” In the Year 2000, nuclear provided 30% of Germany’s power mix. ALL NUCLEAR PLANTS WILL BE SHUT DOWN BY 2022″

The German people have been duped. Their energy turn-around doesn’t look like a fossil fuel phase-out or an attempt to clean up the environment. In fact, it looks more like a not-so-cleverly disguised technique for prolonging the life of their dirty and polluting coal industry.

Their mistake is to ignore the clear science that says that small radiation doses are truely harmless, and instead embrace the retoric of those who would mislead the public for their own interests.

Jim, your own tirelessly optimistic promotion of OTEC is similar to the attempts of other environmentalist who baselessly fear nuclear power, but still hope to find a way to decarbonize without it. It might work someday, but historically, anti-nuclearism has always led to more fossil fuel use, more air pollution, and more harm to human health. We can’t afford to keep paying this very high price so that people can keep ignoring the truth (that no matter how scary we find nuclear, it still is the best option).

Jim, your own tirelessly optimistic promotion of OTEC is similar to the attempts of other environmentalist who baselessly fear nuclear power, but still hope to find a way to decarbonize without it. It might work someday, but historically, anti-nuclearism has always led to more fossil fuel use, more air pollution, and more harm to human health. We can’t afford to keep paying this very high price so that people can keep ignoring the truth
Quoted for truth.

The profits of the fossil fuel industry are immense, and would make it trivial to support many—possibly dozens or even hundreds—of advocates of false “alternatives” to nuclear power, meanwhile sticking with their products. Amory Lovins has reportedly stated that fossil fuel interests have been very good to him. We know Mark Z. Jacobson is largely sponsored by the Precourt Institute, based on oil money. In a rational world the slightest whiff of contamination by FF interests should utterly destroy someone’s environmental credentials, so why do any of these people still have any shred of Green credibility?!

Again, there are still zero GWatts of OTEC on the entire planet. Therefore there is no credible safety record nor cost record for comparison. Cost effective OTEC is essentially no closer at hand than fusion. Even if it becomes viable for baseload in coastal cities, it will be another big stretch for it to competitively make hydrogen which can replace gasoline, and even if that happens, it will be another big stretch for it to competitively make hydrogen to replace fossil gas for electrical peaking, and then another big stretch for it to make hydrogen for baseload electricity. Such a long, hard road.

Also, all arguments built around expensive nuclear decomissioning are inherent BS. When nuclear plants are allowed to serve out their economical lifetime, the decomissioning funds, which are set aside from electricity sales, can easily pay for decomissioning. It is only Shoreham fiascos that are the problem (i.e. when perfectly viable nuclear plants are effectively stolen by politicians and forced to close, resulting in more fossil fuel profits and air pollution).

For comparison, here’s another source and another on the energy safety issue; they all vary a bit. To me, the details don’t matter; the only important feature for any of these sources is that coal is the standout. Any clean energy that fails to close every single coal plant before closing the first nuclear plant is nothing short of fraudulent. And strategies that combine coal with renewables (e.g. Germany, Wyoming, North Carolina) are the most deceitful of all; even the tiniest amount of coal in the mix makes the renewable-rich option enormously deadlier than nuclear. After coal, the nex biggest safety issue for electricity is biomass burning, any attack on nuclear which doesn’t also attack coal and biomass is also off-target.

your own comment indicates 9000 died in the 1986 Chernobyl melt down

Fatalities from Chernobyl were 56, breaking down to 49 from acute radiation sickness and 7 fatal thyroid cancers. This number would fit on a single bus. The claims of thousands or millions are based on dose-response models known to be wrong, but kept around because they are politically useful.

Jim, the prices quoted above for OTEC do not come from EIA. As is standard practice in the “renewables” community they’re hypothetical numbers merged with real numbers in the hope no one will notice.

Why would EIA bother, when the largest plant to date is projected to generate 100 kilowatts by the end of 2016 – one one-thousandth of the smallest plant listed in the chart?

Until someone comes up with even a modest utility scale prototype, OTEC will remain a pipe dream with a very big pipe. For OTEC and hamster wheels powered by genetically engineered, very big hamsters, we don’t have time.

You have a number of errors and misconceptions which invalidate your argument.

Currently we consume about 18TW and from below it is suggested this should be all nuclear.

18 TW isn’t global electric consumption (which is closer to 2 TW), it is total primary energy consumption before conversion losses. Essentially all of this winds up as heat somewhere (a trivial fraction is radiated to space as non-thermal EM waves).

Most of the rest of your argument is based on that erroneous concept, and must be discarded. I will not address it further.

For one thing it causes thermal stratification, which is slowing the thermocline

Addition of greenhouse gases adds far more heat to the oceans than nuclear plants can, or could.

Unless and until OTEC actually starts displacing fossil fuels (not just being added in pilot-level amounts at uneconomic prices), proffering it as an alternative to nuclear borders on fraud. Further, the calculations I’ve seen here from OTEC proponents show that even the largest possible OTEC deployment is very likely to fall short of supplying demand. The rest must also be provided by some other means, and it must be carbon-free or the effort is for naught. I’m afraid there is no viable alternative to the atom.

with the production of 2.5TW the surface temperature of the oceans

and therefore the atmosphere would be reduced on the order of one degree F per decade.

I find this difficult to believe. At 2% thermal efficiency, a 2.5 TW OTEC effort would put 125 TW of heat into the lower oceans. At the IPCC’s 2007 estimate of 1.6 W/m², total human climate forcing is ~820 TW (and rising).

when you produce the energy carrier hydrogen with Greg Rau’s supergreen hydrogen process to get it to market, consuming 20 to 40 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of H2 produced, you would sequesters about 7GT of CO2 annually

What I recall from my analysis of the Navy CO2/H2 co-production scheme’s figures when it first came around was that only about 1/3 of the input energy went to hydrogen production; the rest was lost liberating CO2 or just as heat. This gives you a rather massive energy deficit right there, even before losses in conversion and transport.

Nothing prevents the “supergreen” process from being used with other sources of electricity. However, there are less energy-intensive methods of CO2 capture, and the same minerals which Rau’s process uses can be exploited with much less energy expenditure via enhanced weathering. Given the solubility limit of silicic acid in water which limits the amount which can be used on land, one of the suggestions was to spread crushed olivine on ocean beaches where wave-action working will mechanically accelerate the surface reactions and both silica and carbonate can wash off in far greater quantities than rivers can transport.

you would sequesters about 7GT of CO2 annually and neutralize the ocean acidification Bob points out is a threat to phytoplankton and other marine life.

Scratching on the back of a virtual envelope, 1 ppmv of CO2 is roughly 157 grams per square meter of Earth’s surface or 8 gigatonnes. Since the USA alone emits over 6 GT of CO2 per year and accounts for a rapidly-shrinking fraction of global emissions, 7 GT is just not going to cut it. OTOH, it would make a nice addition to a complete decarbonization of other energy and help return the atmosphere to 350 ppm. However, doing that completely requires pulling out some 400 gigatonnes of CO2; that’s a staggering figure. At one time I pondered how such a thing could be done, given unlimited cheap energy. I came up with the idea of synthesizing LDPE from water and CO2 and injecting it into old oil wells. I just realized that Bakelite injected into geothermal layers hot enough to finish polymerization would probably be better; it could be called neo-coal.

With 14TW you would produce 1.8 GT/yr of H2

Given the losses in the Rau process that figure seems to be in the ballpark. However, 1 kg of hydrogen only contains 120 MJ/kg LHV, or only about 200 quads of energy in the 1.8 GT. This is less than half of current human energy consumption today and far less than the masses of up-and-coming developing countries will demand.

What you’re laying out here is a supplement at best; it falls far short of being a solution.

I don’t have the chutzpah to dispute a former NASA chief technologist or the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory on this.

How much experience do they have doing big engineering projects? At 5% thermal efficiency, a 400 MW(e) plant is moving 8 GW(th). That’s as much as 3 good-sized nuclear reactors. If you are looking for relevant expertise, you’re going to find a lot more of it at Bechtel and Fluor than NASA or JHU.

One of the things I’m going on is breathless articles about OTEC going back almost 50 years; I recall one mentioning the production of strawberries in Hawaii using the cold deep water to provide the low root zone temperatures the plants need. Almost half a century after that we’re STILL playing at the sub-megawatt level, and that’s with the convenience of supporting equipment and piping on solid ground. The problems will grow as you go into the equatorial waters where most of your OTEC potential is; the open ocean is what’s called a “high-energy environment” and tends to break things.

Let me ask you a question: how much money would you put into an OTEC venture if one had an IPO today?

Using SNF as a heat source for the tar sands is clever, but a quick search informed me that dry-cask storage is limited to 45 kW heat output per cask, so the volume of fuel to be transported would be awfully large.

The big problems for OTEC are in the hard-to-impossible categories: thermodynamics, materials science, mechanical engineering, anti-fouling, and dealing with destructive natural forces. The big problems for nuclear are purely political, and can literally change with the stroke of a pen (the current problems were established with one and can be removed the same way). Political problems can seem insoluble, until suddenly they aren’t. With China, Korea and Russia standing as counter-examples to the “can’t be done” anti-nukes, I don’t think we have long to wait.

Jim, why are you assuming that 36 TW of nuclear waste heat would be “stored in the ocean” when thousands of times that amount of solar energy are radiated out to space from the earth’s surface, 24/7/365? Why are you assuming all waste heat from nuclear ends up in the ocean, or even that all nuclear plants use once-through cooling of ocean water?

About .1% of all ambient energy at the surface of the earth is being trapped by carbon in the atmosphere, with a tiny fraction of that ending up in the ocean. It’s the .1% of the 120 petawatts from the sun which is causing climate change – not the .1% of the insignificant fraction of energy from all the earth’s anthropogenic sources combined.

Similarly, the liability to sea life of impingement and entrainment is infinitesimal compared to that of acidification.

The assigning of significance to the insignificant and obliviousness to scale are products of irrational fear, not sound analysis. It seems when these debates reach their logical conclusion, you resort to “nuclear has squandered its goodwill”. Instead, what’s been squandered is the imperative of addressing climate change in an attempt to placate unfounded fears.

Jim, this is fact-free nonsense (if Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1996, referred to the “nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month” the poor geezer must have been suffering from dementia – he was ten years off).

But this is made up. A web of lies, constructed to justify irrational, primal fear.

Sorry, but I’m finding I have little tolerance left for the hysteria (written in all-caps, or not) which is responsible for hastening an environmental disaster.

Jim, I really don’t care whether you disagree with me. I’m not an expert, that’s why I’ll happily defer to them.

Eric Chaisson’s paper is an interesting one, if a bit simplistic (his claim that albedo changes globally are “negligible” is demonstrably false) but he’s an astrophysicist, not a climatologist. Climatologists overwhelmingly agree that nuclear can play an important role in limiting climate change.

I don’t accept the “agree to disagree” BS – if you disagree with my experts, tell me why. If not, I’ll accept your resignation from this discussion as concession of the points I make

Jim, like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Union of Concerned Scientists might have once had some Concerned Scientists in its employ. But their current president is a lawyer, and “The Union of Concerned Lawyers” has an almost comical ring to it, doesn’t it?

Be that as it may – there are (as expected) not only no “quick facts” in your link, but no facts at all. Without getting into details, I’ll refer you to this letter from 75 of the top conservationists in the world – respected scientists, every one of them – arguing that nuclear could make a “major, and perhaps, leading” contribution to preventing global biodiversity depletion:

“An Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy

As conservation scientists concerned with global depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of the human life-support system this entails, we, the co-signed, support the broad conclusions drawn in the article Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation published in Conservation Biology (Brook & Bradshaw 2014).

Brook and Bradshaw argue that the full gamut of electricity-generation sources—including nuclear power—must be deployed to replace the burning of fossil fuels, if we are to have any chance of mitigating severe climate change. They provide strong evidence for the need to accept a substantial role for advanced nuclear power systems with complete fuel recycling—as part of a range of sustainable energy technologies that also includes appropriate use of renewables, energy storage and energy efficiency. This multi-pronged strategy for sustainable energy could also be more cost-effective and spare more land for biodiversity, as well as reduce non-carbon pollution (aerosols, heavy metals).

Given the historical antagonism towards nuclear energy amongst the environmental community, we accept that this stands as a controversial position. However, much as leading climate scientists have recently advocated the development of safe, next-generation nuclear energy systems to combat global climate change (Caldeira et al. 2013), we entreat the conservation and environmental community to weigh up the pros and cons of different energy sources using objective evidence and pragmatic trade-offs, rather than simply relying on idealistic perceptions of what is ‘green’.

Although renewable energy sources like wind and solar will likely make increasing contributions to future energy production, these technology options face real-world problems of scalability, cost, material and land use, meaning that it is too risky to rely on them as the only alternatives to fossil fuels. Nuclear power—being by far the most compact and energy-dense of sources—could also make a major, and perhaps leading, contribution. As scientists, we declare that an evidence-based approach to future energy production is an essential component of securing biodiversity’s future and cannot be ignored. It is time that conservationists make their voices heard in this policy arena.

Signatories (in alphabetical order)

Professor Andrew Balmford, Professor of Conservation Science, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. apb12@cam.ac.uk

Professor Andrew J. Beattie, Emeritus, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia. abeattie@bio.mq.edu.au

Assistant Professor David P. Bickford, Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore. dbsbdp@nus.edu.sg

Professor Tim M. Blackburn, Professor of Invasion Biology, Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, University College London, United Kingdom. t.blackburn@ucl.ac.uk

Professor Daniel T. Blumstein, Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, USA. marmots@ucla.edu

Professor Luigi Boitani, Dipartimento di Biologia, e Biotecnologie Charles Darwin, Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy. luigi.boitani@uniroma1.it

Professor Mark S. Boyce, Professor and Alberta Conservation Association Chair in Fisheries and Wildlife, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Canada. boyce@ualberta.ca

Professor David M.J.S. Bowman, Professor of Environmental Change Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Tasmania, Australia. david.bowman@utas.edu.au

Professor Scott P. Carroll, Institute for Contemporary Evolution and Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of California Davis, USA. spcarroll@ucdavis.edu

Associate Professor Phillip Cassey, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Australia.
Professor Stuart Chapin III, Professor Emeritus of Ecology, Department of Biology and Wildlife, Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA. terry.chapin@alaska.edu

Professor David Choquenot, Director, Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Australia. david.choquenot@canberra.edu.au

Dr Ben Collen, Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, University College London, United Kingdom. b.collen@ucl.ac.uk

Professor Richard T. Corlett, Director, Centre for Integrative Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. corlett@xtbg.org.cn

Dr Franck Courchamp, Director of Research, Laboratoire Ecologie, Systématique et Evolution – UMR CNRS, Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Université Paris-Sud, France. franck.courchamp@u-psud.fr

Professor Chris B. Daniels, Director, Barbara Hardy Institute, University of South Australia, Australia. chris.daniels@unisa.edu.au

Professor Chris Dickman, Professor of Ecology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. chris.dickman@sydney.edu.au

Associate Professor Don Driscoll, College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, The Australian National University, Australia. don.driscoll@anu.edu.au

Professor David Dudgeon, Chair Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. ddudgeon@hku.hk

Associate Professor Erle C. Ellis, Geography and Environmental Systems, University of Maryland, USA. ece@umbc.edu

Dr Damien A. Fordham, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Australia. damien.fordham@adelaide.edu.au

Dr Eddie Game, Senior Scientist, The Nature Conservancy Worldwide Office, Australia. egame@tnc.org

Professor Kevin J. Gaston, Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation, Director, Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, United Kingdom. k.j.gaston@exeter.ac.uk

Professor Dr Jaboury Ghazoul, Professor of Ecosystem Management, ETH Zürich, Institute for Terrestrial Ecosystems, Switzerland. jaboury.ghazoul@env.ethz.ch

Professor Robert G. Harcourt, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia. robert.harcourt@mq.edu.au

Professor Susan P. Harrison, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California Davis, USA. spharrison@ucdavis.edu

Professor Fangliang He, Canada Research Chair in Biodiversity and Landscape Modelling, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, Canada and State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol and School of Life Sciences, Sun-yat Sen University, Guangzhou, China. fhe@ualberta.ca

Professor Mark A. Hindell, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Australia. mark.hindell@utas.edu.au

Professor Richard J. Hobbs, School of Plant Biology, The University of Western Australia, Australia. richard.hobbs@uwa.edu.au

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Professor and Director, Global Change Institute, The University of Queensland, Australia. oveh@uq.edu.au

Professor Marcel Holyoak, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, USA. maholyoak@ucdavis.edu

Professor Lesley Hughes, Distinguished Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia. lesley.hughes@mq.edu.au

Professor Christopher N. Johnson, Department of Zoology, University of Tasmania, Australia. c.n.johnson@utas.edu.au

Dr Julia P.G. Jones, Senior Lecturer in Conservation Biology, School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University, United Kingdom. julia.jones@bangor.ac.uk

Professor Kate E. Jones, Biodiversity Modelling Research Group, University College London, United Kingdom. kate.e.jones@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Menna E. Jones, Department of Zoology, University of Tasmania, Australia. menna.jones@utas.edu.au

Dr Lucas Joppa, Conservation Biologist, United Kingdom. lujoppa@microsoft.com

Associate Professor Lian Pin Koh, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Australia. lianpin.koh@adelaide.edu.au

Professor Charles J. Krebs, Emeritus, Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Canada. krebs@zoology.ubc.ca
Dr Robert C. Lacy, Conservation Biologist, USA. rlacy@ix.netcom.com

Associate Professor Susan Laurance, Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change, Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Studies, James Cook University, Australia. susan.laurance@jcu.edu.au

Professor William F. Laurance, Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation, Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science and School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Australia. bill.laurance@jcu.edu.au

Professor Peter Ng Kee Lin, Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore. dbsngkl@nus.edu.sg

Professor Thomas E. Lovejoy, Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and University Professor in the Environmental Science and Policy department, George Mason University, USA. tlovejoy@unfoundation.org

Dr Antony J Lynam, Global Conservation Programs, Wildlife Conservation Society, USA. tlynam@wcs.org

Professor Anson W. Mackay, Department of Geography, University College London, United Kingdom. ans.mackay@ucl.ac.uk

Professor Helene D. Marsh, College of Marine and Environmental Sciences, Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research, James Cook University, Australia. helene.marsh@jcu.edu.au

Professor Michelle Marvier, Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Santa Clara University, USA. mmarvier@scu.edu

Professor Lord Robert M. May of Oxford OM AC Kt FRS, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. robert.may@zoo.ox.ac.uk

Dr Margaret M. Mayfield, Director, The Ecology Centre, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia. m.mayfield@uq.edu.au

Dr Clive R. McMahon, Sydney Institute of Marine Science and Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Australia. clive.mcmahon@utas.edu.au

Dr Mark Meekan, Marine Biologist, Australia. m.meekan@aims.gov.au

Dr Erik Meijaard, Borneo Futures Project, People and Nature Consulting, Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia. emeijaard@gmail.com

Professor Scott Mills, Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program in Global Environmental Change, North Carolina State University, USA. lsmills@ncsu.edu

Professor Atte Moilanen, Research Director, Conservation Decision Analysis, University of Helsinki, Finland. atte.moilanen@helsinki.fi

Professor Craig Moritz, Research School of Biology, The Australian National University, Australia. craig.moritz@anu.edu.au

Dr Robin Naidoo, Adjunct Professor, Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability University of British Columbia, Canada. robin.naidoo@wwfus.org

Professor Reed F. Noss, Provost’s Distinguished Research Professor, University of Central Florida, USA. reed.noss@ucf.edu

Associate Professor Julian D. Olden, Freshwater Ecology and Conservation Lab, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, USA. olden@uw.edu

Professor Maharaj Pandit, Professor and Head, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Delhi, India. mkpandit@cismhe.org

Professor Kenneth H. Pollock, Professor of Applied Ecology, Biomathematics and Statistics, Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University, USA. pollock@ncsu.edu

Professor Hugh P. Possingham, School of Biological Science and School of Maths and Physics, The University of Queensland, Australia. h.possingham@uq.edu.au

Professor Peter H. Raven, George Engelmann Professor of Botany Emeritus, President Emeritus, Missouri Botanical Garden, Washington University in St. Louis, USA. peter.raven@mobot.org

Professor David M. Richardson, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Invasion Biology, Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. rich@sun.ac.za

Dr Euan G. Ritchie, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Australia. e.ritchie@deakin.edu.au

Professor Terry L. Root, Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, USA. troot@stanford.edu

Dr Çağan H. Şekercioğlu, Assistant Professor, Biology, University of Utah, USA and Doçent 2010, Biology/Ecology, Inter-university Council (UAK) of Turkey. c.s@utah.edu

Associate Professor Douglas Sheil, Department of Ecology and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway. douglas.sheil@nmbu.no

Professor Richard Shine AM FAA, Professor in Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. rick.shine@sydney.edu.au

Professor William J. Sutherland, Miriam Rothschild Professor of Conservation Biology, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. w.sutherland@zoo.cam.ac.uk

Professor Chris D. Thomas, FRS, Department of Biology, University of York, United Kingdom. chris.thomas@york.ac.uk

Professor Ross M. Thompson, Chair of Water Science, Institute of Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Australia. ross.thompson@canberra.edu.au

Professor Ian G. Warkentin, Environmental Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. ian.warkentin@grenfell.mun.ca

Professor Stephen E. Williams, Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change, School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Australia. stephen.williams@jcu.edu.au

Professor Kirk O. Winemiller, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences and Interdisciplinary Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Texas A&M University, USA. k-winemiller@tamu.edu

http://www.savediablocanyon.org/conservationists-for-nuclear/

Jim, I’m not sure why you’d bring up mutually-assured destruction on TEC, other than to further the misconception that nuclear energy and nuclear apocalypse are somehow related. You repeat the “proliferation” mantra, a concept with no analog in the fossil fuels realm, and attempt to link the arms race to Chernobyl by including both in the same muddled thought.

Instead, you might bring up the Megatons to Megawatts program, where 550 tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) from Russia – the equivalent of 20,000 nuclear warheads – was purchased by the U.S. and turned into clean electricity. Or that any country possessing the technology to turn nuclear fuel into nuclear warheads would have no problem buying raw material on the open market with which to do so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

With the antinuclear ethos so obviously at odds with fact, it’s appropriate that a reference to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and their scary clock appear here. From what I understand, there were once some atomic scientists working at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Now, their executive director has a background in political science, and their editorial staff seems to be made up of activists who self-identify as “scientists” with scant justification to do so.

“I also believe that GW is a greater threat than anything nuclear weapons is ever going to counter and it is almost assuredly more of a real threat to the territorial integrity of the United States or any other counter with a coastline than anything else on the horizon.”

Exactly. This is how the doomsday clock should now apply! We must juxtapose the threat of nuclear weapons against the promise of peaceful application of nuclear energy towards mitigating climate change threats. So let’s get busy and keep that clock from stricking midnight by unleashing the peaceful use of nuclear energy!

Pray tell me how any low-albedo PV process which creates 4 units of waste heat for every unit of output (20% efficient panels) can solve those problems… especially when it requires fossil-fired backup when the sun isn’t out?

You must be disgingenuous. The answers you seek are right in front of you and have been all the time.

The problem with polar/glacial melting is heat at the poles/glaciers. Nuclear power plants are far from them. The polar problem is non-condensible GHGs, which keep heat from radiating away most effectively where cold and night minimize the influence of water vapor. A coast-full of NPPs in California would only heat things southward, where the ocean current flows.
The heat-trapping power of the GHGs emitted by fossil-fired plants is many tens of times their thermal emissions. Nuclear power has no GHGs, so its influence is limited to its direct waste heat.
Technologies tested but not yet commercially developed can increase the thermal efficiency of nuclear power to equal anything else out there, again without concern about GHGs.
Off-peak nuclear process heat is a prospect for atmospheric carbon capture, potentially creating GHG-negative products.
And as for the silly clock…

Yes, we’ve been over this before. Burying the excess heat doesn’t actually get rid of it. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten into depth in my technical response yet.

The same applies to heat sent to the abyss

The abyss is not “gone”. It is a finite resource and still affects sea levels.

OTEC also provides a boost to thermohaline circulation

That’s nice, but (a) it’s on the ragged edge of thermodynamic feasibility and (b) it cannot handle human needs by itself; even at the limits of OTEC the losses in conversion for transport reduce the available end-use energy well below needs (and boost the cost).

Nuclear power produces none of these benefits and in fact contributes to the thermal stratification that is slowing the THC

Let me work some numbers for you: In 2013, total human energy consumption was roughly 18.0 TW, compared to average non-reflected solar energy of roughly 122,000 TW. If nuclear thermal output was boosted to 60 TW(th), it would contribute 0.05% as much to the world as the Sun does. Almost none of this would be close to the arctic or near glaciers. The influence on thermal stratification and warming of the poles: nil.

The influence of the elimination of fossil-fuel GHG emissions would be immense; positive GHG forcings from human emissions are about 2.5 W/m², compared to maybe half a watt after tripling human energy use and going all-nuclear.

Mr Baird, youbrought up the heating effect of nuclear, countered by PE using actual facts. So now you are suggesting that your point prevails by means of a popularity contest?

For the record, I do not hold a PE license. Never needed one.