David Roberts Asks, "Is 100% Renewable Energy Realistic?"--Still Antinuclear

Excerpted Roberts Quotes Promoting Wind and Solar Over Nuclear--Read Article for Full Context

Below I parse what I think Dave got wrong in his second of a two-part post about the feasibility of 100% renewable energy. I parsed his first part here. To see what he got right you'll need to read his articles. And if you decide to read them, keep in mind that he has absolutely no background, theoretical or practical, in engineering or science and has been inextricably imprinted with a bias against nuclear energy.

Two potentially large sources of dispatchable carbon-free power are nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

Nuclear and CCS do not have equal potential. What is “potential” about nuclear energy? Next to hydro, it’s the largest low carbon source of electricity on the planet, and has been for over half of a century. Wind and solar are the potentially viable energy sources, nuclear already has a long proven history.

All through his article, Dave repeatedly associates nuclear (a proven source of low carbon energy) with CCS (a completely unproven source) as if they have equal “potential.” He puts nuclear in the same box as CCS, just as antinuclear groups have always put nuclear power stations in the same box with nuclear weapons and coal.

Nuclear power stations ≠ nuclear weapons

Nuclear power stations ≠ coal power stations

Nuclear power stations ≠ carbon capture and sequestration

Clearly, nuclear power, our main source of low carbon energy for a half century, belongs in the box with other proven low carbon technologies, not with fossil fuels.

Suffice it to say, a variety of people oppose one or both of those sources, for a variety of reasons. 

Why no mention of the variety of people also oppose wind, hydro, and biomass?

In this post I’m going to discuss three papers that examine the subject, try to draw a few tentative conclusions, and issue a plea for open minds and flexibility. It’ll be fun!

This will be fun and although he works tirelessly to insinuate otherwise, Dave’s mind remains quite closed to nuclear as you’ll see.

There are two papers circulating right now that cast a skeptical eye on the goal of 100 percent renewables.

One is a literature review on the subject, self-published by the Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), authored by Jesse Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom ...

The other is a new paper in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews that boasts “a comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems.” It is by B.P. Heard, B.W. Brook, T.M.L. Wigley, and C.J.A. Bradshaw, who, it should be noted, are advocates for nuclear power.

CleanTechnica Watch: Comment Analysis of Thorium Article--Volume 1

In this article I clean up behind CleanTechnica's community manager who made a total of 87 comments under an antinuclear article published on CleanTechnica. Consider it a debate where each debate partner is banned from the other's comment field :  )

Some pronuclear commenters had their remarks held for moderation (even though CleanTechnica's comment rules claim they never do that) which were subsequently never published, while others had comments deleted. I saw one instance where this community manager posted a long rebuttal ...to a comment he'd deleted! Apparently, he does this fairly routinely.

Because the CleanTechnica community manager made 17% of the 509 comments before he shut them down, I'll be parsing them by category. I'm also breaking this up into more than one volume. This is Volume 1. The community manager's arguments occasionally trip on each other but in a nutshell they are based on his erroneous insinuation that wind will always cost less everywhere and that storage will fix the intermittency problems.

Feel free to drop into that comment field to see quotes taken from it in full context.

Cost

The CleanTechnica community manager's main argument is that when wind costs less then nuclear, we should replace nuclear with it.

Using that simplistic reasoning, we should eliminate all other new low carbon sources of energy that may cost more than onshore wind (which, in the U.S., would, in addition to new nuclear, include solar PV, solar thermal, offshore wind, geothermal, and biomass). See Figure 2.

CleanTechinca Writes Last Antinuclear Energy Article—Pigs Fly

Frankly, we primarily stopped writing about nuclear since everyone in the industry should know by now it is an industry entering its retirement stage.

...so says Zachary Shahan in yet another antinuclear article. Interestingly enough, I wrote an article earlier this year critiquing yet another of their antinuclear energy articles.

However, because of the interest (and backlash) the Before the Flood article raised, I decided it was worth communicating this point one more time [emphasis mine].

If CleanTechnica really believed that nuclear energy is “entering its retirement stage” they wouldn’t still be writing antinuclear articles.

Using Bill McKibben’s climate change war analogy, Figure 1 below lists our four main weapons against climate change in descending order of deployment:

Figure 1: Low Carbon Sources of Energy in United States via 2016 BP Review

Pronuclear comment is not welcome at CleanTechnica. From their original comment policy page:

This site is not the place to discuss future nuclear designs that might make nuclear affordable, the unproven GenIV type stuff that might or might not work. If there’s a clear demonstration of affordable nuclear sometime in the future [China will begin replacing the furnaces in many of its coal plants with Gen IV, gas cooled, pebble bead reactors as soon as 2018 and Russia just put a breeder reactor into commercial operation last month], then we can open up the discussion about the role nuclear could play in replacing fossil fuels.

In the meantime, there are several sites where they love to discuss nuclear ideas. Feel free to take your speculations to one or more of those sites. We’re going to stick with stuff that is affordable and practical.

[Aside]

 Shahan began his article with praise of another antinuclear article.