Uranium also has a “peak uranium” problem just like “peak oil”. Even though there’s lots of uranium left to be dug up, we will hit a peak in production and it will become more and more expensive to dig up after that. It’ll buy about 10 years after peak oil.

We need sources of energy that we do not dig up.

I know you might have covered this in other posts, but can you give a quick run down of the “myriad flaws nuclear power has.” I have some general ideas (waste disposal, rate limiting factor of containment units produced, uranium mining/poisoning, nuclear accidents, targets for terrorists). What else?

Proliferation risk is of course, large — not so much for our nukes, but if we were to drive a global resurgence.

Water Consumption in a climate change world worries me. Yes, you can design a nuke with less water use, but it’ll cost you more.

Yes, Lamont is right in that we are clearly headed towards lower grades of ore — if the world were actually to build several hundred more nukes, that would accelerate the problem.

I’m sure others can list more problems.

Why the federal government would want to spend tens of billions of dollars (or more) misdirecting trillions of dollars of private capital into nuclear power is a mystery? That said, I’m sure conservatives will insist that we throw a fair amount of money that way as part of any climate deal. I’ll write more on that subject soon.

“The average up-front capital cost for a new 1-gigawatt nuclear plant, sufficient power for about 1 million U.S. homes, is $2 billion to $6 billion. The cost of 1 gigawatt of geothermal and wind power is less than $2 billion; the same amount of solar power cost $5 billion to $10 billion. Never mind it can take years to bring a new nuclear power plant online; the U.S. hasn’t had a new nuke plant in more than two decades….”

And when you count the positive externalities of renewable, and the negative externalities of nuclear, it’s even clearer that nukes are just bad economics. McCain is insane.

How would not constructing new nuclear electric plants in the U.S. prevent other countries from building them for proliferation purposes?

I would agree with your assessment that getting to 80% nuclear in the U.S. is probably unrealistic, but I’d certainly take nuclear over new coal plants any day. Here in the Southwest local renewables, including large amounts of concentrating solar thermal, probably can meet increasing demand and even begin to phase out fossil fuels. However, for other parts of the country it will either mean massive build out of transmission to places like the desert Southwest or something done locally. Given that their seems to be a structural/political bias towards regional generation, nuclear may be a reasonable option to displace coal in those areas not renewables rich.

I would certainly support a vast national network of renewables connected by HVDC, but it doesn’t seem like that idea is getting any political traction. Perhaps you could comment on whether you agree with that assessment and what could be done to change the situation. Aren’t states going to want to have the plants and jobs local rather than creating a type of trade deficit with far flung windy and sunny states?

i don’t have a citation for that tho.

1) The Balkanization of our electric grid creates state by state business and regulatory structures which put, for instance, states in the Southeast, at a disadvantage.

2) The uneven distribution of renewable energy resources by region.

3) The renewable energy movement is divided between those who advocate distributed energy to the exclusion of large renewable generators and those who advocate both distributed and centralized energy. See this article which is not an unusual view: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/ rea/ news/ reinsider/ story?id=52252

For, let’s call it, the National Renewable Grid, to get some traction more advocates of renewables would need to speak strongly for it. So far they haven’t, as many are caught up in the “Small is Beautiful” philosophy. They see renewable energy as the way to usher in a society built on a smaller scale leaving out the equation, the uneven distribution of renewable energy flux, the benefits of economies of scale and the actual scale of current and projected future energy demand.

I’ve put up this website (www.solarsouthwest.org) as one possible format/ suggestion for creating policy momentum in this direction. The TREC/DESERTEC idea is the equivalent for Europe and Africa www.desertec.org .

here

here

here

and here

The proliferation effect is an indirect one — I merely meant that a massive federal subsidy would help the technology to have a global renaissance, which would lead to proliferation.

Yes, we are going to need a massive build out of HVDC for renewables. It is inevitable, so I hope we do it sooner rather than a later.

Most of your other nuclear myths are debunked on the Mother Jones debate as well, Joe.

Again untrue and showing an ignorance of the nature of nuclear technology.

This blog is called “Climate Progress”–I assume we’re trying to make progress in the war on global warming and you’re wanting to go into battle with our most effective weapon left back at base.

It kind of reminds me of that scene in the movie “Aliens” when all the Marines have to give up their heavy weapons and one of them says, “What are we supposed to use, harsh language?”

For example, while you can get uranium from sea water, it costs $300/kg which is about ten times the current spot price of uranium.

This is the same problem with everyone who looks at all the oil reserves and claims that we’ll never run out of it. That is true, but the remaining oil gets more and more expensive to get out and harder to pump fast enough to supply growing energy needs. Uranium has the same problem — its nearly infinite in supply, but its costly to get at it.

“our most effective weapon left back at base”???
That ain’t nuclear. Our best weapon is efficiency — easily.

And I was being quite conservative with my calculations here. I even used EIA’s new much slower growth for electricity demand. And a very efficient plug-in. In reality it would probably be 800 to 1000 nukes to be 80% in 2050 — and $6000 is NOT a high estimate these days.

AQ Khan, the Indian-born father of the Pakistani bomb, and who also sold nuclear secrets to North Korea, Libya and Iran (probably with the blessing of the Pakistani intelligence service and government), learned a lot working for the Dutch company FDO on “peaceful enrichment”. After three years he went to Pakistan to start work on their bomb, and it only took him so long because Pakistan had one or two sane Prime Ministers in the intervening years.

If nuclear technology is shared, then nuclear weapons are spread. And if you’re going to build a nuclear reactor every month in your country, nuclear technology will certainly be shared, simply because of the vast number of people you’ll need to work on them all. If you restrict the number and backgrounds of the people working on the things, then you won’t be able to build one a month.

You can have lots of nuclear reactors and lots of nuclear weapons, or not many reactors and few or no weapons, but you cannot have lots of reactors and few or no weapons.

http://climateprogress.org/ 2008/ 04/ 17/ leaving-no-small-stone-unturned/

Kiashu, a thorium-based reactor doesn’t require enrichment and has a fuel that is worthless in nuclear weapons–proliferation concerns addressed.

You can have NO reactors and lots of nuclear weapons, as the US did for years, and you can have lots of reactors and NO weapons, as the Japanese have had for years. The technology to build a reactor is not the same as the technology to build a weapon. I’m a perfect example–after years of nuclear engineering education, I know a fair amount how to build a reactor, but I don’t know the first thing about how to build a bomb, other than that all I know about steady-state neutronics, heat-transfer in the core, stable dynamic operation, and fission product buildup and fuel depletion, have NOTHING to do with how to build or operate a weapon.

I also agree with you that we will need 1000 reactors. That’s why it’s so very important to figure out what those reactors will be. Will they be light-water reactors that waste most of their uranium, take lots of steel and concrete, and produce transuranic waste? Or will they be liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, that use thorium at nearly perfect theoretical efficiency, have modest resource demands, and are inherently safe?

Why not use plentiful renewable energy to power our daily lives and reserve these rare, energy-dense elements for special purposes. Who knows what future uses we will have for them?

It is a repetition of the same dynamic and type of planning that got us into the fossil fuel bind.

The basic resource of “renewable” power is abundant, but the mechanisms to convert it to useful forms (solar panels, windmill blades, concentrating surfaces) are by definition expensive because of the diffuse nature of the source. There’s no getting around that.

We can talk about Moore’s Law all we want with integrated circuits, but you don’t change the fact that 1000 watts of solar energy fall on every square meter of well-oriented surface. Now, a thousand years from now.

Nuclear power is a concentrated (incredibly concentrated) energy source that can have a tiny fraction of the capital investment of solar/wind technologies if utilized properly. It’s no secret that I don’t consider the light-water reactor the “proper” utilization of nuclear energy.

We used solar and wind energy for millennia and moved to fossil fuels because they represented a denser form of energy that made less demand on capital to realize. Nuclear power is theoretically six orders of magnitude better than fossil fuels, and doesn’t produce the CO2 we’re all so worried about (in addition to the mercury and other filth spewed). Nuclear technology is overwhelmingly the most promising response to our future energy needs.

The first is that a thorium reactor requires a plutonium core to supply the neutrons to keep it going. So you cannot have thorium reactors without a few conventional reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium. So in terms of proliferation you’ve not reduced the risks very much by going for thorium reactors.

Secondly, let us know when we have commercially-proven thorium power reactors. Pro-nukers, like pro-renewable people, tend to look at the best practice in theory for their favoured technology, and the worst practice in reality for their disfavoured ones. A more honest appraisal would be to look at what has actually been achieved in each case. And for thorium reactors, unfortunately that ain’t squat. Maybe in a decade or two, we’ll see. Keep researching, by all means - but don’t expect the world to make plans based on those technological maybes. Yes, yes, I know - your favoured technology is a certainty, honest, not like all those other ones that have worked so well on paper or in labs but are still so slow to come about.

It’s not true that the US produced nuclear weapons without reactors; see the B-Reactor, which made plutonium for the Trinity test, the Nagasaki bomb and many others until shutdown in 1968. No country has produced nuclear weapons without having nuclear reactors first.

It’s not true that the science in the power industry is of no use in the weapons industry. If that were true, nobody would be worried about Iran. If that were true, then Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, India, and North Korea would never have acquired nuclear weapons. All those countries had scientists and technicians train in the “Atoms for Peace” programme, or got information from those who did, and all except Israel have said that these “peaceful” studies were the base on which they built their weapons technology.

The demonstrated result of the US and SU in the 1950s and 1960s trying to spread nuclear power generation technology was weapons proliferation. And for every country that got them, there were several others (Australia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, etc) who considered getting them, took deliberate steps towards getting them, but then rejected it for political and diplomatic reasons.

You can’t have a lot of reactors without also ending up with a lot of weapons. Now, you may not consider a lot of weapons as a problem, or you may say that it’s inevitable no matter what. That’s a different argument, though. Fact is, the more reactors we build, the more bombs we’ll get.

Of course, the same goes for the chemical industry and chemical weapons. If you can make bleach and so on then you can make mustard gas. But we’ve managed to ban chemical weapons. That took a deliberate effort over many years, international treaties, and countries being willing to destroy their chemical weapons stockpiles. The same’s quite possible with nuclear weapons - but at this point it’s a theoretical possibility only, we’re stuck with the weapons for the next couple of decades at least.

If you want nuke reactors, you’ll get nuke weapons, too. That’s the demonstrated history of the world.

That is demonstrably false. A thorium reactor can operate without ever using plutonium at all.

I imagine that every power plant in the US will be replaced in 50 years. In that context 700 plants (nuclear or other) looks pretty much like business as usual.

You’ve reduced the risk dramatically…if experience holds, to nothing. A thorium reactor requires a fissile “start” to it. Plutonium is one option, but it is the worst. Uranium-233 is the best. Uranium-235 is in the middle. Once started, the thorium reactor produces the fissile material it needs from the thorium and does not require additional “starting” fuel. For a LFTR, at shutdown, the fissile U-233 is simply recycled into the next LFTR core, along will all other core fluids. The connection between thorium and weapons-grade plutonium does not exist.

There is a company called “Thorium Power” proposing to “degrade” weapons-grade plutonium in a mixture of plutonium and thorium fuel, but there’s is an entirely different goal that isn’t relevant to this discussion.

Secondly, let us know when we have commercially-proven thorium power reactors. Pro-nukers, like pro-renewable people, tend to look at the best practice in theory for their favoured technology, and the worst practice in reality for their disfavoured ones. A more honest appraisal would be to look at what has actually been achieved in each case. And for thorium reactors, unfortunately that ain’t squat. Maybe in a decade or two, we’ll see. Keep researching, by all means - but don’t expect the world to make plans based on those technological maybes. Yes, yes, I know - your favoured technology is a certainty, honest, not like all those other ones that have worked so well on paper or in labs but are still so slow to come about.

Fair enough. There aren’t any LFTRs to speak of right now. But let’s be fair across the board as well. Solar power is a tiny fraction of 1% of world energy output. Do we through it out as well? This same line of reasoning can be used to exclude any new advanced technology.

We’re fighting a war against climate change, and trying to make “Climate Progress”. We’ve got to figure out how to replace 90% of the energy generated in the world. It’s doesn’t matter so much where a technology is at, it matters how hard it will take to get it where it needs to be. Does it require technology innovation, or breakthrough? What are the capital costs? What social factors will oppose it? These must be addressed for any technology, and I will be happy to stack LFTR up against the best of them.

It’s not true that the US produced nuclear weapons without reactors; see the B-Reactor, which made plutonium for the Trinity test, the Nagasaki bomb and many others until shutdown in 1968. No country has produced nuclear weapons without having nuclear reactors first.

Pardon me, I thought it was clear from the discussion that we were talking about POWER reactors. And the US has never used POWER reactors for the development of nuclear materials. Neither have any other countries. They use dedicated production reactors that are far simpler to build and operate. You don’t even need this to get weapons-grade materials. Simply build enrichment technology, or buy highly-enriched uranium from some other country. But possessing the material is necessary but not sufficient for a weapon–you need much more knowledge beyond that for success, and those are not skills taught to nuclear engineers.

It’s not true that the science in the power industry is of no use in the weapons industry. If that were true, nobody would be worried about Iran. If that were true, then Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, India, and North Korea would never have acquired nuclear weapons. All those countries had scientists and technicians train in the “Atoms for Peace” programme, or got information from those who did, and all except Israel have said that these “peaceful” studies were the base on which they built their weapons technology.

I never said they were of “no use” I said that a trained nuclear engineer has very little application for his/her skill set in the arena of weapons design. It is an entirely different field and not taught in any books or courses that I know of.

The demonstrated result of the US and SU in the 1950s and 1960s trying to spread nuclear power generation technology was weapons proliferation. And for every country that got them, there were several others (Australia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, etc) who considered getting them, took deliberate steps towards getting them, but then rejected it for political and diplomatic reasons.

The US and USSR never tried to spread weapons technology…in fact, they tried very hard to preserve their technological advantage, even over “allies”. Other countries developed the technology on their own because it just wasn’t that hard for a committed country to figure out how to do it. None of which has anything to do with nuclear power. If you want weapons and you’ll devote the time and energy to getting them, you’ll get them.

You can’t have a lot of reactors without also ending up with a lot of weapons. Now, you may not consider a lot of weapons as a problem, or you may say that it’s inevitable no matter what. That’s a different argument, though. Fact is, the more reactors we build, the more bombs we’ll get.

That’s not a fact and is actually contradicted by real-world experience. Japan has lots of reactors and no weapons. South Africa had weapons and no reactors. Israel has weapons and no reactors. South Korea has lots of reactors and no weapons.

Of course, the same goes for the chemical industry and chemical weapons. If you can make bleach and so on then you can make mustard gas. But we’ve managed to ban chemical weapons. That took a deliberate effort over many years, international treaties, and countries being willing to destroy their chemical weapons stockpiles. The same’s quite possible with nuclear weapons - but at this point it’s a theoretical possibility only, we’re stuck with the weapons for the next couple of decades at least.

You bring up a good point–technology is never fundamentally good or evil, only what we do with it. We make bleach instead of mustard gas. We make electrical power instead of nuclear weapons. The benefit to humanity of nuclear power is overwhelming, and for the sake of future generations we need to use this technology.

If you want nuke reactors, you’ll get nuke weapons, too. That’s the demonstrated history of the world.

No, the demonstrated history of the world is that if you want nuclear weapons you’ll get them. You can later go and develop reactors to make it look peaceful as the United States did, or you can simply develop power reactors in the first place with no intention to develop weapons, as Japan did, but there is no link between developing power reactors and later developing nuclear weapons.

this is a terrible argument. solar thermal’s general proof is something we call “day,” expressed as the equation:

sun + water = critters

MSRs are a wee bit more complicated than turning “day” into “steam” instead of “clouds.”

It wouldn’t, of course. However, if countries build a lot of new nuclear plants then it’s extra hard for those countries to object to others building nuclear plants without making themselves look like complete hypocrites.

Eli — the world can build a fantastic quantity of power plants in a short period of time if it wants to. China alone built 200 GW of mostly coal plants in the previous two years. That, of course, has driven the price of both coal and coal plants through the roof. And nuclear is different because it has not seen a lot of new power plants built in the past decade, so a lot of the suppliers have disappeared and it has mere yet supply bottlenecks.

Finally, as to your statement “Power plants are not forever” — I wish. Tell that to the grandfathered coal plant operators in this country.

The LFTR has the potential to answer all of Joe’s and Earl’s objections to objections to nuclear power. Everyone who has researched them agrees that they are very safe. They generate far less waste than LWRs. In fact most of the material coming out of LFTRs is radiologically stable, and has industrial uses. They can be mass produced, and they cost far less to build than conventional reactors. They can be cooled by air, thus do not have a water problem. Their waste heat can be used for desalination. The thorium fuel cycle is proliferation resistant. There are easier, cheaper and more practical ways of obtaining bomb making material than by diverting fissionable material from a LFTR. Finally Enough thorium is known to exist in the United States to power the entire American economy for thousands of years.

Opposition to nuclear power is more like a religious cult than a rational stance. We have good reason for wanting to replace carbon based energy sources with land efficient, environmentally friendly non-carbon energy resources. We desperate need energy systems that will prevent rather than fight global warming. Come on Joe, do you really hate nuclear power so much that they would prefer sacrificing the future of the planet and of the human race, rather than to support a nuclear power solution?

as i do not expect this technology to be fully deployable within ten years, may i suggest that the first round of changes, otherwise known as “staying under 425ppm and averting the worst of peak oil,” involve the wide just-build-it application of clean power that is ready for building.

For example, Kerr-McGee still has tons of radioactive tailings at their Kress Creek site in W. Chicago. They have spent more than $500 million dollars but still aren’t done. The plant closed in ‘73 but is still contaminated with radioactive waste.

Here is a letter some homeowners got last year from EPA informing them their property may not have been properly cleaned. And, oh, by-the-way beware of radioactivity if you dig.

http://www.wegoweb.net/ blog/ archives/ 103-EPA-Sends-letter-to-117-West-Chicago-Homeowners.html#extended

I don’t consider myself knee-jerk anti-nuke but here in the US we do have the opportunity to start to develop a sustainable energy solution now, not re-cycle the 20th century options. It may be that a place like Japan might not have the same options, though I wouldn’t claim to speak for them.

One of the difficulties with nukes is that the technology is largely inscrutable except for a very small group of nuclear engineers and physicists. They could, together, be engaged in some type of “group think” that overlooks some difficulty which billions of dollars later is only discovered by chance by some “outsider”. Meanwhile, if this happens, the group of nuclear engineers will have every reason to engage in obfuscation and “arse-covering” rather than level with the public. A grid run largely on renewables will be complex but it should be understandable to at least the broader technical community if not everybody with a basic science education. I’m not anti-big science or anti-complexity but more of a fan of Occam’s Razor.

You finally argue “A grid run largely on renewables will be complex but it should be understandable to at least the broader technical community if not everybody with a basic science education. I’m not anti-big science or anti-complexity but more of a fan of Occam’s Razor.” In other words, if it requires some effort for you to understand, you will hide your laziness and ignorance under the claim that you are applying Occam’s razor and the pious and false claim that you are not being anti-science.

You have in effect appealed to own ignorance and laziness as an argument against developing nuclear technology.

In any case, I have written about nuclear power in a way that is not at all dismissive:
http://terraverde.wordpress.com/ 2007/ 09/ 15/ the-renewable-electron-economy-part-vi-nuclear-power%E2%80%A6climate-saver/

I am a quite open-minded and curious person, so I believe you are way off the mark. Life, however, is not just a series of intellectual challenges…at some point one needs to use “Occam’s Razor” to decide which of these intellectual challenges are worth pursuing as realistic options. I feel that pursuing renewables is a first line of defense given their relative simplicity versus nukes, as well as the issues already outlined above by Joe.

Better watch that ad hominem style of argumentation….

But there is a strong current on this site that thinks wind and solar thermal can do the job. The way political winds blow, it’s much more likely that they will get a chance to prove themselves than thorium will, and much like corn ethanol before them, they will be introduced to the harsh world of unintended consequences.

Those will include, but not be limited to: more coal, more oil wars, draconian energy curtailments, rolling blackouts, economic stagnation and regression, and political recriminations.

* nothing can stop global warming except carbon storage or quadrillion-dollar sunglasses. energy supply choices affect the speed of the warming. if your concern here is the need instead of the means, you should be working on improving large-scale wind and solar because that’s what we’ve got.

* near-foodstock ethanol, commodity markets, and petroleum-based agriculture are not comparable with large-scale renewable energy generation.

* your certainty of the utter failure of renewable energy in the hands of the world’s engineers today is at odds with your faith in those same engineers being able to perfect LTFR tomorrow.

* if practical, LTFR can’t be implemented for at least a decade. if construction times are anything like LWRs, that’s “whoops.”

“Those will include, but not be limited to: more coal, more oil wars, draconian energy curtailments, rolling blackouts, economic stagnation and regression, and political recriminations.”

Those ARE already seen in those european countries that have phased out, or have a moratorium on phasing out nuclear, and have tried to replace them with renewables.

Italy, Germany and Denmark are building coal plants. In Italy energy allotments per household are already in effect. Denmark is only saved by hydro from Norway (lucky draw of geography for Norway). Germany exports a lot of wind-power as demand does not match supply, and buys back (expensively) nuclear energy from France. The high subsidies required for wind in Germany have resulted in high electricity prices, despite the far higher and more effective push to energy saving (home and office insulation for example) than in the US. The high electricity prices are pushing energy intensive industries (aluminum, steel, copper refining) out of the country.
Germany does not have the geography to expand hydro much. Switzerland does, but has enough sense NOT to concrete over the alps.
The US does not have the luxury of energy richer, and/or common sense richer neighbors that can supply the energy needed to make up for expensive experiments with renewables that will prove ultimately futile and economically futile on the scale needed, as Denmark, Germany and Italy have.
The push to coal in europe is the best real-world example on how well weather based renewables can replace baseload. Not a single coal plant has so far been shut down by them anywhere, despite billions of euros expended on them.

f’r'example denmark has about 5,500 turbines amounting to ~3,200MW installed capacity. if you take out the 203 turbines of ~400MW total in the offshore farms, you get 5,300 turbines averaging 0.5MW — a far cry from joe’s (and lester brown’s) call for >1.5MW turbines — and a much higher average cost. but for the co-ops the money works out.

Re: Germany, nukes, and coal. Germany’s renewable policy is aggressive but I believe does not have the same grid-friendly policy as Spain. Only recently have German scientists at ISET come up with a plan to coordinate different types of renewables so as to actually replace fossil or nuclear generation. Without effective policies to replace fossil generation by renewables, I agree that shutting down nukes is premature. I also believe that we need some form of non-solar based generation as a back up to renewables especially if we experience massive disturbances to the weather from events like a Krakatoa style eruption (unlikely but possible). We might have Enhanced geothermal by then but the timeline for EGS is not yet well established. So research into less polluting, more secure nukes should proceed.

If Europeans are serious about renewables they should look into the DESERTEC/TREC model which additionally provides a post-oil source of trade for North Africa and the Middle East. The US however domestically has strong enough renewable resources to easily replace most of its fossil generation with current technology.

So, I think “either/or” is not the way to go…perhaps this attitude frustrates those here spoiling for a fight…but so be it.

This is incredibly twisted anyway because there was, in the first place, no reason to build a nuclear power plant except to create enough plutonium to build a nuclear bomb. It’s the most expensive and dangerous form of power ever produced

The only other reason, to build a nuclear power plant now, is a nuclear military industrial complex with a will to survive, which arose in the U.S. during the Cold War.

Kirk, you said that a thorium reactor does not need plutonium, it can use U-235. However, we were speaking of: (a) thorium’s requirement for conventional enriched-uranium reactors, and (b) weapons proliferation. Now, uranium is not enriched by reactors, it’s true - but we still get weapons proliferation, since highly enriched uranium is used for nuclear weapons, and indeed has been used in the nuclear weapons development of several states since WWII.

And we still get that thorium use will be limited to available U-235.

In addition, your own site tells us that plutonium is among the products of your favoured salt reactor.

So really, whatever kind of material we use for our reactor fuel, and whatever kind of reactor we have, we can’t get away from fissile material well-suited for weapons as either an input or a product. This shouldn’t surprise us, since after all reactors and bombs have the same basic process, it’s just a matter of whether they’re sub- or super-critical.

I would expect neither renewables nor nuclear to displace fossil fuels. History shows that when a country gets renewable or nuclear energy, it keeps burning fossil fuels as well. The largest nuclear energy power in the world is the US, and it’s also the largest user of fossil fuels, and the largest per capita user outside fossil fuel exporting countries. The French with nuclear as 80% use as much oil per person as the Danes or Spanish with wind at 20%.

So we can’t just build nuclear reactors or wind turbines or whatever and expect fossil fuel use to magically stop in response. We will use less fossil fuels when we decide to use less fossil fuels. That decision can be expressed in many ways: by bulldozing coal-fired plants, setting incredibly high fuel efficiency standards for all vehicles past and present, carbon tax, making more walkable and bikable our cities. and so on and so forth.

But if we have (say) 1,000GWh of coal-fired plants and then build 1,000GWh of nuclear or renewables, we won’t shut down the coal-fired plants, we’ll just use 2,000GWh of electricity instead.

Neither nuclear nor renewables will remove fossil fuels and mitigate or stop climate change. That’s what history shows. To remove fossil fuels we need to make a decision to remove fossil fuels.

today we can change the demand while maintaining quality of life; today we are suffering radical consequences of over-application. the decision’s never been easier.

As to grandfathered coal plants, grandad can be a pretty young guy. The walls may be old, but the insides and controls are routinely replaced over 20 years or less, so, willy nilly, well over 700 GW of power plants are going to be built over the next 50 years and 700 GW of them could be nuclear.

There are arguments against nuclear, but the inability to erect 700 GW of capacity is not one of the believable ones.

The French did NOT do 700 — try under one tenth of that.