Nuclear 2.0: Why A Green Future Needs Nuclear Power

This book achieves a rare thing these days. It links two main bodies of scientific knowledge in a cohesive narrative for solving the planet's greatest challenge. The first are the hard realities of Climate Change, confirming the main scientific conclusions. The second are the solutions commensurate with the magnitudes of the challenge presented in the first. For the non-scientist, the mastery of this amalgamation takes a little time. It did for me. But rare books like this, make it much easier. It is so because Lynas successfully has mastered his material himself, after his own struggles.In this book Mark Lynas honestly, directly, clearly, and most of all, factually, synthesizes the information to present to the reader, the most effective answer to the challenge before humanity. Like me, he admits to a lack of clarity on the subject for a long time. As a committed environmentalist, he had opposed nuclear as a matter of faith. In his mighty, but little book (90 pages), Lynas re-examines his faith and finds it wanting.To Lynas, 4th gen, new nuclear, is a completely different animal from the earlier generation reactors. The Integral Fast Reactor, the IFR, was designed between 1984 and 1994 at Argonne National Laboratory, to answer all the faults of the earlier water reactors. The fast neutron reactors can not melt down; they recycle their own waste as fuel; and their products can not be used to make a bomb.In the end, he proposes the "burying of the hatchet" with environmentalists (like himself), who have opposed nuclear. With renewables and efficiencies, new nuclear would provide the steady, safe, sustainable, carbon dioxide free, base power for the grid, in great plentitude, for all the needs on a fast growing planet. And this, in the magnitudes, that renewables and efficiencies would NOT COME CLOSE to achieving alone. This key conclusion he well supports in direct and telling detail.The reader will come to his or her own conclusions, but this thesis in my opinion, is central to organizing the human response to the coming climate fiasco, in the most rational and direct manner. I think it's the essential perspective.

This book is written by an environmentalist for other environmentalists. Its main objective is to explain that nuclear power is safe. The author, Mark Lynas, claims that there is no alternative to nuclear power given the need to reduce CO2 emissions and slow down climate change. The book is well written and easy to read. It is aimed at the average person who knows little about the subject. It is short, about 25,000 words, and a little superficial. I was a little frustrated that there was not more detail, but it works as a high-level overview.The US gets 19% of its electricity from nuclear power, but the last nuclear plant completed in this country started operation in 1995. Anti-nuclear campaigners have helped kill off the industry in the US. Nuclear energy is a complicated subject and because so few people in the media and politics seem to understand the science, emotion has triumphed over hard facts and reason. Lynas goes through each of the urban legends surrounding nuclear power and demolishes them one by one. The evidence from Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Fukushima shows that humans can withstand a lot more radiation than was originally anticipated. Studies show that the Japanese 'A' bomb survivors had only a 0.5% increased risk of dying from cancer. About 50 people died as a result of the Chernobyl accident not the thousands that were predicted. At Three Mile Island the release of radiation was so small that nobody was harmed. Nuclear waste can be stored safely. In the film The China Syndrome it was suggested that the molten core of a nuke could bore through the Earth and literally reach China. The accident at Fukushima proved this was pure fantasy. On the positive side, a 2013 study from James Hansen showed that the use of nuclear power between 1971 and 2009 avoided the premature deaths of 1.84 million people, thanks to its air pollution benefits.It has become too expensive for the average utility to build a nuclear plant in the US. The over-engineering and over-regulation makes the costs horrendous. Southern Company, which is one of the biggest utilities in the US is building a new facility in Georgia at a cost of $16 billion. Even they are getting financial assistance from the US government. Given the fear of US investors for all things nuclear, new projects can only get built with government help or risk sharing.What Lynas makes clear is that we can't reduce CO2 with renewables alone. Renewables are intermittent and produce a much smaller bang for the buck. In 2012 wind produced 2.3% of global electricity and solar 0.4%. In the US the numbers were 3.5% and 0.1%. A solar plant in Germany will produce less than 10% as much electricity as a nuclear plant of the same capacity in MW. Solar only really makes economic sense in sunny countries. Onshore wind is unpopular and offshore wind is too expensive. Greenpeace has advocated a "pie-in the sky" strategy whereby wind would produce 22% of global electricity by 2030 and solar 17%. The cost would be $8.8 trillion and there is just not the land available for all those windmills. This clearly is not going to happen.France has embraced the nuclear dream and has 58 working nuclear plants, generating 80% of the country's electricity. French nukes have a great safety record and all of their high-level waste is stored in one facility about the size of a basketball court. Germany is situated next door and has invested heavily in renewables. It now gets about 12% of its electricity from wind and solar and 18% from nuclear. Its retail electricity rates are 82% higher than those in France. One can only speculate at the eventual cost to customers if Germany realizes its 80% renewables target in 2050. Germany is now closing its nukes because it has a powerful anti-nuclear lobby, but it is having to build coal plants to replace the lost output. Make sense?Unlike most countries, the US has plenty of gas and coal. Building new coal plants in the US has become very difficult, the public does not like them them and gas fired plants are cheaper. Since nuclear is off the table, gas has become the favored base load option. However, gas also produces CO2, so it is not an ideal solution.Reading this book I concluded that the US and Germany had abandoned nuclear power mainly for irrational reasons. Lynas tries to placate his friends in the environmental movement, and convince them that he is not a traitor. He does not blame them for their misguided activism and the misinformation that they spread over the decades. Had the environmental movement not become obsessed with nuclear power we would probably be in a much better position today.

This is to date the single most complete, clear, and relatively concise treatment of the subject of nuclear power that I have read (and I've read a number of them). I highly recommend it to all... especially to those who still question whether nuclear power is as undeniably safe, clean, and economical as it in fact is. I found it to cover a remarkably full range of the important issues and facts and history, with great care and accuracy.I've been an environmentalist, mountaineer, cyclist, and fighter for social justice and rational application of science and medicine all my life. I am strongly opposed to reliance of fossil fuel, which kills tens of thousands per year and rapes the environment generally (coal and oil and natural gas mining), in addition to the increasingly strongly documented role of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel in accelerating global warming. The child of two teachers, trained in science and medicine at Harvard, UCSD, and elsewhere I have a special appreciation of clear yet detailed communication. This book should be read by all. It helps dispel the many anti-nuclear myths, on by noe, clearly and factually, and also addresses the many myths regarding the false notion that "renewable" power is anything other than a proven failure when it comes to meeting most of our electricity needs, or displacing use of fossil fuel.It is honest and straightforward.

Super livre, facile et agréable à lire. Toute la démonstration est intéressante. La fin laisse un peu à désirer dans la mesure où il essaye de conclure sans ouvrir à vers la suite : comment fonctionnent​ les politiques énergétique des pays ? Comment son plan va se greffer dessus ? Ce n'est pas l'objet du livre et plutôt que de laisser un autre livre / auteur le traiter, il a préféré proposer un doux rêve sympathique assaisonné de "ça va pas être facile". Un incontournable pour ceux qui n'y connaissent rien pourtant.

Outstanding book. It puts everything into perspective. Have you wondered why Germany's green movement has resulted in the highest CO2 emissions in the EU? The first thing everyone mentions are accidents from first gen nuclear power plants. I don't see too many people driving 100 year old cars either. New 4th gen reactors are safe and will burn spent fuels from old gen plants. Win win - no CO2. Everyone (especially Lionardo Dicaprio) should read this book.. Way to go Mark.

El libro definitivo que deberías leer para cambiar de opinión sobre la energía nuclear. El futuro deberá ser con renovables Y nucleares 2.0

Das Buch hat mich überzeugt. Kein Ideologe ist hier am Werk gewesen, sondern jemand der Chancen, Risiken und Kosten verschiedener Szenarien darstellt und so ein realistisches Bild entwirft von den Möglichkeiten, dem Nutzen und der Erfordernisswieder verstärkt in Kernenergie zu investieren. Der Autor macht klar, dass der Ausstieg aus der Kernenergie fast ausschließlich zugunsten der Kohle erfolgt und dass so der Klimaerwärmung nicht zu begegnen sein wird. Der Autor befürwortet einen Energiemix aus Wind, Sonne, Kernenergie, Gas, Kohle und Öl. Im Gegensatz zu ideologisch gefärbten Lektüren sind hier Zeiträumen und Zahlen genannt, die auch politisch machbar erscheinen. Der Author geht verständlich auf neue Kernkraftwerkskonzepte ein, sowohl geplante, wie auch momentan schon im Bau befindliche. Sicher keine Lektüre für Besserwisser, aber eine für Wissenwoller.Rainer Livschütz

We cannot afford to turn away from the possibility of unlimited, cheap and carbon-emissions free energy without a full understanding of it and the issues connected to it. If James Hansen, the 'father' of climate change science, thinks it should be investigated as a possible solution for avoided the threatening carbon/climate disaster (see "Storms of my Grandchildren"), then it deserves a look. Or, to put it another way, how much do YOU really know about nuclear energy? Probably not as much as you could or should.This is what Mark Lynas, a respected environmentalist author with a sound track record ("Six Degrees," for instance), has set out to do in this modest, as well as cheap, and easily accessible book, well aware that he might upset some of his colleagues on green issues. But this is what has to be done, in a no-stone-unturned approach to escaping climate change. While people like Harvey Wassermann scream hysterically from the roof-tops, Animal Farm-like, "Renewables good, nuclear bad," (and getting his "facts" muddled into the bargain) you may want to ask yourself how many people have died in accidents at nuclear power-plants, to see if the word "Nuclear" deserves its bad reputation. You may like to reflect that no-one died at Fukushima, no-one died at Three Mile Island. According to a list, compiled from multiple sources, in Wikipedia, the figure is less than 70 fatalities at the time of the accident, including Chernobyl, from 1952 to 2009. Meanwhile, last year 32,000 Americans died in car accidents. And we still drive cars.This book shows how nuclear technology has moved on; the way we have made nuclear energy in the past has been incredibly inefficient (1% of the fuel's potential) and incredibly dirty, using so called slow neutrons in fission. Using fast neutrons - the Nuclear 2.0 of the title (although fast reactors have been around in experimental form since the 1950s) - you can stop mining Uranium as there is already enough in the world, you can reduce waste, you can actually burn waste (Hansen mentions an estimate of $50 trillion's worth waste already sitting around in the US that could be turned into fuel and turned from being waste) you can reduce weapons proliferation (what waste there is, is unsuitable to make weapons from.) You might be tempted to say, "What's not to like?""Nuclear" might just be the clean word we have been looking for. If renewables can't hack it - and, with the best will the world, as fast as we expand them, we are making life difficult by constantly increasing our per capita demand on top of an increasing population - at the very least this book gives an excellent and up-to-date picture of the current situation. Even if you don't agree, at least you will be better informed.