ITT oil and coal propaganda proving propaganda and fear mongering work.
Nuclear is safer in every single regard. Even including weapons nuclear energy has harmed fewer humans than coal or gas by far.
In Australia, nuclear is being used as a propaganda tool by the coal lobby to defend their interests against renewables because the build time is so long (and I suspect because the miners are more or less the same).
Large scale solar with batteries is 1/6th the cost, 5x faster to build, better for the environment, better for energy independence, and doesn’t carry the risk of an event that’ll render an entire country uninhabitable. I’m yet to hear a decent argument for nuclear.
the build time is so long (and I suspect because the miners are more or less the same).
Correct. It takes a long time to build a miner. Regressive politicians are hard at work to rectify that though, by once again allowing minor miners to mind the mines.
Is nuclear safer than solar and wind?
IMO, it is if you factor in the fact that it’s currently the fastest way of actually replacing the energy generated by fossil fuels before the earth becomes totally incompatible with human life.Nope, I’m wrong, see replies.… but that’s literally not true?
Actually, seems you’re right though it’s obviously still more complicated than either one or the other. I was using outdated information, my bad.
Did some more research. A few links:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2020/Q2/can-renewable-energy-really-replace-fossil-fuels.html (Talks only about renewable energy but not nuclear, though I still found it helpful)
Hey, I just wanted to say thank you for looking into this further and being brave to admit when you’re wrong. That’s a really admirable quality which is way too uncommon these days!
For the safety aspect, I don’t think deaths is the most helpful comparison - considering for nuclear that many, many thousands of people will have to deal with health problems caused by radiation exposure over decades. Lots of people argue that the Chernobyl death toll should include people who die from the effects of that radiation, which would push the numbers from ~300 dead to tens of thousands.
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Technically yes, people keep dieing on the windmills.
This is not me saying we need to build less solar or wind. We still need to build more and we also need small modular reactors to provide base load. If we had the battery capacity to store renewables at scale I would be for it however we do not.
Do you have a source for the claim that wind and solar are more dangerous than nuclear?
I looked myself and from what I saw Solar and wind were safer than nuclear, not to mention cheaper and cleaner.
It is close but Nuke wins. Note I’m being pendantic. I think we should be building small modular reactors when farms and solar farms to compliment each other. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Even according to your source (which is really biased, by the way), renewables are just as safe as nuclear.
Why should be waste money on expensive, dirty nuclear power when we can get double the return on investment with much cleaner renewables?
There is no sensible reason to mine limited uranium unless you want us to continue to be dependent on exploitative, extractive industries?
Did you read my comment or did you just derp
Just saying anyone who disagrees with you is a shill is the absolute most pathetic argument, it’s what conspiracy loons do.
No one is saying use coal or gas that’s a red herring all the nuclear proponents love to try and throw in there, nuclear is hugely expensive and very slow to build with lots of complex supply chain, waste management issues, and security issues where as renewables are able to be installed far faster, cheaper and safer.
It’s either waste huge sums on building nuclear reactors while we continue to burn gas and oil for the ten to twenty years it takes to get a reactor online OR invest in renewables and get off fossil fuels quicker, cheaper and safer.
I love how people will blindly support nuclear power plants so strongly that any argument made against them is automatically called propaganda.
My power electronics professor told us the same thing you did, that nuclear power plants are dead because they’re too complex and expensive to maintain in the long run, and that renewables are the better choice at this point. Maybe this will change as fusion reactors improve, but we’re probably decades out before industrial fusion plants start showing up, if they ever do.
Two issues here. The fear of nuclear energy was astroturfed by Oil and Gas. This means any irrational arguments against nuclear are propaganda which 99% are.
The second is there is no reason nuclear projects have to be big and complex. We could easily have small reactors to power towns and remote location. The reason we don’t has a lot to do with fear.
Simply put we are foolish not to be utilizing more nuclear power.
When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.
Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
- Cheaper
- Lower emissions
- Faster to provision
- Less environmentally damaging
- Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
- Decentralised
- Much, much safer
- Much easier to maintain
- More reliable
- Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.
Frequently asked questions:
- But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?
While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.
- Don’t renewables take up too much space?
The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.
- Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?
No, it’s dirtier. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised environmental harm caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers always show nuclear as more environmentally harmful than renewables.
- We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.
Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
Excellently written!
I am so tired of people who have no idea how good wind and solar are/have gotten smugly declaring that wind and solar will never be good enough to meet energy demands…
Thank you! Please feel free to copy and share. There is so much pro-nuclear rhetoric online, particularly on Reddit, I debate it every time I see it but there’s too much for me to do alone.
Love that the meme format uses water and hydro isn’t fuckin mentioned
offshore drilling could be jammed in the background, too
geothermal is there, we just can’t see it cause it’s underground
The thing with hydro is that it is limited by the hydrography of the country.
Once you’ve built all damns it was possible, that’s it. And that usually only covers a just small portion of a country’s energy needs.
That applies to availability of fossil fuels too, though. Everyone acts like it’s never gonna run out, but the number one producer of oil and gas in the world is literally causing thousands of miniature earthquakes and poisoning groundwater in a desperate effort to get to the worst quality fossil fuels.
That’s true about fossil fuels. But it seems you’re interpreting my comment as if I was defending the use of fossil fuels.
What I’m pointing out here is that the fact that hydroelectric energy production (although very clean) is not really an alternative for many countries as a substitute for fossil fuels. It is not a matter or decision lack of attention or investment. Many developed countries actually have most of their potential capacity installed, yet that accounts for very little of their electric demand. Take Germany as an example:
Germany had a hydropower installed capacity in 2016 of 11,258 MW (…). In the same year, the country generated 21.5 TWh from hydroelectric plants, representing about 3% of the country’s total electricity generation.
The hydropower capacity in Germany is considered mature and the potential already almost completely exploited, with limited room for growth. In recent years, growth in capacity has mainly come from repowering of existing plants.
Source: Hydroelectricity in Germany
Of course, there’s exceptions (% of total domestic electricity generation): Canada (59.0%), Norway (96%), Paraguay (100%) or Brazil (64.7%).
Actually, from what I can tell, hydro seem to be so convenient (it can be ramped up/down on-demand, used for storage, cheap) that most countries that can afford it tend to maximize their installed capacity to the extend their hydrography allows them to.
ITT: People regurgitate oil company propaganda verbatim.
replace skeleton with cooling rods and this meme gets better tbh 😂
Fantastic!
It’s already got the Cherenkov radiation though.
I don’t get it, didn’t Europe produce like 100% wind power at one point this past week?
Solar is also at a record high and cheaper than ever. I think this is just some weird fossil fuel meme meant to be ignorant.
Nobody wants to maintain anything.
When you fail to maintain coal, gas, wind, or solar, it just stops working for the time being.
When you fail to maintain nuclear systems (be that poor understanding, lack of training, negligence, whatever), things go very bad very quickly.
This is before you get into wider issue’s like waste management and environmental concerns.
Oh boy, another hot take from a well educated and informed source, I’m sure.
80% of what you think about nuclear is fossil fuel propaganda, 10% is because the soviets are dipshits, and the last 10% are reasonable concerns that redundant safety system upon redundant safety systems address.
While we’re criticizing sources, do you have a source on those percentages?
This is the internet, where 90% of percentages are made up. Including this one.
Every safety system makes it more expensive to run and they’re already not profitable, do you really think they’ll just keep throwing money into it without cutting corners? One little economic downturn and we start getting problems…
Why even risk it when we could have far better systems from the start? Nuclear is nice in science fiction but when you actually have to plug the numbers into the real world it doesn’t look good at all, especially not compared to wind, solar and tidal
Insulting people you disagree with is a rather poor way to win them over and/or create productive discourse.
We tend to forget the negligence humans are capable of.
But to be fair, abolishing nuclear was a trick to expand oil, gas and coal afaik. At least the funding came from there iirc.
True, but there were also concerns about the proliferation of nuclear technology and the risks of nuclear war.
If we could power the earth without nuclear or fossil fuels, that would be objectively better. But it just doesn’t seem possible.
And trying to achieve an impossible goal while simultaneously burning even more carbon is irresponsible.
So we need to quickly build out the required nuclear capacity.
Yes, I agree that there are risks involved.
I think the risks with Fossil fuels are a lot higher:
- instead of putting nuclear waste in the ground, we pump it in the air (fossil fuel waste is radioactive)
- instead of nuclear proliferation, we support barbarist states such as saudi arabia
So, the question between fossil and nuclear was never there. It was always nuclear and people that lobbied against it should go to jail for the rest of their lives for murder.
Now, I have no clue how far along we are. This (site)[https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/renewable-energy-by-country/] says we‘re at 17% global coverage and some people argue that rn we should invest every dollar/euro in renewables instead of nuclear.
I can understand that argument. Not sure which makes more sence though.
Waste management and environmental concerns are already bad with coal power (even worse than nuclear power, in the sense that nuclear doesn’t launch waste into the air as far as I know, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong)
Although, yes, security has to be higher for nuclear power, but nuclear is not as bad as most people think
There is no solution for nuclear waste. It’s buried underground it takes millennia to disperse the radiation. Don’t think there is anything worse environmentally.
New nuclear reactors are fully or nearly fully automated I think. If humans disapeared overnight, they can fully shut down by themselves. Also newer reactors are made so that you need to actively monitor the reaction to even keep it going unlike old reactors (that are not in use anymore I think) that had you monitoring it to prevent it blowing up.
Playing devils advocate here:
Automated systems are not maintenance or error free and the costs of mistakes are vast. It may have been designed to detect problems and shut itself down; but has it been maintained well enough to successfully do so? Maybe, maybe not.
Given how well maintained most public infrastructure is, I’m not very confident.
Seriously. A finicky system which requires constant monitoring is a bad idea. People have problems maintaining their cars.
Simple, robust, and capable of absorbing neglect is better.
I wouldn’t say that’s true for gas. Without the right maintenance and/or shutdown procedures, refinery systems can reach dangerous pressures and literally explode.
Even shutting down a refinery is a very calculated process. If the refinery teams decided to walk away doing nothing, people would be in danger. The sheer amount of toxins released could kill quite a few, let alone explosions or fire.
I’m not a big fan of gas power, but it’s surely deadly in the wrong hands.
My
firstsecond… paragraph was a bit of a simplification.While that is true, a refinery explosion is far less impactful than a nuclear meltdown.
Don’t get me wrong, both are really bad; but a refinery gone wrong doesn’t leave huge amounts of land entirely unusable for decades.
Honestly I’d rather avoid both and go for energy sources like wind, solar, hydro, even geothermal. I think we could go a long way if the majority of homes had panels on the roof and some local storage for night time use.
I’ve said elsewhere; I like the concept of Nuclear energy, I just struggle to trust those that run it, particularly given how neglected much of our existing infrastructure is already.
Nuclear had its time. Solar and wind is cheaper, can be distributed and has a fraction of the waste and supply chain issues.
I’m increasingly of the same opinion, however, I dislike the fact that even talking about nuclear as a potential bridge technology is such a polarizing issue.
I am very far from being an expert on the subject and accordingly don’t have a strong opinion either way as to what role, if any, it can usefully play in transitioning to sustainable energy models.
What I don’t like is the immediate labeling of either side of the issue as somehow automatically being indicative of bad faith or “shilling” on behalf of a larger, nearly conspiratorial interest.
its not that nuclear is bad, but it’s very expensive and takes a long time to commission, where the bridge between now and full scale renewable is on a shorter time frame. if the idea of using nuclear as a transition was made 10-20 years ago, absolutely. now, it’s kinda too late.
so pretty much the most economical solution is to go all in on renewable from now on
Thanks for the response. That makes sense and I think I’m probably on-board.
Solar and wind have location, storage and reliability issues. Nuclear completely takes the place of fossil fuel generation on all those fronts.
Not in France!
Pollution? That’s a problem for future Homer.
What about tidal?
Not a good solution for most of the world, but great for where it can be done, same as geothermal.
Spicy take: we need to curb our addiction to power sources.
No need
The main power utility in Idaho is looking into nuclear power generation. I’m pretty excited considering I’m in the utility industry.
Very true.
I would support reactors which aren’t designed to produce enriched uranium, don’t blowup when neglected, and don’t produce as much waste.
There has been some work on molten salt reactors recently, which look promising.
Oh yes, let’s focus on an extremely expensive energy source! Let’s get rid of dependencies of dicatotors by making us dependent of other dictators to get uran! Why waste any more time on energy sources that pay off after a few years when we can have an energy source they’ll still have to pay for in 100 generations? So genious!
Not to mention how long it takes to find good spots since noone wants to have one in their backyard and even if you have a spot it takes almost a decade to build m
Also you need to guarantee cooling which is going to be a bigger and bigger problem in the coming years…
So much better than spending a fraction of the money to build renewables much faster with less risk…
Right? I’m pretty sure everyone downstream of Fukushima likes it this way. The people who are hoping we don’t need an actual priesthood, or glowing cats, or whatever, to warn people about nuclear waste thousands of years in the future after the fall of all current civilizations, like it this way.
Let nuclear continue to waste away as the terrible idea it always was.
There are real gold nuggets of useful nuclear tech that we need for the energy revolution. We can make it safe, and we will need all tools at our disposal.
