French only for the first 20 seconds or so.
Don’t like all the arguments as much as the last one. Nuke people will say the 4th gen technology will solve all the problems – all except one, maybe.
Worth listening to the end. Find out why Nuclear is not like Napster.
My response to Jeremy Rifkin:
1. The Liquid Fuel Thorium Reactor (LFTR) will cost half or less than current reactors, per Watt: no large containment building, no cooling towers, and no high-pressure plumbing.
2. LFTR’s produce zero long-term waste. And they can consume small amounts of existing nuclear waste for power.
3. LFTR’s use no uranium.
4. If you’re worried about terrorism, we should end production of fuel oil and fertilizer. That’s killed far more people (thousands) than nuclear terrorism has (zero).
5. LFTRs use no water. They are air cooled, and can be put anywhere.
I should also say, LFTRs have no spent fuel, no spent fuel pool, and cannot melt down (because the fuel is already liquid). In case of accident, they shut themselves down into a safe configuration without operator intervention.
4th generation plants as commercial power plants are a few decades away at best. They are no excuse not to deploy other clean energy, like solar and wind, as fast as possible.
Once again, Jeremy Rifkin “separates the wheat from the chaff” in only a few moments. Yep, the bottom-up view is the correct one.
On a related note, people forget about the investment costs associated with nukes. Most governments are broke so nuclear technology will need to be built by investors. Even with fast-track licensing, once you start construction it will take 5-7 years before the plant will start to return money to the investor. In our “quarterly report” world, modern investors would never stand for this. Meanwhile, if these same people invest in wind generators, they could be installed and producing power (and money) in three months.
In the mean time, anyone who has read “A Tale of Two Cities” should sit back and compare pro-nuke France to no-nuke Germany. The same thing happened in Canada 40 years ago when the province of Ontario built nukes while the province of Quebec built three mega-size hydro electric projects. In 2011, Ontario is burning through tax-payer dollars to refurbish Ontario nukes (these costs are not passed on to electricity bills) while Quebec is sitting pretty.
About the only thing Ontario did right in the past 4 years was to build Big Becky (a tunnel to divert water from Lake Erie into Ontario’s hydro generation plant at the Sir Adam Beck power station) and support private investment in wind generation. I sill think that PV Solar this far north is a mistake.
http://www.opg.com/power/hydro/new_projects/
Regarding solar PV “this far north”: Germany is the current world leader in the production of solar energy. Yet we have two advantages over Germany when it comes to solar PV. First we have a lot of space to put our panels because our population density is microscopic in comparison (although we should be putting panels on rooftops). And, more importantly, we get a lot more sun than Germany does. The exact term is “solar resource”. And we have more of it, by quite a margin.
I think the scariest of Rifkin’s arguments is that Nuclear power uses 40% of France’s potable water! Why is this? Surely, their power plants should have just been built nearer to the sea. Although Japan is tectonically a very bad place to build any nuclear plants (and to be so heavily dependent on them), the fact remains that Fukushima was not a disaster. However, for me (as a former geologist and hydrogeologist), the “elephant in the room” is the cost of decomissioning the plants and “disposing” of the waste.
In the UK, the government has managed to convince the private sector that nuclear power is a commerically-viable investment. At first sight, this seems surprising when you consider that investors are liable to put money aside to help with plant decommissioning and storage of waste (i.e. a UK total of £900 million over 40 years). However, what the government is keeping very quiet about is the fact that the taxpayer remains liable for the £25 billion it will cost to “dispose” of the waste underground (see DTI (2007) Nuclear Power Generation Cost Benefit Analysis, p.20).
However, at the end of the day, I agree with James Lovelock, Mark Lynas, David MacKay, George Monbiot, Stuart Brand (and many others) who say that nuclear power is a necessary evil. Nevertheless, apart from the waste “disposal” issue, there is also the fact that, as our global population passes the 7 billion mark, we need to de-carbonise our economy now – not in 10 to 15 years time. This is why the failure of Energy Companies to invest in – and/or Governments to subsidise – sensible renewable energy technology (such as Solar and Tidal) is tantamount to corporate negligence.
The US uses about half of its surface water withdrawals to cool larger thermal power plants.
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/wupt.html
So the best argument against nuclear is that it’s irrelevant to the young people because millions and millions and millions of buildings are file-sharing their own energy?
What does that mean?
The internet works by copying information. If this guy knows of some neat energy-copying scheme, I want to know about it 🙂
His other arguments are
1. that a saving of only a few hundred giga-watts of continuous CO2 production is irrelevant;
2. that because there’s no satisfactory solution to the waste problem there never will be one;
3. that uranium will run out, despite economically viable reserves in excess of 100 times the amount mined each year, and despite the fact that mined uranium obviously isn’t the only fuel;
4. that France shouldn’t have reactors cooled by sea water because of tsunami risk.
It’s a bit short on content. But I guess you liked his style of speaking. It’s pretty good.
“…that France shouldn’t have reactors cooled by seawater because of tsunami risk“… I obviously missed this point but, if he said it, this too is nonsense: Japanese engineers knew about the Tsunami risk and designed the Fukushima site accordingly. Unfortunately for them, this particular mega-quake caused the land at the site to subside by a metre or two in the time before the Tsunami arrived (this is also why some of the very high-tech defences of numerous towns failed).
Unlike France, Japan did not have a choice (it does not have any fossil fuel deposits). However, unlike Japan, France is not at such great risk from Tsunamis (although the cataclysm that befell the Minoan civilisation on Crete when Santorini blew up several 1000 years ago does demonstrate that we can never be certain about these things and, I suppose Strombolli could decide to go “pop” one day… It’s very unlikley but, then, so is winning the lottery (especially if like me you don’t waste your money buying a ticket) 🙂
The strongest arguments for not pursuing nuclear power are not economic; they are environmental: Mining it is messy, dangerous, and kills people; and burrying it is morally questionable given that you can never really dispose of something that will be dangerous for millions of years and (in the case of carbon dioxide even more than radioactivity) must therefore never escape.
the advantages of a distributed energy system based on a smart grid should be obvious.
Of course the smart grid is good, and it should be pursued, with vigour.
But the idea that it’s a kind of copying process like file-sharing is just silly.
Also it doesn’t exist yet. It’s not as if it’ll just appear one day, and then all central power production will become suddenly redundant.
Another reason that nuclear energy should not be written-off quite so quickly is that conventional thermal nuclear power stations can only make use of less than 1% of the Earth’s uranium (i.e. the easily-splittable U-235). To use the rest (i.e. U-238), we would have to have not given up on Fast Neutron Reactor technology. Indeed, the World Nulcear Association is in favour of it (but, of course, they would be).
Seriously though, before we consider extracting uranium from seawater; where it is universally-present at higher concentration (3.3 ppb) than its average-crustal abundance (2.6 ppb), surely we should make full use of what we already have got?
The only thing, I think Rifkin did not mention was the environmental impact of mining the stuff; and the increased mortality rates amongst those unfortunates whose livelihoods depend on such questionable enterprise.
That’s a very good point about the ethics of mining.
My guess is that he didn’t mention it because he’s only talking about the economic future of nuclear and the reasons why he thinks it shouldn’t attract investment. Unfortunately, we live in a world where far too few investments are influenced by the ethical considerations of mining. I’m sure he’s aware how little it features in the list of priorities of his file-sharing generation when they consider their new phones and laptops. There’s a whole other campaign there, about mining in general. It’s certainly not restricted to uranium.
Also, to make that argument you’d really have to compare the casualty rate to energy ratio of uranium mines in relation to coal, and then take a sensible view on how much coal mining would be displaced by new nuclear, for example. I don’t think there’d be much doubt which way that would go.
I’m a bit late to this discussion; it seems that people have already covered most of the points I noted while listening to the presentation. Nevertheless, here’s my list of objections:
1. He complains that nuclear plants cost money. Yep, that’s true. So does everything else. Renewable technologies by their nature have no fuel costs, which means that all of their costs are capital costs. The capital intensity problem is a serious issue with nuclear plants, but it’s slightly worse with renewables.
2. He flat-out lies in claiming that there’s no solution to the waste plan. The Yucca Mountain facility was not closed for technical reasons, it was closed for solely political reasons. It’s still there, still ready to accept waste. And there are other countries with waste repositories.
3. He’s right that all that spent fuel is dangerous. So why don’t we activate Yucca Mountain and put it there rather than leave it in pools?
4. He flat-out lies again in maintaining that the supply of uranium is limited. Yes, the price will go up, but nowhere near enough to affect the economics of nuclear power.
5. He’s quite right that fuel reprocessing generates plutonium. We should dump that part of the fuel cycle and stick with once-through fuel cycle.
6. His claim about nuclear using up 40% of the fresh water in France is ridiculous. Does he think that the water is destroyed? No, it’s put right back out into the river where it’s available for any other use. No, it’s not radioactive.
7. Then he dismisses seaside nuclear plants using salt water for cooling on the grounds that they’re vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis — but there has NEVER been a significant earthquake along the French coast, there has NEVER been a significant tsunami along the French coast, and there is nothing in the geology of France to suggest the possibility of a significant earthquake.
8. His comparison of distributed energy systems with distributed information systems is idiotic. Information works well in a distributed system because a) the cost of transferring it is infinitesimal; and b) it costs nothing to copy information. Neither of these conditions applies to electricity. Indeed, it could well be argued that the Internet is partly re-centralizing through the cloud, with substitutes huge server farms for the individual computers and disk drives of users. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong about centralization; some things work better centralized and some things work better decentralized. The value of decentralization is that it’s local: my stuff is right here with me, so I don’t have to worry about the paraphernalia of centralized systems. Sometimes this is an advantage; sometimes, it isn’t.
All in all, the level of intellectual dishonesty in this presentation is so high that I think it proper to dismiss Mr. Rifkin out of hand.
Sin. “The Yucca Mountain facility was not closed for technical reasons, it was closed for solely political reasons.” Yes, certainly, and that is a reason much more serious than the technical ones (by the way which geologists that I talk with endorse). So, I guess we could build another Yucca Mountain in Texas or South Carolina, where the people are more likely to endorse a really big energy project. One of the biggest issues is the waste, and there is not yet a solution owing to both technical and political (trains across the US carrying that waste, “Not through my state.”). I would like to hear your response to your own question, “So why don’t we activate Yucca Mountain and put it there rather than leave it in pools?.”