Breaking the Cycle of Anti-nuclear Indoctrination--The "80% renewables" argument

I highly recommend this excellent presentation by Jesse Jenkins explaining why (assuming it's possible) an 80% wind and solar grid is not likely a good idea. From a Tweet by Joris van Dorp:

I first encountered this argument in an article last year by the anti-nuclear David Roberts writing for Vox. My response:

Above, Dave puts a pair of sentences back-to-back to give you the impression that the dispute is over using nuclear to decarbonize that last 10 to 20 percent. But that isn't really what the dispute comes down to. The idea that the world can reduce emissions 80% with renewables for electrical and especially for all energy use is an untested hypothesis, let alone getting to 100%. The dispute is over how much nuclear and how much wind and solar is going to be needed from start to finish.

Take a few minutes to digest the following two graphics where I tried to summarize the gist of Jenkins' presentation with markups of his original material (keeping in mind that these are my interpretations of his presentation).

Figure 1

Breaking The Cycle of Anti-nuclear Indoctrination -- Uranium Mine Tailings Argument

Above is a photo I took of a Toucan while I was in the Brazilian Cerrado. Not a birder, have no idea which species it is. I'm including because it brings me pleasure and as a reminder of why I blog about the environment.

Below is a collection of quotes from comments under a pro-nuclear article at Grist:

The "waste" problem from nuclear power isn't the "spent" fuel, it's the tailings piles from uranium mining ...Uranium tailings piles are even more toxic than coal or tar sands tailings piles, and they all leach into the environment ... The argument against coal ash is a more general environmental issue similar to some of the issues raised against nuclear. (mountains of radioactive tailings.) ...During early years of operation, mine tailings at this site were discharged onto a flat, low-lying area adjacent to the processing facility... 

Back in the day, long before the internet came along, uranium mine tailings were used (along with everything else they could think of) as an anti-nuclear argument. Many people are now indoctrinated with that misinformation and the internet is still full of articles echoing it, as indoctrination victims of indoctrination victims continue to carry the torch. That's how indoctrination works and why beliefs like creationism endure.

Bottom line?

• Everything in your car, phone, and computer came from mines.
• Uranium mining accounts for a tiny fraction of a single percent of all mining (1).
• Uranium mining is no worse for the environment than the mining of any other metal (5).
• Uranium is a heavy metal with similar toxicity to the (75 pounds of) lead found in in your car battery (3).
• Uranium mine tailings are about as radioactive as your granite countertop, and less radioactive than the original ore (2) (5).
• Old mine sites of all kinds are being cleaned up and returned either to a natural state or to a state safe to use for other purposes (4).
• Environmental regulations now exist to prevent the repeat of environmentally damaging mining practices regardless of what is being mined (6).

Peer Review of Wendover Production's "The Nuclear Waste Problem" Youtube Video

Above images from Nuclear Energy Waste--Making Mountains Out of Mole Hills

The YouTube video, The Nuclear Waste Problem was published on November 21, and went viral with about half a million hits in a few days. I learned of its existence when it was presented to me as irrefutable evidence for why nuclear can't be part of the climate change solution.

Technically, it's quite well done. The graphics and music are appealing. The transcript is about two and a half pages long, single spaced. Unfortunately, the narrative found in that transcript is remarkably inaccurate. If the graphics and music are lipstick, the narrative would be the pig.

Simon Holmes à Court thinks 100% Renewable Energy has been Demonstrated to be Possible in Australia

More Twitter activity from Simon.

He starts by asking:

nuclear twitter: does anyone have a simple LCoE for a nuclear power station? i'd love to better understand the economics.

If he's an energy expert, I have to wonder why he's asking for data from strangers on Twitter. You wouldn't see the likes of James Hansen doing that for one of his many papers published in Science and elsewhere. And as is almost always the case with his tweets, you're never sure what he is trying to say. Did he mean an equation? An example calculation? Examples of LCOE for nuclear? A spreadsheet?

It's not just me. Also not sure what he is asking for, Suzy Waldman handed him a link to Lazards which listed various LCOEs and an EIA link that explained the concept of LCOE.

I, in turn, responded to Suzy:

Tom Biegler responds to me:

Thanks. And I don't suppose they include load leveling costs to turn wind and solar into a product that users might like, want and need.

I, in turn, respond to him with a link to an Energy Matters article that tries (but apparently often fails) to explain why you can't compare the LCOE of sporadic sources to baseload sources:

Exactly ...if you want to compare LCOE of wind and solar to baseload nuclear LCOE, you find what it would cost to make them do baseload (answer offshore wind in UK is six times more expensive than Hinkley). 

Missing the point of the Energy Matters article entirely, Simon posts a typically cryptic response devoid of capitalization:

Environmental Progress--The Power to Decarbonize

Figure 1

Environmental Progress has a new study out that I found very compelling.  It's just raw data arranged in a manner that paints a global picture. Critics can't punch holes in it by attacking assumptions chosen because it doesn't have any. In a nutshell, it shows a strong global correlation between nuclear energy use and lower carbon intensity, but no such correlation between wind and solar.

It took some effort for me to understand how the graphic shown in Figure 2 below was derived. To make sense of it I had to drop down into the appendices to look at the data for each country:

In service to transparency, we have reproduced all 68 national carbon intensity of energy charts used in this analysis in our appendix, in addition to publishing the aggregated national charts.

Each dot represents a given country's carbon intensity at a given level of annual nuclear, or wind, or hydro, or solar output. Each data point used to plot the thick curve is a kind of average of the dots at a given annual electricity output for nuclear, or wind, or hydro, or solar. The carbon intensity in countries can grow or retract with the addition or reduction in any given energy source (nuclear, wind, solar, or hydro). In Japan, for example, a reduction in nuclear caused an increase in carbon intensity.

I put my anti-nuclear hat on to find a way to punch holes in the results. Could the different horizontal scales be hiding something? Are plots using the same scale hiding something in the clutter for wind and solar? To resolve those issues I overlaid the nuclear and wind graphs at the same scale and magnified the results to make them more visible (see Figure 1).