"In the last 30 years, we've only built two nuclear reactors from scratch in the United States"the Vogtle plants 3 and 4 in Georgia. And those took 17 and 18 years respectively from planning to operation," said Jacobson.
As for "these small modular reactors which are being proposed, they do not even exist commercially," said Jacobson. "There's not even a test reactor".So, there's no reason to even think that those will take less than worldwide 12 years"and more likely 15 to 20 years from planning to operation." And, "They suffer the same problems as large reactors."
There are other "new designs" but they, too, "can cause disasters."
With climate change needing to be tackled rapidly, nuclear power "is completely useless" because "it just takes too long," said Jacobson.
Then, there's cost: the two new Vogtle reactors "cost $35 billion for 2.2 gigawatts."
Solar and wind energy take one to three years from "planning to operation," he said. With nuclear "you are basically waiting around 15 years to put something up" the cost of which is "three to eight times" more than solar and wind power.
"I mean who would do that if you're actually thinking rationally about it?" asked Jacobson. "It's just nonsensical to even start."
Then there's "security problems that are really important especially with small modular reactors-- weapons proliferation. Multiple countries have developed weapons in the guise of civilian nuclear energy programs either by importing uranium that they can enrich like Iran is doing with"centrifuges, or by harvesting plutonium from spent fuel rods."
"Right now there are 30 countries in the world with nuclear electricity," said Jacobson.
"That would go up with small modular reactors because they can be shipped around the world. This will encourage more countries to develop [atomic] weapons."
As for nuclear waste, "You have to store radioactive waste for a couple of hundred thousand years"The U.S. spends $500 million dollars a year just storing current waste. And you have to do this for 200,000 years"and there's always a risk of it becoming loose and getting into the water or getting into the air."
Jacobson spoke of the "lung cancer risk from underground uranium mining" Radon is a gas that decays into polonium breathed in by miners. And so there's a huge increase"of lung cancer. You don't have that with clean renewable energy."
"And then carbon dioxide. People think that nuclear is carbon-free. It's not close to carbon-free," said Jacobson. "It's nine to 37 times the carbon equivalent emissions as wind per unit of energy."
That's due to the nuclear fuel cycle, he explained, of mining, milling and enrichment of uranium to a level that can be used in a nuclear power plant-- a carbon and "energy-intensive process-- "and also the construction of nuclear plants. "So nuclear starts in a deficit of putting carbon into the air."
Detailing "technologies that directly replace nuclear," he repeated the use of "enhanced geothermal energy" in which water is injected deep in the ground to be heated by the hot rock below to come up through a production pipe as super-heated fluid or steam that can drive turbines and generate electricity-- just like nuclear power. But "there are no emissions whatsoever from enhanced geothermal."
And then there's wind, solar and hydroelectric power. "New York has lots of hydro, lots of potential for solar, lots of potential for wind both onshore and offshore," he said.
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