People who think Nuclear is very safe and impossible to fuck up forget they will have a government department called Doge being run by a fuckwit
Nuclear plants are far from the only public hazard if he’s actually going to go into places and derail them personally.
Perfect. Now that renewable technology is finally cheap and quick to build, the oil and gas lobby is trying to redirect attention to nuclear, which takes decades to build in most places.
We can do both. There’s nothing preventing us from doing both, and the most effective way for the oil and gas lobby to get what they want is to divide us.
If pro-renewable people say “we must only have renewables, nothing else!” It makes us seem like ideologues. If we seem like ideologues, moderates get confused because they think “well I do like to hedge my bets and try all things out.” And pro-nuclear advocates (who are all over the spectrum) get louder, complain more, and swing more moderates and politicians back toward nuclear and away from renewables. Then you can repeat the cycle in reverse.
The conservative trick is not to substitute something that doesn’t work for something that does. It’s to keep us divided, blaming each other, and going back and forth between different solutions so often that we never get anything done. Chaos is a ladder.
We can do both
Can we? As you said, a lot of it is trying to divide us…. The next step is “we don’t need these renewables here, we should build nuclear” [continuing to pollute for 14 years, multiple billions of dollars]
Lobbyists having an argument is one thing - and inevitable, they can make up one no matter what - infighting is quite another.
We can do both.
If you have a set amount of money and resources to invest renewables are almost exclusively the better choice. Investing in nuclear instead means it will take even longer for us to wean off fossiles. That’s why it’s so useful for the oil lobby to support nuclear.
Jesus is this honestly how you think the world works? Oil is lobbying for their competitor? And why the fuck would any of these unfounded scenarios mean we couldn’t, as citizens, push for both cleaner power options?
Almost exclusively? No. Nuclear produces predictable energy and a lot of it in a small area, which is why things like data centers are being built on them. As another example, if you’re above the arctic circle renewables straight up aren’t a thing in the winter (unless you count geothermal, maybe).
Overall it’s still probably the better choice, just because nuclear is hard, but it’s not like it doesn’t have a few remaining drawbacks.
We don’t have a set amount of money and resources, fundamentally.
We have an abundance of food, water, and shelter.
We have a lot of smart people who are currently spending their lives making money on made up markets and apps.
We have plenty of steel, concrete, and any other resources that would be in contention.
When it comes to money, if we raised taxes just a little, we’d be fine. I’m kind of an MMT person, but point is, we could get money, print it, tax it, etc. as it’s an abstraction on top of the other things above.
The mindset of “it’s gotta be one or the other” is a false choice presented by the fossil fuel industry and conservative politicians. They say we can’t raise taxes and we can’t increase deficit spending so they can get us to fight. And I guarantee you, if we all agreed to do nuclear, they would flip the script and start investing in renewables, because what they want is to kill momentum. After all, who do you think was behind all the scare mongering after three mile island?
I don’t want to kill momentum for renewables, but I want to start building it for nuclear at the same time.
We can do both.
If we were actually going full speed with “all of the above”, I’d agree. We need to and it’ll give the best results. However nuclear is very expensive and takes too many years to build. All too often it’s there only because the current fossil fuel companies would find it more profitable.
We can’t afford to lose momentum on the fastest and cheapest energy choices to wait for something more profitable for fossil fuel companies
The mindset of “it’s gotta be one or the other” is a false choice presented by the fossil fuel industry and conservative politicians.
What fossil lobby or conservative politician is currently saying “okay guys you can have renewables, but then we will have to cut back on nuclear”? That’s the opposite of what conservatives are saying.
You are repeating a talking point that’s being spread around to distract from the fact that it is financially rewarding for the fossil lobby to postpone the transition away from them to sustainable energy sources as far as possible, which is exactly what will happen if we drain resources from renewables towards nuclear. And acting like our resources aren’t in some way limited is nothing but wishful thinking.
While you wait for the next nuclear power plant, the fossil fuel lobby is raking in record profits for decades to come.
Invest the money into renewables instead. And every bit of money you think you can get from “just raising the taxes a little” or “printing it” - invest that too. Everything else is a waste of time and resources.
I don’t care what bad-faith conservatives are saying, yes they’re full of it. Here are the facts:
- We are pushing forward full-tilt on renewables in general. Factories are going up, the IRA was 80% focused on renewables, and as long as the incoming admin doesn’t actively roll things back, we’re heading in the right direction.
- Headlines like this one are coming up because private companies are starting to invest in nuclear for their own purposes. This is spare money and effort that we could be leaving on the table.
- If we start seeing politicians actively shutting down green energy in favor of nuclear, we should absolutely say “fuck no”.
- As of yet, I have not been seeing this in policy or in reality, and every year the renewable industry becomes more self-sustaining and grows without active pushes from the government (though we can and should continue to subsidize).
From where I’m standing, we should be encouraging the private sector and investing some percentage of our portfolio in restarting and building nukes with all of that context.
This is the same logic behind building an investment portfolio. You could go all in on Bitcoin, or you could spread out your portfolio in the market. 80% into the solid, tried and true stocks, 15% into up and comers, 5% into moonshots like crypto or gamestop or whatever. Same deal here.
Honestly, as long as fossil fuels are more expensive nobody’s going to stop the transition, anyway.
A decade ago, two decades ago, I was all for nuclear.
But something that takes 20 years from start to finish isn’t going to cut it when we’re already nearing 1.5 degrees.
That kind of thinking was wrong a decade ago and is still wrong now. If we have any chance of stopping climate change we are going to have to massively decarbonise not only electricity production, but also transport and heating. That’s going to mean a massive electrification of those sectors and a huge increase in demand over decades. Putting off large fixed investment now as it wont help out immediately but will help significantly during the time that electricity demand is growing is just nonsense.
Again, we can do both. This is not a zero sum game, there are nuclear physicists and people who are passionate about nuclear who will either be working on nukes, OR pivoting to software engineering so they can make money on the crypto/AI/whatever boom. I have met them.
The enemy is not the person who wants to build a parallel solution to the same problem. The enemy is the person who says “oh oops, there’s just not enough money 😬 we gotta fund only one, which one should we do? Figure it out and then we can move forward, in the meantime we’ll just keep using these fossil fuels.”
They are playing us with divisive politics. My expectation if we fund both is one of the following happens:
- We reach 20 years from now, and between storage breakthroughs and renewables scaling out we are 100% renewable capable. We stop construction of new nuclear plants, we keep the few that came online for a while and then we decommission. We win.
- We reach 20 years from now. We have made significant progress on renewables and storage, but we still haven’t been able to replace base load entirely. Storage breakthroughs didn’t happen, and we have to keep funding more research. In the meantime, we’re able to decarbonize and rely on nukes instead of fossil fuels. We win.
Hedging bets is smart in all cases, especially when it’s not a zero sum game. Don’t let them divide us.
I think it’s generally people online talking about one or the other, or trying to advocate for nuclear over renewables. If it had to be one, renewables are cheaper, faster to build, already having industry scaling up. We can’t afford to slow this train down.
I’m more than happy to jump on we need all the non-fossil energy generation we can get, but we can’t afford to be any slower than we already are. We can’t put off progress we can have now for some potential in a decade or two.
I’m also not convinced we can make nuclear affordable and safe, but it has enough advantages that we should certainly try …. Only if it doesn’t slow down where we’re already making progress
Agreed. I was never saying it was, but that oil and gas companies are pushing nuclear instead of renewables because of this very reason.
Sure, both can be true though. What I don’t see very often from the pro-nuke crowd, right or left, is that we should defund renewables. Pro-nuke types tend to be pretty technical and very in the weeds so they see the benefits of both. They just get bent out of shape by their pet project being defunded.
On the pro-renewable side, there’s more partisanship because it’s a wider base, it appeals to the crunchy side of the left, AND nuclear has been character assassinated with fear around meltdowns. Most people with concerns around timelines and technical constraints on nuclear, like yourself, are flexible too.
It’s the crunchy folks and the moderates we need to convince. If they log onto a post here on Lemmy and see a bunch of pro-nuke people and pro-renewable people arguing and not agreeing that both forms are awesome and we should do both, those people are much more likely to fall for one of the forms of propaganda from the fossil fuel lobbyists. After all, we can’t even agree!
They can do whatever they want. They’re still going to get undercut.
Yeah, because it’ll tie budgets up for ten years building it, and in the meantime all the fossil fuel people can tap those final nails into our coffin while they line their pockets.
Ten years? More like twenty. Hinkley point C was started in 2013, supposed to be finished 2023. This year the estimation was corrected to 2029-2031.
Counterpoint: UAE went from zero nuclear energy to producing as much as Denmark or Portugal produce renewables in ten years. From a base of zero nuclear expertise in the country.
It was 13 years and not 10. From your source the bid was won in 2009 and the third reactor started in 2022, with the fourth not ready for that article (middle 2023). Still not 20 years, but 30% above the claimed decade.
The graphic and comparison however are just clickbait. For one it compares a filthy rich oil-state without democracy and Denmark/Portugal where the government can’t just push something like that through. Apart from that it’s made to look like a sudden extreme increase from UAE that might continue that strongly, which it won’t. Starting an NPP of course makes a sudden huge spike, while renewables are more incremental.
This comes as no surprise to me when the source seems to be highly subjective with a huge bias towards UAE:
Those who are critical of these high-energy nations ought to consider that they are not the countries to blame for climate change. Indeed, these countries ought to be applauded for taking measures to wean themselves off of fossil fuels
Of course one of the major oil-states that pushes against measures to slow down the climate change at every chance it gets is not to blame for anything… Sure…
And we all know that the UAE are the international beacon of safety, worker’s rights, rule of law and cost effectiveness.
That’s a really bad argument. That’s like saying the Soviet Union was really good at digging canals.
So existing examples that go against your argument dont count because you dont like the country. OK.
So countering your argument with counterarguments why your example is flawed isn’t allowed, because you’d need to reconsider?
Tell me, do you really think the UAE are willing, not capable, willing to invest in safety and lawfulness as much as any even halfway free country?
Ok so counter-argument, the UK is also a terrible example when it comes to getting things done (safely or not), our government is even worse than the United States when it comes to intentionally fucking up and delaying things in order to funnel public funds into the hands of donors/cronies. Hell we’re already projected to spend more on a high speed rail project that isn’t even high speed by the standards of anywhere else on earth than the EU is spending on their entire half a continent spanning rail network upgrades.
Its possible that it was built to a lower standard than would be expected in the west, both in terms of quality and worker safety. Though unless you have specific reports of that I dont see any reason just to assume it because Arabs bad.
In addition this was largely built by Korean companies who have a successful record of building NPPs at home without incident, I imagine Korea wouldnt be particularly happy if their citizens (especially highly trained and economically productive ones) were being abused to build foreign infrastructure.
The main point is that NPPs dont have to be stuck in a quagmire, and using Hinkley Point as a stand in for all NPP construction is disingenuous, just as using the UAE as a sole example would be.
And even if they do finally build it, it’s still a centralized system that regulatory-captured monopoly utilities can gouge the public on.
Solar and wind threaten them by being decentralized as well as by not relying on fossil fuels.
Centralized power is perfectly fine if your power is state run.
After all, natural monopolies should be socialized and run at cost.
And with the advent of small modular reactors, you can even decentralize your power.
A small reactor can have a building the size of gas station can power a small city, and the reactor will be small enough that it’s literally impossible for it to melt down.
Sadly, regulations in the US (and many US allied nations) incentivise large and large plants that take forever to build and require custom parts which drive up the cost even more.
Moving transport entirely over to the energy grid is going to take more energy than we currently generate - who’d of thought!
We’ve postponed nuclear for +40 years, causing climate change to get further and further out of hands.
Thanks Greenpeace /s
Greenpeace funded by the Rockefeller family trust. Literally.
And Friends of the Earth funded by Atlantic Oil.
The 1970s were full of oil companies throwing money at environmental groups who were anti-nuclear.
Except the money kept rolling in for decades.
If America hadn’t responded to Chernobyl with fear of atomic power and instead adopted a “this is why communism will fail, look how much better we can do it” attitude, the climate crisis would be a non-issue right now
As an engineer, Chernobyl is terrifying. It was close to being 10x worse than it was. The thought that capitalism could do it better is the height of hubris. If you think your technology is fail-safe, nature (including humans) will find a better way to fail.
There are many reasons besides safety that nuclear makes no sense. Others have listed them here. But this recent hand-waving away of safety is frightening. Saying that our technology today is so much better while anti-intellectualism is running rampant. Saying facilities could always be staffed by experts while our political system is more unstable than ever. Thinking that we could store waste for 10,000 years when humanity has never built something that has intentionally survived a fraction of that time.
The downside of this equation is just too severe. Nuclear plants are uninsurable for a reason, and by default are insured by the public. That cost is ignored in the equation, because it’s too large for even the biggest insurance conglomerates to consider.
Don’t forget about three mile island. I think much spin on the Chernobyl situation can be attributed to the embarrassment of the self failure
Threee mile island was only a partial meltdown, and very little fission product was ever released to the environment. Nowhere near as blatant and drastic of a failure as what happened in Chernobyl.
True, however it was embarrassing to the atomic lobby. It was very similar in his a little lack of oversight caused a huge crisis.
The scale of the repercussions was very different, yes and that was emphasized to put the three mile incident in a better light.
Because we were determined to phase out fossil fuels at the time?
About fucking time.
I used to be pro-nuclear and I am still not worried about the safety issue. However, fissile material is still a finite resource and mining for it is an ecological disaster, so I no longer am in favor of it.
Most human acticity requires some degree of mining. Lithium, copper, uranium etc. The impact of that however pales in comparison to the sheer volumes of land that are destroyed by climate change and fossil fuel extraction. Besides, when mines finally do shut down they often become havens for wildlife.
fissile material is still a finite resource
We have reserves that will last centuries, and it can literally be extracted from seawater just like lithium if the economics allow for it. Can’t comment on the mining impact, though. Is it any worse than rare earth metals?
There is no economical way to extract fissile material from sea water. This is no different from people saying you can mine gold that way. Technically, yes. Practically, no.
The only way we know to get the uranium necessary for reactors in the quantities we need to do it is to mine it. And we don’t even have enough to mine to last for a century at current consumption.
The world’s present measured resources of uranium (6.1 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium
Sure, maybe some new practical way to make a reactor without uranium or to find uranium elsewhere might happen. But that’s a MIGHT. With what we know now, we need uranium and we need to mine it and there isn’t enough.
Dude. Read the rest of your source.
Thus, any predictions of the future availability of any mineral, including uranium, which are based on current cost and price data, as well as current geological knowledge, are likely to prove extremely conservative
In recent years there has been persistent misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the abundance of mineral resources, with the assertion that the world is in danger of actually running out of many mineral resources. While congenial to common sense if the scale of the Earth’s crust is ignored, it lacks empirical support in the trend of practically all mineral commodity prices and published resource figures over the long term. In recent years some have promoted the view that limited supplies of natural uranium are the Achilles heel of nuclear power as the sector contemplates a larger contribution to future clean energy, notwithstanding the small amount of it required to provide very large amounts of energy.
Of course the resources of the earth are indeed finite, but three observations need to be made: first, the limits of the supply of resources are so far away that the truism has no practical meaning. Second, many of the resources concerned are either renewable or recyclable (energy minerals and zinc are the main exceptions, though the recycling potential of many materials is limited in practice by the energy and other costs involved). Third, available reserves of ‘non-renewable’ resources are constantly being renewed, mostly faster than they are used.
Literally half the page you linked discusses how we’re not going to run out of resources anytime soon.
Known reserves are sufficient for 90 years because nobody wants to bother with further prospecting when supply hugely exceeds demand.
I did read that, which is why I said this:
Sure, maybe some new practical way to make a reactor without uranium or to find uranium elsewhere might happen. But that’s a MIGHT.
Building tons more nuclear reactors in the hopes that we’ll find new resources to power them all because we haven’t spent enough time prospecting does not make much rational sense to me.
You appear to be severely misunderstanding the source. You may want to take the time to read through it again.
Also, did you think we checked each and every resource we industrialised to make sure we had a few millenia worth before we started using them? Last I heard, our known lithium resources are only sufficient for a decade or two at current rates, never mind the increasing usage.
Are you asking if we did smart things before we began exploiting resources? Because the answer is no, never. Not once.
You’re missing the point, which is that we don’t normally measure reserves in centuries. We prospect as needed, and there is no reason to think that we would be unable to locate new deposits as necessary. All this and more is covered in the source you linked.
As someone who isn’t well versed on the topic, is the impact from mining fissile material worse than the impact of mining the stuff we need for batteries and storage of renewable? Big fan of renewables, and not trying to start some shit. Trying to learn. Lol
Batteries can be made from literal saltwater nowadays.
Otherwise, lithium mining is certainly not exactly good for the environment, but can be managed. Uranium (even the non-fissile) is pretty toxic and can contaminate the whole area.
What happened to the Navajo Nation due to uranium mining is disgusting and it’s what made me turn away from supporting the idea of nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
The early and mid 20th century was the era of thousands of Superfund sites. This particular incident doesn’t seem any worse than average. We’re still dealing with the toxic aftermath of mining and processing all sorts of minerals with no regard for the environment during that time. Is uranium actually any worse than any other mineral in that sense?
I’m not sure “it’s no more a local environmental catastrophe and healthcare nightmare than other forms of mining” is exactly a good argument to do it. And as I showed in another link, we have 90 more years of uranium to power the reactors we currently have, so we better hope we come up with some new way to power reactors quickly considering how long it takes to build one plant with the current technology we can come up with.
You did not show any such thing in your other link, rather the exact opposite.
By your logic about environmental impact, we should then stop ALL mining and processing activities because they caused pollution a century ago. That’s obviously not realistic, practical, nor even helpful. It should be based on the technology and environmental impact of today.
Are you claiming uranium mining no longer causes environmental and health problems on a local level? That’s quite a claim.
It’s also not true.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3653646/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201047/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412020320626
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/
I admit, I am only smart enough to understand the abstracts of the papers and I did not read every link in its entirety, but this does not sound like a solved issue by any means.
I just went to the conclusion of this long paper, which essentially says “we just don’t know enough to assess how bad it could be, but it could be bad,” and I think the final sentence is especially prescient:
Our engineered solutions may well become the contaminated sites of the future.
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1228_web.pdf
Now, if your argument is that it is necessary to cause damage to the local environment and cause a lot of early, painful deaths, I would again say that is not a good argument.
Breeder reactors produce more fissile material than they consume.
As far as I can tell from looking, there are no breeder reactors for large scale power generation, there never have been, and while multiple countries are trying, none of them have actually done it.
There have been plenty. For example, the CANDU series of reactors developed in the 1950s and 60s. Breeder reactors were quite popular during the early days of nuclear power, as it was initially thought that there was maybe only 100 years’ worth of (easily accessible) nuclear material on earth, rather than the thousands (or tens of thousands) of years’ worth we know of now, due to both more reserves being discovered and also easier methods of fuel enrichment being developed. The fact that breeder reactors have fallen out of favour due to abundant fuel reserves certainly says something.
I know there have been plenty of breeder reactors. What I can’t find is a breeder reactor in a scale large enough to generate power for a city. In fact, from what I read, that’s been tried more than once without success. Can you point me to a breeder reactor that was actually a useful test case for powering a city?
The Wikipedia page for breeder reactors has a whole list you can even sort by output capacity. For example, the BN-800.
What I’m reading on Wikipedia is that none of them have been used for large scale power generation yet. Which was what I was saying. Wikipedia showing what their output capacity is does not show how long that output capacity can be maintained or how much it might fluctuate.
Otherwise, what do you think the reason is that no country has yet to use one to power any cities?
Here’s the generation statistics of the BN-800 reactor I mentioned before: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=451 It’s been operating at about 70% of it’s rated capacity basically since it was first turned on, that’s large scale power generation. Breeder reactors have been in commercial use for decades (see also: Phenix and Superphenix).
The simple reason why breeder reactors aren’t the default is because most reactors don’t need to be breeders. The two main upsides of a breeder reactor is a) breeding of nuclear material, which as I said before was only ever a concern in the very early days of nuclear power. We have thousands of years’ worth of fuel available now. b) The reuse of nuclear waste for additional power generation. Of course you have to have nuclear waste to reuse first, which necessitates many other, non-breeder reactors already being in use, so breeder reactors are usually restricted to countries that already have significant investment into nuclear power, like France, Russia, China, etc… If you don’t need to breed more nuclear fuel, and you don’t have waste to reprocess you might as well keep it simple and build a regular LWR reactor.
Once you use up all the heavy elements by fission you just put the newly created light elements into fusion reactors and get the originals back
That’s currently science fiction.
No shit, it’s a joke. This would violate conservation of energy.
Ok, good. My humour detector must need a recharge.
To get the originals mater back would be a violation, but you’d get something out. Just less and less each time round. That’s what I thought you were suggesting. Even that is fantasy for now.
I don’t believe in the /s.
Aside from conservation of energy being violated, I don’t think there’s enough hydrogen produced from fission to do it either. I’m no physicist but I don’t think fusion of iodine, cesium, strontium, krypton etc is viable, I think it’s gotta be the really low weight stuff like hydrogen and helium.
Agreed.
How disappointing.
Renewables and storage are far superior, in almost every conceivable metric it’s not funny.
Yet we let conservatives hype up nuclear garbage and carbon recapture as the solution to climate change.
Still better than coal in every way.
Right so if you’re moving off of coal, the cheaper and better option (renewables) is the right move.
Not really, not right now it isn’t. If you want to cover baseload with wind and solar you’ll need energy storage. We haven’t got a solution that scales well, yet.
Base load isn’t really a thing. This is the problem with pro nuclear. There isn’t an understanding of the issue. Lets not talk about reaction time of fission plants.
Base load isn’t really a thing.
How do you figure that?
This is the problem with pro nuclear. There isn’t an understanding of the issue.
Is this an attempt at insult? If you believe that I have misunderstood something, then please enlighten me.
Lets not talk about reaction time of fission plants.
Agreed, let’s leave that out of the equation, as then the only viable backup to solar and vind, using current technology, is burning stuff.
Renewables aren’t baseline power, they’re just unfit for purpose if not combined with nuclear or coal; all anti nuclear movements do is ensure the latter is used.
I just don’t see it in terms of fundamentals. We’ve heard this for years, yet countries that have denuclearized have not been able to go full renewables, they have become more dependent on fossil fuels. Storage has just not been able to keep up with demand, baseload is still necessary, and we don’t have other options.
We should absolutely keep investing in renewables and pushing forward, they help. There is no reason at the same time to prevent investment in nuclear and other non-carbon emitting solutions, and if tech companies are willing to foot the bill we shouldn’t complain. Every gigawatt counts at this point.
We’ve heard this for years, yet countries that have denuclearized have not been able to go full renewables, they have become more dependent on fossil fuels.
Which countries are you referring to? Germany for example denuclearized and replaced them with renewables, they didn’t become more dependent on fossil fuels (even if people like to say that).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:Germany_electricity_production.svg
Fyi Germany has reintroduced coal plants because of the storage issues.
They also relied on Russian gas until Gazprom was ordered to cut over half of the gas flow because of Germany aiding Ukraine.
I don’t think that “reintroduced” is fair wording here. Even if we hadn’t denuclearized, new coal plants would still have been opened. The proportion of coal power to other power also didn’t increase, even in spite of the challenges posed due to Russias war.
Japan for one, whose coal and natural gas consumption has gone up significantly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan
Germany has stayed fairly steady, fair enough. Imagine if they had just focused on replacing fossil fuels instead of nuclear, they would be nearly carbon free by now.
I have no problem with the majority of funding going to renewables and making progress right now, but I also don’t see why we can’t break ground on new 4th generation nukes and continue investment in nuclear research at the same time. We can hedge our bets, make progress on both. If the 100% renewables + storage plan pans out, cool, we stop the nukes. If they don’t, then cool, we have our carbon free baseload production and we aren’t a decade behind on it when we need it.
Storage has just not been able to keep up with demand
The thing is that things are evolving incredibly fast in this space. Renewables have gone from being more expensive than the alternatives to being the cheapest option by a large margin in the span of a decade, and prices are still plummeting. This trend can be observed for both renewables (solar/wind) and different storage technologies. The reason we’re not seeing them online at a large scale yet is that they’ve quite simply just recently become economical to do so. Nuclear does very much not have this property - it trends towards being more expensive over time. Given how long these projects take to build, it’s not out of the question that they will have to shut down on account of being just way too expensive in comparison once the projects are finished.
There is no reason at the same time to prevent investment in nuclear and other non-carbon emitting solutions, and if tech companies are willing to foot the bill we shouldn’t complain. Every gigawatt counts at this point.
I generally agree with this - any private actor that wants to build nuclear completely on their own dime and at their own risk should be able to do so. The problem is that this is not what’s happening - these companies often get government funding for these initiatives, which displace investments that could otherwise be going to other more viable solutions.
Take Sweden for example, where the right wing government campaigned on renewables being too woke and that nuclear is the only option. The way they are making nuclear happen is by guaranteeing financing at favourable terms, plus offering guaranteed pricing of the output electricity for these plants. This is going to be massively expensive for tax payers, and is actively making it so that other renewables are not getting built.
Since nuclear takes so much time to build out and is so unviable from a financial perspective, it’s also used as an excuse by fossil fuel interests, that get to stay in business comparatively longer in a scenario where the world tries to pursue nuclear vs where the world pursues renewables.
This is why nuclear support should generally be met with skepsis.
I don’t think we have the time to wait on and expect breakthroughs anymore. A decade ago, sure, but if we end up having major issues with storage and don’t make those breakthroughs 10 years from now, and we start building nuclear plants then, we’re in for an even worse timeline.
Re: government support, sure. If this is a zero sum game and we have to choose one or the other, I’ll probably go renewable. From what I’ve seen, the zero sum mentality itself is the conservative trap. They keep us fighting against each other when we could just say “do both”.
When the IRA passed in the states, there was some amount of funding for nukes. Not a ton, but some. Yet there was skepticism of that, there were calls on the left to defund that among circles I frequented. Why? The support for nukes was much less than renewables and storage, and like an order of magnitude less. It was a hedge - keep investing in alternatives to renewables in case they don’t work out, because we don’t have a crystal ball. So why be divided on this?
The trap isn’t nuclear. It’s division and scarcity thinking. It’s zero-sum politics.
We aren’t waiting for storage breakthroughs though. The current technology is good enough, cheap enough, and faster to build. And meeting the reaction times needed to use renewables correctly.
My understanding is that this is not the case for providing baseload to entire cities, and it’s unlikely to be the case as we increase energy usage (which has been spiking again, thanks to crypto and AI among other things). With current battery tech it would require massive amounts of lithium that would have far greater environmental impact, and still not really cover all needs. And other mechanisms, like stored energy (pumping water, spinning disks)are more theoretical.
I think I would be much more open to the argument once we have a full modern city converted at least partially to 80-90% renewables, with emergency services and other core infrastructure running off of storage instead of existing power plants. If we get there, then I’d probably stop saying we should invest in nuclear in parallel.
And to be clear, we should get there, if possible. We should push forward full throttle, because all of that innovation would be incredible, and I don’t want us to rely solely on one power source at all, be that renewables, nuclear, or whatever else. A smart strategy is have backups, which is why I think we should do both.
I agree with the end statement. We should be doing anything we can to reduce fossil fuels.
We need to think beyond lithium for grid storage. Lithium is great where space is limited as in a house or something similar. There will be multiple technologies that will provide storage on the grid.
I think the bigger problem for nuclear is reaction time. You need plants that can react quickly to compliment renewables. Storage is handling a lot of this but I don’t know if nuclear could. It is my understanding that base load isn’t really a thing.
Nuclear is cool. Has its pros and cons. I don’t know if we should be pushing it so hard. It’s too expensive, takes too long to build, and the decommissioning of a plant takes decades. I just don’t see the future for it.
Hmm, I think of baseload as the following:
- Hospitals and emergency services
- Data centers and communications
- 24 hour transit needs
- 24 hour lighting in cities
- Ventilation, heating/cooling for certain climates
Some of these can be mitigated significantly, but some of these are just things that really can never be down and have to have like 99.999% reliability. As we electrify, I’m going to be looking at storage solutions for these things and seeing if we really feel confident in that up time and having extra reserves. Engineers usually over design, so if we expect to need like 0.1 gigawatts for a week for emergency services during an abnormal weather event, I would want to plan for 1 gigawatt for two weeks for instance.
If that can be done with storage, then that’s awesome, and once we start seeing that roll out widely I will stop advocating for the “do both” strategy.
yeah here come the nukes. They missed all the fun and now they think it just makes sense.
From November 15.
Plus ruzzians are shooting Ukraine with hyper rockets.
Fuck
But they produce the strongest greenhouse gas by far. Water Vapour.
wanna bet how the cooling tower in gas and coal plants function?
That’s a shitty argument. The alternative is a windmill, not a coal powerplant.
geothermal anyone?
Thats what happens when they become more financially viable. Shouldn’t really surprise anybody.
Why would they be more financially viable now?
Because cost of megawatt-hour via nuclear power plant decreases every year. EVERY YEAR.
The reason the USA shut down old nuclear power plants decades ago was because they were very expensive. Some of those old reactors were recently acquired by Microsoft in the expectation that rising power demand (and therefor price) would make them viable again.
I’m sure the EU is expecting similar shifts in financial viability as the Russian aggression drags on, eliminating natural gas imports availability.
Because cost of megawatt-hour via nuclear power plant decreases every year. EVERY YEAR.
Nothing in that table is dropping every year.
Capital cost spiked a decade ago, and are now still higher than 2002 levels. Fuel spiked at a similar time and is now back to 2004 levels (but not as low as 2007). Similar story for operating costs.
Basically it looks like 2008 sent nuclear cost through the roof, and it’s only just recovering to start of the century prices.
At the top it states these are the costs in USD per MWh after adjusting for inflation.
As you can see, the Operating Costs did in fact spike between 2004 and 2012, but then continued to decrease every year from 2015 to 2020. The Total Generating Costs saw the same spike sometime after 2007 but again went back on the trend of decreasing after 2015.
You’ve made an excellent point of arguing semantics. I concede that “every year” isn’t as accurate as saying “most years except for the spike in 2004-2012”.
Falling back to the level they were before the 2008 financial crisis isn’t indicative of the technology advancing and a general downward trend. It’s just the market normalising.
If we had been not investing in nuclear plants only whilst costs were sky high I’d think you’d have an argument, but we’ve been avoiding nuclear investments for a lot longer than that.
There have been a lot of technological advances, though. Maybe you just never noticed, but we’ve had advances in fuel assembly and coolants that allow operation at lower temperature ranges and smaller reactors.
In the future, potential new Thorium Reactors, almost all of which currently operational are for research purposes, could provide another huge leap forward as they produce less plutonium than other standard Uranium isotopes.
Plus, our technology for containing and handling plasma has grown in leaps and bounds, although most of that technology seems to be closely guarded in China so I don’t have high hopes for it.
yeah maybe because only the most cost effective ones remain? (natural selection)
…and because the older plants are simply written off already. If you already recouped the building costs, you can charge based on just the running cost.
Are you saying newer facilities aren’t more efficient but instead a random chance which coincidentally leads to anual efficiency gains?
If that were true, we wouldn’t need to guess. We could just look at the data showing that new plants provide cheaper electricity.
Thats why I linked the data.
It just presents data without going into detail. You’re making unsupported assumptions.
