I don't know about everybody else, but I'm judging it based on the author being a Canadian turbolib who's still really scared of getting nuked by the USSR.
It's written by an Indian nuclear physicist and disarmament activist. This book's line is that it takes too long (valid) and is too dangerous (less valid). Naomi Klein gave it a good review so it's probably not turbolib shit.
I know he was born in India. His professional career is in British Columbia.
His "it takes too long!" argument is absolute nonsense. It hinges on the bulk of the "construction" time being government reluctance about nuclear power. So nuclear power takes too long to build because we take too long to build it? That argument doesn't pass muster.
The average time to build a plant is around decade solely on construction and another decade in compliance. Nuclear power is safe as a result of regulation and compliance, not in spite of it.
It's almost like a country with more engineers and a larger workforce can build things faster. Most renewables can be set up in five weeks or so. We need development in both but five years is a while with a ticking clock.
I'm sorry. I think I've been overly hostile. We definitely can agree on the point that we need to walk and chew gum at the same time, so to speak.
We need to be busting out every tool at our disposal to slow down this global climate crisis. I'm just of the opinion that fear of nuclear power is vastly overblown, and this book is feeding into that fear. In a perfect world we'd be running entirely off true renewable energy. But we aren't. We live in Hell. We need to pull out all the stops so we don't make ourselves extinct.
Yeah it seems like you are arguing with the no nuclear under any circumstances libs and I'm arguing with the nuclear or bust ones. We need the silver buckshot and we need it now.
Yeah, the (online) left is weirdly "fuck yeah science!" on nuclear and the counterpart is still riding on the legacy of the 1980s anti-nuclear movement, opposing it under any circumstances.
I'm personally of the opinion nuclear should be phased out eventually, but coal, oil, gas and other minor fossil fueled energy has a way higher priority to go first.
It also matters little, because energy under capitalism is dependent on the infighting between factions of capital. Like the much-mocked German shutdown of nuclear power. Half opportunism to prevent the electoral rise of the green party and half gift to the mining corporation RWE. Had it not happened, it would be the firms dealing with nuclear power supply, etc. to profit. Nothing gets done without the bourgeois benefitting.
It would seem the problem is capital, not what policy to follow.
20 years doesn’t really seem that big of a deal compared to the consequences of climate chsnge. But in the US, it will actually take 60 years and then abandoned half way because 25 contractors were revealed to be fictitious companies and the 5 real ones demand a $150 billion screwdriver
20 years is a big deal because climate change is exponential and we don't have that much time, many places in 2044 won't be habitable anymore. Nuclear is a good option but it can't be the only option.
There are real constraints to nuclear power, it doesn't just roll off an assembly line.
There's a very large capital investment required, a very sophisticated workforce and quite of a bit of work before construction even starts.
Even if nuclear produced no waste, it's still very expensive and complex, and too complex to build the ~600 2GW plants at the same time that the US would need to fully transition.
Which four of the French ones? I thought all the inland ones were near rivers.
The US one has 26 billion gallons piped to it.
Qatar does not have nuclear power stations. The UAE has one, which is literally about 200 yards from the ocean.
So water is still one issue. But we can pipe water, so we'll ignore that. Nuclear is already very expensive so some water transport is fine. Other issues:
existing land usage (residential or commercial) and impact on natural environment (much less than coal or land-based renewables but you still have to fight people and manage critical habitat)
geological stability because you're storing highly reactive waste on site for a decade or two and you also want to avoid incidental ground contamination getting into ground water
risk of natural disasters like flooding or tsunamis
security risks (it's remarkable there hasn't been any major damage to Ukrainian reactors)
ground stability because nuclear plants are very heavy (similar but not identical to geological stability)
I got an error there. They are built by water sources but 11 of 15 power rely on evaporative cooling via cooling towers.
There is the possibility of dry cooling, which doesn't use external water.
Geological stability is not relevant with on site storage in spent fuel pools or dry caskets.
If you keep risk assessment up to date that is not a problem (tsunami walls, emergency pumps/generators automatic shutdown, ...)
Security risks are of a concern not only for nuclear power plants. Think of pumped hydro. The Ukrainian reactors at Zaporizhzhia have very high standards of protection. Thick concrete walls, steel containment. It would be cheaper to start nuclear attacks, than to try to create a nuclear catastrophe by damaginh the reactors. But better save than sorry, hence the warnings by IAEO.
Ground stability is a factor in every building. Especially high ones with small ground area and strong forces acting on them... like wind turbines.
Naomi Klein gave it a good review so it's probably not turbolib shit.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you simply don't know what you're talking about.
Let's take a peek at Naomi Klein's recent writing, but first I want to preface it by pointing out her last book was about how "the pandemic made everyone crazy" and some people mixed up her Twitter account with an antivaxxer. Pretty thin gruel, and the Shock Doctrine wasn't really much better at using a lame analogy to conduct a historical investigation. It's kind of impressive how people trip over hacks like Klein and Zizek and make them part of their weird pantheon of writers considering their writing contains so many blatant insults to the reader's intelligence. I guess it's all about the buzz surrounding some writers, Klein speaking at occupy, Zizek appearing in documentaries, which obscures the hints in their writing that precede their most trashy displays in rando magazines like Compact and whatever this one where Klein is using a genocide to sell the aforementioned shit book is called. Okay, now on to the good stuff.
DS: It’s very hard to know how to behave right now. I know you wrote a piece last week about the tragedy of the Hamas attacks, and there were some who were hurt by parts of it.
NK: I think everybody is in an impossible position that we didn’t create. The Israeli government has used the bloodiest day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and there was not even time to bury the dead to mourn before those deaths were used to justify a massive war crime that is ongoing in Gaza and now expanding beyond it.
Let's remind ourselves what got her in hot water that she's brushing off here:
I spent the evening in candlelight and tears with a dear friend who just learned that a close family member was among those massacred in Israel. I won’t name the kibbutz to protect her privacy but yes, it was unequivocally a massacre.
We tried to explain the killing of this family member – a civilian with two kids – to our kids. We tried to do it in a way that would not fill their young hearts with fear and hatred for the people who committed the crime. That was hard enough, but possible. Harder for us adults is the fact that, in their desire to celebrate the powerful symbolism of Palestinians escaping the open air prison that is Gaza — which occupied people have every right to do — some of our supposed comrades on the left continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and in some extreme cases, even seem to celebrate them.
In fact these callous displays are a gift to militant Zionism, since they neatly shore up and reconfirm its core and governing belief: that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will – look, even the bleeding-heart left is making excuses for our killers and thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel.
"So sorry you were offended, it's hard to know how to be "politically correct" with all the rabid leftists these days, buy my book. :-)"
It really seems to be a no-brainer that any writer who compulsively shits on the USSR without making a real analysis just by making shitty historical comparisons (Ann Pettifor comparing proposals to use western tax dollars to fund a "green belt" of for profit enterprises in the Sahel to the Soviet Union may be a rare exception, but honestly she seems to hinge everything on investors putting down the cocaine and considering climate change seriously so maybe the rest of her stuff is lame too, also the guy who wrote Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of A Ukrainian Nationalist trashes the USSR here and there but he never backs it up with anything good and the stuff on the OUN etc is great) can be dismissed completely
Thank you for coming to my TED talk in conclusion check the ingredients on your slop next time
Since the start of 2022, China has completed an additional five domestic reactor builds, with their completion times ranging from just under five years to just over 7 years.
For argument sake, let's say it takes China five years to build five 2GW plants (10GW). Let's assume 25 plants can be in this 5 year pipeline at anytime.
Rounding up from China's population, assuming instantaneous training and transformation of the global population to a similar level as China's nuclear industry, we can then assume that 60 GW can be delivered annually, globally.
With a global electricity usage of 23,000 TWh a year translating into 2.6 TW required hourly, and a capacity factor of 80 percent, it would take 54 years to completely transition to nuclear - call it 40 years to account for existing renewables, building ~1300 nuclear plants
Looking at China's uranium consumption for nuclear, we can estimate new requirements of 17,000 tons of uranium per year. So in 2065, 40 years after ham on nuclear, we'll need 750,000 tons of uranium annually.
One estimate is that about 8 million tonnes of uranium is recoverable at $260 a kg (uranium is currently ~100 a kg).
That's fine, surely we'll have a good ten years of full uranium consumption before it becomes unviable? Unfortunately not, because with the additional requirements each year, we'd hit that recoverability/cost limit within 30 years.
Too long, too expensive and too hard.
(Come back when thorium SMRs are viable though, those could be good)
Did your calculation account for the fact that energy and economic growth having an almost 1:1 relation, meaning a compound growth of ~3% economic growth every year will add up quadrupling the energy requirements in 50 years.
I don't think that's actually true - it might have been from 1940s USA to the early 1980s but I don't think it holds weight anymore.
For example, if there was total electrification of cars and heating within 5 years, electricity demand would increase unimaginably while GDP would barely move.
I don't know about everybody else, but I'm judging it based on the author being a Canadian turbolib who's still really scared of getting nuked by the USSR.
It's written by an Indian nuclear physicist and disarmament activist. This book's line is that it takes too long (valid) and is too dangerous (less valid). Naomi Klein gave it a good review so it's probably not turbolib shit.
I know he was born in India. His professional career is in British Columbia.
His "it takes too long!" argument is absolute nonsense. It hinges on the bulk of the "construction" time being government reluctance about nuclear power. So nuclear power takes too long to build because we take too long to build it? That argument doesn't pass muster.
The average time to build a plant is around decade solely on construction and another decade in compliance. Nuclear power is safe as a result of regulation and compliance, not in spite of it.
Weird how China can do it in five years, then.
It's almost like a country with more engineers and a larger workforce can build things faster. Most renewables can be set up in five weeks or so. We need development in both but five years is a while with a ticking clock.
I'm sorry. I think I've been overly hostile. We definitely can agree on the point that we need to walk and chew gum at the same time, so to speak.
We need to be busting out every tool at our disposal to slow down this global climate crisis. I'm just of the opinion that fear of nuclear power is vastly overblown, and this book is feeding into that fear. In a perfect world we'd be running entirely off true renewable energy. But we aren't. We live in Hell. We need to pull out all the stops so we don't make ourselves extinct.
Yeah it seems like you are arguing with the no nuclear under any circumstances libs and I'm arguing with the nuclear or bust ones. We need the silver buckshot and we need it now.
Yeah, the (online) left is weirdly "fuck yeah science!" on nuclear and the counterpart is still riding on the legacy of the 1980s anti-nuclear movement, opposing it under any circumstances.
I'm personally of the opinion nuclear should be phased out eventually, but coal, oil, gas and other minor fossil fueled energy has a way higher priority to go first.
It also matters little, because energy under capitalism is dependent on the infighting between factions of capital. Like the much-mocked German shutdown of nuclear power. Half opportunism to prevent the electoral rise of the green party and half gift to the mining corporation RWE. Had it not happened, it would be the firms dealing with nuclear power supply, etc. to profit. Nothing gets done without the bourgeois benefitting.
It would seem the problem is capital, not what policy to follow.
20 years doesn’t really seem that big of a deal compared to the consequences of climate chsnge. But in the US, it will actually take 60 years and then abandoned half way because 25 contractors were revealed to be fictitious companies and the 5 real ones demand a $150 billion screwdriver
20 years is a big deal because climate change is exponential and we don't have that much time, many places in 2044 won't be habitable anymore. Nuclear is a good option but it can't be the only option.
There are real constraints to nuclear power, it doesn't just roll off an assembly line.
There's a very large capital investment required, a very sophisticated workforce and quite of a bit of work before construction even starts.
Even if nuclear produced no waste, it's still very expensive and complex, and too complex to build the ~600 2GW plants at the same time that the US would need to fully transition.
What energy source ist fast enough to build? Wind? PV?
France constructed 56 reactors in 15 years (1974-1989) with about 60GW capacity.
Germanys nuclear program was faster in constructing capacity than any phase in the Energiewende.
Yep, solar and wind. Site selection isn't easier with wind but considerably easier than nuclear.
Static pumped hydro is still complex but not as hard as nuclear plants
You do know that you can build nuclear power plants almost anywhere?
Four of the french ones are not at water sources. The biggest in the US is located in a desert. Katar has nuclear reactors.
Why would site selection be difficult?
Which four of the French ones? I thought all the inland ones were near rivers.
The US one has 26 billion gallons piped to it.
Qatar does not have nuclear power stations. The UAE has one, which is literally about 200 yards from the ocean.
So water is still one issue. But we can pipe water, so we'll ignore that. Nuclear is already very expensive so some water transport is fine. Other issues:
I got an error there. They are built by water sources but 11 of 15 power rely on evaporative cooling via cooling towers. There is the possibility of dry cooling, which doesn't use external water.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you simply don't know what you're talking about.
Let's take a peek at Naomi Klein's recent writing, but first I want to preface it by pointing out her last book was about how "the pandemic made everyone crazy" and some people mixed up her Twitter account with an antivaxxer. Pretty thin gruel, and the Shock Doctrine wasn't really much better at using a lame analogy to conduct a historical investigation. It's kind of impressive how people trip over hacks like Klein and Zizek and make them part of their weird pantheon of writers considering their writing contains so many blatant insults to the reader's intelligence. I guess it's all about the buzz surrounding some writers, Klein speaking at occupy, Zizek appearing in documentaries, which obscures the hints in their writing that precede their most trashy displays in rando magazines like Compact and whatever this one where Klein is using a genocide to sell the aforementioned shit book is called. Okay, now on to the good stuff.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231019132834if_/https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/15184/naomi-klein-doppelganger-2023-interview-israel-palestine
Let's remind ourselves what got her in hot water that she's brushing off here:
"So sorry you were offended, it's hard to know how to be "politically correct" with all the rabid leftists these days, buy my book. :-)"
It really seems to be a no-brainer that any writer who compulsively shits on the USSR without making a real analysis just by making shitty historical comparisons (Ann Pettifor comparing proposals to use western tax dollars to fund a "green belt" of for profit enterprises in the Sahel to the Soviet Union may be a rare exception, but honestly she seems to hinge everything on investors putting down the cocaine and considering climate change seriously so maybe the rest of her stuff is lame too, also the guy who wrote Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of A Ukrainian Nationalist trashes the USSR here and there but he never backs it up with anything good and the stuff on the OUN etc is great) can be dismissed completely
Thank you for coming to my TED talk in conclusion check the ingredients on your slop next time
Why does it take too long? Because there are too many people who believe it's too dangerous
Because it's genuinely complex thing?
For argument sake, let's say it takes China five years to build five 2GW plants (10GW). Let's assume 25 plants can be in this 5 year pipeline at anytime.
Rounding up from China's population, assuming instantaneous training and transformation of the global population to a similar level as China's nuclear industry, we can then assume that 60 GW can be delivered annually, globally.
With a global electricity usage of 23,000 TWh a year translating into 2.6 TW required hourly, and a capacity factor of 80 percent, it would take 54 years to completely transition to nuclear - call it 40 years to account for existing renewables, building ~1300 nuclear plants
Looking at China's uranium consumption for nuclear, we can estimate new requirements of 17,000 tons of uranium per year. So in 2065, 40 years after ham on nuclear, we'll need 750,000 tons of uranium annually.
One estimate is that about 8 million tonnes of uranium is recoverable at $260 a kg (uranium is currently ~100 a kg).
That's fine, surely we'll have a good ten years of full uranium consumption before it becomes unviable? Unfortunately not, because with the additional requirements each year, we'd hit that recoverability/cost limit within 30 years.
Too long, too expensive and too hard.
(Come back when thorium SMRs are viable though, those could be good)
why are you assuming that nuclear has to completely replace all other forms of energy, whether renewable or not, to be worth building?
Death to America
I didn't - I cut 16 years off the timeline, or about 30 per cent
That's accurate enough for a thought experiment that turns 80 percent of the world's population into China
Did your calculation account for the fact that energy and economic growth having an almost 1:1 relation, meaning a compound growth of ~3% economic growth every year will add up quadrupling the energy requirements in 50 years.
I don't think that's actually true - it might have been from 1940s USA to the early 1980s but I don't think it holds weight anymore.
For example, if there was total electrification of cars and heating within 5 years, electricity demand would increase unimaginably while GDP would barely move.
Capitalism is generally also horrible at building things, even if the decision is finally made.