> The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. ... The political capital lost in a reactor accident isn't worth it. The lost of faith in technology, the loss of trust in science
That omits what is by far the largest risk and issue, climate change. The cost of climate change dwarfs the risks mentioned above.
If solar or other renewable sources can't prevent climate change, then nuclear is a small price to pay.
No energy source is completely free of GHG emissions over its full life cycle. As you can see from my other posts I am pretty bullish about renewables but this particular article advances some bad arguments.
According to Sovacool's analysis, nuclear power, at 66 gCO2e/kWh emissions is well below scrubbed coal-fired plants, which emit 960 gCO2e/kWh, and natural gas-fired plants, at 443 gCO2e/kWh. However, nuclear emits twice as much carbon as solar photovoltaic, at 32 gCO2e/kWh, and six times as much as onshore wind farms, at 10 gCO2e/kWh. "A number in the 60s puts it well below natural gas, oil, coal and even clean-coal technologies. On the other hand, things like energy efficiency, and some of the cheaper renewables are a factor of six better. So for every dollar you spend on nuclear, you could have saved five or six times as much carbon with efficiency, or wind farms," Sovacool says.
1) Even if we use the input numbers for his model, the amount of emissions you save is calculated against the fossil status quo. (At least until fossil use is basically gone and it's all just non-fossil sources competing with each other.) If the baseline is 443 for natural gas, every kWh produced from nuclear saves (443 - 66) = 377 grams, and every kWh produced from offshore wind saves (443 - 10) = 433 grams. A kWh of offshore wind saves 56 additional grams per kWh against a gas baseline, 15% better than nuclear, not 600% better.
2) He's blithely switching between currency units and energy units. A dollar's worth of offshore wind investment produced significantly less lifetime energy in 2008 than a dollar's worth of nuclear power investment. Even after 8 years of falling offshore wind costs and rising nuclear costs, crossover has been achieved only very recently.
3) The largest single part of nuclear emissions in his analysis comes from fuel enrichment at the front end. This was because there were still old, inefficient, gaseous diffusion enrichment plants operating in 2008 in the United States and France. Both are now closed, so the West enriches uranium only via centrifuge, which has much lower energy requirements and corresponding emissions.
Are you sure about that?
Wouldn't a 1 or 2 degrees temperature increase be preferable to nuclear meltdowns becoming more frequent because we get much more nuclear power plants?
And just how common are nuclear meltdowns over time? It's a flawed risk analysis, further mitigated by newer Gen-IV reactor designs that are going to be coming out of China and India before long. Altogether, there have only been two INES level 7 incidents and one level 6 incident since 1954 [0]. And while unfortunate and expensive, they're incidents that can be cleaned up and recovered from.
By contrast, you're stuck with the consequences of a 1-2 degree temperature increase. And they're guaranteed, and will be around for centuries before the carbon cycle could ever even hope to compensate. The loss of low-lying property and other problems tied to rising sea levels would be in the tens of trillions [1].
People tend to bake in all sorts of potential negative externalities for nuclear energy, and much of that's baked into current regulations. Unfortunately, the same isn't done for other energy sources. When you start to try and look at those externalities (and that's a very difficult task, as many are hard to precisely measure), it can drastically change the math involved. And many of those negative consequences aren't a matter of chance. They're 100% guaranteed byproducts, especially with coal for instance.
The effect of the Fukushima meltdown was that 156,000 people were displaced, although some people say that this was an over-reaction and the exclusion zone could be much smaller [1,2]. Climate change is expected to displace 150 - 200 million people by 2050 [3], so it corresponds to about a thousand meltdowns.
That omits what is by far the largest risk and issue, climate change. The cost of climate change dwarfs the risks mentioned above.
If solar or other renewable sources can't prevent climate change, then nuclear is a small price to pay.