As one of the legs of the stool holding up the theory of 'warsocialism' the author, Jay Hanson, claims:
No alternative – even nuclear [5] – has the potential to replace more than a tiny fraction of the power presently generated by fossil fuels.
It has taken me about an hour this morning to follow a debate on the credibility of the study cited by Hanson. I have been convinced by information found here and most significantly here, that the "Storm-Smith" hypothesis is not credible and over-estimates by many times the energy costs of nuclear power, even taking into consideration the energy used in the construction of the plant, the milling and mining of uranium ore, and the full decommissioning of the plant. In addition, nuclear power can be produced from thorium as well which is three to four times as plentiful as uranium.
From the second site: (emphasis mine)
It is worth noting that the widely quoted paper by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith (SLS), which gives a rather pessimistic assessment of the Energy Lifecycle of Nuclear Power, assumes a far larger energy cost to construct and decommission a Nuclear Power plant (240 Peta-Joules versus 8 Peta-Joules(PJ)). The difference is that Vattenfall actually measured their energy inputs whereas Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Smith employed various theoretical relationships between dollar costs and energy consumed. This paper also grossly over-estimates the energy cost of mining low-grade Ores and also that the efficiency of extraction of Uranium from reserves would fall dramatically at ore concentrations below 0.05%. Employing their calculations predicts that the energy cost of extracting the Olympic Dam mine's yearly production of 4600 tonnes of Uranium would require energy equivalent to almost 2 one-GigaWatt power plants running for a full year (2 GigaWat-years). You can follow this calculation here. This is larger than the entire electricity production of South Australia and an order of magnitude more than the measured energy inputs.
I am therefore convinced that Jay Hanson's pessimism on the potential for nuclear energy to provide is based on faulty research. That in fact nuclear energy can efficiently provide a far greater share of American electric generation. This is not a fundamental problem in physics as claimed, merely a political and economic one.
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