Posts Tagged ‘nuclear energy’
salt cooled nuclear reactors – part of the mix?
On a recent Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, Steven Novella presented a segment on salt-cooled nuclear reactors which really interested me. As a young person in the early 80s, I went to Roxby Downs, some six hours’ drive north of Adelaide, to protest against BHP’s Olympic Dam uranium mine, having learned something about uranium, radioactivity, fissile material and such, and having friends who had big concerns about all this stuff. There wasn’t much in the way of confrontation, but I certainly enjoyed tramping around in the semi-desert, espying desert peas, poached egg daisies and the like, and the night sky and its gadzillions of stars was definitely the highlight of the trip.
Of course I’ve learned a lot more about nuclear power since those days, and the era of the Maralinga nuclear tests, also in the South Australian outback, was then only a generation further back. The world has become a lot smarter about nuclear power, I think, since those days, and certainly I’ve noticed that nuclear power has been used in the USA (which currently has 92 operating reactors) and Europe (167, and falling) without any mishaps – uhh, excepting the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, no doubt an influence on the Roxby Downs protestors.
The only other reactor incidents of note, I think, have been Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011, about which there has been plenty of misinformation. I recall a fellow teacher, a few years ago, reminding us in the staff room of the Fukushima melt-down that ‘killed thousands’. She was confusing the Fukushima event with the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which indeed killed over 20,000 people, a catastrophe virtually unimaginable to Australians.
I’ve written about nuclear power before, including this quite impressive piece, if I may say so myself (as nobody else will), but this is an opportunity for me to learn more about salt-cooled reactors and the input to all this of one Bill Gates, a figure who seems to raise the ire of some of my acquaintances, presumably due to what they deem as his ill-gotten wealth. Economics has never been my strong suit, which partially explains my life of relative poverty (though laziness and a kind of habitual solitude is more to blame), so I couldn’t begin to judge how ill-gotten, or not, his gains have been, but I’ve read a couple of very good books on his recommendation – Origin Story, by David Christian (a ‘Big History of Everything’) and How the world really works, by Vaclav Smil (‘A scientist’s guide to our past, present and future’) – and I’m aware of the work he’s been doing in recent years on vaccination and education in various African and Asian countries, so I’ve come to trust him on various practical issues faced by our species.
According to Steve Novella, in episode 989 of the SGU podcast series, Gates sat down with climate scientists some years ago to get the lowdown on investing in green or clean technology for the future, and the option that apparently most appealed to him, was salt-cooled nuclear reactors, or molten salt reactors. Novella himself has advocated for nuclear along with solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and any other low carbon options, in other words a multi-pronged approach, with different options obviously more or less suited to particular regions, and he believes that there are more than a few misconceptions about the dangers and downsides of nuclear energy generation.
So the nuclear industry has not been faring well of late. Existing systems are passing their use-by dates, and investment is lagging behind demand, which itself is suffering due to aforementioned misconceptions. Gates, however, has been convinced that a relatively old nuclear technology needs to be revived. A reactor is currently being built in Wyoming by a Gates-backed company, TerraPower (referenced below), which is being mooted as faster (to build), cheaper and safer than existing reactors, and with a smaller output (around 300 megawatts rather than a gigawatt). It will be salt-cooled rather than water-cooled, and this, according to Novella, is the decisive feature:
‘Water has to be under high pressure, and this high pressure is what causes much of the expense, the safety features, you have to be constantly managing the amount of pressure, and this massively complicates the design, and therefore the cost, etc’.
Another important feature of the design is that:
‘It separates out the nuclear part of the plant from the energy production part. That may sound simple, but it means that the turbine, which turns the heat from the nuclear part, the reactor, into electricity, is housed in a separate building – which means, theoretically, that you don’t need a lot of the safety features in half of the plant (the production part) that you have in the other half’.
So the ultimate idea is for a cheaper, more efficient plant. The separated design for TerraPower’s system has yet to be approved by the regulators, but it sounds quite straightforward, and is even described by TerraPower as ‘boring’ in its simplicity.
So how does ‘salt cooling’ work? The salt (fluoride or chloride) stores the energy from the reactor by heating up until molten, after which it flows to the turbine to produce electricity, but the salt retains the heat from the reactor for much longer than water does, and as such it can essentially serve as a power storage device, like a battery, which can then serve as a kind of load-following power plant for more intermittent forms of renewable energy. The more conventional nuclear power plants don’t have this compatibility with renewables.
Apparently salt-based nuclear facilities were first produced in the 1950s and were phased out in the 70s, for some reason (more research required). The Wyoming nuclear site is being built within the region of a coal plant that is due to close completely in the 2030s, so that it can use the grid connections and some of the infrastructure of that plant, with the advantage that it can ramp up and down more effectively than coal-based power plants can (natural gas is also good as a ‘peaker’ electrical source, but without the clean benefits of nuclear).
So this facility, which has yet to clear some regulatory hurdles, should serve as a proof-of-concept for further facilities as other nuclear reactors pass their use-by date. The USA currently derives about 19% of its energy from nuclear, and falling, but energy demand for that nation is expected to increase by some 50% by mid-century. As we all should know, Germany decided to decommission its nuclear reactors some time ago, with the stated aim of ‘going green’, but has instead fallen back on coal and gas.
So it seems that the salt-based technology and the architectural design of this Wyoming plant will be proof against the kind of disaster experienced at Fukushima (where ‘corporate capture’ was also a factor to be mindful of), but there is also the issue of nuclear waste, or spent nuclear fuel. Of course this is of great concern to the public, as shown when South Australians rejected plans by its government to make a bit of dosh by offering some of our vast, uninhabited land as a dumping ground for such material. But as Novella points out, there’s a linear inverse relation between the radioactivity of this spent fuel and its half-life. That’s to say, the more highly radioactive the material, the shorter the half-life. So the material, if buried well underground in a geologically stable environment, would only be dangerously radioactive for a fraction of the thousands of years of its overall radioactivity.
It all sounds relatively positive. Something to keep an eye on over the next few years.
References
giving nuclear energy a chance, please
Episode #989
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
the thorium fuel future, or not…
So what about thorium as part of our clean energy future? Are there any thorium reactors operating? How do they work? How do they compare to uranium-based reactors?
Well, there appear to be a lot of plans on drawing boards, for good reason, it seems. Thorium is about three times more abundant than uranium, and is potentially a safer source of nuclear energy, which, ironically, is largely why it was overlooked early on, due to uranium’s far greater weapons potential. To quote Wikipedia,
The Thorium Energy Alliance estimates “there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years.”
When used in a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), a type of molten salt reactor (MSR), far less nuclear waste results. And there are many other positives. An estimate by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia, for example, that a ton of thorium can produce the energy of 200 tons of uranium and three and a half million tons of coal.
And there’s more stuff about thorium’s advantages that sound just too good to be true. Wikipedia lists nine positives in bullet points. However, there are substantial start-up costs, and there are problems with ‘breeder reactors’ and proliferation, which I’ll try to understand later.
Reading the story of uranium v thorium from the late forties into the seventies, you can clearly see that the military side of the military-industrial complex, especially in the USA, won out at the expense of safe commercial and domestic energy use. But what with the recent urgency about alternatives to fossil fuels, and the concern (methinks largely unwarranted) about uranium-based nuclear, thorium is inching its way back into favour. Sabine Hossenfelder reports on its soon-to-be-arrival in Europe while castigating the German state’s pulling the plug on nuclear in general (Steve Novella of the Skeptics’ Guide is also bemused). I reckon they’re gonna change their changed mind eventually.
Anyway, the news is that the Netherlands and France, two countries that embrace nuclear power, have teamed up to bring small thorium reactors to Europe. NAAREA, a French alternative energy company, and Thorizon of the Netherlands, have combined their smarts and funds, and I’ll quote Sabine:
NAAREA is already working on small nuclear reactors, and they want to combine their technology with the thorium cores from the Dutch.
This is the concept of small, transportable nuclear reactors that I first read about in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now some years ago. The fact is, though, that progress seems to be slow in this field, in spite of all the global warming concerns. NIMBYism is still a problem, as well as whole of government negativity, as in Germany. Nations that are more keen are India, which has the world’s largest thorium reserves, China, Canada and the USA.
So what about here in Australia? We have actually banned nuclear energy, both federally and in every state and territory, and there appears to be no appetite for changing the situation. This also means there’s no avenue for those interested in nuclear energy and its engineering and technical requirements to gain expertise in the field here. I suspect the only factor that will change our governmental (and popular) mindset will be the proven success of new thorium-based reactors elsewhere. Of course, Australia has the perfect climate for solar and storage, so there’s little appetite for changing direction – though it should be noted that Australia ranks with the USA as having the third largest reserves of thorium, behind India and Brazil.
So how does thorium work as a nuclear fuel? I’ve no idea, so here goes with another particle of my lifelong learning. First, to the World Nuclear Association. Three points:
- [Thorium] is fertile rather than fissile, and can only be used as a fuel in conjunction with a fissile material such as recycled plutonium.
- Thorium fuels can breed fissile uranium-233 to be used in various kinds of nuclear reactors.
- Molten salt reactors are well suited to thorium fuel, as normal fuel fabrication is avoided.
The first point is sort of self-explanatory – thorium nuclei (232) can’t be split apart by ‘thermal neutrons’ (neutrons travelling above a certain velocity), but they can be converted into fissile material via ionising radiation. The nuclei may then capture neutrons and be converted to fissile material (uranium-233, in the case of thorium).
The third point obviously needs some explaining. The reactors used to generate thorium-based energy are called liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs), which are:
a molten salt type of reactor [MSR], meaning that the fuel inside the core is actually in a liquid form in a salt formation that circulates inside the core. It is hot and acts as a fuel and coolant at the same time, meaning that the heat from this liquid fuel that is circulating inside the core is being transferred to the heat exchanger and to the rest of the components and electricity is produced similarly to any other type of reactor.
Elina Charatsidou (see references)
That’s a start. The differences between this type of liquid fuel and the highly structured solid fuel rods create both advantages and disadvantages…
So, as mentioned, thorium-232 is quite abundant and, unlike uranium-235, it isn’t fissile (which makes it similar to uranium-238), but its ‘fertility’ allows it to capture neutrons, so transmuting into protactinium-233 which then decays into uranium-233, which is fissile. This, I think, is the important point. It’s the splitting of the uranium-233 that produces the efficient energy, not thorium itself. And Elina points out something I don’t quite understand as yet – ‘there are 2 ways that can be produced – uranium-233 can be produced inside the core, or outside and then placed inside the core as a fuel for the thorium reactors’.
Ultimately, though Elina Charatsidou and other informed commentators aren’t quite buying into the hype of some about a thorium future. It should be developed, and it’s needed as our population continues to grow and, more importantly, become more prosperous. We need to get behind it as part of a multi-faceted approach to our energy future.
For a more positive spin on thorium and new developments in nuclear energy, especially regarding storage, re-use, corrosion and cost factors, as well as issues around public-private ownership, the Copenhagen Atomics video, linked below, is well worth a look.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Good News: Small Nuclear Thorium Reactors are Coming to Europe (Sabine Hossenfelder video)
Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 2018 (pp146-9)
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspx
stuff on nuclear energy, fossil fuel emissions and the future
- China — 9,877.
- United States — 4,745.
- India — 2,310.
- Russia — 1,640.
- Japan — 1,056.
- Germany — 644.
- South Korea — 586.
- Iran — 583.
Jacinta: So we heard recently, on an SGU podcast, that more CO2 was pumped into our atmosphere in 2022 than in any previous year, in spite of more people and governments being on board with combatting global warming than ever before.
Canto: Yes, depressing but unsurprising, with the population continually rising and, more importantly, more of the global population catching up with the WEIRD world. We can only hope that the increase in CO2, and greenhouse gases generally, will slow, and soon be reversed, as will the population. I mean, the population needs to stabilise, like ZPG, and the greenhouse effect needs to be reversed.
Jacinta: Well what the SGU has highlighted is that Germany, and not just Germany, is closing nuclear power plants much more readily than fossil fuel production, or fossil fuel imports, because… why?
Canto: Because of the overblown reaction to the Fukushima disaster, which, if cool heads prevailed, should not have affected a country that doesn’t tend to be hit by tidal waves, that doesn’t suffer from the ‘managerial capture’ and the problems in nuclear safety management that plagued the Japanese nuclear industry…
Jacinta: But there’s also the long lingering concerns about nuclear energy, in Germany and globally, as I recall from the days way back in the 1980s when there were big protests about our uranium exports here in Australia, which I must admit to being involved in. Fears about nuclear radiation were at quite a height then, what with the Maralinga tests in South Australia, our state, in the 1950s and 60s. The blast sites were still found to be highly contaminated in 1985.
Canto: So – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – three nuclear incidents from which we’ve learned a heap. And from all the testing done in the Pacific, by the USA and France, and maybe others. The USA’s last test there was done in 1962. They continued doing stuff in Nevada till 1992. The French kept on testing at Mururoa until 1996, but as we know, the protests just kept growing and growing, and it all seems to have ground to a halt.
Jacinta: Never say never. So the Green Party in Germany were very anti-nuclear, and they forced an agreement with the government in 2000 to phase out nuclear energy by 2022. Later, Angela Merkel’s government managed to extend the phase-out date to 2034, but then Fukushima happened, and the date was put back again to 2022. They were on track to do that, but Putin’s invasion of Ukraine delayed it slightly. They’ve just closed the last nuclear power facility.
Canto: So, according to the SGU, Germany’s energy production spread in 2010 was 60% fossil fuels, 23% nuclear and 17% renewables. In 2022 it had changed to 51% fossil fuels, 6% nuclear and 43% renewables, which isn’t bad, but clearly if they hadn’t abandoned nuclear, that might’ve reduced the fossil fuel load by another 20% or so.
Jacinta: Lies lies and damn statistics. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. So, seriously, as Steve Novella points out in his SGU rant, we should be focussing on phasing out fossil fuels – coal first, as the dirtiest, then oil, then gas – and keeping nuclear going as a fairly long stop-gap in the medium term.
Canto: They’ve got a whole transcript of the podcast online, I’ve just discovered. And one of the points Novella makes is that you have to look at the path to achieving zero emissions. Germany already has the nuclear infrastructure, as do other European countries, such as Sweden (which almost went the way of Germany), so rebooting its nuclear facilities would be far less costly than starting from scratch as we’d be doing in Australia, where there’s absolutely no appetite for nuclear…
Jacinta: And we’re perfect for solar and storage, and offshore wind. Anyway, as a result of Germany’s decision it’s the third highest CO2 emitter in Europe, behind Poland and the Czech Republic, and the figures are extremement revealing. Germany releases 385 grammes of CO2 per kWh, compared to nuclear-powered France, at 85, and Sweden, which has a lot of hydro, at 45 – the lowest in Europe.
Canto: Tasmania, which is all hydro, boasts about its negative emissions, since it exports a proportion of its energy.
Jacinta: Italy is up at 372, having got rid of its nuclear generators.
Canto: Hell in a hand-basket.
Jacinta: So they describe nuclear as a bridging technology…
Canto: But what do they do with all the waste? Radioactivity and all?
Jacinta: Good question. A quick search turns up this:
Over 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored across Europe (excluding Russia and Slovakia), most of which is in France. Within the EU, France accounts for 25 percent of the current spent nuclear fuel, followed by Germany (15 percent) and the United Kingdom (14 percent).
That’s from a ‘World Nuclear Waste Report’ in 2019, from an organisation called Focus Europe. They say that only Finland has ‘a permanent repository for the most dangerous type of waste’.
Canto: So, all the more reason to focus on renewables, but wth nuclear being a part of the mix for the foreseeable, storage is a big issue, and then there’s the Ukraine situation. ..
Jacinta: And a controversial situation in the Balkans, on the Croatia-Bosnia border, but you go first.
Canto: Well, we’re talking about the Zaporizhzhia plant in south-eastern Ukraine. The World Nuclear Association is presenting a timeline of all the distressing events from the start of the invasion to the present. Interestingly, Russia captured Chernobyl at the beginning of their invasion, but then thought better of it. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Chernobyl became the site of the Battle of Chernobyl and Russian forces captured the city on 24 February. After its capture, Ukrainian officials reported that the radiation levels started to rise due to recent military activity causing radioactive dust to ascend into the air. Hundreds of Russian soldiers were suffering from radiation poisoning after digging trenches in a contaminated area, and one died. On 31 March it was reported that Russian forces had left the exclusion zone. Ukrainian authorities reasserted control over the area on 2 April.
The whole Chernobyl debacle – it’s on the way to Kyiv, near the border with Belarus – is a prime example of Russian incompetence in this ‘special military operation’. As to Zaporizhzhia in the south-east, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, the situation is very murky, with Russia claiming it has complete control of it and Ukraine emphatically denying this claim. It has been regularly shelled, presumably by the Russians, and nearby residents have been evacuated recently.
Jacinta: Yeah, here in Australia we never think of warfare being a threat to the nuclear industry, it goes to show, you never know. Of course power supplies will always be a target in war, but it’s extra problematic with nuclear power – why we shouldn’t rely on it, unless we went the bonobo way pretty damn soon re our social evolution… Yes, the Croatia-Bosnia issue is all about waste dumping. It’s not about warfare or anything, just increased tensions, and the general nimbyism that goes with all this, if that’s not being too dismissive. It’s Croatia that’s building the waste facility near the Bosnian border, and the worries are about public health, local agriculture and their river systems.
Canto: So to get back to the fossil fuel issue, because of increased energy demand overall – and that’ll continue for a good while – we’re releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere, at increasing rates, even while our percentage of energy demand that’s met by fossil fuels is going down. So, fat chance of reaching our targets – generally considered as no more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures by – whenever. Others are giving up on that and talking about 2 degrees, which many consider more or less catastrophic.
Jacinta: They say that currently 75% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. Uhhh, that’s not an exact figure. And some fossil fuels are worse than others, as we’ve said.
Canto: And at this rate, our emissions will almost double by 2050. And battery electric, and hydrogen, will require more fossil fuel emissions to produce. Nuclear could be an option there, but it’s unlikely everyone’s going to get on board with nuclear.
Jacinta: And, as Steve Novella points out, all of these new renewable energy projects – wind and solar in particular – are involved in a backlog to get onto the grid. There just isn’t enough grid electricity to cover new projects, and upgrading the grid to cope with varied, and variable, forms of energy, is a major, time consuming project in itself. And that’s leaving aside all the political machinations going on, the vested interests and so forth. We’ve just recently allowed fracking to go ahead in the Northern Territory, and so it goes…
References
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts (episode 931)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moruroa
https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_931
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-03/nt-government-fracking-decision-beetaloo-basin-gas/102295762
giving nuclear energy a chance, please
Compared with nuclear power, natural gas kills 38 times as many people per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, biomass 63 times as many, petroleum 243 times as many and coal 387 times as many – perhaps a million deaths a year.
Steven Pinker, ‘The Environment’, Chapter 10 of Enlightenment now.
an unfortunate slow-down
I’ve written about nuclear energy before, here and here. It comes to mind again due to my reading of Pinker’s new book, so I’ve decided to venture into the field again, despite not having improved my paltry readership over the years.
Clearly the spectre of radiation hangs over the nuclear industry, and many green polemicists have done their best to darken that spectre, but if facts count for what I wish they would count for, Australia could solve all its considerable energy woes with a few nuclear power plants.
Take the case of France, a nation with almost three times our population. Thanks largely to its nuclear power program, which was boosted after the seventies oil crisis in order to deliver national energy security, it’s the world’s largest net exporter of electricity, because once the plants are built and paid for, electricity generation is cheap. In fact, some 17% of this electricity comes from recycled nuclear fuel. It currently earns 3 billion euros annually from exported electricity, and that’s not factoring in its exports from reactor technology and fuel products and services.
Australia has far more land than France, and given its small population, it would stand to gain substantially from exporting nuclear-derived electricity to the world, after finally putting an end to its frankly ridiculous domestic energy woes. I recognise though, that such a far-reaching project is beyond the imaginations, let alone the negotiating skills of today’s adversarial pollies. We need more entrepreneurs and non-partisan public intellectuals to get behind such projects, accompanied by realistic schemes and hard data.
There’s also the problem of winning over the public. The facts on nuclear energy should speak for themselves, but the largely human tragedies of Fukushima and Chernobyl, together with the perceived and perhaps actual connection between nuclear energy and weapons, and also the general fear of radiation and its relation to storage, leakage and accidents, have created polarised outlooks that impede progress in the field. This is well illustrated by a three-part set of videos on the subject, including an intro and two others, ‘nuclear energy is awesome’ and ‘nuclear energy is terrible’, suggesting that its authors have found little common ground.
As the negative part of the videos points out, weapons technology has been developed in five countries – India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa and North Korea – through reactor technology. As the current debate over Iran illustrates, it’s hard to distinguish between nuclear energy technology and covert weapons technology. There’s also the waste problem. Radioactive and toxic chemical materials such as plutonium remain a problem for tens of thousands of years. A stable and remote underground environment, such as exists right here in South Australia’s north, would be one of the safest bets for burial, but beware of apoplectic rage when anyone suggests such an idea, even though, as one of the world’s largest exporters of uranium, we’re deeply involved in the industry and would likely get plenty of help from nations grateful for our raw material.
Of course, there have been accidents.
To put the nuclear energy scare in perspective, it’s worth noting that if you mention the word Tohoku outside of Japan you’re likely to get little back but an unknowing shrug. Mention Fukushima and you’ll likely get a more animated response. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed approximately 16,000, with over 6,000 injured and 2,500 still missing. Almost 250,000 were left homeless. The Fukushima meltdowns resulting from this disaster killed nobody – though there are ongoing tests regarding radiation and cancer incidence, which suggest that increased risks are small.
I’ve written in one of my earlier posts about the obvious inappropriateness of building nuclear plants in earthquake-prone areas, and about the boys’ club mentality of Japan’s nuclear oversight system, but what about the accident itself and the associated radiation spill? As the most recent serious nuclear incident, and therefore the most relevant to the future of a developing industry, it’s worth taking a close look at it.
The Fukushima facility, one of the world’s largest, was made up of six boiling water reactors, of which three were in use at the time of the earthquake. The oldest of these was built in 1967, the other two in the early seventies. The seawall protecting the plant was ten metres high. The largest tsunami wave to hit the plant was 13 metres (a 2008 in-house study suggesting that the plant was unprotected from waves above 10.2 metres was dismissed, as purveying ‘unrealistic’ concerns). There were failures of the emergency cooling system, including piping and valve problems that hadn’t been monitored sufficiently. A number of hydrogen-air explosions occurred in the days after the tsunami, further damaging the plant. Clearly, there were maintenance problems in the lead-up to the failure, communication problems during the crisis, and a general culture of complacency throughout, deadly to such high-risk geographical locations. However, none of this should necessarily act as a complete brake on the industry. The lessons to learn would seem to be obvious. More openness, more active monitoring, sensible placement of nuclear plants, and ongoing research towards improved and safer facilities.
As far as I can see, there’s much more to be said about the positives of nuclear energy. In spite of the recent massive pause, or reversal, in our reliance on it, nuclear is by a huge distance the safest – and greenest – form of energy in terms of lives lost, health problems and any other indicator we can think of. There is plenty of data to back this up, but it involves far more than workplace safety. The damage from global carbon emissions is, of course difficult to calculate and the subject of endless debate, but there’s no doubt that nuclear has the smallest carbon footprint of any current energy technology. More importantly, it’s the only non-fossil fuel technology capable of providing reliable electricity on a global scale, at a time when the battle against global warming is very far from being won. The Trump debacle won’t last of course, but there is a greater threat from increased industrialisation in China, India, and the developing countries of the world – though any casting of blame would be unfair term considering the carbon being pumped out by the fully industrialised west.
The critics of nuclear point to the past, and to the radiation hazards of storage. They’re not interested in acknowledging modern developments which have made nuclear power increasingly safe and cheap, due to streamlining and standardisation of design, the plausibility of cheaper thorium reactors, and a host of innovations that have led to gen-III and gen-IV systems waiting to be brought online. Sadly, we may have to wait a while to see them. France, Germany, Japan and the USA are reducing their reliance on nuclear, and turning back to dirty energy, due only to its largely undeserved public reputation. It’s likely we’ll have to wait until the climate crisis deepens before we return to seeing the sense of nuclear energy. It will be interesting to see just how long it takes.