The Myth of the Nuclear Renaissance - The game is already over for nuclear energy

[kristopher]

The Myth of the Nuclear Renaissance
The game is already over for nuclear energy.
July 18, 2016, at 2:00 p.m.


Dear editor,

Desperate times for the nuclear industry call for desperate rhetoric. Hence the reach, once again, for "renaissance," even though the facts support no such thing and the industry itself dare not even resurrect the mythological moniker. ["The New Nuclear Renaissance," 6/11/2016]

With nuclear power priced out of the market – not only by natural gas but, more importantly for climate, by renewables – die-hard nuclear proponents are dressing up old reactors in new propaganda.

Sodium-cooled, fast and even small modular reactors are all designs that have been around – and rejected – for decades.

Sodium-cooled reactors are prone to fires, explosions and super-criticality accidents. A rapid power increase inside the core of such a reactor could vaporize the fuel and blow the core apart. Far from "walk away safe," these on-paper designs have not been submitted to the kind of rigorous "all scenarios" testing that could definitively designate them as meltdown proof.

The reactor that consumes its own radioactive waste as fuel is not the waste management panacea its sounds like...

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-07-18/stop-perpetuating-the-myth-of-the-nuclear-renaissance

[progressoid]

1. Well we better ramp up renewables even more then.

Because the CO2 levels ain't gonna go down with Natural Gas and Coal in the mix.

[kristopher]

2. We are moving faster than predicted...

Remember the concern about China?

To Slash CO2 And Air Pollution, China’s Coal Use Peaks
BY JOE ROMM JUL 26, 2016 2:45 PM
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/07/26/3802017/china-peaked-coal-use-study/

And in a recent investors report on the future of energy Goldman Sachs, agreeing with Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the International Energy Agency writes,

“On our wind and solar numbers, emissions in IEA scenarios could peak as early as c.2020, rather than 2030.”

Nuclear Power Advocates Claim Cheap Renewable Energy Is A Bad Thing
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/07/28/3802326/nuclear-power-renewables-cheap/

We need to ramp up, that is undoubtedly true, but the key factor is restructuring the grid away from large scale centralized generation in order to incentivize the distributed structure which maximizes the opportunities for renewable energy's operational profile.

[NickB79]

3. So are global CO2 emissions

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19052016/global-co2-emissions-still-accelerating-noaa-greenhouse-gas-index

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not just rising, it's accelerating, and another potent greenhouse gas, methane showed a big spike last year, according to the latest annual greenhouse gas index released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

CO2 emissions totaled between 35 and 40 billion tons in 2015, according to several agencies. Some of that is absorbed by forests and oceans, but those natural systems are being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new CO2. As a result, the inventory shows, the average global concentration increased to 399 parts per million in 2015, a record jump of almost 3 ppm from the year before.

Methane levels jumped 11 parts per billion from 2014 to 2015, nearly double the rate they were increasing from 2007 to 2013. Methane, and other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and tropospheric ozone, are measured in parts per billion because the concentrations are lower.

"This inventory shows the rate of releases are increasing. It's going completely in the wrong direction, with no sign that the planet as a whole has the problem under control," said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist in the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who wasn't involved in compiling the inventory.

So, either someone is cooking the books on global emissions and we're releasing far more than the IEA is accounting for, or the planet's carbon sinks have saturated far faster than we thought they would and carbon simply has nowhere left to go.

[kristopher]

4. That's a lagging indicator and doesn't address data in post #2.

Post 2 points to what happens going forward. Your post, while informative, is related most closely to my opening statement in post 2, "Remember the concern about China?"

No where is the claim made that we've reversed the trajectory, but what we HAVE successfully done is bend the curve towards a reversal far more rapidly than most analysts predicted would happen.

That is good news in case you are still confused.

[NickB79]

6. We bent the curve? Really?

"This inventory shows the rate of releases are increasing. It's going completely in the wrong direction, with no sign that the planet as a whole has the problem under control," said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist in the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who wasn't involved in compiling the inventory.

2016: when the definition of good news is that we took the emissions curve from exponential to just slightly less than exponential.

[kristopher]

5. China installed 20 GW of solar power in first-half; triple from a year ago

Jul 22, 2016
China installed 20 GW of solar power in first-half; triple from a year ago

China installed 20 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity in the first half of 2016, three times as much as during the same period a year ago, state news agency Xinhua reported late on Thursday citing the country's largest solar industry lobby.

The surge in capacity extended China's lead over Germany as the top solar generator, said Wang Bohua, General Secretary of the China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA), according to Xinhua.

<snip>

Production of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules also increased to 27 GW, up by 37.8 percent in the first half of the year, the CPIA said in a report on its website, adding that the profit margins of the major manufacturers improved to an average of 5 percent from 4.85 percent last year...

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-solar-idUSKCN1020P7

[NickB79]

7. That's good, because we have 9 yrs to close all the planet's coal-fired plants; 14 yr to kill cars

Or we risk catastrophic climate change so severe that it could cripple the economies of most nations on Earth.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/06/global-warming-target-miss-scientists-warn

“It means that by 2025 we will have to have closed down all coal-fired power stations across the planet,” said John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “And by 2030 you will have to get rid of the combustion engine entirely. That decarbonisation will not guarantee a rise of no more than 1.5C but it will give us a chance. But even that is a tremendous task.”

And in the meantime, we just saw global CO2 jump 5 ppm in the past year alone, something almost no one at the Paris talks dreamed was possible. Heaven knows what the next few years will bring