Its also vastly friendlier for humans and animals. The number of deaths due to meltdowns, and accidents in nuclear palls in comparison to all those occuring due to wind turbines and solar.
If you're an environmentalist it behooves you to honestly look at the research and data that has accumulated over the past 40 years on this topic.
So far every nuclear accident we've seen are going to be around for forever timescales.
The US could have been at the forefront of solar and wind power but it continually tries to push coal.
Let's clarify that China, Germany and Japan are consuming more coal per dollar of GDP than the US is. Those are the #2, #3, and #4 economies. Coal dominates both German and Chinese energy. The US coal industry has been contracting rapidly, falling back to 1985 levels, losing about 1/3 of output. China on the other hand, is still consuming as much coal as the rest of the world combined and four times that of the US.
Japan for its part, plans to open four dozen new coal plants in the next decade.
> The US could have been at the forefront of solar and wind power
The US invented modern solar and is at the forefront. As of early 2017, the US was still getting more of its energy from solar than China (not growing nearly as fast however). The US is adding dramatically more solar capacity than anybody else not named China. Capacity equivalent to four or five nuclear power plants, every year. In 2016 the US added 10 times as much solar capacity as what Germany did (an early leader), and nearly twice that of Japan.
The US is #2 in wind power globally and will remain there indefinitely. It's also at the forefront there. It's adding the equivalent of two or three nuclear power plants worth of wind energy capacity per year, while US energy consumption is flat.
The US has 30 times the installed wind energy generation capacity vs Japan for example.
Currently there are only three major players in wind energy. China, the US, Germany. Germany is starting to fall far behind the US just due to economic size variance.
To see Canada look to nuclear isn't a surprise.
Photovoltaic cells can be made with thin film technologies based on rare elements such as gallium, indium, and tellurium. The vast majority are made with crystalline silicon wafers.
Wind turbines can be made with permanent magnet generators incorporating neodymium and dysprosium or terbium. The majority are made with electromagnets, which require no rare metals.
Nuclear, wind, and PV all have drastically lower full-lifecycle GHG emissions and deathprints per terawatt hour than any combustion-based electricity sources. It grieves me that so much "pro-nuclear" advocacy is just renewables-bashing -- and that so much "pro-renewable" advocacy is just nuclear-bashing. (Yes, I agree that nuclear really is safer and much cleaner than fossils.)
Not only are solar/wind safer and cleaner, paired with modern battery storage they are now considerably cheaper and more effective at providing base load. And prices are still going down, while nuclear prices are if anything increasing.
Any pointers ?
- nuclear power plants might not occupy much space compared to other forms of energy production, but nuclear plants are extremely expensive. To the point where new building projects based on the conventional nuclear technologies are starting to fail because of cost basis. And there is nothing clean about mining and processing the needed uranium. Mining uranium is very bad for the environment and the workers as the uranium-rich soil radiates.
- it is also not true that the production of wind turbines and solar panes "devastate" the environment more than any other industrial production.
- it is not vastly friendlier for humans and animals. Beyond the issues with the mining of uranium and potential hazards whenever radioactive material is handled, operating a nuclear power plant has an environmental impact, even if it is only for the needed water cooling.
- as far as I am aware, no country has so far solved the issue with the long term storage of used fission material.
- and there are the meltdowns. While the exact number of people directly killed by the meltdowns are debatable, there are many more suffering long-term damage for the radiation exposure. They have rendered quite some large areas completely inhabitable for humans. And I am writing these lines from Bavaria, where there are still limits on eating mushrooms from the local forests, and where wild boar has to be checked for radiation before it is considered safe for human consumption. This is over 30 years after the Chernoby incident, and over 1000km away from the reactor. And it is expected to last for at least 20 more years.
So far the usage of nuclear energy has had quite a negative environmental impact already. Not to imagine a large incident in a more populated area. Japan got away lucky that the radiactive contamination was not blown towards the Tokyo region.
You write, that nuclear energy has no intermittancy problems - yes it mostly does not depend on the weather for the amount of energy produced. Except when it does, as power plants have to be shut down depending on the supply of cooling water, or when the water temperatures get to high, etc. Or when there are technical reasons which force a complete shutdown. Then the whole plant goes down removing a significant amount of energy production from the grid. In the last days, a lot of solar and wind power was transmitted from Germany to France due to extreme weather conditions
As said before, building new nuclear plants has become extremely expensive. Meanwhile the prices for wind and solar have gone down rapidly and below the price of new nuclear installations. There are also little risks to the population. If you are not standing below a failing wind generator or falling from your roof while installing solar, there are no risks. No contaminations, and the dismantling is a relatively cheap progress compared the dismantling of nuclear power plants - which is estimated to vastly exceed 1 billion per plant.
We put a man on the moon in less than a decade without any prior experience or technical know-how but we can’t figure out how to make safer nuclear reactors and install them? Bowl of shit.
Such vigor. Much audacity. Wow.
I'm a fan of building more nuclear reactors but this tag-line doesn't give me much hope - in essence it's a "process to plan to explore the potential". There's not even a hint of experimental science much less development in that sentence (I hope these are the writers words and that Canada's plans are (or involve) a bit more concrete.
Canada has a lot of "oil sands" that would benefit greatly from atomic process heat, reducing carbon footprint, turning feedstock losses into salable product, and increasing production rates. Canadas mineral resources, engineering capabilities, and regulatory mindset are highly favorable to becoming a technological leader in an important sector.
My question concerns China. I know it is busy building many conventional nuclear plants. But is it also working on new nuclear technologies?
Small reactors, maybe even mobile, can only make this worse.
If you want to prevent nuclear accidents, you should be supporting attempts to build new reactors, because that's the fastest route to getting the old ones decommissioned.
In fact, small format nuclear offers a decent chance at bridging the (frankly archaic in my opinion) second and third generation reactors with fourth generation and beyond.
Small format allows for quicker iteration and greater distribution of development due to lower costs (witness start-ups across North America, Europe and China making progress that might make ITER or the EDF blush in a few years).
Small format encourages systems that actually use waste of previous generations reactors, thereby alleviating the single-biggest worry about 'nukular' beyond proliferation.. which in itself is physically and technically stymied by advanced techs.
The problem with nuclear waste, however, very much exists already.
And there is no mention that these SMR create less nuclear waste or that they can't be turned into weapons grade material. Certainly even the fissile material in an SMR would be enough for a dirty bomb out of hell. Let alone the material you can steal from a dozen reactors in a sparsely populated area, none of which will have significant security.
No I know, you fear, that this increases the number of reactors dramatically and therefore the likely hood and number of accidents.. but don't you think nuclear is a better alternative to coal etc. while we are switching to regenerative energy's?
Because we still need at least backup power plants for a while, due to the non constant nature of wind and sun.
Fossil energy is preferable to nuclear, and the volatility of wind or solar energy is much less of a problem than people think. Especially with newer technologies to even out the supply.
