We can do all three things at once

The problems with nuclear power aren't meltdowns, but the facts that it often takes decades just to construct a new plant, it creates an enormous carbon footprint before you get it running, it has an enormously resource-intensive fuel production process, it contributes to nuclear proliferation, it creates indefinitely harmful waste, and even if we get past all of that and do expand it, that's just going to deplete remaining fuel sources faster, of which we only have so many decades left.

It's not a good long term solution. I agree we should keep working plants running, but we can't do that forever, and we still need renewable alternatives - wind, hydro and solar.

And it wasn't some nebulous group of NIMBYs that worked against nuclear power, it was the fossil fuel lobby. I don't know why people keep jumping to cultural explanations for what is clearly a structural issue. The problem isn't some public perception issue, but political will, and that tends to be bought by the fossil fuel lobby.

Also there is good science on why we actually can switch to entirely renewables: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/23/no-miracles-needed-prof-mark-jacobson-on-how-wind-sun-and-water-can-power-the-world

I don't think nuclear power was killed by NIMBYs, at least not entirely. In the 1970s and 80s the financial world started taking a much more short-term view. Nuclear power plants have such a huge up-front cost that you aren't going to see returns for decades. When the market wants numbers to go up every quarter they're not going to finance something that won't make a profit for 20 years.

Suspect a lot of those NIMBYs were led by fossil fuel producers in a NIMBY hat...

I just don't get why they can close down nuclear power plants while still keeping coal power plants open. Coal is so much worse.

The problem with nuclear is it gives fossil fuel giants a free pass to try speedrun killing the planet before it even arrives.

If we plan for nuclear, we plan to do nothing for 50 years.

I don't understand why individuals are so set on centralized generation. We suddenly have the capabilities to decentralize generation and greatly reduce the need for the grid. I think it is worth it for the aesthetic advantages alone.

The number of people who still think nuclear power is a manageable risk in any capacity is really depressing. We still have no idea what to do with all the nuclear waste we're creating even now. And that's not even considering the impact of having a nuclear plant when you're in a war.

Please provide valid sources to back up your comment. Thanks.

As someone who has actually looked into nuclear waste and the current storage techniques instead of relying on knee-jerk fear mongering, yes. Store it in my area. Hell, store the casks underneath my house for all I care. If you are surprised by this answer, it's because you don't know shit about nuclear waste and how little of a problem it is.

The waste doesn't pose any danger as long as it's stored securely and doesn't cost that much space. The only downside of the waste is that it needs to be stored forever, but that's a very, very, small price to pay for not destroying the planet..

Weird how y'all haven't figured it out yet considering Finland has and Germany has had nuclear power plants for longer.

But I suspect it's more of a lack of wanting to do what's needed for storage because 'politics' and boomers than it is because it's not possible.

The US has a fuckton of space not being occupied by anyone or anything.

It just needs to be buried deep enough. Problem solved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

And uranium mines. Nuclear is an energy transport medium rather than a source. You have large dirty dangerous destructive mining.

Nuclear waste is stored in water tanks. Its quite safe there.

You know what’s scary? The existential threat of climate change.

"Endanger birds"

A whole lot less than most alternative solutions

building new nuclear plants is barely an option though because it costs tons of money and, more importantly, takes like 10 years to build. However I agree we shouldn't decommission the existing ones if they still are in a good state

Nuclear is not cheap.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

One of the ways solar and wind can become more reliable is by expanding the grid.

I'm not sure where you're from, but in the US we have three grids: the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and Texas. These grids aren't connected despite their names, and there have been many attempts in the past to connect them to little avail.

The benefit of larger grids with distributed energy resources is that even if local environments are cloudy or calm, those conditions usually are locally concentrated. This means that if one DER is underproducing, another DER can make up for the loss if that DER's locale is sunny and windy.

This gets better the wider a net you cast to collect energy (i.e. grid).

On your counterpoints to wind, "the view" is in the eye of the beholder - I'm young and I love the look of modern wind turbines; wind turbines reduce the overall amount of bird deaths from the energy industry as we transition away from fossil fuels; no significant evidence has been found to link wind turbine noise to health issues; and shadow flicker has not been correlated with any adverse health outcomes either, leading me to believe that this propaganda is being propagated by either NIMBYs or the fossil fuels industry or both.

Point is: solutions to climate change will come in a silver buckshot, not in a silver bullet. We need an all hands approach to this so we reverse damage as soon as possible and get to restoration as soon as possible.

Other I agree with you though. I would love to have a backbone of nuclear through the American Great Plains where population centers are low. Only issue there though is groundwater use, but I'd imagine future reactors could make use of geothermal-type solutions to cool instead of surface waters. Maybe there's a radiation risk there. Idk, need to research more

It's kinda the same though isn't it? Opposition to nuclear power, opposition to wind, solar, geothermal, hydro. Seems like maybe what people want most of all is to stick their heads in the sand and just have everything stay the same forever. It was a multi-decade effort to get people off of leaded gas FFS.

Yet those two places are not nuclear wastelands

At least electrifying means that you’ll be ready for renewables- that has to be done as well

Operating permit issued for Chinese molten salt reactor

China Unveils Plans For ‘Largest Ever’ Container Ship, Powered By Thorium Reactor

China has 21 nuclear reactors under construction which will have a capacity for generating 21.61 gigawatts of electricity, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That is more than two and a half times more nuclear reactors under construction than any other country.

Ootl... What's going on with that particular power plant?

I don't like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It'd probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it's anticipated to create from radiation exposure.

Bottom line, when you're talking about reactors that aren't pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that's reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.

what is happening with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine is souring me on the idea of nuclear power in general

The problem with nuclear power is that it can cause very large problems very quickly if a plant is mismanaged. By contrast, coal plants cause marginal problems played out over 30-50 year lifespan of the facility. One makes for big scary flashy headlines and the other is just a drip-drip-drip of under-the-radar bad news.

Also, it should be noted that nuclear power is too efficient. When you turn on a nuke plant, the amount of new electricity tanks the market. This is awful for cartels and profit-seeking energy retailers. By contrast, gas plants allow you to generate energy on a marginal scale (MWhs instead of GWhs) and only sell into the market when the price is peaking. ERCOT has turned Texas gas plants into absolute gold mines, as electricity selling for $25/MWh in the morning surges to $3000/MWh by late-afternoon.

Solar and Wind plants have similar problems. They generate when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, rather than when the price of electricity is peaking.

So while nuke/solar/wind plants are efficient, they are also economically self-defeating. They don't function well in a cartel. They don't let you fix prices and maximize the cost for retail consumers. And they don't help you corner the market to press out competition.

This isn't a problem for Ukrainians (who are lucky to have any amount of electricity any time of day). But its a huge problem for stable western nations inside the imperial core, who need continuous economic growth to justify expanded military budgets with higher tax revenues.

I would. ROI takes longer, but they're super fucking profitable as soon as they turn a profit at all. They're generally base loaded 24/7 except for about 3-4 weeks per year for refueling outage. I'm 35, so assume 10 years to build and another 10 years before it starts profiting. I'm retired at 55. Sounds pretty good to me.

Edit: source in response to reply asking for it so they will find it :)

I absolutely would and have done so: https://www.vaneck.com/us/en/investments/uranium-nuclear-energy-etf-nlr/

Sure would. I put money into renewable stocks and they tanked hard. Looking at you RNW.

We already run carriers and subs on nukes, supertankers and massive cargo ships could use them too. And arguably should, given they're a huge, massive source of pollution.

I literally own a bit of stock in the most nuclear-power-related company in my country - so yes.

Yes - it's called my fucking electricity bill.

Paper money, sure. But nickels and dimes? No thanks, I don’t want to walk around with radioactive currency

I wouldn't build a new power plant, but reactivating existing ones makes sense and is cheaper per GW than solar and reactivation has insignificant emissions.

Please stop this nonsense argument about Germany fucking up by shutting down nuclear. Even 20 years ago, nuclear energy wasn't that significant for our enery mix and shutting it down over the last 20 years didn't fuck up anything. The last few power plants had a capacity of about 4 to 8 GW and are not missed here.

For the last 20 years, coal consumption declined (could be faster though) and renewable had a steep growth (could be faster of course).

It is true that we started consuming more natural gas, but in the end the change is not about using old nuclear power plants that are unsafe or building new nuclear plants that will be usable in 10 to 20 years but about pushing renewable and improving the grid to solve the distribution problem.

I didn't know a lot of what was written in the article but as a German I can say that it reads reasonable and makes sense for me. It overlaps with what I learned at school and in general.

The article misses the important factor of war.

Germany has coal in their ground, quite a lot. In case of a war, Germany doesn't need to get coal from anywhere but from themselves.

Nuclear material is much more complicated to get.

Which makes maintaining coal infrastructure more reasonable from a military perspective.

Also nuclear reactors are great military targets....

Energy shouldn't be a business, it's a necessity at this point.

I'd like to note it's not profitable because it generates so much energy so consistently that it's hard to keep prices up.

That's why nuclear energy should never have been a private sector investment but a government one, or maybe hybrid. That's how it's worked in Finland, and the new reactor we had built plus the growing solar really saved us from the electricity spike after Russian gas was turned off.

They should just start selling merch to fans to be profitable. Nuclear hoodie? Yes please /j

pump storage hydroelectricity is the only storage we need.

whats your problem? who said we want to keep using fossil fuels forever? to me, the thing about nuclear power is its waste products and the timescales on which that degrades into something less but still as dangerous as before slow clap

did you know? getting insurance for a nuclear power plant is possible! but you might as well build a new nuclear power plant every year to spend that money more wisely... source some german paper: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/kernkraft-ist-nachhaltig-nachhaltig-unversicherbar-a-f6d8ef67-4f51-4697-965a-add0480ca712

we need to get off fossil fuels and nuclear fuels are one of them.

i mean sure, choose a timescale large enough and even the sun becomes a fossil fuel, but thats silly: sipping-off-the-suns-emissions itself, the operation of solar panels is not really degrading anybodies quality of life, except perhaps those who might look down onto now reflecting rooftops... making them is of course power consuming, but we are making stuff that makes power which takes power... and instead of just nodding at each other and chugging along we start bickering about the not tasty, not smelly stuff that makes your hair fall out all funny like...and ogle at it? wtf?

but ok you know what?: sure but only if you are personally responsible to have that thing in your backyard and fix it when it inevitably shits itself. also: garbage days are all yours now

The unholy trinity of "environmentalists", lobbying and the fossil fuel industry.

Y’all really have no fuckin clue how much safer it is than fossil fuels

It's safer but much more expensive to install and administer.

I think you replied to the wrong person.

You dolt there was never a problem with cooling the plants. The issue was that there is red tape that limits how much water the plant can discharge into the Rhine. That could have easily been addressed if the plants were just allowed to cycle more water. The higher the flow rate the colder the water will come out the other end . The water is put through a heat exchanger and then cycled back to the river. If more water can be piped through then the reactor can maintain lower temperatures.

Nuclear forms a base load of power that's consistent day to day and far cheaper to reliably produce than wind or solar.

Wind and solar create cheap abundance during optimal periods, but are expensive to store long term

Third and fourth-gen nuclear addresses these issues to a very, very significant degree.

Like, less than 1% of the current waste stream, and waste that lasts around 300 years (as opposed to the current 27,000 (fucking) years.

1. It creates radioactive waste that will destroy storage sites for centuries to come.
2. Mining and preparing the fuel needed for the reactors is far from green.

Do all of you share one brain cell? Have you ever researched nuclear beyond slurping big oil propaganda? Fossil fuels are currently devastating our water and air, but yes lets fret on hypothetical issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_drillhole_disposal https://yle.fi/a/3-10847558

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

Meanwhile, the Japanese cities where the bombs were dropped: all green and filled with life.

Ah, fusion reactors. Ready to market in 10 years since 1950.

https://www.iaea.org/publications/15558/nuclear-energy-in-mitigation-pathways-to-net-zero

We will never run out of fuel for the next few 10 thousand years. And by that time we'll probably have functional Dyson spheres.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occurrence_of_thorium

Yeah, principles.

The principles that it won't be profitable for 50+ years if at all.

And it will mean we are stuck with fossil fuels for just as long.

So I'm all for doing anything to survive, preferably sometime in the last 50 years.