Yikes! Totally ignoring the climate impact of nuclear power. Not understanding that nuclear doesn’t play well with renewables (it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time).
Finally explaining that there were only 28 deaths after the Chernobyl accident, ignoring all the additional deaths by cancer and deformed unborn children.
Sorry, this article is totally wrong in so many ways.
Which are, at absolute most and at the most pessimistic estimate, at few thousands excess deaths[0]. The same estimates for coal at are thousands.....per year, not for the last 40 years.
Well, your comparison might also be invalid because we haven't used nuclear power to the scale coal is used. Maybe if there were many nuclear plants we might have seen many disaster?
Both nuclear and coal were used more than solar. And solar caused more deaths per MWh produced than nuclear (cause people fall off roofs while installing/maintaining it).
If you think scale matters - then you should also think that solar is more risky than nuclear by your own logic (because we're not using it on as big scale).
Genuinely curious, because I haven't heard these arguments before.
> Totally ignoring the climate impact of nuclear power
What climate impact? I though it was CO2 neutral (except for construction, which has similar costs to wind an solar). A quick google doesn't give me anything.
> it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time
I thought nuclear was basically a steam boiler, same as coal or gas plants? Why is the control slower for nuclear?
AFAIK nuclear output can be controlled only in a certain range, but if you go below a certain threshold it shuts off and you then have to restart it, which takes a lot of time.
Coal has a similar issue, these plants also can't be turned on and off quickly. In fact, the term "base load" originally was driven more by the minimum amount of power that has to be consumed to keep a plant running. Only now with the move to renewables with varying output the meaning has shifted to the consumption side of things.
Gas plants however can be turned on and off and easily, they work similar to aircraft engines. In Germany, the heat produced is then used for district heating, which gives these plants almost perfect efficiency. It's not a coincidence that Germany picked gas as supplement for renewables during the transition to 100% green energy. Gas (in the form of hydrogen directly ~ methane made from hydrogen) is also a key contender for very long term energy storage (in Germany, you have to save energy produced in the summer for use in winter, the batteries needed for that would be roughly in the order of ~50 million Tesla Model S (100kWh) batteries). The cost of overbuilding renewables and storing the energy in gas, with a lower round-trip efficiency, seems to be lower than building the big battery that would be needed.
Wind is also better in winter than solar, which is why wind is such an important and hot topic in Germany. Solar doesn't bother anyone, but wind turbines are huge and people can see them in the landscape. Solar does not have this problem, but during the winter, the output goes down to almost nothing.
Nuclear, coal, and gas powerplants only differ in how you produce heat. After that they work the same (heat water, make steam, drive turbines). There is usually a few stages of turbines to extract as much work as possible. Reaction time is 1 hour or more.
The waste heat can be used for district heating no matter how you produced the heat (in my city they use coal powerplant for this). It's not just gas. And it's not "perfect efficiency", it's about 80% for the best cogeneration powerplants compared to 60% without cogeneration. It's a little less in practice cause most powerplants aren't as modern and as efficient.
All of these is usually used on regular (not peaker) powerplants, because it's only useful if you use your powerplant for long periods of time.
There are also peaker powerplants. They work differently, and they are optimized for quick reaction time (so the energy they produce is more expansive and efficiency is lower). Reaction time is about 15 minutes. They don't only burn gas - they can also burn any liquid fuels (but gas is indeed the most common). Usually the efficiency of peaker powerplants is about 30-40%, can be almost as good as the regular ones but it's not worth it to install cogeneration if your plant runs for few hours a day.
I'm not sure which kind you were talking about. If they use cogeneration it means they must run for long time, and peaker powerplants running constantly is wasting money and fuel. Do you know what reaction time (from 0 to 100%) they have? 15 minutes or more like 1 hour? Or maybe less (then they are piston engines - and efficiency is even worse).
Anyway - there are also grid-scale batteries that can deal with power fluctuations on the order of milliseconds. That's why if you have lots of renewables and reasonably free energy market - grid scale batteries economically beat the crap out of peak powerplants (like gas plants).
In USA and Australia grid scale batteries already made building new peak powerplants unprofitable. It will soon happen in Europe too (unless lobbying stops this). Here [1] you can read more about how it works. It's basically the same advantage that High Frequency Trading has over regular traders on regular stock market. Just the difference isn't 1 second vs 10 milliseconds but 15 minutes vs 10 milliseconds. Before gas powerplant start up to produce the missing energy - the battery supplied it and shut down again. So now energy price lowered and gas powerplant has to either to produce that energy anyway and sell it for a fraction of price, or to shut down wasting fuel and not earning any money. And gas peak powerplants aren't designed for producing energy cheaply, they are designed for producing energy when there's shortage so energy is expansive.
So when you have grid scale batteries - they drive peak gas powerplants out of business :)
Maintaining a critical fission reaction is difficult and in a large plant you might have to coordinate hundreds of people in dozens of locations to reduce power. Starting up a plant takes math and precise measurements, and there’s a natural limit to the speed you can do so or else you can cause a runaway supercritical reaction. Also, to be the most efficient, they are designed to run at near capacity for their lifetimes, and reducing the power would cancel that, so it’s simply not designed into the system to be reactive like that, as opposed to a submarine plant which is designed to power up and down a bit over short time frames.
It is in no way co2 neutral. Its strongest claim is that it emits less co2 than alternatives. This is based on a bunch of assumptions on how hard it is to get the raw material, that the radiated garbage is transported once (to storage that does not exist) etc. So it is bullshit, but it will always be claimed in these comment threads, right next to the lie of Chernobyl having killed basically no-one.
Nuclear steam boilers are slow to control as their base reaction takes time to cool up or down. Good for base load, not fast coverage of highs.
> Not understanding that nuclear doesn’t play well with renewables (it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time).
That's actually not been true for the last 40 years or so. In France, nuclear power plants have been doing load following without problem. They are apparently able to adjust their production by 80% over 30 minutes. One such episode is explained here: https://lenergeek.com/2019/03/07/mix-electrique-nucleaire-tr...
I read the article and I do not see the 80% mentioned. I really would have loved to read this, but they mentioned only 10GW of variation, that's roughly 20% I believe.
> it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time
Well, France has been doing it just fine for the last 33 years:
> [...] flexible operation of nuclear reactors is possible and has been applied in France by EDF’s 58 reactors for more than 30 years without any noticeable or unmanageable impacts: no effects on safety or on the environment, and no noticeable additional maintenance costs, with an additional unplanned capability load factor estimated at only 0.5%. EDF’s nuclear reactors have the capability to vary their output between 20% and 100% within 30 minutes, twice a day, when operating in load-following mode
Nuclear is the best option, no? Of course it has risks but given how awful coal and other traditional power sources run it seems to be the best option.
We are only going to use more and more energy, generating and lowering energy costs will be a net positive for all. Especially to support EVs.
> As the European Union moves to cut ties to Russian oil and gas in the wake of Moscow’s war on Ukraine, France has been betting on its nuclear plants to weather a looming energy crunch. Nuclear power provides about 70 percent of France’s electricity, a bigger share than any other country in the world. But the industry has tumbled into an unprecedented power crisis as EDF confronts troubles ranging from the mysterious emergence of stress corrosion inside nuclear plants to a hotter climate that is making it harder to cool the aging reactors. The outages at EDF, Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output tumbling to its lowest level in nearly 30 years, pushing French electric bills to record highs just as the war in Ukraine is stoking broader inflation. Instead of pumping vast amounts of electricity to Britain, Italy and other European countries pivoting from Russian oil, France faces the unsettling prospect of initiating rolling blackouts this winter and having to import power.
Nuclear power is so good that France might have to import energy from German coal power plans next winter to avoid large scale blackouts.
Like most of the western world, France permitted their nuclear capacity to rot while not making sufficient progress to secure other sources of relatively clean energy.
In fact president Macron initially intended to reduce nuclear energy to 50% of power generation. One of the many moronic policies he had to walk back (the other big one was further cuts to France’s defence budget).
France currently has half the reactors stopped (28/56), but why?
- 7 are stopped for refurbishment as their lifetime extension require important work
- 13 are stopped for the corrosion issue detected
- 3 are currently replacing the nuclear fuel
- 5 are stopped for other technical issue
It's true that this year France will only produce 300TWh instead of 350TWh last year which is not the gloom picture that you try to make. By Novembre most of the reactors are planned to be backed online.(https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/energie/infographies-ba...)
The main problem is that the new reactors that were supposed to come online 10 years ago are still not there, and that the multiple offshore wind generation projects are still blocked!
It needs a catastrophic fail ihre for nuclear to become deadly for the masses. Germany replaced the nuclear power plants with coal and gas based plants whose Modus operandi is deadly for the masses.
Even if you want to shutdown nuclear, Germany did it in an extremely stupid.
Nuclear power is mainly being replaced by renewables, not coal or gas.
Natural gas only accounts for 15% of electricity production, the upcoming gap could probably easily be filled with alternatives.
But it's main use isn't electricity, but for heating in private homes and all sort of processes in the industry. About half of all homes are heated with gas, you can't simply flip a switch and replace the gas heating in 20 million homes with electric heating.
TL;DR: the pressing problem that needs solving is how to prioritize private homes versus the industry's use of natural gas, even if nuclear power plants would suddenly spring out of the ground for free, they wouldn't help much with this.
It's as "green" as the electricity used for the hydrogen production. The idea is to use hydrogen as energy storage, produced from surplus wind and solar energy.
The total number of deaths due to the nuclear energy production works wide is less than the animal number of french people dying due to air pollution by German coal plants.
