Build Nuclear. Frak. Drill.

Standing up to extremists on climate change

Housekeeping: We’re four episodes into our nuclear podcast season “Age of Miracles” that we’re lucky to partner on with star co-hosts Packy McCormick and Julia DeWahl. Check it out.

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In a previous post, we talked about the fertility crisis, and how the “people who hate people” are driving a lot of policy decisions, and discourse. Politicians and activists bemoan the lack of action and demand change. They despair that there is little that can be done to fix the impending climate apocalypse. They put together nonbinding agreements, such as the Paris Accords, at great expense and time, and then despair when these foolhardy approaches don’t work. 

Despite all of the rhetoric, climate change, particularly reducing our energy dependence on fossil fuels is actually straightforward to solve. We’ve already solved it! We just don’t have the political will to implement it… 

The answer to climate change isn’t degrowth, population control, or using less energy, the answer is nuclear. Why? 

For one, nuclear energy is cheap. Nuclear energy only costs about $30/megawatt-hour. Coal costs between $57 and $148/megawatt-hour. Nuclear costs an order of magnitude less than coal does. However, nuclear does have higher upfront costs and a high discount rate.  

In addition to being cost-effective, nuclear energy is incredibly clean. It creates the least carbon emissions of any energy source, barring wind. Nuclear produces 4x less carbon emissions than solar does. 

People often complain about potential radiation in the event of a meltdown, but I don’t think people quite understand just how safe modern nuclear energy plants are. If you lived within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, you would receive an average radiation dose of about .01 millrem/year. To put this in perspective, the average person in the US receives 300 millirem per year of radiation exposure from background sources of radiation. 

That may sound nice, but what about waste? Doesn't nuclear suffer from problems around waste disposal? Doesn’t spent uranium have a half-life of 4.5 billion years? It’s true that spent nuclear fuel will be with us for 500-600 years, but it’s hard to wrap your mind around just how small of a problem storing spent uranium is. Uranium is incredibly energy-dense: 

Because of its energy density, 60 years of Nuclear waste from the US (i.e all of the spent fuel from the U.S. ever) can fit in 1 football field. To put it into perspective, we have 70,000 tons of nuclear waste in the US, a lot, but there are plenty of places to put it. In comparison, we create 43 billion tons of C02 a year.  Currently, nuclear waste is packaged into dry casks and stored on-site indefinitely. It has never harmed or killed anyone. There are over 60 dry cask storage sites across 34 states. 

Eventually, barring political pressure, we will likely bury all of our nuclear waste in one mountain in Nevada, Yucca Mountain. 

The waste question also ignores the components and materials required by other renewable energy technologies. Other technologies, such as solar panels, require large amounts of heavy metals and environmental toxins that make them difficult to dispose of. You also need much larger quantities of these materials to make significantly less electricity. 

Not only is nuclear energy clean, but it is also efficient. You’d need 3 million solar panels, or 430 wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy as one commercial nuclear reactor. Solar and wind only work 10-30 percent of the time (the wind has to blow, and the sun has to shine to get power from these renewables). A lot of people like to respond that battery capacity is the answer to these problems, but we have nowhere near the battery capacity for off-peak sun and wind hours. Currently, we could run California for just 23 minutes if we used every battery that existed in the state right now. 

Nuclear energy, despite its reputation from a few high signal events, is actually the safest way to make electricity. Fossil fuel combustion kills more than a million people a year from exposure to pollutants like PM2.5. Additionally, pollutants from fossil fuels like PM2.5 make you stupid (they can reduce your intelligence by as much as two IQ points for every increase in PM2.5 concentration of 5 micrograms per cubic meter). 

Even the worst nuclear disasters are less bad than is traditionally portrayed in the media. For example, Chernobyl resulted in many fewer fatalities than is traditionally thought: 

Why then, do people hate nuclear?

For one, vivid imagery from Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island Vivid imagery from events like Chernobyl, and three-mile island, even though both of these events killed far fewer people than more traditional energy sources have. The effects were actually small, even for the worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl. 

Additionally, Bruce Springsteen and James Taylor simply made it uncool to support nuclear. They foolishly conflated nuclear energy with nuclear bombs. In the 1970s, there was a big concert, called No Nukes: The Muse Concerts for a Non-Nuclear future, headlined by Bruce Springsteen and James Taylor. 

Policy decisions make it difficult, and more expensive than it should be to build nuclear. The cost to build a nuclear plant varies wildly between country to country, due to the differences in policies in different countries. This is because Nuclear energy has poor political economy. New plants incur high upfront costs. This means that prices spike in the short run, but then get cheaper, this is a difficult sell to energy buyers. New nuclear plants are also risky for politicians. Nuclear plants, because of their high capital costs, often experience cost overruns. These are bad for politicians. 

The final reason some environmentalists hate nuclear is that those Degrowthers won’t accept any level of waste production, even though the nuclear waste is minimal. Hating nuclear energy acts as a strong ingroup signal. The signal would be costless if it wasn’t stupid. This explains why people who are most concerned about the environment don’t support it.

The choice between solving climate change, and not solving it is simple. Either we build nuclear energy, or we don’t. 

We already have two case studies of developed countries that took two different paths to solving their climate crisis. France and Germany. 

France embraced nuclear energy. Driven by the oil crisis in the 1970s, French prime minister Pierre Messmer created a plan to generate all of its electricity from nuclear power. 

At the time, essentially all of France’s power came from imported foreign oil, and with prices skyrocketing, the French administration was forced to look for alternatives. This strategic decision eventually meant that France produces the vast majority of its power from Nuclear.

France contrasts strongly with Germany. Germany, perhaps due to its powerful green movement, perhaps due to lobbying influence from Russian oil and gas interests, or a combination of the two, only produces about 13% of its electricity from Nuclear power. 

Despite spending more than double what France does on energy, Germany produces less than half of its energy from renewable sources. Its reliance on wind and solar energy has handicapped its ability to successfully migrate away from burning fossil fuels. 

The right path is straightforward, we just have to stand up to the eco-luddites, and extremists who don’t like nuclear energy for reasons that simply are not rational. Without nuclear power, we don’t stand a chance of addressing climate change.

Thanks to Will and Julia