Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumReal world numbers from the grand renewable energy experiment are not promising.
Last edited Sat Apr 18, 2026, 10:52 PM - Edit history (1)
These are some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations of mine, not from some spreadsheet. It looks to me that nations with aggressive renewable energy programs pay about 40% more for electricity than nuclear powered nations and their carbon intensity is about five times that of nuclear nations.
It's clear to me that renewable energy becomes more expensive than nuclear power before it reaches that celebrated point of "supplying 100%" of a nation's electricity demand for some short amount of time.
As I started writing this here in California nuclear power was carrying about 10% of the load, renewables more than 85%, and gas about 2%. In addition to carrying 10% of the load, nuclear power plays an important roll in maintaining the stability of the grid. If Diablo Canyon was shut down it would be replaced with gas power plants.
Nations with aggressive renewable energy programs are paying over forty cents a kilowatt hour for electricity. Raising these prices even further to install more renewable energy systems would not reduce carbon intensity proportionately. Raising electric rates can, however, lower a nation's carbon dioxide emissions by shrinking the economy. The harshest impacts of a shrinking economy are felt by lower income working class people.
None of these unfavorable non-linear effects exist with nuclear power. A one gigawatt nuclear power plant can replace a one gigawatt fossil fuel power plant one-to-one. If you keep building nuclear power plants you can shut down all of your fossil fuel power plants. France did this. This is reality, it's not hand-waving and creative accounting and conspiracy theories or actual lies about the costs and capabilities of renewable energy.
And here's the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about...
Once you've shut down all your fossil fuel power plants, you can continue to build nuclear power plants and take down all your industrial scale solar and wind "farms" as they wear out and the cost of maintaining them escalates. After that you can make fertilizer and fuels using nuclear power. You can tear down hydroelectric dams and free your rivers...
This is the scenario that scares both the fossil fuel industry and renewable energy enthusiasts.
It scares me too, because there's no limit to growth. ( I used to be rooting for "peak oil" because it would limit growth. We later learned the peak comes after the world as we know it has been destroyed by global heating, which is not the sort of limit I was rooting for.)
Unfortunately we humans have worked ourselves into a corner. Renewable energy alone cannot support 8 billion people. It cannot displace fossil fuels entirely. If we don't quit fossil fuels entirely then billions of people will suffer and die.
Magical energy storage systems don't exist. Fusion power plants may never be practical. But we do have a seventy year old technology that is capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, one that could carry us through a unsettling future.
It's a horrible thing to witness the fantastical beliefs of humans corroding the foundations of the natural world as we have known it and our own civilization. We've got to pay attention to the numbers. Wishful thinking won't save us.
Metaphorical
(2,654 posts)Your arguments are a bit disingenuous, especially given your previous posts.
I agree that nuclear offers a solid background, and we need more. At the same time, nuclear has its limitations as well:
Thorium is not widely used as nuclear fuel primarily because it is not fissile (cannot sustain a chain reaction alone), requires expensive, complex reprocessing to become usable, and cannot currently compete with the established, cheaper infrastructure of uranium fuel. While thorium-232 is abundant and fertile, it must be converted into fissile uranium-233, a process that is technologically and economically demanding. U-238 has the same non-fissile characteristics, while U-235, which makes up most nuclear reactors, has Pu-239 as a parent, making processing complicated and hazardous. Most of the byproducts of U-235 are also long lived and radioactive, if not necessarily fissile.
Personally, I think we'll see more Thorium-based reactors - even given the processing complexities, they are still safer than U-235 and the US has ample reserves of Th. However, I expect it will take several decades before that happens on a wide enough scale to make a real difference.
Kinetic and geothermal energy systems have obvious limitations; solar was making inroads before the Great Pumpkin took office, but these were always part of a full spectrum energy strategy. With TFG laying waste to government, I honestly don't see any significant positive energy change beyond reverting to coal and seeing the petroleum sector gouge consumers.
hunter
(40,763 posts)The earth has only one atmosphere. The political follies of any single nation are of lesser concern. That said, I'd rather not be a cog in the machinery of a nation that is dragging the rest of the world down.
As to your concerns, fuel costs are just a small fraction of the overall cost of financing and operating a nuclear power plant. Reprocessing used fuel and/or breeding fuel from thorium and uranium 238 increases the cost of fuel but it doesn't increase the price of electricity much.
In a fossil fuel power plant as the price of the fuel increases the price of the electricity it produces increases nearly as much. (This does, of course, ignore the environmental costs of fossil fuels that are an existential threat to our civilization.)
Building new nuclear reactors using existing designs is still a good idea even when there are potentially superior designs on the horizon.
To be blunt, we need to face reality. Global warming is getting worse. On one side we have people who refuse to believe that, on the other side we have people who insist renewable energy can support 8 billion people or, at a minimum, significantly postpone the collapse of our civilization.
I'm not going to pretend that nuclear power is going to halt global warming. I do think that maintaining a heavy industrial base using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels will give humanity a lot more room to find the political solutions that will be essential to our own survival and whatever is left of the natural environment we knew.
Solar panels obliterating many square miles of living desert and giant wind farms don't solve any fundamental problems. We've explored their capabilities at gigawatt scales and they've come up short. At the same time I don't begrudge anyone the solar panels on their roof or their super-efficient automobile. Our society really doesn't offer us many ways to reduce our own environmental footprint beyond grinding poverty. The smallest environmental footprint I ever had was living in my broken car in a church parking lot scavenging food out of trash cans. Thankfully I had access to flush toilets connected to a modern sewage treatment plant and clean fresh water. Everyone on earth deserves flush toilets connected to modern sewage treatment systems and clean fresh water. Providing those simple things to eight billion people requires reliable high density energy resources.