Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says former spokeswoman

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54103163

by sandGorgon • 6 years ago

64 152 6 years ago

bbc.com

smhg2• 6 years ago

I think it would be a good idea to put the first 2 words at the end of the title to make it less sensational?

sandGorgon• 6 years ago

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is the name of the org -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion

smhg2• 6 years ago

But they aren't saying this if I understand correctly? Only someone formerly affiliated with them?

_Microft• 6 years ago

The current title [0] seems misleading indeed as she is no longer involved with them. The title suggested by user loulouxiv sounds less misleading decent. Maybe use this one?

[0] "Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says former spokeswoman"

loulouxiv• 6 years ago

Yes it would be even more logical to write

Nuclear power 'only option' says former Extinction Rebellion spokeswoman

since this not directly linked to this organization

Krasnol2• 6 years ago

But it has to be sensational.

The proper title should be "Michael Shellenberger buys prominent Extinction Rebellion member" and it should be in the boulevard section.

It's not like she ads any relevant insight or information to the topic. She just repeats the tag lines of Shellenbergers campaign. The only thing missing is someone mentioning his book.

kasperni• 6 years ago

My heart says no to nuclear power. My brain says yes.

coldtea4• 6 years ago

My reasoning says regarless of the technical merits in theory, people have managed to mess every kind of nuclear reactor setup, have been saying for decades "this time with the new design it's different", and have a horrible track record of nuclear waste storage/disposal (or lack thereof).

p_l2• 6 years ago

If you limit to USA, maybe that's true.

France managed to keep all its waste in a small hall thanks to reprocessing. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima involved ancient designs coupled with extra non-reactor errors.

yodelshady• 6 years ago

My reasoning says we have a few thousand tonnes of solid radioactive waste and a few tens of billions of tonnes of gaseous fossil waste that is wreaking havoc planetwide.

California alone, THIS YEAR alone, has lost an area 3 times the size of the Chernobyl exclusion zone due to weather that should be unusual, but won't be. Australia likewise. Forests near me have been lost due to parasites who should be killed by a frost that never came. This is the new normal. This doesn't end.

Those were the two options, and you knew it. Sorry but my life has been stories of people who claim to be environmental and frustrate every single practical effort to reduce emissions, then claim ignorance of the consequences. You knew.

wcoenen2• 6 years ago

I think the concerns around nuclear waste storage are a little overblown. A lot of nuclear waste is stored on site, which is an indication of how incredibly little of it is produced. Compare that to the hundreds of millions of tons (!) of toxic coal ash that are produced and dumped somewhere annually. Surely trading millions of tons of coal ash for a few tons of nuclear waste would be an improvement?

imtringued4• 6 years ago

I agree. The insistence on new designs is making me feel like they still haven't figured out what the real problem is.

goatinaboat3• 6 years ago

a horrible track record of nuclear waste storage/disposal (or lack thereof)

What is this horrible track record of which you speak? Some examples please.

ClumsyPilot13• 6 years ago

"mess every kind of nuclear reactor "

There are many reactor designs that have never suffered an accident, and some of them have been around since the 50's. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

"horrible track record of nuclear waste"

Compared to what? On a normal year air pollution (combustion waste) kills 500,000 - 2,000,000 people, nuclear waste kills 0.

lawlessone3• 6 years ago

Yeah i'd prefer renewable energy.. but we've wasted too much time for that.

We are probably too late in general.

patall• 6 years ago

Yeah i'd prefer renewable energy.. but we've wasted too much time for that.

If that is your first thought, why would you even think of nuclear power as an alternative? Hinkley Point C "might" be finished 17 years after inception. If everything goes right from now on. For 9+ ct per kWh.

phre4k• 6 years ago

Nuclear power is pretty cool if you don't build the plants in risky areas or ignore safety measures.

I'm a radiation safety officer and the completeness of precautions taken is inversely proportional to the amount of greediness of the company's CEO.

Until that's solved, nuclear power is a double-edged sword, as seen in Chernobyl and Fukushima. There's currently no perfect solution to that energy problem.

What many people don't know: There's more radiation set free by coal power plants than nuclear power plants because they burn that stuff and blow it into the air.

dewey3• 6 years ago

There's more radiation set free by coal power plants than nuclear power plants because they burn that stuff and blow it into the air.

Trying to understand this: "more radiation set free by coal power plants than nuclear power plants"

Is that for the day-to-day operations of a plant? I actually thought nuclear power plants don't emit any radiation in normal operations and only if something bad happens. Or if it's referring to a Fukushima like event how do you compare that? I have a hard time putting these two in relation.

svara2• 6 years ago

What many people don't know: There's more radiation set free by coal power plants than nuclear power plants because they burn that stuff and blow it into the air.

That's misleading the way you state it. The total amount is not a relevant measure without also knowing the concentration.

iso16314• 6 years ago

Fukushima killed 0 people. The evacuation has 2,000 deaths attributed to it.

In comparison the Earthquake and Tsunami killed 15,000 people.

Even setting aside the global effects of climate change, local air polution from coal burning kills 20,000 people a year in Europe alone [0], and 13,000 in the U.S. [1]

[0] http://www.env-health.org/IMG/pdf/heal_report_the_unpaid_hea...

[1] https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheT...

Tepix5• 6 years ago

We don't know how much radiation is set free by nuclear power plants because the highly radioactive nuclear waste they leave behind will be around for tens of thousands of years and we don't know if and when it will contaminate the planet.

pjc5011• 6 years ago

My inner project manager says "why do all these projects overrun in cost and time" and "don't let the best be the enemy of the good". You can build a lot of renewables in the time it takes to get a nuclear plant up and running.

scandox• 6 years ago

My brain says human societies cannot guarantee the sort of long term management and integrity required to keep these facilities safe over extremely long lifetimes.

jamescun• 6 years ago

Nuclear was perhaps the correct option 20 years ago.

A nuclear power plant can easily take a decade to build (Hinkley C, announced 2010, approved 2016, generation expected 2025), how many decades will it take to build enough plants to replace our current fossil fuel based generation?

It is time we don't have anymore. We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.

carlmr2• 6 years ago

We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.

And don't forget reducing power usage. Corona has shown that we can drastically reduce the amount of commuters on the road and airplanes in the sky.

read_if_gay_2• 6 years ago

The lockdown is/was an extraordinarily shitty situation for a lot of people and is therefore not a permanent solution for climate change.

nefitty• 6 years ago

I understand that some climate change deniers may be motivated by their belief that the adaptations we would have to make to reverse it would negatively impact the economy. Interestingly enough, the those change that covid has forced have had devastating economic impacts.

ben_w• 6 years ago

I wouldn’t count on that. A lot of people are already brisling against the restrictions imposed in response to the pandemic despite the virus actually existing — I doubt they would be sustainable once this crisis has passed.

shakermakr• 6 years ago

And also reduced our basic freedom, our economies, and placed millions into poverty.

Covid isn’t a good example of a sustainable balancing of the environment over human activity.

2muchcoffeeman• 6 years ago

Well, the worst possible outcome is potentially catastrophic enough that actually, you want to invest in both simultaneously.

chroem-• 6 years ago

This. Myopia on a single method for reducing carbon emissions is how you get rolling blackouts. Perfect is truly the enemy of good here.

zpeti2• 6 years ago

The IPCC predicts 2 degrees of temperature increase by 2050, which is the same as between 1950-2000.

I believe they also think world GDP _increase_ (not actual GDP) might be 6% less due to this, but don't quote me on that.

This is the number 1 authority on climate change.

While there are risks associated with that increase, it won't be the end of the world. Despite what the sensationalist media says, or democratic politicians and 15 year olds predicting the end of the world in 12 years. That is simply not true. The world will not become a ball of flame, in a few decades. Not even the UN thinks so.

There is plenty of time to build nuclear power plants, if that's how we wanted to deal with this issue.

jonathanstrange2• 6 years ago

I disagree and would like to point out that "12 years" is a strawman. You've got to think a bit more long-term and about all effects on the environment and living conditions as a whole.

If you take an unbiased look at climate change, resource exhaustion, and species extinction, then it becomes hard to believe that mankind will have the conditions to thrive on Earth in 200 years from now. It may be possible, maybe with technological inventions, but it certainly doesn't look that way. We're only about 200 years into massive industrialization and have already damaged Earth on an unprecedented scale.

The current species extinction graph alone should worry people way more than it tends to do right now. Changes to the oceans are also extremely alarming, because certain conditions in the oceans could trigger a collapse of most of the ecosystem.

ClumsyPilot13• 6 years ago

Are you sure GDP is the right metric to be looking at?

Suppose there was some event that killed all homeless people - it might not affect GDP much. Should we do let such event happen and conclude it's no big deal?

paganel2• 6 years ago

Less GDP will also probably mean less pollution, so hopefully things will even out at some point.

fakedang• 6 years ago

Except, the increase between 1950-2000 was the highest amount of emissions for any period of that duration. If you're looking for reassurance, that period is not the benchmark you should be taking for comparison. We are currently suffering the effects of our exploitation and devastation over that period, just as we are currently in a much better position because of banning CFCs in the 80s. Climate change isn't an instantaneous process.

imtringued4• 6 years ago

The only problem is that if you tell everyone that we have plenty of time then nobody is going to do anything until it is too late. I hate sensationalism in both directions but as it is right now, humans certainly aren't going to stop at 2 degrees.

ClumsyPilot13• 6 years ago

Most people have no idea how fucked we actually are.

What happens after 2050? Climate change continues, even if the world goes completely carbon neutral. Economic damage continues.

Read the report, the only way to keep to 2 degrees is to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. The sequestation industry would have to be larger than the oil industry was at its peak.

Given that we can't even switch to renewables and plant trees, what are the odds we will subsidise an enormous industry to fix the atmosphere?

jonathanstrange2• 6 years ago

I've heard conflicting stories about that. On the one hand, the people from TerraPower seem to have a solution with a good ecobalance. It was featured in the documentary about Bill Gates. On the other hand, I've heard several people claim that renewables are much cheaper and have better ecobalances, but I haven't seen the evidence for it.

So I'm personally undecided and with my limited knowledge believe that investing in renewable energy and new, modern nuclear power plants seems to be the right solution. In any case, change needs to occur as soon and fast as possible. But I'd be interested in sources to better information, particularly the claims I've heard that the costs for nuclear power plants is too high.

Is there an unbiased,reliable source for looking up complete ecobalances for energy sources, including the whole lifespan and all manufacturing of components and their disposal?

ClumsyPilot13• 6 years ago

I feel that untill the last coal powerplant is gone, splitting hair on ecobalance is a distraction.

Full ecobalance is hard, many variables, many will vary by country or by state/county.

goatinaboat3• 6 years ago

Building one-offs after spending years battling scientific illiteracy in the courts is indeed time consuming, but there is actually no reason we couldn't just churn them out assembly line style. The technology is pretty mature now.

We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.

Those things aren't without lead time either. Wind farms don't grow on trees. Solar panels have an intricate manufacturing process requiring rare earth elements.

wazoox• 6 years ago

Case in point: China has built and put into production several EPR-design reactors while the projects started earlier in Europe are still lingering.

topbanana• 6 years ago

It is time we don't have anymore. We should now be focusing renewables and, more cruicially, storage.

You think that can be done faster than 10 years?

pjc5011• 6 years ago

The UK managed something like 5% -> 25% renewables in the past 10 years; complete decarbonisation of electricity isn't really possible in 10 years, but I'm cautiously optimistic. Especially as the price has fallen so dramatically; large areas of the US are ripe for cheap solar.

AnthonyMouse5• 6 years ago

A nuclear power plant can easily take a decade to build (Hinkley C, announced 2010, approved 2016, generation expected 2025), how many decades will it take to build enough plants to replace our current fossil fuel based generation?

If it takes about a decade to build a nuclear plant then building enough nuclear plants should take... about a decade? It's not as if you build one, wait until it's completely finished and then start building a second one somewhere else. You build more than one starting right now and then more than one is finished in about a decade. Less if people would stop using "it takes too long" and similar as an excuse to make it take longer to build them.

Tepix5• 6 years ago

Building and tearing down nuclear power plants tends to cost vastly more money (billions!) than estimated at the time of their planning, especially with the more recent ones. They require massive subsidies.

ACow_Adonis• 6 years ago

what's our supply of people and equipment capable of building safe nuclear power plants? I'm going to take a wild stab and proclaim that supply is relatively inelastic and possibly extremely so in the short term...

So i'm guessing it probably is pretty close to impossible to build too many in one go simultaneously, like other relative mega-structures or infrastructure, you are generally limited to a handful in generalized localities at any one time.

m4x• 6 years ago

If it takes about a decade to build a nuclear plant then building enough nuclear plants should take... about a decade?

Only if the world had unlimited access to appropriately skilled engineers and trades people, and the mountain of resources required to construct a nuclear power station.

Training people for something as specialised as building nuclear power stations is very time consuming in its own right.

imtringued4• 6 years ago

It's not that simple. If you want to build more nuclear plants at the same time you also need more workers, more specialized factories and a proven design that has been field tested so that you don't end up with a fleet of defective plants after you have built 100 of them.

It's not as if you build one, wait until it's completely finished

If you assign a worker to Hinkley C then he is going to work at Hinkley C until it is finished. You can't just send him to a different plant. That would delay Hinkley C.

TaylorAlexander• 6 years ago

Don’t forget reducing consumption.

onion2k• 6 years ago

The best time to build a nuclear power station was twenty years ago, but the second best time is now.

jka3• 6 years ago

Yep.

The total levelized cost of energy (LCOE[1]) for both wind and solar is now lower than nuclear: it's cheaper to procure equivalent power production via non-nuclear means.

The UK's Business, Energy and Industry Strategy department published energy production cost estimates in 2016[2], and the Open Energy Information organization has collated similar statistics[3].

You're spot on that post-energy-generation storage remains a problem - I'd be really glad to hear if anyone in this thread has up-to-date knowledge of where we are with regards to that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[3] https://openei.org/apps/TCDB/

Erlich_Bachman• 6 years ago

"post-energy-generation storage" is only a problem for the intermittent generators like solar and wind. This is exactly why nuclear is a solution. It doesn't suffer from problems of storage and can easily offset intermittence of other power sources by varying its power, as long as those different kinds of generators are on the same grid.

This is the key reason we are talking about nuclear, it is not simply about levelized cost.

jamesrom• 6 years ago

This is a completely fallacious argument. You would've said the same thing 20 years ago.

Secondly, just because one plant takes a decade to build, that does NOT mean we can't build 100 plants in a decade. Again, your argument does not make any sense. If we had started 20 years ago, we very well could be stamping out SMRs by the hundreds, today.

Finally, granting the urgency you claim, there is no evidence to suggest replacing fossil fuel based generation with renewable is going to be quicker than nuclear. To frame it as such is misleading.

oliwarner• 6 years ago

I think we can do both, no? Build a fleet of small reactor sites around the country, deploy PV everywhere now, and invest in battery technologies for tomorrow.

If we end up with way too much energy production, we undercut fossil entirely, plus get to use some to start physically fixing environmental damage being done. Carbon capture, etc.

tarboreus2• 6 years ago

So we do...what? To power the US with solar you would need over 11 million acres of solar panels, and that's likely an extreme lowball estimate. That's half of Tennessee. That model doesn't really account for storage and intermittentcy issues, which we need to innovate ourselves out of. Some newer estimates also suggest we'd need more like all of Texas covered in solar panels. Sorry, but there aren't alternatives here. Nuclear is it.

0xy• 6 years ago

Renewables don't work short term without gas peaking plants, which are not renewable and are extremely bad for the environment.

"Renewables", as usually pitched, are anything but renewable. Solar with gas peaking plants is not renewable. Wind with gas peaking plants is not renewable. Nuclear on the other hand, is extremely green and can be working at 100% capacity on windless sunless drought-stricken days.

lawlessone3• 6 years ago

I'm not really a fan of ER, calls itself a rebellion and then has the most milquetoast performances that could scarcely be even called a protest.

pjc5011• 6 years ago

And yet they've got Priti Patel condemning them, putting them on the PREVENT list: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/10/xr-extinctio... and more recently talking up banning them entirely. It looks like their recent protest against the Murdoch press hit a nerve.

bergoid2• 6 years ago

What's an example of a decent protest in your view?

ClumsyPilot13• 6 years ago

I've had many people tell me their methods are too extreme, and how dare these people block roads for some protest, you should just sit quetly in the corner corner a sign or soemthing.

pvaldes10• 6 years ago

Not, Not the only.

There are a lot of room for improvement in using energy better. Cars do not need to spend so much fuel as before, and there is room for improvement in isolation of houses so they don't need so much energy.

None of those are related with nuclear energy but would reduce the climatic problem just now, not in ten years, without putting a low probability but catastrophic collateral effect in the middle of the road for our grandsons.

In any case with or without nuclear, with the highest wildfires registered in the history in Russia, Australia, Brazil and US (2019-2020) we either focus and solve the arsonism crimes, predatory logging, and environmental lack of water problems or we aren't going anywhere. Deliberate arsonism should be reclassified worldwide as crime against (the future of) humanity. If we can bomb a whole city in Irak, we should be able to drop water in California or Canberra.

agumonkey• 6 years ago

Cultural change can do a lot. Less consumption, less waste.

When I think about ICE.. every time someone used brakes in the past they were wasting energy ... at least EVs will recapture some of that.

dispat0r4• 6 years ago

In Germany we're pretty much at the base line it's to expensive to waste energy. After picking the low hanging fruit (light, lcd tvs, not using a dryer all the time) It gets very hard.

bad_user2• 6 years ago

"Deliberate arsonism should be reclassified worldwide as crime against (the future of) humanity"

You mean that, what the western countries did throughout the 19th and the 20th century, the developing countries aren't allowed to do now?

Why? Because some forests are burning near one of the richest cities in the world?

pvaldes10• 6 years ago

People in western countries had to bloody fight each mm, for those laws. Laws that are always eroding. Is a sisyphean task, even here.

Developing countries are sovereign and have governments and armies. Prominent environmentalists are assassinated each year in those countries and the cases remain inexplicably unsolved. All the time.

So, no more excuses and "come here and solve my environmental problems so I don't need to". No more "donate to save the rainforest for 40 years, so we can sell later the logs to the first company that knocks at my door". People can always choose not to vote for the mentally damaged candidate.

pjc5011• 6 years ago

If we can bomb a whole city in Irak

Notwithstanding the human and archaeological impact of this, the environmental impact was pretty terrible as well. The oil consumption of all those tanks and planes can't have been small, as well as the burning oilfields that blackened the sky and all the depleted uranium rounds littering the country.

pvaldes10• 6 years ago

You have a point here. I'll rephrase it. If we can bomb a whole city in Irak, we should be able to stop bombing cities also. Is a much easier task and would help also to fix the climate problem.

Has anybody calculated how many greenhouse effect gasses are released when moving and dropping a bomb?

nix23• 6 years ago

Why does she wear a kryptonite amulet?

Krasnol2• 6 years ago

Ms Lights said she has since taken a role at campaign group Environmental Progress UK, whose campaigns include supporting the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk.

So she got a job at a nuclear lobby organisation.

This is great for her. I'm not sure the lobby will able to pay until her retirement but maybe she can make the jump back into renewables.

LatteLazy5• 6 years ago

It seems like the environmental movement spends an enormous amount of time and energy arguing over small details over what we should do (how much of electrical energy should come from nuclear). Meanwhile we do nothing because people who don't want to are a majority. So what's the point in arguing?

cm2187• 6 years ago

Rather, whatever diet you impose on western co2 emissions, which are already decreasing, is going to be dwarfed by China’s increase. China is building new coal power plants now. Environmentalists are not helping their credibility by focusing on second or third order details.

LatteLazy5• 6 years ago

This is the core environmental problem: how do you get every country to cut their emissions and buy quite a lot? If you can't get them to do that (and we've failed completely) trying to get them to cut and cut a lot AND do it with nuclear (or whatever else) is a non starter.

pjc5011• 6 years ago

Much of the older environmental movement was anti-nuclear first. Before global warming became a key issue the big threat was the instant obliteration of a large fraction of humanity by nuclear weapons, and since civilian power and weapons were tightly linked this led to campaigning against nuclear power. There were also lots of issues with waste dumping.

This goes all the way back to the French government murdering a protestor and sinking a ship to suppress protests; the Rainbow Warrior.

LatteLazy5• 6 years ago

It just seems like a convenient thing for people to be tribal over, while as a whole they achieve nothing. There's is a scene in red dwarf where there is a holy war over the colour of the hats people should wear. This is the same thing as far as I can tell.

webreac• 6 years ago

We have passed the peak of oil production. Nuclear is the only solution to mitigate the crisis we are going to face. I think we will need to get rid of nuclear at long term (like 50 years). But for the next 20 years (probably 40), we need nuclear.

pjc5011• 6 years ago

You can't get rid of nuclear in 50 years, the decay products take centuries to become safe.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53595839 "Trawsfynydd was shut down in 1991 after operating for a quarter of a century. Magnox said it still expected the site to be completely cleared by the 2083 target."

input_sh• 6 years ago

We have one long term nuclear waste facility in Finland (expected to be operational in 2023). It can handle about a hundred years of waste from an associated power plant before being completely buried. It was made because the Finnish law requires nuclear waste produced in Finland to be disposed of domestically.

I don't really know if any other country with nuclear power plants have any sort of a plan for what to do with it.

ourlordcaffeine• 6 years ago

As someone who works in the energy industry: it isn't.

ZeroGravitas2• 6 years ago

It seems odd that extinction rebellion need to do crazy stunts like glue themselves to tube trains to get in the papers, yet someone who leaves and says its unreasonable to abandon fossil fuels gets featured across multiple publications.

aaron695• 6 years ago

If you don't know why Zion Lights about turn is interesting, it's because of this well known disastrous interview -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3kJwQBZOkM

I have to say, I'm quite surprised and happy, it seems there is hope yet.

gralx3• 6 years ago

The world's supply of containment elements beryllium, niobium, zirconium, yttrium, and hafnium would be exhausted within ten years to thirty years if we were to produce enough nuclear power plants to supply our 15TW energy diet, assuming all other industrial uses of those elements were to cease and no advances in engineering were to provide alternatives.[0] To obtain one-tenth of our diet, we could get from 100 years to 300 years out of nuclear power under those same assumptions, exhausting those materials for the duration of our species due to irradiation of the containment materials.

If nuclear is a stop-gap measure worth pursuing, then we must face dire resource limitations.

[0] Derek Abbott. "Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?" Proceedings of the IEEE, October 2011

DuskStar3• 6 years ago

exhausting those materials for the duration of our species due to irradiation of the containment materials.

Not going to comment on the rest of this, but I'm pretty sure we could reclaim those rare-earths if we really wanted to.

gralx3• 6 years ago

Since speeding up the half-life of the radioactive elements is off the table, what do you propose?

Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says former spokeswoman

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