Why We Need More Nuclear Power
China, Korea, Russia and France know nuclear power is efficient, long-lasting, clean, and sensible - the US needs to wake up
Why we need more nuclear, the best way to meet the demand for electric power, the need to overcome the unfounded emotional fear of radiation, the need to overcome delays from over-regulation, 5 ways to build more quickly, the terrible mistake of phasing out existing nuclear, a look at energy density, the need to stop subsidizing less efficient power sources
Climate activists who are opposed to nuclear power, please listen: If even the champion of the renewable energy push, Bill Gates, is for more nuclear power, shouldn’t you get on board? Can’t we all agree? Shouldn’t this be bipartisan? Here’s what Bill Gates said recently:
“Bill Gates, speaking at the Economic Club in Washington, DC said “electricity unfortunately, has to be reliable. It's got to work during, you know, say the ten day period that Tokyo, who needs 23GW of electricity has. You'd have no solar and no wind for, say, ten day period. And so the need to have baseload generation like nuclear and others or to have a miracle in storage so that you can save that energy is very high.”
In his somewhat jumbled statement, I’ve noticed three things – 1) acknowledging the possibility of going for a long period without sunshine or wind, even for ten days; 2) the need for a reliable baseload like nuclear power; and 3) the additional acknowledgement that it would take a miracle to have sufficient backup storage for renewables. The best backup storage at present is 4 to 8 hours, not ten days, for wind or solar farms, and very expensive.
Energy News Beat commented on AI and Data Centers: “It isn’t clear just how much electricity will be required to power an exponential increase in data centers worldwide. But most everyone agreed the data centers needed to advance AI will require so much power they could strain the power grid and stymie the transition to cleaner energy sources.” I might add that data centers not only need power; it needs to be steady and reliable 24/7; not intermittent. Nuclear is not only steady and reliable, it only emits steam, not CO2.
The main reason more nuclear power plants aren’t being built in the US is the expense, which is greatly exacerbated by over-regulation and permitting obstacles, which are themselves exacerbated by unwarranted fear of radiation due to ignorance of the actual facts or the fear of the political risk of fighting against the anti-nuke organizations. More on exaggerated radiation fears later. I think if there were no fear of radiation, at least no more fear than that of the hazards of any other industrial endeavor, then most of the regulations and permitting obstacles could safely be made less stringent and nuclear power plants could be built at much lower cost.
The massive amount of money and resources being spent on wind, solar, and battery backup is not good because intermittent power is most likely to fail during an extreme hot or cold weather crisis, just when we most need the power. To make matters worse, the intermittent nature of wind and solar power cause the wholesale cost of power to fluctuate. Wind is unpredictable, but if the winds are strong when demand is low, the price of power produced drops, sometimes even goes negative, calling for even more subsidizing. The same is true with solar. Sunshine will produce max power in midday and none at night. If the midday production is greater than demand, the price drops. To keep wind and solar in business, they are being subsidized (see next paragraph) to keep the price up. Backup storage is proposed as a solution, but it is totally inadequate and grossly expensive. These frequent times when the wholesale price drops have a detrimental affect on the steady, reliable power sources, like natural gas and nuclear, and it’s making them unprofitable. If they go out of business, we will lose the last chance for a reliable grid system, and it will be disastrous.
Billions and billions of dollars are being spent on renewables and backup batteries. The backup batteries will do no good at all when there’s not enough wind or sun to recharge them. It’s wasted money. More billions are being spent on Contracts for Difference (CfDs), subsidizing the difference in the market price of power from fluctuating, intermittent sources.
Imagine if that same amount of money for all the above was spent instead on building nuclear power plants, with much longer useful lifetimes and except for occasional maintenance, providing available power 24/7 in all seasons regardless of weather events. The folks who are very concerned about carbon emissions would at the same time be satisfied because nuclear has no carbon emissions.
Note: “Some people argue that uranium is a finite source that will run out soon, but reactor physicist Dr Nick Touran has calculated that nuclear fuel will last us 4 billion years”
Which is the better investment - a 15 year solar or wind plantation or an 80 year nuclear plant? BTW, “Wind farms require up to 360 times as much land area to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear energy facility, a Nuclear Energy Institute analysis has found. Solar photovoltaic (PV) facilities require up to 75 times the land area.” - not to mention the loss of farmland…
Angelica Oung, writing in Elemental Energy April 20/24, said “Russia, China and Korea are still building them [nuclear power plants] efficiently… we used to build them well in the past… France is the only developed country that can be said to have decarbonized in any meaningful way without relying on hydro AND THEY DID IT IN THE 70s BY ACCIDENT WITH NUCLEAR”
A sign of the growing interest in nuclear power: A global group of companies with a common interest in developing nuclear energy solutions for the maritime sector have launched Nuclear Energy Maritime Organization (NEMO). To be headquartered in London, NEMO will officially start activities in the second quarter of 2024. BTW, Captain Nemo was the genius in Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues under the Sea".
some good news - Doomberg apr 2/24: “The federal government will provide a $1.5 billion loan to restart a nuclear power plant in Covert, Michigan, officials announced Wednesday. Holtec International acquired the 800-megawatt Palisades plant in 2022 with plans to dismantle it. But now the emphasis is on restarting it by late 2025, following support from the state of Michigan and the Biden administration.”
“Earlier this year, Vogtle #4 - the latest US nuclear power unit - connected to the grid for the first time. This marked a milestone in a very rocky road to restart the US nuclear construction business… To help jump start new nuclear power, Westinghouse designed a new reactor known as the AP1000. The reactor is designed to be safer than older models because it has Advanced Passive (hence AP) safety mechanisms to shut down the plant in an emergency even if the station loses all power. In addition, the AP 1000 was designed to be ‘mass produced’ with large portions assembled at centralized factories and then shipped to construction sites… There’s long been a theory that standardized designs could drive down construction costs of nuclear power, and it’s one of the main theoretical appeals of small modular reactors. While AP1000s are large reactors, they are arguably the most standardized and modular large reactors on the market.”
zionlights highlights how much energy density is in uranium
look how much energy is in a tiny uranium fuel pellet
Phasing out nuclear power plants is a big mistake; it actually causes the increase of fossil fuel use. “Crucially, anti-nuclearism has resulted in increased emissions when we should have seen decreases. These activists have, arguably, worsened climate change - the very cause they claim to care about.” “Nuclear Phaseouts Increase Fossil Fuels”
zionlights explains nuclear waste is not to be feared. I quoted her post on this extensively 5/9/24 in “Setting the Record Straight on Radiation”. Her article is the best one I’ve seen that explains why we need not fear nuclear waste more than any other industrial waste; it just has to be managed properly. I especially like her writing on this because she admittedly started from a negative perspective. Her title says it all - “Everything I Believed About Nuclear Waste Was Wrong”. I heartily recommend reading the entire post.
She lets us know that she had the usual misconceptions, fearing nuclear radiation, until she decided to dig deep to get the actual facts. She now explains that nuclear waste is not to be feared. Below are just a few paragraphs…
“What I’d been told about leaking waste was not to do with nuclear energy. The leaky vats I was afraid of were from weapons-related reactors, such as the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State, where the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Energy produced plutonium for use in the atomic weapon program. Some of these contaminants leaked into the land and water, including into the Columbia River. I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons…I was also confused about how much nuclear waste there is in the world. It turns out that there isn’t very much of it. All the high-level nuclear waste produced in the world would fit in a single football field to a height of approximately ten yards…We live in an industrialised civilisation where waste is a by-product of our everyday lifestyles. Many of these wastes are hazardous, including lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, chlorine, hydrofluoric acid, cyanide, asbestos, dioxins, many other carcinogens, clinical wastes and various pathogens. They are, for the most part, managed carefully. But arguably, of all of them, nuclear waste is managed the most carefully…When the fuel assembly has cooled down, it is transferred to a stainless-steel and concrete dry storage cask. These are designed to contain fuel assemblies for around a century. The casks shield radiation, which means you can stand next to one and not be exposed to radiation from the waste inside. The casks are usually stored at the power station.”
Read the whole post
more from Zionlights”…
Zionlights substack also has given a lot of thought to ways to build nuclear reactors more quickly. Zion Lights 4/15/24 “AI is helping to bring down the costs of nuclear fission. Blue Wave AI Labs has successfully deployed machine learning tools at two nuclear power plants by studying reactor operating behavior and forecasting products into the fuel-cycle design and management processes. AI has saved the operating company millions of dollars per reactor each year. Blue Wave projects that the new software could save up to $80 million annually once the tools are expanded to the country’s 32 boiling water reactors. ”