Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
Swedish teenager Ia Anstoot says group’s ‘unscientific’ opposition to EU nuclear power serves fossil fuel interests
Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don't understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We've had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we'd do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.
we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.
I think it's fine to think of it as imperfect, even if those imperfections can never be truly solved.
We only need nuclear to bridge the gap between now and a time when renewable CO2 neutral power sources or the holy grail of fusion are able to take the place the base load power that we currently use fossil fuels for, and with hope, that may only be a few decades away.
Or that our other imperfect solutions like the fossil fuels we continue to use now aren't worse.
Perfect or just secure is even more expensive, that is the problem.
If the Soviets hadn’t cut corners and Chernobyl hadn’t happened in this first place, this is likely where we would already be.
If I recall, 50 years ago we didn’t have the technology/understanding of nuclear fuel enough to make as much as we can now. When I did a school paper on the subject like 20 years ago, they were saying nuclear wasn’t sustainable because we didn’t have enough fuel.
My understanding is that that has changed recently with breakthroughs in refinement of fuels.
One reason it wasn't made a priority 50 years ago is because Jimmy Carter - a nuclear submariner who understood the risks and economics - decided it wasn't a good idea.
This is a man who was present at a minor nuclear accident, who helped create the modern nuclear submarine fleet, acknowledging that nukes weren't going to help during the height of the Oil Embargo.
That is factually false information. There are solid arguments to be made against nuclear energy.
https://isreview.org/issue/77/case-against-nuclear-power/index.html
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
The long lead times for construction that invalidate nuclear power as a way of mitigating climate change was a point recognized in 2009 by the body whose mission is to promote the use of nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Nuclear power is not a near-term solution to the challenge of climate change,” writes Sharon Squassoni in the IAEA bulletin. “The need to immediately and dramatically reduce carbon emissions calls for approaches that can be implemented more quickly than building nuclear reactors.”
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Wealer from Berlin's Technical University, along with numerous other energy experts, sees takes a different view.
"The contribution of nuclear energy is viewed too optimistically," he said. "In reality, [power plant] construction times are too long and the costs too high to have a noticeable effect on climate change. It takes too long for nuclear energy to become available."
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, agrees.
"Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build," he said. "When you factor it all in, you're looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant."
He pointed out that the world needed to get greenhouse gases under control within a decade. "And in the next 10 years, nuclear power won't be able to make a significant contribution," added Schneider.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
the largest fission plant was literally working 5 years after construction started
fission plants are just more expensive now because we don't make enough of them.
I guess safety standards changed but even wind power kills more people per watt than fission so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nuclear could've easily worked if people didn't go full nimby in the past few decades
There are solid arguments to be made against both nuclear and renewables (intermittence, impact of electricity storage, amount of raw material, surface area). We can't wait for perfect solutions, we have to work out compromises right now, and it seems nuclear + renewable is the most solid compromise we have for the 2050 target. See this high quality report by the public French electricity transportation company (independent of the energy producers) that studies various scenarios including 100% renewable and mixes of nuclear, renewables, hydrogen and biogas. https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy%20pathways%202050_Key%20results.pdf
Those aren't arguments against nuclear power; those are arguments against the incompetence of entities like Southern Company and Westinghouse, as well as the Public Service Commission that fails to impose the burden of cost overruns on the shareholders where they belong.
I should know; I'm a Georgia Power ratepayer who's on the hook paying for the fuck-ups and cost overruns of Plant Vogtle 3 and 4.
It would've been way better if they'd been built back in the '70s, since all indications are that the folks who built units 1 and 2 actually had a fucking clue what they were doing!
Your arguments didn't actually invalidate the comment you replied to. They are just arguments against nuclear being a short-term solution.
We need both, short and long term ones. Wind and water cannot be solely relies upon. Build both types.
That is true, building a nuclear power plant doesn't help. The problem is how many we closed down in a panic, in particular after Fukushima. We could make great strides towards cleaner energy and cutting the actually problematic power plants (coal, gas) out of the picture as we slowly transition to renewables-only if we had more nuclear power available.
Of course, in hindsight it's difficult to say how one could have predicted this. There's good reasons against nuclear energy, it just so happens that in the big picture it's just about the second-best options. And we cut that out first, instead of the worse ones.
“2009” hahahaha and here we are. More coal more gas plants than ever.
"We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable" is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn't be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
The radiation would only affect a small area of the planet not the whole world, and technically radiation doesn't even cause climate damage. Chernobyl has plenty of trees and plenty of wildlife, it's just unsuitable for human habitation.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
Here's my favorite way to put it: because of trace radioactive elements found in coal ore, coal-fired power plants produce more radioactivity in normal operation than nuclear power plants have in their entire history, including meltdowns. And with coal, it just gets released straight into the environment without any attempt to contain it!
And that's just radioactivity, not all the other emissions of coal plants.
I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:
So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.
It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen.
Nuclear fission using Uranium is not sustainable. If we expand current nuclear technologies to tackle climate change then we'd likely run out of Uranium by 2100. Nuclear fusion using Thorium might be sustainable, but it's not yet a proven, scalable technology. And all of this is ignoring the long lead times, high costs, regulatory hurdles and nuclear weapon proliferation concerns that nuclear typically presents. It'd be great if nuclear was the magic bullet for climate change, but it just ain't.
An actual cogent argument about nuclear power.
Nothing is truly renewable, we still don't know how to cheat thermodynamics. Sun itself is not renewable.
Though sun will be problem million years later.
Small nitpick, but Google says that there are 57 nuclear reactors currently under construction worldwide in 2023. 22 of them are in China alone.
That's an oversimplification to the point that it is wrong. Nuclear power is not the only form of clean energy like that at all. It can not be scaled in this situation to save us, because it takes too long to build them.
Just like assuming a perfectly spherical cow, or a frictionless surface, you can completely ignore the economics, the massive cost and schedule overages to make nuclear work.
Flamanville-3 in France started construction in 2007, was supposed to be operational in 2012 with a project budget of €3.3B. Construction is still ongoing, the in-service date is now sometime in 2024, and the budget has ballooned to €20B.
Olkiluoto-3 is a similar EPR. Construction started in 2005, was supposed to be in-service in 2010, but finally came online late last year. Costs bloated from €3 to €11B.
Hinkley Point C project is two EPRs. Construction started in 2017, it's already running behind schedule, and the project costs have increased from £16B to somewhere approaching £30B. Start up has been pushed back to 2028 the last I've heard.
It's no different in the US, where the V.C. Summer (2 x AP1000) reactor project was cancelled while under construction after projections put the completed project at somewhere around $23B, up from an estimate of $9B.
A similar set of AP1000s was built at Vogtle in Georgia. Unit 3 only recently came online, with unit 4 expected at the end of the year. Costs went from an initial estimate of $12B to somewhere over $30B.
Note that design, site selection, regulatory approvals, and tendering aren't included in the above. Those add between 5-10 years to the above schedules.
I think this is the most overlooked aspect, besides it never being in time to do any good for the crisis we are in now.
I believe, the increasing cost and loss in efficiency compared to alternatives will always be an issue for NE to be out-priced by solar and wind (Dunai, 2019; WNSIR, 2022). These cost will eventually come back to the end user.
Most definitely the reason why nuclear advocates want the government to give securities and don't dear to be the entrepreneurs they claim to be (NOS Nieuws, 2018). Please give me some welfare state, but I'd rather have some more solid solutions.
Costs. Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) analysis by U.S. bank Lazard shows that between
2009 and 2021, utility-scale solar costs came down 90 percent and wind 72 percent, while
new nuclear costs increased by 36 percent. The gap continues to widen. Estimates by the
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has seen the LCOE for wind drop by
15 percent and solar by 13 percent between 2020 and 2021 alone. IRENA also calculated that
800 GW of existing coal-fired capacity in the world have higher operating costs than new
utility-scale solar photovoltaics (PV) and new onshore wind (WNSIR, 2022).
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Long term nuclear is great...
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we're paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
So we can't just spam build nuke plants right now to fix everything.
30 years ago that would have worked.
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
That's not remotely on the same scale, carbon-wise. Global output is like 4 billion tons of concrete per year, a nuclear plant uses like 12 tons per megawatt; an all-in nuclear buildout would use a tiny, tiny fraction of global concrete production and the carbon costs aren't even remotely equivalent.
(also, wind power uses way, way more concrete)
do you have a source for this carbon cost? i can't find any figures about even the amount of concrete in a nuclear plant nevermind the co2 cost of that.
I do find a lot of literature that states that the lifecycle co2 cost of nuclear is on part with solar and wind per kwh so i find your assertment about the payback time being decades a little unlikely to say the least.
8 years to build, not 30. Instead we are building many many more coal and gas plants. What a terrific alternative. Fallacy of renewables without storage is done. It’s never going to happen.
Long term nuclear is great
It's the most expensive option so I'm not sure why people here are so keen on it. It's much cheaper and faster to scale up renewable energy and in-fill with batteries and gas. Then phase out gas over time for a mix of things like pumped hydro, tidal, etc.. This is already working in a lot of places and doesn't involve long build times like nuclear.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn't true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO2 reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.
I don't know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don't create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change
Except the plants take so long to build they won't be ready until we're at 2°C
Since I don't see it mentioned anywhere: Ignoring the economical and environmental issues that nuclear power still has compared to actual renewables, it has a geostrategic problem: Uranium is a geologically limited resources, which just creates political and economical dependencies. And since Russia has a lot of it, keeping working sanctions against them alive is pretty problematic, if you need to buy your energy resources from them. See gas supply.
It's not like Russia has all of it, there are more uranium in the rest of the world, but it has full supply chain.
New archetypes of NP can run on depleted fuel. There's enough of that around for more than 50yrs of power.
Ahh... no. New solar and wind generation can be spun up much faster than nuclear.
emphasis mine:
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.
Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.
So in short:
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Mmmm I agreed with you until reading this. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report showed us that Wind + Solar + Battery Storage are still a safer bet for rolling out non-fossil fuel energy sources at the fastest rate we can launch them. Nuclear sadly still takes too long to build.
I think there is a space for advanced nuclear, though. Small Modular Reactors, Fast Breeders, and such should be encouraged going forward. The US (and I think UK) each have funds specifically designated to the development of advanced nuclear too.
But old nuclear will take too long to get a hold on emissions. I still think nuclear fits in a well-balanced energy portfolio, but not of the specific technology of the 1950s-1990s.
We've had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we'd do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
I mean, Chernobyl is kind of an outdated example. Fukushima would be the more recent one to point at, or even Three Mile Island. Not particularly useful for your argument. Still, I think if people got educated about all 3 of those examples from history, they'll come out convinced that nuclear is still a safe bet.
Problem is, like I said above, that conventional nuclear takes too damn long to build.
Not to mention the conventional plants don't seem to be faring all that well...
The study also questions the reliability of the nuclear fleet, particularly given the dramatically low availability of French power plants this year – nearly half of the 56 nuclear reactors were closed even though the EU was in a complicated period of electricity supply with frequent peaks in the price of electricity above €3/kWh.
That sounds pretty awful when everyone expects nucleur to handle baseload.
Canada is also investing in modular reactors, so there are already several large players in the field.
What provides me trepidation is the economic system means slack jawed corpos with MBAs will be working tirelessly to skirt safety.
Now if the government was to run ... Wait, that is communism and is therefore the bad thing to do /s
I am a huge fan of nuclear power, but I wouldn't say fearing it is ignorance.
You need to make sure it is regulated, secure, well-engineered, and above all, we need a place to store the waste.
Yet, congress and others, at least in America, have done nothing. We should mainly be powered by nuclear and it is rare for a plant to be built. If done correctly you get safe, clean, power.
Even if you could magically increase the number of nuclear reactors started before 2012 tenfold to keep up with wind and solar, you'd have to triple uranium mining overnight to fuel them for the first time.
Not that nuclear energy is the ONLY solution, just that it should be used alongside other methods of clean energy, as well as better energy efficiency on the consumer side.
Can you explain how we handle waste safely into the next milenia?
The majority of solid nuclear waste, the kind that lasts milenia, can be reprocessed in to fuel and used again. France is particularly good at this.
The water released from Fukushima contains no solid nuclear waste. Rather, its irradiated water where some of the hydrogen has become tritium. Tritium has a half life of about 12 years, and is naturally occuring from solar radiation. The safest way to deal with it is to filter it, then dilute it so that the percentage of tritium is not much higher than the natural level. This is what Japan is is doing, and will continue doing for several years.
Simply put, safely dealing with nuclear waste is a well understood process, and the main reason it doesn't get done is because of objections from anti nuclear-power activists
You should look into the modern tech here, it isn't just burying millions of tons of toxic waste under New Jersey. There are "breeder reactors" that use the recycled fuel to generate more power. They actually generate more fissile material than they consume, so instead of waste, they mostly produce more fuel.
Funfact: РБМК-1000(same model as in Chernobyl) was used on all four blocks in St. Petersburg(Leningrad). Currently 2 out of 4 are still in use, another two were replaced with ВВЭР-1200.
And people’s age and background has so weirdly much to do with how they internalize nuclear safety risk. My best german friend is very opposed to fossil fuels and believes in much stronger renewable focus, but is absolutely opposed to nuclear and basically laughs about how stupid he thinks that risk is. It’s wild.
Especially when you realize how little impact Chernobyl and Fukushima really had. Even including those two accidents, coal plants have emitted vastly more radioisotopes (which occur naturally at low levels in coal, but since we burn such vast quantities of coal…) and vastly more carcinogens.
It doesn't really matter whether you think nuclear energy is risky or not - it's economically the worst option. It's the most expensive of all the main sources of power. It's much cheaper to just transition to a mix of mostly renewable power and plenty of places have already done it with success. So why do something unnecessary like nuclear when it's more expensive than the alternatives?
It's crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.
Honest question: why shouldn't we be afraid?
but fear that we'd do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
Chernobyl turned an entire city into a radioactive wasteland for the next 10k years. Same goes for 3-mile island and Fukushima. The last of which was just over 10 years ago.
Are we so arrogant to think that that could never happen again? What's changed?
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax:
This sort of generalization is ignorance.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don't do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
It also doesn’t help that people got brainwashed that solar energy and heat pumps will solve all our problems. I don’t have enough space to install so many solar panels to provide power to heat pump during the Eastern European winter and even if I did, ROI will be longer than their expected lifetime. And we still use lead during production, and no one wants to recycle them. These geniuses here import broken solar panels and dump them into the ground and cover them, call that recycling. FFS, nuclear waste disposal is less scary than this uncontrolled shit.
You do understand that solving the world's carbon energy crisis is not an individual person's job, right? We're not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We're talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it's pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.
Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.
You don't have enough space to install solar panels, but you do have space for a nuclear reactor? Interesting!
Don't you love it when you get heavily downvoted but no-one is brave enough to challenge your point of view?
I mostly agree with you. Solar is good if you own a house, with a roof and have thousands in disposable cash to invest, but that's not most people.
Heat pumps can't be run on your solar power alone and if your house isn't well insulated, they can be extremely inefficient, ending up costing you substantially more than sticking with gas or oil. And that's not getting in to the other short comings of heat pumps which I believe is a separate debate.
As many people in this thread have said, the best time to invest in nuclear was thirty years ago, but the next best time is now. Give us tonnes of cheap, carbon free electricity to throw in to a heat pump and then they make sense.
For the love of everything, at least let's stop decommissioning serviceable nuclear plants.
Looking at you, Germany...
looking intensifies
Maybe it was Putin's sabotage?
Upd: nah, his mentality of 90-ies gang member doesn't allow him to think this far.
My understanding is that they eventually become unserviceable as they age, because of mechanical/structular reasons, or because the costs of servicing them is so prohibitive that they are unserviceable economically.
That they definitely have a begin, middle, and end, life cycle.
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won't have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They're bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
People tend to overrate the harms from potential changes, while simultaneously vastly underrating the harms that already exist that they’ve gotten used to.
This is the most wise thing I've read today. We all know it, but it needs to be said more.
A lot of the anti-nuclear sentiment comes from the 80s when the concerns were a lot more valid (and likely before half the pro-nuclear people in this thread were born).
But blaming people on social media for blocking progress on it is a stretch. They're multi-billion dollar projects. Have any major governments or businesses actually proposed building more but then buckled to public pressure?
Anyway, I'm glad this conversation has made it to Lemmy because I've long suspected the conspicuous popularly and regularity of posts like this on Reddit was the work of a mining lobby that can't deny climate change anymore, but won't tolerate profits falling.
My parents, who are boomers, are vocally anti nuclear because when they were children through young adulthood, had weekly nuclear drills. Stop, drop and roll. They thought it was ridiculous, and believe that all nuclear technology should be destroyed as it leads to nuclear weapons. They also strongly believe that the human race will make itself extinct in a nuclear war any moment now.
The biggest enemy of the left is the right, it's just that everyone on the left can agree that they're terrible so it doesn't come up in discourse too much, whereas the people who are on your side but want to do things a different way will take up much more of your attention.
If socialists and liberals worked together in Germany, the Nazis would not have come to power. It's their bickering that led to liberals giving Hitler power in a coalition and socialists famously saying "after Hitler, us".
Even when there's a fascist takeover, it's enabled by the left of center arguing with itself.
They're bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
I really don't get this "nuclear as stepping stone" argument. Nuclear power plants take up to ten years to build. Also (at least here in Germany) nuclear power was expensive as hell and was heavily subsidized.
We have technology to replace coal and gas: Wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Why bother with nuclear and the waste we can't store properly...?
Because none of those (except hydro and geothermal, but those are both extremely location dependent) will deal with the baseload power generation we need. And don't just say we will make more batteries, lithium is already getting more expensive, and there may be global shortages in the next few years.
How do you plan to reach 80% non-carbon-based energy by 2030? That's the current stated goal by the Biden Admin, and it's arguably not aggressive enough. Nuclear plants take a minimum of 5 years to build, but that's laughably optimistic. It's more like 10.
SMR development projects, even if they succeed, won't be reaching mass production before 2030.
The clock has run out; it has nothing to do with waste or disasters. Greenpeace won.
10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.
If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.
And at that time, you'll say either "it's too late to rely on nuclear now" or "fortunately we're about to get these new power plants running". You're not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you're building for the next decades.
Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on "clean production" and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim "green manufacturing". That country is... China!
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
That's a little out of nowhere and I don't get what you're saying, but I totally agree with the rest
but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
Yes, so we need change FAST. Not in 15 years when the nuclear plant is finally built, not in 20 years when it starts producing commercial power, not in 25 years when it finally offsets the carbon cost of the concrete to build it, not in 30 years when it breaks even on the cost and the company can think about building another, not in 35 years when it offsets the cost in money and carbon to decommission the thing in the future. Now, so we should be building windfarms, that are MASSIVELY cheaper per MW than nuclear and can be built in 6 months and have less of a carbon impact.
Any way you run the numbers, any metric you look at wind beats nuclear.
I used to be very very pro nuclear, then one day I tried to argue against someone and did the calculations myself.
There is no conceivable way that we can reach NetZero carbon-free worldwide global economy in 15 years. This isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. And it's a marathon that will last hundreds and thousands of years if human technological civilization is to continue to exist.
Therefore, it would be prudent to invest in every carbon neutral and zero carbon technology that we can right now to achieve those goals. This is not a one technology solution. It's an all hands on deck response to the climate crisis, and we will be lucky if we achieve this by the year 2100.
There's about 100 years of uranium ressource available actually, double the production and you got only 50 years... that's mainly the problem with nuclear. Extraction from the ocean is economically not viable.
They aren't left. Communists are strong pro-nuclear for the last 70 years.
Downvoting people want to tell me communists are not strong pro-nuclear since 1950-ies?
Why yes lets build 150 fission plants every year for 30 years so we can checks notes generate 1/5 of the current demand. By all means research fussion. But to think that humans are competent enough to manage that many plants at once and to ignore the permanent issue of the waste is crazy to me. In addition nuclear is more carbon intensive than renewables and the more plants you make the quicker you will run out of optimal uranium deposits. “But what about fast breeders?!?!” why yes lets make tons of plutonium and have our plant constantly catch on fire so we can pursue a decades old dead end technology. We could be building massive floating wind farms off coasts around the world but nah lets whine about a pipe dream that nuclear will save the day instead. This activist is misled as many are sadly.
Isn't the main worry the "side product" of weapons grade nuclear materials?
No.
None of them is ignoring climate change, Actually you are more than anyone else since you are promoting an energy source that isn't green. Many other nuclear accidents happened over the past years but you sound like the kind of person that doesn't care much about the environment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste_dumping_by_%27Ndrangheta
do not let "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough"
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road -- yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I am not sure when the narrative around nuclear power became nuclear energy vs renewables when it should be nuclear and renewables vs fossil fuels.
We need both nuclear and renewable energy where we try to use and develop renewables as much as possible while using nuclear energy to plug the gaps in the renewable energy supply
I live less than 2 miles from the last remaining coal power station in England.
I would much rather have nuclear instead of a chimney chucking god knows what into the air (and subsequently into me) for my entire life.
Fun fact, coal plants produce more radiation into their environment than nuclear plants
Modern reactor designs are so damn safe it's insane
Coal is filthy, but this is a myth and also an attempt at paltering.
Someone compared a poorly filtered coal plant running cherry picked coal to a brand new nuclear plant in the middle of its fuel cycle once decades ago and got the expected result.
When you open it and get the fuel out and when you mine the fuel it's orders of magnitude more. Reprocessing plants like La Hague under normal operation release more of the long lived radiation than fukushima and TMI combined.
I lived less than 2 miles from a coal power station (until they pulled it down). By the owners own admission, when it was running, it released about 60kg of radioactive material a year from stuff that was in the coal.
It's called fly ash and releases more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear power plant producing the save amount of electricity. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
Just because coal is bad doesn't mean that nuclear isn't bad though.
Greenpeace was founded to be an anti-nuclear organization. See, most of the founding members were members of the Sierra Club (another environmentalist organization) but the Sierra Club was actually pro-nuclear power. The Sierra Club was actually fighting against the installation of new dams due to the effect of wiping out large swaths of river habitat and preventing salmon runs and such.
Anyway, in 1971 there was an underground nuclear bomb test by the US government in an area that was geologically unstable. (there were a bunch of tests to see just how geologically unstable). Protesters thought that the test would cause an earthquake and a tsunami.
Anyway, the people who were unhappy with the Sierra club not actively protesting nuclear power, wanted to protest this nuclear bomb test too, so they formed an organization called the "Don't make a wave committee". They sued, the suit was decided in the US's favor, the test went off, and no earthquake happened (which is how the earlier tests said it would go).
At some point, the "Don't make a wave committee" turned into Greenpeace.
Also about this timeframe, Greenpeace started receiving yearly donations from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation is the charitable foundation created by the Rockefeller heirs that "uses oil money to make the world a better place" but they kind of don't. They've been anti-nuclear since the beginning, and even directly funded some radiation research in the 1950s that lied about safe exposure limits to radiation, claiming that there was no safe limit. That research went on to shape international policy, and by the time new research came out, the policy was already written and thus hard to change.
As a side note, another alumnus of the Sierra Club was approached by the then CEO of Atlantic Oil and directly paid a sum of something like $100k (in 1970 money) to found another anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth.
The Sierra Club and many other Western Environmental Groups have been receiving Russian money for a long time. Money that Russia is specifically spending to increase Western dependence on the Oil and Gas it sells. If it hampers a Western Nation's O&G or Nuclear development then Russia wants to invest in it.
Yup, but that Russian funding started after the Sierra Club stopped being pro-nuclear power. Which is sad.
Any good sources on this that you could recommend?
https://www.rbf.org/grantees/greenpeace-fund-inc But the info is only the last 5 years. The Rockefeller fun has actually started to break with oil in the last 10 or so years. They've been greenwashing themselves.
Still, the Rockefeller foundation is very anti-nuclear. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/grant/nuclear-threat-initiative-2021-2/
100% right.
It doesn't make any sense without reprocessing though, have to do both. Fortunately France and Finland have active programs.
The US needs to both learn how to do reprocessing again and build more plants.
The US needs to legalize it first
420 blaze it... Wait wat?
The US has such a huge stockpile of used fuel, our reprocessing would be so deeply effective.
France program is still on a crisis due to maintenance and drought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis_since_late_2021
And China
It seems Finland looked at EU and USSR and said "I want that, but better".
Alsu Russia has its own reprocessing for a long time, but yeah, not until Putin dies.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don't get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.
We need a mix. Centralization isn't the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won't be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.
We can and should be doing both. Use the money our governments are giving to fossil fuels in subsidies. $7 trillion PER YEAR (that's 11 million every minute) in public subsidies go to fossil fuels. Channel that to nuclear and renewables and there's more than enough to decarbonise the grids with both short- and long-term solutions.
What we definitely should not be doing is closing perfectly working nuclear power plants.
Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.
Nuclear (with the exception of France because they're special) is limited to being a base load as you alluded, but power demand varies throughout the day. Nuclear can't vary on a 24 hour scale to follow the load so we need renewables and energy storage or hydroelectric to make up the difference. That's what "nuclear OR renewables" misses
I can't imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.
not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.
Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.
The cost of electricity dropping is bad news for nuclear power plants because they'll be even less profitable when they're finished. Especially since they take decades to construct, during which time renewables and storage become even cheaper.
And we'll still need a way to store power from renewables when they overproduce.
For what I’ve read, it’s beats nuclear tech exists and is ready to be built at scale now. Renewables are intermittent in nature and need energy storage to work at scale. We don’t have the tech for a grid wide energy storage.
Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.
It's not actually required at all though, thats all FUD from the big energy monopoly that hate anything that can be owned and run by people that aren't them - there are endless options for making a stable grid using renewables and they're all considerably cheaper, quicker to make and a lot more resilient.
Nuclear gets pushed so hard because it protects the billionaires monopoly that's the only reason.
We need both.
It's not one or the other.
A big problem with solar and wind is that they are not as reliable as nuclear. In a worst-kaas scenario neither will produce energy because there is no sun or wind and there is no way to store enough electricity for these moments. Therefore we need a constant source that creates electricity for those moments. Of course, we do also need renewables, but nuclear is essential because it is reliable.
Scalability problems. We need to make as many solar wind and battery installations as we can, but there's only so much production and installation capacity. And eventually we'll run short on materials, especially for batteries. Nuclear uses a different system, so we can scale that even as we have issues with other systems.
If renewables are an option you should definitely go for them, but we as a species are pretty much at manufacturing capacity for them. That capacity is being increased, but for now it makes sense to do nuclear in parallel.
Renewables also have the issue of storage, and not all locations are as suitable for wind or solar.
There are cases where nuclear makes more sense, and especially in the short term we need anything that will get us away from fossil fuels.
You could build an entirely new solar, wind, and battery supply chain from the mines to the factories in a quarter of the time it takes to build a single nuclear plant.
Nuclear is a much more reliable power source, barring a breakdown, you know exactly how much a nuclear reactor will produce at any given time.
Renewables are much more finnicky, and you really need something like hydro, that has a large amount of energy storage, to back it up.
Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels
Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
The only real problem I have with new nuclear plants is that we have to build them with the current government and regulatory environment.
The current government in the United States is so terrible at its job it cannot even agree to pay its debt bills for things it already agreed to buy in a currency that it issues itself without a never ending series of debates.
The current regulatory structure allows all kinds of environmental criminality and corners to be cut by the corporations who will ultimately build, staff, and run these power plants.
I don't trust these "public/private partnerships" to result in well-designed, adequately planned, correctly maintained nuclear plants. I expect corners will be cut all over the place, and that maintenance and upkeep that is supposed to occur regularly according to anyone with any sense during the design process will be deferred in order to generate more upfront profit. I also suspect that rampant NIMBYism will result in any new ones being placed in areas that are already largely impacted by other terrible societal aspects: inequality, racism, gerrymandering, other industry, etc.
There's more toxic waste from solar panels each year than nuclear waste from all nuclear history. And this solar waste keeps snowballing at an insane rate. Because right now we're dealing with waste from 20-30 years ago, when the amount of deployed solar panels was low. 20-30 years from now there will be no place to bury all that shit.
Sorry to burst your bubble on wind and solar... The amount of fiberglass and resin waste of astounding. The concrete trashes that particular spot for many hundreds of years. There are piles of birds in many areas with wind. And then solar... Oof... Most of the chemicals come from China. The slave labor, child labor, and toxic waste at the mines and refineries is just mind boggling. There's a huge amount of work to do before wind and solar can be good options for humanity and the environment.
Nuclear has made great strides. We just don't see those advances in the US unless you're on a modern nuclear ship in the engine room. Europe has amazing modern designs. So does japan.
A lot of what you just said is not true, fully bullshit, so I'll just ignore all that. Dead birds? Cmon. Are we going to tear down all the skyscrapers in the world because birds run into them? Are we going to stop the entire logging industry because it takes away bird's nesting space? Don't spout anti-green energy propaganda like you are worried about the birds, if you were really worried about them, you would be pro green energy
If you consider the peripheral waste involved in their production it is only fair to do the same for everything else, and when you do, solar and wind still win. And it's only going to get better, we are refining and recycling the rare materials involved better and better every year. We are kindof in the golden age of solar power improvements.
One thing I don't see a lot of people talking about is how nuclear is probably better for the environment due to how you don't have to cut down a Forrest to generate a viable amount of electricity meanwhile nuclear only requires two factory sised buildings to generate more than enough electricity to be viable and that's assuming you have a sister breeder reactor to generate power from the waste
I don't really know anything about this topic, but I heard there are new designs of nuclear fission plants that are much safer and "unmeltdownable"? Called Molten Salt Reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
Cause once again no one can see the potential advancements nuclear technology can have if it had proper investment. Everyone see's Chernobyl and Fukushima and then they switch off.
Yes Renewables are better than nuclear for the moment but to demonize and not even discuss it is just burying your head in the sand
If the Great Filter theory is correct, climate change will most likely be our Great Filter.
Our species is simply not equipped with the ability to deal with the problems it created. Many people can, but they're not powerful to do anything, and there's too many uneducated people for the masses to rise up about this problem.
We think so short term, it's impossible for some people to think about the future and accept that we'll need to change the way we live now so that we can keep living then. They're hung up on Chernobyl because it was a big bang that killed lots of people at once and it was televised everywhere that has a society and TVs, but they are unable to see that in the long term coal and gas have killed and are still killing way more people than nuclear accidents, because it's a process that's continuous and kills people in indirect ways instead of a big blast.
holy crap a voice of reason, hopefully they listen. And hopefully she's free to come scream at the climate activists here in the US too.
Hopefully this young activist listen to what older activists with decades of experience have to say
Meh ... so the nuclear lobby astroturfing campaigns we know from reddit have arrived on lemmy now. That we have to decide between coal or nuclear is propaganda. Nuclear is an old fashioned concept just like coal - decentralized renewables are the future - fuck the nuclear lobby and their feeble lies!
Do you have a source for your fear that this is effective for the nuclear lobby? I am in the US, I'm so unaware of a nuclear lobby.
Your government to begin with. A centralized energy source nobody else can deploy is a big leverage on people and yet another tool to control them
It’s moot now. Economics is the main anti nuclear force at the moment. Large scale nuclear will remain a “it would have been nice”, a “why didn’t they just”.
That's just how it is. Unfortunately most people have absolutely no understanding of that and just split between nuclear power bros and anti nuclear vegans.
Nuclear is good only for regions where there is no possibility to build wind and solar. In such regions/countries the government has to step in, take the loss and build nuclear.
The activist argues nuclear power is a crucial tool against climate change and disagrees with Greenpeace's concerns about its environmental impact. Greenpeace defends its position, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing renewable alternatives like solar and wind for cutting emissions.
As a bit of a "young climate activist" myself (certainly more of a jaded, realistic one) , nuclear is still a bad idea. We don't need a overabundance of electricity, we need more sustainable energy. The last thing we should be doing as environmentalists is giving governments and capitalists more resources to weaponize- ntm more opportunities to critically fuck up our planet. Yes, nuclear energy CAN be produced totally safely. However, from a logistics standpoint this depends on keeping a number of factors in check and one has to account for the materials involved. Storage of nuclear waste is already a problem on planet earth. The U.S has bunkers full of this sludge that will kill anyone who gets close- Not to mention how unethical industry practices are when it comes to mining on a world wide scale!
The U.S has bunkers full of this sludge that will kill anyone who gets close-
Damn, apparently being a climate activist doesn't involve actually learning anything about what form nuclear waste takes and how the storage process works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste_dumping_by_%27Ndrangheta
They were probably mentioning the risk nuclear waste has, and they are not much wrong about it.
- The total volume of all nuclear waste ever produced by the entire globe is one of the smallest and easiest to manage compared to other forms, filling up less than a football field.
I didn't fact check all of you points, but this at least is utter nonsense. In Germany alone we currently have 130.000 m³ of nuclear waste that are stored in temporary storages. We haven't found a permanent storage yet. 130.000 m³ is equivalent to a 360 m x 360 m square assuming it's a meter in height. This is certainly more than a football field and this is Germany only.
We estimate that we have about 300.000 m³ nuclear waste until 2080 because of the ongoing deconstruction of old nuclear power plants... And still we have no idea how to store the waste savely and permanently.
Source in German: https://www.bge.de/de/abfaelle/aktueller-bestand/
Good should not be the enemy of perfect.
Your concerns are valid, but there are only so many economically viable ways to produce energy and nuclear is plainly better than burning more fossil fuels despite the downsides.
Yes, we need to transition to 100% renewables(that dont take more energy in producing the equipment than its lifetime output) but until that comes to pass any option that isn't actively killing us globally, eg, fossil fuels, should be on the table.
unethical industry practices are when it comes to mining on a world wide scale!
This is the only point that reads as true and coherent.
Kyoto was in 1997. 2030 is 33 years, you can't seriously consider 1.5 generations is a sprint.
Which, by the way, there is almost no conceivable way we are going to meet the 2030 deadline to maintain 1.5C. We have to think longer term.
There still is no zero emissions technology for long haul airlines, shipping, or pouring concrete for infrastructure. Those are all huge emitters.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In April, the environmental campaign group announced it would appeal against the EU Commission’s decision to include nuclear power in its classification system for sustainable finance.
Ia Aanstoot, from Sweden, who for three years took part in the Friday school strikes movement started by Greta Thunberg, said Greenpeace’s legal challenge served fossil fuel interests instead of climate action.
This week, Aanstoot submitted papers to the EU court of justice asking to become an “interested party” in the upcoming legal battle between the European Commission and Greenpeace.
One of these, Julia Galosh, a 22-year-old biologist, said: “I’ve protested opposite Greenpeace in horror as they campaigned to stop Germany’s nuclear reactors – something which led to much more demand for coal.
A Greenpeace EU spokesperson said: “We have the greatest respect for folks who are worried about the climate crisis and want to throw everything we have at the problem, but building new nuclear plants just isn’t a viable solution.
Encouraging investments into nuclear energy by including it in the EU taxonomy risks diverting funding away from renewables, home insulation and support for people hit by extreme weather.
The original article contains 764 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I don't think this is the solution everywhere. In my country there is no safe space to put the waste.
And then don't forget France had real trouble keeping them going during summer heat waves because the rivers were so warm, they didn't cool down their nuclear power plants enough.
France had one (1) winter where they had some very slight trouble due to a confluence of Covid delayed maintenance, worse than expected refurbishment needed and a warmer than expected winter. That is to be offset against 40 years of selling carbon free energy over winter to all its neighbours.
We can literally bury the pellets in the ground where we got the uranium in the first place, and all nuclear waste ever produced would fit inside one football stadium with space to spare.
Every country has the space.
Nuclear power is neither safe nor ecologically sustainable. The waste is immensely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The model is centralized so wealthy oligarchs own the power source and sell it to everyone else. Better to move toward distributed power generation that isn't massively toxic. Greenpeace must stay anti-nuke.
Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.
ETA:
Let's look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.
Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought cough… Three Mile Island cough, and how to deal with that:
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, "It's not as bad as a nuclear disaster" isn't exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It's not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
Then there's the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what's at hand.
Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show "Death rates by unit of electricity production":
Seems shocking enough and I'm sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.
According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:
Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.
Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).
Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.
We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.
Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn't have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.
Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data's own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.
And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.
So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.
Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.
Amazing to me that on a platform that is the epitome of the power of decentralization we don't see the same advantages with energy production and storage.
I am not in favor of development of nuclear power for 2 reasons:
I swear to god all these "Omg nuclear will save us from climate change bro! Small modular reactors are right around the corner, trust me" tech bro types are fossil fuel industry plants to try and distract people from building renewables and instead build nuclear reactors that will ensure some construction company's CEO gets a multi-million bonus every year for the next 15 years and not much else.
Lets not trade in polluting the air with polluting the ground and water even more.
Meh, nuclear isn't anti-climate but anti-environment (not only waste but the production too).
I mistook this as being pro nuclear weapon instead of pro nuclear power lol.
The problems with nuclear power is not the waist affecting the environment just by sitting their, but by having humans gain access to that waist and doing nefarious things with it. I am all for breader reactors, but they output waist perfect for use in nuclear bombs. I have little faith that we could guard that waist sufficiently until it reaches a secure dump, and that faith scales down as the number of reactors scales up.
When she can tell me a practical, long-term, solution to nuclear waste, demonstrate that a nuclear bomb is not a military target, sure.
We just saw Japan release nuclear waste into the ocean for lack of a solution (to the waste from a fucking nuclear disaster) , don't tell me it's not a problem.
Yes I know coal emits radioactive waste, I'm not a coal advocate.
Here are few things to consider:
Thank you, could not have said it better. Nuclear is the way forward, at least until fusion energy is viable.
The vast majority of nuclear waste is not highly radioactive. Over 90% of it is low-level waste. As we progresses we’re finding better ways to manage and reduce this or even recycling it.
Even still, it still needs to be transported, stored in specialized facilities, etc. All that transport and resource usage isn't free and must be considered as part of the cost of nuclear.
The Fukushima incident though unfortunate and a reminder to improve safety standards didn’t result in any direct fatalities due to radiation.
Direct fatalities is a poor metric for nuclear safety.
As for nuclear plants being military targets, any infrastructure can become a target in wartime, dams, chemical plants or any other energy installations. The key is to ensure safety and security measures.
Those are great arguments for not doing those things as well. These are things that massive unsustainable human populations make use of and are not necessary to thriving human populations.
practical, long-term, solution to nuclear waste
This depends on the type of waste, and how radioactive it is. The overwhelming majority of nuclear waste is low level, and capable of being safely stored in steel/concrete casks. The higher level stuff can be safely stored in exhausted mines.
demonstrate that a nuclear bomb is not a military target, sure
All power sources are inherently military targets, so you've defined an impossible task.
Additionally, you can design a plant to be a lower risk target in the case of an attack. We've had decades of research put into how to make these plants safe.
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/homesec/RL34331.pdf
https://theconversation.com/how-to-protect-nuclear-plants-from-terrorists-57094
We just saw Japan release nuclear waste into the ocean for lack of a solution
I'm not thrilled with it either, but the waste they are releasing is diluted.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66610977
The water they are releasing is basically no different than the radioactivity of normal sea water.
Maybe learn some science before you sound stupid in public? That waste water was cleaner than your drinking water.
Maybe learn some science before you sound stupid in public
lol
The European Commission is being sued by environmental campaigners over a decision to include gas and nuclear in an EU guide to “green” investments.
Eight national and regional Greenpeace organisations including France, Germany and EU office in Brussels are asking the court to rule the inclusion of gas and nuclear invalid.
I totally support Greenpeace in this. Neither nuclear nor gas should be considered a "green" investment. Ia Aanstoot, the "18 year old climate activist", is wrong to support the European Commission's stance on this.
I always feel like I'm taking fucking crazy pill when we talk about nuclear energy.
Are we forgetting Chernoble, 3 mile island, or even more recenlty fukishima?
Sure, nuclear energy is great, cheap and reliable.. but IF something goes catastrophically wrong, like I dunno.. earth quakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods, etc (IE things we can't really plan for) you run the risk of not being able to fix it easily...
I guess I"m not a huge fan of making large swaths of the earth uninhabital if shit goes sideways.
Uninhabitable by humans. Chernobyl created a nature preserve in an instant. The coal pollution you've inhaled has affected you more than all 3 of these nuclear disasters.
There aren't "large swaths of thr earth" that aren't inhabitable because of nuclear. Nuclear kills less people than coal mining - where hundreds of people dying during one catastrophe happens. Renewables aren't a solution for every country either and cover large swaths of land you mentioned. Hydro also has a huge effect on the environment, despite being the "most green" solution (unless you count the concrete needed to build dams).
Nuclear should be the default. It's not "profitable" for the people building them who think short term.
There are currently 401 operational nuclear power plants worldwide, and you've managed to list three (with three mile island not even breaching facilty containment) accidents in 70 years of nuclear energy exploitation. If that doesn't vouch for safety and reliability of nuclear, I don't know what does. Unlearn cold war hysteria.
Anti nuclear was from a time when you couldn't learn how it works on the internet and people were scared of nuclear weapons and thought power plants were just thinly veiled bomb factories
Are we forgetting about airplane catastrophes every time we fly? Or do we live in fear of flying, despite the risk of getting injured being significantly less than when driving a car?
This is like the covid argument. I don't want to be put in danger by other's decisions. If you want to fly/drive/go out without covid protection, whatever high-risk activity, don't force it on me.
Ironically, burning fossil fuels is actually making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable. Even if you include nuclear disasters nuclear is outrageously safe
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
And when operating properly coal plants irradiate their surroundings significantly more than nuclear plants
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
And we actually can plan for natural disasters. Fukushima was avoidable https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361
Also it’s worth noting that most of the world has the luxury of not building nuclear plants on seismically active, volcanic islands.
All of these items are accounted for when feasibility studies are conducted for new plants (and even old plants up for license renewal). Chernobyl was due to the type of reactor (which doesn't exist in the US), 3 Mile Island resulted in no adverse effects to health or environment and led to more stringent training and equipment upgrades, and Fukushima was built in a poorly selected location.
Of course there's risk involved with nuclear, but we mitigate those risks appropriately. We don't stop driving cars because of deadly accidents - we engineer safety systems to mitigate risk.
A car accident doesn't have ripple effects for those no where near the car accident.
I just think it's absolutely nuts that, given the volatility of the earth, that we would even risk it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but coal powered plants have caused more cancer than any of those events on their own and when operated safely to modern standards they have a very low to no risk of release whereas coal plants release pollutants by design. Nuclear waste is in a solid state so it's far easier to dispose of underground vs coal which immediately gets put into the atmosphere
Well..
Chernobyl right now is an awesome nature preserve thanks to humans being gone. The entire area has been slowly moving back to its original state with even wolves moving back. That last bit is important as wolves have a huge influence on stability in natural habitats.
I know, silver linings, but still.
To the point: nuclear energy doesn't need to be that bad. Well designed reactor are pretty much safe, and toxic end products are relatively little and manageable in comparison to gas and coal reactors. Chernobyl just was a shit reactor managed by idiots.
Ironically, because of their desig, nuclear power plants do not emit any radiation while coal and oill reactors do emit radiation coming from their fuels. That adds to all the other pollution classic power plants emit.
Then there are other fuels that could / should be used to avoid the "we don't want people to have plutonium" issue.
Then the two big alternative energy generators wind and solar both have their own issues. No wind? No power. Night? No power. Clouds? No power. Wind farms kill birds. Solar panels require replacement every x amount of years because they degrade. The "no power" problem require huge batteries, or if you're lucky, an entire lake to store that energy but now that late basically can't be used for anything else and won't be able to sustain any life.
Then finally: in comparison, nuclear energy generates enormous amounts of power where wind and solar generates very little. Humanity needs huge amounts of power to live.
Nuclear power plants take a long time to build but then give us huge amounts of power for as long as we need it to. If we really want to move away from CO2 emitting power generation, which we really really really do, I really think we can't ignore nuclear energy
That's fair, but you are assuming that the US, or any other nation with a nuclear plant will be run by competent people. I don't have that faith. Perhaps because I'm pessamistic, but perhaps because I see people like Trump getting elected, or the rise of right wing, anti science, governments getting elected across the globe.
Ukraine likely wasn't thinking they would be invaded by their neighbor and neighboring countries are now put at risk because of one rogue nation attacking their neighbor.
My problem with nuclear is that IF shit goes sideways, you can't put that genie back in the bottle. I just watched a documentary on Fukishima, and despite the fact it was built on the ocean, it's a nightmare of engineering to try to contain the shit show...
Look, I know I'm not going to convince this group that I'm right, but your also not going to convince me that I'm wrong... because you can't engineer end users or nature out of the discussion. They are always wild cards.
The safety of a region is fairly predictable even if the individual disasters aren't as predictable. If you don't build on fault lines, earth quakes aren't generally going to be a risk. If you don't build in tornado alley, or on the coast, tornadoes and hurricanes aren't going to be a risk. If you build at higher elevations, flooding isn't going to be a risk, etc.
And even with those nuclear disasters (that we've now learned from and can design reactors to prevent), nuclear has a far, far, far lower death rate per kWh of energy than all fossil fuels. The cost of continued fossil fuel use is already killing the planet, and already too high of a cost. We need to be switching away as fast as we possibly can, and nuclear is a viable alternative among many.
It's all pretty much been said already, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read takes like yours.
You mention the possibility of things going wrong with nuclear, but you don't mention the things currently going wrong with fossil fuels. Coal is killing people right now, and actively "making large swaths of the earth uninhabital".
Depending on your source, nuclear is either the safest or second safest energy production method, even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Nuclear is not the end goal of power generation, but it is the best we have right now.
My goal is not really to turn this into a discussion, but I feel like your concerns might be based on common misconceptions about nuclear energy.
Chornobyl (Ukrainian spelling) was such a big disaster because it was the first major nuclear disaster. The reactor was built without hands-on experience with the consequences of a nuclear disaster driving the design of the facility itself. We have since learnt a lot about proper design of nuclear reactors and about how to respond to any incidents.
The Fukushima reactor was designed with that knowledge in mind, but the event was a perfect shitstorm consisting of both an earthquake and a tsunami hitting the facility at the same time. And even though the local population might disagree, the disaster was arguably less serious than Chornobyl was. Due in large part to a better design and proper disaster response.
We're more capable than ever of modeling and simulating natural disasters, so I'd argue we acutally CAN plan for most of those. Any disaster we can't plan for nowadays is likely to also fuck up an area even worse than the resulting nuclear disaster would.
But probably the most important thing to mention is that nuclear power is a lot more diverse in the modern world. Gone are the days that uranium fission reactors are the norm. They were only popular because they serve a secondary purpose of creating resources for nuclear weapons, in addition to their power generation. With molten salt reactors, thorium-based reactors and SMR (small modular reactors) there's really not a good reason to build any more "classic" nuclear reactors other than continuing the production of nuclear weapons, which I hope we can just stop doing.
The best way to prevent large scale incidents is to prevent large scale reactors, which is why there's so much interest in SMR lately.
All in all, we likely can't fully transition to renewables fast enough without the use of nuclear power as an intermediary. But the actual dangers with modern designs are far fewer than they used to be and we should take care not to give in to irrational fears too much.
To put things into perspective: We currently have no way of stopping a major solar storm that would thouroughly disrupt all modern life, nor can we stop large asteroids heading our way. Both are potentially planet-ending disasters, but the possibility that they might occur doesn't stop us from trying to build a better earth for the future, right?
There are talks about civil war in the US and fears of a further escalation of the war in Ukraine, while Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in the war zone right now.
There’s a lot of money in the nuclear industry and they spend a lot of money to shape public opinion about it. No doubt they use troll farms to manufacture consent too. For me, the biggest and most glaring problem with nuclear power is the human element that can’t be trusted long term. Governments and industry will go to any length to cut costs, to line their own pockets, to lie, and put their personal ambitions above anything else. That’s how you get Chernobyls and 3 mile islands and fukushimas. It’s also not financially viable without massive government subsidies and government insurance. It’s highly centralized, and easily controlled and monetized by capitalists. It requires a readily available and reliable source of water which is something that climate change will cause problems for. Plus they take forever to build and cost billions. The answer nuclear bros have to that is to cut red tape, but then you have the problem of Chernobyls and Fukushimas. The fact is, nuclear is not a solution. Capitalism and the idiotic need for endless growth and exploitation is the problem. We need de-growth and switch to a combination of wind, solar and other real clean energy.
This comment has gained me the most attention on the fediverse so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these comments are from or directly related to those type of content farms
Nuclear power isn't even cheap anymore. Solar power is 5x cheaper per megawatt than it was 10 years ago. Wind power is half the price. Both are cheaper than nuclear, which has gone up in price despite a decade of research to make it cheaper.
we're not forgetting, we just know that theyvwern't that big a deal and new reactor designs can't have that happen
3 Mile Island had completely minimal impact. And Fukishima, despite being a cataclysmic combination of unfortunate events and poor planning on that possibly happening, the impact there was also extremely minimal, with the only negative effects more on the evacuation reaction being way wider than necessary.
And, of course, all of that is with decades old facilities that lack many of the mechanisms of modern technology that even further protect and minimize any possible negative impacts.
Heck, a thorium nuclear plant physically can't melt down.
Why do I feel like the call for more nuclear power has just been another sneaky ass ploy by Russia to use resources as a source for power?
Edit: yup. Thanks for convincing me.
Not News. Not Reasonable.
Apparently the nemesis of the left is the left. Watching it sink with my popcorns 🍿
Left Vs right is a childish way of looking at politics. Nothing is actually that simple.
Ah, yes, teen figures out nuclear energy problems from bedroom. I'm sure she has a great career ahead spewing bullshit for some industry.
What problems do you think nuclear has that outweighs the problems with fossil fuels?
The fact that the girl in the article is the daughter of a dude who runs an ecomodernist organization funded (PDF) by fossil fuels investors.
Nuclear energy produces the worst toxic waste guaranteed, and can and has a record of leaking a lot of radioactive material.
When wind and solar are ready alternatives it just makes no sense.
A coal power station belches far more radioactive contaminants in to the atmosphere than any nuclear power station.
Wind and solar aren't ready, that's the whole point! They're great when it's windy and sunny, but useless when it's still and night time. Until mass power storage is a solved problem, wind and solar are unable to provide the base load power that can be provided by fossil fuel/nuclear power stations needed by advanced nations.
To preface, i dont support coal at all, its way worse than nuclear.
If i remember right, the coal thing was measuring radioactivity in the air around coal and power plants. Thats not the nuclear waste im talking about. Spent nuclear fuel is dangerously radioactively for longer than the whole of human civilization. It puts plastic's lifespan to shame. Its no where on the scale of volume as fossil fuel waste, but pound for pound i believe it is the worst substance we can produce.
If you remind me later today ill explain how energy storage is easily solvable, itll take longer than i have now
Alright its later today so heres how renewable energy as a baseline supply works. We actually already have a working example of it, hydro electric. Renewable energy thats used as baseline. When you think energy storage i think most people think of batteries, but theyre mostly suited for mobile energy storage, like cars and handheld devices. For utility power we have much more scalable, and simpler energy storage. For hydroelectric, they take excess electricity generated, and power pumps to pump the water back uphill, to use for later demand. Its physical energy storage. You can power a motor to lift a weight and pulley system with excess energy, then run it in reverse as a generator for demand. This is basic engineering, and its as scalable as you need it.
Bullshit. Nuclear waste (more precisely, spent fuel that can be reprocessed for new fuel or other useful radionuclids) is the only waste we have actual good solutions for. It's not an engineering problem, we know very well how to safely dispose of the small amount of ultimate nuclear waste.
All the other waste, including waste from producing new and retiring old solar panels and wind turbines, basically just gets thrown into the landscape with no containment whatsoever. And some of that stuff is toxic, some will never degrade (plastics used in composite materials the wind turbine blades and towers are made of).
Plus, if you only used nuclear energy throughout you life, the amount of ultimate waste can literally fit into a coke can. That's how efficient and energy dense it is.
We already have more nuclear waste than we have capacity to store. And we arent reusing that nuclear waste. If you wanna become a nuclear engineer and get them to start using it please do, but right now the nuclear waste plan is to bury it for many millenia
It’s not a question of nuclear vs wind/solar. It’s a question of running baseline power from nuclear or coal/gas, which kill people every single day. It just doesn’t make the news.
Wind and solar are not magic bullets. Better than fossil fuels, yes. But they come with their own "the ocean is too big to pollute" type quagmires that we overlook when deployed on the small scale. The most basic example: solar panels are dark in colour -- deploying a few of them is trivial, but deploying a lot of them over time will cause the average albedo of the earth to change, heating it. This won't be a problem today, but would be in a century. Etc. Still better than greenhouse gasses though.
Nuclear likewise has issues. You're just straight up adding heat to the system. And depending on the reactor design, you have waste. But it's a huge improvement over fossil fuels.
Solar panels arent typical light surfaces, they dont convert all the light absorbed into heat, their whole point is they convert some light absorbed into electricity.
Add onto the fact black is already a popular roof color.
Please don't down vote just because you don't agree. Please please don't let this be reddit again
I'm not downvoting because I don't agree, I'm downvoting because the statement is factually inaccurate - coal power produces more radioactive waste than nuclear power does.
