Part 1 of 2 Parts
Climate change is threatening human civilization. Predictions of the speed and extent of climate change are becoming increasingly dire. Many solutions have been proposed but one thing is for sure, humanity as a whole will have to endure major and rapid changes in our societies if we are to survive.
One trend in climate change mitigation discussions that really disturbs me is the number of climate scientists and environmentalists who are turning into supporters of nuclear power. Recently, four prominent climate researchers published an open letter to the effect that massive new build of nuclear power plants is the only way to prevent climate change from overwhelming us. The four authors of the letter are James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley.
They say that rapid global decarbonization is the only solution to the problem of climate mitigation and I agree. Although there are international agreements of many nations to limit their emissions of carbon dioxide in the future, unless global carbon dioxide release can be sharply curtailed, I fear that our civilization is doomed.
The global generation of electricity is one of the main sources of carbon dioxide emissions. There are a variety of sources of electrical generation besides fossil fuels which are releasing the carbon dioxide. The letter from the four scientists say that there is no reason to favor renewable energy sources over other possibilities such as nuclear power. They take a rhetorical potshot at renewables by disparaging “cutting down forests for bioenergy and damming rivers hydropower” as being a serious threat to the environment. Interesting that they fail to mention wind, tidal, geothermal or solar renewables.
The point of the letter is their contentions that “Nuclear power, particularly next-generation nuclear power with a closed fuel cycle (where spent fuel is reprocessed), is uniquely scalable, and environmentally advantageous.” I have spent years studying and writing about nuclear power. I would take strong exception to the idea that nuclear power is “environmentally advantageous.” There are many areas of the world today that cannot be used for any human purpose because they are contaminated by radioactive materials.
The authors of the letter do admit that nuclear power poses “…unique safety and proliferation concerns that must be addressed with strong and binding international standards and safeguards.” This sounds reasonable until you realize that these “strong and binding international standards and safeguards” are vulnerable to political and economic forces that have no regard for dangers posed by nuclear accidents.
One of the problems with supporting nuclear power lies in the claim that nuclear power generation does not emit any carbon dioxide. While this is true, it is not the whole store. Estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per watt generated for different power sources over the life span of the generating plants shows that over its lifetime, a nuclear power plants emit more carbon dioxide per watt than hydro, wind or solar power generation. So nuclear power is not “carbon free.”
Another challenge the letter writers level against wind and solar is that they are intermittent and cannot provide reliable steady baseload power. My response to that is that Elon Musk recently installed a battery system in Australia to store energy from renewables generation and feed it back when power generation stops. This means that intermittent renewable power generation can be part of a baseload system with the addition of batteries. In terms of cost, the battery system cost around sixty-six million dollars and saved forty million dollars in its first year of operation so it will be fully paid off in two years.
Please read Part 2