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
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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.
Even if it takes 2 decades to get a new plant going, it's a nuclear plant's worth of fossil fuels we don't need any more, and therefore worth doing.
If it isn't fossil fuels, it's automatically better.
The main problem with nuclear power plants isn't the radiation or the waste or the risk of accident. It's that they cost so damn much they're rarely profitable, especially in open electricity markets. 70-80% of the cost of the electricity is building the plant, and without low interest rates and a guaranteed rate when finished it doesn't make economic sense to build them.
The latest nuclear plant in the US is in Georgia and is $17 billion over budget and seven years later than expected.
It’s that they cost so damn much
The cost of continued fossil fuel use is far higher.
rarely profitable
Profit should not be the motivation of preventing our climate disaster from getting worse. If the private sector isn't able to handle it, then the government needs to do so itself.
And besides, the only reason fossil fuels are so competitive is because we are dumping billions of dollars in subsidies for them. Those subsidies should instead go towards things that aren't killing the planet.
Would it be better to dump billions into nuclear power plants that won't come online for a decade at least, or to dump billions into renewables that can be online and reducing emissions in under a year?
We should worldwide be putting trillions into both. Renewables should be first priority, but not all locations have good solar, wind, and battery options.
That's your opinion. I think funding nuclear is just burning money and wasting time we don't have.
That's the exact argument people have been making for 60 years, and look where we are now. Around 80% of the world's energy is still from fossil fuels. Do you want to continue making the same mistakes as the previous generations?
You cannot run the entire grid on entirely renewable. We physically don't have enough lithium in the world to make the batteries for it, and even if you don't use lithium there would be untold ecological destruction to extract the rare earths.
Renewable and hydroelectric is a solution but not viable everywhere and hydro also causes massive ecological destruction
If we started building nuclear powerplants right now it would take 10-20 years before they're even online. That's 10-20 years worth of technology improvements that could make it obsolete, especially if we don't pin our hopes on nuclear baseload and start building a grid that can be 100% renewable.
And that's not even mentioning the truly massive budget overruns. Or the environmental impact of mining and refining fuel.
And you would be running 10-20 years of gas and coal power plants in addition to the renewables if you're not in a suitable area for hydro because suitable grid scale energy storage solutions literally don't exist. Maybe they will in 10-20 years, but would you bet on a maybe or go with nuclear which we know will work as a baseload?
Considering nuclear plants consistently go tremendously over budget, budget that could be used on renewables, and how quickly renewables are improving, I would take that bet in a heartbeat.
For reference, here's a graph comparing the cost per megawatt hour over cost per installed capacity from 2010-2019. Solar is now 1/5th what it was 10 years ago, onshore wind is half, and offshore wind is down by 25%.
The cost of nuclear power in that time has increased by more than 50%.
I would much rather invest in something that's showing improvements in cost and technology than Cold War white elephants.
Nuclear plants are immensely profitable, just not on time scales politicians are interested in. You're deep in the red for 10-20 years and then after that it prints money
So after 10-20 years of construction and cost overruns and 10-20 years of operating at a loss you start making money.
And that's assuming electricity rates don't drop in that time. Which they are as renewables get deployed more and more because they don't go 100% over budget in time and money.
If we get started building nuclear power plants now, how much will storage and transmission tech improve before they're even completed, let alone profitable?
It's not 10-20 years of construction AND 10-20 years at a loss, it's 10-20 years of construction at a loss. Not great, but up to 40 years as you suggest sounds a lot worse because it's a misrepresentation.
How long do you think it will take for a nuclear power plant to earn back the $34 billion it takes to build one? They're definitely not making that much money the first year the plant is online.
Isn't a lot of that due to organization structures in US power Markets? I remember reading that a lot of times costs on electrical power go nuts due to near fraudulent managers.
No we don't, you can use only renewables and just cut the useless spending
The classic shortsighted point of view that has put us in the current situation in the first place.
Ask yourself what put us into current situation
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.
You don't need to imagine a future without nuclear in the mix - there are plenty of places doing fine with renewables and without coal or nuclear right now.
which country?
For example South Australia - no coal since 2016, no nuclear ever, runs mostly on a mix of renewables - solar and wind with batteries and transient gas for in-fill.
Edit: thanks to whoever downvoted my verified statement of fact (see below)
This doesn't seem to agree with that statement.
So I looked in the document and it agrees with my point. The most recent stats for South Australia are 8977 GWh of renewable energy and 5717 GWh non-renewable gas energy. You'll note the gas use is dropping pretty rapidly as they put more renewables on.
Ok, so from your point of view 40% fossil fuels is still doing fine? I interpreted your original comment to mean they were doing 100% or close to it in renewables. Then I misunderstood.
It's just a temporary measure while we transition to 100% renewables. You can see from the numbers that it's dropping year by year as new renewables are brought on.
never heard of that country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stations_in_Australia?wprov=sfla1
Weird argument. "It's a place bigger than a bunch of EU countries put together but it's not a country so I'm going to use other places that aren't South Australia to counter your point which was about South Australia"
lol im not playing this shell game.
Wind and Solar are "renewable" to a certain scale. If you dump gigantic wind farm in the middle of a jet stream, for example, you can impact downstream climate cycles.
that's why we could be aware of all the externalities.
solar could be deployed on the ocean but that will certainly lower sea temperatures.
let's terraform intentionally rather than just accidentally.
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.
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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.
Don't forget nuclear waste that is just building up forever with nothing to do with it.
It's the only kind of waste that goes away on it's own if you literally sit on it and do nothing
Do you know how much nuclear waste has been produced in the whole world for the entire history of nuclear energy production?
Around 500 000 tonnes.
That's 0.001% of the waste thrown into the atmosphere by fossil fuels EVERY YEAR.
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.
What are you talking about? Nuclear has been the target of a massive misinformation campaign from the fossil fuel corporations for decades. Looks like you've fallen for the FUD. People have been formatted by literally every form of media to think of nuclear as something dirty, dumping green glowing waste into the environment, and making fish grow extra heads.
Countries like Germany have been closing perfectly fine NPPs because of FUD funded by their huge fossil fuel lobby. 80% of our energy is from fossils, and they have apparently successfully convinced people that we shouldn't attack that number with every tool at our disposal. Meanwhile, we're collectively spending literally trillions of dollars on fossil fuel subsidies every year. Is that what pushing nuclear hard looks like?
You accuse me of falling for FUD, I accuse you of falling for FUD - you say the reason it's so unpopular is because everyone else is wrong, I say it's so popular because everyone else is wrong...
Germany has been very concerned about nuclear since a reactor exploded and they lived thorough the drama of having a cloud of nuclear fallout drift over them, i remember it and it was scary. Interesting France loves nuclear and this didn't happen in France, the French government lied and said they didn't detect any radiation because they didn't want to pay for leukaemia treatment and etc -- what I'm getting at is it's super complex why some people love nuclear and some hate it. When a second major nuclear disaster hit the planet it bulstered German distrust in the tech, it's not some sinister plot.
The facts remain billionaires make huge sums from oil and are already invested, that's why they fight to keep it - they know they'll lose their monopoly when we move away from it if we go to something normal companies and towns can run so their favourite alternative is the only other option that allows them to have a monopoly.
Oil and gas subsidy are bad for sure, you're kidding of you think the nuclear industry doesn't get absolutely huge amounts of public money thrown at it - look at Hinckley point C for example, the British government locked in an absurdly high price per mwh so EDF would get paid about double the current market rate - and this isn't rare, all over the world tax payers are funding nuclear subsidiaries because the plants aren't economically viable
And when the men in radiation suits came round collecting bird poop because the local reactor was leaking that's also paid for by the tax payers - it happened twice that I've known of. That's before you even think about how much tax money was spent on development and related costs, fuel sourcing, etc...
The wind industry has had mild government support, solar even less - except in Germany where it's been incredibly effective in enabling rooftop solar and grid modernization. Yet they've been building solar farms near me a lot recently because small private investors are able to actually see a return on their investments - since they started taking about building a replacement nuclear plant dozens of renewable sites have been put in the area, all now generating and some already paid off and making profit.
Nuclear was amazing in the fifties and it still has some limited use cases but it's basically obsolete as more modern technologies have emerged - and are continuing to emerge, they're starting to put in tidal systems and biomass conversion facilities (which are actually carbon negative) with huge developments underway in solar panel development, if the same investment had been made in solar and chemistry as has been with nuclear then there wouldn't be any of the fuel crisis going on.
Seriously go look at the history of nuclear power research and development, government money and billionaire energy conglomerate money gets poured into it at every step and it's endlessly pushed as the next big thing... Then look at the developments in things like solar panels and algae to fuel chemistry - that's all major breakthroughs by chem nerds who used their moms old tuppawear to cultivate strains because they'd already spent the research budget on a bus ride to the local park to scoop algae from the pond.
Nuclear subidies aren't even in the same order of magnitude as fossil fuel subsidies. There's so much fearmongering in that comment I don't even know where to start... Chernobyl really was the best thing to happen to the fossil fuel lobby.
go look at the history of nuclear power research and development
My friend, I went to university for this shit.
Yes renewables need to come with storage.
Storage technology isn't there yet. Nuclear is. The only viable approach is "all of the above." Anything less is foolishness and oil industry propaganda.
50 yeas ago people couldn't think of a future without fossile fuel. 100 years ago people thought ships would run on coal for eternity and 200 years ago or in fact up until WW2 horses did most of the work when it came to transportation.
Things change fast. Stagnation of technology is not the norm.
There are urgent needs we can't wait 50 years for.
France started to build their new power plant in 2007 and hope to connect it to the grid next year.
I guarantee you that climate change and industrial loads will still be a thing in 16 years.
The same people who run the oil companies also run nuclear plants, billionaires love a monopoly but what they hate is local communities being able to own and run solar farms and wind turbines, they hate the idea of someone that isn't them being able to spend a million making a profitable offshore wind farm or a raised water energy storage facility -- more than anything they hate the thought of houses and businesses having PV on the roof and being able to detach evenb just in part from the mechanisms owned by them.
The same people who run the oil companies also run nuclear plants
What? You keep saying this in this thread, where the hell are you getting it from?
I mean it's not even a deep dive to get to that conclusion, it's not even a puddle depth investigation - the companies which run nuclear power station are also oil and gas companies. EDF literally just do both, you don't need to look at shared ownership or board members or anything, they're literally a French government owned power company that traditionally deal in fossel fuel. NRG energy literally nuclear and fossel fuel company, Siemens energy literally used to be called gas and power division, Bruce power in Canada is TC energy who are the major player in oil and gas pipelines....
Go look up who owns your local nuclear plant, it's oil and gas companies so let's not pretend otherwise
I mean, those are power companies. If you're calling public power companies "the oil and gas billionaires" then you're clearly being facetious.
When people talk about the oil and gas billionaires they are referring to the ones who spend millions on lobbying, Exxon, Shell, BP, Aramco, etc. You know, the ones funding climate change denial and nuclear fearmongering for decades.
And where do you think all the materials for that come from? Eind turbines, solar panels and batteries require huge amounts of (rare) earth materials that need to be dug up in very -let's say ugly- mines.. lithium for example, is now the core component for most of our batteries and lithium mines are polluting as hell. If we want to have all the lithium we need for all of our storage capacity, well need to destroy beautiful places like the Atacama desert because if we don't we won't have enough lithium.
The rare in 'rare earth' is not related to scarcity, many of the most common elements in the crust are 'rare earth materials' lithium is a great example because it's hugely abundant especially in salt water where it can be extracted at the same time as desalination - which is especially good paired with wind and solar because it can rapidly switch power usage so excess energy at peek times can be used which helps stabilise the grid, then when generation is low it can pause to conserve power. Also ideal for placement directly tied to solar where sun and saltwater are plentiful, such as the equator.
The other good thing is that lithium is infinitely recyclable and battery tech keeps evolving to require less of it in its chemistry. Theres endless other battery technologies and energy storage methods available too, lithium is great for cars and phones because of the energy density but for grid tied storage that's not really an issue.
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.
That's why places that use mostly renewables and no coal or nuclear often have gas fired generation which can start up in the rare cases when it's needed. These places already exist and do just fine with no nuclear.
This may be true, but I am not convinced that it is any better than nuclear. To start up regeneration quick the gas winning needs to be on a pilot light (dutch source: https://nos.nl/l/2485108). In Groningen there are (according to the same source) 5 places on pilot light that together must produce at least 2.8 billion cubic metres of gas a year. This is quite a lot of fossil fuels, so I would rather have a nuclear power plant than this gas winning (which comes with other disadvantages as well).
I'm sorry but burning methane isn't doing just fine.
It's in-fill which is only used when needed and it's reducing every year as more renewable sources are added.
is only used when needed
Sure, but it's still GHG emissions, "only when needed" or not. The whole point we're making is those gas generators should have been nuclear generators in the first place.
And we continue building gas and coal power plants. Why? Build nuclear plants instead.
It's only temporary measure while other renewables come on board. It can be built, serve its purpose and then decommissioned before a nuclear plant could even have been built. As a stop-gap it's the "best worst solution".
So it's more nuclear vs renewables and a ton of batteries. (Or other storage options)
What it really should be is nuclear plus renewables plus a ton of batteries (or other storage options) vs fossil fuels.
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.
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.
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.
