but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
Chernobyl turned an entire city into a radioactive wasteland for the next 10k years. Same goes for 3-mile island and Fukushima. The last of which was just over 10 years ago.
Are we so arrogant to think that that could never happen again? What’s changed?
I don’t know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don’t create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.
Except wind and solar don’t have anywhere near the density we need. Nuclear plants are about 1kW/m^2. Wind is 2-3W/m^2, solar is 100W/m^2. Siting wind and solar projects can be just as damaging.
I didn’t even mention tidal or geothermal. But how are any of those just as damaging? Nuclear waste is still a issue and again if it were attacked or destroyed would cause a massive ecological issue. Again last I checked destroying a wind, solar, tidal, or geothermal generator would not release radiation. Also the time to build one of those compared to a nuclear plant is a lot less last I checked.
Producing wafers for solar panels is indeed one of the most ecologically damaging activities we can engage in. Have you ever been to a semiconductor fab?
It also doesn’t help that people got brainwashed that solar energy and heat pumps will solve all our problems. I don’t have enough space to install so many solar panels to provide power to heat pump during the Eastern European winter and even if I did, ROI will be longer than their expected lifetime. And we still use lead during production, and no one wants to recycle them. These geniuses here import broken solar panels and dump them into the ground and cover them, call that recycling. FFS, nuclear waste disposal is less scary than this uncontrolled shit.
Don’t you love it when you get heavily downvoted but no-one is brave enough to challenge your point of view?
I mostly agree with you. Solar is good if you own a house, with a roof and have thousands in disposable cash to invest, but that’s not most people.
Heat pumps can’t be run on your solar power alone and if your house isn’t well insulated, they can be extremely inefficient, ending up costing you substantially more than sticking with gas or oil. And that’s not getting in to the other short comings of heat pumps which I believe is a separate debate.
As many people in this thread have said, the best time to invest in nuclear was thirty years ago, but the next best time is now. Give us tonnes of cheap, carbon free electricity to throw in to a heat pump and then they make sense.
You do understand that solving the world’s carbon energy crisis is not an individual person’s job, right? We’re not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We’re talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it’s pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.
Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.
I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:
Current nuclear power generation is non-renewable. It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen. And it goes without saying that waiting to scale up some novel unproven or inexistent sustainable way of nuclear power production is out of the question, for time and safety reasons. Which brings me to point 2.
We need clean, sustainable energy right now if we want to have any chance of fighting climate change. From start of planning of a new nuclear power plant to first power generation can take 15 or 20 years easily. Currently, about 10% of all electricity worldwide is produced by about 400 nuclear reactors, while around 15 new ones are under construction. So, to make any sort of reasonable impact, we would have to build to the tune of 2000 new reactors, pronto. To do that within 30 years, we’d have to increase our construction capacity 5 to 10 fold. Even if that were possible, which I strongly doubt, I would wager the safety and cost impacts would be totally unjustifiable. And we don’t even have 30 years anymore. That is to say nothing of regulatory checks and maintenance that would also have to be increased 5 fold.
So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don’t do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
It’s crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.
Just like assuming a perfectly spherical cow, or a frictionless surface, you can completely ignore the economics, the massive cost and schedule overages to make nuclear work.
Flamanville-3 in France started construction in 2007, was supposed to be operational in 2012 with a project budget of €3.3B. Construction is still ongoing, the in-service date is now sometime in 2024, and the budget has ballooned to €20B.
Olkiluoto-3 is a similar EPR. Construction started in 2005, was supposed to be in-service in 2010, but finally came online late last year. Costs bloated from €3 to €11B.
Hinkley Point C project is two EPRs. Construction started in 2017, it’s already running behind schedule, and the project costs have increased from £16B to somewhere approaching £30B. Start up has been pushed back to 2028 the last I’ve heard.
It’s no different in the US, where the V.C. Summer (2 x AP1000) reactor project was cancelled while under construction after projections put the completed project at somewhere around $23B, up from an estimate of $9B.
A similar set of AP1000s was built at Vogtle in Georgia. Unit 3 only recently came online, with unit 4 expected at the end of the year. Costs went from an initial estimate of $12B to somewhere over $30B.
Note that design, site selection, regulatory approvals, and tendering aren’t included in the above. Those add between 5-10 years to the above schedules.
I think this is the most overlooked aspect, besides it never being in time to do any good for the crisis we are in now.
I believe, the increasing cost and loss in efficiency compared to alternatives will always be an issue for NE to be out-priced by solar and wind (Dunai, 2019; WNSIR, 2022). These cost will eventually come back to the end user.
Most definitely the reason why nuclear advocates want the government to give securities and don’t dear to be the entrepreneurs they claim to be (NOS Nieuws, 2018). Please give me some welfare state, but I’d rather have some more solid solutions.
Costs. Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) analysis by U.S. bank Lazard shows that between
2009 and 2021, utility-scale solar costs came down 90 percent and wind 72 percent, while
new nuclear costs increased by 36 percent. The gap continues to widen. Estimates by the
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has seen the LCOE for wind drop by
15 percent and solar by 13 percent between 2020 and 2021 alone. IRENA also calculated that
800 GW of existing coal-fired capacity in the world have higher operating costs than new
utility-scale solar photovoltaics (PV) and new onshore wind (WNSIR, 2022).
Gee, I wonder if the cost might go down if we built more of them, as is the case with, y’know, basically every other complicated thing that humans build.
Except throughout the history of nuclear power it has always gotten more expensive, regardless of time period, learning curve, adoption curve, or any other variable you care to consider. Solar, wind, and batteries have always gotten cheaper and continue to do so.
So even if I follow your logic, that nuclear plants will get cheaper and faster to build, wich I’m not, you still have to build the first generation of plants slow and expensive. So we either wait 15 years to get better at building those plants, or we just build renewables right now.
Functionally they are because different Capital Groups will chase different projects. For instance Bill Gates / TerraPower is heavily backing both Fusion and SMR Fission technology.
Meanwhile other Capital Groups like Anschutz are piling money into Wind Farms then there’s yet other groups like Silicon Ranch pouring money into Solar Farms.
It seems to have escaped the notice of most Netizens but the big money Capitalists have finally come out to play in the Green / Renewable Energy space. Sure there’s an absolute limit on the money and manpower that even they can afford but practically speaking those limits are so high that we’re unlikely to reach them.
So what happens when you finish pouring the concrete in 15 years and the demand has already been satisfied by renewables? Concrete production alone accounts for ~8% of global emissions.
I am not anti-nucleur, I wish we invested more decades ago.
We could build them in a lot less time than 15 years, we’d just need to summon up the political will for it. I’m not saying we should stop building Wind or Solar either.
Well demand isn’t going to go down, and we’re going to have to replace all of the old power plants anyways, even if they are solar or wind. Everything that we build has a lifespan, and the United States has a heck of a lot of legacy power plants that are going to be decommissioned over the next 100 years regardless of what type of plants these are. Solar, wind, hydro, coal, gas, nuclear… Nothing lasts forever.
Yes that is exactly what would happen. To do that though, you really need state funding, state approval, and a secure supply chain as well as experienced engineers, management and construction and supply chains.
I am a huge fan of nuclear power, but I wouldn’t say fearing it is ignorance.
You need to make sure it is regulated, secure, well-engineered, and above all, we need a place to store the waste.
Yet, congress and others, at least in America, have done nothing. We should mainly be powered by nuclear and it is rare for a plant to be built. If done correctly you get safe, clean, power.
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.
Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.
So in short:
Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.
You should look into the modern tech here, it isn’t just burying millions of tons of toxic waste under New Jersey. There are “breeder reactors” that use the recycled fuel to generate more power. They actually generate more fissile material than they consume, so instead of waste, they mostly produce more fuel.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn’t true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO2 reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
The long lead times for construction that invalidate nuclear power as a way of mitigating climate change was a point recognized in 2009 by the body whose mission is to promote the use of nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Nuclear power is not a near-term solution to the challenge of climate change,” writes Sharon Squassoni in the IAEA bulletin. “The need to immediately and dramatically reduce carbon emissions calls for approaches that can be implemented more quickly than building nuclear reactors.”
Wealer from Berlin’s Technical University, along with numerous other energy experts, sees takes a different view.
“The contribution of nuclear energy is viewed too optimistically,” he said. “In reality, [power plant] construction times are too long and the costs too high to have a noticeable effect on climate change. It takes too long for nuclear energy to become available.”
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, agrees.
“Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build,” he said. “When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.”
He pointed out that the world needed to get greenhouse gases under control within a decade. “And in the next 10 years, nuclear power won’t be able to make a significant contribution,” added Schneider.
But Europe or America the story of the same. Cost overruns and other issues mean nuclear is running out of steam. We are at the end of the age of nuclear… Until fusion comes along, apparently only 20 years away
Long lead times against nuclear have bee raised for the last 25 years, if we had just got on with it we would have the capacity by now. Just cause the lead time is in years doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.
My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.
Long lead times, cost overruns, producing power at a higher price point than renewables, long run time needed to break even, even longer dismantling times and a still unsolved waste problem. Compared to renewables that we can build right now.
Did you read the quote? 15-20 years, as in decades before 1 nuke plant is built. I agree in that politicians of the past should have led us to a more sustainable and resilient energy future, but we’re here now.
Advanced nuclear should still be 100% pursued to try to get those lead times down and to incorporate things like waste recycling, modularity, etc., but the lead time in decades absolutely means nuclear power might not be something worth doing.
The IPCC puts the next 10-20 years as the most important and perilous for getting a hold on climate change. If we wait for that long by not rolling out emission-free power sources, transit modes, or even carbon-free concrete, etc., then we might cross planetary boundaries that we can’t come back from.
Nuclear is a safe bet and bet worth pursuing. I would argue that, along with that source from the IAEA, old nuclear is note worth it.
How much concrete does it take to build a nuclear plant? Concrete production is currently 8% of global emissions, so if you have to scale up construction capacity 10x for the next decade, don’t you end up destroying the environment with concrete before they are even operational?
Great point. You need concrete for wind, solar, and li-ion battery storage too (including pumped hydro), but out of those I’d say pumped hydro is the only one that remotely compares in the amount of concrete needed for construction.
So purely looking at the emissions from materials needed to build these power sources, renewables have the edge due to less concrete. These emissions might show up elsewhere in raw material extraction like with silicon for solar, and then the rare earth metals needed for generators in wind, all the lithium/nickel/cobalt needed for batteries, etc., but I want to say that the Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) from places like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US or the International Energy Agency (IEA) worldwide have taken that into account and still show that renewables + storage are cheaper on a carbon basis compared to fossil fuels and nuclear.
The cool thing about concrete for renewables (excluding hydro dam) is only the very base pad needs to be virgin. You can make a lot of the rest of the base and fill material with down cycled concrete. So tearing down part of an old factory on land near the solar panels are? Crush it up and only move it a few miles over to where you need it. Rather than hauling that to a landfill where it sits forever, costing energy use to haul, and more energy use to bring the fill and other bade materials from a further destination.
“We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable” is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
It’s been a decade since a report came out recognising nuclear as too expensive to be viable, and that the best economic decision is to go all-in on renewables. In that time, the price of nuclear has not changed (really, it’s likely gone up, with how much construction in general has gone up, while the technical side of it has not changed), while the cost of renewable energy has continued to go down.
I’m not ideologically opposed to nuclear. But the evidence clearly tells us that it’s just not a reasonable option. At least not unless the long-promised affordability improvements from SMRs actually end up realising themselves. Or fusion gets to the point where it can be used for energy generation.
So… climate change deniers want to delay action on climate change. So they push for nuclear because it has long lead times and that forestalls action?
Come on man. That’s a pretty ridiculous theory. Climate change deniers are out there yelling “drill baby drill” not going undercover as nuclear advocates.
He’s completely right, and I don’t get why more people don’t see that. As an example, here in Denmark, the leader of the far right populist party is both the one saying climate change would be a good thing since it means warmer summer weather as well as constantly bringing up nuclear energy any single time someone starts talking about climate change. It’s honestly so transparent. I used to see the same thing all the time on Reddit, and now I guess it’s Lemmy’s turn for this shit.
because it has long lead times and that forestalls action
I won’t profess to know for sure what their reasoning is. I suspect it’s a bit of that, and also a bit of hope/expectation that the fossil fuel industry will be well-situated to pivot into nuclear in a way that they can’t as easily do with renewables. The more centralised nature and heavy reliance on large-scale resource extraction is very similar. But they actual explanation isn’t what’s important.
What’s important is the simple fact that the biggest climate change deniers are now trying to promote nuclear. If you want to refute the claim, you need to explain that better than I can.
I’m not very familiar with Australian politics or leaders so I can only go with what I see in those articles. First, I don’t see any climate change denial. I see a debate about renewables and nuclear
Why are conservatives against renewables:
They can’t meet our total energy needs.
Wind and solar products are predominantly made in China and conservatives don’t want to feed the Chinese economy or increase dependence (one thing I do know about AU is that Chinese influence is quite heavy and a cause of great concern there).
Why are conservatives pro-nuclear:
It provides baseload capacity that supports wind/solar where they are weak.
It has military applications.
It creates large infrastructure spending within AU and supports mining industry.
They believe it will rankle liberals.
Maybe you have a point that conservatives who are dead-set against renewables will throw nuclear into the conversation as a distraction which they know will not go anywhere. But as an outside observer who doesn’t have built up associations with these characters, I honestly just see rational inclusion of nuclear in the energy mix. This all seems healthy to me.
Sorry. How does wind power kill anyone? Okay, every once in a while you hear about a technician falling off a windmill, but are there any fatalities in regard to the effects of wind power?
Lacking safety standards specific to the use case of wind turbines. For example, there was a fire during installation and someone jumped to their deaths to get away. They had quick decent harnesses but couldn’t use them because of the location of the fire.
And? Those safety standards for constructing and maintaining wind turbines can be increased just as much as the safety standards for any other type of heavy labor. For example by mandating that wind turbines must have fire suppression systems installed or that wworkers must be able to rapel on the outside of the wind turbine.
“in 2011 coal produced about 180 billion kWhrs in England with about 3,000 related deaths. Nuclear energy produced over 90 billion kWhrs in England with no deaths. In that same year, America produced about 800 billion kWhrs from nuclear with no deaths.”
The only two major nuclear-related death incidents were Chernobyl and Fukushima. But Fukushima only killed one person, the rest were killed by the tsunami and being relocated from the exclusion zone. But many people blame the Japanese government for fucking up the evacuations, while other people criticize the government for actually evacuating people.
In any case, those 2,300 Japanese people were not killed by the actual nuclear incident, they were killed because they were very old and could not adapt to moving into a new apartment that’s a government provided them. Chernobyl is believed to have killed about 500 people.
I should also mention that the Fukushima exclusion zone has largely been lifted, and many people have moved back home.
There are solid arguments to be made against both nuclear and renewables (intermittence, impact of electricity storage, amount of raw material, surface area). We can’t wait for perfect solutions, we have to work out compromises right now, and it seems nuclear + renewable is the most solid compromise we have for the 2050 target. See this high quality report by the public French electricity transportation company (independent of the energy producers) that studies various scenarios including 100% renewable and mixes of nuclear, renewables, hydrogen and biogas. https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy pathways 2050_Key results.pdf
If I recall, 50 years ago we didn’t have the technology/understanding of nuclear fuel enough to make as much as we can now. When I did a school paper on the subject like 20 years ago, they were saying nuclear wasn’t sustainable because we didn’t have enough fuel.
My understanding is that that has changed recently with breakthroughs in refinement of fuels.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don’t mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn’t seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
“Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”
It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.
Yea both are horrible. But we can get off fossil fuels and walk away. We can’t with nuclear. It’ll always be with us and doesn’t solve that we need fossil fuel for other things.
Jets and ships are still going to need fossil fuels.
Which is why I think the best thing we could be doing right now is focusing on improving how energy is store. With the right advancement we could solve a lot of these problems with the right battery.
Mercury will always be with us. Arsenic will always be with us. PFAS will always be with us. Natural radiation will always be with us. Fortunately, nuclear waste is easily detectable, the regulations around it are much stronger, the amount of HLW is miniscule and the storage processes are incredibly advanced
Moreover, most Nuclear waste won’t always be with us. A lot of fission prodcuts have half lives in the decades or centuries
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
The nuclear power plant decades older than Chernobyl that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and resulted in a only single death and some expensive clean up?
The push for nuclear power across social media is 100% an industry sanctioned psyop.
Oh please, I’ve been advocating for nuclear power since before most people even owned a dial up modem. You younger ones see everything through a haze of recency bias.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can’t fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it huh?
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
How do you get the uranium or thorium? Generally, it has to be mined. Are we using nuclear powered mining equipment? No. We use fossil fuel powered mining equipment. Then we use fossil fuels to power the trucks that take the depleted nuclear product to the storage depot, which is powered and requires employees who drive there using fossil fuel powered vehicles, using fossil fuel powered warehouse equipment. When does nuclear power phase out the fossil fuel power? Are we going to decommission oil and coal production facilities? Or are we just going to use nuclear to augment the grid?
Don’t forget all the fossil fuels used in machinery that builds nuclear power plants, and the CO2 emissions from all of the concrete used.
Oh, and if you start building a nuclear power plant right now it will be online (maybe) in a decade or two and hopefully for only 150% of the initial cost. There’s a nuclear power plant in Georgia that is $17 BILLION over budget.
While that’s true, we still have for example safe air travel, although I’m pretty sure companies would be happy to ship their passengers minced to maximize their profit.
Also, thorium reactors would be a great step forward, unfortunately its byproducts can’t be used for nuclear weapons, so their development was pretty slowed down.
Big news worthy accidents are a really good way to ensure strong regulation and oversight. And nuclear is very regulated now so that it has lower death rate than wind power.
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
And we would be expecting these corrupt Cost cutting types to warehouse nuclear waste for hundreds if not thousands of years while requiring regular inspections and rotation of caskets periodically while also maintaining the facilities. All of that for a product that doesn’t produce any value, it just sits there and accumulates.
And where does it get stored? Right now almost 100% of waste is stored on site above ground because they really have no good solution. People will say things like “its just a little bit of toxic waste” or “its cool because we could use it in process we don’t have yet but might in the future” and all I can think of is how this was the same thinking that got us into our dependence on our first environmental catastrophic energy source. I’m not confident we that scaling up to another one will end well.
Right now almost 100% of waste is stored on site above ground because they really have no good solution.
You mean there’s so little they don’t even need a dedicated facility for it, and it’s safe enough that people are willing to work where it’s stored? Sounds great!
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
Because the energy industry is historically the one lobbying governments for less regulation. Also, has there ever been a nuclear project in the history of mankind that didnt result in depleted Uranium leeching into local watertables and/or radioactive fallout? Your comment is basically tacit acceptance that people are going to act unethically, which, in regards to nuclear power, is bound to have human consequences.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety. With a nuclear power plant, you mitigate the disaster potential by having so many more people involved in the design and inspection processes.
The risk of an electrician installing faulty wiring in your home could be mitigated by having a third party inspector review the work. Now do that 1000x over and your risk of “politicians are paid off” is negligible.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety
Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they “artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we’ll use solar”. I’m not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.
If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it’s a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.
Regulations are actually generally created by regulatory bodies, which are usually non-political. For instance, the underwriter laboratory is the major appliance, building and electrical approval body in the United States.
In most countries, building codes and safety codes are created by industry specialists, people who have been in the industry as professionals for many decades and have practiced and been licensed in the field that they are riding the regulations for.
There’s a big difference between politicians who are passing these laws, and those writing them who are the regulatory bodies. Generally, as a politicians will simply adopt the codes as recommended by the professional licensing and certification bodies.
I suppose it will be the end of modern civilization if politicians decide to politicize electrical or building codes. Then we’ll be fucked for sure. We’ve seen that happen before with the Indiana pi bill.
“The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.”
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
Or they could just allow everyone to build nuclear reactors in their backyard, everyone is saying that they are safer than a banana so i don’t see any issue
One reason it wasn’t made a priority 50 years ago is because Jimmy Carter - a nuclear submariner who understood the risks and economics - decided it wasn’t a good idea.
This is a man who was present at a minor nuclear accident, who helped create the modern nuclear submarine fleet, acknowledging that nukes weren’t going to help during the height of the Oil Embargo.
I think it’s fine to think of it as imperfect, even if those imperfections can never be truly solved.
We only need nuclear to bridge the gap between now and a time when renewable CO2 neutral power sources or the holy grail of fusion are able to take the place the base load power that we currently use fossil fuels for, and with hope, that may only be a few decades away.
Anybody who thinks humans and civiilization will exist in 200 years without degrowth is living in a fantasy world. We can’t solve our problems of fossil fuel dependence and an ever-growing population with recycling, denser housing, and nuclear power. Nature needs space, not everyone wants to live like a sardine in a dense city.
Where will we get our nitrogen fertilizer at massive scale w/o fossil sources?
Use of fossils are the only reason humanity was able to grow way outside the bounds of normal Earth capacity. Without fossils we’ll be forced into a sustainable relationship with our planet and that probably isn’t 8 billion or more people living in “civilized society” regardless of it’s efficiency.
And no, I"m not an “eco-fascist” and don’t want genocide or want poor people or brown people to disappear, don’t fall into false dichotomies.
Eco-fascist outcomes come from Eco-fascist methods. How do you propose to accomplish this degrowth without subjecting the world’s population to genocide and privation?
Human nature is to strive, to fight for a better life for themselves and their communities. The preservation of agrarian lifestyles and “harmony with the planet” a bunch of backwards romantics push is not more important than the betterment of the species, no matter how much people cry about it.
If people need to live in dense cities, then they will live in dense cities.
It’s opposite of degrowth. It is capitalism with its wide beastly grin.
The preservation of agrarian lifestyles and “harmony with the planet”
I like how you mix it togerher under pro-nuclear thread about combating climate change. Also it says you didn’t research what degrowth is and possibly doesn’t have even common sense.
is not more important than the betterment of the species, no matter how much people cry about it
De- means the opposite of. Growth is when things get bigger. De-growth means shrinking human resource usage.
How can we shrink human resource usage? Two ways:
Shrink the human population. ie genocide.
Shrink the resource usage per person. ie privation.
Address the question. How is “degrowth” not a dog whistle for either killing hundreds of millions of people, or forcing hundreds of millions of people to live in poverty?
8 billion plus humans are not sustainable on Earth regardless of how efficient our electrical production is, how cool Tesla’s cars are, or how many people go vegan. Nature will bring our numbers to sustainable levels if we don’t do it. Nature will not be so kind.
How do you propose to accomplish this degrowth without subjecting the world’s population to genocide and privation?
Education
Opportunity
Help those who don’t want to give birth not to give birth
Reduce the influence of religion that promotes childbirth and irresponsible family planning
Reduce the influence of pressure to grow in every way that is likely exacerbated by capitalism
I find it funny that those who immediately go to genocide are the ones implying I have the sick mind.
8 billion people is absolutely sustainable, we could support significantly more at a modern standard of living with just the resources we use today. The problem is the way we organise how and where we live, and a parasitic owner class using and abusing vastly more resources than they could ever need.
Education
Opportunity
Help those who don’t want to give birth not to give birth
Reduce the influence of religion that promotes childbirth and irresponsible family planning
Reduce the influence of pressure to grow in every way that is likely exacerbated by capitalism
And if after all that people still want to have children?
Nature will bring our numbers to sustainable levels if we don’t do it. Nature will not be so kind.
The estimates I’ve seen project the world population will hit a peak before long, and gradually decline. It’s because of birth rates declining as development/education/wealth rise in a region.
Plus looking that far ahead, humans will probably have technologies that we today don’t even know are possible. If we had all the energy and high tech new materials we needed, many more options become possible.
It has been fifty years that “oh no they take so long to build, better never start” that by today we would have completely decarbonized energy generation if we started actually building them.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Mmmm I agreed with you until reading this. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report showed us that Wind + Solar + Battery Storage are still a safer bet for rolling out non-fossil fuel energy sources at the fastest rate we can launch them. Nuclear sadly still takes too long to build.
I think there is a space for advanced nuclear, though. Small Modular Reactors, Fast Breeders, and such should be encouraged going forward. The US (and I think UK) each have funds specifically designated to the development of advanced nuclear too.
But old nuclear will take too long to get a hold on emissions. I still think nuclear fits in a well-balanced energy portfolio, but not of the specific technology of the 1950s-1990s.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
I mean, Chernobyl is kind of an outdated example. Fukushima would be the more recent one to point at, or even Three Mile Island. Not particularly useful for your argument. Still, I think if people got educated about all 3 of those examples from history, they’ll come out convinced that nuclear is still a safe bet.
Problem is, like I said above, that conventional nuclear takes too damn long to build.
Not to mention the conventional plants don’t seem to be faring all that well…
The study also questions the reliability of the nuclear fleet, particularly given the dramatically low availability of French power plants this year – nearly half of the 56 nuclear reactors were closed even though the EU was in a complicated period of electricity supply with frequent peaks in the price of electricity above €3/kWh.
That sounds pretty awful when everyone expects nucleur to handle baseload.
Yeah, the argument of nuclear crumbles when you start to peak behind the curtain of operation. Still, renewables have the same problem.
Wind turbines break shafts, studs, bolts, lifts, generator step-up (GSU) units, etc. Then you still need oil for all the mechanical systems in a turbine too, which can degrade. Operations can keep up with this though, and in my experience wind can be up and running a lot more frequently with reference to failures that cause downtime compared with maintenance of nuclear with reference to downtime for it.
Same with solar, or even better with solar because the only moving parts with solar are the axis trackers that move panels such that they always point at the sun. Lots more uptime that doesn’t involve radiation exposure, although that concern for operations has probably been designed out as reactor technology has grown up.
Since I don’t see it mentioned anywhere: Ignoring the economical and environmental issues that nuclear power still has compared to actual renewables, it has a geostrategic problem: Uranium is a geologically limited resources, which just creates political and economical dependencies. And since Russia has a lot of it, keeping working sanctions against them alive is pretty problematic, if you need to buy your energy resources from them. See gas supply.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
The radiation would only affect a small area of the planet not the whole world, and technically radiation doesn’t even cause climate damage. Chernobyl has plenty of trees and plenty of wildlife, it’s just unsuitable for human habitation.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
Here’s my favorite way to put it: because of trace radioactive elements found in coal ore, coal-fired power plants produce more radioactivity in normal operation than nuclear power plants have in their entire history, including meltdowns. And with coal, it just gets released straight into the environment without any attempt to contain it!
And that’s just radioactivity, not all the other emissions of coal plants.
That’s an oversimplification to the point that it is wrong.
Nuclear power is not the only form of clean energy like that at all. It can not be scaled in this situation to save us, because it takes too long to build them.
It takes 6 years on a fast paced build. If we had started when we knew of the problem, we could have avoided some of the problem. It is the only energy source we can scale up in that way, however. Every other energy source takes longer for less yield with current technology.
It is not the only source like that at all. It is way easier, cheaper, faster and sustainable to build windmills where the is constant wind, solar cells where there is a lot of sun, hydro where there is… Energy sources should be built depending on the locality so they complement each other.
This kind of talking in absolutes like some of you are doing is just plain wrong and it does disservice to advocacy for nuclear power.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second best time is today. We can’t let what we should have done stop us from doing what should be done.
And for other sources, wind and solar are great sources of energy that should be a supplement, but sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, and we don’t currently have the battery technology to store energy on the scale to handle those fluctuations. We need a stable backup, and nuclear is by far the best clean and stable energy source.
Another person with the incredible wisdom to tell me the is no sun during the night.
Thank you sir!
I’ll make it quick:
Reducing carbon emissions is urgent. Building nuclear plants takes time, is expensive. There is no capacity to build enough to offset any carbon, not to mention building them produces carbon emissions. Plus many are even scheduled to be closed.
Building something that will make a difference 20 years from now is smart, but if it comes at the expense of what is urgent today, it is very very dumb.
Exactly. This person is talking about planting trees and waiting 20 years?
If you’re hot today you don’t plant a tree, you put up a temporary shade (like a tent). Just nailing plywood roof to four posts is better than waiting 20 years for a frigging tree to grow.
People complaining about “the current technology” of solar, windmills, and batteries? Prices per MW are dropping so fast, it won’t even matter soon. Battery tech is only old because we didn’t have a lot of power to store. I bet we have better batteries before the decade it will take to build a single nuclear plant.
we have better batteries before the decade it will take to build a single nuclear plant.
That is quite the gamble though. You’re so sure that we’ll be able to develop a new technology and deploy it on a global scale within the next 20 years, that we shouldn’t even bother with the one clean solution that we know works? Not only that, you’re assuming a technology we don’t have yet will be better for the environment, despite all of our current battery tech being awful for the environment.
That’s not like putting up a tent, that’s like saying we shouldn’t plant a tree because someone is probably going to invent an instant tree service, so we should just wait. Like, maybe someone does invent instant trees, but if it doesn’t happen in 20 years we’re gonna feel really dumb
Solar not working during the night is going to keep being a relevant point until we have the capability to manage it, your sarcasm doesn’t do anything to refute that point. There are plenty of cool ways that scientists and engineers are working on solving those problems with better energy storage, but it’s all still in the experimental stages, and until I see build out timelines for energy storage on national scales, all of the variable output power solutions will be nonstarters for fossil fuel replacement. You say that we can’t wait 20 years for nuclear reactors, but we also can’t wait 20 years to figure out how to build a big battery. We don’t even know what the carbon emissions or time costs of whatever we decide on will be, but we do know that working nuclear reactors are a thing today.
I’m not against solar or wind, I have solar panels on my house right now, but it has only reduced my reliance on the fossil fuel grid, it’s nowhere close to replacing it
Plus many are even scheduled to be closed.
Then don’t! I kind of see your point about not building new reactors, even if I disagree, but what purpose could closing existing plants possibly have? How is that going to save carbon and reduce fossil fuels??
8 years to build, not 30. Instead we are building many many more coal and gas plants. What a terrific alternative. Fallacy of renewables without storage is done. It’s never going to happen.
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
That’s not remotely on the same scale, carbon-wise. Global output is like 4 billion tons of concrete per year, a nuclear plant uses like 12 tons per megawatt; an all-in nuclear buildout would use a tiny, tiny fraction of global concrete production and the carbon costs aren’t even remotely equivalent.
do you have a source for this carbon cost? i can’t find any figures about even the amount of concrete in a nuclear plant nevermind the co2 cost of that.
I do find a lot of literature that states that the lifecycle co2 cost of nuclear is on part with solar and wind per kwh so i find your assertment about the payback time being decades a little unlikely to say the least.
Small scale reactors that require almost no maintenance and produce enough power for a single city are the hot topic right now due to what you just mentioned. As a side product, they provide hot water for the city.
Imagine living in a snowy city where hot water is pumped through the sidewalks to people’s homes. No frozen pipes, no shoveling snow. No people freezing to death…
You still need to clear snow and ice. The hot water pipes are insulated to ensure that the hot water remains hot until it goes into radiators and faucets. You’d lose all that heat if you use it to heat sidewalks.
My city does this. Hot water is pretty cheap here if you’re hooked up to the municipal network. If you have an electric water heater you’ll go bankrupt in the winter.
Lots of people know virtually nothing about nuclear even tho they’re avid supporters of it. So when you point out a downside, they get mad.
As a side product, they provide hot water for the city.
Hot water (technically superheated steam) is the main (and only immediate) product of a nuclear reactor…
Trying to directly use secondary coolant as hot potable water just makes zero sense though. It’s waaaaay more efficient to move the electricity and then heat different water.
I mean, you’re talking about an open loop nuclear system…
No sane engineer would ever do that. A small primary loop leak and your dosing everyone, all to just essentially lose efficiency.
Even if you could magically increase the number of nuclear reactors started before 2012 tenfold to keep up with wind and solar, you’d have to triple uranium mining overnight to fuel them for the first time.
Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
Honest question: why shouldn’t we be afraid?
Chernobyl turned an entire city into a radioactive wasteland for the next 10k years. Same goes for 3-mile island and Fukushima. The last of which was just over 10 years ago.
Are we so arrogant to think that that could never happen again? What’s changed?
I don’t know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don’t create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.
Except wind and solar don’t have anywhere near the density we need. Nuclear plants are about 1kW/m^2. Wind is 2-3W/m^2, solar is 100W/m^2. Siting wind and solar projects can be just as damaging.
I didn’t even mention tidal or geothermal. But how are any of those just as damaging? Nuclear waste is still a issue and again if it were attacked or destroyed would cause a massive ecological issue. Again last I checked destroying a wind, solar, tidal, or geothermal generator would not release radiation. Also the time to build one of those compared to a nuclear plant is a lot less last I checked.
Producing wafers for solar panels is indeed one of the most ecologically damaging activities we can engage in. Have you ever been to a semiconductor fab?
It also doesn’t help that people got brainwashed that solar energy and heat pumps will solve all our problems. I don’t have enough space to install so many solar panels to provide power to heat pump during the Eastern European winter and even if I did, ROI will be longer than their expected lifetime. And we still use lead during production, and no one wants to recycle them. These geniuses here import broken solar panels and dump them into the ground and cover them, call that recycling. FFS, nuclear waste disposal is less scary than this uncontrolled shit.
Don’t you love it when you get heavily downvoted but no-one is brave enough to challenge your point of view?
I mostly agree with you. Solar is good if you own a house, with a roof and have thousands in disposable cash to invest, but that’s not most people.
Heat pumps can’t be run on your solar power alone and if your house isn’t well insulated, they can be extremely inefficient, ending up costing you substantially more than sticking with gas or oil. And that’s not getting in to the other short comings of heat pumps which I believe is a separate debate.
As many people in this thread have said, the best time to invest in nuclear was thirty years ago, but the next best time is now. Give us tonnes of cheap, carbon free electricity to throw in to a heat pump and then they make sense.
That usually happens when you call a lot of people brainwashed. I don’t engage with it anymore.
Did I call a lot of people brainwashed?
Is it hard to understand the context of my comment? It replies to your first paragraph.
You do understand that solving the world’s carbon energy crisis is not an individual person’s job, right? We’re not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We’re talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it’s pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.
Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.
I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:
Current nuclear power generation is non-renewable. It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen. And it goes without saying that waiting to scale up some novel unproven or inexistent sustainable way of nuclear power production is out of the question, for time and safety reasons. Which brings me to point 2.
We need clean, sustainable energy right now if we want to have any chance of fighting climate change. From start of planning of a new nuclear power plant to first power generation can take 15 or 20 years easily. Currently, about 10% of all electricity worldwide is produced by about 400 nuclear reactors, while around 15 new ones are under construction. So, to make any sort of reasonable impact, we would have to build to the tune of 2000 new reactors, pronto. To do that within 30 years, we’d have to increase our construction capacity 5 to 10 fold. Even if that were possible, which I strongly doubt, I would wager the safety and cost impacts would be totally unjustifiable. And we don’t even have 30 years anymore. That is to say nothing of regulatory checks and maintenance that would also have to be increased 5 fold.
So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.
What provides me trepidation is the economic system means slack jawed corpos with MBAs will be working tirelessly to skirt safety.
Now if the government was to run … Wait, that is communism and is therefore the bad thing to do /s
This sort of generalization is ignorance.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don’t do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
It’s crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.
Just like assuming a perfectly spherical cow, or a frictionless surface, you can completely ignore the economics, the massive cost and schedule overages to make nuclear work.
Flamanville-3 in France started construction in 2007, was supposed to be operational in 2012 with a project budget of €3.3B. Construction is still ongoing, the in-service date is now sometime in 2024, and the budget has ballooned to €20B.
Olkiluoto-3 is a similar EPR. Construction started in 2005, was supposed to be in-service in 2010, but finally came online late last year. Costs bloated from €3 to €11B.
Hinkley Point C project is two EPRs. Construction started in 2017, it’s already running behind schedule, and the project costs have increased from £16B to somewhere approaching £30B. Start up has been pushed back to 2028 the last I’ve heard.
It’s no different in the US, where the V.C. Summer (2 x AP1000) reactor project was cancelled while under construction after projections put the completed project at somewhere around $23B, up from an estimate of $9B.
A similar set of AP1000s was built at Vogtle in Georgia. Unit 3 only recently came online, with unit 4 expected at the end of the year. Costs went from an initial estimate of $12B to somewhere over $30B.
Note that design, site selection, regulatory approvals, and tendering aren’t included in the above. Those add between 5-10 years to the above schedules.
I think this is the most overlooked aspect, besides it never being in time to do any good for the crisis we are in now.
I believe, the increasing cost and loss in efficiency compared to alternatives will always be an issue for NE to be out-priced by solar and wind (Dunai, 2019; WNSIR, 2022). These cost will eventually come back to the end user.
Most definitely the reason why nuclear advocates want the government to give securities and don’t dear to be the entrepreneurs they claim to be (NOS Nieuws, 2018). Please give me some welfare state, but I’d rather have some more solid solutions.
Gee, I wonder if the cost might go down if we built more of them, as is the case with, y’know, basically every other complicated thing that humans build.
Except throughout the history of nuclear power it has always gotten more expensive, regardless of time period, learning curve, adoption curve, or any other variable you care to consider. Solar, wind, and batteries have always gotten cheaper and continue to do so.
So even if I follow your logic, that nuclear plants will get cheaper and faster to build, wich I’m not, you still have to build the first generation of plants slow and expensive. So we either wait 15 years to get better at building those plants, or we just build renewables right now.
We do both. This isn’t a binary choice.
Money and manpower are not infinite. Any money spent on one is a choice not to spend it on the other.
Functionally they are because different Capital Groups will chase different projects. For instance Bill Gates / TerraPower is heavily backing both Fusion and SMR Fission technology.
Meanwhile other Capital Groups like Anschutz are piling money into Wind Farms then there’s yet other groups like Silicon Ranch pouring money into Solar Farms.
It seems to have escaped the notice of most Netizens but the big money Capitalists have finally come out to play in the Green / Renewable Energy space. Sure there’s an absolute limit on the money and manpower that even they can afford but practically speaking those limits are so high that we’re unlikely to reach them.
So what happens when you finish pouring the concrete in 15 years and the demand has already been satisfied by renewables? Concrete production alone accounts for ~8% of global emissions.
I am not anti-nucleur, I wish we invested more decades ago.
We could build them in a lot less time than 15 years, we’d just need to summon up the political will for it. I’m not saying we should stop building Wind or Solar either.
Well demand isn’t going to go down, and we’re going to have to replace all of the old power plants anyways, even if they are solar or wind. Everything that we build has a lifespan, and the United States has a heck of a lot of legacy power plants that are going to be decommissioned over the next 100 years regardless of what type of plants these are. Solar, wind, hydro, coal, gas, nuclear… Nothing lasts forever.
Yes that is exactly what would happen. To do that though, you really need state funding, state approval, and a secure supply chain as well as experienced engineers, management and construction and supply chains.
I am a huge fan of nuclear power, but I wouldn’t say fearing it is ignorance.
You need to make sure it is regulated, secure, well-engineered, and above all, we need a place to store the waste.
Yet, congress and others, at least in America, have done nothing. We should mainly be powered by nuclear and it is rare for a plant to be built. If done correctly you get safe, clean, power.
emphasis mine:
First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.
Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.
So in short:
Can you explain how we handle waste safely into the next milenia?
You should look into the modern tech here, it isn’t just burying millions of tons of toxic waste under New Jersey. There are “breeder reactors” that use the recycled fuel to generate more power. They actually generate more fissile material than they consume, so instead of waste, they mostly produce more fuel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn’t true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO2 reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.
That is factually false information. There are solid arguments to be made against nuclear energy.
https://isreview.org/issue/77/case-against-nuclear-power/index.html
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Your arguments didn’t actually invalidate the comment you replied to. They are just arguments against nuclear being a short-term solution.
We need both, short and long term ones. Wind and water cannot be solely relies upon. Build both types.
deleted by creator
You mean the nation that invented Prince 2 can’t get a project done on time and budget?!
@magikmw
Well it’s being built by the French 😄
But Europe or America the story of the same. Cost overruns and other issues mean nuclear is running out of steam. We are at the end of the age of nuclear… Until fusion comes along, apparently only 20 years away
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64
I have high hopes for fission, it is like scifi actually come true.
But in 20 years we may be way past worrying how to make energy without greenhouse gases. I really hope it’s closer.
“2009” hahahaha and here we are. More coal more gas plants than ever.
Long lead times against nuclear have bee raised for the last 25 years, if we had just got on with it we would have the capacity by now. Just cause the lead time is in years doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
when is the best time to plant a tree? 30 years ago. When is the second best time? now.
Surely the second best time would have been 29 years ago
Don’t fuck this up for me bro
As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.
My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.
Long lead times, cost overruns, producing power at a higher price point than renewables, long run time needed to break even, even longer dismantling times and a still unsolved waste problem. Compared to renewables that we can build right now.
Did you read the quote? 15-20 years, as in decades before 1 nuke plant is built. I agree in that politicians of the past should have led us to a more sustainable and resilient energy future, but we’re here now.
Advanced nuclear should still be 100% pursued to try to get those lead times down and to incorporate things like waste recycling, modularity, etc., but the lead time in decades absolutely means nuclear power might not be something worth doing.
The IPCC puts the next 10-20 years as the most important and perilous for getting a hold on climate change. If we wait for that long by not rolling out emission-free power sources, transit modes, or even carbon-free concrete, etc., then we might cross planetary boundaries that we can’t come back from.
Nuclear is a safe bet and bet worth pursuing. I would argue that, along with that source from the IAEA, old nuclear is note worth it.
How much concrete does it take to build a nuclear plant? Concrete production is currently 8% of global emissions, so if you have to scale up construction capacity 10x for the next decade, don’t you end up destroying the environment with concrete before they are even operational?
Great point. You need concrete for wind, solar, and li-ion battery storage too (including pumped hydro), but out of those I’d say pumped hydro is the only one that remotely compares in the amount of concrete needed for construction.
So purely looking at the emissions from materials needed to build these power sources, renewables have the edge due to less concrete. These emissions might show up elsewhere in raw material extraction like with silicon for solar, and then the rare earth metals needed for generators in wind, all the lithium/nickel/cobalt needed for batteries, etc., but I want to say that the Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) from places like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US or the International Energy Agency (IEA) worldwide have taken that into account and still show that renewables + storage are cheaper on a carbon basis compared to fossil fuels and nuclear.
The cool thing about concrete for renewables (excluding hydro dam) is only the very base pad needs to be virgin. You can make a lot of the rest of the base and fill material with down cycled concrete. So tearing down part of an old factory on land near the solar panels are? Crush it up and only move it a few miles over to where you need it. Rather than hauling that to a landfill where it sits forever, costing energy use to haul, and more energy use to bring the fill and other bade materials from a further destination.
“We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable” is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
We should do both as fast as we possiblity can. Expand all non ghg emitting sources as fast as possible to cut out coal and gas.
It’s been a decade since a report came out recognising nuclear as too expensive to be viable, and that the best economic decision is to go all-in on renewables. In that time, the price of nuclear has not changed (really, it’s likely gone up, with how much construction in general has gone up, while the technical side of it has not changed), while the cost of renewable energy has continued to go down.
I’m not ideologically opposed to nuclear. But the evidence clearly tells us that it’s just not a reasonable option. At least not unless the long-promised affordability improvements from SMRs actually end up realising themselves. Or fusion gets to the point where it can be used for energy generation.
So… climate change deniers want to delay action on climate change. So they push for nuclear because it has long lead times and that forestalls action?
Come on man. That’s a pretty ridiculous theory. Climate change deniers are out there yelling “drill baby drill” not going undercover as nuclear advocates.
He’s completely right, and I don’t get why more people don’t see that. As an example, here in Denmark, the leader of the far right populist party is both the one saying climate change would be a good thing since it means warmer summer weather as well as constantly bringing up nuclear energy any single time someone starts talking about climate change. It’s honestly so transparent. I used to see the same thing all the time on Reddit, and now I guess it’s Lemmy’s turn for this shit.
I won’t profess to know for sure what their reasoning is. I suspect it’s a bit of that, and also a bit of hope/expectation that the fossil fuel industry will be well-situated to pivot into nuclear in a way that they can’t as easily do with renewables. The more centralised nature and heavy reliance on large-scale resource extraction is very similar. But they actual explanation isn’t what’s important.
What’s important is the simple fact that the biggest climate change deniers are now trying to promote nuclear. If you want to refute the claim, you need to explain that better than I can.
I’m not very familiar with Australian politics or leaders so I can only go with what I see in those articles. First, I don’t see any climate change denial. I see a debate about renewables and nuclear
Why are conservatives against renewables:
They can’t meet our total energy needs.
Wind and solar products are predominantly made in China and conservatives don’t want to feed the Chinese economy or increase dependence (one thing I do know about AU is that Chinese influence is quite heavy and a cause of great concern there).
Why are conservatives pro-nuclear:
It provides baseload capacity that supports wind/solar where they are weak.
It has military applications.
It creates large infrastructure spending within AU and supports mining industry.
They believe it will rankle liberals.
Maybe you have a point that conservatives who are dead-set against renewables will throw nuclear into the conversation as a distraction which they know will not go anywhere. But as an outside observer who doesn’t have built up associations with these characters, I honestly just see rational inclusion of nuclear in the energy mix. This all seems healthy to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
the largest fission plant was literally working 5 years after construction started
fission plants are just more expensive now because we don’t make enough of them.
I guess safety standards changed but even wind power kills more people per watt than fission so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nuclear could’ve easily worked if people didn’t go full nimby in the past few decades
Sorry. How does wind power kill anyone? Okay, every once in a while you hear about a technician falling off a windmill, but are there any fatalities in regard to the effects of wind power?
probably technicians falling off is the biggest thing
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-eagle-deaths-wind-turbines-kill-humans/?sh=5b0b28345467
So it isn’t wind at all, but lacking safety standards.
Lacking safety standards specific to the use case of wind turbines. For example, there was a fire during installation and someone jumped to their deaths to get away. They had quick decent harnesses but couldn’t use them because of the location of the fire.
And? Those safety standards for constructing and maintaining wind turbines can be increased just as much as the safety standards for any other type of heavy labor. For example by mandating that wind turbines must have fire suppression systems installed or that wworkers must be able to rapel on the outside of the wind turbine.
Makes you wonder if the same thing couldn’t be done for nuclear plants!
The only two major nuclear-related death incidents were Chernobyl and Fukushima. But Fukushima only killed one person, the rest were killed by the tsunami and being relocated from the exclusion zone. But many people blame the Japanese government for fucking up the evacuations, while other people criticize the government for actually evacuating people.
In any case, those 2,300 Japanese people were not killed by the actual nuclear incident, they were killed because they were very old and could not adapt to moving into a new apartment that’s a government provided them. Chernobyl is believed to have killed about 500 people.
I should also mention that the Fukushima exclusion zone has largely been lifted, and many people have moved back home.
Your not counting the indirect deaths.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
Fewer people die to nuclear than wind power.
Nuclear is scary because you hear about it, not because it is actually deadly.
To be fair, Frank falling to his death from the top of wind turbine 45 has much shorter consequences.
It won’t have distant descendants dying after not working out symbols meant to not play with the glowing stuff left by the ancients.
Like tragic Glowing Peril tale: https://timharford.com/2023/11/cautionary-tales-the-lethal-fallout-of-a-stolen-treasure/
There are solid arguments to be made against both nuclear and renewables (intermittence, impact of electricity storage, amount of raw material, surface area). We can’t wait for perfect solutions, we have to work out compromises right now, and it seems nuclear + renewable is the most solid compromise we have for the 2050 target. See this high quality report by the public French electricity transportation company (independent of the energy producers) that studies various scenarios including 100% renewable and mixes of nuclear, renewables, hydrogen and biogas. https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy pathways 2050_Key results.pdf
Thank you. The pro-nuclear bullshit from Reddit seems to be spilling over.
imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.
we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.
Perfect or just secure is even more expensive, that is the problem.
If the Soviets hadn’t cut corners and Chernobyl hadn’t happened in this first place, this is likely where we would already be.
Or that our other imperfect solutions like the fossil fuels we continue to use now aren’t worse.
If I recall, 50 years ago we didn’t have the technology/understanding of nuclear fuel enough to make as much as we can now. When I did a school paper on the subject like 20 years ago, they were saying nuclear wasn’t sustainable because we didn’t have enough fuel.
My understanding is that that has changed recently with breakthroughs in refinement of fuels.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don’t mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn’t seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
“Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”
It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.
Yea both are horrible. But we can get off fossil fuels and walk away. We can’t with nuclear. It’ll always be with us and doesn’t solve that we need fossil fuel for other things.
Jets and ships are still going to need fossil fuels.
Which is why I think the best thing we could be doing right now is focusing on improving how energy is store. With the right advancement we could solve a lot of these problems with the right battery.
Mercury will always be with us. Arsenic will always be with us. PFAS will always be with us. Natural radiation will always be with us. Fortunately, nuclear waste is easily detectable, the regulations around it are much stronger, the amount of HLW is miniscule and the storage processes are incredibly advanced
Moreover, most Nuclear waste won’t always be with us. A lot of fission prodcuts have half lives in the decades or centuries
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
My country, Sweden, also gets a decent chunk of power from hydro. Back in 2021, about 43% was hydroelectric, and 31% was nuclear.
deleted by creator
The nuclear power plant decades older than Chernobyl that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and resulted in a only single death and some expensive clean up?
The push for nuclear power across social media is 100% an industry sanctioned psyop.
deleted by creator
Oh please, I’ve been advocating for nuclear power since before most people even owned a dial up modem. You younger ones see everything through a haze of recency bias.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
And what do YOU know about radioactive waste disposal?
We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?
I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
deleted by creator
The worst nuclear disaster has led to 1,000sq miles of land being unsafe for human inhabitants.
Using fossil fuels for power is destroying of the entire planet.
It’s really not that complicated.
Both sound terrible.
I don’t really want to pick the lessor of two evils when it comes to the energy.
We are on a time limit thanks to climate change. We can’t afford to complain about picking the lessor of two evils.
The option proposed is that making a small area of the planet inhabitable or worsening climate change. Sorry but that’s a shitty comparison.
By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can’t fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it huh?
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it?
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
You mean under ground from where it was dug out?
The plant itself, water inevitably getting in contact with wastes and leaking also.
You mean water under ground? It was in contact million years before any of us was born.
Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.
How do you get the uranium or thorium? Generally, it has to be mined. Are we using nuclear powered mining equipment? No. We use fossil fuel powered mining equipment. Then we use fossil fuels to power the trucks that take the depleted nuclear product to the storage depot, which is powered and requires employees who drive there using fossil fuel powered vehicles, using fossil fuel powered warehouse equipment. When does nuclear power phase out the fossil fuel power? Are we going to decommission oil and coal production facilities? Or are we just going to use nuclear to augment the grid?
Don’t forget all the fossil fuels used in machinery that builds nuclear power plants, and the CO2 emissions from all of the concrete used.
Oh, and if you start building a nuclear power plant right now it will be online (maybe) in a decade or two and hopefully for only 150% of the initial cost. There’s a nuclear power plant in Georgia that is $17 BILLION over budget.
So basically saving the planet is mega super important, but somehow 17 billions is suddenly too much?
That $17 billion could be spent on renewables that produce cheaper electricity and be online in less than 20 years.
How much renewables do you get for $17B?
While that’s true, we still have for example safe air travel, although I’m pretty sure companies would be happy to ship their passengers minced to maximize their profit.
Also, thorium reactors would be a great step forward, unfortunately its byproducts can’t be used for nuclear weapons, so their development was pretty slowed down.
That actually sounds more comfortable than normal airline travel
Big news worthy accidents are a really good way to ensure strong regulation and oversight. And nuclear is very regulated now so that it has lower death rate than wind power.
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
Much much tighter regulations. Our cars aren’t aluminum cans waiting to crush everybody inside them because of strict safety regulations.
And we would be expecting these corrupt Cost cutting types to warehouse nuclear waste for hundreds if not thousands of years while requiring regular inspections and rotation of caskets periodically while also maintaining the facilities. All of that for a product that doesn’t produce any value, it just sits there and accumulates.
And where does it get stored? Right now almost 100% of waste is stored on site above ground because they really have no good solution. People will say things like “its just a little bit of toxic waste” or “its cool because we could use it in process we don’t have yet but might in the future” and all I can think of is how this was the same thinking that got us into our dependence on our first environmental catastrophic energy source. I’m not confident we that scaling up to another one will end well.
Is it quote from 60-ies? We have. At least Russia has. US had too.
You mean there’s so little they don’t even need a dedicated facility for it, and it’s safe enough that people are willing to work where it’s stored? Sounds great!
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
Because the energy industry is historically the one lobbying governments for less regulation. Also, has there ever been a nuclear project in the history of mankind that didnt result in depleted Uranium leeching into local watertables and/or radioactive fallout? Your comment is basically tacit acceptance that people are going to act unethically, which, in regards to nuclear power, is bound to have human consequences.
Has there been one that did leech uranium? I’m just asking questions!
An electrician installing faulty wiring doesn’t render your home uninhabitable for a few thousand years.
So there’s one difference.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety. With a nuclear power plant, you mitigate the disaster potential by having so many more people involved in the design and inspection processes.
The risk of an electrician installing faulty wiring in your home could be mitigated by having a third party inspector review the work. Now do that 1000x over and your risk of “politicians are paid off” is negligible.
Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they “artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we’ll use solar”. I’m not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.
If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it’s a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.
Okay, so we’ve got a safe nuclear power plant that’s a decade behind schedule and 100% over budget.
By your logic I suggest you avoid any building constructed in the US as nothing would ever be safe enough.
You are saying, regulations will fix this? Politicians create the regulations, the fines, and enforcement.
Political parties are running on platforms of deregulation right now.
Regulations are actually generally created by regulatory bodies, which are usually non-political. For instance, the underwriter laboratory is the major appliance, building and electrical approval body in the United States.
In most countries, building codes and safety codes are created by industry specialists, people who have been in the industry as professionals for many decades and have practiced and been licensed in the field that they are riding the regulations for.
There’s a big difference between politicians who are passing these laws, and those writing them who are the regulatory bodies. Generally, as a politicians will simply adopt the codes as recommended by the professional licensing and certification bodies.
I suppose it will be the end of modern civilization if politicians decide to politicize electrical or building codes. Then we’ll be fucked for sure. We’ve seen that happen before with the Indiana pi bill.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
“The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.”
a wind mill going down and a nuclear plant blowing up have very different ramifications
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
The risks are lower in literally everything else…?
Nationalise energy production.
Or they could just allow everyone to build nuclear reactors in their backyard, everyone is saying that they are safer than a banana so i don’t see any issue
One reason it wasn’t made a priority 50 years ago is because Jimmy Carter - a nuclear submariner who understood the risks and economics - decided it wasn’t a good idea.
This is a man who was present at a minor nuclear accident, who helped create the modern nuclear submarine fleet, acknowledging that nukes weren’t going to help during the height of the Oil Embargo.
I think it’s fine to think of it as imperfect, even if those imperfections can never be truly solved.
We only need nuclear to bridge the gap between now and a time when renewable CO2 neutral power sources or the holy grail of fusion are able to take the place the base load power that we currently use fossil fuels for, and with hope, that may only be a few decades away.
Degrowth is the only realistic solution.
Anybody who thinks humans and civiilization will exist in 200 years without degrowth is living in a fantasy world. We can’t solve our problems of fossil fuel dependence and an ever-growing population with recycling, denser housing, and nuclear power. Nature needs space, not everyone wants to live like a sardine in a dense city.
Where will we get our nitrogen fertilizer at massive scale w/o fossil sources?
Use of fossils are the only reason humanity was able to grow way outside the bounds of normal Earth capacity. Without fossils we’ll be forced into a sustainable relationship with our planet and that probably isn’t 8 billion or more people living in “civilized society” regardless of it’s efficiency.
And no, I"m not an “eco-fascist” and don’t want genocide or want poor people or brown people to disappear, don’t fall into false dichotomies.
How is degrowth realistic at all? And how does degrowth happen in a way that isnt billions of people starving to death?
Eco-fascist outcomes come from Eco-fascist methods. How do you propose to accomplish this degrowth without subjecting the world’s population to genocide and privation?
Human nature is to strive, to fight for a better life for themselves and their communities. The preservation of agrarian lifestyles and “harmony with the planet” a bunch of backwards romantics push is not more important than the betterment of the species, no matter how much people cry about it.
If people need to live in dense cities, then they will live in dense cities.
It’s opposite of degrowth. It is capitalism with its wide beastly grin.
I like how you mix it togerher under pro-nuclear thread about combating climate change. Also it says you didn’t research what degrowth is and possibly doesn’t have even common sense.
And it is you who calls someone fascist?
Okay let’s break it down.
De- means the opposite of. Growth is when things get bigger. De-growth means shrinking human resource usage.
How can we shrink human resource usage? Two ways:
Address the question. How is “degrowth” not a dog whistle for either killing hundreds of millions of people, or forcing hundreds of millions of people to live in poverty?
8 billion plus humans are not sustainable on Earth regardless of how efficient our electrical production is, how cool Tesla’s cars are, or how many people go vegan. Nature will bring our numbers to sustainable levels if we don’t do it. Nature will not be so kind.
I find it funny that those who immediately go to genocide are the ones implying I have the sick mind.
who do you educate? those people will be genocided.
who do you give birth control to? those people will be genocided.
there is no policy you can create and implement that will not disproportionately effect one group over another.
it’s all genocide.
wut?
don’t do genocide
8 billion people is absolutely sustainable, we could support significantly more at a modern standard of living with just the resources we use today. The problem is the way we organise how and where we live, and a parasitic owner class using and abusing vastly more resources than they could ever need.
And if after all that people still want to have children?
Let it try, we’ll see who wins.
Too many people missing the bigger picture, but here we’ve got a winner!
The estimates I’ve seen project the world population will hit a peak before long, and gradually decline. It’s because of birth rates declining as development/education/wealth rise in a region.
Plus looking that far ahead, humans will probably have technologies that we today don’t even know are possible. If we had all the energy and high tech new materials we needed, many more options become possible.
Except the plants take so long to build they won’t be ready until we’re at 2°C
It has been fifty years that “oh no they take so long to build, better never start” that by today we would have completely decarbonized energy generation if we started actually building them.
We could have also built solar collectors in orbit and beamed carbon-free electricity to Earth if we started 50 years ago.
Heck, if we funded fusion research properly there’s a good chance we’d have had that by the mid 90s
Doesn’t matter, not it’s to late so think about something else
It was too late ten years ago
It is too late today
It will be too late in ten years
It is always too late.
But weirdly it is never too late to be anti nuclear power.
It is also never to late to go full green energies and cut the useless spending such as private jets, luxury yatchs and son on
Mmmm I agreed with you until reading this. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report showed us that Wind + Solar + Battery Storage are still a safer bet for rolling out non-fossil fuel energy sources at the fastest rate we can launch them. Nuclear sadly still takes too long to build.
I think there is a space for advanced nuclear, though. Small Modular Reactors, Fast Breeders, and such should be encouraged going forward. The US (and I think UK) each have funds specifically designated to the development of advanced nuclear too.
But old nuclear will take too long to get a hold on emissions. I still think nuclear fits in a well-balanced energy portfolio, but not of the specific technology of the 1950s-1990s.
I mean, Chernobyl is kind of an outdated example. Fukushima would be the more recent one to point at, or even Three Mile Island. Not particularly useful for your argument. Still, I think if people got educated about all 3 of those examples from history, they’ll come out convinced that nuclear is still a safe bet.
Problem is, like I said above, that conventional nuclear takes too damn long to build.
Not to mention the conventional plants don’t seem to be faring all that well…
That sounds pretty awful when everyone expects nucleur to handle baseload.
Yeah, the argument of nuclear crumbles when you start to peak behind the curtain of operation. Still, renewables have the same problem.
Wind turbines break shafts, studs, bolts, lifts, generator step-up (GSU) units, etc. Then you still need oil for all the mechanical systems in a turbine too, which can degrade. Operations can keep up with this though, and in my experience wind can be up and running a lot more frequently with reference to failures that cause downtime compared with maintenance of nuclear with reference to downtime for it.
Same with solar, or even better with solar because the only moving parts with solar are the axis trackers that move panels such that they always point at the sun. Lots more uptime that doesn’t involve radiation exposure, although that concern for operations has probably been designed out as reactor technology has grown up.
Or at least I’d hope…
Canada is also investing in modular reactors, so there are already several large players in the field.
Since I don’t see it mentioned anywhere: Ignoring the economical and environmental issues that nuclear power still has compared to actual renewables, it has a geostrategic problem: Uranium is a geologically limited resources, which just creates political and economical dependencies. And since Russia has a lot of it, keeping working sanctions against them alive is pretty problematic, if you need to buy your energy resources from them. See gas supply.
New archetypes of NP can run on depleted fuel. There’s enough of that around for more than 50yrs of power.
Ahh… no. New solar and wind generation can be spun up much faster than nuclear.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
The radiation would only affect a small area of the planet not the whole world, and technically radiation doesn’t even cause climate damage. Chernobyl has plenty of trees and plenty of wildlife, it’s just unsuitable for human habitation.
Here’s my favorite way to put it: because of trace radioactive elements found in coal ore, coal-fired power plants produce more radioactivity in normal operation than nuclear power plants have in their entire history, including meltdowns. And with coal, it just gets released straight into the environment without any attempt to contain it!
And that’s just radioactivity, not all the other emissions of coal plants.
That’s an oversimplification to the point that it is wrong. Nuclear power is not the only form of clean energy like that at all. It can not be scaled in this situation to save us, because it takes too long to build them.
It takes 6 years on a fast paced build. If we had started when we knew of the problem, we could have avoided some of the problem. It is the only energy source we can scale up in that way, however. Every other energy source takes longer for less yield with current technology.
If we had started, but we didn’t.
It is not the only source like that at all. It is way easier, cheaper, faster and sustainable to build windmills where the is constant wind, solar cells where there is a lot of sun, hydro where there is… Energy sources should be built depending on the locality so they complement each other.
This kind of talking in absolutes like some of you are doing is just plain wrong and it does disservice to advocacy for nuclear power.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second best time is today. We can’t let what we should have done stop us from doing what should be done.
And for other sources, wind and solar are great sources of energy that should be a supplement, but sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, and we don’t currently have the battery technology to store energy on the scale to handle those fluctuations. We need a stable backup, and nuclear is by far the best clean and stable energy source.
Another person with the incredible wisdom to tell me the is no sun during the night. Thank you sir!
I’ll make it quick: Reducing carbon emissions is urgent. Building nuclear plants takes time, is expensive. There is no capacity to build enough to offset any carbon, not to mention building them produces carbon emissions. Plus many are even scheduled to be closed.
Building something that will make a difference 20 years from now is smart, but if it comes at the expense of what is urgent today, it is very very dumb.
Exactly. This person is talking about planting trees and waiting 20 years?
If you’re hot today you don’t plant a tree, you put up a temporary shade (like a tent). Just nailing plywood roof to four posts is better than waiting 20 years for a frigging tree to grow.
People complaining about “the current technology” of solar, windmills, and batteries? Prices per MW are dropping so fast, it won’t even matter soon. Battery tech is only old because we didn’t have a lot of power to store. I bet we have better batteries before the decade it will take to build a single nuclear plant.
That is quite the gamble though. You’re so sure that we’ll be able to develop a new technology and deploy it on a global scale within the next 20 years, that we shouldn’t even bother with the one clean solution that we know works? Not only that, you’re assuming a technology we don’t have yet will be better for the environment, despite all of our current battery tech being awful for the environment.
That’s not like putting up a tent, that’s like saying we shouldn’t plant a tree because someone is probably going to invent an instant tree service, so we should just wait. Like, maybe someone does invent instant trees, but if it doesn’t happen in 20 years we’re gonna feel really dumb
Solar not working during the night is going to keep being a relevant point until we have the capability to manage it, your sarcasm doesn’t do anything to refute that point. There are plenty of cool ways that scientists and engineers are working on solving those problems with better energy storage, but it’s all still in the experimental stages, and until I see build out timelines for energy storage on national scales, all of the variable output power solutions will be nonstarters for fossil fuel replacement. You say that we can’t wait 20 years for nuclear reactors, but we also can’t wait 20 years to figure out how to build a big battery. We don’t even know what the carbon emissions or time costs of whatever we decide on will be, but we do know that working nuclear reactors are a thing today.
I’m not against solar or wind, I have solar panels on my house right now, but it has only reduced my reliance on the fossil fuel grid, it’s nowhere close to replacing it
Then don’t! I kind of see your point about not building new reactors, even if I disagree, but what purpose could closing existing plants possibly have? How is that going to save carbon and reduce fossil fuels??
Sadly, humanity had other things to do :(
Yep. Fuck Putin.
Ain’t that the truth. We could’ve just been naked eating fruit and making art all day, but instead we have anxiety and loans.
Long term nuclear is great…
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
So we can’t just spam build nuke plants right now to fix everything.
30 years ago that would have worked.
8 years to build, not 30. Instead we are building many many more coal and gas plants. What a terrific alternative. Fallacy of renewables without storage is done. It’s never going to happen.
That’s not remotely on the same scale, carbon-wise. Global output is like 4 billion tons of concrete per year, a nuclear plant uses like 12 tons per megawatt; an all-in nuclear buildout would use a tiny, tiny fraction of global concrete production and the carbon costs aren’t even remotely equivalent.
(also, wind power uses way, way more concrete)
do you have a source for this carbon cost? i can’t find any figures about even the amount of concrete in a nuclear plant nevermind the co2 cost of that.
I do find a lot of literature that states that the lifecycle co2 cost of nuclear is on part with solar and wind per kwh so i find your assertment about the payback time being decades a little unlikely to say the least.
I don’t think it’s a far fetched statement, but I’m also not sure if it’s true.
I know concrete has a pretty big carbon footprint, but, I don’t know how that scales in relation to the carbon savings of nuclear power.
(What’s with the downvotes?)
Small scale reactors that require almost no maintenance and produce enough power for a single city are the hot topic right now due to what you just mentioned. As a side product, they provide hot water for the city.
Imagine living in a snowy city where hot water is pumped through the sidewalks to people’s homes. No frozen pipes, no shoveling snow. No people freezing to death…
You still need to clear snow and ice. The hot water pipes are insulated to ensure that the hot water remains hot until it goes into radiators and faucets. You’d lose all that heat if you use it to heat sidewalks.
My city does this. Hot water is pretty cheap here if you’re hooked up to the municipal network. If you have an electric water heater you’ll go bankrupt in the winter.
Small scale reactors are actually more expensive than larger reactors. Even compared to Vogtle 3 and 4…
Lots of people know virtually nothing about nuclear even tho they’re avid supporters of it. So when you point out a downside, they get mad.
Hot water (technically superheated steam) is the main (and only immediate) product of a nuclear reactor…
Trying to directly use secondary coolant as hot potable water just makes zero sense though. It’s waaaaay more efficient to move the electricity and then heat different water.
I mean, you’re talking about an open loop nuclear system…
No sane engineer would ever do that. A small primary loop leak and your dosing everyone, all to just essentially lose efficiency.
Where did you even see that suggested?
Building any sort of new power plant uses a shitload of concrete, so that cost isn’t as dramatic as this would seem.
I think nuclear is dramatically overstated in terms of short term feasibility, but concrete use is not the reason why.
So would it be fair to say you have no concrete objections to the nuclear plan?
Even if you could magically increase the number of nuclear reactors started before 2012 tenfold to keep up with wind and solar, you’d have to triple uranium mining overnight to fuel them for the first time.
deleted by creator