All the analysis like this forget to count the cost of decommissioning the nuclear technology, reactors and fuels.
Cost for end of life reactors are an order of magnitude those of contruction, and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist, both payed by -public-.
The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane crash, not at all.
The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by economic/financial reasons.
If all the world, developing or not, will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers will be very different.
Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels, the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones.
Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis.
One key of green energy is the distributed nature of solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less dipendence on big company, more public control.
Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy use.
EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not illuminate the belly of airplanes).
The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good candidates too)
I'm not sure they forget about cleanup for nuclear so much as it just isn't included for any power generation method.
The residual ash from coal plants are called coal tailings. They basically contain everything in the coal that didn't burn. Currently this is all piled up near the coal power plant. So you have chemicals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, as well as a smattering of radioactives like uranium sitting in a pile. Occasionally weather washes out these "piles" and they find their way into streams or leach through the underlayment to hit the ground water. When a coal plant is decommissioned the owner files for bankruptcy and the pile of coal tailings becomes another Superfund site.
Yet somehow nuclear is different. Even though if nothing is done, in a thousand years the coal tailings will still be just as toxic as today. While the radioactive waste will be near a background.
This is certainly wrong, unless the word "definitive" is used to shift the goal post such that it's effectively impossible to meet. Like the people who said, of Yucca Mountain, that "sure, it's been geologically stable for millions of years, but we can't definitively say there won't be an earthquake tomorrow", or "what if society collapses and, ten thousand years from now, a tribe of stone age explorers breaks into the concrete and reinforced steel facility buried under a mountain in the remote desert, and then goes 700 meters down, uses their lithic tools to bust down a few more steel doors, and gets irradiated? Those hypothetical 10-20 people in the distant future might die, thus we can conclude there is no definitively safe storage solution".
At a minimum definitive must mean from today and until we can and will make any radioactive waste not radioactive waste anymore. If that requires safety against stone age explores or not I can't say. History has an abundance of tales of how we store things safe enough and then decades (or a few years) later we learn that dumping thousands of barrels of radioactive waste in the ocean was stupid, that slapping some concrete on top of a nuclear bomb test site didn't really contain it, that mixing chemical waste with earth and letting it sit near a river was pretty stupid, etc. etc.
Definitive means it is 100% certain this is not happening with any radioactive waste as there's no lower limit where radiation isn't dangerous. "Definitely safe against human stupidity and error" seems fine to me for radioactive waste when there's zero need to produce any. Again, is that timescale up until stone age man in the future? I can't say but the producers of radioactive waste need to know the answer before they can built a storage facility or they'll have to make it safe enough for anything less than the earth going pooof.
Nuclear technology is safe enough, and the storage of the waste is non-issue: the amount of waste produced thorough last 80 years since we first split atom would fit in a single storage facility of the size of the football stadium. If we want to move away from fossil fuels then the nuclear is our best bet, solar and wind are just impractical toys.
> Nuclear technology is safe enough
"enough" is a point of view, is your, so ok for you, not enough for me.
Fukushima was not enough safe, but again, for me. And there are many others "not enough" situations others than 3 famous.
> storage of the waste is non-issue..
To me, is not a volumetric problem, but for time ad long term safety.
At fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is still a big problem now, imagine the big part of plants, and there is a 90km avoidence zone for many years.
Make nuclear really safe maybe can be done, at witch cost? Will stay still in market? I doubt. Probably some nuclear technology will remain and can be used and developed for research and bootstrap, not for supply the whole.
> solar and wind are just impractical toys
These toys are in lowering cost, rising efficiency and world wide spread and deployment, more than any others technology, and 10 yrs. ago was difficult to think, now is reality, and investing resources on solar/wind/others will make a difference -now-, can be widespread, create more workplaces, where building more nuclear will make some effect to 10 years, and can be done only by few big companies (apart environment issues).
> At fukushima disposing of the contaminated water is still a big problem now,
That tritium is a huge nothingburger. They could dump it into the ocean now or store it for a century then dump it; either way it causes no real harm. The amount of tritium they're wringing themselves into knots over is a nonissue.
Efficiency of solar and wind isn't the real issue. The problem is: solar only works during a day, and wind farms only work when there's wind. Which makes both of them irregular, unpredictable. It could be mitigated if we had a cheap mass energy storage technology, but we don't (Li-Ion batteries are way too expensive, and hydroelectric storage requires very specific conditions, it cannot be built just anywhere). What we need is a stable supply of energy which is independent of the time of day and the weather. Nuclear can be that.
Yes, efficiency is not an issue, but is improving.
Storage technology evolve, there are many battery technology, even better than li-ion if fully developed, and storage can be chemical, capturing co2 and making fuels with net zero CO2 pollution, can be thermal, can be even gravitational, hydrogen local storage, and energy can move in grids, to go where is need from where is available, engineering can do this now it there is a true will.
If there is a system finely distributed (many systems) for production, transport and storage, in a mix on low to high tecnology, this will make global energy really available and independent of uncertains and variable conditions.
Many examples of good offgrid appication exist, done by some guys, Imagine what can be done with true development/investment just tomorrow.
And Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a shift of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and wind are everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly vanish for long periods everywhere..
You make a lot of assumptions here, about the directions in which future technologies can possibly develop. The thing is: if we are making decisions right now, we should make it based on what we know for sure, not based on our hopes and dreams, which might never materialize. In 20 years time, if the technologies you mention do indeed appear, we can re-evaluate our approach.
> Uranium (like fossil fuels) is not everywhere, a shift of geopolitics will affect availability, sun and wind are everywhere, maybe not constant, but hardly vanish for long periods everywhere..
Sun disappears for half of the day, every day. Strong wind is not that common at all, except in few selected areas, like the seaside.
Much of the technology i mention are here now, concrete and available, storage/battery for sure, driven dy automotive conversion to electric, synthetic fuels are way more close than 20years, all the fossil fuel infrastructure will benefit, and here are big$$, and will work with CO2 capture tech, i suspect we will need this very very soon. In the future are fusion (hope), ad real -safe- fission.
if i have 1$ to invest, i think is wise to invest in tech available, deployable today, scalable, adaptable, and fine grained on territory. just an opinion.
At night use storage and transfer energy with grids, this tech is available now.
When windy, store in battery, and if needed transfert with grids, tech available now.
No sun, no wind, no sea/tides, no grid, neiter a generator? well.. placing a fission plant here seems the right case, but suspect no one will live in a such place..
Current mass deployment of solar could prove to be very beneficial in the long run though, as 1. it leads to advances in the mass-manufucturing of solar panels which in turn produce reductions in per unit costs, and 2. it encourages research into energy storage, like methane production from CO2 and solar energy.
well, sure, nothing is free, but costs are (sometimes) investment, and this is more an issue of politics/economy planning than tech.
And with the perspective of such a big development, investment everywhere, of planetary size, who will stay out of a businnes at this scale? i don't understand..
About Minesota, i will read the report, after a brief look i understant that in a state with 25%coal, 20%nuclear, 17%gas, talking of such big increase of green will cause panic to someone.
About Grid, the infrastrucure is here, is necessary, and is independent from the pool of sources (green, fossil, etc..) so it's cost is not related to nature of sources, it's a long term investment to be mantained, so is unavoidable.
The Storage is the open problem, here the investment are necessary and, as you say, in the long run.
But to have a real long run, maybe some classic rules of the market need to be relaxed? to let the techs develop..
>>About Minesota, i will read the report, after a brief look i understant that in a state with 25%coal, 20%nuclear, 17%gas, talking of such big increase of green will cause panic to someone.
The authors of the report advocate getting to zero carbon via nuclear and hydro. The advantage is they are both concentrated baseline power sources, so don't require extensive storage and transmission infra.
guarding a single storage facility is easy: just put a thousand men with machine guns between it and anyone who could possibly try to raid it. Guarding against nature is even easier: we have at least a century worth of climate data, it's not that hard to select one place that is safe from earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters.
This is such a rubbish argument I wondered where it came from and it's even the DOE who writes this (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...). It is completely misleading, so yes the volume of the spend fuel if packed together would fit a football field to a height of 10 yards. However, you could (and hopefully never would) store your nuclear waste like that, you need containment vessels, cooling (air circulation) etc. and this number also completely ignores the amount of "non-fuel" nuclear waste that you have as well.
Decomissioning is factored into all nuclear lifecycle analyses. Long term waste solutions are in operation today (see WIPP) and expanding soon (see Onkalo).
On the technical level, i think yes, there are analysis and solution.
But at practical level (economic/politics) decommissioning is left to the posterity (cost rising years after years, shifting of milestone, more taxes.. and so on)
The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane crash, not at all.
The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by economic/financial reasons. If all the world, developing or not, will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers will be very different.
Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels, the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones.
Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis.
One key of green energy is the distributed nature of solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less dipendence on big company, more public control.
Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy use. EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not illuminate the belly of airplanes).
The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good candidates too)