More Nuclear Energy, Please

From the Guardian, a left-leaning newspaper that does not try to hide the fact that it is left-leaning, this story, about why we need nuclear energy. It comes to us from the Pirate’s Cove blog, via Maggie’s Farm.

Apparently, New York State closed a nuclear power plant two months ago. No one in New York paid it much note. The Guardian reports:

On 30 April, the Indian Point nuclear power plant 30 miles north of New York City was shut down. For decades the facility provided the overwhelming majority of the city’s carbon-free electricity as well as good union jobs for almost a thousand people. Federal regulators had deemed the plant perfectly safe.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, a key figure behind the move, said that the shuttering of Indian Point brought us “a big step closer to achieving our aggressive clean energy goals”. It’s hard to reconcile that optimism with the data that’s recently come out. The first full month without the plant has seen a 46% increase in the average carbon intensity of statewide electric generation compared to when Indian Point was fully operational. New York replaced clean energy from Indian Point with fossil fuel sources like natural gas.

And this does not even account for the chance that New York City is more likely to suffer blackouts during the summer season. If such happens, it will be following the splendid example that California has set.

Should we be surprised? The Guardian says that we should not.

It’s a nightmare we should have seen coming. In Germany, nuclear power formed around a third of the country’s power generation in 2000, when a Green party-spearheaded campaign managed to secure the gradual closure of plants, citing health and safety concerns. Last year, that share fell to 11%, with all remaining stations scheduled to close by next year. A recent paper found that the last two decades of phased nuclear closures led to an increase in CO2 emissions of 36.3 megatons a year – with the increased air pollution potentially killing 1,100 people annually.

This is hard to believe, so it is probably true. The great chancellor Merkel, who caved unceremoniously to the green lobby, has chosen to replace nuclear energy with-- coal:

Like New York, Germany coupled its transition away from nuclear power with a pledge to spend more aggressively on renewables. Yet the country’s first plant closures meant carbon emissions actually increased, as the production gap was immediately filled through the construction of new coal plants. Similarly, in New York the gap will be filled in part by the construction of three new gas plants. For the Germans, investment in renewables did eventually pay dividends, but it largely replaced the old nuclear plants’ output rather than reducing existing fossil fuel consumption. The carbon intensity of German electricity is higher than the EU average.

The Guardian continues, stating the obvious. It is surely interesting to note that climate change fanatics have no use for science or rational thought.

However, even a more aggressive investment in renewable energy wouldn’t have solved Germany’s problem. There are just a handful of large economies that have already mostly decarbonized their grids; all of them have a foundation of nuclear or hydroelectricity (or both), and then to greater or lesser degrees add renewables like wind and solar on top. This is because nuclear and hydro are able to provide electricity whenever we need it. These “firm” sources of clean electricity do not need to wait for the sun to shine or the wind to blow to power the ventilators in our hospitals. Batteries and other forms of energy storage are great, and we need much more funding of research and development to make them even better, but until huge technological leaps occur, sustainables are hindered by the need for cooperative weather.

So, satisfying our energy needs depends on cooperative weather. Perhaps we need to perform some ritual sacrifices to the god of the weather. There, that will solve all of our problems.