This is the podcast version of the Sustain What discussion I just had with the relentless clean-energy optimist, investor and evangelist Michael Liebreich. Key sections are on the need to switch metrics for success from kilowatt/hours to energy services; the ethics of focusing decarbonization on the most carbonized nations; the potential for energy-hungry
Thank you, Mike. The 2013 SciAm graphic is historically interesting, and I appreciate your kindly retrieving it, but it's hopelessly outdated. If its ≤2011 analyses and their even older data accurately reflected today's commercial renewables, those wouldn't be nearly as cheap as they are. Some key basic assumptions have also changed, such as wind-turbine materials and PV-module or -sheet design (though if they still needed aluminum, it's all reusable or recyclable).
Seaver Wang's study, at first glance, appears to omit the whole nuclear fuel cycle, causing the same order-of-magnitude error as much of the literature rebutted in my land-use reference https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2011.06.005. Qualitatively, Wang's paper looks suspect because it's so far from observed market realities: it has nuclear vastly less materials-intensive than solar/wind, yet they, which have nearly zero opex, are empirically manyfold cheaper (unsubsidized) than nuclear, which has substantial opex and cheaper labor.
There's nothing quaint about total system costs (which I introduced in the mid-1970s) or economies of scale (see my book Small Is Profitable, which compares them with 207 diseconomies of scale in power systems). I think we agree that both are valid and important concepts. I've been applying them rigorously for over half a century.
If you think wind and solar has the four problems you mention, I can see why you might turn to nuclear as a solution. However, they're not problems, and if they were, nuclear is worse on unpredictable forced outages, somewhat worse on inertia (because virtual inertia from smart inverters is much faster and more precise than rotational inertia), comparable (ground-mount solar) or worse (rooftop solar or wind) on sprawl as my reference showed, and irrelevant on seasonal storage (since it's not a problem, as more than a thousand peer-reviewed studies show). On that, please start with:
Re Iberian blackout, the same essay has a paragraph summarizing some possible causes, but no one knows yet what happened, and such events are always complex, so please wait patiently for the actual forensics. It's unclear whether the ~2 GW of Spanish nuclear trips at about the same time were a cause or a consequence.
And re NERC, of course inverters should stabilize not destabilize the grid, and modern ones properly applied can and do, as grid-forming inverters prove daily. South Australia is among the best examples of how the virtual inertia of modern inverters routinely corrects grid frequency or voltage excursions much faster and more precisely than rotating inertia can do, even at ranges ~1000 km. That state is running on ~82% renewables as of a few months ago, expects 100% annually by 2026/27 (shrinking the intertied ~18% to zero net), and has no hydro, nuclear, or "baseload" fossil capacity. It runs on PV, wind, and big batteries, up to and beyond 100% of statewide demand (which exceeds 1 GW).
Oh come on. Mills is a very polite, reasonable, even-handed guy. So was the late Peter Huber. Mills has praised EVs and is not against wind and solar. He just makes realistic assessments of what's possible.
Are you ever going to be a guest on Chris Keefer's Decouple podcast? Did you listen to his episode about you with guest Mark Nelson?
I don't think I know Mark Mills personally, but I was commenting not on him but on the quality and integrity of his published work. My longest email exchange with him, in 1999 (https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/E99-18_MMABLInternet.pdf), tried to find the basis of his and Dr. Peter Huber’s claims about Internet electricity usage. My LBNL colleagues and I went in assuming that those authors were doing competent and honest analysis. That assumption, alas, didn’t survive the frustrating discussion, and it became clear that scholarly discourse with Mills was a waste of time. If he later made “realistic assessments of what’s possible” with EVs or renewables, I haven’t seen them—only hit jobs for fossil-fuel and nuclear-industry clients. Alas, he doesn’t seem to have improved with age, and when his conclusions are demolished in peer-reviewed literature, he simply repeats and amplifies them. The latest summary of his long misinformation on IT and energy is in the Epilogue to Dr. Jon Koomey’s classic textbook on analytic practice (2017 edn., https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Numbers-into-Knowledge-Master-ing/dp/1938377060/). Mills’s exuberant recent views (https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-energy-transition-wont-happen) can be usefully contrasted with my 10 May 2025 essay (ai-electricity.stanford.edu) , and with two leading IT-energy experts’ methodological cautions (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2021.05.007).
Thank you for being the first to call Chris Keefer’s Decouple podcast and the Mark Nelson episode to my attention. Having now viewed that ~3-year-old episode, I was unimpressed by Mr. Nelson’s sloppy preparation, propensity to make stuff up, and sketchy logic. He pretty comprehensively misrepresented my 49-year-old Foreign Affairs paper (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1976-10-01/energy-strategy-road-not-taken, free reprint at https://rmi.org/insight/energy-strategy-the-road-not-taken/), even inventing a supposed fondness for oil furnaces and hostility to utility-scale PVs (the paper didn’t mention PV: in 1976, “solar” meant thermal panels for heating water). And his main objections to its thesis haven’t worn well: e.g., on exclusivity of paths, simply reflect on France, or see the 2020 statistical finding (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00696-3), across 123 countries over 25 years, of “a negative association between the scales of national nuclear and renewables attachments” suggesting that “nuclear and renewables attachments tend to crowd each other out.”
It might have been possible to have a valuable conversation about such topics, but Decouple wasn’t it. I don’t recall having been invited to go on Mr. Keefer’s podcast. He seemed better-informed and fairer-minded than Mr. Nelson; then again, the summaries of his past postings seem mainly focused on nuclear advocacy, and more stuck on old issues than exploring new ones. (David Roberts he’s not.) And I’m baffled by why he would host a professional nuclear advocate, who seems to know less than he does about my 1976 article, to misdescribe it and speculate about my motives. My modern writings, from Reinventing Fire (2011) onwards, offer a far more useful guide. Hugh Nash’s 1979 book The Energy Controversy: Soft Path Questions and Answers (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Energy_Controversy.html?id=FCKIQgAACAAJ) thoroughly digests the incumbent industries’ three dozen critiques and responses published about my 1976 article at the time. And if those aren’t a sufficient guide to what I think and why, why not ask?
Thanks for the Mills dialog pdf. I've skimmed through it a bit. I'm sure you've probably caught him on a few PC power use details, but his over all thesis is that computers are going to consume a lot more energy. In case you haven't noticed, outfits like Google and people like Larry Ellison are trying to buy their own nuclear reactors to power AI.
Mills's problem isn't just with "details"; it's that his widely proclaimed 1999 prediction that IT would use half of US electricity by 2020 was high by a factor of ~25. (For comparison, the US energy use envisaged for 2000 in my 1976 soft-energy-paths article that we just corresponded about was right within a few percent, though higher than actual; it was independently found at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1955010 to be the only accurate such foresight in the literature.)
Yes, I'm aware of the supply moves you mentioned, though I think they're foolish. Again, please read my essay about them at ai-electricity.stanford.edu.
Yes to your first sentence, Mike. That's why nuclear makes climate change worse: costing manyfold more per kWh than solar/wind/efficiency (with or without firming for both), it displaces manyfold less carbon per dollar. Also per year.
All generators are "intermittent," differing in outage characteristics. Forced outages of big thermal power stations, including nuclear, are in general bigger (lumpier), longer, more abrupt, and far less predictable than those of solar and wind. The big thermal plants therefore require more and costlier backup. You may find helpful on "intermittence" and grid integration: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2017.11.006.
I think your last sentence lacks factual foundations, but we also differ philosophically. I think all ways to save or produce energy should get to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location, or ownership. If that were allowed, all the top empirical market data sources (Lazard, BNEF,...) concur that new nuclear power would be manyfold out of the money. That conclusion also doesn't depend on reactors' size, type, or fuel cycle (another conversation).
Yes I have a different philosophical view on energy involving quaint concepts like total system costs and economies of scale. Nuclear may be expensive to start, but you get a lot of extras for that expense that solve all of wind and solar's problems like intermittency, inertia, sprawl and seasonal storage.
Net zero types won't confront the fact that nuclear competes for resources with wind and solar. They compete for financing, minerals, electrical infrastructure and human expertise. Nuclear clearly uses less minerals and electric infrastructure. There's a decades old Scientific American graph and a new study by Seaver Wang of BTI that show this. Electrifying things competes with electric infrastructure for minerals and other resources.
Wind and solar are intermittent and use lots of land. It's easy to start adding wind and solar, but gets progressively more expensive to reach some elusive goal. With nuclear we have the empirical example of France building 50 some reactors and reaching 70-80% of electricity generation. There are unproven nuclear technologies that offer prospects for reducing the CO2 emissions from process heat. Nuclear should clearly be prioritized.
Yes to your first sentence, Mike. That's why nuclear makes climate change worse: costing manyfold more per kWh than solar/wind/efficiency (with or without firming for both), it displaces manyfold less carbon per dollar. Also per year.
All generators are "intermittent," differing in outage characteristics. Forced outages of big thermal power stations, including nuclear, are in general bigger (lumpier), longer, more abrupt, and far less predictable than those of solar and wind. The big thermal plants therefore require more and costlier backup. You may find helpful on "intermittence" and grid integration: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2017.11.006.
I think your last sentence lacks factual foundations, but we also differ philosophically. I think all ways to save or produce energy should get to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location, or ownership. If that were allowed, all the top empirical market data sources (Lazard, BNEF,...) concur that new nuclear power would be manyfold out of the money. That conclusion also doesn't depend on reactors' size, type, or fuel cycle (another conversation).
I don’t normally follow meteorologist Dr. Pielke’s energy posts, but I did check the link you kindly suggested. It points to an elaborate (293 pp) but very unconvincing Finnish paper (https://tupa.gtk.fi/julkaisu/bulletin/bt_416.pdf) by mining engineer Dr. Simon Michaux, claiming that the energy transition will fall far short of obtaining six needed materials (Cu, Li, Ni, Co, V, and graphite), and impliedly others. I take his views (https://www.simonmichaux.com) to be sincerely held but partly unsound, because his conclusions depend on outdated and unrealistic assumptions, such as:
- no improvements after 2018 in the efficiency of using energy (vs. the ~5x profitable potential in end-use efficiency (https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aad965), not counting the ~3x upstream gain from primary renewable electricity) or materials (just better structural design saves about half the cement and steel: https://www.rmi.org/profitable-decarb/),
- no demand response, passive buildings, or solar heat,
- no economics, hence no competition between marginal supply and more-efficient use,
- hydrogen rather than electric heavy trucks and intercity trains,
- inefficient heat pumps for space heating and none for process heat,
- 2018-average renewable data and ~20-year lifetimes,
- a presumed need for long-term or even seasonal electrical storage, illustrated by 28-day and 12-week cases.
Perhaps the best antidote to the long-storage fallacy that causes much of Michaux’s huge supposed need for batteries is the 2021 50Hertz/Elia study (https://www.eliagroup.eu/en/press/2021/11/20211119_elia-group-publishes-roadmap-to-net-zero) for the continent with the most concerning Dunkelflaute: on careful Fourier analysis, not handwaving, Europe turns out to need only at most 1–2 weeks of storage, assumed to use green molecules made from surplus renewable capacity and burned in existing gas turbines (though fuller integration of EV storage could substitute). Michaux’s assumptions about grid stability on various timescales are not consistent with the modern literature’s ~1,000+ peer-reviewed studies of 100%-renewable grids, e.g. as summarized by e.g. Breyer et al. (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910) and Jacobson (https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/100PercentPaperAbstracts.pdf), nor with many countries’ actual operating experience.
In summary, I agree with Dr. Pielke that it’s important to run the numbers, but paying proper attention to the assumptions yields very different answers than he supposes.
Mike, these two book reviews leave me with the impression that more would not be useful. We seem to follow different literatures and apply different analytic standards. I would therefore respectfully suggest that you kindly explore the more rigorous literature that my writings abundantly cite. It may surprise you.
Andy -- Michael Liebreich is everything you list -- and you can add one more - a fraud in that he has decided to be "blind" to technology he doesn't understand or accept.
In the face of accepted 80 year old college textbook text / spreadsheets/ and visual graphs:
--- explaining "electrical resonance" and how it always develops over-unity electric output power - and
--- professional laboratory test results validating and documenting the fact that the:
--- "resonating tank circuit" always develops "over-unity power development".
he continues to preach his position - which besides being totally self-serving (for his "position" in Society - but also profiting financially from it) by denying what he doesn't understand - either by choice - specifically remaining ignorant - or by design.
Thank you, Mike. The 2013 SciAm graphic is historically interesting, and I appreciate your kindly retrieving it, but it's hopelessly outdated. If its ≤2011 analyses and their even older data accurately reflected today's commercial renewables, those wouldn't be nearly as cheap as they are. Some key basic assumptions have also changed, such as wind-turbine materials and PV-module or -sheet design (though if they still needed aluminum, it's all reusable or recyclable).
Seaver Wang's study, at first glance, appears to omit the whole nuclear fuel cycle, causing the same order-of-magnitude error as much of the literature rebutted in my land-use reference https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2011.06.005. Qualitatively, Wang's paper looks suspect because it's so far from observed market realities: it has nuclear vastly less materials-intensive than solar/wind, yet they, which have nearly zero opex, are empirically manyfold cheaper (unsubsidized) than nuclear, which has substantial opex and cheaper labor.
There's nothing quaint about total system costs (which I introduced in the mid-1970s) or economies of scale (see my book Small Is Profitable, which compares them with 207 diseconomies of scale in power systems). I think we agree that both are valid and important concepts. I've been applying them rigorously for over half a century.
If you think wind and solar has the four problems you mention, I can see why you might turn to nuclear as a solution. However, they're not problems, and if they were, nuclear is worse on unpredictable forced outages, somewhat worse on inertia (because virtual inertia from smart inverters is much faster and more precise than rotational inertia), comparable (ground-mount solar) or worse (rooftop solar or wind) on sprawl as my reference showed, and irrelevant on seasonal storage (since it's not a problem, as more than a thousand peer-reviewed studies show). On that, please start with:
- 50Hertz/Elia study: https://www.eliagroup.eu/en/news/press-releases/2021/11/20211119_elia-group-publishes-roadmap-to-net-zero
- NREL Hussainy & Livingood 2021: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0064570
- Breyer et al. 25 July 2022 IEEE 100%RE review: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3193402 or https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9837910
My perspective on nuclear energy and its competitive landscape is framed tersely at https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/why-nuclear-power-is-bad-for-your-wallet-and-the-climate, and more fully at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2022.107122.
I hope this will help you broaden your research base. Thanks for writing. Best wishes -- Amory
So, what do you think about Mark Mills' latest article?
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2025/05/16/a_new_iea_report_and_the_iberian_blackout_end_dreams_of_an_energy_transition_1110756.html
It continues his decades-long profession of propaganda. He has no shame.
Re AI and electricity, please read my documented essay posted 16 May at ai-electricity.stanford.edu.
Re Iberian blackout, the same essay has a paragraph summarizing some possible causes, but no one knows yet what happened, and such events are always complex, so please wait patiently for the actual forensics. It's unclear whether the ~2 GW of Spanish nuclear trips at about the same time were a cause or a consequence.
And re NERC, of course inverters should stabilize not destabilize the grid, and modern ones properly applied can and do, as grid-forming inverters prove daily. South Australia is among the best examples of how the virtual inertia of modern inverters routinely corrects grid frequency or voltage excursions much faster and more precisely than rotating inertia can do, even at ranges ~1000 km. That state is running on ~82% renewables as of a few months ago, expects 100% annually by 2026/27 (shrinking the intertied ~18% to zero net), and has no hydro, nuclear, or "baseload" fossil capacity. It runs on PV, wind, and big batteries, up to and beyond 100% of statewide demand (which exceeds 1 GW).
Oh come on. Mills is a very polite, reasonable, even-handed guy. So was the late Peter Huber. Mills has praised EVs and is not against wind and solar. He just makes realistic assessments of what's possible.
Are you ever going to be a guest on Chris Keefer's Decouple podcast? Did you listen to his episode about you with guest Mark Nelson?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5gQPbXaw0g
I don't think I know Mark Mills personally, but I was commenting not on him but on the quality and integrity of his published work. My longest email exchange with him, in 1999 (https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/E99-18_MMABLInternet.pdf), tried to find the basis of his and Dr. Peter Huber’s claims about Internet electricity usage. My LBNL colleagues and I went in assuming that those authors were doing competent and honest analysis. That assumption, alas, didn’t survive the frustrating discussion, and it became clear that scholarly discourse with Mills was a waste of time. If he later made “realistic assessments of what’s possible” with EVs or renewables, I haven’t seen them—only hit jobs for fossil-fuel and nuclear-industry clients. Alas, he doesn’t seem to have improved with age, and when his conclusions are demolished in peer-reviewed literature, he simply repeats and amplifies them. The latest summary of his long misinformation on IT and energy is in the Epilogue to Dr. Jon Koomey’s classic textbook on analytic practice (2017 edn., https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Numbers-into-Knowledge-Master-ing/dp/1938377060/). Mills’s exuberant recent views (https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-energy-transition-wont-happen) can be usefully contrasted with my 10 May 2025 essay (ai-electricity.stanford.edu) , and with two leading IT-energy experts’ methodological cautions (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2021.05.007).
Thank you for being the first to call Chris Keefer’s Decouple podcast and the Mark Nelson episode to my attention. Having now viewed that ~3-year-old episode, I was unimpressed by Mr. Nelson’s sloppy preparation, propensity to make stuff up, and sketchy logic. He pretty comprehensively misrepresented my 49-year-old Foreign Affairs paper (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1976-10-01/energy-strategy-road-not-taken, free reprint at https://rmi.org/insight/energy-strategy-the-road-not-taken/), even inventing a supposed fondness for oil furnaces and hostility to utility-scale PVs (the paper didn’t mention PV: in 1976, “solar” meant thermal panels for heating water). And his main objections to its thesis haven’t worn well: e.g., on exclusivity of paths, simply reflect on France, or see the 2020 statistical finding (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00696-3), across 123 countries over 25 years, of “a negative association between the scales of national nuclear and renewables attachments” suggesting that “nuclear and renewables attachments tend to crowd each other out.”
That said, as Nelson surmises, proliferation has indeed been my top nuclear concern for the past half-century, for compelling reasons explained in many lay and technical publications including a 1980 Foreign Affairs paper (https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/RMI_Document_Repository_Public-Reprts_Nuclear-Power-and-Nuclear-Bombs-Foreign-Affairs.pdf) and 2010 Foreign Policy update (https://rmi.org/insight/on-proliferation-climate-and-oil-solving-for-pattern/). However, since nuclear power falls at the first hurdle, economics—it has no business case or operational need—one needn’t debate whether it’s proliferative, safe, etc. And Nelson doesn’t understand that the scale issue (what’s the right size) is about not ideology but economics, as explained in the definitive synthesis Small Is Profitable (https://rmi.org/insight/small-is-profitable/, a 2002 Economist Book of the Year). As I wrote in the 1970s and repeated in 2008 (https://grist.org/article/nuclear-deterrence-part-two/), “It would be just as silly to run an aluminum smelter on small wind turbines as it is to heat houses with a fast breeder reactor.” The point is not small scale everywhere, but the right size for the job.
It might have been possible to have a valuable conversation about such topics, but Decouple wasn’t it. I don’t recall having been invited to go on Mr. Keefer’s podcast. He seemed better-informed and fairer-minded than Mr. Nelson; then again, the summaries of his past postings seem mainly focused on nuclear advocacy, and more stuck on old issues than exploring new ones. (David Roberts he’s not.) And I’m baffled by why he would host a professional nuclear advocate, who seems to know less than he does about my 1976 article, to misdescribe it and speculate about my motives. My modern writings, from Reinventing Fire (2011) onwards, offer a far more useful guide. Hugh Nash’s 1979 book The Energy Controversy: Soft Path Questions and Answers (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Energy_Controversy.html?id=FCKIQgAACAAJ) thoroughly digests the incumbent industries’ three dozen critiques and responses published about my 1976 article at the time. And if those aren’t a sufficient guide to what I think and why, why not ask?
Thanks for the Mills dialog pdf. I've skimmed through it a bit. I'm sure you've probably caught him on a few PC power use details, but his over all thesis is that computers are going to consume a lot more energy. In case you haven't noticed, outfits like Google and people like Larry Ellison are trying to buy their own nuclear reactors to power AI.
Mills's problem isn't just with "details"; it's that his widely proclaimed 1999 prediction that IT would use half of US electricity by 2020 was high by a factor of ~25. (For comparison, the US energy use envisaged for 2000 in my 1976 soft-energy-paths article that we just corresponded about was right within a few percent, though higher than actual; it was independently found at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1955010 to be the only accurate such foresight in the literature.)
Yes, I'm aware of the supply moves you mentioned, though I think they're foolish. Again, please read my essay about them at ai-electricity.stanford.edu.
Yes to your first sentence, Mike. That's why nuclear makes climate change worse: costing manyfold more per kWh than solar/wind/efficiency (with or without firming for both), it displaces manyfold less carbon per dollar. Also per year.
I'd welcome a ref, please, to the SciAm graph and Wang study you refer to. Your conclusion about minerals is dubious, and at best highly sensitive to assumptions: e.g. https://thebulletin.org/2017/05/clean-energy-and-rare-earths-why-not-to-worry/, https://rmi.org/insight/six-solutions-to-battery-mineral-challenges/, and https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf.
All generators are "intermittent," differing in outage characteristics. Forced outages of big thermal power stations, including nuclear, are in general bigger (lumpier), longer, more abrupt, and far less predictable than those of solar and wind. The big thermal plants therefore require more and costlier backup. You may find helpful on "intermittence" and grid integration: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2017.11.006.
Solar PV (groundmount) uses about the same land as nuclear: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2011.06.005. Windpower uses 1-2 orders of magnitude less. Rooftop PV uses none and is sufficient to power the world: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25720-2.
France did what you say, but at ruinous cost, and now can't afford to sustain or replace those reactors. Not a good example of sound energy policy.
For better process-heat solutions, please see www.rmi.org/profitable-decarb/.
I think your last sentence lacks factual foundations, but we also differ philosophically. I think all ways to save or produce energy should get to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location, or ownership. If that were allowed, all the top empirical market data sources (Lazard, BNEF,...) concur that new nuclear power would be manyfold out of the money. That conclusion also doesn't depend on reactors' size, type, or fuel cycle (another conversation).
Here's the Scientific American post (using Wayback Machine to include the graphic):
https://web.archive.org/web/20150213131116/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-energys-hidden-costs/
Here's Seaver Wang's study:
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/updated-mining-footprints-and-raw-material-needs-for-clean-energy
Yes I have a different philosophical view on energy involving quaint concepts like total system costs and economies of scale. Nuclear may be expensive to start, but you get a lot of extras for that expense that solve all of wind and solar's problems like intermittency, inertia, sprawl and seasonal storage.
Net zero types won't confront the fact that nuclear competes for resources with wind and solar. They compete for financing, minerals, electrical infrastructure and human expertise. Nuclear clearly uses less minerals and electric infrastructure. There's a decades old Scientific American graph and a new study by Seaver Wang of BTI that show this. Electrifying things competes with electric infrastructure for minerals and other resources.
Wind and solar are intermittent and use lots of land. It's easy to start adding wind and solar, but gets progressively more expensive to reach some elusive goal. With nuclear we have the empirical example of France building 50 some reactors and reaching 70-80% of electricity generation. There are unproven nuclear technologies that offer prospects for reducing the CO2 emissions from process heat. Nuclear should clearly be prioritized.
Yes to your first sentence, Mike. That's why nuclear makes climate change worse: costing manyfold more per kWh than solar/wind/efficiency (with or without firming for both), it displaces manyfold less carbon per dollar. Also per year.
I'd welcome a ref, please, to the SciAm graph and Wang study you refer to. Your conclusion about minerals is dubious, and at best highly sensitive to assumptions: e.g. https://thebulletin.org/2017/05/clean-energy-and-rare-earths-why-not-to-worry/, https://rmi.org/insight/six-solutions-to-battery-mineral-challenges/, and https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf.
All generators are "intermittent," differing in outage characteristics. Forced outages of big thermal power stations, including nuclear, are in general bigger (lumpier), longer, more abrupt, and far less predictable than those of solar and wind. The big thermal plants therefore require more and costlier backup. You may find helpful on "intermittence" and grid integration: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2017.11.006.
Solar PV (groundmount) uses about the same land as nuclear: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2011.06.005. Windpower uses 1-2 orders of magnitude less. Rooftop PV uses none and is sufficient to power the world: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25720-2.
France did what you say, but at ruinous cost, and now can't afford to sustain or replace those reactors. Not a good example of sound energy policy.
For better process-heat solutions, please see www.rmi.org/profitable-decarb/.
I think your last sentence lacks factual foundations, but we also differ philosophically. I think all ways to save or produce energy should get to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location, or ownership. If that were allowed, all the top empirical market data sources (Lazard, BNEF,...) concur that new nuclear power would be manyfold out of the money. That conclusion also doesn't depend on reactors' size, type, or fuel cycle (another conversation).
Have you checked out Roger Pielke Jr's latest piece:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/heavy-metal?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=119454&post_id=164005387&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=kv1q8&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I don’t normally follow meteorologist Dr. Pielke’s energy posts, but I did check the link you kindly suggested. It points to an elaborate (293 pp) but very unconvincing Finnish paper (https://tupa.gtk.fi/julkaisu/bulletin/bt_416.pdf) by mining engineer Dr. Simon Michaux, claiming that the energy transition will fall far short of obtaining six needed materials (Cu, Li, Ni, Co, V, and graphite), and impliedly others. I take his views (https://www.simonmichaux.com) to be sincerely held but partly unsound, because his conclusions depend on outdated and unrealistic assumptions, such as:
- no improvements after 2018 in the efficiency of using energy (vs. the ~5x profitable potential in end-use efficiency (https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aad965), not counting the ~3x upstream gain from primary renewable electricity) or materials (just better structural design saves about half the cement and steel: https://www.rmi.org/profitable-decarb/),
- no demand response, passive buildings, or solar heat,
- no economics, hence no competition between marginal supply and more-efficient use,
- hydrogen rather than electric heavy trucks and intercity trains,
- inefficient heat pumps for space heating and none for process heat,
- 2018-average renewable data and ~20-year lifetimes,
- 11% PV and 25% wind capacity factors—the past decade’s US averages were respectively 23–25% and 32–36% (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b),
- grid balancing requires big batteries (nine other carbon-free methods are ample and generally cheaper: see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2020.106827, https://www.volts.wtf/p/what-the-sun-isnt-always-shining?publication_id=193024#details with Lovins comment), and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2017.11.006), and
- a presumed need for long-term or even seasonal electrical storage, illustrated by 28-day and 12-week cases.
Perhaps the best antidote to the long-storage fallacy that causes much of Michaux’s huge supposed need for batteries is the 2021 50Hertz/Elia study (https://www.eliagroup.eu/en/press/2021/11/20211119_elia-group-publishes-roadmap-to-net-zero) for the continent with the most concerning Dunkelflaute: on careful Fourier analysis, not handwaving, Europe turns out to need only at most 1–2 weeks of storage, assumed to use green molecules made from surplus renewable capacity and burned in existing gas turbines (though fuller integration of EV storage could substitute). Michaux’s assumptions about grid stability on various timescales are not consistent with the modern literature’s ~1,000+ peer-reviewed studies of 100%-renewable grids, e.g. as summarized by e.g. Breyer et al. (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910) and Jacobson (https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/100PercentPaperAbstracts.pdf), nor with many countries’ actual operating experience.
Reduced need and increased circularity are not the only minerals solutions either; they and four more are summarized in my 2022 blog (https://rmi.org/insight/six-solutions-to-battery-mineral-challenges/), RMI’s 2024 monograph (https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf), and for rare earths, my 2017 article (https://thebulletin.org/2017/05/clean-energy-and-rare-earths-why-not-to-worry/, expanded from one in the military journal Joint Force Quarterly). Of course, if you assume that cars and light-duty vehicles respectively average 3¼ and 2 mi/kWh forever (67 and 109 mpge, vs. 2025–6-market-entry state-of-the-art 251–343 mpge—see https://saemobilus.sae.org/articles/reframing-automotive-fuel-efficiency-13-01-01-0004), 3–6x-efficiency Tesla Semi trucks don’t exist, etc, you can calculate immense mineral needs, as Michaux does, but that doesn’t make it so.
In summary, I agree with Dr. Pielke that it’s important to run the numbers, but paying proper attention to the assumptions yields very different answers than he supposes.
Mike, these two book reviews leave me with the impression that more would not be useful. We seem to follow different literatures and apply different analytic standards. I would therefore respectfully suggest that you kindly explore the more rigorous literature that my writings abundantly cite. It may surprise you.
Andy -- Michael Liebreich is everything you list -- and you can add one more - a fraud in that he has decided to be "blind" to technology he doesn't understand or accept.
In the face of accepted 80 year old college textbook text / spreadsheets/ and visual graphs:
--- explaining "electrical resonance" and how it always develops over-unity electric output power - and
--- professional laboratory test results validating and documenting the fact that the:
--- "resonating tank circuit" always develops "over-unity power development".
he continues to preach his position - which besides being totally self-serving (for his "position" in Society - but also profiting financially from it) by denying what he doesn't understand - either by choice - specifically remaining ignorant - or by design.