NuclearEnergy

Quora Answer : Why do environmentalists prefer wind and solar over the more reliable nuclear?

Feb 3

As the old saying goes "Nuclear power : cheap and safe. Pick one"

Basically nuclear power is one of those things that looks good on paper. If you just imagine the idealized case where everything goes right, then the numbers look OK. Until you figure in all the problems and risk of the real world.

But to make sure nuclear power is safe you have to spend a lot : both in careful up-front design, planning, construction. Then you still need to run it with a high level of expertise, competence and caution. You need ongoing expensive maintenance to prevent accidents. You need to worry about managing the waste. You need to avoid nasty accidental leaks. You have to build a supply chain for delivering uranium and removing radioactive waste without terrorists getting hold anything they can use to make "dirty bombs". Everything has to be tightly controlled. More or less forever.

And if you let your guard down. If 20 years into running your nuclear power plant you get a crap government that neglects its responsibilities for safety. Or a cost-sensitive corporation that tries to reduce the expense by hiring untrained incompetents. Everything can go wrong.

Furthermore, when you read and think about this you are probably thinking about developed countries. But every country in the world needs electricity. Do we want nuclear power-plants, with all these risks, proliferating everywhere in the world? Including countries that don't have the resources to provide the high level of competent management; countries where corrupt officials don't give a fuck about safety. Countries in chronic civil war where an invading militia might see the nuclear plant as a target to be seized or blown-up?

In contrast the economics of solar and wind are working out great. The more solar panels and wind-turbines we make, the more economies of scale kick in to make them cheaper. Because they are cheap and fast to deploy (because they don't come with all the safety requirements), power generation can be rolled out fast; and then improved incrementally (with newer, more efficient models) in a piecemeal way.

You don't worry who is getting their hands on them and using them. One place where solar is growing fast is Afghanistan, where it's driven by opium producers. (What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power) Rural Afghanistan is getting rapidly electrified with solar. There is zero plausibility that Afghanistan would be getting this degree of electrification from pebble bed reactors. Or that anyone would like to see a whole load of reactor-ready uranium being brought in to an area which is suffering a long ongoing civil war.

So wind and solar have exactly the profile of being cheap, fast, distributed, local, bottom-up, not requiring huge centralized top-down projects to manage them, that appeal to environmentalist. And feels like "the future" to us.

OTOH, it seems to us that it's exactly the dinosaur big corporations (fossil fuel and large scale construction industries) who feed off huge multi-decade projects (usually funded by government) who are so keen on nuclear and so keen to propagandize in favour of it. To be charitable, if you are in the business of building coal fuelled power-stations that take 10 years to construct and run for 50 years, then nuclear power-stations are more familiar to you. The engineering challenges look more familiar. The cost-structure looks more familiar. You think "this is a business I can understand and adapt to".

That's not what you think about wind-farms where most of the parts can be pre-fabricated in a factory in China and where a turbine can be installed out of doors in a couple of days. And where, potentially thousands of small producers and suppliers could sell a bit of energy into a smart grid.