Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
That is factually false information. There are solid arguments to be made against nuclear energy.
https://isreview.org/issue/77/case-against-nuclear-power/index.html
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
The long lead times for construction that invalidate nuclear power as a way of mitigating climate change was a point recognized in 2009 by the body whose mission is to promote the use of nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Nuclear power is not a near-term solution to the challenge of climate change,” writes Sharon Squassoni in the IAEA bulletin. “The need to immediately and dramatically reduce carbon emissions calls for approaches that can be implemented more quickly than building nuclear reactors.”
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Wealer from Berlin’s Technical University, along with numerous other energy experts, sees takes a different view.
“The contribution of nuclear energy is viewed too optimistically,” he said. “In reality, [power plant] construction times are too long and the costs too high to have a noticeable effect on climate change. It takes too long for nuclear energy to become available.”
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, agrees.
“Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build,” he said. “When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.”
He pointed out that the world needed to get greenhouse gases under control within a decade. “And in the next 10 years, nuclear power won’t be able to make a significant contribution,” added Schneider.
Long lead times against nuclear have bee raised for the last 25 years, if we had just got on with it we would have the capacity by now. Just cause the lead time is in years doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
when is the best time to plant a tree? 30 years ago. When is the second best time? now.
Surely the second best time would have been 29 years ago
Don’t fuck this up for me bro
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As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.
My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.
No it wouldn’t. China laid more concrete in 5 years than the entire world did in 100 years. I highly doubt that converting the entire world to nuclear is going to use that much more concrete. I mean hell, they laid like 15 or 20,000 miles of high speed rail in just a few years. They built like 300 million apartment units.
Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).
That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you’re right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can’t, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world’s construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems “10x increase world construction capacity” was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.
Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can’t find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it’s dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.
I won’t bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I’m still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones…
Not all 7,000 construction workers would be working on the site concurrently. Different trades come and go depending on the phase of the project. So at first you’ll have the civil engineering earth movers come in, who clears the site and excavates the foundations. Then you’ll have the concrete crews come in who pour the foundations and do all of the concrete work. Obviously on a nuclear power plant there is a lot of foundation work, as well as a lot of above ground concrete so probably a good chunk of the construction workers will fall into this category.
Power plants also have a lot of structural steel work, electrical and special equipment that would likey fall under the piping category but each of these uses a separate set of skilled labor that does not overlap.
If you were going to actually try to build 3,300 nuclear power plants, you would rotate crews from project to project which would increase efficiency rather than hiring 27 million separate workers.
In any case, I don’t think converting the world’s total electrical power generation to 100% nuclear is by any stretch of the imagination a good idea. Personally I think maybe 15 to 25% nuclear power generation would be a more realistic mix, similar to the US electrical power generation. The rest of the power should be solar, wind, hydro, wave and geothermal as they are absolutely cheaper to build.
I’m not sure I agree with how you’d be able to execute on that level or organized construction safely, but I think we’re also reaching the “impossible-to-be-sure hypothetical” territory, so I’ll concede the point for now.
I think my problems of cost and time still stand. It looks like adding rooftop solar with batteries to every building is still cheaper (on startup, and likely per MW) than nuclear plants. Regions that cannot support solar, onland wind, geo, or hydro can justify nuclear (at least unless shipping batteries or hydrogen conversion becomes cheap enough to compete), but I don’t think they amount to nearly 15% of the power needs in the world since they represent fairly distinctive regions with low energy demand.
Long lead times, cost overruns, producing power at a higher price point than renewables, long run time needed to break even, even longer dismantling times and a still unsolved waste problem. Compared to renewables that we can build right now.
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We can safely store waste for centuries.
Nice, we can defer the problem to the next generation.
And unlike nuclear reactors, solar panels can be recycled completely
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The plan is the same as for all other parts, recycling. The US gas no provisions about recycling currently, which is the reason people choose the cheapest disposal method currently, just dumping it.
Did you read the quote? 15-20 years, as in decades before 1 nuke plant is built. I agree in that politicians of the past should have led us to a more sustainable and resilient energy future, but we’re here now.
Advanced nuclear should still be 100% pursued to try to get those lead times down and to incorporate things like waste recycling, modularity, etc., but the lead time in decades absolutely means nuclear power might not be something worth doing.
The IPCC puts the next 10-20 years as the most important and perilous for getting a hold on climate change. If we wait for that long by not rolling out emission-free power sources, transit modes, or even carbon-free concrete, etc., then we might cross planetary boundaries that we can’t come back from.
Nuclear is a safe bet and bet worth pursuing. I would argue that, along with that source from the IAEA, old nuclear is note worth it.
How much concrete does it take to build a nuclear plant? Concrete production is currently 8% of global emissions, so if you have to scale up construction capacity 10x for the next decade, don’t you end up destroying the environment with concrete before they are even operational?
Great point. You need concrete for wind, solar, and li-ion battery storage too (including pumped hydro), but out of those I’d say pumped hydro is the only one that remotely compares in the amount of concrete needed for construction.
So purely looking at the emissions from materials needed to build these power sources, renewables have the edge due to less concrete. These emissions might show up elsewhere in raw material extraction like with silicon for solar, and then the rare earth metals needed for generators in wind, all the lithium/nickel/cobalt needed for batteries, etc., but I want to say that the Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) from places like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US or the International Energy Agency (IEA) worldwide have taken that into account and still show that renewables + storage are cheaper on a carbon basis compared to fossil fuels and nuclear.
The cool thing about concrete for renewables (excluding hydro dam) is only the very base pad needs to be virgin. You can make a lot of the rest of the base and fill material with down cycled concrete. So tearing down part of an old factory on land near the solar panels are? Crush it up and only move it a few miles over to where you need it. Rather than hauling that to a landfill where it sits forever, costing energy use to haul, and more energy use to bring the fill and other bade materials from a further destination.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
the largest fission plant was literally working 5 years after construction started
fission plants are just more expensive now because we don’t make enough of them.
I guess safety standards changed but even wind power kills more people per watt than fission so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nuclear could’ve easily worked if people didn’t go full nimby in the past few decades
Sorry. How does wind power kill anyone? Okay, every once in a while you hear about a technician falling off a windmill, but are there any fatalities in regard to the effects of wind power?
Fewer people die to nuclear than wind power.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twhNuclear is scary because you hear about it, not because it is actually deadly.
To be fair, Frank falling to his death from the top of wind turbine 45 has much shorter consequences.
It won’t have distant descendants dying after not working out symbols meant to not play with the glowing stuff left by the ancients.
Like tragic Glowing Peril tale: https://timharford.com/2023/11/cautionary-tales-the-lethal-fallout-of-a-stolen-treasure/
probably technicians falling off is the biggest thing
“in 2011 coal produced about 180 billion kWhrs in England with about 3,000 related deaths. Nuclear energy produced over 90 billion kWhrs in England with no deaths. In that same year, America produced about 800 billion kWhrs from nuclear with no deaths.”
The only two major nuclear-related death incidents were Chernobyl and Fukushima. But Fukushima only killed one person, the rest were killed by the tsunami and being relocated from the exclusion zone. But many people blame the Japanese government for fucking up the evacuations, while other people criticize the government for actually evacuating people.
In any case, those 2,300 Japanese people were not killed by the actual nuclear incident, they were killed because they were very old and could not adapt to moving into a new apartment that’s a government provided them. Chernobyl is believed to have killed about 500 people.
I should also mention that the Fukushima exclusion zone has largely been lifted, and many people have moved back home.
Your not counting the indirect deaths.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
So it isn’t wind at all, but lacking safety standards.
Lacking safety standards specific to the use case of wind turbines. For example, there was a fire during installation and someone jumped to their deaths to get away. They had quick decent harnesses but couldn’t use them because of the location of the fire.
And? Those safety standards for constructing and maintaining wind turbines can be increased just as much as the safety standards for any other type of heavy labor. For example by mandating that wind turbines must have fire suppression systems installed or that wworkers must be able to rapel on the outside of the wind turbine.
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It’s not just construction workers, it’s the management, it’s the regulators, it’s the suppliers, and the design and engineering teams. Most countries have lost all of that capability apart from places like South Korea, Finland, Russia, France and China.
China currently has 22 nuclear reactors under construction, 70 in the planning phase, and they currently operate 55. Well that is less than the United States, they will surpass the US soon. They seem to have figured it out.
If we hadn’t of had Luddites getting in the way of nuclear power for half a century then we wouldn’t have this issue.
I think this insults Luddites. Luddites are not stupid to get in a way of nuclear power.
Those aren’t arguments against nuclear power; those are arguments against the incompetence of entities like Southern Company and Westinghouse, as well as the Public Service Commission that fails to impose the burden of cost overruns on the shareholders where they belong.
I should know; I’m a Georgia Power ratepayer who’s on the hook paying for the fuck-ups and cost overruns of Plant Vogtle 3 and 4.
It would’ve been way better if they’d been built back in the '70s, since all indications are that the folks who built units 1 and 2 actually had a fucking clue what they were doing!
That is true, building a nuclear power plant doesn’t help. The problem is how many we closed down in a panic, in particular after Fukushima. We could make great strides towards cleaner energy and cutting the actually problematic power plants (coal, gas) out of the picture as we slowly transition to renewables-only if we had more nuclear power available.
Of course, in hindsight it’s difficult to say how one could have predicted this. There’s good reasons against nuclear energy, it just so happens that in the big picture it’s just about the second-best options. And we cut that out first, instead of the worse ones.
Your arguments didn’t actually invalidate the comment you replied to. They are just arguments against nuclear being a short-term solution.
We need both, short and long term ones. Wind and water cannot be solely relies upon. Build both types.
“2009” hahahaha and here we are. More coal more gas plants than ever.
Thank you. The pro-nuclear bullshit from Reddit seems to be spilling over.
Sadly it looks like the astroturfing has spilled over from reddit to here
When and where do I pick up my check?
It’s literally on every social media platform. 100% psyop.
I’m not sure how much is a psyop and how much is people who thought (with some merit) that nuclear was a good idea 30 years ago and haven’t updated their thinking now renewables and storage have nuclear beat on price and speed of construction.
I never considered that renewables were just straight up quicker to build TBH
It could be both? This is a very calculated post.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
The radiation would only affect a small area of the planet not the whole world, and technically radiation doesn’t even cause climate damage. Chernobyl has plenty of trees and plenty of wildlife, it’s just unsuitable for human habitation.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
Here’s my favorite way to put it: because of trace radioactive elements found in coal ore, coal-fired power plants produce more radioactivity in normal operation than nuclear power plants have in their entire history, including meltdowns. And with coal, it just gets released straight into the environment without any attempt to contain it!
And that’s just radioactivity, not all the other emissions of coal plants.
This is a fun fact but I don’t think it matters, no one is getting radiation sickness from coal smoke. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying coal smoke is healthy, it’s fucking awful and causes way more deaths than nuclear power plants.
I think you just contradicted yourself in that same sentence
No, I’m saying that saying the radiation concerns specifically of coal output isn’t a concern with regards to health.
You’re right coal deaths are just confined to mines, respiratory illnesses and excess cancers from chronic low dose exposure.
it’s fucking awful and causes way more deaths than nuclear power plants.
Federation of American scientists (FAS) believe that the number is actually calculable:
“The quantity of radioactive material liberated by the burn- ing of coal is considerable, since on average it contains a few parts per million of uranium and thorium”
“Per gigawatt- year (GWe-yr) of electrical energy produced by coal, using the current mix of technology throughout the world, the population exposure is estimated to be about 0.8 lethal cancers per plant-year distributed over the affected population.”
“Table 7.2 summarizes these data. With 400 GWe of coal-fired power plants in the world, this amounts to some 320 deaths per year; in the world at large, some plants have better filters and cause less harm, while others have little stack-gas cleanup and cause far more.”
https://rlg.fas.org/mwmt-p233.pdf
That’s about the number of people who died from Chernobyl, every year. From the radiation from coal power plants.
In India alone it is estimated that 112,000 deaths per year are attributed to coal power plants. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118
320 deaths globally is a drop in the in the coal bucket of death. It’s not worth specifically worrying about. Coal as a whole is the problem. Not the nuclear byproduct of coal.
Sure sure, but we are still pumping out isotopes of uranium and plutonium into the atmosphere. We are lucky the effects of radioactive isotopes are generally overblown then, huh?
🙏 I need you to listen to me extremely closely. I am not saying nuclear shit in the atmosphere is good. I never said this. I never implied this. All I’m saying is that the nuclear aspects of coal usage are a drop in the bucket in the massive pile of problems it has. I’m not saying coal is good either.
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Per megawatt of generated energy, coal releases significantly more radioative waste into the environment than nuclear does.
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It’s not meant to be “fair;” it’s meant to shock people with how ridiculously bad burning coal is. Think about it: it’s crazy that a trace-element unused byproduct of coal production is a pollutant being produced on the same order of magnitude as the thing in nuclear power that’s actually producing all the power. Until people read it, they’d probably guess that coal either produced no radiation at all, or many orders of magnitude less than nuclear, but nope. And on the other end of it, if that tiny fraction of coal’s pollution output is enough to rival all of nuclear, I think it helps put a finer point on just how much worse all the rest of it is.
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It’s not unfair, nor is it misleading. Coal contains a few parts per million of uranium. Sometimes more depending on source. So when burned this uranium is released into the atmosphere. When used for fission uranium has about 200 million times the energy density then burning the carbon carbon bonds in coal. So kilo for kilo a coal power plant dumps about as much uranium and other nasty trace elements into the atmosphere then a nuclear plant has in it’s core.
The situation is even more unfavorable for coal as nuke plants don’t typically dump any of their primary radioactive elements to atmosphere. Increasing scale of nuclear doesn’t change this either as it would require every nuclear plant on the planet to go full Chernobyl just to match what coal outputs.
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Fuck of with that false dichotomy shit. Just because something isn’t fair (like life), doesn’t mean it’s misleading.
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I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:
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Current nuclear power generation is non-renewable. It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen. And it goes without saying that waiting to scale up some novel unproven or inexistent sustainable way of nuclear power production is out of the question, for time and safety reasons. Which brings me to point 2.
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We need clean, sustainable energy right now if we want to have any chance of fighting climate change. From start of planning of a new nuclear power plant to first power generation can take 15 or 20 years easily. Currently, about 10% of all electricity worldwide is produced by about 400 nuclear reactors, while around 15 new ones are under construction. So, to make any sort of reasonable impact, we would have to build to the tune of 2000 new reactors, pronto. To do that within 30 years, we’d have to increase our construction capacity 5 to 10 fold. Even if that were possible, which I strongly doubt, I would wager the safety and cost impacts would be totally unjustifiable. And we don’t even have 30 years anymore. That is to say nothing of regulatory checks and maintenance that would also have to be increased 5 fold.
So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.
It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen.
Nuclear fission using Uranium is not sustainable. If we expand current nuclear technologies to tackle climate change then we’d likely run out of Uranium by 2100. Nuclear fusion using Thorium might be sustainable, but it’s not yet a proven, scalable technology. And all of this is ignoring the long lead times, high costs, regulatory hurdles and nuclear weapon proliferation concerns that nuclear typically presents. It’d be great if nuclear was the magic bullet for climate change, but it just ain’t.
I thought thorium was way less problematic from a nuclear proliferation perspective, that the risk was largely constrained to dirty bombs?
Everything can be turned to dirty bomb
Well, there is Plutonium option, but superpowers want to be superpowers. Probably only USA, Russia, France and Britan can do it.
We’d run of our uranium that’s economical to extract using current technology and at current prices. All known mineral reserves could power the world on exclusively nuclear energy for several thousand years at least.
All known mineral reserves could power the world on exclusively nuclear energy for several thousand years at least.
You got a source for that? Because the one I linked says that we run out of known Uranium deposits by 2100 at current usage rates. Our known Uranium deposits run out mid-century if we use nuclear to follow the IEA Blue Map plan to reduce carbon emissions by 50%, and we run out of even speculated deposits by 2100 under that scenario. Where are you getting “several thousand years” from? Is Thorium part of the mineral reserves to which you’re referring?
The source you linked talks about uranium reserves. Mineral reserves, known and unknown deposits, refer explicitly to the known amount of economically minable supplies of that mineral.
Discussion around them can be misleading, especially for a growing industry, because as a resource becomes more scarce, it becomes more economically viable to mine difficult deposits, this growing the reserve. On top of that, the effort and technology tend to yield new methods of both mining and refining that increase yields.
I think you have a point. Look at how the Oil & Gas industry pivoted to fracking and tar sands after conventional oil started drying up around 2005.
There are deposits out there, probably, and the only time mining companies will consider changing ehat and how they currently mine is if they have a reason to do so,: aka an economic (or governmental) reason.
Still, discovery, technology r&d, and supply chain establishment might take more time than what we have. It’s good that we should keep nuclear and all of this on the table, but it shouldn’t be a priority.
An actual cogent argument about nuclear power.
Nothing is truly renewable, we still don’t know how to cheat thermodynamics. Sun itself is not renewable.
Though sun will be problem million years later.
Small nitpick, but Google says that there are 57 nuclear reactors currently under construction worldwide in 2023. 22 of them are in China alone.
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Just like assuming a perfectly spherical cow, or a frictionless surface, you can completely ignore the economics, the massive cost and schedule overages to make nuclear work.
Flamanville-3 in France started construction in 2007, was supposed to be operational in 2012 with a project budget of €3.3B. Construction is still ongoing, the in-service date is now sometime in 2024, and the budget has ballooned to €20B.
Olkiluoto-3 is a similar EPR. Construction started in 2005, was supposed to be in-service in 2010, but finally came online late last year. Costs bloated from €3 to €11B.
Hinkley Point C project is two EPRs. Construction started in 2017, it’s already running behind schedule, and the project costs have increased from £16B to somewhere approaching £30B. Start up has been pushed back to 2028 the last I’ve heard.
It’s no different in the US, where the V.C. Summer (2 x AP1000) reactor project was cancelled while under construction after projections put the completed project at somewhere around $23B, up from an estimate of $9B.
A similar set of AP1000s was built at Vogtle in Georgia. Unit 3 only recently came online, with unit 4 expected at the end of the year. Costs went from an initial estimate of $12B to somewhere over $30B.
Note that design, site selection, regulatory approvals, and tendering aren’t included in the above. Those add between 5-10 years to the above schedules.
Gee, I wonder if the cost might go down if we built more of them, as is the case with, y’know, basically every other complicated thing that humans build.
So even if I follow your logic, that nuclear plants will get cheaper and faster to build, wich I’m not, you still have to build the first generation of plants slow and expensive. So we either wait 15 years to get better at building those plants, or we just build renewables right now.
Except throughout the history of nuclear power it has always gotten more expensive, regardless of time period, learning curve, adoption curve, or any other variable you care to consider. Solar, wind, and batteries have always gotten cheaper and continue to do so.
Is there some reason for that? What makes nuclear power fundamentally different from all other human undertakings?
Yes that is exactly what would happen. To do that though, you really need state funding, state approval, and a secure supply chain as well as experienced engineers, management and construction and supply chains.
I think this is the most overlooked aspect, besides it never being in time to do any good for the crisis we are in now.
I believe, the increasing cost and loss in efficiency compared to alternatives will always be an issue for NE to be out-priced by solar and wind (Dunai, 2019; WNSIR, 2022). These cost will eventually come back to the end user.
Most definitely the reason why nuclear advocates want the government to give securities and don’t dear to be the entrepreneurs they claim to be (NOS Nieuws, 2018). Please give me some welfare state, but I’d rather have some more solid solutions.Costs. Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) analysis by U.S. bank Lazard shows that between
2009 and 2021, utility-scale solar costs came down 90 percent and wind 72 percent, while
new nuclear costs increased by 36 percent. The gap continues to widen. Estimates by the
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has seen the LCOE for wind drop by
15 percent and solar by 13 percent between 2020 and 2021 alone. IRENA also calculated that
800 GW of existing coal-fired capacity in the world have higher operating costs than new
utility-scale solar photovoltaics (PV) and new onshore wind (WNSIR, 2022).- Dunai, Marton et al. Nuclear energy too slow, too expensive to save climate: report (2019), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J
- NOS Nieuws, Nieuwe kerncentrale niet mogelijk zonder staatssteun (2018) https://nos.nl/artikel/2258154-nieuwe-kerncentrale-niet-mogelijk-zonder-staatssteun
- WNSIR, World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2022, https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-v3-lr.pdf
That’s an oversimplification to the point that it is wrong. Nuclear power is not the only form of clean energy like that at all. It can not be scaled in this situation to save us, because it takes too long to build them.
It takes 6 years on a fast paced build. If we had started when we knew of the problem, we could have avoided some of the problem. It is the only energy source we can scale up in that way, however. Every other energy source takes longer for less yield with current technology.
If we had started, but we didn’t.
It is not the only source like that at all. It is way easier, cheaper, faster and sustainable to build windmills where the is constant wind, solar cells where there is a lot of sun, hydro where there is… Energy sources should be built depending on the locality so they complement each other.
This kind of talking in absolutes like some of you are doing is just plain wrong and it does disservice to advocacy for nuclear power.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second best time is today. We can’t let what we should have done stop us from doing what should be done.
And for other sources, wind and solar are great sources of energy that should be a supplement, but sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, and we don’t currently have the battery technology to store energy on the scale to handle those fluctuations. We need a stable backup, and nuclear is by far the best clean and stable energy source.
and we don’t currently have the battery technology to store energy on the scale to handle those fluctuations
We kinda do, though. It’s really new, but there are a few battery technologies that claim they can currently store enough power to defend building them and making solar or wind be the base load. At a lower cost per lifetime kwh than nuclear.
Another person with the incredible wisdom to tell me the is no sun during the night. Thank you sir!
I’ll make it quick: Reducing carbon emissions is urgent. Building nuclear plants takes time, is expensive. There is no capacity to build enough to offset any carbon, not to mention building them produces carbon emissions. Plus many are even scheduled to be closed.
Building something that will make a difference 20 years from now is smart, but if it comes at the expense of what is urgent today, it is very very dumb.
Energy needs are only going to keep rising. Just build both FFS. Wind and solar is often built by private companies on their own initiative so with the right incentives the market can just go and build them. Government’s can put money towards nuclear so that we don’t need to have this same stupid tired argument in 20 years that we’ve been having for the last 20. It’s completely different industries and technical skills so it’s not as if doing one detracts from the other. Just start fucking building them.
Yes!
This idea that only nuclear is the best and we should go all into nuclear is completely stupid.
Exactly. This person is talking about planting trees and waiting 20 years?
If you’re hot today you don’t plant a tree, you put up a temporary shade (like a tent). Just nailing plywood roof to four posts is better than waiting 20 years for a frigging tree to grow.
People complaining about “the current technology” of solar, windmills, and batteries? Prices per MW are dropping so fast, it won’t even matter soon. Battery tech is only old because we didn’t have a lot of power to store. I bet we have better batteries before the decade it will take to build a single nuclear plant.
we have better batteries before the decade it will take to build a single nuclear plant.
That is quite the gamble though. You’re so sure that we’ll be able to develop a new technology and deploy it on a global scale within the next 20 years, that we shouldn’t even bother with the one clean solution that we know works? Not only that, you’re assuming a technology we don’t have yet will be better for the environment, despite all of our current battery tech being awful for the environment.
That’s not like putting up a tent, that’s like saying we shouldn’t plant a tree because someone is probably going to invent an instant tree service, so we should just wait. Like, maybe someone does invent instant trees, but if it doesn’t happen in 20 years we’re gonna feel really dumb
Solar not working during the night is going to keep being a relevant point until we have the capability to manage it, your sarcasm doesn’t do anything to refute that point. There are plenty of cool ways that scientists and engineers are working on solving those problems with better energy storage, but it’s all still in the experimental stages, and until I see build out timelines for energy storage on national scales, all of the variable output power solutions will be nonstarters for fossil fuel replacement. You say that we can’t wait 20 years for nuclear reactors, but we also can’t wait 20 years to figure out how to build a big battery. We don’t even know what the carbon emissions or time costs of whatever we decide on will be, but we do know that working nuclear reactors are a thing today.
I’m not against solar or wind, I have solar panels on my house right now, but it has only reduced my reliance on the fossil fuel grid, it’s nowhere close to replacing it
Plus many are even scheduled to be closed.
Then don’t! I kind of see your point about not building new reactors, even if I disagree, but what purpose could closing existing plants possibly have? How is that going to save carbon and reduce fossil fuels??
I’m all in favor of going apeshit with renewables, but I was under the impression that with current global energy usage, it would take renewables on a scale that is basically impossible to accomplish, if we wanted to drop carbon and nuclear as the backbone of global power production. Or at least that’s what Sabine Hossenfelder told me on YouTube.
I watch her videos, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t say that. I remember the conclusion was that is expensive, not renewable, new nuclear tech is even more expensive and nobody wants it next door. We need to reduce carbon immediately, but there is no way to build enough nuclear plants to even make a dent into the carbon emissions we produce. Not to mention many reactors are even scheduled to close. So sure let’s have the conversation and let’s plan to build but not at the expense of what is urgent now.
Yes. PIMBY - please in my backyard - solar, methane capture off my septic tank, a windmill. I’m not saying “it’s impossible, so fuck it,” to be sure. Though solar infrastructure needs more incentive/requirements to be installed over urban parking lots. They’re converting arable farmland with prime soil into massive solar fields that aren’t designed to be compatible with shade-based agriculture either because of the density or the heavy metals leeching into the soil, and meanwhile there are entire countries worth of parking lots in the USA where I’m sweating my balls off in the baking August sun.
If going 100% renewable is impossible to accomplish, then nuclear is even more impossible. The front-loaded cost for nuclear plants means you’d be able to power the world for 20-30 years or more of solar/wind/batteries (at an amortized rate because costs aren’t front-loaded) for the cost it would take to just turn on the facilities that got us to 100% nuclear.
I think you are vastly overestimating the productivity of renewables right now. They are a smart investment to augment what we have, but to take non-renewables offline and to build enough renewables to reach the levels of modern nuclear, we will need an additional decade… Assuming the tech in renewables continues to make massive gains. There just aren’t enough skilled workers, and you can’t run these people non-stop to produce enough windmills to meet demand.
Renewables are only 20% of the US total, nuclear is 18% (and the US is the highest producer of nuclear worldwide at 30% of the world’s total), and the remaining ~60% is fossil fuels.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn’t true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO2 reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Long term nuclear is great…
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
So we can’t just spam build nuke plants right now to fix everything.
30 years ago that would have worked.
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
That’s not remotely on the same scale, carbon-wise. Global output is like 4 billion tons of concrete per year, a nuclear plant uses like 12 tons per megawatt; an all-in nuclear buildout would use a tiny, tiny fraction of global concrete production and the carbon costs aren’t even remotely equivalent.
(also, wind power uses way, way more concrete)
Building any sort of new power plant uses a shitload of concrete, so that cost isn’t as dramatic as this would seem.
I think nuclear is dramatically overstated in terms of short term feasibility, but concrete use is not the reason why.
So would it be fair to say you have no concrete objections to the nuclear plan?
do you have a source for this carbon cost? i can’t find any figures about even the amount of concrete in a nuclear plant nevermind the co2 cost of that.
I do find a lot of literature that states that the lifecycle co2 cost of nuclear is on part with solar and wind per kwh so i find your assertment about the payback time being decades a little unlikely to say the least.
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(What’s with the downvotes?)
Small scale reactors that require almost no maintenance and produce enough power for a single city are the hot topic right now due to what you just mentioned. As a side product, they provide hot water for the city.
(What’s with the downvotes?)
Lots of people know virtually nothing about nuclear even tho they’re avid supporters of it. So when you point out a downside, they get mad.
As a side product, they provide hot water for the city.
Hot water (technically superheated steam) is the main (and only immediate) product of a nuclear reactor…
Trying to directly use secondary coolant as hot potable water just makes zero sense though. It’s waaaaay more efficient to move the electricity and then heat different water.
I mean, you’re talking about an open loop nuclear system…
No sane engineer would ever do that. A small primary loop leak and your dosing everyone, all to just essentially lose efficiency.
Where did you even see that suggested?
Imagine living in a snowy city where hot water is pumped through the sidewalks to people’s homes. No frozen pipes, no shoveling snow. No people freezing to death…
You still need to clear snow and ice. The hot water pipes are insulated to ensure that the hot water remains hot until it goes into radiators and faucets. You’d lose all that heat if you use it to heat sidewalks.
My city does this. Hot water is pretty cheap here if you’re hooked up to the municipal network. If you have an electric water heater you’ll go bankrupt in the winter.
Small scale reactors are actually more expensive than larger reactors. Even compared to Vogtle 3 and 4…
8 years to build, not 30. Instead we are building many many more coal and gas plants. What a terrific alternative. Fallacy of renewables without storage is done. It’s never going to happen.
Long term nuclear is great
It’s the most expensive option so I’m not sure why people here are so keen on it. It’s much cheaper and faster to scale up renewable energy and in-fill with batteries and gas. Then phase out gas over time for a mix of things like pumped hydro, tidal, etc… This is already working in a lot of places and doesn’t involve long build times like nuclear.
I don’t know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don’t create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change
Except the plants take so long to build they won’t be ready until we’re at 2°C
Knowing nothing about the process, can i ask, is the time it takes to build one based on current standards? Like if we were to focus more resources into the construction of new plants wouldnt they be built faster?
The latest nuclear power plant built in the US is seven years behind schedule and almost $20 billion over budget. It bankrupted Westinghouse Energy, and is slated to cost consumers more than double what comparable electricity costs because of these overruns.
And this was a plant that was using newer construction techniques like offsite assembly to reduce costs.
Looks like one holdup nowadays is the ability to source HALEU (Uranium that is 4x as enriched as the typical fuel used in current reactors).
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-high-assay-low-enriched-uranium-haleu
It was sourceable from Russia before they invaded Ukraine.
emphasis mine:
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.
Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.
So in short:
- Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
- Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
- Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.
Ahh… no. New solar and wind generation can be spun up much faster than nuclear.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Mmmm I agreed with you until reading this. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report showed us that Wind + Solar + Battery Storage are still a safer bet for rolling out non-fossil fuel energy sources at the fastest rate we can launch them. Nuclear sadly still takes too long to build.
I think there is a space for advanced nuclear, though. Small Modular Reactors, Fast Breeders, and such should be encouraged going forward. The US (and I think UK) each have funds specifically designated to the development of advanced nuclear too.
But old nuclear will take too long to get a hold on emissions. I still think nuclear fits in a well-balanced energy portfolio, but not of the specific technology of the 1950s-1990s.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
I mean, Chernobyl is kind of an outdated example. Fukushima would be the more recent one to point at, or even Three Mile Island. Not particularly useful for your argument. Still, I think if people got educated about all 3 of those examples from history, they’ll come out convinced that nuclear is still a safe bet.
Problem is, like I said above, that conventional nuclear takes too damn long to build.
Not to mention the conventional plants don’t seem to be faring all that well…
The study also questions the reliability of the nuclear fleet, particularly given the dramatically low availability of French power plants this year – nearly half of the 56 nuclear reactors were closed even though the EU was in a complicated period of electricity supply with frequent peaks in the price of electricity above €3/kWh.
That sounds pretty awful when everyone expects nucleur to handle baseload.
Yeah, the argument of nuclear crumbles when you start to peak behind the curtain of operation. Still, renewables have the same problem.
Wind turbines break shafts, studs, bolts, lifts, generator step-up (GSU) units, etc. Then you still need oil for all the mechanical systems in a turbine too, which can degrade. Operations can keep up with this though, and in my experience wind can be up and running a lot more frequently with reference to failures that cause downtime compared with maintenance of nuclear with reference to downtime for it.
Same with solar, or even better with solar because the only moving parts with solar are the axis trackers that move panels such that they always point at the sun. Lots more uptime that doesn’t involve radiation exposure, although that concern for operations has probably been designed out as reactor technology has grown up.
Or at least I’d hope…
Canada is also investing in modular reactors, so there are already several large players in the field.
Since I don’t see it mentioned anywhere: Ignoring the economical and environmental issues that nuclear power still has compared to actual renewables, it has a geostrategic problem: Uranium is a geologically limited resources, which just creates political and economical dependencies. And since Russia has a lot of it, keeping working sanctions against them alive is pretty problematic, if you need to buy your energy resources from them. See gas supply.
New archetypes of NP can run on depleted fuel. There’s enough of that around for more than 50yrs of power.
It’s not like Russia has all of it, there are more uranium in the rest of the world, but it has full supply chain.
What provides me trepidation is the economic system means slack jawed corpos with MBAs will be working tirelessly to skirt safety.
Now if the government was to run … Wait, that is communism and is therefore the bad thing to do /s
Even if you could magically increase the number of nuclear reactors started before 2012 tenfold to keep up with wind and solar, you’d have to triple uranium mining overnight to fuel them for the first time.
Can you explain how we handle waste safely into the next milenia?
The majority of solid nuclear waste, the kind that lasts milenia, can be reprocessed in to fuel and used again. France is particularly good at this.
The water released from Fukushima contains no solid nuclear waste. Rather, its irradiated water where some of the hydrogen has become tritium. Tritium has a half life of about 12 years, and is naturally occuring from solar radiation. The safest way to deal with it is to filter it, then dilute it so that the percentage of tritium is not much higher than the natural level. This is what Japan is is doing, and will continue doing for several years.
Simply put, safely dealing with nuclear waste is a well understood process, and the main reason it doesn’t get done is because of objections from anti nuclear-power activists
You should look into the modern tech here, it isn’t just burying millions of tons of toxic waste under New Jersey. There are “breeder reactors” that use the recycled fuel to generate more power. They actually generate more fissile material than they consume, so instead of waste, they mostly produce more fuel.
They also don’t exist in large scale energy production and likely never will. (Just some test plants) They’re too expensive compared with other energy generation so no-one’s seriously considering them right now.
They actually generate more fissile material than they consume,
So we’ll need to store or dispose of large amounts of fissile material until it can be used – which only makes more? This seems unsustainable.
Not that nuclear energy is the ONLY solution, just that it should be used alongside other methods of clean energy, as well as better energy efficiency on the consumer side.
If you want a real surprise check out what George HW Bush’s 1988 environmental platform was. If we actually followed through on it we would be better off.
I am a huge fan of nuclear power, but I wouldn’t say fearing it is ignorance.
You need to make sure it is regulated, secure, well-engineered, and above all, we need a place to store the waste.
Yet, congress and others, at least in America, have done nothing. We should mainly be powered by nuclear and it is rare for a plant to be built. If done correctly you get safe, clean, power.
But why not skip the expense and nuclear waste and just build up mixed renewable energy instead? It’s cheaper and plenty of places have already done it with great success.
Are you talking about wind mills and solar? They won’t supply enough power and have other draw backs. Everything has pros and cons.
Nuclear is consistent, safe and affordable. We have been using nuclear power for 50 years with few issues.
There are plenty of places already doing a mix of renewables with in-fill from batteries and transient gas generation and it works just fine. eg. South Australia. No coal or nuclear is needed and the gas is gradually being phased out with other renewable sources.
Funfact: РБМК-1000(same model as in Chernobyl) was used on all four blocks in St. Petersburg(Leningrad). Currently 2 out of 4 are still in use, another two were replaced with ВВЭР-1200.
It’s crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.
And people’s age and background has so weirdly much to do with how they internalize nuclear safety risk. My best german friend is very opposed to fossil fuels and believes in much stronger renewable focus, but is absolutely opposed to nuclear and basically laughs about how stupid he thinks that risk is. It’s wild.
Especially when you realize how little impact Chernobyl and Fukushima really had. Even including those two accidents, coal plants have emitted vastly more radioisotopes (which occur naturally at low levels in coal, but since we burn such vast quantities of coal…) and vastly more carcinogens.
It doesn’t really matter whether you think nuclear energy is risky or not - it’s economically the worst option. It’s the most expensive of all the main sources of power. It’s much cheaper to just transition to a mix of mostly renewable power and plenty of places have already done it with success. So why do something unnecessary like nuclear when it’s more expensive than the alternatives?
Honest question: why shouldn’t we be afraid?
but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
Chernobyl turned an entire city into a radioactive wasteland for the next 10k years. Same goes for 3-mile island and Fukushima. The last of which was just over 10 years ago.
Are we so arrogant to think that that could never happen again? What’s changed?
Chernobyl is a city inhabited today. In fact, the reactors right next to the ones that burnt were still producing energy a few years ago.
Hopefully your ignorance won’t last 10k years and you’ll learn that nuclear is far less dangerous than your car for example.
Thank you for the intelligent reply. I just can’t imagine why people are afraid anymore 🖕
Pripyat is not inhabited in a normal way. There are no children or families and there won’t be. Simply because children eat dirt and dirt is radioactive. Saying it is inhabited like you did implies there is normal life happening. It never will be again.
It also doesn’t help that people got brainwashed that solar energy and heat pumps will solve all our problems. I don’t have enough space to install so many solar panels to provide power to heat pump during the Eastern European winter and even if I did, ROI will be longer than their expected lifetime. And we still use lead during production, and no one wants to recycle them. These geniuses here import broken solar panels and dump them into the ground and cover them, call that recycling. FFS, nuclear waste disposal is less scary than this uncontrolled shit.
You do understand that solving the world’s carbon energy crisis is not an individual person’s job, right? We’re not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We’re talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it’s pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.
Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.
Don’t you love it when you get heavily downvoted but no-one is brave enough to challenge your point of view?
I mostly agree with you. Solar is good if you own a house, with a roof and have thousands in disposable cash to invest, but that’s not most people.
Heat pumps can’t be run on your solar power alone and if your house isn’t well insulated, they can be extremely inefficient, ending up costing you substantially more than sticking with gas or oil. And that’s not getting in to the other short comings of heat pumps which I believe is a separate debate.
As many people in this thread have said, the best time to invest in nuclear was thirty years ago, but the next best time is now. Give us tonnes of cheap, carbon free electricity to throw in to a heat pump and then they make sense.
That usually happens when you call a lot of people brainwashed. I don’t engage with it anymore.
Did I call a lot of people brainwashed?
Is it hard to understand the context of my comment? It replies to your first paragraph.
Normally I’m not a “lesser of two evils” type, but nuclear is such an immensely lesser evil compared to coal and oil that it’s insane people are still against it.
For the love of everything, at least let’s stop decommissioning serviceable nuclear plants.
Looking at you, Germany…
*looking intensifies*
Maybe it was Putin’s sabotage?
Upd: nah, his mentality of 90-ies gang member doesn’t allow him to think this far.
For real, God forbid we keep the actual safe, clean nuclear plants running
This doesn’t sound like astroturfing at all! lol
“Someone has a dissenting opinion it must be ASTROTURFING AAAAAHHHHHHH”-You for some reason…
This is so pathetic to look at, tons of accounts piling more upvotes on each other than a regular day at lemmy in total and constantly congratulating each other on their oh so based opinions. Bloody clown show, totally organic and not astroturfed at all.
Just a bit funny it looks exactly the same on each social media they pop out all of a sudden. “I am advocating for clean nuclear energy since school, derp”Haven’t you been around Reddit before this? The overwhelming opinion is pro-nuclear and nothing has changed here.
My understanding is that they eventually become unserviceable as they age, because of mechanical/structular reasons, or because the costs of servicing them is so prohibitive that they are unserviceable economically.
That they definitely have a begin, middle, and end, life cycle.
He was specifically referring to the serviceable ones.
At some point in time none of them are serviceable.
That is what taxes are for. God forbid government officials have to cut into their overinflated bonuses to keep a major source of energy in service.
Even if you ignore capitalism, at some point they fatigue and break to the point where they cannot be repaired, but need to be replaced.
You don’t have to demo a whole building to replace a machine. When they need to be replaced, replace it.
Money is literally the only excuse here. Greed is what prevents us from advancing, it’s the reason we never switched from coal and why we are likely not going to last another 100 years. The old rich fuckers don’t care, they aren’t going to live that long anyways, and their children are going to be rich enough that even their descendants 10 generations from now will live comfortably in the hell we are turning the planet into.
No, it’s not just about greed. The reactor itself, it’s housing, and equipment around it have a definite lifetime to them, no matter how much you’d wish otherwise.
Better to decommission before it becomes unsafe, and build a next gen better new one.
Disproven by Russia. Maybe sometimes core is replaced because it uses unsafe design by current standards like in St. Petesburg.
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won’t have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I am not sure when the narrative around nuclear power became nuclear energy vs renewables when it should be nuclear and renewables vs fossil fuels.
We need both nuclear and renewable energy where we try to use and develop renewables as much as possible while using nuclear energy to plug the gaps in the renewable energy supply
Don’t get scared off by the N Word
Nuclear isn’t the monster it’s made out to be by oil and coal propagands.
I live less than 2 miles from the last remaining coal power station in England.
I would much rather have nuclear instead of a chimney chucking god knows what into the air (and subsequently into me) for my entire life.
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100% right.
It doesn’t make any sense without reprocessing though, have to do both. Fortunately France and Finland have active programs.
The US needs to both learn how to do reprocessing again and build more plants.
Greenpeace was founded to be an anti-nuclear organization. See, most of the founding members were members of the Sierra Club (another environmentalist organization) but the Sierra Club was actually pro-nuclear power. The Sierra Club was actually fighting against the installation of new dams due to the effect of wiping out large swaths of river habitat and preventing salmon runs and such.
Anyway, in 1971 there was an underground nuclear bomb test by the US government in an area that was geologically unstable. (there were a bunch of tests to see just how geologically unstable). Protesters thought that the test would cause an earthquake and a tsunami.
Anyway, the people who were unhappy with the Sierra club not actively protesting nuclear power, wanted to protest this nuclear bomb test too, so they formed an organization called the “Don’t make a wave committee”. They sued, the suit was decided in the US’s favor, the test went off, and no earthquake happened (which is how the earlier tests said it would go).
At some point, the “Don’t make a wave committee” turned into Greenpeace.
Also about this timeframe, Greenpeace started receiving yearly donations from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation is the charitable foundation created by the Rockefeller heirs that “uses oil money to make the world a better place” but they kind of don’t. They’ve been anti-nuclear since the beginning, and even directly funded some radiation research in the 1950s that lied about safe exposure limits to radiation, claiming that there was no safe limit. That research went on to shape international policy, and by the time new research came out, the policy was already written and thus hard to change.
As a side note, another alumnus of the Sierra Club was approached by the then CEO of Atlantic Oil and directly paid a sum of something like $100k (in 1970 money) to found another anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.
We need a mix. Centralization isn’t the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won’t be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.
Even if it takes 2 decades to get a new plant going, it’s a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels we don’t need any more, and therefore worth doing.
If it isn’t fossil fuels, it’s automatically better.
The main problem with nuclear power plants isn’t the radiation or the waste or the risk of accident. It’s that they cost so damn much they’re rarely profitable, especially in open electricity markets. 70-80% of the cost of the electricity is building the plant, and without low interest rates and a guaranteed rate when finished it doesn’t make economic sense to build them.
The latest nuclear plant in the US is in Georgia and is $17 billion over budget and seven years later than expected.
It’s that they cost so damn much
The cost of continued fossil fuel use is far higher.
rarely profitable
Profit should not be the motivation of preventing our climate disaster from getting worse. If the private sector isn’t able to handle it, then the government needs to do so itself.
And besides, the only reason fossil fuels are so competitive is because we are dumping billions of dollars in subsidies for them. Those subsidies should instead go towards things that aren’t killing the planet.
Would it be better to dump billions into nuclear power plants that won’t come online for a decade at least, or to dump billions into renewables that can be online and reducing emissions in under a year?
We should worldwide be putting trillions into both. Renewables should be first priority, but not all locations have good solar, wind, and battery options.
That’s your opinion. I think funding nuclear is just burning money and wasting time we don’t have.
Isn’t a lot of that due to organization structures in US power Markets? I remember reading that a lot of times costs on electrical power go nuts due to near fraudulent managers.
Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.
I can’t imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.
not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.
You don’t need to imagine a future without nuclear in the mix - there are plenty of places doing fine with renewables and without coal or nuclear right now.
which country?
For example South Australia - no coal since 2016, no nuclear ever, runs mostly on a mix of renewables - solar and wind with batteries and transient gas for in-fill.
Edit: thanks to whoever downvoted my verified statement of fact (see below)
never heard of that country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stations_in_Australia?wprov=sfla1
Weird argument. “It’s a place bigger than a bunch of EU countries put together but it’s not a country so I’m going to use other places that aren’t South Australia to counter your point which was about South Australia”
lol im not playing this shell game.
Wind and Solar are “renewable” to a certain scale. If you dump gigantic wind farm in the middle of a jet stream, for example, you can impact downstream climate cycles.
that’s why we could be aware of all the externalities.
solar could be deployed on the ocean but that will certainly lower sea temperatures.
let’s terraform intentionally rather than just accidentally.
For what I’ve read, it’s beats nuclear tech exists and is ready to be built at scale now. Renewables are intermittent in nature and need energy storage to work at scale. We don’t have the tech for a grid wide energy storage.
Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.
Yes renewables need to come with storage.
Storage technology isn’t there yet. Nuclear is. The only viable approach is “all of the above.” Anything less is foolishness and oil industry propaganda.
50 yeas ago people couldn’t think of a future without fossile fuel. 100 years ago people thought ships would run on coal for eternity and 200 years ago or in fact up until WW2 horses did most of the work when it came to transportation.
Things change fast. Stagnation of technology is not the norm.
There are urgent needs we can’t wait 50 years for.
France started to build their new power plant in 2007 and hope to connect it to the grid next year.
I guarantee you that climate change and industrial loads will still be a thing in 16 years.
The same people who run the oil companies also run nuclear plants, billionaires love a monopoly but what they hate is local communities being able to own and run solar farms and wind turbines, they hate the idea of someone that isn’t them being able to spend a million making a profitable offshore wind farm or a raised water energy storage facility – more than anything they hate the thought of houses and businesses having PV on the roof and being able to detach evenb just in part from the mechanisms owned by them.
And where do you think all the materials for that come from? Eind turbines, solar panels and batteries require huge amounts of (rare) earth materials that need to be dug up in very -let’s say ugly- mines… lithium for example, is now the core component for most of our batteries and lithium mines are polluting as hell. If we want to have all the lithium we need for all of our storage capacity, well need to destroy beautiful places like the Atacama desert because if we don’t we won’t have enough lithium.
The rare in ‘rare earth’ is not related to scarcity, many of the most common elements in the crust are ‘rare earth materials’ lithium is a great example because it’s hugely abundant especially in salt water where it can be extracted at the same time as desalination - which is especially good paired with wind and solar because it can rapidly switch power usage so excess energy at peek times can be used which helps stabilise the grid, then when generation is low it can pause to conserve power. Also ideal for placement directly tied to solar where sun and saltwater are plentiful, such as the equator.
The other good thing is that lithium is infinitely recyclable and battery tech keeps evolving to require less of it in its chemistry. Theres endless other battery technologies and energy storage methods available too, lithium is great for cars and phones because of the energy density but for grid tied storage that’s not really an issue.
It’s not actually required at all though, thats all FUD from the big energy monopoly that hate anything that can be owned and run by people that aren’t them - there are endless options for making a stable grid using renewables and they’re all considerably cheaper, quicker to make and a lot more resilient.
Nuclear gets pushed so hard because it protects the billionaires monopoly that’s the only reason.
Nuclear is a much more reliable power source, barring a breakdown, you know exactly how much a nuclear reactor will produce at any given time.
Renewables are much more finnicky, and you really need something like hydro, that has a large amount of energy storage, to back it up.
Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.
The cost of electricity dropping is bad news for nuclear power plants because they’ll be even less profitable when they’re finished. Especially since they take decades to construct, during which time renewables and storage become even cheaper.
And we’ll still need a way to store power from renewables when they overproduce.
If renewables are an option you should definitely go for them, but we as a species are pretty much at manufacturing capacity for them. That capacity is being increased, but for now it makes sense to do nuclear in parallel.
Renewables also have the issue of storage, and not all locations are as suitable for wind or solar.
There are cases where nuclear makes more sense, and especially in the short term we need anything that will get us away from fossil fuels.
You could build an entirely new solar, wind, and battery supply chain from the mines to the factories in a quarter of the time it takes to build a single nuclear plant.
Scalability problems. We need to make as many solar wind and battery installations as we can, but there’s only so much production and installation capacity. And eventually we’ll run short on materials, especially for batteries. Nuclear uses a different system, so we can scale that even as we have issues with other systems.
A big problem with solar and wind is that they are not as reliable as nuclear. In a worst-kaas scenario neither will produce energy because there is no sun or wind and there is no way to store enough electricity for these moments. Therefore we need a constant source that creates electricity for those moments. Of course, we do also need renewables, but nuclear is essential because it is reliable.
That’s why places that use mostly renewables and no coal or nuclear often have gas fired generation which can start up in the rare cases when it’s needed. These places already exist and do just fine with no nuclear.
This may be true, but I am not convinced that it is any better than nuclear. To start up regeneration quick the gas winning needs to be on a pilot light (dutch source: https://nos.nl/l/2485108). In Groningen there are (according to the same source) 5 places on pilot light that together must produce at least 2.8 billion cubic metres of gas a year. This is quite a lot of fossil fuels, so I would rather have a nuclear power plant than this gas winning (which comes with other disadvantages as well).
So it’s more nuclear vs renewables and a ton of batteries. (Or other storage options)
any danger that comes from nuclear energy is minuscule compared to the danger that comes from fossil fuels, which are proven to be a main factor in climate change and to cause cancer
One thing I don’t see a lot of people talking about is how nuclear is probably better for the environment due to how you don’t have to cut down a Forrest to generate a viable amount of electricity meanwhile nuclear only requires two factory sised buildings to generate more than enough electricity to be viable and that’s assuming you have a sister breeder reactor to generate power from the waste
Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels
Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
