Safe, sure. Efficient? Not even close.
It’s far, far more expensive than renewable energy. It also takes far, far longer to build a plant. Too long to meet 2030 targets even if you started building today. And in most western democracies you wouldn’t even be able to get anything done by 2040 if you also add in political processes, consultation, and design of the plant.
There’s a reason the current biggest proponents of nuclear energy are people and parties who previously were open climate change deniers. Deciding to go to nuclear will give fossil fuel companies maximum time to keep doing their thing. Companies which made their existence on the back of fossil fuels, like mining companies and plant operators also love it, because it doesn’t require much of a change from their current business model.
Australian politicians have been arguing about nuclear energy for decades, and with whats going on now, petty distracting squabbling while state governments are gutting public infrastructure
The most frustrating thing is the antinuclear party is obviously fine with nuclear power, and nuclear armaments, just look at the aukus submarines
labors cries about the dangers to our communities and the environment are obviously disingenuous, or they wouldnt be setting a green light for the billionaire robber barons to continue tearing oil and minerals out of the ground (they promise to restore the land for real-sies this time)
Anyway, a nuclear power plant runs a steam turbine and will never be more than what, 30% efficient?
Photovoltaic cells are even less efficient, I think they’re somewhere between 10-20% efficient. I think the way to go would be a solar collector, like the Archimedes death ray, but much much bigger.
That is already a thing and it’s called concentrated solar power. Basically aim a shit load of mirrors at a target to heat it, run some working fluid through the target and use that to make steam to turn a turbine. There are a few power plants that use it but in general it has been more finicky and disruptive to the local environment than traditional PV panels would be.
The fantastic thing about renewables is how much they lend themselves to a less centralised model. Solar collector? Sure, why not‽ Rooftop solar on people’s houses? You bet! Geothermal? If local conditions are favourable to it, absolutely!
Instead of a small number of massive power plants that only governments or really large corporations can operate individuals can generate the power for themselves, or companies can offset their costs by generating a little power, or cities can operate a smaller plant to power what operations in their city aren’t handled by other means. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.
This contrasts with nuclear. SMRs could theoretically do the same thing, but haven’t yet proven viable. And traditional plants just put out way too much power. They’re one-size-fits-all by definition, and only have the ability to operate alongside other modes with the other modes filling in a small amount around the edges.
But how do we produce enough batteries for renewable energy?
Pumped hydro? Or one of the many other non battery storage options, or just over production
How viable is pumped hydro? It would be good if feasible, but last I checked, there were not enough places where you can install them.
No, you’re right. It’s not an option for everyone. Which is why I mentioned that there are many other solutions which are similar and over production which is simpler and cheaper
Which options, can you specify?
What? You don’t have Google? Options I know of (other than batteries and pumped hydro) : Compressed Air Energy Storage, Thermal Energy Storage, Fly wheels, Hydrogen, Supercapacitors, Gravitational Storage
The fact that you descend into complete science fiction should give you pause for thought. I doubt it will, but please think about how fantastical your proposed solutions are - “a massive lake of molten salt under every city” (I actually like that one!)…
- It’s not easy to go over all options.
- Many of these are largely theoretical, or for temporary storage. For instance, I don’t think fluwheels can store energy for months.
Pumped hydro requires a specific sort of place and not sure there’s enough of them for most countries to rely on.
Correct. That’s why I enumerate a bunch itf other options for the other guy who said the same thing.
Redox flow, sodium ion, iron air, etc.
There are some 600+ current chemical-based battery technologies out there.
Hell for me, once sodium is cracked, that shit is so abundant that production wouldn’t have many bottlenecks to get started.
Will Li-ion battery companies let that happen? They want profit, which means they want to keep the high battery cost.
Price driven consumption has been done by industrial users for decades. And countries like UK has been storing energy in storage heaters at home for decades as well. EVs can do wonders here.
Blah blah blah nobody wants to hear actual evidence and suggestions that solar and wind might be better. We’re on a mission for Nuclear power damn the Fukushima refugees and who cares if we store the waste encased in concrete at the bottom of the ocean which we know will eventually leak into the food stream
Noo kyaa larr is the fyuuu charrr
Good luck in the winter. 😉
Agreed, building a nuclear facility takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. However… This doesn’t need to be the case at all.
A lot of the costs go into design, planning and legal work. The amount of red tape to build a nuclear plant is huge. Plus all of the parties that fight any plans to build, with a heavy not in my backyard component.
If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly. Back in the day we could build them faster and cheaper. And these days we build far more complex installations quicker and cheaper than nuclear power plants.
The anti-nuclear movement has done so much to hold humanity back on this front. And the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost.
You can’t cut the red tape. The red tape is why we’re able to say nuclear is safe.
the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost
Huh? Nuclear fusion doesn’t have any downsides or upsides. Because it doesn’t exist. We’ve never been able to generate net power with fusion. (No, not even that story from a couple of years ago, which only counted as ‘input’ a small fraction of the total energy used overall. It was a good development, but just one small step on the long journey to it being practical.)
Being anti-nuclear was a poor stance to have 20, 30 years ago. At that time, renewables weren’t cost effective enough to be a big portion of our energy generation mix, and we should have been building alternatives to fossil fuels since back then if not earlier. But today, all the analysis tells us that renewables are far cheaper and more effective than nuclear. Today, being pro-nuclear is the wrong stance to take. It’s the anti-science stance, which is why it has seen a recent rise among right-wing political parties and media organisations.
I have never heard being pro-nuclear is the anti science stance and it being on the rise among right wing political parties. All the right wing is talking about it more coal and less things to be done about the climate.
The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed and not anti science at all.
I believe nuclear can help us get to the future we want and we should have done it a lot sooner. Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.
Nuclear is a possible solution to more power.
However as long as we can’t use the old nuclear waste as fuel we are not going to have to way to get uranium in way that is human and affordable.
Also nuclear power plants are expensive as fuck. You will pay several billions of euros in order to build one. You will have at least 10 years of building time. In that time the power demand may already have been doubled tripled or quadrupled. So are you ready to build 4 times as much of hundreds billions worth of power plants in the hope you finish them on time or don’t over build?
Or do you want to build a solar plant or a wind farm in several months once demand has increased? For a fraction of the costs?
Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.
Not easily, for the reasons explained in my reply to @[email protected].
The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed
I doubt it, because the science itself is against nuclear. Evidence says it would be too expensive and take too long to deliver compared to renewables.
Very well, let’s agree to disagree. Perhaps I am wrong. But I am in no way right wing or spreading misinformation.
The people I’ve spoken who work in the nuclear field bitch about unneeded red tape all the time. Some of it is important for sure, but a lot of it can be cut if we wanted to without safety becoming an issue. The price of nuclear has gone way up the past 20 years, whilst the knowledge and tools have become better. This makes no sense to me. We should be able to build them cheaper and faster, not slower and more expensive. And there are countries in the world, that can get it done cheaper, so why can’t we?
I’m all for renewables, I have solar panels. But I’m not 100% convinced we have grid storage figured out. And in the meanwhile we keep burning fossils in huge amounts. If we can have something that produces energy, without fucking up the atmosphere, even at a price that’s more expensive than other sources (within reason) I’m all for that. Because with the price of energy from coal, the money for fixing the atmosphere isn’t included.
Thank you for answering in a respectful manner.
Idk, maybe SMR or sth improve the red tape thing
If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly.
That’s a pretty big ask for a democratic government where half of the politicians are actively sabotaging climate initiatives…
The only countries where this is really feasible are places where federal powers can supersede the authority of local governments. A nuclear based power grid in America would require a complete reorganization of state and federal authority.
The only way anyone thinks nuclear energy is a viable option in the states is if they completely ignore the political realities of American government.
For example, is it physically possible for us to build a proper deep storage facility for nuclear waste? Yes, of course. Have we attempted to build said deep storage facility? Yes, since 1987. Are we any closer to finishing the site after +30 years…no.
A very uninformed take
Please share oh enlightened one
Other people have already corrected your misinformation
Huh. So those of us that have always advocated for a nuclear baseline with wind/solar topping off until we have adequate storage solutions are climate change deniers? That’s new.
First, no, that’s not what I said. If you’re only going to be arguing in bad faith like that this will be the last time I engage with you.
Second, baseload power is in fact a myth. And it becomes even worse when you consider the fact that nuclear doesn’t scale up and down in response to demand very well. In places with large amounts of rooftop solar and other distributed renewables, nuclear is especially bad, because you can’t just tell everyone who has their own generation to stop doing that, but you also don’t want to be generating more than is used.
Third, even if you did consider it necessary to have baseload “until we have adequate storage”, the extremely long timelines it takes to get from today to using renewables in places that don’t already have it, spending money designing and building nuclear would just delay the building of that storage, and it would still end up coming online too late.
I used to be a fan of nuclear. In 2010 I’d have said yeah, we should do it. But every time I’ve looked into it over the last 10 years especially, I’ve had to reckon with the simple fact that all the data tells us we shouldn’t be building nuclear; it’s just an inferior option to renewables.
Aaaw, someone doesn’t like the tone used? Well that’s unfortunate. How about you start with leaving dem bad faith arguments?
Renewables will not cover your usage. Period. You will need something to cover what renewables won’t be able to deliver. Your options are limited. Nuclear is the only sustainable option for many places. Sure you got hydro (ecological disasters) or geothermal in some places, but most do not have those options.
It’s not an XOR problem.
Renewables will not cover your usage.
False. Multiple countries are already able to run on 100% renewables for prolonged periods of time. The bigger issue is what to do with excess power. Battery solutions can cover moments where renewables produce a bit less power.
100% renew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production
All the countries that manage 100% renewable power use high levels of hydropower. Which is not an option for many countries and has it’s own ecological problems associated with it.
Also, these 100% renewable countries have very little electricity requirements.
The United States produces at least produces four million Gigawatt hours of electricity per year. Compare that to some of these “100% renewable” countries.
Sure, most countries that already made it use hydro. But Denmark is already up tp 80% without hydro, and the UK and Germany are already nearly halfway there without any meaningful hydro. And there’s still so much solar and wind that can still be installed. They’re nowhere near their maximum production capacity yet.
100% from renewables is clearly feasible and achievable. Of course it takes time and investments, but nuclear energy will takre more time and investments to get going again.
Oh noes, facts. The bane of all renewables evangelicals…
Just wait till you have to tell them they’re looking at irrelevant data. Not only are they using specific usecases that are not applicable to a large majority of countries, but they’re also using data that doesn’t support the long term fossil fuel goals.
Just wait till you tell them how much the electricity requirements will skyrocket once we’re transitioning to EV, dropping fossil fuel heating, cooking, cargo trucks switch to EV, etc etc.
Really hope green hydrogen kicks off. Could begin society’s efuel saga
Sorry to report, hydrogen is also hopeless. It’s cool tech, but making it work in practice is hopeless because it diffuses straight through every container you try and keep it in, and achieving reasonable energy densities requires cryogenic storage.
Also, developments have been stalling out relative to electrical solutions because of this and because of the heavy investment in electrics.
I can only see it really working in practice in niche applications where you will be close to cryogenic facilities.
Locking hydrogen up in ammonia is what the industry looks to be moving to to avoid the problem you describe.
Also, look up the 7 Hydrogen Hubs in the US as an example of this market getting started. There are no downsides to developing a hydrogen market if we’re going to have oodles of excess renewable energy.
In the summer. In ideal conditions. Lets talk again once you’ve tried 12 continuous months in the heavily populated northern hemisphere. 😉
We’re nowhere near the potential capacity for energy production from renewables, and already we’re capable of doing 100% renewable power production.
Potential capacity is really not the issue.
As I said, lets talk once you’ve managed a full winter. 😉
Wasn’t one of these built and ended up being a huge failure?
Solar plants, windmills or nuclear plant? You gotta be more specific.
We’re not gonna make any of those targets. Make peace with that and prepare accordingly. Pick a shitty future. Mad Max at worst, Elysium at best.
AMOC collapse, Carbon Sinks failing. We’re boned. Cooked. Soon to be roasted. If our Govt’s ever react at all, it’ll be far too little far too late by the time they do.
Fuck I wish the politicians would give this to us straight like that.
Why is Albo’s party spreading memes about three eyed fish instead of saying “yeah Dutton’s nuclear plan is safe, but it maximises fossil fuel use in the short term and we’d prefer to focus on renewables”
The irony of Homer Simpson representing safe nuclear energy…
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let’s stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can’t make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn’t get less dangerous with time. So, why isn’t anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that’s because we already have a solution, just not “forever”.
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It’s a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
As a friend once said “benzene is what anti-nuclear people think nuclear waste is.”
I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that’s significantly more than I’ll use in my lifetime.
I’d gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It’d make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.
Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml
The density of uranium always fucks with me. How can something that takes up so little volume weigh so much?
It’s thicc.
phat nucleasss
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxguides/toxguide-8.pdf
I didn’t know that before but it appears cyanide does have a half-life that is a fraction of nuclear waste.
That doesn’t make it or the other compounds less dangerous, of course.
That’s uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Most cyanide in surface water will form hydrogen cyanide and evaporate.
As long as it has a surface to evaporate, it will degenerate.
… Hydrogen cyanide is literally what has been used to execute people in gas chambers and genocide during the Holocaust. The LC(Lo), the lowest recorded lethal concentration is 107ppm, resulting in death in 10 minutes. That’s, objectively, far more dangerous than the respective material that firefighters were exposed to at Chernobyl. You don’t want that in any appreciable quantity in the air around people that you want to continue living.
Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It’ll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.
And that’s great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn’t disappear, the cyanide doesn’t magically change into cookiedough. You’re just spreading it around more.
Cyanide is used extensively in precious metal recycling too. So even reclaiming resources has a harsh chemical cost. Meeting workers from there I was surprised to say the least about how ‘casually’ they work with Cyanide. Clearly they have safty protocall but nothing like what I imagined something like Cyanide would call for.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn’t surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
Checkmate uh pro democratic people I guess?
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
France is EU’s first importer of ‘Russian nuclear products’: study – Euractiv
New report shows Russia raking in revenue from state nuclear company | Fox Business
Russia faces threat of sanctions on nuclear power industry as Germany backs uranium ban – POLITICO
Bratislava to reject EU’s latest sanctions package if it includes ban on Russia nuclear fuel
Russia’s Rosatom Helps Putin Skirt Sanctions
Russia’s nuclear project in Hungary: France’s growing role | OSW Centre for Eastern Studies
https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220517-greenpeace-report-russland-taxonomie.pdf
They have more uranium than we do
literally the least efficient in terms of cost and time.
battery backed renewables are a fraction of the price and are being deployed right now.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost
edit: the tech is cool as hell. go nuts on research reactors. nuclear medicine has saved my sisters life twice… but i’m sorry, its just not a sane solution to the climate crisis.
No, it’s not the best we have. Solar and wind are way safer, cost less and don’t produce waste.
Sure, nuclear power is safe until it isn’t. Fukushima and Chernobyl are examples of that. Nuclear plants in Ukraine were at risk during Russian attacks. Even if you have a modern plant, you don’t really think that under capitalism there is an incentive to care properly for them in the long run. Corners will be cut.
Besides that they produce so much waste that has to be: a) being transported b) stored somewhere
Looking at the US railroad system and how it is pushed beyond it’s capacity right now and seeing how nuclear waste sites are literally rotting and contaminating everything around them I’d say it’s one of the least safe energies. Especially if you have clean alternatives that don’t produce waste.
Is this a joke?
No, it is the truth
Yeah, nothing back there except tons of highly radioactive waste that nobody knows what to do with for the next million years, nothing back there but the risk of contaminating a whole region with radioactive shit like it happened in Chernobyl and Fukushima, nothing back there except for overly expensive energy that’s only cheap because governments subsidized the shit out of it because they thought it was the new big thing you need to have, and now they still do just because. Don’t get me worng, it’s probably still a tiny bit better than burning fossils. But it’s still bullshit.
Sigh, we know EXACTLY what to do with it.
Dig a deep hole into the bedrock, put the waste in dry casks, put the casks in the hole, backfill with clay.
This has been known for decades!
I live in a suburb north of Stockholm in Sweden, here in Scandinavia we have a very stable bedrock, I would absolutely welcome a disposal site for nuclear waste in my suburb, and I am talking about a site that would accept waste from all over the world (for a fee obviously).
It would be simple, create jobs, and allow us to keep using nuclear power to allow for quicker removal of fossil power plants.
As for Chernobyl, TMI and Fukashima, Chernobyl was a bad design which was run by people who lacked access to information about past nuclear accidents, leading to bad management, TMI had a fail deadly indicator system, where a broken light bulb caused incorrect information to be acted on, and Fukashima was built in a bad location.
I recommend you to watch this 2006 BBC Horizon documentary, it is called Nuclear Nightmares and talks about our fear of radiation, and weather or not it is warranted:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
A large coal power plant needs at least 10000 tons of coal every day according to Wikipedia.
A nuclear plant needs about 25 tons per year.
That is a huge, massive difference in logistics, pollution and use of resources, that is not even getting into the coal ash that is produced by cosl plants, according to the EPA, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in the US by coal power plants. None was generated by nuclear power plants.
Please watch the documentary, it is a few years old, but the premise still holds.
Also just for those still not convinced, that coal ash is radioactive as well, and contains other toxins, and has polluted far more land than nuclear.
Oh absolutely!
Another point is that there are places outside Chernobyl and Fukashima that have higher background radiation that either exclusion zone, and that is places where people live normally, I seem to recall that being mentioned in the documentary I linked.
There are downsides to nuclear these days. Incredibly high cost with a massive delay before they’re functioning. Solar + wind + pumped hydro + district heating is where it’s at in 2024.
This.
Also, tie together more countries’ power grids to even out production and demand of renewables, and reduce the need for other backup sources.
For a fraction of the cost of nuclear, increase the storage capacity as well. We’ve had days where the price per MWh was negative in many hours, because of excess production.
The barriers to carbon free energy aren’t technical, they’re purely political.
Please understand that negative prices are the market for electricity breaking down! That is not a good thing. It should mean that if you have solar panels on your roof you have to pay to participate in the national grid because you are dumping energy into the grid when it can’t use it, but special rules have been made for renewable plants. Literally, imagine a contract-to-supply for wind or solar…
I understand very well the implications of the negative price, which is why I advocated NOT to spend trillions in nuclear, when issues of balancing demand and production can be solved for a fraction of what nuclear costs.
Yeah, back in 2010 and before nuclear was the way to go but with the incredible advancements in solar and wind it’s no longer the best option.
Still shame on Germany for decommissioning nuclear reactors and deciding to build Nordstream 2 and burn coal as a replacement.
You probably also didnt heard about Thorium based molten salt reactors, they are much safer than conventional nuclear, also cheaper, and you can have a 50MW installation in space not much larger than a shipping container. A 50MW solar installation is close to 1km2 and thats without any storage included. It even can be modified to run on spent fuel of conventional nuclear power plants.
SMRs are DOA. They have been “the next big thing” for decades now. They need to shit or get off the pot.
No industry has quite so much vaporware technology as nuclear power. Any idiot can promise and never deliver. Look at Elon Musk.
with the incredible advancements in solar and wind it’s no longer the best option.
I haven’t heard of any advancement that makes solar generate energy when the sun doesn’t shine and wind generate energy when the wind isn’t blowing.
You haven’t heard of any advancements in energy storage at all?
Not that we need them, the best energy storage is old AF and excellent
The wind is always blowing somewhere and overproduction is cheaper than batteries
You can’t overproduce electricity. You have to match the load.
I know. There are many solutions to this
No, there is pumped storage. Honestly, despite the plethora of start-ups claiming to have a solution (sodium batteries, molten-salt, etc) The only really proven way to store electricity for later is pumped storage, but that relies on geography (hills) which not everyone has. Batteries are great for phones, and cars but they simply don’t scale to countries.
district heating is where it’s at in 2024.
You don’t have those in 2024? Commies built central heating in every city.
Iceland, where I’m from, has had it for ages in pretty much every house.
You can make Thorium reactors much smaller and cheaper, basically a 50MW unit is not much larger than a shipping container, while being much more safe than standard nuclear plants. The largest issue is over-regulation of the nuclear power in general.
A 50MW of solar installation is HUGE, and thats 50MW at the sunniest part of the planet: https://newsaf.cgtn.com/news/2019-12-15/Kenya-launches-Chinese-built-50MW-solar-power-plant-MqC575l6Te/index.html, We are basically talking about close to a square kilometer installation…
there is simply no way to call a 50MW solar plant cleaner than nuclear and its probably not even that much cheaper in the end. Compare that to a shipping container sized reactor… Only thing in the way, is the nuclear scare and government regulations.
Still not a reason to not build them, the entire point is for nuclear to handle the load when solar/wind can’t provide due to weather. Other renewables will still be producing the bulk of the power we need, but at night nuclear will be handling any demand spikes, each of them would greatly reduce the number of batteries required to satisfy the demand. They can stay until our solar output is so high we can just start electrolyzing water into hydrogen as energy storage.
If you’re suggesting using Nuclear as a peaker plant or to turn it off and on whenever wind/solar is not up for it then I’m sorry to say that it’s not viable. Nuclear generators don’t handle well being turned off and on.
My good friends Xenon and Samarium.
That’s why they mentioned “pumped hydro”
Deep level irony that you used a Simpsons meme, which takes place in a city that suffers from a Nuclear Power Plant that doesn’t dispose of nuclear waste properly.
Every form of energy generation is problematic in the hands of capital. Security measures can and are often considered unnecessary expense. And even assuming that they will respect all safety standards, we still have the problem of fuel: France, for example, was only able to supply its plants at a cheap cost because of colonialism in Africa. Therefore, nuclear energy potentially has the same geopolitical problems as oil, in addition to the particular ones: dual technology that can and is applied in the military, not necessarily but mainly atomic bombs.
__
Also, I thought memes were supposed to be funny…
I’d argue it’s almost qualifies as an antimeme
It’s not completely unfunny because of the unintentional irony. Tough it definitely belongs to that specific category of “meme” commonly seen on r/politicalmemes or any of its variants on the feedverse: usually a frame from The Office with text written on a whiteboard, with the ubiquity of the complete absence of a joke.
Yeah, I’d tend to agree on that. Even beyond the security issues, nuclear has the potential to be a safe, but it also has the potential to be disastrous if mis-managed.
We see plenty of issues like this already, including what occurred here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident
Now imagine a plant in Texas, where power companies response to winter outages has basically been “sucks to be you, winterizing is too costly”.
Or maybe we’d like to go with a long-time trusted company, who totally wouldn’t throw away safety and their reputation for a few extra bucks. Boeing comes to mind.
I like nuclear as a power source, but the absolutely needs to be immutable rules in place to ensure it is properly managed and that anyone attempting to cut corners to save costs gets slapped down immediately. Corporate culture in North America seems to indicate otherwise.
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
Thats not even funny. It’s not even a meme. It’s just straight outright corporate propaganda. F off with that, Pinkerton!
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
You would be surprised to know the amount of scientific research with actual solutions that aren’t applied cause goes against the fossil fuel companies and whatnot. Due to the fact that they have market monopoly.
Nuclear is the best and most sustainable energy production long term. You get left with nuclear waste which we are still figuring out how to deal with, but contemporary reactors are getting safer and more efficient. Not to mention breeder reactors can use the byproducts of their energy production to further produce energy.
I mean renewables are just cheaper…
To a point yes but large scale energy storage needed to make renewables viable to handle all of the load is not economically viable yet
Renewables with large scale storage are currently cheaper than any other source of energy
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.
Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.
Economicaly might be viable, but there is so much unused experimental tech that has higher potential and scales better (higher scientific development as well).
Every commercial fuel recycling plant in existence releases large amounts of radioactivity into the air and water, so I dont really see them as a good alternative.
Here is a world map of iodine 129 before fukushima, its one of many radioactive isotopes released at nuclear reprocessing plants: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/images/iupac/j_pac-2015-0703_fig_076.jpg The website where I got it from: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/Iodine#section=Isotopes-in-Forensic-Science-and-Anthropology
Considering how long it would take to build safe reactors, how expensive it would be and how much radioactive contamination would be created both at the production of fuel and later when the storage ever goes wrong after thousands of years, I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.
I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.
Renewables and batteries have their own problems.
Producing and processing cobalt and lithium under current conditions will mean engaging in large-scale deforestation in some of the last unmolested corners of the planet, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste as part of the refinement process, and then getting these big bricks of lithium (not to mention cadmium, mercury, and lead) that we need to dispose of at the battery’s end of lifecycle.
Renewables - particularly hydropower, one of the most dense and efficient forms of renewable energy - can deform natural waterways and collapse local ecologies. Solar plants have an enormous geographic footprint. These big wind turbines still need to be produced, maintained, and disposed of with different kinds of plastics, alloys, and battery components.
Which isn’t even to say these are bad ideas. But everything we do requires an eye towards the long-term lifecycle of the generators and efficient recycling/disposal at their end.
Nuclear power isn’t any different. If we don’t operate plants with the intention of producing fissile materials, they run a lot cleaner. We can even power grids off of thorium. Molten salt reactors do an excellent job of maximizing the return on release of energy, while minimizing the risk of a meltdown. Our fifth generation nuclear engines can use this technology and the only thing holding us back is ramping it up.
Unlike modern batteries, nuclear power doesn’t require anywhere near the same amount of cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese. Uranium is surprisingly cheap and abundant, with seawater yielding a pound of enrichable uranium at the cost of $100-$200 (which then yields electricity under $.10/kwh).
We can definitely do renewables in a destructive and unsustainable way, recklessly mining and deforesting the plant to churn out single-use batteries. And we can do nuclear power in a responsible and efficient way, recycling fuel and containing the relatively low volume of highly toxic waste.
But all of that is a consequence of economic policy. Its much less a consequence of choosing which fuel source to use.
The Simpsons shows it’s safe and efficient 😅
One of the saddest bits of the show was when they kinda just gave up talking about socio-economic issues and made the whole show revolve around Homer being a big dumb-dumb.
Some of the harshest criticism they had around nuclear power revolved around its privatization and profitization. A bunch of those early episodes amounted to people asking for reasonable and beneficial changes to how the plant was run, then having to fight tooth and nail with the company boss for even moderate reform.
Dental plan! Lisa needs braces.
Don’t forget Blinky, the three eyed fish.
Renewables are better, cheaper and more scalable. Its not even close. Look at Denmark for how it can be done.
Denmark looking decidedly not green this morning. It’s sunny, but virtually no wind - might be like this for another week. Check the map regularly to understand why unreliable energy is actually just a way of increasing gas usage.
Okay, where is the comparison to nuclear? For that you have to build massive infrastructure, that costs billions, that no one want to insure, thats why it has to be backed by state money. After that the waste has to be managed by the state too, because no company wants to deal with the liability of radioactive waste for thousands of years at least, so that, too, comes out of the taxpayers pockets.
I don’t like fossil fuels, but this is just plain stupid
(and also as a cherry on top, tschernobyl, fokushima)
Sorry - What?
You said Denmark had converted to green energy. I pointed out that they haven’t done anything like that. You are now moving the goal posts and saying “where is the comparative essay defending nuclear power”…
If you must, France turned completely green in the 70s. So they’ve provided 50 years of clean energy. Its a classic story and not as simple as I’m going to make out, but still. Look at the map link in the last post - any area that stays green is either using hydro or nuclear. Hydro is great, but you need mountains and water.
Sorry, yeah maybe that wasn’t the best response.
But you still claiming nuclear is green is just crazy. There is still no place on earth that can hold nuclear waste. Especially not for the thousands of years that it would need. There is nothing clean about energy, that produces waste, that we can’t even handle.
Also, the energy mix in Denmark is very renewable wherever possible (https://ens.dk/en/our-services/statistics-data-key-figures-and-energy-maps/annual-and-monthly-statistics)
It’s definitely not the best we have
My issue with nuclear energy isn’t that it’s dangerous or that it’s inherently bad. The world needs a stable source of energy that compensates for wind and solar fluctuations anyways. For the current realistic alternatives that’s either going to be nuclear or coal/oil/natural gas. We have nothing else for this purpose, end of discussion.
My problem is the assumption underlying this discussion about nuclear energy that it somehow will solve all of our problems or that it will somehow allow us to continue doing business as usual. That’s categorically not the case. The climate crisis has multiple fronts that need to be dealt with and the emissions is just one of them. Even if we somehow managed to find the funds and resources to replace all non renewable energy with nuclear, we would still have solved just 10% of the problem, and considering that this cheap new energy will allow us to increase our activities and interventions in the planet, the situation will only worsen.
Nuclear energy is of course useful, but it’s not the answer. Never has technology been the answer for a social and political issue. We can’t “science and invent” our way out of this, it’s not about the tech, it’s about who decides how it will be used, who will profit from it, who and how much will be affected by it etc. If you want to advocate for a way to deal with the climate crisis you have to propose a complete social and political plan that will obviously include available technologies, so stop focusing on technologies and start focusing on society and who takes the decisions.
One simple example would be the following: no matter how green your energy is, if the trend in the US is to have increasingly bigger cars and no public transport, then the energy demands will always increase and no matter how many nuclear plants you build, they will only serve as an additional source and not as a replacement. So no matter how many plants you build, the climate will only deteriorate.
This is literally how the people in charge have decided it will work. Any new developing energy source that is invented serves only to increase the consumption, not to replace previous technologies. That’s the case with solar and wind as well. So all of this discussion you all make about nuclear Vs oil or whatever is literally irrelevant. The problem is social and political, not technological.
