Denmark is reconsidering its 40-year ban on nuclear power in a major policy shift for the renewables-heavy country.
The Danish government will analyse the potential benefits of a new generation of nuclear power technologies after banning traditional nuclear reactors in 1985, its energy minister said.
The Scandinavian country is one of Europe’s most renewables-rich energy markets and home to Ørsted, the world’s biggest offshore wind company. More than 80% of its electricity is generated from renewables, including wind, biofuels and solar, according to the International Energy Agency.
Can someone fill me in on why this website is so insanely pro nuclear energy?
Like, I’m not even fundamentally against it but I don’t understand why we should invest billions in a tech that has essentially been leapfrogged already, would take a decade to become relevant again and is more expensive per KW/h than both renewables and fossil fuels.
Yet every comment criticizing nuclear on Lemmy always (literally every time) gets buried in downvotes. It’s super weird.
Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.
I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.
There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.
Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.
I’m pretty sure it’s a campaign or people who are influenced by it. It started years ago on reddit. All of the sudden a perceived majority was pro-nuclear. It really happened in the span of a few weeks or maybe 1-2 months.
I’m not the only person who was dismayed by winding down nuclear power worldwide after the overblown situation at Three Mile Island. Then Fukushima caused another scare that could have been prevented, and turns out was not even that severe. If we had continued working nuclear at pace, while winding down fossil fuels we would be in a better situation environmentally now.
Some pop-sci YouTube channels also heavily started promoting nuclear energy during the same time period
It’s the go-to strategy for fossil fuel companies to stay in the market as long as possible
They know it’s not possible, they don’t want to build new ones but the discussion alone is slowing down renewables and makes it less likely that the current fossil power plants can be shut down soon.
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Nuclear is less expensive and more scalable than solar, wind, hydro.
It does not boil the planet like fossil fuels.
Yes it takes time and money to set up, but that’s a short term cost.
This is assumed to be widely known, so critical questions that don’t take that into account are assumed to be either in bad faith or laziness.
Nuclear is less expensive and more scalable than solar, wind, hydro.
It’s neither.
More scalable is hilarious. They take like 10 years to build and cost 18 billion dollars to get 1GW steady state.
Meanwhile, we can whip out 1GW of solar in 2yrs for 2 billion, and do it in modular sections. You don’t have steady state, but you could build solar out to compete with enough battery and high voltage transmission lines, with basically zero nuclear hurdles. It would cost, but it is viable now and much faster, and that’s with current tech. Batteries and panels are just getting cheaper and better.
The LCOE for nuclear is substantially higher than wind and solar. It’s not just upfront costs.
How is it less expensive than solar??? Are you using solar panels from 1970?
It has always been highly subsidized. And there is also cost to keep it working. Fuel rods and people… And if you include “persistent waste storage costs” and force them to pay money into a fund that will be used in case of a rare catastrophy, combined with the prediction of solar getting cheaper and cheaper, no one with the intention to gain money would invest in that.
Nuclear power is slow and rigid. And it is absolutely uneconomical in the long run.
Yet another article that tries to create the impression that there might perhaps possibly be theoretical considerations for the return to the use of nuclear power under certain circumstances…
It’s unlikely.
If for no other reason than defense, it should be considered. Europe can’t rely on the US nuclear umbrella anymore, unfortunately. Y’all need a local source for weapons.
How a nation can defend one’s nuclear reactors against sabotage and assault considering we have a war boiling in Europe?
Is it different than how a country would protect other infrastructure like government buildings, hospitals, other electrical grid infrastructure, dams, etc.?
I wonder how much wind, solar and energy storage you could build with all that money
It’s not either-or. Money that aren’t spend on nuclear will be mostly spent on burning fossil fuels, because that’s the niche they occupy together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcoN2bdACGA Please watch this. This is Why Trump is threatening Greenland. This Technology would be the END of for profit energy production. That’s where all the far-right bullshit has come from, that’s why Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan are all pushing climate denial. War is the only way fossi fuels remain in demand because there are no electric tanks!
Banning nuclear reactors was one of the worst environmental decisions humans have ever made.
Or* it was just a smidge too early. Things are much safer now from what I understand.
how is that nasty mink farming going then? denmark has changed to the worse.
Didn’t all the mink farms close?
https://www.europeancorrespondent.com/r/the-sad-return-of-the-minks
denmark is on a decline. visit any town but CPH and you see a dying country. small towns are super backwards, integration kinda failed (dont mention iranians), drinking prime minister…and mink farms.
denmark was cool like 40yrs back or so
Interesting perspective. When you say any town, do you include places like Aarhus and Odense? If yes, what are the symptoms of the country dying there?
What small towns are you talking about specifically? There are definitely struggling places out there, in curious if we’re thinking of the same places.
Also what’s the issue with the prime minister drinking?
What was cool about Denmark 40 years ago?
well if i go to the north sea any city is in decline. blavand,rodekro all those…and then go up to hjorring…i stayed there a week some years back…aaaauuuugh…the horrors.
went to the mall in aarhus…made me laugh and cry…they still to this day have a “how i met your mother” cafe in the mall…since 20 years…and it looks like it. but it is not only the ugly malls outside of cph it is that the cities have just become useless. i hang out in hvarde often and nothing absolutely nothing has improved there in the last 2 decades. necropole? is that what you call communities of old ppl? while decades ago denmark could have been considered progessive I am sure you wont find anyone outside of denmark say that.
have they stopped farming wild animals? no. has their policy on drungs evolved? nope.
maybe it is their brainrot, but thoses fences for the swineflu…absurd. just go say you hate brown people.
so 40yrs ago DK was cool because they were at least progressive,quite rich and laid back.
Nuclear power is the only way for humanity to progress.
So, could we in Sweden perhaps then reopen the nuclear power plant of Barsebäck, that was closed because Denmark didn’t enjoy having one right across the water from their capital?
This is good news.
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