„Ohne Atomenergie wird es bis 2050 fast unmöglich sein, die CO2-Emissionen zu senken“, so UN-Atomenergiechef

27 comments

1. Is anyone making a real attempt to decarbonize?

2. If you’re a hammer, every problem’s a nail.

3. Given current technology, wind and solar fallacies won’t work.

4. IIRC I read that here in the UK to electrify (replace) all current combustion engine vehicles would require the equivalent of 6 nuclear power stations in capacity terms.

   Our government (election due shortly) seem to have their heads in the sand over these facts.

5. Nuclear power is incredible safe and even when it goes wrong, the effects are mostly local and regional. Nuclear waste storage is a massive red herring – even people in the industry of working on safe nuclear storage believe that it is a waste of money to dig it down to the extent planned in many European countries for example. And again, even massively improprerly stored nuclear waste, again, causes local damage. Compared to global harm from coal for example, it isn’t even comparable. Nuclear is strictly better.

6. I mean what do you expect the UN atomic energy chief to say, “yeah nuclear is cool i guess but you can do without it”?

7. With investment in nuclear, we could have been on a zero-carbon electrical grid more than 20 years ago, and we could have started to replace aging nuclear plants with solar, wind, and storage by now.  The 1.5°C limit could have been met. 

   Instead, the fossil-fuel led anti-nuclear lobby has potentially doomed us all.

8. Nuclear power is one of the safest and cleanest. People just believe the propaganda which is spread by corporations.

9. Nuclear is very expensive and people are irrationally scared of it. As renewable technology improves and international tensions between nuclear-capable countries increase both of these factors are going to get worse.

10. Yeah, like, all nuclear advocates insist on renewables + nuclear, it’s fossil companies who opposes everything and (the) dumb (subset of) environmentalists acting like people who want nuclear don’t want anything else, while pushing for renewable ONLY (while keeping current fossil plants) 

11. How is this news? He’s the “atomic energy chief”. You think he got that job without cozying up to the nuclear industry?

    Solar is cheap as dirt, and quickly getting even cheaper. Cheaper batteries are coming, whether they wind up being sodium ion or something else entirely – progress is being made quickly.

    Nuclear power is incredibly expensive, and its dying fast, so the nuclear guys are crying. They’re whining and bitching and moaning because they know that they are out of time. They want to push an expensive – dangerous – product before its made entirely useless by renewables.

    Don’t let them fool you.

    A plant paid for today will take 10 years to go into operation. What will the cost of solar and batteries be in 10 years? Exactly… they want to lock us into expensive technologies now before everyone realizes how obsolete they really are. They want to lock up money that could be going into energy storage research so we can buy energy several times more expensive than renewable energy.

12. “We can’t do it without nuclear” says atomic energy chief

    “We can’t do it without fossil fuels” says oil corporation

13. If the same amount of money that was poured into uranium fission for the last 60 years had been instead, put into domestic pump geothermal , solar thermal, domestic wind, domestic grid and storage, methane digesters, and low head hydro, global warming would have been stopped in its tracks 40 years ago.

14. Most reactor projects have run 2-5x over budget, 2x schedule, and less power generated than promised. This is in addition to the decommissioning costs, etc.
    But the large Turkish solar plant was approved in 2017 and generated full power in 2023.
    [Karapinar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karap%C4%B1nar_solar_power_plant)

15. But greenpeace dosent want nuclear.

16. The climate change movement is destroying itself with its own inflexibility and dogma.

    As an environmental process engineer I’ve seen retrofit technologies that could get near-zero carbon emissions from our existing power plants. It’s technology that is demonstrated 100% viable at the bench scale and cheap, but taking it to pilot scale the appetite for research funding and/or investment is zero. EPA grants won’t touch it because under Bush and Trump the agency was run by industry lobbyists that deny climate change exists, and under Obama and Biden they wouldn’t get near anything that wasn’t solar. The last attempt at a pilot scale demo was launched by Clinton and killed by Bush in 2002. That’s how long this technology has rotted on the vine. Even now after 20 more years of solar PV and wind turbine research, the retrofit technologies are still orders of magnitude cheaper which means we can afford to get *more* carbon out of the atmosphere.

    Even on Reddit when I’ve talked about it, nobody wants to actually hear about it works. It feels like I’m taking punches from under a wet blanket just for suggesting we consider these more economical alternatives. I’ve been called everything from a fossil fuel industry shill to a planet killer without anyone having the slightest interest in what it actually is or how it works.

    Ultimately nuclear power is suffering the same fate although there is a little more appetite for research. Too many environmental interests are making it difficult for politicians to support it. There’s going to be so much squabbling that everyone gives up and dumps their capital budgets into solar PV/wind projects. The thing about those is that the expense of the project means you’re only solving a small piece of the pie. Politicians love the political talking points of having spent billions on big green energy projects while ignoring the fact that it only meets 3% of their state’s energy demand, and the other 97% comes from old dilapidated fossil fuel plants that spew out carbon and toxic aerosol pollutants with abysmal environmental standards.

    The problem is that the politicians focus on the energy source, while the issue is the emissions that come from the process. Politicians have no clue how one leads to the other, so they base all their decisions not on what the engineers tell them but how the lobbyists sway them. Right now, the only politicians who would actually listen to practical solutions to climate change like nuclear energy are being told what to think by lobbyists who simplify it as “nuclear bad”. It’s a message that the politicians know will resonate with their base, and it lines their pockets by directing billions away from investment in nuclear energy and other very-low-carbon interim technologies that are more affordable and practical than converting the whole world to solar energy on an impossible timeline.

17. Gosh, if only someone would invent PASIVE SOLAR HOT WATER HEATERS! imagine the energy savings!!!

18. 2030 is supposedly the tipping point. with how expensive nuclear is and how long it takes to implement, I can’t believe it wouldn’t be better to put the extra money in trying to figure out a way to effectively do carbon capture. conservation will not save us at this point. we absolutely need carbon removal.

    and I’d personally like a calculation on whether we’d be better off implementing more solar, wind, and other alternatives now even if we dont fully decarbonize by 2050. than invest a ton of money into something that’s hot going to remove any pollution at all for 20 years.

    add to this, by 2050, i can’t imagine we won’t have better batteries.

19. Nuclear is NOT CO2 neutral. 

    Not if you look at the supply chain… Which leads us to find fact number 2:

    How big are the uranium reserves in the UK exactly?

20. I’ve been saying this for years! Nuclear has its problems, but it’s highly efficient and low carbon

21. Yes, build nuclear, build solar, build hydro, build wind farms. Build whatever works for your area. Just start building it.

22. Yes, well… we don’t need to “decarbonize” 100%. We need to decrease out carbon footprint drastically and quickly. Renewables are the fastest way to do that.

    This weird idea that because wind+solar every once in a while might not supply 100% demand even with predicted costs for storage included, so they “never can be carbon free”… is just dumb.

    It doesn’t need to be carbon-free. It’s *fine* if it only reduces our carbon load by 95%.

    Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

    Nuclear can’t come on line fast enough, and even if it could, there’s no way the proliferation, war, and terrorism risks are worth doing it in unstable countries, which is… most of the world. And the massive water use is going to be a problem with climate change, too.

23. Nuclear is an adjective and should not be used as a noun.

24. Pretty sure they have been saying for a while that we need nuclear, wind, solar, and water all to be able to do it.

25. Well we’d better go ask the guy who knows the most about nuclear!
     

26. I don’t know why we’re not building thorium reactors like crazy evidently several have been built. There’s really no waste there’s no meltdown possibility that threatens us it’s abundant as hell and you can’t make bombs from it. Save your breath up thoroughly research this you’re not going to sway me with but!!

27. Yes. People have been saying this for years. We should have never stopped building nuclear plants.