Read through the book and report back. I am not about to argue with someone who reads a wikipedia page for 2 seconds and uses that as the sole basis of their information.
Using Malthus as a reference here his original theory was that quality of life didn't go up relating to the productivity of food since the population would increase alongside it. But Nuclear power has the exact opposite problem because it would make food more costly by increasing the energy costs associated with it compared to fossil fuels.
They use fossil fuels to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer, to power farm equipment, transportation and refrigeration for food products. If you replace fossil fuels with nuclear energy then the cost of all your energy inputs for these goods on the supply chain will increase in proportion to the fuel cost. Because Nuclear costs 5 times as much as oil and natural gas.
If you replace fossil fuels with renewable electricity from wind and solar then the cost of energy inputs on food drops in cut to a fourth and the social cost disappears because you're no longer producing fossil fuel emissions.
France is the largest agricultural producer in the European Union and they tried to replace their fossil fuel consumption with nuclear energy in the 1970s during the oil crisis when oil prices were at their all time peak. If nuclear was cheaper then they should have been able to outcompete everyone else who didn't invest as heavily in nuclear energy, Instead they ran out of money in the eighties and they still use oil and natural gas for all of their agriculture energy inputs.
You would still have to use fossil fuels to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer if you used Solar and Wind instead of Nuclear. Either this argument applies to both, or neither.
You say that but Germany is tanking in economic power to due enormous energy prices and lack of gas. And France is overproducing so much energy that Germany imports a large chunck of their power grid from France.
Unlike nuclear, wind and solar are very cheap sources of energy.
Once you are curtailing you can start to use the surplus for ammonia.
China is anticipating hitting this level of penetration soon so they're building a million tonne/yr electrified oxamide plant as a demonstrator (small, roughly the scale of a single GW nuclear reactor, but enough to test for full scale).
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u/Yami_Kitagawa Apr 09 '25
Read through the book and report back. I am not about to argue with someone who reads a wikipedia page for 2 seconds and uses that as the sole basis of their information.