“The only countries that have successfully moved from fossil fuels to low-carbon power have done so with the help of nuclear energy.” – Michael Shellenberger As Europe and China are finding out the hard way, energy is life. Energy is food. Energy is warmth. Energy is order. Energy is civilization. The absence of energy is death. It is hunger. It is cold. It is the end of civilization. These are simply indisputable axioms of physics. The second law of thermodynamics is as brutal as it is undefeated: disorder is spontaneous, and life is the pinnacle of high order.
It would be really interesting to model how much carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere as a result of Greenpeace anti nuclear energy stance and the effect it has had on denuclearization worldwide. In the face of Putin's terror can you believe the Germans are shutting down their entire nuclear industry? Countries like Australia (who have 30% of the worlds Uranium and doesn't even have a tectonic fault line on shore anywhere ) didn't even get a start thanks to an bi partisan act of parliament signed late last century in the frenzy of the anti nuclear movement.
Many readers are discussing the availability / sustainability of uranium, it should be noted that over the last half-century, many research have been done on the potential to just extract it from sea water, which would put the reserve of Uranium basically close to infinity, just google "uranium seawater extraction" should give you a ton of hits.
And this is not some fantasy pie in the sky (or sea ), most number suggest somewhere in the low 100s per pound of U3O8 (yellow cake) via this method, while currently most miners are talking about like 70~80 to incentivize starting new mines, in short, this is more or less simply a matter of price incentives and country(s) putting their mind to it. as the problem is also that to do it on an industrial scale it's not going to happen via some garage startups.
If anything, China's Hydro Engineering society already announced recently that their goal is to try and setup a pilot project around 2026~31 for industrial scale Uranium extraction from the sea. this is far closer to a reality than most seem to assume.
(the article is in chinese, but you can google translate.)
There are other concerns with Nuclear, particularly I'm not sure if we can train enough people to operate them, and the profileration gets more concerning if we're starting to build them in smaller / poorer countries etc. but "running out of Uranium" really isn't the problem.
While I agree that nuclear is necessary for the U.S. for have a sane energy strategy, we can't even keep clean drinking water, upkeep our bridges, and keep our grid safe.
Realistically, I think we have to start getting the basics bad down first. Stop alienating our trades. Stop importing third world work standards and cultures into some of the basic parts of our infrastructure labor because we're starting to get third world infrastructure.
After we reverse those trends, we can start thinking about nuclear. But right now nuclear sounds like trying to run on broken kneecaps.
Oh, to be clear, I'm a one man electric shop that has industrial experience doing maintenance in coal and natural gas power plants when I was still employed by other companies.
Some are still in good shape, and some are simply a mess. They're held together by old equipment that you can't find anymore, that has to be taken down and rebuilt or custom ordered. The systems are all a mess from years of repairs and modifications, some to get it up and running from downs, some from epa requirements thrown on after the fact.
Then you have the fact that only certain older employees, or in some cases, only certain older employees of certain subcontractors, know anything about how the systems work, and it's a nightmare.
So I just take this knowledge and extrapolate it out to the other facilities. Our water treatment plants and dams are much the same from what I've hear. Port's from the little work I've done at them and what I've heard are the same. I assume our grid and transfer stations are the same. I know home systems are.
Reports are water and plumping are in shambles. Bridges have been for decades.
With us not able to keep these up, why do we think we can keep up the nuclear we have any better? Or make new nuclear any better? Color me dubious. I see the importance of it, but it's at the top of a house that needs a much better foundation than is currently there, in much need of repairs
Chernobyl was as bad as it was due to Soviet Party incompetence. With the slow slide down of America, it’s a bit of a miss to say we wouldn’t have the same problem within 50 years time.
You're saying that modern western governments can't be relied upon to make sure that essential public infrastructure remains safe, well-funded and fit for purpose? Surely some mistake...
Anyone has a reference to read up on a good balanced fact based “business case” for Nuclear?
-I’d like to understand better as with the limited info I have, I tend to agree with the chicken that nuclear is discounted with platitudes, so I would love to get more fact based context.
- “Nuclear is expensive”, I am suspicious as cost is rarely mentioned in fighting climate change, but often appears to challenge nuclear. Once the investment for this “zero carbon future” is made, incremental cost of nuclear energy is low?
- What is the solution and additional cost to get a balanced grid with only solar and wind? Minimum of x% fossil or some astronomic cost for storage? It’s frustrating to hear people say “just build more windmills” I’d like to compare nuclear energy cost with solar/wind including this balancing grid cost.
- Safety, great analogy from unblinking om air travel, is there some health/safety data vs other energy sources?
- “It takes to much time to build reactor” So how long and compared to what? I assume it will take a while before there is a low carbon solution to balance the grid
Happy to learn to get a more fact based view. Thanks in advance for any suggestions
Nuclear nonproliferation concerns killed it. Fast breeder reactors use a U235-enriched core sheathed in U238 to produce plutonium, which can itself be completely burned in a fast reactor (the even isotopes of plutonium won't be split by slow neutrons). This is much more efficient than relying solely on U235 - there's far more U238 available - and the original 1940's vision for the commercial nuclear fuel cycle involved going this route.
Unfortunately it also allowed the manufacture and extraction of weapons-grade plutonium - and India did this in the 60's (testing their first weapon in 1974); they also refused to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. That brought western promotion and commercialisation of that fuel cycle to a screeching halt - without which we'd probably have solved the materials and handling problems by now (fast neutrons tend to embrittle containment vessels, tubing, etc, and it takes a *lot* of years of research experience and testing to work through those engineering issues and safety concerns).
My primary objection to fission is the waste (fast neutron reactors might help with that). Conversely, my primary objection to hydrogen fusion is all the fast neutrons it generates (which in turn makes the surroundings radioactive). Here is a company trying to commercialise an alternative fusion reaction that produces only alpha particles: https://hb11.energy/ (there's huge engineering problems there too, this time with giant lasers and capacitors).
"Putting aside the tired tropes of the alleged dangers of nuclear energy and handling of nuclear waste..."
Awfully convenient to handwave them away, meaning you don't have to think about (or, worse, actually fund and account for) things like the massive logistics required to safely store waste that'll still be lethally dangerous tens of thousands of years from now.
Yes, the citizens of Fukushima agree that "nUcLeAr POwEr iS pErFeCtly SAfE"
"Ten years on, more than 40,000 people are unable to return home, most of them from areas near Fukushima Daiichi, where the triple meltdown forced the immediate evacuation of 160,000 people.
While the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco], stabilised the damaged reactors at the end of 2011, work has barely begun to locate and remove melted nuclear fuel – a complex decommissioning operation that is expected to take at least 40 years and cost of billions of dollars."
Calling Fukushima poor design is a bit harsh. These plants would have survived completely had they not lost all emergency power for that long. The only bit of bad planning was that their emergency generators got flooded by the tsunami. Otherwise the plants did function as they were supposed to and the radiation from the meltdown was contained.
It was a good lesson to learn, when it comes to emergency power. I give you that.
Being this laid back about learning lessons in retrospect, in the aftermath of catastrophic failures, is exactly the sort of thing that makes nuclear a hard sell when the consequences are extremely severe and will persist basically forever.
It is ASTOUNDING to me that the audience for a substack which is heavily geared towards examining how risks are generally much worse and less well understood that they ought to be has such a ho-hum blindspot in this one area because it aligns with their biases.
I’m generally pro-nuclear but it’s far from the “solution” that this post claims it to be. Proven Uranium reserves would last us 90yrs at our current rate of power consumption. Even if increased U prices led to a 2x expansion in the total supply… the reality is there’s just not that much of it.
Moving towards breeder reactors could mayyybe 7x the possible total energy acquired from that supply, but breeder reactors are an even thornier & more dangerous question… as they produce weapons grade material…. A world full of breeder reactors is a genuinely terrifying place.
I do agree it’s worth developing further, esp thorium reactors. But at best, nuclear is a small component of a broader overhaul of our grid. It’s certainly not anything close to a solution.
No, looking at the reserve of Uranium is missing the point. Uranium exists in the seawater (as do almost every element in the periodic table.) and that is almost infinite and even self-replenishing, there's been a ton of research done on this over the last half-century (
( some examples but you can just type in seawater extraction uranium in google and see a ton of results. )
The reason we haven't done this is mainly due to the cost, as it is obviously still less costly to just find concentrated Uranium deposits and do things that way, instead of trying to set up a whole new supply chain for a new process, however, looking at these research it would appear that the cost is not THAT ridiculous compare to current mining method, especially if Uranium price goes to where many of us think it will.
I saw an article in China saying that their plan is to begin setting up a commercial pilot project starting around 2026 or so to try this out. The science behind it is fairly straightforward. It's just that no one has tried it on an industrial scale yet.
Oh come on. There is literally infinite amounts of Uranium all around us, its just matter of cost to dig it up and refine it. That being said, even if Uranium would run out of, we would AT LEAST 50 to 100 years to think up magic ways (chemistry ! shocking !) to refine a substitute, or to modernize said reactors for Plutonium, Thorium, whatever.
The energy content in the thorium in coal ash we throw away is many multiples of the energy from burning coal. Liquid thorium reactors operate at a far lower pressure than the typical uranium based reactor does & they have a freeze plug where the fuel and moderators would slide through into a holding tank on an absolute loss of power.
1 kilogram of uranium-235 can theoretically produce 20 terajoules of energy. To create an equivalent amount of energy from coal would require 1.5 million kilograms.
This kind of context-free random theoretical factoid isn’t the right way to evaluate our options. Here is some more context around your fact:
- Only 0.72% of natural uranium on Earth is the fissile
U-235 flavor. The vast majority, 99.2745%, is the benign U-238. The ratio is about 140:1, so for every U-235 atom pulled out of the ground, 140 times this number of uranium atoms must be extracted.
- Optimistically, we can expect a 50% yield from the fully processed U-235.
- There are roughly 7.6M tons of proven U reserves; take 0.72% of that to get available U-235 (that’s 54.7k tons). Halve that to get actual, usable U-235 after accounting for efficiency of processing and extraction in the reactor itself (that’s 27.3k tons). At 17M kcal/g, that will yield 4.2e17 kcal, or 1.76e21 J of energy.
- That ~2e21 J of energy (rounding up!) amounts to 20% of the energy yielded by our proven oil reserves, or 5% of energy yielded by total fossil fuel reserves.
Again, I think nuclear power is going to be an important component of all this, but the reality is it’s not that abundant.
One thing that these studies leave out is how the efficiency of nuclear technology will improve over time. This isn't something that can be predicted accurately but it is time-tested through-out our existence. We have become increasingly more efficient with our oil and gas extraction and use. This will play out in the nuclear realm as well.
Also as more resources go into development, more uranium deposits will be found and new methods will be found to extract it.
I would. There was a nuclear power plant a couple towns over where I grew up as a kid. I also have stood directly on top of a nuclear reactor in the reactor compartment and used to be a nuclear reactor operator on a submarine. :)
👋 I'm currently 5 km from two nuclear reactors. In fact I've spent maybe 30 years of my life here. I'm not worried at all, neither is anyone else who lives here.
I agree with the chicken, but the main problem with solar and wind is that it is not storable. The energy to make panels is a tiny cost (you have to mine U and construct reactors too). The real problem is you can barely store energy for a few hours from day to night, and we can forget about storing it from summer to winter.
> I agree with the chicken, but the main problem with solar and wind is that it is not storable.
Why the "but"? Perhaps "and another problem with solar and wind..."?
With wind and solar you have to account for the mining and production of storage as well.
Wind is a lot better than solar though since there are regions where it's windy most of the time. Solar is a lot more unreliable.
And if you're looking at private energy consumption solar really sucks, because during the day (when you're at the office, or out in the sun enjoying the weather) you don't really need the energy and in the evening when you do (for light and heat), the panels aren't producing anything.
So yeah, wind and (especially) solar need to go hand with an inexpensive and efficient storage method. We don't really have that at the moment.
Great post. Nuclear is the only green future in my view and it's sad that poeple fear it without having looked at the research. You just have to compare the C02 production of Germany to Norway to see who has the correct vision.
"I guess Greenpeace China isn’t a thing? Does Greenpeace speak truth to Xi’s power, or are their dangerous platitudes reserved us gullible know-nothings in the West?"
Yes, that's exactly right.
Greenpeace was SJW converged decades ago. It's why Patrick Moore left the organization he co-founded. It was infected with the leftist mindset, which is stupid, arrogant, venal, power hungry, and obstinate. They know what's best for YOU and if it kills a few useless eaters, well, that's the cost of bringing a socialist utopia to the earth (with them at the top of the pyramid of course).
I'm old enough to remember 3 Mile Island. The propaganda worked on me. Then, a few years ago, I read that no one died, no one seriously affected, and there were rumblings that things were somehow allowed to get out of control.
0 deaths.
So, yes. Greenpeace and their ilk want you and your family to suffer, perhaps dead, and they think it's funny. They ignore China for one simple reason. China doesn't care what they think. They say 'no', or are silent to the forces that have dismantled these once proud United States. It's that simple. Someday, people here will do the same thing. The only question is how much damage will the Prog / SJW / Woke mob do before strong men stand up. and tell the blue-haired barrel shaped anti nuclear Greenpeace "protestor" to STFU.
It would be really interesting to model how much carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere as a result of Greenpeace anti nuclear energy stance and the effect it has had on denuclearization worldwide. In the face of Putin's terror can you believe the Germans are shutting down their entire nuclear industry? Countries like Australia (who have 30% of the worlds Uranium and doesn't even have a tectonic fault line on shore anywhere ) didn't even get a start thanks to an bi partisan act of parliament signed late last century in the frenzy of the anti nuclear movement.
Many readers are discussing the availability / sustainability of uranium, it should be noted that over the last half-century, many research have been done on the potential to just extract it from sea water, which would put the reserve of Uranium basically close to infinity, just google "uranium seawater extraction" should give you a ton of hits.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/voigt1/ (like this one)
And this is not some fantasy pie in the sky (or sea ), most number suggest somewhere in the low 100s per pound of U3O8 (yellow cake) via this method, while currently most miners are talking about like 70~80 to incentivize starting new mines, in short, this is more or less simply a matter of price incentives and country(s) putting their mind to it. as the problem is also that to do it on an industrial scale it's not going to happen via some garage startups.
If anything, China's Hydro Engineering society already announced recently that their goal is to try and setup a pilot project around 2026~31 for industrial scale Uranium extraction from the sea. this is far closer to a reality than most seem to assume.
http://www.hydropower.org.cn/showNewsDetail.asp?nsId=30330
(the article is in chinese, but you can google translate.)
There are other concerns with Nuclear, particularly I'm not sure if we can train enough people to operate them, and the profileration gets more concerning if we're starting to build them in smaller / poorer countries etc. but "running out of Uranium" really isn't the problem.
There's at least 2700x more uranium and thorium in coal/coal ash than sea water
No mention of a Manhattan project for thorium which would provide clean energy without nuclear waste.
While I agree that nuclear is necessary for the U.S. for have a sane energy strategy, we can't even keep clean drinking water, upkeep our bridges, and keep our grid safe.
Realistically, I think we have to start getting the basics bad down first. Stop alienating our trades. Stop importing third world work standards and cultures into some of the basic parts of our infrastructure labor because we're starting to get third world infrastructure.
After we reverse those trends, we can start thinking about nuclear. But right now nuclear sounds like trying to run on broken kneecaps.
Oh, to be clear, I'm a one man electric shop that has industrial experience doing maintenance in coal and natural gas power plants when I was still employed by other companies.
Some are still in good shape, and some are simply a mess. They're held together by old equipment that you can't find anymore, that has to be taken down and rebuilt or custom ordered. The systems are all a mess from years of repairs and modifications, some to get it up and running from downs, some from epa requirements thrown on after the fact.
Then you have the fact that only certain older employees, or in some cases, only certain older employees of certain subcontractors, know anything about how the systems work, and it's a nightmare.
So I just take this knowledge and extrapolate it out to the other facilities. Our water treatment plants and dams are much the same from what I've hear. Port's from the little work I've done at them and what I've heard are the same. I assume our grid and transfer stations are the same. I know home systems are.
Reports are water and plumping are in shambles. Bridges have been for decades.
With us not able to keep these up, why do we think we can keep up the nuclear we have any better? Or make new nuclear any better? Color me dubious. I see the importance of it, but it's at the top of a house that needs a much better foundation than is currently there, in much need of repairs
Hi when do you think a majority of the people in the first world will die due to climate change and other issues?
Chernobyl was as bad as it was due to Soviet Party incompetence. With the slow slide down of America, it’s a bit of a miss to say we wouldn’t have the same problem within 50 years time.
You're saying that modern western governments can't be relied upon to make sure that essential public infrastructure remains safe, well-funded and fit for purpose? Surely some mistake...
Anyone has a reference to read up on a good balanced fact based “business case” for Nuclear?
-I’d like to understand better as with the limited info I have, I tend to agree with the chicken that nuclear is discounted with platitudes, so I would love to get more fact based context.
- “Nuclear is expensive”, I am suspicious as cost is rarely mentioned in fighting climate change, but often appears to challenge nuclear. Once the investment for this “zero carbon future” is made, incremental cost of nuclear energy is low?
- What is the solution and additional cost to get a balanced grid with only solar and wind? Minimum of x% fossil or some astronomic cost for storage? It’s frustrating to hear people say “just build more windmills” I’d like to compare nuclear energy cost with solar/wind including this balancing grid cost.
- Safety, great analogy from unblinking om air travel, is there some health/safety data vs other energy sources?
- “It takes to much time to build reactor” So how long and compared to what? I assume it will take a while before there is a low carbon solution to balance the grid
Happy to learn to get a more fact based view. Thanks in advance for any suggestions
What about this: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/fast-neutron-reactors.aspx I've been reading about these reactors that are attempting to close the cycle and reuse the waste so that the remaining waste is both minimal and dangerous for a much shorter period. Anyone have any experience on this?
Nuclear nonproliferation concerns killed it. Fast breeder reactors use a U235-enriched core sheathed in U238 to produce plutonium, which can itself be completely burned in a fast reactor (the even isotopes of plutonium won't be split by slow neutrons). This is much more efficient than relying solely on U235 - there's far more U238 available - and the original 1940's vision for the commercial nuclear fuel cycle involved going this route.
Unfortunately it also allowed the manufacture and extraction of weapons-grade plutonium - and India did this in the 60's (testing their first weapon in 1974); they also refused to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. That brought western promotion and commercialisation of that fuel cycle to a screeching halt - without which we'd probably have solved the materials and handling problems by now (fast neutrons tend to embrittle containment vessels, tubing, etc, and it takes a *lot* of years of research experience and testing to work through those engineering issues and safety concerns).
My primary objection to fission is the waste (fast neutron reactors might help with that). Conversely, my primary objection to hydrogen fusion is all the fast neutrons it generates (which in turn makes the surroundings radioactive). Here is a company trying to commercialise an alternative fusion reaction that produces only alpha particles: https://hb11.energy/ (there's huge engineering problems there too, this time with giant lasers and capacitors).
"Putting aside the tired tropes of the alleged dangers of nuclear energy and handling of nuclear waste..."
Awfully convenient to handwave them away, meaning you don't have to think about (or, worse, actually fund and account for) things like the massive logistics required to safely store waste that'll still be lethally dangerous tens of thousands of years from now.
Yes, the citizens of Fukushima agree that "nUcLeAr POwEr iS pErFeCtly SAfE"
"Ten years on, more than 40,000 people are unable to return home, most of them from areas near Fukushima Daiichi, where the triple meltdown forced the immediate evacuation of 160,000 people.
While the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco], stabilised the damaged reactors at the end of 2011, work has barely begun to locate and remove melted nuclear fuel – a complex decommissioning operation that is expected to take at least 40 years and cost of billions of dollars."
Fukushima was a disaster waiting to happen. Poor design and poorer choice in location. Especially being a very active geological region.
Calling Fukushima poor design is a bit harsh. These plants would have survived completely had they not lost all emergency power for that long. The only bit of bad planning was that their emergency generators got flooded by the tsunami. Otherwise the plants did function as they were supposed to and the radiation from the meltdown was contained.
It was a good lesson to learn, when it comes to emergency power. I give you that.
Being this laid back about learning lessons in retrospect, in the aftermath of catastrophic failures, is exactly the sort of thing that makes nuclear a hard sell when the consequences are extremely severe and will persist basically forever.
Excuse me but when a massive earthquake and tsunami kills over 15.000 people, it's pretty remarkable that radiation did not kill anyone.
It is ASTOUNDING to me that the audience for a substack which is heavily geared towards examining how risks are generally much worse and less well understood that they ought to be has such a ho-hum blindspot in this one area because it aligns with their biases.
This looks quite nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0
Of course, yes this Very Deep Hole has solved the problem forever! Hooray!
Well, it kind of does when the bedrock at the location has been strong enough to survive several ice ages.
What's your threat scenario? Humans long gone, some alien species visits the planet 50k years from now and start digging and get radiation poisoning?
I thought it was Finland that got this ball moving. https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/finland-lobbies-nuclear-energy-as-a-sustainable-source/
Apparently a lot of these EU countries want a reliable energy source that they can consider green.
Also, beat the chicken by two days. :P
https://baerlocherbearing.substack.com/p/ppi-fed-speakers-and-nuclear-developments
<3 your blog.
I’m generally pro-nuclear but it’s far from the “solution” that this post claims it to be. Proven Uranium reserves would last us 90yrs at our current rate of power consumption. Even if increased U prices led to a 2x expansion in the total supply… the reality is there’s just not that much of it.
Moving towards breeder reactors could mayyybe 7x the possible total energy acquired from that supply, but breeder reactors are an even thornier & more dangerous question… as they produce weapons grade material…. A world full of breeder reactors is a genuinely terrifying place.
I do agree it’s worth developing further, esp thorium reactors. But at best, nuclear is a small component of a broader overhaul of our grid. It’s certainly not anything close to a solution.
(Source for all of the above is pages 255-264 of https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m)
No, looking at the reserve of Uranium is missing the point. Uranium exists in the seawater (as do almost every element in the periodic table.) and that is almost infinite and even self-replenishing, there's been a ton of research done on this over the last half-century (
https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extract-uranium-seawater-nuclear-power
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/voigt1/
( some examples but you can just type in seawater extraction uranium in google and see a ton of results. )
The reason we haven't done this is mainly due to the cost, as it is obviously still less costly to just find concentrated Uranium deposits and do things that way, instead of trying to set up a whole new supply chain for a new process, however, looking at these research it would appear that the cost is not THAT ridiculous compare to current mining method, especially if Uranium price goes to where many of us think it will.
I saw an article in China saying that their plan is to begin setting up a commercial pilot project starting around 2026 or so to try this out. The science behind it is fairly straightforward. It's just that no one has tried it on an industrial scale yet.
http://www.hydropower.org.cn/showNewsDetail.asp?nsId=30330
( for those that can read chinese or bother to run it through google translate. )
So, we're far less likely to run out of Uranium than the thing we're actually relying more and more on right now, aka Natural gas.
Oh come on. There is literally infinite amounts of Uranium all around us, its just matter of cost to dig it up and refine it. That being said, even if Uranium would run out of, we would AT LEAST 50 to 100 years to think up magic ways (chemistry ! shocking !) to refine a substitute, or to modernize said reactors for Plutonium, Thorium, whatever.
The energy content in the thorium in coal ash we throw away is many multiples of the energy from burning coal. Liquid thorium reactors operate at a far lower pressure than the typical uranium based reactor does & they have a freeze plug where the fuel and moderators would slide through into a holding tank on an absolute loss of power.
"Literally"
1 kilogram of uranium-235 can theoretically produce 20 terajoules of energy. To create an equivalent amount of energy from coal would require 1.5 million kilograms.
Here’s a presser for a paper exploring viability of nuclear in the long term (https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html), which backs up the conclusions in my comment above.
Here’s a very optimistic pamphlet on availability (https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2002/20-2-Nuclear_fuel_resources.pdf)… but when you get down to the meat of it (the table at the end, Table 3), check out the top left cell “Potential energy production - conventional only” X “current fuel cycle”… that’s what we actually, provably are capable of producing with all available conventional supply and conventional processing today: 827k TWh. That’s about 8 years worth of global energy supply (2017 final energy consumed was 113k TWh, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#Total_Energy_Supply).
This kind of context-free random theoretical factoid isn’t the right way to evaluate our options. Here is some more context around your fact:
- Only 0.72% of natural uranium on Earth is the fissile
U-235 flavor. The vast majority, 99.2745%, is the benign U-238. The ratio is about 140:1, so for every U-235 atom pulled out of the ground, 140 times this number of uranium atoms must be extracted.
- Optimistically, we can expect a 50% yield from the fully processed U-235.
- There are roughly 7.6M tons of proven U reserves; take 0.72% of that to get available U-235 (that’s 54.7k tons). Halve that to get actual, usable U-235 after accounting for efficiency of processing and extraction in the reactor itself (that’s 27.3k tons). At 17M kcal/g, that will yield 4.2e17 kcal, or 1.76e21 J of energy.
- That ~2e21 J of energy (rounding up!) amounts to 20% of the energy yielded by our proven oil reserves, or 5% of energy yielded by total fossil fuel reserves.
Again, I think nuclear power is going to be an important component of all this, but the reality is it’s not that abundant.
Thorium is far more abundant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
One thing that these studies leave out is how the efficiency of nuclear technology will improve over time. This isn't something that can be predicted accurately but it is time-tested through-out our existence. We have become increasingly more efficient with our oil and gas extraction and use. This will play out in the nuclear realm as well.
Also as more resources go into development, more uranium deposits will be found and new methods will be found to extract it.
"Nuclear power is safe..." in THEORY.
In practice, what would you say if they build next nuclear plant near your house?
I would. There was a nuclear power plant a couple towns over where I grew up as a kid. I also have stood directly on top of a nuclear reactor in the reactor compartment and used to be a nuclear reactor operator on a submarine. :)
👋 I'm currently 5 km from two nuclear reactors. In fact I've spent maybe 30 years of my life here. I'm not worried at all, neither is anyone else who lives here.
This is Doomberg, not Facebook. Stop with the Hobson's Choice nonsense. That's for the children's table.
"Under President Doomberg, the US would revitalize its nuclear power industry." Doom: Run for office .
I agree with the chicken, but the main problem with solar and wind is that it is not storable. The energy to make panels is a tiny cost (you have to mine U and construct reactors too). The real problem is you can barely store energy for a few hours from day to night, and we can forget about storing it from summer to winter.
> I agree with the chicken, but the main problem with solar and wind is that it is not storable.
Why the "but"? Perhaps "and another problem with solar and wind..."?
With wind and solar you have to account for the mining and production of storage as well.
Wind is a lot better than solar though since there are regions where it's windy most of the time. Solar is a lot more unreliable.
And if you're looking at private energy consumption solar really sucks, because during the day (when you're at the office, or out in the sun enjoying the weather) you don't really need the energy and in the evening when you do (for light and heat), the panels aren't producing anything.
So yeah, wind and (especially) solar need to go hand with an inexpensive and efficient storage method. We don't really have that at the moment.
Great post. Nuclear is the only green future in my view and it's sad that poeple fear it without having looked at the research. You just have to compare the C02 production of Germany to Norway to see who has the correct vision.
"I guess Greenpeace China isn’t a thing? Does Greenpeace speak truth to Xi’s power, or are their dangerous platitudes reserved us gullible know-nothings in the West?"
Yes, that's exactly right.
Greenpeace was SJW converged decades ago. It's why Patrick Moore left the organization he co-founded. It was infected with the leftist mindset, which is stupid, arrogant, venal, power hungry, and obstinate. They know what's best for YOU and if it kills a few useless eaters, well, that's the cost of bringing a socialist utopia to the earth (with them at the top of the pyramid of course).
I'm old enough to remember 3 Mile Island. The propaganda worked on me. Then, a few years ago, I read that no one died, no one seriously affected, and there were rumblings that things were somehow allowed to get out of control.
0 deaths.
So, yes. Greenpeace and their ilk want you and your family to suffer, perhaps dead, and they think it's funny. They ignore China for one simple reason. China doesn't care what they think. They say 'no', or are silent to the forces that have dismantled these once proud United States. It's that simple. Someday, people here will do the same thing. The only question is how much damage will the Prog / SJW / Woke mob do before strong men stand up. and tell the blue-haired barrel shaped anti nuclear Greenpeace "protestor" to STFU.
Ahhh…. Putin must be so proud that the USSR seeds of dissent sown all those years ago in The West have finally blossomed.