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Energy Transition Crisis - Episode 5: The Case For and Against Nuclear Power

Energy Transition Crisis

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Energy Transition Crisis - Episode 5: The Case For and Against Nuclear Power

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2023Sep 13

Chapters: 00:00 Episode 5: The Case For and Against Nuclear Power 02:50 The Case for Nuclear Energy 07:05 The Case Against Nuclear Energy: Operational Safety Risks - Nuclear Meltdowns 16:14 The Case Against Nuclear Energy: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation 20:06 The Case Against Nuclear Energy: Nuclear Waste Disposal 25:49 Cost Overruns 31:26 Human Error Caused the Accidents! 38:15 Conclusions Episode 5: • Energy Transition Crisis - Episode 6:... Barring a major breakthrough in deep geothermal, Nuclear power is the only source of baseload energy that could realistically be built out to supply 80k TWh of clean electricity by 2050. And all the technology needed to do that is already known and proven to work. But public sentiment against nuclear couldn’t be much stronger. What most people don’t realize is that technological advancements already solved all the common objections to nuclear power years ago, but government bureaucracy has stood in the way of adopting those technological advances. I’ll show you the arguments both for and against nuclear energy, in this episode of Energy Transition Crisis. The three big objections to nuclear power are Operational safety risks, such as core meltdowns, weapons proliferation, and waste disposal. In the first episode I promised not to sugar-coat the challenges we face, so in this episode I’ll show you the arguments for and against nuclear energy in full detail, then in the next two episodes I’ll show you how advanced nuclear technologies and small modular nuclear reactors fully overcome most of the arguments against nuclear. Contrary to common perception, nuclear energy is already the safest form of baseload power generation in existence. The number of deaths and diseases—including cancer—is far lower in nuclear powerplants than in coal mines and the oil patch. But similar to aviation, while the accidents are few and far between, on the rare occasions they do happen, it’s always front page news, and the public never forgets them, despite that far more deaths and diseases are caused by coal than nuclear. The argument in favor of nuclear is simple: Barring a major breakthrough in geothermal, which hasn’t happened yet, Nuclear the ONLY option that can realistically build out the 80k TWh of 24/7 baseload power generation we need by 2050. There simply is no other option that can realistically provide all the clean energy needed to phase out fossil fuels. So therefore, there can be no successful energy transition without nuclear energy. Nuclear power offers the lowest operational cost of baseload electricity generation in existence. That’s super important, because to usher in a whole new era of human prosperity, our challenge is not just to replace fossil fuels. We need to replace fossil fuels with a clean alternative that makes possible cheaper and more abundant energy that we ever had before, and nuclear power is ideally suited to that task. I’ve argued in prior episodes that Wind and Solar combined still supply less than 2% of our energy needs after two decades of aggressive development, and I’ve cited this as reason to question whether it’s realistic to build 50 times more wind and solar in the next 25 years than we’ve built in the last 25 years. So I feel obliged to acknowledge that just like wind and solar, nuclear supplies less than 2% of our energy today, and it will be necessary to build 50 times that amount by 2050 to phase out fossil fuels completely. So it’s reasonable to question whether I’m being hypocritical when I say it makes perfect sense to embrace nuclear as our primary strategy for baseload power generation.

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