Engineering360: "Clean Power Generation Insuffficient for Climate Mitigation"

Pray for an asteroid.

Pray for nuclear energy....We have the answer, it's the PC do-gooders that are blocking the path to salvation....In fact it's the ignorance and fear perpetrated by these demons that has put us in this situation to begin with...We should have all been driving electric cars 30 years ago, generated by clean sustainable nuclear energy....

I won't disagree.

So you're OK with all the African countries, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan all having nuclear power in the same way the USA does?

You missed North Korea? Political Junkie! The topic had nothing to do with who or what countries?

Incorrect.

It has everything to do with it.

We currently have the only country which has used nuclear weapons in battle having a bromance with the country which is most likely to use them in the near future.

Both leaders being narcissistic, with bad haircuts and highly unpredictable behaviour.

You want this to spread to every country which wants nuclear power? This is why nuclear power needs to be phased out.

While I'd like to take credit as a PC do-gooder for blocking the growth of nuclear energy, I'm afraid the lack of nuclear power is a matter of simple economics. New nuclear power plants cost tens of billions of dollars to build. Even with billions of dollars in US federal loan guarantees the proposed nuclear power plants couldn't get sufficient funding.

Consider the clean up costs from nuclear power plant failures (Chernobyl = $200B+, Fukushima $200B+, etc) are close to half a trillion dollars. How do you insure a project with that large a cost of failure? I can't even buy a $20K car without providing proof of insurance, good luck finding a $100B insurance policy.

Not to mention the inability of the nuclear power industry to provide a plant design that could be mass produced, the key to bringing down costs. If every automobile had to be designed and built from scratch the way nuclear power plants are designed and built, no one could afford to buy them. But an even bigger problem is that building power plants puts almost all of your lifetime expenses up front, so it can be a decade or longer before revenue can be collected from users. That's a lousy business model - the money boys all believe that there are easier ways to make money.

And then there's that pesky old problem of how to dispose of spent fuel rods that will remain highly radioactive for centuries. Perhaps if every proponent of nuclear power would just take home a few spent fuel rods . . . Oh, and the need to guard all those spent fuel rods so terrorists won't make cities uninhabitable with dirty bombs

Perhaps I could be persuaded to support nuclear power if it wasn't essentially 18th century tea kettle technology with a 20th century heat source bolted on. Sure, it's fun to think that we are masters of the universe who can control the mad genies of nuclear power, it is more realistic to admit that we servants of Murphy and his pesky law.

All things considered, with all the costs and downside potentials, I suggest that we should stick to engineering the practical instead of blindly pursuing the unrealistic dream power sources that have never lived up to their potential. Using solar power and wind power (both cheaper than coal) don't require prayer or a path to salvation; just back up batteries to get us through the night.

Nuclear Power is the only way for us Energy Hogs.

My neighbour turns on at least 10 spotlights to showcase his weekend house. We need a wind farm to just power him?

More power available will be used up by more useless applications.

By all means, we need to have the Green Police to compel people on how they should live their lives.

It's intriguing to read that they feel that transportation is a hard to decarbonize industry. Electric and fuel cell options exist for almost all of this sector, indeed in China a city converted its entire bus fleet to electric. Couple with renewable energy sources makes this decarbonized.

Steel uses coke in the process but the power behind it could be renewable electric and biogas; same for cement. The downside is a lack of viable CCS options as yet, but even that is improving day-by-day.

True, we need a concerted effort, but the truth is that the main obstacles are Government inactivity and corporate lobbying from the polluters. Those need to change most of all.

Yes, before coal, steel was made from coke (carbonised wood). Coke making wasn't the most pleasant industry in terms of air pollution but with modern techniques it could be made so.