Reading on the Energy Transition

I was born a little over a year after the Chernobyl disaster and I grew up around stickers like these.

Nuclear energy is not very popular in Germany. It’s just normal to say it’s obviously bad and move on. Chernobyl, Fukushima, giant piles of nuclear waste polluting our planet for tens of thousand of years, what’s not to love.

For obvious reasons - the Gas and Climate sandwich crisis - I’ve been trying to answer some obvious questions for myself: is this renewable transition actually realistic or are we just lying to ourselves? What are we transitioning too, exactly?

Of course public discourse is entirely devoid of details.

I started seeking out sources that had concrete things to say about nuclear energy. This updated my priors quite a bit! I now consider it likely that we’d be in a better place today had we invested more in this type of energy over the last decades, and hope that we do so. I’m still actively looking for people out there who can steelman an energy mix without nuclear for me.

An excerpt of reads I found notable follows. I keep reading and so I’m collecting more of these, but probably won’t go through the trouble of polishing them up as I have done here¹

• Nuclear waste isn’t as bad as I thought. I first came across this after I watched Chernobyl 1986² which btw is fantastic. Simplifying dramatically, the really dangerous stuff decays relatively quickly, so unless (as happened in Chernobyl) you blow it all across the continent it is not as bad as one might imagine. (To be fair, what blew across the continent wasn’t the waste but close enough). Also, what is called “waste” is actually still fuel, just needs the right kind of reactor.
• Chernobyl likely caused 300-500 direct and indirect deaths³.
• Fukushima is estimated as having caused 2314 deaths, however none attributed to radiation. Instead, they were largely caused by the evacuation of 160.000 citizens and the associated physical and mental stress³. In particular, it looks as though a more contained evacuation could possibly have saved lives⁴.
• Fossil fuels kill people at 820x the rate of nuclear (which has the lowest rate of all energy sources)⁵⁶. Whether you like nuclear or not, so far it is the safest source of energy we have.
• I want to visit COVRA⁷! When you hug the spent fuel casks you’re getting less than background radiation because the cask shields you⁸.
• Nuclear isn’t easy to build because it’s hard to finance and even if you manage, the resulting energy currently isn’t be cheap enough⁹. That’s largely why there isn’t more of it.
• The first modular reactor design just got approved and they’re trying to have one running by 2029¹⁰. It will be interesting to see whether it will be plagued by the delays and cost explosions commonly associated with nuclear projects. The DOE has already spent $600M to make this one even make it this far.
• Germany spent close to half a trillion¹¹ (!!) dollars on expensive gas this last winter, and on that budget you can build an entire generation of nuclear power plants… I know this because China decided to do just that ($440bn)¹²
• Germany seems to be pretty dumb about energy.
• I buy the argument that nuclear fusion will never happen¹³.
• I haven’t read much about danger of nuclear proliferation but I’m sure it would be a concern if nuclear power plants went up all over the globe.

I have learned a bit about renewables and mostly have more questions now and, not to belittle the indisputable progress deploying renewables, a bad feeling about the overall trajectory we’re on.

• There are some studies that show that renewables+storage could end up working out in terms of going CO2 neutral & not sitting in the dark¹⁴ but it’s beyond my grasp, still looking for even just a basic explanation of how that might even pan out that way. A friend who has experience in the renewable energy sector in Germany tells me these studies underestimate the effort/political will it will take to decentralize the grid.
• How The World Really Works¹⁵ was an interesting read. Lots to criticize about the presentation and the pretty bogus claim to impartiality, but it makes a compelling argument that the majority of our dependence on fossil fuels is in areas not discussed much in public, and that there is no transition path yet.
• For example, how will we fix nitrogen to make ammonia? We burn gas today. Nuclear can do it well, but what else is in store if not that? Hydrogen, which we can maybe, maybe make via solar¹⁶?
• Another example, Solar panels are made from polysilicons, and making polysilicons is extremely energy-intensive¹⁷. Can we make and keep making lots of them from renewables, or is the plan to keep burning gas for those and offset the associated emissions? Or nuclear? Geothermal¹⁸?
• Also note that in Germany, a solar panel rated for 100W produces an average of 9W (due to nighttime, clouds, etc). 25% for the US due to the sunnier South. So if you put lots of energy into making one and they don’t last forever, are they even a net benefit in most places?
• “Fun” fact, a solar panel turns ~80+% of incoming energy into heat, so if you covered, say, the Sahara desert with solar panels, you’d get some juice but also you’d really heat up the planet¹⁹. Sad. Maybe that’s how Andy Weir got the idea for Project Hail Mary²⁰ though!
• Germany is good for wind!²¹
• Climate Change and the Nation State¹⁵ helped me think of the climate crisis as primarily a migration crisis triggered by agricultural breakdown. It becomes a lot less abstract, and much scarier, that way. The book also points out that China has been taking Climate Change much more seriously (despite still burning lots of coal).
• More fun facts: by weight, roughly one forearm worth of you is ammonia that you consumed via food, and almost all of it was made by the Haber-Bosch process fueled by natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen²². (The entire article is great).
• I really hope there’s an adult in the room somewhere and humanity isn’t just collectively pretending to be able to get off fossil fuels this century. I’ll be very surprised if 2050 comes around and we’re anywhere near carbon neutral, to be honest.
• Green Party’s 2020 manifesto²³ has only this to say about nuclear: “the climate crisis can be solved without this high-risk technology and world-wide existential threat to humanity”. Solidly disagree on the “existential threat” part at this point, but still eager to learn what the plan actually is, and how the risk of the plan failing has been weighed against the risk of including some nuclear base power.
• Jack Devanney²⁴ (very pro nuclear but also very qualified) makes the argument²⁵ that intermittent renewables and nuclear are effectively in direct competition because if you have nuclear you’re just not going to need renewables any more; and if you have intermittent renewables nuclear loses out to gas power plants. So it’s between “no CO2 and nuclear” or “some CO2 and renewables”.