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Safe, sure. Efficient? Not even close.
It’s far, far more expensive than renewable energy. It also takes far, far longer to build a plant. Too long to meet 2030 targets even if you started building today. And in most western democracies you wouldn’t even be able to get anything done by 2040 if you also add in political processes, consultation, and design of the plant.
There’s a reason the current biggest proponents of nuclear energy are people and parties who previously were open climate change deniers. Deciding to go to nuclear will give fossil fuel companies maximum time to keep doing their thing. Companies which made their existence on the back of fossil fuels, like mining companies and plant operators also love it, because it doesn’t require much of a change from their current business model.
Australian politicians have been arguing about nuclear energy for decades, and with whats going on now, petty distracting squabbling while state governments are gutting public infrastructure
The most frustrating thing is the antinuclear party is obviously fine with nuclear power, and nuclear armaments, just look at the aukus submarines
labors cries about the dangers to our communities and the environment are obviously disingenuous, or they wouldnt be setting a green light for the billionaire robber barons to continue tearing oil and minerals out of the ground (they promise to restore the land for real-sies this time)
Anyway, a nuclear power plant runs a steam turbine and will never be more than what, 30% efficient?
Photovoltaic cells are even less efficient, I think they’re somewhere between 10-20% efficient. I think the way to go would be a solar collector, like the Archimedes death ray, but much much bigger.
That is already a thing and it’s called concentrated solar power. Basically aim a shit load of mirrors at a target to heat it, run some working fluid through the target and use that to make steam to turn a turbine. There are a few power plants that use it but in general it has been more finicky and disruptive to the local environment than traditional PV panels would be.
The fantastic thing about renewables is how much they lend themselves to a less centralised model. Solar collector? Sure, why not‽ Rooftop solar on people’s houses? You bet! Geothermal? If local conditions are favourable to it, absolutely!
Instead of a small number of massive power plants that only governments or really large corporations can operate individuals can generate the power for themselves, or companies can offset their costs by generating a little power, or cities can operate a smaller plant to power what operations in their city aren’t handled by other means. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.
This contrasts with nuclear. SMRs could theoretically do the same thing, but haven’t yet proven viable. And traditional plants just put out way too much power. They’re one-size-fits-all by definition, and only have the ability to operate alongside other modes with the other modes filling in a small amount around the edges.
There are designs for a giant glass cone put in the middle of the desert. Air under the cone gets warmed and it rises up through a couple turbines on its way out of the device.
I would remind you that Aukus is a mess of the Coalition’s making - after they made a mess of the original submarine replacement project under Abbott and Turnbull, insisting on Diesel.
But for Labor to withdraw from Aukus would cause a shitstorm of unseen proportions.
But how do we produce enough batteries for renewable energy?
Pumped hydro? Or one of the many other non battery storage options, or just over production
How viable is pumped hydro? It would be good if feasible, but last I checked, there were not enough places where you can install them.
No, you’re right. It’s not an option for everyone. Which is why I mentioned that there are many other solutions which are similar and over production which is simpler and cheaper
Which options, can you specify?
What? You don’t have Google? Options I know of (other than batteries and pumped hydro) : Compressed Air Energy Storage, Thermal Energy Storage, Fly wheels, Hydrogen, Supercapacitors, Gravitational Storage
- It’s not easy to go over all options.
- Many of these are largely theoretical, or for temporary storage. For instance, I don’t think fluwheels can store energy for months.
The fact that you descend into complete science fiction should give you pause for thought. I doubt it will, but please think about how fantastical your proposed solutions are - “a massive lake of molten salt under every city” (I actually like that one!)…
Pumped hydro requires a specific sort of place and not sure there’s enough of them for most countries to rely on.
Correct. That’s why I enumerate a bunch itf other options for the other guy who said the same thing.
Redox flow, sodium ion, iron air, etc.
There are some 600+ current chemical-based battery technologies out there.
Hell for me, once sodium is cracked, that shit is so abundant that production wouldn’t have many bottlenecks to get started.
Will Li-ion battery companies let that happen? They want profit, which means they want to keep the high battery cost.
Oil & Gas companies didn’t want Solar, Wind, and Storage to proliferate, yet they did because of cost savings.
I think we could start to see that for these alternative-ion batteries if lithium supply ever becomes an issue. There will always be a niche that has the opportunity to grow in the economy. Just takes the right circumstances and preparation
True, but gotta see. Currently these companies are so minor.
Price driven consumption has been done by industrial users for decades. And countries like UK has been storing energy in storage heaters at home for decades as well. EVs can do wonders here.
Fuck I wish the politicians would give this to us straight like that.
Why is Albo’s party spreading memes about three eyed fish instead of saying “yeah Dutton’s nuclear plan is safe, but it maximises fossil fuel use in the short term and we’d prefer to focus on renewables”
We’re not gonna make any of those targets. Make peace with that and prepare accordingly. Pick a shitty future. Mad Max at worst, Elysium at best.
AMOC collapse, Carbon Sinks failing. We’re boned. Cooked. Soon to be roasted. If our Govt’s ever react at all, it’ll be far too little far too late by the time they do.
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Agreed, building a nuclear facility takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. However… This doesn’t need to be the case at all.
A lot of the costs go into design, planning and legal work. The amount of red tape to build a nuclear plant is huge. Plus all of the parties that fight any plans to build, with a heavy not in my backyard component.
If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly. Back in the day we could build them faster and cheaper. And these days we build far more complex installations quicker and cheaper than nuclear power plants.
The anti-nuclear movement has done so much to hold humanity back on this front. And the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost.
You can’t cut the red tape. The red tape is why we’re able to say nuclear is safe.
the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost
Huh? Nuclear fusion doesn’t have any downsides or upsides. Because it doesn’t exist. We’ve never been able to generate net power with fusion. (No, not even that story from a couple of years ago, which only counted as ‘input’ a small fraction of the total energy used overall. It was a good development, but just one small step on the long journey to it being practical.)
Being anti-nuclear was a poor stance to have 20, 30 years ago. At that time, renewables weren’t cost effective enough to be a big portion of our energy generation mix, and we should have been building alternatives to fossil fuels since back then if not earlier. But today, all the analysis tells us that renewables are far cheaper and more effective than nuclear. Today, being pro-nuclear is the wrong stance to take. It’s the anti-science stance, which is why it has seen a recent rise among right-wing political parties and media organisations.
I have never heard being pro-nuclear is the anti science stance and it being on the rise among right wing political parties. All the right wing is talking about it more coal and less things to be done about the climate.
The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed and not anti science at all.
I believe nuclear can help us get to the future we want and we should have done it a lot sooner. Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.
Atkeast in my country, the only two pro-nuclear parties are fsr-right climate change deniers and the same old fucks who’re only pro-nuclear because the green party isnt.
What country is that?
Judging by the statement and username, Germany. And I agree
Germany.
Nuclear is a possible solution to more power.
However as long as we can’t use the old nuclear waste as fuel we are not going to have to way to get uranium in way that is human and affordable.
Also nuclear power plants are expensive as fuck. You will pay several billions of euros in order to build one. You will have at least 10 years of building time. In that time the power demand may already have been doubled tripled or quadrupled. So are you ready to build 4 times as much of hundreds billions worth of power plants in the hope you finish them on time or don’t over build?
Or do you want to build a solar plant or a wind farm in several months once demand has increased? For a fraction of the costs?
Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.
Not easily, for the reasons explained in my reply to @[email protected].
The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed
I doubt it, because the science itself is against nuclear. Evidence says it would be too expensive and take too long to deliver compared to renewables.
Very well, let’s agree to disagree. Perhaps I am wrong. But I am in no way right wing or spreading misinformation.
The people I’ve spoken who work in the nuclear field bitch about unneeded red tape all the time. Some of it is important for sure, but a lot of it can be cut if we wanted to without safety becoming an issue. The price of nuclear has gone way up the past 20 years, whilst the knowledge and tools have become better. This makes no sense to me. We should be able to build them cheaper and faster, not slower and more expensive. And there are countries in the world, that can get it done cheaper, so why can’t we?
I’m all for renewables, I have solar panels. But I’m not 100% convinced we have grid storage figured out. And in the meanwhile we keep burning fossils in huge amounts. If we can have something that produces energy, without fucking up the atmosphere, even at a price that’s more expensive than other sources (within reason) I’m all for that. Because with the price of energy from coal, the money for fixing the atmosphere isn’t included.
Thank you for answering in a respectful manner.
We should be able to build them cheaper and faster, not slower and more expensive. And there are countries in the world, that can get it done cheaper, so why can’t we?
It’s because we stopped building them. We have academic knowledge on how to do it but not the practical/technical know-how. A few countries do it because they’re doing a ton of reactors, but those don’t come cheap either.
Idk, maybe SMR or sth improve the red tape thing
So THE worst case scenario for nuclear only puts it at 6× the cost of renewables? That’s not really the argument you think it is…
If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly.
That’s a pretty big ask for a democratic government where half of the politicians are actively sabotaging climate initiatives…
The only countries where this is really feasible are places where federal powers can supersede the authority of local governments. A nuclear based power grid in America would require a complete reorganization of state and federal authority.
The only way anyone thinks nuclear energy is a viable option in the states is if they completely ignore the political realities of American government.
For example, is it physically possible for us to build a proper deep storage facility for nuclear waste? Yes, of course. Have we attempted to build said deep storage facility? Yes, since 1987. Are we any closer to finishing the site after +30 years…no.
It’s possible to do nuclear in cheaper sense, just do not ask for US ones
A very uninformed take
Please share oh enlightened one
Other people have already corrected your misinformation
Huh. So those of us that have always advocated for a nuclear baseline with wind/solar topping off until we have adequate storage solutions are climate change deniers? That’s new.
First, no, that’s not what I said. If you’re only going to be arguing in bad faith like that this will be the last time I engage with you.
Second, baseload power is in fact a myth. And it becomes even worse when you consider the fact that nuclear doesn’t scale up and down in response to demand very well. In places with large amounts of rooftop solar and other distributed renewables, nuclear is especially bad, because you can’t just tell everyone who has their own generation to stop doing that, but you also don’t want to be generating more than is used.
Third, even if you did consider it necessary to have baseload “until we have adequate storage”, the extremely long timelines it takes to get from today to using renewables in places that don’t already have it, spending money designing and building nuclear would just delay the building of that storage, and it would still end up coming online too late.
I used to be a fan of nuclear. In 2010 I’d have said yeah, we should do it. But every time I’ve looked into it over the last 10 years especially, I’ve had to reckon with the simple fact that all the data tells us we shouldn’t be building nuclear; it’s just an inferior option to renewables.
Aaaw, someone doesn’t like the tone used? Well that’s unfortunate. How about you start with leaving dem bad faith arguments?
Renewables will not cover your usage. Period. You will need something to cover what renewables won’t be able to deliver. Your options are limited. Nuclear is the only sustainable option for many places. Sure you got hydro (ecological disasters) or geothermal in some places, but most do not have those options.
It’s not an XOR problem.
Renewables will not cover your usage.
False. Multiple countries are already able to run on 100% renewables for prolonged periods of time. The bigger issue is what to do with excess power. Battery solutions can cover moments where renewables produce a bit less power.
100% renew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production
All the countries that manage 100% renewable power use high levels of hydropower. Which is not an option for many countries and has it’s own ecological problems associated with it.
Also, these 100% renewable countries have very little electricity requirements.
The United States produces at least produces four million Gigawatt hours of electricity per year. Compare that to some of these “100% renewable” countries.
Sure, most countries that already made it use hydro. But Denmark is already up tp 80% without hydro, and the UK and Germany are already nearly halfway there without any meaningful hydro. And there’s still so much solar and wind that can still be installed. They’re nowhere near their maximum production capacity yet.
100% from renewables is clearly feasible and achievable. Of course it takes time and investments, but nuclear energy will takre more time and investments to get going again.
Oh noes, facts. The bane of all renewables evangelicals…
Just wait till you have to tell them they’re looking at irrelevant data. Not only are they using specific usecases that are not applicable to a large majority of countries, but they’re also using data that doesn’t support the long term fossil fuel goals.
Just wait till you tell them how much the electricity requirements will skyrocket once we’re transitioning to EV, dropping fossil fuel heating, cooking, cargo trucks switch to EV, etc etc.
Really hope green hydrogen kicks off. Could begin society’s efuel saga
Sorry to report, hydrogen is also hopeless. It’s cool tech, but making it work in practice is hopeless because it diffuses straight through every container you try and keep it in, and achieving reasonable energy densities requires cryogenic storage.
Also, developments have been stalling out relative to electrical solutions because of this and because of the heavy investment in electrics.
I can only see it really working in practice in niche applications where you will be close to cryogenic facilities.
Locking hydrogen up in ammonia is what the industry looks to be moving to to avoid the problem you describe.
Also, look up the 7 Hydrogen Hubs in the US as an example of this market getting started. There are no downsides to developing a hydrogen market if we’re going to have oodles of excess renewable energy.
In the summer. In ideal conditions. Lets talk again once you’ve tried 12 continuous months in the heavily populated northern hemisphere. 😉
We’re nowhere near the potential capacity for energy production from renewables, and already we’re capable of doing 100% renewable power production.
Potential capacity is really not the issue.
As I said, lets talk once you’ve managed a full winter. 😉
Biggest, not all.
Wasn’t one of these built and ended up being a huge failure?
Solar plants, windmills or nuclear plant? You gotta be more specific.
Concentrated solar plants that heat using a bunch of focused light
There are a bunch. But solar panels have gotten a lot better in the last decades, whereas thermodynamics has remained the same. They are not worth the investment anymore.
The irony of Homer Simpson representing safe nuclear energy…
Well, it took much effort for Homer to blow up NPP
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let’s stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can’t make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn’t get less dangerous with time. So, why isn’t anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that’s because we already have a solution, just not “forever”.
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It’s a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
As a friend once said “benzene is what anti-nuclear people think nuclear waste is.”
I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that’s significantly more than I’ll use in my lifetime.
I’d gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It’d make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.
Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml
The density of uranium always fucks with me. How can something that takes up so little volume weigh so much?
It’s thicc.
phat nucleasss
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxguides/toxguide-8.pdf
I didn’t know that before but it appears cyanide does have a half-life that is a fraction of nuclear waste.
That doesn’t make it or the other compounds less dangerous, of course.
That’s uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Most cyanide in surface water will form hydrogen cyanide and evaporate.
As long as it has a surface to evaporate, it will degenerate.
… Hydrogen cyanide is literally what has been used to execute people in gas chambers and genocide during the Holocaust. The LC(Lo), the lowest recorded lethal concentration is 107ppm, resulting in death in 10 minutes. That’s, objectively, far more dangerous than the respective material that firefighters were exposed to at Chernobyl. You don’t want that in any appreciable quantity in the air around people that you want to continue living.
Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It’ll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.
And that’s great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn’t disappear, the cyanide doesn’t magically change into cookiedough. You’re just spreading it around more.
Hydrogen cyanide will turn into “cookie dough” in 1-5 years. Which is way shorter than “forever”.
The way you said it in your first comment made it seem longer lasting than radioactive waste. Which it isn’t according to the linked PDF. That is the only point I was trying to make.
Cyanide is used extensively in precious metal recycling too. So even reclaiming resources has a harsh chemical cost. Meeting workers from there I was surprised to say the least about how ‘casually’ they work with Cyanide. Clearly they have safty protocall but nothing like what I imagined something like Cyanide would call for.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn’t surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
Checkmate uh pro democratic people I guess?
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
France is EU’s first importer of ‘Russian nuclear products’: study – Euractiv
New report shows Russia raking in revenue from state nuclear company | Fox Business
Russia faces threat of sanctions on nuclear power industry as Germany backs uranium ban – POLITICO
Bratislava to reject EU’s latest sanctions package if it includes ban on Russia nuclear fuel
Russia’s Rosatom Helps Putin Skirt Sanctions
Russia’s nuclear project in Hungary: France’s growing role | OSW Centre for Eastern Studies
https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220517-greenpeace-report-russland-taxonomie.pdf
They have more uranium than we do
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Curious to hear you say this. I live in NZ and cyanide waste is always raised as an objection to gold mining.
An unfortunate reality is that while we CAN store things safely, that doesn’t mean they always will be.
There are downsides to nuclear these days. Incredibly high cost with a massive delay before they’re functioning. Solar + wind + pumped hydro + district heating is where it’s at in 2024.
This.
Also, tie together more countries’ power grids to even out production and demand of renewables, and reduce the need for other backup sources.
For a fraction of the cost of nuclear, increase the storage capacity as well. We’ve had days where the price per MWh was negative in many hours, because of excess production.
The barriers to carbon free energy aren’t technical, they’re purely political.
district heating is where it’s at in 2024.
You don’t have those in 2024? Commies built central heating in every city.
Still not a reason to not build them, the entire point is for nuclear to handle the load when solar/wind can’t provide due to weather. Other renewables will still be producing the bulk of the power we need, but at night nuclear will be handling any demand spikes, each of them would greatly reduce the number of batteries required to satisfy the demand. They can stay until our solar output is so high we can just start electrolyzing water into hydrogen as energy storage.
You can make Thorium reactors much smaller and cheaper, basically a 50MW unit is not much larger than a shipping container, while being much more safe than standard nuclear plants. The largest issue is over-regulation of the nuclear power in general.
A 50MW of solar installation is HUGE, and thats 50MW at the sunniest part of the planet: https://newsaf.cgtn.com/news/2019-12-15/Kenya-launches-Chinese-built-50MW-solar-power-plant-MqC575l6Te/index.html, We are basically talking about close to a square kilometer installation…
there is simply no way to call a 50MW solar plant cleaner than nuclear and its probably not even that much cheaper in the end. Compare that to a shipping container sized reactor… Only thing in the way, is the nuclear scare and government regulations.
If you’re interested in energy solutions and haven’t read the RethinkX report on the feasibility of a 100% solar, wind and battery solution, it’s definitely worth taking a look.
Whilst I agree that we need to decarbonise asap with whatever we can, any new nuclear that begins planning today is likely to be a stranded asset by the time it finishes construction. That money could be better spent leaning into a renewable solution in my view.
Exactly this. I am “in favor” of nuclear energy, but only in the sense that I’d like fossil power to be phased out first, then nuclear. Any money that could be spent on new nuclear power plants is better spent on solar and wind.
I’d like Nuclear power not to be thrown out with the bathwater because it is practically essential for space travel/colonization in the long term. Solar panels can only get us so far, and batteries are a stop-gap. We need nuclear power because it is the only energy source that can meet our needs while being small enough to carry with us.
All should praise the magic, hot rocks.
it is practically essential for space travel/colonization in the long term.
Seems like it’s pretty important we not burn through our finite reserves of it if we can help it. I’m not saying we should reach zero nuclear, but I don’t think we should be relying on it too much either.
We are no where near close to running out of nuclear material. And for its energy density, we are unlikely to run out anytime in the next 10000 years. It can also be found in asteroids or other rocky bodies, so unlike wood or fossil fuels, Earth isn’t the only place to get it.
The materials needed to produce batteries and wind turbines and maintain them over time is the issue. Did your 62 page report discuss this?
Doesn’t seem to be including the land usage.
Does it cover everyone on the planet using the same amount of electricity as a North American? 8 billion people now. And usage is increasing too, gotta power EVs and AI (but not limited to that).
im fine with dropping AI for more humans right now, but apparently that wont generate shareholder value.
First it doesn’t matter because it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not.
Second the whole point is that electricity use per capita is always increasing.
Idk if people would drop AI… sad
Nah, they won’t. It goes bling-bling, has a couple of good use cases, but because it generates Market Hype, Companies will cram it into everything. And i hate it.
There are two main problems in my opinion, and they are both related to the “fuel”. First, uranium is rare and you often need to buy it from other countries. For instance, Russia. Not great. Second, it is not renewable energy. We can’t rely on nuclear fission in the long run. Then there’s also the issue of waste, which despite not being as critical as some argue, is still a problem to consider
A big problem IMO is the generational responsibility of the waste as well. There needs to be decades of planning, monitoring and maintaince to ensure waste sites are safe and secure, this can be done but modern political climates can make it difficult.
Agreed, dealing with the waste is a thing. But for me a solvable problem and something that doesn’t need to be solved right away. We currently store a lot of nuclear waste in holding locations till we figure out a way to either make it less radioactive or store it for long enough. The alternative however is having coal plants all over the world spew all their dust (including radioactive dust) and CO2 straight into the atmosphere. This to me is a far bigger issue to solve. It isn’t contained in one location, but instead ends up all over the world. It ends up in people’s homes and bodies, with a huge impact to their health. It ends up in the atmosphere, with climate change causing huge (and expensive) issues.
The amount of money we need to handle nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than what we are going to have to pay to handle climate change. And that isn’t even fixing the issue, just dealing with the consequences. I don’t know how we are ever going to get all that carbon back out of the atmosphere, but it won’t be cheap.
Uranium is not that rare. Doesn’t Canada have quite a bit of it? Portugal used to mine it too, as well as several countries in Africa
Yeah, countries obtaining uranium really isn’t that big of an obstacle.
The mining is also usually a really polluting affair for the region, much more than the what power generation might suggest. And overall, in many countries there is a lot of subsidies going on for hidden costs, especially relating to the waste and initial construction. So it is not as cheap as a first look might suggest.
I’m not against it per se, it is better than fossil fuels, which simply is the more urgent matter, but it’s never been the wonder technology it has been touted as ever since it first appeared.
One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Of course, we’ve also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.
But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn’t so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.
Coal has caused more deaths this year than the entire history of nuclear anything has in total. This includes nuclear energy, nuclear research, nuclear medicine, nuclear irradiation (food storage), and too many orphan sources.
It’d be nice to prioritise it at least rather than tucking it away under the oil and gas rug. There is no real competition in energy output to a nuclear power plant. And despite its egregious up front cost, operating it is relatively low cost.
In regards to fuel, uranium is used often but there is options such as thorium that have been used with some success. I do agree it is unfortunate to have to purchase from other countries but I think it beats buying natural gas from wherever it may be sold.
you often need to buy it from other countries. For instance, Russia. Not great.
Yeeeeah, I wouldn’t worry about that. Sure we (Australia) are conservative with our fears of mining and exporting uranium, especially with the Cold War and reactor whoopsies around the world. But historically it doesn’t take much for us to go down on an ally.
Just let us finish unloading all our coal off to the worst polluting nations first, then we’ll crack the top-shelf stuff.
Is that supposed to convince me that there’s plenty of uranium left? Because based on the numbers shown with reserve vs. historical usage it kinda seems like it would last for a few decades at best.
There are some reactor designs that run on waste of standard reactors. It would solve two of your points for at least some decades.
Uranium isn’t the only possible fuel. It’s just the one we’ve been using (because it’s the one that lets you make nuclear weapons).
Buying uranium from Canada and Australia? Inconceivable!
That’s why we need fusion, which will use a lot of the same tech.
I don’t think it will. The large cost of a reactor will probably be shared, but fission plants don’t deal with plasma, magnets, hydrogen/helium storage, lasers, or capacitors. And we don’t even know the method by which a practical fusion plant will operate!
I am talking in the sense that the same companies are participating in fusion research, and pretty sure the methods you mentioned are utilized somewhat in nuclear plants. Like handling and filtering radioactive materials.
Radioactive waste maybe. Fusion plants are likely to create irradiated parts that degrade quickly, similar to fission plants. Fusion fuel on the other hand, is gaseous, and likes to escape. Hydrogen is explosive, while helium-3 is just expensive.
In Spain we are starting to get negative prices every weekend for electricity thanks to renewables. France is not even close to those prices with their bet for nuclear.
Don’t get me wrong, I love nuclear power. And I’m not a big fan ok what thousands of windmills made to our landscapes. But efficiency wise renewable is unbeatable nowadays.
I’m not a big fan
…
thousands of windmills
I see what you did there.
Meanwhile in Georgia (USA) they completed a new nuclear power plant and they have to raise rates because it went 100% over its $14 billion budget.
Like every other nuclear power plant ever built
Like every other US government project ever built.
•cough cough• SLS •cough•
The Spanish government is now petitioning its public for ideas on how to waste power.
time to start mining for crypto and running LLM AI servers.
They should have public fridges that are left open to help cool the planet.
They should build the Matrix.
Mine bitcoins. Or ditch capitalism. Wait, last one is opposite of wasting. Feed capitalism.
Look. Bitcoins might be useless at a societal level. But if we’re going to use excess renewable energy to drive out of business the crypto-miners who get their power from coal…
They don’t need to be exclusive. Power generation should be diverse. Otherwise prices will go through the roof on times without wind (happens in Germany). This can lead to higher energy prices in combination with high energy exports.
Nuclear power does not solve the issue here. Nuclear reactors take hours or even days to ramp up or down. They are not quick enough to react to such occasions.
True, it wouldn’t be enough, This is why Germany still has a lot of coal-fired power station and natural gas power stations, despite huge investments into renewables, and is also investing a lot into wood-fired power stations (imo a really terrible idea). The nuclear plants could still ease the situation by giving a stable basic load that has some planable variability (wind models are getting also better every year and aren’t that bad as it is). For now renewables cannot really provide a very stable basic load (at least not here, might be different for other areas).
There are great concepts to improve all of this with stuff like pumped-storage hydroelectricity, but those cannot be build everywhere and take up a lot of space. It is going forward and I think nuclear power will come to an end eventually. For now, I think they still have their place (and imo Germany acted irrationally by shutting them all down).
I mean, we’ve been lucky that France completly fucked their energy sector up (hints towards that nuclear plants probably also won’t be the ultimate solution), otherwise we’d have lost a loooot of money and would have had energy prices even worse.
Here an imo interesting read: https://gemenergyanalytics.substack.com/p/capture-price-of-importsexports-in
Negative energy prices are a bad thing! That means that someone is dumping energy into the grid (you should be paying the grid if you have solar panels!!) In the UK all renewable energy had to be called ‘experimental’ so that the pricing was fixed and the government picks up the tab - that’s not good. Check this map - right now the wind isn’t blowing and solar hasn’t got out of bed - so most of the countries using renewables are looking shit - later today solar will kick in, but tonight it will be bad again. That isn’t a solution.
Energy is expensive in France because we are legally forced by european regulation to sell at those prices. Our energy is the least expensive to produce
Just because it’s safe doesn’t mean it’s the best we have right now.
- It’s massively expensive to set up
- It’s massively expensive to decommission at end of life
- Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
- It takes a long time to set up.
- It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We’ve got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
I’m pro nuke energy but to pretend there are no downsides is what got us into the climate mess we are in in the first place.
Cost, being a major drawback, space being another. And of course while they almost never fail, they do occasionally, and will again. And those failures are utterly catastrophic, and it’d hard to convince a community to welcome a nuclear plant, and if the community doesn’t want it then it can’t or shouldn’t be forced onto them.
They also represent tactical strike sites in time of combat engagement. Big red X for a missile.
There are also significant environmental concerns, as we really have no good way to dispose of nuclear waste in a safe or efficient manner at this time.
It’s likely that nuclear based energy is the future, but you need to discuss the bad with the good here or we are just going to end up at square one again. There are long term ramifications.
Cost billions and have 10 year lead times?
Yes. Should have started more 10years ago, but doesn’t mean don’t start now.
If you start building a new nuclear plant today, it’ll start generating power around the year 2045, by which time renewables with storage will have gotten even cheaper.
Bet you the public will be on the hook to pay for that white elephant because utility companies privatize profits and socialize losses.
Why do you assume it takes that long? Are you assuming US circumstances?
That’s how long they actually end up taking to build.
Look up the project history of your local NPP and see how long it was from planning approval to putting power on the grid.
It says it took 60 months on average. I guess from approval, it often took 8 years, so a decade makes sense.
Which country builds a NPP in only 5 years, China?
South Korea
Except we have better options than we did 10 years ago.
I’d be all for nuclear if we rolled back the clock to 2010 or so. As it stands, solar/wind/storage/hvdc lines can do the job. The situation moved and my opinion moved.
We’re reaching the point where discussing cost in regard to the energy crisis makes us look like fucking idiots.
Imagine what kids reading the history books are going to think of these discussions.
And 10 years isn’t that long really. If someone said we could use no fossil fuels in energy generation in 10 years time that doesn’t sound long at all.
Cost is a proxy for productivity and resources. So while it is stupid to say that the energy transition is too expensive, shouldn’t we rather invest our productivity and resources into a faster and cheaper solution? Drawing focus away from renewables is dangerous as others have mentioned, because it is too late to reach our goals with nuclear.
No I don’t think so. Nuclear is super effective and consistent, especially for large setups.
Using renewables while we get our nuclear up makes complete sense. And subsidising nuclear with renewables after that also makes sense.
But the technology to rely entirely on renewables isn’t really there either.
But the technology to rely entirely on renewables isn’t really there either.
Yes, it is.
This is a book by a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering that goes into the details. We don’t need nuclear. All the tech is there.
shouldn’t we rather invest our productivity and resources into a faster and cheaper solution?
We sure should. Do tell of this this faster, cheaper solution that is also adequate to meet all of our needs.
Really gives me the warm fuzzies when someone looks at changes to physical systems over time then draws a trend line into the future indefinitely without any citations or discussion of plausibility for the part they drew on.
Which part specifically do you take issue with? It’s a bounded timeframe with over 60 references. We’re already 4 years into their predicted trends and on track so it seems like they are into something.
All the charts on page 15. The ones where they extrapolate exponential improvement for a decade while only citing themselves. Their prediction is 15% annually for storage cost improvements in Li-ion batteries which they call ‘conservative’
Our analysis conservatively assumes that battery energy storage capacity costs will continue to decline over the course of the 2020s at an average annual rate of 15% (Figure 3).
Let us check if their souce updated. $139 for 2023? That isn’t a 15% decrease since 2019’s $156, let alone year over year since then, which would be under $90. In spite of last year’s drop that is still more than the 2021 price of $132. I don’t know what ‘on track’ means to you but it must be something different than it means to me.
Wdym 10 year lead times?
Renewables are better, cheaper and more scalable. Its not even close. Look at Denmark for how it can be done.
Deep level irony that you used a Simpsons meme, which takes place in a city that suffers from a Nuclear Power Plant that doesn’t dispose of nuclear waste properly.
Every form of energy generation is problematic in the hands of capital. Security measures can and are often considered unnecessary expense. And even assuming that they will respect all safety standards, we still have the problem of fuel: France, for example, was only able to supply its plants at a cheap cost because of colonialism in Africa. Therefore, nuclear energy potentially has the same geopolitical problems as oil, in addition to the particular ones: dual technology that can and is applied in the military, not necessarily but mainly atomic bombs.
__
Also, I thought memes were supposed to be funny…
It’s definitely not the best we have
Given that solar and wind are cheaper, get built to schedule and far less likely to have cost overruns, this meme is bullshit.
Sure, nukes are great. But we need clean energy right the fuck now. Spending money on new nukes is inefficient when it could be spent on solar and wind.
The best strategies are rarely single trick. Energy should be diversely sourced.
Correct, but don’t forget that renewables is an umbrella term.
If you use solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal and bioenenergy, you’re diversified and it’s all renewable. Add in storage and there’s not much of an issue anymore.
Except having enough rare earth minerals to build all of that for all of the planets energy needs, forever.
Yup, except that part it’s a great plan.
Are you really bringing up resource limitation when your point is energy sources that depend on finite fuel?
Besides, the current form of renewables is the best option we have right now, so we should put all efforts into that. Once we find something better, absolutely go for that.
Uranium is actually quite common on earth, hence it not being included in the rare Earth’s minerals. Go get a shovel full of dirt. Anywhere on earth that shovel of dirt on average will contain something like a micro or nanogram of uranium. Shit’s everywhere.
People just feel like there has to be a catch with renewable energy and latch onto the idea of rare earth metals. Besides cobalt having some use in some kinds of lithium batteries right now, theres not really rare earth stuff going into renewables. Solar panels are silicon and aluminum, wind turbines are simple machines connected to a magnet spinning inside coils of copper, lithium batteries are already being made with iron as the other component.
We already have 30% nukes. Right now we need more solar and wind. I’m not saying shut down nukes. They are good. They are just a waste of money and time to build new when we have cheaper and easier to produce alternatives.
Where is this that has 30% nuclear already?
This, this should be common sense, and I don’t understand why it’s not.
Okay, so, say I need some energy that’s pretty dense in terms of the space that it takes up, say I need a large amount of constant energy draw, and say that I need a form of energy that’s going to be pretty stable and not prone to variation in weather events. I.e. I seek to power a city. This isn’t even really a far-fetched hypothetical, this is a pretty common situation. What energy source seems like the best for that? Basically, we’re looking at hydropower, which generally has long term environmental problems itself, and is contextually dependant, or nuclear.
Solar also makes sense, wind energy also makes sense, for certain use cases. Say I have a very spread out population or I have a place where space is really not at a premium, as is the case with much of america, and america’s startling lack of population density, that might be the case. But then, I kind of worry that said lack of population density in general is kind of it’s own ongoing environmental crisis, and makes things much, much harder than they’d otherwise need to be.
I think the best metaphor for nuclear that I have is the shinkansen. I dunno what solar would be, in this metaphor, maybe bicycles or something. So, the shinkansen, when it was constructed, costed almost double it’s expected cost and took longer then anyone thought it would and everybody fucking hated it, on paper. In practice, everybody loves that shit now, it goes super fast, and even though it should be incredibly dangerous because the trains are super light and have super powerful motors and no crash safety to speak of, they’re pretty well-protected because the safety standards are well in place. It’s something that’s gone from being a kind of, theoretical idiot solution, to being something that actually worked out very well in practice.
If you were to propose a high speed rail corridor in the US, you would probably get the same problems brought up, as you might if you were to plan a nuclear site. Oh, NIMBYs are never gonna let you, it’s too expensive, we lack the generational knowledge to build it, and we can patch everything up with this smaller solution in e-bikes and micromobility anyways. Then people don’t pay attention to that singular, big encompassing solution, and the micromobility gets privatized to shit and ends up as a bunch of shitty electric rental scooters dumped in rivers and a bunch of rideshare apps that destroy taxi business. These issues which we bring up strike me as purely being political issues, rather than real problems. So, we lack generational knowledge, why not import some chinese guys to build some reactors, since they can do it so fast? Or, if we’re not willing to deal with them, south korean?
I’m not saying we can’t also do solar and renewables as well, sure, those also have political issues that we would need to deal with, and I am perfectly willing to deal with them as they come up and as it makes sense. If you actually want a sober analysis, though, we’re going to need to look at all the different use cases and then come up with whichever one actually makes sense, instead of making some blanket statement and then kind of, poo-pooing on everything else as though we can just come up with some kind of one size fits all solution, which is what I view as really being the thing which got us into this mess. Oooh, oil is so energy dense, oooh, plastic is so highly performing and so cheap and we don’t even have to set up any recycling or buyback schemes,
oooh, let’s become the richest nation on the planet by controlling the purchasing of oil. We got lulled into a one size fits all solution that looked good at the time and was in hindsight was a large part in perhaps a civilization ending and ecologically costly mistake.
The global leader in solar and wind is China. As a result those things are now communism and we can’t have them.
Global leader in nuclear is also China. They are actually building the reactors that cannot meltdown, but you also can’t make weapons from them, and they can run on the nuclear waste we have already produced with the crappy cheap reactors we use. We designed the reactors that China is now building 60 fucking years ago, and just shelved the design.
Real patriots demand private investment in carbon capture only.
How is China so good at handling energy
They don’t have to care about things like cost of the projects, NIMBYs, ecological or historical damage, or regulations
Renewables are cheaper per kwh, but it’s yet to be seen if they’re cheaper when you get to higher grid renewable percentages and need to involve massive grid storage.
In the US we already have something like 30% which alleviates pretty much all the storage concerns. For our dollar right now, solar and wind are the best place to invest.
Agree, but the leadtime is very long, so where’s the best place to invest in 10 years? Hopefully the grid is much more renewable then.
Funny that you call them “Nukes”. You really don’t like the nuclear power plants if you call them the same as nuclear weapons.
dude I say nuke when I microwave things
That’s the fun part about being in a place where you can hold a discussion. Some people don’t agree with you, but they can still see the benefits of the option you are talking about or even agree that they are a great solution for now.
The funny this is that I was a nuke person for a long time, until the facts changed. Nukes were really great fifteen years ago. But solar and wind have surpassed them in terms of cost so my opinion changed. Good shit.
Windmil blades need to be replaced far more often than anything even half that expensive at nuclear facilities and require huge costs in chemicals and transportation. Off shore blades need even more frequent replacement. The best gelcoats in the world arent going to stave off salty air and water spray for long, and as soon as water gets in one small spot, the entire composite begins to delaminate. You don’t pay as much down the line with nuclear and you dont have to worry about offsetting the carbon output of manufacturing new blades so frequently.
No, you just pay out the nose up front.
If I had money to invest in the energy sector, I don’t know why I should pick nuclear. It’s going to double its budget and take 10 years before I see a dime of return. Possibly none if it can’t secure funding for the budget overrun, as all my initial investment will be spent.
A solar or wind farm will take 6-12 months and likely come in at or close to its budget. Why the hell would I choose nuclear?
Perhaps making the highest monetary ROI isn’t the only thing to consider when it comes to energy generation during a climate crisis?
Then we just move the problem. Why should we do something that’s going to take longer and use more labor? Especially skilled labor.
Money is an imperfect proxy for the underlying resources in many ways, but it about lines up in this case. To force the issue, there would have to be a compelling reason beyond straight money.
That reason ain’t getting to 100% clean energy in a short time. There is another: building plants to use up existing waste rather than burying it.
Wdym skilled labor? I mean, nuclear mostly take bog standard constructions and the experts cannot be “repurposed” for renewables as well.
Nuclear is nothing bog standard. If it was, it wouldn’t take 10 years. Almost every plant is a boutique job that requires lots of specialists. The Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design was meant to get around this. It didn’t.
The experts can stay where they are: maintaining existing nuclear power.
Renewables don’t take much skilled labor at all. It’s putting solar panels on racks in a field, or hoisting wind blades up a tower (crane operation is a specialty, but not on the level of nuclear engineering).
I mean, it seems normal for big structure constructions to take 5 years at least…
About bog standard construction, I meant not standardized nuclear, but that many parts of it is just constructions
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Are solar and wind really “clean” energy? Everyone in this thread seems to ignore the costs of these methods.
Every modern wind turbine requires 60 gallons of highly synthetic oil to function, and it needs to be changed every 6 months. That’s a lot of fossil fuel use.
Lithium mining for batteries is extremely destructive to the environment.
Production of solar panels burns lots of fuel and produces many heavy metals. Just like with nuclear waste, improper disposal of these toxic elements can be devastating to the environment.
Of course, solar and wind are a big improvement over coal and natural gas. I dont want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, I just want to be realistic about the downfalls of these methods.
I believe, with our current technology, that nuclear is our cleanest and greenest option.
Ok so, realistically, if we all agree on this today, when would new nuclear power plants begin generating electricity? With all the regulations which are in place today?
≈20-30 years, outside of China. They should have the first molten salt reactors being turned on in another 8 years or so, but they started those projects in 2020
If we “all agree” and do a moonshot construction plan we could have electricity in 8 years. This is a fantasy, tho.
Best case scenario in the real world is operational in 12 years.
In the capitalist hellscape here in the US, a reasonable expectation would be 18-20 years.
20 years also happens to be the lifespan of our wind turbines. In 20 years, all of the currently running wind turbine blades will be in a landfill and new ones will need to be manufactured to replace them.
No reasonable person is suggesting nuclear as a short-term option. It’s a long term investment.
If you’re going to do that, then also consider the co2 output of all the concrete needed for nuclear power plants.
And the environmental impact of mining and enriching the fuel.
You know renewables aren’t even the same thing as nuclear right? renewables aren’t consistent and it’s currently not possible to store the renewables anywhere.
We already have over-capacity of renewables.
Spending money on more doesn’t help when there’s no where to put that energy.
I’m curious how you think adding nukes have an advantage here. You understand that nukes are not easily shut down? If we have a problem with an over abundance of energy, adding nukes to the grid only makes that problem worse.
No. Nukes make up the reliable baseload 24h/day
Have you any idea how a modern day grid functions?
The only other thing that can provide a reliable baseload 24h/day is hydro, which in upon itself is high $$$ to implement and has its own environmental issues.
You should familiarize yourself with the complexities of grid management.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFZVn38dTM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66YRCjkxIcg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1BMWczn7JM
… it’s currently not possible to store the renewables anywhere
Every time someone argues this, it’s immediately obvious they haven’t actually paid attention how the storage market has been progressing.
Next, you’ll probably talk about problems with lithium, as if it’s the only storage technology.
