Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-glow-or-go dept.

The Register says that for the second year in a row scientists from a variety of fields have joined together to urge the world to embrace nuclear power instead of the single minded focus on renewable energy. Last year the group included four scientists. This year it includes 66 from a far more diverse set of disciplines.

This year's letter pleads with the "green movement" to get over their objections to nuclear power, and face the facts that the "renewables only" approach cannot possibly succeed.

Their open letter reads in part:

As conservation scientists concerned with global depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of the human life-support system this entails, we, the co-signed, support ... a substantial role for advanced nuclear power systems with complete fuel recycling ...

Much as leading climate scientists have recently advocated the development of safe, next-generation nuclear energy systems to combat global climate change, we entreat the conservation and environmental community to weigh up the pros and cons of different energy sources using objective evidence and pragmatic trade-offs, rather than simply relying on idealistic perceptions of what is ‘green’.

Although renewable energy sources like wind and solar will likely make increasing contributions to future energy production, these technology options face real-world problems of scalability, cost, material and land use ... As scientists, we declare that an evidence-based approach to future energy production is an essential component of securing biodiversity’s future and cannot be ignored. It is time that conservationists make their voices heard in this policy arena.

The full letter and complete list of signatories is here. The list includes dozens of biologists, conservationists, zoologists and biodiversity scientists from the English speaking world as well as a few other countries.

Last year's letter appears appeared here but met with some dismissal, in no small part due to one of its well known signatories; the somewhat controversial James Hansen of the Hockey Stick fame.

In this years letter, the scientists were acknowledging the inconvenient truth that there is no realistic prospect at all of powering a reasonably comfortable and numerous human race using only or mostly renewable power.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:16PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:16PM (#126642)

    The best thing for Earth conservation would be to provide heat to all humans using thermonuclear energy ... once.

    • (Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:38PM

      by Jeremiah Cornelius (2785) on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:38PM (#126669) Journal

      People are TERRIBLE custodians of energy producing technologies like Coal and Gas... What with "warming" and mercury contamination - the famous chromium poisoning by PG&E, etc.

       

      Yet somehow, of all the manifest risks one might consider, we should still deem the good and safe custody for nuclear fission and its byproducts - as the least of worries?

       

      I have some "enhanced rhetorical techniques" to offer these great minds.

       

      --
      You're betting on the pantomime horse...
      • (Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday December 17 2014, @08:48AM

        by mtrycz (60) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @08:48AM (#126800)

        That is an incredibly good argument. thanks for the insight.

        --
        In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by zeigerpuppy on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:50PM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:50PM (#126649)

    The nuclear industry has no one to blame for its demise but itself. The litany of accidents, huge cost overruns and basic failure to deal with waste cannot be ignored.
    Reprocessing proved not to be viable so don't believe the talk of "closed fuel cycle".
    Most damning of all is that the regulatory authorities have ended up in the pocket of the industry. And most of the industry was so tied in one way or another to military nuclear programs as to make the whole thing a massive money sink.
    The nuclear fuel cycle also produces huge amounts of CO2 due to the mining, refining, transport and decommissioning of reactors. We're headed for a bit of a rocky road as fossil fuels go offline but the last thing we need is nuclear reactors in hard economic times.
    Concentrated solar and wind is the longer term answer and it's now becoming very price competitive. If half the subsidy that nuclear or coal gets was spent on renewables it would be even cheaper.

    • (Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @12:56AM

      by Snow (1601) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @12:56AM (#126690) Journal

      If solar/wind is the answer, how do you propose that I heat my house at night in the winter when it's -30 outside? That requires a lot of energy, and when it's that cold, the air is frequently quite still. Do we import energy from the USA who hopefully has extra nighttime wind capacity to sell? We don't have the technology to make multi-gigawatthour batteries. Compressed gas storage or water pumps are something like 40% efficient, so you end up losing most of your energy there.

      Please, I'd love to hear your ideas.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:06AM

        by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:06AM (#126698)

        Large scale energy storage to even out the grid requirements. This can be achieved by a number of methods: molten salt (in the concentrated solar facility), vanadium batteries, pumped water, flywheels etc.
        We're talking about utility scale power plants here not something you put in your backyard.

        • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:25AM

          by MrGuy (1007) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:25AM (#126719)

          Heck, don't discount electrolysis to produce hydrogen, with subsequent clean, efficient burning....

          • (Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:36AM

            by Snow (1601) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:36AM (#126751) Journal

            Hydrogen production is about 70% efficient, then burning that hydrogen in a turbine later is about 60% efficient, so you end up with 42% of what you put in.

            • (Score: 2) by TK on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:48PM

              by TK (2760) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:48PM (#126883)

              Use the excess production of your solar plants during peak production hours to electrolyze water, then run the turbine at night. It's not perfect, but it's not terrible.

              Combine this with pumped hydro, batteries, etc. There's no reason we have to go with only one technology.

              --
              The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
              • (Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:08PM

                by Snow (1601) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:08PM (#126915) Journal

                If storing energy for future use wastes 58% of your input, that is pretty terrible. Add that hydrogen storage is difficult, requires very, very large and expensive containment vessels, and just burning natgas with CCS (carbon capture and storage) looks really, really good.

                Also, not to mention that you would need a wind/solar generation capacity 2-4 times your average demand to cover for overnight periods... Look at my comment below on the storage capacity it would take to replace a single nuke plant for a 10 hour period. It's insane.

                • (Score: 2) by TK on Wednesday December 17 2014, @06:09PM

                  by TK (2760) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @06:09PM (#126952)

                  "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

                  If our capacity is built up for peak summer weekday usage, then when it's bright, sunny and windy in the winter and on weekends we can use the excess capacity to split water. Or use the captured carbon to make methane if hydrogen is too difficult to deal with.

                  It's not a one size fits all solution, but it might be useful if you put a wind farm or a solar array near a natgas plant.

                  --
                  The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
                  • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday December 17 2014, @10:45PM

                    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @10:45PM (#127013)

                    Don't convert if you don't have to. The molten salt concentrated solar plants can provide power for about13 hours after the sun goes down by using the residual heat in the salt.
                    If you really want to use hydrogen, then don't burn it, run it through a fuel cell (even better store it as ammonia).

        • (Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:32AM

          by Snow (1601) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:32AM (#126749) Journal

          I had to look up the vanadium batteries. If you wanted enough battery capacity to output 2GW overnight (10 hours), you would need 1 gigalitre of electrolyte, or 400 Olympic pools worth.

          I was wrong about pumped water efficiency, it turns out to be roughly 80% efficient, so that's actually pretty good, but you need the right geological features. Plus, water freezes here, so that might cause problems.

          To make 2GWh for 10 hours using flywheels, you would need about 50 million Kg of flywheels. Also, they need to be kept in a vacuum.

          You would need 72 million litres of molten salt to produce the same energy (and I think the numbers I found were for thermal energy, so actual electrical output would be less). Not to mention, molten salt is quite corrosive.

          So really, how can we get a stable energy supply, by only hoping on the sun and/or wind? I think that sun/wind energy is great, and definitely something that should be tapped, but that alone cannot solve the problem. We need nukes for base power load, wind and solar combined with energy storage to deal with peak demand, and also gas turbines to fill in the gaps. Everything has it's advantages and disadvantages, so we need some overlap. We also need a backup plan (gas turbines) for when the sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow.

          • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday December 17 2014, @10:51PM

            by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @10:51PM (#127014)

            The key is to mix the technology across the grid to minimize storage (we already do this). Thankfully wind and solar are quite compatible in this regard.
            It's true that some intermittent peaks need to be smoothed out, which is where hydro comes in.
            The molten salt tech is in use today ( http://www.solarreserve.com/what-we-do/csp-technology/). [solarreserve.com]

            • (Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @11:04PM

              by Snow (1601) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @11:04PM (#127019) Journal

              Hydro makes for a better base load generating facility rather then for peak demand. This is because the rivers that are dammed, generally have a relatively conistant flow rate, and messing with the flow rate causes problems downstream.

              The link doesn't provide any data on how much energy they are actually able to store. Also they have pretty large facility, and it's still only producing 110MW (and I think it's safe to assume that is only during the day). A nuclear power plant would put out 20 times that much energy, and it would do it 24x7x365.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:55PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:55PM (#126948)

          I think people are overlooking using carbon+hydrogen as an energy storage medium due to an all or nothing mindset on CO2 emissions. As long as we used air as the input material (http://wot.motortrend.com/1411_audi_creates_synthetic_diesel_out_of_just_air_and_water.html), then it becomes a closed cycle and isn't contributing to the problem. The other cool part is: if this could be made practical, we could continue to use existing cars and reduce/remove that as a source of CO2 as well.

          • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday December 17 2014, @10:55PM

            by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @10:55PM (#127016)

            Where do you get the energy for the separation and synthesis? This doesn't work out so well for hydrocarbons.
            Ammonia on the other hand is a great way to store solar energy as a liquid fuel. If you must power a vehicle by it you can but in the longer term electro synthesis and fuel cells are the way to go (less pollutants and more efficient)

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @11:09PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @11:09PM (#127021)

              I was thinking of using the renewables to power the process for creating the synthetic diesel (so instead of setting-up a specific amount of solar cells to run your town, you'd setup a larger number - enough to run the synthetic hydrocarbon plant and create fuel to run your old reliable diesel gen station at night.)
              I'm not really on board with the idea that all these cool souning, but not currently available solutions (like ammonia, fuel cells, etc) are superior enough to just toss out all the existing cars, generators, etc. If we could find a way to make the fuel for them part of a closed loop (ie pull the carbon back out of the air afterwards), then it's mostly a huge win right (probably not perfect due to incomplete combustion creating some bad stuff, but hugely better than digging up multi-million year old carbon and pumping it into the atmosphere.)

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Pav on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:21AM

        by Pav (114) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:21AM (#126701)

        Perhaps fossil fuels might need to stay the largest part of your mix, but we in Australia have no such excuse. We're the sixth highest CO2 emitter per person in the world (behind Bahrain, Bolivia, Brunei, Kuwait and Qatar), and yet we're subsidising coal and reducing subsidies for large scale solar [carbonneutral.com.au]. In the recent past our prosperity has been helped by a resources boom in which coal mining played a large part, and like anywhere else politics is following the money. Our conservative prime minister was basically a coal lobbyist at the recent G20 in Brisbane. He has said that coal is "good for humanity" and it should be "the foundation of our prosperity" into the forseeable future, and our policy is following those sentiments.

      • (Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday December 17 2014, @09:29AM

        by mojo chan (266) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @09:29AM (#126807)

        If your house was properly insulated it wouldn't need so much energy to heat it. Passively heated houses are built in northern Europe and work very well. Storing heat in water is also easy and cheap.

        --
        const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:19PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:19PM (#126897) Journal

        If solar/wind is the answer, how do you propose that I heat my house at night in the winter when it's -30 outside? That requires a lot of energy, and when it's that cold, the air is frequently quite still.

        Let's say you're talking about an existing dwelling and can't build a Passive House [wikipedia.org]. Well, there are still many things you can do. Ground-source Heat Pumps [wikipedia.org] are an excellent choice if you're sitting on at least 6 ft of subsoil, because the Earth is always 55F and that's +85F from your scenario. Pump it up with a little bump at the heat exchanger and you're in business. It's a venerable technology, very much time-tested, and utterly reliable. People with GSHPs pay maybe a couple hundred bucks to heat (and cool, which is the extra bonus) their homes all year.

        Ah, but your house is directly built on top of a layer of solid granite? Well then, insulate. Insulation is very cheap, very big bang-for-the-buck, and nearly any heat source will do much, much better when you've properly sealed the envelope of your house. You don't need to take your R value to +60...the point of maximum utility is R-38. Anything beyond that is silly, because your exterior walls will become so thick you'll have to rebuild your roof so that runoff doesn't funnel into the middle of the exterior walls. (Yes, there are silly retrofit projects that have done this and cost out in the >$100K range).

        If you want to make your home really comfortable and really efficient, then go with radiant floor heating [thisoldhouse.com] instead of radiators or forced-air. It's truly awesome, because your living space becomes uniformly comfortable, rather than super-heated in some spots and freezing in others. The bare floors are so toasty you will want to walk on them barefoot. And it is absolutely the most efficient way to distribute heat in the home.

        There are many, many other tactics you can employ to answer your question, like earth-banking (to essentially take advantage of the effect that GSHPs provide), daylighting (which Passive Houses use), and while some can cost a lot, a great many of them cost next to nothing. You don't necessarily have to have nuclear power plants to meet your needs, or even solar/wind.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @12:52AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @12:52AM (#127045)
        Maybe something like this would work:

        For heating:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater [wikipedia.org] http://www.homepower.com/electrical-thermal-storage [homepower.com] http://www.cmpco.com/ETS/faq.html [cmpco.com] http://www.steffes.com/off-peak-heating/how-ets-off-peak-heating-works_copy.html [steffes.com]

        For cooling:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning [wikipedia.org]

        I found these after a quick search. You can probably find more, maybe diy for less money.
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:14AM

      by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:14AM (#126700)

      Actually, no. Reprocessing proved plenty viable - it was after all the normal procedure for quite a while in the early days of nuclear energy. It was simply killed by advances in uranium mining, which made it considerably cheaper to buy freshly mined and refined fuel than to reprocess spent fuel. Easy enough to fix if we passed laws requiring that all spent fuel be reprocessed in a timely fashion.

      As a bonus we could reasonably expect a rapid improvement in reprocessing technologies, since they would only have to compete with existing half-century old technologies rather than the much cheaper mining/refining technologies.

      • (Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday December 17 2014, @09:32AM

        by mojo chan (266) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @09:32AM (#126809)

        What killed commercial scale reprocessing is the cost and uncertainty. No-one is willing to invest billions in developing a new type of plant to do the reprocessing in the hope that it gets them their money back at a time when nuclear seems to be on the way out.

        There is also little incentive to reprocess because we already paid the power companies so much money to store the spent fuel indefinitely. Those massive and on-going subsidies had a very negative effect. Sure, spent fuel is a liability, but when the government is the one paying the insurance bill who cares?

        --
        const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:26PM

          by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:26PM (#126923)

          That may be what's kept it from returning, but when reprocessing died the plants were already in operation, and nuclear energy was just picking up steam.

          I agree that the "storage strategy" was a bad idea from day one, but that's hardly an argument to avoid changing it. We could just as easily subsidize reprocessing as building giant, impractical long-term storage facilities that are doomed to failure. And we have an enormous amount of waste to deal with already - reprocesing plants would have plenty of work to do even if no new nuclear plants are ever built. And that's extremely unlikely - most nations which have decided to shut down their nuclear industry have quietly changed course within a few years. We're still decades away from a viable alternative. Oil is expensive, coal is more radioactive, and natural gas requires all new infrastructure (besides which it actually accelerates global warming, even compared to coal, unless leakage can be kept below ~4%. And independent estimates put current leakage rates in the US at 15-20%)

      • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday December 17 2014, @11:16PM

        by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @11:16PM (#127024)

        Nuclear reprocessing has resulted in massive cost overruns: Rokkasho $B27 (3x over cost), leaks: THORP (UK) had a leak of 83000 liters of waste in 2005, Hanford (clean up costing $B113.6), Mayak -storage rank exploded.
        These don't look like a history of reprocessing working very well. It's super expensive, uses chemical processes that are extremely corrosive and there's significant issues of transuranic sludge concentrating in pipes or fractionating in storage.
        There are always better ways to do things but I think the fundamental issue of generating such long lived hazardous materials is really the Achilles heel.
        Oh but we have fast breeders, that'll fix it. Well the economic and accident history is even worse for those.

      • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Thursday December 18 2014, @12:30AM

        by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Thursday December 18 2014, @12:30AM (#127041)
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 18 2014, @01:16AM

          by Immerman (3985) on Thursday December 18 2014, @01:16AM (#127048)

          It seems to me such analysis focus on short-term benefits. Yes, reprocessed waste is not significantly safer than "raw" waste - if anything it's more dangerous because it's no longer diluted by a majority of relatively non-radioactive fuel. Those scary-sounding half-lives in the thousands of years? They mean the fuel doesn't decay quickly, and hence emits very little radiation. The radioactive stuff is all the unstable fission products - the actual "waste".

          The benefits though are twofold:

          1) You produce less total waste. By recovering the 70-90% of the "waste" that is still viable fuel you reduce the quantity of waste by the same amount.

          2) Reprocessed waste is all relatively short lived. Remove the uranium and plutonium and within a few centuries the remaining waste will be relatively safe. Leave the fuel mixed in though and the decay of the surrounding waste will cause fissioning in the fuel, producing more fresh waste. And that puts you in the situation where your storage site has to contain the waste for the many thousands of years it takes for the fuel to be used up if you want to avoid irradiating future generations who have completely forgotten the storage site even exists.

          And of course much of the equipment used in reprocessing will itself eventually become low-level radioactive waste - but again, that's waste that will stop being radioactive in decades or centuries, rather than tens of millenia. Reprocessing is NOT a magic bullet - it's simply a manner of cleaning up our mess so that our umpteen-times-great grandchildren aren't faced with the problem.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:59AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:59AM (#126768) Journal
      At this point, it's obvious that the strategy of anti-nuclear activists is to make the conditions for another nuclear accident. How else can you explain a strategy which forces used nuclear fuel to be stored relatively unsafely at hundreds of pools by the reactors rather than safer locations? And which similarly prefers to treat used fuel rods as waste rather than a valuable resource to be recycled?

      Most anti-nuclear activists are also environmentalists. So why is nuclear fuel the only resource which shouldn't be recycled?

      I have a solution. Get out of the way and let humanity learn how to safely recycle nuclear fuel rods. That will solve a significant fraction of the problems with nuclear reactors.
    • (Score: 2) by khakipuce on Wednesday December 17 2014, @01:04PM

      by khakipuce (233) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @01:04PM (#126839)

      All established power generation has a litany of accidents, 2 major fires at fossil power stations in the UK this year, the greens have just created a nuclear bogey-man which piles cost on top of cost for the nuclear industry and weights the game against it.

      Look at lives lost in coal mining and oil production, vastly more than due to nuclear accidents.

      All plants need to be built and decommissioned so have roughly equivalent carbon footprints for those phases* and it is lunacy to equate the tiny amount of carbon from uranium mining to the vast amount of carbon produce by fossil fuel generation.

      *apart of course from wind turbines which are built and installed by fairies and so have no carbon foot print or environmental impact

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:43PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:43PM (#126931) Journal

      The nuclear industry has no one to blame for its demise but itself. The litany of accidents...
       
      Litany implies a lot. In the 60 year history of nuclear power I can only think of three accidents. That seems pretty safe to me.

    • (Score: 1) by treeves on Wednesday December 24 2014, @12:17AM

      by treeves (1536) on Wednesday December 24 2014, @12:17AM (#128805)

      Litany of accidents? How many people have provably died from accidents involving nuclear power generation? Compare that to accidents resulting in fatality involved in other forms of power generation please.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @10:53PM (#126651)

    Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro.
    Single-minded? Fission is a lot more monolithic.
    Somebody drank the kool-aid.

    there is no realistic prospect at all

    Somebody hasn't talked to the people of Germany who have had days where the majority of their power came from renewables.
    That would be Germany, the country whose lowest latitude is roughly the same as Quebec.

    Of course, it will take a giant corporation to take on the decade-long process of building a nuke plant, making lots of overpaid executives happy and allowing some crumbs to find their way to the fat cats' minions.

    ...unlike the distributed model that takes weeks and spreads the wealth around more evenly (while not creating kilotons of waste that no one yet has figured out what to do with).

    I'm thinking that it would be interesting to see a list of the employers of these scientists.

    -- gewg_

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:35PM (#126666)

      Somebody hasn't talked to the people of Germany who have had days where the majority of their power came from renewables.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#mediaviewer/File:Electricity_Production_in_Germany.svg [wikipedia.org]

      I see this graph. Do you see it too?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @12:11AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @12:11AM (#126681)

        Find a chart that covers a week's span and we'll talk.
        The days I was talking about were Sundays, of course.

        -- gewg_

      • (Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:28PM

        by moondrake (2658) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:28PM (#126866)

        I see your chart, and raise you (a more recent) one [wikipedia.org]:

        Unfortunately, could not figure out how to directly link to the figure but scroll down to the nice pie chart for the first half of 2014 on the right.

        Summary: 17.1% Nuclear, 30.8% renewable (I include biogass here), rest fossil.

        Let that sink in for a moment. In 3 years they have more than tripled their renewables output. Since I assume that gewg_ was talking about recent developments, I'd say they are doing pretty well.

    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:41AM

      by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:41AM (#126702)

      Renewables are wonderful - but they can only supply a fraction of normal demand without cheap, efficient, high-capacity energy storage (aka "batteries").
      The basic fact is that solar is probably the cheapest renewable energy source, and it's only just beginning to approach price-parity with fossil energy on a per kWh basis. But to truly compete what we need is for the price of solar + at least 1 day worth of power storage to reach price parity, and that's probably still decades away. And even once it's achieved it will still take decades to deploy.

      There are some promising technologies on that horizon, but so far nothing has reached mass-market scale. Lead-acids typically cost about 50%-100% as much as the paired off-grid solar system, and that only offers a few days worth of normal power usage if the weather turns cloudy. Plus there's the neuro-toxicity considerations of bringing that much lead to the surface. Lithium-based are becoming cost-competitive, but identified global lithium deposits aren't even remotely sufficient to provide even a single days worth of global power buffer. Aquion is promising if it lives up to the hype, as are liquid metal batteries, and those giant thermal batteries that are supposed to be comparable to pumped-water gravity batteries. But for now those are mostly just hype, and we have an urgent problem on our hands. Nuclear could help fill the gap until advances in battery technology allow renewables to take over.

      And nothing says we have to continue to follow the "giant reactor" path - there's a few different companies working on assembly-line production of small modular nuclear reactors in the 20-100MW range - some of which could potentially even be retrofitted into existing coal/gas/oil powerplants, and most of which are far safer than the large reactors currently in existence. Some don't even have the capacity to be refueled in the field - essentially turning them in to large nuclear batteries which have to cool down in place before being shipped back to the factory for "recharging" - providing a regularly occurring maintenance window in which the outer containment structure can be repaired in relative safety. Said structure itself being far cheaper than current structures, usually consisting of just a reinforced hole in the ground.

    • (Score: 2) by tonyPick on Wednesday December 17 2014, @07:57AM

      by tonyPick (1237) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @07:57AM (#126794) Homepage Journal

      Somebody hasn't talked to the people of Germany who have had days where the majority of their power came from renewables.

      Reading around the reports; Germany is currently paying 50% extra for domestic electricity, twice the going rate for commercial electricity in Mittlestand businesses (SME) and most importantly building coal plants to deliver the baseload.

      Sure - renewables are good when the sun shines and the wind blows, and you can get some good days (The "better than half" they've had was from a single day, at the height of summer, briefly, during a public holiday when demand was low; on average they're at just under 5% from Solar).

      But you need baseline capacity.

      In Germany that's coal plants (added 9 new ones between 2010 - 2015).

      This is not a good thing. Very few people like Nuclear, it's just "less worse" than the alternatives for delivering reliable baseload.

    • (Score: 2) by hoochiecoochieman on Wednesday December 17 2014, @11:30AM

      by hoochiecoochieman (4158) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @11:30AM (#126819)

      Somebody hasn't talked to the people of Germany who have had days where the majority of their power came from renewables.

      Here in Portugal, it's not days, but months. Last year, our coal plants had to be shut down for months because renewables were taking all the electricity market.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:02PM (#126654)

    There is too much money in oil and gas for this to gain any traction. Furthermore, environmentalists clearly prefer long term pain over short term hazards - they will try to block any expansion of nuclear power anywhere in the western world. Who knows, maybe big oil/gas is funding some of these environmentalists against their real competitor - nuclear.

    Energy policy decisions are not made because of rational thought. They are made to keep the status quo despite rational evidence. We will continue to burn oil and gas for decades to come, until no more large scale money can be make from it. Future generations be damned. It's a policy of "fuck you, I got mine".

    Some sobering numbers:
      1. Oil consumption over last 15 years went up 50%, from 60 million barrels per day, to 95 million barrels today.
      2. Oil consumption is going to increase another 1m barrels per day.

    You know that big drop in oil prices? That was because oil consumption increase will be a little less than initially projected.

    http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/news/2014/december/iea-releases-oil-market-report-for-december.html [iea.org]

    The IEA Oil Market Report (OMR) for December cut the outlook for 2015 global oil demand growth by 230 000 barrels per day (230 kb/d) to 0.9 million barrels per day (mb/d) on lower expectations for the Former Soviet Union and other oil‐exporting countries..... Global production fell by 340 kb/d in November to 94.1 mb/d on lower OPEC supplies. Annual gains of 2.1 mb/d were split evenly between OPEC and non‐OPEC producers. Surging US light tight oil supply looks set to push total non‐OPEC output to record growth of 1.9 mb/d for 2014, but the pace is expected to slow to 1.3 mb/d for next year.

    See, we are pushing 100m per day soon. That's a rate of consumption, not total to date.

    Coal will increase 50% soon too

    http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2014/december/global-coal-demand-to-reach-9-billion-tonnes-per-year-by-2019.html [iea.org]

    Global demand for coal over the next five years will continue marching higher, breaking the 9-billion-tonne level by 2019, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its annual Medium-Term Coal Market Report released today.

    Yet, will all this, environmentalists continue to try to kill nuclear. Yes, as the CO2 emissions are ever going higher and higher and higher.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by m2o2r2g2 on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:41PM

      by m2o2r2g2 (3673) on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:41PM (#126672)

      Ok. Dirty consumption is increasing. You think renewables vs nuclear is a problem. Very well.

      Let's say we have X dollars to spend on "anything but oil/coal"(TM)...

      The best move is to spend it on the technology that will give the best results for sustainability of the planet ie renewables vs nuclear.
      So renewables should be fighting against nuclear (and they do have a good argument) for these dollars.
      The competition will drive improvements and raise awareness of both sides. As others alluded to, nuclear still does have its problems that it needs to sort out.

      The fight between them (and the attention it brings to both sides) is the best way to keep both sides in the public awareness. This in turn is the key to applying enough pressure to the politicians to eventually make concessions against big oil/coal. They won't be big concessions due to how much they are weighed down by the gold lining their pockets but every step is a win...

      The other hat that should be thrown into the ring is fusion. I know it is perpetually 30 years off, but without continued public awareness investment will disappear. Fusion would be the next game changer for mankind. However it could also be the next white elephant if we can't overcome the problems (but we won't know until we try).

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday December 17 2014, @01:06AM

        by frojack (1554) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @01:06AM (#126692) Journal

        Agreed.

        But without some realization of how much damage to the planet renewables will do (everybody looks the other way and pretends there is no problem), and also without some understanding of the scale of renewables development that will be necessary to JUST to displace coal, you end up in a shouting match based on emotions (like half the posts above) rather than the science.

        Micro nuclear is probably the way of the future, and comparing modern renewable sources to ancient nuclear designs is not helping the discussion. There are micro-nuclear [gizmag.com] designs that can't melt down and which are walk away safe.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @06:03AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 17 2014, @06:03AM (#126770) Journal

        Let's say we have X dollars to spend on "anything but oil/coal"(TM)...

        Which is a poor assumption to make. There's always all this zero sum thinking going on.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:37PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:37PM (#126943)

      Good points.

      Also much of the price of oil was due to simple derivative middle man markup (it is that much, I have heard estimates as high as 70% of the demand was speculation).

      They are spooked. All of that housing/dotcom money didnt just 'go away'. It was parked in oil/gold. The question is where is it draining off too if you are into that sort of thing...

  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:28PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:28PM (#126665) Journal

    Nuclear power is awesome. Compact and powerful, a single plant can produce gigawatts. It does not pollute the air which contributes to global warming. It is estimated that we have enough fuel to last us for multiple millennia and then some. I can't find the exact source, it was a few years ago but it is said we have enough mineable uranium to last us for 10,000 years also taking into account future power demands. When you look at those benefits it really looks attractive.

    BUT

    Nuclear is very, very costly. Processing nuclear material involves a lot of really nasty and highly toxic chemical processes such as enrichment/storage using hex and reprocessing using the PUREX process and its derivatives. When its safely inside a reactor and boiling water it looks good on paper. But if you peek behind the curtains and see the nasty processes that enable fuel processing then it starts to look very ugly and very expensive.

    Then throw in the fact that plants are built not to provide us with heat and power but to make someone money. Need I say more?

    • (Score: 2) by lajos on Wednesday December 17 2014, @12:20AM

      by lajos (528) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @12:20AM (#126683)

      Nuclear is very, very costly ... a lot of really nasty and highly toxic chemical processes ... reprocessing using the PUREX process and its derivatives .. it starts to look very ugly and very expensive.

      well thank gosh solar panels are made from organic pixie dust by Tinkerbell

      ... plants are built not to provide us with heat and power but to make someone money ...

      in not for profit Fairy Land

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 17 2014, @01:04AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 17 2014, @01:04AM (#126691) Journal

      Nuclear is very, very costly..etc

      And:

      • requires large distribution network - unlike renewables which, in many cases, have a good leeway in placing the production closer to consumption (I'm yet to hear someone saying "I can live off-grid because I have my own nuclear reactor")
      • scales up only in big increment steps (build another gigawatts plant instead, for instance, than install another solar PV for an extra 1kW on many roofs), which means...
      • ... you can't upgrade it incrementally when the technology improves
      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 2) by Covalent on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:55AM

    by Covalent (43) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:55AM (#126707) Journal

    Solar and Wind should definitely be a huge piece of the puzzle going forward...but it's hard to beat nuclear for peak, on-demand power.

    And yes there's a waste problem, and yes there's a leakage problem, and yes there's a cost problem. But all of these combined are less than the actual cost of fossil fuels (particularly coal).

    Coal burning increases lung cancer and mercury poisoning in people, which incurs a significant cost. It also contributes to acid rain (though much less so due to increased regulation), which decreases the productivity of farms and fisheries.

    But the number one cost of burning coal may well be the collapse of ocean fisheries due to acidification caused by carbon dioxide. If that continues to happen, just the financial cost would be enormous, not to mention the environmental and ethical costs.

    Long and short, nuclear is much cheaper than coal when the externalities are included. Nuclear is no panacea...there is environmental damage from the mining and waste processing and storage. But they are all orders of magnitude less than the damage associated with coal.

    --
    You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:12AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:12AM (#126754)

      STORAGE has to be a huge part of the renewables picture.
      Anyone who doesn't get that has simply missed the boat.

      People who mention coal these days are to be ignored.
      It's not part of any serious discussion.
      The future is renewables and distributed.

      nuclear [...] externalities

      ...like kilotons of waste that are still around (since 1943).
      No one has yet figured out what to do with that.

      ...like children with 40x the normal rate of thyroid abnormalities because a for-profit company cut corners and their reactors blew up.

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday December 17 2014, @09:24AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @09:24AM (#126806) Journal
        Storage is an interesting problem because it's both technical and economic. There are lots of ways of densely storing energy, as long as you don't care about efficiency (producing hydrogen or diesel are well-understood processes that have been used for over a hundred years). Solar energy is abundant enough that even if you lost 50% or so in storage costs then there's ample sunlight hitting the Earth (even if you just covered a chunk of desert land), as long as you can make the panels cheap enough. Currently, you can't. The efficiency of the panels also makes a difference. The maximum theoretical efficiency of photovoltaics is, I believe, around 42%. Some panels in the lab are 40% efficient. Most in mass production are 12-14%. If you could produce something 3-5% efficient for a few dollars per square metre, then it would be more interesting than any current panels, because you could do huge deployments very cheaply and not care about the wear or storage losses.
        --
        sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 2) by jbernardo on Wednesday December 17 2014, @08:59AM

    by jbernardo (300) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @08:59AM (#126801)

    Even without opening the source link, I can tell it is another of a string of fact and rational arguments free editorials by Lewis "no global warming" Page.
    His rants and his gung-ho clique of commentators are some of the reasons why I no longer read the register, even if there still are some good writers there, like Trevor Pott and Simon Sharwood.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @12:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @12:55PM (#126835)

    im happy this submission made it to the front page because I went to original site and my post never showed up there sooo..
    nuclear is not a solution.
    we have coal and gas "problems" today because it was okay to use 50 years ago.
    who is to say that if going down the nuclear path some more we will not become dependant on it like gas and coal and face same pollution problems then?
    yes nuclear is powerfull source but if it breaks it is also very powerfull.
    we had many meltdowns and accidents since its inception which has not gone past the 100 year marker yet.
    the problem is that tomorrow I can walk away from a oil gas or unfinity energy (-aka- "renewables") powerplant but I cannot walk away from a nuke plant ... thus if we accept nuclear we might also have to accept extortion: "give me more money to make this nuke plant safer" ...

    • (Score: 2) by jbernardo on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:19PM

      by jbernardo (300) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @02:19PM (#126859)

      If you make any comment outside the accepted group think of the register (no nuclear/pacifist/global warming on LP rants, not enough pro-microsoft and anti-google on AndOr ones) more than once, you'll be added to a blacklist and your comments will be censored before posting. That was the main reason I deleted my login there after 12 years.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:04PM (#126891)

    I'm sure you missed it (intentionally?) but how bout we start with that fuel recycling bit? Yeah, nobody does that. There are all kind of wild plans what to do with the waste but no viable action at all. It's just being stored for now, often in bad shape. And in the current form it will need to be stored for a long, loooooong. time, you know like as long as there has been homo sapiens or something like that. This comparison might be factually wrong but it's here to illustrate the fact we're talking about geological time here and not wall clock time.

    The reality is there really is no good way to produce energy and conservation is our only salvation. That and renewables.