This quote is attributed, perhaps spuriously to Keynes. A sharper version of the same point is made here by Noah Smith, exploring the concept “Derp”, “”the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors”, where “strong priors” in the technical Bayesian sense, mean that ” … you really, really believe something to be true. If your start off with a very strong prior, even solid evidence to the contrary won’t change your mind. ”
A notable example of this, very relevant on this blog, and cited by Smith, is the cost of solar energy. Roughly speaking, the cost of solar modules has fallen by a factor of 10 over the past few years, and the cost of installed systems by a factor of three. If that hasn’t changed your mind about the relative merits of alternative policy option, then you must have really strong priors, and in that case, you shouldn’t be engaging in debate, since your mind can’t be changed by evidence. As Smith observes, “That is unhelpful and uninformative, since they’re just restating their priors over and over. Thus, it is annoying. Guys, we know what you think already.”
But, it’s easy to throw stones, so I thought I would check my own archives to see if I was guilty of Derping on this point. Here is what I thought in 2004
Nuclear (fission) power is probably the cheapest large-scale alternative electricity source (there are some sites where wind is cost-competitive, and similarly for geothermal) but it is still a good deal more expensive than coal or gas. How much more expensive is hard to tell because the industry is riddled with subsidies, but I’d guess that the full economic cost is about twice as high for nuclear electricity as for coal or gas. Moreover, most recent construction has been in places like China and Korea where safety standards may not be as high as they would have to be to get nuclear energy restarted in the developed world as a whole.
What this means is that nuclear power won’t enter into calculations until we have a carbon tax (or equivalent) steep enough to double the price of electricity. It’s clear though, that much smaller increases in costs would make a wide range of energy conservation measures economically viable, as well as reducing final demand for energy services. Implementing Kyoto, for example, would not require anything like a doubling of prices. Whether or not a more radical response is justified, it’s clearly not going to happen for at least a decade and probably longer.
Nevertheless, if mainstream projections of climate change turn out to be correct, and especially if, as Lovelock suggests, they turn out to be conservative, we’ll eventually face the need for new sources of electricity to replace fossil fuels. Solar photovoltaics are improving fast but still a long way from being cost-competitive. So it may well be that, at least for an interim period, expansion of nuclear fission is the best way to go.
I didn’t mention carbon, capture and storage, but I also supported that as a good option for Australia, assuming it could me made to work.
The facts have changed, and I have changed my mind. I now think the role of renewables, and particularly solar is going to be much larger than seemed likely ten years ago, nuclear much less, and CCS marginal.
Update Obviously, this post was intended to provoke a reaction from the critics of renewable energy (normally, also advocates of nuclear) who regularly comment here, challenging them to say how they had adjusted their views in the light of the evidence of the last decade. Most commenters responded thoughtfully. But our single-topic nuclear fans, Hermit and Will Boisvert, responded by herping even more flerps of derp. Despite being reminded of the topic, they just kept on pumping out the same constant, repetitive reiteration of their priors that defines derp. This does, at least provide me with some guidance. From now on, comments from single-issue pro-nuclear commenters (specifically, the two mentioned) will be deleted unless they contain a point that has not been made previously or (highly improbably) a change of view.
John Quiggin 
@hix
The whole point of Bayesian thinking is to have non-diffuse priors. But, the strength of your priors ought to reflect the weight of evidence.
On Snowden, despite all the people now claiming “we all knew this”, the extent was worse than the worst case I considered possible, to the point where I hesitated to discuss it online for fear of being accused of being a conspiracy theorist. So, although my priors were broad, and therefore weak wrt to the central tendency, they weren’t weak or broad enough.
@John Quiggin
As an aside:
I know the feeling.
Today I read an interesting piece about the “conspiracy theorist” epithet: “Conspiracy Theories? No One Does it Better Than West’s Elite – By Neil Clark”
It reminded me of a generalised protest I went to in Brisbane outside the gates of a school where the then PM was appearing. All the varied protesters were sent on to one side of the road by the police.
Two ladies turned up with hand made signs supporting their particular issue (from memory the closure of a childcare facility or something similar). I indicated that they might join the other disparate groups across the road and they said “but we’re not protesters, we’re just concerned about the government closing down the centre and want the PM to know that.”
I’ll happily be labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ for speculating that the wedges driven between all of us as citizens are more by design than accident.
Climate action obstructionists, laboring under the delusion that dangerous climate change is vastly exaggerated and who have gone to great lengths to inculcate that view within the public go right the way to the top of mainstream politics – don’t you a big lot of responsibility or blame for perpetuating the reign of coal should be levelled against them?
@Ken Fabian
I’d describe deniers and green dreamers as partners in crime. On the one side you get coal and on the other side you also get coal. The coal miners should hardly believe their luck. When emissions fail to seriously reduce (aside from a general downturn) I think the knives could be out for both sides.
The now comfortable middle class gets some 80% of its electricity, personal mobility and overnourishment from fossil fuels while promoting the fantasy of a wind and solar economy. I suspect the Spanish middle class thought like that look what happened
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9411367/The-pain-in-Spain-recession-and-the-middle-class.html
Posted without comment: http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/cedex-coal-states.png
Oh. Right. The graph is not visible on this platform. So I will comment. The link in my comment above is to a graph of change in coal fired generation by state.
Anyway, I guess I should try to say something relevant to the topic. Um… Well, in the past I didn’t realize how bad the lies about nuclear power’s costs were. I investigated some of the more blatent lies and found out that even people I thought could be trusted on the issue were lying, either actively or through negligence. I will quote what Daniel Davies said on this topic, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”
Hermit, ‘green’ anti-nuclear activism is mostly a noisy minority who only count because mainstream politics keeps pointing at them and saying it’s their fault. It’s apparently their fault that we have a climate problem to alarm and upset people. It’s their fault mainstream politics is incapable of pushing for nuclear power as well? Rubbish.
Climate science denial bleeds away any motivation to push for nuclear within conservative politics. It offers a super cheap do nothing option that successfully diverts and silences calls by commerce and industry to use nuclear in ways that anti-nuclear activism never could. Anti-nuclear activism is almost irrelevant in the climate and energy debate, except as scapegoat. If the LNP ever wanted to address emissions with nuclear no bunch of fringe activists could made them stop. But they don’t want to address emissions do they?
If Australian conservatives had spent a tenth of the effort pushing for climate action using nuclear as they have spent pushing climate science denial and obstructionism over the past two decades we would probably have nuclear in the pipeline now. Conservatives denying there is any need has been far more damaging to nuclear as emissions solution than green anti-nuclear activism could ever be.
Our mainstream media’s willingness to go along with gratuitous criticism of nuclear even more than it does with criticism of climate science is a pretty good indicator of how much wealthy and influential conservatives really want to use nuclear for reducing emissions.
@Ken Fabian, on the influence of antinuclear activism.
Ken, no, anti-nuclear activists are not a powerless fringe tendency in the environmental movement.
Just about every mainstream environmental group—Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, NRDC, Riverkeeper near New York, you name it—is strongly anti-nuclear and lobbies and propagandizes against it. Can you name any environmental group other than The Breakthrough Institute that is not antinuclear, much less one that supports nuclear power to any degree?
Nor is antinuclear animus politically impotent. Green Party parliamentarians and government ministers have pushed through nuclear bans and phaseouts in Germany and now France. Greens mobilize huge demos against nuclear power all over the globe, and politicians listen to those protests, and even more to the popular, feel-good renewables nostrums greens promote as alternatives to nukes. Greens have gotten large subsidies and renewable portfolio standards passed by the US Congress and in dozens of states, and in many other countries.
The notion that Greens have no political clout is absurd. You don’t mean to say that it was conservatives that pushed through Australia’s ban on nukes, do you, or Germany’s and Austria’s? Or are you blaming conservatives for not trying hard enough to overturn the green-inspired ban on nukes? That’s just confused scapegoating.
Conservatives do tend to support nuclear, while most greens strongly oppose it—and, unfortunately, the green critique of nuclear power has captured the public imagination and now drives policy. If greens would support nukes as part of a clean energy strategy then there would be an obvious opening for a deal with conservatives that would push forward a nuclear build, with tremendous benefits for decarbonization.
The left has a long and disgraceful history of denying responsibility for the consequences of the policies it advocates. It looks like that impulse is alive and well among greens.
@Ronald Brak The cost of reducing contamination from “incidents” is staggering.
Aargh, Will Boisvert, you know not shame!
I’ve struggled with trying to understand what this post is trying to say or even what might be deemed an “appropriate” response. Is it about people changing their minds on the basis of new evidence? It’s hard to argue in principle with that. Personally I’m inclined to initially pay a little more attention to those who have managed to go through what is sometimes a difficult process to discard previously strongly held beliefs. It doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with them.
If you want tales of personal journeys, then go and see Pandora’s Promise. If you want an individual response, I’m quite happy to say I changed my mind on nuclear power though I can’t see why anybody would be very interested on an individual level. Why was I opposed to nuclear power – because I was (and still am) on the left “of course”. Let’s not make things too complicated, it’s that simple. I recall my mother telling me of recurring nightmares of nuclear Armageddon. Colonial wars and interventions were the order of the day from Vietnam to death squads and fascist coups in Latin America. And make no mistake the ugly face of imperialism was ultimately backed by a nuclear arsenal. As I recall, Michael Hudson says something like – not the gold standard or dollar standard but the F-16 standard. If conventional military force failed, then what? Remember that the US has threatened or mooted the use of nuclear weapons on more occasions than all other nuclear armed states put together. It was not too hard to put two and two together – or so it (very reasonably) seemed then.
Historical echoes of this remain the foundation of anti-nuclear attitudes. The LCOE of nuclear generated electricity absolutely nothing to do with it at all. Incidentally the “nuclear is too expensive” meme was peddled in the 1970s too.
There is also something to say also about the story that historically, anti-nuclear movement was environmentalist. I don’t think so. It was driven by the left – the peace committees, friendship societies, Western Communist parties, the emerging New Left, Fabians, pacifists and various others of left wing persuasion. The “environmentalists” came a little bit later and with them the “small is beautiful” and “self reliance” types. As the influence of the left waned, the influence of these types increased. Their ideological influence in “environmentalism” remains strong, insidious and reactionary. They represent a right wing ideology not terribly different from libertarian-ism. How’s that for flame bait? And yes, I am quite prepared to expand on this.
What’s the point of all this? If you don’t attempt to understand historical context and your own place in it, then you are left with believing that now is day zero. To pretend that this context has not influenced the economics of nuclear power is to my mind not credible especially in the US. The anti-nuclear movement success in stopping significant government funded research and development of advanced nuclear power in the 1990s in the US is but one example. While spinning narratives of the technological wonders to come in for example energy storage (if only enough R&D money was spent on it) nuclear power is castigated for being stuck in the 20th century. Disingenuous or what? How can this not adversely the cost of nuclear power? Some reality and honesty please.
More to follow on PV.
WB: ” You don’t mean to say that it was conservatives that pushed through Australia’s ban on nukes, do you, or Germany’s and Austria’s? ”
Does the name “Angela Merkel” ring any bells?
With that, I’m adding Germany & Austria to the list of topics on which we’ve heard your views and don’t want to hear any more. That includes quibbles about Merkel – I’m sure you have some, but I’m not interested
And, as regards Australia, the only proposal for nuclear power was in fact killed by the conservative party in 1971. The subsequent Labor government looked at reviving the idea, IIRC, but concluded it wasn’t a goer, a conclusion every sensible analysis since has reinforced.
I Googled for the protests obstructing the US nuclear renaissance and found one, which apparently attracted 8 people. No doubt they are responsible for the cost overruns
http://www.topix.com/forum/com/georgia-power/TF5MJP9BA0FTGSG7P
Quokka, please don’t expand on this. What’s clear from your post, as with Pandora’s Promise is that you are too busy correcting errors you made in the 1970s and 1980s to pay any attention to the evidence of the 2000s.
Contrary to what you say, “The LCOE of nuclear generated electricity” has everything to do with it, for those of us who never bought the idea of the anti-nuclear campaign as the replacement for anti-Vietnam protests.
And indeed “Incidentally the “nuclear is too expensive” meme was peddled in the 1970s too.” so effectively that utilities everywhere abandoned their nuclear construction programs midstream. Doubtless that’s because they were run by guilt-stricken lefties.
John Quiggin, might you allow quokka to elaborate on just the one element – how reactionary and libertarianism is somehow conflated into the *one thing he dislikes*? I think it would prove exceedingly diverting to see the full faulty maouverings of his logic.
I might mention that I pay nothing directly for either electricity or car fuel. I’m now dabbling in several other forms of renewable energy. It’s clear to me these methods are niches that help somewhat without being crucial replacements for fossil fuels. Neither my own observations nor the regular news from media outlets like Der Spiegel persuade me that the squeaky cleans (wind and solar) can make enough of a difference.
Some of those observations were just today; in a small town one family is putting up 10 kw of PV to grab the feed-in tariff but they’ve run out of north facing roof space for the 40 panels. Another family was removing a sizeable 10 kw wind turbine as it failed to produce steady power. As always coal or something like it remains the fallback option.
@ZM
Would you like to here something quite similar from the purportedly centrist Nordhaus and Shellenberger. It could hardly be more succinct:
But rather than obscure the dogmatism that underlies green opposition to nuclear energy, the economic arguments further revealed it. Having demanded policies to make energy more expensive, whether cap and trade or carbon taxes, greens now complain that nuclear energy is too expensive. Having spent decades advocating heavy subsidies for renewable energy, greens claim that we should turn away from nuclear energy because it requires subsidies. And having spent the last decade describing global warming as the greatest market failure in human history, greens tell us that, in fact, we should trust the market to decide what kind of energy system we should have.
@quokka
N&S must be competing to get the most possible fallacies in one para. That is the silliest thing I’ve read in a long time. Too busy to demolish I’m afraid, so I’ll crowdsource this one.
Hermit, could you run out and take a photograph of your of the people who are removing their wind turbine, please? A record of people who were actually confused enough to think that a single wind turbine would provide a constant source of electricity should be kept for benefit of history. And the fact that their response is to remove it rather than install an off grid battery bank/generator set up or simply connect to the grid if that’s available also makes them rather unique.
Sorry, if you followed my arguments you’d see I don’t argue on the price of things at all – more of a values girl myself.
I think nuclear energy is dangerous and the dangers reach ahead of us in time, and evoking the Hippocratic principle, ought not be undertaken at all and this should be agreed to without any regard for price whatsoever.
I think the market economy is a failure.
Ronald Brak, there is actually quite a lovely Russian film called Urga or Close to Eden in English about a family who get power for a television they watch infrequently by a windmill. It is a very good movie if you like foreign films.
ZM, plenty of people get power infrequently get power from windmills. I know I do. It’s the idea of someone going through the expense and trouble of installing a wind turbine and then removing it becuase it ‘failed to produce steady power’ which is hilarious.
In 2012 France had a audit of their nuclear facilities and found them just too expensive to replace.
It’s not greenies or lefties or basket weavers that are stymieing a clean green nuclear future, it’s the bean counters.
Oh, that is very funny!
@John Quiqgin
You have entirely missed the point. And I’m not correcting mistakes I made in the 1970s, because I don’t regard them as mistakes. I would have thought that was very obvious from what I wrote.
@ZM
I would be happy to oblige you, but it would cover a lot more ground than just nuclear power. But not now.
Now I will leave you with my “first law” of energy and climate.
In the absence of unforeseeable future events, security and reliability of electricity supply will never be compromised by pursuit of environmental objectives. In nations without secure and reliable (and sufficient) electricity supply, attainment of such will not be compromised by pursuit of environmental objectives.
This directly follows from the reality that no matter what the cost of reliable, on-demand electricity is, the cost of not having it is unacceptably higher.
This applies even if there are some people who find watching TV only when the wind blows to be an acceptable state of affairs.
In this context a whole lot of hand waving about LCOE and haggling over the last one or two cents per kW/h is an exercise in futility. What counts ultimately is average cost system wide. And that before even putting any of the claims about LCOE under the microscope rather than credulously believing assertions.
“This applies even if there are some people who find watching TV only when the wind blows to be an acceptable state of affairs.”
If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.
That sounds like a pretty strong prior you’ve got there. 😉
@quokka Is this a spoof?
@ John Quiggin on anti-nuclear politics in Germany, Austria and Australia
Deleted as advised
–As for Australia, I was under the impression that the Conservatives (weakly) support nuclear power while Labor opposes it.
The larger issue isn’t green obstruction of nuclear power, though that’s real enough; it’s that the left and the environmental movement ought to be the natural vehicle for nuclear power (as it actually once was). Labor and the left should be strenuously pushing to enact a massive nuclear buildout, along with renewables, because that’s the fastest, most comprehensive and cheapest way to decarbonize the energy supply, as well as being very afe-say and an environmental boon. Instead, the left is dragging its feet because of anti-nuclear dogmas.
An all-renewables, no-nuclear policy is the slow, lackadaisical and incomplete way to combat global warming, as Germany is proving now. The real problem with the anti-nuclear left is not that it’s crazy, but that it’s fainthearted and, in crucial respects, downright reactionary in its abhorrence of needed technological advancements. Progressive and environmentalists who are really serious about global warming don’t want that; they want vigorous, decisive action that. That won’t happen without nuclear.
Even the faint hearted fare better than the false hearted Will Boisvert.
“It’s better to say that the initiative was distinctively Green….
…
The larger issue isn’t green obstruction of nuclear power, though that’s real enough; it’s that the left and the environmental movement ought to be the natural vehicle for nuclear power (as it actually once was). Labor and the left should be strenuously pushing to enact a massive nuclear buildout…”
Let us all give hearty thanks that Master Will Boisvert is not Laird o’ th’ Left then!
Even under 0% nuclear power Japan does not forecast an increase in GHG (page 27).
@Will Boisvert All this left/right divide on nuclear power…it was opposition to nuclear weapons testing that unified people. Remember Mururoa? Marshall Islands? Maralinga? Nevada? Sinking of Rainbow Warrior by French secret service?
It was an own goal by the pro nuclear lobby, they have nobody but themselves to blame.
BNEF put out this study into the PV industry. They find that arguments tend to be made based on faulty, misleading, outdated or just wrong data.
Hermit, Will, Nuclear advocacy that fails to acknowledge climate action obstructionism as a serious problem is advocacy that will continue to fall flat on it’s face.
Climate obstructionism by the Right is not a reaction against green anti-nuclear activism, it is a reaction of powerful coal share investing conservative interests against climate action activism. It’s a result of conservatives rallying to the defense of the projected future incomes of fossil fuels and of deceptive accounting that allows them to defray the full costs of their products to future generations, in order to undercut competition, like nuclear.
Nuclear advocacy can’t shake loose of it’s anti-green baggage, nor of the belief that conservative interests are nuclear’s friends. Too many nuclear advocates are climate science deniers – not a reassuring sign – and too vehemently anti-green for organised nuclear advocacy to break with the Right and demand they ditch their climate obstructionism. Rather than face that division in their own ranks they prefer to make it all about green opposition. The suggestions that all that stands in the way of solving the climate problem is green intransigence is deluded; Australian conservatives will never commit to nuclear as long as they can keep denying the climate problem really matters.
The climate science denial of the Right is a house of cards waiting to collapse and when it does they will act like they are nuclear’s best friend. Why are advocates of nuclear so reluctant to shake that house of cards?
@ John Quiggin, on facts changing minds,
The reason many people still have misgivings about solar is not because of “strong priors” but because they are indeed looking at facts—a wider range of facts, in a deeper context, than greens normally consider.
It’s true that solar installations have gotten cheaper recently. But their capacity factors are incredibly low, much lower than most greens credit, so their LCOEs are still much higher than nuclear’s. And that’s at very low penetrations; as the percentage of wind and solar generation on the grid rises, the mathematically inevitable curtailment of these surge-and-slump intermittents will also rise; capacity factors will therefore fall even further and per-kwh costs soar. LCOE also doesn’t capture the additional system costs solar imposes on grids, including costs of redundant transmission capacity and storage and the costs of building and running coal and gas plants to back up solar, with their attendant greenhouse emissions and pollution.
So given the realities of the costs and performance of wind and solar, they are still the highest-cost, slowest and most incomplete way to approach decarbonization. That assessment is borne out by more facts about real-world renewables initiatives. Germany’s Energiewende was forced into a major retrenchment this year because of insupportable costs and the difficulties of integrating solar and wind into the grid. Solar installations were cut in half from 2012 levels, by design, and that ramp-down means the Energiewende will likely not meet its targets for 2020, which were timid and sluggish to begin with. Fossil-fueled electricity generation and CO2 emissions are rising steadily.
Similarly, in China the massive buildout of wind and solar is proving a fiasco; intermittent generation is feeble and the contrast with nuclear productivity is glaring. Last year China’s 13 gigawatts of nuclear produced as much low-carbon electricity as its 55 gigawatts of grid-connected wind turbines. Chinese solar does even worse. Every yuan invested in a nuclear gigawatt produces three times as much clean electricity as a yuan invested in solar installations, and displaces three times as much Chinese coal-fired electricity, along with its notorious air pollution.
The problem with rose-colored assessments of solar based on a few cherry-picked facts is that they feed a conviction among greens that wind and solar can “do it all”—and that we can therefore abolish nuclear without paying a heavy price in climate change. For example, green websites are full of stories about how wind and solar are taking up the slack from shuttered Japanese and German nukes. But the facts show just how fanciful that conceit is. In order to replace the low-carbon electricity from that roughly 60 GW of lost nuclear capacity, we would have to build 300 GW of solar panels, three times the entire world PV capacity in 2012, at a cost of $480 billion dollars. (That’s just construction costs, not counting extra transmission, storage, fossil-fueled backup, etc.)
So John, please, help me to understand—given all the facts, why should nuclear advocates change their minds and prefer solar to nuclear?
“So John, please, help me to understand—given all the facts, why should nuclear advocates change their minds and prefer solar to nuclear?”
I will help you out here Will Boisvert yet again, although you seem a man to ignore good sense to me. I will do so using mythology. I hope because you have pretentious to be a writer, you will care for myth. Otherwise it is a great shame tat you didn’t pursue science I think.
The previous thread was called Pandora’s Promise.
Another commenter on a previous thread mentioned rudely Pandora at me, so I wrote what I remembered of the myth for everyone’s benefit. I will copy it down here for your aid too Will Boisvert. But I will say at the outset nuclear energy is Promethean, in case you are the sort of person to misread myth.
You posted your shameful piece badly utilising a reference to the Banality of Evil on J W Mason’s blog. So perhaps you also consider yourself as having “affirm[ed yur] membership in the Cobain-Linklater-Copeland tribe”, in which case we all know what obvious 90s insult would apply to you Will Boisvert, and of course we all know it ends with out.
“I know some of the surviving variants of Pandora’s Box, not all, and i’m sure a lot were lost to time as things are. It is old and Greek and fairly dark (give me bucolic verse or persephone or something like the golden ass any day) I think – but of course, if you address a woman, with non-specific hints, why not bring up Pandora!?!
From what i remember (anyone please correct me, i am not going to bother looking it up right now) i think it generally follows from Prometheus – who stole fire for men (or maybe they were titans or something at this stage?) and taught them to eat meat – trying to pacify the gods by giving them part of the flesh, but, as a trickster, Prometheus taught the men to give the gods only the less edible parts. Zeus punished Prometheus by binding him to a rock, and vultures pecked out his liver or something.
Ok, I’m getting a book I have after all. Literature and the Crime Against Nature.
“Mythically, it was Prometheus who determined that the Neolithic Golden Age should be replaced by the terrible age of Bronze:
Earth’s natural plenty no longer sufficed.
Man tore open the earth, and rummaged in her bowels.
Precious ores the Creator had concealed
As close to hell as possible
We’re dug up – a new drug
For the criminal. So now iron comes
With its cruel ideas. And gold
With crueller. Combined they bring war –
War, insatiable for the one,
With bloody hands employing the other.
Now man lives only by plunder.
(Ovid)”
I can’t remember the direct link, but to punish men or Prometheus or both Zeus created Pandora and gave her as a gift to Prometheus’ more stupid brother or something like that. She was very attractive and he was happy to wed her, but Zeus had given her a vessel, which she was to open. And when opened out came all of the evil, and hope stayed inside. etc etc”
@Will Boisvert
Fact, Chernobyl melted down. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.
Fact, Fukushima blew up (hydrogen explosions) and melted down. TEPCO first falsified safety records in 1976. A 2008 Tsunami study was ignored. Over 200,000 people were evacuated after the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
Fact, there have been 33 serious incidents and accidents at nuclear power stations since the first recorded one in 1952 at Chalk River in Ontario, Canada.
I hope you are including the costs of all these large meltdowns, evacuatios and clean ups in your costings of the “efficency” of nuclear power.
Finally, fission fuel is a limited resource on earth just like coal and oil. It will run out. Economic and energy-return-viable deposits are limited. Don’t bother arguing about getting uranium from seawater. That is a furphy (a fanciful tale) as that would produce a negative energy return – more energy taken to obtain it than would be produced. You might as well mine gold from gum trees. (Outback gumtrees have been shown to take up gold in minute quantities where gold is present.)
In the final analysis we will have to survive on renewable energy for that will be all that’s left. All non-renewables will run out, and soon, if fully expolited If renewables cannot support our current world population and living standards then that too will be a plain hard fact. But I will get a rap over the knuckles for pointing out yet again, in detail, where that leaves us. Between a rock and a hard place is a good summary.
@Will Boisvert
Classic strawman. Greens don’t assert that “wind and solar can do it all”. Greens also argue for energy usage avoidance and energy efficiency and demand management. We’ve also argued for geothermal and wave and tidal energy and biomass. Some of us argue for passive or even active geo-engineering.
And some of us aren’t opposed to nuclear power or don’t see shutting it down as the top priority — and even those who do trenchantly oppose nuclear power are not the obstacle to nuclear renaissance, as has been repeatedly shown in this topic.
It’s actually quite simple. We need to stop desequestering and combusting fossil HC as soon as possible and co-extensively work around the consequences of that. Renewables are part of that plan, but there’s a lot more than that involved.
PS: Interesting that your nym translates as “Greenwood” …
@Ikonoclast Another fact is that Fukushima was very close to a chain reaction meltdown which would have required the evacuation of Tokyo, which probably would have bankrupted the country with global consequences. A combination of good luck and bravery seemed to have saved the day but risks still exist and its estimated that it will take 40 years to clean up the mess.
Its no wonder PV has become more popular.
@ Ikonoclast and Rog,
I would love to respond to the points you’ve raised, but I’ve been warned that I’m not to discuss the topics of ruclear nisks and ukushima-fay under pain of deletion, per page 1 # 47 and 49 and page 2 # 31. If you look around close by you can find comments that address issues you are concerned about. If you look back over this thread and the Pandora Post-mortem thread you may find posts that address issues that you are concerned about. Rog, especially. on the third page of Pandora’s Postmortem, if you count to five. Note, Rog, that a “chain reaction meltdown” is physically impossible. In the absence of water the reactor has no moderator and the nuclear chain reaction immediately shuts down. Rog, antinukes have many false and bizarre ideas about how nuclear reactors function and fail; I hope you’ll take time to read more widely on the topic, including sources who are not antinuclear activists.
Ikonoclast, reserves of fission fuels are stupendously larger in energy content than the earth’s hydrocarbon reserves. There are many good and innovative technologies for mining, extracting and burning them, and we will surely develop more. In situ leaching, seawater extraction (down to $300 per kilogram in experiments), co-processing from phosphate or rare earth mines, breeder reactors—there are so many ways to obtain fissile fuel that it’s out of the question that human ingenuity will be foiled by the task. Probably we’ll get more just by digging it up in places—deep deposits, undersea deposits—we haven’t bothered looking because uranium is dirt cheap. If you read more widely on the topic with an open mind, instead of limiting yourself to antinuclear writers, you will discover that concerns about fissile fuel constraints are unfounded. There is plenty out there to supply all the world’s energy needs for many thousands of years, and we will get it.
@ Fran Barlow,
Of course you’re right—I shouldn’t exaggerate for effect. Wind and solar do grab the headlines, though, and I think many naïve greens who aren’t up on the specs, and the public who are influenced by green ideas, have a general impression that wind and solar will be supplying almost all of the electricity. Greens tend to downplay other aspects of a total renewables system because many other elements, especially biomass and “demand management”, are even more problematic than wind and solar.
And yes there are pro-nuclear greens and their numbers are growing. So far, though, I think you must admit that the overwhelming attitude towards nuclear among greens is stridently oppositional, and indeed abolitionist.
I do feel that you and other nuclear-neutral greens still don’t register how badly the renewables project has failed, and thus your assessment of the comparative merits and prospects of nuclear and renewables is skewed. In Germany, the Energiewende is being hit with drastic cutbacks of 40 to 50 % in the deployment rates of onshore and offshore wind, and of solar. It was barely keeping up with its targets last year, and the new cutbacks will make its 2020 and 2030 targets impossible. German electricity in 2030 will likely be almost as carbon-intensive as it was in 1999. As geo and hydro resources won’t scale, the only way for Germany to meet its decarbonization targets is to restart all its nuclear reactors. Restarting reactors should be policy goal number 1 for greens, and number 2 should be finding cheap ways to build new nukes. The left should be particularly active on 2, because the key there is to reject neoliberal models of ownership and financing.
As for whether greens bear any responsibility for blocking the nuclear renaissance, I could talk about certain places and certain people, but per 13 and 31 this is a topic I just can’t discuss freely. My apologies.
Will Boisvert’s proposition on how to treat Mother Earth: ” Probably we’ll get more just by digging it up in places—deep deposits, undersea deposits—we haven’t bothered looking because uranium is dirt cheap.”
Mother Earth’s reply: “Waste Me. &$@! me, my friend”
There have been several official reports post Fukushima, the American Nuclear Association said that it could take 10 years to understand fully what happened. This appraisal identifies the weakness as being human and stresses that worst case scenarios must be addressed, not brushed aside as nonsense. They are quite clear on the matter, it wasn’t the tsunami that caused the accident it was the failure of the nuclear industry to make allowances for naturally occurring events.
What is apparent is that nuclear accidents are a fault of the nuclear industry and it is the nuclear industry that is now calling for tighter regulations.
In his book Mark Willacy details the political response as does this piece in the NYT
In hindsight you could say that they panicked but in their defense the politicians did identify a worst case scenario, something that obviously TEPCO had not.
This on the Energiewende:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/07/the-energiewende-an-introductory-look-at-germany%E2%80%99s-energy-transformation
And this
http://www.economist.com/node/Energiewende
Incidentally, Will, I came across an article of yours from 2009 published in the US Social Democratic magazine In These Times. The article asserted that the citizenry of Manhattan were more “Green” than those of Vermont, citing the energy footprint consequences of population density — the inability to buy stuff, the resort to walking and mass transit, the lower loss of heat per person in apartments given their adjacency and so forth.
As is common with urban mythology, such claims are not entirely ridiculous. Yet you forget the hinterland. Manhattan would not be possible without a vast hinterland to supply it with the consumer goods its citizenry can buy — much of it from outside the US, the footprint of which is accounted with others.
Now don’t get me wrong — I support urban consolidation for many of the reasons you cited in the article — though I don’t find nature boring — but I do find such pleading to be either lazy or disingenuous.
Humanity functions as a vast system reaching across the borders of virtually every jurisdiction in the world. Speculating on what would happen if everyone had the per capita footprint of Manhattan is simply moot because it’s not in practice possible.
@Will Boisvert
You are a fantasist Will. I almost envy you. It must be comforting to believe such nuclear cornucopian fairy tales. Those of us who live in the real world of real physics and real ecology know the picture is quite different.