The United Nations 2021 Report on Life Cycle Analysis for Electricity Generation.
It's here: Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options
Of course, this topic, life cycle analysis, is covered extensively in the scientific literature, which few people who shout loudly (as if they know something) about energy and the environment actually read.
This report however is nice, because it has all sorts of charts and graphs and summarizes things quite well.
It is interesting to compare the carbon cost of the options. One of the conceits of the so called "renewable energy" option is that the costs of intermittency are never included, for instance, the LCA of solar should include the cost of dangerous natural gas burned at night, because every damned night episodes of darkness occur.
This report excludes that, but it does have a nice evaluation of the cost of the big "let's mine all the world's cobalt using poor people to dig it for low or no pay" battery fantasy. It's ugly.
Another thing that's interesting is the comparison between solar PV and nuclear energy on toxicity. The toxicity risk (expressed as a unit "CTUh," "comparative toxicity units" ) associated with solar PV is between a factor of 3 to 6 more toxic than nuclear. Nuclear is roughly comparable to wind, and slightly worse than hydro, although we are fresh out of fresh water rivers to destroy. Of course, toxicity is only one issue, neither solar, nor wind, nor hydro can compare to nuclear on land use, an important component of climate change, and none of these match nuclear's carbon cost. (cf. Figure 41 in the report.)
I would note that much of the carbon cost attributed to nuclear energy - which is even without energy storage, which it actually doesn't need and is, in any case, lower than all other forms of energy - is attributed to mining and enrichment. I argue that neither are necessary, at least for several centuries, in "breed and burn" systems, given the uranium and thorium already mined, and in the latter case dumped from ores used to provide neodymium and dysprosium for redundant generators for wind turbines and gas plants. I will discuss this topic with my son over Thanksgiving Dinner, as he applies to Ph.D. programs in nuclear engineering. It will certainly be more useful to talk to him than it is to post long discussions of scientific punctilios on DU.
Nuclear energy is already better than everything else, but it can be even better, via heat networks and the recovery of valuable materials from used nuclear fuels. These are the topics I wish to discuss with my son, and about which I will write him, getting as much in as possible before I die.
Anyone who reads this report seriously, or even looks at the pictures seriously, would be compelled to agree, in my view, that opposing nuclear energy is insane, the climate change equivalent of being an antivaxxer in the time of Covid.
Of course, many people are insane; it's fashionable in these times to be so, in one way or another, but an undercurrent of popular insanity has always been there. We are paying for it, not only with a destroyed environment, but in many other ways.
As I approach the end of my life the thing that stuns me the most is the realization of how much we want to lie to ourselves.
Enjoy the holidays.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Again, I regard these obsessions in a world being destroyed by dangerous fossil fuels, with hundreds of millions dead from air pollution since 1979 because shit for brains type have wedgies over Three Mile Island as insane.
Get it? Insane. Insane. Insane. INSANE.
Do I make myself clear? No? Again, I couldn't care less.
What I'm about to say falls into the level of discussing the fact that mRNA vaccines save human lives with an anti-vax Trumper, clearly useless, because dogma based on insistent arrogant idiot faith based dogma is intractable. I'll say it nonetheless:
Despite much stupid rhetoric from people who couldn't pass a precalculus course in an underfunded school, Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone. Then President Jimmy Carter walked through the Three Mile Island reactor building during the accident, this some decades after he went into the core of the melted Chalk River reactor as a naval officer.
President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."
He has lived the longest life of any President.
The supposition that we should spend billions of dollars to satisfy the idiot assumptions of anti-nukes that if anyone anywhere is exposed to a radionuclide because of nuclear power it's a tragedy - this on a planet where we won't spend any money at all to provide basic sanitary services to the billions of people on this planet who lack access to even primitive sanitary facilities - is criminal.
The idea is that we need to clean up Three Mile Island to a risk standard that no fucking normally operated coal plant could ever meet, even after the expenditure of trillions of dollars, that no normally operated gas plant could meet for the same expenditure, that no fucking normally operated wind plant could meet, is beneath contempt.
The basis for this nonsensical waste of money is wholly dependent on the dubious, unproven, and possibly even fraudulent "linear no threshold" (LNT) model for the effects of radiation, this despite that the potassium essential to all living tissue is radioactive. This ideology, again, kills people, on a scale of millions, tens of millions, over time, hundreds of millions of human beings. The fact that anti-nukes, including the very annoying and disingenuous anti-nukes who run around saying "I'm not an anti-nuke" while serving up meaningless anti-nuke rhetoric, that again, to repeat again and again kills people by promoting ignorance and hysteria, um, bothers me, to be sure, but there's nothing more I can do to make anti-nukes be, informed, rational, knowledgeable, and frankly remotely ethical or intelligent. They clearly can be none of those things.
Now, if some asshole wants to carry on about how Flo from Progressive won't bundle nuclear plant insurance along with car and boat insurance, or if Geico can save you 15% or more on all insurance except nuclear plant insurance, or that Liberty makes sure that you only pay for what you need except if you want nuclear plant insurance, there's nothing I can do about it.
They've been carrying on about insurance and Three Mile Island for the entire 19 years I've been suffering this insipid argument here at DU. Meanwhile, in that 19 years, between 110 million people and 130 million people died from air pollution according to the Lancet references I have been posting here time and time and time again, only to hear the same ridiculous arguments flung back at me.
As I wind down from discussing hard science and environmental issues on DU, I've taken the liberty of removing some of the most egregious and toxic anti-nukes from my ignore list, because I need to remind myself of exactly how futile a remotely intelligent discussion with any of these awful people would be.
Recently, an "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinuke offered the same kind of disingenuous claims as the present company, this with a dubious pronouncement that I should not flip off him or her. This was after posting in one of my threads pictures that had the same quality and fact checking as a World Weekly News headline:
A Minor Problem For Sound Science of the Effect of Offshore Windfarms on Seabirds: There Isn't Any. Post #9.
When I started writing here in late November of 2002, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 372.68 ppm as recorded at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory. The most recent data point at the observatory was 414.88 ppm. In the week of April 25, 2021 the reading hit 420.01 ppm. In the spreadsheet I keep of Mauna Loa Observatory data, the 52 week running average of increases over ten year periods during the week I joined DU was 18.00 ppm/10 years = 1.80 ppm/year. As of last weekly data point (week beginning 11/14/2021) the same average was 24.52 ppm/10 years = 2.45 ppm/year.
Recently I updated the expenditure on so called "renewable energy" as we happily run along trashing huge stretches of wilderness, rendering them into industrial parks to serve the clearly failed rhetoric of anti-nukes.
Source: UNEP/Bloomberg: Global Trends in Renewable Energy.
I manually entered the figures in the bar graph in figure 8 to see how much money we've thrown at this destructive affectation since 2004 (up to 2019): It works out to 3.2633 trillion dollars, more than President Biden has wisely recommended for the improvement of all infrastructure in the entire United States.
The result, as recorded at Mauna Loa's CO2 observatory are clear enough. The degradation of the planetary atmosphere resulting from appeals to ignorance and wishful thinking is accelerating, not decelerating.
Over Thanksgiving dinner, I had a discussion with my son about the Breit-Wigner formulation of neutron capture cross sections. It was infinitely more intelligent and frankly worthwhile than listening, yet again, to fucking idiotic blather about Three Mile Island.
Which conversation is worthy of addressing the crisis before humanity? Rehashing stupid shit about spending billions of dollars to satisfy a collection of idiots concerned about a few radioactive atoms escaping from Three Mile Island or engaging a highly educated young man on the subject of neutron dynamics in a nuclear plant?
For the record: I've driven through Harrisburg many times; it's not all that far from where I live. It's still there. The people living there are living useful productive lives.
Meanwhile ignorance kills people, millions of people worldwide in the Covid case, tens of millions, hundreds of millions worldwide in the anti-nuke case. In my opinion they are exactly the same kind of ignorance.
But anyway, here's what I said to the other, "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinuke, and it applies here and now in this context:
Let me say it again: I'm not interested. I don't stay up at night reading through your every utterance to see what you did and didn't say, because, again, I couldn't care less. Most of the time you're on my "ignore list." OK? I've seen enough to form as much of an opinion as I am willing to form.
What exactly is it that you want from me? I couldn't possibly be as interesting as the cartoons over in the "Nuclear Free" group. Hang out over there. They're fun. I'm not. I'm too damned bloody serious. I give more of a shit about climate change more than I do about clowns.
Why do I fucking bother? You won. The world has sunk trillions of dollars more on wind turbines and solar cells in this century than it did on nuclear reactors. Why can't you just be happy with all that winning? You won...420 ppm. Congratulations!
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Let me repeat that:
You won: We spent vast sums of more money on so called "renewable energy" than we did on nuclear energy, including the money squandered to "clean up" Three Mile Island to a ridiculous risk standard that we apply to nothing else, a risk standard set by dumb shit for brains anti-nukes
We hit 420 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 in the atmosphere in 2021, less than 10 years after hitting 400 ppm. We are absolutely sure to exceed 422 ppm in 2022.
You won.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Enjoy the rest of the Thanksgiving weekend.
