Experts say world is ‘past peak fossil power’ but warn against uneven development of energy projects
Nuclear power generation is likely to break records in 2025 as more countries invest in reactors to fuel the shift to a low-carbon global economy, while renewable energy is likely to overtake coal as a power source early next year, data has shown.
China, India, Korea and Europe are likely to have new reactors come on stream, while several in Japan are also forecast to return to generation, and French output should increase, according to a report on the state of global electricity markets published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Wednesday.
Electricity demand is also expected to increase around the world, fuelled largely by the move to a low-carbon economy. Electric vehicles and heat pumps, as well as many low-carbon industrial processes, require electricity rather than oil and gas.
Nuclear is expensive because when particulate pollution kills millions of people every year, nobody cares at all. But when a nuclear accident kills exactly zero people, we get massive levels of hysteria and shut down a dozen nuclear power plants on the other side of the planet.
Imagine the reaction if there was a single nuclear disaster that killed 9 million people. According to greenpeace that’d be 9 chernobyls, but more likely it would be between 100 and 1000 chernobyls. Do you think people might be a bit upset about that? But with fossil fuels that is now happening every single year, and it’s probably just going to get worse. (CO2 emissions are just getting higher every year despite all the growth in renewables) And you get a few news headlines about it and then everyone forgets. Weirdly enough climate change caused by the same fossil fuels gets far more attention, even though those effects are even harder for the average person to understand.
And even with this level of paranoia about nuclear, with the incredible level of security put in with gen 3 reactors that directly contribute to the massive cost and time overruns, we still have these “nuclear is not safe enough” claims flying around.
That’s the dumbest take I’ve ever heard on this topic and that’s saying a lot. And how do you know how many people were killed by the Fukushima triple meltdown that is in no way contained and has displaced tens of thousands of people permanently? The answer is we don’t know because the Japanese government has systematically suppressed any reliable information from coḿing out. Which just goes to show that nuclear power is a danger to democracy on top of all its other drawbacks.
And who ever said the alternative to building nuclear plants is building more fossil fuel generation capacity? That’s just delusional. Nobody is doing that, in fact fossil ist very quickly being replaced by renewable at a pace nuclear could in no realistic scenario get even remotely close to.
So which part is wrong? Does pollution not kill millions of people each year? Is shutting down reactors on the other side of the planet a smart move when the causes of one disaster are completely inapplicable to them? Are both of these responses reasonable and proportional?
you’re sounding like a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think japan has a police state that is in the habit of suppressing all information. I’ll admit zero deaths is hyperbole for fukushima. There were probably a few deaths directly caused by, it, maybe a few dozen (at most, and totally unproven) from long-term health effects, and many deaths from the (unnecessary in hindsight) rapid evacuation. They still pale in comparison to the 19 thousand deaths from the tsunami that caused the disaster.
Certainly not an enormous leap in logic at all. No sir. It’s just that the deadly nuclear radiation spontaneously causes the death of liberty. Russia only covers up their nuclear accidents (on those RBMK reactors they are still running) because of nuclear power, certainly not because of the way their society structured.
You just said that. Nobody else said that.
Like CBS?
or the New York Times?
or Mainichi?
I could go on. This is public knowledge. But there’s no point trying to argue with the willfully ignorant. I’ll leave it at that.
Did you even read your own articles?
CBS:
NYT:
Mainichi:
None of these support anything close to the kind of cover up needed to result in a “nobody can know how many people died” level of lack of information. They’re mostly about failing to report the disaster fast enough and downplaying it by using certain wording and having a lax security culture. Not about the government preventing investigations or giving gag orders or something like that.