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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
“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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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/
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
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
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!
“2009” hahahaha and here we are. More coal more gas plants than ever.
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
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.
Thank you. The pro-nuclear bullshit from Reddit seems to be spilling over.
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.