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.
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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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are on a time limit thanks to climate change. We can’t afford to complain about picking the lessor of two evils.
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.
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.
We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?
Launch it into the sun or Florida
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.
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.
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
Moving batteries seems like a terribly inefficient way of replacing power lines.
Power lines would still mean we need energy on demand though wouldn’t it. And if we can transport energy from an area like a huge solar array in the Sahara to Kazakhstan or China it would be better. I was just raising it as an off thought like maybe theres more ways to think about solving this problem than just building plants. What level of storage ability could we have that would let us build a large solar array in the Sahara to power Africa and Europe vs just building more plants. I think our end goal will be energy storage and like you brought up transport/transmission. I think that because I think we have energy production pretty well 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 push for nuclear power across social media is 100% an industry sanctioned psyop.
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.
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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.
renewables
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nationalise energy production.
Much much tighter regulations. Our cars aren’t aluminum cans waiting to crush everybody inside them because of strict safety regulations.
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.
Try to arrange the incentives in such a way that if the plant melts down, the company that owns it loses money.
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.
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.
Or that our other imperfect solutions like the fossil fuels we continue to use now aren’t worse.
Perfect or just secure is even more expensive, that is the problem.
If the Soviets hadn’t cut corners and Chernobyl hadn’t happened in this first place, this is likely where we would already be.
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.
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.
That is factually false information. There are solid arguments to be made against nuclear energy.
https://isreview.org/issue/77/case-against-nuclear-power/index.html
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
The long lead times for construction that invalidate nuclear power as a way of mitigating climate change was a point recognized in 2009 by the body whose mission is to promote the use of nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Nuclear power is not a near-term solution to the challenge of climate change,” writes Sharon Squassoni in the IAEA bulletin. “The need to immediately and dramatically reduce carbon emissions calls for approaches that can be implemented more quickly than building nuclear reactors.”
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Wealer from Berlin’s Technical University, along with numerous other energy experts, sees takes a different view.
“The contribution of nuclear energy is viewed too optimistically,” he said. “In reality, [power plant] construction times are too long and the costs too high to have a noticeable effect on climate change. It takes too long for nuclear energy to become available.”
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, agrees.
“Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build,” he said. “When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.”
He pointed out that the world needed to get greenhouse gases under control within a decade. “And in the next 10 years, nuclear power won’t be able to make a significant contribution,” added Schneider.
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.
I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:
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Current nuclear power generation is non-renewable. It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen. And it goes without saying that waiting to scale up some novel unproven or inexistent sustainable way of nuclear power production is out of the question, for time and safety reasons. Which brings me to point 2.
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We need clean, sustainable energy right now if we want to have any chance of fighting climate change. From start of planning of a new nuclear power plant to first power generation can take 15 or 20 years easily. Currently, about 10% of all electricity worldwide is produced by about 400 nuclear reactors, while around 15 new ones are under construction. So, to make any sort of reasonable impact, we would have to build to the tune of 2000 new reactors, pronto. To do that within 30 years, we’d have to increase our construction capacity 5 to 10 fold. Even if that were possible, which I strongly doubt, I would wager the safety and cost impacts would be totally unjustifiable. And we don’t even have 30 years anymore. That is to say nothing of regulatory checks and maintenance that would also have to be increased 5 fold.
So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.
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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.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Long term nuclear is great…
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
So we can’t just spam build nuke plants right now to fix everything.
30 years ago that would have worked.
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.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn’t true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO2 reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.
I don’t know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don’t create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change
Except the plants take so long to build they won’t be ready until we’re at 2°C
Ahh… no. New solar and wind generation can be spun up much faster than nuclear.
emphasis mine:
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.
Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.
So in short:
- Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
- Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
- Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Mmmm I agreed with you until reading this. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report showed us that Wind + Solar + Battery Storage are still a safer bet for rolling out non-fossil fuel energy sources at the fastest rate we can launch them. Nuclear sadly still takes too long to build.
I think there is a space for advanced nuclear, though. Small Modular Reactors, Fast Breeders, and such should be encouraged going forward. The US (and I think UK) each have funds specifically designated to the development of advanced nuclear too.
But old nuclear will take too long to get a hold on emissions. I still think nuclear fits in a well-balanced energy portfolio, but not of the specific technology of the 1950s-1990s.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
I mean, Chernobyl is kind of an outdated example. Fukushima would be the more recent one to point at, or even Three Mile Island. Not particularly useful for your argument. Still, I think if people got educated about all 3 of those examples from history, they’ll come out convinced that nuclear is still a safe bet.
Problem is, like I said above, that conventional nuclear takes too damn long to build.
Not to mention the conventional plants don’t seem to be faring all that well…
The study also questions the reliability of the nuclear fleet, particularly given the dramatically low availability of French power plants this year – nearly half of the 56 nuclear reactors were closed even though the EU was in a complicated period of electricity supply with frequent peaks in the price of electricity above €3/kWh.
That sounds pretty awful when everyone expects nucleur to handle baseload.
Yeah, the argument of nuclear crumbles when you start to peak behind the curtain of operation. Still, renewables have the same problem.
Wind turbines break shafts, studs, bolts, lifts, generator step-up (GSU) units, etc. Then you still need oil for all the mechanical systems in a turbine too, which can degrade. Operations can keep up with this though, and in my experience wind can be up and running a lot more frequently with reference to failures that cause downtime compared with maintenance of nuclear with reference to downtime for it.
Same with solar, or even better with solar because the only moving parts with solar are the axis trackers that move panels such that they always point at the sun. Lots more uptime that doesn’t involve radiation exposure, although that concern for operations has probably been designed out as reactor technology has grown up.
Or at least I’d hope…
Canada is also investing in modular reactors, so there are already several large players in the field.
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
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.
Even if you could magically increase the number of nuclear reactors started before 2012 tenfold to keep up with wind and solar, you’d have to triple uranium mining overnight to fuel them for the first time.
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Not that nuclear energy is the ONLY solution, just that it should be used alongside other methods of clean energy, as well as better energy efficiency on the consumer side.
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Can you explain how we handle waste safely into the next milenia?
Honest question: why shouldn’t we be afraid?
but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
Chernobyl turned an entire city into a radioactive wasteland for the next 10k years. Same goes for 3-mile island and Fukushima. The last of which was just over 10 years ago.
Are we so arrogant to think that that could never happen again? What’s changed?
Funfact: РБМК-1000(same model as in Chernobyl) was used on all four blocks in St. Petersburg(Leningrad). Currently 2 out of 4 are still in use, another two were replaced with ВВЭР-1200.
And people’s age and background has so weirdly much to do with how they internalize nuclear safety risk. My best german friend is very opposed to fossil fuels and believes in much stronger renewable focus, but is absolutely opposed to nuclear and basically laughs about how stupid he thinks that risk is. It’s wild.
Especially when you realize how little impact Chernobyl and Fukushima really had. Even including those two accidents, coal plants have emitted vastly more radioisotopes (which occur naturally at low levels in coal, but since we burn such vast quantities of coal…) and vastly more carcinogens.
It’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.
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax:
This sort of generalization is ignorance.
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
I understand the technology, physics and socioeconomic ramifications and i’m against it.
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.
For the love of everything, at least let’s stop decommissioning serviceable nuclear plants.
Normally I’m not a “lesser of two evils” type, but nuclear is such an immensely lesser evil compared to coal and oil that it’s insane people are still against it.
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won’t have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I am not sure when the narrative around nuclear power became nuclear energy vs renewables when it should be nuclear and renewables vs fossil fuels.
We need both nuclear and renewable energy where we try to use and develop renewables as much as possible while using nuclear energy to plug the gaps in the renewable energy supply
Easy, by paying people to spread misinformation.
That’s the “how”. The other commenter was unsure about “when”.
This is the product of a couple of cultural movements in previous generations.
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People who conflated their Cold War-era opposition to nuclear weapons with opposition to nuclear energy. The Venn diagram with early environmental movements has considerable overlap.
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A more general and mostly-irrational fear of nuclear energy mostly stoked in the U.S. by Three Mile Island, which is a case study in good nuclear accident management with piss-poor public relations. (See: the first few seasons of the Simpsons many gags about the dangers of the power plant.)
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The current environmental movement’s general unwillingness to acknowledge nuclear energy as a very advantageous tool in the push to eliminate fossil fuels. Why? Over-optimism about where renewables are now and continued influence of the Boomers from #1 who taught all of their university classes.
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Over-reaction to Fukushima, particularly in the EU (other than France). And then doubling down until Ukraine forced their hands when Russian gas became an embarrassment.
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A decade ago I’d agree with you. But given the amount of time needed to get a nuclear power plant online, if we tried to use nuclear to replace fossil fuels, it’ll probably be too late. Add to that the fact that the cost of wind and solar has dropped significantly and the fact we’d be trading dependency on resources from a group of unstable countries to a dependency on resources from another group of unstable countries, it just seems like nuclear just isn’t a very good option any more.
Of course there could be a tech change (like fusion) which alters this, but the days of fission are past. Keep the plants that are currently operational going, and if there’s construction near completion, then sure. But I feel like fission has become a bad option for new developments. Takes too long and there’s better solutions available that don’t depend on resources from other countries.
Fusion is still decades away from being commercially viable, so while continued funding for RnD for it should be important, it still has a long way to go before we can even start making plans for power plants operating on it.
As for Nuclear having long set up time… that’s not a reason to not use it. That’s a reason to hammer out plans and start finding ideal sites for it to service high density and high demand areas as soon as possible. The other half of this coin is that activists and legislatures need to take a serious look at Nuclear Regulations and cut the things that are simply not needed. Nuclear continues to be a viable option in spite of the severe restrictions placed upon it, restrictions that no other form of energy production could even be viable much less profitable. If we equalized these limitations and restrictions, you can pretty much guarantee that Nuclear would suddenly become #1 choice and still maintain the highest safety rating per watt produced.
Solar, Wind and Nuclear all complement each other very well, with the downsides of each generation being easily offset by the other two forms of power generation. Wind and Solar take a lot of space to make farms that produce enough power to feed a large city, where as a nuclear plant can produce the same amount of power with considerably less space. And the two can be interwoven together, with most nuclear plants already having ‘no go’ areas or restricted zones around them that could easily be filled in with Solar and Wind.
Solar will give you a set amount of power each day the shines, varying throughout the year but works as a good baseline. Initiatives could be pushed to add rooftop solar to most homes, businesses and other buildings or infrastructure that people don’t need to walk across or stand upon, increasing the base line here in a relatively cheap and low cost way, though of course these panels do need to be cleaned regularly so just plastering them to the sides of skyscrapers isn’t quite as viable as people like to think it would be.
Nuclear is a very efficient form of power generation with variable output. While it is true that Nuclear plants need some time to vary their output, this isn’t nearly as big of deal as people make it out to be given the rate of power generation can be changed in a matter of minutes, not hours, and using historical data of power usage year over year and monitoring current conditions, a properly built and managed nuclear plant can easily adjust on a schedule to raise and lower it’s output ahead of rising and falling demands throughout the day. And using modern reactor designs, these advantages become more pronounced with faster reaction times in generation and more thorough use of fuel leaving considerably less waste.
And Wind power acts as a great back up and buffer for all other forms of power generation, in rural areas wind power can easily provide 100% of the power needs and more to rural and suburban communities, and when combined with other forms of power wind can easily and rapidly bring turbines online or shut them off to follow the demand of the power grid and bridge the gap during any anomalous spikes and valleys in usage. Wind turbines do take a lot of space per gigawatthour produced, but in rural areas with farming or livestock where lots of land isn’t really being used and developed for other reasons, wind turbines make sense, and with good a good power grid that can transmit power over hundreds of miles, can incorporate large areas of empty land into high density area in the same region to meet power needs with minimal pollution and carbon footprint.
Of course each power generation has it’s problems, Solar only works when the sun shines obviously, requiring large scale power storage which isn’t exactly feasible with the technology we have today. Wind turbines seem great on the surface, but their blades are made of carbon fibre in most instances, and have 7 year life spans at most, with no current programs or policies in place to break down these turbine blades that will not decay naturally, meaning roughly every seven years landfills and dumps get thousands more semi-trailer sized blades dumped into them with no long term plan on how to recycle or reuse them. And Nuclear power has the waste issue, and more importantly a PR issue. With older 60s and 70s designs, these reactors did generate notable amounts of waste, but this is less a problem with more modern reactors that can even run previously ‘depleted’ waste fuel through them to generate power while also reducing the amount of radioactive material left over. And of course the longer setup times, which addressed above is not actually something they should need, given the absurdly high standards placed upon Nuclear by skeptics and detractors decades ago mean many other power plants, factories and even government buildings would immediately be disqualified and turned into exclusion zones due the natural radioactivity of the building materials such as granite which we know to be harmless to humans.
Nuclear plus renewables is the path we need. Add in power storage technologies to smooth out fluctuations and we’re fully covered.
It’s going to take decades to decarbonize, the current Paris accord 2030 goal will not be met at all. Biden has set a target date for the US for 2050 to achieve net zero. That’s 37 years away.
Currently we’re going in the opposite direction:
“The Production Gap 2021 report states that world governments still plan to produce 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 (including 240% more coal, 57% more oil and 71% more gas) than the 1.5 degree limit.[118]”
People are talking about solving climate change as a sprint, but really it’s a marathon. In fact, we don’t even have the technology to fully decarbonize all sectors. It’s going to take an “all hands on deck” approach and yes, will cost trillions of $$$ to achieve.
I’m pretty doubtful that we will achieve net zero energy and zero carbon before the end of the century. The first 50% of emissions reductions will be the easiest of the low hanging fruit; each successive % reduction will be that much harder and more expensive to achieve.
Tying back to your comment, each nuke plant permanently displaces millions of tons of CO2 emissions per year.
the fact we’d be trading dependency on resources from a group of unstable countries to a dependency on resources from another group of unstable countries
I’m not sure calling Canada (up until 2019 the largest exporter and miner of uranium) an unstable country. Unless you want to talk about our looming housing crash.
He is talking about Kazakhstan, which produces ~46% of the supply (compared to Canada’s ~15% of which they export even less). Other top producers includes Namibia and Uzbekistan, not terribly stable countries.
And on top of that, the Stans have a big neighbour that would be willing to conquer them to secure these resources, to strengthen its geopolitical position.
Also not sure what your source is for Canada being the largest exporter, as they have exported less than Kazakhstan since at least 2013 (according to what I can find, but please prove me wrong if that isn’t the case). They definitely weren’t the largest miner of it since 2009 I believe.
Canada also produces oil. So why does what fuckheads in places like Russia and Saudi Arabia affect oil prices in Canada?
Seems like in a capitalist world, markets are global and instability anywhere in the world affects the prices of resources that are traded globally. Being dependent on those resources means wars need to be fought to secure those resources to keep the prices stable.
Nuclear energy can not be used to “plug gaps”. The power that it produces can not be varied very quickly. The goal should be to only have renewable in the end.
Solar panels aren’t truly renewable since they degrade over time and need to be replaced after around 20-30 years. Yes they can be recycled, but so can (and is) nuclear waste.
Everything has a cost and you can’t escape entropy.
This is true; nothing is sustainable at geological time scales. Human technological civilization even less so. Just look at how badly North Africa, the Middle East and China’s environment has been degraded through thousands of years of organic (!) farming. The Middle East used to have enormous cypress forests, and North Africa was full of wetlands where the Qattara Depression now resides.
Minimum warranty for good solar panels at 90% is 30 years , they will last 60 (no one knows exactly) albeit not as efficient.
I just had some installed.
Guaranteed 80% efficiency for 20 years.I heavily doubt they will last 60 years.Had energy storage installed as well. Only guaranteed 90% (~4500 cycles) for 10 years.
EDIT: double checked the data sheet. They are actually 86% for 25 years with a rated 0.5% per year degradation rate.
Quite sure mine had 30 years at 90 % . But it was the really good mono ones. Storage is a completely different story. But hey even if they are down to 25% I would keep them and just add new ones.
0.5 would mean 30 for 60 years also…
Let’s not forget about nuclear fusion, which will be way more efficient and have less waste if we can figure it out!!!😉
What I meant by gaps was that nuclear can be used in areas where solar or wind is not feasible yet or in areas where solar or wind cannot fulfill the energy demands.
Also we have very good control over nuclear power generation. There are a variety of methods using which we can control the reaction rate of the fission process
Uhhhhh
I live less than 2 miles from the last remaining coal power station in England.
I would much rather have nuclear instead of a chimney chucking god knows what into the air (and subsequently into me) for my entire life.
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Don’t get scared off by the N Word
Nuclear isn’t the monster it’s made out to be by oil and coal propagands.
Greenpeace was founded to be an anti-nuclear organization. See, most of the founding members were members of the Sierra Club (another environmentalist organization) but the Sierra Club was actually pro-nuclear power. The Sierra Club was actually fighting against the installation of new dams due to the effect of wiping out large swaths of river habitat and preventing salmon runs and such.
Anyway, in 1971 there was an underground nuclear bomb test by the US government in an area that was geologically unstable. (there were a bunch of tests to see just how geologically unstable). Protesters thought that the test would cause an earthquake and a tsunami.
Anyway, the people who were unhappy with the Sierra club not actively protesting nuclear power, wanted to protest this nuclear bomb test too, so they formed an organization called the “Don’t make a wave committee”. They sued, the suit was decided in the US’s favor, the test went off, and no earthquake happened (which is how the earlier tests said it would go).
At some point, the “Don’t make a wave committee” turned into Greenpeace.
Also about this timeframe, Greenpeace started receiving yearly donations from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation is the charitable foundation created by the Rockefeller heirs that “uses oil money to make the world a better place” but they kind of don’t. They’ve been anti-nuclear since the beginning, and even directly funded some radiation research in the 1950s that lied about safe exposure limits to radiation, claiming that there was no safe limit. That research went on to shape international policy, and by the time new research came out, the policy was already written and thus hard to change.
As a side note, another alumnus of the Sierra Club was approached by the then CEO of Atlantic Oil and directly paid a sum of something like $100k (in 1970 money) to found another anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth.
100% right.
It doesn’t make any sense without reprocessing though, have to do both. Fortunately France and Finland have active programs.
The US needs to both learn how to do reprocessing again and build more plants.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
any danger that comes from nuclear energy is minuscule compared to the danger that comes from fossil fuels, which are proven to be a main factor in climate change and to cause cancer
Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels
Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
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safety and efficiency will be improved by investment in nuclear. storage needs are dramatically reduced because we now have reactors that can run off of the waste of other reactors, “recycling” it and massively improving efficiency while reducing waste. yes, there are concerns with nuclear, but opposing nuclear is a losing battle. we need nuclear, and yes, the tech needs to develop further, but we won’t get that without investing in it today.
This. It amazes me how many people are anti nuclear but don’t understand what it is, how it’s waste can be recycled and how it is less harmful to the environment than wind and solar. Yes you read that correctly.
It’s less surprising when you realize the founder of greenpeace was drummed out of the org over this same issue.
Do you have a source on that? I googled the founders of greenpeace, but I didn’t find any reference to your claim.
not really my jam, but even wikipedia mentions division over golden rice which is also pretty dumb.
here’s one from '08 politico.
a lot of things like this gets memory holed as to not be so obvious about having luxury beliefs where they don’t mind how many people starve as long as it pushes their particular facet of a nuanced agenda imho.
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Because this is not currently deployed at scale. We are way past “waiting for the next great technology”.
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Conventional nuclear is deployed at scale, especially in the USA, China, and France.
Would it be deployable to most major city areas that have easy access to water?
You forgot the /s
Good stance, though part of the problem is that we hopped off nuclear, but not quite.
So we recognized risks of the nuclear plants and we started doing fixes, but most critically, we largely stopped making reactors. So instead of migrating to newer, fundamentally safer designs, we keep duct taping the existing ones.
We already have much better technology understanding, but because new nuclear is scary, and somehow old nuclear got grandfathered in, we are generally living with 70s limitations. Fukushima failed in a way a more modern design would probably have done in a ‘failsafe’ way. Same for waste, we have knowledge on how to have reactions that end with much less problematic material (though still not great, at least with a more manageable half life).
So we should make sure we address the concerns, but have to balance that against letting perfect be the enemy of the good. So far we’ve been so reluctant about safety of new reactors, we ironically are stuck with roughly 70s level safety.
Norway (iirc, or some country near it.) Has been making a large containment facility in a deep mountain cave that would be able to store a large amount of the waste. The waste is actually pretty much a non issue at this point. I would much rather we start making more reactors now while we still have a chance, than be paralyzed with fear that the nuclear waste is gonna be some major crisis. It won’t be, but the amount of pollution from NOT having the reactors will be.
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High level waste is only about 5% of the total waste produced and the rest is low to moderately radioactive. The low stuff is safe within a week and the moderate waste is safe within a few months. Almost all of it can be disposed of normally after that like any other trash.
If you took all of the high level waste like actual fuel rods that has ever been produfed in the US since 1945 and put it all in one spot it would be about the size of an American football field.
Literally fling them into the sun or something. Waste is a non-issue
I agree that waste is an overblown issue but launching it into space is about the worst thing we could do. With the rate of critical failures of rocket launches, we are practically guaranteed to have exploding rockets spewing nuclear waste into the atmosphere. There are plenty of solutions to nuclear waste here on earth that are mainly held up by fear mongering and nimbyism
Fling them dont put them on a ballistic missile. Literally get a strong rubber band and a flock of sophomores, put the shit on the band, have the boys pull on it and bada bing bada boom shit flies past voyager 1 in no time and the lads will regrow every cell on them anyway by next friday
There’s also the issue with mining and refining uranium that emit a huge amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
Nowhere as close to fossil fuels or even the materials for EV batteries.
Do you have any numbers on this?
Lithium mined 2022: 130,000 metric tons
Uranium mined 2022: 48,888 metric tons
Of course EV batteries consist of only ~5% lithium so…
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It’s maddening that you are getting downvotes. Are they from ignorance or bad actors? Because who would downvote a true statement about SAFETY, FFS?
Because the environmental damage caused by the largest nuclear disasters in history is still nothing like the damage from fossil fuels.
Not just that but the fossil fuel industry’s history is full of much worse disasters than any nuclear plant.
If you were to truly compare them based just off safety it’s no contest. Nuclear power is cleaner and safer
But there was no actual comparison. The post was pointing out how the safety was not good enough, not that it was less safe than fossil fuels. Not everyone is comfortable with a nuclear power plant in their back yard. So I guess you’re perfectly fine with the current level of nuclear power regulation and safety? Good. The rest of the public is not for the reasons stated.
The rest of the public has been manipulated by oil barons who constantly push these fear mongering talking points.
It is safer in every way.
You act like Homer Simpson is real and that’s how nuclear power plants operate. In the modern age unless it’s just gross incompetence it’s been safer for decades.
Oh and if you want those safety regulations to ever get better you have to keep putting money into them. You’re not gonna get progress by ignoring them.
In fact that’s the only reason nuclear power isn’t more prevalent because the average citizen is so blinded by oil propaganda they refuse anything to do with it.
I’ll type it for the third time in this thread: But there was no actual comparison.
And there are 2 more important reasons to table new nuclear plant development.
What’s to compare? On a per kWh basis, nuclear is cleaner and safer. On a per accident basis nuclear is cleaner and safer. On a waste product basis nuclear is cleaner and safer.
Coal plants emit radioactive material in the smoke they kick out. They literally spit continuous radioactive material into the air. Nuclear plants simply do not.
In fact, putting aside Chernobyl (there are so many reasons including it skews the numbers against nuclear unfairly) there have been more deaths related to wind turbines than nuclear plants.
Edit: and even with all the deaths from Chernobyl, it’s still safer on a per kWh basis. :End-Edit
The reason Chernobyl is unfair is for a few reasons. Most of them being abhorrent policies that were enacted by the Soviet Union.
Operators of the plant were poorly trained. Design flaws that could impact safe operation were classified and not shared with the operators. Testing processes were a joke by all standards, even for the time. And the RBMK reactors were simply flawed in their design, and it was known about from the beginning because it was done to be cheap.
Compare that with a CANDU reactor which has both active and passive safety mechanisms that make it nearly impossible to meltdown. The closest we’ve ever had to an accident was a false alarm about contaminated water leaking that was sent out from the Darlington, Ontario plant a number of years ago.
And the issue with nuclear waste isn’t as huge as everyone makes it out to be. The vast majority of the spent fuel drops down to background levels in a few decades. And the really radioactive stuff, which is about 2% of the total fuel, is radiative for thousands of years. But the fun fact about that is it can be reprocessed into new fuel and used again in a reactor like the CANDU reactors.
The only reason that fuel isn’t being recycled today is because it’s still economically cheaper to just use new fuel and store the used stuff on site.
lol. I’ve said now 4 times this is not about nuclear vs fossil fuels. It’s hilarious the perseveration on this.
Nuclear is dead. Accept it and move on to fixing the problems with renewables. There are 2 fantastic reasons to avoid nuclear.
2 million people die every year from coal emissions. Nuclear weapons haven’t even killed that many.
“But there was no actual comparison.” I’m typing it again because it seems you missed that part.
What fucking comparison are you looking for?
None. Please go back and read the thread. It wasn’t about an actual comparison, even though you and others seen to perseverate on the “fucking” comparison.
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We really do need a better option to dumping it into the oceans.
If you’re talking about tritium from Fukushima, no, we don’t.
