The Fantasy of Reviving Nuclear Energy - NYT
The Fantasy of Reviving Nuclear Energy
Stephanie Cooke | New York Times | April 18, 2024
World leaders are not unaware of the nuclear industry’s long history of failing to deliver on its promises, or of its weakening vital signs. Yet many continue to act as if a “nuclear renaissance” could be around the corner even though nuclear energy’s share of global electricity generation has fallen by almost half from its high of roughly 17 percent in 1996.
In search of that revival, representatives from more than 30 countries gathered in Brussels in March at a nuclear summit hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Belgian government. Thirty-four nations, including the United States and China, agreed “to work to fully unlock the potential of nuclear energy,” including extending the lifetime of existing reactors, building new nuclear power plants and deploying advanced reactors.
Yet even as they did so, there was an acknowledgment of the difficulty of their undertaking. “Nuclear technology can play an important role in the clean energy transition,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, told summit attendees. But she added that “the reality today, in most markets, is a reality of a slow but steady decline in market share” for nuclear power.
The numbers underscore that downturn. Solar and wind power together began outperforming nuclear power globally in 2021, and that trend continues as nuclear staggers along. Solar alone added more than 400 gigawatts of capacity worldwide last year, two-thirds more than the previous year. That’s more than the roughly 375 gigawatts of combined capacity of the world’s 415 nuclear reactors, which remained relatively unchanged last year. At the same time, investment in energy storage technology is rapidly accelerating. In 2023, BloombergNEF reported that investors for the first time put more money into stationary energy storage than they did into nuclear...
...The Energy Department estimates the total cost of such an effort in the United States at roughly $700 billion. But David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, has calculated that the two new reactors at the Vogtle plant in Georgia — the only new reactors built in the United States in a generation — on average, cost $21.2 million per megawatt in today’s dollars — which translates to $21.2 billion per gigawatt. Using that figure as a yardstick, the cost of building 200 gigawatts of new capacity would be far higher: at least $4 trillion, or $6 trillion if you count the additional cost of replacing existing reactors as they age out...more
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opinion/nuclear-power-fantasy-climate.html
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...energy.
This has been a very successful ploy of the fossil fuel sales industry for decades, and I note with moral disgust, that antinukes handing out pernicious marketing helped fund Putin's war on Ukraine, funded by fossil fuel sales to Germany.
I also know that fossil fuel sales people do not give a rat's ass about climate change. Just as they seek to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen," no lie is too transparent for them to embrace.
The result is a planet on fire.
No sense of decency, none. The planet is in flames and still we hear this nonsense.
People lie, fossil fuel sales people among them of course, to themselves and each other, but guess what, a measure of "performance" can be expressed in something called "numbers:"
The numbers are here: 2023 World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), Table A.1a on Page 264.
Of course there are people who want to gaslight - gaslight is the right word because of its double meaning, since fossil fuel sales people sell gas (sometimes rebranding it as "hydrogen" ) - but I assure anyone who asks that 7 + 8 is not greater than 29. Therefore solar and wind do not outperform nuclear energy, no matter what dumb reporter is cited by the fossil fuel industry.
I note that the figure for nuclear energy, 29 EJ, is largely the result of work conducted by people under attack and vituperation by dunderheads working to keep the fossil fuel industry going, antinukes and - in the German case - Putinites and other reps of the fossil fuel industry. That denialist vituperation succeeded and left the planet in flames.
I note, that the Ukrainians, who are bearing the brunt of the war funded by German antinukes, fully intend to embrace nuclear energy when the war is over. For them the consequences of antinukism are very real, very deadly, more so than for the rest of us.
Ukraine latest: Energoatom looks to future, SNRIU updates EU regulators
I note also that the reactionary wind and solar industry, which has soaked up trillions upon trillions of dollars for no environmental result other than the acceleration of climate change, squandered these vast sums for no reason in an atmosphere of mindless cheering.
We may easily compare, again, using numbers, the expenditures on useless forms of energy, solar and wind, with those on clean and sustainable energy, nuclear energy, from publicly available data:
This graphic is interactive at the site where it is located, the IEA Energy Investment Overview and Key Findings web page.
If one scrolls over the this particular graphic and adds the numbers up, one can easily see, assuming one isn't a fossil fuel marketing person selling denial with cheap, transparent and dishonest graphics, that 4.12 trillion dollars was squandered on solar and wind since 2015, leaving the planet in flames, and the superior and higher performing nuclear industry only received 377 billion dollars in the same period, mostly to prevent its infrastructure from being further trashed by the fossil fuel industry.
The fossil fuel industry, it's sales people, and its promoters in the antinuke cults lack a sense of decency. They have no decency, none whatsoever.
Have a nice work week.