Enter the IAEA web page, there you will find that not even IAEA rhinks of nuclear energy as a replacement. Thats because uranium reserves arent infinite. Once conventional uranium mines run out of uranium, we will have to go for the non conventional ones and prices will go up the paradigm IAEA professes is nuclear is excellent as a transition techonology (they also include natural gas as a transition techonology) to a fully renewable energy market.
Also, its generally not advisable to have more than a 10% of nuclear energy.
I found this story to be informative, about why Germany closed their nuclear power plants. I think that context can defuse a lot of arguments about Germany’s decision.
I didn’t know a lot of what was written in the article but as a German I can say that it reads reasonable and makes sense for me. It overlaps with what I learned at school and in general.
Every dollar / euro / whatever invested in nuclear power should have been invested in real renewable energy for a bigger impact and a better sustainable transition to green energy.
It gets especially funny when you can’t use the powerplants in the summer anymore because it gets too hot for the cooling water like it has been in France.
You dolt there was never a problem with cooling the plants. The issue was that there is red tape that limits how much water the plant can discharge into the Rhine. That could have easily been addressed if the plants were just allowed to cycle more water. The higher the flow rate the colder the water will come out the other end . The water is put through a heat exchanger and then cycled back to the river. If more water can be piped through then the reactor can maintain lower temperatures.
No it was meant as a general summary of the comment sections on posts like these.
They’re always filled with people acting like nuclear power is the most dangerous way of generating energy despite all scientific data showing pretty much the opposite. Fossil fuels are more dangerous than every other type of energy combined.
Nuclear’s solution for permanent waste is to bury it and hope the future can get rid of it. I’m tired of pushing current problems onto future generations. Yes nuclear is safer than fossil fuels, but it’s not perfect.
whats your problem? who said we want to keep using fossil fuels forever? to me, the thing about nuclear power is its waste products and the timescales on which that degrades into something less but still as dangerous as before slow clap
did you know? getting insurance for a nuclear power plant is possible! but you might as well build a new nuclear power plant every year to spend that money more wisely… source some german paper: spiegel.de/…/kernkraft-ist-nachhaltig-nachhaltig-…
we need to get off fossil fuels and nuclear fuels are one of them.
i mean sure, choose a timescale large enough and even the sun becomes a fossil fuel, but thats silly: sipping-off-the-suns-emissions itself, the operation of solar panels is not really degrading anybodies quality of life, except perhaps those who might look down onto now reflecting rooftops… making them is of course power consuming, but we are making stuff that makes power which takes power… and instead of just nodding at each other and chugging along we start bickering about the not tasty, not smelly stuff that makes your hair fall out all funny like…and ogle at it? wtf?
but ok you know what?: sure but only if you are personally responsible to have that thing in your backyard and fix it when it inevitably shits itself. also: garbage days are all yours now
the waste products are a non issue. Even if we chucked the waste products of every power plant into hospitals for terminally ill orphans who have nobel prizes the damage would not even come close to a hundredth of the damage coal and oil have caused already. Waste products are put into water until they become stable enough to be disposed of. Its not dangerous
i do not think something that stays dangerous for longer than you have not shat your pants is negligible.
if shitting your pants was the way to get rid of radioactive waste, i would be all for it, but as it stands all you would be left with would be tainted with nobody to clean it up for you. and somebody would still have to take care of the radioactive waste… it doesnt just vanish. there are no organisms that eat it up and make it into foodstuffs for others.
maths can say it is negligible, but then sad hard reality kicks in and you have to be holding on to something that can kill not just you but anybody you tell to take over for you. this is not a place of honor
toxic waste is more managable than radioactive waste. that is the logic that i am pounding on here.
your logic says: let future generations take care of stuff we cant manage.
and i say: it would be very irresponsible as we already have messed up the planet enough. let’s not add harder to manage waste to what’s already there.
can we just agree to disagree?
im not even saying we should ban research or something, there is still radioactive waste to manage
roflmao XD I’m sorry, but you trying to sound smart by saying how much energy a kg of U235 has, and then using the wrong unit (a unit of power, not of energy) is just the funniest thing ever XD.
And yeah, nuclear waste is kind of solvable, but it will be an issue for at least a thousand years to come, and that’s a LONG time… I can get that environmentalists are like “yeah, this is just another way of shoving our current issues FAAAAR into the future”. Even if we just bury it all in some safe space…
I live in Taiwan and we are decommissioning our last 4 nuclear plants. We also scrapped a newly built nuclear plant because people just don’t understand how safe new nuclear plants are. Instead 97% my stupid country is burning fossil fuel for electricity and our citizens are doing Pikachu faces because of the bad air quality.
It’s even more stupid is that we are gearing up to electrify the country… Using fossil fuels… Which is worse for the environment.
We have transitioned from solving the decision problems with “will it work?” to solving the optimization problems. Definitely a different time for fusion!
No, absolutely decommission old and out-of-date plants to avoid anything catastrophic. There is an argument for keeping some of the ones that are there now and even building new ones, but what is happening with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine is souring me on the idea of nuclear power in general. Not when a war could cause a catastrophe. You can’t really war-proof every nuclear power plant.
I don’t like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It’d probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it’s anticipated to create from radiation exposure.
Bottom line, when you’re talking about reactors that aren’t pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that’s reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.
what is happening with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine is souring me on the idea of nuclear power in general
The problem with nuclear power is that it can cause very large problems very quickly if a plant is mismanaged. By contrast, coal plants cause marginal problems played out over 30-50 year lifespan of the facility. One makes for big scary flashy headlines and the other is just a drip-drip-drip of under-the-radar bad news.
Also, it should be noted that nuclear power is too efficient. When you turn on a nuke plant, the amount of new electricity tanks the market. This is awful for cartels and profit-seeking energy retailers. By contrast, gas plants allow you to generate energy on a marginal scale (MWhs instead of GWhs) and only sell into the market when the price is peaking. ERCOT has turned Texas gas plants into absolute gold mines, as electricity selling for $25/MWh in the morning surges to $3000/MWh by late-afternoon.
Solar and Wind plants have similar problems. They generate when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, rather than when the price of electricity is peaking.
So while nuke/solar/wind plants are efficient, they are also economically self-defeating. They don’t function well in a cartel. They don’t let you fix prices and maximize the cost for retail consumers. And they don’t help you corner the market to press out competition.
This isn’t a problem for Ukrainians (who are lucky to have any amount of electricity any time of day). But its a huge problem for stable western nations inside the imperial core, who need continuous economic growth to justify expanded military budgets with higher tax revenues.
I do think that nuclear power is necessary for the green transition. For now at least.
But two things: 1. It creates radioactive waste that will destroy storage sites for centuries to come. 2. Mining and preparing the fuel needed for the reactors is far from green.
It creates radioactive waste that will destroy storage sites for centuries to come.
Mining and preparing the fuel needed for the reactors is far from green.
Do all of you share one brain cell? Have you ever researched nuclear beyond slurping big oil propaganda? Fossil fuels are currently devastating our water and air, but yes lets fret on hypothetical issues.
Just insulting people will always make them buck against your points, however valid and informed. Bad approach.
The problem with radioactive waste isn’t the fact that it’s dangerous now, it’s the fact that it remains dangerous for much longer than we’re even remotely able to plan for. People will likely have to deal with that danger in waaaay longer than civilization has existed on earth so far.
So the horizontal borehole for instance: amazing idea for the next century - or even, heck, few millenia!! - but how do you make sure our ancestors in 50,000 years never drill a new borehole right there?
What you’re calling radioactive waste is a marketing term. In nuclear power it’s referred to as unspent fuel. We’re just getting to the point in our nuclear power technology to be able to use the rest of the “radioactive waste”. It’s why we don’t bury and seal off the storage sites. It’s still fissionable material with the right technology.
People who want nuclear plants should also vote for having a nuclear waste storage in your area if that is possible. In germany we still dont have a solution for the waste we already have and the states who want Nuclear Plants are already said no to havin a storage in their state. You cant make this shit up
As someone who has actually looked into nuclear waste and the current storage techniques instead of relying on knee-jerk fear mongering, yes. Store it in my area. Hell, store the casks underneath my house for all I care. If you are surprised by this answer, it’s because you don’t know shit about nuclear waste and how little of a problem it is.
(Below is my opinion, I respect you have yours, and I’m not having a go at you. I just want to take part in the discourse friendo!)
To me, if they wanted to store it in my area by encasing it now (or, any time in like the last 40 years), I wouldn’t mind either.
The issue that isn’t fear-mongering that people continually overlook because of all the knee-jerking people lamenting that it’s “unsafe”, is that we then have to maintain containment for thousands upon thousands of years.
That’s the issue, permanent storage, not all the temporary storage that is happening now.
Nuclear is not a great solution to immediately reducing emissions, in my opinion. Takes way too much capital and way too much time to get operational. Don’t close still operating plants, but damn, we need to be building the fastest shit possible, right now. Not something that takes a decade to build. We have solutions ready, governments just aren’t getting their act together and build it. Even if the business-case doesn’t make complete sense; we don’t have time.
Sand batteries, liquid air energy storage, lithium ion batteries, flow batteries, (plus a bunch of other contenders) they’re all immature technologies but they do work right now, anywhere, no terrain for pumped-hydro required. Sure they’re not very efficient, or have crap lifespan in the case of Li-ion, but solar plants literally aren’t being built in some places because prices go negative during the day, and plants are being curtailed.
We need to build storage, now, even if it’s not a silver bullet. And we can’t wait for expensive-as-fuck nuclear.
Someone should call me when we decide re-enriching spent nuclear fuel is fine and we can do nuclear waste recycling, actually getting our money’s worth. Or when thorium gets good.
My personal opinion conclusion:
Nuclear waste is not immediately that concerning for safety, it’s the fact we’re signing up to store it for longer than recorded history.
It’s expensive and takes to long to build
The technology needed for the energy transition already exists
Also agree, that turning off operating nuclear doesn’t make sense.
Thanks for reading, looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts.
Even better: reprocess the fuel. The linear fuel life time decommissions nuclear fuel as useless while it still has 90-something percent of energy potential left. Having a more cyclical life cycle allows for the spent fuel to be reconstituted into new fuel, and to be used anew. All the waste that does end up being produced is only a fraction of the waste produced in a linear process, and only dangerous on a societal timescale instead of a geological one.
The waste doesn’t pose any danger as long as it’s stored securely and doesn’t cost that much space. The only downside of the waste is that it needs to be stored forever, but that’s a very, very, small price to pay for not destroying the planet…
Yes because nuclear plants are so expensive which means electricity price will go up for the non rich people. Unless of course they use tax money to bring down the cost but that means you still paying with your taxes to make it more affordable.
Yeah, and like most of Europe, that German population lives in cities, not random forests and mountains in the middle of nowhere where you could also do underground storage like Finland has done.
Don’t you think it sounds crazy to build a underground storage just to have it closed for a million years. I just can’t understand why anybody would want that.
Well you see we kinda are failing at the whole mitigating climate change issue and we and we only have so many rare earth minerals to exploit for large scale battery storage banks. And every year we are burning more Fossil Fuels and shutting down more reactors and building no new modern designs and giving nuclear none of the funding the fossil fuel industry receives or the renewables industry receives.
Compared to Fossil fuels that’ll stay in the air for thousands of years while they essentially terraform the planet into something way less habitable for humans? How the hell is that more logical???
Finland is a bit too north and cold for rapid deployment and storage of renewables. Although summer is excellent for solar, winter makes solar barely useful and can decrease some wind (newer designs help a lot with the snow issue).
Germany is more stable, but electrical storage is still an issue, along with the larger population. Having planned at least 1 new power plant while decommissioning the older ones would have made a lot more sense while transitioning to 100% renewables. Spent nuclear fuel doesn’t use much space - the spent fuel can be stored underground in containers in deep bed rock in drilled shafts and then cemented over. It’s less effort and resources that what Germany’s many mining companies use extracting minerals or fossil fuels.
Can’t do the same for all that pollution your damn lignite plants make though.
No, investing in nuclear costs sooo much money. Money that would be missed for building reneweables. If the conservatives wouldnt have blocked the renewable boom we had in 2012, we would be much further. Im glad were out of that nuclear stuff.
Nobody has. Nuclear casks need maintenance for their life time. We haven’t invented any kind of nuclear proof forever material that’s immune to entropy. And every single one of these solutions people propose have flaws that render the solution not viable so for now we end up storing it all above ground
Everything in life slowly degrades over time and the longer the life span of something the more it degrades. Especially when that contained is filled with something radioactive.
There are lots of people who are justifiably not comfortable expecting a private company to continue a maintenance cycle that brings in zero profit and all costs for a few thousand years without cutting corners. I don’t like the idea of the Elon musks being the Smaug of nuclear waste
From 2019. Yes, we’ve figured out how to store it permanently. The country of 5 million somehow figured out what the hundreds of millions in Germany, USA, and others couldn’t.
Or more accurately, actually did it. The solution has been known for awhile.
Also, never said a private company had to do anything - that’s just a strawman you brought up.
So government then. Give the Responsibility to fund this all cost and zero profit social good endeavor to politicians like Trump or a Bolsonaro.
Finland and a few other countries are testing this out. But unfortunately like every other solution, there ends up being some unforeseen problem. Time will tell. Which is part of why a lot of people are hesitant and not wanting to rush into these things.
We also are finding other solutions in the meantime. Its not a bad thing if at the end of the day we don’t need nuclear.
Electricity is a public utility. Profit shouldn’t come into the question. When it does you just end up using coal and gas, which isn’t good for the planet or people at all.
One of many reasons is the issue of distribution at a distance. It’s terribly inefficient to deliver power to distant locations because you get drops the further you go. Another reason would be strategic. You don’t want to have too much infrastructure centralized on a single location in case of war.
It’s just not going to happen, it’s way too slow to become profitable. There are plenty of nuclear power plants in production that have been in production for 40 years that still aren’t profitable.
Storage is going to have to be the thing that makes up for the instability of solar and wind, whether it be in the form of heat storage, hydrogen production, fly wheels, or some breakthrough in Battery Tech.
It shouldn’t be, but I don’t live in Fairy Tail land, I live in the real world. And as sad as it is the fact of the matter is if it’s not profitable it’s not happening. At least not in the US, so unless the population finally chooses the band together tear down the current structure and basically change overnight I have to ask for realistic possible solutions
The US is the worst offending nation but many others will fail for the same reason. Was just heading off the “but this one small place with specific economics did it” comments
China are building, designing, and testing more nuclear and new nuclear technologies. I hardly think that’s a small nation. My own country is building new nuclear plants too. Planning to open 2026. Another 8 are being considered right now to be built on existing sites (presumably to replace older ones). France have massive nuclear investment and are the ones supplying our new reactors if memory serves.
An almost immeasurable amount? It’s how goods are transported, enables a vastly larger pool of workers due to how far they can travel, and is a continuous source of work for an entire sector
I’d like to note it’s not profitable because it generates so much energy so consistently that it’s hard to keep prices up.
That’s why nuclear energy should never have been a private sector investment but a government one, or maybe hybrid. That’s how it’s worked in Finland, and the new reactor we had built plus the growing solar really saved us from the electricity spike after Russian gas was turned off.
Exactly. It’s not about building new ones, that’s incredibly expensive with modern Western safety standards. But at least keep the ones already built running as long as it’s safe. Germany really fucked up with this due to populism
Please stop this nonsense argument about Germany fucking up by shutting down nuclear. Even 20 years ago, nuclear energy wasn’t that significant for our enery mix and shutting it down over the last 20 years didn’t fuck up anything. The last few power plants had a capacity of about 4 to 8 GW and are not missed here.
For the last 20 years, coal consumption declined (could be faster though) and renewable had a steep growth (could be faster of course).
It is true that we started consuming more natural gas, but in the end the change is not about using old nuclear power plants that are unsafe or building new nuclear plants that will be usable in 10 to 20 years but about pushing renewable and improving the grid to solve the distribution problem.
Thanks for the correction, never realized how little the nuclear share was in Germany, I always assumed it was much higher, similar to the countries I’m more familiar with. The recent phase-out barely makes a difference
You’re welcome. I hope I didn’t come across as too pissed off.
“Germany fucked up by shutting down their (last) nuclear power plants” is not only an argument by people outside of Germany but unfortunately is used by german conservatives and the far right as well as libertarians who don’t want to take any steps to fight climate change but try to preserve “the old ways”.
Nuclear in Germany has been more or less dead for a long time. The last (commercial, there are newer reactors used for science) reactor has started building in 1982 and started producing in 1989. People who call for more nuclear power in Germany are at least 35 years too late.
I’ve got solar panels on my roof, and being Dutch windmills are in my blood. But I’m also not blind to the reality that both wind and solar will only get you so far. And there’s already a lot of opposition to wind farms - they ruin the view, endanger birds and there’s health concerns due to noise and shadow projection.
If we just build even one nuclear powerplant, we could basically just… not do wind. And we’d have pleeeenty of power for the coming energy transition, change to electric vehicles, etc.
But noooo… nuclear is scary. Especially to the people who only cite Fukushima and Chernobyl in regards to safety. That’s the same as banning air travel because of 9/11 and the Tenerife disaster. Nuclear power is safe, cheap and we owe it to the planet to use it wisely instead of more polluting alternatives.
It’s kinda the same though isn’t it? Opposition to nuclear power, opposition to wind, solar, geothermal, hydro. Seems like maybe what people want most of all is to stick their heads in the sand and just have everything stay the same forever. It was a multi-decade effort to get people off of leaded gas FFS.
building new nuclear plants is barely an option though because it costs tons of money and, more importantly, takes like 10 years to build. However I agree we shouldn’t decommission the existing ones if they still are in a good state
Well, here in the Netherlands we definitely need far more energy in the near future. We’re moving away from natural gas for heating and fossil fuels are going away in favor of electric vehicles. Add in things like heat pumps, more people getting airconditioning, data centers and other growing energy needs.
Basically, right now we have ‘just about’ enough electricity available, but soon it won’t be. We already import quite a bit of energy from other countries, which makes us inherently vulnerable.
Nuclear plants are expensive and take a long while to build. Which is why I hold politicians responsible for not pushing them through years ago. The best time to build a nuclear plant was ten years ago. The second best time is today.
Toxic baits, windows, roadtrafic, high voltage powerlines, the massive decline in insects, loss of habitats. All of them are much worse than the casualties by windmills.
Even the link itself mentions how it’s not really a good metric to use as it doesn’t factor in whole lot of externalities. I.e coal is cheaper, but when it creates air pollution that shortens your lifespan, is it worth the tradeoff? Nor does it factor in things like energy density: a nuclear power plant is far smaller than the amount of land needed to put up enough wind turbines to match its output.
Basically… LCOE looks like a neat gotcha, right up until you look past that first diagram.
Its expensive to build new bespoke massive, built on site reactors. I’m not arguing for more of them I’m saying lets run them for their full service lives as they were so expensive to produce. However if we are discussing new installations i’d love to start making a lot of small modular light water reactors in factory conditions. Economies of scale.
I agree. Smaller local modern salt reactors would be a better use of nuclear than investing in the conventional centralised nuclear plants. However they’re still in the experimental phase and not easily available. I too would love if “we” starting making a lot of them, but there’s no finished design or anyone offering to build them for mass deployment.
Right now, with the currently available options, renewable is the only cheap mass produced energy source that can beeasily deployed everywhere and in different scales.
Hopefully the container sized nuclear plants will eventually be as easy to setup.
Renewables also have a similar issue with storage. It exists mainly in experimental projects. It’s extremely local if it even makes financial sense to do it. In places where existing nuclear or hydro is available it will not be make much financial sense to store excess renewable energy with a loss.
One of the ways solar and wind can become more reliable is by expanding the grid.
I’m not sure where you’re from, but in the US we have three grids: the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and Texas. These grids aren’t connected despite their names, and there have been many attempts in the past to connect them to little avail.
The benefit of larger grids with distributed energy resources is that even if local environments are cloudy or calm, those conditions usually are locally concentrated. This means that if one DER is underproducing, another DER can make up for the loss if that DER’s locale is sunny and windy.
This gets better the wider a net you cast to collect energy (i.e. grid).
On your counterpoints to wind, “the view” is in the eye of the beholder - I’m young and I love the look of modern wind turbines; wind turbines reduce the overall amount of bird deaths from the energy industry as we transition away from fossil fuels; no significant evidence has been found to link wind turbine noise to health issues; and shadow flicker has not been correlated with any adverse health outcomes either, leading me to believe that this propaganda is being propagated by either NIMBYs or the fossil fuels industry or both.
Point is: solutions to climate change will come in a silver buckshot, not in a silver bullet. We need an all hands approach to this so we reverse damage as soon as possible and get to restoration as soon as possible.
Other I agree with you though. I would love to have a backbone of nuclear through the American Great Plains where population centers are low. Only issue there though is groundwater use, but I’d imagine future reactors could make use of geothermal-type solutions to cool instead of surface waters. Maybe there’s a radiation risk there. Idk, need to research more
Yet if we plan for nuclear it’ll be like “oh no, we’ve had project delays and cost blowouts” like they do every time and we will just burn fossil fuels the whole time and die anyway.
Also the anti nuclear green think tanks are called educated people. And all you’d need to do is look at the European failures and shut downs to know the costs don’t add up.
Also the anti nuclear green think tanks are called educated people.
LMAO. Your brain must be so much bigger than that of physicists who are proponents of nuclear energy. Mr "disagreement with my opinion means you're wrong".
The number of people who still think nuclear is bad and solar / wind will make up for it is really depressing. We could have had an unrivaled nuclear power infrastructure but those NIMBY assholes stopped it 50 years ago and now we rely on extending existing plants past their lifetimes while running in fucking circles about how to save the planet. Has anyone who wants to “go green” without nuclear ever looked at the power output of these things?? It’s not even the same league! AaagggghHhHhhhhhhhh
I’ll be a source. I worked at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in MD for over 10 years. Because of the trend of shutting down nuclear, I shifted over to operating a combined cycle power plant. Calvert with 2 units did about 1800MW combined, base loaded 24/7 except for outages, and those were staggered so that when one went down for maintenance and refueling, the other unit was still throwing 900MW to the grid. My current plant has 2 gas engine turbines and 1 STG, and on a good day when we’re fully up 2x1 with ducts in, we can hit about 800MW when it’s called for. Balls to the wall in perfect conditions on a plant that’s not even ten years old, we can’t do half of what Calvert was doing and they’ve been operating since the 70s.
Imagine what modern nuclear tech could do. We should’ve been a step ahead of everybody with this.
Thanks for this. I did ask OP for sources, in other words links to verifiable data to back up the assertion that:
“Has anyone who wants to “go green” without nuclear ever looked at the power output of these things?? It’s not even the same league! AaagggghHhHhhhhhhhh”
So this kind of got lost in the weeds, and I see the argument below. The real reason I wont provide sources is partly because it is very easy to look up, and the reality is I could write a thesis with a ton of fucking sources and never cover it all. Typically, in an actual scientific debate, the onus is on you to provide a source which debunks my claims. However, I can give a short summary with some general, but verifiable numbers. I did a quick search for all of this, and most of it is on wikipedia with sources listed.
The average American nuclear power plant provides about 800-1000MW of energy, and has a life time of about 35-40 years. The US has 88 of them, most of which have been running since the 70s. Their age means many should be considered for decommissioning soon, but since we haven’t been building new ones to replace them the old ones continue to be serviced while we seek alternatives.
America’s largest solar farm produces ~350MW, which is less than half of a nuclear plant. That’s actually pretty decent, but this is the high end of the scale for solar, and this output is only achievable in perfect conditions (weather, daytime, location). At night it produces nothing. So the major problem many solar / wind enthusiasts ignore when discussing this is what happens then? How do we store enough power to sustain a city, or something larger, through every night? Those mighty big batteries aren’t eco friendly either, since at the moment our best option is lithium. That may change soon but we can’t really move on maybe.
My point to start with was that we should have never stopped building nuclear - we could have pushed fossil fuel out ages ago, but lobbyists really fucked that. Solar is great, but we need like 200 more of those major solar farms and an absolute fuckload of massive batteries, and the logistics of that is a nightmare that is unlikely to see fruition in time. It will be a long time before we have enough solar / wind to do more than supplement our power grid. We should keep building it in the meantime, but it is also a slow process, much like building nearly any large scale power generation.
To be clear, I am in favor of both. Nuclear should have always been the back bone of our power grid. Solar should be coming online as supplementary power supply allowing us to decentralize and support the transition to greener tech. This is not an either/or situation - we really need both, or fossil fuels will royally fuck our planet first. Maybe someday we will be efficient enough to go all solar, but expecting it to replace fossil fuels AND nuclear in the near future is just unrealistic idealism. We will die before hitting such ideal goals - in the meantime we must compromise.
It’s the difference between spending 0 seconds looking it up and wanting “a source”, versus actually looking it up and not finding anything, then asking where the info comes from.
Asking for a source just to ask for a source is called sealioning.
Asking for a source just to ask for a source is called sealioning.
Good grief, no.
I read so much absolute bullshit around nuclear and renewables where people just write out their feelings on the subject. Asking for sources to back up their claims isn’t sealioning, it’s a polite way of asking someone to try and back up their claims with facts.
In this instance, OP said, “Has anyone who wants to “go green” without nuclear ever looked at the power output of these things?? It’s not even the same league! AaagggghHhHhhhhhhhh”
I want to know what they’re talking about. If they’re saying 1 solar panel or wind turbine has a smaller output than a nuclear plant then … well yeah, that’s obvious. If they’re saying renewables won’t work without nuclear then that’s a straight up lie and I’d like them to post sources to back up that assertion.
We could have had an unrivaled nuclear power infrastructure but those NIMBY assholes stopped it 50 years ago
now we rely on extending existing plants past their lifetimes
Running in fucking circles about how to save the planet.
Has anyone who wants to “go green” without nuclear ever looked at the power output of these things?? It’s not even the same league
So which part do you know to be false, that you couldn’t easily look up and had to ask him where he got this obscure info? Which part do you want him to source? All of it? Even the part where we are running in circles fixing climate change? Or is it the part where current plants are being showered in money to make up for extended lifetimes?
OPG manages power production for all of Ontario, with 2 nuke plants putting out over 3 GW each, for a total of ~6.5GW, OPG generates about 18-19GW so 30% is covered by two plants
The majority of the remainder is hydro across 66 fucking plants. And nothing else comes even close in output
And these are CANDU reactors, they don’t require refined uranium, and don’t contribute to proliferation like other plants, they also don’t meltdown explosively since boiling the coolant reduces the nuclear reaction rate.
Do you have any opinions on light water SMR designs? Do you think the idea to mass produce them and distribute these smaller reactors on a local basis is feasible, or do you think if they are mass produced we would be more likely to see them clustered in series in more modern plants?
Idk much about that in particular but I can speculate based on what I know about the power industry and business in general. I think larger modular clusters (10-30) would be more common just because of the infrastructure needed. Sure, we might see instances of 1-3 units here and there, but I imagine that if a company is already going to the trouble of buying a plot of land and building a switchyard, getting water access and RO-EDI tech for it, cooling water of whatever type, n+1 redundancy on all equipment, radioactive waste management including on-site storage of spent fuel, etc while also welcoming the NRC and FERC and whoever else to scrutinize, it makes the most sense to have several units making money power. Like anything else, upping the scale makes the cost per instance go down. Nuclear in the US has a fuckload of red tape and permitting and oversight that cost a lot of money to stay on top of. There could be good applications for small clusters like closer to urban, more densely populated areas where land is expensive and the power needs are the immediate vicinity. Or in developing areas that don’t have much power demand, at least not yet. There’s no good reason why a small cluster couldn’t replace the remaining coal plants. It’s also completely feasible to throw some up at military bases or large university campuses for training and their own power needs. Big power will want to squeeze as many into as small of a space with as little maintenance requirement as they can get away with because everything they do is in the name of maximizing profits for shareholders. But for nationalized power like in France, it kinda doesn’t make sense to build anything else right now.
Maybe the best part of SMR tech as I understand it is that somebody could get the land and permits and infrastructure set up for the end goal but just build a small percentage of the reactors at first, and then scale up later. This is cheaper to start, faster to build, and is a perfect proof of concept strategy to get investors excited at funding the bulk of the project.
I don’t understand why individuals are so set on centralized generation. We suddenly have the capabilities to decentralize generation and greatly reduce the need for the grid. I think it is worth it for the aesthetic advantages alone.
My opinion is that to be truly decentralized we should do both. Not just physically decentralize by location, but decentralized in a sense of having multiple options. We should do solar, and wind, and nuclear power. The power output of solar and wind is just not where it needs to be to replace both nuclear and fossil fuels, so I do have to argue in favor of building more nuclear power, but that doesn’t mean I am against building any other renewables as well.
The number of people who still think nuclear power is a manageable risk in any capacity is really depressing. We still have no idea what to do with all the nuclear waste we’re creating even now. And that’s not even considering the impact of having a nuclear plant when you’re in a war.
“Ukraine seems to be fine” is an odd thing to say considering what is going on there in general, but to your point, we can be glad that the fighting around Chernobyl did not do more damage. There’s also a difference in strategy when a country attacks their neighbour to annex their land. If they instead want to mess with a country further away, they can just drop some bombs on their nuclear plants and see what happens.
The entire French nation begs to differ. Look at that map! Power generation alllll over the country, not tucked in an unpopulated area or clustered in one spot ‘just in case’.
Then look across the border at Germany. The CND and Greens did a number on then generations ago, and Russia has kept up the fear over nuclear so they were able to keep Germany dependent on Gazprom. Until Ukraine.
France has not been at war since they started building nuclear plants and has no solid plan for dealing with nuclear waste either from what I can tell.
I have no idea what the CND in Germany is supposed to be and neither has Google.
France had to repeatedly power down nuclear plants and buy electricity from neighbours because they couldn’t cool their plants. Because there was so much drought in Europe there wasn’t enough water. A phenomenon that will surely never happen again in Western Europe in the next couple of decades.
This is the other issue about thermal plants including coal, natural gas, concentrated solar power (CSP), and nuclear: water cooling.
All of these plants boil water to pass over a turbine and crank a generator, but that steam needs to be cooled so it condenses and makes a closed loop. You need cooling water to do this, and a lot of it.
If water is becoming scarce, and we have other needs for it like residential or agricultural uses, then that can greatly impact thermal generators, leading to outages like you say if cooling can’t be done.
Chris Nelder with the Rocky Mountain Institute has a good podcast episode on this on his The Energy Transition Show podcast. Check it out!
France comes begging across the border for coal and gas electricity in hot summers when their reactors have to lower output because river water for cooling is too hot. Then they pat themselves on the back because the CO2 is not generated within their borders.
The vast majority of “nuclear waste” is just common items that have come into contact with radiation. The really radioactive portions can be, and are safely stored within the facilities themselves.
Sure, the barely radioactive waste components do need to be buried (or it seems like that’s the current trend), but they pose no risk to anyone as long as they’re not digging them up.
And for how long to they have to be “safely stored”? For how long do they have to be buried without anyone digging them up? And where are we burying anyway where there is no risk of anyone digging them up intentionally or accidentally, no risk of natural phenomena interfering, no risk of the barrels breaking and nuclear waste seeping into our water? There is a reason why countries have been struggling to find these safe storage spaces for decades. I’d argue that is because there aren’t any.
Reaching for an unproven concept of “drilling really deep holes” that’s barely a few years old to convince people there is no problem with long-term storage of dangerous waste we’ve been accumulating for decades, but sure, I’m just a NIMBY.
I’m glad you took the time to completely not read the article that I sent you. I know you didn’t read it because if you had read it, you would see that we have discovered several times over the past few billion years that nature had made its own deposits of nuclear material in the same manner as we are advising the waste to be deposited in. It’s not new science. We have evidence of it occurring naturally multiple times and no issues from that. No spread of radiation from that. No inundation of groundwater from that. But yes you’re correct and all the nuclear scientists are wrong clearly.
Whether it would work or not wasn’t even the main point of what I said. But that doesn’t matter to you anyway as your strategy to debate seems to be to call others stupid often enough until everyone else understands how smart you are. Good luck with that.
if someone gives you cited information and you refuse to read the cited information, then You’re not stupid. You’re willfully ignorant which is far worse. It’s not dangerous waste if it’s properly handled and treated and disposed of.
The architecture of the housing facilities is quite an interesting thing to look into. They’re pretty safe, other than like catastrophic tectonic activity as far as I know.
I think the more interesting part is the labelling of those sites. Well, the potential ideas to mark these areas as dangerous to dig/disturb. What I’ve seen is that it’s trying to mark them for the far future so that even if you don’t know the language, it’s (hopefully) obvious.
I don't think nuclear power was killed by NIMBYs, at least not entirely. In the 1970s and 80s the financial world started taking a much more short-term view. Nuclear power plants have such a huge up-front cost that you aren't going to see returns for decades. When the market wants numbers to go up every quarter they're not going to finance something that won't make a profit for 20 years.
I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Nuclear displaces fossil fuels at a better rate than renewables and is just as low carbon impact as them. We could replace the entire fossil grid with nuclear in 10 years if there was public support and demand for it, but fossil giants have been parroting the same antinuclear myths and fears dor the last 70 years and its so widely spread even pro renewable people have been deluded into thinking nuclear is bad for the planet when it might very well be our last best hope of fixing greenhouse emissions without the entire world reverting to pre industrial lifestyles.
Nuclear plants wouldn’t take so long to build if people stopped trying to sue and protest their construction and sabotage it with all the red tape. If permits were approved and certified tomorrow a new plant could be operational in 10 years. 5 if it was actually funded and supported. Building the plant is easy, its cuttinf through the red tape encouraged by the oil lobby that is takes decades
But what if one of those stray radio nucleides corrupts my potential grand grand grand grand children 500 years down the line? What say you of your safety margins then?. (Dies of coughing due to coal Ash)
I think nuclear and fossil fuel people all the same people. Its all energy investors. Nuclear would come with a lifetime storage contract with the ability to continually jack up the public cost indefinitely as the requirements change. Seems like an industry that would appeal to the fossils fuel types.
The problems with nuclear power aren’t meltdowns, but the facts that it often takes decades just to construct a new plant, it creates an enormous carbon footprint before you get it running, it has an enormously resource-intensive fuel production process, it contributes to nuclear proliferation, it creates indefinitely harmful waste, and even if we get past all of that and do expand it, that’s just going to deplete remaining fuel sources faster, of which we only have so many decades left.
It’s not a good long term solution. I agree we should keep working plants running, but we can’t do that forever, and we still need renewable alternatives - wind, hydro and solar.
And it wasn’t some nebulous group of NIMBYs that worked against nuclear power, it was the fossil fuel lobby. I don’t know why people keep jumping to cultural explanations for what is clearly a structural issue. The problem isn’t some public perception issue, but political will, and that tends to be bought by the fossil fuel lobby.
If we built breeder reactors we could use the spent waste fuel to power the entire US for 1000 years. That runs into plutonium existence problems, but it’s a political problem, not a resource problem.
However, I still agree with what you’ve said. We should limit our nuclear footprint to key isotope production, but we really shouldn’t be doing that until we’ve gone full carbon neutral.
Edit: In case you can’t see the reply to this comment, my conversation partner has given me more information I didn’t have before. Breeder reactors are neat, but they have more issues than I originally knew. (Still a badass concept though :P) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2968/066003007
The problem here is the AM/FM distinction: Actual Machines vs Fucking Magic.
Fucking Magic is great if you’re writing scifi, or trying to sell snake oil to investors. The Hyperloop and FSD are examples of Fucking Magic. Sure, they could, in theory, exist, but they don’t, and we don’t know how long they would take or even if they make sense in the long term.
There’s nothing wrong with working on new technologies that may as well be Fucking Magic until they do become viable.
However, if you are making plans for how to proceed with your policy goals, you need Actual Machines. Actual Machines can’t do miracles and fix all of our problems overnight like Fucking Magic can, but they have the benefit of existing. We know their actual benefits and their actual drawbacks. We know that they won’t present some brand new problem that makes them impossible to work with, because they are mature. Trains and bicycles are Actual Machines. Wind, solar and hydro power are Actual Machines.
Cars are also Actual Machines, and thanks to over a century of maturity, we can confidently say that they are not sustainable at their current scale. Nuclear fission is similar.
We don’t know if Fucking Magic will make the transition to an Actual Machine, and if it does, whether it will turn out to be viable.
If breeder reactors are going to become a technology we can rely on to solve our nuclear fuel and waste issues, then they need to make the transition from Fucking Magic to Actual Machines to finally being viable, and that could take decades or more of further research, and yet more decades to actually build the things. Sure, that could come in time to extend our nuclear fuel reserves before they run out in around a century, but it might not. We just don’t know. It certainly won’t come in time to make a difference to climate change.
I wasn’t trying to insult you, I am honestly just angry at how our society has poisoned everyone’s thinking into this bizarre quasi-religious faith in technological miracles so it can sell them fantasies, and I think the Actual Machines / Fucking Magic distinction is an entertaining way of making the absurdity of it very clear.
While those are all fair points, it’s also important to note that Gen IV reactor technology has projected generation efficiencies of very roughly 100-300x the energy yield from an identical mass of fissile material when compared to Gen II and Gen III reactors. I dare say that would change the efficiency equation rather significantly if those numbers pan out in the implementation stage.
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