the exclusion zone of fukushima hasn't changed since the beginning even after 10+ years. same for pripyat and chernobyl, those already close to 40 years. UK had to test sheep for radioactivity in certain domestic areas up until 2012.
nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.
This is an interesting argument and let's stipulate it is correct. In that case, take all the oil capex and spend it on power sources that are least costly, least risky, and come on line fastest. Who thinks nuclear is least costly, least risky, and arrives soonest? Anyone? Bueller?
The problem with those power sources–and this has been pointed out many, many times–is they don't make reliable base load power. The sun doesn't shine at night–no solar power. Winds don't blow on calm days–no wind power.
You are forced to build massive battery farms. Batteries require mining chemicals. For the scale we are talking about, you would be strip-mining the earth.
You are forced to make incredibly costly upgrades to electric grids–some of which are nearly a century old. Because the current grids can't handle the unreliable, wax-and-wane nature of solar and wind power.
You are forced to build gigantic solar panel and wind farms, destroying vast swathes of natural ecology and displacing and destroying many species.
You are forced to deal with solar panels and wind turbines at the end of life problem, especially solar panels which contain toxic chemicals which are at risk of leaching into the environment (think 'water table') unless they are properly disposed of. No one has a viable plan for proper disposal of solar panels at the scale we would have to be talking about.
And finally–the elephant in the room. The giant energy corporations just won't transition to renewable energy if they don't get a high-enough return on their investments. They want something like 12% ROI. This is extremely unlikely. They've left all their commitments to go renewable conditional so they can weasel out by saying it's not cost-effective for them. Just look at what's happening in reality: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/23/siemens-energy-scraps-profit...
The intermittency of renewables adds costs, but these costs are finite and declining. At this point it's likely that going with renewables will be cheaper than going with nuclear, especially as one projects these declines into the next couple of decades (when any nuclear plant started now will have to compete with improved renewable and storage technologies.)
"On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research"
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels."
The plan by RE people is 'Let's hope that a hundred different unlikely events all line up exactly right, and we'll be able to go fully RE'. This is not a realistic plan. If you did software engineering like this, you would be laughed out of the room (and then fired).
Fossil fuel companies would have no special advantage in most renewable and storage technologies, so it's rational they'd try to stick with what they're good at for as long as possible, perhaps even going down with the ship and returning value to the shareholders as they collapse.
Nothing about renewables is speculative. Renewables build-out is the largest share of energy capex. If renewables were "destroying many species" it would be all over the news. The 1980s called and wants their "solar will never..." argument back.
Out of curiosity, I decided to do some napkin math on this.
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2.
Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone is worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak).
However, the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375 square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's considerably better than the land area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar installation. The question, therefore, is whether a better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a substantially-worse best-case figure; I don't think it does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.
If you look at the value delivered per acre by a solar field, it's massively (orders of magnitude) higher than the value delivered by a farm.
If land cost rules out solar, it also rules out agriculture. I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
> If land cost rules out solar, it also rules out agriculture.
Land cost rules out solar because there are alternatives which do not cost nearly as much in land (barring, per above, preventable and rare disasters). The same can't be said about agriculture; there ain't (to my knowledge) some agricultural equivalent of a nuclear power plant. Vertical farming might be it someday, but so far that hasn't panned out at scale.
> I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
We "nuke bros" ain't saying we shouldn't use PV at all, either. Solar panels:
- Are much more portable than nuclear plants
- Can be deployed in a wider range of locations than nuclear plants (Have you tried putting a molten-salt reactor on a rooftop? Solar's great for that!)
- Are great at providing energy for peak loads, energy to be stored later, and energy for things that don't typically need to be powered when there's no sunlight (e.g. air conditioning)
Solar panels have their place even in a world powered primarily by nuclear.
Likewise, livestock animals:
- Are much more portable than crop fields
- Can be raised in a wider range of locations than most crops (Have you tried growing corn on a mountain? Chickens and goats are great for that!)
- Taste good, produce byproducts that taste good (like eggs and milk), and provide nutrients that are harder to come by in vegan diets without either supplements or additional planning (e.g. multiple different crops).
Animal products have their place even in a world fed primarily by plant products.
Given this: yeah, by all means work toward reducing agriculture's land footprint - but that effort's independent from the effort to reduce the energy sector's land footprint, so it really shouldn't be surprising that people advocating for the power-per-land effort won't automatically start talking about the food-per-land effort in a conversation about power.
What are you talking about? It’s not all dollar cost. You can’t eat what a solar farm produces. A solar farm does not replaced the carbon sequestration of a forest. Endangered species displaced by solar farms (desert tortoises, for example), do not benefit from the “value” produced by a solar farm, quite the opposite! This is what the “nuke bros” are talking about!
We can assign monetary value to things and then compare them. Food, for example, has value mostly because of enjoyment, not because we absolutely have to eat (the elasticity of demand for beef is an example of this.) The value of the ecosystems displaced by farming, PV, or other land using activities can also be assigned a monetary value (since it's clearly seen as tradeable against economic benefits.)
Given that, we can ask what's the ratio of the value of the output of a farm to the value of the displaced natural ecosystem, and do the same for PV. And if we do that, we will find the ratio is MUCH higher for PV than it is for farming.
So, if the goal is to maximize utility for a given displacement of natural ecosystems, we come out ahead (on the margin) if we use land for PV instead of farming. If we want to return land to nature at lowest cost we would do that by returning farmland to nature, not PV land.
Have you seen the economic costs of the cleanup operation though? It's absolutely astronomical (for various reasons). That money is not money going to new nuclear plants or renewables, but going to nowhere.
This effects people too.
Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lot of money and an unaccounted for cost of nuclear?
> Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion?
1) That isn't an astronomical number. It is $2,000-$8,000 per Japanese person. For a freak accident. Put that in $/kWh terms and you might find that nuclear was reasonably cost effective even in one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, let alone under normal conditions.
2) I don't know if it is controversial; although if the people demanding the cleanup are the same lunatics who regulate the industry in the west I want to see what the justification is for spending $100s of billions of dollars.
3) The cleanup cost should be considered. When we multiply probability by cost it will be a short consideration. There is no way it is as bad as what everyone is currently already doing with coal. It is likely that it will also be better than renewables once waste is factored in, just because the volumes of material involved.
Pretty sure the cleanup costs for continued use of coal, oil, and natural gas due to global climate change far exceed any from nuclear, including even Chernobyl.
Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block. Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really don't get how close to sea level massive portions of these very large areas are. Far larger than the Fukushima exclusion zone, that's for sure.
Also worth pointing out that there are plenty of low-lying inland areas both critical to the global economy and vulnerable to damage from climate change. Relevant to my own background: California's Central Valley sits pretty darn close to sea level, and is already dependent on rather elaborate levee systems to keep floodwaters and delta seawaters at bay. Said region produces large swaths of the world's entire supply of various fruits and vegetables; that farmland turning into ocean (a very real risk per various climate models) would be catastrophic for the global supply of said produce.
And that's just around sea level rise. The Central Valley's water issues are another probable symptom of global climate change, and just because the Valley lucked out with a wet winter this year doesn't mean that luck will persist. If push comes to shove, I'm sure California's agricultural sector would much rather invest the billions necessary for desalination and upgraded levees to address those symptoms than abandon California entirely - but those are still costs being thrust upon California due to a continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Not until fossil fuels are eliminated for all practical purposes. The only real competition we have today is against global climate change. Once we get past that hump, we can quibble about non-carbon-emitting details.
As long as coal, oil, and natural gas are burned and released into the atmosphere, the economic "competition" going forward is illusory. We're just buying the mitigation and cleanup efforts on credit.
If we tried to clean up the radioactive materials that coal powerplants pump into air - the cost would be even more ridiculous. But somehow we don't care.
I had suffered the downvoting on reddit before: write something backed with data against nuclear (specially if your source is a pro-nuclear report), and in less than 5 minutes you get -10 and no replies.
People think I’m being anti-nuclear, which I not what I said. It’s just an emotional response.
I’m just stating that the cleanups are expensive, stupidly expensive and the more nuclear we have the more chance of this happening again, or worse, there will be.
Look at coal seam gas jn the US, sole plants are leaking untold levels of methane. The US can’t regulate anything properly when it comes to energy.
People don’t realise that Fukushima wasn’t caused by a tsunami, it was caused by negligence.
Sure, it's Reddit. Point out that Europe and EU isn't the same and you get 50-100 downvotes in a discussion where the difference matters followed by a boatload of snarky responses. But this isn't Reddit. Here the same snark and opinions are put in pretty packages to avoid mods, but it's still there. Look at any mention of China or Socialism for example.
If you calculate radioactive materials released per energy produced - nuclear is below coal, even including all the accidents.
It's irrational to avoid nuclear powerplants.