This is the real problem. We shouldn't shut down existing nuclear plants, but adding more in a period when renewables are advancing at a tremendous pace is just... not sensible.
Thorium is abundant and a byproduct of rare earth mining. It’s also what the moon is mostly made up of, so our energy requirements on the moon could use locally mined sources for power generation making moon bases much cheaper to operate.
A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR, not only can’t melt down, it can be smaller and require less staff to manage, requires no external cooling so it can be built anywhere, and cannot be used to make bombs. It’s also not radioactive by itself.
In the 1940s, both uranium and thorium were looked at as potential fuels for nuclear energy, but you can’t make bombs with thorium, so the US went with uranium. LFTRs create no nuclear waste, can be used to burn existing nuclear waste created by other nuclear energy processes, extracting more energy from our giant stockpile of unusable nuclear waste, and if the plant loses power, which is only needed to keep a frozen plug frozen, excess fuel melts and the empties into a reserve tank. Most rare earth mining companies don’t even know what to do with the thorium they mine, so they store/stockpile it in hopes of future uses.
It simply baffles my mind that this isn’t even on the table for potential, near limitless energy generation in addition to, or in replacement of, wind and solar green energy. The nuclear fearmongering has tainted the idea of safe nuclear power generation to the point that I suspect many of you have never heard of it. We literally have the answer to energy needs for the entire world, using greener production, but since it’s new and would require billions to fund and start, it hasn’t been considered until recently.
If billionaires really wanted to help humanity, rather than simply saying so for PR and launching their cars into space or creating flamethrowers, this is an investment that, while not as quick to return gains, would be lucrative, forward thinking, and beneficial enough to help all of humanity and this planet. And they could have started in the 50s when the government played around with a test reactor for proof of concept and proved it worked. Imagine a timeline where capitalism and greed weren’t a thing and climate change wasn’t even an utterance outside of explaining why Venus is so fucking hot!
That is not true. Scientist even argue if LFTRs are a powerful way to create Uranium233.
I cannot find information online about scientists saying anything of the sort, but I don’t feel like logging into my work VPN to access the pay-walled articles that might have that info. The amount of time required to get enough material for any significant bomb, at least with the information I can find, makes it impractical for that purpose so I stand by my statement.
Also not correct. Where did you get your facts from?
I thought about including little to no waste in there, but opted to put none, because yes, while it still creates some waste, it’s significantly less waste, that becomes safe after a few hundred years compared to the several thousands of years that current nuclear waste takes to become safe.
My message is still correct, which I suspect is why you only selected two sections from the entire thing – where I over-generalized a statement of fact – as arguments to negate the entirety of my reply.
Current NPP are extremely, almost comically inefficient and wasteful. The material is harder to get, harder to handle, less fuel-dense, and the waste produced creates a hazard that spans hundreds of human lifetimes. We’ve known about thorium for power generation for decades, but greed and “national security” prevented us from acting on it. Coupled with the confusion and misrepresentation of nuclear power as “dangerous” in the eyes of the general public, and we’re now on a collision course with a potential wasteland of a planet.
But hey, don’t let a little mistype or over-generalization stop us from knowing options that have largely been withheld or lumped in with more dangerous forms of the same power generation.
What, and steal their glory‽ Also, I don’t know if there’s no ability to crosspost in Lemmy, or my client just doesn’t support it. E.g., I recently discovered that there’s an “edited” icon in some clients that I don’t see in Voyager.
Anyhoo, OP said they don’t play Factorio, so I just might. I juuuust might.
Loads of people love to pretend an NPP is just a hut with a magic gem inside delivering an endless amount of power for free. In reality they are huge, highly complex, high-security facilities that take decades and billions to build and need to be operated and maintained by loads of highly trained staff in 24/7 shift operations. This isn’t to downplay their merit of providing CO2 emission free power, but for the love of god please appreciate the enormous effort and expense this is achieved with, especially when comparing it to renewables.
Solar panels require a specific grade of silicone as a rare(ish) raw material input that requires extraction and heavy processing. Wind turbines don’t really use anything that is not readily available (steel, aluminum, fiber glass, etc.)
The technology to recycle solar panels still needs to be developed. The technology to recycle solar panel blades exists, but has not scaled up yet.
I’m not saying solar/wind have no material cost. I am saying the process for refining uranium requires extracting a lot of uranium ore.
You don’t actually need that much uranium though. Yeah it’s a big operation, but that stuff goes a long way.
Even wind power needs rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which pretty much only come from China and the mining operations there are kind of horror shows.
It’s almost like many things operate exactly like that but don’t have people spreading disinformation or fearmongering to the point where people are so pants shittingly terrified of them they won’t even consider it.
Sure, but hopefully you have no trouble believing that simultaneously, nuclear power companies and governments wanting to use nuclear, despite the risks, have been propagandizing for nuclear.
Pro-nuclear folks are often completely unaccepting of there being risks and externalized costs, which feels to me like they’re subject to propaganda (notwithstanding that I’m likely subject to different propaganda).
Nuclear power companies are rare, and badly funded. Most civilian nuclear programs are/were state-sponsored. Throughout the cold war, the main financial driver was a need for enriched plutonium and uranium for obvious applications.
Now that we have been (mostly) in an era of nuclear deproliferation for over 30 years, there is little to no money behind nuclear lobbying (though nuclear-armed powers are much less likely to scale back civilian nuclear production, they also don’t have a military need to increase it). Weapons programs aside, “Big Atom” does not exist (unlike Big Oil or Big Coal who have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying annually).
Countries like Belgium or Germany even shuttered perfectly serviceable and economically viable NPP on ideological grounds FFS.
Now green field nuclear might not be a sound investment anymore (arguable, and depending on unreliable predictions about our future ability to do grid-scale battery storage to overcome intermittency issues as well as our willingness to rely on fossil gas instead).
But as someone living in a country whose nuclear program got fucked by stupid panicky rhetoric, I can tell you from experience that until the energy crisis of last year, “nuclear good” was a fringe “right wing” opinion held almost exclusively by people for who economics matters more than ecology (because traditional ecologists truly believe that nuclear waste is always worse than GHG emissions).
Yoyoing gas prices and the threat of an infrastructure collapse recently brought nuclear back into a more mainstream appeal, but unfortunately far too late to seriously consider building new NPPs.
Not quite. They initially did, but these days they fund the pro-nuclear groups more because it causes discussion between the pro-nuclear groups and the pro-renewables groups. This means nothing of substance really gets done. Moreover, they prefer nuclear over renewables because nuclear takes a lot longer to build. They don’t mind another 15-20 years of fossil fuels that a nuclear-heavy strategy gives them, whereas renewables can be deployed right now which hurts their bottom line more.
Well of course not, now. I never said it would fix the now problems we face. Had we started in the 1950s, or even the 70s, the impact of climate change would have been negligible and likely mitigated entirely by changes to society that we can’t possibly speculate given our current world. Unfortunately, money and greed played yet another part in destroying our futures by those who won’t be around to see what they’ve done or simply don’t care.
From what I understand, the costs and time needed to build a reactor would be far less if the constructions crews actually had experience building them.
Things that don’t exist yet aren’t a solution for problems we have now.
It’s not like we could now just build a thorium reactor that makes economic sense without decades of serious prototyping. And by that time we might have found that there are more pbolems with it than we thought.
Nuclear power isn’t renewable. Joule for joule, our reserves of nuclear fuel and petroleum are comparable. It’s a decent bandaid, but between the finite fuel supply and the nuclear waste problem it’s hardly the future and should be used as sparingly as needed to get us off of oil and onto renewables.
Sure, let’s pay private corporation billions in subsidies by handling their waste and have more centralisied and expensive energy production. Oh and trade dependencies due to uranium
The most recent nuclear reactor built in the US bankrupted Westinghouse and is set to raise utility rates. Oh, and it’s $17 billion over budget and 7 years late.
Yep. Yet, Climate scientists still believe that we need to rely on a combination of nuclear and renewable energy in order to combat climate change. This tells me we’re bad at it, and we need to get better at building and maintaining nuclear plants.
Yes, power output can be regulated in nuclear energy. It is, however, not economical to do so most off the time. Building a nuclear reactor is a massive capital investment, so any time you’re not running at 100% you are increasing your payback time, which leads to more expensive electricity.
Nuclear is a great supplement to wind and solar PV.
Especially when the share of renewables get close to 100%.
Going from 85-90% to 100% imply to almost double the capacity of renewables energy available, even with batteries and thermal power stations as a backup.
On the other hand having 10-15% of nuclear really helps to stabilize the grid and lower the need to oversize the renewables power production.
I’m taking a course on power generation, transmission, and distribution, and you basically said what I wanted to say.
If you look at generation in California, there’s a huge peak during the day (due to the increased supply of power from solar) and a decreased demand for power in general (because needs are being met by individual solar). The extra power needs to be stored/used or wasted. No other options, which is what makes solar weaker (than it could be) right now - we don’t have the storage capacity to be keeping the excess for nighttime.
They don’t think that. Take South Australia for example - it’s moving towards 100% renewables with the help of a mix of sources including battery storage. There’s no need for non-renewable nuclear energy in the mix.
Some of the smartest people in the world have been working for over half a century to get better. And yet it's still getting more expensive to build them.
Maybe it's just hard and a dead end. Like the paddlewheel or dirigibles. At the time they felt like the future but there were unforeseen problems in scaling them up to meet expectations, and we found better, safer ways of doing the same thing.
Small nuclear reactors seem to work pretty well. Using them for deep space or disaster response would make sense. Just park a Seawolf off the coast and hook it up to support the grid.
We have documentation, but you.need to have construction crews working to keep the specific routines and needs sharp.
Sure they have people “ready” to work on such projects but it takes significant time to tool and train up, even for the “ready” folks because they don’t do these jobs often.
Are they significantly different from normal specialized plumbing/electrical/heavy construction work? Weird, complex things get built all the time these days and I'm curious how much different pouring concrete for a reactor is compared to, say, a bridge.
How many dozens of years will the area around the bridge be inhospitable if the concrete is not poured, and mixed correctly? Who would take the risk doing the work except for people that are highly trained or extremely ignorant? There’s a lot of specialized work involved with the whole process including creating the reactors, which until recently, have mostly been specialized designs for each plant. Lots of articles about nuclear energy and it’s problems can be found online if you’re interested in reading more.
If we were talking about naval reactors you'd have a point.
But this is what I was talking about in another post: Maybe big reactors are a bad idea? Maybe there are issues with getting them to utility-scale that, like blimps, makes them the less ideal solution for most applications?
Great article, the one time a corporation actually loses money from cutting corners, and it’s because government inspectors kept catching them in the act. Hilarious!
Or by the amount of waste that takes thousands of years to decay that we have no real way of dealing with except to bury it in some hole with a warning written in pictographs we can only hope future humans understand.
The waste is worth the carbon emissions reduction.
If we could replace all our carbon emitting power with wind and solar today I would be in full support. But we can’t. Especially in parts of the world where solar doesn’t work half the year.
So I’ll take the waste surrounded by warnings burried in a hole over carbon emissions. Carbon emissions are much worse.
Is price the only concern? Seems like too narrow of a focus.
Maybe try sorting by “lifespan”, as nuclear facilities last 3-4x longer.
You could try sorting by “crude oil usage”, as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.
Would be interesting to sort by “birds killed” or “acres of habitat destroyed”
I’m not saying nuclear is necessarily better, that is a difficult calculation. But we got ourselves into this climate change disaster by short-sightedly “sorting by price”. Perhaps spending more money for a long term investment would be more wise than always going with the cheapest option.
You could try sorting by “crude oil usage”, as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.
It’s not useless, and it’s most certainly not worse in almost all ways - enriching the fuel and construction time/costs are all that make it fall apart.
Nuclear can be built near pretty much any water source without tainting it at all, it generates a huge amount of power with very little land usage, it lasts for a long time.
If we had time, I’d be all in on nuclear - but it takes almost a decade of build time… We need solutions a hell of a lot faster than that or we’re all screwed anyways
I was going to shred you because nuclear plants also have turbines that rotate and need lubricant, but then I did a quick search and found an interesting article that interviewed someone from a nuclear power plant that claimed one oil change in 34 years. lubesngreases.com/…/lubricants-at-the-atomic-fron…
Yeah, since there is no combustion there is no carbon deposition and thus the oil basically lasts forever. We just filter it and add occasionally to make up for leaks.
Because of higher efficiency requirements and because the wind turbines have a much larger number of smaller moving parts.
The oil requirements of nuclear are all on the first construction, mining, and refining of the fuel. Very little is required at the operation of the reactor.
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