Nuclear power no panacea for poor nations - ElBaradei, head of IAEA

[bananas]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N27334980.htm

INTERVIEW-Nuclear power no panacea for poor nations-IAEA
27 Oct 2008 20:52:46 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 (Reuters) - Nuclear energy is undergoing a worldwide renaissance, but poor nations yearning to develop need to realize that it is no panacea to profound poverty, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

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"It could be part of the energy mix in many of the large developing countries, but I always continue to lower expectations," he told Reuters in an interview after addressing the U.N. General Assembly.

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"There's a lot of over-expectation," he said. "We think everybody has the right to use it but there are certain parameters you have to fulfill."

<snip>

"It will help with climate change, energy independence, fluctuation in prices, but one has to take it in perspective."

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[PDJane]

1. He's quite correct,

and it's a dangerous fuel, although cleaner than coal. Barely.

[NNadir]

4. I would characterize the "barely" word as an example of extreme misinformation.

I assume that you have not read the EXTERNE reports, or any of the many thousands of papers published on external cost of energy.

In fact, according to Denholm, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Lab: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2005/39/i06/abs/es049946p.html, nuclear power's climate change external cost is less than 20% of the external cost of wind/compressed air costs.

Nuclear climate change costs can be 1/100 th of dangerous natural gas.

Basically the claim that nuclear is comparable to coal consists of extremely lazy thinking.

Nuclear is cleaner than stored wind energy, as clean as direct use wind with no spinning reserve back up, (but more reliable) and cleaner than solar PV.

It is not perfect, but there are zero perfect forms of energy.

[stopbush]

2. The elephant in the room: there's not enough source material available

to power more nuke plants.

There's currently a 50-year supply of nuclear fuel. Build more plants, and that fuel is used even more quickly. Build enough nuke plants to account for 25% of the world's energy and that fuel source will last only 12 years.

MIT issued a report on this last year, but nobody seems to know about it. There are FINITE resources available to power nuke plants. It's a fact.

[NNadir]

5. Really?

Prove it.

Nuclear resourses are infinite essentially.

[Viking12]

3. No panacea for rich nations either.

Just sayin'.

[NNadir]

6. It will not save the asses of pathetic yuppies to sure, but will remain what it has been

for three decades now, the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free primary energy.

Once the project to destroy the world's rivers nears completion, it will probably become the even bigger than its next competitor, hydroelctric.

It is very unlikely that any of the toy forms of energy so widely hyped, wind, solar, geothermal, blah, blah, blah, will reach 30 exajoules per year in the live time of anyone now living, based on the last 50 years of continuous promise that they would do so.

[Terry in Austin]

7. The fallacy is to assume 30 EJ as some kind of given

It is very unlikely that any of the toy forms of energy so widely hyped, wind, solar, geothermal, blah, blah, blah, will reach 30 exajoules per year

Toy forms of energy they may be, but in the end they will have to suffice.

None of them, including nuclear, scales up to what we've come to expect as our energy entitlement.

Here's where we learn to adapt our notions of how much energy is "enough" to the realities of how much energy there will actually be. Clue: less, way less.

You may proceed to shoot the messenger...

[NNadir]

10. I am hardly one to say that there is such a thing as an "energy entitlement."

I have argued long and hard that even a "2000 watt" world, with average human consumption amounting to the energy output over one year of 2000 watts of continuous power, is hardly sustainable. That's a little over 1/6th of the average per capita American consumption, and about double Chinese per capita consumption.

I have written as much thousands of times.

My nuclear vision is not cornucopian, although it is very clear that nuclear energy is more than capable of providing provide a few hundred exajoules of energy per year for many centuries.

But the idea that geothermal, solar or wind toys can ever match nuclear is just what it has been for many decades - shrilly so on this website for well more than a half a decade here - wishful thinking.

In fact, the chemistry of solar PV energy - not to mention its high cost and poor reliability - makes it incapable of supplying 30 exajoules, never mind the hundreds of exajoules its proponents keep pretending will come along with Santa Claus.

The external cost of storing wind energy is enormous and highly toxic and - except in the community of blissfully stupid anti-nukes - most people recognize that the wind does not blow continuously.

I really have very little patience with people who whine that we cannot have much energy and then whine as well that we need to destroy and vandalize the most reliable, cleanest, and inexpensive form of scalable energy that we now have, that would be nuclear. Nuclear energy doesn't have to be perfect to be better than everything else. It merely needs to be better than everything else, which it is, by a long shot.

Somehow this particular class of dumb-bells insist that only nuclear energy should be required to prove that it can do everything to prove that it is the best form of energy, that only nuclear energy need establish that it can contain all of its risks for eternity, and that other forms of energy can proceed irrespective of their higher risk.

The anti-nuke cults, with their vast ignorance, selective attention, deliberate distortions, human indifference, moral vacuity and historical misapprehensions consist entirely of the type of brats who would sit on the deck of the Titanic saying that no one should agree to get into a life boat because they paid for first class tickets and weren't being given the accommodations they paid for.

I couldn't care less about your message. I'm basically tired of short lazy sound bites.

I understand energy on starker and deeper terms than 99% of the people I meet. The other 1% all understand nuclear energy better than I do.

To be frank, I expect disaster, famine, death, poverty, war and environmental collapse. It didn't have to be this way, but we have stumbled into it by reading fairy tales when we should have been working as hard as we could. I do not expect that my kids will be driving Tesla inspired electric cars powered by solar cells on the roofs of 5000 square foot McMansions in the suburbs. What little energy they have in their times will be dominated by nuclear power - to the extent it has survived vandalism by thugs - but their lives will be hard and deprived compared to the one I have nearly finished living.

I expect their lives will be bleak and involve great struggle.

I am deeply ashamed of my generation and its excesses, and I hold in contempt those who set out to make this world, little mindless cretins of the type who wax romantic about shit like their cool solar pool lights.

Some of the most egregious and deliberate liars responsible for the world we live in, are the dipshits who spend so much of their time cruising fundamentalist illiterate anti-science anti-nuke websites, like the shit for brains Greenpeace website for instance.

Have a nice fluffy whiny day.

Ignorance kills.

[bananas]

8. NNadir gets his numbers wrong, again.

Nuclear is NOT "the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free primary energy".
We get slightly more energy from hydro than nuclear.
Saying "largest, by far" is just silly.
Anyone can look up the numbers themselves, they are in these tables:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb1101.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb1116.html

[kristopher]

9. He also ignores the fact that the majority of the world's poorest

He also ignores the fact that the majority of the world's poorest live in countries with little to no grid infrastructure. The claim that nuclear is somehow going to help them is a big steaming pile of horse dung.

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[angryfirelord]

12. Maybe not now...

...but that's mainly due to the anti-nuclear stance our country is taken. Nuclear energy IS scalable in very large quantities and provides a consistent 24/7 power source. Better yet, if we can continue research of extracting energy from the spent fuel rods, then nuclear energy has potential to be a renewable resource.

As we're learning from the oil crisis, we must have different sources of power, but nuclear must be included in that mixed bag. Geothermal is limited in where you can build the plant, solar is expensive & works only in the day, and a wind farm requires a large area of space in a specific area to generate power. Nuclear plants can be built pretty much anywhere as long as the ground is stable and that there's enough room for an evacuation.

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/thyd/ne161/ncabreza/sources.html
http://cleantechnica.com/2008/05/18/does-nuclear-power-compete-with-conservation-wind-solar-and-biomass/
http://www.mauinews.com/page/content.detail/id/510330.html

Ideology is no substitute for reality. :)

[kristopher]

15. You don't have the facts on your side.

The abstract from Berkeley is the only reputable cite you've offered, but it doesn't do a complete analysis of the problem or available solutions. I'd suggest you download and read this report by Romm and then compare his analysis with some of the claims you are basing your conclusions on. As you say, ideology is no substitute for reality, and the reality is that going from fossil fuels to nuclear is jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
"Nuclear power generates approximately 20 percent of all U.S. electricity. And because it is a low-carbon source of around-the-clock power, it has received renewed interest as concern grows over the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our climate.

Yet nuclear power’s own myriad limitations will constrain its growth, especially in the near term. These include:

* Prohibitively high, and escalating, capital costs ƒ
* Production bottlenecks in key components needed to build plants ƒ
* Very long construction times ƒ
* Concerns about uranium supplies and importation issues ƒ
* Unresolved problems with the availability and security of waste storage ƒ
* Large-scale water use amid shortages ƒ
* High electricity prices from new plants ƒ

Nuclear power is therefore unlikely to play a dominant—greater than 10 percent—role in the national or global effort to prevent the global temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above preindustrial levels.

The carbon-free power technologies that the nation and the world should focus on deploying right now at large scale are efficiency, wind power, geothermal power, and solar power. They are the lower-cost carbon-free strategies with minimal societal effects and the fewest production bottlenecks. They could easily meet all of U.S. demand for the next quarter -century, while substituting for some existing fossil fuel plants. In the medium-term (post-2020), other technologies, such as coal with carbon capture and storage or advanced geothermal, could be significant players, but only with a far greater development effort over the next decade.

Progressives must also focus on the issue of nuclear subsidies, or nuclear pork. Conservative politicians such as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other nuclear power advocates continue to insist that new climate legislation must include yet more large subsidies for nuclear power. Since nuclear power is a mature electricity generation technology with a large market share and is the beneficiary of some $100 billion in direct and indirect subsidies since 1948, it neither requires nor deserves significant subsidies in any future climate law."

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/nuclear_power_report.html

[excess_3]

13. poor Americans don't deserve cars ...

poor non-Americans don't deserve
nuclear power
......

OK, whatever

[kristopher]

14. That isn't what the article says...

Nuclear isn't the appropriate technology for developing countries. It is one of the most expensive to build and operate; and it requires an additional massive nationwide investment in the infrastructure to distribute the product. Distributed generation is a much more cost effective solution. The cost trends of nuclear are upwards, and the cost trends of wind/solar are downward. Nuclear energy requires an ongoing flow of scarce capital out of the developing countries for fuel, while renewables have both a lower initial capital cost and no fuel costs. Renewables also provide many more in-country jobs for operations and maintenance than nuclear.