For the love of everything, at least let’s stop decommissioning serviceable nuclear plants.
Looking at you, Germany…
*looking intensifies*
Maybe it was Putin’s sabotage?
Upd: nah, his mentality of 90-ies gang member doesn’t allow him to think this far.
For real, God forbid we keep the actual safe, clean nuclear plants running
My understanding is that they eventually become unserviceable as they age, because of mechanical/structular reasons, or because the costs of servicing them is so prohibitive that they are unserviceable economically.
That they definitely have a begin, middle, and end, life cycle.
Well other countries have and are doing done so. I really doubt that the reason is anything that politics.
Buildings and machinery fatigue and wear out over time.
And highly critical uptime devices and buildings need extra maintenance and upkeep.
Old sites need to be decommissioned. Even if you ignore the financial costs in the upkeep at some point they just fatigue to the point of needing to be replaced.
I’m not anti-nuclear, all I’m saying is if you want nuclear you have to build new sites, you can’t keep the old sites going forever.
Rotating equipment are replaceable is not that much of an issue they operate on regular steam.
Buildings are reinforced concrete unlikely to be a concern not in a reasonable timeframe unless rebars corrode for some reason.
Issue would be items operating with water directly in contact with the reactor, so critical piping, heat exchangers and reactor vessels, which I can’t say I am an expert specifically for nuclear plants.
I imagine the main concern would be the reactor itself as all reat can be replaced.
Not to argue minutia, as it doesn’t take away from my correct point, but I was speaking specifically of the reactor and it’s housing and the building around it. A reactor when it’s built has a pre-planned age limit to it.
We can do calculations to evaluate them. If someone creates a fairly accurate or at least conservative stimulation of the reactor and housing, a mechanical engineer should be able to determine if it’s still good for operation or needs replacement. They use ASME code and tables to do life fraction calculations.
He was specifically referring to the serviceable ones.
Disproven by Russia. Maybe sometimes core is replaced because it uses unsafe design by current standards like in St. Petesburg.
Russia isn’t really known for their safety rules. A lot of those reactors are running way past their expiration and are deteriorating past the point where they should be running.
It’s a finite fact. A reactor has a lifetime to it, then it needs to be replaced. Unlike other mechanical devices/engines it can’t be serviced because of the radiation involved.
Russia isn’t really known for their safety rules.
Agreed except nuclear. After Chernobyl there were no Nuclear Power Plant accidents in any post-Soviet country. Iven the scale of corruption in country I’m surprised.
A lot of those reactors are running way past their expiration and are deteriorating past the point where they should be running.
It depends how you define expiration. ISS expired like 4 times if not more. For example St. Petesburg NPP still has 2 РБМК-1000(same as in Chernobyl, but modernized) built in 1980(and 1981). Both are planned to be decommisioned in 2025.
Unlike other mechanical devices/engines it can’t be serviced because of the radiation involved.
If reactors were unservicable, then there would be no need in NPP personel.
Both are planned to be decommisioned in 2025.
My point exactly. They have planned decommissioned dates because they cannot be serviced and maintained safely forever.
Unlike other mechanical devices/engines it can’t be serviced because of the radiation involved.
If reactors were unservicable, then there would be no need in NPP personel.
I disagree. During the lifetime operation of a plant they need personnel, it’s not an All or Nothing thing. They don’t just turn off the lights and shut the door and all walk out.
Hell, even after a plant starts it’s decommission plan, which can take 10 to 20 years, they still need personnel.
That is what taxes are for. God forbid government officials have to cut into their overinflated bonuses to keep a major source of energy in service.
Even if you ignore capitalism, at some point they fatigue and break to the point where they cannot be repaired, but need to be replaced.
Normally I’m not a “lesser of two evils” type, but nuclear is such an immensely lesser evil compared to coal and oil that it’s insane people are still against it.
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won’t have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
People tend to overrate the harms from potential changes, while simultaneously vastly underrating the harms that already exist that they’ve gotten used to.
A lot of the anti-nuclear sentiment comes from the 80s when the concerns were a lot more valid (and likely before half the pro-nuclear people in this thread were born).
But blaming people on social media for blocking progress on it is a stretch. They’re multi-billion dollar projects. Have any major governments or businesses actually proposed building more but then buckled to public pressure?
Anyway, I’m glad this conversation has made it to Lemmy because I’ve long suspected the conspicuous popularly and regularity of posts like this on Reddit was the work of a mining lobby that can’t deny climate change anymore, but won’t tolerate profits falling.
The biggest enemy of the left is the right, it’s just that everyone on the left can agree that they’re terrible so it doesn’t come up in discourse too much, whereas the people who are on your side but want to do things a different way will take up much more of your attention.
If socialists and liberals worked together in Germany, the Nazis would not have come to power. It’s their bickering that led to liberals giving Hitler power in a coalition and socialists famously saying “after Hitler, us”.
Even when there’s a fascist takeover, it’s enabled by the left of center arguing with itself.
Firstly, liberals are not left of centre, they are the original capitalists, the ideology that socialism was built in opposition to.
Secondly, Liberals will always side with fascists when push comes to shove. To liberals, Fascists are distasteful, bigots and extremists, however, fascism does not threaten the liberal system. It does not threaten the liberal ruling class, at least inherently, whereas socialism is an existential threat to that class. To a liberal economy, to a liberal nation.
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The main disconnect I see around this is people looking at an objective scale of political science versus a more contextual scale, like narrowing down to Western politics. In terms of an absolute scale, we’re all authoritarians because we believe in having a centralized government. That classification isn’t remotely useful however. Western politics tends towards capitalism and authoritarianism, and so it makes sense to discuss it with adjusted scales.
The axis is authoritarian-libertarian, not liberal. The definition might be different in common parlance, but people not understanding terms in political science through ignorance is not a reason not to use them.
A liberal socialist is a subset of liberals, the same as social democrats and social liberalism.
You cannot seek to preserve capitalism and also be a socialist.
And to Germany’s communist party, fascists were also distasteful, bigots, and extremists, and they would lead to the collapse of capitalism.
“As late as June 1933 the Central Committee of the [KPD] was proclaiming that the Hitler government would soon collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions, to be followed immediately by the victory of Bolshevism in Germany.” - The Coming if the Third Reich, Richard Evans
I’m not going to make some ridiculous statement however that leftists will always side with fascists when push comes to shove. German liberals tolerated fascists to get political power, and German communists tolerated fascists to get political power. They were both fucking idiots for doing so.
You’re correct that on the entire spectrum of political theory that liberals are on the right. However, on that grand spectrum, liberals are also authoritarian, and communists are also authoritarian – because the entire notion of having a centralized government is authoritarian. It’s pointless to look at the spectrum from an objective, academic position, because it’s totally incongruous with the actual reality of things. When it comes to the scope of Western politics, liberals are left of center, and most tend towards positions of complete civil equality for everyone, which is libertarian in Western scope.
Arguing that liberals are actually on the right is like arguing that we never actually have negative temperatures in winters because Kelvin is always positive and it’s impossible to have negative Kelvin. You’re technically correct, but for realistic purposes it’s utterly meaningless.
And to Germany’s communist party, fascists were also distasteful, bigots, and extremists, and they would lead to the collapse of capitalism.
This would be a good mirroring response if it had any amount of truth to it. To the Communists in Germany, the fascists were their mortal enemy. The two parties were fighting in the streets. The Communists saw the fascists as a capitalist system, they certainly were not under the impression that fascism would bring about the end of capitalism.
A declaration by the Communists that the Fascists would collapse under their own contradictions is not evidence to the contrary, or evidence that the German communists tolerated the fascists.
Liberal and libertarian are not the same thing and cannot be conflated, and authoritarianism isn’t anything with a state.
I swear, the political compass has rotted people’s brains.
But that’s kind of part of the problem though… By resorting to violence they destroyed democracy in Germany by the legitimizing the authority of the state.
As cited by the University of Cambridge:
“Smash the Fascists…” German Communist Efforts to Counter the Nazis, 1930–31 Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
By James J. Ward
“For most historians in the West, the German Communist Party (KPD) belongs among the gravediggers of the Weimar Republic. Other culprits certainly abounded; still, the Communists are held to have made a major contribution to the fall of Weimar by preaching violence, promoting civil disorder and economic disruption, and deliberately trying to weaken the republic’s chief supporters, the Social Democrats (SPD). With such policies, Western scholars have charged, the Communists in effect collaborated with the Nazis and their allies on the right to bring about the destruction of Germany’s first parliamentary democracy.”
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
I really don’t get this “nuclear as stepping stone” argument. Nuclear power plants take up to ten years to build. Also (at least here in Germany) nuclear power was expensive as hell and was heavily subsidized.
We have technology to replace coal and gas: Wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Why bother with nuclear and the waste we can’t store properly…?
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
That’s a little out of nowhere and I don’t get what you’re saying, but I totally agree with the rest
How do you plan to reach 80% non-carbon-based energy by 2030? That’s the current stated goal by the Biden Admin, and it’s arguably not aggressive enough. Nuclear plants take a minimum of 5 years to build, but that’s laughably optimistic. It’s more like 10.
SMR development projects, even if they succeed, won’t be reaching mass production before 2030.
The clock has run out; it has nothing to do with waste or disasters. Greenpeace won.
Greenpeace won
And in doing so, helped doom us all together with big oil, gas and coal.
This is why I’m very wary of groups that are environmentalists vs groups of scientists. I have strong distaste for the former as woo woo people who only follow the science when it’s convenient.
10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.
If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.
And at that time, you’ll say either “it’s too late to rely on nuclear now” or “fortunately we’re about to get these new power plants running”. You’re not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you’re building for the next decades.
Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on “clean production” and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim “green manufacturing”. That country is… China!
but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
Yes, so we need change FAST. Not in 15 years when the nuclear plant is finally built, not in 20 years when it starts producing commercial power, not in 25 years when it finally offsets the carbon cost of the concrete to build it, not in 30 years when it breaks even on the cost and the company can think about building another, not in 35 years when it offsets the cost in money and carbon to decommission the thing in the future. Now, so we should be building windfarms, that are MASSIVELY cheaper per MW than nuclear and can be built in 6 months and have less of a carbon impact.
Any way you run the numbers, any metric you look at wind beats nuclear.
I used to be very very pro nuclear, then one day I tried to argue against someone and did the calculations myself.
There’s about 100 years of uranium ressource available actually, double the production and you got only 50 years… that’s mainly the problem with nuclear. Extraction from the ocean is economically not viable.
Why yes lets build 150 fission plants every year for 30 years so we can checks notes generate 1/5 of the current demand. By all means research fussion. But to think that humans are competent enough to manage that many plants at once and to ignore the permanent issue of the waste is crazy to me. In addition nuclear is more carbon intensive than renewables and the more plants you make the quicker you will run out of optimal uranium deposits. “But what about fast breeders?!?!” why yes lets make tons of plutonium and have our plant constantly catch on fire so we can pursue a decades old dead end technology. We could be building massive floating wind farms off coasts around the world but nah lets whine about a pipe dream that nuclear will save the day instead. This activist is misled as many are sadly.
Isn’t the main worry the “side product” of weapons grade nuclear materials?
There are nuclear plants in operation today that do not use or create any fuel that is capable of being weaponized. In fact, coal plants emit more radiation than a modern nuclear power plant.
The issue of reactors creating weapons grade materials and the radioactive impact of a plant on the surrounding environment are really 2 totally separate issues. You’re right on both counts, but the way you put them together makes it sound like they’re somehow related.
Also to split some hairs, just because you can’t make a nuke out of radioactive material doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be weaponized, you could make dirty bombs out of pretty much anything radioactive, just conventional explosives to scatter radioactive stuff around making it hard to clean up. Pretty sure that spent fuel of any type would probably make for a great dirty bomb if the wrong people were able to get their hands on it.
There are nuclear plants in operation today that do not use or create any fuel that is capable of being weaponized.
And they cost too much. Governments only fund weaponizeable fission.
In fact, coal plants admit much more radiation than a modern nuclear power plant.
Not in a way that can be concentrated and weaponized.
No.
I don’t have the sources right now, but nuclear reactor designs exist that output minimal weapons grade materials and some that output none at all. IIRC they are in use already, but I’d have to check what their names are.
Yes. It’s possible, but they are not of interest to nuclear power states.
None of them is ignoring climate change, Actually you are more than anyone else since you are promoting an energy source that isn’t green. Many other nuclear accidents happened over the past years but you sound like the kind of person that doesn’t care much about the environment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste_dumping_by_'Ndrangheta
“Nuclear energy isn’t green” lol. You sound like an anti-vaxxer.
do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I am not sure when the narrative around nuclear power became nuclear energy vs renewables when it should be nuclear and renewables vs fossil fuels.
We need both nuclear and renewable energy where we try to use and develop renewables as much as possible while using nuclear energy to plug the gaps in the renewable energy supply
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Don’t get scared off by the N Word
Nuclear isn’t the monster it’s made out to be by oil and coal propagands.
I live less than 2 miles from the last remaining coal power station in England.
I would much rather have nuclear instead of a chimney chucking god knows what into the air (and subsequently into me) for my entire life.
Fun fact, coal plants produce more radiation into their environment than nuclear plants
Modern reactor designs are so damn safe it’s insane
That wasn’t fun at all.
If they are so damn safe why i can’t build one in my backyard?
Because the radioactive bits need to be handled by trained and trusted personnel because if those bits fall into the wrong hands they can be used for some horrible shit
My biggest concern here is the “wrong hands” part. I absolutely believe that nuclear waste can be stored safely for a very long time, but I know from experience that safety is a distant concern next to minimizing costs for a company. We have companies breach environmental protection rules all the time, and yet some people still see the EPA as too powerful and want to tear it down. How do we ensure that waste is actually stored safely?
By ensuring that said power plants aren’t run by corporate interests and investors concerned with the bottom line above all else.
so are you saying that it is not safe?
If I install solar panels and the inverters incorrectly I could potentially harm or kill myself and others. Therefore solar isn’t safe.
But then why you can build these in your garden and not nuclear?
with the risk of feeding the troll, maybe this will sway some fence sitters from adopting this argument
because we allow people to shave (some even do it with straight razors, too - dangerous shite) themselves and others with little to no oversight but we don’t let them perform surgery without proper training that takes a decade or so to master. should that make surgery illegal?
also, if you want to talk safety for home implements just look at the number of people that die due to carbon monoxide poisoning (or sometimes explosions) because of improperly set up heating at home. did you know it’s illegal to operate on your own gas pipes without proper permits? yup, you need to be qualified for that so you don’t rig your house into an IED
or if you want to have some fun, play around with some improperly discharged fridge capacitors, and see what that gets you. yet, you still have a fridge, I’d wager. by your logic, if it’s allowed in a home, it’s safe, right?
Because crayon eaters like you would open them up.
Try to get fuel-grade uranium.
Such a dumb question.
Building a nuclear power plant requires the collaboration of physicists, nuclear + electrical + civil engineers, etc…
Solar requires a certified electrician.
We know how to build nuclear safely, it just requires a lot more effort and oversight, therefore is not something you can build at home.
Have you ever been in a coal fired plant? Or even easier, been around a coal furnace for home heating? What about industrial environments?
That shit isn’t safe.
There are different levels of safety, personal reactors are on the other side of a cultural shift.
Everything can be unsafe if in the wrong hands
There are different degrees of safety associated with all things and we as a society have deemed nuclear power plants and their fuel as something that should only be in the hands of those trained and trusted in how to use it
Because few governments scared about nuclear bombs more
If planes are safer than cars, why can’t I fly a Boeing 797-9 Dreamliner?
Chew on that for a while.
If planes are safer than cars, why can’t I fly a Boeing 797-9 Dreamliner?
Because perhaps they are not
It’s called fly ash and releases more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear power plant producing the save amount of electricity. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
I lived less than 2 miles from a coal power station (until they pulled it down). By the owners own admission, when it was running, it released about 60kg of radioactive material a year from stuff that was in the coal.
I would rather have a gun pointed at me than a bazooka, that doesn’t mean i should have a weapon pointed at me.
We can solve a problem without generating another one. There are better alternatives to nuclear.
There are no alternatives to nuclear.
This isn’t true at all, I’m pro nuclear but battery fields and full renewables is still an option, albeit more expensive as it stands
To be honest nuclear power is pretty damn safe, safer than wind and only beat by solar.
Chart comparing sources of electricity per terrawatt hour vs deaths.
Edit: small clarification
And that isn’t a counter argument.
100% right.
It doesn’t make any sense without reprocessing though, have to do both. Fortunately France and Finland have active programs.
The US needs to both learn how to do reprocessing again and build more plants.
The US has such a huge stockpile of used fuel, our reprocessing would be so deeply effective.
The US needs to legalize it first
And China
France program is still on a crisis due to maintenance and drought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis_since_late_2021
The maintenance crisis is under control, it will not be worse than past year.
Under control ? EDF Debt is around 100 billions, disponibility is around 58% and electricity price took +25% since two years…
EDF have been in debt for a very long time, they’ve been bought back by the state to restart a new plant generation. Disponibility has been worse and it was uncertain as the new maintenance issue was inspected everywhere. Now the global analysis is done and the maintenance has been aligned with the prediction for months, which calmed the market. Electricity price increase is multi-factorial: post COVID restart, war in Ukraine and new nuclear maintenance issue. It’s still under the effect of all of that and it will take a couple more years to come back to the previous situation, though still higher prices due to normal inflation and progressive carbon pricing.
If you’re worried about price variations, more renewable will make that worse. There are big variations of daily prices on the European market depending on wind in the North for example. Although thanks to the connected system, we can benefit from the right conditions from multiple parts of the continent.
It seems Finland looked at EU and USSR and said “I want that, but better”.
Alsu Russia has its own reprocessing for a long time, but yeah, not until Putin dies.
Greenpeace was founded to be an anti-nuclear organization. See, most of the founding members were members of the Sierra Club (another environmentalist organization) but the Sierra Club was actually pro-nuclear power. The Sierra Club was actually fighting against the installation of new dams due to the effect of wiping out large swaths of river habitat and preventing salmon runs and such.
Anyway, in 1971 there was an underground nuclear bomb test by the US government in an area that was geologically unstable. (there were a bunch of tests to see just how geologically unstable). Protesters thought that the test would cause an earthquake and a tsunami.
Anyway, the people who were unhappy with the Sierra club not actively protesting nuclear power, wanted to protest this nuclear bomb test too, so they formed an organization called the “Don’t make a wave committee”. They sued, the suit was decided in the US’s favor, the test went off, and no earthquake happened (which is how the earlier tests said it would go).
At some point, the “Don’t make a wave committee” turned into Greenpeace.
Also about this timeframe, Greenpeace started receiving yearly donations from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation is the charitable foundation created by the Rockefeller heirs that “uses oil money to make the world a better place” but they kind of don’t. They’ve been anti-nuclear since the beginning, and even directly funded some radiation research in the 1950s that lied about safe exposure limits to radiation, claiming that there was no safe limit. That research went on to shape international policy, and by the time new research came out, the policy was already written and thus hard to change.
As a side note, another alumnus of the Sierra Club was approached by the then CEO of Atlantic Oil and directly paid a sum of something like $100k (in 1970 money) to found another anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth.
The Sierra Club and many other Western Environmental Groups have been receiving Russian money for a long time. Money that Russia is specifically spending to increase Western dependence on the Oil and Gas it sells. If it hampers a Western Nation’s O&G or Nuclear development then Russia wants to invest in it.
Yup, but that Russian funding started after the Sierra Club stopped being pro-nuclear power. Which is sad.
Any good sources on this that you could recommend?
https://www.rbf.org/grantees/greenpeace-fund-inc But the info is only the last 5 years. The Rockefeller fun has actually started to break with oil in the last 10 or so years. They’ve been greenwashing themselves.
Still, the Rockefeller foundation is very anti-nuclear. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/grant/nuclear-threat-initiative-2021-2/
Thanks for these!
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.
We need a mix. Centralization isn’t the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won’t be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.
Even if it takes 2 decades to get a new plant going, it’s a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels we don’t need any more, and therefore worth doing.
If it isn’t fossil fuels, it’s automatically better.
The main problem with nuclear power plants isn’t the radiation or the waste or the risk of accident. It’s that they cost so damn much they’re rarely profitable, especially in open electricity markets. 70-80% of the cost of the electricity is building the plant, and without low interest rates and a guaranteed rate when finished it doesn’t make economic sense to build them.
The latest nuclear plant in the US is in Georgia and is $17 billion over budget and seven years later than expected.
It’s that they cost so damn much
The cost of continued fossil fuel use is far higher.
rarely profitable
Profit should not be the motivation of preventing our climate disaster from getting worse. If the private sector isn’t able to handle it, then the government needs to do so itself.
Would it be better to dump billions into nuclear power plants that won’t come online for a decade at least, or to dump billions into renewables that can be online and reducing emissions in under a year?
We should worldwide be putting trillions into both. Renewables should be first priority, but not all locations have good solar, wind, and battery options.
That’s your opinion. I think funding nuclear is just burning money and wasting time we don’t have.
You cannot run the entire grid on entirely renewable. We physically don’t have enough lithium in the world to make the batteries for it, and even if you don’t use lithium there would be untold ecological destruction to extract the rare earths.
Renewable and hydroelectric is a solution but not viable everywhere and hydro also causes massive ecological destruction
If we started building nuclear powerplants right now it would take 10-20 years before they’re even online. That’s 10-20 years worth of technology improvements that could make it obsolete, especially if we don’t pin our hopes on nuclear baseload and start building a grid that can be 100% renewable.
And that’s not even mentioning the truly massive budget overruns. Or the environmental impact of mining and refining fuel.
Isn’t a lot of that due to organization structures in US power Markets? I remember reading that a lot of times costs on electrical power go nuts due to near fraudulent managers.
Nuclear plants are immensely profitable, just not on time scales politicians are interested in. You’re deep in the red for 10-20 years and then after that it prints money
So after 10-20 years of construction and cost overruns and 10-20 years of operating at a loss you start making money.
And that’s assuming electricity rates don’t drop in that time. Which they are as renewables get deployed more and more because they don’t go 100% over budget in time and money.
If we get started building nuclear power plants now, how much will storage and transmission tech improve before they’re even completed, let alone profitable?
It’s not 10-20 years of construction AND 10-20 years at a loss, it’s 10-20 years of construction at a loss. Not great, but up to 40 years as you suggest sounds a lot worse because it’s a misrepresentation.
How long do you think it will take for a nuclear power plant to earn back the $34 billion it takes to build one? They’re definitely not making that much money the first year the plant is online.
No we don’t, you can use only renewables and just cut the useless spending
The classic shortsighted point of view that has put us in the current situation in the first place.
We can and should be doing both. Use the money our governments are giving to fossil fuels in subsidies. $7 trillion PER YEAR in public subsidies go to fossil fuels. Channel that to nuclear and renewables and there’s more than enough to decarbonise the grids with both short- and long-term solutions.
What we definitely should not be doing is closing perfectly working nuclear power plants.
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Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.
Nuclear (with the exception of France because they’re special) is limited to being a base load as you alluded, but power demand varies throughout the day. Nuclear can’t vary on a 24 hour scale to follow the load so we need renewables and energy storage or hydroelectric to make up the difference. That’s what “nuclear OR renewables” misses
I can’t imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.
not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.
You don’t need to imagine a future without nuclear in the mix - there are plenty of places doing fine with renewable and without coal or nuclear right now.
which country?
For example South Australia - no coal since 2016, no nuclear ever, runs mostly on a mix of renewables - solar and wind with batteries and transient gas for in-fill.
Edit: thanks for downvoting my verified statement of fact
This doesn’t seem to agree with that statement.
So I looked in the document and it agrees with my point. The most recent stats for South Australia are 8977 GWh of renewable energy and 5717 GWh non-renewable gas energy. You’ll note the gas use is dropping pretty rapidly as they put more renewables on.
Ok, so from your point of view 40% fossil fuels is still doing fine? I interpreted your original comment to mean they were doing 100% or close to it in renewables. Then I misunderstood.
never heard of that country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stations_in_Australia?wprov=sfla1
Wind and Solar are “renewable” to a certain scale. If you dump gigantic wind farm in the middle of a jet stream, for example, you can impact downstream climate cycles.
that’s why we could be aware of all the externalities.
solar could be deployed on the ocean but that will certainly lower sea temperatures.
let’s terrafirm intentionally rather than just accidentally.
Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.
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The cost of electricity dropping is bad news for nuclear power plants because they’ll be even less profitable when they’re finished. Especially since they take decades to construct, during which time renewables and storage become even cheaper.
And we’ll still need a way to store power from renewables when they overproduce.
Don’t forget nuclear waste that is just building up forever with nothing to do with it.
Do you know how much nuclear waste has been produced in the whole world for the entire history of nuclear energy production?
Around 500 000 tonnes.
That’s 0.001% of the waste thrown into the atmosphere by fossil fuels EVERY YEAR.
It’s the only kind of waste that goes away on it’s own if you literally sit on it and do nothing
A big problem with solar and wind is that they are not as reliable as nuclear. In a worst-kaas scenario neither will produce energy because there is no sun or wind and there is no way to store enough electricity for these moments. Therefore we need a constant source that creates electricity for those moments. Of course, we do also need renewables, but nuclear is essential because it is reliable.
That’s why places that use mostly renewables and no coal or nuclear often have gas fired generation which can start up in the rare cases when it’s needed. These places already exist and do just fine with no nuclear.
This may be true, but I am not convinced that it is any better than nuclear. To start up regeneration quick the gas winning needs to be on a pilot light (dutch source: https://nos.nl/l/2485108). In Groningen there are (according to the same source) 5 places on pilot light that together must produce at least 2.8 billion cubic metres of gas a year. This is quite a lot of fossil fuels, so I would rather have a nuclear power plant than this gas winning (which comes with other disadvantages as well).
I’m sorry but burning methane isn’t just fine.
It’s in-fill which is only used when needed and it’s reducing every year as more renewable sources are added.
is only used when needed
Sure, but it’s still GHG emissions, “only when needed” or not. The whole point we’re making is those gas generators should have been nuclear generators.
And we continue building gas and coal power plants. Why? Build nuclear plants instead.
So it’s more nuclear vs renewables and a ton of batteries. (Or other storage options)
What it really should be is nuclear plus renewables plus a ton of batteries (or other storage options) vs fossil fuels.
If renewables are an option you should definitely go for them, but we as a species are pretty much at manufacturing capacity for them. That capacity is being increased, but for now it makes sense to do nuclear in parallel.
Renewables also have the issue of storage, and not all locations are as suitable for wind or solar.
There are cases where nuclear makes more sense, and especially in the short term we need anything that will get us away from fossil fuels.
You could build an entirely new solar, wind, and battery supply chain from the mines to the factories in a quarter of the time it takes to build a single nuclear plant.
Nuclear is a much more reliable power source, barring a breakdown, you know exactly how much a nuclear reactor will produce at any given time.
Renewables are much more finnicky, and you really need something like hydro, that has a large amount of energy storage, to back it up.
We need both.
It’s not one or the other.
Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.
It’s not actually required at all though, thats all FUD from the big energy monopoly that hate anything that can be owned and run by people that aren’t them - there are endless options for making a stable grid using renewables and they’re all considerably cheaper, quicker to make and a lot more resilient.
Nuclear gets pushed so hard because it protects the billionaires monopoly that’s the only reason.
What are you talking about? Nuclear has been the target of a massive misinformation campaign from the fossil fuel corporations for decades. Looks like you’ve fallen for the FUD. People have been formatted by literally every form of media to think of nuclear as something dirty, dumping green glowing waste into the environment, and making fish grow extra heads.
Countries like Germany have been closing perfectly fine NPPs because of FUD funded by their huge fossil fuel lobby. 80% of our energy is from fossils, and they have apparently successfully convinced people that we shouldn’t attack that number with every tool at our disposal. Meanwhile, we’re collectively spending literally trillions of dollars on fossil fuel subsidies every year. Is that what pushing nuclear hard looks like?
You accuse me of falling for FUD, I accuse you of falling for FUD - you say the reason it’s so unpopular is because everyone else is wrong, I say it’s so popular because everyone else is wrong…
Germany has been very concerned about nuclear since a reactor exploded and they lived thorough the drama of having a cloud of nuclear fallout drift over them, i remember it and it was scary. Interesting France loves nuclear and this didn’t happen in France, the French government lied and said they didn’t detect any radiation because they didn’t want to pay for leukaemia treatment and etc – what I’m getting at is it’s super complex why some people love nuclear and some hate it. When a second major nuclear disaster hit the planet it bulstered German distrust in the tech, it’s not some sinister plot.
The facts remain billionaires make huge sums from oil and are already invested, that’s why they fight to keep it - they know they’ll lose their monopoly when we move away from it if we go to something normal companies and towns can run so their favourite alternative is the only other option that allows them to have a monopoly.
Oil and gas subsidy are bad for sure, you’re kidding of you think the nuclear industry doesn’t get absolutely huge amounts of public money thrown at it - look at Hinckley point C for example, the British government locked in an absurdly high price per mwh so EDF would get paid about double the current market rate - and this isn’t rare, all over the world tax payers are funding nuclear subsidiaries because the plants aren’t economically viable
And when the men in radiation suits came round collecting bird poop because the local reactor was leaking that’s also paid for by the tax payers - it happened twice that I’ve known of. That’s before you even think about how much tax money was spent on development and related costs, fuel sourcing, etc…
The wind industry has had mild government support, solar even less - except in Germany where it’s been incredibly effective in enabling rooftop solar and grid modernization. Yet they’ve been building solar farms near me a lot recently because small private investors are able to actually see a return on their investments - since they started taking about building a replacement nuclear plant dozens of renewable sites have been put in the area, all now generating and some already paid off and making profit.
Nuclear was amazing in the fifties and it still has some limited use cases but it’s basically obsolete as more modern technologies have emerged - and are continuing to emerge, they’re starting to put in tidal systems and biomass conversion facilities (which are actually carbon negative) with huge developments underway in solar panel development, if the same investment had been made in solar and chemistry as has been with nuclear then there wouldn’t be any of the fuel crisis going on.
Seriously go look at the history of nuclear power research and development, government money and billionaire energy conglomerate money gets poured into it at every step and it’s endlessly pushed as the next big thing… Then look at the developments in things like solar panels and algae to fuel chemistry - that’s all major breakthroughs by chem nerds who used their moms old tuppawear to cultivate strains because they’d already spent the research budget on a bus ride to the local park to scoop algae from the pond.
Nuclear subidies aren’t even in the same order of magnitude as fossil fuel subsidies. There’s so much fearmongering in that comment I don’t even know where to start… Chernobyl really was the best thing to happen to the fossil fuel lobby.
go look at the history of nuclear power research and development
My friend, I went to university for this shit.
Yes renewables need to come with storage.
And where do you think all the materials for that come from? Eind turbines, solar panels and batteries require huge amounts of (rare) earth materials that need to be dug up in very -let’s say ugly- mines… lithium for example, is now the core component for most of our batteries and lithium mines are polluting as hell. If we want to have all the lithium we need for all of our storage capacity, well need to destroy beautiful places like the Atacama desert because if we don’t we won’t have enough lithium.
The rare in ‘rare earth’ is not related to scarcity, many of the most common elements in the crust are ‘rare earth materials’ lithium is a great example because it’s hugely abundant especially in salt water where it can be extracted at the same time as desalination - which is especially good paired with wind and solar because it can rapidly switch power usage so excess energy at peek times can be used which helps stabilise the grid, then when generation is low it can pause to conserve power. Also ideal for placement directly tied to solar where sun and saltwater are plentiful, such as the equator.
The other good thing is that lithium is infinitely recyclable and battery tech keeps evolving to require less of it in its chemistry. Theres endless other battery technologies and energy storage methods available too, lithium is great for cars and phones because of the energy density but for grid tied storage that’s not really an issue.
Storage technology isn’t there yet. Nuclear is. The only viable approach is “all of the above.” Anything less is foolishness and oil industry propaganda.
50 yeas ago people couldn’t think of a future without fossile fuel. 100 years ago people thought ships would run on coal for eternity and 200 years ago or in fact up until WW2 horses did most of the work when it came to transportation.
Things change fast. Stagnation of technology is not the norm.
There are urgent needs we can’t wait 50 years for.
The same people who run the oil companies also run nuclear plants, billionaires love a monopoly but what they hate is local communities being able to own and run solar farms and wind turbines, they hate the idea of someone that isn’t them being able to spend a million making a profitable offshore wind farm or a raised water energy storage facility – more than anything they hate the thought of houses and businesses having PV on the roof and being able to detach evenb just in part from the mechanisms owned by them.
The same people who run the oil companies also run nuclear plants
What? You keep saying this in this thread, where the hell are you getting it from?
I mean it’s not even a deep dive to get to that conclusion, it’s not even a puddle depth investigation - the companies which run nuclear power station are also oil and gas companies. EDF literally just do both, you don’t need to look at shared ownership or board members or anything, they’re literally a French government owned power company that traditionally deal in fossel fuel. NRG energy literally nuclear and fossel fuel company, Siemens energy literally used to be called gas and power decision, Bruce power in Canada is TC energy who are the major player in oil and gas pipelines…
Go look up who owns your local nuclear plant, it’s oil and gas companies so let’s not pretend otherwise
Scalability problems. We need to make as many solar wind and battery installations as we can, but there’s only so much production and installation capacity. And eventually we’ll run short on materials, especially for batteries. Nuclear uses a different system, so we can scale that even as we have issues with other systems.
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Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels
Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
Cause once again no one can see the potential advancements nuclear technology can have if it had proper investment. Everyone see’s Chernobyl and Fukushima and then they switch off.
Yes Renewables are better than nuclear for the moment but to demonize and not even discuss it is just burying your head in the sand
This thread: nuclear is far better than fossil fuels
Everyone else: nuclear is not as good as renewables
This thread: nuclear is far better than fossil fuels
Crickets
