Safe, sure. Efficient? Not even close.
It's far, far more expensive than renewable energy. It also takes far, far longer to build a plant. Too long to meet 2030 targets even if you started building today. And in most western democracies you wouldn't even be able to get anything done by 2040 if you also add in political processes, consultation, and design of the plant.
There's a reason the current biggest proponents of nuclear energy are people and parties who previously were open climate change deniers. Deciding to go to nuclear will give fossil fuel companies maximum time to keep doing their thing. Companies which made their existence on the back of fossil fuels, like mining companies and plant operators also love it, because it doesn't require much of a change from their current business model.
Australian politicians have been arguing about nuclear energy for decades, and with whats going on now, petty distracting squabbling while state governments are gutting public infrastructure
The most frustrating thing is the antinuclear party is obviously fine with nuclear power, and nuclear armaments, just look at the aukus submarines
labors cries about the dangers to our communities and the environment are obviously disingenuous, or they wouldnt be setting a green light for the billionaire robber barons to continue tearing oil and minerals out of the ground (they promise to restore the land for real-sies this time)
Anyway, a nuclear power plant runs a steam turbine and will never be more than what, 30% efficient?
I would remind you that Aukus is a mess of the Coalition's making - after they made a mess of the original submarine replacement project under Abbott and Turnbull, insisting on Diesel.
But for Labor to withdraw from Aukus would cause a shitstorm of unseen proportions.
But how do we produce enough batteries for renewable energy?
Price driven consumption has been done by industrial users for decades. And countries like UK has been storing energy in storage heaters at home for decades as well. EVs can do wonders here.
Fuck I wish the politicians would give this to us straight like that.
Why is Albo's party spreading memes about three eyed fish instead of saying "yeah Dutton's nuclear plan is safe, but it maximises fossil fuel use in the short term and we'd prefer to focus on renewables"
We're not gonna make any of those targets. Make peace with that and prepare accordingly. Pick a shitty future. Mad Max at worst, Elysium at best.
AMOC collapse, Carbon Sinks failing. We're boned. Cooked. Soon to be roasted. If our Govt's ever react at all, it'll be far too little far too late by the time they do.
Blah blah blah nobody wants to hear actual evidence and suggestions that solar and wind might be better. We're on a mission for Nuclear power damn the Fukushima refugees and who cares if we store the waste encased in concrete at the bottom of the ocean which we know will eventually leak into the food stream
Noo kyaa larr is the fyuuu charrr
Good luck in the winter. 😉
Agreed, building a nuclear facility takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. However... This doesn't need to be the case at all.
A lot of the costs go into design, planning and legal work. The amount of red tape to build a nuclear plant is huge. Plus all of the parties that fight any plans to build, with a heavy not in my backyard component.
If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly. Back in the day we could build them faster and cheaper. And these days we build far more complex installations quicker and cheaper than nuclear power plants.
The anti-nuclear movement has done so much to hold humanity back on this front. And the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost.
You can't cut the red tape. The red tape is why we're able to say nuclear is safe.
the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost
Huh? Nuclear fusion doesn't have any downsides or upsides. Because it doesn't exist. We've never been able to generate net power with fusion. (No, not even that story from a couple of years ago, which only counted as 'input' a small fraction of the total energy used overall. It was a good development, but just one small step on the long journey to it being practical.)
Being anti-nuclear was a poor stance to have 20, 30 years ago. At that time, renewables weren't cost effective enough to be a big portion of our energy generation mix, and we should have been building alternatives to fossil fuels since back then if not earlier. But today, all the analysis tells us that renewables are far cheaper and more effective than nuclear. Today, being pro-nuclear is the wrong stance to take. It's the anti-science stance, which is why it has seen a recent rise among right-wing political parties and media organisations.
If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly.
That's a pretty big ask for a democratic government where half of the politicians are actively sabotaging climate initiatives....
The only countries where this is really feasible are places where federal powers can supersede the authority of local governments. A nuclear based power grid in America would require a complete reorganization of state and federal authority.
The only way anyone thinks nuclear energy is a viable option in the states is if they completely ignore the political realities of American government.
For example, is it physically possible for us to build a proper deep storage facility for nuclear waste? Yes, of course. Have we attempted to build said deep storage facility? Yes, since 1987. Are we any closer to finishing the site after +30 years.......no.
It's possible to do nuclear in cheaper sense, just do not ask for US ones
Huh. So those of us that have always advocated for a nuclear baseline with wind/solar topping off until we have adequate storage solutions are climate change deniers? That's new.
First, no, that's not what I said. If you're only going to be arguing in bad faith like that this will be the last time I engage with you.
Second, baseload power is in fact a myth. And it becomes even worse when you consider the fact that nuclear doesn't scale up and down in response to demand very well. In places with large amounts of rooftop solar and other distributed renewables, nuclear is especially bad, because you can't just tell everyone who has their own generation to stop doing that, but you also don't want to be generating more than is used.
Third, even if you did consider it necessary to have baseload "until we have adequate storage", the extremely long timelines it takes to get from today to using renewables in places that don't already have it, spending money designing and building nuclear would just delay the building of that storage, and it would still end up coming online too late.
I used to be a fan of nuclear. In 2010 I'd have said yeah, we should do it. But every time I've looked into it over the last 10 years especially, I've had to reckon with the simple fact that all the data tells us we shouldn't be building nuclear; it's just an inferior option to renewables.
Biggest, not all.
The irony of Homer Simpson representing safe nuclear energy...
Well, it took much effort for Homer to blow up NPP
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let's stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can't make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn't get less dangerous with time. So, why isn't anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that's because we already have a solution, just not "forever".
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It's a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
As a friend once said "benzene is what anti-nuclear people think nuclear waste is."
I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that's significantly more than I'll use in my lifetime.
I'd gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It'd make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.
Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxguides/toxguide-8.pdf
I didn't know that before but it appears cyanide does have a half-life that is a fraction of nuclear waste.
That doesn't make it or the other compounds less dangerous, of course.
That's uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Cyanide is used extensively in precious metal recycling too. So even reclaiming resources has a harsh chemical cost. Meeting workers from there I was surprised to say the least about how 'casually' they work with Cyanide. Clearly they have safty protocall but nothing like what I imagined something like Cyanide would call for.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn't surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
Checkmate uh pro democratic people I guess?
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
France is EU’s first importer of ‘Russian nuclear products’: study – Euractiv
New report shows Russia raking in revenue from state nuclear company | Fox Business
Russia faces threat of sanctions on nuclear power industry as Germany backs uranium ban – POLITICO
Bratislava to reject EU's latest sanctions package if it includes ban on Russia nuclear fuel
Russia's Rosatom Helps Putin Skirt Sanctions
Russia’s nuclear project in Hungary: France’s growing role | OSW Centre for Eastern Studies
https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220517-greenpeace-report-russland-taxonomie.pdf
Curious to hear you say this. I live in NZ and cyanide waste is always raised as an objection to gold mining.
An unfortunate reality is that while we CAN store things safely, that doesn't mean they always will be.
There are downsides to nuclear these days. Incredibly high cost with a massive delay before they're functioning. Solar + wind + pumped hydro + district heating is where it's at in 2024.
This.
Also, tie together more countries' power grids to even out production and demand of renewables, and reduce the need for other backup sources.
For a fraction of the cost of nuclear, increase the storage capacity as well. We've had days where the price per MWh was negative in many hours, because of excess production.
The barriers to carbon free energy aren't technical, they're purely political.
Please understand that negative prices are the market for electricity breaking down! That is not a good thing. It should mean that if you have solar panels on your roof you have to pay to participate in the national grid because you are dumping energy into the grid when it can't use it, but special rules have been made for renewable plants. Literally, imagine a contract-to-supply for wind or solar...
You don't need to tie grids to transfer energy between them.
Still not a reason to not build them, the entire point is for nuclear to handle the load when solar/wind can't provide due to weather. Other renewables will still be producing the bulk of the power we need, but at night nuclear will be handling any demand spikes, each of them would greatly reduce the number of batteries required to satisfy the demand. They can stay until our solar output is so high we can just start electrolyzing water into hydrogen as energy storage.
That's why they mentioned "pumped hydro"
You can make Thorium reactors much smaller and cheaper, basically a 50MW unit is not much larger than a shipping container, while being much more safe than standard nuclear plants. The largest issue is over-regulation of the nuclear power in general.
A 50MW of solar installation is HUGE, and thats 50MW at the sunniest part of the planet: https://newsaf.cgtn.com/news/2019-12-15/Kenya-launches-Chinese-built-50MW-solar-power-plant-MqC575l6Te/index.html, We are basically talking about close to a square kilometer installation...
there is simply no way to call a 50MW solar plant cleaner than nuclear and its probably not even that much cheaper in the end. Compare that to a shipping container sized reactor... Only thing in the way, is the nuclear scare and government regulations.
The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it's just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.
If you're interested in energy solutions and haven't read the RethinkX report on the feasibility of a 100% solar, wind and battery solution, it's definitely worth taking a look.
Whilst I agree that we need to decarbonise asap with whatever we can, any new nuclear that begins planning today is likely to be a stranded asset by the time it finishes construction. That money could be better spent leaning into a renewable solution in my view.
Exactly this. I am "in favor" of nuclear energy, but only in the sense that I'd like fossil power to be phased out first, then nuclear. Any money that could be spent on new nuclear power plants is better spent on solar and wind.
I'd like Nuclear power not to be thrown out with the bathwater because it is practically essential for space travel/colonization in the long term. Solar panels can only get us so far, and batteries are a stop-gap. We need nuclear power because it is the only energy source that can meet our needs while being small enough to carry with us.
All should praise the magic, hot rocks.
The materials needed to produce batteries and wind turbines and maintain them over time is the issue. Did your 62 page report discuss this?
Doesn't seem to be including the land usage.
Does it cover everyone on the planet using the same amount of electricity as a North American? 8 billion people now. And usage is increasing too, gotta power EVs and AI (but not limited to that).
There are two main problems in my opinion, and they are both related to the "fuel". First, uranium is rare and you often need to buy it from other countries. For instance, Russia. Not great. Second, it is not renewable energy. We can't rely on nuclear fission in the long run. Then there's also the issue of waste, which despite not being as critical as some argue, is still a problem to consider
A big problem IMO is the generational responsibility of the waste as well. There needs to be decades of planning, monitoring and maintaince to ensure waste sites are safe and secure, this can be done but modern political climates can make it difficult.
Agreed, dealing with the waste is a thing. But for me a solvable problem and something that doesn't need to be solved right away. We currently store a lot of nuclear waste in holding locations till we figure out a way to either make it less radioactive or store it for long enough. The alternative however is having coal plants all over the world spew all their dust (including radioactive dust) and CO2 straight into the atmosphere. This to me is a far bigger issue to solve. It isn't contained in one location, but instead ends up all over the world. It ends up in people's homes and bodies, with a huge impact to their health. It ends up in the atmosphere, with climate change causing huge (and expensive) issues.
The amount of money we need to handle nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than what we are going to have to pay to handle climate change. And that isn't even fixing the issue, just dealing with the consequences. I don't know how we are ever going to get all that carbon back out of the atmosphere, but it won't be cheap.
Uranium is not that rare. Doesn’t Canada have quite a bit of it? Portugal used to mine it too, as well as several countries in Africa
Yeah, countries obtaining uranium really isn't that big of an obstacle.
The mining is also usually a really polluting affair for the region, much more than the what power generation might suggest. And overall, in many countries there is a lot of subsidies going on for hidden costs, especially relating to the waste and initial construction. So it is not as cheap as a first look might suggest.
I'm not against it per se, it is better than fossil fuels, which simply is the more urgent matter, but it's never been the wonder technology it has been touted as ever since it first appeared.
One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Of course, we've also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.
But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn't so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.
It'd be nice to prioritise it at least rather than tucking it away under the oil and gas rug. There is no real competition in energy output to a nuclear power plant. And despite its egregious up front cost, operating it is relatively low cost.
In regards to fuel, uranium is used often but there is options such as thorium that have been used with some success. I do agree it is unfortunate to have to purchase from other countries but I think it beats buying natural gas from wherever it may be sold.
you often need to buy it from other countries. For instance, Russia. Not great.
Yeeeeah, I wouldn't worry about that. Sure we (Australia) are conservative with our fears of mining and exporting uranium, especially with the Cold War and reactor whoopsies around the world. But historically it doesn't take much for us to go down on an ally.
Just let us finish unloading all our coal off to the worst polluting nations first, then we'll crack the top-shelf stuff.
Is that supposed to convince me that there's plenty of uranium left? Because based on the numbers shown with reserve vs. historical usage it kinda seems like it would last for a few decades at best.
There are some reactor designs that run on waste of standard reactors. It would solve two of your points for at least some decades.
Uranium isn't the only possible fuel. It's just the one we've been using (because it's the one that lets you make nuclear weapons).
Buying uranium from Canada and Australia? Inconceivable!
Except that you don't need uranium for nuclear reactors. The reason it's used traditionally because it's also used for nuclear weapons. Thorium is a much better fuel that's more abundant. China has already started operating these types of reactors. The other advantage of this design is that they use molten salt instead of water for cooling. Molten salt reactors don't need to be built next to large bodies of water, and they are safer because salt becomes solid when it cools limiting the size of contamination in case of an accident.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-issued-for-Chinese-molten-salt-re
That's why we need fusion, which will use a lot of the same tech.
In Spain we are starting to get negative prices every weekend for electricity thanks to renewables. France is not even close to those prices with their bet for nuclear.
Don't get me wrong, I love nuclear power. And I'm not a big fan ok what thousands of windmills made to our landscapes. But efficiency wise renewable is unbeatable nowadays.
I'm not a big fan
...
thousands of windmills
I see what you did there.
The Spanish government is now petitioning its public for ideas on how to waste power.
They don't need to be exclusive. Power generation should be diverse. Otherwise prices will go through the roof on times without wind (happens in Germany). This can lead to higher energy prices in combination with high energy exports.
Energy is expensive in France because we are legally forced by european regulation to sell at those prices. Our energy is the least expensive to produce
Negative energy prices are a bad thing! That means that someone is dumping energy into the grid (you should be paying the grid if you have solar panels!!) In the UK all renewable energy had to be called 'experimental' so that the pricing was fixed and the government picks up the tab - that's not good. Check this map - right now the wind isn't blowing and solar hasn't got out of bed - so most of the countries using renewables are looking shit - later today solar will kick in, but tonight it will be bad again. That isn't a solution.
Just because it's safe doesn't mean it's the best we have right now.
- It's massively expensive to set up
- It's massively expensive to decommission at end of life
- Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
- It takes a long time to set up.
- It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We've got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
I would like to add, that though we have the means to store the radioactive waste safely, it's not done properly in many places. So it's also an organizational challenge.
Storage is not easy when you don't have massive amounts of free land. This is an ongoing debate in Europe, and in one particular country a leaky storage was discovered just a month or two ago. Again.
And there is no guarantee that what we build today is not going to be a massive liability in 50 or 200 or hell, 500 years. But the companies and people who are responsible will not even exist at this point.
The problem with these arguments and the focus of debates is that they are based on nuclear energy from uranium, not thorium. Thorium is ubiquitous in nature, power centers are much easier to set up and can be small and the waste, while initially (a bit) more radioactive than uranium waste, loses it's radiation level much faster
Edit:typo
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
I'm pro nuke energy but to pretend there are no downsides is what got us into the climate mess we are in in the first place.
Cost, being a major drawback, space being another. And of course while they almost never fail, they do occasionally, and will again. And those failures are utterly catastrophic, and it'd hard to convince a community to welcome a nuclear plant, and if the community doesn't want it then it can't or shouldn't be forced onto them.
They also represent tactical strike sites in time of combat engagement. Big red X for a missile.
There are also significant environmental concerns, as we really have no good way to dispose of nuclear waste in a safe or efficient manner at this time.
It's likely that nuclear based energy is the future, but you need to discuss the bad with the good here or we are just going to end up at square one again. There are long term ramifications.
Worth noting that all modern failures have been GE models or ancient Westinghouse models. Modern nuclear reactors built by Westinghouse are virtually immune from meltdown, and Westinghouse is the lead player in new builds. Nuclear safety has come miles since the like of Fukushima, and especially 3 Mile Island. I'd feel perfectly safe living near a new Westinghouse nuclear plant.
There's always a way to fail. Always.
There are no unsinkable ships. No matter how safe the Titanic is, keep enough of them on the sea and one will eventually sink the way least people expected. If life on Earth depends on a Titanic never sinking...we're fucked eventually.
Life on Earth depends on no more than a couple on nuclear plants blowing up catastrophically.
Wdym space with nuclear energy?
Nuke energy! Actually, don't. We need it.
They also represent tactical strike sites in time of combat engagement. Big red X for a missile.
Practice shows that in land wars instead of big X it is just burden for both sides. I'm talking Putin-Ukraine war.
I agree with everything you say. It really is spot on. What I don't understand is how, with your awareness, do you still consider yourself pro-nuclear. Honest question, I really am curious.
This is a shocker for many on social media but you can accept that something you want is not perfect but still want it, or see good in a bad person, but still not want them on the throne.
Just because I can be realistic about it's pros and cons instead of blindly parroting that I have been told to parrot doesn't mean I can't be pro nuclear.
Other power sources have more problems. And I say just launch the waste into space and eventually the reactors will just be out of the stratosphere and it won't matter if it explodes.
But you got to walk before you can run.
I just dislike when people pretend there are no downside to nuke, EV, wind, etc, because if they make one little comment on a con suddenly they're some anti enviro Trump sucker and get dogpiled
Renewables are better, cheaper and more scalable. Its not even close. Look at Denmark for how it can be done.
Denmark looking decidedly not green this morning. It's sunny, but virtually no wind - might be like this for another week. Check the map regularly to understand why unreliable energy is actually just a way of increasing gas usage.
Okay, where is the comparison to nuclear? For that you have to build massive infrastructure, that costs billions, that no one want to insure, thats why it has to be backed by state money. After that the waste has to be managed by the state too, because no company wants to deal with the liability of radioactive waste for thousands of years at least, so that, too, comes out of the taxpayers pockets.
I don't like fossil fuels, but this is just plain stupid
(and also as a cherry on top, tschernobyl, fokushima)
Cost billions and have 10 year lead times?
Yes. Should have started more 10years ago, but doesn't mean don't start now.
Except we have better options than we did 10 years ago.
I'd be all for nuclear if we rolled back the clock to 2010 or so. As it stands, solar/wind/storage/hvdc lines can do the job. The situation moved and my opinion moved.
If you start building a new nuclear plant today, it’ll start generating power around the year 2045, by which time renewables with storage will have gotten even cheaper.
Bet you the public will be on the hook to pay for that white elephant because utility companies privatize profits and socialize losses.
We're reaching the point where discussing cost in regard to the energy crisis makes us look like fucking idiots.
Imagine what kids reading the history books are going to think of these discussions.
And 10 years isn't that long really. If someone said we could use no fossil fuels in energy generation in 10 years time that doesn't sound long at all.
Cost is a proxy for productivity and resources. So while it is stupid to say that the energy transition is too expensive, shouldn't we rather invest our productivity and resources into a faster and cheaper solution? Drawing focus away from renewables is dangerous as others have mentioned, because it is too late to reach our goals with nuclear.
Wdym 10 year lead times?
It's definitely not the best we have
Given that solar and wind are cheaper, get built to schedule and far less likely to have cost overruns, this meme is bullshit.
Sure, nukes are great. But we need clean energy right the fuck now. Spending money on new nukes is inefficient when it could be spent on solar and wind.
The best strategies are rarely single trick. Energy should be diversely sourced.
This, this should be common sense, and I don't understand why it's not.
Okay, so, say I need some energy that's pretty dense in terms of the space that it takes up, say I need a large amount of constant energy draw, and say that I need a form of energy that's going to be pretty stable and not prone to variation in weather events. I.e. I seek to power a city. This isn't even really a far-fetched hypothetical, this is a pretty common situation. What energy source seems like the best for that? Basically, we're looking at hydropower, which generally has long term environmental problems itself, and is contextually dependant, or nuclear.
Solar also makes sense, wind energy also makes sense, for certain use cases. Say I have a very spread out population or I have a place where space is really not at a premium, as is the case with much of america, and america's startling lack of population density, that might be the case. But then, I kind of worry that said lack of population density in general is kind of it's own ongoing environmental crisis, and makes things much, much harder than they'd otherwise need to be.
I think the best metaphor for nuclear that I have is the shinkansen. I dunno what solar would be, in this metaphor, maybe bicycles or something. So, the shinkansen, when it was constructed, costed almost double it's expected cost and took longer then anyone thought it would and everybody fucking hated it, on paper. In practice, everybody loves that shit now, it goes super fast, and even though it should be incredibly dangerous because the trains are super light and have super powerful motors and no crash safety to speak of, they're pretty well-protected because the safety standards are well in place. It's something that's gone from being a kind of, theoretical idiot solution, to being something that actually worked out very well in practice.
If you were to propose a high speed rail corridor in the US, you would probably get the same problems brought up, as you might if you were to plan a nuclear site. Oh, NIMBYs are never gonna let you, it's too expensive, we lack the generational knowledge to build it, and we can patch everything up with this smaller solution in e-bikes and micromobility anyways. Then people don't pay attention to that singular, big encompassing solution, and the micromobility gets privatized to shit and ends up as a bunch of shitty electric rental scooters dumped in rivers and a bunch of rideshare apps that destroy taxi business. These issues which we bring up strike me as purely being political issues, rather than real problems. So, we lack generational knowledge, why not import some chinese guys to build some reactors, since they can do it so fast? Or, if we're not willing to deal with them, south korean?
I'm not saying we can't also do solar and renewables as well, sure, those also have political issues that we would need to deal with, and I am perfectly willing to deal with them as they come up and as it makes sense. If you actually want a sober analysis, though, we're going to need to look at all the different use cases and then come up with whichever one actually makes sense, instead of making some blanket statement and then kind of, poo-pooing on everything else as though we can just come up with some kind of one size fits all solution, which is what I view as really being the thing which got us into this mess. Oooh, oil is so energy dense, oooh, plastic is so highly performing and so cheap and we don't even have to set up any recycling or buyback schemes,
oooh, let's become the richest nation on the planet by controlling the purchasing of oil. We got lulled into a one size fits all solution that looked good at the time and was in hindsight was a large part in perhaps a civilization ending and ecologically costly mistake.
The global leader in solar and wind is China. As a result those things are now communism and we can't have them.
Global leader in nuclear is also China. They are actually building the reactors that cannot meltdown, but you also can't make weapons from them, and they can run on the nuclear waste we have already produced with the crappy cheap reactors we use. We designed the reactors that China is now building 60 fucking years ago, and just shelved the design.
Funny that you call them "Nukes". You really don't like the nuclear power plants if you call them the same as nuclear weapons.
Renewables are cheaper per kwh, but it's yet to be seen if they're cheaper when you get to higher grid renewable percentages and need to involve massive grid storage.
Windmil blades need to be replaced far more often than anything even half that expensive at nuclear facilities and require huge costs in chemicals and transportation. Off shore blades need even more frequent replacement. The best gelcoats in the world arent going to stave off salty air and water spray for long, and as soon as water gets in one small spot, the entire composite begins to delaminate. You don't pay as much down the line with nuclear and you dont have to worry about offsetting the carbon output of manufacturing new blades so frequently.
No, you just pay out the nose up front.
If I had money to invest in the energy sector, I don't know why I should pick nuclear. It's going to double its budget and take 10 years before I see a dime of return. Possibly none if it can't secure funding for the budget overrun, as all my initial investment will be spent.
A solar or wind farm will take 6-12 months and likely come in at or close to its budget. Why the hell would I choose nuclear?
Are solar and wind really "clean" energy? Everyone in this thread seems to ignore the costs of these methods.
Every modern wind turbine requires 60 gallons of highly synthetic oil to function, and it needs to be changed every 6 months. That's a lot of fossil fuel use.
Lithium mining for batteries is extremely destructive to the environment.
Production of solar panels burns lots of fuel and produces many heavy metals. Just like with nuclear waste, improper disposal of these toxic elements can be devastating to the environment.
Of course, solar and wind are a big improvement over coal and natural gas. I dont want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, I just want to be realistic about the downfalls of these methods.
I believe, with our current technology, that nuclear is our cleanest and greenest option.
You know renewables aren't even the same thing as nuclear right? renewables aren't consistent and it's currently not possible to store the renewables anywhere.
We already have over-capacity of renewables.
Spending money on more doesn't help when there's no where to put that energy.
... it's currently not possible to store the renewables anywhere
Every time someone argues this, it's immediately obvious they haven't actually paid attention how the storage market has been progressing.
Next, you'll probably talk about problems with lithium, as if it's the only storage technology.
literally the least efficient in terms of cost and time.
battery backed renewables are a fraction of the price and are being deployed right now.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost
edit: the tech is cool as hell. go nuts on research reactors. nuclear medicine has saved my sisters life twice.... but i'm sorry, its just not a sane solution to the climate crisis.
Nuclear lobby really tries to sell us to the fact, that it's better to have control over power by a few big players. Must be terrifying to think about people creating their own power eventually.
Just make it public
Who says it needs to be controlled by a few big players?
I mean, obviously we never would, but there could absolutely be a right way to do this. Nationalization could be a solution. Or something like co-determination.
It doesn't need to, but it is.. It's fine to have ideas, but let's keep them SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, REALISTIC, terminated.
Thats not even funny. It's not even a meme. It's just straight outright corporate propaganda. F off with that, Pinkerton!
Did we ever figure out toxic waste disposal?
solved for quite some time. it gets mixed with concrete and stuck in a bigger concrete container called a "dry cask".
Link, because I believe in "outsourcing critical thinking".
we tried to, then the state we were gonna stick it all in said "eh maybe we don't want to the country's home for spent fuel, considering how it will stay hot for tens of thousands of years.
so our solution was to just... ignore it. store it in cooling pools at every plant spread all over the country. because hundreds of different waste holding ponds are SURE to be better than the thing we were planning lol.
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
You would be surprised to know the amount of scientific research with actual solutions that aren't applied cause goes against the fossil fuel companies and whatnot. Due to the fact that they have market monopoly.
I'm sure nuclear can be super safe and efficient. The science is legit.
The problem is, at some point something critical to the operation of that plant is going to break. Could be 10 years, could be 10 days. It's inevitable.
When that happens, the owner of that plant has to make a decision to either:
- Shut down to make the necessary repairs and lose billions of dollars a minute.
- Pretend like it's not that big of a deal. Stall. Get a second opinion. Fire/harass anyone who brings it up. Consider selling to make it someone else's problem. And finally, surprise pikachu face when something bad happens.
In our current society, I don't have to guess which option the owner is going to choose.
Additionally, we live in a golden age of deregulation and weaponized incompetence. If a disaster did happen, the response isn't going to be like Chernobyl where they evacuate us and quarantine the site for hundreds of years until its safe to return. It'll be like the response to the pandemic we all just lived through. Or the response to the water crisis in Flint Michigan. Or the train derailment in East Palestine.
Considering the fallout of previous disasters, I think it's fair to say that until we solve both of those problems, we should stay far away from nuclear power. We're just not ready for it.
I agree it's safe but idk it's the best we currently have, I think that probably depends on locale.
Solar and wind (and maybe tidal?), with pumped hydro energy storage is probably cheaper, safer, and cleaner... But it requires access to a fair bit more water than a nuclear plant requires, at least initially.
But nuclear is still far better than using fossil fuels for baseline demand.
Land usage is also a huge concern with hydro power. Pumped hydro storage means permanently flooding an area to create the reservoir, which carries many above and beyond just the destruction of whatever was there before. The flooded land has vegetation on it, which is now decaying under water. This can release all sorts of unpleasantness, most notably mercury.
I agree it absolutely has problems and I hope we come up with a better solution in the near future.
But it's currently the lesser evil. Even though nuclear plants don't need a lot of fuel, getting that fuel is still typically more damaging than creating a water reservoir, or using an existing natural reservoir.
Land usage is what makes nuclear the most ecologically sound solution. Solar and wind play their part. But for every acre of land, nuclear tops the chart of power produced per year. And when you're trying to sate the demand of high density housing and businesses in cities, energy density becomes important. Low carbon footprint is great for solar and wind but if you're also displacing ecosytems that would otherwise be sucking up carbon, its not as environmentally friendly as we'd like.
Are you displacing whole ecosystems, though?
How much do wind farms affect grasslands and prairies, etc? They'll have an impact for sure, but it's not like the whole place gets paved over.
And solar can get placed on roofs of existing structures. Or distributed so it doesn't affect any one area too much.I have to admit idk much about sourcing the materials involved in building solar panels and windmills. Idk if they require destructive mining operations.
I imagine that a nuclear reactor would require more concrete, metal, and rate earth magnets that a solar/wind farm, but idk. I likewise don't know the details about mining and refining the various fissile material and nuclear poisons.The other advantage of renewables is that it's distributed so it's naturally redundant. If it needs to get shut down (repairs, or a problem with the grid) it wont have a big impact.
I like nuclear, and it's certainly the better choice for some locations, but many locations seems better suited for renewable
Yes yes. Let's continute to use energy sources which are limited in terms of available but necessary resources and cause highly problematic by-products. It has been going on so well so far. Hasn't it?
Are you talking about oil and gas?
Must. Not. Feed. The. Troll.
Nothing about nuclear energy production is good, sensible and safe! You are dependent on a finite resource, you have to put in an incredible amount of effort to keep it running. Not to mention the damage caused by a malfunction (see Fukushima and Chernobyl).
What are you even talking about?!?! There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.
Uranium is more abundant than silver and we don't need much to power a nuclear reactor.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait.
Chernobyl: 2 Fukushima: 0
Keep in mind that Chernobyl was built in the 50s with 50s tech it never maintained during the USSR era.
Fukushima did not anticipate a tsunami. Because of the Fukushima disaster we know have new protocols to improve future nuclear builds. If anything Fukushima is a prime example how safe a nuclear reactor can be even when the worst scenario happens.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait. Chernobyl: 2 Fukushima: 0
Are you really that dillusional that you think that the only casualties are the people who died in the incident? Hundreds of peoples suffered from cancer and other long term effects alone in chernobyl. The area is still hazardous to people (as some 'clever' Russian invaders just proofed two years ago)
Please go check. I'll wait.
PlEaSe Go ChEcK. I'lL wAiT.
...
Please just grow up, kiddo
What are you even talking about?!?! There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left. Uranium is more abundant than silver and we don't need much to power a nuclear reactor.
And yet we would still be dependent on an industry, just as we are today on coal, gas and oil.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait.
As others have already answered: far more people died than you claim here! How much land was made uninhabitable for centuries? How many animals would have to die? How much food would have to be destroyed because it was contaminated? What happens if a tsunami hits an offshore wind farm? They collapse... And then? Do they have to be rebuilt?But you can do that because the land has not been contaminated
There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.
TL;DR: If we switched over to nuclear, we’d burn through the world’s reserves of accessible uranium ore in less than twenty years. Hopefully the sun will last a bit longer than that.
According to 2022 Red Book, there are around 8 million tonnes of Uranium which we could extract for $260 or less, per kg. The current price for uranium is around half that, FYI, so nuclear fuel prices would have at least doubled by the point we’re extracting that last million tonne.
Nuclear power plants use around 20 tonnes of uranium per TWh, according to the world nuclear association, and world energy consumption is around 25,000 TWh per year, according to the IEA. That would be half a million tonnes of uranium consumed per year. Meaning we would burn through the world’s reserve of reasonably accessible uranium in just sixteen years.
Furthermore, any energy production that has the potential to injure, harm or kill thousands of people cannot be considered safe. Just because nothing has happened so far.
The good safety of nuclear in developed countries goes hand in hand with its costly regulatory environment, the risk for catastrophic breakdown of nuclear facilities is managed not by technically proficient design but by oversight and rules, which are expensive yes , but they also need to be because the people running the plant are it's weakest link in terms of safety.
Now we are entering potentially decades of conflict and natural disaster and the proposition is to build energy infrastructure that is very centralized, relies on fuel that must be acquired, and is in the hands of a relatively small amount of people, especially if their societal controll/ oversight structure breaks down. It just doesn't seem particularly reasonable to me, especially considering lead times on these things, but nice meme I guess.
The good safety of nuclear in developed countries goes hand in hand with its costly regulatory environment, the risk for catastrophic breakdown of nuclear facilities is managed not by technically proficient design but by oversight and rules, which are expensive yes , but they also need to be because the people running the plant are it's weakest link in terms of safety.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/646230.stm
Unless you are in Britain, where they manage to have a costly regulatory environment and poor safety outcomes because THE PEOPLE TASKED WITH KEEPING US SAFE JUST STRAIGHT UP FALSIFY RECORDS.
Nuclear power relies on stable, safe, and advanced nations not like, I dunno, starting a land war in Europe that threatens to flood the continent with fallout.
A concern of mine is the increasing prevalence of natural disastors as global warming worsens. Our plant and storage location may be safe now but natural disasters will be way worse and in unexpected locations as we're already seeing.
The US better be careful of all those land invasions from Canada. All those NATO countries that live in the largest defensive alliance ever, that are threatened by Russia who couldn't invade one of Europe's poorest countries. China could be invaded at any moment by the Mongols.
Where the fuck we gonna put all the waste product? I'm not saying nuclear power is bad, far from it, but we have two problems here:
- Its cost prohibitive to build new Third Generation reactors that are fault tolerant, and moreso to assure that all the Second Generation reactors are fully fault tolerant given how adjacent they are to flood plains and fault lines in the US
- Where the fuck are we gonna put the waste at? Yucca Mountain is off the table for good, WIPP is nearing capacity for a pilot plant, and we have nothing like Onkalo planned out despite the funding being there many times over
All the waste a plant ever produces in its lifetime can be contained with ease on site. Waste certainly isn't the main issue, though it's portrayed to be. Cost of deployment and staffing are more prohibitive issues, and both are surmountable. I don't think it's a bandaid for all power issues, but it's a powerful tool that should be used more often, not phased out.
What's wrong with nuclear waste? Is it radioactive or something? Like the original uranium we got out of the ground?
But we don't really have it now, which is the main problem. In the time it takes to build these things (also for the money it takes), we could plaster everything full with renewables and come up with a decentralized storage solution. Plus, being dependent on Kazachstan for fissile material seems very... stupid?
Nah renewables are the best we've got
I hate to say it, but regardless of one's stance, on his back should be "Public perception of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island."
I say regardless of one's stance, because even if the public's perceptions are off...when we remember those incidents but not how much time was in between them or the relative infrequency of disasters, they can have outsized effects on public attitude.
Didn’t you hear about that about that wind turbine that exploded and spread wind all over a dozen farmer’s fields? /s
It's not a great idea from the risk. If future governments let the windmills fall into disrepair, all that happens is windmills are useless. They can never accidently summon centuries of nuclear winter.
They can never accidently summon centuries of nuclear winter.
Neither can nuclear power plants, lol. Nuclear power plants are not built in a way that can trigger a nuclear bomb explosion, which is inherent to the theory of nuclear winter of nuclear explosions leaving material in the atmosphere to blot out the sun.
Maintaining a fission reaction is an incredibly complicated process that requires human intervention to sustain. If nuclear plants fell into "disrepair" the would just turn off and be useless, like windmills.
The sheer quantity of stupid people that exist is staggering.
And really depressing.
Because I want to be like 'who gives a shit what those frothing removed perceive as scary' but... There are just so many.
And they are so easy to steer with fear.
Maybe that's the trick?
Try something like "Coal causes abortions and makes white baby Jesus cry!" with a dash of 'Muslim folks can't use Nuclear power!'
Yeah that really convinces me. I'm stupid so ill switch to your point of view
It's not clear what your trying to stay, but if you're saying that coal is very bad and nuclear power is better, that's not untrue, but it's important to remember that the economic pressure right now is against coal and for renewable energy, even in coal country businesses won't build in a state that won't explicitly commit to only building renewable energy exclusively for all new ot replacement energy sources. The situation isn't perfect, there should be more aggressive removal of dirty energy, granted, but nuclear power isn't the only clean option, and it comes with a lot of risks.
@spicytuna62 It's not the best we got. The best we got is to stop the wasteful overproduction and stop letting society being about building building building.
We should rather reframe society into being about growing and localizing the economy. Focusing on living with nature, not at it's expense.
It's interesting watching the discussion in this thread evolving and polarizing. Yesterday the discussion started as 'nuclear is one solution in a portfolio of solutions to combat climate change. vs. nuclear is always bad.' and developed into 'nuclear is good and you're dumb. vs. nuclear is bad and you're evil'.
It's also really weird because discussing a topic like this is heavily impacted by where you come from. For exemple the discussion about nuclear energy cannot be the same in France, China, USA or Russia and I see almost everyone here talking the thing like the choice between Nuclear Energy or not (because it's should never be about Nuclear Energy or Renewable Energy) was the same everywhere on the planet.
So here we are, a lot of people talking to themselves instead of talking with each other, hammering their idea on the topic without even once considering that others living in others places and living in others conditions will approach the subject differently (and than it should be normal and comprehensible)
Seems like that's how every large scale "discussion" on the internet goes, all nuance goes out the window. I guess the platforms don't allow for nuanced takes? Other than maybe longform podcasts, but those aren't exactly large scale discussions like reddit or twitter. Maybe some clever sociologist can figure out why we are like this (or likely already has).
ITT: ignorant people with 20+ years old knowledge.
Nuclear energy has been safe for a long time. Radioactive waste disposal is better than ever now.
Radioactive waste disposal is better than ever now.
But is it good enough?
Breeder reactors reuse the waste as fuel until there's a significantly smaller amount of actual waste.
I imagine if we actually committed to funding nuclear tech, we'd get even better at disposing of it.
Shit, why not send it into space with Elon's rockets? Only half joking.
Also you can separate fuel waste from useful part. So even less waste.
Because we can dump the waste down deeper mine shafts, making it easier for us to pretend it doesn't exist?
I don't know to laugh or cry when I see peole quote the thousands of years waste storage of nuclear. That's never been a thing, and never will be.
I agree on them being safe - when rules are properly adhered to, they're extremely safe, similarly to air travel. People only suspect their safety because when they do fail, they tend to fail spectacularly, again similar to air travel.
Having said that, they may be efficient to operate, but they are by no means efficient to build. They cost a lot of resources, and have a 10 year lead time - plus you need to worry about the cost of waste storage and decommissioning.
So sure, nuclear is better than fossil fuels, but you're just kicking the nonrenewable can down the road.
That time and resources would be far better spent on renewables, because that where humanity is gonna have to go long-term no matter how well any other alternatives work.
Isn't the whole thing with renewables that we can't ramp production with demand and don't have storage figured out? Use renewables as much as you can, and use nuclear to fill in those gaps.
The storage will probably have a similar lead time anyways and isn't as proven as nuclear.
Nuclear is the worst possible option to fill said gaps. Nuclear reactor need to run at a mostly stable output permanently, they are slow to react to changes and can't be switched on or off at will.
You could use them to generate a stable base power level, but that's the opposite of what we need. It wouldn't change anything regarding the need of energy storage.
The best option currently as a gap filler is gas cause it can be turned on or off in minutes when needed.
Not keeping up with demand is a self-made problem. Multiple EU countries already have multiple days a year where they use 100% renewables.
I expect debates, hm Interesting this got this much upvotes
But also why no one talked about land usage
No one talks about land usage for solar either. Which is a real shame, because with some relatively minor redesigns solar plants can be integrated into the ecosystem without causing massive damage, instead of what usually happens which is just clear-cutting a huge field and destroying any plant and animal life there.
Nuclear plants also have to built adjacent to reliable water supply. I'll bet the land is more expensive and a bigger environmental impact whereas the location for solar is more flexible
The USA specifically has so much useless land with minimal ecological value, that if an energy project could actually be done at a federal level we could probably not have to worry about it.
There is a whole bunch of land in central USA that is not especially unique or teaming with life, slap down a big renewable energy farm.
stop shilling for industry, bootlicker
Actually, the industry is fully investing in wind and solar and wouldn't touch nuclear with a long pole, because excessively expensive.
Stop projecting your fetish on to us.
No, it's not the best we have. Solar and wind are way safer, cost less and don't produce waste.
Sure, nuclear power is safe until it isn't. Fukushima and Chernobyl are examples of that. Nuclear plants in Ukraine were at risk during Russian attacks. Even if you have a modern plant, you don't really think that under capitalism there is an incentive to care properly for them in the long run. Corners will be cut.
Besides that they produce so much waste that has to be: a) being transported b) stored somewhere
Looking at the US railroad system and how it is pushed beyond it's capacity right now and seeing how nuclear waste sites are literally rotting and contaminating everything around them I'd say it's one of the least safe energies. Especially if you have clean alternatives that don't produce waste.
People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It's lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society's ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn't require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Wind turbines and solar panels don't stop working when we can't use their electricity either, so it's not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren't built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.
It should also be said that money can't always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.
Some personal thoughts: My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously. We have limited land too, and a housing crisis on top of it. So land usage is a big pain point for renewables, and even if the land is unused, it is often so close to civilization that it does affect people's feelings of their surroundings when living near them, which might cause renewables to not make it as far as it could unrestricted. A nuclear reactor takes up fractions of the space, and can be relatively hidden from people.
All the other parties who heavily lean in to combating climate change at least acknowledge nuclear as an option that should (and are) being explored. And even the more climate skeptical parties see nuclear as something they could stand behind. Having broad support for certain actions is also important to actually getting things done. Our two new nuclear powered plants are expected to be running by 2035. Only ten years from now, ahead of our climate goals to be net-zero in 2040.
Great points.
I think the option of nuclear needs to be on the table, and in some (or many) circumstances it might be the best fit.
Presently in Australia one of our two major parties is campaigning on a "pivot to nuclear" platform, but we're kind the polar opposite to the netherlands (both figuratively and literally?). The vast majority of Australia is sunny desert, girt by sea, with a tiny population in on the coast. My state is something like 2,000km by 1,250km, with about 2 million people. Nuclear just doesn't seem like a good fit right now.
My concern is that with this pivot to nuclear we basically just keep burning coal for the next 20 years while we're building nuclear plants.
It might be a great idea to build several reactors, while we furiously build out wind and solar.
There are some gargantuan solar hydrogen cracking projects not far from here in the planning phase which just sound amazing to me.
My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously.
I'm not from Netherlands, but very much belive this.
Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.
I heard some greens in landlocked municipality(or whatever they call it in Britain) ruled against solar in favour of tidal. While same party in costal municipality ruled against of tidal.
I see biggest problem not in production, not in is it nuclear, but in is it buisness as usual. Capitalism knows no end to greed.
In germany we use more space for golf courses and christmas trees than renewables. Compared to the land used tongrow animal feed thats a drop in a bucket. You could eat a little less meat and have more than enough room for 100% renewables.
Sorry, but that is far from correct. Of course you can throttle wind and solar production if you want, but the problem of to much energy is a nice to have. You could create Hydrogen or desalinate water in large scales if you got energy left over Regarding nuclear power: If you calculate the cost of nuclear and include that you need to store the waste for thousands of years it's not cheap either. And you also need to source the fuel from somewhere. Uranium is not abundant. And also it takes 20 years to build an new plant. By then it will be even lest cost effective. Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.
You can certainly try to use the power as much as possible, or sell the energy to a country with a deficit. But the problem is that you would still need to invest a lot of money to make sure the grid can handle the excess if you build renewables to cover 100% of the grid demand for now and in the future. Centralized fuel sources require much less grid changes because it flows from one place and spreads from there, so infrastructure only needs to be improved close to the source. Renewables as decentralized power sources requires the grid to be strengthened anywhere they are placed, and often that is not practical, both in financial costs and in the engineers it takes to actually do that.
Would it be preferable? Yes. Would it happen before we already need to be fully carbon neutral? Often not.
I'd refer you to my other post about the situation in my country. We have a small warehouse of a few football fields which stores the highest radioactivity of unusable nuclear fuel, and still has more than enough space for centuries. The rest of the fuel is simply re-used until it's effectively regular waste. The time to build two new nuclear reactors here also costs only about 10 years, not 20.
Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.
All of these things should happen regardless of nuclear progress. And they do happen. But again, building renewables isn't just about the price.
If you calculate the cost of nuclear and include that you need to store the waste for thousands of years i
This hasn't been true for decades.
High Level Nuclear waste, aka spent fuel, can be run through breeder reactors or other new gen types to drastically reduce their radioactive half-life to decades and theoretically years with designs proposed in the last few years. Only reason reactors don't do this is lack of funding and demand for such things, the amount of high level waste produced is miniscule per year. And there are theories proposed already that could reduce ot further but nuclear phobia pushed by the oil lobby prevents proper funding and RnD to properly push those advancements to production.
My issue with nuclear energy isn't that it's dangerous or that it's inherently bad. The world needs a stable source of energy that compensates for wind and solar fluctuations anyways. For the current realistic alternatives that's either going to be nuclear or coal/oil/natural gas. We have nothing else for this purpose, end of discussion.
My problem is the assumption underlying this discussion about nuclear energy that it somehow will solve all of our problems or that it will somehow allow us to continue doing business as usual. That's categorically not the case. The climate crisis has multiple fronts that need to be dealt with and the emissions is just one of them. Even if we somehow managed to find the funds and resources to replace all non renewable energy with nuclear, we would still have solved just 10% of the problem, and considering that this cheap new energy will allow us to increase our activities and interventions in the planet, the situation will only worsen.
Nuclear energy is of course useful, but it's not the answer. Never has technology been the answer for a social and political issue. We can't "science and invent" our way out of this, it's not about the tech, it's about who decides how it will be used, who will profit from it, who and how much will be affected by it etc. If you want to advocate for a way to deal with the climate crisis you have to propose a complete social and political plan that will obviously include available technologies, so stop focusing on technologies and start focusing on society and who takes the decisions.
One simple example would be the following: no matter how green your energy is, if the trend in the US is to have increasingly bigger cars and no public transport, then the energy demands will always increase and no matter how many nuclear plants you build, they will only serve as an additional source and not as a replacement. So no matter how many plants you build, the climate will only deteriorate.
This is literally how the people in charge have decided it will work. Any new developing energy source that is invented serves only to increase the consumption, not to replace previous technologies. That's the case with solar and wind as well. So all of this discussion you all make about nuclear Vs oil or whatever is literally irrelevant. The problem is social and political, not technological.
Most sensible comment in the thread, thread shoulda probably ended here.
Meme propaganda? In my Lemmy feed?
It’s more likely than you think
Freedom is solar/micro-wind with batteries.
We literally can't get rid of nuclear power totally. It produces isotopes that are essential to modern medicine.
Literally one of the safest sources of energy production in existence.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-safest-and-deadliest-energy-sources/
@yogthos @spicytuna62 I don't mind nuclear but often those touting the virtues of nuclear energy implicitly want to prop up the crazy levels of inefficiency and overproduction of the current global economy with a cleaner energy source. If could stem the bleeding a little bit but the problems I mentioned will have to be addressed at some point.
We obviously will have to address the problem of capitalism sooner than later.
It's pronounced nookielurr.
And it's not a noun
It's unsafe, not renewable, not independent from natural resources (which might not be present in your country, so you need to buy from dictators) and last but not least crazy expensive.
AFAIK in the USA, nuclear energy is the safest per unit energy generated. Solar is more "dangerous" simply because you can fall off a roof.
Nuclear energy has huge risks and potential for safety issues, yes. But sticking to the numbers, it is extremely safe.
Need to buy from dictators?
I didn't realize Australia and Canada who has highest uranium reserves are dictators. Canada also used to be highest uranium producer until relatively recently.
There is no need. Though Kazakhstan and Russia may be cheapest if you're near there.
It's not renewable, but known reserves will power the world for a century, based solely on current average efficiency and not modern improvements
Nuclear waste is still an unsolved problem that absolutely no one wants to touch with a ten foot pole. Also nuclear power is a pretty expensive method of power generation and can't be insured, leaving all risk of disaster on the shoulders of society. To be clear: society will be pretty fucked when a nuclear disaster happens anyway.
It's a lot better than coal, though.
Storage of nuclear waste is solved. It's unbelievable that people say it's not.
Edit here https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU
Digging hole. Problem solved.
You posted a 18 min Youtube video, sponsored or at least supported and sanctioned by a nuclear power plant operator.
At least point to the section of the video where the source of your claim is.
Nuclear waste is a much smaller problem than most people think. The waste is very little and can be stored underground for eons without much risk.
Yes it exist for a long time, but one kilo of uranium produces as much energy as 16 ton coal, and leaves behind 47 grams of nuclear waste.
I could not find the 47 grams figure on the page you linked, where is that stated exactly?
World Nuclear Association’s mission is to facilitate the growth of the nuclear sector by connecting players across the value chain,
I would not ca that trustworthy. There not even close to independent.
Solar and wind will always need batteries for times of low output, until we get more resilient and larger capacity batteries we will need a backbone to support the electricity grid to avoid having to overbuild battery capacity.
As of right now natural gas is that backbone but that could change and very well be nuclear energy until we figure out something like mass produced solid state batteries.
I like your pitch black humour.
Idealists and reality. Natural opposites.
Renewables are unreliable. That's a fact. Yes you have moments, days even weeks where they can deliver what is currently required. In total output. Not yet in delivers when you actually need it output.
Sure you can have 100% renewable generation for a 24hr period, but if your generation is during the day and your usage is spread into the night, you're not really covering your needs, no matter how good it looks on paper.
It is also your current usage. Now do the math and replace all fossil fuel usage with electric alternatives. Cars, buses, trucks, heating, cooking, etc. Now calculate just how much more renewables you need to cover all that in ideal circumstances.
Now do the same for windless winter days.
If we're going to step away from fossil fuels entirely, you're going to have to accept nuclear as an option. Thinking we'll manage only with renewables is a dream. While you dream, we're burning fossil fuels non-stop. Cuz that's reality.
You can have renewables with nuclear, or renewables with fossil fuels. You're actively choosing renewables with fossil fuels.
by insulating the roof of my house better i cut my useage of oil by more than 50%, next time i'll insulate the outer walls, and after that i'll switch to electric heating that would need just 20% of the original energy.
you forget that the energy consumption not neccesarily always rises. All appliances get better and better in efficiency, for example.
Yes, your total energy consumption drops, but your electricity consumption rises as a result. Electrification of stuff that relied on burning fossil fuels means that electricity consumption goes up even while total energy consumption stays the same or drops. I'm not necessarily saying that nuclear is the solution, but it's a solution that can at least buy us a few decades for renewables and energy storage to catch up to demand.
An EV will double your electricity usage. Look into the requirements for EV cargo transport. Swapping out all the diesel trucks, just the heavy transport will come close to doubling the national electricity needs. Add to that small vans and buses.
I urge you to actually do the math. You'll get a much much better understanding of the issue. Just pasting links to articles that look like they support your arguments adds to the dream.
The aim is to drop fossil fuels. Your goal should've been to embrace nuclear while increasing renewables. Atm you seem fine with just burning fossil fuels, killing the planet, cuz the alternative isn't renewable. GG.
Take a look at Germany, Belgium, etc. ditching nuclear because the green parties fought so hard for it. What are they doing now? Back to healthy healthy coal and gas. Thanks for helping kill the planet even faster in your zeal for exclusively renewable energy.
Why are people downvoting this....
There may be a point when we don't need nuclear, maybe once we dramatically level up our battery technology, but that point is not now, and probably not for the next 50 years
If the goal of this meme was to start a discussion pointing out all of the shortcomings or nuclear or was very successful.
Plenty of benefits, but pretty far from problem free.
When can we start talking about fusion again?
Iam so sick of this conversation. It is not cheap, it’s not clear where to let the waste and in the end it’s even dangerous. Don’t let some populists make you think nuklear energy is good. France made a big mistake to go all in. All projects take longer than expected and cost much more than calculated.
Yes, all projects do those things, generally.
Have they had issues with your other concerns?
France made a big mistake to go all in.
Not only does Germany import electricity from France (which comes from...?), but Germany has (according to this) a substantially higher carbon footprint per capita.
If the only issue is cost and projects taking longer than expected, isn't that a good tradeoff for carbon neutral power?
And yes, of course, I would prefer renewables, you would prefer renewables, we all would. But it's somewhat disingenuous to decry the use of nuclear, advocate for renewables, and at the same time, rely heavily on coal, as Germany does (or at the very least, did recently.
Germany Imports 0,5% of the Electricity from France. It’s not that we are depending on it. The day ahead prices for electricity are lower in Germany than they are in France. The Coal Plant are not running on full capacity, cause it is cheaper to import electricity through the European electricity Grid. Level of burning coal is the same level that it was in the 60’s. The most imported electricity is Norway water power and Danish wind Power.
The cheap news that we depend on France are just wrong. No idea why everybody is riding this dead horse. Even in the summer 2022 when gas prices where high caused by the Ukraine war and the summer was hot, we had to help our France with energy, cause their nuclear power plants couldn’t get enough cooling water from the rivers, cause the water lvl in it was to low and the most power plant needed maintenance.
And the CO2 thing. The emissions are infinite high, cause there is not a solutions for it. Not even close! I just don’t buy the shit, that the EU declared nuclear as co2 free. That’s bullshit.
I like to discuss and get new ideas. But the whole nuclear thing is just stupid and so many people are ignoring the facts about that.
China will be offering nuclear waste disposal services once they complete the molten salt reactors that we designed in the '60s. Nuclear waste will be a non-issue, unlike the cyanide waste created in coal and natural gas plants.
clean... so many storage pools full of spent fuel, no home for them in sight... hundreds of pools, spread all over the US....
clean?
I mean cleaner than coal, sure. but it's enormous infrastructure and regulatory hurdles aren't worth it.
Nuclear waste is a solved problem, it is contained to a tiny physical object, all we gotta do is dig a hole, put the object into the hole, and cover it up.
We pretend that it is way harder than it is.
I live in a suburb north of Stockholm in Sweden, and I'd support the government building a large underground permanent storage of nuclear waste from all over the world (for a fee) in my suburb, we have the best ground for permanent storage in Scandinavia, we would earn money, create jobs and make the world safer.
Nuclear waste is a solved problem
maybe solved where you live, and only for as long as your containment facility stays in one piece.
earthquakes, meteors, tidal waves - these things do happen, sure, not often on a lifetime scale, but compared to the long half-lives of this stuff? plenty of time for the worst case scenario.
I think you pretend the problem is simpler than it actually is, when considered the time frames involved. It's not your lifetime we're talking, it's the hundreds of generations where this shit remains hot.
AND I'd add your country is at least trying, in the US we've given up and store it in pools local to the reactors, it's ignorant as fuck
There are functioning Thorium based Molten Salt Breeder reactors, which for ~50MW can be built in a shipping container size - they are small, so can be deployed at local sites, thus reducing transmission losses, much harder to use for weapons (thats why the world tilted towards the use of uranium reactors in the first place), dont need prior enrichment, and can use much higher percentage of the fuel - so much less waste product. Also since the whole stuff is a molten salt, you just drain it from the reactor core and the reaction simply comes to halt.
The technology works, as it was tested when they were deciding if the industry goes with uranium or thorium, but the war lobby win out unfortunately, as they wanted a source for their nuclear weapons, at which the Thorium reactors are not great.
And yes, nuclear is super clean even if we compare it with solar+wind batteries not even counted in to the equation. BTW you can use "spent" fuel rods from conventional nuclear plants in a breeder reactor, to further diminish waste and use them up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
yep, they're awesome, and may sidestep some of the HUGE investments in gigantic infrastructure - one day. What you conveniently leave out is no one is doing this yet at scale; china's got one test reactor going last time I looked.
I personally love the idea, but the nuclear industry here in the US is obsessed with large steam turbine setups in the multiple megawatt scale; even small modular reactors are getting side eyes.
So yeah, it exists, but it's not going to displace the current tech (which is really 60's tech with better electronics).
No it is not. If you calculate in the future money tax payers have to pay to keep the nuclear waste safe (for thousands of years) or the cost of a larger incident like Chernobyl or Fukushima which also has to be paid by the tax payers then the 'cheap nuklear power' is not so cheap as it looks like...
The disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are symptoms of a greater issue: construction and maintenance of an extremely volatile and sensitive process reliant upon the integrity of infrastructure and quality of manpower.
Nuclear requires a stable society and economy flush with resources and education and little to no risk of political stability.
Those places are welcome to invest heavily into nuclear while CO2 concentrations build up as emmissions continue unabated.
Renewables fed into a fusion reactor is the best currently
'Currently'?
Currently we cannot even sustain a fusion reaction. Not to mention utilize its energy output
Yeah! Let's dig a big hole till we hit lava and then throw everything into it. :)
Totally. Tinpot dictators getting nukes is nothing to worry about. And the waste can just be handwaved away. After all, they have a storage facility in Finland that will probably come online in a couple of years. Problem solved.
The waste is a fair point - storage isn't a long term solution but then I suppose it can be managed in the interim, not like the effects of climate change.
I'm not seeing your point of "nukes" though?
More nuclear plants means more capacity and diversification in supply chains, i.e. it's easier to acquire technology and supplies through dark channels. That will lead to more proliferation. Where do you think North Korea got its nukes? The answer is Pakistan, by the way.
I still prefer 47 grams of nuclear waste over 1950 Kg of coal pollution in the air.
That is for the same amount of energy.
What? Do you live in the 1950s? Have you heard of nuclear accidents? How many people did wind and solar energy kill so far?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
If you want the answer, here's the data. Solar is slightly safer than Nuclear, Nuclear is slightly safer than Wind. The three are WAY safer than fossil fuels.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Yep, I'm also afraid of taking airplanes because a handful of them have crashed. But per TWh produced, nuclear is statistically the safest method... just like that it's statistically safer to fly across the country than to drive there, but I'm too scared for that :/
"Safe". Yeah. Let's talk about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima. All that was kinda not so safe, don't you think?
Comparatively speaking, it's safer than coal mining. Wikipedia Nuclear Accidents by Death Toll
All of those were caused by human mistake. But this does not mean that they must be discarded. Because human mistake happens. If it is with a solar panel, it's inconsequential. Not with a nuclear reactor. So yes, it is an issue to consider, but in truth all it means is that we have to be VERY careful
If it is so that a human mistake can cause a big number of casualties and massive environmental damage it is far from safe, even if you are very careful.
I work with people. Human mistakes are inevitable
Still less radiation than coal plants release in normal operation.
Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy production. Even with the big accidents, the impact hasn't been that big.
Chernobyl was by far the biggest, but that was 40 years ago, in a poorly designed plant, with bad procedures and a chain of human errors. We've learned so much from that accident and that type of accident couldn't even have happened in the plants we had at the time in the west. Actually if the engineers that saw the issue could contact the control room right away, there would not have been any issue. In 1984 that was a problem, in 2024 not so much, we have more communication tools than ever. The impact of Chernobyl was also terrible, but not as bad as feared back in the time. In contrast to the TV series, not a lot of people died in the accident. With 30 deaths directly and another 30 over time. Total impact on health is hard to say and we've obviously have had to do a lot to prevent a bigger impact, but the number is in the thousands for total people with health effects. Even the firefighters sent in to fix stuff didn't die, with most of them living full lives with no health effects. And what people might not know, the Chernobyl plant has had a lot of people working there and producing power for decades after the disaster. It's far from the nuclear wasteland people imagine.
Fukushima was pretty bad, but the impact on human life and health has been pretty much nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the disaster were also very unique. A huge earthquake followed by a big tsunami, combined with a design flaw in the backup power system, combined with human error. I still to this day don't understand how this lead to facilities being closed in Germany, where big earthquakes don't happen and there is hardly any coast let alone tsunamis. It's a knee jerk reaction that makes no sense. Studies have indicated the forced relocation of the people living near there has been a bigger impact on people's health than anything the power plant did.
Compare this to things we consider to be totally normal. Like driving a car, which kills more people in a week than ever had any negative impacts from nuclear power.
Or say solar is a far more safe form of power, even though yearly hundreds of people die because of accidents related to solar installations. Or for example hydroplants, where accidents can also cause a huge death toll and more accidents happen.
And this is even with the non valid comparison to the current forms of energy where we know it's a big issue. But because the alternative isn't perfect, we don't change over.
Impossible with modern reactors, technologyimproved a lot since then.
You mean the modern reactors who are still not in a commercial productive state? But even if these would be NOW ready to actually be available it's still so that there are a vast overwhelming majority of the old reactors which are not as safe as the meme was insinuating.
