Must/can the world abandon fossil fuels and go all nuclear in 3 decades?

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Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet Do the math on replacing fossil fuels: To move fast enough, the world needs to build lots of reactors By Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist Jan. 11, 2019

Comments and photos by John Shanahan Climate scientists tell us that the world must drastically cut its fossil fuel use in the next 30 years to stave off a potentially catastrophic tipping point for the planet. [There are many other scientists who say that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels or any other manmade source will not cause Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming or sea level rise. See here, here, here and here] Confronting this challenge is a moral issue, but it’s also a math problem—and a big part of the solution has to be nuclear power. [It is a moral issue to force the world to stop using fossil fuels if there is little man-made climate catastrophe. It is a moral issue to claim that the whole world can change to nuclear for all the things fossil fuels do in 30 years when it may take several hundred.]

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Today, more than 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, which are used to generate electricity, to heat buildings and to power car and airplane engines. Worse for the planet, the consumption of fossil fuels is growing quickly as poorer countries climb out of poverty and increase their energy use. [It is not worse for the planet to use fossil fuels. Fossil fuels help reduce poverty, which is a major cause of pollution, destruction of natural areas and wildlife habitat.] Improving energy efficiency can reduce some of the burden, but it’s not nearly enough to offset growing demand.

Any serious effort to decarbonize the world economy will require, then, a great deal more clean energy, on the order of 100 trillion kilowatt-hours per year, by our calculations—roughly equivalent to today’s entire annual fossil-fuel usage.

[Decarbonizing the world would bring the end of all living things. Life cannot exist below a certain threshold of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It is technically impossible to remove CO2, from the atmosphere in any significant amount, just deprive people everywhere of energy that created the modern world.] A key variable is speed. To reach the target within three decades, the world would have to add about 3.3 trillion more kilowatt-hours of clean energy every year. [It is impossible to add this much nuclear energy in three decades or any time frame in that order of magnitude. Why? The whole world would have to be as prosperous and well run as France and Switzerland. It is impossible to make those economic and government changes in tree decades. It will probably take three centuries for those changes to occur or longer, if ever. Who in their right mind wants to put nuclear power in countries that have extreme poverty, corrupt governments, human rights violations of all sorts, tribal and regional wars, no industries for employment, etc. Nuclear power should only be for prosperous, peaceful countries with sound government.]

Solar and wind power alone can’t scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. [Its not whether wind and solar could scale up fast enough. Its whether wind and solar could be the sole power source for the world. The answer is absolutely NO! See here. Even Germany’s concerted recent effort to add renewables—the most ambitious national effort so far—was nowhere near 2

fast enough [and it doesn’t come close to providing the necessary energy without massive back up from fossil fuels]. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany’s peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That’s just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target.

Most countries’ policies are shaped not by hard facts but by long-standing and widely shared phobias about radiation.

To put it another way, even if the world were as enthusiastic and technically capable as Germany at the height of its renewables buildup—and neither of these is even close to true in the great majority of countries—decarbonizing the world at that rate would take nearly 150 years.

Even if we could develop renewables much faster, huge problems would remain.

Although costs have dropped dramatically for solar and wind energy, they are not a direct, reliable replacement for coal and gas. When the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, little or no energy is collected. And when nature does cooperate, the energy is sometimes wasted because it can’t be stored affordably. Bill Gates, who has invested $1 billion in renewables, notes that “there’s no battery technology that’s even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables.” If substantially expanded, wind, solar and hydropower also would destroy vast tracts of farmland and forest.

What the world needs is a carbon-free source of electricity that can be ramped up to massive scale very quickly and provide power reliably around the clock, regardless of weather conditions—all without expanding the total acreage devoted to electric generation. [The world energy supply doesn’t need to be all carbon-free. But it would be better if there were a lot more nuclear energy. The best way to get there is facing reality of what changes are needed to get nuclear going again for all the countries that are qualified to use it and stop meaningless discussions and court cases with anti-nuclear extremists. China and Russia don’t have this problem. The world is not better off because of the anti-nuclear extremists. In fact, it is a lot worse off.] Nuclear power meets all of those requirements.

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When Sweden and France built nuclear reactors to replace fossil fuel in the 1970s and 1980s, they were able to add new electricity production relative to their GDPs at five times Germany’s speed for renewables. Sweden’s carbon emissions dropped in half even as its electricity production doubled. Electricity prices in nuclear-powered France today are 55% of those in Germany.

So why isn’t everyone who is concerned about climate change getting behind nuclear power? [Unnecessary extreme fear about man-made climate change is one of the biggest problems facing many regions of the world today. Again, not in Russia and China.] Why isn’t the nuclear power industry in the U.S. and the world expanding to meet the rising demand for clean electricity? [A stacked regulatory system and dullard regulatory agency catering to Greenpeace, The Natural Resources Defense Council, high level powerful anti-nuclear scientists and the public that supports them.] The key reason is that most countries’ policies are shaped not by hard facts but by long-standing and widely shared phobias about radiation.

Nuclear power is the safest form of energy by far, especially compared with coal, which continues to cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths a year from air pollution in addition to contributing to climate change. [This statement about coal and nuclear is very true except coal does not contribute to Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.]

Reasons put forward to oppose nuclear power in no way stack up to the real dangers facing humanity from climate change.

Over six decades, nuclear power has experienced only one fatal accident, Chernobyl in 1986, which directly caused about 60 deaths and is blamed for thousands more over time from low-level radiation. That’s a serious accident, but other nonnuclear industrial accidents have been worse. A hydroelectric dam failure in China in 1975 killed tens of thousands, and the 1984 Bhopal gas leak at a Union Carbide plant in India killed 4,000 initially and an estimated 15,000 more over time. We don’t stigmatize those entire industries as a result.

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The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island killed no one. In Japan in 2011, the fourth largest earthquake in recorded history and a 50-foot tsunami together took almost 20,000 lives—and damaged the Fukushima nuclear facility, which leaked radiation. Exposure during the incident contributed to one worker’s 2016 death, according to the Japanese government; the badly handled evacuation of the area, by contrast, is blamed for much hardship and many deaths.

Nuclear power is regulated as though any amount of radiation is extremely dangerous.

Yet we all walk around in a soup of background radiation, giving us an average of about 3 millisieverts (mSv) per year but ranging up to 200 in some places, with no demonstrated harm. The occupational and medical recommendations are to stay below 50 per year. At Fukushima, only 12 individuals at the plant received more than 200 mSv, and nobody outside the plant exceeded 50. It’s possible to measure and track very low levels of radiation, but those levels are harmless.

Nor is nuclear waste the insurmountable problem that the public has been led to believe.

The volumes are tiny, unlike the vast quantities of equally toxic waste from coal and other fuels. An American’s entire lifetime of electricity use powered by nuclear energy would produce an amount of long-term waste that fits in a soda can. All spent fuel from U.S. reactors over the past 60 years would fit on a football field, stacked 20 feet high.

Today we store spent fuel at reactor sites in concrete casks (radiation does not escape the concrete) that will be safe for a hundred years. After that, the waste can be burned in reactors that are currently being designed, or it can be buried permanently.

All the reasons put forward to oppose nuclear power amount to over-hyped fears that in no way stack up to the real dangers facing humanity from climate change.

Nuclear power, if scaled up in a way that has already been shown possible, would easily compete on price with fuels that pollute far more. South Korea, which has built 10 of its reactors based on the same design, already produces nuclear power at or below fossilfuel prices. Recent American and European efforts to build first-of-a-kind reactor designs in a hyper-regulated environment have led to large cost overruns and delays.

But in the coming years, the world can build reactors centrally, at factories or shipyards, 5

using standardized designs, and achieve costs below other fuels. We can create hundreds of reactors per year world-wide and meet the world’s enormous need for clean energy.

It is a win-win strategy, giving humanity its only viable path to stop a climate catastrophe while providing poorer countries with the energy they need to grow. It’s the only strategy that adds up. [The idea of mankind being capable of stopping man-made climate catastrophes is QUATSCH!! That is German for NONESENSE.] [This article has many good ideas about nuclear energy. But its discussion about manmade climate change and very short 30 year time frame for implementing nuclear worldwide are far from reality in the opinion of John Shanahan, civil engineer, Denver, Colorado. He is past president of Environmentalists for Nuclear – USA and Go Nuclear, Inc. In February 2019 he will be founding a website to face the real problems of getting the nuclear power industry going in the western world and providing fossil fuel energy for the less developed areas of the world. His e-mail is: acorncreek2006@gmail.com] —This essay is adapted from the authors’ new book, “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow,” published by PublicAffairs. Mr. Goldstein is a professor emeritus of international relations at American University; Mr. Qvist is an energy engineer and consultant.

[There are many beautiful regions of the world. The rest can be greatly improved with plentiful energy from fossil fuels and nuclear, with good government, with the right aid to establish independent sound economies and education systems. The following photos are some examples.]

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Africa

Argentina 7

Australia

Austria 8

Belgium

Brazil 9

Canada

Chile

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China

Ecuador 11

France

Germany 12

India

Indonesia 13

Ireland 14

Italy

Japan 15

Kenya

(South) Korea

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Mexico

Mongolia

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Morocco

Nepal

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Netherlands

New Zealand 19

Norway

Peru 20

Romania

Russia 21

Slovakia

Slovenia 22

South Africa

Sweden 23

Switzerland

Turkey 24

Uganda

United Kingdom

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Colorado (20 miles west of Denver) United States [The photos above show a beautiful world with climate that we are familiar with. What kind of man-made climate change do you think will happen in the next 30 to 50 years?

Articles claiming that people around the world have only a few decades to stop using fossil fuels because of so-called Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming and claiming that nuclear power can/must be implemented worldwide to replace all uses of fossil fuels are out of touch with reality about Earth’s climate, fossil fuels and nuclear power. These alarmist articles must not be allowed to influence governments and global policies. Reality about energy sources used from 1965 to 2015 is shown in the graph below. How much change and what kind of change do you realistically expected for the next fifty years – for climate and for energy use? Will the world still be as beautiful as today?

John Shanahan, civil engineer, Denver, Colorado, USA] 26

Will the world suddenly stop use of coal and vastly increase nuclear in 50 years? Can you guess by looking at the graphs?

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