Thing That Matters. One of the 10 inconvenient truths listed is that environmentalists should EMBRACE NUCLEAR POWER: Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy
Mr. Adams, I’ve been puzzling over this exact question for some years. In dealing with “them”, what I’ve found pretty consistently is that they grew up with anti-nuclear attitudes, which they acquired from misinformation in their school classes and the public media. To make it worse, their refusal to challenge their preconceptions proves, in their minds, their own sincerity and superior knowledge.
I’ll stretch the point for the sake of clarity. In colonial times, a person could prove his uprightness by accusing others of witchcraft. Any person who spoke against the accusations was in turn suspected of the same crime, so few people did. In the same way, anti-nukes consider their opposition to nuclear energy to be a moral position and anyone who says different is necessarily immoral and therefore untrustworthy.
You can show with simple arithmetic that there is no possible way to minimize the harmful effects of global warming without a major program of nuclear construction. But the people we are dealing with here would never allow arithmetic to outweigh ideological commitment.
I don’t suppose I’ve added to the world’s store of knowledge with this observation. Still, it’s an interesting question. Thanks for bringing it up.
I am still on the fence with nuclear power. I do understand your arguments and I must agree, that when compared to dirty coal, nuclear energy is absolutely better, there is no doubt about that.
I am still concerned about accidents and meltdowns. There is always that possibility and no one can guarantee a fool proof, safe nuclear plant, its just not possible. The issue with an accident is that just one meltdown could have a DEVASTATING affect on millions of people. In my opinion, its just not worth the risk, when there are other options.
Now there have been a lot of breakthroughs in the solar realm which would allow 24/7 electricity production. Instead of just photovoltaics, some of the top scientist in this field are recommending the use of mirrors heating water to run steam turbines by day. Then using stored energy from photovoltaics to run stuff by night. Its a lot more complicated than that, but you would have to read the full report to get it, but it is feasible.
I urge you to read this very fair writeup about nuclear before completely making your mind up one way or another.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/05/the-nuclear-option.html
People are scared. It is the job of a good nuke to sway the hearts, THEN minds of these folk. The French don’t have anti-nuclear sentiments like fear mongering Americans do…
I see your point, truly, but…
Does the waste produced by spent nuclear fuel not count as a pollutant? I keep hearing nuclear energy proponents calling it clean, but it seems to me that there is little net difference between concentrating your pollution into incredibly dangerous little pellets (or rods, or what have you) and in spreading equally horrible little particles throughout the atmosphere and water table.
Wind, tides, solar, solar-thermal, concentrated solar, geothermal, hydro-electric - and nuclear - these all have their plusses and minuses. They are all better (in my opinion) than fossil fuels.
The intelligent way to decide which to use is to weigh ALL the pros and cons of each against the others, and find the right *combination* of sources, rather than emphasizing the pros of your pet favorite, and pushing for *only* that one.
Dubai just signed a deal with UK to build a NUclear power plant, and the news head lines was.”Dubai invests in RENEWABLE energy”. Can you clarify how is nuclear energy renewable energy. Is uranium so much abundant that there is no problem mining it.
When talking with those people, I’d emphasize that no single technology is going to be sufficient to solve all our environmental problems, especially regarding climate change. Instead, a large variety of technologies will each be part of the solution. Remind them that this isn’t a nuclear vs solar problem, it’s a coal vs everything else problem.
While it may seem short-sighted to some people to replace the immediate problem of greenhouse gas emission with the long-term problem of storing spent rods that may be dangerous for 10,000 years, the fact is that if we don’t solve the immediate problem, the later problem isn’t really an issue.
So yes, nuclear has to be a part of the solution. So does photo-voltaic, especially in the form of distributed production (regular people with PV cells on their roofs). So does solar thermal, which holds great promise for large-scale production. Greater adoption of mass transit, hybrid cars, electric cars, and even fuel cell cars are also part of the solution.
NeutralExistence.com, I read through the Mother Jones Article. It’s pretty painful to see such a phony compilation of anti-nuke propaganda decorated as a thoughtful analysis.
The incident at Three Mile Island and and the non-incident at Davis-Besse are portrayed as near-calamities. Guards caught napping in their break room are accused of recklessness.
The article pretends there is doubt about the health effects of operating plants. On the one hand there are professional, scientific organizations like the Ontario Cancer Treatment and Research Foundation and the National Cancer Institute which say there aren’t any. On the other hand, there’s Greenpeace which says there are. I’m not making this up. The article actually cites Greenpeace as a source!
Well, why not? They cite every other paid anti-nuke. Why bother with the truth when lies are so much more fun? It’s deeply troubling that a person could read the article and describe it as “very fair.”
We’ve had a meltdown. The results of the accident at Three Mile Island were zero illnesses, zero injuries, zero deaths. If you want to worry about a calamity, consider that thousands of Americans die every month from the pollution from burning coal. Oh, but you’re against coal, too. Here’s the problem: without nuclear, the world has to keep burning fossil fuels. That’s because renewable energy only works if there’s a backup energy source. Do you have any idea how big a storage system would be required to power the US all night with stored solar energy? Go back to your uncited source and scope it with a pocket calculator. I guarantee you’ll change your mind about its feasibility.
Interestingly, children all get this: solar and wind energy don’t work when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. If there’s no nuclear energy, people will keep burning fossil fuels. I blame the schools for the inability of grownups to grasp this fundamental fact.
Tad, you’re wrong. There is a huge “difference between concentrating your pollution into incredibly dangerous little pellets (or rods, or what have you) and in spreading equally horrible little particles throughout the atmosphere and water table.” The small quantities of nuclear waste can be safely encapsulated and isolated from the environment. In fact, there has never been a case of harm resulting from nuclear-energy waste. In contrast, coal-fired power plants generate such huge quantities of toxic wastes that there’s no way they can be isolated. Their effects are already apparent in the form of poisoned aquifers. That’s in addition to the poisons distributed into the soil and water around the world.
My chief consolation is knowing that more people are catching on to the truth and the world is going nuclear. But we’re still capable of screwing this up. The same idiots who tied nuclear energy up in the courts before could do it again. If we were where we should be, global warming would be farther away and we’d be in a stronger position to deal with it. If anti-nukes have their way we’ll utterly destroy the environment.
Thorium.
MySchizoBuddy asked how nuclear power can qualify as renewable.
Of course, it is possible to define words like renewable in many ways. The US DOE, for example includes waste to energy plants and plants that produce electricity by burning the waste products from the lumber industry as “renewable”.
Uranium is abundant enough to envision it being the primary heat supply for a system that supplies all of the world’s energy - including process heat and transportation needs. If the uranium is fully utilized by high conversion ratio and actual breeder reactors, it will last for thousands of years.
As C. Edward mentioned, that computation does not even consider the fact that thorium is also useful and about 3-4 times as abundant as uranium.
To answer Tad - there is a huge difference between a carefully stored, potentially valuable material like used nuclear fuel and a flat out waste material like the deadly waste products that are spewed out of a coal fired power plant. (You see, even engineering oriented people can use emotionally charged language if pressed.)
Solar is becoming true more and more, and also it’s safer and abundant.