At Science Alert Carly Cassella reports on the developments in how energy is produced:
Last year, the share of coal in the power sector sat around 38 percent. It pains me to tell you this, but that is the exact same percentage that it was in 1998. In two decades, almost zero progress has been made.
As should have been obvious the Paris Accord was something between a press release and an attack vehicle on the U. S. Today the use of coal to generate power is actually increasing, mostly driven by China and India.
Keep in mind that the three largest producers of emissions are energy generation, transportation, and construction. Chinese construction alone would be enough offset anything the U. S. could do to reduce carbon emissions. If you’re interested in reduction of emissions as anything but a cudgel to beat your political opponents with, you’ve got to support more nuclear power generation and carbon capture.
There’s no way to get more nuclear without the public fronting 100% of the costs and liabilities.
Small modular reactors, particularly thorium reactors, will drastically reduce both the costs and the liabilities. I believe that India is likely to lead the way on those.
Nuclear takes a long lead time to build, even under ideal conditions. Even assuming the political option turns around tomorrow, it would be at least a decade until any new plan could come online. Meanwhile, it’s likely that existing plants will be retired in that time.
Again, not with small modular. Those are built in factories and installed on site. They have zero maintenance or next to it. At end of life you dig them up and replace them.
Yes, but my understanding is that such reactors are still conceptual and there’s no firm ready and able to build and deploy them here in the US, even assuming the regulatory hurdles and NIMYism were overcome.
So, it will still be a long time before nuclear can grow in relative or absolute numbers.
They’re slightly more than conceptual. There’s presently a small thorium reactor operating in the Netherlands and, I believe, another one in Singapore.
To my knowledge there are 7 SMRs presently operational and there should be another 4-12 SMRs installed in Canada, Russia, and China by the end of the year.
It’s not the temperature rise that concerns me, it’s the encroaching jungle.
“Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds”
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
If you break things down further, we now have 5.5% of our energy from wind and 1.3% from solar.
Steve
Have you read Greener Than You Think?
There are four new units being built. VC Summer and Vogtle are/were adding two units to their existing sites. They are using the Westinghouse AP-1000 design, and it is supposed to be simpler and standardized. For more info, google Generation II vs Generation III+ nuclear reactor designs. It will get you started. (Most US plants use Gen II designs.)
VC Summer has had multiple problems from the start. After some problem with the original contractor, Westinghouse was contracted to build the units, but Westinghouse went bankrupt from the cost overruns.
(For the intellectually curious, the reason that you hire a large engineering contractor is because they know what they are doing. You get Haliburton or some similar engineering contractor instead of Joe and Fred’s Engineering Contractors and soda shop.)
The sites were originally licensed for multiple units, but the additional units were never built. Since the licenses were still valid, there were not as much regulatory paperwork.
The problem is not necessarily the construction costs. The problem is that the construction costs need to be paid upfront, and it will be years before they will generate revenue.
Yes, when I was pretty young. We had a bookmobile come to our school. Looking back, it was surprising that it had a pretty good sic-fi section. Read Verne and Wells first, then some other classics that were mixed in. All I remember is some kind of grass taking over the world, and that it was actually funny in places. Pretty sure it got California first, which made it better.
Steve
Not qualified to judge the end game with renewables, but it seems like a total fantasy to believe that nuclear will save the world from carbon. Turning experimental reactors into an industry is very far-fetched. And who is going to do it? The same people who have been paying for idiotic lies about how climate change might not be real? Nothing like a highly-deregulated nuclear power industry to give you confidence in your future.
“Turning experimental reactors into an industry is very far-fetched.â€
Oh the irony. The sun and the wind have blinded me…….
BTW – any Tesla’s go up in flames today? Did any
of the fake factories ship?
Elon Musk is a con man who will hopefully end up stranded on Mars with Jeff Bezos. I don’t have high hopes about actual renewables, but real people are involved in that industry, rather than Silicon Valley dipshits.