Nuclear Energy
Current location:
Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading:
Work Won't Love You Back
by Sarah Jaffe
Listening:
Adventures on the Floating Island
by Monster Rally
(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status)
Today's Q&A-based essay (which is a little longer than usual) is from my new project, Climate Happenings, where I share/discuss/analyze news and topics related to the climate, renewable energy, the green economy, and the countless sub-topics this meta-topic touches.
Nuclear Energy
A question from David:
“I keep hearing different people say that natural gas is clean, but I’ve been told it’s mostly just cleaner than coal and oil, not CLEAN clean. I’ve also heard that nuclear energy is clean, but also it seems like it’s not, though I’m not sure how it compares to things like solar and wind and coal and oil. What’s the truth here?”
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First, thanks for this question, David, as it gives me a chance to try out the Q&A format I’m thinking about making a regular component of this newsletter (and this is a great topic).
Second, on natural gas: you’re right that it’s a less-polluting option (in terms of both particulate-related air-quality issues and emissions) than most common alternatives.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel that tends to be harvested alongside other fossil fuels (it’s usually found in gas-pockets tucked amidst oil and coal deposits), but it burns a bit cleaner than oil and coal—though there are concerns about it sneaking into the atmosphere in-transit, as transport pipes are notoriously leaky, and this gas is mostly methane (and methane is about 25-times as impactful in terms of global warming than CO2—though thankfully it doesn’t stick around in the atmosphere as long as CO2).
Okay, that out of the way, let’s talk nuclear power and its weird place in the current clean energy mix.
Nuclear fission is what we use to generate electricity in nuclear power plants, today.
It involves breaking atoms apart and harvesting the heat from that reaction, and that heat is then typically used to spin turbines to generate electricity.
This approach is great in that is allows us to create a stable, reliable, generally decent-sized flow of electricity.
It’s less-ideal in that nuclear fission generates nuclear waste: radioactive byproducts that have to be stored in special (and expensive) ways for generationally long periods of time, and which could theoretically be used by bad people to create dirty bombs.
Nuclear power plants have also melted down a few times, though this is a very small concern for most modern nuclear power plants; it’s something that can happen, but it’s so unlikely and rare that nuclear waste is by far the more pressing and concrete issue.
Nuclear fusion, in contrast, involves slamming atoms together and harvesting the heat from that reaction to generate electricity.
This is cleaner than splitting atoms (there’s some waste, but it’s recyclable within about 100 years, compared to the 1,000-year waste that nuclear fission can make), and should be less expensive because it uses cheap and easy-to-source materials (things like hydrogen and helium, rather than uranium, thorium, and plutonium).
There’s also no chance of a fusion power plant melting down, as the process itself doesn’t allow for it (it just shuts down if interrupted or otherwise messed-with).
There’ve been a lot of milestones in the development of nuclear fusion power recently, but it’s still a stretch-goal.
We might see some tangible proof-of-concept fusion power examples (which generate more energy than they consume) before 2030, but most estimates suggest we won’t have the option of building real-deal nuclear fusion plants till at least 2050.
At the moment, then, we’ve got nuclear fission, and a lot of work is being done to make that a better option, even as some countries continue to rely upon existing nuclear power plants for a significant chunk of their energy needs (France and the US currently get about 69% and 19.5%, respectively, of their total electricity from nuclear, for instance).
Some of this work revolves around making it cleaner (less waste-production), while other efforts are focused on making it more modular (Small Modular Reactions, or SMRs).
In the latter case, modularity is generally achieved by reducing the scale of the power plant so that it takes up a lot less space, requires substantially less local infrastructure to build and maintain, and (as a tradeoff) produces less energy.
The upside of this approach is that SMR reactors can be pre-fabricated elsewhere, which could make them far cheaper to build than existing nuclear power options while also making them suitable for use in more locations.
This could mean we build a lot of smaller, cheaper nuclear power plants rather than having one, massive central power plant in a given region.
This approach would also allow nuclear power plants to serve as backups for when the sun isn’t shining on solar panels and the wind isn’t spinning turbines; the smaller models would be cheap enough to serve in this capacity (existing models are too expensive and cumbersome for this use-case).
That could be a killer application for this type of power plant, as nuclear power’s core differentiator when compared to other non-CO2-generating energy options is that it produces a steady, reliable stream of electricity (similar to a coal- or oil-burning plants, but without the emissions).
So pairing SMRs with more irregular options like solar and wind would make the downsides of those intermittent (but cleaner) options less of an issue; the small nuclear power plant would fill in the energy-generation gaps.
That said, there are still understandable concerns about the waste that is produced, there are concerns about having nuclear-anything in one’s backyard (which could make building even smaller models politically perilous in some regions), and there’s warranted worry we might build a bunch of modular nuclear fission plants only to have nuclear fusion come along and make them all obsolete before they’ve earned back their construction costs (an eventuality that would arguably be amazing for the world, but less ideal for the pocketbooks of governments that invest in fission power right before the fusion energy revolution begins).
So in summation: nuclear power is clean-ish, could become even more useful soon, and could be upended if nuclear fusion pays off in the next few decades.
But in the meantime it’s a generally safe but politically fraught option that tends to work best when combined with other sources of (even cleaner) power like hydro, solar, and wind because it balances out some of their (mostly intermittency-related) downsides.
If you enjoyed this essay, consider subscribing to Climate Happenings (free) and/or supporting my work by buying me a coffee :)
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Things I've Made This Week
Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.
Aspiring Generalist: Free Online Textbooks
Brain Lenses: Nine-Ender Ages (podcast version)
Climate Happenings: German Coal, Drought Bombs, Flood Maps
I Will Read To You: To the River
Let’s Know Things: China's Demographic Crisis
Curiosity Weekly / Daily: August 9 / August 9
One Sentence News: August 10 (podcast version)
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Interesting & Useful
Absurd Trolley Problems — neal.fun Every problem is the trolley problem.
The Wood Database — www.wood-database.com
Concerning mechanical properties of the wood, many times it would read something like “moderately hard and heavy, with good strength properties...” But I was left wondering: how hard, how heavy, and how strong was this wood? What were they using as a standard, and how exactly did it measure up to other woods that I was used to using?
Micromorts — micromorts.rip Dying! It is what humans do. We do, however, attempt to delay this end for as long as possible. We continue to make horrible decisions around risk and death.
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Outro
I'll keep this short, following that longer-than-usual essay up top, but if you're interested in those climate-related topics, consider signing up for Climate Happenings—it's free and I'm having a lot of fun making it.
Also: I'll be popping around to Raleigh and Baltimore in the coming weeks, then Seattle in the latter-half of September. I'm not sure what my schedule will look like for either trip, yet, but let me know if you have suggestions on things to check out in these areas, please :)
What have you been up to, recently? Making any changes? Doubling-down on any existing routines, rituals, or commitments? Taking any trips? Plotting any at-home adventures?
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