So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety. With a nuclear power plant, you mitigate the disaster potential by having so many more people involved in the design and inspection processes.
The risk of an electrician installing faulty wiring in your home could be mitigated by having a third party inspector review the work. Now do that 1000x over and your risk of “politicians are paid off” is negligible.
Regulations are actually generally created by regulatory bodies, which are usually non-political. For instance, the underwriter laboratory is the major appliance, building and electrical approval body in the United States.
In most countries, building codes and safety codes are created by industry specialists, people who have been in the industry as professionals for many decades and have practiced and been licensed in the field that they are riding the regulations for.
There’s a big difference between politicians who are passing these laws, and those writing them who are the regulatory bodies. Generally, as a politicians will simply adopt the codes as recommended by the professional licensing and certification bodies.
I suppose it will be the end of modern civilization if politicians decide to politicize electrical or building codes. Then we’ll be fucked for sure. We’ve seen that happen before with the Indiana pi bill.
“The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.”
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety
Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they “artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we’ll use solar”. I’m not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.
If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it’s a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
Because the energy industry is historically the one lobbying governments for less regulation. Also, has there ever been a nuclear project in the history of mankind that didnt result in depleted Uranium leeching into local watertables and/or radioactive fallout? Your comment is basically tacit acceptance that people are going to act unethically, which, in regards to nuclear power, is bound to have human consequences.
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can’t fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it huh?
I never said we can’t do also wind, solar, thermal, and hydro; in fact we have to do all of them. But, hydro isn’t possible in most places (and also makes “a part of the world uninhabitable” too — look at how much the Three Gorges Dam displaced, for example), nor is geothermal. And wind and solar are inconsistent — great as part of it, but they can’t be the entirety of the grid, unless you want the entire country to go dark on a cloudy day, cuz we simply can’t make batteries store that much.
No. The original comment said the “worst disaster made a very small she’s of the planet uninhabitable”. Keep in mind this disaster was the result of Soviet incompetence and completely avoidable with standards implemented in the US.
They’re saying our “worst case scenario” using nuclear power is better than worst case scenario continuing to use fossil fuels.
Likelihood of worse case scenario using nuclear power is also extremely low. Whereas worst case scenario (billions of people dying) for continuing to use fossil fuels is EXTREMELY HIGH.
Bet you’d feel* differently if you were a resident of one of the island nations that’s going to drown in the next decade or two. That part of the world’s definitely going to be uninhabitable if we continue to do nothing.
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
Which each have their drawbacks. Just as an example, though not representative of the majority, what do you do about months of no sun in the Arctic Circle for solar power? There is no single solution to this problem. Nuclear is better than fossil fuels by far, and we should not just throw it away out of fear.
I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
“Easier”? Are you aware of the fact that radioactive waste tombs are meant to stand for millions of years? It requres a lot of territory, construction and servance charges, and lots of prays for nothing destructive happens with it in its “infinite” lifetime.
I think it’s photosynthesis. ‘Bury in the ground’ is an extreme simplification btw.
Also, I am finished with this topic scince long anough. It feels politically biased. If you’d like to reply, I’d hear it gladly. But I m not going to be involved into a discussion.
It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage. If we could create a battery that doesn’t just leak energy from storing, we could generate power in one location and ship it out where it’s needed. There could be remote energy production plants using geothermal or hydroelectric power that ship out these charged batteries to locations all over. It would let us better utilize resources instead of having to have cities anchored around these sources.
Or we could generate a ton of power all at once, store it and use it as needed rather having to have on demand energy production
Hell with better batteries even fossil fuels begin to be climate friendly since you could store the massive energy created and know you’re using close to 100% of it.
It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage.
Globally humanity already invests over 10 Billion dollars per year in advancing battery technology.
If we could create a battery that doesn’t just leak energy from storing…
In order to build what you are talking about will almost certainly require real room temperature super conductors. We can get close, maybe, with the next generation of Aluminum-Air or Iron-Air batteries but this is big pimping. It’s incredibly complicated and difficult.
It’s like Fusion Power. We can see a future where we have it figured out and working but it’s still some years, if not decades, away.
We could just use energy to fill a big hole with water and put plastic wrap over top until we need to get the energy back then we pump it through a dam.
Kind of an unconventional battery, but I’ve heard of solar and wind being used to pump water uphill into reservoirs and then released through a hydro plant when the sun/wind aren’t shining/blowing. I’d be curious to know the amount of production lost from storing it this way.
I heard the loss comes from evaporation. Another cool idea I heard was using a mining cart. So its not practical but I think the idea is cook because I’m pretty science illiterate but it got me thinking about what a battery actually is. So you drag a mine cart up a hill with energy produced using renewable energy and then let it go down the hill and collect the stored energy with its motion. Technically there isn’t anything like evaporation so you could store the mine cart up the hill with no energy loss.
Interesting. Didn’t consider the evaporation. I imagine friction could effect the minecarts, but no idea to what degree. Some loss is gonna happen so matter what. If I’m understanding correctly, even nuclear, built away from population centers, will lose some power due to transmission distances.
Why do you think they’re pushing it for a reason? Renewables are very much a great option without the nuclear power. I hate that they’re here, but the nuclear activists are definitely here. 3 words, Fukushima, Fukushima, Fukushima.
How many 9.1 magnitude earthquakes do you think there are? And the reports following the disaster showed that there were definitely ways to prevent it from happening, like, for example, not building it so close to the sea.
I mean, if we want to go down that path, there’s no reason to think that governments won’t just stick to fossil fuels and fuck us all.
Even so, it took a literal once-in-a-century earthquake in the right place to send a tsunami to the perfectly misplaced reactor to actually make just one person die. One. And two died from the aforementioned massive tsunami caused by an earthquake that occurs around once a century.
You know there’s a crapload more reactors than Fukukishima, right? Like over 70% of France’s energy demands are met with nuclear power.
The issue here is that you are parroting the devisive argument that investors in oil have been putting out for decades. You are also ignoring the harm that outputting millions of tonnes of carbon-based effluent has on the world’s population as a whole.
Gram for gram nuclear is safer and your horror stories should be discounted. Retort:
2023 Marco Pol…Sweden, Karlsh…22 October 2023Lennard en z’n …United Kingdo…26 March 20232023 Princess …Philippines, Pol…28 February 20232022 Keystone …United States, …7 December 2022
Cool, keep on with your ‘nuclear bad’ narrative. It does objectively less harm than carbon-based energy.
The nuclear power plant decades older than Chernobyl that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and resulted in a only single death and some expensive clean up?
The push for nuclear power across social media is 100% an industry sanctioned psyop.
Oh please, I’ve been advocating for nuclear power since before most people even owned a dial up modem. You younger ones see everything through a haze of recency bias.
It’s so stupid too, Fukushima just released their contaminated water from over 10 years ago into the ocean last week. Do they not read the news? At least wait until disaster news from actual nuclear power plant disasters aren’t fresh in everyone’s minds.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don’t mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn’t seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
“Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”
It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.
Yea both are horrible. But we can get off fossil fuels and walk away. We can’t with nuclear. It’ll always be with us and doesn’t solve that we need fossil fuel for other things.
Jets and ships are still going to need fossil fuels.
Which is why I think the best thing we could be doing right now is focusing on improving how energy is store. With the right advancement we could solve a lot of these problems with the right battery.
Mercury will always be with us. Arsenic will always be with us. PFAS will always be with us. Natural radiation will always be with us. Fortunately, nuclear waste is easily detectable, the regulations around it are much stronger, the amount of HLW is miniscule and the storage processes are incredibly advanced
Moreover, most Nuclear waste won’t always be with us. A lot of fission prodcuts have half lives in the decades or centuries
How do you get the uranium or thorium? Generally, it has to be mined. Are we using nuclear powered mining equipment? No. We use fossil fuel powered mining equipment. Then we use fossil fuels to power the trucks that take the depleted nuclear product to the storage depot, which is powered and requires employees who drive there using fossil fuel powered vehicles, using fossil fuel powered warehouse equipment. When does nuclear power phase out the fossil fuel power? Are we going to decommission oil and coal production facilities? Or are we just going to use nuclear to augment the grid?
Don’t forget all the fossil fuels used in machinery that builds nuclear power plants, and the CO2 emissions from all of the concrete used.
Oh, and if you start building a nuclear power plant right now it will be online (maybe) in a decade or two and hopefully for only 150% of the initial cost. There’s a nuclear power plant in Georgia that is $17 BILLION over budget.
Big news worthy accidents are a really good way to ensure strong regulation and oversight. And nuclear is very regulated now so that it has lower death rate than wind power.
No, they just have a super incredulous public so even inconsequencal things get blown way out of proportion in the news. So there’s more oversight.
It’s like flying, but to an even greater extent. Because people are afraid of flying and crashes are very public and news worthy, the FAA does a great job investigating incidents and requiring safety improvements. They’ve made it so flying is orders of magnitude safer than driving. A similar thing happens with nuclear. Because the public is scared, the news covers, so the government makes sure it is very safe.
While that’s true, we still have for example safe air travel, although I’m pretty sure companies would be happy to ship their passengers minced to maximize their profit.
Also, thorium reactors would be a great step forward, unfortunately its byproducts can’t be used for nuclear weapons, so their development was pretty slowed down.
Also there was that german experimental Thorium reactor that was so mismanaged, it made Burns’ Springfield power plant look well handled. I think that scared a lot of people off of Thorium for a long time.
Source: Lived right next to that reactor during my childhood.
Or they could just allow everyone to build nuclear reactors in their backyard, everyone is saying that they are safer than a banana so i don’t see any issue
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
And we would be expecting these corrupt Cost cutting types to warehouse nuclear waste for hundreds if not thousands of years while requiring regular inspections and rotation of caskets periodically while also maintaining the facilities. All of that for a product that doesn’t produce any value, it just sits there and accumulates.
And where does it get stored? Right now almost 100% of waste is stored on site above ground because they really have no good solution. People will say things like “its just a little bit of toxic waste” or “its cool because we could use it in process we don’t have yet but might in the future” and all I can think of is how this was the same thinking that got us into our dependence on our first environmental catastrophic energy source. I’m not confident we that scaling up to another one will end well.
Right now almost 100% of waste is stored on site above ground because they really have no good solution.
You mean there’s so little they don’t even need a dedicated facility for it, and it’s safe enough that people are willing to work where it’s stored? Sounds great!
Combustion engine sounded great too before the entire world started using them everywhere. You trust corporate interest to store this material for hundreds if not potentially thousands of years.
But it isn’t concrete. It needs constant maintenance and inspection. The casks need to be monitored and rotated out when they begin to erode and break down. Whose doing that for 1009 years?
I think it’s fine to think of it as imperfect, even if those imperfections can never be truly solved.
We only need nuclear to bridge the gap between now and a time when renewable CO2 neutral power sources or the holy grail of fusion are able to take the place the base load power that we currently use fossil fuels for, and with hope, that may only be a few decades away.
Anybody who thinks humans and civiilization will exist in 200 years without degrowth is living in a fantasy world. We can’t solve our problems of fossil fuel dependence and an ever-growing population with recycling, denser housing, and nuclear power. Nature needs space, not everyone wants to live like a sardine in a dense city.
Where will we get our nitrogen fertilizer at massive scale w/o fossil sources?
Use of fossils are the only reason humanity was able to grow way outside the bounds of normal Earth capacity. Without fossils we’ll be forced into a sustainable relationship with our planet and that probably isn’t 8 billion or more people living in “civilized society” regardless of it’s efficiency.
And no, I"m not an “eco-fascist” and don’t want genocide or want poor people or brown people to disappear, don’t fall into false dichotomies.
If I recall, 50 years ago we didn’t have the technology/understanding of nuclear fuel enough to make as much as we can now. When I did a school paper on the subject like 20 years ago, they were saying nuclear wasn’t sustainable because we didn’t have enough fuel.
My understanding is that that has changed recently with breakthroughs in refinement of fuels.
One reason it wasn’t made a priority 50 years ago is because Jimmy Carter - a nuclear submariner who understood the risks and economics - decided it wasn’t a good idea.
This is a man who was present at a minor nuclear accident, who helped create the modern nuclear submarine fleet, acknowledging that nukes weren’t going to help during the height of the Oil Embargo.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
We do it all the time in the construction industry.
For instance, Bechtel has 55,000 people in the US.
“Since the 1950s, Bechtel has designed, serviced, or delivered 80% of all nuclear plants in the U.S… Bechtel has provided engineering and construction services for 88 of the 104 operating nuclear plants in the United States.”
So just hire them. Too bad they lost almost all of their institutional knowledge about nuclear construction compared to what they used to have.
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.
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.
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?
“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.
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.
I’m sick and tired of “pro-environment” useful idiots shilling against nuclear power
You know that the idea we should be investing in nuclear is being pushed by the very same people who for decades were telling us we didn’t need to worry about climate change, right?
They’re trying to get “useful idiots”, as you so eloquently put it, to also support nuclear energy, rather than going all-in on renewables.
The “useful idiots” in this scenario are not the people opposing nuclear. They’re the ones suggesting it’s actually an economical idea, and in so doing either explicitly or (more often) implicitly suggesting that we shouldn’t invest too much in actual renewable energy.
Right, also nuclear power helps maintain centralization and authoritarian control of populations. Decentralization everywhere is the future for both energy and security reasons.
There are solid arguments to be made against both nuclear and renewables (intermittence, impact of electricity storage, amount of raw material, surface area). We can’t wait for perfect solutions, we have to work out compromises right now, and it seems nuclear + renewable is the most solid compromise we have for the 2050 target. See this high quality report by the public French electricity transportation company (independent of the energy producers) that studies various scenarios including 100% renewable and mixes of nuclear, renewables, hydrogen and biogas. https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy pathways 2050_Key results.pdf
Our local new #nuclear power station, Hinkley Point in the UK, is years behind schedule. The cost has more than doubled to £40bn ($46bn) and the strike price (guaranteed price we as electricity customers will have to pay for it is £106per mwh (index linked so will be nearer £150 by 2028 (for 35 years) when it is planned to be operational.
But Europe or America the story of the same. Cost overruns and other issues mean nuclear is running out of steam. We are at the end of the age of nuclear… Until fusion comes along, apparently only 20 years away
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.
“We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable” is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
So… climate change deniers want to delay action on climate change. So they push for nuclear because it has long lead times and that forestalls action?
Come on man. That’s a pretty ridiculous theory. Climate change deniers are out there yelling “drill baby drill” not going undercover as nuclear advocates.
He’s completely right, and I don’t get why more people don’t see that. As an example, here in Denmark, the leader of the far right populist party is both the one saying climate change would be a good thing since it means warmer summer weather as well as constantly bringing up nuclear energy any single time someone starts talking about climate change. It’s honestly so transparent. I used to see the same thing all the time on Reddit, and now I guess it’s Lemmy’s turn for this shit.
because it has long lead times and that forestalls action
I won’t profess to know for sure what their reasoning is. I suspect it’s a bit of that, and also a bit of hope/expectation that the fossil fuel industry will be well-situated to pivot into nuclear in a way that they can’t as easily do with renewables. The more centralised nature and heavy reliance on large-scale resource extraction is very similar. But they actual explanation isn’t what’s important.
What’s important is the simple fact that the biggest climate change deniers are now trying to promote nuclear. If you want to refute the claim, you need to explain that better than I can.
I’m not very familiar with Australian politics or leaders so I can only go with what I see in those articles. First, I don’t see any climate change denial. I see a debate about renewables and nuclear
Why are conservatives against renewables:
They can’t meet our total energy needs.
Wind and solar products are predominantly made in China and conservatives don’t want to feed the Chinese economy or increase dependence (one thing I do know about AU is that Chinese influence is quite heavy and a cause of great concern there).
Why are conservatives pro-nuclear:
It provides baseload capacity that supports wind/solar where they are weak.
It has military applications.
It creates large infrastructure spending within AU and supports mining industry.
They believe it will rankle liberals.
Maybe you have a point that conservatives who are dead-set against renewables will throw nuclear into the conversation as a distraction which they know will not go anywhere. But as an outside observer who doesn’t have built up associations with these characters, I honestly just see rational inclusion of nuclear in the energy mix. This all seems healthy to me.
It’s been a decade since a report came out recognising nuclear as too expensive to be viable, and that the best economic decision is to go all-in on renewables. In that time, the price of nuclear has not changed (really, it’s likely gone up, with how much construction in general has gone up, while the technical side of it has not changed), while the cost of renewable energy has continued to go down.
I’m not ideologically opposed to nuclear. But the evidence clearly tells us that it’s just not a reasonable option. At least not unless the long-promised affordability improvements from SMRs actually end up realising themselves. Or fusion gets to the point where it can be used for energy generation.
To expensive to be viable against the current solar wind and storage pieces. But when those go up due to saturation and shortages, it may become viable again.
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.
people who thought (with some merit) that nuclear was a good idea 30 years ago
As you say, it had some merit. In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s a damn shame we didn’t build significant amounts of nuclear 30+ years ago.
Unfortunately today the only people supporting nuclear are the same ones wanting to delay the move away from fossil fuels, and the “useful idiots” (as another user in this thread put it—though ironically they were using it to refer to those in favour of renewables) who don’t recognise how much more economical renewables are and how much more able to combat climate change they are. The “useful idiots” are coming from a well-meaning place. They’re just not up-to-date on the economics.
Of course who does not agree with you suddenly is called “idiot”.
Well, no. Somebody else was calling me an idiot for following the evidence that says nuclear is too expensive and renewables are a better option. I simply pointed out that their claim works far better pointed at them than it does at me.
And look, I’m not old enough to have been politically engaged 50 or 30 years ago. Practically, it doesn’t matter what we should or should not have done 30 years ago. We need to evaluate the conditions of today and decide what’s the best option.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except wind and solar don’t have anywhere near the density we need. Nuclear plants are about 1kW/m^2. Wind is 2-3W/m^2, solar is 100W/m^2. Siting wind and solar projects can be just as damaging.
I didn’t even mention tidal or geothermal. But how are any of those just as damaging? Nuclear waste is still a issue and again if it were attacked or destroyed would cause a massive ecological issue. Again last I checked destroying a wind, solar, tidal, or geothermal generator would not release radiation. Also the time to build one of those compared to a nuclear plant is a lot less last I checked.
Tidal is not a proven technology. The ocean environment is incredibly harsh on equipment. High-temp geothermal power generation is extremely site-specific, though ground-loop technology for heating and cooling is a proven technology that is woefully underutilized (though there are big challenges there as well, since ground loops take up space and done incorrectly overheat the ground temp/water table, etc.).
Producing wafers for solar panels is indeed one of the most ecologically damaging activities we can engage in. Have you ever been to a semiconductor fab?
It’s a lot easier and cheaper to build a solar plant of ten times the seize compared to one nuclear plant though.
How did you get those numbers though? A standard on-shore wind turbine has a maximum power output of 2MW. Let’s say on average, it’s half, so 1 million Watt. You’re counting 500k m² per turbine?
What kind of area did you use for the nuclear plant?
Also, solar has the added benefit that it can be installed on basically wasted space (e.g., people’s roof) unlike the others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Functionally they are because different Capital Groups will chase different projects. For instance Bill Gates / TerraPower is heavily backing both Fusion and SMR Fission technology.
Meanwhile other Capital Groups like Anschutz are piling money into Wind Farms then there’s yet other groups like Silicon Ranch pouring money into Solar Farms.
It seems to have escaped the notice of most Netizens but the big money Capitalists have finally come out to play in the Green / Renewable Energy space. Sure there’s an absolute limit on the money and manpower that even they can afford but practically speaking those limits are so high that we’re unlikely to reach them.
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).
It has been fifty years that “oh no they take so long to build, better never start” that by today we would have completely decarbonized energy generation if we started actually building them.
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.
Were there mistakes during the build process like lowballing spending figures or building time so they are permitted to build or did they just royally fuck up some other way?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don’t do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.
we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
An electrician installing faulty wiring doesn’t render your home uninhabitable for a few thousand years.
So there’s one difference.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety. With a nuclear power plant, you mitigate the disaster potential by having so many more people involved in the design and inspection processes.
The risk of an electrician installing faulty wiring in your home could be mitigated by having a third party inspector review the work. Now do that 1000x over and your risk of “politicians are paid off” is negligible.
You are saying, regulations will fix this? Politicians create the regulations, the fines, and enforcement.
Political parties are running on platforms of deregulation right now.
Regulations are actually generally created by regulatory bodies, which are usually non-political. For instance, the underwriter laboratory is the major appliance, building and electrical approval body in the United States.
In most countries, building codes and safety codes are created by industry specialists, people who have been in the industry as professionals for many decades and have practiced and been licensed in the field that they are riding the regulations for.
There’s a big difference between politicians who are passing these laws, and those writing them who are the regulatory bodies. Generally, as a politicians will simply adopt the codes as recommended by the professional licensing and certification bodies.
I suppose it will be the end of modern civilization if politicians decide to politicize electrical or building codes. Then we’ll be fucked for sure. We’ve seen that happen before with the Indiana pi bill.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
“The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.”
Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they “artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we’ll use solar”. I’m not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.
If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it’s a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.
Okay, so we’ve got a safe nuclear power plant that’s a decade behind schedule and 100% over budget.
By your logic I suggest you avoid any building constructed in the US as nothing would ever be safe enough.
It’s plenty safe now, but my electricity rates have doubled because the plant was so over budget and they need to make their money back.
a wind mill going down and a nuclear plant blowing up have very different ramifications
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
The risks are lower in literally everything else…?
Because the energy industry is historically the one lobbying governments for less regulation. Also, has there ever been a nuclear project in the history of mankind that didnt result in depleted Uranium leeching into local watertables and/or radioactive fallout? Your comment is basically tacit acceptance that people are going to act unethically, which, in regards to nuclear power, is bound to have human consequences.
Has there been one that did leech uranium? I’m just asking questions!
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
The worst nuclear disaster has led to 1,000sq miles of land being unsafe for human inhabitants.
Using fossil fuels for power is destroying of the entire planet.
It’s really not that complicated.
Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
You mean under ground from where it was dug out?
The plant itself, water inevitably getting in contact with wastes and leaking also.
You mean water under ground? It was in contact million years before any of us was born.
Both sound terrible.
I don’t really want to pick the lessor of two evils when it comes to the energy.
By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can’t fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it?
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it huh?
I never said we can’t do also wind, solar, thermal, and hydro; in fact we have to do all of them. But, hydro isn’t possible in most places (and also makes “a part of the world uninhabitable” too — look at how much the Three Gorges Dam displaced, for example), nor is geothermal. And wind and solar are inconsistent — great as part of it, but they can’t be the entirety of the grid, unless you want the entire country to go dark on a cloudy day, cuz we simply can’t make batteries store that much.
We are on a time limit thanks to climate change. We can’t afford to complain about picking the lessor of two evils.
The option proposed is that making a small area of the planet inhabitable or worsening climate change. Sorry but that’s a shitty comparison.
No. The original comment said the “worst disaster made a very small she’s of the planet uninhabitable”. Keep in mind this disaster was the result of Soviet incompetence and completely avoidable with standards implemented in the US.
They’re saying our “worst case scenario” using nuclear power is better than worst case scenario continuing to use fossil fuels.
Likelihood of worse case scenario using nuclear power is also extremely low. Whereas worst case scenario (billions of people dying) for continuing to use fossil fuels is EXTREMELY HIGH.
Bet you’d feel* differently if you were a resident of one of the island nations that’s going to drown in the next decade or two. That part of the world’s definitely going to be uninhabitable if we continue to do nothing.
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Do you realize that “degrowth” equals billions of people starving to death?
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Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
Wind, solar, etc.
Which each have their drawbacks. Just as an example, though not representative of the majority, what do you do about months of no sun in the Arctic Circle for solar power? There is no single solution to this problem. Nuclear is better than fossil fuels by far, and we should not just throw it away out of fear.
Arctic Circle already uses wind?
Not fear, reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
And what do YOU know about radioactive waste disposal?
I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
“Easier”? Are you aware of the fact that radioactive waste tombs are meant to stand for millions of years? It requres a lot of territory, construction and servance charges, and lots of prays for nothing destructive happens with it in its “infinite” lifetime.
Launch it into the sun or Florida
Launching radioactive waste into space is a terrible idea, because rockets on occasion crash. Once that happens it becomes a nuclear disaster.
Instead we can safely store it in depleted mines.
We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?
I think it’s photosynthesis. ‘Bury in the ground’ is an extreme simplification btw. Also, I am finished with this topic scince long anough. It feels politically biased. If you’d like to reply, I’d hear it gladly. But I m not going to be involved into a discussion.
My country, Sweden, also gets a decent chunk of power from hydro. Back in 2021, about 43% was hydroelectric, and 31% was nuclear.
It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage. If we could create a battery that doesn’t just leak energy from storing, we could generate power in one location and ship it out where it’s needed. There could be remote energy production plants using geothermal or hydroelectric power that ship out these charged batteries to locations all over. It would let us better utilize resources instead of having to have cities anchored around these sources.
Or we could generate a ton of power all at once, store it and use it as needed rather having to have on demand energy production
Hell with better batteries even fossil fuels begin to be climate friendly since you could store the massive energy created and know you’re using close to 100% of it.
Moving batteries seems like a terribly inefficient way of replacing power lines.
Globally humanity already invests over 10 Billion dollars per year in advancing battery technology.
In order to build what you are talking about will almost certainly require real room temperature super conductors. We can get close, maybe, with the next generation of Aluminum-Air or Iron-Air batteries but this is big pimping. It’s incredibly complicated and difficult.
It’s like Fusion Power. We can see a future where we have it figured out and working but it’s still some years, if not decades, away.
Allow me to share the most frustrating graph I have ever seen
We could just use energy to fill a big hole with water and put plastic wrap over top until we need to get the energy back then we pump it through a dam.
Then profit.
Problem solved
Kind of an unconventional battery, but I’ve heard of solar and wind being used to pump water uphill into reservoirs and then released through a hydro plant when the sun/wind aren’t shining/blowing. I’d be curious to know the amount of production lost from storing it this way.
I heard the loss comes from evaporation. Another cool idea I heard was using a mining cart. So its not practical but I think the idea is cook because I’m pretty science illiterate but it got me thinking about what a battery actually is. So you drag a mine cart up a hill with energy produced using renewable energy and then let it go down the hill and collect the stored energy with its motion. Technically there isn’t anything like evaporation so you could store the mine cart up the hill with no energy loss.
Interesting. Didn’t consider the evaporation. I imagine friction could effect the minecarts, but no idea to what degree. Some loss is gonna happen so matter what. If I’m understanding correctly, even nuclear, built away from population centers, will lose some power due to transmission distances.
Why do you think they’re pushing it for a reason? Renewables are very much a great option without the nuclear power. I hate that they’re here, but the nuclear activists are definitely here. 3 words, Fukushima, Fukushima, Fukushima.
How many 9.1 magnitude earthquakes do you think there are? And the reports following the disaster showed that there were definitely ways to prevent it from happening, like, for example, not building it so close to the sea.
And do you think other countries would make smarter and wiser decisions? Dude.
I mean, if we want to go down that path, there’s no reason to think that governments won’t just stick to fossil fuels and fuck us all.
Even so, it took a literal once-in-a-century earthquake in the right place to send a tsunami to the perfectly misplaced reactor to actually make just one person die. One. And two died from the aforementioned massive tsunami caused by an earthquake that occurs around once a century.
You know there’s a crapload more reactors than Fukukishima, right? Like over 70% of France’s energy demands are met with nuclear power.
The issue here is that you are parroting the devisive argument that investors in oil have been putting out for decades. You are also ignoring the harm that outputting millions of tonnes of carbon-based effluent has on the world’s population as a whole.
Gram for gram nuclear is safer and your horror stories should be discounted. Retort:
2023 Marco Pol…Sweden, Karlsh…22 October 2023Lennard en z’n …United Kingdo…26 March 20232023 Princess …Philippines, Pol…28 February 20232022 Keystone …United States, …7 December 2022
Cool, keep on with your ‘nuclear bad’ narrative. It does objectively less harm than carbon-based energy.
The nuclear power plant decades older than Chernobyl that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and resulted in a only single death and some expensive clean up?
The push for nuclear power across social media is 100% an industry sanctioned psyop.
Oh please, I’ve been advocating for nuclear power since before most people even owned a dial up modem. You younger ones see everything through a haze of recency bias.
@dangblingus @PeleSpirit
It certainly feels that way.
It’s so stupid too, Fukushima just released their contaminated water from over 10 years ago into the ocean last week. Do they not read the news? At least wait until disaster news from actual nuclear power plant disasters aren’t fresh in everyone’s minds.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don’t mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn’t seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
“Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”
It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.
We do have fantastic options, water, wind, and sun renewables. Let’s focus on them.
Yea both are horrible. But we can get off fossil fuels and walk away. We can’t with nuclear. It’ll always be with us and doesn’t solve that we need fossil fuel for other things.
Jets and ships are still going to need fossil fuels.
Which is why I think the best thing we could be doing right now is focusing on improving how energy is store. With the right advancement we could solve a lot of these problems with the right battery.
Mercury will always be with us. Arsenic will always be with us. PFAS will always be with us. Natural radiation will always be with us. Fortunately, nuclear waste is easily detectable, the regulations around it are much stronger, the amount of HLW is miniscule and the storage processes are incredibly advanced
Moreover, most Nuclear waste won’t always be with us. A lot of fission prodcuts have half lives in the decades or centuries
Jets and ships can be nuclear powered. It’s just not a very good idea for jets at least.
Sure, but doesn’t that just increase the nuclear waste storage issue if we turn all these vehicles nuclear powered
We don’t have to put all our eggs in one basket, but we should definitely avoid the basket that is literally setting fire to our planet right now.
We needs a permanent national nuclear waste disposal site now, before the spent nuclear fuel stored in 35 states becomes unsafe https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
Well, vote to make it happen then? I don’t care about the U.S.; I’m not American.
Vote to make what happen and where are you from?
Build one then
How do you get the uranium or thorium? Generally, it has to be mined. Are we using nuclear powered mining equipment? No. We use fossil fuel powered mining equipment. Then we use fossil fuels to power the trucks that take the depleted nuclear product to the storage depot, which is powered and requires employees who drive there using fossil fuel powered vehicles, using fossil fuel powered warehouse equipment. When does nuclear power phase out the fossil fuel power? Are we going to decommission oil and coal production facilities? Or are we just going to use nuclear to augment the grid?
Don’t forget all the fossil fuels used in machinery that builds nuclear power plants, and the CO2 emissions from all of the concrete used.
Oh, and if you start building a nuclear power plant right now it will be online (maybe) in a decade or two and hopefully for only 150% of the initial cost. There’s a nuclear power plant in Georgia that is $17 BILLION over budget.
So basically saving the planet is mega super important, but somehow 17 billions is suddenly too much?
That $17 billion could be spent on renewables that produce cheaper electricity and be online in less than 20 years.
How much renewables do you get for $17B?
Big news worthy accidents are a really good way to ensure strong regulation and oversight. And nuclear is very regulated now so that it has lower death rate than wind power.
Yes, nuclear accidents are great because then there’s more regulation? That doesn’t sound like a sound argument. You guys are acting crazy.
No, they just have a super incredulous public so even inconsequencal things get blown way out of proportion in the news. So there’s more oversight.
It’s like flying, but to an even greater extent. Because people are afraid of flying and crashes are very public and news worthy, the FAA does a great job investigating incidents and requiring safety improvements. They’ve made it so flying is orders of magnitude safer than driving. A similar thing happens with nuclear. Because the public is scared, the news covers, so the government makes sure it is very safe.
Not that driving was safe anyway
It’s a risk virtually everyone considers accountable.
While that’s true, we still have for example safe air travel, although I’m pretty sure companies would be happy to ship their passengers minced to maximize their profit.
Also, thorium reactors would be a great step forward, unfortunately its byproducts can’t be used for nuclear weapons, so their development was pretty slowed down.
If only we had a non fossil energy source we could safely export to developing nations instead of ICE technology.
(Intenal Combustion Engine)
Also there was that german experimental Thorium reactor that was so mismanaged, it made Burns’ Springfield power plant look well handled. I think that scared a lot of people off of Thorium for a long time.
Source: Lived right next to that reactor during my childhood.
That actually sounds more comfortable than normal airline travel
Much much tighter regulations. Our cars aren’t aluminum cans waiting to crush everybody inside them because of strict safety regulations.
Nationalise energy production.
Or they could just allow everyone to build nuclear reactors in their backyard, everyone is saying that they are safer than a banana so i don’t see any issue
Make them live on site?
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
And we would be expecting these corrupt Cost cutting types to warehouse nuclear waste for hundreds if not thousands of years while requiring regular inspections and rotation of caskets periodically while also maintaining the facilities. All of that for a product that doesn’t produce any value, it just sits there and accumulates.
And where does it get stored? Right now almost 100% of waste is stored on site above ground because they really have no good solution. People will say things like “its just a little bit of toxic waste” or “its cool because we could use it in process we don’t have yet but might in the future” and all I can think of is how this was the same thinking that got us into our dependence on our first environmental catastrophic energy source. I’m not confident we that scaling up to another one will end well.
You mean there’s so little they don’t even need a dedicated facility for it, and it’s safe enough that people are willing to work where it’s stored? Sounds great!
Combustion engine sounded great too before the entire world started using them everywhere. You trust corporate interest to store this material for hundreds if not potentially thousands of years.
I trust the material to just sit there like big slabs of concrete usually do.
But it isn’t concrete. It needs constant maintenance and inspection. The casks need to be monitored and rotated out when they begin to erode and break down. Whose doing that for 1009 years?
Is it quote from 60-ies? We have. At least Russia has. US had too.
I think it’s fine to think of it as imperfect, even if those imperfections can never be truly solved.
We only need nuclear to bridge the gap between now and a time when renewable CO2 neutral power sources or the holy grail of fusion are able to take the place the base load power that we currently use fossil fuels for, and with hope, that may only be a few decades away.
Degrowth is the only realistic solution.
Anybody who thinks humans and civiilization will exist in 200 years without degrowth is living in a fantasy world. We can’t solve our problems of fossil fuel dependence and an ever-growing population with recycling, denser housing, and nuclear power. Nature needs space, not everyone wants to live like a sardine in a dense city.
Where will we get our nitrogen fertilizer at massive scale w/o fossil sources?
Use of fossils are the only reason humanity was able to grow way outside the bounds of normal Earth capacity. Without fossils we’ll be forced into a sustainable relationship with our planet and that probably isn’t 8 billion or more people living in “civilized society” regardless of it’s efficiency.
And no, I"m not an “eco-fascist” and don’t want genocide or want poor people or brown people to disappear, don’t fall into false dichotomies.
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Or that our other imperfect solutions like the fossil fuels we continue to use now aren’t worse.
If the Soviets hadn’t cut corners and Chernobyl hadn’t happened in this first place, this is likely where we would already be.
If I recall, 50 years ago we didn’t have the technology/understanding of nuclear fuel enough to make as much as we can now. When I did a school paper on the subject like 20 years ago, they were saying nuclear wasn’t sustainable because we didn’t have enough fuel.
My understanding is that that has changed recently with breakthroughs in refinement of fuels.
One reason it wasn’t made a priority 50 years ago is because Jimmy Carter - a nuclear submariner who understood the risks and economics - decided it wasn’t a good idea.
This is a man who was present at a minor nuclear accident, who helped create the modern nuclear submarine fleet, acknowledging that nukes weren’t going to help during the height of the Oil Embargo.
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.
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.
Federation of American scientists (FAS) believe that the number is actually calculable:
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.
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.
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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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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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Per megawatt of generated energy, coal releases significantly more radioative waste into the environment than nuclear does.
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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:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
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.
We do it all the time in the construction industry.
For instance, Bechtel has 55,000 people in the US.
So just hire them. Too bad they lost almost all of their institutional knowledge about nuclear construction compared to what they used to have.
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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Nice, we can defer the problem to the next generation.
And unlike nuclear reactors, solar panels can be recycled completely
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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.
Nuclear 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
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-eagle-deaths-wind-turbines-kill-humans/?sh=5b0b28345467
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.
Makes you wonder if the same thing couldn’t be done for nuclear plants!
Okay, so increase those safety standards on wind then get back to us with price per kilowatt and project lead times.
deleted by creator
You know that the idea we should be investing in nuclear is being pushed by the very same people who for decades were telling us we didn’t need to worry about climate change, right?
They’re trying to get “useful idiots”, as you so eloquently put it, to also support nuclear energy, rather than going all-in on renewables.
The “useful idiots” in this scenario are not the people opposing nuclear. They’re the ones suggesting it’s actually an economical idea, and in so doing either explicitly or (more often) implicitly suggesting that we shouldn’t invest too much in actual renewable energy.
Right, also nuclear power helps maintain centralization and authoritarian control of populations. Decentralization everywhere is the future for both energy and security reasons.
deleted by creator
There are solid arguments to be made against both nuclear and renewables (intermittence, impact of electricity storage, amount of raw material, surface area). We can’t wait for perfect solutions, we have to work out compromises right now, and it seems nuclear + renewable is the most solid compromise we have for the 2050 target. See this high quality report by the public French electricity transportation company (independent of the energy producers) that studies various scenarios including 100% renewable and mixes of nuclear, renewables, hydrogen and biogas. https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy pathways 2050_Key results.pdf
@BrokebackHampton @sv1sjp @flossdaily
Our local new #nuclear power station, Hinkley Point in the UK, is years behind schedule. The cost has more than doubled to £40bn ($46bn) and the strike price (guaranteed price we as electricity customers will have to pay for it is £106per mwh (index linked so will be nearer £150 by 2028 (for 35 years) when it is planned to be operational.
This when #wind is costing as low as £40 per MWh.
Nuclear energy is a scam
#renewables #wind
You mean the nation that invented Prince 2 can’t get a project done on time and budget?!
@magikmw
Oh, I didn’t know we invented Prince 2, another thing to apologise for…
Don’t worry, you invented Canadians for that.
@magikmw
Well it’s being built by the French 😄
But Europe or America the story of the same. Cost overruns and other issues mean nuclear is running out of steam. We are at the end of the age of nuclear… Until fusion comes along, apparently only 20 years away
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64
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!
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.
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.
“We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable” is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
So… climate change deniers want to delay action on climate change. So they push for nuclear because it has long lead times and that forestalls action?
Come on man. That’s a pretty ridiculous theory. Climate change deniers are out there yelling “drill baby drill” not going undercover as nuclear advocates.
He’s completely right, and I don’t get why more people don’t see that. As an example, here in Denmark, the leader of the far right populist party is both the one saying climate change would be a good thing since it means warmer summer weather as well as constantly bringing up nuclear energy any single time someone starts talking about climate change. It’s honestly so transparent. I used to see the same thing all the time on Reddit, and now I guess it’s Lemmy’s turn for this shit.
I won’t profess to know for sure what their reasoning is. I suspect it’s a bit of that, and also a bit of hope/expectation that the fossil fuel industry will be well-situated to pivot into nuclear in a way that they can’t as easily do with renewables. The more centralised nature and heavy reliance on large-scale resource extraction is very similar. But they actual explanation isn’t what’s important.
What’s important is the simple fact that the biggest climate change deniers are now trying to promote nuclear. If you want to refute the claim, you need to explain that better than I can.
I’m not very familiar with Australian politics or leaders so I can only go with what I see in those articles. First, I don’t see any climate change denial. I see a debate about renewables and nuclear
Why are conservatives against renewables:
They can’t meet our total energy needs.
Wind and solar products are predominantly made in China and conservatives don’t want to feed the Chinese economy or increase dependence (one thing I do know about AU is that Chinese influence is quite heavy and a cause of great concern there).
Why are conservatives pro-nuclear:
It provides baseload capacity that supports wind/solar where they are weak.
It has military applications.
It creates large infrastructure spending within AU and supports mining industry.
They believe it will rankle liberals.
Maybe you have a point that conservatives who are dead-set against renewables will throw nuclear into the conversation as a distraction which they know will not go anywhere. But as an outside observer who doesn’t have built up associations with these characters, I honestly just see rational inclusion of nuclear in the energy mix. This all seems healthy to me.
We should do both as fast as we possiblity can. Expand all non ghg emitting sources as fast as possible to cut out coal and gas.
It’s been a decade since a report came out recognising nuclear as too expensive to be viable, and that the best economic decision is to go all-in on renewables. In that time, the price of nuclear has not changed (really, it’s likely gone up, with how much construction in general has gone up, while the technical side of it has not changed), while the cost of renewable energy has continued to go down.
I’m not ideologically opposed to nuclear. But the evidence clearly tells us that it’s just not a reasonable option. At least not unless the long-promised affordability improvements from SMRs actually end up realising themselves. Or fusion gets to the point where it can be used for energy generation.
To expensive to be viable against the current solar wind and storage pieces. But when those go up due to saturation and shortages, it may become viable again.
Thank you. The pro-nuclear bullshit from Reddit seems to be spilling over.
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
As you say, it had some merit. In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s a damn shame we didn’t build significant amounts of nuclear 30+ years ago.
Unfortunately today the only people supporting nuclear are the same ones wanting to delay the move away from fossil fuels, and the “useful idiots” (as another user in this thread put it—though ironically they were using it to refer to those in favour of renewables) who don’t recognise how much more economical renewables are and how much more able to combat climate change they are. The “useful idiots” are coming from a well-meaning place. They’re just not up-to-date on the economics.
Weird how it is never the right time to build nuke
Fifty years ago: no
Thirty years ago: no
Today: no
But of course later suddenly it is “oh if only we built it back then”
Or “oh it’s too late now, it takes sooooooo much”
Meanwhile curiously fossil fuel usage keep growing.
Europe was (and is) basically enslaved to Russia gas due to the “no nuclear” green crowd.
Of course who does not agree with you suddenly is called “idiot”.
Well, no. Somebody else was calling me an idiot for following the evidence that says nuclear is too expensive and renewables are a better option. I simply pointed out that their claim works far better pointed at them than it does at me.
And look, I’m not old enough to have been politically engaged 50 or 30 years ago. Practically, it doesn’t matter what we should or should not have done 30 years ago. We need to evaluate the conditions of today and decide what’s the best option.
And the evidence is clear: that’s renewables.
I agree but I think the nuclear ship has sailed. Astroturfing can influence public sentiment but it can’t change economics.
It could be both? This is a very calculated post.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An actual cogent argument about nuclear power.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think it’s a far fetched statement, but I’m also not sure if it’s true.
I know concrete has a pretty big carbon footprint, but, I don’t know how that scales in relation to the carbon savings of nuclear power.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except wind and solar don’t have anywhere near the density we need. Nuclear plants are about 1kW/m^2. Wind is 2-3W/m^2, solar is 100W/m^2. Siting wind and solar projects can be just as damaging.
I didn’t even mention tidal or geothermal. But how are any of those just as damaging? Nuclear waste is still a issue and again if it were attacked or destroyed would cause a massive ecological issue. Again last I checked destroying a wind, solar, tidal, or geothermal generator would not release radiation. Also the time to build one of those compared to a nuclear plant is a lot less last I checked.
Tidal is not a proven technology. The ocean environment is incredibly harsh on equipment. High-temp geothermal power generation is extremely site-specific, though ground-loop technology for heating and cooling is a proven technology that is woefully underutilized (though there are big challenges there as well, since ground loops take up space and done incorrectly overheat the ground temp/water table, etc.).
Producing wafers for solar panels is indeed one of the most ecologically damaging activities we can engage in. Have you ever been to a semiconductor fab?
It’s a lot easier and cheaper to build a solar plant of ten times the seize compared to one nuclear plant though.
How did you get those numbers though? A standard on-shore wind turbine has a maximum power output of 2MW. Let’s say on average, it’s half, so 1 million Watt. You’re counting 500k m² per turbine?
What kind of area did you use for the nuclear plant?
Also, solar has the added benefit that it can be installed on basically wasted space (e.g., people’s roof) unlike the others.
Source
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.
Sadly, humanity had other things to do :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
We do both. This isn’t a binary choice.
Money and manpower are not infinite. Any money spent on one is a choice not to spend it on the other.
Functionally they are because different Capital Groups will chase different projects. For instance Bill Gates / TerraPower is heavily backing both Fusion and SMR Fission technology.
Meanwhile other Capital Groups like Anschutz are piling money into Wind Farms then there’s yet other groups like Silicon Ranch pouring money into Solar Farms.
It seems to have escaped the notice of most Netizens but the big money Capitalists have finally come out to play in the Green / Renewable Energy space. Sure there’s an absolute limit on the money and manpower that even they can afford but practically speaking those limits are so high that we’re unlikely to reach them.
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.
Except the plants take so long to build they won’t be ready until we’re at 2°C
It has been fifty years that “oh no they take so long to build, better never start” that by today we would have completely decarbonized energy generation if we started actually building them.
We could have also built solar collectors in orbit and beamed carbon-free electricity to Earth if we started 50 years ago.
Heck, if we funded fusion research properly there’s a good chance we’d have had that by the mid 90s
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
https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/natural-resources-energy/2022-12-14/the-opening-of-terrapowers-nuclear-plant-in-kemmerer-will-be-delayed-by-two-years
It was sourceable from Russia before they invaded Ukraine.
Were there mistakes during the build process like lowballing spending figures or building time so they are permitted to build or did they just royally fuck up some other way?
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
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.
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.
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.
emphasis mine:
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:
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.
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.
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.
This sort of generalization is ignorance.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don’t do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
Ahh… no. New solar and wind generation can be spun up much faster than nuclear.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
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.
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.
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.
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.
I understand the technology, physics and socioeconomic ramifications and i’m against it.
Care to elaborate?