Okay, but let's skip Venezuela. For now. Also, while authoritarian Russians are corrupting Eastern Europe, and belligerent Middle Eastern immigrants are disrupting western Europe, and China is manipulating the entirety of the African continent as well as its own neighborhood...

Well, let's sit quietly and think this thru. Socialist and authoritarian impulses appear to be washing over the globe, and this might not be the time for the comfortable law and order which makes nuclear work well.

By all means sit down and think some more on that Crid.

Amy, it takes 50 odd years to get regulatory approval for building nuclear plants. Even after you have approval and start construction the rules may change mid build and increase cost. In 2017 Westinghouse EC went into chapter 11 because of issues like this. Without some sane level of deregulation new nuclear power isn't possible in the US.

If you claim to be serious about global warming, but you aren't worried about nuclear power, then you aren't serious about global warming. Global-warming activists often claim that they are merely trying to steer society towards a course of prudent caution. Well, nuclear power is that course. (Maybe supplemented with bits of solar.) Their opposition to it reveals the truth -- their goals are totalitarian, and global warming, like global cooling in the 1970s, is merely a pretense.

Crid, I agree with your concern regarding some Third World and Third-World-to-be regions. However, in North America, I don't think we have that much to worry about. The danger of terrorists being able to steal materials from nuclear power plants, and fashion nuclear bombs (or, more realistically, dirty bombs) out of them is, IMO, overstated. Someone isn't going to just go grab a fuel rod from a spent-fuel pool at a plant, and take it back to their banileu apartment -- the radiation would kill them (and their neighbors) within hours. It takes a lot of resources to handle those things properly. The hard part of this , from a diplomacy standpoint, is: how do you tell developing economies in the Third World that they can't have nukes, especially after beating on them about increasing carbon emissions?

"Amy, it takes 50 odd years to get regulatory approval for building nuclear plants."

Depends on how a country wants to manage its affairs. France is getting something like 70% of its electricity from nuclear, clearly didn't let bureaucracy & litigation get in the way. (although greenies are now on the attack there too, and want to replace nuclear with solar & wind)

Thomas Edison sleazily attempted to suppress the AC distribution system promoted by Westinghouse & Tesla, by trying to whip up hysteria about the supposed dangers of AC and its associated voltages. If today's political and social climate had existed back then, he probably would have gotten away with it.

What the Enviros won't admit is that they just don't want us to consume ANY electricity. The type of generation doesn't matter; they're going to fight it no matter what. "Clean" renewables like Wind kill birds. So do solar panels, apparently. Biomass can blow up. Hydro...I can't remember what the beef is with hydro...Maybe it kills fish?

Ben's right that our regulatory structure is likely to doom new construction of Nuclear plants in the future. You have to keep in mind that generation companies have to be willing to invest in the permitting process, not just the building process. So, is it a good financial risk to try to get a new nuclear plant built? (The answer right now is "No.")

Also, the issue of permanent storage of spent fuel rods and LLRW (Low Level Radioactive Waste) is politically fraught.

Hydro creates lakes which make more surface area, which means more evaporation.

All of the power sources have risks as well as benefits. My guess is in the long term, some combination is the best solution.

> It takes a lot of resources to
> handle those things properly.

Well, as do airliners. But when there are people around who aren't actually interested in handling things properly, there can be unpleasant results.

(It came to mind yesterday that nine-'lebben is essentially a generation ago. Voters in elections hereafter will have no memory of America's Post Cold War / Weird Sex years. Cobain is, essentially, Sinatra to those people.)

> 50 odd years to get
> regulatory approval

Muffin, the whole point was that their are vast and not-necessarily-shrinking regions of our globe where "regulatory approval" was never, ever going to be a problem… Either because the only infrastructure guy with the wherewithal to build a plant was the Supreme Commander For Life's brother in law, or because some nation without the tax base to build a decent public library was going to expect Gringos to handle all that "financing" and "science" stuff. (Hellll-ooo Micronesia!)

But let's take a moment to reassure CD—

> If you claim to be serious
> about global warming

…I do not…

> but you aren't worried
> about nuclear power

…I am not (stateside, anyway)…

> then you aren't serious
> about global warming.

Again, no!

LISTEN TO COUSIN DAVE, because he's totally right.

Also, ✓ Ahw.

Also, ✓ Nic (in her long term analysis, as if humanity had a choice...)

Listen, we all dream of solving each of humanity's problems with a single brilliant stroke of insight. But that's not how humanity moves forward. Ever. [Rather, weegit Fitzinstarhts.]

Consider this headline, or what used to be called a headline, in May 2019: Measles.

For the Love of Christ, WE KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THIS. Nonetheless....

So you haven't heard the expression scratch a Green, find a Red? no one?

"But that's not how humanity moves forward. "

This. We spend a century in Middle Ages cities where people dump their chamber pots out of second-story windows into the street, and Black Plague kills a third of the population. Then, one day, a Christopher Columbus goes off and finds a new continent entirely by accident, and all of sudden, optimism returns. Life today ain't that bad. Tomorrow has the potential to be very much better.

ahahhahahahahhahh electricity consumed by cars will rise 300 fold ahahahhhdahhaha;hdh
sorry, I was choking I laughed so hard. If cars are now 3% of the market a 300 fold increase will be more than all the cars on the road. Did they mean 300%? That is more like 20% of the cars on the road, which also won't happen. Picking innumerate forecasts is not a good start to an argument. People do not want electric cars because they have problems.

The broader argument about nuclear of course is true. I simply note that the same groups were against both fossil fuels and nuclear BEFORE the climate change threat became a big deal. Climate change is just their excuse. Many have noted that if they were truly worried about climate change like they say they are they would not buy beach houses and would run toward nuclear. They are not sincere they just hate all progress and have a fantasy that we can all live off our backyard gardens and bike to work.

Because trucks, hauling heavy stuff.

Just build them close to Mexico and capitalize on the inevitable hysteria to double down on border security.

Seriously, why aren't we putting moon-landing funding levels into fusion containment research?

I agree David. I was just pointing out that the only holdup on US nuclear power is regulatory. And without changing that nothing will change. Westinghouse bet on new nuclear because of all the global warming fears. They hoped that would free up the regulatory state and allow some modern technology. They were wrong and went into bankruptcy because of it.

"Also, the issue of permanent storage of spent fuel rods and LLRW (Low Level Radioactive Waste) is politically fraught."

Use modern technology. Since you can't get anything approved every nuclear plant in the US is very old out of date technology. It is both more dangerous and significantly less efficient than what you could do today.

Which is why claims by Obama and others that the NRC is captive to industry interests is so hilarious. They've even been called a rubber stamp. The same group that prior to 2010 hadn't approved any new design since the 1970s. As for those designs they approved after 2010, they kept upping requirements post approval killing most projects. The only group I've seen the NRC really respond to is the US military.

"All of the power sources have risks as well as benefits. My guess is in the long term, some combination is the best solution."

No one wants to mention lowering usage other than in arguing about government mandates. It isn't here yet for electricity, but the market can and will price power according to capacity.

You cannot build yourself out of energy dependency, any more than you can build yourself out of traffic jams.

> No one wants to mention lowering
> usage other than in arguing
> about government mandates.

Well, electricity usage has constant downward pressure just because people are cheap, right? No matter how cheap & clean it gets, a guy who makes 50 widgets with half as much electricity gets to spend the difference on his mistress. And it's like that for everything, isn't it? Aluminum beer cans and plastic milk cartons are tremendously thinner across our lifetimes not through government regulation, but just because compounds and manufacturing have improved so much that the companies can save money on feedstocks.

(If that's wrong, somebody say so.)

Meanwhile, cheap energy is maybe the essential enabler of modernity... Reading at night, talking electronically to people far away, etc.

I can think of some seismic reasons to maybe not build in California... but given that the US grid is basically three parts for the continental US (never was clear on AK or HI), it doesn't entirely matter WHERE they are - the power goes to the grid (except for my comments on transmission loss later).

(this is why electricity falls under federal guidelines, it falls under interstate commerce - except for a big chunk of Texas, which has its own grid)

BTW, the issues with hydro is cooling and clearing of water (sediment pools upstream of the dam), gets deeper and thus is cooler. Also fish spawning, removal of free-floating driftwood from the environment. Etc. Although nobody complains when beavers do the same things :)

Frankly, what I would like to see is somebody tackling the problem of transmission loss. A LOT of power is lost during transmission (part of what makes big solar fields less effective when you stick them in sunny places far from the population).

All that said, I think expanded nuclear power would be a good thing. I also think it would be even better if we could tap that super-dome of magma under Yellowstone for geothermal. But that's just because I don't like having to punt the radioactive waste to the future generations.

But it doesn't NEED to be in California or other trembly-places.

(sorry that was rambling)

"Well, electricity usage has constant downward pressure just because people are cheap, right?"

It does -- but this isn't mentioned enough, and people are cheap instantly, not in planning. You get an LED bulb, it's really not an energy saver any time the house has to be heated, or in its manufacture... the savings is in not having to replace it for years.

Anon Says:

"Frankly, what I would like to see is somebody tackling the problem of transmission loss."

Interestingly this is where solar panels on rooftops make a big impact. You don't have significant site to site transmission losses when the generation site overlaps with the use site. As a result it doesn't matter much if such systems are somewhat less efficient than larger scale powerplants because they don't have to transmit the power over long distances.

That being said, solving the long distance transmission loss problem isn't trivial. We already use aluminum cables for high voltage lines and copper for the local grid... both of which are fairly optimal solutions given current technological capability.

Silver is a marginally better conductor than copper, but is MUCH more expensive. I don't see replacing copper infrastructure with silver wiring as a viable improvement path.

The only really solution would be a technological advancement using room temperature superconductor wire... but we don't know how to make anything like that.

We have real scientific roadblocks limiting improvements in transmission, this isn't something we can just "tackle", people have been working on this kind of thing for decades and the current record holder for high Tc superconductor materials still requires cooling by liquid nitrogen. Unfortunately it isn't viable to cryogenically cool the entire electrical grid.

Radwaste Says:

"You get an LED bulb, it's really not an energy saver any time the house has to be heated, or in its manufacture... the savings is in not having to replace it for years."

Right, but it does save you significant energy when you want the house to be cooled.

The great thing about LEDs is that they primarily turn energy into light with some associated heat. Incandescent bulbs on the other hand primarily turn energy into heat with some associated light.

Energy efficiency is often about turning the power into what you want.

I don't want a space heater that is better as a light source and I don't want a light source that is better as a space heater.

LEDs allow you to get light when you need it and rely on your heating system to control temperature.

That equates to savings.

Current estimates are that if we converted to LEDs by 2027 we could save about 348 TWh (compared to no LED use) of electricity:

https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/save-electricity-and-fuel/lighting-choices-save-you-money/led-lighting

And that isn't primarily because of bulb replacement.

> we could save about 348 TWh
> (compared to no LED use) of
> electricity

At what cost to the environment in manufacture or disposal?

Also, whereja got school?

Crid,

The extrinsic costs of manufacture for LEDs are overall less than incandescent or CFL.

They last between 20 and 40 times as long as incandescent bulbs and use about 85% less electricity to produce the same luminosity.

It really isn't even a contest at this point, they are about 10x more efficient from an economic perspective when all factors are properly accounted for.

In addition, they do not have issues with mercury like CFLs do. The semiconductor materials involved are environmentally benign.

There is an issue of aluminum heat sink recycling, but that can be resolved... the issue here isn't one of aluminum toxicity, but rather that it is very energy intensive to produce so recycling/reclaiming aluminum is extremely important. Aluminum that ends up in a landfill is a huge energy waste.